I don’t know how it is in other countries, but nearly thirty years ago when I was in elementary school, a Chinese propaganda slogan stuck with me: “If you want to get rich, build roads first; have fewer children, plant more trees.”
Every part of that slogan has been put into action, continuously, for decades. Although low birth rates have now become a problem, back then it seemed like a solution.
Xi Jinping may be a rather dull person, but his most famous saying is “Lucid waters and lush mountains are invaluable assets.”
As for building roads — the Belt and Road Initiative speaks for itself. We’ve built bridges in Croatia, in Bangladesh, in Mozambique, and roads and railways all over the world.
That slogan is probably engraved in every Chinese person’s memory.
> Although low birth rates have now become a problem, back then it seemed like a solution.
They haven't, imo. I am from India, and I have been hearing for the last two decades how we have avoided same mistakes as China and the latter is headed for a demographic collapse. China is only marching forward, and focusing more on automation to hedge its bets. While overpopulation in India has choked almost every city in India. I honestly don't know what will happen as more people migrate from rural to urban areas.
India's population will peak in 2065, while China's already has. It's depressing to imagine that 250-300M more people are left to be added before we finally see a decline.
Just like 1970s claim "overpopulation will destroy the planet" turned out to be exaggerated, the modern idea that “a large population is a blessing” feels equally misguided.
The predictions of Ehrlich in "the population bomb" and the club of rome were undone within a few years with the "green revolution" which saw massive increases in food production.
Ehrlich in particular was suggesting mass starvation by the 1980's. Conceivably, it is possible that too many people will cause problems, but nothing like what they actually predicted has come to pass.
Partially, yes! Population is #1 strain on resources. However, the political climate around 1970s was more like population would create large scale food shortages, famines, and without interventions, population would keep on growing forever. We at least now know that population peaks with prosperity, and food is largely a solved problem.
We're on the verge of ecological collapse, undergoing an insane mass extinction event with ocean acidification and methane release going off the charts. I can't even begin to conceive of your reality.
In my opinion, we might have avoided some of the mistakes, but that is still costing us.
The best usually leave the country after getting the prime education India can provide, and support the retirement plans of other countries' aging populations more than their own - the Indian government actively seems to encourage this, looking at how our PM tries to negotiate for more visas during every first-world trip. Even with the demographic dividend, we do not have enough jobs, so the elderly are not supported neither fiscally, nor infrastructure-wise, since old people cannot walk on bad roads or take advantage of non-existent programs anyway. For the younger people, the insane competition makes both work and personal life hell.
Whenever I see videos of China and their cities, and then look out of my window, it makes me both depressed and angry. I still don't understand how India can even be compared to China any more.
The nice thing about being a growing, underpopulated country, is that you're very attractive to immigrants. China can just fill the demographic gap with migration policies.
Not to be coy, but what do you mean by that? The reason I ask is because I think many of us use these terms, but without ever thinking about exactly which behaviors we're critiquing, or how they relate to what we truly value. For instance both the Roman and Greek Empires deserve immense respect, yet they were both often imperial empires ruled by dictators. The same is no less true of many societies that played key roles during The Renaissance, and patrons of the talents of the era.
I hold immense respect for China, because I think they're achieving great things. I also think there is a high probability that they will be the first society to start creating permanent off-planet colonizations, which is what will probably signal the birth of the next era of humanity, so that in the future a name like Wang Yie might lie right alongside Neil Armstrong.
On the other hand I certainly don't think the US should emulate them. It's important for the world to be multipolar, not only in alliances, but also in ideology, perspective, and behavior. What will happen to China once they inevitably find themselves with a leader who is not socially motivated, or who is incompetent? In such a centralized system outright collapse is not out of the question. Or perhaps they'll be just fine? Who knows? By maintaining a wide diversity of systems across the world, I think we maximize our chances of collective success and minimize our chances of collective failure.
Indeed, I think Rome, Greece and other conquering powers get more respect than they deserve. There's no actual reason so many people have to die for these countries' national ambitions. Feel free to generalize to the US, etc.
Didn't Rome save a lot of lives by pax romana? Perhaps it was actually better in terms of loss of life to be conquered by Rome than have endless wars among yourselves. Applies to the US too.
They go hand in hand. The authoritarianism of China allows it to undertake generational projects of immense scale with mass popular support through propaganda.
It works well when the government is pursuing welfare maximising initiatives, but limits self-correction when the government goes off track.
A small example of it going wrong, was when Mao convinced peasants to exterminate Sparrows and other ‘pests’ only to severely disrupt the ecosystem and cause a famine.
Somehow we (the United States) accomplished generational projects that are currently out of the realm of possibility such as the interstate system without risking anything like a famine. I think a lot of people in America have been overly-empowered to stand in the way of the most modest progress through NIMBYism, litigation, local government, etc. To a lot of people it increasingly feels like a form of private authoritarianism over tiny fiefdoms for absolutely no benefit to a vast majority of people.
"Somehow" we did that back when we believed in a strong federal government working for the benefit of the people. It's no wonder that we lost the ability after decades of anti-government propaganda and regulatory capture.
It's not that people turned against the government just randomly. Who was the last genuinely socially motivated President we had? I idealize JFK, but I think that's largely because of his charisma, how he ended, and obviously the space program. Yet how did he not just immediately condemn and completely dismantle the entire CIA when the proposal for Operation Northwoods [1] reached his desk, and was one signature away from execution? And that'll probably look benign as the actions from more recent decades are declassified in the future.
And after his assassination everything went downhill fast with divide and conquer, all alongside global self destructive geopolitical nonsense that continues to this very day. We have spent, just since 2000 upwards of a very conservative baseline of $10 trillion on war and military related expenses. That's a starting point of about $30,000 for every single man, woman, and child in America. Think about all of the amazing things we could have done with that money. Instead we just blew it on pointless wars and have literally less than nothing to show for it since they not only made the US far less safe, but made the world far less stable.
LBJ made more progress on social issues than any President with the possible exception of FDR. Certainly dramatically more progress per year in office. Jimmy Carter was also socially motivated.
Reagan changed the game, Newt Gingrich destroyed cooperation, and now we're living in the world they created.
I don't believe we are capable of a strong government that will also work for the benefit of the people today. Anti government sentiment didn't just spring up from a vacuum.
>*"conservatives have been running that playbook since the New Deal"
I think one of America's many failures is allowing a radically revolutionary right-wing (that is currently headed full speed to fascism) to keep calling themselves "conservatives" when that label is about as incorrect as can be. They don't "conserve" anything. They're not actually reactionary, although they often pretend to be. They are not trying to be defenders of Chesterton's Gate[1]. They're radicals, who want to reshape society to their own whims and prejudices. And they ought to be address and treated as such.
> To a lot of people it increasingly feels like a form of private authoritarianism over tiny fiefdoms for absolutely no benefit to a vast majority of people.
that is what it means to have property rights.
It prevents your interests from being usurped by someone else without first consulting you. Of course, like anything, it can be taken too far, but getting the balance right is important.
If it tips too far towards gov't authoritarianism, the people who are not connected tends to suffer silently (while the majority who gets told these "nation building" projects benefits them).
If it tips too far towards the private individual, then you get nimby-ism and such.
America's elevation of individuality and property rights above everything else, its inability to work together collectively to achieve a goal, and its citizen's infighting, distrust of and belligerence toward each other, are the main reasons it is incapable of doing big things anymore.
The minute we had a huge health emergency that should have united the population, it was immediately politicized such that half the country was trying to fix it, and the other half were trying to prolong it and grief the fixers.
We're done for if we can't stop pitting half the country against each other over literally every issue.
Presumably many of the people who currently attribute China’s ability to build infrastructure to authoritarianism would also attribute America’s past ability to build infrastructure to authoritarianism. They would presumably also decry any future attempts to build ambitious infrastructure in America as authoritarianism.
The interstate was for the military. The new deal was in part thanks to left wing communists/unionists voicing for the gov to do more for the people. Then came McCarthyism.
Actually, the US didn’t have a famine, it had the opposite. Automation like combines and tractors obviated the need for oxen and farmhands to plow and reap manually. The farmers competed in a race to the bottom (depleting the soil and causing the dust bowl). They fired most farmhands and still had a surplus. Food prices plummeted while giant dust storms became the norm.
The government had to step in and pay farmers NOT to plant, to extricate them from the downward spiral / race to the bottom that the “free market” had producted in the face of automation / massive supply shocks.
Meanwhile, the laid-off farm workers (20% of USA used to be employed in farm-related jobs) migrated to cities but it would be a decade before the manufacturing base was built up to employ them. They lived in Hoovervilles and shantytowns set up to house them. A third of the country’s banks failed and the money supply shrank. The fed sat that one out. You can read books by John Steinbeck and others describing life at that time (eg Grapes of Wrath).
So eventually, projects like the Interstate Highway System, and even weapons manufacturing and mobilization for WW2 caused mass employment. At a time when people needed jobs, this was a good thing for the economy and didn’t need communist propaganda to attract workers. Capitalism’s race to the bottom created the desperation the workers needed for undertake large state projects. And it is about to happen again.
Ironically, around the same time the US had a massive surplus, Russia and China were experiencing massive man-made famines under collectivization. Whether that horrific economic experiment ultimately led to more prosperity through 5-year plans is a contentious question (ideological leftists like Noam Chomsky have told me, quoting Amartya Sen, that supposedly China had less deaths from malnutrition afterwards than India, but that’s hardly a high bar considering their population density).
PS: I don’t mean to pick on communism alone for extreme ideological economic system enforcement leading to famines. The Irish Potato Famine could probably be squarely put into the ideological capitalism column (landlords and property rights trumping people’s lives), or how Britain (a capitalist country) exploited India and the famines in Bengal were also largely due to requisition of grain, similar to the Volga famine during the Russian civil war.
> It was the same thing with the Soviet union, was it ever really successful at any point?
yes. the soviet union was wildly successful for most of its history. it went from a backwater poor agrarian country to an industrial superpower near peer with the US in a single generation, while simultaneously going through multiple brutal wars and crushing nazi germany at immense cost. despite all that, the soviet union had the fastest and greatest economic and quality of life rise of any country in the 20th century.
of course it had problems that led to its collapse but you cannot be serious and say it was never successful at any point
You don't need press for everyone to see that China is straight killing it in almost every sector. Manufacturing, compute, you name it. Sure, they aren't without problems.
And as for free press, look at where freedom of press took United States. You have companies like Fox news that "aren't actually news, just entertainment", who blatantly lie about election fraud. You have podcasters like Joe Rogan who are at the same time "just bullshitting", while also pushing ideological narratives. And most republicans still believe election was stolen in 2024.
And overall, the party that was all about free speech, free trade, and small federal government power is pretty much doing the exact opposite in every single aspect, and people voted for them.
And yes, from a pure statistical standpoint, having centralized power isn't optimal since you don't want someone crazy having lots of centralized power, but at the same time, you also don't want what US has, where on the average 7/10 people simply just don't give a fuck about US being destroyed financially and socially.
China is plainly and obviously many times more successful than the Soviet Union ever was, even if you ignore all the propaganda and just rely on yourself as a primary source - I.e., “hop on a plane and see for yourself.”
China's success has come _after_ they economically liberalized in a way that resembles the west's free markets.
Soviets never did any of this. They "stubbornly" kept to a command economy. While china does have their 5-year plans and command economy, they have loosened that up for private individual's enterprises, and allowed special economic zones for which free market capitalism thrives.
With a bit of state help in infrastructure etc, this enabled china to leverage their enormous human capital to simply out-muscle their way into industrial dominance. Now with such a dominant position, they can call shots in a way that irks the US. Compounding the problem is that the authoritarian style of gov't in china enables long term strategic planning and execution - something that seems sorely lacking from the US for the past 3 decades.
Why does the added qualifier in your first paragraph matter?
You’re literally just explaining why the Soviet Union was less successful.
Nothing stopped the Soviet Union from liberalizing their economy and running it better like China. They just didn’t do it. Which loops us back to my original comment.
I didn’t bring my point up as some kind of communism versus capitalism thing, I’m just plainly stating that as far as single-party mostly-authoritarian governments go, China is far more accomplished than the USSR was.
You can go to China and see it for yourself. The USSR make itself inaccessible to foreigners for the most part, but you can hop on a train and visit nearly any place freely. It's pretty easy with their extensive train system.
I see a lot of cope with "c-China is lying! It's not really that good!" But lots of tourists such as myself have been all over the country, and tbh, I think the "propaganda" undersells it a bit. I thought there was no way it could be as nice as the travel videos I saw, but it was even better.
I’m really curious to better understand what aspects of China’s government would hurt your day to day life.
From what I read online the people there are free to rant and get things fixed. Their local government representative is held accountable if the people in his/her province are unhappy. Not too different from a typical democratic setup I guess? But this could be off because I don’t know anyone personally there.
I'm not sure where you are reading, but people are not free to rant in China. Many of my friends would lose privileges because they were foolish enough to openly speak poorly regarding certain topics, and suddenly they were banned from Wechat, which is equivalent to being banned from the internet, and from using money in noncash form. My sister was visiting and was dumb enough to get herself banned from way more services and she was scared she wouldn't be able to get back home. In a very few places, they check your social score to ensure that you aren't low-life enough to be barred from there too. I only spoke freely after checking an area for no cameras, so I always had all of my privileges, but me and a Chinese friend, after coming to the USA (I am not Chinese, only went there for school), hope we never end up back in China.
Regarding day to day life in the USA, I am unaffected by China.
> I’m really curious to better understand what aspects of China’s government would hurt your day to day life.
For tech workers in particular, the structure of the economy would prevent high equity-based compensation. I also distinctly recall China's heavy-handed enforcement of COVID lockdowns, and the sudden about-face when discontent reached a boiling point. Then there's the censorship too - disagreeing on low-stakes local issues is one thing, but if you disagree with national policy, you cannot exactly discuss it in the open the way that we do here.
I have known a few Chinese people, and they downplay this stuff. Some of them are even political refugees from the purges following Mao's death, and they downplay the level of authoritarianism in the country. As bad as the US has gotten recently, we're still not at that level.
It really does seem like both nations are slowly converging on similar systems of government, but hopefully this authoritarian swing in the US can be limited.
I can answer this question. I’m a native-born Chinese, and I’ve never studied abroad. This year I just completed my first trip overseas, visiting the UAE. First of all, I don’t think China is a fully democratic system, but it’s not an outright dictatorship either. At the same time, I don’t think the two-party voting system in the U.S. qualifies as democracy either. One of the biggest drawbacks of Western criticism of China for being “undemocratic” is that many Chinese people travel abroad and are exposed to the outside world. If the West had a better system, we would definitely be willing to follow it, but their proposals are worse than ours—especially after Trump took office, things have only gotten more chaotic.
In China, the only real restriction is that you cannot severely criticize the Party and its leaders. I mean, minor criticism is acceptable—for example, pointing out areas that aren’t working well—but you cannot completely reject them. For instance, you cannot post offensive memes about leaders. This is different from the U.S., but I think the comparison is interesting. By sacrificing this particular freedom, we actually gain many other freedoms.
The most typical case this year was a food poisoning incident at a kindergarten. The staff, ignoring safety regulations, added toxic chemical elements to the food. This incident went viral on the Chinese internet, and the public criticism was focused on the government and relevant medical authorities, but people did not(dared not)—blame the Party itself. In the end, a large number of the responsible personnel were punished or sentenced. The problem was resolved, and it did not implicate the Party itself.
Many people don’t realize China’s major advantages, and I only understood them by observing foreigners who run businesses in China( i mean this video if anyone is intreseted https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-ozoOKhUO4&t=329s) . China has a system of accountability. If anyone travels in China, I highly recommend observing rivers, streets, and even trees—they all have markers indicating who is responsible. This means that if something goes wrong in that area, someone is accountable. Of course, corruption can undermine this, but the system is still operational. China doesn’t have problems like California’s high-speed rail, the UK’s HS2, or the charging stations under Biden that were barely built and with almost no one held accountable.
As for why I chose the UAE: honestly, Europe has disappointed me too much these days. Our social media is full of reviews about being stolen from or robbed while traveling in Europe, and the same applies to Southeast Asia. They’re basically at the same level of insecurity. Even in the UAE, which is considered a relatively safe country, I was still worried about my credit card being lost or fraudulently charged. In China, I never have to worry about such things. Of course, Japan, South Korea, or Singapore might also be safe, but those countries are just too boring for me.
Do I care about politics? Of course I do. The more sensitive topics can always be navigated with wordplay—everyone is familiar with these strategies. For more serious matters, a VPN works perfectly.
(My English writing isn’t very good, so I often write in Chinese and use ChatGPT to help me translate.)
To be honest, I roughly searched around, including asking AI, but I couldn’t really figure out what happened. I hardly have any impression of her; her videos can be found on Chinese internet, but the recommendation algorithms have never suggested them to me. From what I’ve found so far, she seems quite controversial. She might have been limited in reach on Chinese internet. Maybe the government found a suitable reason, or maybe not — I really haven’t clarified that part.
How much is "freedom" worth to you? Do you think your average homeless person in San Francisco would be worse off with free healthcare, housing, and no right to vote?
The most charitable interpretation I can think of, if OP didn't misuse the word, would be, the generic "China bad" narrative being applied to things like equating the Belt and Road (loans, infrastructure projects) to centuries of old-fashioned exploitation of Africa. After all, it takes one to know one.
It’s not that hard to find examples. Chinese incursions in the south China sea and the development of artificial islands to project power and control over the region. Their plans for Taiwan. The annexation of Tibet. Xinjiang ethnic cleansing. Erosion of democratic freedoms in Hong Kong SAR. And yes the entire Belt and Road initiative which is basically loan sharking.
No. That list shows coercive or authoritarian behavior, not classical imperialism.
Imperialism means establishing colonies or directly ruling foreign territories for economic extraction. China today doesn’t occupy or govern other sovereign states. The South China Sea, Hong Kong, Tibet, Xinjiang, and Taiwan are all disputes within--except Taiwan + the South China Sea--undisputed national boundaries.[1] Belt and Road loans, while allegedly predatory, are contractual and do not create colonial rule. So it’s perhaps aggressive nationalism and coercive influence, but not imperialism.
1. Yes, looking way back, the occupying Qing dynasty established said boundaries through quite a lot of imperialism about a century before the US got busy manifesting its destiny.*
To be fair China challenging white people rule is kinda bad if you are white.
I suppose us Westerners can now kinda feel how the Ming must have felt in the 19th century?
They're plainly trying to expand their territory in Taiwan and the South China Sea. Building invasion barges that can only be used for invading Taiwan, harassing Phillipine ships. It's not subtle.
I don't think any super power looks fantastic, and we definitely should not idolize China.
But also, we should let that be an excuse for western powers. We have corporations forcing most of the decisions in our country for extremely short term gains.
In the US we have... decrypt public transit, horrible healthcare, halting progress on renewable energies, we're probably going to make less than our parents while billionaires make more.
Like it sucks, and if anyone tells you well at least you don't live in China you should roll your eyes, why does where we live have to suck. Oh, and we even have awful imperialism too.
A mean not to go too deep into whataboutism… but at least they only persecute their own Muslims rather than picking random countries on a map and persecuting them.
I see your point but, they're really not selling much more than golf carts and drones. If they go all-out with selling their actual military hardware (which they have a large stockpile and production capacity of), it would be get much more difficult for Ukraine to keep up the balance without increasing support from the west.
It's really quite interesting to see China being labelled as imperialist mean while the western powers have been colonizing and meddling in all kinds of affairs for generations... (see Operation Northwoods as one example)
The entire point of being able to mention past mistakes is for future generations to be able to learn from them and avoid making the same mistakes. It seems, in recent times, that while this liberty is "afforded" to US/Europe, they're not able to use it effectively, if at all. Meanwhile, even though the Chinese might not be able to talk about their mistakes publicly, it seems evident from their progress and events that they have not forgotten them, and that it is in their minds, at the very least.
Edit: Not to mention, looking at how your current president is going after Canada just because of an ad, don't keep your hopes up on US citizens being able to "mention" things either.
Have you not been paying attention to what's going on this country?
We're building concentration camps. We have the Gestapo rounding up brown people. We have people being deported to supermax prisons in countries they have no connection to for protesting America's material support for genocide on college campuses. We have a media that is increasingly owned by lackeys of this administration (just look into CBS and Bari Weis as the latest example). Every aspect of our government is for sale from pardons to merger approvals and ending SEC investigations. There is functionally no law and order where we may start simply ignoring inconvenient parts of the Constitution like the 22nd Amendment. We have the military in our streets to incite violence. We have the Navy blowing up random small boats off Venezuela, arguably to incite a hot war with Venezuela. We have people who are rapidly unable to afford a place to live, food or both (and that's a bout to get a whole lot worse when SNAP gets suspended in November as the administration refuses to use the $6 billion set aside to fund it). We have a Speaker who won't swear in a duly elected House representative because she'll be the 218th vote on a discharge petition that will force a vote on release of the Epstein files, which the president will be forced to veto and he doesn't want to be put in that position.
