News Apple, Intel, and Nvidia Suppliers Halt Production in China Due to Mand Shutdowns

[gargoylenest]

Well to be fair, economists agree that the proper way to judge pollution is compared to GDP, since the majority of pollution comes from manufacturing, whether it be direct by-products of manufacturing or the energy production that feeds the manufacturing. In this case the US produces 3 times less pollution per GDP dollar.

what do economist have to do with pollution?

 

[Historical Fidelity]

what do economist have to do with pollution?

A lot actually…..economists hold the country responsible by rating countries on their justification for the pollution it emits. It’s called the energy efficiency metric. In lamens terms energy efficiency measures the volume of goods and services provided to domestic and international markets against the CO2 release of the nation. Right now the United States is better than the world average whereas China has 2x worse energy efficiency than the world average.

 

[gargoylenest]

that is very interesting. Thank you for the info; though, making a quick google search, I find that US is ranked 8th and China is ranked 6th in energy efficiency. does that make sense?
edit: ok, I believe you are talking about energy intensity?

 

[Historical Fidelity]

that is very interesting. Thank you for the info; though, making a quick google search, I find that US is ranked 8th and China is ranked 6th in energy efficiency. does that make sense?
edit: ok, I believe you are talking about energy intensity?

So I believe your information is CO2 per capita which yes the US falls behind China on that one. The energy efficiency metric is CO2 per GDP dollar which rates countries based on the criteria I laid out above. Here are 2 sources I found that illustrates this.

The world bank rates the USA at 0.2 kg of CO2 per PPP (purchase power parity) GDP dollar and China at 0.5 kg of CO2 per PPP GDP dollar

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PP.GD

The next source is from 2013 so isn’t up to date but explains the energy efficiency metric well

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/31/how-us-carbon-pollution-compares-with-the-rest-of-the-world.html

Hope this helps

 

[Co BIY]

Conflating CO2 emissions with air "pollution" isn't helpful.

You could have very clean emissions that still generate a lot of CO2 (think a modern economy with primarily gas powerplants). Clean air with lots of power available.

Or you could have millions people cooking three meals a day over wood and charcoal stoves (China not too many decades past and the West a century or more ago). Very dirty/smoky/sooty and polluting compared to the CO2 levels which were low because little power was consumed per person.

CO2 is better discussed as a separate issue from "Pollution". Although it may have climate effects it has no negative health effects (in atmospheric concentrations) and it's presence in the atmosphere is crucial to life on Earth. We would not want to get to 0% CO2 in the atmosphere.

China will probably do well with their power transition as it is a pretty simple system overall, tends towards centralization and will not be too difficult to mange on a Central planning basis as long as they commit to producing a lot of power and keep it relatively cheap. If they try and play with power production at the margins they will have a lot harder time getting pricing and production right. (This has proven difficult even in countries with very responsive and flexible markets). They have the chance to leapfrog using advanced technologies in "green" energy and nuclear.

 

[TheOtherOne]

Maybe we should start investing in domestic manufacturing.
🤷‍♂️

But are the consumers ready to pay the higher premium for "domestic" manufacturing?

Consumers are too "smart" and quick to jump on Internet and find a seller who's listed product for $2 cheaper even if it arrives after 3 - 5 weeks from some Asian/African country. But they are also very patriotic and brave enough to complain why we don't make things locally/domestically anymore.

Remember all these online E-Tellers like Ebay, Amazon, Alibaba etc.. became as big as they did ONLY because of consumers.

 

[Historical Fidelity]

Conflating CO2 emissions with air "pollution" isn't helpful.

You could have very clean emissions that still generate a lot of CO2 (think a modern economy with primarily gas powerplants). Clean air with lots of power available.

Or you could have millions people cooking three meals a day over wood and charcoal stoves (China not too many decades past and the West a century or more ago). Very dirty/smoky/sooty and polluting compared to the CO2 levels which were low because little power was consumed per person.

CO2 is better discussed as a separate issue from "Pollution". Although it may have climate effects it has no negative health effects (in atmospheric concentrations) and it's presence in the atmosphere is crucial to life on Earth. We would not want to get to 0% CO2 in the atmosphere.

China will probably do well with their power transition as it is a pretty simple system overall, tends towards centralization and will not be too difficult to mange on a Central planning basis as long as they commit to producing a lot of power and keep it relatively cheap. If they try and play with power production at the margins they will have a lot harder time getting pricing and production right. (This has proven difficult even in countries with very responsive and flexible markets). They have the chance to leapfrog using advanced technologies in "green" energy and nuclear.

Since China’s primary source of power production right now is coal fired power plants, it’s safe to say their CO2 release is proportional to soot and other detrimental by-products being released as well. But you are right in that China will have an easier time moving to nuclear energy. If it weren’t for 3 mile island (if you look at the reports the actual radiation release was tiny so it was mostly blown out of proportion by the media) and Chernobyl (commies thinking a weapons grade production reactor design is fine for civilian power production…still can’t justify that logic) then the US and most of Europe would already be nuclear powered. The big advantage is that China didn’t need nuclear power back when reactors still had major flaws (like emergency cooling systems requiring electricity or other power sources to work and the high pressures that boiling and pressurized reactors need), China has a chance to build a fleet of generation 3+ and 4 reactors that were designed in countries that won’t be adopting them due to their people’s attitude towards the perceived danger of nuclear.

