President Trump and his administration have claimed that the Paris climate accord is a “bad deal” because it requires much more of the US than of China. This reflects an enduring conservative paranoia that the Chinese are getting one over on us.

The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 6, 2012

To this day, it remains a central conservative argument against climate action: China is the real problem and it isn’t doing anything, so US action is futile.

So if your climate plan is I give up beef or my light SUV, but you’ve got no plan to deal with this over in China… I’m unpersuaded. pic.twitter.com/wrB2LwWhKr — jimgeraghty (@jimgeraghty) May 15, 2017

In support of this position, conservatives point to the fact that dozens of coal plants have either recently been built or are in the planning or construction phases in China. This, they say, gives the lie to the country’s promises.

It can be difficult for the average news consumer to sort out this dispute. The Chinese government is notoriously opaque, the situation is developing rapidly, and most of what reaches US media is shallow he-said, she-said coverage.

Happily, the Center for American Progress is on the case. It recently sent a team of researchers to China to investigate its energy markets, analyze regulatory and plant construction data, and interview Chinese coal miners and coal plant operators. It sought to answer a simple question: What is China doing about coal?

The result is a report — authored by Melanie Hart, Luke Bassett, and Blaine Johnson — that offers the clearest picture yet of the big picture on coal in China. And a closer look, it turns out, utterly destroys the conservative argument. Far from sitting back and coasting while the US acts, China is waging an aggressive, multi-front campaign to clean up coal before eventually phasing it out — reducing emissions from existing plants, mothballing older plants, and raising standards for new plants. Unlike the US, it is on track to exceed its Paris carbon reduction commitments.

In short, while the US dithers along in a cosmically stupid dispute over whether science is real, China is tackling climate change with all guns blazing. The US, not China, is the laggard in this relationship.

China is grappling with the consequences of its recent coal binge

Let’s briefly recount China’s recent history with coal, to get a better sense of its current position.

Starting around 2000, China entered a period of headlong economic growth, lifting millions and millions of people out of poverty. That growth was fueled almost entirely by coal — hundreds and hundreds of new, dirty coal plants.

Around 2010, the coal binge began winding down, thanks to several factors. For one, the economy, encouraged by the Chinese government, began transitioning from a manufacturing-intensive economy to one more based on services and quality of life. For another, the government started building the shit out of renewable energy. And finally, the air and water became so choked with pollutants that citizens began demanding reform.

(Side note: Around 2013, there was another mini boom in coal plant construction in China, for reasons having to do with a shift of regulatory authority to the provinces. That’s what has helped bolster the conservative argument. It’s a complicated story, covered in the report, but suffice to say, it was a boomlet and it’s over.)

All that has led to a much-publicized shift away from coal. But the details of China’s approach to coal are quite interesting.

China has to leap directly from coal to renewables. That’s difficult as hell.

When assessing US and Chinese approaches to coal, it’s important to remember one key background fact: The US is blessed with abundant, accessible, cheap natural gas; China is not. This difference crucially shapes climate strategy.

Basically, it gives the US a huge advantage. Because natural gas is less carbon-intensive than coal, simply shifting from coal to natural gas can push emissions down. As a bonus, natural gas plants tend to be faster and more nimble than coal plants, which makes them well-suited to balancing out swings in wind and solar.

That’s how the US has reduced carbon emissions in recent years: Renewable energy and energy efficiency are both booming, but the bulk of the work is being done by the coal-to-natural gas shift. Natural gas is providing the US with a buffer, some running room, as it scales up renewables.

China doesn’t have that option. Its natural gas reserves are less plentiful and more difficult to access; the infrastructure is not there to develop them.

So China has to leap directly from coal to renewables. That is ... tricky.

For one thing, without natural gas to help, it will take absolutely stratospheric levels of growth in renewables to back out coal. In Paris, China pledged to develop 800 to 1,000 gigawatts of new renewable energy capacity by 2030 — the equivalent of the entire US electricity system. Even if it achieves that, it still won’t be nearly enough to replace coal.

China has 1.3 billion people to our 325 million. It needs lots of power.

So it can’t get rid of coal as fast as the US can. It has to keep some coal around. But the pollution crisis means it also has to clean coal up. What to do?

The government is doing ... a lot. There’s a whole appendix in the report, listing recent regulatory actions. But the efforts fall roughly along two paths: one, building cleaner plants, and two, cleaning up or shutting down existing dirty plants.

China is building clean(er) coal plants

There are three basic categories of coal plants. All of them burn coal to boil water to generate steam to spin a turbine. They are distinguished by how much heat and pressure they put the steam under.

Subcritical plants do not reach water’s critical point, which is 705 degrees Fahrenheit and 3,208 pounds per square inch. Supercritical plants do — they get up over 1,000 degrees. Ultra-supercritical plants get even hotter — up to 1,400 degrees and 5,000 pounds of pressure per square inch.

With each boost in temperature and pressure, the process gets cleaner, yielding more energy and less pollution per unit of coal. (Cleaner plants are also, as you’d expect, more expensive.)

