It’s being hailed as “the biggest and most consequential climate story in the world right now,” by people in the know: after decades of soaring climate pollution, China may have cut carbon emissions last year.

Even more encouragingly, Chinese emissions have been “flat or falling” for almost two years. And carbon pollution appears to have dropped in 2025 even though the country used more energy overall and electricity demand kept growing. China’s gargantuan build-out of clean energy covered the increase and began eating into fossil fuels.

There are, of course, lots of caveats and cautions, and we’ll get into those. But it’s worth pausing on the point that the world’s largest source of climate pollution is no longer growing relentlessly. 

For so long, climate trolls have relied on whataboutery about China to deflect responsibility and the need for others to act. And it’s been a dismayingly effective tactic. China accounts for roughly one-third of the current global carbon spew all on its own, and its trajectory has shaped the global climate problem for the past two decades. On the metric that really matters — the amount of carbon pollution over time — China’s emissions are now causing more global warming than all of Europe’s long industrial history (though China is still far behind — and unlikely ever to surpass — the US).

It needs to be said that the latest estimates show last year’s drop in China was very modest. The analysis was conducted by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air for Carbon Brief and it concludes that emissions dropped one per cent in the final quarter of 2025 and less........

© National Observer