Guest Post by RYAN COOPER
The last month has seen a nearly continuous series of climate disasters striking across the world: extreme heat in the Pacific Northwest, wildfires in the western U.S. and Canada blanketing half the continent with smoke, extreme flooding in Germany, India, and China, and on and on. We surely haven't seen the last climate disaster of 2021.
Climate change is a global problem, and all countries are implicated. But one country is far more important to the world's climate future than any other: China. The decisions made by the Chinese leadership will largely determine whether the climate fries.
When speaking about China's emissions, one sometimes hears the argument that rich countries should bear the brunt of the effort against climate change, because the U.S. and Europe are responsible for the bulk of historical emissions.
This argument is pretty strained to begin with. If climate change is a potentially existential threat to human society (and it is), surely stopping it takes priority over anything else, including litigating who should be most responsible for mitigating it.
I do agree that rich countries should be morally obliged to contribute more than poorer ones because of their greater historical emissions, but at the end of the day, simply wrenching down emissions must matter more than that.
By the same token, allowing poorer countries to burn carbon is not going to do them much good if that brings about climate change that will destroy their economies anyway. In a critical emergency, everybody has to do as much as they can, as fast as they can.
