Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please.
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John Quiggin 
While Trumpism represents a nadir in the neoliberal journey, it also serves as a warning of what lies ahead if systematic change is not achieved. The continued concentration of wealth, deepening inequality, and erosion of democratic norms could lead to the permanent entrenchment of plutonomy. However, crises often create opportunities for transformation …
China coal update – very good news
One of my New Year’s resolutions is to write as little as possible about Donald Trump. One key part of his toxic political method is to monopolize public attention. It takes a lot of effort to distinguish between empty blather and actual policy, and I have no special qualifications for cleaning out septic tanks.
The website of China’s National Statistics Bureau now provides a large number of data series in English. https://data.stats.gov.cn/english Those on energy outputs are just out for December 2024. I think they are more important than Trumpery.
Here they are verbatim for thermal generation of electricity, almost entirely from coal:
Output of Thermal Power, Current Period (100 million kwh) 5,975.0
Output of Thermal Power, Growth Rate (the same period last year) -2.6 %
Output of Thermal Power, Accumulated Growth Rate 1.5 %
Zero-carbon generation gets despatch priority on the grid, so thermal is a residual. The totals for all electricity production were:
Output of Electricity, Current Period (100 million kwh) 8,462.4
Output of Electricity, Growth Rate (the same period last year) 0.6 %
Output of Electricity, Accumulated Growth Rate 4.6 %
This CAGR growth rate translates to a mean annual increase in instantaneous demand of 72 Gw continuous equivalent.
Real GDP data are published quarterly, not monthly. The annual y-o-y growth from Q4 2023 to Q4 2024 was 4.6%, somewhat lower than the headline whole-year rate of 5%, suspiciously close to the forecast. I don’t know why Reuters report it as 5.4%. https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-economic-growth-surpasses-forecasts-stimulus-push-2025-01-17/ It is reasonable to assume that electricity demand will continue to track real GDP quite closely, as it does in OECD countries, efficiency gains from heat pumps, LED lamps, smart controls etc roughly balancing new demand from electric cars, arc furnaces etc.
In a comment on 30 December (https://johnquigginblog.substack.com/p/monday-message-board-fa7/comment/83623203 ) , I puzzled over the mismatch between the Chinese electricity demand data and that on renewable installations. Plug in a corrected estimate for electricity, and the contradiction goes away. New zero-carbon generating capacity meets all the increase in demand from now on (69 Gw cont-eq in 2024) absent a black swan shock.
Since we didn’t have the December numbers then, I used a conservative estimate of Chinese solar installations for the whole year of 230 Gw nameplate. The final official total was 277 Gw (https://electrek.co/2025/01/21/china-solar-wind-2024/ ). My guesstimate for the total increase in zero-carbon capacity rises from 85 to 95 Gw cont-eq, against mean demand of 72 Gw cont-eq. The puzzle now is why it took till December for thermal generation to start falling. Expert Lauri Myllyvirta worries about growing curtailment from grid bottlenecks, but Chinese engineers are cracks at building infrastructure like HVDC lines. The coal will go first, and faster than the ever-cautious IEA projects.
You are seeing this right. On a y-o-y basis, coal generation fell in China in December, not spectacularly but significantly. This was not because of a sudden drop in demand for electricity, which dipped but stayed positive. The trend increase in demand was more than met by new renewables, with an assist from nuclear. Hooray, and About Bloody Time. It doesn’t look like a one-month fluke, as the y-o-y increase in thermal generation from Q4 to Q4 was an insignificant 0.05%.
Enter the usual caveats. We can’t be certain yet that coal burning in China has definitively peaked and has started its inevitable decline. The National Statistics Bureau may be cooking the books. Public holidays, mild weather, or just random noise may be responsible. Growth in coal for chemicals or steel, or more droughts cutting hydropower, can still throw the Chinawende off track. And so on. We have been burnt before and it would be prudent to wait till all the numbers are in, or at least wait another month for confirmation.
