Because some people want to use climate as a weapon.
China and India need to stop burning BILLIONS of tons of coal a year. Everyone needs to stop burning coal in general.
This is a classssic Right/Big Oil bot talking point. Why do you think the climate is where it is now? What is the main country that has pushed so much CO2 into the atmosphere in the last 80 years that we’re even talking about this?
Yes, China, India and others need to reduce fossil fuel production and usage. But this talking point is typically used as API propaganda to push the blame elsewhere. Also where is that demand coming from? Again, it’s America and the West.
Nobody should be burning coal. Full stop. I’m not on the right, I’m a power plant engineer. A combination of nat gas, hydro, nuclear, solar and wind needs to be used GLOBALLY. Bringing up the worst offenders doesn’t make me any less against the rampant waste the US also produces.
But the implication by omission in your first comment is a literal talking point of API. It’s their entire thing. Just distract from implementing any real change by pointing to other countries. You can say that, but in the same post you should explicitly call out the entire other side of the coin.
The USA gets about 30% of its electricity via renewables. The USA gets about 14% of its electricity through coal (14% too much). China gets about 30% of its electricity via renewables and about 60% of its electricity via coal. I can call that out for being bad without it being implied I think oil is best, no? China is the current number 1 for new renewables, USA is number 2. One of the big issues that is ignored is the exorbitant amount of electricity Americans use residentially.
In a vacuum you can say whatever you want, but in today’s media environment with bad actors and bots all over, posting anonymously online to repeat Big Oil talking points requires additional context. Nothing you’re saying is factually incorrect, but it just so happens to align with propaganda strategies.
That’s what makes it so effective as propaganda, they can hide behind “it’s not incorrect, it’s just facts” but the implication (and they’ve openly parroted it all over) is that everything is the fault of India and China and therefore we shouldn’t be trying to decarbonize and move away from fossil fuels.
Saying India and China shouldnt use coal has nothing to do with the USA decarbonizing. The US has, and continues to utilize renewables at mass scale. Pretending issues in other countries don’t exist just let’s global emissions continue to climb. I’m anti coal, thats kind of like my thing.
I can see you’re not absorbing what I’m saying, so… ok
Don’t forget China needs to stop using cement! We can use it though of course.
And all those 3rd world countries aren’t allowed sidewalks!
Nobody should be using coal. Nobody NEEDS to use coal. Its not like you use coal for awhile then level up and it turns to renewables. Developing nations should be given/sold the necessary resources to be self sufficient.
Yeah China bad bad bad bad bad! CHINANNNAA!!
Coal bad, China meh.
You forgot the cement use!! CHINA BAD FOR USING CEMENT!1!
Is it super cement though?
Ok I’ve had fun so I guess I’ll try to educate you.
You’ve fallen for right wing talking points blaming China for climate change. Notice how they hone in a singular talking point while ignoring everything else? They don’t talk about carbon, they try to take a singular point coal.
Here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions_per_capita
Sort by emissions per capita and see where countries line up. US #16, China #25. India #125.
That’s not to say that coal is fine. But when you hone in on that singular talking point and blame CHINA and oh yeah INDIA bad countries why are they so bad bad bad, then you’ve fallen for right wing Fox news screaming “CHINA’S COALL!”
PS watch for them blaming cement use too, which of course developing countries will use more of.
Phew! Almost thought we should do something. Luckily I can just play video games whilst we wait for China and Indie to their act together
We are doing something… More than a quarter of our electricity comes from renewables and less than 15% come from coal (should be zero across the board across the globe). We are number 2 globally in new renewables. Behind number 1 China, a country in which 60% of electricity generated is from coal.
Technically true, but you don’t need to help the pro-climate catastrophe people (it’s wild that those people exist BTW) use “We shouldn’t bother to get better until they get better” to influence policy. Don’t be a crab. For what it’s worth, India burns less coal per capita than the US and China is blowing everyone else out of the water on advancing solar power and electric vehicles.
India burns a bit more than double the coal the USA does. It also accounts for 75% of their electricity generation fuel. Whereas in the usa its less than 14%. So India burns less per capita but significantly more by weight and their entire grid is based on coal. Nobody should be burning coal for electric generation period. The USA has consistently gotten better and better with emissions while excuses are made for India/China. We are getting better and have been getting better, look at the amount of nat gas plants, solar fields, hydroelectric, wind and cogen facilities that have popped up in the last couple decades.
India burns substantially less than double the US. Even if that wasn’t the case, trying to lay the blame on other countries is textbook crab mentality. That’s problematic even before you get to the callous narcissism of “Yeah, we burned coal when we were developing, but it’s wrong now so you cant. Good luck developing! We’re rooting for you to do it the right way!”
In 2024 India 1.3 billion tons In 2024 the U.S. burned 411 tons
I’m not laying blame I’m saying we as a species need to stop burning coal. The US shouldn’t be doing it and neither should any other country. The US as I said, has been consistently improving methodology of generation. We have not however curbed our electricity use its only increased. It will continue to increase in an incredibly dramatic fashion more with electric cars, AI data centers and residential draw. We aren’t that high in polution per capita because we are burning fuel poorly. We are high because we use such a significant amount more per person. The issue is less the fuel, more the habits we as Americans have. I’m a mechanical engineer working in stationary engineering for a large cogen power plant. Emissions have steadily gotten better and better throughout my time in the field.
Americans and pulling up the ladder. What an iconic duo.
