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Climate’s thousand pound gorilla in the room? China. Since 2016, China has been responsible for about 90% of global emissions growth. But as of 2025, China’ s emissions have started to fall. So why is no-one talking about it? Climate Curious’ Ben Hurst and Maryam Pasha spoke to Fix The News’ founder, solutions journalist and political economist, Angus Hervey to ask why this is a massive climate breakthrough, and question why the story that the world’s largest fossil fuel emitter in the world has decided to change its ways isn’t headline news.
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Created by TEDxLondon
Executive produced by Josie Colter
Produced by Ben Beheshty
Curated by Deesha Chandra
Hosted by Maryam Pasha and Ben Hurst
Communications by Tara Cooper and Issey Gladston
00:00 Introduction
00:46 China’s emissions: The big picture
02:25 China’s energy strategy shift
03:28 Renewables vs. coal in China
05:23 The scale of China’s renewable efforts
06:21 Complexities of China’s climate role
08:41 Global implications
09:36 Conclusion
Introduction
[00:00:00] Ben Hurst: Welcome to Climate Quickies, bite-sized nuggets of climate Goodness from our TEDx London experts in under 10 minutes in this week’s climate, curious, we are asking now that China’s global emissions growth [00:00:15] has started to fall. Why is no one celebrating? To help us unpick this huge climate story, we have the founder of Fix the News Solutions journalist Angus Hery.
[00:00:26] Ben Hurst: He reveals why the world’s largest fossil fuel emitter has [00:00:30] decided to change its ways and gives some pointers as to why this isn’t front page news. On the untold story of the world’s biggest emit, I turn in a huge corner. Here’s Angus Heavy stay curious.[00:00:45]
China’s emissions: the big picture
[00:00:46] Angus Hervey: One thing begins with a sea. It is China, which is the thousand pound gorilla in the room. Hands down, the biggest story of 2025, and let me try and explain to you why it’s such an important story. [00:01:00] Since pa, since Paris in 2016, China has been responsible for about 90% of global emissions growth. 90%. So if you stripped China out, the rest of the world’s emissions over the last decade [00:01:15] have essentially flatlined, which is amazing.
[00:01:18] Angus Hervey: It means that all of the activism and Greta and the battles and the protests and all of the shouting, it kind of worked. We stopped emissions from going up. It [00:01:30] worked everywhere except for China because while we were all arguing and shouting and, and, and getting angry with the people, you know, with the fossil fuel interests, China added the equivalent of five Germanys to the global emissions ledger.[00:01:45]
[00:01:46] Angus Hervey: So, and, and China didn’t care what Greta Thunberg was saying. China didn’t care about which banks were signing up to net zero pledges and which ones weren’t. None of that would’ve made any difference to what China did [00:02:00] over that decade. So China was kind of the why.
[00:02:03] Ben Hurst: Sorry, why not? What, what’s going on with China?
[00:02:09] Ben Hurst: I, I feel like this, I feel like this is like something that maybe I, people are supposed to understand, but [00:02:15] I don’t understand. I dunno. What, what is so different about China compared to everyone else? Maybe that’s a bad question. I don’t know, but just out of interest, we can cut it out.
China’s energy strategy shift
[00:02:25] Angus Hervey: The Chin, the Chinese Communist Party has a completely different set of [00:02:30] incentives and motivations and stresses on it.
[00:02:33] Angus Hervey: Um, and what is happening in the West is largely irrelevant, certainly with regards to energy. Um, in terms of what China is planning to do, uh, China’s main [00:02:45] priority is to create energy security and energy, energy abundance. And over the last decade, China decided that the way to do that was to build a bucket load of coal plants, uh, and, and get them running around the clock.
[00:02:59] Angus Hervey: But at the same [00:03:00] time, China was also taking a bet on renewables. And what happened is that this is the last year is the year that it flipped. China’s emissions have now been flat or falling for 18 months. It looks very, very likely we’re still waiting for the final data, but unless something [00:03:15] really dramatic happens, China’s emissions are going to decline over the full year for 2025.
