United States per-capita CO2 emmisions are 17.5 tons per year vs China's 6.18, and that's not even taking into account the fact that China emits a lot of CO2 producing cheap products to sell to the US.
I think a relevant point may also be the rate of increase. The numbers I saw show that the US per capita emissions actually trending down and China was still increasing.
I’m not trying to absolve the US here just noting that rate of increase/decrease matters in addition to per capita and absolute values
I'm not sure why you'd expect it to be otherwise. This is a per-capita figure, and carbon emissions are strongly correlated with income and purchasing power. CO2 emissions aren't driven by consumer goods production alone.
So that last link has numbers drastically different from the GP’s data, and it says that it comes simply from fossil fuel combustion and cement — not population. Population is also not a great metric; the types of power plants, typical personal transportation usages, and transport of everyday items like food will vary greatly. These are also all very dynamic.
The reality is all these data sources will he estimates. Estimates can be severely wrong — they can be produced by local governments with incentives to lie, or estimated by outside observers with poor actual knowledge. China has had a long history of empirical lying in their economic data locally due to internal party targets, for example. I see no reason for them to give accurate numbers to the UN/external world, where as with the US there’s enough decentralization and public data that there’s a better chance of being more accurate (but still probably quite off).
Of course they're estimates, you can't exactly plug a meter on every exhaust pipe in the country and take a reading every couple of days. And of course the methodology varies from one study to another. But modern estimates do account for things like types of power plants, typical personal (and public, and business/industrial) transportation usages etc.. It's not like the whole scientific world waited for us to discuss this on HN before figuring out that maybe 10 people who go to work by bike isn't quite the same as 10 people who drive a jeep to work.
There is less data available for China and therefore the estimates are likely wrong by a higher margin than the estimates for the US. But the figures do very much fit the demographics, economy and geography of China so I doubt that the margin is that high.
When azinman2 claimed the reported COTAP numbers for China are probably wrong I was saying the same is true for the US for exactly the same reasons - measuring emissions on a national scale is hard, there are good reasons not to believe any self-reported data that business relies on, and frankly America has worse climate emissions policies than China at the moment.
I'm not suggesting that other agencies that independently measure emissions are wrong. It is possible to measure emissions remotely (eg the satellite that SmellyGeekBoy linked to), and that provides proper unbiased data.
Per capita is the only metric that makes sense for carbon emissions since the effects are not going to be confined to artificial nation boundaries. So no, no need to multiply anything.
Companies in developed countries have been exporting emissions to developing countries. Those companies are profiting while people like you and I point fingers at each other. Pretty funny. Anyway if you look at the emission metrics per capita it's still developed countries at the top.
... but if developed countries are asking developing countries to reduce their emissions it means they are implicitly asking for a price raise too, no? So, why not do that?
Not everyone can afford the price raise. Firms in developed countries would be hurt if consumption decreases due to the price raise so who’s going to support this policy?
Unfortunately we can't blame it on ourselves as our carbon emissions, assuming it's even relevant, have decreased massively compared to predictions.