Sorry, mixed up grandpa and boss, hence the “the fact that you’re here”. The fact that you could have that conversation with your boss is because the Soviets gave everything to save him.

My grandfathers fought the Nazis in Europe and Japanese in the Pacific. A great uncle fought in Spain and in Germany against fascists both times

So all your family fought on the side of socialism against fascism and now you spit on their tomb by saying “socialism is just as bad”?

The Soviet Union was the most advanced and humane state of its time. Western Europe was murdering tens of millions through imperialism in the global south, the US had literal Jim Crow era laws against black people and was killing tens of millions through imperialism in Central/South America. If it weren’t for the fucking Bolsheviks, the entirety of Eastern Europe would have been genocided by Nazis and the few remaining people colonised, never to industrialise. The Soviet Union was the first country to guarantee truly universal healthcare, education and pensions, and only then did Europe have to follow through for fear of revolution. Highest unionisation rates in the world, abolished houselessness and unemployment. It certainly had flaws, but it’s literally the best it had to offer. For every Stalinist repression victim you quickly go dig up, I’ll show you ten Africans murdered by French/Belgians, or a hundred Indians murdered by British.

Maybe the fact that the left supports improved working rights, unionisation, free education, equality of opportunities and between nations, freer borders for people…

I am not talking about WWII at all because it is irrelevant to the discussion at hand

I brought up WWII because the peak of the Gulag system was starting on 1936, and by Stalin’s death in the mid-1950s it had essentially disappeared, it was a system implemented during a time of extreme necessity due to dekulakization, maintained during WW2 and the Nazi hysteria of the late 1930s after the assassination of Kirov, and dismantled after Nazism had been eliminated from Europe.

really quite racist

The USSR was patently the least racist nation in Europe. While in my homeland of Spain education in Basque and Catalan was forbidden, the Soviet Union for the first time in history guaranteed the citizens of all the republics an education in the official language of their choice, leading for the first time to universal education in Ukrainian, Kazakh, Belarusian, or even minor languages such as Mari for those who spoke it and desired to be educated in such languages. In France, up to 1993, there were no public schools teaching children in Occitan language, and even now I don’t think there’s even one. Fuck, the “Union of Socialist Soviet Republics” doesn’t even have a toponym or an ethnicity in its name, how many countries can claim the same?!

evil and oppressive

Look. I’m a Spaniard. In 1936, we had a fascist coup which resulted in a civil war between fascists and anti-fascists. The policy of the western world was to do nothing and to leave the war to itself while the Nazis and the Italian Fascists bombed the fuck out of my country’s partisans (ever heard of Picasso’s Gernika?). The only nation in the planet to help the antifascist struggle was the Soviet Union, which is the only source of Spanish antifascists of weapons, planes, tanks and military training against the fascists. It’s crazy to tell me that the only nation that helped the fight against fascism in my homeland was “evil and oppressive”. Your grandpa, a Jewish man, would have been murdered if it weren’t for the Soviets. The very fact that you’re here is because of the 27 million lives that the Soviet Union sacrificed in order to save Europe from Nazism.

It’s not just trying to build solar capacity, it’s building all solar capacity in the planet. Solar photovoltaics is essentially exclusively manufactured in China, as are e.g. EV batteries. China is definitely the leading country when it comes to solar and batteries, while maybe the peak of wind technology is in Europe. They’re also innovating on nuclear and they approved to build the largest hydroelectric generation plant in the planet, producing twice as much as the current largest (three gorges dam, also in China?.

So let’s start hating on the world capital of photovoltaics and nuclear because of a lemmitor’s predictions of energy production over the coming 20 years in China?

Not about altruism, just contradicts your prior claim of “energy security”. Maybe they’re switching to renewables because they do care about the environment and because they’re affordable?

That’s why China is working hard on the greatest desert reforestation projects in the world, and why it exports an insane amount of solar panels instead of keeping them for themselves.

First of all greenhouse gases not just CO2

For cumulative that’s debatable. CH4 is the second most important gas, and its half-life in the atmosphere is short enough that over spans of 100s of years it can decompose into CO2 which has a much lesser greenhouse potential.

Per capita annual emissions

See? Moving the goalposts. Moving from cumulative, the real important metric, to per capita current emissions during a renewable transition, because otherwise the data doesn’t fit your preconceived, chauvinistic anti-china views.

