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Comment by chrsw | Hacker News Reader

Why does the innovation in this space appear to be mostly from China?

China became dependant on oil imports in the mid 1990s even as further massive economic growth was planned.

Being weak on oil and strong on manufacturing led them to take a less insane approach to climate change than in more oil dominated economies.

This is a hysterical take given that China, next to India, is the single largest polluter on the planet and continually refuses to have anything to do with the West's obsession with climate change.

> China has been the world's largest and fastest-growing producer of renewable energy for more than a decade, but has widened its lead over international rivals through a steep acceleration in the roll out of wind capacity since 2021.

> China added more wind generation capacity in the past two years than over the previous seven, and in 2022 generated 46% more wind power than all of Europe, the second largest wind generation market, according to data from think tank Ember.

https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/china-widens-ren...

Unfortunately, both can be true simultaneously[1].

1: https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/china/

If you are implying that rating separates China from the West:

https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/new-zealand/

https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/canada/

Not at all, I would say pretty much all major industrial economies are failing to meet the necessary environmental targets, but that doesn't mean they aren't also deploying lots of renewables. China does seem to score a little worse, even than the US[1], but clearly lots needs to be done, everywhere.

https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/usa/

When people say "climate change" they really mean "internal combustion cars".

Ignore it, they don't know any better and don't want to.

not if you compare per capita. those countries you name have a significant sized populations that should be taken into account to normalize comparisons to other counties with much smaller populations.

It's pretty simple.

China strategically took over a huge percentage of the world's manufacturing ability, and access to essential minerals. They are now reaping the rewards of other countries' mandated switch to renewable tech.

The primary selling point of the battery discussed in the story is that it doesn't use certain "essential" minerals.

There's still a whole bunch of other stuff, other than nickel and cobalt, that's needed for batteries (and battery controllers). Global production and manufacture of all parts of an EV battery is dominated by China - of course all of the research will happen there.

Because they are in the process of building a new generation of car companies that don't have legacy products.

Manufacture happens primarily there.

Battery chemistry breakthroughs don’t come that usually from China, though.

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