[ralferoo]

"big number bad" isn't a great way of analysing the data, because China has a massively larger population.

The US emits 49% more CO2 per capita than China. And even with the much larger rate of increase, 0.79% to US' 0.3%, it'll still require 81 years to catch up to the US per capita rate [0].

The US aren't the good guys here, not by any means. Compared to my country, for instance, the US' emissions are 3x per capita that of the UK. If you want to argue that we shouldn't be using per capita (although we absolutely should), then that's 45x the UK's CO2 emissions.

[0] log(13.59/9.13) / log(1.0049) = 81.4 years

[sarchertech]

In absolute numbers China produces 1/3 of the total worlds CO2, and they are still growing the amount of CO2 they are producing.

That is not the actions of a country who “believes in climate change”.

China’s CO2 per capita is ahead of every large developed country except for the US, Australia, and Russia.

[ralferoo]

A few days late for the discussion, but I just happened to watch an interesting youtube video today [1] which seemed worth sharing.

A summary of some of the points early in the video: in 2025, China added 300GW of solar and 100GW of wind power. In comparison, between 2015 and 2014 China added a total of 78GW of coal power capacity, and for 2025 onwards an additional 161GW has been proposed or reactivated. So, clearly just one year of additional renewables capacity far exceeds the additional coal capacity over multiple years.

Around 5:25, the video then talks about the difference between capacity (maximum possible power) and generation (the amount actually produced) and another chart at 5:52 shows that even though capacity has increased by 6% from 2024 to 2025, actual coal power generation decreased by 1.2% over the same timeframe. So even though the headline is that China is building more coal power stations, in practice they're to cover peak load and to provide energy security and the actual energy production (and hence) emissions is decreasing. FWIW, the same chart shows a similar global trend.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qde4r4_uMU0

[Zigurd]

Actually, if you Google the rankings, China is 27th per capita, behind, of all places, Iceland.

[sarchertech]

> ahead of every large developed country

Because those are the only ones that can move the needle on climate change.

[Zigurd]

You didn't bother to do the search and find out how many industrialized nations are also higher emitters per capita.

[sarchertech]

I said large developed countries.

No one cares if Iceland emits more co2 per capita. They have < 400k people.

This isn’t about fairness, this is about whether the actions of the leaders of China care about impacting climate change.

[desterothx]

Almost like the entire worlds manufacturing was pushed to China the last 40 years (and is now getting moved to cheaper countries with the rising Chinese middle class). Is there a similar explanation for why the US number is so high?

[myrmidon]

Outsourced manufacturing is much less of a factor than people typically assume:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/imported-or-exported-co-e...

US numbers are insanely high because cheap hydrocarbons are locally available (=> bad incentives) and everyone is wealthy (that correlation is very strong; just compare Luxembourg, which is much wealthier and more polluting than surrounding nations) and also population density is rather low so more energy wasted for transport.

[flakeoil]

> that correlation is very strong; just compare Luxembourg, which is much wealthier and more polluting than surrounding nations

Well, your theory does not hold at all if you look at Switzerland which pollutes 1/4 of the US per capita. CO2 pollution is not and does not have to be correlated with standard of living.

[myrmidon]

The reality is obviously more complex, and many countries have already managed to somewhat decouple economic growth from CO2 emissions (very good!), but as a crude approximation: More money => everyone gets more stuff => more CO2 emissions (producing and running that stuff).

If you want meaningful CO2/capita comparisons, you also have to be very careful with countries that get ("free") hydro power opportunities for electricity because that distorts the picture massively (same for e.g. Norway).

Big producers of hydrocarbons, on the other hand (like the US) have to work hard to resist the allure of cheap & convenient fossils.

Switzerland is so far ahead in this comparison because they get a lot of CO2-free hydroelectricity (>50%), have to import most hydrocarbons (=> incentive against) and also save massively on transportation because density is much higher.

[gwerbin]

How much of that "decoupling" is actually just "exporting"? Not being glib or dismissive, I think it's an important distinction and I don't know enough about Europe to know how the two compare.

[gwerbin]

There are so many bad incentives all over the place in the USA, and it's not so much that cheap hydrocarbons create them as it fails to prevent them.

Consider the gradual takeover of SUVs on the roads (many which to be fair are probably about as efficient as sedans were 20 years ago, albeit more expensive in real terms and significantly more dangerous for pedestrians), or the heavy reliance on trucking rather than rail for heavy freight transportation between logistics hubs, or the heavy reliance on air for long-distance travel due to having literally zero high-speed rail, or the fear of nuclear power, or the overt political opposition to green energy.

[sarchertech]

The rest of that is true but the US moves a much higher percentage of its freight by rail than almost any large developed country.

Just in comparison to Europe “46 percent of European freight goes by truck while only 11 percent goes by rail, while in the United States more than 40 percent goes by rail while just 30 percent goes on the highway."

This is in ton-miles, so it’s the metric most directly relevant to emissions.

[myrmidon]

Is this excluding maritime shipping?

According to eurostat (https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/SEPDF/cac...) that is two thirds of freight volume and it probably still eclipses even rail transport in CO2 efficiency (until full CO2 free rail electrification), so this probably distorts things completely...

If you actually compare the emission fractions, you can see that the US uses much more CO2 per capita on transport compared to Europe (about 3 times as much!):

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-ghg-sector?cou...

[ralferoo]

You seem to think China is the evil polluter here. Just sort by per capita, and you'll see it's not even in the top 10% most polluting per capita.

There are plenty of large (depending on your definition of large) countries above it. Not just US, Australia and Russia that you are excluding for some reason, but also Qatar, Kuwait, UAE, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Canada all have significantly developed economically important countries. And they all have GDP per capita much greater than China's. What's your rationale for excluding them? There's a whole host of smaller countries with higher GDP per capita than China between those I listed above and China on the CO2 per capita results.

