From Assaad Razzouk
The clean energy transformation isn't just a climate goal; it’s a powerful economic engine. Exhibit 1: Clean energy - mostly EVs, batteries, and solar - fueled 1/3 of China’s 2025 GDP growth. Without it, growth would have slumped to just 3.5% www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-cle...
This chart shows the change over six months in China's volume of industrial production. The recovery which began in mid-2024 has aborted, probably because of Trump's tariffs. Domestic policy missteps didn't help either. The usual route China has taken in the past, namely, to overstimulate property development, is closed because there is a huge oversupply of housing (from previous stimuli), and house prices are still falling.
I presume the government will step up stimulus soon.
From Ben Alexxander
Trump said that China just makes wind turbines to sell. Yet another unhinged lie. China has more wind capacity than the rest of the world combined.
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 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.
[...]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.
China has just released its official year-on-year industrial production growth rate for November (4.8%, down from a peak of 7.7 % in March). November's data for US and EA (Euro Area*) industrial production are only available through October 2025. I have a function which estimates additional month(s) of data for a time series. It calculates the next month via three different techniques and uses the average of these three values as the forecast. I have thus been able to estimate an average for industrial production for China, the US and the Euro Area through November.
The chart plots the 6-month rate of change at annual rates in the unweighted average. These are the three largest economies/economic zones in the world, and allowing for Chinese overestimation of GDP, are roughly equal in size. The 6-month rate of change is slowing for all three zones: China peaked in March 2025, and has been decelerating since; the US peaked in June this year; and the EA in April this year.
Growth for the average of the 3 is still positive, just, but the trend is down. Note again the pattern: an accelerating recovery in the world economy from Q4 2024, fizzling out as Trump's tariffs disrupt economies and increase uncertainty.
How low can it go? Well, there is the powerful (lagged) influence of falling interest rates, which should be holding the world economy up, offset by the more immediate impact of the increased uncertainty and trade reductions of the tariff war. So we may see stagnation rather than recession.
From Reuters
China's oil demand is forecast to plateau between the years 2025 and 2030, a research group linked to state oil major CNPC said on Thursday, as the rise of electric vehicles slashes demand for gasoline and diesel.
Most of China's incremental demand for oil this year came from jet fuel and petrochemicals, said Haibo Wang, director of oil market research at the CNPC Economics & Technology Research Institute.
Apparent consumption of oil is expected to reach 760 million tons in 2025, up 0.9% on the year, he added, but demand is set to stabilise next year and stay above 700 million tons until 2030.
Last year the research unit forecast that oil demand could reach 770 million tons in 2025, before gradually falling to 240 million by 2060.In September, top refiner Sinopec, which is also state-owned, said it expected total oil demand to peak in 2027.Natural gas demand will peak later, between 2035 to 2045 at 620 billion to 650 billion cubic meters, the CNPC research group added.It also raised its forecast for oil demand used to make chemicals and new materials to a peak of 290 million tons in 2050, up 57% from this year.
A very clear slowdown. (See China's manufacturing PMI heads south)
Europe is (more or less) still recovering, though I would not describe it as a runaway boom.
But the US is sliding. Plus, China's slowdown is forcing the country to export deflation as her industry tries to survive the domestic crunch.
Quelle pagaille ! Trump's tariff tango is endangering the world economy. The world's two largest economies are at best stagnating. And the trends don't look good.
[Technical note: Most Chinese economic time series are affected by the peripatetic Chinese New Year, which can be in January or February. The NBS (National Bureau of Statistics) often does not publish data for January and February, or publishes an average for the two months.
Seasonally adjusting these time series is difficult. This is complicated further by China's publishing industrial production as a year-on-year change, not as an index. Estimating an index was made more tricky by successive Covid lockdowns. I have found that my seasonal adjustment program was not completely removing seasonality because of these problems.
