China, the world’s biggest user of coal, is suddenly burning less of it, a change with enormous implications for the state of the atmosphere and the…

China, the world’s biggest user of coal, is suddenly burning less of it, a change with enormous implications for the state of the atmosphere and the potential course of global climate change

The shift has been both abrupt and unexpected, bringing fresh credibility to China’s pledge to rein in its greenhouse gas emissions, now also the highest level in the world. Blamed in the West for the failure of the last global climate change talks, in Copenhagen in 2009, China is setting itself up to play a constructive role at the next round of discussions, in Paris later this year

As recently as 2010, China added as much coal-fired electricity generation capacity in a single year as exists in all of Germany. It took China’s slowing economy, a slump in heavy industry and unprecedented moves by the Communist Party to curb choking levels of air pollution to produce the drop-off in coal consumption, which began in 2014 and has continued this year

Still, the idea that China might be transformed from the world’s smoke-belching factory into a cleaner, more high-tech place remains a distant prospect — even with the advent of a new cap-and-trade system that President Xi Jinping has promised to put in place by 2017

Getting to a greener economy will require China to find alternative energy sources on a monumental scale. The nation must transform its economy without greatly increasing the unemployment rate in places such as the coal fields of the north, something that could undermine the Communist Party’s hold on power

“I was traditionally, honestly extraordinarily pessimistic about all this, if you had asked me two or three years ago,” said Mikkal Herberg, director of the Energy Security Program at the Seattle-based National Bureau of Asian Research. “It is only in the last year or two that I have actually begun to believe they can do some of the things they are promising to do.”

As China became the world’s industrial powerhouse, its demand for electricity soared, rising nearly 17-fold from 1980 to 2012. The nation burned coal as if there was no tomorrow, and its greenhouse gas emissions rose past those of the United States nearly a decade ago

But with heavy industry slumping and the economy becoming ever less energy-intensive, the growth in electricity demand has been flat this year and is expected to average a relatively modest 4 percent a year between now and 2020

For coal, the turnaround is more significant. Coal use, which had risen by more than 9 percent a year in the decade to 2011, fell by 2.9 percent last year, as the industrial economy faltered. The decline has continued this year

Experts point out that heavy rainfall boosted hydropower generation last year, and that a number of new coal-fired power stations will come online in the next two years. Nevertheless, there is a growing sense that a fundamental change is taking place, because of an aggressive shift into cleaner fuels, slower economic growth that has hit heavy industry hardest, and a conscious transition away from high-polluting industries that used a lot of coal and electricity