U.S. Emissions Jumped in 2025 as Coal Power Rebounded
(nytimes.com)131 points by fleahunter 4 hours ago
131 points by fleahunter 4 hours ago
Sadly related:
> In a reversal, the [EPA] plans to calculate only the cost to industry when setting pollution limits, and not the monetary value of saving human lives, documents show.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/12/climate/trump-epa-air-pol...
>calculate only the cost to industry
Industry is perfectly capable of calculating its own costs, and advocating for its own motivated self-interest, thank you very much. This is not a bug we need to fix.
The purpose of agencies like the EPA is to "see the [Pareto optimal] forest for the trees" and counterbalance industry's [Nash equilibrium] profit motive.
Otherwise let's just rename it the Shareholder Protection Agency, because that's all it would be.
Well, they very successfully advocated for their interests, and now the administration they helped install handed the EPA over to them. Maybe they should rename the EPA to Environment Destruction Agency, same as they renamed the Department of Defense to Department of War...
Funny cause in the long run shareholders are just as effed as the rest of us, so this is not protection
AI is partly to blame here.
All that power has to come from somewhere. The idea that all this AI is powered by “green” energy and unicorn farts is just a bunch of PR puffery from tech companies trying to divert attention from the environmental damage they’re causing.
The uncomfortable truth is that AI is the biggest setback on our path to energy sustainability we’ve seen in a generation.
It is, but degrowth is an election losing proposition. Any talk like this needs to be transparently non-hostile to demand for political purposes. The solution should be something like requiring them to build nuclear or renewable energy, or tax them and put the money into a subsidy fund for clean energy.
There is a real need for education of the masses. Not destroying the planet should win elections, not lose them.
Intentionally reducing quality of life in the short term will never win elections, no matter how educated a populace is. The best strategy to reduce consumption that seems to be working is allowing below replacement total fertility rates.
Thank you for acknowledging the elephant in the room. I've literally seen people on HN argue that AI's increased power demand isn't bad for climate goals, because the money will encourage renewables.
It's astounding how people don't see it, even when it's the invisible hand of the market that's choking them to death.
It's not the power demand that is the problem.
It's that the majority of AI deployments are happening in a country which has a has had very poor renewable adoption and is now actively sabotaging renewable projects with an active opposition to climate goals because a particular group wants to protect their existing revenue.
Renewables are cheap and highly profitable, and money talks - even in the US, as can be seen in Texas. But it's hard to fight against your government when they want to force you to buy their rich friends' fossil fuels instead...
This is a pretty gross mis characterization of what’s happening. There’s been a lot written about the fluff that is a lot of these AI company “purchases” of “green” energy. In practice there’s no way to get that power from (insert middle of nowhere location with green energy plant) to (insert location of AI datacenter) so to actually power the data center the utility is forced to power on some clunky old coal plant to keep the chips powered.
The AI company is issuing press releases saying how they bought all this clean power but in practice they just forced some old clunky power plants back online to meet their demand.
Exactly this. Powering all AI data centers with renewable energy is actually trivially easy.
You could even legislate it and make big tech companies responsible for providing the power themselves. One stroke of the pen resolves the issue.
If OpenAI can afford to “spend $1 trillion” on AI they can afford to build some wind/solar/battery power plants.
We can power it all and then some with renewable and nuclear energy. We elected a regime openly hostile to that and openly pro fossil fuel. Like they literally ran on burning more coal, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that we are burning more coal.
AI doesn’t matter. If it’s not AI it’ll be EVs. Or if you’re pro immigration (as I am) then what do you think letting more people into the country does for power demand? It’s something like 5kW averaged out over 24/7 per head. That’s probably conservative when you do a full accounting of all demand per head. Every new immigrant is probably equivalent to a rack of GPUs.
Degrowth is political fantasy. It will establish a populist backlash every time. Or are you going to line up to be the first to become poorer?
I look at that stuff as a very privileged fantasy. Only the rich can romanticize poverty. The people who fantasize about green back to the land scenarios are usually wealthy middle or upper class people in developed nations who have zero first hand experience of what that actually means outside the Avatar films.
We've had my more movement on the nuclear front than any time since 3mile island
I don't like the social harms related to AI but I think the energy is a silly emphasis. No one has ever thought twice about any heavy industry or absurdist garbage for consumers, home heating, etc.
If we were on track for everything else a serious uptake of AI might have put us barely off track.. But this is like blaming the wafer thin mint for the fat guy exploding.
The biggest setback is all of these companies lecturing us about being green, then sucking down power for cryptocurrency, and now LLMs.
In my mind, the only viable way out is the power density of nuclear. Datacenter should not be ordered by taxpayer subsidized energy.
> In my mind, the only viable way out is the power density of nuclear.