So I have adjusted somewhat the method of calculation for Chinese IP, by seasonally adjusting my estimated IP index before and after covid separately. In addition, I have fitted a centred 12-month moving average to the resulting time series. By definition, a 12-month moving average contains no seasonality. The rate of change I show is calculated from the average of my seasonally adjusted index and its 12-month centred moving average. I hope this still leaves enough variation to detect change in business cycle trends, without being misled by spurious seasonality.]
Showing just how pernicious the effect of Trump's tariff tango is, China's manufacturing is suffering at pretty much the same time as the US's is also sliding. A triumph.
The chart shows the average of S&P Global's and the official NBS manufacturing PMIs, extreme-adjusted, and smoothed using a 3-month centred moving average.
During and just after Covid, it became important to watch services. In a normal business cycle, it's manufacturing and construction which drive the cycle, because of the inventory (stock) problem. Services, on the other hand, tend to fluctuate much less over the cycle, so the aberration of big swings during and after Covid is probably over, and manufacturing is once again important. (Though, to be fair, in the US, confidence is so damaged that services may still be affected.)
It remains to be seen whether manufacturing drags down services and with it GDP, globally, but that has to be a big risk.
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.
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| 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.
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| 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. |
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.
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| 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.
From a skeet by Lauri Myllyvirta
Quarterly results of China's and the world's largest oil refiner Sinopec: China's consumption of transport fuels (gasoline, diesel and kerosene) fell 4% year-on-year in Jan-Sep, due to the impact of "alternative energy" i.e. EVs, speeding up from 3.6% drop in H1.
Demand for main petrochemicals [however], measured in ethylene equivalent, grew 8% - surging plastics and chemical production continues, with lots of new capacity coming online at the end of the five-year plan. Import substitution plays a part but cannot account for most of the growth.
I've been puzzling over the reported growth in transport fuel production in recent months, which doesn't seem to be accounted for by domestic demand or net exports. The Sinopec data suggests that it's inventory buildup (or under-reported exports?).
China's emissions have either peaked already, or will soon do so. In which case, world emissions will also peak. The decline initially will be small, but it will accelerate because of cheap EVs, solar and batteries. Our task now is to steepen that curve and to accelerate the replacement of fossil fuels.
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| Source: Our world in data |
From EVCurveFuturist
What if I told you that even with political setbacks, EVs will dominate car sales by 2030? That’s right—despite recent challenges, the road to mass BEV adoption is still clear. Back in 2019, I projected that global BEV (Battery Electric Vehicle) sales would reach between 90-95% of total vehicle sales by 2030. This forecast was based on several critical factors: technological improvements, cost reductions, increasing consumer acceptance, and strong policy support from major economies.
However, as we move into 2025, new developments have prompted a reassessment of these projections. While my 2024 forecast was accurate—missing the actual NEV (New Energy Vehicle) final sales figure by just 100,000 units—I have now factored in the ‘Trump effect’ when updating my 2025-2030 outlook.
The ‘Trump effect’—including a 25% tariff on imported EV batteries, reduced federal tax credits, and emissions regulation rollbacks—could raise U.S. EV prices by 10% and slow sales growth by 5%. As the U.S. remains a major automotive market, this impacts global adoption, lowering my projection from 95% to 90% by 2030. However, state initiatives like California’s zero-emission mandates and New York’s infrastructure investments may mitigate these setbacks. Local policies can counteract federal headwinds, keeping the BEV transition on track.
Despite the potential challenges posed by the ‘Trump effect’, strong consumer demand, rapid battery innovation, and international momentum for EV adoption persist. Europe and Asia are doubling down on their commitments to electric mobility, driven by emissions regulations and aggressive electrification targets.
