Chinese emissions peaking now; India's soon

Another telling chart from Carbon Brief

Let's first look at China.  

The height of the bars shows the total increase in the demand for electricity, each year, in TWh (terawatt-hours). One TWh = 1000 GWh (Gigawatt-hours) or 1 million MWh (Megawatt-hours).  

So in 2020, Covid caused low growth in total demand, and this was mostly met by renewables.  But in 2021, demand rebounded strongly as Covid lockdowns were partially removed, with the result that only a third of the increase was met by renewables.   Excluding the jump in demand in 2021, the rise in electricity demand each year over the last 3 years is the highest it's been.   And each of those three years, the percentage supplied by renewables has risen, and in 2025 it exceeded 100%.  

Economic growth will increase electricity demand each year, on average, but the key point is that non-fossil supply growth (30% per annum) is much faster than total demand.  Now that it's reached parity, the gap will widen.  Renewables will more and more rapidly eat into coal's market share. 

If you add the S-curve acceleration of EV sales, it is clear that China's emissions have peaked.  Which means world emissions have peaked too, though don't expect a rapid plunge — yet.

India's story is a bit different.  Yes, renewables filled more than 100% of the increase in demand last year, but that's because demand growth was low (due to an early-onset monsoon reducing temperatures below previous years', meaning less air conditioning was needed).  India's growth in electricity demand is about 85 TWh per annum, but is expected to increase, while the increase in supply from renewables was just 71 TWh.  So if the summer heat is typical this year, supply from coal will increase, meaning emissions will increase.  But the growth rate in renewables is much higher than the growth rate in demand.  These lines will soon cross over again.

Here's what Carbon Brief says:

India added 35GW of solar, 6GW wind and 3.5GW hydropower [capacity] in the first 11 months of 2025, with renewable energy capacity additions picking up 44% year-on-year.

Power generation from non-fossil sources grew 71TWh, led by solar at 33TWh, while total generation increased 21TWh, similarly pushing down power generation from coal and gas.

The increase in clean power is, however, below the average demand growth recorded from 2019 to 2024, at 85TWh per year, as well as below the projection for 2026-30.

This means that clean-energy growth would need to accelerate in order for coal power to see a structural peak and decline in output, rather than a short-term blip.

Meeting the government’s target for 500GW of non-fossil power capacity by 2030, set by India’s prime minister Narendra Modi in 2021, requires just such an acceleration.

CREA (Centre for Research on Energy and Clear Air)  believes that China's emissions from electricity have peaked, and India's will peak in 2028.  I concur.

However, CREA points out:

[...]one major obstacle common across China, India, and Indonesia is the continued addition of new coal-fired power plants and mining capacity. The new clean energy infrastructures being built in each country creates powerful resistance from the coal industry, which will only intensify once coal demand begins to contract. This political and economic inertia threatens to slow the clean energy transition and lock in high-carbon energy systems in these countries for decades to come, making a rapid post-peak decline in emissions far from guaranteed.

The continued fall in the costs of solar panels and batteries will be a powerful countervailing force, because of course, coal is not getting any cheaper, but governments in all three countries would be wise to ban all new coal power stations immediately.  They won't be needed.

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.

The true climate impact of aviation

From Carbon Brief

 

Data for 2018 shows the global population flying more frequently – and over longer distances than ever before – with nearly 38m scheduled flights, carrying 4.3bn passengers over a total of 54bn km. Aviation has been growing at around 5% per year before 2020.

But what is the climate cost of all these flights? The oft-quoted figure is that aviation accounts for around 2% of global CO2 emissions. Yet, the impact of aviation on the climate goes beyond just CO2 and its emissions have complicated interactions in the atmosphere that can reinforce the warming impact.

Aviation’s climate impacts have been studied for many years, including a special report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1999, but rarely are all the results pulled together to produce such a comprehensive analysis and assessment based on the best available science.

Published in the journal Atmospheric Environment, we – along with 19 other scientists around the world – recently produced an updated analysis of the present-day climate impacts of aviation.

We find that, when all its impacts are taken into account, aviation represents around 3.5% of the warming impact caused by humans in the present day.

Below, we unpack this headline result of the study and describe a little of the context.

[Read more here]

For simplicity, I will assume in future that the GHG emissions from aviation are ~4% of the total.  Of course, as emissions from other sources fall, the percentage will increase.