I think about all these things when people bring up so-called "authoritanism" in China. Do you not see how dire the situation is not only in the US but basically all of the developed world? France, Germany and the UK are poised to have actual Nazis win their next elections due to these economic crises that governments absolutely refuse to address.
And imperialism? What imperialism? Pretty much every conflict on Earth currently can be traced back to the US, either because a US ally is a proxy doing war crimes or simply because the US turns a blind eye because one or both sides are buying US arms to commit those same war crimes.
Just this month the Nobel committee handed the Peace Prize to an opposition leader in Venezuela who has promised to make Venezuela more Israel-friendly and to privatize all the resource extraction to Western companies. "Peace".
We are in 1930s Germany. Worrying about China seems crazy to me.
What makes you think I disagree with any of that? These are dark times. Honestly, the West is so profoundly stupid right now that a part of me wishes China could be a beacon of respectability. It's just a shame about their being ahead of the curve on the malicious government.
Don't know why you're downvoted, this seems a pretty accurate take to me.
It seems most of us in the West are mostly incapable of self-criticism and have been fed so much propaganda that we forgot how to see through all the bull**.
Are low birth rates a problem? The job market keeps being published about lack of employment. Recent was this UK having a 1,200,000 plus college graduates and less than 100,000 job placements. The USA market is also bad with very limited economic mobility based on years past.
Is the job market too restrictive with maximize profit over maximum knowledge transfer and upkeep? Not properly balancing older and newer labor. That is the reason for "low birth rate problem"?
ML is being pushed to condense the labor market even more. Along with growth of larger and more powerful businesses. Number of businesses are pushing to be an oligopoly and more to a duopoly or monopoly.
The current and future labor market with modern business ideology does not seem to match the statement _low birth rate problem_. The problem seems to be elsewhere.
Based on my understanding, that’s still the case. I think the problems you mentioned are currently beyond what any government can handle, even one with extremely strong control like China. China is now facing both rising unemployment and a low birth rate. In the past, when China’s birth rate was higher, unemployment was not this high. The fundamental problem is not that there are too many people, but that the economy lacks vitality. Moreover, a declining birth rate will cause systems like pensions and healthcare—which rely on the next generation to support the previous one—to collapse.
The relationship between the job market and employment is not so straightforward as you presume. After all, fewer people means less demand for labor as much as it means more supply. In general a falling population is considered an economic risk.
> a Chinese propaganda slogan stuck with me: “If you want to get rich, build roads first; have fewer children, plant more trees.”
Why call it propaganda though ? That doesn't sound like a biased, deceptive or misleading policy.
It hasn't been thought through much which is universally common for some govt policies everywhere, but it results have been positive for the most part ?
"Have fewer children" implies that people are a burden, which can be true in a dysfunctional society, like perhaps China under Mao.
But in a well functioning system, more people get more things done and make society wealthier.
The old idea was that the planet can only produce enough food for a certain number of people. But it turned out that people produce the food, not the planet!
Probably neither "larger n is always better, for any value of n" nor "smaller n is always better, for any value of n" adequately captures the nuance involved in assessing whether having more or fewer children will increase wealth.
It also turns out that producing food requires some amount of both planet and people.
There's only so much food people can grow on planet Earth, so it remains true, even if the number varies depending on the means available for producing that food. So yeah we can grow more food than people thought decades ago, but the Earth and the energy available to it, along with arable land are still finite.
So most people believe it was a mistake. We were misled by some so-called experts at the time. Conspiracy theorists claim that many of those experts weren’t Han Chinese, since the one-child policy only applied to the Han population.
The policy last about 35 years and didn’t end till 2015. Even today there a limit on procreation as the cap was only increased to three children in 2021. At some point the CCP has to own its mistakes.
The problem isn’t that China instituted the policy (although its use of forced abortions to enforce was… problematic), it’s that its system of government prevented open discussion, reflection, and self-correction.
My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I ride a Mercedes, my son rides a Land Rover, and my grandson is going to ride a Land Rover…but my great-grandson is going to have to learn Mandarin.
LOL. Probably no longer needed. China currently has no real solution for the low birth rate. I guess they are 99% relying on industrial robots and household robots(in the future).So China will desperately invest in the robotics sector. (The recently released 15th Five-Year Plan likely includes this). By then, language likely won’t be an issue—AI can replace everything.
the government is trying to encourage more births through subsidies and other measures. In fact, experience from developed countries has already shown that this approach doesn’t work. Moreover, the subsidies the Chinese government provides are far lower than in developed countries and far below the actual cost of raising a child.
The most common nationwide subsidy is 3,600 RMB per child per year, which is basically ineffective. For a woman on maternity leave, the government will subsidize her based on her salary, which can be substantial—in places like Shanghai it could reach 200,000–300,000 RMB—but still not enough to stimulate population growth.
To put it in a darker perspective: the only way to truly boost birth rates would be to reduce women’s rights or compensation, which is unlikely in any civilized country. A historical example is Romania.
So in my understanding, China has only two viable paths: solve the cost of raising children through household robots or by means of coercion, the government could require state-owned enterprise employees and Communist Party members to have children. China has 100 million Party members and roughly tens of millions of SOE employees. SOE employees usually have stable benefits and income, so childbirth could be tied to salary, benefits, or promotion opportunities. To some extent, this could be argued as reasonable—after all, they are supported by taxpayers and arguably should contribute to society. But it still counts as a rather dark idea, and I imagine it would be a last-resort option.
I’ve actually thought a lot about this issue. My conclusion is that it’s not feasible. China has never been good at integrating other ethnicities and races. Even managing the 56 recognized ethnic groups within mainland China hasn’t gone very well; it has copied many mistakes from the Soviet Union, which has now led to a certain degree of backlash.
So I’ve always felt that China’s ambition extends only to Taiwan, and Taiwan is the endpoint. After all, the people on Taiwan are Chinese too, sharing the same culture and ethnicity. Another point that people might overlook is that China’s approach to incorporating outsiders is based on cultural identity rather than racial identity, which is the opposite of the U.S. In the U.S., you can come in, bring your own culture, help reshape American culture, and still become an American. In China, you can only be considered Chinese if you adopt Chinese culture.
Of course, sometimes we discuss online hypotheticals like whether it would be good for China to annex Mongolia or Myanmar. From a purely military perspective, it would be very easy for China. But almost no one supports it, because our way of thinking dictates that it would require an enormous cost to transform those populations into Chinese culture, and that cost is simply not worth it. Trade and cooperation are the best approach.
Wise to use forests to contain deserts. Problem is that China still plays a big role in importing deforestation-linked commodities and fund overseas projects that exacerbate global loses. There are low tree survival rates and falsified coverage, like the Three-North Shelterbelt program which is plagued by inefficiencies over its 40 years of operation.
It's also hard to balance afforestation without causing scarcity of water and displacement of native forest habitats. For example, instances where shrubs are misclassified as forests inflate the report figures. China seems to be the global leader in biodiversity loss, with about 80% of its coral reefs and 73% of its mangroves gone since 1950. Everyone knows their abusive fishing practices, and the millions of tons of plastic pollution into the ocean every year.
So, keep up the good environmental efforts, China, and hope you do even better.
It’s hard to reason about where China is today with forestation. Obviously their efforts from 20 years ago didn’t do much good, probably due to corruption and mismanagement. Today they seem to have solved so issues, is it could really be working. The primary resource they need to manage is water, and any effort that requires too much water (especially water diverted from local farmers) isn’t sustainable.
Honest question, aren't coral reefs also very sensitive to climate change? How much of that loss is because of regional activities and how much is due to global environmental changes?
Nobody's claiming that all coral is going to go extinct.. the reef environment that has existed for the past few thousand years is at great risk though. Water temperatures that we know have been relatively stable for several hundred years are suddenly rapidly warming. Bleaching events due to high temps which infrequently occurred in the past are happening nearly every year now, which gives the reef no time to rejuvenate between them. The evolutionary process which protects species in their niches takes hundreds or thousands of generations to adapt to new selection pressures and the changes are happening over dozens of generations instead, which may be too fast for most species to respond.
Coral and coral reefs will surely exist for the next few hundred million years but e.g. the Great Barrier Reef as an example of a vibrant reef ecosystem might not. We don't know exactly where the tipping point for these extremely complex systems lies, but we know that it's some point in the direction we're heading and we're starting to see examples of the outcomes that scientists predict to see near those tipping points.
My guess is as a species it will relocate to somewhere with the right temperature zone but because coral takes so long to grow from the perspective of those of us alive the existing “old growth” coral will die.
Considering that China is responsible for ~25% of cumulative CO2 emissions to date, there's not much difference between the regional and global inputs.
Request the source? I researched and calculated the cumulative percentage of global carbon emissions from major economies since the industrial revolution:
- United States: 24%
- China: 15%
- Russia: 6.7%
- Germany: 5.2%
- United Kingdom: 4.4%
- Japan: 3.8%
- India: 3.5%
- France: 2.2%
- Canada: 1.9%
- Ukraine: 1.7%
source from Global Carbon Project, is this reliable?
My area has seen some wildfire smoke season near the end of summer. It never happened when I was a kid. Now every summer there’s wildfire smoke for several days or several weeks.
The climate appears to be changing and heavily forested areas of midwest US and canada are on fire every summer.
Planting trees could be great for the environment, but without the moisture it could become a tinderbox for wildfires.
India too has been adding more green cover than ever. Higher CO2 in atmosphere leads to faster growth of forests. But more important factor is urbanization for India. As people move to cities the need to cut down trees goes down.
You'll read about some 70 year old woman/man in an obscure village who's reforested thousands of acres on their own, or resuscitated a lake (e.g. the lake guy in Bengaluru).
But there's little effort to harness their knowledge in a systematic way, add knowledge from others into the knowledge bank, do peer review, and then systematically dispense the knowledge in the form of a kit to environmentalists and bureaucrats across the country. China did this, and that's why they're so successful.
One nice thing about these developing countries is due to the power infrastructure tends to be not very good - which prompts people to take things into their hands and install solar, not to save the planet but to stave off brownouts, and be able to run the AC around the clock to stave off the heat.
For residential, solar + batteries straight up beats legacy infra on cost, and with the upcoming cheap sodium batteries, things are only going to get better.
Cities tend to expand up. Almost all buildings in Mumbai that are under 5 stories are targeted for "redevelopment" i.e. a developer buying it out and building something taller in its place.
But I live in a rural area of New Zealand and I also see how people moving onto farm land greatly increases tree cover (not forrest) and biodiversity, I assume because people plant gardens, and closely husband them
In New Zealand farmers are grossly damaging to the environment. They clear everything and plant mono cultures and treat water as exhaustable and rivers as waste dumps
So yes people in cities is a good thing, but people in rural areas are good, to
Guess it depends on whether subsistence living is more resource intensive than urban living where on average urbanites own more possessions per capita.
This is opposite to everything I've ever read. A brief "greening" period was expected (and is now nearing its end) as climate change started taking off due specifically to this effect.
Edit: to clarify, I'm saying the greening thing already happened due to increases in CO2 levels (though it's possible this is due to heat and not CO2 itself, I guess?).
Hmmm, separately of plant-types, I wonder if there may be a distinction here between how a surge in individual growth doesn't necessarily translate to a surge in the forest.
Imagine a higher CO2 concentration allows a tree to reach maturity a whole +25% faster, taking 16y instead of 20y. However its happening in an established forest, already bounded by mountains, rivers, etc, where mature trees sustain for another 100y before they finally die off and take 10y to decompose, opening the spot for a replacement.
In that case, the number of simultaneous trees doesn't go up very much, because the main effect is to reduce "downtime". The "duty-cycle" for a tree-sized patch of ground goes from having a mature tree ~77% of the time to ~79%.
So, it turns out that there are two types of plants: those whose growth is rate-limited by available CO2, and those whose aren't, as the latter evolved a more efficient pathway during a previous era of low CO2 concentrations.
So depending on which kinds of plants, you can both be right.
Climate patterns are changing. My kids will retire with the cheap old farmland we bought that I’m planting black walnuts on.
Upstate NY was ideal maple syrup production territory for years. Now, we’ve changed from USDA Zone 5 to 6, so the region will be more like western Virginia in 20 years.
The TLDR is that they aren't. Global warming made some areas more hospitable to forests (warmer, more precipitation) and increased drought resistance counteracts some of the increased aridity in other ares: https://e360.yale.edu/features/greening-drylands-carbon-diox...
The atmosphere has so far barely changed in temperature compared to natural variations in temperature over time that had smaller and lesser effects than the effect we are seeing.
The abnormally rapid rise in CO2 levels we are seeing is unusual and accords better with the unusualness of rapid global greening. It isn't climate change that is causing it. It is CO2, directly.
How much of this is the result of reversing the deforestation caused by the Great Leap Forward and other anti-nature policies of the mid twentieth century?
It's not a bad thing if this is mostly just restoring forests ravaged by bad policy, but it's a bit odd to compare this reforestation, quantitatively, to what's going on in countries that didn't have a "war against nature".
My immediate thought, yeah isnt that because they don't really naturally have the kinds of softwoods forests good for making boards and paper? And until more recently they were taking recycled paper/fiber from america in empty shipping containers returning.
The real news is that it's also slightly happening in other developed countries too, another rhetoric point towards Steven Pinker's concept that as nations get richer they become more environmentally conscious, cause they can afford to care about it.
> The real news is that it's also slightly happening in other developed countries too, another rhetoric point towards Steven Pinker's concept that as nations get richer they become more environmentally conscious, cause they can afford to care about it.
I'm not sure it's environmentalism. It's efficiency. From the article.
> In richer countries, where farming has become more efficient, deforestation has slowed or even reversed
You simply don't need as many people living in villages, farming marginal land. New England re-forested because the land was never that good for farming, and it made a lot more sense to work in factories.
I’d heard that project wasn’t going so well. The trees weren’t really suited to the areas where they were planted, and many died off. I suppose even if only a small percentage survive, it’s still better than desert.
> as nations get richer they become more environmentally conscious, cause they can afford to care about it.
Thus far, getting rich has been dirty business. This is what leads people to care more so than them being able to afford to care. Their richness is a side effect of their pollution, thus, caring is a side effect of richness but that's not the root cause. Pollution -> Money -> Caring. If you removed the money, people still care they just can't afford to do anything about it.
I'm not familiar with Pinker or this theory, just poking at it :)
> Steven Pinker's concept that as nations get richer they become more environmentally conscious, cause they can afford to care about it.
I think in this case it's more of a correlating factor. The countries struggling with deforestation have very little state capacity to enforce property rights or any sort of environmental regulations. Whereas in the developed world it's much easier to stop illegal logging or homesteading.
I agree and would also add that food security is also a massive factor. With a high food insecurity clamping down on illegal expansion of farmland is politically toxic - but as land use efficiency rises and cities grow conservationalism becomes a much more important agenda to back.
People like nature - all things held equal we want to live in a beautiful natural world... but if that world comes at the cost of having food on the table. Whether that inefficiency is technologically, environmentally (e.g. New England's poor soil) or conflict driven doesn't significantly change public opinion.
China is very large, has 90% of the population living on 40% of the land in the southern and eastern portion of the country, and some massive deserts that they don't want to expand. This leaves a lot of room for tree planting programs.
> “the doomsday outlook [on climate change] is causing much of the climate community to focus too much on near-term emissions goals, and it’s diverting resources from the most effective things we should be doing to improve life in a warming world.”
I guess it's cool there's something to be hopeful about, westerner's just seemed excited to make money off of melting ice in Greenland.
Bill Gates is fundamentally anthrophilic, so his concern is above all human suffering. I think that’s a valid viewpoint, but also shortsighted; keeping this planet habitable will require tough decisions and sacrifices, and should stay the utmost priority, out of sheer necessity.
The population as a whole has a rapidly dwindling appetite for tech billionaires trying to impose "tough decisions and sacrifices" on everyone else, so Bill's probably in the right lane. He has already been the target of a vast array of conspiracy theories.
We shouldn't consider the fact China did much more deforestation to start with and even after all this reforestation China has lesser forest area than the US despite being larger in size:
> The US claims: "China is the world's largest consumer of illegal timber products."
> And, according to studies, that is true.
> The Environmental Investigation Agency says: "The immense scale of China's sourcing [of wood] from high-risk regions [of the world] means that a significant proportion of its timber and wood product imports were illegally harvested."
And research by Global Witness last year said there were "worrying" levels of illegality in countries from which China sources more than 80% of its timber.
Just as with CO2, a better comparison would look at per-capita figures and the destinations of consumption--for instance paper and furniture for export.
It may also take into account the viable land area, lest we also want to condemn Australia for having so much less forest area despite being similar in size to the US.
well, china also has gigantic northern and western regions that cannot be forested. the us doesn't have an equivalent of the tibetan plateau or the gobi desert
The US was positioned to leverage technological and economic advantages to embrace and profit massively off of next gen energy infrastructure. It is a tragedy of our era that anti-conservationalism was able to gain such a strong foothold in the body politic.
There was still a perfectly nice window of opportunity even scratching nuclear from the list.
My other glib thing about nuclear is that France, a much denser nation than the US (though of course density is a local property...), has a bunch of nuclear, but even with "full" buy-in it's hard to make the whole thing profitable, and a lot of the nuclear reactors are running at like 80% capacity.
Electricity is pretty fungible at smaller scales but when you start building reactors you need water and you need consumers of a lot of electricity to be close by, and that does cause its own sets of constraints.
Would still be better if the US had built a bunch more nuclear reactors, but my assumption has often been that there are limits to how much it could be expanded in the US given those constraints.
> a lot of the nuclear reactors are running at like 80% capacity.
This is presumably intentional. Beyond longevity, being able to shift one plant to 0 and take up the load across other plants allows for continued uptime even with a plant down (or just below capacity).
> it's hard to make the whole thing profitable
Considering France had the second-cheapest electicity for industrial use in the EU (in 2015, the most recent date from Wikipedia), this feels more regulatory-bassed than a properly fair shot at "Look how expensive nuclear is"
It's intentional in that people are making decisions to do things, but the people running the power plants really would rather run at much higher capacity
I get what you're saying, but the line of comfort for these plants is above where it's at. I think the target is like 90% or something?
> Considering France had the second-cheapest electicity for industrial use in the EU (in 2015, the most recent date from Wikipedia), this feels more regulatory-bassed than a properly fair shot at "Look how expensive nuclear is"
Well... the State is present to make the whole thing work. This isn't a bad thing per se, though I think it goes against some US narratives of "well if the state didn't put in a bunch of regulations then nuclear would just be everywhere".
It's more I guess a point about how there's unlikely to be magical economies of scale that make this whole thing work out.
And the industrial use electricity point goes hand in hand with the reactor usage levels: there's a lot of electricity that EDF would like to sell but have few buyers for! It's a buyer's market!
I like nuclear stuff in general, just think it's worth being clear eyed that nuclear power generation has Real Problems that even full state and societal buy in didn't solve in France's case. Though they did get cheap power for trains etc from the deal, so not like France's situation is bad by any stretch of the imagination.
I used to be a true believe in nuclear (in the 80s, 90s). Recently, I thought (with good justification) that it's a folly to build out nuclear if renewables' economics continue on the current path.
Recently, I wonder if a nuclear winter (I mean this in the cold war context) is likely enough to make renewables massively less efficient. If the current administration were more competent, I'd assume that they are pushing non-renewables for that reason.
But then again, after a nuclear winter, our energy consumption will probably drop to near zero (the population being near zero), so it probably wouldn't matter either way.
Nuclear doesn’t work in a market based electricity market. The capital costs are high and it’s difficult to make money if you aren’t paying down those expenses.
IMO, the old style regulated public utilities were cheaper and more reliable.
I was pretty into nuclear as well but it's pretty obvious that solar/wind with battery storage is the future. For the price of a single reactor you can build out like 5x the capacity with other renewables. That's also accounting for the down periods.
It's kinda fitting that NOW trump jumps on board with nuclear, once the data says it isn't really necessary anymore. It's possible we can maybe build some useful small reactors for some stuff, but yeah.
That will be one of many things they will not forgive us for. Alas most of us in developed countries have treated the world as a dumping ground for our excess.
> It is a tragedy of our era that anti-conservationalism was able to gain such a strong foothold in the body politic.
