Site redirects warning, UBlock Origin or similar highly recommended
What kind of garbage website is this? You try going back to lemmy, but can’t because this fucking bear trap redirects you 7 times to itself!
Shit, I’m so sorry! I use Ublock Origin so that I don’t get that kind of bullshit, so I didn’t know!
I’ll add a warning on the post
God I hate those
Bit of a tangent, but I find it a bit funny when people say what China’s doing in Africa isn’t colonialism, because they’re investing billions in infrastructure.
Imagine if the British government defended the brutal colonisation of India, by going on about how much they’d invested in the railways they used to ship out all the resources they plundered.
China’s also building craploads of things like coal power plants in order to force longterm dependency on an expensive and bad commodity.
It’s definitely mercantilism.
I wanted to educate myself a little here:
Electricity sector in India shows growth of fossil fuel plants has been shrinking: 2017 had 22.94% YoY increase in fossil fuel electricity generation while 2018 was 2.05% increase and 2023 was 0.49% increase.
https://energyandcleanair.org/publication/india-enters-an-unnecessary-coal-plant-permitting-spree-in-2023/ Says that ~35GWh of coal production is permitted, pre-permitted, or announced. Which would be ~13% growth in fossil fuel use, a large increase in rate compared to the year previous.
The linked article states the plants in construction are already excessive (according to India’s National Energy Plan), as would be any future plants.
What’s not clear is that any of these built plants will come online or be used at all.
Imagine if the British government defended the brutal colonisation of India, by going on about how much they’d invested in the railways they used to ship out all the resources they plundered.
There’s no need to imagine. This argument gets made the time . The British unified India, gave it a railway, a public service , etc. They did actually build infrastructure. People have been using this to justify British colonialism in India for over a century. Before that few in the west thought colonialism required justification. The British built these things in order to make wealthy extraction from their colonies as efficient as possible.
Let me guess: They added power lines.
That’s certainly part of it, yes.
They also conveniently forgot to mention that almost 80% of their electricity generation comes from fossil fuels, increasingly from coal. But hey, no problem. Net zero by 2030. Coughcoughcoughcoughcoughcough.
They didn’t forget to mention that, it’s clearly admitted in the article. But now they can take much more advantage of cleaner electricity as it’s introduced: every country does need to do both
Do you think the trains were using something other than fossil fuels before?
As the article mentions, the trains previously ran on naan bread.
That’s the conductors, not the trains themselves.
hard to believe it’s a good choice but it’s still the better choice - electricity generated by dozens of coal plants are going to hurt MUCH, MUCH LESS - than millions of two stroke engines puttering fuel and oil out for individual transit needs.
Well, there’s a reason India fought so hard against banning fossil fuels at the last climate summit.
Jesus, 16 kilometers of electric railway added everyday, that’s impressive, well played India !