It's logical to start with the king of greenhouse emissions if you want to stop global warming.
But per capita is more informative when thinking about policy for curbing emissions, which is how we actually change our effect on the climate.
If China were to split into 10 countries each emitting 10% of what they do now it'd be the exact same emissions, but according to you it would be much better.
Similarly if the EU would become one country, that country would be high up on the list, much higher than member countries now! Oh no!
Looking at per capita emissions is much more fair.
Anyway, China's emissions are falling since last year ( https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha... ). What's the US doing?
But policy is where real change needs to be made, and the effects of policy still scale with population in most cases.
Also, you don’t want all the low-population countries to each start contributing as much to global warming as the US.
There's a few reasons why China has more CO2 than the rest of the world. Do you want them or are you ignoring them? In plain:
- more people
- more productivity/development
- more exports on processed goods
Even children can understand these points.
China's emissions were 10 billion tons CO2 in 2017 and have increased every single year to 12.29 billion tons CO2 in 2024. Meanwhile, US decreased from 5.22 to 4.9 in the same time
US emissions icreased by 2.5% https://rhg.com/research/us-greenhouse-gas-emissions-2025/
China's emmisions have decreased by <1% https://e360.yale.edu/digest/china-emissions-decline
China has only produced significant CO2/capita in the last decade. The US and Europe are responsible for the accumulated GHG that have gotten us into the current mess. We blew nearly the entire CO2 "budget" for keeping us under 2C of warming, just by ourselves, so it's kinda odd to be pointing fingers at the foreigners who are just now halfway catching up to what we're emitting now.