Maybe no help from Exxon, but US per capita CO2 has been decreasing since 1978. But China and India have increased per capita, which is scary given their huge populations.
Both US population and absolute US greenhouse gas emissions have been growing over time. Population has simply grown proportionally faster than emissions. So yes, US emissions per capita have decreased over time, but total US emissions have been rising, and that's what affects climate.
US emissions have declined about 15% in absolute terms since the early 2000s. That’s a billion tons less per year. Unfortunately China added about 10 billion tons a year in the same period so it didn’t help very much.
I'm embarrassed that I didn't know total annual US CO2e emissions have _dropped_ since circa 2005. My only source when I wrote my comment was the in-browser graph in the Wolfram Alpha search result for "us greenhouse gas emissions history" (https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=us+greenhouse+gas+emis...), which presents a data period of only 1990-2005. A more complete source is https://www.c2es.org/content/u-s-emissions/.
Thank you for reminding me not to hastily extrapolate data when it happens to fit my expectation of what's going on, and when actual data are readily available.
The thing is: we are cutting emissions, but it probably won’t save the planet, if China and India keep growing. The “fairness“ of per capita usage is a separate issue from climate change
US per capita is still higher the China and India. It seems that the US thinks they are more entitled to output more per capita simply because they are decreasing.
the US is still an order of magnitude higher than India in per capita emissions
