In a way it is? Let me explain.
The USA is big, but China bigger. If the USA over optimizes on reducing greenhouse gas today, at the expense of our long term economic and world power, China, who cares for less about preserving the world will continue to destroy the world and claim the most power simultaneously.
So while we can reduce OUR footprint by taking ourselves out of the game, the world still loses.
So now try to find a less myopic solution where we remain powerful enough to get the whole world to tamper down their impacts.
We don't win by removing ourselves from the competition. And the competition has a high chance of killing us all. But rolling over is a guaranteed way to lose everything everywhere.
Oh and the prior commitments like the Paris accord were engineered to harm us while allowing China to dominate.
Anyone with a couple of marbles in their noggin can see that depending on a finite resource dug out of the ground for everything is not a good long term plan. Offsetting that dependence with infinitely renewable sources just makes sense. You mention China cares less, yet you fail to acknowledge China by far outpaces the US in its pursuit of renewables. Yes they still use a lot of coal, but they are actively adding more renewables. It’ll just take time. At least they are trying. Also look at their adoption of EVs compared to US.
This perspective relies on seeing Chinese lives as worth less than American lives. On average individual Americans contribute more to the problem than individual Chinese people.
One example is airline miles. Americans travel 2000 miles by plane every year. In China the figure is 1000 miles. So your argument is basically "sure, we could stop traveling by plane, but if Chinese people travel an extra 50 miles a year that wipes out our progress." But that's a pretty poor argument to justify continuing to do 2000 miles/year, if you genuinely think the problem should be addressed.
If both countries reduced to 100 miles/year, it probably wouldn't be enough. But this is an ongoing choice all around. It's not reasonable to suggest that Chinese people have less individual need for air travel. Looking at contribution per country and not per person is not reasonable.
> This perspective relies on seeing Chinese lives as worth less than American lives.
I'm not sure I follow this. If I was to summarise GenerocUsername's argument it would be "the Chinese government is less concerned with making their economy green, and if the US begins taking an economic/influence hit to make it's economy greener, it'll be yielding an economic advantage to China, which will canabalise more global industry in a non-green way, resulting in a net worse environmental outcome." They're claiming basically a fundamental ideological difference between the countries on climate change that, coupled with a claim of zero-sum international industry, means long term environmental outcomes are better if the US is a dominant international player today.
Sidestepping the argument itself which I believe has a number of key weaknesses (as outlined by others in the comments), can you go over how you're linking that to a devaluation of Chinese lives?
Well, China is now completely dominating the renewable energy sector. There were some efforts in the last few years of the US and some other western countries like Germany to catch up. But it kind of looks like this space will be ceded, for better or worse, to China.
But China is deploying more wind and solar energy than the USA. If anything the refusal to diversity energy sources is leaving USA even more behind the competition in the long term.
I see your point of view, but the fact is they are growing and so deploying new assets. The US is not growing and for us it is mostly about replacing assets. They have different payoff schedules. We have pre built infrastructure we are still paying off. You cannot just rebuild it mid lifecycle without taking massive losses.
> China, who cares for less about preserving the world
The premises of your argument are refuted by facts.
A larger percentage of people in China (compared to the USA) believe climate change is a serious threat to humanity and support policies to tackle climate change. https://ourworldindata.org/climate-change-support
The US is much worse than China in terms of emissions per capita, both historically and today https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita
China also leads the world in tech that is crucial for the move away from fossil fuels (solar, wind, electric vehicles and batteries). You can easily look up evidence for this, if you feel any initial doubt.
This recent news article has a nice snippet on the current trajectory on climate change https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/24/china-doubles-down-... "China pledged Wednesday to cut its world-leading levels of climate pollution by up to 10 percent during the next decade — one day after U.S. President Donald Trump urged global leaders to abandon the effort to halt the Earth’s rising temperatures."
> prior commitments like the Paris accord were engineered to harm us while allowing China to dominate
Who engineered them to harm us? You’re saying there’s a powerful pro-China cabal that designed the Paris accords on purpose to harm us and benefit China? Come on..
Yes
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