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Originally Posted by Azure
I don't think you understand.
China IS building a massive amount of solar capacity, and it has done effectively NOTHING to reduce their demand on coal. Now they are going full steam ahead building out more coal capacity. That means from here on out emissions are going to get worse.
At the same time every single developing nation who needs to address their energy demands is going to build coal capacity simply because we all screwed up and didn't make natural gas cheap and readily available, and that includes the resources and infrastructure to build the plants, including signing agreements with the developing world to help them. Who do you think is filling that role right now? China. What do you think China is going to push? Coal.
The way I see it, around 2005 the world needed to shift massively in the direction of natural gas in order to now be at the point where coal usage is significantly reduced, and all developing nations are on the natural gas train. The US managed to cut their emissions 20% since 2005, but at the same time the rest of the world sat on their ass and thought going 'green' was the way out, and overall emissions have increased 51%. If the US is capable of reducing their emissions 20%, all other 1st world nations were as well. How many did? At the same time Europe should have made sure they had their #### together and weren't dependent on Russian gas. For obvious reasons, but also because the transition to natural gas is largely dependent on one big thing. It being cheap. And in order for it to be cheap, every single country which has gas resources, needs to be extracting it.
And lastly, exporting LNG to Asia should have been #1 on our list of things to do since 2001 in order to meet growing demand and help them reduce their emissions. But instead Canada has done what Canada does best. Nothing.
You are right about one thing. If modelling is correct, we are doomed.
The only way out of this was for rich, developed nations to lead the charge, and Canada is one of those countries, if not one of the top 3 countries in the world who should have taken charge. We didn't, and there is no way out of this mess now in the short term.
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What do you think I don't understand?
China is a developing nation and needs massive amounts of energy as we use almost 3x as much electricity per capita. That build out isn't going to go on forever. Lots of the coal capacity China is building will not be used either. China has said their coal peak will be 2025, so it's not like this is unexpected or unplanned. We all want them to stop, but the impact on their economy would be much harder than it was for us. Having said that, of course we'd like that sooner. I'm not sure how that diminishes the amazing growth we're seeing in renewables. It's an exponential growth and we're at the beginning, but doubling every 2.5-3 years and the projections keep getting revised up. It's wonderful news and I don't understand why some people want to be so negative. Their 5 year plans get constantly revised up for renewables and they expect 33% of their electricity mix to be at 33% by 2025 even while already adding a million city buses and millions of light duty vehicles to the grid. How is that not good news? Many things can be simultaneously true so I don't know why I don't understand how terrible things are when I'm aware of the facts