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
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).
Wait... https://co2.jpl.nasa.gov/
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.
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.
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.
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? ;-)