China is the West’s picture of Dorian Gray. We pretend we’re so good for reducing our carbon use by not manufacturing anything and switching to less immediately carbon intensive, meanwhile the rest of the world exported 182 million metric tonnes of coal to China (roughly 140 million cubic meters of the stuff) last year. That would be enough to fill 208,000 3000sqrft mcmansions from bottom to top with coal every year.

So why does China have so much green energy going in? Because exploiting the environment sometimes includes green energy. You dam every river, raze every forest to set up windmills or solar panels or to burn as “biomass”, because you want to suck up every bit of resources you can and that includes stuff that happens to be considered green.

That’s not all. China has also used more concrete than the rest of the human race throughout all of history in just the last few decades. Cement in particular is a highly carbon intensive thing to make (particularly using fossil fuels which almost all cement is made using), and they’ve built empty cities that’ll some day fall into dust without having ever had people living in them.

That’s why I say we need to be very careful about letting environmentalism become a box they package up and put on the shelf. It’s easy to think we can consume away our problems caused by overconsumption, but it’s much more complicated than that.

CO2 emissions from energy use and cement production fell by 1% in the second quarter. When combined with a sharp 6.5% increase in January-February and a monthly decline in March, there was a 1.3% rise in CO2 emissions across the first half of the year, compared with the same period in 2023.