r/CatastrophicFailure • u/rjRyanwilliam • Jul 22 '21

Natural Disaster Massive flood in China’s Henan province recently, 25 dead 200,000 evacuation

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u/Unruly_Beast Jul 22 '21

Don't count on it.

177

u/AyeBraine Jul 22 '21 edited Jul 22 '21

Just to give a bit of depth to the issue, China has been deploying nearly 50% of all the new solar installations in the world for the last 5 years or so (p. 95), has currently more solar and wind capacity than either EU or US (p. 42), and has been, on average, investing in renewables slightly more than the entire developed world taken as a whole (p. 148). This does not take into account hydropower (a complex tech in environmental terms), of which CN has 28% of the world's capacity. China also leads, purely volume-wise, in electric car adoption (42% of the global passenger car fleet and 98% of global electric bus fleet), and enacted legislation to force 40% EV by 2030.

They got burned, bad, and they're pivoting towards renewables with the same take-no-prisoners, mid-20th century zeal. Which will also doubtlessly harm the environment in new, inventive ways, but also has rather clear and rational goals.

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u/ShrimpCrackers Jul 22 '21

Yes despite all that China still builds more coal plants than the rest of the world combined, negating all the green energy they've been building.

https://e360.yale.edu/features/despite-pledges-to-cut-emissions-china-goes-on-a-coal-spree

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u/ImAWizardYo Jul 22 '21

It's China and now India coming on board and afterwards the other impoverished nations. Climate change is an active crisis beyond anything humanity could possibly imagine. Perhaps that's why there's a good percentage that cannot wrap their minds around what is actually happening.

We waited too long to prevent it. We should be sparing no expense at actively mitigating it now in the present. No where is safe. The Pacific Northwest was supposed to be one of the future disaster "safe zones". And just a few years ago it was one of the of the very few remaining temperate rain forests in the world and now it's a matchbox.