China for First Time Promises to Reduce Its Greenhouse Gas Emissions
President Xi Jinping told a U.N. climate summit that China will reduce emissions across its economy, expand renewables sixfold and make electric cars “mainstream.”
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Installing solar panels in Jiangsu Province, China, in May.Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
By Somini Sengupta
Sept. 24, 2025 Updated 4:32 p.m. ET
For the first time, China has announced a detailed target for reducing the greenhouse gas emissions from its immense economy, saying on Wednesday that it would cut carbon dioxide and other pollution by at least 7 to 10 percent by 2035.
The plan was detailed by President Xi Jinping, speaking by video link at a United Nations climate summit.
In the past, China had pledged only that its greenhouse gas emissions would continue rising until they peaked around 2030. Now, however, studies suggest that China’s emissions have already reached a plateau, five years earlier than expected.
In his Wednesday statement, Mr. Xi also said China would increase the proportion of non-fossil fuels in its energy system to more than 30 percent over the next decade, referring to solar, wind and hydropower. That would translate into a drop in greenhouse gas emissions if these sources replace coal-burning plants, which China remains heavily reliant on.
His brief appearance on the screen was a testament to China’s epic scale in ramping up its use of renewable energy. He said China plans to expand wind and solar capacity sixfold from 2020 levels, adding up to a massive 3,600 gigawatts in all. He also said China would make electric cars “mainstream” in new sales.
Mr. Xi’s remarks came as world leaders gathered at the United Nations Wednesday to detail their latest plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 2035, as part of the global Paris Agreement to combat warming. They followed by a day President Trump’s speech at the United Nations General Assembly where he called efforts to rein in climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.”
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China’s latest climate targets matter for several reasons. First, China currently is the world’s biggest polluter, which means that without a significant turnaround, there is little hope of slowing down global warming.
China’s new climate target is also a sharp contrast to the posture of the United States, which has contributed the largest share of emissions since the start of the industrial era and which has repudiated climate action under the Trump administration. In addition, China’s announcement is a nudge to other big polluters, like the European Union and India, to step up and submit new 2035 targets as required under the Paris accord. The European Union has issued tentative targets, and India has not yet submitted its plan.
Climate advocates pointed out that China’s steps alone were not strong enough to meet the Paris Agreement’s goals to limit global temperature rise to relatively manageable levels, but they also suggested that China may be underpromising, and that changes to its energy mix could happen more swiftly. “This 2035 target offers little assurance to keep our planet safe, but what’s hopeful is that the actual decarbonization of China’s economy is likely to exceed its target on paper,” said Yao Zhe, the global policy adviser at Greenpeace East Asia.
The United States is not expected to set a new goal. It has announced that it will pull out from the Paris Agreement.
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Ultimately, what matters most is not what China announces but what China is doing. It has become the world’s clean-energy powerhouse. It is investing hundreds of billions of dollars in clean energy projects around the world. That is beginning to transform the global economy, and also geopolitics.
China’s latest target, known in diplomatic jargon as its Nationally Determined Contribution, “is outflanked by the real economic transition already underway in the clean tech sector,” said Li Shuo, who directs the China Climate Hub at the Asia Society’s Policy Institute. “In the absence of the U.S. and E.U., China will be the only game in town,” he said.
China dominates the production and processing of minerals, including nickel and lithium, required for renewable energy technology. Chinese firms lead the world in the production of solar panels, wind turbines and batteries, and the sheer scale of that activity has driven down prices so quickly that in many countries, solar and wind energy are cheaper than power from coal, oil or gas.
China also produces more electric cars and motorcycles than any other country in the world and is increasingly setting up factories on nearly every continent. One recent study went as far as to suggest that China’s push into renewable energy technology is “creating the conditions for a decline in fossil fuel use.”
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In the 1990s, it became the world’s factory floor by burning mountains of coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, to power its factories. It still burns more coal than any other country, and it is still building coal-burning power plants.
But it’s unclear to what extent they will be used in the years to come, because China is adding renewable energy to its grid at astonishing scale and speed. In 2023 China added more solar power capacity than the United States has built in total.
Independent analysts see a significant tipping point in China’s emissions trajectory. After growing for two decades, there are signs that its greenhouse gas emissions appear to be flattening out. One study showed that China’s power-sector emissions dropped by 2 percent between March 2024 and March 2025, and while that is a small number, they projected that the trend would probably continue through the rest of this year.
That matters worldwide. Without a swift decline in China’s emissions, there is no chance of keeping global temperature increases to relatively manageable levels. By global scientific consensus, that means limiting the rise of the average global temperature to well under 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial temperatures, and ideally to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).
There’s been another important shift. China was the leading builder of coal-burning power plants in the rest of the world. In 2021, the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, promised a U-turn. He said China would stop building or financing coal abroad and instead promote clean energy technologies. That pledge appears to have been mostly kept. There has been no foreign direct investment in coal projects, nor loans from China’s two main development banks since 2021, according to an analysis by Boston University, though the plants already underway “will emit carbon dioxide for decades going forward.”
Somini Sengupta is the international climate reporter on the Times climate team.
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