The correct metric is per capita emissions from fossil fuels, which for India is 13% of the US permissions. Even if you use per country instead of the correct per capita India comes out way ahead of the US with total emissions 55% of the US emissions.
China's per capita emissions are 61% of the US.
More importantly China has a long term plan to get to carbon neutrality and they have the political structure to give them a good chance of achieving that.
The US on the other hand has a decent chance of electing a President in a few months who thinks climate change is a scam and wind turbines cause cancer and whose party wants to get rid of most government programs that promote non-fossil fuel energy and boost promotion of fossil fuels.
If we're going about this from pure physics, climate change isn't about "per capita" nor political scaremongering and demagoguery, it's about absolute carbon emitted.
You have to account on a per capita basis, or else your comparisons will make no sense at all.
Would you consider it reasonable to compare total emissions by Monaco and India? How about total emissions between your household and the entire continent of Europe? Of course you wouldn't.
As someone else has said [1], look where the puck is going. China's renewables and storage deployment trajectory is going vertical [2] [3] [4] [5], and will strand a lot of their coal assets [6]. India is, admittedly, going to need some pressure to encourage the desired outcome (along with the Philippines and Indonesia [7]).
> so calling US laggards in that context is misdirection.
Not at all. The US is doing fuck all compared to China, except for California who is driving clean energy and storage aggressively. The US could absolutely drive out fossil generation more rapidly, based on China's efforts in plain sight. Politics, laziness, and lack of will.
Edit: China is also forcing steelmaking to electric arc furnaces vs coal [8].
[8] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-07-11/china-for... | https://archive.today/pKy4K ("China didn’t permit any coal-based steelmaking projects in the first half of the year for the first time since announcing its major climate neutrality goals in 2020, according to a report released Thursday. All 7.1 million tons a year of steelmaking capacity permitted by provincial governments in the first half used electric arc furnaces, a cleaner process that runs on recycled scrap and electricity, said the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air in its report on Thursday.")
