But China and India!

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TL;DR

Hot take

“But what about China and India!?” is the great cry of those looking for excuses and reasons to delay climate change action.

It’s absolutely true that China and India need to reduce their emissions, but we’ve all got to get started now instead of waiting for the perfect conditions and agreements.

Explanation

Nations don’t want to cede economic advantages to other countries that they compete with. Taking action against climate change is perceived as somehow harmful and damaging to a nation’s economy. Politicians are elected by their own country men and women, why would they damage their own economy and piss off all those people if other countries aren’t taking action?

Some background to this is the historic emissions. Remember how the problem is cumulative emissions, not just the current rate? While China has emitted most of the human carbon emissions in atmosphere over time, they have a population of over 1 billion people. The United States has around 350 million people.

Report cards

If you wanted to check how each nation was actually doing on it’s climate commitments then you should swing by this excellent website. For a comparison there’s an OECD specific website as well.

Also this amazing website shows a live map of various countries electricity grids and their current carbon intensity. Unfortunately not every country is available but it’s still a great resource.

Screenshot of continental United States showing various carbon intensity levels for electricity generation

China

It is also worth pointing out that China produces much of the world’s renewable energy infrastructure - solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles. From a manufacturing perspective they produce around 80% of the world’s solar panels.

China’s own installed capacity is reported to be 50% non-fossil fuels. In 2023 they were expected to deploy more renewables than the entire United States has all up. It’s been reported that in “the first quarter of 2023, China’s utility-scale solar capacity had reached 228 GW, more than that of the rest of the world combined” China is an example of what happens when you embrace the transition to a renewable energy powered economy.

Yes it’s true China is also deploying a lot of coal fired power plant capacity. That word again, capacity. China has also decommissioned 70+GW of coal-fired plants. The new ones will eventually serve as backups to renewable energy. China doesn’t have a large gas network or access to large gas reserves - other countries are deploying gas as backups to renewables. So if the coal-fired power plant is sitting idle, it’s obviously not emitting greenhouse gases.