We’re back to the reading comprehension problem again.

That wasn’t a direct quote, that was a characterization of the shallow vapidity of your argument.

Coal is like 50% of their grid. If you removed it you would be plunging the whole country back into the dark ages.

The future is 100% green energy, but that isn’t going to happen overnight, and especially can’t happen overnight in a growing economy that needs to add energy at a high rate to keep up with demand.

China is spending more than the rest of the world combined on green energy, and they are currently putting more green energy on their grid than anything else. But they still need fossil fuels to maintain their current growth.

When that growth slows down, then it becomes possible for a shift to occur, where green energy is added and fossil energy is taken offline. It is not currently possible to do this in China.

You know where it is possible to do this? Fully developed countries like America, where demand has more or less peaked and there is no excuse for continuing to add fossil fuels onto the grid. If we spent half of what China spends on green energy, we could be retiring all of our own fossil fuel power plants by the end of the decade, but not only are we not doing this we have trained a certain sector of our population to clap like monkeys and point at other countries whenever the issue comes up.

Pointing at countries that have only developed recently and are still going through the process and saying “you can’t use fossil fuels” while living in a country that built its entire economy on fossil fuels is peak chauvinistic bullshit. Have some self awareness and think about context before you make broad proclamations.

If that’s what you think I was saying then you need to work on your reading comprehension.

Last year, China commissioned 96 GW of new coal production and commissioned 356 GW of wind and solar. This was the most coal production China has built in a single year since 2015, and it was still less than the amount of renewables that they put on it.

I wish China could wave a magic wand and have their entire energy grid go green, but the truth is that their middle class is still growing, and with it the demand for electricity, and even with the massive amount of spending they’ve put into wind and solar those forms of power simply can’t keep up with the rising demand on their own, so coal remains a necessary part of their multimodal grid with multiple redundancies and sufficient storage.

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