Following a call to share more non-Western themes, here is an article from local Vietnamese newspaper Viet Nam News, Saturday’s edition. Reading between the lines is always key here, so I thought you might appreciate this piece.
Vietnam faces a power shortage this spring and summer. The solution is coal and more coal. There is indeed a new power development plan (PDP8) that puts a focus on green energy, but only relatively speaking, coal will grow until 2030. It’s growth that matters. The G7 wants green growth, but that’s only a side-hustle for the government, it seems. Wind and solar energy have a hard time, enforcement on the ground is falling behind.
So the question for this sub might be how to make green energy the only alternative.
From statistical review of world energy from 2021 to 2022:
Coal went from 114TWh to 100TWh, hydro went from 76TWh to 96TWh and wind/solar went from 28TWh to 34TWh. Temporarily returning to 2020 levels is bad, and vietnam could still do a lot better, but this is still progress.
Going from negligible wind and solar to half as much as their coal generation since 2018 is a staggering growth rate.
Looks like someone is trying to paint five exceptional years for coal divestment followed by an okay one (coupled with record heat waves, drought and a re-opening economy) as an increase in coal.
Cue more cries of “bUt wHaTaBoUt China, India, Indonesia and Vietnam” to delay action in the west where emissions per capita are an order of magnitude higher.
https://www.energyinst.org/statistical-review
That is not quite true anymore. The EU, which is a huge part of the West has lower per capita production based emissions then China and even when you adjust for trade they are very close. Obviously it is still true for India, Indonesia and Vietnam thou, but China has higher then global emissions per capita.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-per-capita?time=2019
Thanks for intervening here, this was not my intention, but you can absolutely read it this way. I kept it too short, basically I would argue that more relative expansion of green energy would be great. The strong coal foundation is a problem, yet Europe and US etc. are much more problematic.
The statistics show a path forward, thanks again. It would be great to talk more concretely about responsibility and actors to move further, which is not easy here. Building new wind parks etc. can be a hustle, I learnt.
My comment was directed more at the newspaper editor (unless that was you?). but thanks for the clarification either way. The line between people saying we need to move faster and bad faith actors shifting blame can get pretty fuzzy at times.
Sure and, naaah, I’m not in charge. The newspaper is very much neutral, so this is interesting on its own considering the not-so-open press world. There are other reports in the same edition on green matters, but no links are drawn.