It was the entirely predictable result of the policies we adopted. You don't get to be sloppy and shortsighted and then sail off into the sunset without consequences.
Kicking the industrial layers of the economic pyramid overseas and telling people to learn to code is what you do when you want a quick win and don't care if people will rightly hate you in a couple decades (IMO it's a miracle we're discussing this now and not in 2002).
Behaving that way isn't socially/politically sustainable and it doesn't take a genius to figure it out.
Humans think on a scale of seconds, minutes, hours, and days. Nature operates at a scale of years, decades, centuries, and millennia. This mismatch is our biggest problem.
How do you figure? Carbon footprint only matters per unit of output.
Americans produce 2-2.5x more output per ton of carbon emitted than the average country. And this despite the fact that the US is (1) the second largest manufacturer in the world, (2) one of the largest agricultural producers in the world, and (3) the largest oil producer in the world.
The US has a surprisingly low per capita carbon footprint given its vast per capita carbon-intensive production.
That's not great context: China and India have huge populations, it's expected that they should be at the top.
Better context can be found here[1] (countries by emission per capita). It's still not great because it shows a lot of small countries at the top. For example: Palau is the first, but it has a population of a few thousand people, so their emissions are a rounding error when compared to other countries.
Per capita isn't the useful metric in this regard for the reason Palau illustrates. The climate cares about volume.
Per capita emissions is a way to assign relative sin by those who feel guilty about living large.
Bill Gates today, "This is a chance to refocus on the metric that should count even more than emissions and temperature change: improving lives. Our chief goal should be to prevent suffering, particularly for those in the toughest conditions who live in the world’s poorest countries. The biggest problems are poverty and disease, just as they always have been. Understanding this will let us focus our limited resources on interventions that will have the greatest impact for the most vulnerable people.”
You can’t look at carbon footprint in isolation. All carbon is a result of the production of something, often production which improves the state of human suffering.
What is more important is efficiency.
Otherwise the logical argument is “the US should have remained poor with more human suffering because our carbon footprint would be smaller”
Not intending to make this political, but it's a relevant point to consider: we should also take into account the carbon footprint of all the bombs that were dropped by America and its proxies into the equation as well.
The environmental impact from these would be immense, I'd imagine.
All nuclear explosions themselves aren't even going to be statistically detectable.
IIRC from assessments of the US military's carbon footprint, cumulative footprint of nuclear weapons infrastructure is probably significantly less than .1%
There's a hundred other things to worry about first IMO.
Not the detonation itself (if we don't count the fires it may cause), but the total CO2 cost of nukes is high [1]:
> A bomb on its own does not emit carbon dioxide… It’s the infrastructure, the construction (cement emits a lot), fossil fuel use, manpower, consumption, supply chains etc that all contribute.
> A study published in the Energy & Environmental Science journal has documented that using 1/1000 of the total capacity of a full-scale nuclear war weaponry would induce 690 tonnes of CO2 to penetrate the earth’s atmosphere. This is more than the annual carbon footprint of the United Kingdom.
I feel it's worth pointing out that this is where some folks brains kind of break when the "cost" of a good is mentioned.
It's the massive infrastructure to do the things profitably at scale that is often the problem with much of the stuff we consume and use. Then the "cost" of the environmental damage down the line. The "intangibles" get split up.
Then we see these insane figures when these intangibles are all lumped together. This further disconnects people's brains from the real scale of what's going. Cuz our brains suck with big numbers.
China has 4 times the population. In any rational divvying up of the world's total emissions allowance by country China's share would be 4 times that of the US, but they are only emitting twice what the US is emitting.
Both are over their fair share, but the US is over by a larger factor so is farther behind on getting to where they need to be.
(This is not taking into account trade. Divvying up the world emissions budget by population gives the fair amount for each country if there is no trade. If there is trade the best way to handle it is probably to count the emissions for making things in country X that get consumed in country Y as being emissions in Y. With that correction China comes out even better).
Assigning blame and guilt is pointless. Just look at how well it has worked to motivate the US to change. That is to say, not at all.
The only thing moving the needle is renewables and nuclear generating power more cheaply than fossil fuels, so it becomes stupid to not switch to them even if you have no regard for the long term health of the environment.
Per capita emissions give us a better idea of which groups of people require the largest change in their lifestyle in order to hit net zero. The current numbers suggest that the typical person in the US will have to do a lot more to hit net-zero than the typical person in China. Obviously, you can do better and estimate per capita emissions for each province/state/city or by wealth level. For instance, in many poor countries, most of their emissions come from the top 5-10% of the population. Everyone else emits basically nothing.
On the other hand, the total emissions of a country, absent other information, has little actionable value. It can only be uses to assign blame, so quite useless.
That still sounds like assigning blame and a vague call to "change lifestyle", instead of concrete action plans for energy, manufacturing, transportation and agricultural sectors. That is where the bulk of emissions are, not some billionaire's yacht or private jet.
> If there is trade the best way to handle it is probably to count the emissions for making things in country X that get consumed in country Y as being emissions in Y. With that correction China comes out even better).
A huge portion of China's emissions come from making things for people that aren't in China. The argument is that if a Chinese factory makes only widgets used in the US, those emissions from the Chinese factory are probably more accurately counted as US emissions.
Its like saying that you are 0 emissions because you have an electric car with no tailpipe while ignoring where the electricity is coming from.
The counter argument is that they'd have mass unemployment and would be in poverty without it. Virtually all rapid modern industrialization is reliant on exporting to foreign markets so characteizing it as American emissions is largely a misomer as it is really global emissions.
While I fundamentally disagree, do you really not see how that would then mean all Chinese emissions are therefore a result of the United States? So that's... worse?
What? No, because China is also exporting to other markets. The counterfactual is that we don't do global industrialization and let the global poor remain poor.
The US introduced China to western manufacturing markets. So if they would otherwise be poor and non-industrialized, the US is responsible for it all.
We can't claim we rose them from poverty while also denying culpability for the consequences thereof...
Though I think everyone is just saying Chinese emissions should be counted, proportionally, against the people they're making products for. And the US is one of their biggest customers.
>The US introduced China to western manufacturing markets. So if they would otherwise be poor and non-industrialized, the US is responsible for it all.
Who is "We" here? I am speaking from a global perspective. Chinese industrialization has internal agency, drivers and motivation, the US did not force China to industrialize. Secondly Global Demand is not US-Specific, Europe, Japan and other markets contributed with their own agreements so the claim that the US is "responsible" is overstated here.
>Though I think everyone is just saying Chinese emissions should be counted, proportionally, against the people they're making products for. And the US is one of their biggest customers.
That's not what anyone serious is saying because it's just splitting hairs. Everyone buys from China, the US accounts for 15% of China's total imports so clearly their role here is exaggerated again. China also consumes much of their own manufacturing, while the US also exports many services elsewhere, so should US emissions be counted in other countries? And then there are also structural dynamics in how surplus economies intentionally suppress their demand to run surpluses.
In a world of comparative advantage, I don't see the particular value in performing funny calculations to divy up moral blame according to shifting trade dynamics, just much easier to point it out as shared global responsiblity in the path for Modernity.
>> China has 4 times the population. In any rational divvying up of the world's total emissions allowance by country China's share would be 4 times that of the US, but they are only emitting twice what the US is emitting.
For now. Look at the rate of growth on their per capital carbon emissions. Then compare it with that of the USA.
China is also deploying a ton a renewables though. Its the worlds leading producer of renewables. It’s a mistake to think they won’t ween off carbon where they can. The US has a president that said “drill baby drill”.
It's funny this myth persists, primarily in conservative circles, it seems. We are far worse per capita than China. In 2023, the US emitted 13.83 tons of carbon per capita. In that same year, China emitted 9.24 tons per capita. There are few countries that are worse than us - that list includes Russia and Saudi Arabia.
Your point reads strangely, it's almost like saying "Why even bother when CO2 emissions are so high" - surely ANYTHING that they are doing to turn that around should be celebrated and encouraged rather than saying "Yeah but..." - Rome wasn't built in a day and all.
is that per Capita? Also, At least they are going in the right direction with most metrics (switching to electric, installing renewable, planting trees, etc), whereas the US (under Trump) is hellbent on getting rid of renewables, focusing on coal/fossil fuel, slowing down electric cars, destroying national parks, etc.
What does your comment have to do with ecology? Just because China plants trees (news flash, so does the US) doesn't erase the fact they are far and away the biggest emitter of carbon emissions and have high levels of pollution.
This is one of the places where per capita doesn't matter as much as total emissions. We have one planet. The yearly total and cumulative matters the most.
China is by far the leading emitter. Over double of the US as of 2023 (latest available data I can find). China's emissions also aren't falling, they are skyrocketing. The US emissions ARE falling.
The US dominates in cumulative, which is essentially the measure of the total damage done to the planet. The US is doing something about it though. Yearly emissions have been dropping since 2007.
Per capita most definitely matters. Every human is equal, there is no reason why one human has the right to emit much more than another. If we go by your reasoning, then all developing countries should figure out how to raise living standards without consuming more resources so the Americans don’t have to reduce theirs.
You are incorrect that China isn’t doing anything to lower its impact. It’s emissions would be much much much worse for the standard of living increases it achieved without investments in clean energy and EVs, tech that it is exporting abroad to the benefit of the world and to the dismay of America’s petro dollar dependence.
With such thinking, I now get why the rest of the world is beginning to hate America so much.
I didn't say China isn't doing anything. They are rolling out a mind boggling amount of clean energy right now. More than any other country by far. It's honestly incredible scale. It unfortunately isn't keeping up with their emissions though. The data is from 2023. It's very possible that in the last two years China has been able to stabilize emission growth.
I actually disagree a bit on the first part. I think developing countries have a right to have higher per capita emissions as they raise their standard of living and economy where they can get to the point of widely adopting clean energy.
I visited Beijing in April and it was much cleaner than it was before, electric vehicles everywhere, but people were also much richer, before a car was some sort of luxury and now it was just something you could get if you could find a place to park it. It’s hard to describe.
The o the thing to consider is that China isn’t really a full on consumption economy yet, that they develop a lot of infrastructure and make a lot of stuff for export, all that would be counted in per capita emissions even if it wasn’t to the benefit of a per capita member. The infrastructure building is going to slow down someday (like it did in Japan), China should seriously consider its exports next (especially rare earth refining which is really dirty and resource intensive).
> Then China could fracture into 10 separate nations, and their output would sudenly be negliable?
Don't you see the argument goes both ways? If the US merge with a few Africa countries, does it count as an "improvement" in regard of carbon emission?
In the "we only have one planet" angle, I think it's worth considering that China is not just burning coal for domestic purposes for fun. The fossil fuel consumption is an input to some output, a lot of that going abroad.
If China is the factory for all of these products sold in the US (and elsewhere of course), then isn't China just accounting for even more US emissions?
In that sense, some sort of eco-Trump could put all the tariff money into green tech or something, to balance out the exporting of emissions.
Though to be fair, I gotta imagine that... a lot of chinese emissions are purely for domestic purposes.
>If China is the factory for all of these products sold in the US (and elsewhere of course), then isn't China just accounting for even more US emissions?
China can't have it both ways, they are glibly blaming the rest of the world for their emissions while reforesting due to importing timber from rest of the world illegally.
> The Environmental Investigation Agency says: "The immense scale of China's sourcing [of wood] from high-risk regions [of the world] means that a significant proportion of its timber and wood product imports were illegally harvested."
And research by Global Witness last year said there were "worrying" levels of illegality in countries from which China sources more than 80% of its timber.
I'm not talking about China's position, but thinking about texture of the emissions reductions in the rest of the world.
It's probably fairly unknowable what percent of emissions are for products that will be exported back out from China, but I think it's reasonable to say that when I buy some random wooden table from China and import it into Australia (for example), that I am at least somewhat responsible for those emissions, even if per-country emissions data doesn't reflect that!
I don't think this is some free pass for Chinese ecological behavior overall. My general hypothesis has been that at least some part of emissions reductions in the US and Europe are due to outsourcing. I just don't know how much of it is that.
That’s a really great point. Maybe their emission curve is what matters. It’s the measure of if they are investing enough into reducing emissions despite their production needs.
The thing is it's not _their_ production needs if they are the factory of the world.
If the US put a 1000% tariff on Chinese goods tomorrow, emissions in China would likely go down a decent amount, right? But is that an indicator of their production needs? Or the US's consumption patterns?
Not that this is some bilateral thing, there's a lot of people buying a lot of stuff from many places. Just thinking about a very simple example, and how I would like to see quantification on this front, but I don't know how doable it really is.
Theres going to be a very entertaining set of mental gymnastics people will start doing once China's emissions growth peaks and starts falling compared to the US. They're building a lot of renewables, a lot of nuclear plants and are very obviously tooling up to replicate fusion from whoever nails it.
Whereas the US is trying to increase its fossil fuel industry and cancelling renewable projects.
They aren't just building "a lot" of renewables and nuclear, they are building an absolutely mind boggling amount of it. Last year it was more than the rest of the world combined!
Who cares about mental gymnastics. It's a win for literally everyone and I hope you ca see it that way instead. Competition is good. It drives others to keep up.
Despite what the current US govt wants, the economics of solar and other renewables will drive it. Worst they can do is slow it down a bit.
During the same period the US also added 18MM acres and so has Canada, but additionally Russia, India and Europe have also net added forest… so the “baddies” are still Brazil, Indonesia and the democratic Republic of the Congo.
This is a purely ecological/existential conversation. Of course the US has a horrible track record of policing the globe in its own interest. But if you want to wage selfish wars, you’d think you’d enforce policies that make sure there’s a tomorrow to be conquered.
The US reforested significantly in the twentieth century as well, which helped keep some of the US cooler than it should have been relative to the climate change norm.
I've been binging a lot of videos on things like rewilding and other approaches that can be used to restore landscapes. The Chinese have successfully executed a number of large scale projects over the decades. They started this early. Where other countries talked about doing things, the Chinese went ahead and did those things.
One of their projects is allowing them to undertake infrastructure projects in the desert. They simply stick bales of straw into ditches to stop soil being blown away by wind. The straw traps soil, water, and breaks down over a few years allowing plants to take hold. It's a simple approach that works. Very pramatic, dig a ditch, stick in some straw. Done. Repeat.
Outside of China, the green wall in Africa is a very pragmatic approach that involves digging a lot of half moon shaped ditches to trap rain water. Simple and effective.
Other approaches involve using fences to stop sheep and other grazers from preventing anything vaguely green tinted shoots from being eaten and giving them a chance to actually turn into trees.
What I like about these approaches is that some relatively simple measures can have big effects. People spend a lot of time hand wringing over seemingly insurmountable problems. The Chinese are showing that in addition to the power to destroy landscapes, we also have the power to remake them. It works. They aren't tree huggers. Better landscapes also mean local economies benefit. Deserts don't feed people. Water retention means agriculture gets a second chance.
What I admire in the Chinese is the pragmatic can do attitude. Their motivations are of course self serving. They value having clean air in their cities, clean drinking water, and a landscape that can support agriculture and infrastructure. And in the end that's the best kind of motivation you can get. It's something worth copying. Whenever economy, science, and environment align, everybody wins.
A lot of areas in the rest of the world that are subject to desertification, pollution, etc. are fixable. And there's value in fixing them that needs more attention. I don't see this as a green/left topic. If you exist on this planet, why wouldn't you want something to be done to clean up the mess we've all created in the last centuries? Breaking out this topic from the usual left/right day to day politics is key. The rest is just work. The Chinese put the rest of us to shame with hard work.
The idea is that rain flows downhill, you dig the half moon shape to capture the water on the end without a ditch and then it sinks into the ditch instead of flowing unobstructed to the river and taking all soil with it.
It's an ancient practice that was forgotten and rediscovered. The beauty of this approach is that it shows results within a few short years. Basically in Africa if there's water, nature shows up and consumes it. So you get lush growth and rapid soil restoration. Trees, vegetables, etc. on what was a heavily eroded flood plain before.
It's easy to explain, the locals get why it works. And they get a very fast response from nature and all the produce and riches that come with that. And all they need is shovels and some elbow grease.
assuming you're not joking, construction equipment is incredibly expensive for countries to whom profiting from importing it is not a "sure thing", doubly so if their roads are not developed. This is why a 2000s hummer in central America still costs as much as a nice modern car.
A basic trencher is little more than a push lawnmower frame with a chain saw attached. Not enormous industrial equipment, but still a large boost to productivity vs a shovel.
again this is in a country that may have little to no debt infrastructure, so no way to take out a proper loan to buy the equipment, and many hoops to import it. The fact that it's small isn't the matter, it's that it's specialized. A used/legacy backhoe or skid steer maybe, but even if you can afford it, there's no tractor supply co or home depot, you are likely handling lading the thing yourself
There are way more. One channel that I might call https://www.youtube.com/@MossyEarth. They basically use donations to take on projects to do smalls scale nature restoration. I am actually considering making a donation to them because I like what they do. There are more examples of such channels.
Not everything on this front is without controversy of course and I'm not blind to that. But I like the positive, constructive nature of these approaches. Just the simple notion that it's fixable with a bit of cleverness and lots of hard work. China is of course an autocracy that you can criticize for a lot of things. But they are doing a few things right as well. And it's worth calling that out and learning from them.
It's really hard to understate how deforestation ravaged China - their forestry cover declined by almost half during The Great Leap Forward as the CCCP at the time pushed hard to exploit the land. As a result, there were severe and noticeable problems with flooding and desertification. So starting in the 70s they invested heavily in the "Three-North Shelter Forest Program" (aka the Great Green Wall). Although, probably more importantly, economic liberalization meant farming became more efficient and people could move towards cities and free up the land again.
I think more fascinating has been Russia's surge in forestry growth, also very notable in the report. Unlike China their forests have expanded almost completely accidentally. Communist-era collective farmlands have slowly been getting abandoned. Their frontier has been shrinking and the forests have crept in, tree growth being aided by longer growing period and thawing permafrost.
And Europe in the golden era. A squirrel could jump tree to tree from north Scotland al the way to the south. Timber, grazing, charcoal are the prime reasons why everything is gone
as an American that was my understanding also.. small nit (understate deforestation) -> (overstate deforestation).. the phrase means "even if I talked for ten minutes with all the emphasis I can find, it would not be enough to show it.. you cannot OVERstate how serious the impact was..
Of course, planting is one thing, maintaining is another. Many areas turn green for a few years and then fade back to desert. The real challenge is building an ecological culture, not just a green map.
This sounds big but its less than the bare minimum required. Their coal emissions are insane. In my opinion its all anyone should be talking about when it comes to climate change.
The project wasn't started as a global warming fix. As the article notes, it was about preventing desertification:
> Over the last three and a half decades China has planted roughly 120 million acres of forest, according to U.N. figures, much of it added to contain the spread of deserts. Last year China completed a project, begun in 1978, to plant a 2,000-mile-long belt of trees around the Taklamakan Desert in the west. Work continues on a belt of trees around the massive Gobi Desert in the north.
Can you tell everyone what their per capita emission is? While you're at it, compare that with the US per capita emissions. Also let us know the accumulated emissions for China and US in the last 50 years.
Chinese CO₂ emissions per capita are only about 60% as much as the USA, but in the past 25 years US per capita emissions have dropped by about a third and Chinese emissions per capita have almost tripled and are still rising rapidly. Considering that China is about 4 times as populous as the US, this is a huge problem for the world. (US emissions are also a huge problem; we all need for them to decrease very quickly.)
Much as I wish to be optimistic, one year does not a trend make. As per the link:
The shallow decline in 2015 and 2016 was due to a slump that followed a round of stimulus measures, while zero-Covid controls caused a sharper fall in 2022.
We might be on the right path, but also the very rapid decarbonisation of primary energy and transport may be overwhelmed by growth in other sectors like cement, metal oxide reduction, or beef.
(Or not, there's at least theoretical paths to make those examples better, this is just meant to moderate hope rather than to deny it entirely).
China was exiting poverty and heavily industrializing during that period, along with building up massive amounts of infrastructure that could save some emissions over time, though of course also things like coal plants are included in the infrastructure numbers. But if we look at absolute instead of per-capita for some odd reason, an aspect to also look at is that a lot more of those CO2 emissions are from China manufacturing for the US and the world than vice versa.
If we focus on rates of growth, China is building much more solar and nuclear than the US per-capita. And they don't have as much available domestic gas which with shorter carbon chains makes much less CO2, and that's the big problem. The US has twice as many natural gas reserves as China, with 1/4 the population, so, post-dissemination of fracking technology, that's largely down to geographical luck.
