# Country CO2/capita CO2 total (2022) Population
- ------------- ---------- ---------------- ----------------
1 China 8.89 12,667,428,430 1,425,179,569
2 United States 14.21 4,853,780,240 341,534,046
3 India 1.89 2,693,034,100 1,425,423,212
America is still the largest historical polluter by a mile and China has already hit peak emissions. They are doing much better than America on this front. At this rate they’ll hit net zero before we will
If somebody does pollution for a while how in the world would that make them ineligible from being the leader in the future technologies that stop the pollution?
I am not following your logic or point here. The US has been the leading polluter, would that somehow stop us from saving the world from pollute if we came up with the technology for the rest of the world to stop polluting? Of course not. It's a very strange whataboutism that you are purveying that gets repeated frequently in online forums, but doesn't stand up to a little bit of back-and-forth.
Pollutant-wise, are you insinuating that solar and wind and battery manufacturing is more polluting overall than the extraction and burning of fossil fuels they replace?
Parent deleted his comment with insults and got flagged dead. Perhaps insulting those with legitimate questions and people who have long-term accounts (indicating a lack of low-effort brigading ala reddit) isn't the best method, particularly when you don't respond to any of those questions. A bit of a "look in the mirror" moment.
Nothing to do with my comment or your reply specifically. I suspected bot voting manipulation and this entire discussion is filled with absolutely stupid Reddit-style comments. People posting substantive comments were being downvoted.
Some of the dumbest, low quality comments I read here come from 10+ year old accounts so account age has no correlation to discussion quality.
I can't argue in good faith when everyone is acting like children.
> China is by far the world's biggest polluter, by a factor of 2-3x that of the US so let's not paint them as some beacon of environmental stewardship.
China's leading the planet in development and deployment of renewable energy tech.
What proportion of China's emissions are a consequence of The West's externalizing the manufacturing of what it consumes?
At least with China in the driver's seat it looks like the planet's manufacturing needs will actually get cleaned up. Meanwhile the US will keep pearl clutching as it fades into irrelevance and Zimbabwean hyperinflation.