Now an assignment - you are Chinese and you have 1.5bn people in your country, lets hear it? You think you can't reasonably list 100x "excuses" for their "issues" and "reasons" for CO2 consumption?
They are working a lot harder than pretty much all other countries combined to usher in renewables and many other things while we elect people who don't know what wind is/does and stare at the Sun during the eclipse.
I agree that new coal sucks but it's a very easy talking point for westerners like us to latch onto when our own contributions to emissions remain way over 50% higher per capita - despite much of the manufacturing and such not happening in our countries.
"Basically flat" only after running up an exponential curve so that coal consumption is now higher per capita in China than it is in the US and China is generating ~60% of its electricity from coal compared to ~16% in the US.
> I agree that new coal sucks but it's a very easy talking point for westerners like us to latch onto when our own contributions to emissions remain way over 50% higher per capita
You don't even get to say "westerners" anymore. CO2 emissions are higher per capita in China than they are in Europe because they burn such a disproportionate amount of coal, and are only lower than the US and Canada because the US and Canada burn more oil per capita from being so spread out.
All the more reason they have no excuse for building coal. Yet they're also burning more coal than the rest of the world combined.
> most of the new coal plants are there for days when there’s neither sun or wind.
If that was actually the case they wouldn't need to build new coal plants because renewable generation at 40% of normal plus the existing traditional power plants that used to be enough to supply 100% of power by themselves would be more than sufficient. More to the point, if that was actually the case then their emissions would be way down because they'd only be burning coal for something like one week every two years.
Just that they're still 'developing' and aren't even close to the historical contributions of the US?
Assuming you're American, it's a bit rich to have contributed more in absolute terms and then tell other countries what they can't do.
Explain me why the average car in the US is a tank with horrible fuel economy? In rural I can sorta see it. But in cities, why drive a truck? These are all choices that America makes.
This is a sham excuse. Building coal power plants before solar or nuclear were viable or even existed is not the same as choosing to do it in modern day.
> Explain me why the average car in the US is a tank with horrible fuel economy?
The "best selling" light vehicles in the US are pickup trucks because the sales numbers aren't divided out into personal and business purchases and businesses buy a lot of trucks. The best selling non-pickup is the Toyota RAV4, which gets better than 30 MPG in the non-hybrid version and better than 40 MPG in the hybrid version.
It's the same reason it was the dominant fossil fuel for electricity in the US until the shale revolution made natural gas cheap and abundant.
The reasons Trump is a schmuck for pushing coal are (1) he wants it instead of renewals rather than as a way to help fill the gap between renewables and what we need until we can build enough renewables and storage, and (2) in the US that makes no sense because because natural gas can fulfill that role and is better in pretty much every way that coal.
Compare to China which is putting vast amounts of resources into building renewables, storage, and also a nationwide UHV distribution network (currently 40-50000 km compared to ~0 in the US) which means local variations in solar/wind can increasingly be covered by non-local renewables, which should reduce the need to fire up those new local coal plants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...
The US grid is 18% nuclear, 10% wind and 6% solar. China is 5% nuclear, 9% wind and 6% solar.
The UK is 34% wind+solar. Uruguay Greece, Spain and Germany are all >=40% wind+solar. Lithuania and Denmark are >50% wind+solar.
How is it that nuclear, wind and solar can handle a higher percentage of the grid in all of these other countries?
> he wants it instead of renewals rather than as a way to help fill the gap between renewables and what we need until we can build enough renewables and storage
The only thing Trump wants is to shore up votes in coal-producing swing states for the midterms. He's going to slightly delay the shuttering of some coal fired power plants that are just going to close anyway for a ridiculous and purely political reason and the real-world consequences of it are going to be negligible, because this:
> in the US that makes no sense because because natural gas can fulfill that role and is better in pretty much every way that coal.
And not only that, renewables are now the cheapest form of new generation until the grid gets above something like 40% renewables and you have to start actually doing something about the intermittency. Neither the US nor China have that much yet and in neither case do they need the percentage of fossil fuels that they currently have.
But the argument for continuing to operate existing plants is that you still need electricity while building new renewables. The argument for replacing coal plants with natural gas is that conversions are cheaper than new plants and natural gas is better than coal. There is no argument for building new coal when your grid is <40% renewables -- just build new renewables.
> Compare to China which is putting vast amounts of resources into building renewables, storage
Then why is their number lower than the US one, never mind countries in Europe?
> and also a nationwide UHV distribution network (currently 40-50000 km compared to ~0 in the US) which means local variations in solar/wind can increasingly be covered by non-local renewables, which should reduce the need to fire up those new local coal plants.
The US is covered in 100+kV transmission lines. Even higher voltage transmission lines have lower losses, but you're talking about going from a single digit percentage to a lower single digit percentage. It's basically a cost trade off between building all new transmission towers or using the same money to build slightly more renewable generation capacity -- and the latter benefits you more on the normal days when you're not trying to supply power to someone hundreds of miles away and can just use the extra power locally.
3 cents per kwh
> more nuclear or renewable generation
20 cents per kwh
> What excuse actually is there
A sevenfold price difference is a pretty significant excuse, don't you think?