Pardon this tangent but nuclear power is my jam haha. My favorite gen 4 reactor design is called LiFTR (Liquid fluoride thorium reactor) which uses lithium fluoride salts as the coolant and as the carrier fluid for its nuclear fuel. first it solves the uranium problem by using thorium instead (4 times more abundant). Outside the reactor core but still within the biological shield a bed of thorium is subjected to neutron bombardment from the core which transmutates thorium 232 into uranium 233 (which is not used in nuclear weapons so nuclear proliferation is not a problem, bombs use uranium 235 or plutonium 239). That newly created U233 is funneled into a fluoride reactor where U233 is turned into a volatile gas UF6 to separate from the solid thorium and collected. The UF6 is then reacted with H2 to remove 2 fluorides to become solid UF4 and injected into the fluoride salt flow into the main reactor. The beauty of a fluoride salt reactor comes in the many passive safeties inherent with the design. First, fluoride salt is pumped at atmospheric pressure, second, unlike water, fluoride salt is not a neutron moderator which means that there is nothing to slow down the neutron and allow the uranium atom to absorb it and split. (Uranium can still produce a reaction with fast neutrons but not at a rate that is needed to maintain a chain reaction for power production) Only when the salt is pumped through the core which is lined with a neutron moderator known as graphite does a chain reaction take place, and once the salt moves out of the core it can no longer sustain a reaction. Third, the uranium is diffused in several tons of fluoride salt instead of all stored in dense pellets all in the center of the core (this is why gen 1 and gen 2 reactor designs can melt down, and LiFTR cannot). Fourth, salts by their ionic bond nature are very forgiving to neutrons blasting their bonds apart. Ionic bonds are most suggestions than covalent bonds so once a fluoride ion is ripped off of a lithium, they both find themselves again or other ions that also got ripped apart and re-join, whereas water produces hydrogen when hit by neutrons (hydrogen buildup leaking from the reactor is how all three Fukushima reactor buildings blew up), and five, since the reaction mixture is a liquid, the design can passively cool itself if power goes out. The design has a salt freezer at the bottom of the reactor which must be supplied with electricity to keep the salt plug leading to a Passive heat dissipation tank frozen. As soon as power is lost the salt plug melts and the entire fluoride salt mixture drains into the tank where the residual heat can safely be dissipated at no risk to a nuclear chain reaction due to needing graphite to moderate the neutron speed.

All in all very cool generation 4 designs coming out.

 

[Co BIY]

Pardon this tangent but nuclear power is my jam haha.

I get that.

Interesting that my original post barely touched on the nuclear power potentials because after I wrote I spent a few hours reading about the nuclear power fleets of various countries.

I would like to see the US take the baby step of simply replacing our older nuclear plants with the new fail-safe designs. No expansion, no major change just consider it a safety upgrade. Then we could get the new systems up and running to see their potential.

 

[pocketdrummer]

But are the consumers ready to pay the higher premium for "domestic" manufacturing?

Consumers are too "smart" and quick to jump on Internet and find a seller who's listed product for $2 cheaper even if it arrives after 3 - 5 weeks from some Asian/African country. But they are also very patriotic and brave enough to complain why we don't make things locally/domestically anymore.

Remember all these online E-Tellers like Ebay, Amazon, Alibaba etc.. became as big as they did ONLY because of consumers.

The answer would be to tax importation of products from those countries to offset the difference and then use that money to fund expansion of domestic manufacturing.
I'm going to give you a benefit of a doubt that you weren't insinuating that I am simply complaining and not putting money where my mouth is. But in case you are, I do go out of my way, and spend more money, to purchase products that are made in the US or by a country that has generally good relations with the US. Obviously, that's not possible with everything, but it is possible with a lot of thing.

 

[pocketdrummer]

You haven't been back to China since 2007? You can't imagine how much better it has gotten since then. I went once every 2 years from 2009 to 2017, and I could see progress, especially in Beijing (the other place I visited regularly was Dalian, same thing):

• dusty dumps and wild parking lots replaced with green spaces and young saplings
• the smog that didn't allow you to see across the street simply disappeared - gone ! Pollution went from Mexico-like to Paris-like in less than a decade;
• public transportation was already good, it got better;
• many vehicles went from gas and diesel to propane and electric, especially taxis.

There's a reason why NASA recently thanked China : they actually managed to grow stuff in deserts, and substantial surfaces of it at that. And while China has the highest power consumption level in the world, it also has the highest population too - a Chinese uses 2.5 less carbon-based energy than a North American.
Pot, this is kettle.

As of 2020, China still has the most coal power plants of any nation in the world by a LARGE margin. They also have a considerable number of coal power plants under construction, which we both know they won't be shutting down any time soon. If that 2.5x less carbon-based energy number is true (I have not corroborated that number yet), it likely won't be the case in the next 5-10 years as the US moves away from coal and China continues to build more.

