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Fell asleep watching last night and continued watching now...
I'll post more as my thoughts arise. One thing that occurs to me is the absurdity of the statement "those who have historically contributed most to the problem should step up to the plate first in the effort to reduce emissions".
If I'm the first to discover a large river and fish all I want, there's no problem. Nature is practically unimpacted by the few fish I gather. Later on, if many others start fishing all they want and that causes a problem with the fish population, is the correct course of action to tell all those first to the stream to leave, or is it to apply limits everyone wanting to fish?
It's similar fail logic as white-looking people paying "reparations" to darker-looking people because of historic injustice done by and to people long dead.
Why should the US take on an unequally larger responsibility for a problem unforeseen and begun by dead people? If there's a problem with the global commons, it's everyone's responsibility regardless of which dead people started it.
It seems abundantly clear that all nations have an equal role to play in solving the problem, but defining what equal is, is quite difficult.
A CO2 allowance per capita seems to be the intuitive definition of "equal", but that leaves out the other half of the equation, the number of people. CO2 per capita encourages a large population since things like military consumption of fossil fuels would be distributed across many people, as an example. The fact that the US has a steady birthrate should count as something.
So, the topic of "equal" isn't so straightforward.
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