The usual thing is to point at China because China is a huge place with a huge population and so as it industrialized it uses a lot of power and emits lots of CO2.
This made plenty of sense ten years ago, when for a smaller country you could compare their entire CO2 footprint to China's annual growth and ask why bother. But increasingly while China is still huge these comparisons look worse for even medium-sized countries unless they're actually on a sensible path. China is growing more slowly and importantly mostly by using more renewables and electrifying, so the comparison looks more uncomfortable.
The comparison with China was never very good, as thinking in terms of emissions per country is useless. Per capita emissions would be much more relevant, and even then you'd have to take into account that Chinese factories produce their goods mainly for Western markets.
Per captia emissions is the most useless stat and by the way China's per captia emissions are high now so update that talking point. As for the western market argument, governments are responsible for managing their emissions not private companies. The reason China makes goods for the western market is because the western markets introduced legislation to try and reduce emissions while China did not.
