• panda_abyss@lemmy.ca
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    1 day ago

    There are so many strategic advantages to China’s mass solar adoption.

    Let’s say there’s a war, it’s going to be much easier to take out a few coal plants or nuclear plants than masses of solar panels spread out geographically.

    They have well defined lifetimes and are easily replaceable.

    They’re cleaner, plus good for domestic manufacturing.

    The west needs to get our asses into gear.

    • MrMakabar@slrpnk.net
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      12 hours ago

      The West is not united on the issue. The EU got a hard lesson from Russia, that fossil fuel dependence is a massive problem. So you see actually quite large investments into the green transition. This is building on some good progress earlier. Obviously Trump doing what he does scares the EU, which currently imports way too much LNG from the US to easily replace. There is push back from the fossil fuel industry, but the laws in place and general direction are good. It is too slow however.

      The US as the other large Western power went in the other direction. They elected Trump and currently work on blackmailing the world using oil. This year alone, they bombed Iran, moved a massive fleet towards Venezuela and used sanctions to destroy Russian oil exports. So the three largest oil producers, who deliver a lot of oil to China and are not some sort of vassal to the US.

    • Inaminate_Carbon_Rod@lemmy.world
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      19 hours ago

      Australia was perfectly positioned to take inspiration from China and run with it.

      Unfortunately our mining companies have way too many fingers in our politics.

    • Rolder@reddthat.com
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      12 hours ago

      But on the flip side I feel like it would take far less bombing power to render a field of solar panels inoperable.

    • ms.lane@lemmy.world
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      23 hours ago

      Not just solar, they started building new gen4 reactors 20 years ago.

      Guess what forward thinking does for the future?

      We seem to want to go only backward though.