US Accounted for Nearly 50% of World’s CO2 Emissions Growth in 2025 — Thanks, AI Data Center Explosion & Pro-Pollution Trump
Support CleanTechnica's work through a Substack subscription, on Patreon, or on Stripe. Help us produce all of the high-quality, original content we publish week after week despite the challenges of content-scraping AI, antisocial media, inflation, and other hurdles.
A new report is out from the Energy Institute, and it’s quite damning for the US. The report is the 75th edition of the Statistical Review of World Energy. We’ll dive into other parts of the report, but one big thing Robert Rapier of OilPrice.com noticed is that the US dominated the world’s increase in carbon emissions in 2025.
“North America accounted for 47% of the world’s emissions increase, with U.S. emissions climbing 3.2% as coal-fired power jumped 13%,” he notes.
Total energy supply across the world rise by 1.4% in 2025, going from 592.2 exajoules the year before to 600.3 exajoules last year. “Renewable energy rose much faster in percentage terms, increasing nearly 10%. But in absolute terms, renewables added about 3.2 exajoules, while total energy supply increased by about 8.1 exajoules.” Oy….
US emissions rose by 3.2% in 2025, much more than that global average of 1.4%. This is after years of US emissions mostly declining. The big culprit, as I already said in the headline, was data center electricity demand. It didn’t help, either, that the Trump administration has been forcing utilities to keep old coal power plants open and has been blocking large wind and solar power projects.
The US saw a 13% increase in electricity from coal power plants in 2025. US electricity demand rose by 3%. And the US accounted for a whopping 40% of global data center electricity consumption. As we keep pointing out, the AI craze, aside from producing a lot of slop (and helping people in some ways), is burning up the planet. Solar power grew by 28% in the country, but growing electricity demand and leaning on old, dirty coal power resulted in a significant increase in our carbon emissions.
It has been pointed out for many years that along with renewable energy growth, we need much more energy efficiency. Instead of that, we’re getting a truly unfathomable increase in electricity usage thanks to the current obsession with AI and the enormous data centers AI companies have been building.
I’ll dive into more of the report later, but, for now, this is the news we’ve got. Happy Friday!
Sign up for CleanTechnica's Weekly Substack for Zach and Scott's in-depth analyses and high level summaries, sign up for our daily newsletter, and follow us on Google News!
Have a tip for CleanTechnica? Want to advertise? Want to suggest a guest for our CleanTech Talk podcast? Contact us here.
Sign up for our daily newsletter for 15 new cleantech stories a day. Or sign up for our weekly one on top stories of the week if daily is too frequent.
CleanTechnica uses affiliate links. See our policy here.
CleanTechnica's Comment Policy