Technological advancements continue to lower the cost of ownership, with new battery technologies like LFP and sodium-ion promising even greater affordability and efficiency. Recent insights from ARK Invest suggest that EV adoption is surpassing traditional S-curve dynamics, indicating a more rapid and expansive growth trajectory. As battery costs decline, EVs become accessible to new consumer segments, sparking fresh waves of adoption. ARK’s analysis highlights that, rather than plateauing, EV adoption is accelerating, driven by overlapping adoption cycles as cost reductions make BEVs increasingly attractive to budget-conscious buyers. According to BloombergNEF, battery costs have fallen from $132/kWh in 2022 to $89/kWh today, with LFP batteries already at $50/kWh in China. Coupled with 500KW global fast chargers expected by 2025 (IEA), the cost and convenience of BEVs are set to dominate new car sales.
Emerging markets like Latin America, India, and Africa face challenges with charging infrastructure, but affordable EVs from brands like BYD and sodium-ion battery tech offer potential solutions. A major driving force here is the desire of everyday people to break free from oil dependency and escape the cycle of petrol price gouging. The economic motivation for energy independence is especially strong in developing regions, where fuel costs can take a significant portion of household income. By transitioning to cheap renewables and EVs, these communities can reduce reliance on volatile oil, coal and gas markets, making electric mobility not just a technological shift but a social and economic liberation. These regions, with their growing demand and focus on cost-effective solutions, could have an edge in reaching 90% adoption by 2030 if infrastructure gaps are addressed.
While the consensus often lands around 50% BEV sales by 2030, I project 90% based on the S-curve formula used to model adoption in Norway, Denmark, and Sweden. Key factors include battery cost reductions, technological advancements, and the collapse of ICE supply chains. I also foresee that from 2027 onwards, global PHEV sales will begin collapsing. PHEVs have long been viewed as a transitional technology—providing a safety net for those wary of limited range or charging availability. However, advancements in battery density, particularly with LFP and sodium-ion technologies, are rapidly making PHEVs obsolete. As costs drop and range extends, the onboard petrol generator loses its appeal, especially when BEVs offer lower maintenance, running costs, and a simpler powertrain.
From 2027 to 2030, the growth of BEVs will be exceptionally strong for several reasons. First, the maturity of next-gen battery technologies will push prices well below parity with ICE vehicles, making BEVs the obvious financial choice. Second, legacy automakers, facing increasing pressure to electrify, will accelerate their BEV lineups while phasing out hybrids. Lastly, consumer preferences will continue to shift toward pure electric as charging networks expand and EV infrastructure becomes more ubiquitous, reinforcing the idea that hybrids were merely a temporary stepping stone. I wrote more in depth on this subject in Why PHEVs Are Losing Their Shine.
[Read more here]
August data for China's EV/PHEV/EREV* sales are flat. That's mostly due to weak overall car registrations (down 9% YoY in August). But the percentage is also declining, though the latest month shows a tiny uptick. I seasonally adjust these time series, but because Chinese new year can sometimes be in January and sometimes in February, it's tricky to get entirely reliable seasonal factors. This has been complicated by multiple Covid lockdowns. Sometimes the NBS (National Bureau of Statistics) publishes data for one month, sometimes an average for both January and February, and sometimes no data at all for those two months. I might actually just default to fitting a centred 12-month moving average to the data. In the meantime, for what it's worth, here are the charts.
EV and PHEV sales in China continue to motor ahead.
The first chart shows EV and PHEV sales in absolute terms, seasonally adjusted (by me), and plotted on a log scale. A log scale shows a time series with a constant growth rate as a straight line. The line on the chart below has been gradually levelling off, implying that the growth rate trend is gradually slowing.
This is confirmed by the chart below. There are wild swings over the covid period, but the trend growth rate has slipped to 30% per annum over the last 3 years. That's still a high growth rate, which would lead to a doubling of EV sales every 3 years.
The growth rate of EVs remains much higher than the growth rate of petrol cars. In fact, petrol car sales in China peaked in 2018/19, recovered partially after the Covid lockdowns, but have since resumed their decline. The chart below shows EVs/PHEVs as a percentage of total car registrations. It is not plotted on a log scale. Note the occasional spikes, which occur when EV sales go up and total sales go down. This happens when government incentive schemes change, or when Chinese New Year moves, or simply because of random swings in the time series--one zigging up and the other down in the same month. (Seasonal adjustment of monthly time series in China is tricky because of the peripatetic new year.) There is no fundamental reason for the spike in April, or for the decline in May and June, and I expect to see it reversed over the next few months. EVs will continue to gain market share, because battery prices continue to decline fast, and even despite government attempts to reduce very competitive conditions, EV prices are likely to remain under pressure.