But Friar William from Ockham and the Reverend Bayes advise us to go with the evidence we have until it’s refuted by stronger evidence against, not speculations. If China has in fact passed the peak in coal, these are precisely the data we would be seeing. Pessimists don’t get to cherry-pick bad scenarios without allowing optimists our cheerful ones. For instance, the boom is electric vehicles is accelerating, in China and globally. The longstanding happy green talk in Xi’s Little Pink Book seems increasingly to reflect actual policy. Efficiency gains in solar, wind, and batteries, and economies of scale in production, show no signs of stopping. Chinese firms have got very good at installing wind and solar farms on a gigantic scale, and probably getting better at running them. So provisionally, crossing fingers, not taking it as a pretext for slacking, let’s whisper it in the Covadonga caves where scattered bands of the resistance hold on to reasoned hope: China’s coal burning has peaked.
China is the dominant GHG emitter and user of coal. A coal peak in China is probably a coal peak for the world, very possibly an emissions peak. Each step in the argument here adds uncertainty, which can only be resolved by more data. If the peak month in China was August 2024 (615 Twh of thermal generation), we won’t know for 100% certain before next summer. The Chinese coal peak is a necessary rather than a sufficient condition for the global emissions one.
All the same, the global energy transition is a done deal. Trump will no more be able to stop the massive economic and technological forces driving it than he was able to save American coal companies and miners during his first term. His second “war against the sunset glow” (fn) will be a rerun of failure on a large scale. Withdrawing from the toothless Paris Agreement will have little effect – the fangs are wielded by BYD, CATL, Longi, Goldwind and Jingko, protected by Xi Jinping, by abdication of competitors, not merit, the pre-eminent political leader in the world, like it or not. https://www.ntu.edu.tw/english/spotlight/2022/2111_20221130_1.jpg
Footnote: the quote is from Kipling, “Heriot’s Ford” – with an apposite bonus charge of sexual abuse. https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_heriot.htm
Good news once again, James!! “… [T]he global energy transition is a done deal.” Thank you!! (I know you don’t do it for me, but it really is very helpful over here.)
I don’t know if the current president will be in office long enough to see this, and thus quickly change sides and claim he was always on it. Leading it, in fact. It’s best friend.
China is beating us. That is the headline.
“Ouch” on the poetry and graphic. I guess that is what poetry is for though.
JW – “Chinese firms have got very good at installing wind and solar farms on a gigantic scale, and probably getting better at running them.”
World’s Largest Floating Wind Turbine Hoisted for Tests
“It was transferred to the Shandong Dongying Wind Power Equipment Testing and Certification Innovation Base test site using a self-propelled modular transport unit and on January 11, was successfully hoisted into position for testing … The new unit is massive in scale. CRRC reports the diameter of the wind rotor has reached 260 meters (853 feet), which it says is equivalent to seven standard football fields. The hub height is 151 meters (495 feet). The massive blades it reports have a tip speed “in line” with the speed of high-speed rail.”
Solvang LPG Tanker Ready to Launch New Onboard Carbon Capture Pilot
“Seatrium was contracted to install a seven-megawatt capacity carbon capture system from Wärtsilä. The capture system uses amine scrubber technology to pull about 70 percent of the CO2 out of the exhaust gas from the main engine.”
James Wimberley – “..Efficiency gains in solar, wind, and batteries, and economies of scale in production, show no signs of stopping … Xi Jinping, by abdication of competitors, not merit, the pre-eminent political leader in the world, like it or not.”
Surely it is by merit. True merit, not some deserving-white boondoggling third-way lazy fat meritocratic and/or grifting bourgeois neoliberal con job. There have been no abdications, just knock-outs and bypassing.
Op-Ed: U.S. Tariffs Won’t Slow Down China’s Clean-Energy SectorCompared to its other export industries, China’s cleantech is much less vulnerable to Trump administration trade measures
Op-Ed: U.S. Tariffs Won’t Slow Down China’s Clean-Energy Sector
https://maritime-executive.com/editorials/op-ed-u-s-tariffs-won-t-slow-down-china-s-clean-energy-sector
Also here with an additional graphic:
Why China’s clean energy need not fear US tariffs | Dialogue Earth
Why China’s clean energy need not fear US tariffs | Dialogue Earth
https://dialogue.earth/en/energy/why-chinas-clean-energy-need-not-fear-us-tariffs/
From “About Dialogue Earth”: “We are committed to accurately portraying China’s development impacts across the Global South through geopolitically even-handed reporting and constructive dialogue.”
