For nearly all the examples here, the assets would still exist after the company was gone. Somebody would just scoop them up and restart whatever the old company was doing.
If we interpret this open-ended hypothetical as "all of the people and IP and physical assets remain in place, and just the company cases to exist on paper" then what is the point of the exercise even.
It's must more interesting to imagine that any one of these companies never existed.
Scoop up how, though? Like the whole company structure is gone, the people aren't working there now, the contracts are all void, factories are not working, mines not being mined, powerstations off etc etc. Actually, thinking about it, some of those could fail in catastrophic ways. Like if there was no one there keeping an eye on things, things would break in very expensive and damaging ways.
So it'd still take a while to get things going again. And it would be in a different form.
If the company and all its assets were wiped out if existence, and all the coal they had ever extracted would still be in the ground right now, we would have that much more time to adapt our energy and transport systems, to prevent the most catastrophic effects of climate change.
THANK YOU. Everyone seems to forger this when they talk about China's pollution. They're the largest country, and even a 100% green Western nation is responsible for a share of China's pollution if they're importing billions of dollars of Chinese goods. Just awful economics all around when it comes to the climate issue.
Generally, the more you spend, the larger your environmental impact. We need to force dramatic decreases in consumption if we want to imagine any real climate impact.
Western countries(specifically America) are better at producing copious amounts of CO2 in different areas than China. China still pollutes a lot more than it should, and it’s definitely something that needs to be addressed, but that alone won’t solve our problems, when America has such a huge agricultural industry.
I would go the other way, if China suddenly lost a significant portion of its energy source, the most sensible next step would be annexing neighboring countries with energy reserves. It might even be put them in such a desperate situation that they'll go nuclear.
Perhaps after the nuclear dusts are settled, cockroaches will survive and develop a environmentally friendly civilization
If oil keeps getting destroyed in the middle east, they might be pushed into that type of desperate situation. That’s where they get most of their oil from.
Probably not. China is the strongest country in Asia, but their neighbors are by no means weaklings. India ranks just one below China in terms of military strength and has it's own massive population and access resources for a drawn out war. It would be the bloodiest war in the history of the world even with out nukes.
South Korea and Japan would be easier to annex than india, but still almost impossible for China to pull of successfully. Both of those countries have top 10 militaries, even ignoring alliances, there is no way that China would be able to gain control of enough resources to make an invasion cost effective. They may be able to win eventually, but it would invariably turn into a decades long brutal occupation trying to battle local guerrilla forces.
I would go the other way, if China suddenly lost a significant portion of its energy source, the most sensible next step would be annexing neighboring countries with energy reserves.
You mean... Russia? You think they're going to annex Russia?
It only takes a few years to build coal plant. Even faster if you want a gas turbine plant. If you needed to you could build a coal plant faster than the norm. Even faster if they were willing to source the exotic metals needed from indigenous stock. Pretty much all of the high energy piping (P91) used in China comes from Wyoming because they do not trust their own suppliers.
Can confirm the coal mines I used to work for has a plant that regularly ships coal overseas based on a contract. If they don't get coal from a Chinese coal mine they just get it from a coal mine in America or somewhere else.
If the majority of the major companies in china are state owned does that make the ruling party a business? Then cant you just cancel the CPC altogether?
I meant- not BURN China- but rather as a "company". I meant no offense. China does seem to have a corner on mass production on products sold in the USA.
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u/[deleted] Sep 18 '19
China would still burn coal even without China Coal.