China Has Twice the Environmental Taxes cp the US

This chart is from an interesting research document from the OECD, China's Progress Towards Green Growth: An International Perspective, October 2018. It shows that China has about twice the environmental taxes than does the US:

Personally I am very tired of claims that I see again and again that it's China and India who should be cutting back their use of fossil fuels, since they're the largest emitters.

First of all, the US emitted 2.2 times as much as does India in 2017, according to the 2018 BP report. Cumulatively, since 1850, the US has emitted 7.7 times what India has. So the India part of the assertion is just a dumb argument.

Cumulatively (since 1850), the US has emitted about 1.9 times more CO2 than has China, which I calculated from the World Resource Institute's CAIT database and the 2016-2018 BP reports.

And, I calculate that in 2017 the US emitted about 2.3 times that of China on a per capita basis.

The US has mucked up the atmosphere far more than China has, and continues to do so on an individual basis. It's not like an American newborn has an inherent, god-given right to emit twice as much CO2 as does a Chinese newborn.

The US is still the world's primary energy hog, and the US should be leading the fight to get rid of fossil fuels. Instead the Administration is going in the opposite direction, the future climate be damned.