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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
The UK's last coal plant will sigh out its final pollutants Monday before shutting down for good and officially ending the country's century and a half of coal production. Nottinghamshire's Ratcliffe-on-Soar plant was the last of its kind following Britain's 2015 commitment to close all coal power plants by 2025. Ratcliffe was originally scheduled to shut down in 2022 but stayed open after Russia invaded Ukraine and Europe entered a gas crisis.
The Ratcliffe plant once had 3,000 engineers but only employs 170 staff now. That group will gather to watch a livestream of the plant being turned off, and over 100 of them are set to work on decommissioning the plant over the next two years. Many of the other employees will enter new jobs at different power plants owned by Uniper, Raticliffe's German owner, while others will enter training programs to work on other aspects of the industry.
Britain opened the world's first coal power plant in 1882, London's Holborn Viaduct, with the help of Thomas Edison's Edison Electric Light Company. Coal has played a major part in the UK until very recently. According to a report from energy think tank Ember, coal was responsible for 39 percent of the UK's energy supply in 2012 but shrunk to just two percent in 2019. The decrease in coal production was reportedly equal to double the amount of all greenhouse gases used in the UK in 2023. Between 2012 and 2023, wind and solar generation also increased from six percent to a 34 percent share of the UK's energy. Britain still has a long way to go, but this step has made it the first G7 country to remove all coal power production.
(Score: 4, Informative) by bloodnok on Thursday October 03 2024, @04:59PM (9 children)
It doesn't.
China is doing a lot to bring down its emissions. That 2 power stations per week statistic is all very well, but here is a longer term graph showing that the carbon intensity of chinese power production is in a steady fall: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electricity?tab=chart&country=~CHN [ourworldindata.org]
Or here's another one showing solar generation in China: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electricity?tab=chart&country=~CHN [ourworldindata.org]
China is decarbonizing its power generation at an incredible rate. They have installed more solar in the last year than the US has in its entire history, and in a period of 9 months installed more capacity than the entire UK's peak power requirements: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-26/china-added-more-solar-panels-in-2023-than-us-did-in-its-entire-history?embedded-checkout=true [bloomberg.com]
Western nations are far from shining examples of responsibility in this regard. We *all* need to do our bit. There is plenty to blame China for, but as far as decarbonizing their economy goes, they are world leaders.
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The Major
(Score: 3, Touché) by khallow on Thursday October 03 2024, @05:48PM (6 children)
In other words, it's still increasing GHG emissions from power generation.
UK has done what you allegedly value, but China gets lauded.
(Score: 2) by bloodnok on Thursday October 03 2024, @08:38PM (5 children)
The UK is making good strides. It has scrapped coal but still burns a lot of carbon for power generation. It has a large number of gas power plants, and the Drax facility is one of the largest emitters in Europe, so it still has some way to go.
I am not lauding the Chinese. As I said there is plenty to blame China for, but singling them out as a problem in a discussion about decarbonizing power generation is either disingenuous or inaccurate.
The Chinese state is embracing a clean technological future while some in the west (Canada) are more interested in building new pipelines for fossil fuels. Ironically, some of those pipelines are supposed to be to supply China with fossil fuels for the next 30 years or so. At China's current rate of progress that doesn't look like a good bet.
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The Major
(Score: 3, Insightful) by khallow on Friday October 04 2024, @12:16AM (4 children)
Or the other thing, honest and accurate. Again, the Chinese are the largest source of GHG emissions from power generation and still growing. Selecting graph presentations that hide that indicate that maybe we should look elsewhere for the alleged "disingenuous and inaccurate".
(Score: 2) by bloodnok on Friday October 04 2024, @05:33PM (3 children)
Really? That graph just shows what it shows. I never claimed or intended to imply that China is not a huge and increasing emitter. It is growing its industrial base at a tremendous and alarming rate, but it it is doing so with a greater amount of renewable energy than has ever been done before.
To go back to the original point: no, responsibility to "save the planet" does not fall solely on Western nations.
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The Major
(Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Friday October 04 2024, @06:16PM (2 children)
Exactly. And what I'm noting is what it doesn't show - namely the continued increase in GHG emissions from Chinese power generation. This remains particularly dishonest when one considers your narrative - that "China is doing a lot to bring down its emissions" - it's not. It's just producing a bunch of renewable generation capacity in addition to its still growing fossil fuel power generation. Moving on, your narrative then segued into:
Western nations are much better than China by your metric! Let's view that carbon intensity graph again, this time [ourworldindata.org] with the G7 countries (all solidly developed world) added. Without exception every one of the G7 countries has a better carbon intensity. Only one, Japan comes close due to a sudden increase in GHG emissions around 2011, but it's still a sixth lower. France in particular is incredibly low at less than 10% of the same carbon intensity of its energy production.
The bottom line here is that if GHG emissions are important to you, then where they come from is important too. China generates [ourworldindata.org] 26% of all GHG emissions (in 2022). In comparison, the US generates 11%. India is in third place at 7.5%. The UK is under 1%.
(Score: 2) by bloodnok on Friday October 04 2024, @11:56PM (1 child)
I picked that graph because it shows that even as China is ramping up its power generation (and I have not disputed the that much is coming from fossil fuels) it is managing to lower the percentage that produces C02. As far as I can see, this means that the amount of new power they are generating from renewables is greater than the amount of new power from fossil fuels.
If you want to say that China is not doing a lot to bring down its emissions when it has just made the largest annual increase in solar generation that we have ever seen, then fine, it's a matter of perspective and our perspectives differ. I still believe that creating that largest annual increase in solar generation makes it a world leader. If doing more than anyone else has ever done is not world leading, then again it's a matter of perspective and we can disagree.
And yes, western nations are better than China on those totals. I don't and have not disagreed with that. I do still disagree that the West is doing the lion's share of decarbonization, which is where we started.
For giggles, you might also want to take a look at the per-capita rather than total emissions.
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The Major
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday October 05 2024, @05:24AM
Do you have a reason for that disagreement? Your links don't support that claim, for example.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 03 2024, @09:51PM (1 child)
USA seems to drop faster. So do most of the western countries that i looked at. And China seems to start leveling flat.
I don't know, looks like the graph you pointed out seems to point otherwise.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 04 2024, @12:09AM
It's also pretty useless without knowing how much electrical energy each country uses. Congo is way up on that graph, and not getting better, but I bet their actual emissions are minuscule compared to anyone in the G20.