GDP is total production net of total consumption. It would be cool to compare it to those factors independently but don’t know of anyone who reports that data.

I’m not looking to bestow sainthood upon any country. Just looking for the most accurate metric.

First of all greenhouse gases not just CO2

For cumulative that's debatable. CH4 is the second most important gas, and its half-life in the atmosphere is short enough that over spans of 100s of years it can decompose into CO2 which has a much lesser greenhouse potential.

Per capita annual emissions

See? Moving the goalposts. Moving from cumulative, the real important metric, to per capita current emissions during a renewable transition, because otherwise the data doesn't fit your preconceived, chauvinistic anti-china views.

That's why China is working hard on the greatest desert reforestation projects in the world, and why it exports an insane amount of solar panels instead of keeping them for themselves.

Unreliable may have been a poor choice of words.
You can’t move coal around with pipes or wires. Someone needs to drive trucks full of coal to a power plant.

The pollution from coal tends to have a lot of externalities that drag on the economy. Lost work days, faster equipment degradation, etc.

They use coal but they have practical reasons to want to reduce reliance on coal.

Trucks? If you move coal for a power plant using trucks you're going to need a lot of trucks, you use trains or ships instead, or just build the power plant next to the mine and use conveyor belts.

They're attempting to raise the replacement rate to maintain their still massive population. It is problematic.

but at what cost!

how is that greenwashing?
Then buying woodpellets from canada, shipping them to EU to fuel an 'eco' biomass installation is definitely greenwashing.
But you're right, Sinophobia is also a pseudo-democrat, lib trait.
That's what you're doing.

The US may have effectively banned it, but everybody else is buying loads of it.

As far as I can tell it's operating at capacity. China's installing it for the same reason everyone else is. It's cheap as chips. Power stations take a lot of planning and management, while you can take a few acres of fields and effectively turn it into a money generator with no moving parts.

I'd have got some myself, but my house faced the wrong way to get in on the free solar panels boom, and the up front costs mean it won't pay itself back for like 20 years. I was tempted once the prices went through the roof when Russia invaded Ukraine, but I moved to a tariff priced every 30 minutes or so and the benefits vanished. I might as well let a local farmer build it all instead.

And despite building all our shit, they still actually pollute less CO2 per capita: https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-per-capita/

Chinas exports might not be huge for China, but they're huge for the rest of the world

China effectively seems to be playing Factorio. They have a solar/wind production rate of X/day and X keeps going up faster and faster.

They'll sell those panels and turbines to whoever will take them. They're cheap but the sheer volume means that you need a huge economy to take any significant share of that inventory. With the US effectively out of the picture the biggest remaining economy is China. On top of that the EU does have some tariffs on Chinese renewables and that skews the deployments even more towards China.

Trains and ships are part of the logistics chain but trucks are definitely part of it. They have a big advantage of not needing train stations or ports, as long as you have a decent road.
Some of the larger strip mining operations fill a truck per minute.

So you're saying there are just too many Chinese people? How many should there be?

I'm guessing a lot of that coal is being used to feed westerners urge to buy more crap we don't need.

From 2021 to 2022 they added another 38 Million Tons of CO2 per year to their 10,575 Mt

If they want to reverse that in one year then they need to have 4,166,667 less people plus extra to account for increasing CO2 per person. Obviously thats a nonsense plan, they need to set a target year and slowly change their replacement rate with overcorrection over the duration, but thats precisely what they are not doing.

That's not really how it works. Some random Chinese peasant (that's the vast majority of China's population) doesn't produce much CO2. You can add or remove millions of them without significantly impacting coal consumption or CO2 production.

Industry pollutes. Some types pollute more than others.

China has been increasing energy usage across the board at a much higher rate than the population has been growing. It's a nonsense plan because there's no reason to think that reducing the population would affect that trend.

While there's a clear trend of China using more coal there's just as clear a trend of coal making up a smaller and smaller share of China's power usage over time. Just about every analysis says they're solidly on track to completely phase out coal by 2025 and nobody predicts they'll need to shrink their population to do it.

Because humans just existing produces far less pollution than humans producing a lot of stuff.

It's trivial to say that a bunch of hunter-gatherers don't pollute much but we're not generally willing to relegate people to living in the stone age.

Our economic choices have a much larger impact on pollution than our personal choices do. Ideally we'd have a measure of pollution per consumption. Everyone would have a score that calculates the total pollution created by the entire supply chain that supports their choices. So if a mine in Africa is polluting so a Chinese guy can have a nice air condition, that should be counted for China; and if a factory in China pollutes so that a guy in the US can have a new Iphone, that should be counted for the US.

I'm not aware of any such data set. The closest proxy would be GDP or GNP. That essentially provides a measure of how much pollution the total lifestyle of that population produces.

It's a better measure but not a perfect one. The big problem with the US-China GDP comparison is that the US has much more of a service economy while China has a much more manufacturing based economy.

Manufacturing pollutes much more than services do but services don't exist without the manufacturing.

That's why I was saying a better measure would be pollution per GNP. That would cut out services and basically just count manufacturing output. That would make sense because it's the biggest source of pollution and it's the source you can do the most about (ie there's a lot of room to make many parts of the manufacturing chain cleaner).

Nobody is as green as their marketing suggests and China is no exception. China is making huge investments in green tech and there's still a long way to go.

Yes, their energy requirements have also skyrocketed in the last 20 years. However if you look at their energy mix, in 2010 their energy mix was around 70% from coal, and today it's around 50% of their totally energy mix.