Our species has repeatedly been really clear: we're not going to do anything about climate change. Stop pretending lack of interest is lack of options.
That has been achieved largely by outsourcing heavy manufacturing that requires a lot of cheap energy to China.
China one of the highest carbon emission rates per GDP of any large developed nation, but China can't exclusively be blamed for that. China is the "workshop of the world." It's where other countries send their polluting industries to get that pollution out of sight and out of mind, as well as to exploit cheaper labor and a high concentration of manufacturing expertise. China is blasting out CO2 to manufacture products that are exported back to the US, Canada, Europe, and so on, making the latter's carbon emissions look better than they actually are.
I'm not saying China couldn't be cleaner, just that the economy is global and so is this problem. If China switched to cleaner but more expensive energy and took other steps to reduce CO2 emissions, their costs would go up. This would just push manufacturing to whatever countries are willing to ignore climate change.
* we don't just need rate to stop rising, we need rate to fall to pretty much zero.
* and if we could magically get rates to stop rising, and fall to zero, tomorrow, we'd still have about 2 degrees of warming from all the emissions already up there.
People have completely missed the point: the rate of growth of rate of emissions might have improved in some places. But the problem is total amount emitted.
Oh, and you don't avert climate change with per capita cuts if population keeps growing. Which it will, till about 2100.
There is no chance of stopping this. The challenge is massive even if there were political will, and there is no political will. We need to plan for climate change as a near certainty and start preparing now.
That's exactly what I'm saying. Move to land on a hill. Travel north. Buy up some tundra that will be futile farm land in 50 years.
We should also pause for a minute and not the silent beauty of this consensus. No major leader, no scientist, no religious figure ever said Fuck it, let's not bother. But that's what our species have decided...
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/co2?tab=chart&xScale=li...
Just because it's not enough and it's been slow doesn't mean it's nothing.