Accepting Responsibility for a Role in Climate Change

Imagine you’re a well-to-do person attending a dinner of your peers. The food is top-rate and there’s plenty of it. Course after course is laid upon the table.

A group of less-advantaged people has been watching from the sidelines. When the dinner is done, you invite them to join you at the table. After the restaurant staff has served coffee, the bill comes. You and your rich peers insist that everyone now at the table must share in paying the entire bill.

If that seems unfair, then you have just understood the position of the delegates from emerging economies, now negotiating with their wealthier colleagues from the North over a climate deal at Copenhagen.

Some poorer nations have taken the position that because the industrialized world is responsible for most of the greenhouse gas emissions already in the atmosphere — in effect exhausting the environment’s capacity to cope with carbon — rich nations must pay “damages” or “reparations”. These payments presumably would be used by emerging economies to cope with the climate changes that already are devastating some of them, and to increase their standards of living while minimizing their emissions.

But the United States’ chief negotiator, Todd Stern — an attorney and by all accounts a very good and moral man — rejects that argument. Speaking at COP15, the international conference on climate change at Copenhagen, he repeated President Barack Obama’s recent promise that the United States will pay a “fair share” of financial assistance to emerging economies. But, Stern said:

"We absolutely recognize our historic role in putting emissions in the atmosphere, up there, but the sense of guilt or culpability or reparations, I just categorically reject that."

Through most of the past 200 years of industrial revolution, Stern argued, people were “blissfully ignorant” that carbon emissions caused climate change. Therefore, he contended, the people of the United States need not feel a sense of guilt.

Like a good lawyer arguing on behalf of his defendant, Mr. Stern has taken a tough bargaining position. But it is neither accurate nor moral. At the highest levels of academia and government, we have not been blissfully ignorant that industrialization would result in climate change, and even if we were, that does not absolve the developed world of its responsibility to help poor nations as they attempt to achieve a standard of living they so far have only observed from the sidelines.

Scientists have known about climate change since the last 1800s. The first estimates that human-caused greenhouse gas emissions could dramatically increase atmospheric temperatures were made in the late 1800s when Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius estimated that a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide would increase the Earth’s surface temperatures by 5-6 degrees Celsius.

A long period of debate ensued during the early 20th Century, but evidence mounted that Arrehenius had it right. By mid-century, physical measurements were showing a striking correlation between greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and the Earth’s temperature.

In the United States, presidents at least as early as Lyndon Johnson were warned that climate change was coming. In 1965, Johnson’s panel of science advisors told him:

"By the year 2000 there will be about 25% more CO2 in the atmosphere than at present. This will modify the heat balance of the atmosphere to such an extent that marked changes in climate, not controllable through local or even national efforts, could occur."

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