
China, World’s Biggest Polluter, Hits Carbon Goals – 12 Years Early - Leary
https://www.thedailybeast.com/china-worlds-biggest-polluter-hits-carbon-goals12-years-early
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bilbo0s
To be completely fair to everyone else here, it's easy to do something like
that in an authoritarian environment. You can build something like Three
Gorges because you don't care about the people jumping up and down saying
"No". You can also mandate the use of solar and wind energy in a way that you
just can't mandate things in other nations. You don't care about the other
branches of the energy sector that might be hurt by your policy of "playing
favorites". You can swing a pen and hundreds of thousands in carbon heavy
sectors are, all of a sudden, out of work. It doesn't matter to you, because
you don't have to win elections.

I don't doubt that China is ahead of schedule. In fact, I'd be shocked if
China was _not_ in the lead globally on adjusting our energy generation mix.
They'll have really clean looking dispatch stacks long before we do in the US,
but at what cost? (And I'm not just talking about financial costs here.)

That's what we have to keep in mind. The fact is that addressing climate
change is usually much more than a technology problem. How easy those non-
technology aspects of the problem are to overcome greatly depend on what you
are willing to tolerate from the authorities charged with addressing the
climate change issue.

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sigi45
So USA is not smart enough to get this going.

Ok

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thrden
not that its not smart enough, just that it has to listen to alternative
groups. Nuclear power would be one way current technology could drastically
reduce C02 Emissions, yet well intentioned, intelligent actors oppose the
proliferation of such plants. While China could simply ignore those groups,
the US is required to give them a voice in the political process.

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coldtea
Nobody bothers to read TFA before making snarky remarks?

"That’s the conclusion reached by scientists who looked at the country’s
estimated carbon output between 2007 and 2016, as the country’s rapid
industrialization slowed and its consumption of coal declined. The research is
published in the journal Nature Geoscience"

The research was done at the "University of East Anglia in Britain" \-- it's
not merely some report out of China...

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strictnein
Is this completely based on 2016 numbers? 2017 saw an increase from China:

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-carbon-
iea/global-...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-carbon-iea/global-
carbon-emissions-hit-record-high-in-2017-idUSKBN1GY0RB)

[https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-global-co2-emissions-
se...](https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-global-co2-emissions-set-to-
rise-2-percent-in-2017-following-three-year-plateau)

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sct202
FYI, this is based on a paper published in Nature :
[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-018-0161-1?WT.feed_na...](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-018-0161-1?WT.feed_name=subjects_energy-
supply-and-demand) , and not a government announcement. I don't have access to
see what they're using as their data sources, so I'm curious how much they
relied on official Chinese government data.

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jamhan
Is it a coincidence this report appears a month after it was revealed that
China was the source of massive amounts of the banned chemical CFC-11?
[https://www.bbc.com/news/science-
environment-44738952](https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-44738952)

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scruffyherder
Boy do I have a bridge to sell you!

Forecast for today haze with extra smog in SE China.

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jernfrost
What would be the Chinese incentive to lie about this? How hard is it to check
the validity of their claims?

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mikestew
"Their claims"? I'm not saying ya didn't read the article, but you might have
missed this:

 _" Dabo Guan, a professor of climate change economics at the University of
East Anglia in Britain. Guan and his colleagues estimate..."_

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throwaway5752
I bet local and provincial officials have reported resounding success!

