One of the countries that is going up (China) is also doing more than any other country to rapidly roll out renewables both domestically and in other countries, and their emissions have peaked or are near peaking, and is capable of sticking with long term plans. Also a lot of their emissions are from making things for the rest of the world.

The other country that has grown significantly in the last 20 years (India) is still far below using their fair share of the world emission budget, and they are rapidly adding renewables.

The sane way for a planet to use fossil fuels is for countries to use them to build up to the stage where they are wealthy enough to switch to renewables. If the ones that do that earlier stay on fossil fuels too long so that you get climate problems they can't just expect the countries that are not as far a long to just give up on becoming wealthy. They need to heavily subsidize those other countries in renewables so they can shorten or skip the fossil fuel bootstrap stage.

Because of the long time CO2 stays around in the atmosphere, about 40% of the CO2 currently in the atmosphere from human activity came from the US and Europe.

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caminante 16 hours ago | parent [-]

Also a lot of their emissions are from making things for the rest of the world.

That doesn't make it righteous and is a common critique of their coal powered PV manufacturing base.

They're playing games with carbon commitments with arbitrary reduction goals from undefined peaks. We can't trust them.

Meanwhile, they're currently building >200GW of new coal plants.

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tzs 15 hours ago | parent [-]

> Meanwhile, they're currently building >200GW of new coal plants

Many are being built as backups and peakers rather than baseload, designed (or retrofitted in the case of existing plants being upgraded) to be able to cycle up and down to balance wind and solar. They are running at low capacity factors, not actually burning much coal.

Many of these are idle so much that their owners have financial difficulty keeping them open, and the government has had to start paying them for their idle time so they won't go under.

Most of the rest are to replace existing plants that cannot not yet be replaced with renewables, so are at worst neutral on coal usage and are usually actually more efficient than the old plants so there is a reduction.

	▲	caminante 14 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, we've heard these: * "More efficient, next gen coal plants" * "Receiving capacity payments subsidies to stabilize grid" * "We won't run these plants at full capacity" When their carbon intensity still can't touch natural gas alternatives at scale, state owned enterprises are operating in a command economy, and they have no teeth to their carbon commitments. They don't have to build new coal at 10:1 versus retirements to "replace aging coal" or stabilize the grid. Coal is just too cheap and adds diversity,while nobody forces CN to enter climate agreements and looks the other way.