China has invested billions in ports around the world. This is why the West is so concerned
I forgot to say, Europe is beating us too!!
Surely he won’t be able to bear that, when he becomes aware.
We’re number 3! We’re number 3!
I think people badly misconstrue Trump’s words, actions and demeanour. For example, many think he is driven by having people adulate him, in the basic sense that he loves having people love him. He is not driven by that. He does not care in the least what people think of him. He driven by complete contempt for the people who adulate him and he loves fooling them and swindling them. He basks in the glow that comes from knowing they are foolish enough to adulate him during the swindling process.
Trump does not care that other nations are beating the US in parameters he doesn’t care about or understand and there is a very, very large category of things he doesn’t care about or understand. How can he care if he doesn’t understand, care about or even know about the relevant parameters?
Trump probably has the basic belief that the US is too big to fail, is exceptional and has a good destiny and no country or Union can or will ever catch it and surpass it. This absolute belief is common to US oligarchs (and probably most US citizens). They also consider that they can do anything to their country and environment and they will still survive: that their country and environment can absorb any level of abuse and just keep on running. Thus they believe they can, as kleptocrats, keep slicing pieces off the magic pudding and it will remain magically whole and fully productive (for them) indefinitely.
For non-Australians:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_Pudding
This post about cognition probably belongs in a Sandpit for people who want to comment on it. I would like to open a wider discussion on cognition and maybe this post can act as a lead-in.
First up, a fascinating graph from some cognitive research if you have an ageing mind. Alert! If you are over 20 years old you have an ageing mind. If you are 70 or over your mind might be about to decline real fast. There is still hope however if you adopt a “use it or lose it” strategy for mind and body. There is even more hope if you have done well in the life events lottery and the gene pool lottery. The key seems to be about putting together a lot of crystallised intelligence before the inevitable and continuous decline of fluid intelligence from about age 20. (Not that these considerations were necessarily the main focus of the papers listed at the end.)
Without further ado, the graph:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/core/lw/2.0/html/tileshop_pmc/tileshop_pmc_inline.html?title=Click%20on%20image%20to%20zoom&p=PMC3&id=3622463_DialoguesClinNeurosci-15-109-g001.jpg
The sources of this graph are listed in the end notes below. The graph in itself is very interesting. It shows 9 measured aspects of fluid intelligence declining in near linear fashion from age 20 to age 80. It shows crystallised intelligence or “world knowledge” (as measured by 3 chosen proxies) increasing from age 20 to age 70 or a bit later and then declining. The changes are measured in Z-scores. Standard deviation scores are often called Z-scores.
Fluid intelligence is sometimes defined as “the ability to perceive patterns and relationships seemingly independent of previous specific practice or instruction concerning those patterns or relationships.” Crystallized intelligence “involves knowledge and operative intellectual skills that come from prior learning and experience”.
It would seem that if one can keep crystallized intelligence always rising before 70 and even after 70 as long as possible (by dint of good study, exercise, sleep, diet and hopefully some fortunate genes) then one might reasonably hope to continue to get a little better at valued intellectual tasks. There is even hope (I believe) that crystallized intelligence will still prove to improvable and convertible: meaning you can improve what have (in your field of knowledge) and add new fields of knowledge. In the new fields you can often build on existing crystallized intelligence or world knowledge. If you are good at English (spoken and written) you could learn French or Spanish for example with reasonable speed relative to your age.
Of course, due to age you will learn new things slower than a young person and you will have less time left to learn things. But the glass is still half-full which is a surprising statement from pessimist me.
Of course, it matters if you have anything truly worth learning or if you are at least learning for the love of learning. Putting myself more in the second category than the first, I will mention that I have started to learn something of no real exogenous value to an oldie (chess) but I am doing so by researching about learning and cognition and then applying that to chess learning. I can also better judge the free advice and free materials I can get for chess by doing said research into learning and cognition.
