In a generation they went from a famine every decade to the end of famines, in a second generation they went from a industrial age economy with most of its people living in extreme poverty to eliminating extreme poverty and some of its people living on par with those in the wealthiest nations. In this generation they have raised the standard of living of their poorest from a poverty the US hasn’t seen in a century to that of middle class Americans in the 1980s. In order to accomplish this, massive amounts of electricity is needed. That lifestyle is naturally wasteful as it takes electricity for granted, but it’s better by most accounts. This is on top of being the world’s factory and the electricity use that entails.

In short, yes, they need both, and nuclear which they’re also the leader in. Unlike the West they do have plans to get off coal as a power source, and the amount of work they’ve done eliminating coal usage near cities by itself is commendable, compared to its contemporaries like the US.

Probably because they have a billion months to feed and a ridiculously inefficient incentive mechanism for progress in general. Kind of amazing that they put emphasis on green tech at all, except for the fact that they have the bodies to through at it and it’s something the rest of the world values as well.

Last year, China commissioned 96 GW of new coal production and commissioned 356 GW of wind and solar. This was the most coal production China has built in a single year since 2015, and it was still less than the amount of renewables that they put on it.

I wish China could wave a magic wand and have their entire energy grid go green, but the truth is that their middle class is still growing, and with it the demand for electricity, and even with the massive amount of spending they’ve put into wind and solar those forms of power simply can’t keep up with the rising demand on their own, so coal remains a necessary part of their multimodal grid with multiple redundancies and sufficient storage.

Yeah, too bad humans can only focus on one thing at a time.

It’s always best to abandon projects that are difficult, even if minute progress is being done on them. Like, could you imagine if someone made a machine that can fly? That’s just silly, after all only birds have flown for thousands of years.

And while we’re cutting spending I suppose, why not shut down the LHC too? Barely any progress made there in decades too.