Which is to be commended, but also... The US started from one of the worst positions too. The the absolute worst, but certainly the worst of all the major economies.

If they were cheating by any significant amount, we would know because emissions are visible from space. This article has an image showing how emissions can be traced to individual sources, even: https://theconversation.com/tr...

Satellites can also see reduced smog over China.

We can also see the massive solar and wind installations from space, or you can just get a visa and go look at them for yourself. Plenty of people have. Take a PM2.5 and CO2 monitor with you, for good measure.

Is there any area of science where we are ahead of China? Certainly not satellites.

Obviously exponential growth won't go on forever, but we are a very, very, very long way from saturating the available demand or land available for renewables.

Deployment will keep accelerating as costs continue to fall and people see the benefits of producing their own energy. The payback time on the investment has been steadily falling for decades.

Is it that different to what some Western countries have? The US is a two party system. The UK is too, despite recent gains by smaller parties.

Speaking for the UK, the choice is between hard and soft Thatcherism. That's not much of a choice. A vote for anyone else is usually wasted, not counted at the national level.

That is deliberate policy too. No government will change it because they think they can win the next election and gain 100% of the power, rather than a more representative system that distributes it in a democratic way.

It would be nice if the money was invested in alternative forms of rapid transport, like high speed rail. I'd take the train if there was one.

I wouldn't be so certain that China's model won't come to dominate eventually, because we don't seem to be able to fix our democracies. There are clear flaws that are being exploited now, and the inability to adequately deal with climate change while China races ahead is both a moral and economic failure.

I'd very much prefer democracy to be the winning model, but it won't just happen by itself. Look at the rise of populist right wingers - people will vote away their rights and prosperity in exchange for nothing more than rhetoric, if they think that democracy isn't delivering for them.

WebP only got an RFC (9649) in November 2024. JXL hasn't even got that far.

I hope JXL does catch on, but until Chrome supports it that will not happen. Maybe now that it's required for PDF display, Google will be forced to re-adopt it.

To be fair I think the reason they dropped support for JPEG XL is because the reference C library is crap, and last time I looked none of the alternatives were very mature. Hopefully things have improved by now.

But the growth is exponential. It is far from its peak this year.

The pace is likely to keep increasing and deployment gets easier, turbines get bigger, and costs continue to fall. Solar PV is so cheap it's being used as fence panelling.

At this point, any significant emitter is a high priority. We can't afford to do all this stuff sequentially, we have to parallelize our efforts.

It won't make any difference to security either. In fact, it will probably just make it worse. Huawei is one of the few vendors that supplies source code for security review (under NDA).

At least China has now proven that not only can an economy thrive with renewable energy (remember all the hand wringing about the lights going out and destroying manufacturing?), but it can in fact be a hugely lucrative market.

The other big emitters should be looking at China with envy, and seeking to catch up before they are left behind with only expensive fossil and nuclear power.

Sorry to hear you have a terminal prognosis.

I'm not sure there are enough terminally ill but still fairly healthy people who also have the right skills and mindset though. When you think how few people manage to become astronauts... And they would want to be extremely sure that your condition is stable and you won't deteriorate during launch g-forces, in zero-g, en-route, or shortly after arriving. A lot of the work is quite physical. Even in Mars' lower gravity, those suits are heavy and bulky and stiffer than normal clothing.

Then there are the legal aspects of it. Countries that allow assisted dying only tend to do so in fairly narrow circumstances, so the legal landscape for suicide missions is, at best, unclear.