China's Coal Losing to Cheap Solar, Says Top Activist

Coal power is dying in China not because of regulations, but because nobody wants to invest in it anymore.

Ma Jun, one of China's most influential environmental activists, says renewables have become so cheap that there's simply "no business interest" left in building coal plants. After 20 years of fighting for environmental transparency, he's watching the market do what policy alone couldn't accomplish.

Ma founded the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, a Beijing organization that created China's first public database tracking pollution. Before that, he worked as an investigative reporter exposing the country's severe water contamination problems.

His strategy was simple but revolutionary. Make pollution data public so citizens could see which companies were destroying their environment.

The approach worked better than anyone expected. When regular people started calling out polluters on social media, local officials could no longer ignore violations or protect their favorite industries.

"It was no longer easy for mayors or party secretaries to try to interfere with the enforcement, because it's being made so transparent, so public," Ma explained during an interview at the COP30 climate summit in Brazil last November.

That early success with air quality data opened doors for publishing greenhouse gas emissions too. Government officials gained confidence that transparency could actually help rather than hurt their efforts.

The Ripple Effect

China's shift away from coal represents the single biggest climate development on the planet. The country accounts for more than half of global coal consumption, so what happens there matters everywhere.

Ma says the real challenge now is tackling "hard-to-abate" industries like steel and cement manufacturing. Companies in these sectors struggle to find customers willing to pay extra for low-carbon versions of their products.

But he's optimistic that the same transparency that transformed air quality can accelerate industrial decarbonization. When people can see corporate emissions data clearly, market pressure builds naturally.

The activist believes getting more stakeholders involved in climate action, not just government mandates, will drive China's next wave of progress. Open data creates accountability that regulations alone can't match.

After two decades of pushing for environmental transparency in the world's largest polluter, Ma is finally seeing renewables win on pure economics.