It's more impressive when you consider America increased coal usage enough that America was responsible for 300% of the global coal increase in CO2 for 2025
Actually you misunderstood or misrepresented the stats. Your link is a confusing paraphrasing of different sites with the actual data. If you follow the footnotes back you'll find out that the US building 2 coal plants, and temporarily reactivating 2 others. In contrast China is building many new coal plants, at the direction of the President Xi. US industry continues a 70 year trend of moving away from coal. Unlike China which continues to use coal as fast as they can dig it up or import it. The west leans toward using the least polluting fossil fuels, ex Natural Gas, China prefers to use to lower cost fossil fuels, which is coal.
"[2026 March 26] Despite being a renewables superpower, China continues to permit and build new coal-fired power plants at a rapid pace. Analysts say the nation’s new five-year plan will ensure further coal plant expansion and jeopardize China’s ability to deliver on its climate promises.
The 15th Five-Year Plan offered a chance to correct these negative trends and get China’s climate ambitions back on track, but it is an opportunity the government appears to have missed ... Instead, they changed the way they calculate energy intensity, perhaps to disguise the failure to meet Xi’s target, and set a looser ambition for the next five years. "
https://e360.yale.edu/features...
"[2026 Feb 10] Despite media and other reports that China is into “green energy,” the country is still using coal to power its economy, with about 80 to 100 gigawatts of coal-fired capacity added in 2025.
The Statistical Review of World Energy reports that coal accounted for 58% of China’s primary energy consumption in 2024, with fossil fuels accounting for a whopping 88%.
Coal also provided 58% of China’s electricity generation in 2024.
While a report by Ember indicates that populous developing countries like China and India “led the charge in adding more renewable energies” in the first half of 2025, their generation shares show that coal is still king in these countries, and their coal-fired capacity additions indicate that coal will continue to power their economies for the foreseeable future.
The Statistical Review of World Energy reports that coal accounted for 58% of China’s primary energy consumption in 2024. Oil was at 20% and natural gas at 10%. That means that 88% of China’s energy came from fossil fuels. Carbon-free energy (nuclear, hydroelectric, solar, wind, and most other renewables) only provided 12%. Since 2000, China has more than tripled its coal consumption and now uses more coal than the rest of the world’s combined usage, burning 56% of the world’s coal. As Doomberg points out, China consumes almost 20 times the combined consumption of coal by the 27 member states of the European Union, based on 2024 data.
"In 2024, China released 11,173 million metric tons of carbon dioxide — 31.5% of the world’s total. That was about 4.5 times as much as the European Union and almost 2.5 times the amount that the United States released.
China produced 57.8% of its electricity from coal and 33.7% from renewables and hydropower. It is unlikely that China has since switched those numbers so radically when it expanded the capacity of coal-fired plants more in the first half of 2025 than at any time in the past nine years, according to DW. It did so by adding between 80 and 100 gigawatts of new coal power to its grid in 2025, with 21 gigawatts of those gigawatts added in the first half of 2025
The reason that China and India will not divest themselves of coal is that they need affordable and reliable power for their industries and for their residents. With the advent of artificial intelligence data centers that are energy hungry, China will be relying on its vast coal-fired grid — larger than all the generating capacity in the United States — to lead the race. It also needs coal capacity to process the rare earth and other critical minerals that the world needs for “green” technologies."
https://www.instituteforenergy...
"In 2023, China was the biggest carbon polluter in the world by far, having released 11.9 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide (GtCO). Although the U.S. was the second-biggest emitter, with 4.9 GtCO in 2023, its CO emissions have declined by 13 percent since 2010. By comparison, China’s CO emissions have increased by more than 38 percent in the same period. ""
https://www.statista.com/stati...