Have China's emissions peaked?

 From Carbon Brief

China’s CO2 emissions have now been flat or falling for 18 months, starting in March 2024. This trend continued in the third quarter of 2025, when emissions were unchanged year-on-year.

This picture is finely balanced, however, with contrasting trends in different sectors of the economy underlying the ongoing plateau in CO2 emissions, shown in the figure below.

China’s CO2 emissions from fossil fuels and cement, million tonnes of CO2, rolling 12-month totals until September 2025. Source: Emissions are estimated from National Bureau of Statistics data on production of different fuels and cement, China Customs data on imports and exports and WIND Information data on changes in inventories, applying emissions factors from China’s latest national greenhouse gas emissions inventory and annual emissions factors per tonne of cement production until 2024. Sector breakdown of coal consumption is estimated using coal consumption data from WIND Information and electricity data from the National Energy Administration. The consumption of petrol, diesel and jet fuel is adjusted to match quarterly totals estimated by Sinopec.

Reminder: There were covid lockdowns in 2020 and again in 2022 and 2023

Emissions from the production of cement and other building materials fell by 7% in the third quarter of 2025, while emissions from the metals industry fell 1%. This is due to the ongoing real-estate contraction, as the construction sector uses most of the country’s steel and cement output.

Emission reductions from steel production continued to lag the reductions in output, which fell 3%. This is because the fall in demand was absorbed by the lower-carbon electric-arc steelmakers, whereas carbon-intensive coal-based steel production was less affected.

China has struggled to increase the share of electric-arc steelmaking despite targets, due to the large capacity base and entrenched position of coal-based steelmaking crowding out the lower-emission producers.

Power-sector emissions were unchanged year-on-year in the third quarter, as strong growth from solar and wind generation, along with small increases from nuclear and hydro, nearly matched a rapid rise in demand.

Emissions from transport fell by 5% over the period, but oil consumption in other sectors grew by 10%, driven by chemical industry expansion. This resulted in a 2% rise in oil consumption overall.

Gas demand and emissions grew by 3% overall in the three-month period, with consumption in the power sector up by 9% and by 2% in other sectors.

In the power sector, China’s dominant source of CO2, emissions remained flat in the third quarter even as electricity demand grew strongly.

Electricity generation from solar and wind grew by 30%, with solar up 46% and wind power generation increasing 11%. With small increases from nuclear and hydropower, non-fossil power sources covered almost 90% of the increase in demand, even as demand growth accelerated to 6.1% in the third quarter, up from 3.7% in the first half of the year.

This is illustrated in the figure below, where the columns show the change in generation by each source of non-fossil power every quarter and the line shows the increase in electricity demand.

 

Columns: Year-on-year change in quarterly electricity generation from clean energy excluding hydro, terawatt hours. Solid and dashed line: Quarterly and average change in total electricity generation, TWh. Sources: China Electricity Council; Ember; analysis for Carbon Brief by Lauri Myllyvirta.

The steady rise in renewables (bars) shown in the last chart contrasts with the big fluctuations in demand (grey line).  Part of the rise in demand in the latest quarter was due to electricity needed for air conditioning, because of near-record summer heat.  It's possible that demand growth will outpace the growth in supply from renewables next year.  But that will probably be the last time this happens, as the rise in output from renewables continues to increase.  

China's CO2 emissions won't drop fast for now.  But the fact that they have stabilised, or perhaps even peaked, means that world emissions have prolly peaked too, because China is responsible for 1/3rd of global emissions.  

Source: Our World in Data

As developing countries embrace EVs and solar, because they are cheap and getting cheaper, emissions will decline.  What about the USA and Trump?  Yes, de-carbonisation there is likely coming to a juddering halt.  But the country is only responsible for 13% of global emissions.  Everywhere else, driven by economics, renewables are winning the race.

Don't get too excited.  We have to cut CO2 emissions to near zero to stop temperatures rising.  We're a long way from that, though we have at least started down that road.  We need to speed it up if we are to avoid 3 degrees of temperature rise by 2100.  Cutting emissions by at least 5% a year should be our target.  If we did that, we'd cut emissions by 75% by 2050, which would be where they were in 1960.