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.
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.