China produces ~1/3rd of the world's cars, and EVs/PHEVs make up more than half of them. By the end of this year, that ratio will prolly be 60%. It's worth remembering that in January 2014, only 0.2% of cars sold in China were EVs or PHEVs. And notice the surge in the percentage of EV sales over the last five years, from 5% to 55%. (Just a personal note: most analysts got this acceleration completely wrong. Prof Ray Wills and Tony Seba got it right. And luckily, I believed them, so I did too.) This is a classic S-curve, but it shows no signs of flexing over, yet, though as EV sales head towards 80 or 90% of total sales, that has to be imminent.
[Data sources: José Pontes at CleanTechnica; Prof Ray Wills, China's NBS (National Bureau of Statistics); my seasonal adjustment (tweaked X-11 variant); my smoothing, using a 13-term Henderson curve.]
From Jesse Jenkins
How China went from clean energy copycat to global tech leader www.nytimes.com/interactive/...
Comment by Chris Bataille
From a US perspective, this is fundamentally worse than Sputnik, and it is having the exact opposite and wrong reaction to 1957 - retreat, shutting down basic science and clean tech commercialization, instead of diving into creating a national science complex and building fast.
Yes. The religious loons have won. The US is retreating into a new dark age.
From The Energy Mix
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| The hrowth rate hasn't just been 60% per annum for the last year. It's average 60% per annum since June 2021. |
China’s export data suggest that Africa could soon see a spike in solar energy generation, with record imports of photovoltaic panels driving a 60% overall import increase across the continent.“South Africa and Egypt are currently the only countries with installed solar capacity measured in gigawatts, rather than megawatts,” writes global energy think tank EMBER, in a new report.
“That could be about to change.”
EMBER tracked Chinese customs data for solar panels being exported to African countries. The data showed that exports could support record growth rates for 20 countries across the continent from June 2024 to June 2025. The rate for Algeria was stunning, with incoming solar gear increasing 33-fold during that time. Zambia, Botswana, and Sudan rose eightfold, sevenfold, and sixfold, respectively, while Liberia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Benin, Angola, and Ethiopia all more than tripled.
Overall, Chinese exports to Africa rose 60% to deliver a potential capacity of 15,032 megawatts (MW). Solar panel imports across the continent—excluding South Africa—have now tripled over the past two years from 3,734 MW to 11,248 MW.
“These solar panels will provide a lot of electricity,” says EMBER. “The solar panels imported into Sierra Leone in the last 12 months, if installed, would generate electricity equivalent to 61% of the total reported 2023 electricity generation, significantly adding to electricity supply.”
The year’s imports to Chad could similarly generate 49% of that country’s total energy generation in 2023. Solar’s share of energy generation could increase by 10% in Liberia, Somalia, Eritrea, Togo, and Benin, and 5% in 16 other countries.
EMBER says these percentages may be inflated because total electricity generation is often underestimated in sub-Saharan Africa, and the think tank’s Electricity Data Explorer does not include non-grid generation sources like the diesel generators that are widely used in many of these countries.
The destinations for China’s increasing exports across Africa have changed since the continent’s last surge of solar imports in 2023, which was largely driven by South Africa. The rise in solar capacity could replace diesel generation, which in turn might reduce oil imports for many countries. EMBER estimates that a solar panel will pay itself off in savings from reduced oil spending within months.
For example, a 420-watt solar panel that sells for around US$60 in Nigeria would produce 550 kilowatt/hours (kWh) in a year at a cost of 14 cents/kWh. Compare that to spending $60 for diesel, at a price of 66 cents per litre (at the time of EMBER’s analysis), an expense that would yield only 275 kWh of electricity, “implying a payback time of just six months” for the solar panel.