There's going to be big spikes in data center energy consumption in both countries. It's still somewhat marginal at the moment at a little over 4% here and less there but it is going to be a main driver of energy consumption growth going forward.
Banning China from leading nodes may result in doubling or more their consumption in this area as a direct US policy outcome.
China has been a developing country for most the time of the past 25 years. It is indeed a huge problem if it is still rising rapidly. But it is also not fair to limit China’s per capita growth for most of the past two decades
If they are still at 60% of USA unless your opinion is that Chinese people don't deserve air conditioning as much as Americans, you don't really have a point.
Air conditioning is a relatively small part of global CO₂ emissions (3%); you should be more worried about heating.
I would expect air conditioning to also be among the easier energy uses to match with solar power as we go forward. Better building design and more efficient AC devices also make a huge difference.
There's many ways to achieve improved quality of life. Our fancy-insulated new German house with triple glazing and a heat pump used an average of 250 W grid power last month, despite our PV being (1) a Balkonkraftwerk and therefore only 800 W peak, (2) summer's over, lots of clouds now, and (3) in a very sub-optimal location due to a builder's skip. (Still, the neighbours have trimmed the hedge last weekend and the skip has now gone…)
There's easy ways and hard ways, the point is a country which has done the easy way cannot tell another country with less impact per capita they need to do it the hard way before cleaning up its act. Or you can but you're huge hypocrites.
Everyone is going to have a bad quality of life, to the extent they're able to live at all, if we don't act quickly at massive scale in a coordinated fashion.
I can go on and on about the countries that are emitting less than the US.
People and animals live in areas that are liveable. So countries near the equator and fertile countries will always be more populous. So how else do you propose we compare countries? Which are themselves mostly arbitrary lines as far as the earth is concerned - so why chunk by countries? It has to be per person right?
I am with you on this one. I have seen people making similar arguments about plastic dumped in the oceans where at least until about a decade ago China was well ahead of every nation. The oceans don't care about the per capita plastic polluting them.
The earth isn't a person. I think it seems valid to consider the harm and or benefits being caused on a per person basis. Why should an individual in the US be allowed to release more CO2 emissions than an individual in China?
I couldnt care less what their per captia emissions are they have 1.5b people. Accumulated is about the same as the EU and will very soon overtake the US.
EU isn't a country, it's a union of 27 countries with their separate legislatures. I live in Finland, a country of five million people. According to your math I think I'm allowed to basically burn a lake of oil every day, right?
Yes China is outputting way more C02 than the next 6 biggest pollutors combined. Lets focus on them first. They are the only ones not reducing their emission growth.
The US is fairly high but below Canada, Russia, and many Middle Eastern countries. US emissions have also consistently fallen for the past 25 years or so.
Per capita emissions are relevant, because it shows how much each separate country needs to improve in a relative manner. Absolute emissions doesn't matter to what each state needs to do.
Per capita emissions are relevant in the sense that if China broke into ten separate countries tomorrow, with each new country maintaining their current level of emissions, the effect on the planet would be the same even though an entity called “China” is no longer at the top of the leaderboard.
There is some per capita carbon emissions budget such that if each human on earth stayed within that budget, climate change could be mitigated[0]. The average Chinese person exceeds that budget, but does so by significantly less than the average American. So the average American is more at fault for climate change than the average Chinese person is.
Of course, your second claim, that this is a global issue, is correct. But if we solved the global issue in a fair way, China would still emit a few times more CO2 than the US.
0: “Mitigated” rather than totally solved, because to go back to pre-industrial temperatures the budget would have to be negative. But let’s say we’re talking about staying within 2C or some similar goal.
Well they're releasing 9.2ton CO2 per Capita, the US is releasing 13.5ton CO2 per Capita. And this while the US and the rest of the world is doing all of their manufacturing in China.
> Their emissions are the emissions of Western companies for whom they are doing manufacturing.
Spoken like somebody that never stept a foot in China.
Sure, manufacturing for the West is part of it, but up to a few years ago, entering Beijing alone resulted in your naval cavities burning, the moment the airplane door opened.
Because of the usage from coal in households. It was only until a few years ago, that they banned the usage of wood/coal around the city. Outside the city, its coal everywhere for the normal class people who own their (country)house. Near other large cities its still very coal centric in the winter.
And the heating (communal for apartments) is mostly coal and while the coal may burn a bit more clean, and there is some filtration going on, its not a ton. So while open coal burning was reduced directly in the cities like Beijing, they simply moved a lot of it outside the 6th ring.
All those EV's ... great, no more gasoline/oil usage but ... wait, where does a lot of the electricity come from? Oeps...
But wait, all that crypto mining, where do you think that electricity comes from?
And now AI...
And the consumer goods.
Your statement ignore a large part of the coal consumption in the country.
The global economy is so China-dependent it doesn't even make sense to talk about an individual country's emissions profile unless we look at their imports.
And nuclear power - they have a large carbon deficit to make up so you shouldn't think of them as a green economy by any measure but... I think their strongest advantage is that there is a strong environmental pressure within the country and (while industrialists will be industrialists) there is no faction or movement within China that is dedicated to an anti-environmental agenda.
There's a lot of work to be done and there's a lot of friction, corruption and economic pressures constraining that work but there seems to be a genuine desire to do that work.
I wonder what kind of forest China is making? I was watching a really fascinating PBS documentary on Kanopy and it was talking about a lot of the planting efforts haven't been very good worldwide because planting a monoculture of trees doesn't do much and an old forest with tons of diversity stores twice as much carbon or more, which I thought was neat. So protecting existing forests is much better from a climate change standpoint. But either way, planting trees is better than nothing.
I always wondered why Western democracies want carbon taxes, when just reverting more land back to managed forests, seems like a much more reasoned solution. It would trap carbon, help wild life, and provide fresh air, and jobs in forestry, and renewable resources like wood. Seems to me Carbon Taxes primarily benefit the banks, and grow bureaucracy.
A very worrying number of people nowadays seem to think that forests are a thing to counter climate change. What is the species composition being planted? Is it appropriate to the location? Reforestation must be about recreating _forest ecosystems_, not about creating the photosynthetic counterpart of a vast fucking solar farm.
This seems like gross, and I wonder what the net is. It seems impossible that there's no deforestation in the places mentioned int the article, and unlikely that the net is positive.
While Russia cuts more and more timber for export to China. In return for the support in the war (drone components, etc) China asks for even more and more timber and fresh water from Baikal.
The same article says Russia is on 2nd place in reforestation. They do export timber and can export more, while increasing the share of sustainably managed forests. But export of Baikal fresh water? That’s fake news. Didn’t happen and won’t happen, unless you mean just some bottled water.
"In 2020, Russia had 748 Mha of natural forest, extending over 44% of its land area. In 2024, it lost 5.59 Mha of natural forest, equivalent to 816 Mt of CO₂ emissions."
>But export of Baikal fresh water? That’s fake news. Didn’t happen and won’t happen
in Russian, that another waterpipeline - from river Ob' was approved at some Russian Parliament "roundtable on strategic projects with China and Kazakhstan".
Regarding your Global Forest Watch source I recommend to look below the tagline. The numbers that you picked have very specific meaning and the same page says that most of the loss (ca.75%) was due to wildfires and it grew more forest than it was lost due to logging. When including the loss for wildfires, the total balance is negligibly negative.
Regarding you Guardian and Topwar links, you are citing the sources that speculate about rumors about some science fiction projects. Russia does not export water from Baikal or Ob River and won’t export it.
>Regarding you Guardian and Topwar links, you are citing the sources that speculate about rumors about some science fiction projects. Russia does not export water from Baikal or Ob River and won’t export it.
>Are you from country 404 by any chance? Because that's how these posts read.
You may read it whatever way you like. If we look at the facts - statista and globalwatch is some Western sites/orgs, topwar is straight Russian and Guardian is Great Britain.
>Kind reminder - this is not reddit.
This is why you're using that offensive "404" notation (an expression of the Russian propaganda point that Ukraine isn't a sovereign independent state) when referring to Ukraine?
Well, they aren’t. Never have been and never will be. Geopolitics is a ruthless game and those in the middle sometimes get crushed. Which is why you generally want natural borders (mountains, coast, etc).
Like Ukranians a number of nations - for example Hungarians, Chezh, Finnish, Latvians, Estonians, etc. - for centuries didn't have their own state and were parts of larger empires and got their own states only relatively recently.
Like any other, the Russian propaganda thrives on people's ignorance. In this case "Ukranian people and Ukraine don't exist and never have existed, it is just an inferior kind of Russians on historically Russian territory". That is why nor Russian textbooks nor wide Russian info space never mention the 1651 book by French engineer D'Beauplan "Description of Ukraine, a Province of the Kingdom of Poland situated between Moskovia and Transilvania" where he clearly describes in detail a separate Ukrainian ethnicity living on their own separate territory (which is pretty close to the territory of modern Ukraine. Also note that Russia din't even exist back then, it was just a "Moscovia" duchy).
>and never will be. Geopolitics is a ruthless game and those in the middle sometimes get crushed. Which is why you generally want natural borders (mountains, coast, etc).
The same applies to all the above mentioned nations, and this is why they joined NATO, and why Ukraine is trying to.
There are a lot of thing which are clearly "war support", yet it would be a long and frankly pointless discussion, so i'll just refer to China's own words:
Him or some other pointed out to some important EU person that if they (China, an industrial powerhouse) were actually supporting Russian war efforts, the war would already be over.
They've been selling forestry products for decades. North Korea is also a big customer. Unsurprisingly, nations with existing and exclusive economic ties, tend to "support" each other.
North America does this with South America readily.
Probably, yes. This is possible in Sweden, if you go from South to North, you can travel for multiple days by car and if you avoid highways, you will not leave the forest at all.
The joke I'm making is that many Texans like to make that statement about Texas (with regards to size and driving) and claim it's unique to that state and to the US without realizing that it's common for many other parts in the world as well.
Much of Europe used to be forest. It just all got whacked in the few centuries prior to today. So you have Europeans making tiny recoveries to their rampant destruction of their environment celebrating that fact while preventing others from doing what they did. There is one path to this: first clear cut your forests so you can build your industry; then build your industry so you can be prosperous; then rebuild your forests. If you had 100 acres of forest, and cut it down to 1 acre, then you can build 1 acre at the end and claim a 100% improvement. The next year another acre still is 50% improvement. Can any who have retained their forest boast such improvement?
China is following this path and we will celebrate it. As always, do not do what the developed nations say you should. Instead do what they did. After all, Norway did not become prosperous by keeping their oil in the ground.
> There is one path to this: first clear cut your forests so you can build your industry; then build your industry so you can be prosperous; then rebuild your forests.
Sure if you need to bootstrap to the 18th century. It’s much faster and cheaper to skip a few hundred years ahead by importing equipment.
> Much of Europe used to be forest. It just all got whacked in the few centuries prior to today.
The deforestation goes back much further than that. Europe experienced significant deforestation in the middle ages. It was a major issue for many countries long before industrialism.
Yes, all that's happened is that we declared that morality started on Apr 22 2016. Slash and burn, cut and grow. Three hundred years from now, when the result is massive prosperity we can pontificate to whomever is cutting trees then.
How so? US forest cover bottomed out in the 1920s or 1930 and has been going up since. If anything, in the West, the forests aren't logged enough, which increases wildfire risk.
China isn't following a particularly unique path, they just did a speedrun of economic development - they had nearly everyone living in extreme poverty in the 1980s. Before long, they'll be looking for cheap markets to outsource manufacturing and extractive industries to... which is why they're lending money to forgotten African nations. Keeping Russia an international pariah and making them economically dependent on China is probably up their alley too.
> Drawing on national reports prepared for FAO, ...
> Since 2005, the FRA has relied on data provided by a network of officially nominated national correspondents...
My understanding is that these reports are heavily based on data reported by respective governments. I think "officially nominated national correspondents" means bureaucrats of different governments.
But the governments of Russia, India, China are all known to lie. A lot. About a lot of things. I would know.
My default stance is to be skeptical of such claims based on national reports. Independent verification using satellite imagery seems like a better approach.
I don’t know how it is in other countries, but nearly thirty years ago when I was in elementary school, a Chinese propaganda slogan stuck with me: “If you want to get rich, build roads first; have fewer children, plant more trees.” Every part of that slogan has been put into action, continuously, for decades. Although low birth rates have now become a problem, back then it seemed like a solution.
Xi Jinping may be a rather dull person, but his most famous saying is “Lucid waters and lush mountains are invaluable assets.” As for building roads — the Belt and Road Initiative speaks for itself. We’ve built bridges in Croatia, in Bangladesh, in Mozambique, and roads and railways all over the world. That slogan is probably engraved in every Chinese person’s memory.
> Although low birth rates have now become a problem, back then it seemed like a solution.
They haven't, imo. I am from India, and I have been hearing for the last two decades how we have avoided same mistakes as China and the latter is headed for a demographic collapse. China is only marching forward, and focusing more on automation to hedge its bets. While overpopulation in India has choked almost every city in India. I honestly don't know what will happen as more people migrate from rural to urban areas.
India's population will peak in 2065, while China's already has. It's depressing to imagine that 250-300M more people are left to be added before we finally see a decline.
Just like 1970s claim "overpopulation will destroy the planet" turned out to be exaggerated, the modern idea that “a large population is a blessing” feels equally misguided.
>Just like 1970s claim "overpopulation will destroy the planet" turned out to be exaggerated
<looks at the world today>
Seems to me like that prediction is pretty on track.
The predictions of Ehrlich in "the population bomb" and the club of rome were undone within a few years with the "green revolution" which saw massive increases in food production.
Ehrlich in particular was suggesting mass starvation by the 1980's. Conceivably, it is possible that too many people will cause problems, but nothing like what they actually predicted has come to pass.
Partially, yes! Population is #1 strain on resources. However, the political climate around 1970s was more like population would create large scale food shortages, famines, and without interventions, population would keep on growing forever. We at least now know that population peaks with prosperity, and food is largely a solved problem.
We're on the verge of ecological collapse, undergoing an insane mass extinction event with ocean acidification and methane release going off the charts. I can't even begin to conceive of your reality.
>food is largely a solved problem
It really isn't...
Production of calories is a solved problem. Distribution of food to people in need on the other hand…
*logistics of food is not solved?
In my opinion, we might have avoided some of the mistakes, but that is still costing us.
The best usually leave the country after getting the prime education India can provide, and support the retirement plans of other countries' aging populations more than their own - the Indian government actively seems to encourage this, looking at how our PM tries to negotiate for more visas during every first-world trip. Even with the demographic dividend, we do not have enough jobs, so the elderly are not supported neither fiscally, nor infrastructure-wise, since old people cannot walk on bad roads or take advantage of non-existent programs anyway. For the younger people, the insane competition makes both work and personal life hell.
Whenever I see videos of China and their cities, and then look out of my window, it makes me both depressed and angry. I still don't understand how India can even be compared to China any more.
The nice thing about being a growing, underpopulated country, is that you're very attractive to immigrants. China can just fill the demographic gap with migration policies.
I would really respect the hell out of the nation of China if it wasn't for the authoritarianism and imperialism.
Not to be coy, but what do you mean by that? The reason I ask is because I think many of us use these terms, but without ever thinking about exactly which behaviors we're critiquing, or how they relate to what we truly value. For instance both the Roman and Greek Empires deserve immense respect, yet they were both often imperial empires ruled by dictators. The same is no less true of many societies that played key roles during The Renaissance, and patrons of the talents of the era.
I hold immense respect for China, because I think they're achieving great things. I also think there is a high probability that they will be the first society to start creating permanent off-planet colonizations, which is what will probably signal the birth of the next era of humanity, so that in the future a name like Wang Yie might lie right alongside Neil Armstrong.
On the other hand I certainly don't think the US should emulate them. It's important for the world to be multipolar, not only in alliances, but also in ideology, perspective, and behavior. What will happen to China once they inevitably find themselves with a leader who is not socially motivated, or who is incompetent? In such a centralized system outright collapse is not out of the question. Or perhaps they'll be just fine? Who knows? By maintaining a wide diversity of systems across the world, I think we maximize our chances of collective success and minimize our chances of collective failure.
> who is incompetent
I just hope we never go back to Mao-levels of incompetence
Indeed, I think Rome, Greece and other conquering powers get more respect than they deserve. There's no actual reason so many people have to die for these countries' national ambitions. Feel free to generalize to the US, etc.
Didn't Rome save a lot of lives by pax romana? Perhaps it was actually better in terms of loss of life to be conquered by Rome than have endless wars among yourselves. Applies to the US too.
They go hand in hand. The authoritarianism of China allows it to undertake generational projects of immense scale with mass popular support through propaganda.
It works well when the government is pursuing welfare maximising initiatives, but limits self-correction when the government goes off track.
A small example of it going wrong, was when Mao convinced peasants to exterminate Sparrows and other ‘pests’ only to severely disrupt the ecosystem and cause a famine.
Somehow we (the United States) accomplished generational projects that are currently out of the realm of possibility such as the interstate system without risking anything like a famine. I think a lot of people in America have been overly-empowered to stand in the way of the most modest progress through NIMBYism, litigation, local government, etc. To a lot of people it increasingly feels like a form of private authoritarianism over tiny fiefdoms for absolutely no benefit to a vast majority of people.
"Somehow" we did that back when we believed in a strong federal government working for the benefit of the people. It's no wonder that we lost the ability after decades of anti-government propaganda and regulatory capture.
It's not that people turned against the government just randomly. Who was the last genuinely socially motivated President we had? I idealize JFK, but I think that's largely because of his charisma, how he ended, and obviously the space program. Yet how did he not just immediately condemn and completely dismantle the entire CIA when the proposal for Operation Northwoods [1] reached his desk, and was one signature away from execution? And that'll probably look benign as the actions from more recent decades are declassified in the future.
And after his assassination everything went downhill fast with divide and conquer, all alongside global self destructive geopolitical nonsense that continues to this very day. We have spent, just since 2000 upwards of a very conservative baseline of $10 trillion on war and military related expenses. That's a starting point of about $30,000 for every single man, woman, and child in America. Think about all of the amazing things we could have done with that money. Instead we just blew it on pointless wars and have literally less than nothing to show for it since they not only made the US far less safe, but made the world far less stable.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods
LBJ made more progress on social issues than any President with the possible exception of FDR. Certainly dramatically more progress per year in office. Jimmy Carter was also socially motivated.
Reagan changed the game, Newt Gingrich destroyed cooperation, and now we're living in the world they created.
FDR was not generally socially motivated. He was responsive to labor pressure and other organizing.
I don't believe we are capable of a strong government that will also work for the benefit of the people today. Anti government sentiment didn't just spring up from a vacuum.
It sprung up from capitalist propaganda and intentional sabotage of the government by conservatives.
> I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.
Grover Norquist said the quiet part out loud in 2001, but conservatives have been running that playbook since the New Deal.
>*"conservatives have been running that playbook since the New Deal"
I think one of America's many failures is allowing a radically revolutionary right-wing (that is currently headed full speed to fascism) to keep calling themselves "conservatives" when that label is about as incorrect as can be. They don't "conserve" anything. They're not actually reactionary, although they often pretend to be. They are not trying to be defenders of Chesterton's Gate[1]. They're radicals, who want to reshape society to their own whims and prejudices. And they ought to be address and treated as such.
1. https://www.chesterton.org/taking-a-fence-down/
> To a lot of people it increasingly feels like a form of private authoritarianism over tiny fiefdoms for absolutely no benefit to a vast majority of people.
that is what it means to have property rights.
It prevents your interests from being usurped by someone else without first consulting you. Of course, like anything, it can be taken too far, but getting the balance right is important.
If it tips too far towards gov't authoritarianism, the people who are not connected tends to suffer silently (while the majority who gets told these "nation building" projects benefits them).
If it tips too far towards the private individual, then you get nimby-ism and such.
America's elevation of individuality and property rights above everything else, its inability to work together collectively to achieve a goal, and its citizen's infighting, distrust of and belligerence toward each other, are the main reasons it is incapable of doing big things anymore.
The minute we had a huge health emergency that should have united the population, it was immediately politicized such that half the country was trying to fix it, and the other half were trying to prolong it and grief the fixers.
We're done for if we can't stop pitting half the country against each other over literally every issue.
Presumably many of the people who currently attribute China’s ability to build infrastructure to authoritarianism would also attribute America’s past ability to build infrastructure to authoritarianism. They would presumably also decry any future attempts to build ambitious infrastructure in America as authoritarianism.
The interstate was for the military. The new deal was in part thanks to left wing communists/unionists voicing for the gov to do more for the people. Then came McCarthyism.
