China is the world's leading producer of carbon dioxide emissions by a very wide margin.
Its contribution to the rising level of carbon dioxide in the air is so great that here in the mid-2020s, we can use those emissions to get an idea of how China's economy is performing. Since the end of 2024, the pace at which CO₂ accumulates in the Earth's atmosphere has been falling, which indicates that China's economy has slowed.
In August 2025, those problems have manifested in the form of falling industrial output related to the impact of the global tariff war and the country's prolonged and ongoing real estate crisis, which are both major contributors to China's CO₂ emissions. The economic contraction resulting from these factors has led China to put less carbon dioxide into the air.
The latest update of our chart tracking the trailing year average of the year-over-year change in the atmosphere's carbon dioxide concentration from January 2000 through August 2025 shows a sharp decline after December 2024, coinciding with the woes of China's economy.
We've emphasized these very visible factors in this analysis because they are completely ignored in recent claims made by environmental activists that all the reduction is due to China's expansion of renewable energy sources.
We're pretty sure that if China's economy was growing as planned, their year-to-date emissions in 2025 would be higher.
References
National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. Earth System Research Laboratory. Mauna Loa Observatory CO2 Data. [Online Data]. 5 September 2025.
Image credit: Photo of a coal-fired power plant in Shuozhou, Shanxi, China (2010) by Kleineolive at Wikimedia Commons. Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported.
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