The Chinese government has been cranking up standards for new plants. Most new plants built today are ultra-supercritical.

The results are pretty dramatic.

The CAP team pulled together a list of the top 100 most efficient coal plants in China and the US respectively. The differences are striking.

The top US plants are older, built between 1967 to 2012, while China’s were built between 2006 and 2015. Of China’s 100 top plants, 90 are ultra-supercritical; the US, by contrast, boasts exactly one ultra-supercritical plant.

China still has its huge fleet of dirty subcritical plants (more on that in a second), but it is rapidly shifting toward a coal fleet with lower emissions and higher efficiency.

(Side note: It is much easier to add carbon capture and sequestration to ultra-supercritical plants. And yes, China is leading on CCS too.)

China is cranking up standards on existing coal plants

Obviously, China’s overall coal fleet is not as clean as its flagship plants. According to S&P Global Platts, of the 920 gigawatts of coal capacity in the country, 19 percent is ultra-supercritical, 25 percent supercritical, and 56 percent subcritical.

That makes for a lot of air pollution. And air pollution has become a national emergency in China; it has caused civil unrest and threatens more.

In response, starting around 2011, the Chinese government implemented a startling shift in approach.

Rather than hiding or obscuring data on pollution in urban centers, it carefully measured and publicized the data. There is, CAP writes, “a new air quality monitoring system that now provides real-time information on air quality across the nation.” Every family in China’s rising middle class now knows how clean their air is and what the health consequences are for their children.

This has allowed the central government to harness public anger and direct it against provinces or energy companies that balk at anti-pollution efforts. In other words, the central government has grabbed the tiger by the tail. There’s no letting go now.

“For the Chinese Communist Party,” writes CAP, “there is no going back — this is now a political survival issue.”

Starting in 2014, China implemented standards on conventional air pollutants that are “stronger than the comparable standards from the European Union and the United States.”

(See the report for many important footnotes on this table.)

Thus far, new regulation has focused on conventional pollutants, as they are driving the crisis, but the “next round of regulatory tightening will target carbon dioxide.” Already China is raising efficiency standards — kilowatts per unit of coal burned — which will have the effect of reducing the carbon intensity of the fleet.

The existing Chinese coal fleet is now undergoing a rapid program of technology upgrades. It all adds up to this remarkable fact:

If current U.S. regulatory trends continue, by 2020, every coal plant operating in the United States would be illegal to operate in China.

China is going to shut down lots of coal plants

China’s post-2013 coal plant construction boom — mentioned above — was going on even as the economy was shifting to services, renewables were booming, and Chinese demand for coal was declining.

The central government realized what was happening and stepped in to stop it:

They started out ordering local officials to do a better job matching project approvals to local demand and to Beijing’s energy policy dictates; when that failed to stem the tide, Beijing started intervening to cancel projects, including many projects that were already under construction. Earlier this year, China’s National Energy Administration canceled 103 coal-fired power projects across 13 provinces that, if completed, would have added 120,000 megawatts of coal-fired power to the grid. Beijing is also steadily shutting down older, existing plants that cannot meet the nation’s increasingly tight emissions regulations.

Even with these measures, coal capacity still far exceeds demand for coal, which means existing coal plants are being run less and less often.

Currently, Beijing is forcing every plant in the nation to run at the same utilization rate, which is approximately 47.7 percent of total plant capacity. In 2016, plant utilization fell to levels that China had not seen since the 1970s, when the nation was just emerging from the cultural revolution.

There’s no sign that the decline in demand for coal will slow anytime soon. That indicates that utilization rates are going to continue to fall and lots more plants are going to get shut down, including some newer ones. (Brad Plumer had a great story on the plant closings earlier this year.)

The US shouldn’t emulate China’s plan, but it should emulate China’s ambition

As mentioned above, China does not have access to plentiful natural gas reserves. It cannot avoid living with coal power for a while, so it is investing heavily in cleaning up that coal power.

The US does have access to plentiful natural gas, which provides all the buffer needed for a rapid transition to clean energy. There is absolutely no reason to build new coal plants of any kind in the US. And given how old, dilapidated, and dirty the US coal fleet is compared with China’s, the best thing to do is just shut it down as fast as practicably possible. It is not necessary, and it sickens and kills tens of thousands a people a year. Maybe a few of the cleaner plants should be kept open for a while, but unlike China, the US has no reason to make substantial new investments in coal.

What the US might think of borrowing from China is a serious, long-term plan for phasing carbon emissions out of the electricity sector — rather than the inadequate, fragmented, halting effort it has made to date. Even that effort has now fallen into the hands of a major party that, unlike any other major party in the world, denies the very need to address climate change at all.

The conservative argument that the US risks acting alone on climate change is the inverse of the truth. China is acting far more intentionally and aggressively than the US — investing more, building more, testing and experimenting more. If the US remains on its current path, by 2030 China will be the uncontested technological and economic leader on climate change.

And of course climate investments are only a small part of China’s sweeping plan to remake the global economy. Meanwhile, the US looks more and more like another powerful empire that got too bloated and stupid to see the future coming.