Opinion On climate, India, China are doing their fair share

In recent years, India and China have often been unfairly painted as the villains of the climate change story. Their advocacy of a larger carbon budget for countries that have historically had a low GHG footprint is often seen as an impediment to eliminating fossil fuel use. This criticism overlooks the progress made by these countries in achieving their developmental goals through the use of green technology. The global watchdog Carbon Brief’s latest data, released earlier this week, shows that India and China stewarded the world’s renewable energy (RE) expansion in 2025. Record-breaking RE capacity additions led to a fall in coal power generation in the two countries for the first time in 50 years. China achieved this feat even as its electricity demand increased approximately five times compared to 2024, while India is on track to become the second-largest renewables market in the next five years.

The fine print on global RE data reveals positives and negatives. Power generation from green sources grew 71 TWh last year. However, fossil fuel-generated electricity in the EU increased by more than 10 per cent in the first half of 2025 when unstable wind conditions and drought underlined the precarity of RE installations. While some decarbonisation initiatives did make a comeback in the second half of the year, the EU’s solar capacity additions dropped for the first time in a decade. Geopolitical uncertainties, energy shocks and a cost-of-living crisis seem to have dampened the impetus to address climate change on the continent. A large part of its ageing grid was designed for a predictable flow of power, not for a variable-input system like solar or wind. Across the Atlantic, Trump’s blithe dismissal of climate science threatens to undo the decarbonisation gains outside his country. In a reversal of a trend that began in 2005, the US spewed more heat-trapping gases last year compared to 2024.

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For India and China, sustaining the decline in fossil-fuel use will require addressing challenges. Grids will have to be revamped, investments in energy storage systems upscaled to manage RE’s intermittency. However, the Carbon Brief data is sure to give the two emerging economies more heft in advancing their principled positions in global climate negotiations. In fact, as the International Energy Agency has underlined, meeting clean energy goals depends largely on how developed economies overcome the recent barriers to climate change mitigation.