“Even with the recent diesel price rises in Nigeria, diesel is twice as expensive in many other African countries, meaning an even shorter payback [in other African countries].”
A limitation in the analysis is that it’s based on Chinese customs data for solar panels exported to Africa, EMBER writes. Exports may not stay in the African country they are exported to if they are then reshipped to another country, perhaps to dodge tariffs. Even when panels stay in that country, their installation timeline is far from certain without clear data from the importing country. That information was often unavailable for the countries in the study.
However, similar exports to Pakistan were mostly installed and led to a recent surge in solar capacity in that country. With many similar drivers for solar uptake in the two regions, EMBER suggests Africa can look forward to similar results.
(Read EMBER's report here)
The decline in solar panel costs has reached the point where even poor countries want it. Solar is rising exponentially in Africa. If you have diesel off-grid or substitute generators, solar fits in easily. You only need to run the generators at night, instead of all the time. Storage costs are falling faster than solar panel costs. In a couple of years, Africa, and other developing areas, will be installing storage as well as solar.
China isn't just greening its own economy. It's greening the world's.
From The Guardian
There is something of a reality check under way on the response to the climate crisis. It’s no secret that countries and corporations are far from living up to the goals set by international leaders at the landmark 2015 Paris agreement.
Unless there is a significant course correction, the ramifications will be far-reaching and often destructive. The second coming of Donald Trump and growing global instability has made a top-down injection of urgency at the pace needed harder to imagine. Optimism is harder to come by.
But that doesn’t mean nothing is happening.
It’s worth pointing this out because a narrative has started to take hold that renewable energy and other clean solutions have made little to no headway in displacing fossil fuels, and therefore are pointless. Fuelled by Tony Blair and the former US government adviser Daniel Yergin, and embraced by the fossil fuel industry and its lapdogs in the commentariat, it is used to attack zero emissions targets as a fool’s dream. In Australia, it is part of the backdrop as the Albanese government is lobbied over whether to set an ambitious emissions reduction target for 2035.
The reality, though, is more complicated. Here are some things worth considering if you hear climate action is pointless.
One line that has gained some traction this year is that the proportion of global energy supply from fossil fuels has barely moved over the past 35 years. The claim – bubbling away in The Australian, on Sky News [right-wing Murdoch media] and on social media – goes that dirty fuels provided 85% of energy in 1990, and still provide 80% today.
So much for progress, right?
But the Bloomberg New Energy Finance [BNEF]founder and self-declared conservative Michael Liebreich points out that this ignores an important factor.
The percentages referred to by fossil fuel advocates are for primary energy – that is, raw coal, crude oil, gas, wood, sun or wind. They do not refer to useful energy – energy that has been converted into a transportable form, such as electricity or refined petroleum, delivered to a consumer and then used to light their house or move their car.
This useful energy is the more relevant measure. And the process of processing raw fossil fuels into useful energy is, in many cases, not particular efficient. More energy is lost in generating at a remote coal-fired power plant and transmitting it to a home than if solar, wind or hydro was used. Petrol cars require much more energy to travel a kilometre than an electric vehicle does.
If we acknowledge this and consider useful energy alone, Liebreich says the amount of energy provided by fossil fuels is not 80%, but about 68%.
This is obviously still too high. But it won’t stay at this level. Despite all the talk of new coal plants still being built, they are playing in the margins. The International Energy Agency (IEA) forecasts that solar and wind will meet more than 90% of the global increase in electricity demand this year. Global generation from solar and wind energy is expected to increase by about 25%, from 4,000 terawatt-hours to more than 5,000. Next year it is expected to jump another 20%, past 6,000TWh.
The IEA projects that global renewable energy output – including solar, wind and hydro – will surpass coal output in either 2025 or 2026. For the first time in a century, the share of electricity coming from coal will have fallen to less than 33%.