Isn’t China doing better than the rest of the world in steering to renewables (which have their own issues)? The real problem isn’t what we’re burning, it’s the demand. It keeps going up, so even advances in better energy sources dwindle in their growth compared to the total need. But reducing demand is antithesis to a good economy, so we aren’t even considering that. Must tech out of this! (Not working so far)
China is the only major country still building new coal power. The UK, meanwhile, closed its last coal plant in 2024.
The US needs to give up on drill-baby-drill. Germany needs to stop closing perfectly functional nuclear plants. The US especially needs to get out of car-based infrastructure, though even Europe isn’t ideal.
China is number one followed closely by the USA as number two. A larger percentage of our energy comes from renewables than china and we burn SIGNIFICANTLY less coal. 2024 we burned 411 million tons and China burned about 4.5 billion. Make the per capita argument all you want, 4.5 billion is still 4.5 billion and 411 million is still 411 million. You’re absolutely right, the demand is one of the bigger issues nobody knows what to do about.
Cause we are facing global economic hardship, which is partially due to climate change.
This is the sad part, most people’s priority is their standard of living so when economic hardship happens, they double down on short term thinking.
This is why climate action needs to go hand in hand with economic reform so most people’s life gets better as we go towards solar punk.
In theory the rich who have horded all that wealth could benefit humanity if that wealth becomes our piggy bank to fix things.
There is work to be done rebuilding infrastructure to battle climate change. It would be a massive jobs program, but we have reached an era where governments are not allowed to do public works in the public interest, amd since their is no profit to be made in doing the right thing, we must instead all suffer.
Nothing a global guillotine movement won’t solve
I think the main reason is that we’re screwed. After the covid work from home recession, all companies want to make money (extract worked hours from you, the workers, and convert that into dollars). To do so, they need products for you to make so that other people can buy them. Unfortunately, that requires plastic, fuels and various contaminants. So there, we are driving contamination thru the roof so companies can get all the money they lost tenfold. That accelerated the “we’re screwed deadline”, which is now in the past.
From some reading, I recall that Jewish people in the “we’re screwed” trains, owned by tiny black mustash (big fat Orange’s uncle), would totally make love to their partners oh the way to the gas chambers. That’s the euphoric situation we are in. We have given up and are just living the moment. As you might remember, the walls of the ovens had scratches. That’s next. We’ll all try desperately one day to fix this before perishing quickly after. But we are all still here. Its possible that our survivors will be around. All 6 or 7 of them.
I’ve seen like half a dozen articles asking questions like this in the last week.
Money.
The answer is money.
The answer has always been money.
The answer will always be money.
There is no point in asking this question because everyone already knows it’s money.
And anyone that thinks money isnt the answer, is probably financially or emotionally invested in not seeing that money is the answer.
No one’s willing to go first and put themselves at a competitive disadvantage. It needs to be uniform action. And without the US willing to participate it’ll be as slow as molasses.
This is the reason that every billionaire rails against a scary “new world order” or “one world government” or just the UN doing its job… They don’t want to actually be held to anything.
Billionaires. That’s why.
Because money is like a drug. Thats the only explanation that makes sense to me as to why rich people prioritize getting more money when they already have more than they’ll ever need. It is an addiction. We should be treating wealth hoarding as a mental illness.
Because people are selfish assholes.
There will be movement after the first half a billion people starve to death, and when the environment forces another billion or so to move.
Billionaires
Screw humanity.
If only it was just humanity, it would be fine. A dead end species. We’re taking everything with us, which is the real crime.
So what you’re saying is we’re evolutionary boomers
Well, the planet will bounce back without us. Sure, it won’t be the same… but a billion years ago was pretty different from now.
Great Oxygenation Event: Around 2.4 billion years ago, a type of photosynthetic microorganism—cyanobacteria, often called blue-green algae—began producing large amounts of oxygen as a byproduct of photosynthesis. At the time, Earth’s atmosphere had almost no oxygen, and this new oxygen was actually toxic to most existing life. The result was it killed most of the life on earth including itself, and new life forms adapted to oxygen.
So in a few billion more years, whatever intelligent life pops up will look back and think of us as just another algae problem.
David Kipping introduced me to the idea that the window of opportunity for intelligent life may be far smaller than we used to think. It’s a companion to the Rare Earth hypothesis of having so many variables that MIGHT need to exist to make things work, but assuming all conditions are good for what we consider hospitable, how long a planet has before the star changes and how soon basic life starts is not that long cosmically.
Simply put, new life after whatever this climate run stabilized to won’t have a billion years before the Sun begins to change. Not turn into a red giant or dwarf, those are far off still, but it will begin its path towards those long before the actual event, and conditions here will worsen for a teeming biosphere.
To quote “Hamilton”, life only gets probably one shot. Maybe two or three if it’s fast, but we can probably count a few of the mass extinctions that set things back for that.
If humans didn’t have sufficient numbers and intelligence to take advantage of the stable climate of the last hundred thousand years we’d either be extinct or hunter gatherers.
Now that we’ve used up most of the accessible fossil fuels another species won’t be able to industrialize, especially in the next billion years before the sun starts to warm the earth beyond habitability.
Apathetic bloody planet. I’ve no sympathy at all.
Then there is no point, and we should probably not care that much.
End billionaires by any and all means
Leadershit: “Why aren’t people
cranking out new victimsreproducing anymore?”Younger generation: “Fix this shit or we are canceling the next generation.”
Leadershit: (LotR Isildur meme) “No”
