US Leads Global CO2 Emissions Increase in 2025, Report Finds

The United States accounted for roughly a third of the global increase in carbon dioxide emissions in 2025, according to a comprehensive new report from the Energy Institute produced in partnership with Ember, the Kearney Institute, and KPMG. The finding is particularly striking because it comes at a moment when the rest of the developed world is largely moving in the opposite direction.

The primary driver was a 10% jump in American coal consumption last year, reversing years of steady decline as power producers shifted back to coal after natural gas prices rose sharply. The economics were straightforward: when gas prices spiked, utilities that had the option to switch generating capacity back to coal did so, and the emissions consequences followed predictably.

The global picture is more nuanced but no less concerning. Worldwide CO2 emissions rose to a new record in 2025, driven primarily by increased coal use in the United States and continued heavy reliance on coal in China and India. China alone accounted for more than half of global coal consumption, and India's coal use grew by approximately 4%. But the U.S. reversal is the story that caught analysts' attention, because it represents a step backward for a country that had been steadily decarbonizing its power sector.

The Energy Institute's data tells the story in stark terms. U.S. coal consumption in the power sector had fallen roughly 40% between 2014 and 2024, as cheap natural gas and rapidly deploying renewables ate into coal's market share. That decline was one of the primary reasons U.S. emissions had been trending downward. The 2025 reversal erased roughly two years of that progress in a single year.

Several factors contributed to the gas-to-coal switch. Natural gas prices rose 35% year-over-year in 2025, driven by increased LNG exports to Europe (where gas remains the primary alternative to Russian pipeline supply), increased domestic heating demand during a colder-than-normal winter, and pipeline capacity constraints in key producing regions. For utilities operating on thin margins, the economics of coal became attractive enough to bring idle capacity back online.

The political context cannot be ignored. The current administration has been openly supportive of coal, with executive orders rolling back emissions regulations and public statements encouraging increased domestic production. The Environmental Protection Agency has proposed weakening the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards and has signaled that the Clean Power Plan's replacement will be far less aggressive than previous iterations. Utilities have read these signals as reducing regulatory risk for coal operations.

The renewable energy industry points out that the long-term trajectory still favors clean energy. Solar and wind installations continued to set records in 2025, and the Inflation Reduction Act's clean energy tax credits remain in effect, supporting continued deployment. But the speed of renewable buildout is being outpaced by the speed of increased energy demand, driven largely by AI data centers, electrification of transportation, and industrial expansion. The net result is that even as renewables grow, they're supplementing rather than replacing fossil fuel generation.

The health implications are significant and distributed unequally. Coal plant emissions are concentrated in specific regions — primarily Appalachia, the Ohio River Valley, and parts of the Southeast — and the communities downwind of these plants experience higher rates of asthma, cardiovascular disease, and premature death. The American Lung Association estimates that coal-related pollution causes approximately 3,800 premature deaths annually in the United States, a figure that is projected to rise with increased coal consumption.

Internationally, the U.S. emissions increase undermines the country's already strained credibility on climate commitments. The Biden administration had set a target of reducing emissions 50-52% below 2005 levels by 2030. The 2025 increase puts the U.S. further from that goal and makes it mathematically more difficult to achieve, even with accelerated clean energy deployment in the remaining years.

China and India, which together account for the majority of global emissions growth, have their own plans for peaking emissions — China by 2030 and India by 2070. But the U.S. reversal gives those countries a talking point at international climate negotiations: if the world's wealthiest nation cannot maintain its decarbonization trajectory, the argument goes, why should developing nations accelerate theirs?

What This Means For You: If you live near a coal-fired power plant, the air you breathe just got dirtier, and the health risks are real — check the EPA's AirNow.gov for local air quality conditions, especially on hot summer days when ozone peaks. For everyone else, the practical impact shows up in two ways: energy costs and investment returns. Utilities that switched back to coal are keeping electricity prices lower in the short term, but they're also building long-term stranded asset risk that shareholders will eventually bear. If you're investing in energy, the companies best positioned for the next decade are those investing in renewables and grid storage — not those reopening coal units. And if you care about the climate trajectory, the most effective individual action remains political: vote for and support candidates who will maintain emissions regulations, because market forces alone are not moving fast enough.