Is the problem really China?

The metric used to measure carbon emissions significantly shapes which countries are seen to bear the lion's share of the blame for anthropogenic climate change. If we look simply at total emissions, then China has recently overtaken the US as the world's major carbon polluter. But of course, such a measure is simplistic, as it takes account of neither historical emissions, nor relative population sizes. Once these are factored in, the list looks very different.

Much is made in some circles of the fact that over the last decade or two, the vast majority of the global increase in carbon emissions has come from China (and to a lesser extent, India). Yet this way of measuring things (enshrined in the Kyoto protocol) attributes emissions to the country of production, not the country of consumption, effectively enabling rich consumer nations to outsource their emissions. This not only gives them an artificial moral superiority based on being able to point to stable or falling emissions (despite rising consumption), but also means outsourcing the health problems associated with carbon-intensive industries. Of course, China has been benefitting economically from this arrangement, and so has been quite willing up to this point to become the world's factory (and increasingly, its banker). I am not exonerating China, simply trying to highlight some illegitimate ways it is sometimes made into a global scapegoat on this issue.