Solar and wind will together be nearly 20% – up from 4% a decade ago.
A key question is if this growth in renewable energy will eventually reduce global fossil fuel use – as is necessary – or mostly just meet growing energy demand. Liebreich argues compellingly that fossil fuel use is set to fall. Using a simple model, he suggests it is likely to start falling in the 2040s and could be squeezed out of the system by about 2065.
That is not near fast enough to deliver the trajectory scientists say is needed to limit global heating since pre-industrialisation to 1.5C. But it is a well argued rejection of claims that a global transition isn’t possible.
With a population of 1.4 billion and having taken on a huge proportion of the world’s manufacturing, China is easily the world’s biggest direct national climate polluter, pumping out more than twice as much CO2 as the second-placed US.
Its story is mixed, as always. But the data show it is changing. An analysis for Carbon Brief by China experts Qi Qin and Lauri Myllyvirta found that coal’s share of the country’s power generation fell from 73% in 2016 to 51% in June this year. This happened as it continued to build new coal plants for a simple reason – it doesn’t run them at anything like capacity.
A significant moment came earlier this year when China’s national emissions fell for the first time, dropping 1% in the first quarter compared with a year earlier. Beijing needs to do much more if it is to meet its commitment under the Paris deal. Its next five-year plan for economic development, due this year, will be crucial.
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| Source: Carbon Brief Note how renewable electricity generation has, for the first time since the deep 2009 recession, grown by more than the growth in electricity demand, even though demand growth has been strong. |
According to Our World in Data, global sales of internal combustion engine cars – which run solely on petrol or diesel – peaked in 2016 at 80.47m. Electric and plug-in hybrid car sales in that year were just 780,000.
Last year, sales of dirty cars were 62.05m, a 23% fall. Electric and plug-in hybrid car sales had increased to 17.5m.
Put another way, nearly a decade ago only one in every 100 cars sold across the globe was electric. Now it is more than one in five. Elon Musk’s extraordinary self-own in damaging Tesla’s reputation may dent the pace of growth but it won’t stop it. China has little time or need for Teslas and is home to more than 60% of global EV sales.
None of this is to understate the scale of the problem. This column has reported before on the big step-up in global heating since June 2023. Averaged across the globe, every day in 2024 was at least 1.25C hotter than preindustrial levels, and three-quarters were 1.5C hotter.
Extreme weather events are becoming more damaging. Feedback loops (melting permafrost and huge wildfires) are releasing large additional amounts of CO2, accelerating the problem. Governments have barely started to acknowledge the expected increase in economic, societal and environmental costs that will hit productivity – the current focus of the Australian political class – and so much else.
It’s hard to overstate how much there is to be done. But don’t believe self-interested arguments that action is impossible, or will be for nothing.
A video from Undecided by Matt Ferrell
Yes, it's catastrophically stupid. It's as if, at the beginning of the jet age, the US government had banned jets and insisted on using Lockheed Constellations and DC-6s. By the time America comes to its senses (if it ever does) China will be so far ahead, the US will never catch up.
From the ABC, Australia's national broadcaster.
In April this year, China installed more solar power than Australia has in all its history. In one month.
This isn’t a story about Australia’s poor track record on solar; Australia is a global leader. Rather, this shows the astonishing rate at which China is embracing renewable technologies across every aspect of its society.
But don’t make the mistake of thinking this transformation is driven by a moral obligation to act on climate change.
China’s reasons for this are less about arresting rising temperatures than its desire to stop relying on imported fossil fuels and to fix the pollution caused by them.
The superpower has put its economic might and willpower behind renewable technologies, and by doing so, is accelerating the end of the fossil fuel era and bringing about the age of the electrostate.
“The whole modern industrial economy is built around fossil fuels. Now the whole world is moving away from that and that means that we are rebuilding our economy around emerging clean tech sectors,” said Muyi Yang, the lead China analyst at energy think tank Ember.
“Once the new direction is set, the momentum will become self-sustaining. It will make reversal impossible. I think China now has set its direction towards a clean energy future.
