The summer of 2003 was said to be Europe’s hottest in 500 years. Those who saw this as largely due to human-caused climate change could reasonably have blamed the US, the global leader in carbon emissions. Less so in 2023. The International Energy Agency’s estimates of 2023 carbon dioxide emissions, published last week, show all climate change roads (still) lead to Beijing, even if that’s inconvenient.

In 2003, the annual carbon emissions rankings saw: 1) the US at 5.7 gigatons, 2) the PRC at 4.6 gigatons, 3) the EU at 3.6 gigatons, and no one else really matters. By 2013, Chinese emissions had jumped 125 percent and American emissions dropped 10 percent, leaving Chinese emissions more than double that of American. European emissions had fallen fast and India emerged as a clear fourth.

Fast-forward 10 more years and American emissions dropped again, actually a bit more quickly than the prior decade. There are people who still think the PRC and the US are about equal in emissions. In 2023, China was at 12.6 gigatons versus America’s 4.5 gigatons. The EU’s emissions also fell from 2013-2023, and it’s now fourth globally, with India grabbing third.

In 2023, the US, India, EU and heck, let’s just toss in Japan too, combined to 1.8 gigatons less in terms of emissions than China, alone. The PRC’s emissions growth has slowed sharply in the past 10 years, but the volume increment was still 175 percent larger than the increment to Indian emissions (with the others declining).  

Advocates of tight restrictions on emissions cite their views as supported by science and skeptics’ views as selfish and/or completely wrong. And some climate change skeptics say odd things. But the climate movement’s devotion to science and the overriding imperative to cut emissions often vanish when emissions are attributed to sovereign sources. Then science is unceremoniously dumped in favor of fairness.

It’s not fair to hold China accountable because of history or population size or income level or a vague merger thereof. The atmosphere doesn’t care about your excuses, wasteful Americans, but is forgiving of China’s roughly 64 percent share of global coal emissions. The per capita claim may be the worst. China has the same population as India and 4.5 times the emissions.

The important per capita failing concerns solutions. Per climate change warnings, there’s not nearly enough time for solutions via personal decisions. Solutions must be imposed top-down, as broadly as possible. It’s one government, and to a notable extent, one man who can change the trajectory of 1.4 billion people.

The climate change return to influencing Xi Jinping, history notwithstanding, is many times higher than any other form of climate change advocacy. And if he can’t be moved, advocacy is largely performative. If the US, EU, and Japan had all cut emissions by half 2003-2023, and India’s hadn’t grown at all, China would have still caused a global increase.

Some climate change advocates previously went beyond fairness to fantasy. There was an expressed belief that, if the US led on emissions, China would follow. This is dead now, right, my green friends? Numbers over 20 years show otherwise. The slightest bit of sense shows otherwise. Science doesn’t mix well with faith that Xi, of all people, waits for American leadership.

The best defense of PRC emissions levels is the world’s factory defense. Many Chinese numbers are inflated by global demand for cheaper goods—emissions were relocated along with jobs. If so, serious climate change action calls for painful US policies to block cheap, carbon-intensive imports from China. Actually prohibitive tariffs or low quotas.

Those are costly, but there’d be a logic to them. There’s no climate logic at all in leaving tariffs and quotas on China untouched while pausing American exports of liquefied gas, as the Biden administration did in late January. The pause is not even performative—it will likely increase global coal use or shift gas markets toward bad actors, plus harm American producers and workers.

The climate change movement often expresses frustration at not being taken seriously. Export halts for the US, protests for the EU, and fairness for China, whose emissions are 80 percent higher than the US and UE combined. This is why.

Derek Scissors