How adding would more expensive energy solve it? All western schemes to build new nuclear power are enormously subsidized.
Laughably, neither can wind in fact, and there’s still plenty of open question on if wind is even net positive at all.
The only reason tech like that spears to work is because of partial investment. Unfortunately wind comes at tremendous cost and destruction of natural landscapes, enormous maintenance, and piles of carbon fiber waste.
Please give some sources for your misinformation. Because that is not the conclusion in the energy industry.
In the first three quarters of 2025 we added 137 TWh wind energy globally. That is not driven by subsidies or losing money.
https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/solar-and-wind-growt...
I read recently that there are more people working as yoga teachers in the USA than are employed in the coal industry as a whole.
I mean, assuming it's true, the obvious conclusion would be that there should be reasonable limits on what is done to save such a small industry. Looks like there are 40-45k people employed in coal mining in the US, depending on who you ask. _Even if there was no downside to keeping it going_, that would probably only be worth modest government action to keep it on life support; it's simply not a big industry.
When entire industries are automated, and one CEO can mine and sell millions of tons just by clicking buttons on a computer, it raises the question what incentive governments have to protect that industry.
There is no longer the "voters don't want to lose their jobs" argument. Now it becomes purely a "these guys pay lots of taxes" argument - but with most big companies being very efficient at tax planning, a huge mine might pay next to no taxes too. Then it becomes politically far easier to ignore them, and eventually maybe shut them down on a whim, eg. to appease green voters.
There is no such logic going on in the political calculus. It’s a fallacious call to a past where an uneducated man could get a good job in the mines, and by fallacious implication the entire ecosystem of work for uneducated men, that existed 50 years ago and does not now. It’s a symbol of something lost to “liberal” political ideology - something people who have never worked in a mine but also feel disenfranchised can get behind. There is no real belief coal is coming back into style, no one anywhere wants a coal plant operating near them and even if we built more, no one else on earth would buy our excess coal. It’s a canard and a red herring to distract disenfranchised under employed under educated and under skilled Americans, just like the anti-immigrant agenda, and all the other fallacies the modern conservative movement is built around. The goal isn’t to solve a single actual structural problem - it’s to appeal emotionally with things that sound like they could solve problems, despite the fact they wouldn’t if implemented and would make many other things worse.
There was once a time the conservative movement was built on pragmatic rationalism, and people keep looking for it in modern rhetoric. But it’s become built on fallacious populism recently as a short term way to grab power, then overwhelm the system to “rig” it towards their favored people. It’s not about conservatives or liberals, ideology or political goals are the foil. The goal is the appropriation of power and the blocking of democratic change in favor of cronyism.
So there’s no point in trying to find a rational explanation for the policy. There is none in the policy itself. It only exists to garner enough votes to do what’s happening in real time with the goal that with enough shenanigans voting won’t matter next time.
In many cases the best solution would be to retrofit the existing facilities and leverage the transmission infrastructure that is already in place. Retrofit doesn't necessarily mean we continue to burn coal, but it might. Without the aid of a time machine, continuing to burn coal (or even restarting a plant) for a limited period of time may have less incremental impact than other options.
I understand the urge to tear these facilities down, but if we actually care about the environment a more nuanced path is probably ideal.
https://www.publicpower.org/periodical/article/over-100-coal...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Public_Power_Associat...
Your link is from a lobbyist for energy providers. I don't trust their opinions are biased in the public's favor.
All of those energy providers appear to be public utilities, and not privately owned.
But this should reverse again as more solar/other sources come online right?
My understanding from news is that coal is more expensive than even natural gas.
The current administration is actively undermining pretty much any attempt to move towards renewables.
i feel the fact coal is so often considered separately from oil and gas to be very suspicious. Cant help but feel demonizing coal is plays into the interests of petro states.
Obviously we should be moving to green energy, but coal provides energy independence and doesnt fund horrid regimes..
a Coal plant seems way better for world peace than LNG plant
the cost savings could be put to developing green energy faster
There is evidence that coal has worse environmental impact than other fossil fuels. For one, burning gas produces CO2 and water, whereas burning coal results in just CO2 (+ soot and other pollutants). Another is that (open) coal mines have devastating effects on large land areas.
So yes, best leave all fossil fuels where they are, but coal is especially bad.
I have a personal vendetta against coal in particular because of the way it destroys the entire communities and towns. Coal got an early head start in environmentalism villainy because it has immediate and very visible environmental impacts in the process of getting it out of the ground.
While we arguably are at a brink of WW3 today considering the invasion of Ukraine, China rattling sabres like never before towards Taiwan, Trump being hungry for Greenland, internal strife in Iran, the actions of Israel… I bet that the next major flareup will be directly attributable to climate change such as a large drought affecting multiple nations.