We should agree that ALL countries should be working to reduce CO2 emissions. But it sounds like you have a strong US bias and given Trump not only denies that climate change is even a thing, has withdrawn from international agreements on reducing emissions and even tries to pressure other countries to burn oil instead of investing in windfarms, it seems a bit disingenuous to try to make out that China is the only country that needs to improve. Before commenting on the speck in someone else's eye, first remove the plank from your own, yadda yadda...

[sarchertech]

> There are plenty of large (depending on your definition of large) countries above it. Not just US, Australia and Russia that you are excluding for some reason, but also Qatar, Kuwait, UAE, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Canada

None of those countries have more than 50 million people. Most of them have fewer than 10 million. None of them are going to move the needle on climate change.

The US is clearly not a country to emulate when it comes to co2 emissions. I don’t think China is any more “evil” than the US when it comes to climate change.

But their actions are clearly no the actions of a country who “believes in climate change”.

[ralferoo]

> But their actions are clearly no the actions of a country who “believes in climate change”.

I'd be willing to bet that you've not been to China. Shenzhen is a very green city, I'll go into that later, but also Beijing and Shanghai have historically had serious problems with smog in summer, and this has got significantly better in recent years as local government pushes companies towards renewable energy sources and close down coal power stations.

For example in Shenzhen, all buses and taxis have to be EV, and around 80% of all new privately owned cars are also EVs. That seems like a city that believes in climate change.

You've got vast swathes of desert covered by solar panels providing electricity further east (although sadly, a lot is waste due to transmission inefficiencies). That seems like a country that believes in climate change.

You've got a country that produces 80% of the world's solar panels, and has over 1/3 of the worldwide installation of solar panels. That seems like a country that believes in climate change.

You've got a country with massive windfarms and a net exporter of wind turbines. Combined, over 1/4 of all electricity in China comes from renewables. That seems like a country that believes in climate change.

You've got a country that uses a lot of battery storage to smooth power demand, and exports these units to pretty much everywhere because they're about the best you can get. That seems like a country that believes in climate change.

You've got a country that built the massive three gorges dam project, started in the 1990s and finished nearly a quarter of a century ago. That seems like a country that believes in climate change.

Sure, there's still a long way to go, and due to the massive energy demands, it still has coal power stations providing about half it's electricity generation needs. That needle is shifting over time, but you know what? It's still half coal and yet it still only has 2/3 the emissions per capita compared to the US. But even if it still has a long way to go, its actions clearly ARE the actions of a country that believes in climate change.

[sarchertech]

I took Mandarin in college. I don’t hate China. I don’t think the US is a good country to emulate with respect to climate change mitigation.

But if you believe climate change is real, and you have authoritarian control over 1/3 of the entire world’s co2 emissions, you wouldn’t be increasing your green house gas emissions, and you wouldn’t have a co2 emission per capita higher than almost all of the developed world.

[notact]

To be fair, you can replace ""believes in climate change" with "prioritizes energy independence". I would argue the latter is a stronger motivator for China.

[onetimeusename]

I don't think per capita emissions is the only metric that should be used. Environmental impact is not measured per capita. Also it blames people in the US for energy consumed here to manufacture which includes exports for people abroad. The US's per capita emissions are not even far away from other similar nations. It's a data point, sure. It's comparable to Canada and Australia and even South Korea. Where did you get that the US emits 45x the UK?

Another point is there is evidence[1] China has cheated and manipulated their data[2]. I don't like this "who are the good guys" game. Anyone playing this game is just looking to create a narrative about good and bad guys.

[1]: https://www.spglobal.com/energy/en/news-research/latest-news...

[2]: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-new-carbon-metri...

[ralferoo]

> Where did you get that the US emits 45x the UK?

From the GP [1], US emits 4,632,164,876 and UK emits 292,419,359 tonnes CO2. Which, sorry my bad, is actually only 15x. Looks like I did the ratio of China to UK which is 45x.

But either way, it shows that comparing total emissions is stupid because it's biased against bigger countries. Emissions per capita is a far more sensible metric.

> Also it blames people in the US for energy consumed here to manufacture which includes exports for people abroad.

Sure, but the same can be said about China, in fact I'd argue even more so. As a resident of the UK, the majority of things I buy is made in China, almost nothing from the US.

> The US's per capita emissions are not even far away from other similar nations.

Sure, but they are higher than China's, which was the point I was making to refute the GP. The only reason China's total emissions is 3x US is because its population is 4x US.

> Anyone playing this game is just looking to create a narrative about good and bad guys.

If you re-read what I wrote that you're replying to, you'll see that we agree on that.

It was the GP post that tried to compare China and US in terms of emissions, and deliberately chose total emissions to portray China as significantly worse than the US and getting worse year-on-year, while conveniently ignoring the population size differential and that the increase in emissions is still negligible compared to the overall difference, because it'd take 81 years for China to catch up with the US on emissions per capita. I then compared the US to the UK to show that comparing total emissions instead of per capita is stupid, because the population size matters.

But, as I said in the post you replied to - both countries can and should do much better, but as China isn't even in the top 10% of emissions per capita, this is a worldwide problem and trying to pin it all on China is disingenuous.

[1] https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-by...

[onetimeusename]

Ok I appreciate the correction, I could not figure that out.

As far as everything else, yes I think this is a global problem, not solely a Chinese problem but I would characterize US-Chinese relations as tense so that tends to amplify finger pointing which I disagree with so yes, we agree.

[iso1631]

You need to account for carbin import/exports in manufactured goods and services

If the UK imported all its electricity from Poland, it would reduce on a per-capita basis but would increase global