But there are still costs and environmental impact.
If you need water for example for data center cooling no amount of renewable energy is going to change that (I'm speaking generally, of course you could cool more efficiently or use something else), and so as China continues to build more and more as they are today they will also see impacts related to energy cost and environmental impact just like anywhere else in the world. It may manifest slightly differently, but even if Chinese energy production costs were half of what they are in the US it still costs money to build those things and you can't run them at a loss, well you can and China might, but we saw how that turned out in the housing market most recently.
My comment about building stuff decades out is that there is an intersection (imagine a graph with two lines trending in the same direction but with different slopes) where you have to increase performance to keep up, America is doing that at high cost as you can see, and so China will have to build more and build more now to keep up with scaling (there are so many underlying assumptions for these conversations it's hard to even talk about it) which will then raise energy prices and have environmental effects now, not later.
we are typically not in the position to judge our own tropes, like a racist doesn't think they are racist, it's very hard to recognize our own biases and gaps
you are missing important facts and say the things about China that are common to say but untrue, i.e. a trope
If you need water for example for data center cooling no amount of renewable energy is going to change that (I'm speaking generally, of course you could cool more efficiently or use something else), and so as China continues to build more and more as they are today they will also see impacts related to energy cost and environmental impact just like anywhere else in the world. It may manifest slightly differently, but even if Chinese energy production costs were half of what they are in the US it still costs money to build those things and you can't run them at a loss, well you can and China might, but we saw how that turned out in the housing market most recently.
My comment about building stuff decades out is that there is an intersection (imagine a graph with two lines trending in the same direction but with different slopes) where you have to increase performance to keep up, America is doing that at high cost as you can see, and so China will have to build more and build more now to keep up with scaling (there are so many underlying assumptions for these conversations it's hard to even talk about it) which will then raise energy prices and have environmental effects now, not later.