Since the industrial revolution, a human being's quality of life has vastly improved. Modern agriculture (harvesters, fertilizers, food processing), transportation(cars, planes, rail, ships), day to day goods (plastics, steel, concrete), medicine (chemicals), even clean water in a city, all of these are predicated on one thing, the use of energy. And more importantly, the price of energy, the cheaper the better. And given the technology that humanity could master in the past and present, the vast majority of affordable energy comes from fossil fuels (oil, natural gas, and coal). Hence, quality of life and wealth is also predicated on the use of energy and emission of co2.
Given this context, if you look at the total amount of co2 emitted by a country throughout history, china is not the highest all, the western world is. And this emission has allowed the western world to gain great amount of wealth. Second, even today, china's co2 per captia is still lower than some western countries, for example, the US. China also produces a lot of world's industrial goods, like metal, chemicals, etc. In china, industrial electricity use accounts for 65% of the total electricity use. Of course, there could be inefficient use of energy in the industrial sectors, but increasingly, China's manufacturing is showing high levels of efficiency and the power efficiency is continue to improve.
I am not saying these to be anti-west. In fact, I am pro west and critical of china on many things. But in terms of energy and co2 emission, I am advocating for analyzing the situation with objectivity. If you view people are equal regardless of race, ethnicity, nationality and beliefs, I hope you understand that people should also have equal access to energy, and in the past, equal rights to release co2. When most of Chinese people can't even have enough food on the table, and I think its fair to allow them to develop first. While rich and well off nations who can afford to invest and reduce co2 footprint should do so.
I am not saying china should get a free pass. As China is becoming developed and people are being better off, it should be accountable to its co2 footprint too. And today we are doing that. We are working heavily to add clean sources of electricity(wind, solar, hydro, nuclear) and heavily promoting electrified transports (EVs, high speed trains, subways). We are implementing carbon trading system and that will have significant cost on co2 emission industries (oil gas, metal). Chinese government is actively shutting down or forcing upgrades emission and energy intensive companies and factories (steel, paper, textile, most recently bitcoin mining, and more). As you can imagine, there are a lot of PR backlash from the workers and business owners here, and the government is spending a lot of effort to minimize the push back and damage, for example, doing jobs transition program, re-training programs, compensations etc. We having been actively treating the ecosystem by 1) foresting, our forest coverage grew by a lot 2) fighting desertification, we actually reduced the desert area by reversing desertification. If you know what this takes, you know it's insanely difficult. 3) building water projects to increase water use efficiency, alleviate drought induced ecosystem collapse. For example, south to north water diversion project played a critical role in restoring wetlands and ground water in the water-lacking north. By planting trees and grass on 10s of thousands square kilometers of barren Loess Plateau and heavily managing agriculture on nearby banks, the yellow river is less yellow now because sediment is held in place and less is running off into the river. We have been doing all of these for the past 50 years.
Special call out for treating deserts. Many people dedicated their lives to live nearby the desserts and planting grass and vegetation to reverse desertification. In the desert, there is nothing but sand and wind. The wind blew up the sand and they hit your face like knives. The wind also blew up anything you plant in it. Yet these people kept trying, kept experimenting with methods to treat the deserts. Today, they have found ways to do exactly that and the results speak for themselves. These people could have easily found something more comfortable to do, yet, they chose to do the hard thing. And they did it for decades. Try imagine that. Their dedication and selflessness is utterly mind blowing. Its amazing feet of human achievement. But these stories are never ever been told to the world, let alone celebrated, because its from China. We don't want to talk about anything positive about China right?
We still have so much to do, all of our current efforts are of course not enough. But we know that, know our place, know the reality. Chinese government pledged peak carbon by 2030. Given all the current signs and activities, I think we are on the right track. I think we will continue to tackle this challenge, stepping harder on the gas peddle, and execute step by step. A steady, continuous, and unrelenting execution is ultimately what it takes to get anything done. I am a skeptic hopeful.