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China has added forest the size of Texas since 1990

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Re: China has added forest the size of Texas since 1990

#111
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Air conditioning is a relatively small part of global CO₂ emissions (3%); you should be more worried about heating. I would expect air conditioning to also be among the easier energy uses to match with solar power as we go forward. Better building design and more efficient AC devices also make a huge difference.

The point is about quality of life.

Everyone is going to have a bad quality of life, to the extent they're able to live at all, if we don't act quickly at massive scale in a coordinated fashion.

Re: China has added forest the size of Texas since 1990

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s becoming very hard to see China as the adversary and not the U.S. There isn’t even a pretend moral high ground anymore.

What does your comment have to do with ecology? Just because China plants trees (news flash, so does the US) doesn't erase the fact they are far and away the biggest emitter of carbon emissions and have high levels of pollution. Glad they are trying to do good things though.

US is far higher per capita and doing nothing about it.

Re: China has added forest the size of Texas since 1990

#113
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The global economy is so China-dependent it doesn't even make sense to talk about an individual country's emissions profile unless we look at their imports.

There are import corrected CO2 emissions data you can check if you care. Tl;Dr it's not as big as you think it is.

These are 3 relevant data sets from Our World in Data:

"Per capita consumption-based CO₂ emissions" (emissions adjusted for imports/exports)

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-per-capit...

"Imported or exported CO₂ emissions per capita" (shows the effects of imports/exports alone, as tons)

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/imported-or-exported-co-e...

"Share of CO₂ emissions embedded in trade" (shows the effects of imports/exports alone, as percentage of total)

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-co2-embedded-in-tra...

Re: China has added forest the size of Texas since 1990

#114

Much of Europe used to be forest. It just all got whacked in the few centuries prior to today. So you have Europeans making tiny recoveries to their rampant destruction of their environment celebrating that fact while preventing others from doing what they did. There is one path to this: first clear cut your forests so you can build your industry; then build your industry so you can be prosperous; then rebuild your f…

> Much of Europe used to be forest. It just all got whacked in the few centuries prior to today.

The deforestation goes back much further than that. Europe experienced significant deforestation in the middle ages. It was a major issue for many countries long before industrialism.

Re: China has added forest the size of Texas since 1990

#115
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you tell everyone what their per capita emission is? While you're at it, compare that with the US per capita emissions. Also let us know the accumulated emissions for China and US in the last 50 years. Thanks.

The earth doesn't give a shit about per capita, and us and eu are net reducing CO2 emissions since 2014 (even during trump I)

I am with you on this one. I have seen people making similar arguments about plastic dumped in the oceans where at least until about a decade ago China was well ahead of every nation. The oceans don't care about the per capita plastic polluting them.

Re: China has added forest the size of Texas since 1990

#116
post #80
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you tell everyone what their per capita emission is? While you're at it, compare that with the US per capita emissions. Also let us know the accumulated emissions for China and US in the last 50 years. Thanks.

Per capita emissions aren’t relevant to climate impact. Neither are relative emissions between countries. This is a global issue.

No, but if some people are outputting way more CO2 than others, these are the ones we should be focussing on first.

Re: China has added forest the size of Texas since 1990

#117
post #80
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you tell everyone what their per capita emission is? While you're at it, compare that with the US per capita emissions. Also let us know the accumulated emissions for China and US in the last 50 years. Thanks.

Per capita emissions aren’t relevant to climate impact. Neither are relative emissions between countries. This is a global issue.

Per capita emissions are relevant, because it shows how much each separate country needs to improve in a relative manner. Absolute emissions doesn't matter to what each state needs to do.

Re: China has added forest the size of Texas since 1990

#118
post #80
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you tell everyone what their per capita emission is? While you're at it, compare that with the US per capita emissions. Also let us know the accumulated emissions for China and US in the last 50 years. Thanks.

Per capita emissions aren’t relevant to climate impact. Neither are relative emissions between countries. This is a global issue.

> Per capita emissions aren’t relevant to climate impact

They aren't relevant to the climate, but they are relevant to how much energy and wealth you allow each person to have.

Does a person in China deserve to have less energy or wealth than a person in America?

Re: China has added forest the size of Texas since 1990

#119
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you tell everyone what their per capita emission is? While you're at it, compare that with the US per capita emissions. Also let us know the accumulated emissions for China and US in the last 50 years. Thanks.

Chinese CO₂ emissions per capita are only about 60% as much as the USA, but in the past 25 years US per capita emissions have dropped by about a third and Chinese emissions per capita have almost tripled and are still rising rapidly. Considering that China is about 4 times as populous as the US, this is a huge problem for the world. (US emissions are also a huge problem; we all need for them to decrease very quickly.…

China was exiting poverty and heavily industrializing during that period, along with building up massive amounts of infrastructure that could save some emissions over time, though of course also things like coal plants are included in the infrastructure numbers. But if we look at absolute instead of per-capita for some odd reason, an aspect to also look at is that a lot more of those CO2 emissions are from China manufacturing for the US and the world than vice versa.

If we focus on rates of growth, China is building much more solar and nuclear than the US per-capita. And they don't have as much available domestic gas which with shorter carbon chains makes much less CO2, and that's the big problem. The US has twice as many natural gas reserves as China, with 1/4 the population, so, post-dissemination of fracking technology, that's largely down to geographical luck.

There's going to be big spikes in data center energy consumption in both countries. It's still somewhat marginal at the moment at a little over 4% here and less there but it is going to be a main driver of energy consumption growth going forward.

Banning China from leading nodes may result in doubling or more their consumption in this area as a direct US policy outcome.

Re: China has added forest the size of Texas since 1990

#120
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chinese CO₂ emissions per capita are only about 60% as much as the USA, but in the past 25 years US per capita emissions have dropped by about a third and Chinese emissions per capita have almost tripled and are still rising rapidly. Considering that China is about 4 times as populous as the US, this is a huge problem for the world. (US emissions are also a huge problem; we all need for them to decrease very quickly.…

Is the per capita still rising rapidly? China's CO2 growth levels have already started leveling off, and actually showed a slight decline as of late. https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-clean-energy-just-put-c...

Much as I wish to be optimistic, one year does not a trend make. As per the link:

  The shallow decline in 2015 and 2016 was due to a slump that followed a round of stimulus measures, while zero-Covid controls caused a sharper fall in 2022.
We might be on the right path, but also the very rapid decarbonisation of primary energy and transport may be overwhelmed by growth in other sectors like cement, metal oxide reduction, or beef.

(Or not, there's at least theoretical paths to make those examples better, this is just meant to moderate hope rather than to deny it entirely).

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