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Comment by dnautics | Hacker News Reader

The US currently is at per capita GHG emissions approximately at the the same level as it was in 1910.

https://ourworldindata.org/profile/co2/united-states

Despite not being in the paris treaty, the us needs only a 10-12% reduction to meet the paris accord requirements on schedule (43% decrease by 2030).

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The Paris Agreement deals with total emissions. Unlike previous climate treaties, it doesn't specify a baseline year. If you use 2005, as the US was supposed to use, the 2030 target is ~3.5 billion tonnes. 2024 emissions were ~4.9 billion tonnes. If you use a 1990 baseline, as in earlier treaties, the US target becomes ~2.9 billion tonnes.

US population has been basically stable (+10% over the past 10 years), so per capita (in terms of the paris agreement timeframe) is a reasonable proxy.

Yes, but it was most recently at the same level between 1939 and 1940, according to that graph.

And total US GHG emissions are currently at about the same level as they were in 1988.

US consumers and businesses buy almost all their stuff from China. China's massive footprint of Coal should be added to US emissions.

Good point. But one factor is China is also greatly reducing their emissions. For instance, their pollution levels have plummeted after enacting strict controls:

https://epic.uchicago.edu/insights/china-has-quickly-and-sha...

Still, that is a good point, a lot of the emissions from manufacturing have been shifted to other countries.

>China is also greatly reducing their emissions

Are they? because looking at these charts[0], although fossil fuel use as a percent of total energy may be going down, the absolute values for coal, gas and oil only go up year over year.

[0]https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/china#what-sources...

Aye, but that data is up to 2024, here's an update: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha...

"flat or falling" let's be honest. The amount of "fall" in that graph is basically in the noise. It's been flat.

It's still a big change from the previous status quo. I've been checking on absolute emissions on various industrial countries for a while now and this is the first time I've seen them actually flat (and not decreasing as a fraction but increasing in absolute terms)

Sure. Difficult to say much from so few datapoints alone.

On the other hand, the apparent cause suggests the trend will continue.

On the other other hand, perhaps China will suddenly decide to build 100 GW of data centers meaning they ramp all the existing coal plants up to 100% load.

I'm mostly hopeful, but not absolutely so.

Ah, right. Yeah, I've been reading about their incredible decrease in pollution overall, and not on just their C02 emissions. Didn't know these had still been rising over the years, and it's really only in the two years have these been falling too. Still, amazing turn around.

China’s massive coal footprint is shrinking due to successful, intentional effort under the most recent five year plan, and coal’s presence in China’s power mix will likely continue to shrink, while China ramps up exports of clean energy technology to the rest of the world.

In absolute terms, china's coal footprint is increasing, and will continue to increase in the short term, as of early 2026, they were still opening new coal plants.

China is a semi-planned economy. The coal plants are more a form of insurance than a practical and economical source of power.

China is shifting it's coal use from direct burning in coal power plants to coal based oil, gas and chemicals, reducing the need for energy imports that could be cut off in a conflict. Carbon, in form of CO2, will still be released to the atmosphere from this products.

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/chines...

Their coal capacity is increasing, but the utilization is continually falling.

The trend has China installing as much solar capacity as the rest of the world combined every single year within a reasonably small margin.

> US consumers and businesses buy almost all their stuff from China

This is not really the case, China is the US' #3 trading partner, and trade-corrected GHGs are also down (see the graph further down the page), actually by an slightly better percentage off-peak.

Not just the US, a lot of developed countries have outsourced the problem to China (or other countries) to look good on paper, and tanked their local manufacturing as a by-product. It will be interesting how history records this moment.

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