What's interesting in the numbers is that despite the relative political philosophy and fanfare, on a % basis.. the US reduced emissions about the same as the EU and both reduced them more than China.
US energy use is ~2x higher per person though than Europe or China, giving much more room for reductions.
So you'd expect emission changes in China to require the most "effort" (difficult to cut emissions while energy demand/use grows), followed by Europe (where energy use is already down to current chinese levels and demand/use is decreasing), while making progress in the US is by far the easiest since you very high baseline makes it much easier to cut/reduce.
This tracks with political reality I feel.
Energy use: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-mix?tab=line&count...
CO2/capita (basically the same): https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-per-capit...
For specific countries like Switzerland this makes a big difference (times 3!), but for the US and even China this matters surprisingly little.
Here's the unadjusted numbers: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?c...
And yet we end up basically neck-and-neck with the EU that is almost religious about all things green.
So that to me is surprising and brings into question how much government policy matters vs relative global market costs.
But its important to keep in mind that only the relative change stayed similar. US is worse than EU/China by a factor of 2 (in emissions/capita); under a "good" government, I'd hope for that factor to actually decrease instead of just staying the same.
Trump2 already effected climate-negative outcomes; among other things, DOGE cut/cancelled some big projects for "green concrete" which is a significant emission source.
But policy decisions like this can take a long time until they are visible in emission curves. You could argue that only in the last years we've started reaping the investments from German (and to a lesser degree Japanese) government investments into solar power back in the early 2000's, and the whole solar boom might have only come half a decade later without those (so calling it a triumph of market forces over policy might be highly reductive).
US emissions per capita are somewhere around the average of OPEC countries for example.
I can't quite find this dataset but would be interesting to compare say rich EU country households making > 100K EUR to a similar US cohort what that would look like.
Norway cheats with overabundant hydro though, and population density is admittedly higher.
I think comparing income cohorts would be very difficult because you just don't have the data to accurately assign emissions (e.g. just consider emissions from roadworks/public infrastructure: How to even split those?)
Median income (living cost adjusted): https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/median-income-after-tax-l...
Per capita emissions: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-per-capit...
It's like saying "I beat Tom Brady / Kobe / Ronaldo / etc. in their training commitment, because I increased traininig time by 1000% since starting to go running after only sitting on a sofa all day, but they essentially stayed at the same level. Losers."
Points out US headline CO2 emissions down from energy generation using several proxies (looks like no real territorial measurements). That on paper, US less coal more nat gas = less CO2 (spreadsheet true), but in reality US natgas leaks / fugitive methane emissions like magnitude worse than coal.
Broadly also reinforces that US... the worlds largest fossil producer/exporter in last 10 years... somehow should not be penalized for any of the extraction which gets shifted to consumers. Meanwhile PRC.... the worlds largest renewable producer/exporter, somehow should be penalized for making goods that averts emissions, while averted emission credits to consumers. Because world of difference between extracting raw inputs vs raw energy, processing, then packaging inside a carboard box vs a metal barrel.
This basically accounting outcome of fossil lobby fighting over geopolitical / territorial accounting standards (scope 1-4 emissions) 20 years ago which shapes science and reporting downstream. Alternative framing of Gt of emissions per year.
Current account standards
US: 5Gt, PRC: 13Gt
Adjust for fossil trade
US+2: 7Gt, PRC-3: 10Gt
Adjust for renewable displacement
US+0: 7Gt, PRC-15: -5Gt (net negative)
EVERY YEAR, PRC produces ~500GW of solar, whose 30 year operational life will displace 40 billion barrels of oil equivalent, i.e. 100m+ barrels per day, more than annual global oil consumption. Philosophically, and in practice, every year PRC is printing enough solar to avert an entire years of oil from being used in future, which functionally makes PRC emission negative in terms of emission + avoiding emission. But under current standards they're just polluting with solar overcapacity.
Just to add: "30 year operational life" doesn't mean the panels will break after 30 years. All signs point to solar panels producing power indefinitely, with efficiency lowering to ~70-80%.
