China Likely Cut GHG Emissions In 2015 (greenpeace.org) 143
mdsolar writes: Economic and industrial data released [Thursday] by the Chinese government's statistical agency indicates the country's carbon emissions likely fell by around 3% — with the contraction of key heavy industry sectors and the continued expansion of renewable energies driving a wedge between total energy demand and coal use. According to the data, China's coal output fell by 3.5% in 2015, thermal power generation by 3%, coal imports by 30%, pig iron output by 4%, coking coal output by 7%, and cement by 5%. All this suggests that both power sector coal consumption and total coal consumption probably fell by more than 4%. Total oil consumption grew only 1.1% in the first eleven months, gas consumption by 3.7% while cement production (which releases CO2 directly) fell by 4.9%. This indicates a fall of 3-4% in China's fossil CO2 emissions, roughly equal to Poland's total emissions.
The chinese are in a great economic recession (Score:5, Interesting)
They aren't the workbench of the world anymore -- there are cheaper countries for these tasks. Yes, its still full of industry, but the trend is towards salary raises and therefore higher cost which means less competitiveness on the international market.
Also, china has created an artificial bubble in the aftermath of the 2007 crash, which is now, slowly, collapsing. There had been a big real estate bubble as well, which collapsed too.
The shrinking economy then leads to less emissions. Its good that they can indeed cut their emissions, but it would be greater if they could continue to do it with their economy growing.
GDP Grew 6.9% in 2015 (Score:2)
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Its enough if the steel industry has problems, melting steel needs a lot of energy. And it really has massive problems: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/... [bloomberg.com]
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Right, because China's economy has to stay a 1950s replica.
Well, the US exported its production capacity there for that reason.
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Fortunately emissions figures are easily confirmed by satellite monitoring. If these numbers were fake there would be reports of it, because they wouldn't match measurements by western satellites.
In fact, how do you think they measure emissions? They can't account for every random source of emissions in the country. They use their own satellites, combined with data from western ones, and measurements of secondary effects on vegetation etc. It's pretty much impossible to fake on this scale and get away with
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Now, there are 2 sats above the globe measuring CO2. One is from Japan but has very poor resolution. The second is OCO-2. That is the one that showed that China was so
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Do you seriously believe this stuff?
You are complaining about CO2 emissions before 1850! They were so close to nil that cumulatively, we can just ignore them. The world emitted more fossil CO2 last year than it did in the entirety of human history before 1850.
In fact, from 1850 until 1980, Europe was ahead of America in CO2 emissions.
There are more than twice as many people in Europe as in the US. You would certainly expect Europe to be far ahead of the US in CO2 emissions.
It was terribly tempting to just mod you troll. Perhaps someone else can come along and do it.
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OTOH, emissions are MOSTLY tied to $GDP. IOW, it is the business world, along with choices by the businesses and govs, that decide how and where CO2 comes from. As such, Europe and America are actually pretty close in emissions / $ GDP. OTOH, China is one of the worst 3
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So, because Europe and the US are richer, we have the right to pollute more. We are not as bad as China, because although we pollute more, we also enjoy life more.
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America accounts for less than 14% of total co2 emissions, with our co2 / $GDP in the middle range. In addition, our co2 continues to drop.
Europe has around 13% of total CO2, with their CO2 / $ GDP just a bit better than America's.
So, no.
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Again, you are basing this on a per country basis, not a per capita basis. If you split the US up into individual states, the pollution will the be far smaller. Split up into districts and you can practically make American pollution disappear.
Your way of calculating is fraudulent.
Peak Coal in 2013 (Score:2)
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In the mean time, CO2 continues to climb, the number of coal plants in China climb grow faster than the entire rest of the world.
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The overbuilding of the power plants is predicated on the idea that China's coal production has gone down. The problem is, that it has not. China is opening new coal mines EVERY YEAR and has not closed any others, or slowed down at them.
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The fact is, that China is not only the top emitter (double what America currently emits), BUT, they are one of the worst 3 for emissions / $GDP, which is the real issue.
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Certainly the official numbers can't be trusted... however, from your search results: "He estimates the true GDP number is likely 1% to 2% growth." So probably still not a recession.
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The shrinking economy then leads to less emissions. Its good that they can indeed cut their emissions, but it would be greater if they could continue to do it with their economy growing.
The phrase "cut their emissions" implies they took some sort of positive action to deal with their environmental problems, when in fact all that happened is that they manufactured less and so spewed less pollution. As soon as things recover, so will the emissions. So a more accurate characterisation would be "The Chinese recession caused emissions to drop. As soon as things recover, [Austrian]they'll be back[/Austrian]".
