nednobbins

It's a better measure but not a perfect one. The big problem with the US-China GDP comparison is that the US has much more of a service economy while China has a much more manufacturing based economy.

Manufacturing pollutes much more than services do but services don't exist without the manufacturing.

That's why I was saying a better measure would be pollution per GNP. That would cut out services and basically just count manufacturing output. That would make sense because it's the biggest source of pollution and it's the source you can do the most about (ie there's a lot of room to make many parts of the manufacturing chain cleaner).

Nobody is as green as their marketing suggests and China is no exception. China is making huge investments in green tech and there's still a long way to go.

Because humans just existing produces far less pollution than humans producing a lot of stuff.

It's trivial to say that a bunch of hunter-gatherers don't pollute much but we're not generally willing to relegate people to living in the stone age.

Our economic choices have a much larger impact on pollution than our personal choices do. Ideally we'd have a measure of pollution per consumption. Everyone would have a score that calculates the total pollution created by the entire supply chain that supports their choices. So if a mine in Africa is polluting so a Chinese guy can have a nice air condition, that should be counted for China; and if a factory in China pollutes so that a guy in the US can have a new Iphone, that should be counted for the US.

I'm not aware of any such data set. The closest proxy would be GDP or GNP. That essentially provides a measure of how much pollution the total lifestyle of that population produces.

That's not really how it works. Some random Chinese peasant (that's the vast majority of China's population) doesn't produce much CO2. You can add or remove millions of them without significantly impacting coal consumption or CO2 production.

Industry pollutes. Some types pollute more than others.

China has been increasing energy usage across the board at a much higher rate than the population has been growing. It's a nonsense plan because there's no reason to think that reducing the population would affect that trend.

While there's a clear trend of China using more coal there's just as clear a trend of coal making up a smaller and smaller share of China's power usage over time. Just about every analysis says they're solidly on track to completely phase out coal by 2025 and nobody predicts they'll need to shrink their population to do it.

So you're saying there are just too many Chinese people? How many should there be?

Trains and ships are part of the logistics chain but trucks are definitely part of it. They have a big advantage of not needing train stations or ports, as long as you have a decent road. Some of the larger strip mining operations fill a truck per minute.

China effectively seems to be playing Factorio. They have a solar/wind production rate of X/day and X keeps going up faster and faster.

They'll sell those panels and turbines to whoever will take them. They're cheap but the sheer volume means that you need a huge economy to take any significant share of that inventory. With the US effectively out of the picture the biggest remaining economy is China. On top of that the EU does have some tariffs on Chinese renewables and that skews the deployments even more towards China.

Unreliable may have been a poor choice of words.
You can’t move coal around with pipes or wires. Someone needs to drive trucks full of coal to a power plant.

The pollution from coal tends to have a lot of externalities that drag on the economy. Lost work days, faster equipment degradation, etc.

They use coal but they have practical reasons to want to reduce reliance on coal.

That’s a very emphatic restatement of your initial claim.

I can’t help but notice that, for all the fancy formatting, that wall of text doesn’t contain a single line which actually defines the difference between “learning” and “statistical optimization”. It just repeats the claim that they are different without supporting that claim in any way.

Nothing in there, precludes the alternative hypothesis; that human learning is entirely (or almost entirely) an emergent property of “statistical optimization”. Without some definition of what the difference would be we can’t even theorize a test

GDP is total production net of total consumption. It would be cool to compare it to those factors independently but don’t know of anyone who reports that data.

I’m not looking to bestow sainthood upon any country. Just looking for the most accurate metric.

95% of the world’s new coal construction (2023)

China had the largest new coal construction in 2023 but it was far below 95%. I didn’t do all the math but it drops below 50% when you compare it to just the growth of the next three biggest coal producers.

They build most of our solar but we’ve effectively banned it now. They’re not only growing capacity to produce renewables, they’re taking the outputs that were planned for sale here and installing them locally.

Yes. And go check the percentage of coal use over time. Coal is going up. Renewables are going up much faster.

You should be pretty happy with China then. They have a replacement rate just over one. That's lower than the US or Europe.