One country dominated clean energy growth this year, and it isn't the US, UK, or Germany. It's China, by a landslide.

intelshill@lemmy.ca to World News@lemmy.world – 121 points –
One country dominated clean energy growth this year, and it isn't the US, UK, or Germany. It's China, by a landslide.
businessinsider.com
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China is also still building new coal plants at a truly alarming rate.

Don't let heavy carbon emitters steer the narrative this way. Building renewables is just the cheapest way to keep expanding your energy grid at there moment, but if you're not actively taking power plants offline to reduce carbon emissions, you're not actually getting greener.

EDIT: LMAO I'm being mass-downvoted. This is why it's important to think critically about every headline about China - there is an army of propagandists trying to make sure you only see the good stuff.

People really tend to forget that natural gas + variable renewable energies is the current cheapest/more profitable option, but is overall non sustainable.

Storage + VRE is barely existent because energy provider aren't incentivised to build it.

Arg, my first reply was completely off topic. I thought this was a reply in another post.

Yeah, it's great that VRE is cheaper now, but we shouldn't celebrate companies/countries for just taking the cheapest option. It drowns out the legitimate celebration of the companies/countries that are actually making hard decisions by funding renewables when they aren't the cheapest option, investing in long-term R&D, taxing carbon, fixing bureaucratically-entrenched perverse incentive structures, etc.

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Please, you are so right - but please do not engage further with this kind of posts in the future, just report them - the OP of this post is 1 day old, most likely a bot account - Lemmy needs better moderation, and that fast, it's getting worse and worse, day by day.

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