Apply linear extrapolation, and USA would go below Germany in 20 years. Extrapolating with exponential decay, in 40 years.
https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/united-states?country...
Germany is significantly lower in per capita emissions so their reduction is (I'm assuming) a lot harder to achieve. It's like comparing fat loss between someone who starts overweight vs someone who is starting neutral bmi.
https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/united-states?country... and add Germany.
Happy to hear why I'm wrong, I'm certainly not an expert in stats or emissions.
Using the same data source you can truly see how much of an outlier the US carbon footprint is:
https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/united-states?country...
Basically the large majority of countries sit below the 10 tonne per capita cut-off, with the outliers of US, Canada, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Luxembourg above the 15 tonne cut-off (with Qatar being basically off the charts). I am not sure if it is just consumer behaviour differences or energy source differences and I am sure there will be multiple factors depending on the country and regions but these outlier countries are effectively emitting anywhere between 50% to 300% more emissions than any other population on Earth.
The main issue here is population size:
Luxembourg : 600k
Qatar: 2.897M
Saudi Arabia: 34.997M
Canada: 37.885M
US: 331.669M
If you stop thinking per capita and actually take into account total population, you quickly realize that all other nations on Earth are dependent on US market carbon correction in order to avoid environmental collapse. Far more than any other foreign policy ineptitude from the current adminsistration it's the environmental inaction and downright resistance of US lobby driven policy that scares everyone else around the world.
We are still on track for an inevitable major environmental collapse but it could still be vastly mitigated, if US politicians and citizens would get with the program.
[0] If you are from elsewhere in the world, it might be hard to imagine how few threats of natural disasters we have in central Europe: there are basically no earthquakes, no tsunamis, no bush fires, no (real) hurricans (we call them 'storms'), no real tornadoes (it is such a rare thing that it usually makes it to national news if there is one), no (terrible) floods (well, every few decades there is a large flood somewhere here but that's it).
Germany has a much larger per-capita manufacturing and export sectors of their economy, I would expect their emissions to slow more slowly.
But where do they come from? From the optimisation of our energy consumption? Or from the relocation of some of our companies abroad?
France has the benefit of large-scale nuclear power. Any given day, my home province of Ontario, is at around 85%-95% fossil-fuel-free emissions because of nuclear and hydro [1]. If instead we decided to go with solar and wind, then we'd be waiting until 2060 to cut CO2 emissions and burning much more natural gas until then ... just like Germany.
Which is primarily due to Obama era regulations that Trump has done everything he can to roll back. Had the price of gas not skyrocketed and the mortgage crisis not hit, we would've had almost no improvements from 2000-2008.
If you look at the data available from 2016-2018 we went BACKWARDS. You can't extrapolate the data from Obama's regulations that have rolled back and say: look it'll take care of itself.
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-....
That didn't reduce emissions and may have actually increased them.
The NOAA tracking global methane has literally nothing to do with tracking methane output from individual wells - which again, we don't do. Moving the goal posts doesn't make you right. We DO actively track emissions from coal fired plants. We DO know that fracking has absolutely increased methane emissions:
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/08/frack...