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China is on track to beat its peak-emissions pledge

arstechnica.com

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Re: China is on track to beat its peak-emissions pledge

#21

Post by remarkEon »

smallgovt wrote: post #18
Dirlewanger wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard for people to accept the fact that modern Chinese society is rotten to the core. You don't hear people describing China as "the government's horrible, but the people are nice", you hear "the government's horrible, and so are the people". I've heard this from a lot of exasperated Chinese expats.

Your idea will get more traction if you describe the behavior as rotten to the core instead of the person. After all, you are projecting your value system onto another set of people who have different values. Neither of your value systems are true.

>Neither of your value systems are true.

Not believing there is any “true” value system is in itself just another value system (or religion), and asserting as such is just as annoying - often more so.

Re: China is on track to beat its peak-emissions pledge

#22

Post by reallydude »

smallgovt wrote: post #18
Dirlewanger wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard for people to accept the fact that modern Chinese society is rotten to the core. You don't hear people describing China as "the government's horrible, but the people are nice", you hear "the government's horrible, and so are the people". I've heard this from a lot of exasperated Chinese expats.

Your idea will get more traction if you describe the behavior as rotten to the core instead of the person. After all, you are projecting your value system onto another set of people who have different values. Neither of your value systems are true.

> rotten to the core

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/101323...

Dishonesty is so pervasive, it's considered integral to success in every strata. A Chinese citizen getting arrested for misconduct elicits commentary of "they are unlucky" not "that's good for society".

Re: China is on track to beat its peak-emissions pledge

#23

Post by seanmcdirmid »

simion314 wrote: post #17
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, you just put a fan in front of your pollution sensors.

I think satellites are used this days, balloons too

AQI is taken by fixed sensor stations, you can even get a map of them per Chinese city (along with individual readings for more localized AQI measurements). So a few Hebei officials were scamming the system by filtering the air directly around the sensor stations. Beijing was not amused.

Re: China is on track to beat its peak-emissions pledge

#25

Post by dang »

Dirlewanger wrote: post #16
smacktoward wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know why you’re getting downvoted on this, it’s a common problem in authoritarian governments of all stripes. Nobody gets promoted from Apparatchik to Senior Apparatchik by pushing back on the quotas set for them.

It's hard for people to accept the fact that modern Chinese society is rotten to the core. You don't hear people describing China as "the government's horrible, but the people are nice", you hear "the government's horrible, and so are the people". I've heard this from a lot of exasperated Chinese expats.

This comment breaks the site guidelines. Please don't take HN threads further into name-calling and nationalistic flamewar.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: apart from all the other times we've had to ask you this, I just noticed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20518968, which is egregious and a bannable offence. I actually just banned you, but since your other recent comments haven't been that bad, decided to reverse that for the time being. Would you please review the site guidelines and use this site as intended from now on?

Re: China is on track to beat its peak-emissions pledge

#26

Post by rayiner »

What a bizarrely upbeat article. China’s CO2 output will supposedly peak at 10 tons per person for $21,000 GDP per capita. Using the article’s numbers, The US achieves triple the GDP per capita with just 60% higher CO2 emissions. Note also that China’s population will peak and then start declining in just a few years, which has a lot to do with why CO2 output will peak: https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/.... The only reason US CO2 output didn’t peak decades ago is that the US population continues to grow steadily.

Re: China is on track to beat its peak-emissions pledge

#27

Post by yorwba »

rayiner wrote: post #26

What a bizarrely upbeat article. China’s CO2 output will supposedly peak at 10 tons per person for $21,000 GDP per capita. Using the article’s numbers, The US achieves triple the GDP per capita with just 60% higher CO2 emissions. Note also that China’s population will peak and then start declining in just a few years, which has a lot to do with why CO2 output will peak: https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.reuters.com…

> The US achieves triple the GDP per capita with just 60% higher CO2 emissions.

The paper is based on the environmental Kuznets curve model [1], according to which growth in GDP per capita eventually allows more environmentally friendly policies to be implemented, causing pollution per unit of GDP to shrink again. That's exactly the effect that allows the US to generate a higher GDP with comparatively smaller increases in CO2 emissions. The paper uses the fact that some countries are farther along the curve than others to empirically fit the parameters and uses that to estimate when CO2 emissions per capita will peak given current economic development.

Note that that's just about the per-capita measures; the expected peak in population compounds the effect.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuznets_curve#Environmental_Ku...

Re: China is on track to beat its peak-emissions pledge

#28

Post by woodandsteel »

rayiner wrote: post #26

What a bizarrely upbeat article. China’s CO2 output will supposedly peak at 10 tons per person for $21,000 GDP per capita. Using the article’s numbers, The US achieves triple the GDP per capita with just 60% higher CO2 emissions. Note also that China’s population will peak and then start declining in just a few years, which has a lot to do with why CO2 output will peak: https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.reuters.com…

You need to look at the trends. For many decades China built up fossil fuel production and use as fast as possible, and didn't give a damn about the environmental consequences.

But then about a decade ago, the government suddenly realized it needed to get off fossil fuels, for a whole series of reasons (one of them being that, unlike American conservatives, Chinese governmental officials actually believe what their scientists tell them).

So China has been busy turning around the huge ocean liner of its economy as fast as it can, and the result is a great improvement in the first and second derivative of fossil fuels pollution (though a recent slowdown in the economy has also helped here).

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