[00:03:20] Angus Hervey: And that’s not because China’s economy tanked, but because as we talked about earlier, the structure of their energy system has started to fundamentally change globally. Right. Okay.
Renewables vs. coal in China
[00:03:28] Angus Hervey: Coal dropped from 59% of their electricity to 53% in just two years. And remember, this is the country that accounts for the a third of all carbon emissions in the first half of 2025.
[00:03:40] Angus Hervey: Their fossil demand in power generation fell by 2%. That, that’s [00:03:45] staggering. And that should have been the main story in climate everywhere, but of course it wasn’t.
[00:03:50] Ben Hurst: Okay. And, and, uh, are the Chinese coal plants in China. Sorry, again, maybe a stupid question, but in my mind I’m [00:04:00] trying to, I’m trying to picture what is this, uh uh, do they have coal plants in Germany or like in other places around the world?
[00:04:06] Ben Hurst: Or is it all just based in China? China’s doing stuff in China. Yeah.
[00:04:10] Angus Hervey: Look, the majority, the majority, there’s only two countries in the world that are still building coal plants. That is, [00:04:15] those countries are China and India. Nowhere else is building coal plants. Everywhere else is shutting coal plants down.
[00:04:21] Angus Hervey: Um, China does have some coal plants that it’s tried to invest in o overseas, in places, uh, certainly in Asia. [00:04:30] Um, but increasingly the, the, the less so, um, more importantly, the coal plants that China is building. China built a record amount of coal plants in 2025, but it’s just not switching those coal plants on as much, um, because increasingly.
[00:04:43] Angus Hervey: Wind and solar are [00:04:45] starting to eat into coal plant share because they provide cheaper electricity.
[00:04:49] Ben Hurst: Okay. So they’ve, they’ve decided now that their best bet is renewables because of the stuff you were talking about in the last narrative change point around Yeah. The geo, geo is [00:05:00] it geopolitical movement of.
[00:05:03] Ben Hurst: The industry around energy,
[00:05:05] Angus Hervey: I think, I think a better word is just security. Security, um,
[00:05:08] Ben Hurst: right.
[00:05:09] Angus Hervey: Yeah. China, China doesn’t want to be importing coal, producing coal, and it doesn’t wanna be importing oil [00:05:15] and be reliant on other countries. It wants to be, it wants to have its own, be responsible for its own energy.
[00:05:21] Angus Hervey: Uh, and I also just wanna kind of give a bit of context here.
The scale of China’s renewable efforts
[00:05:23] Angus Hervey: China added 330 gigawatts of solar and wind in 2025. Th that is, what is that? A lot that, that sounds like a lot. That is insane. I’ll give you, I’ll give you, that’s a lot. It’s a lot. I’ll tell you. Let me, let me try and explain it. In May, in one month, in 2025, China installed 92 gigawatts of solar, which is 230 million solar panels in a single month, which is the same amount that Germany has installed basically in its entire history.
[00:05:51] Angus Hervey: And China did that in one month in May.
[00:05:55] Maryam Pasha: I think maybe sometimes the thing that is hard for us to wrap our [00:06:00] mind around, um, when it comes to two things, I think when it comes to China that are difficult to wrap our mind around. One is the sheer scale Yeah. Of what we’re talking about. It’s just so much bigger than any [00:06:15] reference point we have.
[00:06:16] Maryam Pasha: Um, and I think the other thing is just.
Complexities of China’s climate role
[00:06:21] Maryam Pasha: The, at least for me is that you, you, and it’s probably a very western perspective because you feel complicated towards China, and so, you know when, then when you asked that question earlier, I was just like, well, because China’s a dictatorship. You know, in my mind, like that’s the easy answer, but it’s good and bad.