I'm a yimby but to be fair the welfare system is so broken in the US that it's kind of a de facto ongoing famine
Actually, the US didn’t have a famine, it had the opposite. Automation like combines and tractors obviated the need for oxen and farmhands to plow and reap manually. The farmers competed in a race to the bottom (depleting the soil and causing the dust bowl). They fired most farmhands and still had a surplus. Food prices plummeted while giant dust storms became the norm.
The government had to step in and pay farmers NOT to plant, to extricate them from the downward spiral / race to the bottom that the “free market” had producted in the face of automation / massive supply shocks.
Meanwhile, the laid-off farm workers (20% of USA used to be employed in farm-related jobs) migrated to cities but it would be a decade before the manufacturing base was built up to employ them. They lived in Hoovervilles and shantytowns set up to house them. A third of the country’s banks failed and the money supply shrank. The fed sat that one out. You can read books by John Steinbeck and others describing life at that time (eg Grapes of Wrath).
So eventually, projects like the Interstate Highway System, and even weapons manufacturing and mobilization for WW2 caused mass employment. At a time when people needed jobs, this was a good thing for the economy and didn’t need communist propaganda to attract workers. Capitalism’s race to the bottom created the desperation the workers needed for undertake large state projects. And it is about to happen again.
Ironically, around the same time the US had a massive surplus, Russia and China were experiencing massive man-made famines under collectivization. Whether that horrific economic experiment ultimately led to more prosperity through 5-year plans is a contentious question (ideological leftists like Noam Chomsky have told me, quoting Amartya Sen, that supposedly China had less deaths from malnutrition afterwards than India, but that’s hardly a high bar considering their population density).
PS: I don’t mean to pick on communism alone for extreme ideological economic system enforcement leading to famines. The Irish Potato Famine could probably be squarely put into the ideological capitalism column (landlords and property rights trumping people’s lives), or how Britain (a capitalist country) exploited India and the famines in Bengal were also largely due to requisition of grain, similar to the Volga famine during the Russian civil war.
> They go hand in hand. The authoritarianism of China allows it to undertake generational projects...
Lack of free press makes it easy to look successful.
It was the same thing with the Soviet union, was it ever really successful at any point?
> It was the same thing with the Soviet union, was it ever really successful at any point?
yes. the soviet union was wildly successful for most of its history. it went from a backwater poor agrarian country to an industrial superpower near peer with the US in a single generation, while simultaneously going through multiple brutal wars and crushing nazi germany at immense cost. despite all that, the soviet union had the fastest and greatest economic and quality of life rise of any country in the 20th century.
of course it had problems that led to its collapse but you cannot be serious and say it was never successful at any point
> It was the same thing with the Soviet union, was it ever really successful at any point?
America had to go to all the way to the moon to win a "first" against the Soviet Union in space.
You don't need press for everyone to see that China is straight killing it in almost every sector. Manufacturing, compute, you name it. Sure, they aren't without problems.
And as for free press, look at where freedom of press took United States. You have companies like Fox news that "aren't actually news, just entertainment", who blatantly lie about election fraud. You have podcasters like Joe Rogan who are at the same time "just bullshitting", while also pushing ideological narratives. And most republicans still believe election was stolen in 2024.
And overall, the party that was all about free speech, free trade, and small federal government power is pretty much doing the exact opposite in every single aspect, and people voted for them.
Im glad China has reigns on all of that. It allows them to pass laws like this https://www.cnbctv18.com/world/chinas-new-influencer-law-wan...
And yes, from a pure statistical standpoint, having centralized power isn't optimal since you don't want someone crazy having lots of centralized power, but at the same time, you also don't want what US has, where on the average 7/10 people simply just don't give a fuck about US being destroyed financially and socially.
China is plainly and obviously many times more successful than the Soviet Union ever was, even if you ignore all the propaganda and just rely on yourself as a primary source - I.e., “hop on a plane and see for yourself.”
China's success has come _after_ they economically liberalized in a way that resembles the west's free markets.
Soviets never did any of this. They "stubbornly" kept to a command economy. While china does have their 5-year plans and command economy, they have loosened that up for private individual's enterprises, and allowed special economic zones for which free market capitalism thrives.
With a bit of state help in infrastructure etc, this enabled china to leverage their enormous human capital to simply out-muscle their way into industrial dominance. Now with such a dominant position, they can call shots in a way that irks the US. Compounding the problem is that the authoritarian style of gov't in china enables long term strategic planning and execution - something that seems sorely lacking from the US for the past 3 decades.
Why does the added qualifier in your first paragraph matter?
You’re literally just explaining why the Soviet Union was less successful.
Nothing stopped the Soviet Union from liberalizing their economy and running it better like China. They just didn’t do it. Which loops us back to my original comment.
I didn’t bring my point up as some kind of communism versus capitalism thing, I’m just plainly stating that as far as single-party mostly-authoritarian governments go, China is far more accomplished than the USSR was.
You can go to China and see it for yourself. The USSR make itself inaccessible to foreigners for the most part, but you can hop on a train and visit nearly any place freely. It's pretty easy with their extensive train system.
I see a lot of cope with "c-China is lying! It's not really that good!" But lots of tourists such as myself have been all over the country, and tbh, I think the "propaganda" undersells it a bit. I thought there was no way it could be as nice as the travel videos I saw, but it was even better.
I’m really curious to better understand what aspects of China’s government would hurt your day to day life.
From what I read online the people there are free to rant and get things fixed. Their local government representative is held accountable if the people in his/her province are unhappy. Not too different from a typical democratic setup I guess? But this could be off because I don’t know anyone personally there.
I'm not sure where you are reading, but people are not free to rant in China. Many of my friends would lose privileges because they were foolish enough to openly speak poorly regarding certain topics, and suddenly they were banned from Wechat, which is equivalent to being banned from the internet, and from using money in noncash form. My sister was visiting and was dumb enough to get herself banned from way more services and she was scared she wouldn't be able to get back home. In a very few places, they check your social score to ensure that you aren't low-life enough to be barred from there too. I only spoke freely after checking an area for no cameras, so I always had all of my privileges, but me and a Chinese friend, after coming to the USA (I am not Chinese, only went there for school), hope we never end up back in China. Regarding day to day life in the USA, I am unaffected by China.
> I’m really curious to better understand what aspects of China’s government would hurt your day to day life.
For tech workers in particular, the structure of the economy would prevent high equity-based compensation. I also distinctly recall China's heavy-handed enforcement of COVID lockdowns, and the sudden about-face when discontent reached a boiling point. Then there's the censorship too - disagreeing on low-stakes local issues is one thing, but if you disagree with national policy, you cannot exactly discuss it in the open the way that we do here.
I have known a few Chinese people, and they downplay this stuff. Some of them are even political refugees from the purges following Mao's death, and they downplay the level of authoritarianism in the country. As bad as the US has gotten recently, we're still not at that level.
It really does seem like both nations are slowly converging on similar systems of government, but hopefully this authoritarian swing in the US can be limited.
I can answer this question. I’m a native-born Chinese, and I’ve never studied abroad. This year I just completed my first trip overseas, visiting the UAE. First of all, I don’t think China is a fully democratic system, but it’s not an outright dictatorship either. At the same time, I don’t think the two-party voting system in the U.S. qualifies as democracy either. One of the biggest drawbacks of Western criticism of China for being “undemocratic” is that many Chinese people travel abroad and are exposed to the outside world. If the West had a better system, we would definitely be willing to follow it, but their proposals are worse than ours—especially after Trump took office, things have only gotten more chaotic.
In China, the only real restriction is that you cannot severely criticize the Party and its leaders. I mean, minor criticism is acceptable—for example, pointing out areas that aren’t working well—but you cannot completely reject them. For instance, you cannot post offensive memes about leaders. This is different from the U.S., but I think the comparison is interesting. By sacrificing this particular freedom, we actually gain many other freedoms.
The most typical case this year was a food poisoning incident at a kindergarten. The staff, ignoring safety regulations, added toxic chemical elements to the food. This incident went viral on the Chinese internet, and the public criticism was focused on the government and relevant medical authorities, but people did not(dared not)—blame the Party itself. In the end, a large number of the responsible personnel were punished or sentenced. The problem was resolved, and it did not implicate the Party itself.
Many people don’t realize China’s major advantages, and I only understood them by observing foreigners who run businesses in China( i mean this video if anyone is intreseted https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-ozoOKhUO4&t=329s) . China has a system of accountability. If anyone travels in China, I highly recommend observing rivers, streets, and even trees—they all have markers indicating who is responsible. This means that if something goes wrong in that area, someone is accountable. Of course, corruption can undermine this, but the system is still operational. China doesn’t have problems like California’s high-speed rail, the UK’s HS2, or the charging stations under Biden that were barely built and with almost no one held accountable.
As for why I chose the UAE: honestly, Europe has disappointed me too much these days. Our social media is full of reviews about being stolen from or robbed while traveling in Europe, and the same applies to Southeast Asia. They’re basically at the same level of insecurity. Even in the UAE, which is considered a relatively safe country, I was still worried about my credit card being lost or fraudulently charged. In China, I never have to worry about such things. Of course, Japan, South Korea, or Singapore might also be safe, but those countries are just too boring for me.
Do I care about politics? Of course I do. The more sensitive topics can always be navigated with wordplay—everyone is familiar with these strategies. For more serious matters, a VPN works perfectly.
(My English writing isn’t very good, so I often write in Chinese and use ChatGPT to help me translate.)
What do you think of Naomi Wu's case?
To be honest, I roughly searched around, including asking AI, but I couldn’t really figure out what happened. I hardly have any impression of her; her videos can be found on Chinese internet, but the recommendation algorithms have never suggested them to me. From what I’ve found so far, she seems quite controversial. She might have been limited in reach on Chinese internet. Maybe the government found a suitable reason, or maybe not — I really haven’t clarified that part.
Also, Linux is invovled?
It seems she was silenced for publicly advocating for LGBT and visited by agents multiple times about it. But there are a lot more details I'm sure.
As long as the cat catches the mice... :-)
How much is "freedom" worth to you? Do you think your average homeless person in San Francisco would be worse off with free healthcare, housing, and no right to vote?
China isn't imperialist.
Imperialism? Expand.
The most charitable interpretation I can think of, if OP didn't misuse the word, would be, the generic "China bad" narrative being applied to things like equating the Belt and Road (loans, infrastructure projects) to centuries of old-fashioned exploitation of Africa. After all, it takes one to know one.
It’s not that hard to find examples. Chinese incursions in the south China sea and the development of artificial islands to project power and control over the region. Their plans for Taiwan. The annexation of Tibet. Xinjiang ethnic cleansing. Erosion of democratic freedoms in Hong Kong SAR. And yes the entire Belt and Road initiative which is basically loan sharking.
No. That list shows coercive or authoritarian behavior, not classical imperialism. Imperialism means establishing colonies or directly ruling foreign territories for economic extraction. China today doesn’t occupy or govern other sovereign states. The South China Sea, Hong Kong, Tibet, Xinjiang, and Taiwan are all disputes within--except Taiwan + the South China Sea--undisputed national boundaries.[1] Belt and Road loans, while allegedly predatory, are contractual and do not create colonial rule. So it’s perhaps aggressive nationalism and coercive influence, but not imperialism.
1. Yes, looking way back, the occupying Qing dynasty established said boundaries through quite a lot of imperialism about a century before the US got busy manifesting its destiny.*
To be fair China challenging white people rule is kinda bad if you are white. I suppose us Westerners can now kinda feel how the Ming must have felt in the 19th century?
They're plainly trying to expand their territory in Taiwan and the South China Sea. Building invasion barges that can only be used for invading Taiwan, harassing Phillipine ships. It's not subtle.
I don't think any super power looks fantastic, and we definitely should not idolize China.
But also, we should let that be an excuse for western powers. We have corporations forcing most of the decisions in our country for extremely short term gains.
In the US we have... decrypt public transit, horrible healthcare, halting progress on renewable energies, we're probably going to make less than our parents while billionaires make more.
Like it sucks, and if anyone tells you well at least you don't live in China you should roll your eyes, why does where we live have to suck. Oh, and we even have awful imperialism too.
>"if it wasn't for the authoritarianism and imperialism"
Oops, my hypocrisy meter just broke.
You may be making assumptions about me.
And oppression of Tibet and the Uyghur people and other human rights violations…
Have you heard of this thing called the new Jim Crow?
A mean not to go too deep into whataboutism… but at least they only persecute their own Muslims rather than picking random countries on a map and persecuting them.
I would rather live in a country that points the guns outward, rather than inward
Ohhh so they aren't like selling weapon to Russia? Right. Keep going.
I see your point but, they're really not selling much more than golf carts and drones. If they go all-out with selling their actual military hardware (which they have a large stockpile and production capacity of), it would be get much more difficult for Ukraine to keep up the balance without increasing support from the west.
It's really quite interesting to see China being labelled as imperialist mean while the western powers have been colonizing and meddling in all kinds of affairs for generations... (see Operation Northwoods as one example)
Everybody makes mistakes.
The US is able to mention its past mistakes.
China still can't talk about students it murdered over 30 years ago.
Yet, recent American presidents have no problem admitting that Afghanistan and Iraq wars weren't the best of ideas.
> The US is able to mention its past mistakes.
The entire point of being able to mention past mistakes is for future generations to be able to learn from them and avoid making the same mistakes. It seems, in recent times, that while this liberty is "afforded" to US/Europe, they're not able to use it effectively, if at all. Meanwhile, even though the Chinese might not be able to talk about their mistakes publicly, it seems evident from their progress and events that they have not forgotten them, and that it is in their minds, at the very least.
Edit: Not to mention, looking at how your current president is going after Canada just because of an ad, don't keep your hopes up on US citizens being able to "mention" things either.
Is that better or worse than aiding/supporting genocide?
Really? I always thought people made a massive deal about an incredibly poor country that become... middle income, and seems to be stuck there.
I'm glad they don't have self-induced famines anymore I guess, but it's not exactly japan in the 80s.
Have you not been paying attention to what's going on this country?
We're building concentration camps. We have the Gestapo rounding up brown people. We have people being deported to supermax prisons in countries they have no connection to for protesting America's material support for genocide on college campuses. We have a media that is increasingly owned by lackeys of this administration (just look into CBS and Bari Weis as the latest example). Every aspect of our government is for sale from pardons to merger approvals and ending SEC investigations. There is functionally no law and order where we may start simply ignoring inconvenient parts of the Constitution like the 22nd Amendment. We have the military in our streets to incite violence. We have the Navy blowing up random small boats off Venezuela, arguably to incite a hot war with Venezuela. We have people who are rapidly unable to afford a place to live, food or both (and that's a bout to get a whole lot worse when SNAP gets suspended in November as the administration refuses to use the $6 billion set aside to fund it). We have a Speaker who won't swear in a duly elected House representative because she'll be the 218th vote on a discharge petition that will force a vote on release of the Epstein files, which the president will be forced to veto and he doesn't want to be put in that position.
I think about all these things when people bring up so-called "authoritanism" in China. Do you not see how dire the situation is not only in the US but basically all of the developed world? France, Germany and the UK are poised to have actual Nazis win their next elections due to these economic crises that governments absolutely refuse to address.
And imperialism? What imperialism? Pretty much every conflict on Earth currently can be traced back to the US, either because a US ally is a proxy doing war crimes or simply because the US turns a blind eye because one or both sides are buying US arms to commit those same war crimes.
Just this month the Nobel committee handed the Peace Prize to an opposition leader in Venezuela who has promised to make Venezuela more Israel-friendly and to privatize all the resource extraction to Western companies. "Peace".
We are in 1930s Germany. Worrying about China seems crazy to me.
What makes you think I disagree with any of that? These are dark times. Honestly, the West is so profoundly stupid right now that a part of me wishes China could be a beacon of respectability. It's just a shame about their being ahead of the curve on the malicious government.
Don't know why you're downvoted, this seems a pretty accurate take to me.
It seems most of us in the West are mostly incapable of self-criticism and have been fed so much propaganda that we forgot how to see through all the bull**.
Are low birth rates a problem? The job market keeps being published about lack of employment. Recent was this UK having a 1,200,000 plus college graduates and less than 100,000 job placements. The USA market is also bad with very limited economic mobility based on years past.
Is the job market too restrictive with maximize profit over maximum knowledge transfer and upkeep? Not properly balancing older and newer labor. That is the reason for "low birth rate problem"?
ML is being pushed to condense the labor market even more. Along with growth of larger and more powerful businesses. Number of businesses are pushing to be an oligopoly and more to a duopoly or monopoly.
The current and future labor market with modern business ideology does not seem to match the statement _low birth rate problem_. The problem seems to be elsewhere.
Based on my understanding, that’s still the case. I think the problems you mentioned are currently beyond what any government can handle, even one with extremely strong control like China. China is now facing both rising unemployment and a low birth rate. In the past, when China’s birth rate was higher, unemployment was not this high. The fundamental problem is not that there are too many people, but that the economy lacks vitality. Moreover, a declining birth rate will cause systems like pensions and healthcare—which rely on the next generation to support the previous one—to collapse.
The relationship between the job market and employment is not so straightforward as you presume. After all, fewer people means less demand for labor as much as it means more supply. In general a falling population is considered an economic risk.
> a Chinese propaganda slogan stuck with me: “If you want to get rich, build roads first; have fewer children, plant more trees.”
Why call it propaganda though ? That doesn't sound like a biased, deceptive or misleading policy.
It hasn't been thought through much which is universally common for some govt policies everywhere, but it results have been positive for the most part ?
Not all propaganda is deceptive.
The best propaganda is 100% true and still achieves it's goal.
So, the term is mainly used to convey an author's opinion on the subject of the topic and not necessarily related to the topic itself ?
Propaganda is deceptive or misleading by definition.
You can deceive while telling the truth, like this ad from a Brazilian newspaper (dubbed in English) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PShbxd42JN8
Truth needs to be put in context. Truth needs to be interpreted. There is no such thing as objective truth.
Effective propaganda is like a filter that is everywhere you look. You don't know it's there because you never see the world without it.
I probably often use that term in a neutral sense.
> That doesn't sound like a biased, deceptive or misleading policy.
Propaganda doesn't imply any of these things; it just implies a polemic.
"Have fewer children" implies that people are a burden, which can be true in a dysfunctional society, like perhaps China under Mao.
But in a well functioning system, more people get more things done and make society wealthier.
The old idea was that the planet can only produce enough food for a certain number of people. But it turned out that people produce the food, not the planet!
Probably neither "larger n is always better, for any value of n" nor "smaller n is always better, for any value of n" adequately captures the nuance involved in assessing whether having more or fewer children will increase wealth.
It also turns out that producing food requires some amount of both planet and people.
There's only so much food people can grow on planet Earth, so it remains true, even if the number varies depending on the means available for producing that food. So yeah we can grow more food than people thought decades ago, but the Earth and the energy available to it, along with arable land are still finite.
So most people believe it was a mistake. We were misled by some so-called experts at the time. Conspiracy theorists claim that many of those experts weren’t Han Chinese, since the one-child policy only applied to the Han population.
The policy last about 35 years and didn’t end till 2015. Even today there a limit on procreation as the cap was only increased to three children in 2021. At some point the CCP has to own its mistakes.
The problem isn’t that China instituted the policy (although its use of forced abortions to enforce was… problematic), it’s that its system of government prevented open discussion, reflection, and self-correction.
at least on this topic, i agree with you
My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I ride a Mercedes, my son rides a Land Rover, and my grandson is going to ride a Land Rover…but my great-grandson is going to have to learn Mandarin.
LOL. Probably no longer needed. China currently has no real solution for the low birth rate. I guess they are 99% relying on industrial robots and household robots(in the future).So China will desperately invest in the robotics sector. (The recently released 15th Five-Year Plan likely includes this). By then, language likely won’t be an issue—AI can replace everything.
Enlighten me - hasn’t Xi and the government recently demanded 2-3 children from each woman? I imagine they’ll push heavily for births again.
the government is trying to encourage more births through subsidies and other measures. In fact, experience from developed countries has already shown that this approach doesn’t work. Moreover, the subsidies the Chinese government provides are far lower than in developed countries and far below the actual cost of raising a child.
The most common nationwide subsidy is 3,600 RMB per child per year, which is basically ineffective. For a woman on maternity leave, the government will subsidize her based on her salary, which can be substantial—in places like Shanghai it could reach 200,000–300,000 RMB—but still not enough to stimulate population growth.
To put it in a darker perspective: the only way to truly boost birth rates would be to reduce women’s rights or compensation, which is unlikely in any civilized country. A historical example is Romania.
