China’s Emissions Stay Flat, Extending Climate Winning Streak

Current conditions: New York City is set for its first snow of the season • More than a million Filipinos are under evacuation orders after Super Typhoon Fung-wong slammed into the archipelago as the equivalent of a Category 4 hurricane • Mexico just recorded its hottest November day, with temperatures of nearly 83 degrees Fahrenheit in the southern Pacific Coast town of Arriaga.

THE TOP FIVE

1. China’s emissions are flat for yet another quarter, continuing downward trend

Technicians from Yingli Solar inspect solar panels. Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

China’s carbon dioxide emissions stayed steady in the third quarter from a year earlier, extending a flat or falling trend that started in March 2024, according to an analysis published Tuesday by Carbon Brief. The report found that the rapid adoption of electric vehicles dropped emissions from transport fuel by 5% year over year. Vast arrays of solar panels and wind turbines and some of the world’s only new nuclear reactors left CO2 emissions in the power sector unchanged, even as demand for electricity grew in the last quarter by 6.1%, up from 3.7% in the first half of the year. Renewables did most of the work. Solar generation grew by 46%, while electricity from wind production increased 11% year over year. “If this pattern repeats, then China’s CO2 emissions will record a fall for the full year of 2025,” wrote Lauri Myllyvirta, the author and lead analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, a Finland-based but China-focused research nonprofit. “While an emission increase or decrease of 1% or less might not make a huge difference in an objective sense, it has heightened symbolic meaning, as China’s policymakers have left room for emissions to increase for several more years, leaving the timing of the peak open.”

The finding comes shortly after the Rhodium Group released its latest global warming trajectory and found that planetary heating would stay relatively steady worldwide, despite the Trump administration’s rollbacks. But the consultancy still forecast a range of potential temperature averages from 2 degrees Celsius to 3.9 degrees above pre-industrial normals. Avoiding the higher-end scenario, as Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo wrote, we need breakthroughs. “What are those breakthroughs? At this point, they aren’t a mystery. Cheaper clean firm power — like advanced nuclear, fusion, or geothermal — would be a huge help. Solutions for decarbonizing flying and shipping are also on the list. We also need to make it affordable to produce iron, steel, cement, and petrochemicals with far fewer emissions.”

A chart from the analysis showing change in emissions from energy sources. Carbon Brief

2. Groups sue over Trump’s blue-state clean energy cuts

An alliance of clean energy groups, along with the Minnesota city of St. Paul, filed a lawsuit Monday accusing the Trump administration of taking what The New York Times called “nakedly partisan funding cuts” during the government shutdown that “wiped out around $7.5 billion for projects in Democratic-led states.” The lawsuit, which named White House budget director Russell Vought as a main defendant, alleged that the administration targeted states the president lost in the last election with “intentional discrimination” and “bare animus.” When Vought announced plans to slash nearly $8 billion in climate-related projects he slammed as the “Green New Scam” in a post on X, the Office of Management and Budget chief listed 16 states, all represented by senators who vote with the Democrats. “Under bedrock equal protection principles, the government must have some legitimate state interest when it treats one group differently from a similarly situated group,” the coalition said in the suit

3. Qcells furloughs 1,000 workers as trade restrictions slow factory

Qcells has spent more than $2.5 billion to establish a solar panel supply chain in the United States. But the Seoul-based company still manufactures many of the cells that get assembled into panels in the U.S. in Malaysia or South Korea.

With new trade restrictions “routinely stalling” shipments of key components, as Reuters put it, the company has furloughed 1,000 workers at its Georgia factories as production slowed. In response, Qcells said it’s ramping up U.S. cell manufacturing at its new plant. “Qcells expects to resume full production in the coming weeks and months. Our commitment to building the entire solar supply chain in the United States remains,” Qcells spokesperson Marta Stoepker said in a statement. “We will soon be back on track with the full force of our Georgia team delivering American-made energy to communities around the country.” (If reading this made you want to review what actually goes into making a solar panel, my colleague Matthew Zeitlin had a great explainer in Heatmap’s Climate 101 series).

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4. The Energy Department pitches its Loan Programs Office as nuclear lender

The Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office formed the speartip of the Biden administration’s clean energy funding efforts, pumping billions to everything from building much-needed solar megafarms in Puerto Rico to restarting a shuttered nuclear reactor for the first time in U.S. history in Michigan. The Trump administration prefers the latter. Speaking at the American Nuclear Society’s winter conference Monday, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said he would focus the agency’s in-house lender almost entirely on atomic energy. “By far the biggest use of those dollars will be for nuclear power plants to get those first plants built,” Wright told the audience in Washington, D.C., according to Reuters. The Loan Programs Office would match “three to one, maybe even up to four to one” on equity deals with “low-cost debt dollars” from the agency.

Back in the spring, the Trump administration was widely expected to zero out the so-called LPO altogether as part of steep cuts led by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. But groups including the right-leaning Foundation for American Innovation campaigned to preserve the LPO, pitching the entity to the new administration on its potential to fund nuclear projects in particular.

5. The left is seizing on the data center opposition

Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont is leading a group of Democratic senators calling on the White House to answer for how soaring electric bills are helping to pay for the artificial intelligence boom driving what The Wall Street Journal called “one of the most expensive infrastructure build-outs in U.S. history.” The letter, directed to the White House and Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, said the president’s order to fast-track data centers forced Americans into “bidding wars with trillion-dollar companies to keep the lights on at home,” suggesting the tech giants behind such services as Facebook, ChatGPT, and Google were winning.

It’s a clear political lane. Silicon Valley’s captains of industry lurched rightward in the last election, embracing Trump in ways that alienated many Americans at a moment when social media is increasingly viewed as addictive and harmful. In what was supposed to be a close race, Democrat Mikie Sherrill trounced her Republican opponent in last week’s New Jersey gubernatorial election by campaigning on taking the state’s grid operator to task for recent rate spikes in what Matthew called the “electricity election.” And a Heatmap Pro poll in September found just 44% of Americans would welcome a data center nearby.

THE KICKER

It’s been a big year for green methanol — the chemical better known as wood alcohol — in China. In July, a Chinese cargo ship refueled with the stuff for the first time. In October, the Communist Party’s top agency in charge of macroeconomic planning listed green methanol among the new sectors eligible for subsidies from the central government. At the end of October, an offshore Chinese project successfully produced its first batch of the fuel. Where’s China looking next for green methanol fuel? Cow dung. Last week, a company in Inner Mongolia applied for green certification to start up what would be China’s first green methanol plant using cattle manure, according to analyst Jian Wu’s China Hydrogen Bulletin.