What Two Years of Flat Emissions in China Actually Show
China's CO2 emissions fell by 1% in the second quarter of 2026, according to analysis by Lauri Myllyvirta, lead analyst and co-founder of the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air. The analysis says the quarter extends a plateau in emissions from fossil fuels and cement that began after a peak in March 2024 and has now lasted more than two years. China is the world's largest emitter, so that plateau matters more to global trajectories than any other single national number.
The immediate driver was oil. Chinese oil use fell 9% overall and 16% for transport in the quarter, and is the first time that falling oil consumption has been responsible for a fall in the country's overall CO2 emissions. Part of the drop looks temporary, because oil imports fell 32% during the disruption of Gulf supplies through the Strait of Hormuz. The analysis estimates that roughly 60% of the import decline was absorbed by China's stockpiles, which swung from being built up to being drawn down.
Part of it looks structural, because the EV fleet removes oil demand permanently, not just during a crisis. EVs avoided 19 million metric tons of oil consumption in the quarter, up 50% from a year earlier, which brings the first-half total to 36 million metric tons. In comparison, that is more oil than the UK consumes in six months.
The numbers deserve scrutiny, because they are built on official Chinese statistics, and the same analyst has documented problems with those statistics. Monthly curtailment data has stopped being published in recent months, which raises the possibility that the indicator is being revised, and reported curtailment has understated actual curtailment by a wide margin. In a separate May analysis, Myllyvirta compared the emissions implied by China's old and new carbon-intensity metrics and found a gap of about 730 million metric tons of CO2, which is roughly Germany's annual total. China's only official explanation is a footnote in its statistical communique defining the new metric as excluding non-energy uses of fossil fuels such as chemical feedstocks. Still, roughly 380 million metric tons appears to be unaccounted for.
Ryna Cui, associate research professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, has argued that inconsistency between how China sets targets and how it tracks progress creates large uncertainties and room for manipulation.
For practitioners, the emissions direction is better supported than the absolute level. China’s first-half 2026 emissions were still marginally up, and the analysis concludes that the trend "remains a race between energy demand growth and clean-energy growth, both of which have slowed down this year." Anyone modeling China-linked supply chain footprints should treat the plateau as credible, treat any single quarter as noise, and watch whether the curtailment and intensity-metric gaps get explained.
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