What we need to do is find some way to make a giant fusion reactor and put it in the sky and get energy from it that way.

But that’s just a pipe dream…

What we need is robust decentralized multimodal energy production fit for the local area where it is installed and contributing to a well maintained distributed grid with multiple redundancies and sufficient storage so that incidental costs are minimized and uptime is effectively 100%. Energy is a tool and its generation is a category of tools, whining about people developing a better screwdriver rather than only using hammers is counterproductive when we’re trying to build a house for as many people as possible that doesn’t fucking kill everyone.

I’m whining about China spending very little on current green energy technology while building more and more coal plants and taking advantage of these sort of PR stories.

I can’t help it, I’m one of those people who whines about climate change.

‘spending very little’???

They produced more new green energy than the total capacity of green energy for the rest of the world combined in 2024.

And yet they keep building more coal plants.

Last year, China commissioned 96 GW of new coal production, retired 100 GW of old coal production, and commissioned 356 GW of wind and solar. This was the most coal production China has built in a single year since 2015, and it was still less than what they took off the grid, and far less than the amount of renewables that they put on the grid.

I wish China could wave a magic wand and have their entire energy grid go green, but the truth is that their middle class is still growing, and with it the demand for electricity, and even with the massive amount of spending they’ve put into wind and solar those forms of power simply can’t keep up with the rising demand on their own, so coal remains a necessary part of their multimodal grid with multiple redundancies and sufficient storage.

“The climate has to get worse for the benefit of the middle class” is a weird argument.

The climate has to get worse for the goal of adding more people from the lower class to the middle class. As someone IN the middle class, who has actual empathy for other human beings, as long as we aren’t going out of our way to kill animals slowly and painfully and/or to the point of extinction, and the ecosystem hasn’t collapsed, I refuse to believe in any goal that puts some vague emphasis on “the climate” as the “good guy” in this.

Evolution is an endless process of monsters eating the babies that need the most help to survive. Nature is the reason we’re killing the environment, “survival of the fittest” i.e. only those with advantages survive and adapt to the changing status of the climate, is the very essence of the very capitalism that is killing the climate.

Survival of the fittest is obsolete and cruel. It’s time we stopped fighting for “the climate” and started defying capitalism, the one place where we can remove Darwinian competition from it without just destroying it further. Sadly, nature needs competition and death to be what it is. That is why we CHOOSE to see humans as separate, instead of justifying it by calling ourselves “just animals”. In the absence of an actual judge above man, we should strive to meet the expectations we would want a benevolent judge to force us to meet.

But let me guess, you’re some greenwashed zealot who only eats vegan food and will probably think I think avocado on toast is common for “young people”? Because only privileged assholes want middle class standards to be lowered. If the superyachts or personal “business” jets were barred from being used by wealthy people like bicycles to globetrot where “the riffraff” can’t afford to go, the dent in carbon emissions would outweigh ALL carbon emissions by everyone else. The rich need to stop riding alone, they can travel 1st class if they want but none of this having a personal jet plane with more seats than the owner has immediate family members. When a teenage “princess” owns a jet so she can fly back and forth to Europe partying non-stop in-flight and until they get back home from vacation-partying every weekend, owning a jet with more than 4 seats is no longer a reasonable thing for the law to allow for private citizens.

I can’t survive without the few luxuries in my life because I literally feel so miserable without access to video games that I would commit suicide. That’s not the same as thinking you’re too good to fly commercial, because I believe no one can reasonably be denied access to the luxuries I have and I understand that people are denied much of what I have. If society can’t uplift most people to middle class, fuck the climate. We’re better off dying if it is doomed to collapse before we achieve a world where people are able to truly enjoy living, not just survive.

You know, I was going to reply to this substantively despite your bizarre “fuck the climate” attitude as if there will be a middle class if the Earth keeps warming… but then you decided to make personal attacks, and I stopped reading.