So in my understanding, China has only two viable paths: solve the cost of raising children through household robots or by means of coercion, the government could require state-owned enterprise employees and Communist Party members to have children. China has 100 million Party members and roughly tens of millions of SOE employees. SOE employees usually have stable benefits and income, so childbirth could be tied to salary, benefits, or promotion opportunities. To some extent, this could be argued as reasonable—after all, they are supported by taxpayers and arguably should contribute to society. But it still counts as a rather dark idea, and I imagine it would be a last-resort option.
>the government could require state-owned enterprise employees and Communist Party members to have children.
Or Beijing could ban birth control and rely on the natural human sex drive to increase the birth rate.
China is a country that does not prohibit abortion at all. Maybe this could be a starting point…
Immigration would be another option… but not sure how willing China is to adopt that
I’ve actually thought a lot about this issue. My conclusion is that it’s not feasible. China has never been good at integrating other ethnicities and races. Even managing the 56 recognized ethnic groups within mainland China hasn’t gone very well; it has copied many mistakes from the Soviet Union, which has now led to a certain degree of backlash.
So I’ve always felt that China’s ambition extends only to Taiwan, and Taiwan is the endpoint. After all, the people on Taiwan are Chinese too, sharing the same culture and ethnicity. Another point that people might overlook is that China’s approach to incorporating outsiders is based on cultural identity rather than racial identity, which is the opposite of the U.S. In the U.S., you can come in, bring your own culture, help reshape American culture, and still become an American. In China, you can only be considered Chinese if you adopt Chinese culture.
Of course, sometimes we discuss online hypotheticals like whether it would be good for China to annex Mongolia or Myanmar. From a purely military perspective, it would be very easy for China. But almost no one supports it, because our way of thinking dictates that it would require an enormous cost to transform those populations into Chinese culture, and that cost is simply not worth it. Trade and cooperation are the best approach.
Wise to use forests to contain deserts. Problem is that China still plays a big role in importing deforestation-linked commodities and fund overseas projects that exacerbate global loses. There are low tree survival rates and falsified coverage, like the Three-North Shelterbelt program which is plagued by inefficiencies over its 40 years of operation.
It's also hard to balance afforestation without causing scarcity of water and displacement of native forest habitats. For example, instances where shrubs are misclassified as forests inflate the report figures. China seems to be the global leader in biodiversity loss, with about 80% of its coral reefs and 73% of its mangroves gone since 1950. Everyone knows their abusive fishing practices, and the millions of tons of plastic pollution into the ocean every year.
So, keep up the good environmental efforts, China, and hope you do even better.
It’s hard to reason about where China is today with forestation. Obviously their efforts from 20 years ago didn’t do much good, probably due to corruption and mismanagement. Today they seem to have solved so issues, is it could really be working. The primary resource they need to manage is water, and any effort that requires too much water (especially water diverted from local farmers) isn’t sustainable.
Honest question, aren't coral reefs also very sensitive to climate change? How much of that loss is because of regional activities and how much is due to global environmental changes?
So, something has been bugging me. Coral is one of the oldest animals.
They've been around for over half a billion years.
They survived the Great Dying, which killed 80-95% of marine species.
And now the ocean gets 0.9 C warmer and it's game over for coral?
Nobody's claiming that all coral is going to go extinct.. the reef environment that has existed for the past few thousand years is at great risk though. Water temperatures that we know have been relatively stable for several hundred years are suddenly rapidly warming. Bleaching events due to high temps which infrequently occurred in the past are happening nearly every year now, which gives the reef no time to rejuvenate between them. The evolutionary process which protects species in their niches takes hundreds or thousands of generations to adapt to new selection pressures and the changes are happening over dozens of generations instead, which may be too fast for most species to respond.
Coral and coral reefs will surely exist for the next few hundred million years but e.g. the Great Barrier Reef as an example of a vibrant reef ecosystem might not. We don't know exactly where the tipping point for these extremely complex systems lies, but we know that it's some point in the direction we're heading and we're starting to see examples of the outcomes that scientists predict to see near those tipping points.
My guess is as a species it will relocate to somewhere with the right temperature zone but because coral takes so long to grow from the perspective of those of us alive the existing “old growth” coral will die.
0.9 C warmer on average vs location specific volatility + acidification
[dead]
Considering that China is responsible for ~25% of cumulative CO2 emissions to date, there's not much difference between the regional and global inputs.
Request the source? I researched and calculated the cumulative percentage of global carbon emissions from major economies since the industrial revolution: - United States: 24% - China: 15% - Russia: 6.7% - Germany: 5.2% - United Kingdom: 4.4% - Japan: 3.8% - India: 3.5% - France: 2.2% - Canada: 1.9% - Ukraine: 1.7%
source from Global Carbon Project, is this reliable?
I added up the 2023 numbers from here: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co-emissions?t...
Isn't this 75% less responsibility than total responsibility in case it's only due to regional activities?
Sure, but 25% of responsibility for something like this is well into "consequences of your actions" territory.
If the world had 25% less GHG emissions to date, warming may well still be sub 1C, and the reefs might be fine.
yeahh,hope china will do better
I think they’re doing a great thing.
My area has seen some wildfire smoke season near the end of summer. It never happened when I was a kid. Now every summer there’s wildfire smoke for several days or several weeks.
The climate appears to be changing and heavily forested areas of midwest US and canada are on fire every summer.
Planting trees could be great for the environment, but without the moisture it could become a tinderbox for wildfires.
India too has been adding more green cover than ever. Higher CO2 in atmosphere leads to faster growth of forests. But more important factor is urbanization for India. As people move to cities the need to cut down trees goes down.
India doesn't do it in an organized way though.
You'll read about some 70 year old woman/man in an obscure village who's reforested thousands of acres on their own, or resuscitated a lake (e.g. the lake guy in Bengaluru).
But there's little effort to harness their knowledge in a systematic way, add knowledge from others into the knowledge bank, do peer review, and then systematically dispense the knowledge in the form of a kit to environmentalists and bureaucrats across the country. China did this, and that's why they're so successful.
Yeah another example of the saying "India is a disappointment to both optimists and pessimists".
One nice thing about these developing countries is due to the power infrastructure tends to be not very good - which prompts people to take things into their hands and install solar, not to save the planet but to stave off brownouts, and be able to run the AC around the clock to stave off the heat.
For residential, solar + batteries straight up beats legacy infra on cost, and with the upcoming cheap sodium batteries, things are only going to get better.
Like how mobile payments took off in Africa early because they weren't held back by existing infrastructure.
Doesn't that put pressure on the cities itself especially the peripheral counties to pave way for housing and concrete roads?
Cities tend to expand up. Almost all buildings in Mumbai that are under 5 stories are targeted for "redevelopment" i.e. a developer buying it out and building something taller in its place.
That is too costly for cities that have cheap and abandoned agricultural land waiting to be deforested and build upon.
The time / distance of commute is a natural limiting factor.
What does “deforested” mean? Isn’t agricultural land already deforested?
Yes, and it's a good thing.
Either way, you need to fit the needs of the same number of people. If they're in a dense city near everything they need, they use less space.
Policies to limit urban sprawl just an expensive way to create more sprawl elsewhere - and roads to it.
> Yes, and it's a good thing
It is. I have seen the data
But I live in a rural area of New Zealand and I also see how people moving onto farm land greatly increases tree cover (not forrest) and biodiversity, I assume because people plant gardens, and closely husband them
In New Zealand farmers are grossly damaging to the environment. They clear everything and plant mono cultures and treat water as exhaustable and rivers as waste dumps
So yes people in cities is a good thing, but people in rural areas are good, to
Guess it depends on whether subsistence living is more resource intensive than urban living where on average urbanites own more possessions per capita.
> Higher CO2 in atmosphere leads to faster growth of forests.
Sigh. No, unfortunately it doesn't. Natural plants are very rarely rate-limited by the CO2 concentration. So forests don't grow faster.
However, higher CO2 does make the forests a bit more drought-resistant.
This is opposite to everything I've ever read. A brief "greening" period was expected (and is now nearing its end) as climate change started taking off due specifically to this effect.
Edit: to clarify, I'm saying the greening thing already happened due to increases in CO2 levels (though it's possible this is due to heat and not CO2 itself, I guess?).
Hmmm, separately of plant-types, I wonder if there may be a distinction here between how a surge in individual growth doesn't necessarily translate to a surge in the forest.
Imagine a higher CO2 concentration allows a tree to reach maturity a whole +25% faster, taking 16y instead of 20y. However its happening in an established forest, already bounded by mountains, rivers, etc, where mature trees sustain for another 100y before they finally die off and take 10y to decompose, opening the spot for a replacement.
In that case, the number of simultaneous trees doesn't go up very much, because the main effect is to reduce "downtime". The "duty-cycle" for a tree-sized patch of ground goes from having a mature tree ~77% of the time to ~79%.
So, it turns out that there are two types of plants: those whose growth is rate-limited by available CO2, and those whose aren't, as the latter evolved a more efficient pathway during a previous era of low CO2 concentrations.
So depending on which kinds of plants, you can both be right.
The scientific research says that drought resistance is due to the increased vegetation growth.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09819...
www.igb.illinois.edu/article/stronger-drought-resistance-urban-vegetation-due-higher-temperature-co2-and-reduced-o3
So why are the forests growing faster
Climate patterns are changing. My kids will retire with the cheap old farmland we bought that I’m planting black walnuts on.
Upstate NY was ideal maple syrup production territory for years. Now, we’ve changed from USDA Zone 5 to 6, so the region will be more like western Virginia in 20 years.
The TLDR is that they aren't. Global warming made some areas more hospitable to forests (warmer, more precipitation) and increased drought resistance counteracts some of the increased aridity in other ares: https://e360.yale.edu/features/greening-drylands-carbon-diox...
The atmosphere has so far barely changed in temperature compared to natural variations in temperature over time that had smaller and lesser effects than the effect we are seeing.
The abnormally rapid rise in CO2 levels we are seeing is unusual and accords better with the unusualness of rapid global greening. It isn't climate change that is causing it. It is CO2, directly.
How much of this is the result of reversing the deforestation caused by the Great Leap Forward and other anti-nature policies of the mid twentieth century?
It's not a bad thing if this is mostly just restoring forests ravaged by bad policy, but it's a bit odd to compare this reforestation, quantitatively, to what's going on in countries that didn't have a "war against nature".
They've been doing deforestation for thousands years. The "Yellow" River is one of the results.
My immediate thought, yeah isnt that because they don't really naturally have the kinds of softwoods forests good for making boards and paper? And until more recently they were taking recycled paper/fiber from america in empty shipping containers returning.
The real news is that it's also slightly happening in other developed countries too, another rhetoric point towards Steven Pinker's concept that as nations get richer they become more environmentally conscious, cause they can afford to care about it.
> The real news is that it's also slightly happening in other developed countries too, another rhetoric point towards Steven Pinker's concept that as nations get richer they become more environmentally conscious, cause they can afford to care about it.
I'm not sure it's environmentalism. It's efficiency. From the article.
> In richer countries, where farming has become more efficient, deforestation has slowed or even reversed
You simply don't need as many people living in villages, farming marginal land. New England re-forested because the land was never that good for farming, and it made a lot more sense to work in factories.
At least some projects run longer I understand: > Last year China completed a project, begun in 1978, to plant a 2,000-mile-long belt of trees
I’d heard that project wasn’t going so well. The trees weren’t really suited to the areas where they were planted, and many died off. I suppose even if only a small percentage survive, it’s still better than desert.
They had setbacks for sure, but they learned from them and continuously adjusted their methods.
I've seen some neat videos on YouTube that sound impressive. Are they impressive in real life? Anyone have any personal experience?
> as nations get richer they become more environmentally conscious, cause they can afford to care about it.
Thus far, getting rich has been dirty business. This is what leads people to care more so than them being able to afford to care. Their richness is a side effect of their pollution, thus, caring is a side effect of richness but that's not the root cause. Pollution -> Money -> Caring. If you removed the money, people still care they just can't afford to do anything about it.
I'm not familiar with Pinker or this theory, just poking at it :)
> Steven Pinker's concept that as nations get richer they become more environmentally conscious, cause they can afford to care about it.
I think in this case it's more of a correlating factor. The countries struggling with deforestation have very little state capacity to enforce property rights or any sort of environmental regulations. Whereas in the developed world it's much easier to stop illegal logging or homesteading.
I agree and would also add that food security is also a massive factor. With a high food insecurity clamping down on illegal expansion of farmland is politically toxic - but as land use efficiency rises and cities grow conservationalism becomes a much more important agenda to back.
People like nature - all things held equal we want to live in a beautiful natural world... but if that world comes at the cost of having food on the table. Whether that inefficiency is technologically, environmentally (e.g. New England's poor soil) or conflict driven doesn't significantly change public opinion.
China is very large, has 90% of the population living on 40% of the land in the southern and eastern portion of the country, and some massive deserts that they don't want to expand. This leaves a lot of room for tree planting programs.
This and Bill Gates saying...
> “the doomsday outlook [on climate change] is causing much of the climate community to focus too much on near-term emissions goals, and it’s diverting resources from the most effective things we should be doing to improve life in a warming world.”
I guess it's cool there's something to be hopeful about, westerner's just seemed excited to make money off of melting ice in Greenland.
Bill Gates is fundamentally anthrophilic, so his concern is above all human suffering. I think that’s a valid viewpoint, but also shortsighted; keeping this planet habitable will require tough decisions and sacrifices, and should stay the utmost priority, out of sheer necessity.
Anthropophilic perhaps…
The population as a whole has a rapidly dwindling appetite for tech billionaires trying to impose "tough decisions and sacrifices" on everyone else, so Bill's probably in the right lane. He has already been the target of a vast array of conspiracy theories.
ah, the classic "you are a sacrifice I'm willing to make"
Oh no, to save the world we'll have to take the train to work instead of a car...
[flagged]
I'm starting to think that we're the baddies.
Great quality comment.
We shouldn't consider the fact China did much more deforestation to start with and even after all this reforestation China has lesser forest area than the US despite being larger in size:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_forest_ar...
https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-54719577
> The US claims: "China is the world's largest consumer of illegal timber products." > And, according to studies, that is true.
> The Environmental Investigation Agency says: "The immense scale of China's sourcing [of wood] from high-risk regions [of the world] means that a significant proportion of its timber and wood product imports were illegally harvested." And research by Global Witness last year said there were "worrying" levels of illegality in countries from which China sources more than 80% of its timber.
Just as with CO2, a better comparison would look at per-capita figures and the destinations of consumption--for instance paper and furniture for export.
It may also take into account the viable land area, lest we also want to condemn Australia for having so much less forest area despite being similar in size to the US.
well, china also has gigantic northern and western regions that cannot be forested. the us doesn't have an equivalent of the tibetan plateau or the gobi desert
Ecologically speaking, the US is an absolute monster of a nightmare. The American carbon footprint is incredible.
The US was positioned to leverage technological and economic advantages to embrace and profit massively off of next gen energy infrastructure. It is a tragedy of our era that anti-conservationalism was able to gain such a strong foothold in the body politic.
> embrace and profit massively off of next gen energy infrastructure
Our children’s generation will never forgive us for abandoning nuclear energy abundance. Truly a crime against humanity.
There was still a perfectly nice window of opportunity even scratching nuclear from the list.
My other glib thing about nuclear is that France, a much denser nation than the US (though of course density is a local property...), has a bunch of nuclear, but even with "full" buy-in it's hard to make the whole thing profitable, and a lot of the nuclear reactors are running at like 80% capacity.
Electricity is pretty fungible at smaller scales but when you start building reactors you need water and you need consumers of a lot of electricity to be close by, and that does cause its own sets of constraints.
Would still be better if the US had built a bunch more nuclear reactors, but my assumption has often been that there are limits to how much it could be expanded in the US given those constraints.
> a lot of the nuclear reactors are running at like 80% capacity.
This is presumably intentional. Beyond longevity, being able to shift one plant to 0 and take up the load across other plants allows for continued uptime even with a plant down (or just below capacity).
> it's hard to make the whole thing profitable
Considering France had the second-cheapest electicity for industrial use in the EU (in 2015, the most recent date from Wikipedia), this feels more regulatory-bassed than a properly fair shot at "Look how expensive nuclear is"
> This is presumably intentional
It's intentional in that people are making decisions to do things, but the people running the power plants really would rather run at much higher capacity
I get what you're saying, but the line of comfort for these plants is above where it's at. I think the target is like 90% or something?
> Considering France had the second-cheapest electicity for industrial use in the EU (in 2015, the most recent date from Wikipedia), this feels more regulatory-bassed than a properly fair shot at "Look how expensive nuclear is"
Well... the State is present to make the whole thing work. This isn't a bad thing per se, though I think it goes against some US narratives of "well if the state didn't put in a bunch of regulations then nuclear would just be everywhere".
It's more I guess a point about how there's unlikely to be magical economies of scale that make this whole thing work out.
And the industrial use electricity point goes hand in hand with the reactor usage levels: there's a lot of electricity that EDF would like to sell but have few buyers for! It's a buyer's market!
I like nuclear stuff in general, just think it's worth being clear eyed that nuclear power generation has Real Problems that even full state and societal buy in didn't solve in France's case. Though they did get cheap power for trains etc from the deal, so not like France's situation is bad by any stretch of the imagination.
I used to be a true believe in nuclear (in the 80s, 90s). Recently, I thought (with good justification) that it's a folly to build out nuclear if renewables' economics continue on the current path.
Recently, I wonder if a nuclear winter (I mean this in the cold war context) is likely enough to make renewables massively less efficient. If the current administration were more competent, I'd assume that they are pushing non-renewables for that reason.
But then again, after a nuclear winter, our energy consumption will probably drop to near zero (the population being near zero), so it probably wouldn't matter either way.
Nuclear doesn’t work in a market based electricity market. The capital costs are high and it’s difficult to make money if you aren’t paying down those expenses.
IMO, the old style regulated public utilities were cheaper and more reliable.
I was pretty into nuclear as well but it's pretty obvious that solar/wind with battery storage is the future. For the price of a single reactor you can build out like 5x the capacity with other renewables. That's also accounting for the down periods.
It's kinda fitting that NOW trump jumps on board with nuclear, once the data says it isn't really necessary anymore. It's possible we can maybe build some useful small reactors for some stuff, but yeah.
Don't forget to count storage and grid updates.
That will be one of many things they will not forgive us for. Alas most of us in developed countries have treated the world as a dumping ground for our excess.
> It is a tragedy of our era that anti-conservationalism was able to gain such a strong foothold in the body politic.
It was the entirely predictable result of the policies we adopted. You don't get to be sloppy and shortsighted and then sail off into the sunset without consequences.
Kicking the industrial layers of the economic pyramid overseas and telling people to learn to code is what you do when you want a quick win and don't care if people will rightly hate you in a couple decades (IMO it's a miracle we're discussing this now and not in 2002).
Behaving that way isn't socially/politically sustainable and it doesn't take a genius to figure it out.
Humans think on a scale of seconds, minutes, hours, and days. Nature operates at a scale of years, decades, centuries, and millennia. This mismatch is our biggest problem.
How do you figure? Carbon footprint only matters per unit of output.
Americans produce 2-2.5x more output per ton of carbon emitted than the average country. And this despite the fact that the US is (1) the second largest manufacturer in the world, (2) one of the largest agricultural producers in the world, and (3) the largest oil producer in the world.
The US has a surprisingly low per capita carbon footprint given its vast per capita carbon-intensive production.
For context, here are the top 10 biggest footprints
1. China 26.16%
2 United States 11.53%
3. India 7.69%
4. Russia 3.75%
5. Brazil 3.16%
6. Indonesia 3.15%
7. Japan 2.15%
8. Iran 2.06%
9. Saudi Arabia 1.60%
10. Canada 1.54%
The top 10 countries account for about ~60% of global CO₂ emissions.
That's not great context: China and India have huge populations, it's expected that they should be at the top.
Better context can be found here[1] (countries by emission per capita). It's still not great because it shows a lot of small countries at the top. For example: Palau is the first, but it has a population of a few thousand people, so their emissions are a rounding error when compared to other countries.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
Why? I would expect China to be at the top since it's #1 manufacturing country? But India is like behind Germany at (5).
How about GDP per emission? And that would make China way higher than US.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-intensity
Per capita isn't the useful metric in this regard for the reason Palau illustrates. The climate cares about volume.
Per capita emissions is a way to assign relative sin by those who feel guilty about living large.
Bill Gates today, "This is a chance to refocus on the metric that should count even more than emissions and temperature change: improving lives. Our chief goal should be to prevent suffering, particularly for those in the toughest conditions who live in the world’s poorest countries. The biggest problems are poverty and disease, just as they always have been. Understanding this will let us focus our limited resources on interventions that will have the greatest impact for the most vulnerable people.”
