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The United States is in the grips of one of the most drastic reversals of green energy infrastructure currently underway on our increasingly warm world. It probably comes as little surprise, then, that the Land of the Free was one of the key drivers of global emissions in 2025.
According to a new statistical review by the Energy Institute, a London-based non-profit, energy supplies are skyrocketing — and as they do, so are emissions.
North America made up 47 percent of the world’s total emissions increase across 2025, led by the US. Much of that was fueled by outsize demand for data centers: as OilPrice.com analyst Robert Rapier notes, the US accounted for 40 percent of global data center electricity consumption, indicative of the impact the country’s AI boom is having on global emissions overall.
Though the US also added some renewable energy — solar capacity alone grew by over 28 percent compared to the previous year — that doesn’t automatically mean dirty, non-renewable energy shrank. As Rapier observes, much of North America’s emissions growth was led specifically by the rising coal-based emissions in the US, which grew by 13 percent.
“Many people assume that if solar and wind are growing quickly, fossil fuels must be shrinking,” Rapier writes. “That is not what the data show. In a growing energy system, both can happen at once. Renewables can rise sharply, while fossil fuel use also rises.”
Part of this is the fact that renewable energy has not grown fast enough to offset other energy sources.
As Rapier obverses, “solar certainly has not failed. But clean energy growth has to be large enough to meet new demand while also displacing existing fossil fuel consumption. In 2025, that did not happen.”
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