Well, it's not that it would influence their choices, it's that Americans are by far the biggest polluters and consumers on the planet - any reduction by them has the highest impact purely because of how off the scale they are. It's like when rich people say "oh when we gave some benefits to a poor person, they just used it on cigarettes. That means we shouldn't give anything to them at all ever". Like.....there's a very clear problem there.
"The New York Times asked Climate Interactive to calculate when Americans would have run out of fossil fuel if the nation’s population had somehow, at the beginning of the industrial era, been allocated a share equal to those of the rest of the world’s people. The calculation was premised on limiting emissions enough to meet international climate goals.
The answer: Americans would have used up their quota in 1944, the year the Allied armies stormed the beaches of Normandy."
China is emitting more than US right now. But that doesn't change the fact that US has polluted more overal.
How are the current generation Americans bound by what their ancestors did ? They can't do anything about it. Aren't they entitled to a good living standard as much as any other person ?
Like...is this an actual question? Of course people are bound by the actions of their predecessors - that's why Americans are still apologizing and making things right to native Americans, that's why things like affirmative action action exists to put things right for how people were treated half a century ago, that's why Germans still apologize and pay reparations for WW2....we can keep on going. Of course you have to take responsibility for the things you've done to the world. Otherwise you've reaped the benefit at the expense of others but hey, it was in the past so it's fine?
