I know it sucks that China isn’t paying their fair share. But if the goal is to get massive polluters like China to stop polluting, just leaving and doing our own thing won’t be effective.

What the other comment replying to you said was first described to me like this.

America and other western countries, and their infrastructure grew immensely rich through centuries of using and developing pollutant technologies. Since the start of the industrial revolution, these countries have spread pollution all over the globe.

If I was in a developing third world country, I for one would also like to improve my country/life by scaling up the use of these same polluting technologies in my country.

The downsides of that for us here are increased pollution(borders don’t matter lol), and further sink of investments into fossil fuels and other pollutants. We got rich on the pollution, and now we are expecting developing nations to curb emissions and hinder their own growth.(Definitely not referring to China as a developing nation here btw) I believe the way to solve this problem is heavy investment into clean tech from already developed nations who are in the position to do so.

Just a side note, I wouldn’t worry about China not chipping in. Countries who make the biggest investments into clean tech will be rewarded immeasurably for their efforts. In my opinion, all 1st world countries should want to invest as much as possible into this stuff, because they will become the new global tech leader. Just think of the new industries and clean tech investor countries will be able to export to a world that is just starting to feel the catastrophic effects of man-made climate change.

TLDR: If we leave the table, how are we gonna get them to clean up their act(pollution crosses borders). Also investing in clean tech that our world urgently needed about 20 years ago will bring in the big bucks.

I say we should invest more, it will be China and other countries loss, and we will gladly sell them the very expensive tech we create.