The link you shared shows:

- Decreasing per capita emissions in the US starting in 1973 (-27%)

- A decrease in the countries emission starting in 2007 (-13%)

Meanwhile for the same period China has had

- a 7x increase per capita since 1973 (+532%)

- 48% increase for its global emissions since 2007

Clearly one is not like the other! One of them achieved significant results.

The climate doesn't care which datapoint you cherry-picked your starting and ending ratios from. It cares about the current rate of emissions.

I really should not have to explain on this forum that when you multiply two numbers together, the values of both multipliers matter. Seven times nearly-nothing is not very much. Point-seven times a lot is... Still a lot. It's basic arithmetic.

The climate doesn't care about per capita. It's strictly the emissions. If you want to care about per capita numbers you should also care about human development index numbers. It's not the same thing to put 20 gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere while doing nothing the quality of life of the global population as compared to putting 20 gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere while raising the standard of living the global population. We should be striving for lowering CO2, but let's not pretend that all emissions are the same.

The climate doesn't care about per capita, but people do. And solving climate change involves a global effort, but if you insist on shoving most of the burden to the global south who never had a chance at a first world lifestyle, they'll just tell you to screw yourself. You want to insist on bringing your accumulated centuries of carbon emissions onto the lifeboat, while telling everyone else to impose quotas on their luggage, then they'll be happy to drag you to the bottom together.

> The climate doesn't care about per capita.

If you don't want to take per-capita emissions into account, and want to look at absolute numbers, then the US has an even smaller carbon budget to work with - and its way exceeding it.

But okay, let's look at per-capita development times quality of life, instead. (China is ~15% behind the US on the latter - does that mean that its per-capita budget should be dropped by a comparative 15%? It's still doing well by that metric.)

You must realize that development is only possible because of access to energy, services, and material goods. Cut the energy, transportation, and services available to the average American by a factor of 3, as a proxy for bringing it's emissions profile down to China's, and tell me - what will happen to its quality of life?

(My prediction is - a sharp decline, followed by a bloody revolution.)