Economically we should think of it like this: Our early industrialization contributed massively to global warming. It allowed us to become extremely wealthy, b

Economically we should think of it like this: Our early industrialization contributed massively to global warming. It allowed us to become extremely wealthy, but also we incurred a "carbon debt" to the rest of the planet, since our atmosphere is a shared resource. Now that others are trying to industrialize, we should repay that "carbon debt" to offset the cost of allowing them to industrialize cleanly, since we had the benefit early on of not having to worry about our impact on the environment. The gains that we made early on were at everyone's expense.