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The phrase "cut their emissions" implies they took some sort of positive action to deal with their environmental problems, when in fact all that happened is that they manufactured less and so spewed less pollution.
You didn't even read the article or even the summary before blathering out that nonsense. From TFA [greenpeace.org]:
"Booming renewable energy generation - China was able to reduce fossil fuel fired power generation by 3% while overall power demand increased 0.5% by adding 30GW of wind power and 17GW of solar capacity, a new world record for any country ever."
In what universe does adding "a new world record for any country" amount of renewable energy sources equates to them not taking any positive action to deal with their
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...it would be greater if they could continue to do it with their economy growing.
From what I hear and read, China are very active in the development of environmentally friendly technologies, and according to some are amongst the world leaders in this area. This makes sense, of course - when your economy has been growing rapidly, and pollution levels are unsustainable, your mind focuses naturally on solving that problem. It could be that their slowdown allows them to catch up technologically and improve their industry, so that they are able to continue to cut emissions when their econom
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WTF? Their economy is still growing by about 6-8% it's just not growing as fast as before, no surprise for a maturing economy.
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Recession? Are you kidding? They're growing at a rate of 6.5% per year! That is red-hot in any other country! Jeez. Where do you get your news, the BBC?
And not the workbench of the world! WTF! Have you even been to a trade show recently? There are whole sectors of products where the only real suppliers are Chinese. Wake up, jeez how do people get so ignorant?
Doubling the number of nuclear reactors works. (Score:4, Insightful)
They have currently 21 reactors being built, I believe they are mostly gen 3s. After this year only Gen 3's (or higher) will be considered for building in China.
They have a long term plan which involves building a LOT more reactors. Essentially building them as fast as they can with relative safely.
No doubt, If a good fusion design come out in the next 10 years, they will build a bunch of those as well.
--- Blair
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And while they spend the next decade building those, last year they installed 17 to 22GW of solar power, and they will likely be building another 100GW+ in the next 5 years dwarfing nuclear builds. 5 Years from now when solar has halved in cost again, nuclear will look like a pointless mistake.
Re:Doubling the number of nuclear reactors works. (Score:4, Interesting)
Question -- when you say the Chinese have installed "installed 17 to 22GW of solar power" in 2015 does that mean the installations will produce an average of 17 to 22GW of power or do you mean the solar plants have that maximum capacity but will only deliver a fraction of that amount of electricity over the period of a year, day and night?
The nuclear reactors China is building and planning to build will operate with an uptime of about 90% or so, so the six (by my count) 1GW reactors they brought into operation in 2015 will produce an average of 5.5GW day and night, rain and shine. The twenty or so reactors under construction will add another 15GW or so of similarly reliable power over the next few years.
The bad news is that the Chinese are going to keep building new coal power plants, more efficient and less polluting than the older plants being decommissioned or retrofitted because they need hundreds of gigawatts of new electricity capacity to meet demand and coal is cheap and readily available (China mines about half the world's total output of coal annually) and no-one cares enough about the ongoing pollution disaster and its health effects for them to stop burning coal.
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"The bad news is that the Chinese are going to keep building new coal power plants,"
The actual news suggests otherwise, they are closing coal plants and installing wind, solar, nuclear, hydro etc. see summary - coal burning is down, not up.
As they are building more solar panel factories hand over fist and with the prices of panels becoming ever cheaper, I expect the installation of solar panels to continue growing exponentially. Nuclear OTOH is poor value for money and accident prone.
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They ARE selling reactors to the rest of the world. The ACPR1000 is a pretty reasonable gen 3 reactor. They are selling them all over the place. (except to the US)
They are ALSO doing massive solar installations where it makes sense to - but yeah, most of the time nuclear is making sense, so they are ramping it up in a big way. They have massive research going into Molten Salt Reactors. Its one of the reasons I think they are "not ready yet" is that China is not shy in putting something like them in place, b
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As far as I know there have not yet been any completed sales of the ACPR1000 reactor (now known as the Hualong One) outside mainland China. There has been a push by the Chinese nuclear industry for export orders and several "expressions of interest" but at the moment no-one is breaking ground on a Chinese-model reactor construction project outside China itself. I don't know of any possible buyers that have even completed the licencing process needed before starting actual construction.
Go Greenpeace (Score:5, Funny)
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The source for this is Greenpeace, one of the more fair and balanced sources of information.
That sentence is a perfect illustration of Poe's law.
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No, it's not.
