The Americans loudly refuse to do anything, loudly deny that there's a problem, and loudly proclaim their hatred of ecology.
The Chinese say yes to everything but they have absolutely no intention of actually doing anything, they just lie.
Check this out : https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/05/23/china-factories-...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/04/china-underrep...
> This means that according to our assessment, China will meet its 2020 pledge and its NDC targets, but still be above current emissions levels. China’s chief climate negotiator, Xie Zhenhua, has expressed the opinion that China could meet its 2030 peaking targets early, reflecting the conclusions of other studies (Green and Stern, 2017; Xu, Stanway and Daly, 2018; Gallagher et al., 2019b; Wang et al., 2019). CAT analysis confirms that, based on current GDP projections, China is indeed likely to meet the carbon intensity target of its 2030 pledge early.
So the TL;DR is China is likely to meet its pledges but the pledges themselves are pretty weak — rated “highly insufficient” and only consistent with a 4 degrees warming limit.
That’s inconsistent with your “say yes to everything but ... just lie” assessment. It appears they don’t say yes to everything (hence the weak pledge) but will hit the promised target.
Your links don’t support your point either. The first link doesn’t pinpoint the cause (could be a lapse in enforcement) and the second link is about a revision in official figures; Guardian’s reporting is based on a NYT article with a more neutral tone, but even the Guardian article with its loaded title (surprise surprise) didn’t call it lying.
But with current developments this will be far too little too late and it will be a rough ride forward.
Unfortunately we can't blame it on ourselves as our carbon emissions, assuming it's even relevant, have decreased massively compared to predictions.
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.
https://cotap.org/per-capita-carbon-co2-emissions-by-country...
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
https://www.livescience.com/49196-nasa-satellite-oco2-carbon...
China shows up very red, but they have 5x the people living in a much smaller area.
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.
There's an adjusted metric that puts things into an even better perspective: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emis... .
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).
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.
Wait... https://co2.jpl.nasa.gov/
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.
Does this mean we need to multiply China's values by 4.2 (1386 mln Chinese vs 327 mln Americans) to account for all those capitas? ;-)
Ya let's blame it all on other people.