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In a report released on September 9, 2025, Ember said: “China’s surge in renewables and whole economy electrification is rapidly reshaping energy choices for the rest of the world, creating the conditions for a decline in global fossil fuel use.” Put another way, China is now the global leader in transitioning away from burning fossil fuels, and making the US mania for dirty fuels that waste three quarters of their available energy look sillier every day.
In the foreword to the report, Ember wrote: “The world stands at a pivotal moment. Climate change, energy security, and economic development are no longer separate challenges. Increasingly, they are interwoven — and so too must be our response. For too long, emerging economies have faced what seemed like a stark trade-off between growth and sustainability. As this report highlights, China’s green ascent challenges that assumption.
“Through scale, innovation and long-term planning, China is demonstrating that decarbonization can go hand in hand with industrial upgrading, job creation, and improved quality of life. These lessons carry significance not only for China, but for the broader region — especially Southeast Asia, where energy demand is rising and development needs remain pressing.”
Let’s unpack that a bit, shall we? In the US, the belief among the fossil fuel ideologues who have now captured the government is that renewable energy simply cannot be the basis of a robust economy because, as they tell us all the time, the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow. They refuse to acknowledge that energy storage technology is now so advanced that renewables absolutely can supply reliable, dispatchable electricity to homes and businesses. What China is doing gives the lie to all that fossil fuel twaddle.
Coal Power Declines In China
China often draws criticism for its embrace of coal-fired generating stations, and it is true that so far this century, it has built more of them and consumed more coal than any other nation. But the difference between China and the US is that it has always viewed coal as a means to an end — the creation of a modern manufacturing economy — not as an end in itself.
In fact, according to Bloomberg, China’s increase in coal power peaked in 2021 and fell significantly in 2022. Then it ticked up again in 2023, but is down by 2 percent so far this year.
Ember says China invested a staggering $625 billion in renewable energy in 2024 — nearly a third of all clean energy funding in the entire world. “China’s surge in renewables and whole-economy electrification is rapidly reshaping energy choices for the rest of the world, creating the conditions for a decline in global fossil fuel use,” Ember said. If current trends hold, “it’s likely that the world’s fossil fuel demand will be in structural decline by 2030.”
An Economic Restructuring
“China has embarked on this transition for a variety of reasons. Interviews with experts conducted for this report reveal that within China there is a realization that the old development paradigm centered on fossil fuels has run its course, and is not fit for 21st century realities. The government’s aim to establish an ‘ecological civilization,’ which simultaneously delivers on economic, social and environmental goals, is the response, embedded in the Constitution since 2018,” Ember said in its report.
“The clean energy transition is constraining China’s dependence on imported fossil fuels, reducing energy costs, stimulating growth and jobs and creating export markets. In 2024, investment and production in clean energy contributed 13.6 trillion RMB ($1.9 trillion) to the national economy — a sum equivalent to about one-tenth of China’s GDP, or the total GDP of Australia — and the sector is growing three times faster than the Chinese economy overall. The depth of buy-in within business is reflected in research, development, and innovation — Chinese companies now account for about 75% of global patent applications in clean energy technology, up from just 5% in 2000.
“These investments in the clean energy future are driving dramatic cost reductions across the world in key technologies such as wind turbines, solar panels, storage batteries and electric vehicles. The benefits are increasingly being felt in emerging markets, many of which are overtaking OECD countries in wind and solar generation share and in electrification.”
China was responsible for most of the global growth in fossil fuel use for a decade, but that is no longer the case, Ember said. In its view, “the implications for governments basing their economic growth plans on exporting coal, oil and gas are plain to see,” as demand for fossil fuels falls.
As China Goes, So Goes The World
That last part is prescient. My colleague Michael Barnard this week explored the Canadian government’s decision to prioritize LNG exports from its West Coast terminals. The US is also dumping billions of dollars into building new LNG terminals in the Gulf of Mexico. But Barnard sees trouble ahead for both. In 2025, China and India signaled that LNG will not be central to their futures.
“India is showing that renewables will crowd gas out of the generation mix. China is diversifying away from LNG with massive renewables, transmission and storage, domestic production and Russian pipelines. These shifts matter because together the two countries represent the largest block of potential demand growth. If they are going in reverse, the market outlook for LNG becomes far weaker,” he wrote.
That parallels what the Ember report said. In its concluding paragraph, Ember wrote, “The scale, pace, and depth of China’s transition raises questions about the future of fossil fuel production globally. China has been the main ‘swing state’ for global fossil fuel demand for a decade.
“Its energy related fossil fuel consumption is likely to begin falling soon due to the twin trends of clean generation and end-use electrification, and made-in-China electro-technologies are displacing fossil energy across the world. The implications for governments basing their economic growth plans on exporting coal, oil and gas are plain to see.”
Cutting fossil fuel use is necessary to reducing carbon emissions and avoiding the worst consequences of a hotter planet, Bloomberg said. But the path to net zero has been complicated by various factors — from indifference and even hostility to the energy transition in some countries like the US, to concerns over the costs of its implementation in others. That has put a huge onus on the world’s biggest polluter — China — to prove to the world that clean energy is the most logical and most effective path forward not only for China but for other nations as well.
“China is disproving the notion that green goals and economic growth are at odds, according to the report,” Bloomberg said. “Instead, it has taken a path that has allowed the two to reinforce each other and create ‘self-sustaining momentum.’”
Disrupting Self-Sustaining Momentum
The fossil fuel industry established “self-sustaining momentum” decades ago, and it is the fear that anything different will send the whole world economy into a tailspin that makes people afraid to transition away from it. If China can show that clean energy and economic growth can be partners, then that fear will disappear. Once that happens, the changeover could happen swiftly.
It is unfortunate that the US has chosen to look to the past rather than the future. That seems guaranteed to be a losing proposition. How long can the US continue its love affair with fossil fuels while China leads the world to a future powered by renewables? Some economists, like Paul Krugman, think this pigheaded insistence on being slaves to the past will spell the end of US leadership on the world stage. He may well be right.
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