It has taken me about 8 months to learn how to learn or at least to get a basic idea about it. This is on top of doing the actual chess study and practice and maintaining a house and an acre and a half of insanely growing gardens, weeds and grass under La Nina conditions, rain bomb conditions, erosion conditions. Plus look to my wife’s health (concerning but getting by) and my own (passable). All this with a 70 year old’s declining energy. It’s pretty clear my mitochondria ain’t what they used to be.
Learning how to learn has been interesting and useful. They never taught us any of this stuff in school or uni in the old days. It was “study hard” but precisely how? What techniques? Space repetition? It seems nobody had ever heard of it when I was young. At least they never told me. Flash cards? Yeah maybe in the latter years of med school and some other schools. Pattern recognition? Chunking? Well maybe some of this research came later than the 1970s (or 1980s) but I am not so sure. Surely, a bit was known back then.
Getting back to chess. It is a formal system. It is a language in a sense but much less like English or French than they are like each other. It has rules, axioms, theorems in a very real sense. It has a syntax. It has patterns, myriads of patterns. It has logic. Some of its logic can be expressed in words, some in arithmetic, in math and in geometry (but the space is not fully Euclidean).
Put it this way, I have done over 10,000 puzzle positions in 8 months (for chunking patterns and getting spaced repetition, played 100s of games, studied basics of opening, middle and endgame principles (even read arguments on whether chess has principles or not in the strict sense) and I am still a patzer: a klutz just above a rank beginner. Elon Musk said “Chess is easy”. It’s not. The easiest move is to not play chess.
“To play chess is the sign of a gentleman. To play it well is the sign of a wasted life.” – Paul Morphy.
It would take a life of study to play, starting as a child with full neuroplasticity and high potential IQ. Is it worth it? Not for people with a life, a job, a career, other things to do. But in old age to learn a bit more including learning about learning? Maybe, if you are intellectually bored.
End Notes:
The graph as illustrated is from the paper: “The aging mind: neuroplasticity in response to cognitive training” – Denise C Park, Gérard N Bischof.
The data for this graph are from the paper: “Models of Visuospatial and Verbal Memory Across the Adult Life Span” –
Denise C. Park, University of Michigan
Gary Lautenschlager, University of Georgia
Trey Hedden and Natalie S. Davidson, University of Michigan
Anderson D. Smith, Georgia Institute of Technology
Pamela K. Smith, University of Michigan
Ikonoclast, there graphed emergent over a human lifetime I also see emergent modern Homo sapiens society as wrought by evolution over deep time. I see where particular intelligence in the young, parents (≤20s), grandparents (~30s) and elders (≥40s) once best served evolutionary fitness.
There is no wasted life, just life begetting new life.
Svante, “once best served” is the key phrase. Is this spread serving us best now? The evolutionary pressures are changing markedly with runaway climate change, pandemics, the destabilising Holocene and ever more powerful technology in the hands of, or at the behest of, ignorant leaders? This will be a mass extinction even but will also possibly generate some saltation events. Homo Sapiens seem much more likely to go extinct than “saltate” at this juncture.
“In biology, saltation (from Latin saltus ‘leap, jump’) is a sudden and large mutational change from one generation to the next, potentially causing single-step speciation.”
The evolutionary main cause, if there is a main cause, of the cross-over from fluid intelligence to crystallised intelligence might be energy based. Maintaining optimum fluid intelligence at the end of physical growth or even still enlarging it somehow would probably cost more energy than the alternative, which is to remember more stuff and remember how it joins up. Is brain memory for crystallised intelligence cheaper (in energy costs) than running on high fluid intelligence brain systems? Perhaps.
Of course, young intelligent organisms (humans in this case) need more fluid intelligence because that is practically all that works independently until experience builds up. One experience is built up, a crystallised intelligence brain machine is cheaper in energy terms to run. (Hmmm, has more abundant food moved this inflexion point in the modern era from 1600 say?) But for species fitness, the spread of having young fluid intelligence and older crystallised experience intelligence working together must have synergies as you say.