China has actually been leading the charge in terms of green energy lately, at least in terms of making solar power equipment more accessible by way of driving down cost.
I have no idea however if they're just exporting this to other countries or if they're also pushing renewable energy domestically.
From what little I've read on this topic in recent years though they seem to realize that all of that smog is coming from somewhere and are taking meaningful action to remedy it, which is in stark contrast to what we're doing in the states these days with stifling clean energy and promoting coal.
China has continued to rapidly increase their use of coal for power generation. Just a few days ago there was an article about them hitting an 18-year high of new coal power installations [1]
It is deceptive to compare coal % of power generation, because China specifically substitutes coal for gas because they have none of that (and no reliable source). This also means those coal plants run at lower/decreasing utilization because a big part of their role is to provide dispatchability. So for China you have 55% coal and 3% gas while the US uses 16% coal and 40% gas for electrical power.
If you compare numbers, you will also find that lower per-capita consumption more than compensates for currently still higher CO2 intensity of chinese electricity (3000kWh/person * 0.5kgCo2/kWh for China vs 5500kWh/person * 0.35kgCo2/kWh, i.e. 1.5 vs 1.9 tons of Co2/year/person from electricity for China vs the US).
> It is deceptive to compare coal % of power generation
It isn't, because coal emits significantly more CO2 per unit electricity than natural gas, since it's pure carbon instead of a hydrocarbon, and therefore should be getting discontinued by everyone rather than installed by anyone.
The "it's a developing country" arguments seem like a dodge when the real reason is that they'd rather emit 80% more CO2 so they can burn coal instead of buying oil or building enough nuclear and renewables to not do either one.
> This also means those coal plants run at lower/decreasing utilization because a big part of their role is to provide dispatchability.
Those percentages are for power actually generated and already take into account capacity factor.
> you will also find that lower per-capita consumption more than compensates for currently still higher CO2 intensity of chinese electricity
What excuse is that for burning coal? Should Germany and the UK be justified in burning more coal too, since they have lower electricity consumption per capita than China?
My point isnt that gas is just as bad as coal. My point is that coal (in China) fills the same role that gas has for electricity in other countries.
Saying "China is >50% coal while the US is only 15%" misses half the picture, because the combined gas + coal percentage is actually almost the same, and the US only really gets to enjoy that cleaner gas in its energy mix because it has so much of it (while China has none).
Blaming China for using coal instead of gas just feels like blaming non-Norway countries for not using enough hydro power to me.
In my view, you only have a solid position to throw shade at China if your countries economical position is somewhat comparable (i.e. not rich as fuck) and you did manage to "resist" the temptation of big fossil reserves.
You could make an argument that Spain was a bit of a poster child in this regard in the 1990s, but even in that comparison they were much wealthier (both absolutely and comparatively to China now).
I could turn the argument around, and ask "why is the US still using >50% fossil fuels in its energy mix, despite being super rich"? What makes gas power acceptable and coal not? And the obvious answer is just that fossil fuels are a really attractive as dispatchable power. If the more-than-twice-as-rich US can not resist the temptation of gas power, why would you expect much poorer China to resist the twice-as-bad coal?
> Saying "China is >50% coal while the US is only 15%" misses half the picture, because the combined gas + coal percentage is actually almost the same,
Except that coal emits almost twice as much CO2 as natural gas per unit of heat generated, and on top of that the majority of US natural gas plants are combined cycle (which converts more of the heat into electricity), because combined cycle is easy for gaseous fuels, whereas neither China nor anyone else is doing combined cycle for coal at scale because it requires turning the solid coal into a gas first.
> the US only really gets to enjoy that cleaner gas in its energy mix because it has so much of it (while China has none).
Oil and gas are an international commodity. It's not even like anyone has a monopoly on it -- if you don't like the US, buy it from Russia. If you don't like Russia, buy it from countries in the middle east.
On top of that, it's assuming that a modern grid even needs to be 60% fossil fuels. Meanwhile several other countries are demonstrating that it isn't at all necessary.
> Blaming China for using coal instead of gas just feels like blaming non-Norway countries for not using enough hydro power to me.
It's not physically possible to build large-scale hydro power in a place like Iraq or Singapore. China can't import a river from Norway. They could very easily import natural gas from any number of countries -- as many other countries do.
> What makes gas power acceptable and coal not? And the obvious answer is just that fossil fuels are a really attractive as dispatchable power.
Except that isn't the real answer. The real answer is that the US has a major oil industry lobbying to sustain its existence. Which is a bad reason, but nobody has figured out a great way to overcome it yet. However, that doesn't apply when you're only first building the infrastructure in the first place, because then you don't have incumbents trying to sustain a status quo that isn't yet established -- and then why would you pick the most terrible one to entrench?
While power consumption per capita is sometimes useful, I don't think it fits here. They continue to invest heavily in coal, that isn't leading in green energy.
New coal power installations != increased use of coal for power generation. You have to stop this lie by omission.
