China’s Coal, U.S. CO2 Stoke Global Warming
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Global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuels and industry totaled 38.11 billion metric tons (GtCO₂) in 2025, hitting a record high, versus 25.51 GtCO2 in 2000. Moreover, the rate of global warming more than doubled for the first time in human history, in only one decade. Scientists are stunned: The Rate of Global Warming has Accelerated More in the Past Decade Than Ever Before, LiveScience, d/d March 7, 2026. According to NASA, 97% of publishing scientists in the world agree that excessive CO2 emissions cause excessive global warming as well as aberrant climate change.
Following a surge in permitting and construction, more than 50 large coal-fired power plants were commissioned in China last year. Source: CREA / Global Energy Monitor. Yale Environment 360 /
China loves coal, but it still should be awarded a gold medal for renewable installations in 2025. No other country came close to installation of 300 gigawatts of solar and 100 gigawatts of wind power in 2025. These installations set a record. Paradoxically, China also wins a tarnished medal for biggest emitter of greenhouse gases at roughly 32% of the world total. If this seems contradictory, yes, it is. But it takes a lot of energy for 1.4B people. After all, the scorecard shows China consumed 40% more coal in 2025 than the rest of the world combined.
China also installed more solar and wind power in 2025 than the rest of the world combined. It is the first country to exceed 1,000 GW of solar capacity. China’s investments in clean energy exceed the combined efforts of the U.S., EU, and UK. Another 300 GW of wind and solar is currently under construction. China’s total clean energy investment in 2025 was $630B.
Still, “Xi Jinping’s promise to reduce China’s carbon intensity by 65 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030 is severely off track. Planners could have compensated with renewed ambition in the 15th Five-Year Plan. 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.” (Isabel Hilton, As It Boosts Renewables, China Still Can’t Break Its Coal Addiction, YaleEnvironment360, March 26, 2026)
US Emissions Turn Up
Meantime, United States greenhouse gas emissions increased for the first time in 24 months: The Rhodium Group’s preliminary 2025 U.S. greenhouse gas emissions analysis reports that after two years of declining emissions, the U.S. produced 2.4% more planet-warming CO2 pollution last year. More concerning was emissions growing faster than the economy, which expanded just 1.9%, reversing three years of successfully decoupling economic growth from carbon output.
Earth’s Tipsy Climate Losing Balance – Worst in History
Climate balance/imbalance is the key gauge of a healthy system. According to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO): “The Earth’s climate is more out of balance than at any time in observed history, as greenhouse gas concentrations drive continued warming of the atmosphere and ocean and melting of ice, These rapid and large-scale changes have occurred within a few decades but will have harmful repercussions for hundreds – and potentially thousands of years.” (Earth’s Climate Swings Increasingly Out of Balance, World Meteorological Organization, March 23, 2026)
Within the past 12 months, Dr. James Hansen (Earth Institute, Columbia) publicly stated: The pace of global heating has been significantly underestimated and the international “2C target is dead.” Buckle up.
US Loses $61 Billion In Clean Energy Projects in Only One Year
“A new report indicates that Trump administration policies led to billions of dollars in canceled investment and tens of thousands of lost jobs… industries also lost an estimated 48,000 potential jobs.” (Grist)
A more comprehensive report, according to Climate Power, nearly 173,000 clean energy jobs have been lost, put on the chopping block, or delayed since Trump took office. The job losses stem from 354 canceled or delayed projects, representing more than $61 billion in investments, which would have powered more than 14 million homes. Clean energy as a priority is gone for this administration, over cliff’s edge, in a tailspin.
Clearly, the United States is intentionally harming the world climate system by pushing fossil fuel use over renewable energy, but that’s only the most obvious of intentional abuses. The US has become public enemy number one of climate change with worldwide impact. For example, “The White House also terminated funding for the US Global Change Research Program, the federal body responsible for producing the nation’s most comprehensive climate reports on the impacts of rising global temperatures. It also shut down climate.gov, NOAA’s primary public-facing website for climate science, and axed NOAA’s Billion Dollar Weather and Climate Disaster dataset, which has provided vital information for first responders, the insurance industry, and researchers to plan recovery efforts and assess weather-related risks… The cuts extended to international climate efforts as well. In February, the administration pulled the US out of global discussions regarding an upcoming global climate change assessment carried out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). President Trump also ordered federal scientists at NOAA and the US Global Change Research Program to cease all work related to IPCC climate assessments, effectively ending US involvement in one of the world’s most critical climate evaluation efforts.” (for a comprehensive list of cuts: Earth.org)
The United States is knee-deep in a massive strategy of global disengagement, ‘isolationism’ pure and simple, America First, regardless of decades of building global interrelationships that have molded the world order. That world order is gone, in crash mode. Along the way, climate change mitigation is low-hanging fruit, easily ignored because of a soft constituency, making it doubly vulnerable with very little ‘pocket money’ payback and crushed by fossil fuel moneyed interests.
At the heart of the problem climate change is an extremely complex global issue that requires worldwide cooperation, the antithesis of isolationism.
Nobody wants to accept it, but a worst-case climate scenario may be taking center stage, flooded coastal cities and bone-dry farmlands as two potential scenarios for failure to acknowledge and mitigate climate change. There is nothing positive about the current direction of seemingly endless fossil fuel energy production. According to scientists, the atmosphere is very close to ‘full-up’ of CO2 emissions based upon guesstimates of limits to keep global temperatures under the dreaded 2C. Then, the whole climate system spins out of control in chaotic fashion.
Isolationism by the world’s leading economy in a complex world with a flagging climate system leads to big trouble for life-supporting ecosystems. But nobody wants to deal with it seriously enough, soon enough to make a big difference; only a couple of countries, out of 195 signatories, are tracking Paris 2015 commitments to cut CO2 emissions by 2030. This is disgustingly outrageous as these same 195 countries were in full agreement that the ‘shit would hit the fan’ unless they cut fossil fuel emissions by 2030 to hold global mean temperature to 1.5°C pre-industrial, which they’ve subsequently moved up to 2°C as 1.5°C looks to ‘be in the bag.’ Clearly, the climate system is outpacing any and all commitments to tame it, but it goes without saying, it’s acting a lot like a wild stallion.
Alas, it is only too obvious that climate change is not a high priority, even as it turns chaotic and destructive enough to crush homeowners’ insurance in some regions of America. Only a few years ago, nobody suggested climate change would end up crushing the property insurance market: How Climate Risks Are Putting Home Insurance Out of Reach, YaleEnviroment360, d/d Sept. 15. 2025.
“After years underestimating the risks posed by climate-fueled disasters, the U.S. home insurance industry is in turmoil. In vulnerable areas, rising insurance costs are upending housing markets and communities, as homeowners scramble to try to find insurance they can afford,” Ibid.
OMG- What happens to property insurance at 2C?
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