“Can you imagine that the Chinese government will say that, oh, we will go back to fossil car, not the electric cars? That won’t happen. That’s not possible … this momentum is becoming so strong.”
It’s hard to communicate the scale of China’s clean technology rollout but it helps to look back to recent history to appreciate the transformation.
China became the world’s factory at the end of the 20th century, manufacturing cheap, low-quality products. This industrialisation modernised the country but also caused widespread environmental damage and drastic air pollution.
The factories were powered by fossil fuels, causing China’s emissions to skyrocket and it to become the largest polluter in the world.
China overtook the United States for top place in 2006, but the US is still responsible for the most emissions historically, at one-quarter of all emissions.
Still, China’s pivot to renewables wasn’t just about addressing these rising emissions.
With polluted waterways and acrid city smog long ago becoming their own crises, China had to act. Part of that response, starting a decade ago, was a plan called Made in China 2025, which outlined how it would reshape its manufacturing capability to focus on high-tech products, including the ones needed to address climate change.
The authoritarian regime put the heft of the state behind clean technologies at a scale and pace difficult to imagine in most democracies.
It began to invest in all components for renewables, especially wind, solar, electric cars, and batteries that are used for both transport and energy storage. To do this, it used significant government-funded subsidies, said Ember’s Muyi Yang.
“We all understand that young sectors and technologies need some protection for them to grow. It’s like helping a baby to learn how to walk; initially, you need to support them.
“But I think the logic behind China’s policy support is always clear — this support is not meant to be pumped up indefinitely.”
When China rose to industrial dominance in the 1990s, it realised that it could maximise output by developing hubs where all parts of a supply chain for a product are built in the same region. The same approach was applied to renewables, meaning battery factories were established near car plants, as an example.
“It’s not about subsidies. It’s about sound planning, sustained commitment, and targeted support,” Yang said.
As the Made In China plan unfolded, more and more power was needed to fuel these energy-hungry factories and the lifestyles of the burgeoning middle class. To keep up, China built new coal-fired power stations, even as it was installing more wind and solar.
This “dissonance” between China’s booming renewables and coal has meant China is painted both as a climate hero and a villain.
It’s also meant that emissions kept rising.
[However,] a decade after the Made in China plan began, the country’s clean energy transformation is staggering.
“It’s a really interesting policy because it’s a 10-year plan to become a world-leading clean tech manufacturer, which they’ve outright achieved,” said Caroline Wang, the China engagement lead at the think tank Climate Energy Finance. “They’ve made themselves indispensable in the new kind of global economy.”
China is home to half of the world’s solar, half of the world’s wind power and half of the world’s electric cars.
“In the month of April alone, 45.2GW of solar was added, more than Australia’s total cumulative solar power capacity,” Caroline Wang said.
“China’s renewable capacity has exponentially increased and that has also contributed to the drop in coal, in coal use and emissions. There is now a structural kind of decline of coal.”
That’s already having an impact on emissions:
Recent analysis from Carbon Brief found the country’s emissions dropped in the first quarter of 2025 by 1.6 per cent. China produces 30 per cent of the world’s emissions, making this a critical milestone for climate action.
With its unmatched economies of scale, this dramatic acceleration has also brought down the cost of electrification across the world and made China the world leader in clean technologies. Chinese-made electric cars are becoming more dominant on Australian [and Thai, and Malaysian, And Brazilian ....] roads — something that’s already happened for the solar panels and batteries installed across Australian homes.
“China has successfully helped the rest of the world lower the bar for them to embark on the transition. This makes it easier for many other countries to jump on board,” Ember’s Muyi Yang said.
“The transition has to be affordable, otherwise it will be extremely difficult for many developing countries.”
China’s clean energy exports in 2024 alone have already shaved 1 per cent off global emissions outside of China, according to Carbon Brief, and will continue to do so for the next 30 years.
Caroline Wang points out that this green era has also brought major economic benefits.
