Perhaps it is. Or perhaps it's necessary to get things done. Who knows?
It's a kind of an odd argument though. That "discerning Americans" will jump on board when they see some other people doing "some things" such that it indicates to them that it must be real.
Why work through that indirection? It's so arbitrary and can be arbitrarily moved. It's a blame shifting mechanism - I won't worry about this until "gulf stream environmentalists", "china", somewhere/someone else does something that I think is enough. I won't say what that is or what I'll actually do and by when. Or if I do and I make it to that point I can always find some other "issue".
Perhaps that's the point. I mean delay and distract was the big tobacco plan - and many of the same people apparently moved to fossil fuel companies.
A more serious and beneficial approach would be to look at what climate science predicted and what happened. Then look at what their future predictions are like.
If you take the IPCC reports they have generally underpredicted the rate of climate change.