askchapo

We are past 1.5C.

True, but I think it's still a valid target for assigning responsibility. The math would be the same regardless of the threshold you pick; US is overbudget, China is underbudget.

We don't need to 'peak', to stop raising CO2 emmissions, we need them to drop, precipitously, very, very quickly.

They gotta peak before they start dropping, that's kinda the definition.

But they have largely actually lowered their CO2 emmissions in the last decades, and as your own first linked article states, China is responsible for about half the CO2 emmissions since 2000...

That's because they're making all of our shit now. The EU is importing some 1.2 billion tons of CO2e a year now (a third of their consumption-related emissions), something that tends to get left out of these graphs.

and that China's total historical CO2 emmissions now exceed the EU's total historical CO2 emmissions.

No they don't, where are you getting your numbers from?

Even if they were, you're eliding the per capita component of consumption. China's cumulative per capita emissions don't even make the top 20.. What are the Chinese people supposed to do, live on air?

But I don't think its good to just massively fanboy/girl ('uncritical support'?) over China, as basically all the other posts in this thread up untill I posted mine have done

I think it's fair to stay skeptical, but if you compare China's progress with the US's, you'll see why the users are on here are gushing. They're the only ones giving the world anything to hope for at this point.

They may be building the components of a post carbon future, but they're doing so with astounding amounts of burnt coal.

Better than what the US/EU are doing, which is building nothing with astounding amounts of burnt coal, gas, and oil. You can't just magic PV and wind turbines out of nothing, you have to use your current energy mix, and China's doing that to make more progress than the rest of the world combined.