They’ve gone ahead and built a solar and wind power manufacturing juggernaut. Its a big deal for anybody like me who wants those deployed at scale. You’ll find that I’m also critical of China on other topics.

The same reason we allow them on any other technology — they create a financial incentive for innovation.

2°C is likely to be ecologically and economically quite damaging, and also at the edge of where we can be reasonably assured that agriculture remains viable. Its not an everybody-dies-instantly threshold

We already lowered the rate of emissions growth, taking us from 4°C by 2100 to ~3°C by then. Getting more is on us; you can’t sit around hoping somebody else acts

You are clearly not a Chinese typewriter historian

You’re assuming that the world is covered in server racks. I don’t expect anything like that, even with significant increases in datacenter construction.

Let’s assume 1kw per person. 10 billion people at peak population some time hence. So about 150 billion m² to provide 1kw per person 24/7. The earth’s surface area is 510.1 trillion m², of which about 1/3 is land. So we’re probably just fine on renewables.

Nothing people do has zero impact. But pretty much everything else has a bigger one. Coal will utterly destroy the land, and the gases emitted after it burns will destroy far more.

Solar like this on a few percent of the land will supply all the electricity people need. So it looks huge, but is surprisingly low-impact compared with other options, or things like raising cattle

They mass imprisonment and cultural destruction is a more recent phenomenon. China first spent several decades bringing in colonists and executing those who complained too loudly.

Meanwhile, in the real world

The New York Times has been covering Uyghur issues since 2001.

It’s a little more complicated than that — El Niño, plus climate change, plus a cut in the amount of sulfur in the fuel burned by ships, plus something that’s not fully understood.