Greenpeace has assuredly done some sketchy shit to get shocking scenes. They are also undeniably highly biased. Therefore it's sarcasm because Greenpeace is very one sided. Plus, it's using the Fox news "Fair and Balanced", which means that the poster is mocking Fox as well as Greenpeace.
Not an example of Poe's law.
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BTW mdsolar, how are you getting along with your new friend mdnuclear? Or will you tell him to stick it where the sun don't shine?
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WRONG (Score:3)
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And why are you biased?
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Economic data is generally considered suspect - the lower level the government, the more suspect. Generally no province will report lower growth numbers than the national average. No city lower than the province. No county lower than the city. However many economists will look at power production data, rail transport data, and sea port data. Those numbers are considered sufficiently reliable, and indeed do seem to give a very accurate picture of the overall economy. They do at least correlate quite well wit
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Hello moron. (Score:2)
have you looked at the stock market recently?
Any idea of what is driving that?
If so this would not be a surprise, and this would not be proclaimed to be an achievement.
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have you looked at the stock market recently? Any idea of what is driving that?
Mostly fear. A severe recession in China should affect the US GDP by less than .2% (and China doesn't seem to be in recession, merely their growth has slowed). Investors are keeping their holdings in cash. Watch for a stock market rebound in a month or so when companies start releasing profit reports (assuming the reports are good, of course).
Oil prices being low are good for the economy.....when you can buy things at a cheaper price, that's good. With the exception of North Dakota and a bit of Texas, the
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More importantly, they expect it to be in a full recession by end of 2016.
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actually, others with better numbers, say that CHina IS doing around 3-5% GDP AT BEST.
Which is actually growth, not a recession.
More importantly, they expect it to be in a full recession by end of 2016.
That's possible, but again, even if they go into a severe recession, we're looking at it affecting the US GDP around .1-.2%. One of the advantage of not exporting much is that the US doesn't depend on foreign economies to buy their stuff.
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And as to CHina's numbers, keep in mind that those that are coming up with the CHinese numbers say that it is, AT BEST, 3-5% growth. Many of those that are following CHina, say that they are already in recession.
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If China goes into a deep recession, the effect on America will be between
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is this better? (Score:2)
Hey, I did not start it. That was some idiot. But, i do have to say that it would be annoying to see that.
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How sad that something so good for the economy is so hated by wealthy.
Its a property of the capitalist system to move money from those who have it to those who can use it to make more (In fact, that's the cool thing about it). Those who are wealthy who hate low gasoline prices either have to adapt and sell their companies, or suffer the consequences. The congress members should use those who profit from the low gasoline prices as campaign contributors, after all those get wealthy, don't they.
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I need a cite for this. All I can find on it is references to his mocking of the drill baby drill slogans and an old interview that Obama told the San Francisco Chronicle that his plans would result in âskyrocketingâ(TM) energy prices.
http://www.ijreview.com/2015/0... [ijreview.com]
But please enlighten me with a reference I can verify.
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So otherwise no, you cannot cite anything but your mind?
Come on, if he said it, it shouldn't be too hard to find. We do not need to make crap up just to support some politician
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hardly surprising.
you'd need a cite for the sky being blue.
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Three replied from three different people and no cite in sight. Could this be because there isn't one and this entire line of conversation is nothing more than a conversion of the truth designed to falsely give credit where none is due? I mean seriously, there are many things to give Obama credit for, we do not need to make crap up in the hopes that no one will notice. You have stooped so low that you are not even backing the original statement now, just attempting to attack the opposing side of the argumen
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So he didn't say he would get $2 a gallon gasoline, he just said demand would drop and prices would be lower?
I don't seem to be able to find anything on it. In fact, I seem to be only able to find a politifact article claiming some Florida politician was not telling the truth when he claimed Obama made a statement of $2.50 a gallon gas (which would have been an increase at the time) and attributed that to Newt Gingrich's statements. And this is from around 2008
http://www.politifact.com/flor... [politifact.com]
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As I already said. I can find absolutely no reference to it other than you saying so and someone else thinking he remembered something. Post a link to cite or it never happened.
I did however find a little spat where Obama claimed Romney's lows gas price claim was conceivable because we would be in economic turmoil just like when Bush left office with Romney's economic plans. That seems to counter what you are saying though.
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Ok, I'm coming right out and calling you a liar on this. If it happened i could easily find reference to it and you could easily cite one. That just isn't happening so I have to ask why you insist on perpetuating this lie? Is Obama doing something so important to you that you have to lie and make shit up? Why? Can't you see that it makes your support delusional?
