... if the US were to behave the way it has done before in these negotiations, then it would be going back to the failed policies of the past. The United States has been obstructionist-in-chief in global climate talks—by, for instance, refusing to accept the principle that wealthy countries who have disproportionately benefited from industrialization driven by fossil fuels, and therefore are both much wealthier than much of the Global South—countries in Africa and Latin America and parts of Asia and the Pacific—but also are much more responsible for the cumulative greenhouse gas emissions for the last more than 100 years.
And the cumulative emissions do matter, for the simple scientific reason that some greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide, are just very chemically stable and long-lived. So if you’re emitting excess CO2 into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels, it just stays there; it doesn’t decay rapidly. And so the cumulative emissions do matter. And therefore, the wealthy countries which have been industrialized for a long time, and which have been responsible for a disproportionate share of those emissions, also share a disproportionate amount of the blame for climate change.
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