US consumers and businesses buy almost all their stuff from China. China's massive footprint of Coal should be added to US emissions.

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computerdork 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Good point. But one factor is China is also greatly reducing their emissions. For instance, their pollution levels have plummeted after enacting strict controls:

https://epic.uchicago.edu/insights/china-has-quickly-and-sha...

Still, that is a good point, a lot of the emissions from manufacturing have been shifted to other countries.

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TremendousJudge an hour ago | parent [-]

>China is also greatly reducing their emissions

Are they? because looking at these charts[0], although fossil fuel use as a percent of total energy may be going down, the absolute values for coal, gas and oil only go up year over year.

[0]https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/china#what-sources...

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ben_w an hour ago | parent [-]

Aye, but that data is up to 2024, here's an update: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha...

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dnautics an hour ago | parent [-]

"flat or falling" let's be honest. The amount of "fall" in that graph is basically in the noise. It's been flat.

	▲	TremendousJudge 35 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		It's still a big change from the previous status quo. I've been checking on absolute emissions on various industrial countries for a while now and this is the first time I've seen them actually flat (and not decreasing as a fraction but increasing in absolute terms)

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dnautics an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> US consumers and businesses buy almost all their stuff from China

This is not really the case, China is the US' #3 trading partner, and trade-corrected GHGs are also down (see the graph further down the page), actually by an slightly better percentage off-peak.

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mbgerring an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

China’s massive coal footprint is shrinking due to successful, intentional effort under the most recent five year plan, and coal’s presence in China’s power mix will likely continue to shrink, while China ramps up exports of clean energy technology to the rest of the world.

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dnautics an hour ago | parent [-]

In absolute terms, china's coal footprint is increasing, and will continue to increase in the short term, as of early 2026, they were still opening new coal plants.

	▲	3eb7988a1663 36 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Their coal capacity is increasing, but the utilization is continually falling.
	▲	nutjob2 an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		China is a semi-planned economy. The coal plants are more a form of insurance than a practical and economical source of power.

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colechristensen an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

The trend has China installing as much solar capacity as the rest of the world combined every single year within a reasonably small margin.