muh fossil fuels 
The falling cost of renewable energy, though, means that many countries, particularly poorer ones, have a strong incentive to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels.
According to Ember’s report, the falling costs of energy produced by Chinese-made wind and solar installations have allowed countries like Mexico, Bangladesh and Malaysia to race past the United States in recent years in terms of using renewably produced electricity (rather than fossil fuels) in everyday activities like heating and cooling buildings or powering vehicles.
Across Africa, solar panel imports from China rose 60 percent in the last 12 months, and 20 African countries imported a record amount over that period, Ember said in a separate study recently.
American companies, who do not make solar panels or wind turbines at anywhere near the scale of Chinese ones, are at a major disadvantage. Chinese companies now supply 80 percent of solar panels and 60 percent of wind turbines worldwide, Ember said.
China has pushed for dominance in renewable energy partly for economic reasons and also to protect its national security by limiting its reliance on oil imports. But the implications for the planet’s health could scarcely be greater. Scientific consensus has long been that a sharp decline in fossil fuel use is the surest way to lessen the pace of climate change.
bro i swear china could implement a “free kittens and cupcakes and rainbows for anyone” policy tomorrow and somehow the NYT gonna find a way to have a problem with that
“and who’s gonna pay for that?”
"i don’ want my damn tax dollas to go towards no damn kitt’ns!!! send 'em to the army or cops like god intended!!!
"I for one would prefer tax money go to kittens than to a standing army or militarized police. Amerikkka should defend the military and the cops and put the money into state sponsored cat rescues. (Or, y’know, social programs to help people, or universal healthcare like almost every other country has some form of.)
"un’versal healthcare? sounds like some commie shit
"
China just keeps winning.
China has pushed for dominance in renewable energy partly for economic reasons and also to protect its national security by limiting its reliance on oil imports. But the implications for the planet’s health could scarcely be greater.
Right, these are obviously the only reasons the asiatic hordes would have for considering this. It is only us, the superior enlightened westerners who could ever consider the planet’s healt. As in, we considered it and decided to not give a single fuck. /s
Even if this were true and China was doing the right thing for the wrong reasons, I’d still take them over the West who continually does the wrong thing for the wrong reasons.
Yup and it’s funny to me that these real material reasons are brought up sort of moralistically when it’s Western “journalism” reporting on something somebody else does.
Like it isn’t very much the same reasons any nation operates by, difference being that the profit motive alone doesn’t dictate everything. Which of course explains why none of this is happening in capitalist countries.
god I wish I was born into a country where there was optimism for the future
best i can do is slop that costs multiple times the hourly wage of the people serving it to you
i read some long form article back in ~2017-2019 about a looming “carbon bubble” that had metasticized and swollen across the financial system of the planet. that fossil fuels had become the defacto marker for certain currencies and that the price of these fuels had become decoupled from their real use value when one accepts the logic of the carbon cycle, where if all these holdings and leases are ever actually exploited, the biosphere will collapse and wipe out many institutions and financial systems.
that means these assets are worth considerably less than they are now valued and, if civilization begins to acknowledge this as part of a desire to not destroy itself, there will be a paradigm shift in the valuation of carbon based assets on the books. to own these assets is banking on collective suicide, and there would be a reckoning as democratically controlled “sovereign wealth funds” and other similar formations like endowments, pension funds, index funds start to unload them.
i accepted the logic but at the time it felt like wishful thinking. however, the fact that the PRC is driving an alternative development model for the rest of the planet in terms of electrification and renewables… i mean, suddenly its not really a pipe dream anymore, so much as a probable materialist pattern we can expect to see play out in the former imperialist powers as they decline and their economic systems collapse/fragment under the pressure of trying to maintain and gatekeep an energy development model most of the world has chosen to not get involved in, since it sucks major ass from well to wheel.
Am I just smoking too much hopium or is China actually gonna straight up save the world
China is today the most important single player in the eventual socialist world-saving, but they will not succeed without revolutions elsewhere. Most likely would be in the colonized world, but a revolution in a major European country or the US would seal the deal.
ask palestinians
nobody else is
Hell yeah
China stay winning.
Is there water below the solar panels?
I know solar panels can be installed over canals so that shade from the solar panel slows evaporation and the evaporation keeps the panels cool, improving efficiency. I’ve never heard of this done over larger ponds of water but surely the same principle applies.
I’m not sure you want them to be cool, perhaps underneath?
The US has so many damn parking lots, imagine them generating electricity and shade for the cars beneath.
Solar panels can also be installed over some types of crop fields, for a “trampoline effect”, which benefits the plants while generating electricity. Which is also really cool and an efficient use of land.
Renewable energy is so fucking cool.
Nice,
CW non vegan
Perhaps even grow prawns/shrimps too
