Hopefully battery storage starts to catch up with generation capacity and reduce curtailment. I wonder how much "slack" is available in profitable operations that way.
Over a Petawatt-hour of Wind generation in 2025 using the latest stealth technology so that even someone with the all the technology and skills of the US military and intelligence communities at his command can't find even one of them.
While China has succesfully been reducing there overall CO² emissions, one part of there high tech aorospace sector is dramaticly increasing emmisions burning methane.
A dramatic factor within itself, not a dramatic quantity compared to everything else.
I'm not sure exactly how much aviation fuel China burned in 2025, nor mass to orbit, but a quick search suggests that in 2024 they burned 38.2 million tonnes of aviation fuel[0], and launched 174.4 tonnes to orbit[1]. For the sake of a Fermi approximation, round that up to 40 MT aviation emissions and 200 tonnes to orbit, and assume a 20x factor of propellant CO2 emission mass to payload mass:
200 * 20 = 4e3 tonnes of CO2 from space launches
40e6 / 4e3 = 10,000 times more comes from aviation
So, space could go up by a factor of 100x (compared to 2024) and still be a literal rounding error compared to just aviation.
As per article, graph shows the nation as a whole is just over 12,000 million tonnes "from fossil fuels and cement".
12e9 / 4e3 = 3,000,000
If I download the image to get the full resolution, there's 586 pixels between the lines for 10,000 million and 12,000 million tonnes, so each pixel on that graph represents 2e9 / 586 ~= 3.4 million tonnes, and 3.4e6 / 4e3 = 850, so even if space launch grew by a factor of a thousand it would only shift that graph by one pixel. One and a bit, but closer to one.
Hopefully battery storage starts to catch up with generation capacity and reduce curtailment. I wonder how much "slack" is available in profitable operations that way.
This will be a dreadfully inconvenient stat for some narratives
Over a Petawatt-hour of Wind generation in 2025 using the latest stealth technology so that even someone with the all the technology and skills of the US military and intelligence communities at his command can't find even one of them.
The Chinese tech truly is advanced.
While China has succesfully been reducing there overall CO² emissions, one part of there high tech aorospace sector is dramaticly increasing emmisions burning methane.
https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/02/china-showcases-new-mo...
A dramatic factor within itself, not a dramatic quantity compared to everything else.
I'm not sure exactly how much aviation fuel China burned in 2025, nor mass to orbit, but a quick search suggests that in 2024 they burned 38.2 million tonnes of aviation fuel[0], and launched 174.4 tonnes to orbit[1]. For the sake of a Fermi approximation, round that up to 40 MT aviation emissions and 200 tonnes to orbit, and assume a 20x factor of propellant CO2 emission mass to payload mass:
200 * 20 = 4e3 tonnes of CO2 from space launches
40e6 / 4e3 = 10,000 times more comes from aviation
So, space could go up by a factor of 100x (compared to 2024) and still be a literal rounding error compared to just aviation.
As per article, graph shows the nation as a whole is just over 12,000 million tonnes "from fossil fuels and cement".
12e9 / 4e3 = 3,000,000
If I download the image to get the full resolution, there's 586 pixels between the lines for 10,000 million and 12,000 million tonnes, so each pixel on that graph represents 2e9 / 586 ~= 3.4 million tonnes, and 3.4e6 / 4e3 = 850, so even if space launch grew by a factor of a thousand it would only shift that graph by one pixel. One and a bit, but closer to one.
[0] Search for "38.2": https://www.greenairnews.com/?p=7427
[1] Page 13: https://planet4589.org/space/papers/space24.1.0.pdf