1) China is already convinced. It's in the article. They are the world-leading user of solar power and are pushing harder than anyone to get away from dirty power.

2) Trump wants to push and invest in dirty power. He wants to significantly increase the production of coal and gas. The very stuff that causes global warming. Convincing Trump is about saving the world from itself. If Trump has his way, the last 20 years of progress towards renewable energy will be wiped out, with a strong possibility of making life very difficult for humanity in the next 50 - 100 years.

Where do you gather that from? They use more coal than the entirety of the rest of the world combined. Their coal usage has more than doubled over the past ~15 years.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/26/business/energy-environmen...

> Now Beijing is trying to slow things down.

> In guidelines released on Monday, China halted plans for new coal-fired power stations in many parts of the country, and construction of some approved plants will be postponed until at least 2018.

Whether this will amount to anything, who can say?

China gets over 70% of its electricity from coal. Yes, they are building more solar but it'll take over a decade for there to be significant change.

Anyway, the real problem is that even if everyone somehow meets the Paris limits, it's not enough.

https://www.beforetheflood.com/

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/539691/china-will-soon-le...

A 5x increase in 15-20 years gets you to 10-15%. While that's good, I don't think it's enough given the current rate of CO2 production. It's hard to complain because they're doing a lot more than everyone else. Unfortunately, we need to find a way to do more.

This too, additional to other links. Meat consumption has a huge carbon footprint.

Their government institutions see the problem and invent guidelines. We'll see the same stuff from the USA, most likely never.

So at what point does the rest of the world intervene?

Solar is fine though, once it paid back its energy production debt. I think bio-fuels should be taxed for the undoing of the distributed damage.

Mixed feelings never make for good punchlines :.)

The problem here is to convince world leaders to actually do something.

[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-16/china-tell...

[2] http://climatepublicopinion.stanford.edu/sample-page/opinion...

[3] https://environment.yale.edu/poe/v2014/

[4] http://www.gallup.com/poll/190010/concern-global-warming-eig...

That's a religion to some people. And this is akin to changing it.

They burn slightly more coal than the rest of the world combined.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/26/business/energy-environmen...

You realise you're source says they're doing exactly that?

"In guidelines released on Monday, China halted plans for new coal-fired power stations in many parts of the country, and construction of some approved plants will be postponed until at least 2018."

They've also gone all in on solar, having more installed capacity than any other nation. They're far from perfect, but they've started to acknowledge the problem at least.

China is also jumping on this opportunity, by the way. I saw an article recently that competitive solar will be a big focus point for its electronics industry.

Do you really think such a person is going to be enthusiastic for retraining for a new, competing with younger people, and moving? Or do you think this person would rather support politicians who promise to restore the coal mining industry?

Of course, we can always put solar panels on top of things. That's a thing. They're doing that in Africa too. But the profits mostly go to solar panel manufacturers in China. And solar panels can't sustain a heavy industrial base... you need coal or nuclear for that, as other industrial nations know very well.

So it comes down to policy.

http://www.ren21.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/REN12-GSR201... (page 20)