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China is forcing hundreds of millions of new trees to exist every year
(www.visualcapitalist.com)
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this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2024
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Thank you for the reply and I appreciate the graphs. Most of those stats would benefit greatly, and would present a better picture if the units were per person though. I'm actually more impressed with some of the other countries in those images, that managed to achieve some of those things with a fraction of China's population.
It's hard to show historical graphs in a post, but even 15 years ago China was at the bottom of all these lists.
The thing that makes China so impressive is that almost all of that capacity has been built out in under 2 decades with no signs of slowing (in fact it's all actually accelerating).
Sure the other countries on there have a better per-capita green energy utilization for the moment, but those other countries are also fully developed and have had the capacity and opportunity to expand their green sectors for 50+ years.
Another thing that isn't shown here is that China manufactures 90% of the worlds solar panels. Meaning that even though they're still #1 for energy production, their flooding of the solar market with cheap panels has allowed dozens of countries to take advantage of that and expand their solar energy generation capacity while offloading the work of manufacturing (and the carbon energy costs of manufacturing) to China.
Another thing is that population doesn't really mean anything, Africa and India are both close in population to China but are well behind everyone else. China is a developing nation still and is only at the beginning of its development into a modern nation. Their model is heavily export focused and their rapid development is being shared with those regions.
As they continue to advance in these sectors, they'll become a development model for India and Africa. Either that or America ends the world because they want to export LNG
I come to these discussions in good faith, because I want to believe that some people are not here to spew propaganda and maybe are just bad with statistics.. But somehow it always ends with "America bad" (which I don't necessarily dispute, but I think is just lazy).
Lets break some things down:
What is an acceptable death toll for you? Because China seems to have a very high tolerance. Does the end goal justify the means? You can't get away with this high percentage of death in democratic countries from your examples, where the electorate has more power to say "no thanks".
Anyways, I think China is doing a lot of good steps for the environment, and it pushes other countries to compete. But saying that China is the only one that can save us, while burning 53% of the world's coal is ridiculous.
Obviously if you do legitimately wish to have discussions in good faith, it would be a good idea not to immediately accuse people of being propagandized. In per capita terms, China still produces far less CO2 than other developed nations despite also manufacturing a large amount of the goods those developed nations use.
For one, I think your death toll for the construction of the three gorges dam is probably out by a couple of magnitudes. Does the end goal justify the means? Almost certainly. China has just compressed an entire 200 years of bloody industrialization (which it has been for every country) into 20 years. There are no countries on Earth that industrialized without vast quantities of blood spilled.
Do you really think people in western countries often vote for national governments one way or another because of their opinions on workplace health and safety? There aren't many countries where the electorate of a workplace can democratically vote to change their boss if they think it's too dangerous. Again, if you want to have legit good faith discussions, it's not a good idea to suggest that China isn't democratic simply because it doesn't conform to a particular template of democracy that you subscribe to. Many people would say that China is in fact more democratic than the west.