Compare GDP PPP per capita. China is very much on a lower place than the US or Germany. China is very developed compared to, say, Philippines, but still developing when compared to Japan or UK.

By which other metric would you compare development? I’m open to debate

The important metric for the moral debate is cumulative CO2 per capita, because that’s the whole reason why we’re measuring coal production history, not because we hate coal per se.

I showed you that, even moving to cumulative coal production, China still has 1/3 that of the US per capita, which is the important metric because why the fuck would we compare a country with 1.4bn inhabitants to one with 340mn without taking population size into account.

So yeah, China still has a lot of margin for coal burning until they reach the evil levels of the US/EU, but thankfully they won’t because they’re the strongest country in renewables, producing essentially 100% of all solar panels in the world.

You’re right, you’re referring to the original source, which is supposedly already in PPP dollars, so I deleted my previous comment. Thanks for the correction. Regardless, that data is 2011, so it’s kinda useless to me because that’s before the energy transition of China.

What’s the point of comparing coal if not for CO2? Most other forms of pollution from coal are local, not global, the international debate here is on climate change, a western-world inhabitant has no right to say what China should be doing with the local pollution. The discussion on coal is started because of its horrendous climate change potential, which comes exclusively from its cumulative CO2 emissions.

But if you want to compare coal numbers, I ran the calculations using this source for US production and this source for China production. Downloading the CSVs from both sources, I get that the US has produced 85643270043 short tons of coal, which at 21GJ of energy per short ton amount to 496731 TWh, whereas China has extracted 617787 TWh, i.e. a bit below 25% more than the USA. Since China has 1411 mn inhabitants and the US has 340 mn inhabitants, i.e. China has 415% the population of the USA, China has along its existence as a country extracted about 1/3 as much coal per inhabitant than the USA.

So yeah, China would have to literally consume twice as much coal as it’s already consumed to reach US values of per-capita historical cumulative coal consumption.

Now what will you come up with? Suddenly coal numbers don’t matter anymore?

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If you “aren’t sure” about that, then why the hell are you trying to discuss it making guesses instead of informing yourself?

China, a country with 4-5 times the US population, has half the cumulative historic emissions. And yet you have the fucking nerve to blame china for coal. The US and the EU get to pollute the fucking Earth for 2 centuries, and China does a renewable revolution in its 40 years since industrializing and you cry about how they still have plans for coal.

Just, seriously, stop arguing from ignorance. If you do not know about cumulative emissions, don’t make “Oh I’m not so sure about that because look at the trends for the past 60 years”, as if the US and EU hadn’t been emitting fossil CO2 since the fucking late 18th century.

China is 17% of the world and almost 40% of the emissions.

Deceiving metrics. What percentage of world PPP GDP is China? China doesn’t pollute due to its population, it pollutes because it’s the industrial hub of the world. How comfortable of you to sit in your office and import Chinese products disregarding the effect of that in the pollution metrics of your country and China.

China is only %27 renewables while the EU is 47%

And how long did China take to develop? What are the cumulative CO2 emissions of China vs those of the US or Europe? Furthermore: where are the solar panels that Europe uses manufactured? Europe may have a blossoming wind industry, but photovoltaics are almost entirely Chinese.

What a chauvinistic and anti-Chinese point of view. BTW, you got completely proven wrong on China building more coal than renewables, you’re just spitting disinformation.

It’s a better measure because western countries outsource manufacturing and associated pollutions to other countries and then pretend to be green.

How much coal has China cumulatively used in its history compared to the US or Europe? Spoiler alert: much less. Almost as if countries in the process of developing used coal for a reason…

Gotta love how you jump to the whataboutism when it comes to good China news. “Yeah sure, they may be saving the environment by going solar, but what about… Uh… Environmental regulation?”

Like, mate, manufacturing 90% of the world’s photovoltaics is the best thing you can environmentally do.

It’s not about regulation. China has almost the complete photovoltaic production of the world. Essentially all panels installed in the rest of the world are also Chinese. It’s about a smart government knowing which technologies to pursue, instead of things like the Spanish “sun tax” of the 2010s that killed whatever solar industry there might have been in the sunniest country in Europe.

No, it’s for Actually Existing Socialism, no idea what a student loan provider is, probably something too USian for me to understand. My bachelor university studies in Spain costed less than 6000€ total including tuition and the few books I had to buy, and my master’s costed around 1500€. That’s without any disability/income price reduction, highest price a Spaniard will pay for public university (around the mid-2010s)