CO2 emissions of each will be about 1/4 of the US, giving them another 30 years or so to catch up.

The US will still find a way to blame it on the Chinese.

CO2 emissions of each will be about 1/4 of the US, giving them another 30 years or so to catch up.”

This assumes that a country’s emissions per person is a relevant statistic. It’s not. Encouraging that is very likely to simply encourage a huge, impoverished population, which is not a virtue.

How about emissions per usable acre? Emissions per monetary value of goods and services produced, or level of freedom and innovation? etc … I’m sure there are more useful measures than the counter-productive emissions per person.

The realities of the military and economic ambitions of China’s dictatorship make it difficult to consider taking climate-related steps that actually damage our economy. If we want to make progress, we need to take steps that are inherently helpful to the economy (perhaps in the long run after an investment phase), or turn the economy-suffocaters into economy-helpers (e.g: tie tough steps that involve higher gas or carbon taxes or stricter regulations to equal or larger tax cuts elsewhere).

To stabilise CO2 concentrations we need (at least) to reduce emissions to zero. In practice we may need to do a little more than this to arrest and reverse the trends and positive feedbacks that are already in place. A policy of contraction and convergence (towards zero) is the only policy which can work, however unappealing it may sound. It is also the only policy that would give the US a moral position to demand that the rest of the world joins in - at the moment China has the perfect get-out, conveniently provided by the US, Australia, Canada and most of the developed world.

Your last para is akin to giving up. Chinese and US emissions are rising and set to rise faster under BAU. Without massive political will this process will continue until all fossil fuels are exhausted, irrespective of the effect on climate. We then have the dual problems of no energy AND a chaotic climate.

I see the undertaking business as a bright star in an otherwise bleak future.

Probably, Science saw the glut, realised that there were other areas maybe under-discussed - in particularly the earnest efforts at the sub-national in China to improve the environment, which include no small amount of grassroots organising and bottom-up political pressure.

One might have thought, rather, that Climate Progress would appreciate a diversity of information rather than merely a dry re-hash of widely publicized information.