> europes coal powerplants are in china, its polution is in china, the products of china are in europe and the producers from china live in europe and the us.

This is generally overstated. Emissions imported or exported via trade are significantly smaller than domestic emissions for almost every country. In the EU vs China case, accounting for imported/exported emissions basically changes which of the two is doing better, but emission levels are pretty close to begin with (US is already doing significantly worse than China either way).

For China, we are talking about ~1 ton/person/year from trade (in favor of China), while local emissions are at ~8 tons/person/year [1].

You make a valid point, but looking at the actual numbers it turns out that this makes (surprisingly) little difference.

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