In a review of two new books about World War I, The Sleepwalkers and July 1914, Harold Evans (aka Sir Harry) notes the uselessness of playing "the blame game" when it comes to the start of the tragic war.
[Christopher] Clark declines to join [Sean] McMeekin in what he calls “the blame game,”
because there were so many participants. He argues that trying to fix
guilt on one leader or nation assumes that there must be a guilty party
and this, he maintains, distorts the history into a prosecutorial
narrative that misses the essentially multilateral nature of the
exchanges, while underplaying the ethnic and nationalistic ferment of a
region. “The outbreak of war in 1914,” he writes, “is not an Agatha
Christie drama at the end of which we will discover the culprit standing
over a corpse in the conservatory with a smoking pistol.” Not having a
villain to boo is emotionally less satisfying, but Clark makes a cogent
case for the war as a tragedy, not a crime: in his telling there is a
smoking pistol in the hands of every major character.
One could say the same with climate. It's tempting to blame the US and other industrialized nations for our past emissions, or to blame China and India, who are building coal plants at a frightening rate, for emissions now.
The truth is simpler. We were sleepwalkers back in 1914, and we are sleepwalkers now.
For more on The Sleepwalkers, the book, here's an excellent interview.
Kit Stolz 