The US still leads the world in historical climate harm

March 19, 2025 by Ketan Joshi In Uncategorized 17 Comments

According to Bloomberg journalist Javier Blas , Judson Kroh, President of Robindale Energy Svc (a coal mining and waste coal reclamation company) claimed that China will “probably” burn more coal from 2020 to 2030 than the US has burned in its entire history:

It is tough to resist actually fact checking a soundbite like this. Blas’ post on right-wing American state-controlled social site X has been seen hundreds of thousands of times, and I originally saw it repeated on LinkedIn.

First: How much coal has the US burned? The government Energy Information Administration has a historical chart, from 1850 to 2009. With some trickery, I extracted the data (and to check it, compared it to the Energy Information’s Statistical Review of World Energy (from 1965 to 2023)):

From 1850 to 2023, the US burned through 1,979 exajoules of coal. You can probably guess adding China to this graphic from the 1965-onwards EI-SRWE source shows a stark difference from the early 2000s:

When I first looked at this chart, I did feel that Blas’ anecdote was probably at least close to correct. That is a lot of space under China’s curve already, and US coal consumption has never been quite as high. But hey, let’s look at the numbers.

First up: let’s superimpose the International Energy Agency (IEA) ‘s 2024 World Energy Outlook scenarios for coal in China:

From 2020 to the end of 2023 (four years) China consumed 352 exajoules of coal (about 87 a year). In the IEA’s STEPs scenario (no new policies), China’s coal consumption only drops slightly. In the Announced Pledges scenario, if China follows its climate goals, coal drops about 10 exajoules, to 80/yr in 2030.

To reach the US historical total of 1,979, it’ll have to consume another 1,627 in six short years, to the end of 2029. So that’s………about 271 exajoules of coal consumption a year.

For Blas’ anecdote to be true, China would have to increase its coal consumption by about three times for the rest of the decade.

We climate activists get cajoled and finger-wagged for being too ‘hopeful’ that the world could free itself of self-destructive fossil fuel reliance, but a fossil fuel executive issuing a set of absurd numbers like this doesn’t seem to draw much critique at all. In the form of an amusing chart:

Being as generous to our US coal mining executive friends as possible, how many years in addition to this decade would you need to add up China’s emissions, to match the US’ total historical consumption? Using the IEA’s STEPs scenario, you have to go backwards from 2030 all the way to 2005 to exceed the US’ total historical emissions: 25 years.

“China will burn through more coal this decade, and also the previous decade, and then another five more years as well, than the US did in its entire history”. It doesn’t really have the same pithy impact, does it?

Blas himself does a loose ‘fact check‘ after having posted the original claim, concedes that it’s closer to double the coal exec’s time claim, and then dismisses the specifics, claiming that “what matters is that the size of the Chinese coal burn vs total US history is absolutely monstrous. It is the elephant in the room that few are discussing”.

Our pollution is fine because someone else also pollutes

I would argue that what matters is that the fossil fuel industry in America is leaning on an old, worn trope it uses to rhetorically exonerate itself for having a shocking track record on climate. The goal is to instil a sort of bad-faith geopolitical fatalism: “why bother limiting our fossil fuels when China’s going crazy with theirs??”.

It is pretty weird to claim that ‘few are discussing’ this – it’s been a hit song on the albums put out by deniers, delayers, luke-warmists and Very Serious Centrists for a long, long time. “What about China” has been one of the single most prominent tropes of bad-faith climate engagement for decades, now.

China’s coal use is high largely because it is a populous country with a lot of heavy industry, but it has also become an energy intensive country in recent decades. They are more reliant on coal than the US, in absolute terms and per-capita:

However, the US is about twice as emissions intensive than China, relative to population:

It makes most sense to view this in terms of cumulative emissions over time, which is ultimately the number that causes the planet to heat (think of the atmosphere as a bucket into which these emissions flow each year). The US has added more to the ‘bucket’ than any other country: followed closely by the EU27 group, to which China has just caught up:

For all the greenhouse gases currently sitting in the atmosphere, the United States is responsible for a fifth. All the climate impacts we see – the fires, the heatwaves, the floods – a fifth of that is American.

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China still ratchets up emissions each year, due to rapid demand growth. The latest update from Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) shows that “while the power mix is getting cleaner, power generation from fossil fuels has continued to increase. This makes it clear that to reach peak emissions in the power sector, clean energy deployment must accelerate and outstrip the growth in demand”. Chinese coal is sticky.

China has also become the world’s clean industrial forge: a dominant force in producing wind turbines, solar panels, batteries used in small and big EVs, and the processing of various minerals and resources for many other energy transformation activities. The deployment of wind and solar in the country’s power grid has had a measurable impact on emissions: taking the edge off the rapid growth of the 2000s and hopefully soon bringing about an actual drop.

Remarkably, China has begun in the past few years creeping closer to having a higher share of non-fossil generation than the US, in its power systems:

Meanwhile, America’s new government is considering restarting shuttered coal plants. Even during the Biden years, the country’s progress on emissions has stalled, due to rising power demand and continued fossil gas combustion. Unsurprisingly the Trump administration is going to gut regulations and climate policies. Trump posted this a few days ago:

The blame game is a little silly, at this point. American fossil fuel executives are manufacturing new versions of ancient talking points that use blame-shifting to draw focus away from their own agency and influence over the Earth’s climate system. That is an influence that hasn’t yet been matched another nation, and possibly may never be.