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All lies.. Give it up man. Put up or shut up..lol
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So no on the 2$ gas claim then.
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I mean your original claim was false. I cannot find it, you cannot find it, and it appears you were reading into something that you posted.
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It's really easy to base your claims on reality too. Perhaps until you can do that, you should walk away.
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How sad that something so good for the economy is so hated by wealthy.
You can't consider gas prices in a vacuum. They're low in large part due to economic downturns in the developing world and weak economic growth in the developed world dropping overall demand for oil while OPEC, due apparently to the usual OPEC shenanigans as well as an economic conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran.
While weak economic growth in the US can be partly blamed on Obama, he had nothing to do with the global effects.
Total Bullshit (Score:2)
In addition, look at the data from OCO2. That shows that CO2 is INCREASING, NOT decreasing.
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The OCO-2 data in Oct and Nov, clearly show an INCREASE in CO2 emissions from the CHinese eastern seaboard. That would make sense since they are still building out new 1GW coal plants at a rate of 1 every 7-10 days. It also means that loads of coal is s
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Interestingly, here it's Greenpeace's bias that gives it more credibility to me.
Greenpeace isn't stupid, on the contrary. They're pretty smart in progressing their cause and when it comes to publicity. They have to, the organisation lives and dies with publicity and the resulting donations. They're not a mouthpiece of the Chinese government, and in general I don't think they're very supportive of the Chinese government considering its less than stellar environmental record. Yet they choose to publish this d
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What is nice about this, is that it is REAL data, and not prone to manipulation. OTOH, ALL of the govs are playing games WRT CO2. Everybody wants to hold every other nation responsible, not themselves. That is why I continue to say that we need to tax all goods based on where the worst sub-part comes from.
Pig iron (Score:2)
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Have you read the second paragraph of the wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Pig iron is a low quality steel with very high carbon concentration and impurities. It was once a way to mass produce iron in high quantities in relatively simple furnaces. It is meant to be later refined either into better quality steal or purer iron.
I doubt anyone on the globe is producing it in our times, the summary is likely misleading. Since the 1910s we know hoe to refine iron ore to a good quality without the need to go via "pig iron"
Polands? (Score:2)
New unit of measurement.
Perfect Weapon (Score:2)
Really? (Score:2)
Re: This is why the US... (Score:3, Funny)
Exactly. The republicans have caused this problem in China.
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And yet, America's emissions CONTINUE TO FALL.
False [eia.gov].
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Nice idea, but might want to make sure it doesn't fall afoul of some WTO stuff.
WTOP help (Score:2)
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What finally caused that to start happening? It seems to me if the process was always there, it wouldn't show any anomaly in the temp records. But for some reasons it supposedly just started or changed to become more intense so temperature read
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You might want to spend your time reading about this as opposed to posting your ignorance on slashdot... If you really cared to know the answers to your questions, you would have answered them yourself.
Re:Recessions will do that (Score:5, Insightful)
Any time that someone links to a Google search as evidence of anything you know that what they are saying is most likely going to be wrong. I don't know what results were coming up in other regions for that search, but for me I get a first result [bloombergview.com] that says that says that only the industrial goods-producing sector of the Chinese economy is in recession, and that "the domestic-oriented service sector is likely to keep growing at low, double-digit rates -- and that should result in real GDP growth of 4 percent to 5 percent". A growth of GDP means that they are not currently in recession.
The next result [cnbc.com] speculates on a future recession in China, and that "Fears of a sharp slowdown in China's economy ... has rattled global markets in recent months". It later says "while a global recession is not yet reflected in Citi's benchmark forecasts for global or Chinese growth in 2016, it is a view that has gained ground within Citi's global economics team". Once again, speculation and fears of what will happen in the future is not evidence that they are in recession now, and it is not even an immediate prediction that there will be one.
For a more up-to-date quote from the same person at Citigroup, the "in the news" part of the search results had this new article [cnbc.com] that said "Citi held its growth outlook for China in 2016, but cut it by 0.2 percentage points to 6.0 percent in 2017". That is a forecast of two years of positive growth, a far cry from the technical indicator of a recession of two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth.
China's rate of growth is definitely declining, that is not the same as saying that their growth is actually negative. They may be heading for it at some stage, but not yet. If their economy is moving from a goods producing industry to service providing one then that will have a positive impact on their greenhouse gas emissions. That does not mean that this reduction of emissions is unsustainable, nor that there is any need to "call you later".
I think that you are still looking for excuses to ignore this report so that you can still rely on the old "China pollutes so we shouldn't have to cut our GHG emissions" line.