No air pollution there
the radical climate scientist keep telling me that Australia's emissions are worse than China's.
They don't help their advocacy
Is that because they are counting the coal we sell them and they burn against us?
You hit the nail on the head, those how go for hyperbola damage their brand with thinking people. The problem with radical "anything" is they dumb the message down for those who don't think for themselves in an effort to subvert the mob in their favour but in doing so they lose the interest, if not the trust, of the thinking person. It is impossible to be an expert on everything, not even possible to have a working knowledge or even a limited understanding of everything, there is just too much to know, so you have to rely on experts. When you know the experts are glossing over things or distorting facts to their own ends they are actually denying people who want to know the chance to understand what is happening. That's when the salesmen step in with plausible lies and steel the show.
Its the per capita emissions and has more to do will the average Australian having electricity, a roof over their heads and a car so realistically, even if we adopted every single green house gas reducing process, because there are so few of us and we live on such a large land mass with such great distances to travel and provide infrastructure to, we would still have a higher per capita output. All too hard to explain so those with an agenda just lift the figures but not the context.
China on the other hand is belching all sorts of garbage into the environment and literally poisoning the air they breath, the water they drink and the ground they walk on, without even considering global warming. The thing is though, with the size of their population and the concentration of so much of it, combined with the lower average standard of living their per capita emissions are lower.
I don't think anyone would want to live next door to a Union Carbide chemical plant, or down stream from a BHP tailings dam, or even near a power station of any sort, not even the most ardent climate change denier. Then again I don't think the average inner city Greens voter would last two days without their Wifi or their skinny latte.