 

[mitch074]

As of 2020, China still has the most coal power plants of any nation in the world by a LARGE margin. They also have a considerable number of coal power plants under construction, which we both know they won't be shutting down any time soon. If that 2.5x less carbon-based energy number is true (I have not corroborated that number yet), it likely won't be the case in the next 5-10 years as the US moves away from coal and China continues to build more.

False - they cancelled the building of new power plants in 2019. On top of that, the existing coal powered power plants are the "least dirty" in the world - close to 5 times more efficient than US ones, which are old, badly maintained and overworked.
As I live in France (where we don't use coal anymore, at ALL), it still seems backwards, but then running on nuclear generated electricity has its own share of problems.

 

[Historical Fidelity]

False - they cancelled the building of new power plants in 2019. On top of that, the existing coal powered power plants are the "least dirty" in the world - close to 5 times more efficient than US ones, which are old, badly maintained and overworked.
As I live in France (where we don't use coal anymore, at ALL), it still seems backwards, but then running on nuclear generated electricity has its own share of problems.

Sources?

 

[mitch074]

Sources?

One ...

China has abandoned 103 coal power plants. Here's what else is changing | World Economic Forum

And two:
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/5/15/15634538/china-coal-cleaner

 

[Historical Fidelity]

One ...

China has abandoned 103 coal power plants. Here's what else is changing | World Economic Forum

And two:
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/5/15/15634538/china-coal-cleaner

Cool based on your “sources” the Chinese have lowered their use of coal for power by 1.6%. That’s meaningless and does nothing to combat their pollution problem. My point remains the same.

 

[mitch074]

Cool based on your “sources” the Chinese have lowered their use of coal for power by 1.6%. That’s meaningless and does nothing to combat their pollution problem. My point remains the same.

Still more efficient than US ones, and they at least are reducing coal use in front of ever increasing energy requirements. As for my "sources", I selected the easy ones to read. There are hundred other sources that corroborate them, in many other languages (that I wasn't sure you could read), but I was making it easy for you to understand. That goal has been reached (you did read them, that's more than a bunch other haters that simply spew back what their enlightened leaders say without firing a single neuron on the way), now if you want to validate or invalidate them, you are free to do your own research, and post your own discoveries one way or another - I'm ready to be proven wrong.
Having seen the intermediate results on-site in person though, I'm pretty confident I'm not too far off the mark.

 

[Historical Fidelity]

Still more efficient than US ones, and they at least are reducing coal use in front of ever increasing energy requirements. As for my "sources", I selected the easy ones to read. There are hundred other sources that corroborate them, in many other languages (that I wasn't sure you could read), but I was making it easy for you to understand. That goal has been reached (you did read them, that's more than a bunch other haters that simply spew back what their enlightened leaders say without firing a single neuron on the way), now if you want to validate or invalidate them, you are free to do your own research, and post your own discoveries one way or another - I'm ready to be proven wrong.
Having seen the intermediate results on-site in person though, I'm pretty confident I'm not too far off the mark.

I appreciate your candor in your response. I absolutely trust you when you say China’s coal plants are more efficient and clean compared to the US because the US stopped building coal plants at the end of the 80’s when the “clean coal” lie was debunked. Since then the US has concentrated on gas turbine plants using natural gas which is plentiful here in the US and one of the cleanest carbon fuels out there.

 

[mitch074]

I appreciate your candor in your response. I absolutely trust you when you say China’s coal plants are more efficient and clean compared to the US because the US stopped building coal plants at the end of the 80’s when the “clean coal” lie was debunked. Since then the US has concentrated on gas turbine plants using natural gas which is plentiful here in the US and one of the cleanest carbon fuels out there.

China has coal but little gas; so they work with what they have. Along with actually renewable energies (solar powered water heaters and more efficient A/C units), they cumulate a very aggressive power saving policy with very important investments in cleaner energy. And yeah, China in the 2000's was VERY dirty : I saw it. They saw it. Contrary to many other countries, they actually decided to act on that in a drastic way. They are good at drastic solutions. It's rather chilling, actually.

 

[Historical Fidelity]

China has coal but little gas; so they work with what they have. Along with actually renewable energies (solar powered water heaters and more efficient A/C units), they cumulate a very aggressive power saving policy with very important investments in cleaner energy. And yeah, China in the 2000's was VERY dirty : I saw it. They saw it. Contrary to many other countries, they actually decided to act on that in a drastic way. They are good at drastic solutions. It's rather chilling, actually.

That’s why I love living in Texas. The state of Texas is the 5th largest producer of wind energy in the entire world with over 10,000 wind turbines producing electricity for the grid. We also utilize over 80,000 water pump windmills for water distribution. I can’t speak for the other states in the US, but Texas is poised to be one of the biggest renewable energy producers in the world.

 

[DonaldCrack322]

I was very annoyed with my electric bill, I was looking for a long time for ways to reduce the bill, and then I came across a website.

There you can change your electricity supplier and keep track of where it's cheaper.
And I also found the best energy suppliers ranked.

That's how I've been getting out of it so far).

Someone advised me to put solar panels, it's more efficient and not as dependent on the state.

So now I'm thinking about solar panels.