Brookings Editor’s Note: “The original paper titled “China’s post-coal growth” was published in Nature Geoscience and authored by Qi Ye, Nicolas Stern, Tong Wu, Jiaqi Lu and Fergus Green. When will China reach its coal peak? Most analysts have predicted that China’s coal consumption will peak somewhere between 2020 and 2040. In an article recently published in Nature Geoscience, however, we argue that China’s economic growth has already decoupled from its coal consumption growth. China’s coal consumption grew from 1.36 billion tons per year in 2000 to 4.24 billion tons per year in 2013, an annual growth rate of 12 percent. As of 2015, the country accounts for approximately 50 percent of global demand for coal. In other words, China’s economic miracle was fueled primarily by coal. This tremendous coal combustion creates air pollution and carbon emissions that threaten China, its neighbors, and the rest of the world…”