This story is part of a selection of our top news from 2025 that we’re republishing during the holiday break. We’ll be back to our regular schedule in the new year.

Previously posted: August 13, 2025

The United States’ carbon emissions increased while China’s declined in the first half of this year compared to the same period in 2024, pointing to a massive shift in roles between the world’s two biggest climate polluters if the trend continues.

Between January 1 and June 30 this year, U.S. emissions rose 4.2% while China’s fell 2.7%, reports Carbon Monitor, a global emissions tracker led by Tsinghua University, France’s Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences, the University of California, Irvine, and China’s Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Institute.

In China, emissions were down 1.4% across the power sector and industry, and held statistically even across all other economic sectors. The United States was one of just three countries, along with Japan and Brazil, that saw emissions rise across their entire economies—including increases of 2% in ground transport and 1.3% in the power sector.

Across all the individual countries in the Carbon Monitor database, Spain recorded the highest emissions increase, at 6%, followed by Brazil at 5.6%, Germany at 5.2%, the European Union plus the United Kingdom at 4.6%, and the U.S. at 4.2%.

Between the world’s two leading emitters, the data show “a reversal of the usual trend over the past decade, when global heat-trapping emissions inched higher in large part because U.S. reductions have been offset by higher CO2 output from China,” Politico writes. “It also comes after decades of American politicians of both parties complaining about China failing to clean up its act.”

The numbers could still be shifted by factors like weather, short-term economic trends, and natural gas prices, Politico writes. “But there are also signs of structural changes in the global economy.” International Energy Agency (IEA) figures show Chinese coal consumption falling 2.6% in the first half of the year, largely due to a boom in solar that saw the country add 92 gigawatts of capacity—that’s 92 billion watts—in a single month in May, compared to all-time U.S. installations of 134 GW.

That reflects a fundamental shift in the way China consumes energy, climate scientist Glen Peters of the Oslo-based Center for International Climate Research (CICERO) told Politico, though it’s still early to declare a permanent change. “Even if Chinese emissions decline this year, I would not start saying they have peaked,” he said. “I would want to see emissions trending down for a few years.”

But U.S. per capita emissions are still well above China’s, according to the latest IEA data. And with Donald Trump moving on all fronts to increase fossil fuel production and revoke renewable energy incentives and confirmed contracts, Stanford University earth systems scientist Rob Jackson said the broader trends are clear—even if it’s too soon to say where the 2025 data will land.

“It’s fair to say that China and the U.S. are on different trajectories now,” he told Politico, with clean technology adoption likely to drive down emissions over the next five years. The U.S., by contrast, is “heading in the opposite direction.”