That sounds interesting. But is it true? What and where is the evidence?
Then its simple napkin math, 550gw solar, 30 year life span, 17% capacity factor = 820 Twh/yr in primary energy equivalent (substitution method 1 unit of solar = 3 unit of oil @ 35% work efficiency). Or about 4 million barrel per day worth, over 30 years... 44 billion barrels over life time, about 1.2 years of total global oil consumption. Translate that to emissions averted... 44 barrel billion oil is ~15Gt of emissions, the equivalent carbon biomass sink to absorb that much emissions is 500,000 sqkm of Amazon, i.e 7% of Amazon rain forest.
Frame it in flow instead of stock terms, PRC solar generates 4mbd of oil equivalent per day, 1.4b per year, 0.6Gt co2, which would take equivalent of 1,200,000 sqkm (25%) of Amazon at annual absorption rate.
This all basic downstream math if you accept approximate consensus on PRC solar production. If nothing changes, PRC on trend to do this every year. PRC has solar capacity to do 2x this. Again, just solar, not other renewables. Unless numbers off by magnitudes, there isn't any interpretation where PRC renewable is not single handily the greatest emission AVERTING force - it does not reduce emissions but it prevents more emissions than world capable of reducing. Global energy demand is only going to increase, west tightening belts to drop fossil from 100% to 80% is rounding error vs PRC preventing fossil from 100% to 200%.
If you don't trust those (which is somewhat fair these days, given how easy it's become to generate fake imagery), you can always go there and see them for yourself. Or, since they're visible from space, launch a satellite to take your own photos.
I never said I did not believe, did not trust.
I just want a source
Too much to ask I guess...
The source I have handily available is [1], which shows an increase of 38 TWh generated from solar in June from 2024 to 2025 and 30 TWh from 2025 to 2026. That's a mean of 52 GW and 41.7 GW respectively, which (at a capacity factor of 0.17, apparently around the average in China) is about 307 and 245 GW of installed capacity -- which roughly agrees with the original claim.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-mix?time=2025...
For example, there's been a massive drop in overall poverty in China over the past two or three decades [1]. Two decades ago they had tens of millions of people that didn't even have access to electricity [2], and half a billion people without access to clean cooking fuels [3]. They've had a 3.4x increase in car ownership [4] in the same period that the US had a 1.2x increase [5], a significant and growing share of which are electric [6] compared to the small and not growing share in the US.
On the energy generation side, China has built 5x as much low-carbon generation the US has over the past decade [7] despite the latter's economy being 50% bigger, and their CO2 per kWh is dropping faster [8] (especially over the past two years...).
It looks to me that the bulk of the US's emission reduction has come from switching from coal to gas, which is happening purely due to their relative costs. I guess it is a real reduction in emissions, but it's not decarbonizing. What happens when they run out of coal plants to convert? I feel like the US has just got lucky with timing and the cost of coal vs gas, whereas China has got unlucky with the timing of their standard of living improvements.
The top level "x% change in emissions" figure is too simple to capture any of this detail. I think it's mostly a coincidence that the figure is about the same for the three groups at the moment -- at some point China will finish raising its standard of living to western levels everywhere and, if nothing else changes, their emissions will start heading downwards faster then everyone else's. People will probably be surprised but the indications are that it's already happening, it's just being hidden for now.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/poverty-explorer?countr... [2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-the-population-w... [3] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/access-to-clean-fuels-and... [4] https://www.statista.com/statistics/285306/number-of-car-own... [5] https://www.statista.com/statistics/183505/number-of-vehicle... [6] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electric-car-sales-share?... [7] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-mix?tab=line&... [8] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-mix?tab=line&...
(As for the EU, I didn't really look at many of their stats. My general feel is that they've spent a reasonable amount of effort, but a lot of it has been on efficiency improvements -- which are welcome, and they benefit everybody which means that some of their effort unfairly shows up under other people's figures, but which might actually have been counter-productive [9] without the associated actual decarbonization of electricity generation.)