Quote:
Originally Posted by redpoint5
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?
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Well the problem is your example. There was a problem. It isn't like sustainably fishing - it is more like draining a lake.
Say you have a lake that has no source of replenishment. For 100 years you and a friend have been drawing water out of the lake - steadily draining it. Heck - you've been just letting the water run because why bother to pay to put in a valve. Just fill your pool and let the water run out the other side. But it is a huge lake so surely it will never run dry. Meanwhile there are 10x as many people on the other side of the lake using a bare minimum of water, hauling it in buckets just for what they need for basic necessities of life. A 100 years go by and suddenly the lake is almost dry and you notice those people across the lake now have a faucet and a shower and are using more water. Only half as much per person as you but they are taking water out of the lake and the lake is going dry. You decided to have a sit down to work out a solution.
So everyone sits down and the people across the lake point out that this is mostly your problem as you used 90% of the water that was in the lake. They only started using more water a few years ago and they take a navy shower each day while you soak in your overflowing pool. They propose that each person get to take the same amount of water out of the lake and you cut back to their level. You refuse - that isn't fair because all of them combined now use more than you do even though you are massively wasting water. You also hate the idea of a navy shower instead of soaking in a pool. You propose that each group gets the same amount of water and they combined cut back to your daily consumption. They refuse - you took 90% of the total water and are still wasting a massive amount of water. So the meeting goes nowhere and everyone keeps doing what they were doing and the lake goes dry.
Almost all the CO2 that western industrial society put into the atmosphere is still there warming the earth. It is incredibly disingenuous for us to be sitting in our 25 mpg cars telling all the people in China riding scooters that they are the problem and we won't downsize to a 30 mpg crossover unless they all agree to ride bicycles.