China is the world’s largest single greenhouse gas emitter, spewing more than double the amount of heat-trapping chemicals as the next biggest climate polluter, the United States.
The world’s largest emitter just delivered some good climate news
China may have met an important climate goal — ahead of schedule.
Umair Irfan was a correspondent at Vox writing about climate change, energy policy, and science. He is a regular contributor to the radio program Science Friday. Prior to Vox, he was a reporter for ClimateWire at E&E News.
For decades, China’s emissions soared ever higher as its economy grew, burning extraordinary volumes of coal, oil, and natural gas to light up cities, power factories, and fuel cars. The trend seemed unstoppable: At one point, China was approving two new coal power plants per week.
It was an alarming prospect for the whole world. “Eighty-five percent of emissions for the remainder of the century are projected to occur outside the EU and the US,” said Michael Greenstone, an economist at the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago. “If we’re going to make real progress on climate change, that will require reductions from that 85 percent.” And since China is the single-largest emitter, there’s no feasible way to meet international climate change targets without them on board.
But now, for the first time, there’s been a shift: China’s greenhouse gas emissions have actually fallen even as energy demand went up.
According to a new report at Carbon Brief by Lauri Myllyvirta, an analyst at Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air, China’s overall greenhouse gas emissions have dropped for the first time, thanks largely to the country’s aggressive build-out of clean energy. Looking at official statistics and commercial data, the analysis shows greenhouse gas output fell 1 percent over the past year, even as China’s overall energy use and economic activity increased.
It’s not a massive shift, but the fact that the curve has bent at all is a major development for the global effort against climate change.
The growth rate of humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions has begun to level off, but it has yet to decline. In order to eventually halt human-caused warming, that rate has to effectively reach zero, and in order to meet the goals of the Paris climate agreement, that has to happen roughly within the next three decades.
The decline of emissions in China is a big step toward this international goal, and the timing puts it on course for its own climate targets, too. China had previously committed to peaking its greenhouse gas emissions before 2030.
“This is a little ahead of schedule,” Greenstone said. “The planet is happy about that.”
Why did this happen?
In large part, the decline in emissions came from clean electricity production. China deployed vastly more wind, solar, and nuclear power — sources that don’t emit carbon dioxide — at a pace faster than its electricity demand growth. Meanwhile, its coal and gas electricity production dropped. China’s emissions have dipped before due to economic slowdowns, so the fact that its economy grew while emissions declined is a significant turning point, putting China in a league with more than 30 countries, including the US, that have already done the same.
China has established itself as the world’s largest producer of solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles, and batteries, driving down prices for the global market. It’s deploying these technologies within its own borders, as well as exporting them en masse, and some of its biggest customers are developing countries. That means China’s investments in clean energy redound to the rest of the world. Renewables accounted for 90 percent of new power capacity installed worldwide last year.
Later this year, countries will gather in Brazil for the COP30 climate conference, where world leaders will hash out how to bring new, stronger commitments to cut their contributions to climate change by 2035. China’s President Xi Jinping pledged that his country will come to the table with a comprehensive plan to further reduce its emissions across its economy, while the US may not show up at all. One his first day of his second term, President Donald Trump began the process of pulling the country out of the Paris climate agreement altogether. Again.
However, in the Carbon Brief report, Myllyvirta noted that China’s small drop in emissions could easily go back up. If its economy grows even faster, demand for fossil fuels could rise again. Whether that happens depends, in part, on how the dust settles on the tariff fight between the US and China. High trade barriers would slow China’s economy. Losing the US as a customer could push China to try to compensate by installing more clean energy domestically.
China also emits greenhouse gases other than carbon dioxide. In particular, China is releasing high levels of HFC-23, a byproduct of making nonstick coatings and a pollutant that is thousands of times more potent than carbon dioxide when it comes to trapping heat in the atmosphere. China committed to halting HFC-23 pollution entirely when it signed the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol in 2021.
To make China’s emissions reductions durable, there needs to be more stringent policies and enforcement to curb climate pollution within the country. Otherwise, current clean energy technologies would need to get cheaper, and new ones would have to be invented. “Given the tepid appetite for aggressive carbon policy around the world, I think the most important thing the world could do is invest in early stage R&D on new energy technologies,” Greenstone said.
Meanwhile, US emissions are also seeing a slight downward trend. But the Trump administration’s push to extract more fossil fuels, cut incentives for clean energy, and roll back efforts to curb greenhouse gases mean that the US could become a larger climate polluter. That could offset some of the progress in China and slow the overall global endeavor to limit climate change.