“It drove 10 per cent of their GDP last year — just the one industry, clean energy. It’s overtaken real estate, and that says a lot because real estate was the driving force of their economy until a few years ago. But now it’s been overtaken by clean energy,” she said.
China’s renewables expansion is also striking because it could not be more different to the direction of another world superpower, the United States, under the leadership of President Donald Trump.
Casting aside the climate damage it will wreak, the US is in a position to return to its “drill, baby, drill” roots because the country produces more than enough fossil fuels to cover its own needs.That’s not the case for China. One of the key reasons it has pivoted to electrification is to get away from its dependence on imported fossil fuels.
“I think there’s some deep strategic thinking … it’s not only about the environmental obligation or international commitment, and it can also not be fully explained by economic benefit in terms of jobs and investment,” Yang said.
“Energy is a basic input for economic activities. Energy security is critical because it’s critical for supporting a functioning economy.”
“China sees the old, the conventional fossil fuel growth model as not sustainable. And it is becoming increasingly unable to sustain long-term prosperity.”
When the world’s economies became hooked on fossil fuels, they became dependent on the countries that could supply them, and the price of fossil fuels increasingly dictated global markets.
“This dates back to issues in the 1970s with the [oil] crisis,” said Jorrit Gosens, a fellow at the Centre for Climate and Energy Policy at the Crawford School of Public Policy at the ANU.
“That’s really when people start to think about energy security, especially when we talk about China.
“China typically is described as very rich in coal, but very poor in natural gas and oil.”
Electrification is changing that, and China — the world’s biggest oil importer — is already weaning itself off with electric cars.
“If you go to Beijing today, you can honestly stand at intersections with four lanes going every way and it’ll be quiet as a mouse. The noisiest thing coming past will be a creaky bicycle,” Dr Gosens remarked.
Last year, crude oil imports to China fell for the first time in two decades, with the exception of the recent pandemic. China is now expected to hit peak oil in 2027, according to the International Energy Agency.
This is already having an impact on projections for global oil production, as China had driven two-thirds of the growth in oil demand in the decade to 2023.
The 20th century was dominated by countries rich in fossil fuels, and many of the world’s conflicts fought over access, power and exploitation of them.
Done right, electrification could change that too, as most countries will be producing their own electricity.
“Even if you have pretty poor-quality natural resources, you can still squeeze quite a bit of electricity out of a solar panel. It’s really changing the geopolitics,” the ANU’s Dr Gosens said.
“Renewable energy is the most secure form of energy that there is because you just eliminate the need for imports.
“But also the cost of it, right? It’s a stable cost. You lock it in as soon as you build it. You know what the price of your electricity is going to be. You get insulated from both those risks if you have more renewable energy.”
For Australia, one of the world’s largest exporters of coal and gas, there is plenty to take from this, with China’s furious electrification paving the way for the rest of the world to follow.
“Even if we have these climate wars here still … we can bicker about how quickly we should transition away from fossil fuels domestically [but] the rest of the world is ultimately going to decide how much they’ll be buying of our coal, gas and iron ore,” Dr Gosens said.
“I think that’s the biggest risk — that we fail to prepare for something and that these changes will be much quicker than we currently anticipate.”
For Climate Energy Finance’s Caroline Wang, it’s in Australia’s interest to be clear-eyed about what’s happening in China.
“I think a gap in Australia and other Western countries is knowledge and understanding. China is a complex country … it’s got good and bad. For the energy transition space, which is full of complexity, there’s a real need, for our strategic national interests, for Australia to understand what is happening in China.”
Finding hope in national self-interest and security might seem strange, but for Wang, China’s transformation makes her more optimistic about the climate crisis.
“This is the world’s largest emitter, the largest population. If they’ve managed to do it in quite a short time — a decade — it’s a kind of achievement that we haven’t seen any other country achieve. And so it’s very inspiring. Seeing that on the ground gave me hope for other countries, including Australia … there are lessons there to be learned.”
