> One could make a decent case that as long as a country is below 100%, it is OK for it to choose growth and development even though that increases emissions.
No, one can't make a decent case of that. China and India have access to radically better renewable energy technology and coal alternatives including very safe nuclear and natural gas.
The US didn't have access to any of that in 1920. Today is not the same as 70 or 100 years ago. The excuse for burning so much coal is considerably debased now.
It'd be like claiming that the USSR/Britain/France/Rome got to wage massive wars of annexation in the past, why doesn't the new superpower - China - also get to do that across all of Asia? Just because X bad thing happened in the past, it doesn't mean countries in the future should get to replicate the mistakes of the past and that it should be acceptable practice (so that they too get their fair share of doing horrible things).
The whole idea of investing hundreds of billions of dollars into renewable energy technology over decades is so we don't replicate the mistakes of the past.
Besides the obviousness of that, China and India should desperately want to avoid those past mistakes, both for strategic reasons and for the basic health of their people. Strategically China has to import huge quantities of coal, it'd be better from a security standpoint if they fulfill their energy demands via domestic renewables and nuclear.
There is no good case to be made that China and India should get to repeat the pollution mistakes of the past, that premise falls apart on every challenge.
You seem to be implicitly assuming that the only acceptable level of CO2 in the atmosphere above whatever would be there without human activity is near zero.
The mistake of the past was not that we put CO2 into the atmosphere by using cheap fuels like coal. The mistake was that we did not treat that as a temporary bootstrap phase to build up to where we could switch to cleaner sources.
No, one can't make a decent case of that. China and India have access to radically better renewable energy technology and coal alternatives including very safe nuclear and natural gas.
The US didn't have access to any of that in 1920. Today is not the same as 70 or 100 years ago. The excuse for burning so much coal is considerably debased now.
It'd be like claiming that the USSR/Britain/France/Rome got to wage massive wars of annexation in the past, why doesn't the new superpower - China - also get to do that across all of Asia? Just because X bad thing happened in the past, it doesn't mean countries in the future should get to replicate the mistakes of the past and that it should be acceptable practice (so that they too get their fair share of doing horrible things).
The whole idea of investing hundreds of billions of dollars into renewable energy technology over decades is so we don't replicate the mistakes of the past.
Besides the obviousness of that, China and India should desperately want to avoid those past mistakes, both for strategic reasons and for the basic health of their people. Strategically China has to import huge quantities of coal, it'd be better from a security standpoint if they fulfill their energy demands via domestic renewables and nuclear.
There is no good case to be made that China and India should get to repeat the pollution mistakes of the past, that premise falls apart on every challenge.