0.Earth 100%
I would have thought that, in saying "we", OP was referring to all of humanity, rather than just the US and/or the Western world.
You can’t look at carbon footprint in isolation. All carbon is a result of the production of something, often production which improves the state of human suffering.
What is more important is efficiency.
Otherwise the logical argument is “the US should have remained poor with more human suffering because our carbon footprint would be smaller”
That’s an insane statement
Not intending to make this political, but it's a relevant point to consider: we should also take into account the carbon footprint of all the bombs that were dropped by America and its proxies into the equation as well.
The environmental impact from these would be immense, I'd imagine.
I mean, just the nukes alone are incomprehensible, adding all the conventional munitions ... I'm out of words.
A Time-Lapse Map of Every Nuclear Explosion Since 1945 - by Isao Hashimoto https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLCF7vPanrY
1 second = 1 month
All nuclear explosions themselves aren't even going to be statistically detectable.
IIRC from assessments of the US military's carbon footprint, cumulative footprint of nuclear weapons infrastructure is probably significantly less than .1%
There's a hundred other things to worry about first IMO.
...do nuclear bombs release significant amounts of CO2? I didn't think they did.
Not the detonation itself (if we don't count the fires it may cause), but the total CO2 cost of nukes is high [1]:
> A bomb on its own does not emit carbon dioxide… It’s the infrastructure, the construction (cement emits a lot), fossil fuel use, manpower, consumption, supply chains etc that all contribute.
> A study published in the Energy & Environmental Science journal has documented that using 1/1000 of the total capacity of a full-scale nuclear war weaponry would induce 690 tonnes of CO2 to penetrate the earth’s atmosphere. This is more than the annual carbon footprint of the United Kingdom.
[1] https://lakenheathallianceforpeace.org.uk/carbon-footprint-o...
I feel it's worth pointing out that this is where some folks brains kind of break when the "cost" of a good is mentioned.
It's the massive infrastructure to do the things profitably at scale that is often the problem with much of the stuff we consume and use. Then the "cost" of the environmental damage down the line. The "intangibles" get split up.
Then we see these insane figures when these intangibles are all lumped together. This further disconnects people's brains from the real scale of what's going. Cuz our brains suck with big numbers.
It doesn't even come close to China. So if we're a nightmarish monster, I would hate to think what that makes China.
China has 4 times the population. In any rational divvying up of the world's total emissions allowance by country China's share would be 4 times that of the US, but they are only emitting twice what the US is emitting.
Both are over their fair share, but the US is over by a larger factor so is farther behind on getting to where they need to be.
(This is not taking into account trade. Divvying up the world emissions budget by population gives the fair amount for each country if there is no trade. If there is trade the best way to handle it is probably to count the emissions for making things in country X that get consumed in country Y as being emissions in Y. With that correction China comes out even better).
Assigning blame and guilt is pointless. Just look at how well it has worked to motivate the US to change. That is to say, not at all.
The only thing moving the needle is renewables and nuclear generating power more cheaply than fossil fuels, so it becomes stupid to not switch to them even if you have no regard for the long term health of the environment.
It's not about assigning blame.
Per capita emissions give us a better idea of which groups of people require the largest change in their lifestyle in order to hit net zero. The current numbers suggest that the typical person in the US will have to do a lot more to hit net-zero than the typical person in China. Obviously, you can do better and estimate per capita emissions for each province/state/city or by wealth level. For instance, in many poor countries, most of their emissions come from the top 5-10% of the population. Everyone else emits basically nothing.
On the other hand, the total emissions of a country, absent other information, has little actionable value. It can only be uses to assign blame, so quite useless.
That still sounds like assigning blame and a vague call to "change lifestyle", instead of concrete action plans for energy, manufacturing, transportation and agricultural sectors. That is where the bulk of emissions are, not some billionaire's yacht or private jet.
> If there is trade the best way to handle it is probably to count the emissions for making things in country X that get consumed in country Y as being emissions in Y. With that correction China comes out even better).
Why?
A huge portion of China's emissions come from making things for people that aren't in China. The argument is that if a Chinese factory makes only widgets used in the US, those emissions from the Chinese factory are probably more accurately counted as US emissions.
Its like saying that you are 0 emissions because you have an electric car with no tailpipe while ignoring where the electricity is coming from.
The counter argument is that they'd have mass unemployment and would be in poverty without it. Virtually all rapid modern industrialization is reliant on exporting to foreign markets so characteizing it as American emissions is largely a misomer as it is really global emissions.
While I fundamentally disagree, do you really not see how that would then mean all Chinese emissions are therefore a result of the United States? So that's... worse?
What? No, because China is also exporting to other markets. The counterfactual is that we don't do global industrialization and let the global poor remain poor.
The US introduced China to western manufacturing markets. So if they would otherwise be poor and non-industrialized, the US is responsible for it all.
We can't claim we rose them from poverty while also denying culpability for the consequences thereof...
Though I think everyone is just saying Chinese emissions should be counted, proportionally, against the people they're making products for. And the US is one of their biggest customers.
>The US introduced China to western manufacturing markets. So if they would otherwise be poor and non-industrialized, the US is responsible for it all.
Who is "We" here? I am speaking from a global perspective. Chinese industrialization has internal agency, drivers and motivation, the US did not force China to industrialize. Secondly Global Demand is not US-Specific, Europe, Japan and other markets contributed with their own agreements so the claim that the US is "responsible" is overstated here.
>Though I think everyone is just saying Chinese emissions should be counted, proportionally, against the people they're making products for. And the US is one of their biggest customers.
That's not what anyone serious is saying because it's just splitting hairs. Everyone buys from China, the US accounts for 15% of China's total imports so clearly their role here is exaggerated again. China also consumes much of their own manufacturing, while the US also exports many services elsewhere, so should US emissions be counted in other countries? And then there are also structural dynamics in how surplus economies intentionally suppress their demand to run surpluses.
In a world of comparative advantage, I don't see the particular value in performing funny calculations to divy up moral blame according to shifting trade dynamics, just much easier to point it out as shared global responsiblity in the path for Modernity.
Because China makes more things that are used in the US than the other way around.
>> China has 4 times the population. In any rational divvying up of the world's total emissions allowance by country China's share would be 4 times that of the US, but they are only emitting twice what the US is emitting.
For now. Look at the rate of growth on their per capital carbon emissions. Then compare it with that of the USA.
China is also deploying a ton a renewables though. Its the worlds leading producer of renewables. It’s a mistake to think they won’t ween off carbon where they can. The US has a president that said “drill baby drill”.
Not per capita.
It's funny this myth persists, primarily in conservative circles, it seems. We are far worse per capita than China. In 2023, the US emitted 13.83 tons of carbon per capita. In that same year, China emitted 9.24 tons per capita. There are few countries that are worse than us - that list includes Russia and Saudi Arabia.
Shanghai's carbon per capita is 11.4. It's not really that different if you equalize the wealth per capita.
Ahem: "China consumes over half of the world’s coal and contributes more than 20% of global CO2 emissions from coal combustion."
But trees are nice.
Source: https://wires.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wcc.918
Your point reads strangely, it's almost like saying "Why even bother when CO2 emissions are so high" - surely ANYTHING that they are doing to turn that around should be celebrated and encouraged rather than saying "Yeah but..." - Rome wasn't built in a day and all.
Are you trying to say something like perfect is the enemy of good?
is that per Capita? Also, At least they are going in the right direction with most metrics (switching to electric, installing renewable, planting trees, etc), whereas the US (under Trump) is hellbent on getting rid of renewables, focusing on coal/fossil fuel, slowing down electric cars, destroying national parks, etc.
Based on forest cover? The US has nearly 50% more forest cover than China, and has been steadily growing it since the 90s as well.
It’s becoming very hard to see China as the adversary and not the U.S. There isn’t even a pretend moral high ground anymore.
What does your comment have to do with ecology? Just because China plants trees (news flash, so does the US) doesn't erase the fact they are far and away the biggest emitter of carbon emissions and have high levels of pollution.
Glad they are trying to do good things though.
US is far higher per capita and doing nothing about it.
This is one of the places where per capita doesn't matter as much as total emissions. We have one planet. The yearly total and cumulative matters the most.
China is by far the leading emitter. Over double of the US as of 2023 (latest available data I can find). China's emissions also aren't falling, they are skyrocketing. The US emissions ARE falling.
The US dominates in cumulative, which is essentially the measure of the total damage done to the planet. The US is doing something about it though. Yearly emissions have been dropping since 2007.
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-greenhouse-gas-emissions
Per capita most definitely matters. Every human is equal, there is no reason why one human has the right to emit much more than another. If we go by your reasoning, then all developing countries should figure out how to raise living standards without consuming more resources so the Americans don’t have to reduce theirs.
You are incorrect that China isn’t doing anything to lower its impact. It’s emissions would be much much much worse for the standard of living increases it achieved without investments in clean energy and EVs, tech that it is exporting abroad to the benefit of the world and to the dismay of America’s petro dollar dependence.
With such thinking, I now get why the rest of the world is beginning to hate America so much.
I didn't say China isn't doing anything. They are rolling out a mind boggling amount of clean energy right now. More than any other country by far. It's honestly incredible scale. It unfortunately isn't keeping up with their emissions though. The data is from 2023. It's very possible that in the last two years China has been able to stabilize emission growth.
I actually disagree a bit on the first part. I think developing countries have a right to have higher per capita emissions as they raise their standard of living and economy where they can get to the point of widely adopting clean energy.
I visited Beijing in April and it was much cleaner than it was before, electric vehicles everywhere, but people were also much richer, before a car was some sort of luxury and now it was just something you could get if you could find a place to park it. It’s hard to describe.
The o the thing to consider is that China isn’t really a full on consumption economy yet, that they develop a lot of infrastructure and make a lot of stuff for export, all that would be counted in per capita emissions even if it wasn’t to the benefit of a per capita member. The infrastructure building is going to slow down someday (like it did in Japan), China should seriously consider its exports next (especially rare earth refining which is really dirty and resource intensive).
Why wouldnt per capita matter? By that logic, you are saying it would be OK for Tuvalu to emit the same amount as the US?
Or actually, if per capita doesn't matter. Then China could fracture into 10 separate nations, and their output would sudenly be negliable?
Per captia doesn't matter.
> Then China could fracture into 10 separate nations, and their output would sudenly be negliable?
Don't you see the argument goes both ways? If the US merge with a few Africa countries, does it count as an "improvement" in regard of carbon emission?
Qatar emits FAR more than the US per capita, but the total emissions are extremely small. The impact on the climate is tiny comparatively.
In the "we only have one planet" angle, I think it's worth considering that China is not just burning coal for domestic purposes for fun. The fossil fuel consumption is an input to some output, a lot of that going abroad.
If China is the factory for all of these products sold in the US (and elsewhere of course), then isn't China just accounting for even more US emissions?
In that sense, some sort of eco-Trump could put all the tariff money into green tech or something, to balance out the exporting of emissions.
Though to be fair, I gotta imagine that... a lot of chinese emissions are purely for domestic purposes.
>If China is the factory for all of these products sold in the US (and elsewhere of course), then isn't China just accounting for even more US emissions?
China can't have it both ways, they are glibly blaming the rest of the world for their emissions while reforesting due to importing timber from rest of the world illegally.
> The Environmental Investigation Agency says: "The immense scale of China's sourcing [of wood] from high-risk regions [of the world] means that a significant proportion of its timber and wood product imports were illegally harvested." And research by Global Witness last year said there were "worrying" levels of illegality in countries from which China sources more than 80% of its timber.
https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-54719577
I'm not talking about China's position, but thinking about texture of the emissions reductions in the rest of the world.
It's probably fairly unknowable what percent of emissions are for products that will be exported back out from China, but I think it's reasonable to say that when I buy some random wooden table from China and import it into Australia (for example), that I am at least somewhat responsible for those emissions, even if per-country emissions data doesn't reflect that!
I don't think this is some free pass for Chinese ecological behavior overall. My general hypothesis has been that at least some part of emissions reductions in the US and Europe are due to outsourcing. I just don't know how much of it is that.
That’s a really great point. Maybe their emission curve is what matters. It’s the measure of if they are investing enough into reducing emissions despite their production needs.
The thing is it's not _their_ production needs if they are the factory of the world.
If the US put a 1000% tariff on Chinese goods tomorrow, emissions in China would likely go down a decent amount, right? But is that an indicator of their production needs? Or the US's consumption patterns?
Not that this is some bilateral thing, there's a lot of people buying a lot of stuff from many places. Just thinking about a very simple example, and how I would like to see quantification on this front, but I don't know how doable it really is.
Theres going to be a very entertaining set of mental gymnastics people will start doing once China's emissions growth peaks and starts falling compared to the US. They're building a lot of renewables, a lot of nuclear plants and are very obviously tooling up to replicate fusion from whoever nails it.
Whereas the US is trying to increase its fossil fuel industry and cancelling renewable projects.
They aren't just building "a lot" of renewables and nuclear, they are building an absolutely mind boggling amount of it. Last year it was more than the rest of the world combined!
Who cares about mental gymnastics. It's a win for literally everyone and I hope you ca see it that way instead. Competition is good. It drives others to keep up.
Despite what the current US govt wants, the economics of solar and other renewables will drive it. Worst they can do is slow it down a bit.
There is the whole totalitarian human rights thing, so if you overlook that small, insignificant issue, then yeah, China is doing great!
Texas has the most wind farms & largest solar arrays in all of the US
I could see how you would come to that conclusion if your knowledge of China started 5 minutes ago
Who the hell are 'we'? The US? The western countries?
By the "forest baddies index", South America is the baddies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_by_continent#/me...
Who is "we"?
The US. Admittedly, it’s a kneejerk reaction.
During the same period the US also added 18MM acres and so has Canada, but additionally Russia, India and Europe have also net added forest… so the “baddies” are still Brazil, Indonesia and the democratic Republic of the Congo.
[dead]
[dead]
[flagged]
This is a purely ecological/existential conversation. Of course the US has a horrible track record of policing the globe in its own interest. But if you want to wage selfish wars, you’d think you’d enforce policies that make sure there’s a tomorrow to be conquered.
Canada has added 20 million acres,
India 22 million acres,
Russia 52 million acres - an area about the size of Kansas.
The US reforested significantly in the twentieth century as well, which helped keep some of the US cooler than it should have been relative to the climate change norm.
https://news.agu.org/press-release/a-century-of-reforestatio...
Texas is ~172 million acres
Thanks for the info.
Honest questions how much forest the US and UK added since they are probably the loudest in the issue of deforestration?
> Russia 52 million acres
Does that include the forests russia has burned down in Ukraine?
I've been binging a lot of videos on things like rewilding and other approaches that can be used to restore landscapes. The Chinese have successfully executed a number of large scale projects over the decades. They started this early. Where other countries talked about doing things, the Chinese went ahead and did those things.
One of their projects is allowing them to undertake infrastructure projects in the desert. They simply stick bales of straw into ditches to stop soil being blown away by wind. The straw traps soil, water, and breaks down over a few years allowing plants to take hold. It's a simple approach that works. Very pramatic, dig a ditch, stick in some straw. Done. Repeat.
Outside of China, the green wall in Africa is a very pragmatic approach that involves digging a lot of half moon shaped ditches to trap rain water. Simple and effective.
Other approaches involve using fences to stop sheep and other grazers from preventing anything vaguely green tinted shoots from being eaten and giving them a chance to actually turn into trees.
What I like about these approaches is that some relatively simple measures can have big effects. People spend a lot of time hand wringing over seemingly insurmountable problems. The Chinese are showing that in addition to the power to destroy landscapes, we also have the power to remake them. It works. They aren't tree huggers. Better landscapes also mean local economies benefit. Deserts don't feed people. Water retention means agriculture gets a second chance.
What I admire in the Chinese is the pragmatic can do attitude. Their motivations are of course self serving. They value having clean air in their cities, clean drinking water, and a landscape that can support agriculture and infrastructure. And in the end that's the best kind of motivation you can get. It's something worth copying. Whenever economy, science, and environment align, everybody wins.
A lot of areas in the rest of the world that are subject to desertification, pollution, etc. are fixable. And there's value in fixing them that needs more attention. I don't see this as a green/left topic. If you exist on this planet, why wouldn't you want something to be done to clean up the mess we've all created in the last centuries? Breaking out this topic from the usual left/right day to day politics is key. The rest is just work. The Chinese put the rest of us to shame with hard work.
Do you know why the mounds with half-moon shapes? Why is it more effective than simply digging a circular hole in the ground?
The idea is that rain flows downhill, you dig the half moon shape to capture the water on the end without a ditch and then it sinks into the ditch instead of flowing unobstructed to the river and taking all soil with it.
It's an ancient practice that was forgotten and rediscovered. The beauty of this approach is that it shows results within a few short years. Basically in Africa if there's water, nature shows up and consumes it. So you get lush growth and rapid soil restoration. Trees, vegetables, etc. on what was a heavily eroded flood plain before.
It's easy to explain, the locals get why it works. And they get a very fast response from nature and all the produce and riches that come with that. And all they need is shovels and some elbow grease.
Same effect for half the work. Look up the videos on youtube, it's manual labor on very hard ground.
Why is it manual? If I had a mission to plant millions of trees, I am going to invest in a ditch witch.
assuming you're not joking, construction equipment is incredibly expensive for countries to whom profiting from importing it is not a "sure thing", doubly so if their roads are not developed. This is why a 2000s hummer in central America still costs as much as a nice modern car.
A basic trencher is little more than a push lawnmower frame with a chain saw attached. Not enormous industrial equipment, but still a large boost to productivity vs a shovel.
again this is in a country that may have little to no debt infrastructure, so no way to take out a proper loan to buy the equipment, and many hoops to import it. The fact that it's small isn't the matter, it's that it's specialized. A used/legacy backhoe or skid steer maybe, but even if you can afford it, there's no tractor supply co or home depot, you are likely handling lading the thing yourself
I think the basic trencher would almost certainly still count as manual labor? Nobody is expecting that they are out there digging with bare hands.
Any YouTube playlist that you can share?
Just search for things like "green wall", "china straw landscape", etc.
A few good ones that I watched:
- Inside Africa's Food Forest Mega-Project https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbBdIG--b58
- China Buried Tons of Dead Plants Under the Desert Sand https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ev8DsPH_82Y
- Green Gold: Regreening the Desert | John D. Liu https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3nR3G9jboc
There are way more. One channel that I might call https://www.youtube.com/@MossyEarth. They basically use donations to take on projects to do smalls scale nature restoration. I am actually considering making a donation to them because I like what they do. There are more examples of such channels.
Not everything on this front is without controversy of course and I'm not blind to that. But I like the positive, constructive nature of these approaches. Just the simple notion that it's fixable with a bit of cleverness and lots of hard work. China is of course an autocracy that you can criticize for a lot of things. But they are doing a few things right as well. And it's worth calling that out and learning from them.
This video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qwshdtijFY and his whole channel are a great binge for this topic.
No nonsense, an actual practitioner, and not very "YouTubey"
It's really hard to understate how deforestation ravaged China - their forestry cover declined by almost half during The Great Leap Forward as the CCCP at the time pushed hard to exploit the land. As a result, there were severe and noticeable problems with flooding and desertification. So starting in the 70s they invested heavily in the "Three-North Shelter Forest Program" (aka the Great Green Wall). Although, probably more importantly, economic liberalization meant farming became more efficient and people could move towards cities and free up the land again.
I think more fascinating has been Russia's surge in forestry growth, also very notable in the report. Unlike China their forests have expanded almost completely accidentally. Communist-era collective farmlands have slowly been getting abandoned. Their frontier has been shrinking and the forests have crept in, tree growth being aided by longer growing period and thawing permafrost.
China was already extensively deforested in the Ming and Qing dynasties.
And Europe in the golden era. A squirrel could jump tree to tree from north Scotland al the way to the south. Timber, grazing, charcoal are the prime reasons why everything is gone
According to WWF, there was some targeted effort on reforestation and sustainable forest management in Russia, which they claim to have assisted.
as an American that was my understanding also.. small nit (understate deforestation) -> (overstate deforestation).. the phrase means "even if I talked for ten minutes with all the emphasis I can find, it would not be enough to show it.. you cannot OVERstate how serious the impact was..
Of course, planting is one thing, maintaining is another. Many areas turn green for a few years and then fade back to desert. The real challenge is building an ecological culture, not just a green map.
This sounds big but its less than the bare minimum required. Their coal emissions are insane. In my opinion its all anyone should be talking about when it comes to climate change.
