True but we should also realize that China didn’t just sit around one day and go “let’s set up a bunch of coal fired power plants and steel mills for funsies.”

Most western countries that have run the neoliberalism playbook have gone “let’s let China build shit, we will do service, finance, and knowledge work instead” but we still want manufactured goods. I just think it’s important to bring this context when people point to China’s coal use as if they are just burning it for fun. They are burning it because we wanted cheaper goods and if we hadn’t have offshored that industry to them we’d be burning it.

We pay them to burn the coal and then complain that China is a polluter.