This has to be the 4th or 5th time I’ve shared this link on HN. Sadly the WH made it very clear that they do not care about the real cost of coal. Here they proudly shout about “beautiful clean coal.” Anyone who believes this ridiculous rebranding of coal really should not be making decisions on it, and those who know better but repeat it are even worse: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/rein...
We’re moving backwards. They actually think we want to work in coal mines again by the hundreds of thousands.
US bad, China good basically.
Coal share of energy likely peaked for China in 2025, even as overall energy usage increased - almost all that increase has come from renewables, which China is of course doubling down upon. China is on trend to become an electrostate, USA on trend to regress on energy infrastructure which will power the next 100 hundred years
China 12 billion tons CO2 and steady, USA 6 billion tons CO2 and falling.
US bad, China very bad.
This kind of denial prevents any solution for global warming.
- USA emits much more per Capita
- CO2 accumulates in atmosphere, so you must account for emissions since the country industrialized
- USA sent it's polluting industries to China and buy the final products
The AA motto goes well: The first step is to admit you have a problem
China is doing so while western countries delegated a lot of its manufacturing to China though.
The fact that US emissions are not going down shows that something is really really wrong there.
Europe claiming that its emissions are going down is deceptive as taking into account its share of emission in China would paint a different picture.
China population is 4 times of US and a lot of CO2 there comes from US outsourcing energy-intensive production.
What does it matter? Two wrongs don’t make a right.
Edit: cursory search shows a flat/falling trend.[0]
[0]https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha...
China and India coal usage dropped for the first time in 52 years[1].
It's also silly to look at anything other than per-capita metrics. If China arbitrarily splits in half or expands, the per-capita metric remains invariant to the historical luck factor behind why national borders are the way they are.
[1] https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-coal-power-drops-in-chi...
No, it's because of renewables. Share of oil in total energy consumption hasn't increased since the sanctions, while wind and solar have been consistently increasing. Coal is down (again, as a share of total energy consumption).
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-energy-source-sub?c...
gas (ofss fuel) is increasing a lot... So yeah, there is some renewables, but we're still pretty far from what is needed...
China is trying to eliminate oil because of the Malacca Dilemma. The US and allies control the seas as part of containment policy. The US also has the Middle East on lockdown, every gulf country in particular. China has a little base in Djibouti and influence over a collapsing IRGC I guess, but not enough to secure any routes. China only has land-based power projection in Eurasia which exerts some limited but insufficient control over land corridors. This is the real incentive behind China's renewables and electrification efforts. That it also addresses global warming is a very welcome side-effect.
Why do I get the feeling that if the answer is that they're polluting more as well, parent will argue that makes it OK for the US, as if we should be following their lead. But if the answer is they're making progress on lowering emissions, he'll argue the opposite?
"The researchers identified two main reasons for the uptick. U.S. electricity demand grew at an unusually fast pace, driven in part by an expansion of power-hungry data centers for artificial intelligence. To meet that demand, electric utilities burned about 13 percent more coal last year than they did in 2024.
...
...the researchers said Mr. Trump’s policies would take time to have an effect and they mostly weren’t responsible for last year’s rise in emissions."
Pretty much ignored in comments here:
> At the same time, colder winter temperatures led many buildings and homes to burn more natural gas and fuel oil for heating last year.
Which none of "shut down the AI DC's", "stop burning coal", or "build more wind & solar" would do squat about.
Maybe we should be looking at boring, pragmatic programs to improve the heating energy efficiency of the worst (say) 5% of America's buildings & homes?
We were doing that through efficiency-focused rebates and incentives that the current administration decided are not worth continuing. Instead they're "unleashing American energy" and deregulating any emissions-producing industry they can.
> ...the current administration decided are not worth continuing...
At least in my part of the US, there are also "state", "county", "city", and "township" governments, which can do such things. They don't have magically unlimited competence and funding - but Washington has never had those either.
OOPS: I forgot school systems, community colleges, and public universities. Those generally control their own infrastructure, and have a lot of it. And the community colleges often have Trades programs - which can boost the workforce you need to replace energy wasting old furnaces, windows, and such.
Florida is going to be one of the first places under water.
Which is why it subsidized coal so it’s competitive with every other source of energy?
The US has gotten tremendous value from AI agents, so I think the trade off was worth it for 2025.
And we represent 0.1% of the population at best. Not really sustainable.
We are destroying the planet and we will come to regret this on our death beds. If anyone doubts that, go for a walk in nature and appreciate how incredible our ecosystems are, and how lucky we are to have that biodiversity, not AI agents.
Edit: I see you edited your comment from 'I have gotten gotten tremendous value from AI agents' to 'The US has gotten tremendous value from AI agents'. But the general point still applies.
https://archive.ph/bOoNL