I think the issue that Del Paso was commenting on is that a lot of Chinas CO2 emissions are caused by producing goods that are then exported to the world.
As one who lived and traveled in China for an extended period of time, I understand to an extent the devil's bargain the Chinese have made. The pollution from manufacturing, and from building population centers too quickly (without sufficiently improving underlying water-treatment and surface-traffic infrastructures), has created an environmental catastrophe. If one considers only the resulting cancers and birth defects borne by so many powerless souls in China, the sense of shame and failure can almost extinguish hope.
Here in the USA, we now have many regions with less pollution than 40 years ago, especially in waterways, because we have closed factories involved in manufacturing solvents, alloys, plastics, and so on. This has cut back CO2 emissions directly, and also dispersed populations from the regions which no longer have the factories, further reducing the typical pollution in those areas caused by sewage, traffic, construction, and use of electricity. While many of "our" coastal areas have been significantly cleaned up, Asia, having become the world's manufacturing center and cesspool, now dumps more toxins directly into the world's oceans than can be calculated.
I am not an apologist for China, but I do get frustrated by generally well intentioned environmentalists who crow about progress in the USA, while never mentioning that in many cases, we have simply moved our mess to other places around the globe---out of sight, out of mind, no more problem--thus adding to the mass delusion that our world is not a single, fragile, self-contained ecosphere traveling around and around in space, but some kind of virtual reality that can be managed with politics and ideology. For too many, science is just another belief system, or its a set of tools for manipulating opinion to achieve power.
If you live in the USA, and you are able to go take photographs of wildlife and natural spaces, after being grateful for the experience, the privilege, the joy, consider occasionally the costs other nations have accepted and paid to make it possible.
And I sometimes despair, here in the USA, that I and my friends and family feel as if we have done something significant, something noble, by simply voting against the other guy.
I'm not sure how effective agonizing over whether or not to post a photo will be in the long run. But I do know that real change is hard as hell. One example of what seems like common sense, but is in fact a maddening battle, is trying to convince homeowners' associations to stop insisting every yard is a picture perfect example of manicured landscaping. This uniform beauty can only be achieved by using massive amounts of pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, and water. But homeowners alone aren't guilty of conspiring to poison ourselves and wildlife! People lucky enough to live in lovely apartment complexes with the same ideas about landscaping are just as much a part of the problem. I see so many well educated folk, who believe they are enlightened, gleefully going along with HOA mandates. They don't even recognize the hypocrisy--or they bury it because work and family are overwhelming enough.
Martin Luther King's famous quote may have been a response to racial tensions, but it applies just as poignantly to our global environmental crisis:
