Image by Alexander Mils.
Typically, I kick this column off with troubling news, but let’s begin with a positive for a change.
Australia’s solar is booming. A total of 40% of residential homes are equipped with rooftop solar, by far the highest rate in the world. Rooftop generation is the way to go, and accounts for 14% of the country’s total electricity generation. That’s obviously a very good thing, made possible by federal rebate programs and local incentives.
The US could learn a lot from how Australia has pulled it off. California was on a similar track with its rooftop solar, but as I interrogate in Bad Energy, Gov. Gavin Newsom, at the behest of the big utilities and corporate donors, gutted the state’s program.
While Australia’s solar bonanza is welcome news and is changing the way the country produces electricity, it’s not the whole story.
Australia remains the world’s largest coal exporter, shipping 70% of its coal to Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and India. It’s also the third-largest liquefied natural gas (LNG) exporter, with 80% of its LNG shipped to Asian markets. Its solar boom doesn’t offset its massive contributions to climate change. 
When we talk about ending our use of fossil fuels, as Australia appears to be doing, at least on the surface, we are forced to reckon with the hard truth: Australia’s vast resources continue to power global capitalism, at the expense of the environment. Its rooftop solar surge may be helping, but not by much. The country remains a major consumer of fossil fuels. Its coal power emissions are the highest in the “developed world.”
Australia is ranked 13th globally in per capita emissions.
It’s the 14th-largest emitter overall and the 2nd-largest, only behind Russia, in fossil fuel exports.
So when we cheer on Australia’s growth in solar (as Bill McKibben did on Ezra Klein’s podcast last week), let’s get serious. There’s a hell of a lot of work to be done, and solar alone ain’t gonna fix the underlying problem. As long as economies and markets keep expanding, energy use will too, and it will remain dominated by fossil fuels.
It’s much the same story in China, where large solar installations (unlike the small-scale, rooftop installations in Australia) appear to be keeping pace with the country’s growing energy usage. It’s been hailed as the most rapid solar expansion in history, but signs indicate it’s now slowing. Like Australia, China’s gleaming solar push masks a darker reality: the country is still burning record amounts of fossil fuels.
Let me explain what’s going on here.
Per capita, the US leads China in greenhouse gas emissions. Americans use more fossil fuel than the average Chinese citizen. The US and Europe have also historically been the largest climate criminals. Indeed, it’s easy and necessary to blame these economies for their outsized role in carbon pollution, and criticizing China isn’t meant to placate the West. That said, despite its rollout of green energy, China is the single largest climate polluter, by a wide margin, accounting for an overwhelming 30% of the world’s total emissions, even with its record gains in renewables.
It’s true that China’s energy use growth last year was supported by the addition of new renewable capacity. This was part of the story, at least, but the other part, rarely mentioned in news about China’s large gains in solar, was that the country also experienced a sharp downturn in construction. As a result, cement production fell by almost 1.69 billion tons, or 7%. It was the lowest level of cement production since 2010. This contributed to a decrease in industrial emissions, which helped offset a slight (0.1%) increase in fossil fuel consumption. Emissions dropped by 0.3% in 2025.
That’s nothing to write home about, and there’s no guarantee it will continue. Overall in 2025, while China’s power sector’s total emissions decreased, national fossil fuel emissions actually grew, thanks in large part to the country’s massive chemical and plastics industry.
I know. It’s crazy to think that cement production is warming the planet, but it’s true. China produces more than half of the world’s supply, which alone accounts for 3-4% of global emissions.
In the first quarter of 2026, China’s emissions grew by 2%, largely due to wasted wind and solar energy. That said, even if China has made alleged gains in fossil fuel emissions, it’s still far from certain whether the country’s economy can continue to grow (at a rate of 4%) and also meet the meager goals set out by the Paris Climate Agreement. Its renewables are keeping up with growth (at least last year), but they aren’t replacing existing fossil fuels in any meaningful way.
As far as the climate is concerned, China is not moving quickly in the right direction and will remain the world’s top emitter of fossil fuel pollution for the foreseeable future. The next-biggest climate polluter, the US, accounts for 11% of total emissions, and India for 8%. And mind you, even if China’s carbon emissions plateau, the climate will still continue to heat up. Much of the carbon that isn’t reabsorbed by plants and soil (over a 50-year period) will remain in the atmosphere for millennia.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but all the hope placed in Australia and China’s renewable growth comes with caveats that don’t bode well for the future of our burning planet.
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Speaking of burning. Many of you are likely clouded in smoke from fires blazing across Canada, upending your weekend. 800 fires are raging. The flames in Northwest Ontario have completely destroyed the entire Namaygoosisagagun First Nation community. The whole town burned to the ground in under an hour. The scenes are absolutely horrifying.
Worried about water in the Mojave Desert? A new groundwater pipeline has been approved, though it may ‘drain the desert.’ And, in other catastrophic news, as Eric Molver reports for us this week, the Trump administration is attempting to erase the National Monuments in Utah. It’s as disgusting as it is predictable. The Trump regime’s antipathy toward planetary health is palpable.
Stay safe out there, and I’ll see ya next week. Oh, and take a few minutes to order a copy of Bad Energy if you can spare the cash (it only takes 30 seconds to set up an account). More on that below.
