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The US accounts for significantly higher emissions than India[1], despite having only a quarter the population.
> and they aren't going to slow down
There's a pretty good case to be made that China is slowing down[2], albeit not as fast as any of us need to be.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
[2]: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha...
They don't, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
> and they aren't going to slow down.
China already did, according to https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/11/china-co2-emis...
https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/fossil-fuels-are-th...
Not only is it factually wrong (US emissions are much higher than Indian ones despite India being like 4x as many people), it also ignores second order effects of sane environmental policy completely:
By demonstrating that emission reduction is feasible, smaller wealthy western nations can have giant effects on billions of people living in poorer states. Not only does this demonstrate that wealth and environmental concerns are compatible, it also allows "follower-nations" to emulate such efforts cost effectively by picking proven technologies and avoiding technological dead-ends.
Just consider wind/solar in China: I would argue that the whole industry and growth rates only got to the current point so quickly is thanks to research, development and investment done in western nations in the decades prior.
Countries like Germany (<100M) had a huge effect on energy development in China (>1b people). If they had just kept using fossils until now, Chinese electricity might well be >90% coal power as well.
Geoengineering is a naive pipedream in my view because all proposals are either the height of recklessness and/or completely financial lunacy: CO2 capture for small individual emitters like cars is never gonna be even close to cost competitive with just reducing those emissions in the first place (but I'm always curious about any novel approaches).
As consummer we are responsible for the whole world emissions in the end. Changing those habbits, can impact things far beyond borders. But that's a political choice which goes against a constant growth based economy and it seems that not many people in our countries are ready to accept this. We want to buy and travel as much as we always did but bear no reponsibilities for the impact it has.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_China
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_the_United...
I have no idea however if they're just exporting this to other countries or if they're also pushing renewable energy domestically.
From what little I've read on this topic in recent years though they seem to realize that all of that smog is coming from somewhere and are taking meaningful action to remedy it, which is in stark contrast to what we're doing in the states these days with stifling clean energy and promoting coal.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/katharinabuchholz/2026/02/27/ch...
If you compare numbers, you will also find that lower per-capita consumption more than compensates for currently still higher CO2 intensity of chinese electricity (3000kWh/person * 0.5kgCo2/kWh for China vs 5500kWh/person * 0.35kgCo2/kWh, i.e. 1.5 vs 1.9 tons of Co2/year/person from electricity for China vs the US).
It isn't, because coal emits significantly more CO2 per unit electricity than natural gas, since it's pure carbon instead of a hydrocarbon, and therefore should be getting discontinued by everyone rather than installed by anyone.
The "it's a developing country" arguments seem like a dodge when the real reason is that they'd rather emit 80% more CO2 so they can burn coal instead of buying oil or building enough nuclear and renewables to not do either one.
> This also means those coal plants run at lower/decreasing utilization because a big part of their role is to provide dispatchability.
Those percentages are for power actually generated and already take into account capacity factor.
> you will also find that lower per-capita consumption more than compensates for currently still higher CO2 intensity of chinese electricity
What excuse is that for burning coal? Should Germany and the UK be justified in burning more coal too, since they have lower electricity consumption per capita than China?
Saying "China is >50% coal while the US is only 15%" misses half the picture, because the combined gas + coal percentage is actually almost the same, and the US only really gets to enjoy that cleaner gas in its energy mix because it has so much of it (while China has none).
Blaming China for using coal instead of gas just feels like blaming non-Norway countries for not using enough hydro power to me.
In my view, you only have a solid position to throw shade at China if your countries economical position is somewhat comparable (i.e. not rich as fuck) and you did manage to "resist" the temptation of big fossil reserves.
You could make an argument that Spain was a bit of a poster child in this regard in the 1990s, but even in that comparison they were much wealthier (both absolutely and comparatively to China now).
I could turn the argument around, and ask "why is the US still using >50% fossil fuels in its energy mix, despite being super rich"? What makes gas power acceptable and coal not? And the obvious answer is just that fossil fuels are a really attractive as dispatchable power. If the more-than-twice-as-rich US can not resist the temptation of gas power, why would you expect much poorer China to resist the twice-as-bad coal?
[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-worldbank-...
Except that coal emits almost twice as much CO2 as natural gas per unit of heat generated, and on top of that the majority of US natural gas plants are combined cycle (which converts more of the heat into electricity), because combined cycle is easy for gaseous fuels, whereas neither China nor anyone else is doing combined cycle for coal at scale because it requires turning the solid coal into a gas first.
> the US only really gets to enjoy that cleaner gas in its energy mix because it has so much of it (while China has none).
Oil and gas are an international commodity. It's not even like anyone has a monopoly on it -- if you don't like the US, buy it from Russia. If you don't like Russia, buy it from countries in the middle east.
On top of that, it's assuming that a modern grid even needs to be 60% fossil fuels. Meanwhile several other countries are demonstrating that it isn't at all necessary.
> Blaming China for using coal instead of gas just feels like blaming non-Norway countries for not using enough hydro power to me.
It's not physically possible to build large-scale hydro power in a place like Iraq or Singapore. China can't import a river from Norway. They could very easily import natural gas from any number of countries -- as many other countries do.
> What makes gas power acceptable and coal not? And the obvious answer is just that fossil fuels are a really attractive as dispatchable power.
Except that isn't the real answer. The real answer is that the US has a major oil industry lobbying to sustain its existence. Which is a bad reason, but nobody has figured out a great way to overcome it yet. However, that doesn't apply when you're only first building the infrastructure in the first place, because then you don't have incumbents trying to sustain a status quo that isn't yet established -- and then why would you pick the most terrible one to entrench?
Their new coal plants either replace older ones. Or they are left idle. Close to 90% of all their generation growth comes from solar and wind.
They use coal because they have coal. Just like the US uses natural gas and then pats itself on the back for "reducing emissions" by switching from coal to gas. But their current trajectory will see them going to burning very little coal. It's a national security issue for them.
In an ideal world I think they'd prefer to be powered by 100% clean energy but not at the cost of losing the AI race.
Clicking through to the source for that graph, we can see that consumption was 22.8TWh in 2014 and 25.6TWh in 2024, a pretty modest increase.
It's also somewhat easy to shift that viewpoint a little, too, right now: China's emissions numbers have started a rapid deceleration downward. They are doing more about their emissions faster than the US. Does the US want to lose to China that badly that we shouldn't even try to align US policy to more of the emissions reductions that China is already succeeding at today? (Much less their robust plans for future emissions reductions?)
In this case, there is no ceiling on global emissions. If one country reduces to zero there would absolutely be less emissions than if they hadn't. There's no incentive for China and India to pick up the slack and create more pollution just to cover what the US stopped making.
China now has 51% electric vehicles, they are switching the whole country to electric
USA won't do that for many decades
https://electrek.co/2025/08/29/electric-vehicles-reach-tippi...
Canada is now allowing Chinese cheap electric car imports which will be a fascinating experiment