TL:DR - we are making some progress but will it be enough?

WRT per capita carbon emissions. We are not doing too badly

Here are the per capita CO2 emissions for many countries/regions. As you can see, per capita emission levels similar to Europe looks like it might be possible (5-7 million tonnes) . Even with China. We need to think of people living at EU levels not US/Canada, which I think that even the World Bank would be happy with.

And US/Canada per capita levels are dropping, a lot (this is likely what is freaking out the fossil fuek companies). In fact, their drop in emissions are keeping the overall carbon emissions growing very slowly, if at all, the last few years. (Compare rate of increase in 2000 to today)

We have a long way to go. But it the US can drop its per capita down to EU levels, which should be possible by 2040 at current trends, we may be able to level off total emissions.

Then we need to really accelerate methods for removing CO2 from the atmosphere and bring the overall levels down. Because even if we level off emissions, it is not likely that overall we will see atmospheric CO2 levels drop. There is a lag because GHG stay in the atmosphere for some time after emission. As we can see below, holding emissions at about today’s level (the yellow line) and then dropping to zero by 2100 (what I think may be the most likely scenario), we will still see CO2 levels rise to almost 50% more than today (to about 600 ppm).

Removing CO2 may may still not be enough. You can see that even getting to negative emissions by 2040 (the blue lines), we cannot get CO2 levels down to ‘normal’ levels until 2100.

We are still in trouble, but we have made some progress. Our great grandchildren will be the final judges.