U.S. Emissions Rise 4.2%, China's Fall 2.7%

Neither the US cares about the climate amd doesn't care about the optics either.

This is capitalism in action: solar is cheaper than anything else per kwh. The obsession with fossil in the West is due to the fossil fuel lobbies, not because of the rational market forces. China doesn't have that.

Has there ever been a polity where your "rational market forces" prevailed over "lobbies" created by market forces?

I'm as big of a proponent on solar as anyone, but to avoid confusion, understand that those cheap solar figures come from using state subsidized Chinese panels on near worthless land in the cloudless remote southwest.

If you are trying to use American made panels near population centers in the Northeast or the Midwest, the economics become much more challenging.

California obtains almost 80% of their daily needs from solar, and is the world’s fourth largest economy. Almost the entire US could run off of solar and batteries based on current utility scale costs of both technologies (but will likely continue to use a mix of nuclear, renewables, batteries, transmission, demand response, and fossil gas for filling in the gaps as learning curves continue to deliver cheaper low carbon energy).

It's simply a matter of will (or in the case of the US, lack thereof).

https://blog.gridstatus.io/caiso-beats-the-heat/

https://blog.gridstatus.io/caiso-batteries-apr-2024/

https://docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy04osti/35097.pdf

https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/how-much-land-power-us...

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/31072025/inside-clean-ene...

https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...

https://electrek.co/2025/06/20/batteries-are-so-cheap-now-so...

https://cleantechnica.com/2025/04/26/there-is-one-clear-winn...

And China's biggest solar and wind farms are in Gansu and Xinjiang. Which is even more remote.

China developed and built many UHVDC transmission lines to deal with it.

China continues to get the bulk of their energy from fossil fuels. 56% from coal. China has double the emissions of the USA and new construction for coal plants reached a 10 year high in 2024:

https://www.carbonbrief.org/chinas-construction-of-new-coal-...

No they don't. They get 56% of their power from coal:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China#...

And they onboarded more coal plants in 2024 than any time in the prev 10 years:

https://www.carbonbrief.org/chinas-construction-of-new-coal-...

Perhaps you replied to the wrong comment? The one you replied to speaks to California, not China.

US coal plant phase out tracking at https://coal.sierraclub.org/coal-plant-map and https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64604 | Europe at https://beyondfossilfuels.org/europes-coal-exit/

(existing coal is more expensive than new renewables and storage in the US and Europe, I cannot speak to the cost in China)

A case study in lying by omission. They build coal plants but they don't use them. In 2024 more than 80% of their energy growth came from solar and wind. As of 2023 solar was already cheaper than coal in China.

What do you gain from lying like this?

https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/china/#:~:tex...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_China

Yup, China added the most capacity in the world of solar, coal and nuclear at the same time.

However, the new coal plants are largely replacing old, inefficient, heavily polluting ones, so they're still a net positive.

The entire world gets the bulk of their energy from fossil. One country is leading the pack in defossiling their economy relatively rapidly, and that's China. Double emissions of the US translates to half-emissions on a per-capita basis. Much less if you include historical emissions. And China's emissions dropped in the previous period, the US increased.

The coal plants are known to be built to support economic growth for one (simple truth), and as baseload for renewable sources (you simply can't go renewable without this, at the moment). Coal plant utilisation rates have been dropping for two decades and are expected to keep dropping. [0]

[0] https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!DJUu!,w_1456,c_limit...

Nothing I said was a lie. Its literally the entire picture of their power grid not just the last 12 months of some boom cycle. You omitted the fact that the majority of their power comes from the most polluting fossil fuel in existence: coal. And it continues to grow coal capacity. It's not building these plants for shits and giggles these are capital intensive projects.

> Nothing I said was a lie.

"Lying by omission" means things not said. Facts deliberately left out to mislead.

> You omitted the fact that the majority of their power comes from the most polluting fossil fuel in existence: coal

And you omitted the fact that majority of cumulative carbon emissions come from developed countries. Not to mention you're spreading your lies on an article that's literally about them reducing total emissions, the final refuge for people like you ("America still emits less, the climate doesn't care about pe-capita blah blah"). Seriously, re-evaluate your priors. Consider the possibility that maybe, just maybe, someone is doing something about the climate, and not even on purpose, while we just sit around.

> It's not building these plants for shits and giggles

Apparently they are because 80% of their energy growth doesn't come from those plants. I think they're part jobs programs, part backup plan.

It's backup power. The power plants will never pay for themselves, but they enable much wider solar deployment because you can use the plants the 1 day a year when the whole country is cloudy.

Ridiculously cheap power is what turns near worthless land into valuable land.

China is also massively scaling storage to complement the renewables.

https://www.ess-news.com/2025/08/20/cnesa-chinas-new-energy-...

> And they onboarded more coal plants in 2024 than any time in the prev 10 years:

Which is a statistic missing the forest for the trees.

In 2025 the Chinese coal consumption has in absolute terms decreased while they have kept building.

New built renewables are able to both absorb all new demand and reduce coal usage.

Sure, it would be better to not build coal plants sitting idle and instead spend the money on renewables and storage.

Through selectively quoting facts you make it seem like China is expanding their coal usage which is incorrect.

You build gas plants to be the backup for that not coal plants. Coal plants get too long to get to temperature to be a backup for renewable energy.

China's coal plants aren't base load, they're peakers, which is what you need in a renewable heavy grid.

Not in China. China has lots of coal but has to import gas, so they build coal peakers instead of gas peakers. China builds their coal plants a little differently so they spin up faster, but mostly they just use plain old weather prediction. 4 hour weather prediction is highly accurate, so they know far enough in advance to know when to spin up the coal.

not if your country doesn't have natural gas

True. But as usual there is more to it. US is running on cheap fossil fuels to most part, though the renewables aren't negligible too. The fossil fuels are actually subsidized, and they are cheap because they are results of exploitation of cheap land. On top of that there are subsidies like tax breaks on the drilling costs etc.. To be fair this is also the case for hydroelectric etc.

So, similar dynamic. If the oil fields, coal mines etc would be sitting on prime land, you wouldn't have it this cheap. If there weren't subsidies, they wouldn't have been this cheap. It's very hard to compare different energy sources because of this. But solar being cheap isn't only a Chiblnese phenomenon. India, Spain etc all prove this. It's cheap when you have a lot of empty land and sunshine.

Not in the history so far. I'm just trying to balance the extreme negative view on Chinese subsidies. They are of similar nature, and scale (as percentage of the total economy). In the EU we have this view of Chinese EVs because they get subsidies from the state, whereas we are doing the same for European car manufacturers (especially Germany amd France). We can at least be rational in our analysis.

Except when you are Germany. Then you shut down the coal plants and replace with natural gas.

The US administration currently almost seems like it does care, and that it is _pro_ climate change. Some really bizarre pronouncements on the topic from ol' mini-hands.

I mean, yes. The coal industry put huge amounts of effort into trying to halt oil and later gas, and it didn't really work in the end.

So, if you have plentiful natural gas, then, yes, certainly, that's what you'll do; it's far, far easier and cheaper. China does not have plentiful natural gas, and is indeed building coal peaker plants.

Scroll through the last 72 hours here and you can kind of see it in action: https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/CN/72h/hourly

Now, clearly, there's a long way to go, and China does still have a lot of baseload coal. But it's not building much if any _new_ baseload coal.

Think that's weird? France has load-following _nuclear_ plants (it more or less has to, given how much of its grid is nuclear).

Do you have a citation for this?

So far as I know, oil production increased coal consumption, and indirectly production, in the early twentieth century.

https://ourworldindata.org/fossil-fuels