China's EAST project has set a new global record by maintaining a high-confinement plasma state for over 17 minutes, paving the way for future clean energy solutions by mimicking the sun's fusion process. China's Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), also known as the "artificial
‘spending very little’???
They produced more new green energy than the total capacity of green energy for the rest of the world combined in 2024.
And yet they keep building more coal plants.
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.
Yes, yes. China is the best country ever.
Not sure where you get that, just saying things aren’t black and white at scale
Nobody said that though? You seem to be putting words in people’s mouths.
The guy makes like 99 posts an hour, 18 hours a day. You can’t expect them all to make sense.
Mistakes will be made, but we will correct them as soon as we found out.
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.
Ah yes, once again we hope that in the future, something is done about climate change.
Except China operates and so far has executed multi year long plans that have been incredibly successful. On top of this they’re the reason green energy is cheap at all, given they’re the world’s producer.
Your words:
That is hoping that in the future, something is done about climate change.
Building new coal-powered plants as the Earth continues to warm and we know for a fact what such plants do to contribute to that is not justifiable. It doesn’t matter that they are “easy to convert” in the future. The coal is being burnt now.
And they’re easier to set up securely than either renewable or the nuclear plants they’ll likely later become.
Yes, it’d be great if they weren’t sanctioned every other week and threatened with war and could dedicate all of their resources to leap frogging dirty tech… But that’s not the world we live in, the world we live in has people that are rising in quality of life and expecting all the benefits. And they simply have more people than the US and Europe combined while only having the GDP of just the US.
It’s not ideal, they’ve admitted as such, but it’s a necessary step that all western nations took even when better options were on the table, it’s unfair to criticize China when they’re also producing more green energy than the rest of the world.
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.
Sure looks to me like that’s what you were saying:
Calling coal necessary…
Coal is like 50% of their grid. If you removed it you would be plunging the whole country back into the dark ages.
The future is 100% green energy, but that isn’t going to happen overnight, and especially can’t happen overnight in a growing economy that needs to add energy at a high rate to keep up with demand.
China is spending more than the rest of the world combined on green energy, and they are currently putting more green energy on their grid than anything else. But they still need fossil fuels to maintain their current growth.
When that growth slows down, then it becomes possible for a shift to occur, where green energy is added and fossil energy is taken offline. It is not currently possible to do this in China.
You know where it is possible to do this? Fully developed countries like America, where demand has more or less peaked and there is no excuse for continuing to add fossil fuels onto the grid. If we spent half of what China spends on green energy, we could be retiring all of our own fossil fuel power plants by the end of the decade, but not only are we not doing this we have trained a certain sector of our population to clap like monkeys and point at other countries whenever the issue comes up.
Pointing at countries that have only developed recently and are still going through the process and saying “you can’t use fossil fuels” while living in a country that built its entire economy on fossil fuels is peak chauvinistic bullshit. Have some self awareness and think about context before you make broad proclamations.
You put something I supposedly said in quotes.
Please link to where I said it.
We’re back to the reading comprehension problem again.
That wasn’t a direct quote, that was a characterization of the shallow vapidity of your argument.
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