It’s not a massive shift, but the fact that the curve has bent at all is a major development for the global effort to halt 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.”
China has 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.
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.
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 Kiglali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol in 2021.
To make China’s emissions reductions durable, it will need more stringent policies and enforcement to curb pollution. It would also help if current clean energy technologies get cheaper, and if new ones are invented.
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 offset some of the progress in China and slow the overall global endeavor to limit climate change.
