What are historical emissions
Reading time: 2 minutesTL;DR
The carbon emissions from human activity already in the atmosphere are known as historical emissions. They didn’t get there themselves, and importantly they didn’t get there evenly.
Explanation
Who put all these cheeky greenhouse gases into the atmosphere? Come on guys, fess up.
A lot of our focus on reducing carbon emissions looks at the current or future rates, per country. Think of this as your current speed while in a car hurtling down the highway. The cumulative emissions are the distance you’ve driven.
As countries try to set targets to reduce their speed there’s lots of finger pointing about who will slow down when. All the while ignoring how far each country has travelled.
Because the problem is cumulative emissions, not just how much we are making at a single point in time we need to consider that the current rate of emissions per country isn’t what caused the mess we’re in today. Some countries are worse, and some countries might have already reduced their emissions on a per capita basis.
This really cool website has an interactive graph so you can see the data for yourself (up to 2011).
So any future talk of reparations - who is going to pay for damages, needs to consider these historical emissions. That’s also what is freaking out the rich countries.