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| ▲ | alexgieg 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| China is trying to become oil-independent by all means necessary. All their means of accessing oil go through geographic bottlenecks that could be weaponized against them in the event of military conflict. Coal, fissile materials, and sunlight are the alternatives they have access to, so they're going for all of those. With some luck, the net effect will be fewer greenhouse gases than keeping themselves oil-dependent, though that isn't necessarily the, or even a, goal. If it happens, it'll be as a side effect. |
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| ▲ | sippingabonedry 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Are you saying China is doing whatever it needs to do to satisfy its power needs, hands forced by geopolitics, and not pure altruism? Say it isn't so. | | |
| ▲ | alexgieg 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | In a saner world, they wouldn't need to be wary of a catastrophic oil shortage due to another power deciding to cut off their access to oil. A saner world is achieved when all countries agree to an international system of rules and conflict resolution and abide by agreements, so things are predictable in the long term. The less predictable things become, the faster everyone ramps up potential solutions to bad potential scenarios. Some are trying to bring that sanity back. Others are trying to increase the chaos as much as they possibly can, and preferably more. | | |
| ▲ | consensus1 an hour ago | parent [-] | | You can't bring back something that was never there | | |
| ▲ | AnimalMuppet an hour ago | parent [-] | | Not in an absolute sense, perhaps. But it was there enough to mostly function most of the time. And international life was more stable because of it. |
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| ▲ | 486sx33 11 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [dead] | |
| ▲ | 121789 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | is this supposed to refute the parent comment's point? | | |
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| ▲ | counters an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > China brought 50 new coal plants online in 2025 alone but keep telling yourself that. China also invested significantly in technology like flue gas desulfurization 10-20 years ago, as well as other approaches which try to mitigate some of the impact of coal burning. So while bringing online coal power plants is obviously and can never be carbon neutral, a more appropriate comparison would be to measure the new plants' additional GHG and SLCP emissions, and compare that to the approach in the US. |
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| ▲ | layer8 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| China brought 78 gigawatts of new coal power capacity online in 2025, but also 315 gigawatts of solar capacity and 119 gigawatts of wind. |
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| ▲ | tonfa 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | And coal is mostly flat, while electricity demand is going up. https://ember-energy.org/app/uploads/2026/09/China-Energy-Tr... (Page 14) | | | |
| ▲ | consensus1 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 78 GW of coal is pretty damn near 78 GW. 315 GW of solar / wind capacity is nowhere near that level of utilization. | | |
| ▲ | Timon3 32 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Would you mind sharing your source? AFAIK the coal plants are only backups, so it'd be very surprising if they're utilized as much as the solar capacity. |
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| ▲ | sippingabonedry 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Which is easy to do when you live an authoritarian state with plenty of vast desert wastelands to erect solar/wind farms. Was there a village there last week? Not anymore, it was in the way. And best of all they can build it all with Uyghur forced labor. Accolades for China all around! | | |
| ▲ | piva00 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I don't see the USA building out that much solar in its vast desert wastelands. | |
| ▲ | harimau777 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yes, and? That's not really relevant to the topic at hand. No one has said that China is a utopia and paragon of human rights. |
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| ▲ | bayindirh 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > China brought 50 new coal plants online in 2025 alone but keep telling yourself that. Despite all of that, Electricitymaps predicts that they can generate 48% of their total energy from carbon-free sources at noon-hours. Now, this is impressive, despite building 50 new coal plants in 2025 alone. |
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| ▲ | leonidasrup 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Last year France produced 94% of electricity from low-carbon sources, that is impressive. https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/france#how-much-of... China produced 41% of electricity from low-carbon sources last year. https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/china#how-much-of-... | | |
| ▲ | bayindirh 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | For me, both are equally impressive actually. Europe has some great clean-energy countries. Interestingly Turkey passed 50% mark apparently. That's also an out of left field revelation for me. | | |
| ▲ | matthewdgreen an hour ago | parent [-] | | This is not really very impressive in context, for two reasons. First, China generated 10,400 TWh in 2025 and France generated only 547 TWh. The 95% and 50% are being applied to different numbers, and the scales here just aren’t comparable. Second, nearly all of France’s power generation was built decades ago, and China’s was built very recently - and is still expanding rapidly in both nuclear and renewables. Comparing France to China is like comparing a 1970s solar powered bungalow to a gigafactory under construction. |
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| ▲ | dalyons 34 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| coal usage has declined there the last two years. Would have declined even more this year, except for a certain very smart war. |
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| ▲ | Hikikomori 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Yet coal burning isn't going up in China. They also built more solar in 2025 than the US has in total. Also currently building 35+ reactors. |