[00:06:44] Maryam Pasha: Obviously not,
[00:06:44] Ben Hurst: right? [00:06:45] Yeah. It’s like
[00:06:45] Maryam Pasha: it’s not that easy. Yeah. It’s not that simple because like. At this point, I would say that like democracy is not that cut and dry anywhere. Yeah, right.
[00:06:56] Ben Hurst: Good point. I,
[00:06:56] Maryam Pasha: um,
[00:06:58] Angus Hervey: I, I don’t think, I don’t think
[00:06:59] Maryam Pasha: can, but maybe that nothing, [00:07:00] nothing to do with it. Maybe that when it comes to this part of the conversation,
[00:07:03] Angus Hervey: I think we can chew government walk at the same time.
[00:07:06] Angus Hervey: I think it’s possible on the one hand to say that dictatorship is, is an abhorrent form of government and certainly not something that we want. And I think it’s also okay to [00:07:15] say that the world’s biggest dictatorship is also the one that is kind of saving us right now when it comes to climate change.
[00:07:22] Angus Hervey: That’s quite a difficult thing to hold in your head, but it’s not impossible.
[00:07:25] Maryam Pasha: Yes. I agree. I think that is what people struggle [00:07:30] with. I think that’s certainly what I’ve struggled with is this kind of, this trying to hold two things that feel contradictory, different, difficult, um, uh, but at the same time, this is a better outcome.
[00:07:43] Maryam Pasha: Like it’s better that the world’s [00:07:45] largest dictatorship is trying, is peaking its emissions and turning towards, um, uh, renewables rather than doubling down on, uh. Yeah.
[00:07:56] Angus Hervey: Oh yeah.
[00:07:58] Maryam Pasha: Or, well, fossil.
[00:07:58] Angus Hervey: I, I, I think that you’re [00:08:00] onto something there. I, I think that you say, look, what world would we want? And I, and I’d say I would want the world where the largest fossil fuel emitter in the world, the one that’s been responsible for all of the fossil fuel emissions growth over the last decade, well, almost all of it.[00:08:15]
[00:08:15] Angus Hervey: I, I’d wanna be in the world where that that player has decided to change its ways. Um, I’d rather that player, which. Accounts for one third of global emissions decide to change its ways. Then the United States be, you know, the, some [00:08:30] green savior because the United States is only 10% of global carbon emissions.
[00:08:34] Angus Hervey: And so if you had to choose between which one of those is the bad guys, uh, I, I’d choose the United States to be the bad guy.
Global implications
[00:08:41] Ben Hurst: And interesting when you talk about narrative change, right? It’s like what [00:08:45] narratives do you actually want to change? And the practicalities of those changes happening, I guess, can be difficult for people for us to grapple with in our minds.
[00:08:55] Ben Hurst: Um, but also like on a, in a prac, on a practical level, like it’s [00:09:00] fundamentally important. Like we are actually all in it to give us. So it is, I think so everybody has to be part of the change, otherwise it doesn’t work right.
[00:09:07] Angus Hervey: I think that’s right. And I also think, you know, the atmosphere doesn’t care where the carbon comes from, right?
[00:09:11] Angus Hervey: It doesn’t care whether the carbon comes from a Chinese coal plant or an [00:09:15] American coal plant or a, or a British gas turbine. You know, it, it’s, it’s all the same as far as the environment as, as far as the atmosphere is concerned. And I think, and I think, you know, the fact that China, the biggest player.
[00:09:29] Angus Hervey: It’s [00:09:30] starting to reduce its emission that that’s the story of 2025, not not the United
[00:09:35] Ben Hurst: States.
Conclusion
[00:09:36] Ben Hurst: Thanks for listening to this quickie.
[00:09:38] Maryam Pasha: This episode was created by our superstar podcast team at TEDxLondon. Until next time,
[00:09:43] Ben Hurst: stay [00:09:45] curious.
