https://ourworldindata.org/per-capita-co2 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_...
China is as capable as the rest of the first world to enforce higher standards if not more.
You have plenty of first world countries with a fraction of the US and Canada's per capita emissions.
You need to look within. You guys are very factually just wasteful. The US and Canada are the ones that stand out like a sore thumb among the First world countries. [0]
Only countries like Qatar and Kuwait are more wasteful than the US and Canada in CO2 per capita emissions.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?t...
Edit: added stats, it almost looks bimodal.
>> China has some of the dirtiest air in the world, but a large share of the country's pollutants are generated during the manufacture of goods destined for countries like the United States, according to a new study.
>> about a fifth to a third of China's air pollutants—which include sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and carbon monoxide—were associated with the production of goods for export, and that about a fifth of those amounts were linked to the production of goods for the United States.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/140122-ma...
India's entire CO2 output is less than half that of the United States, by the way, and its per-capita output is one-eighth. [1] (And gods only know much methane is leaking from American wells. We really aren't interested in counting that.) If you're going to put the squeeze on someone, it should be on the latter... But because we aren't going to squeeze ourselves, we deflect, deflect, deflect.
[1] Since it seems to get by on emitting one-eighth what we do, it sounds like there's plenty left to squeeze from our emissions.