But Trump says Americans need to put coal first
This isn't China. The US President cannot command industry to use coal, as Xi Jinping and the CCP do in China. US industry has been moving away from coal for about 70 years.
You can misrepresent the stats by only looking at coal for electrical power generation, rather than total coal use.
You can misrepresent the stats by citing 2 anomalies of new coal plants, while China is building many new coal plants.
The fact remains the US long trend is moving away from coal, the Chinese long term and ongoing trend is to burn as much coal as they can dig up and import.
The stats speak for themselves. 4.83 billion tons of coal burned for China and 0.42 for the USA. CO2 emissions for China up 38% over a 12 year period, down 13%.
"[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.
In 2021, China’s leader Xi Jinping made two important promises intended to signal China‘s commitment to fighting climate change. At the Leaders Climate Summit in that April, he announced that China would “strictly control” coal generation until 2025 when it would start to gradually phase it out. He also pledged that year that China would reduce the energy intensity of its economy — the amount of CO2 used to produce a unit of GDP — to 65 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.
This month, as China unveiled its plans for the next five years, both promises appeared to be in trouble.
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...
"[2025 August 21] Coal-power capacity could surge by as much as 80-100GW this year, potentially setting a new annual record, even as coal-fired electricity generation declines."
"A former senior official at one of China’s largest power firms stated in an interview in June 2025 that companies are building coal power capacity due to central government pressure."
"The use of coal to make synthetic fuels and chemicals is growing rapidly, climbing 20% in the first half of the year and helping add 3% to China’s CO2 since 2020. The coal-chemical industry is planning further expansion, which could add another 2% to China’s CO2 by 2029, making the 2030 deadline for peaking harder to meet."
"Excess coal-based capacity and a lack of incentives for shifting production mean that electric arc steelmakers, rather than coal-based steel mills, tend to absorb reductions in output, as their operating costs are higher and costs of shutting down and starting up production lines are lower."
"Even if its emissions fall in 2025 as expected, however, China is bound to miss multiple important climate targets this year. This includes targets to reduce its carbon intensity – the emissions per unit of GDP – to strictly control coal consumption growth and new coal-power capacity,"
https://www.carbonbrief.org/an...
"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...
