Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think

Foreigners

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Remember the Indian official in chapter 5 who so persuasively rejected the
claim that India and China should be taking the blame for climate change? I
used the story then to talk about the importance of per-person measures, but
of course it is also about how finding someone to blame can distract us from
looking at the whole system.
The idea that India, China, and other countries moving up the levels should
be blamed for climate change, and that their populations should be forced to
live poorer lives in order to address it, is shockingly well established in the
West. I remember, during a lecture about global trends at Tech University in
Vancouver, an outspoken student saying with despair in her voice, “They
can’t live like us. We can’t let them continue developing like this. Their
emissions will kill the planet.” It is shocking how often I hear Westerners
talking as if they hold remote controls in their hands and can make decisions
about billions of lives elsewhere, just by pressing a button. Looking around, I
realized that her fellow students were not reacting at all. They agreed with
her.
Most of the human-emitted CO accumulated in the atmosphere was
emitted over the last 50 years by countries that are now on Level 4. Canada’s
per capita CO emissions are still twice as high as China’s and eight times as
high India’s. In fact, do you know how much of all the fossil fuel burned each
year is burned by the richest billion? More than half of it. Then the second-
richest billion burns half of what’s left, and so on and so on, down to the
poorest billion, who are responsible for only 1 percent.
2
2

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It will take at least two decades for the poorest billion to struggle from
Level 1 to Level 2—increasing their contribution to global CO emissions by
roughly 2 percent. It will take several decades more for them to get up to
Levels 3 and 4.
In these circumstances, it is a testament to the blame instinct how easily we
in the West seem to shift responsibility away from ourselves and onto others.
We say that “they” cannot live like us. The right thing to say is, “We cannot
live like us.”