The largest polluter in the world is the US Military.
It does make sense, as with the exception of aircraft carriers all of the US military naval assets run on fossil fuels, and so does all other hardware (trucks, tanks, planes, construction equipment, power generators, ...). And almost all of that is exempt from emissions regulations, a lot of it is so old that it predates modern regulations anyway.
[1] https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2022/10/pentagon-cli...
And then to be able to burn any, you first need to take them out of the ground. If we count those indirect emissions, obviously Saudi Aramco causes orders of magnitudes more emissions than the Pentagon. Sure, this comparison may be "cheating", but put it this way; it's much worse for global emissions to have Aramco improve their barrels/day rate by 10% than the Pentagon's budget increase by 10%.
China has orders of magnitude less logistics to accomplish. They only run three small overseas military sites, in contrast to the (at least) 1.000 sites the US operates.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_oversea...
The Pentagon has never passed an audit, so it's not known for it's transparency either.
https://www.npr.org/2021/05/19/997961646/the-pentagon-has-ne...
https://www.defensenews.com/pentagon/2023/11/16/pentagon-fai...
Trillions of funds unaccounted for & much of what is accounted for is "top secret". Not transparent.
> Sure, this comparison may be "cheating", but put it this way; it's much worse for global emissions to have Aramco improve their barrels/day rate by 10% than the Pentagon's budget increase by 10%.
Much of the violence, weapon production, & violations of sovereignty in the world is centered around the desire to control this resource. I'll take emissions that make make life better/useful things vs emissions that destroy lives/things.