Their new coal plants either replace older ones. Or they are left idle. Close to 90% of all their generation growth comes from solar and wind.
They use coal because they have coal. Just like the US uses natural gas and then pats itself on the back for "reducing emissions" by switching from coal to gas. But their current trajectory will see them going to burning very little coal. It's a national security issue for them.
They have also increased total coal use as well. I don't have the stats handy which is why I didn't include an unsourced link, but I will add that here if I have time to find a solid source for that before this thread goes stale.
I'd guess that this is in large part due to the sheer amount of datacenters they plan to bring online in the coming years and the fact that they can't scale up green energy quickly enough to meet the expected demand.
In an ideal world I think they'd prefer to be powered by 100% clean energy but not at the cost of losing the AI race.
I don't know that there would be a huge overlap between the people who would fall for this type of marketing and the people who want to run LLMs locally.
There definitely are some who fit into this category, but if they're buying the latest and greatest on a whim then they've likely got money to burn and you probably don't need to feel bad for them.
Reminds me of the saying: "A fool and his money are soon parted".
Out of curiosity, what are some good use cases for a MBP now with the MBAs being so powerful?
I can think of things like 4K video editing or 3D rendering but as a software engineer is there anything we really need to spend the extra money on an MBP for?
I'm currently on a M1 Max but am seriously considering switching to an MBA in the next year or two.
The Apple Silicon fanless MBAs are great until you end up in a workload that causes the machine to thermal throttle. I tried to use an M4 MBA as primary development machine for a few months.
A lot of software dev workflows often require running some number of VMs and containers, if this is you the chances of hitting that thermal throttle are not insignificant. When throttling under load occurs it’s like the machine suddenly halves in performance. I was working with a mess of micro services in 10-12 containers and eventually it just got too frustrating.
I still think these MBAs are superb for most people. As much as I love a solid state fanless design, I will for now continue to buy Macs with active cooling for development work. It’s my default recommendation anytime friends or relatives ask me which computer to buy and I still have one for light personal use.
While I agree that the slowdown is very noticeable once the MBA gets hot to the touch, I joke that it's a feature, encouraging you to take a cooldown break every once in a while :-)
More seriously though I agree it depends on workload. If you've got a dev flow that hits the resources in spikes (like initial builds that then flatten off to incremental) it works pretty well with said occasional breaks but if your setup is just continuously hammering resources it would be less than ideal.
It's all related to things outside the CPU and GPU that made me choose a base model M5 Macbook Pro. I prefer the larger 14-inch screen for its 120hz capability and much better brightness and colour capability. I adore that there are USB-C ports on both sides for charging. The battery's bigger. That's about it.
If nothing else, I’ve learned that for me personally, 14” is the sweet spot for a laptop. It’s just enough over the 13” to be good, without being obnoxiously large.
I also like NanoTexture way more than I thought I would, so there’s that.
> Out of curiosity, what are some good use cases for a MBP now with the MBAs being so powerful?
Local software development (node/TS). When opus-4.6-fast launched, it felt like some of the limiting factor in turnaround time moved from inference to the validation steps, i.e. execute tests, run linter, etc. Granted, that's with endpoint management slowing down I/O, and hopefully tsgo and some eslint replacement will speed things up significantly over there.
It's a personal thing how much you care, but the speakers on the MBPs are pretty amazing. The Air sounds fine, even good for a notebook, but the MBPs are the best laptop speakers I have ever heard.
What kinds of defensive measures can you even take against such a blatant and yet inevitable invasion of privacy that don't involve you just completely covering your face whenever you go out in public?
I'd love to have a smaller/cheaper phone but I continue to hold onto my Pro from a couple years ago is for the high end camera, particularly the telephoto lens.
What I would like is a really good single camera. If that's even possible. One thing I find sort of irritating about the multi-camera setup on my iPhone is that using it as a magnifier is often frustrating. Get too close to something and it decides to switch cameras, which then means now you're actually looking at something else entirely. Maybe I'm missing a setting somewhere, I can't be the only person to notice how awkwardly the functionality is implemented.
It's hard to get that in a single camera because of the size.
If you consider the size of professional grade camera lenses there's a reason why they produce much better images. But conversely it's pretty impressive what phone manufacturers have been able to accomplish with such a small amount of space. For 90% of use cases camera phones are sufficient.
I have the same issue with my Pixel. It's nice to be able to use a real zoom when I need it, but that means I can't get the one that's otherwise what I really need.
I simultaneously worry that the current administration will do something nuclear and actually make good on their threat to nationalize the company and/or declare the company a supply chain risk (which contradict each other but hey).
I have no idea however if they're just exporting this to other countries or if they're also pushing renewable energy domestically.
From what little I've read on this topic in recent years though they seem to realize that all of that smog is coming from somewhere and are taking meaningful action to remedy it, which is in stark contrast to what we're doing in the states these days with stifling clean energy and promoting coal.
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