| Nearly twice the emissions with over four times the population. Nearly 20% of the world's population is in China. Of course they're going to emit more. But if China were rapidly increasing its emissions per capita, that could still be a problem, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
China seem to have held their emissions more or less still for the last few years where data is available: consumption adjusted: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/prod-cons-co2-per-capita per capita with comparison countries: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?t... In the same period, the US, and indeed most states have achieved only quite small changes to their per capita emissions. So the US has reduced emissions a bit, but from a much higher starting point. My gripe is that westerners often leap to talking about China and India or, worse, overpopulation. The implicit belief seems to be that foreigners are an inconvenient drain on global resources, that they deserve less than us. This is not true. |
What I'm not sure I follow is the relationship you seem to believe exists between per-capita emissions and responsibility to curb them. Emissions need to be curbed in proportion to their percentage of overall global emissions, not in proportion to per-capita consumption. You can vary the per-capita statistics however you like, and as long as the absolute emissions are the same, the damage to the planet is the same. Those emissions could be coming from one person or a trillion. If China had ten billion people, or fifty billion or a hundred it would still be just as incumbent upon them to curb such emissions as they are producing.
Everything else about "implicit beliefs", the "leaps" you believe people to be taking, the questions of who should or shouldn't be blamed are abstract, highly subjective, and while important, should be considered without letting them derail the conversations around needed next steps to curb emissions.