China's Coal Demand May Peak Before 2020

China accounted for almost half of the coal burned globally in 2011, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). The country is also the largest emitter of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming—with much of the carbon produced by burning coal. A professor at Tsinghua University calculated that smog from coal contributed to 670,000 deaths in China in 2012.

There’s some good news: China’s use of coal is “very likely to peak before 2020,” says a report from the National Bureau of Asian Research (NBR), an independent think tank based in Washington and Seattle. The author, Li Zhidong, a professor at Nagaoka University of Technology in Japan who studies sustainable development, examined data from China’s National Bureau of Statistics to find that the country’s appetite for coal is rising at a much slower rate today than it was a few years ago. In 2011, China’s coal consumption jumped 9 percent. In 2013 it rose only 2 percent. J Capital Research, an economic analysis firm, figures coal production actually fell 0.3 percent in 2012, 1.2 percent in 2013, and about 1 percent in 2014.