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

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-...

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.

China is also massively scaling storage to complement the renewables.

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

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

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

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).