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.
The poorest parts of China are still much poorer than any middle class. Most rural Chinese still do not complete high school.
And yet they own large farms that are tax free that they can earn money off of. The few low industrialized parts (currently representing less than 200 million) don’t have schools or massive infrastructure, but also have guarantees their way of life and making money is secure until they do have access to those things. And Xinjiang alone shows it’s not an empty promise; going from one of those regions you’re referring to, to a region that rivals Vietnam or Malaysia by itself.
I bet you won’t blame Mao for the last famine.
Just don’t try to leave if you don’t like it.
And no, nobody needs to make climate change worse with more coal plants.
Yeah, mao fucked up, like the US fucked up during its great famine, sorry dust bowl. And then no famine ever again.
To your second point, of course you can’t leave if you’re a criminal (every nation on earth has this policy) or in severe debt to the government (most nations have this policy), but you can leave under pretty much any other circumstances. I didn’t click your link but even you wouldn’t be spreading the conspiracy theory of secret global police that kidnap random yellow people for the cpc, right?
To your third point, coal plants and any other steam generators are easy to convert over to each other once built. A nuclear plant and a coal plant share 70% of their equipment. Building one lays the foundation for the other. If you need quick base load expansion, you can’t really beat coal or diesel, and continually expanding the quality of life for 1.4 billion people requires constant base load expansion… Even better if it can later be converted into near infinite power sources like nuclear.
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.
Nobody said that though? You seem to be putting words in people’s mouths.
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.
“The climate has to get worse for the benefit of the middle class” is a weird argument.
If that’s what you think I was saying then you need to work on your reading comprehension.
The climate has to get worse for the goal of adding more people from the lower class to the middle class. As someone IN the middle class, who has actual empathy for other human beings, as long as we aren’t going out of our way to kill animals slowly and painfully and/or to the point of extinction, and the ecosystem hasn’t collapsed, I refuse to believe in any goal that puts some vague emphasis on “the climate” as the “good guy” in this.
Evolution is an endless process of monsters eating the babies that need the most help to survive. Nature is the reason we’re killing the environment, “survival of the fittest” i.e. only those with advantages survive and adapt to the changing status of the climate, is the very essence of the very capitalism that is killing the climate.
Survival of the fittest is obsolete and cruel. It’s time we stopped fighting for “the climate” and started defying capitalism, the one place where we can remove Darwinian competition from it without just destroying it further. Sadly, nature needs competition and death to be what it is. That is why we CHOOSE to see humans as separate, instead of justifying it by calling ourselves “just animals”. In the absence of an actual judge above man, we should strive to meet the expectations we would want a benevolent judge to force us to meet.
But let me guess, you’re some greenwashed zealot who only eats vegan food and will probably think I think avocado on toast is common for “young people”? Because only privileged assholes want middle class standards to be lowered. If the superyachts or personal “business” jets were barred from being used by wealthy people like bicycles to globetrot where “the riffraff” can’t afford to go, the dent in carbon emissions would outweigh ALL carbon emissions by everyone else. The rich need to stop riding alone, they can travel 1st class if they want but none of this having a personal jet plane with more seats than the owner has immediate family members. When a teenage “princess” owns a jet so she can fly back and forth to Europe partying non-stop in-flight and until they get back home from vacation-partying every weekend, owning a jet with more than 4 seats is no longer a reasonable thing for the law to allow for private citizens.
I can’t survive without the few luxuries in my life because I literally feel so miserable without access to video games that I would commit suicide. That’s not the same as thinking you’re too good to fly commercial, because I believe no one can reasonably be denied access to the luxuries I have and I understand that people are denied much of what I have. If society can’t uplift most people to middle class, fuck the climate. We’re better off dying if it is doomed to collapse before we achieve a world where people are able to truly enjoy living, not just survive.
