A few years ago China agreed to discuss its runaway greenhouse gas emissions - in 2030. The Obama administration had to try and frame that as a win, noting that China had never even agreed to mention a date before.

The worldwide concessions to China on emissions, and the toothless Paris Agreement, where everyone gets to pick their own way to pretend they are helping, have meant nothing is going to change. Western countries will still strive for no emissions, celebrities will buy carbon offsets they think make up for flying their private jets to environmental meetings, and it won't make any difference in the outcome. 

If we cared more about results and less about the culture war - activists opposed to agriculture, everyone opposed to airplanes unless it's for their own convenience - we'd have a chance of making a real difference. Really all we need to do is stop letting a communist dictatorship lie and things would get better. Instead they will continue to claim they aren't using political prisoners for forced organ donations and the publication in the U.S. and Europe will gush about their reforms, they will claim they are the world's largest producers of solar energy and those same outfits will pretend it means anything.

Obviously any real criticism from inside the country will result in you being the one forced to give up your organs for the benefit of party elites, so that is unlikely to happen.

Awareness of how much China really pollutes is only recent

The United States certainly had its own share of emissions. Once environmentalists successfully scared people about nuclear meltdowns we added more coal, so by the time the Clinton administration killed off nuclear energy in America in 1994, we were belching a lot of CO2. But then natural gas came along and it has been so beneficial that by 2017 American energy produced fewer emissions than the Supreme Court aborted Clean Power Plan would have mandated by 2025.

But it has made little difference globally, as we read every week in political lamentations, because China is a runaway train. Policymakers who didn't want to call them out 20 years ago ignored the scientists who stated plainly that China had to be emitting far more CO2 than the communist dictatorship was reporting. It was only 15 years ago satellite technology and remote sensing was good enough that it made no difference what the Chinese government claimed, the data were right there. They led the world in pollution- and it has only gotten worse. But if you want to cater to them because your base adores them - like billionaire Mike Bloomberg does when he claims China's coal usage is fine because they are moving their plants farther from cities - you ignore all of that and criticize domestic farmers and buy a ticket to "Dark Waters" in protest of the evil runaway science killing us all.

There is nothing wrong with China building an economy, of course. The most hypocritical stance western nations take is to declare a moratorium on emissions for other countries now that we all have cars, flat screen televisions, and air conditioning. 

But we do just that, except we punch down at the countries that can't fight back. At the same time the Obama administration was caving into China they were also denying World Bank funds for centralized energy in nations that lacked it - unless the centralized energy was solar and wind. A billion people use dung and wood for energy and the emissions are monstrous but the only centralize energy they can afford is coal. We denied them that even though coal emissions would still be a fraction of what they are doing now.

We put politics ahead of the environment but it is not those Republicans who don't agree to cripple our economy that deserve all of the blame. We all do, because we want cheap smartphones more than we want cleaner air. 

https://www.sciencecodex.com/environmental-pollution-china-begins-decreasing-633911