The reason I’m not debating China’s flavor of capitalism is because it’s irrelevant.

You brought it up (and are reasserting it in this quote), same as how you bring up China unasked. Clearly you thought it was relevant, you are just trying to avoid responsibility for your claims.

They don’t get a free pass on carbon emissions no matter what economy they have.

Which part of “meeting or exceeding their Paris targets” reads as “get a free pass” to you?

And yes there’s a trade-off, regulating fossil fuels increases production costs. That’s the trade-off everybody makes.

Oh so the decision of what to target isn’t just “no increases immediately”? Glad we agree and can stop pretending it’s so simplistic. Though I see you neglected to acknowledge India’s targets.

Bottom line is that China’s emissions are huge and still growing. They are meeting commitments because those commitments were low in the first place.

The commitments of China were nearly an order of magnitude higher than the EU and US actually. By the way the US withdrew and is going hog wild.

For example China only commited to peak emissions by 2030.

And they are meeting their commitments, even exceeding them, despite being the primary seat of global production while the EU continues to deindustrialize.

The US and EU never needed to make such a commitment because they had already reached their peak in 2005.

In production, yes. They are deindustrializing. Their targets are much easier to hit, they follow the global capitalist economic trend re: imperialism, offshoring. It is actually much harder to reduce emissions while taking on the industry that’s being outsourced.

And yes they perform a large portion of the world’s manufacturing, this “shuffling” of industries that you mentioned. But their lower regulations on emissions is precisely one of the reasons why manufacturing moves there. If they regulated more heavily, then some manufacturing would move out, but at least total global emissions would go down.

It’s really not. You move production to China because overall it is vastly cheaper, primarily due to the much lower costs of labor reproduction and how tightly integrated industries are and can be due to infrastructure and colocation of technical ability. If you want to make something in the US something like half your cost goes to maintaining the humans doing it, and they’re expensive due to massive economic leeches: real estate, finance, insurance. When 80% of a paycheck goes to having a place to live (just renting), going to the doctor, and eating, your labor costs are just subsidizing rent seeking and finance.

Every country needs to participate in raising the cost of fossil fuels, in order for it to work.

Every country needs to meet their climate commitments. Is yours?