It's not a mystery. The US and EU have year on year been decreasing emissions for fifteen ish years now (yes, including during trump I, even if you account for the COVID drop).

That's a cool story you can tell your kids before bed but the reality is that when you include imports the US/EU emissions are stagnating or going up. It's easy not to pollute when you import most of your things from abroad.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/imported-or-exported-co-e...

That graph measures whether they are importing or not.

So it's not the emissions that are stagnant, it's the per capita imports of emissions which are roughly flat.

They have a separate graph which reflects "consumption" based emissions:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-per-capit...

By "imports of emissions" here, are we referring to the emissions involved in the creation of the imported goods? Or just what exactly?

It's an estimate, but AIUI yes.

Those data are moment in time. See one of the child posts for what you're talking about -- and in terms of trade corrected emissions the US and Europe turned the corner even earlier.

Exactly, this graph sums it up: https://climatanthropocene.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/co...

We talk more about it but in the facts nothing changes, if anything it's accelerating

This graph might be more relevant: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-by-re...

The countries most talking about net-zero are indeed reducing their emissions. China is meanwhile trying to catch up to the standard of living of their Western counterparts, driving up emissions massively (while still having great per-capita values, there are just a lot of Chinese that previously lived on basically nothing)