The project wasn't started as a global warming fix. As the article notes, it was about preventing desertification:
> Over the last three and a half decades China has planted roughly 120 million acres of forest, according to U.N. figures, much of it added to contain the spread of deserts. Last year China completed a project, begun in 1978, to plant a 2,000-mile-long belt of trees around the Taklamakan Desert in the west. Work continues on a belt of trees around the massive Gobi Desert in the north.
Can you tell everyone what their per capita emission is? While you're at it, compare that with the US per capita emissions. Also let us know the accumulated emissions for China and US in the last 50 years.
Thanks.
Chinese CO₂ emissions per capita are only about 60% as much as the USA, but in the past 25 years US per capita emissions have dropped by about a third and Chinese emissions per capita have almost tripled and are still rising rapidly. Considering that China is about 4 times as populous as the US, this is a huge problem for the world. (US emissions are also a huge problem; we all need for them to decrease very quickly.)
Is the per capita still rising rapidly? China's CO2 growth levels have already started leveling off, and actually showed a slight decline as of late.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-clean-energy-just-put-c...
Much as I wish to be optimistic, one year does not a trend make. As per the link:
We might be on the right path, but also the very rapid decarbonisation of primary energy and transport may be overwhelmed by growth in other sectors like cement, metal oxide reduction, or beef.(Or not, there's at least theoretical paths to make those examples better, this is just meant to moderate hope rather than to deny it entirely).
That would be great. I was looking at https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions
China was exiting poverty and heavily industrializing during that period, along with building up massive amounts of infrastructure that could save some emissions over time, though of course also things like coal plants are included in the infrastructure numbers. But if we look at absolute instead of per-capita for some odd reason, an aspect to also look at is that a lot more of those CO2 emissions are from China manufacturing for the US and the world than vice versa.
If we focus on rates of growth, China is building much more solar and nuclear than the US per-capita. And they don't have as much available domestic gas which with shorter carbon chains makes much less CO2, and that's the big problem. The US has twice as many natural gas reserves as China, with 1/4 the population, so, post-dissemination of fracking technology, that's largely down to geographical luck.
There's going to be big spikes in data center energy consumption in both countries. It's still somewhat marginal at the moment at a little over 4% here and less there but it is going to be a main driver of energy consumption growth going forward.
Banning China from leading nodes may result in doubling or more their consumption in this area as a direct US policy outcome.
China has been a developing country for most the time of the past 25 years. It is indeed a huge problem if it is still rising rapidly. But it is also not fair to limit China’s per capita growth for most of the past two decades
If they are still at 60% of USA unless your opinion is that Chinese people don't deserve air conditioning as much as Americans, you don't really have a point.
Air conditioning is a relatively small part of global CO₂ emissions (3%); you should be more worried about heating.
I would expect air conditioning to also be among the easier energy uses to match with solar power as we go forward. Better building design and more efficient AC devices also make a huge difference.
The point is about quality of life.
There's many ways to achieve improved quality of life. Our fancy-insulated new German house with triple glazing and a heat pump used an average of 250 W grid power last month, despite our PV being (1) a Balkonkraftwerk and therefore only 800 W peak, (2) summer's over, lots of clouds now, and (3) in a very sub-optimal location due to a builder's skip. (Still, the neighbours have trimmed the hedge last weekend and the skip has now gone…)
There's easy ways and hard ways, the point is a country which has done the easy way cannot tell another country with less impact per capita they need to do it the hard way before cleaning up its act. Or you can but you're huge hypocrites.
Everyone is going to have a bad quality of life, to the extent they're able to live at all, if we don't act quickly at massive scale in a coordinated fashion.
The earth doesn't give a shit about per capita, and us and eu are net reducing CO2 emissions since 2014 (even during trump I)
US: 335M / 5,000M ton / 15 ton
Indonesia: 275M / 650M ton / 2.3 ton
Pakistan: 240M / 225M ton / 1 ton
Nigeria: 220M / 110M ton / 0.5 ton
Brazil: 215M / 475M ton / 2.2 ton
I can go on and on about the countries that are emitting less than the US. People and animals live in areas that are liveable. So countries near the equator and fertile countries will always be more populous. So how else do you propose we compare countries? Which are themselves mostly arbitrary lines as far as the earth is concerned - so why chunk by countries? It has to be per person right?
The earth also doesn't care about national borders, so why are national numbers more useful in this regard?
Governments have a lot of control over things within their borders, and are held responsible when bad things happen within them.
I am with you on this one. I have seen people making similar arguments about plastic dumped in the oceans where at least until about a decade ago China was well ahead of every nation. The oceans don't care about the per capita plastic polluting them.
Yeah currently the biggest source of oceanic plastic is phillipines IIRC
The earth isn't a person. I think it seems valid to consider the harm and or benefits being caused on a per person basis. Why should an individual in the US be allowed to release more CO2 emissions than an individual in China?
> Why should an individual in the US be allowed to release more CO2 emissions than an individual in China?
The lack of a single world government is why.
Agreements between nations are only enforced by honour, and while that's more than nothing, it's not great.
The practical outcome of this is that who is "allowed" to do anything is dynamic, and who may do something the most can be inverted extremely quickly.
Yes thats right.
I couldnt care less what their per captia emissions are they have 1.5b people. Accumulated is about the same as the EU and will very soon overtake the US.
EU isn't a country, it's a union of 27 countries with their separate legislatures. I live in Finland, a country of five million people. According to your math I think I'm allowed to basically burn a lake of oil every day, right?
Great question. Let's indeed make it a point of discussion then. I'd like to know too.
It is 8.89 China vs 14 according to https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-pe...
Per capita emissions aren’t relevant to climate impact. Neither are relative emissions between countries. This is a global issue.
No, but if some people are outputting way more CO2 than others, these are the ones we should be focussing on first.
Yes China is outputting way more C02 than the next 6 biggest pollutors combined. Lets focus on them first. They are the only ones not reducing their emission growth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
The US is fairly high but below Canada, Russia, and many Middle Eastern countries. US emissions have also consistently fallen for the past 25 years or so.
Serialization is a losing strategy here. “Focus” is irrelevant. We need fundamental shifts in energy production.
Per capita emissions are relevant, because it shows how much each separate country needs to improve in a relative manner. Absolute emissions doesn't matter to what each state needs to do.
We all breathe the same air. Every state needs to do everything it can.
Per capita emissions are relevant in the sense that if China broke into ten separate countries tomorrow, with each new country maintaining their current level of emissions, the effect on the planet would be the same even though an entity called “China” is no longer at the top of the leaderboard.
There is some per capita carbon emissions budget such that if each human on earth stayed within that budget, climate change could be mitigated[0]. The average Chinese person exceeds that budget, but does so by significantly less than the average American. So the average American is more at fault for climate change than the average Chinese person is.
Of course, your second claim, that this is a global issue, is correct. But if we solved the global issue in a fair way, China would still emit a few times more CO2 than the US.
0: “Mitigated” rather than totally solved, because to go back to pre-industrial temperatures the budget would have to be negative. But let’s say we’re talking about staying within 2C or some similar goal.
> Per capita emissions aren’t relevant to climate impact
They aren't relevant to the climate, but they are relevant to how much energy and wealth you allow each person to have.
Does a person in China deserve to have less energy or wealth than a person in America?
[dead]
Well they're releasing 9.2ton CO2 per Capita, the US is releasing 13.5ton CO2 per Capita. And this while the US and the rest of the world is doing all of their manufacturing in China.
Maybe the rest of the world should stop doing their manufacturing in china.
It's called China, not china.
If we're going to pick nits, I'm fairly sure most of the Chinese population don't speak English, making it neither China nor china but 中华人民共和国
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-s...
This is propaganda. It's impossible to take this comment in good faith
Not counting the gobi desert , China is only 5x the size of Texas so it’s nothing to sneeze at
“Their” coal emissions
Their emissions are the emissions of Western companies for whom they are doing manufacturing.
> Their emissions are the emissions of Western companies for whom they are doing manufacturing.
Spoken like somebody that never stept a foot in China.
Sure, manufacturing for the West is part of it, but up to a few years ago, entering Beijing alone resulted in your naval cavities burning, the moment the airplane door opened.
Because of the usage from coal in households. It was only until a few years ago, that they banned the usage of wood/coal around the city. Outside the city, its coal everywhere for the normal class people who own their (country)house. Near other large cities its still very coal centric in the winter.
And the heating (communal for apartments) is mostly coal and while the coal may burn a bit more clean, and there is some filtration going on, its not a ton. So while open coal burning was reduced directly in the cities like Beijing, they simply moved a lot of it outside the 6th ring.
All those EV's ... great, no more gasoline/oil usage but ... wait, where does a lot of the electricity come from? Oeps...
But wait, all that crypto mining, where do you think that electricity comes from?
And now AI...
And the consumer goods.
Your statement ignore a large part of the coal consumption in the country.
The global economy is so China-dependent it doesn't even make sense to talk about an individual country's emissions profile unless we look at their imports.
There are import corrected CO2 emissions data you can check if you care. Tl;Dr it's not as big as you think it is.
These are 3 relevant data sets from Our World in Data:
"Per capita consumption-based CO₂ emissions" (emissions adjusted for imports/exports)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-per-capit...
"Imported or exported CO₂ emissions per capita" (shows the effects of imports/exports alone, as tons)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/imported-or-exported-co-e...
"Share of CO₂ emissions embedded in trade" (shows the effects of imports/exports alone, as percentage of total)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-co2-embedded-in-tra...
You should check the stats on that, it is not the case.
AS if they don't consume the products themselves with their 1.2 billion people?
My home country we are only 40 million. I am sure they consume much more than us.
So what? I'm sure I personally consume much less than your country of 40 million
The point is China consumes a lot, for the rest of the world and for itself.
Was pretty obvious, but I wrote it down for you as you seem to be having trouble understanding the concept.
Aren’t they bringing on incredible amounts of solar we could only dream about?
Edit: for the downvoters
https://gemini.google.com/app/6da2be1502b764f1
And nuclear power - they have a large carbon deficit to make up so you shouldn't think of them as a green economy by any measure but... I think their strongest advantage is that there is a strong environmental pressure within the country and (while industrialists will be industrialists) there is no faction or movement within China that is dedicated to an anti-environmental agenda.
There's a lot of work to be done and there's a lot of friction, corruption and economic pressures constraining that work but there seems to be a genuine desire to do that work.
I wonder what kind of forest China is making? I was watching a really fascinating PBS documentary on Kanopy and it was talking about a lot of the planting efforts haven't been very good worldwide because planting a monoculture of trees doesn't do much and an old forest with tons of diversity stores twice as much carbon or more, which I thought was neat. So protecting existing forests is much better from a climate change standpoint. But either way, planting trees is better than nothing.
https://www.kanopy.com/en/product/15418989
Given the goal is to introduce trees to prevent desertification, in this case the relative benefits of old growth are irrelevant.
They're building an insane amount of nuclear. It's the only thing with a hope in a country where a "small" city has like 6 million people.
Are they?
They build 10x more solar power (total numbers compared, in percentages solar nearly tripled since 2021, nuclear had a 10% increase)
That seems more like a modest increase.
Honestly solar seems to have an exponential growth, nuclear linear at best.
Numbers from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China
would you prefer zero trees being added?
Of course not - but it is quite fair to examine articles like this with a critical eye given all the greenwashing that takes place.
Liking waffles!= Hating pancakes.
> Since 1990 ... surpassed by China, which managed to add a staggering 173 million acres....
> Over the last three and a half decades China has planted roughly 120 million acres of forest
Where did the rest come from?
When a mommy tree and a daddy tree love each other very much…
I would have expected that to cause infill rather than spreading.
Well you’re the tree expert, not me. So I dunno?
I always wondered why Western democracies want carbon taxes, when just reverting more land back to managed forests, seems like a much more reasoned solution. It would trap carbon, help wild life, and provide fresh air, and jobs in forestry, and renewable resources like wood. Seems to me Carbon Taxes primarily benefit the banks, and grow bureaucracy.
A very worrying number of people nowadays seem to think that forests are a thing to counter climate change. What is the species composition being planted? Is it appropriate to the location? Reforestation must be about recreating _forest ecosystems_, not about creating the photosynthetic counterpart of a vast fucking solar farm.
One more interesting thing: https://english.news.cn/20251022/ab149540692140f3836a60e22dd...
This seems like gross, and I wonder what the net is. It seems impossible that there's no deforestation in the places mentioned int the article, and unlikely that the net is positive.
While Russia cuts more and more timber for export to China. In return for the support in the war (drone components, etc) China asks for even more and more timber and fresh water from Baikal.
The same article says Russia is on 2nd place in reforestation. They do export timber and can export more, while increasing the share of sustainably managed forests. But export of Baikal fresh water? That’s fake news. Didn’t happen and won’t happen, unless you mean just some bottled water.
>The same article says Russia is on 2nd place in reforestation.
Reforestation alone doesn't matter. What matters is total result of deforestation and reforestation. Russia reforests only about 1Mha/year :
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1059300/russia-reforeste...
while the total resulting loss is
https://www.globalforestwatch.org/dashboards/country/RUS/?ca...
"In 2020, Russia had 748 Mha of natural forest, extending over 44% of its land area. In 2024, it lost 5.59 Mha of natural forest, equivalent to 816 Mt of CO₂ emissions."
>But export of Baikal fresh water? That’s fake news. Didn’t happen and won’t happen
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/07/parched-chines...
in Russian, that another waterpipeline - from river Ob' was approved at some Russian Parliament "roundtable on strategic projects with China and Kazakhstan".
https://topwar.ru/159671-bajkal-xxi-veka-druzhba-druzhboj-a-...
and there were strong leaks, not officially dispelled, that Baikal water was raised during the most recent Putin/Xi meeting.
Regarding your Global Forest Watch source I recommend to look below the tagline. The numbers that you picked have very specific meaning and the same page says that most of the loss (ca.75%) was due to wildfires and it grew more forest than it was lost due to logging. When including the loss for wildfires, the total balance is negligibly negative.
Regarding you Guardian and Topwar links, you are citing the sources that speculate about rumors about some science fiction projects. Russia does not export water from Baikal or Ob River and won’t export it.
>Regarding you Guardian and Topwar links, you are citing the sources that speculate about rumors about some science fiction projects. Russia does not export water from Baikal or Ob River and won’t export it.
Official state news https://ria.ru/20160503/1425318933.html
"Moscow invited Bejing to discuss fresh water transfer project from Russia to China - stated the Russian Minister of Agriculture"
and the further description of the proposed project is exactly the second project described in the topwar link.
Kind reminder - this is not reddit.
>Are you from country 404 by any chance? Because that's how these posts read.
You may read it whatever way you like. If we look at the facts - statista and globalwatch is some Western sites/orgs, topwar is straight Russian and Guardian is Great Britain.
>Kind reminder - this is not reddit.
This is why you're using that offensive "404" notation (an expression of the Russian propaganda point that Ukraine isn't a sovereign independent state) when referring to Ukraine?
Well, they aren’t. Never have been and never will be. Geopolitics is a ruthless game and those in the middle sometimes get crushed. Which is why you generally want natural borders (mountains, coast, etc).
>Well, they aren’t. Never have been
Like Ukranians a number of nations - for example Hungarians, Chezh, Finnish, Latvians, Estonians, etc. - for centuries didn't have their own state and were parts of larger empires and got their own states only relatively recently.
Like any other, the Russian propaganda thrives on people's ignorance. In this case "Ukranian people and Ukraine don't exist and never have existed, it is just an inferior kind of Russians on historically Russian territory". That is why nor Russian textbooks nor wide Russian info space never mention the 1651 book by French engineer D'Beauplan "Description of Ukraine, a Province of the Kingdom of Poland situated between Moskovia and Transilvania" where he clearly describes in detail a separate Ukrainian ethnicity living on their own separate territory (which is pretty close to the territory of modern Ukraine. Also note that Russia din't even exist back then, it was just a "Moscovia" duchy).
>and never will be. Geopolitics is a ruthless game and those in the middle sometimes get crushed. Which is why you generally want natural borders (mountains, coast, etc).
The same applies to all the above mentioned nations, and this is why they joined NATO, and why Ukraine is trying to.
I don't think they're giving away the timber. It is a commercial exchange like any other.
Yes, it is a massive sale of natural resources with huge discounts in exchange for the war support.
What "war support"? China trades with Russia, as it does with Ukraine. It doesn't support a side in particular.
There are a lot of thing which are clearly "war support", yet it would be a long and frankly pointless discussion, so i'll just refer to China's own words:
https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/04/europe/china-ukraine-eu-war-i...
"Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told the European Union’s top diplomat that Beijing can’t accept Russia losing its war against Ukraine..."
Him or some other pointed out to some important EU person that if they (China, an industrial powerhouse) were actually supporting Russian war efforts, the war would already be over.
They've been selling forestry products for decades. North Korea is also a big customer. Unsurprisingly, nations with existing and exclusive economic ties, tend to "support" each other.
North America does this with South America readily.
Source for the discounts? (reddit and x are not a sources btw)
This would happen war or not. Btw, they sell the same off-the-shelf drone components to Ukraine and anyone else willing to pay for them.
How many football fields is that though?
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i2d=true&i=Divide%5Barea+...
About 130 million.
Does this mean that you can drive in the forest for an entire day and still be in the forest?
Probably, yes. This is possible in Sweden, if you go from South to North, you can travel for multiple days by car and if you avoid highways, you will not leave the forest at all.
The joke I'm making is that many Texans like to make that statement about Texas (with regards to size and driving) and claim it's unique to that state and to the US without realizing that it's common for many other parts in the world as well.
Pretty much. Try driving from Perth to Broome in a day. It is about 24hours of straight driving and it is still a good 10 hours to the boarder.
Fun fact is: I heard Texans saying it only a few weeks back. Now I get what you meant ;)
You can do that in Virginia if you drive slowly enough, stay off the Interstate.
For example if you go from Cumberland Gap to Virginia Beach, a distance of 499 miles, it will take you 10 hours and 25 minutes.
Well if you drive slowly enough, you can do that in my backyard :D
This is common in Brazil.
finally some good news.
[dead]
[dead]
[flagged]
Much of Europe used to be forest. It just all got whacked in the few centuries prior to today. So you have Europeans making tiny recoveries to their rampant destruction of their environment celebrating that fact while preventing others from doing what they did. There is one path to this: first clear cut your forests so you can build your industry; then build your industry so you can be prosperous; then rebuild your forests. If you had 100 acres of forest, and cut it down to 1 acre, then you can build 1 acre at the end and claim a 100% improvement. The next year another acre still is 50% improvement. Can any who have retained their forest boast such improvement?
China is following this path and we will celebrate it. As always, do not do what the developed nations say you should. Instead do what they did. After all, Norway did not become prosperous by keeping their oil in the ground.
> There is one path to this: first clear cut your forests so you can build your industry; then build your industry so you can be prosperous; then rebuild your forests.
Sure if you need to bootstrap to the 18th century. It’s much faster and cheaper to skip a few hundred years ahead by importing equipment.
Checking in on the relative wealth of the countries who are only just now developing
> Much of Europe used to be forest. It just all got whacked in the few centuries prior to today.
The deforestation goes back much further than that. Europe experienced significant deforestation in the middle ages. It was a major issue for many countries long before industrialism.
Yes, all that's happened is that we declared that morality started on Apr 22 2016. Slash and burn, cut and grow. Three hundred years from now, when the result is massive prosperity we can pontificate to whomever is cutting trees then.
You're not managing to be coherent I'm afraid.
Try an LLM. Sadly even an 8B model will exceed your powers of comprehension.
You are wrong. In Gaule, most of the country was farmland. Wood consumption was huge.
Have an upvote. Site has too much FUD brigading for any positives on non-western aligned countries.
Meanwhile we're speedrunning DustBowl 2.0 just in time for its 100th anniversary.
How so? US forest cover bottomed out in the 1920s or 1930 and has been going up since. If anything, in the West, the forests aren't logged enough, which increases wildfire risk.
China isn't following a particularly unique path, they just did a speedrun of economic development - they had nearly everyone living in extreme poverty in the 1980s. Before long, they'll be looking for cheap markets to outsource manufacturing and extractive industries to... which is why they're lending money to forgotten African nations. Keeping Russia an international pariah and making them economically dependent on China is probably up their alley too.
> Drawing on national reports prepared for FAO, ...
> Since 2005, the FRA has relied on data provided by a network of officially nominated national correspondents...
My understanding is that these reports are heavily based on data reported by respective governments. I think "officially nominated national correspondents" means bureaucrats of different governments.
But the governments of Russia, India, China are all known to lie. A lot. About a lot of things. I would know.
My default stance is to be skeptical of such claims based on national reports. Independent verification using satellite imagery seems like a better approach.