April 15, 2021 John Kerry, America’s special envoy on climate change, is on a whirlwind global tour to drum up support for a climate “leaders summit” on Earth Day next week. He’s hoping to re-establish the US as a climate leader and extract more serious ambition from his peers, but has been dogged by a familiar complaint from officials in developing economies: the global race to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions is fundamentally unfair. Every country needs to reach net-zero emissions no later than 2050 to avert catastrophic climate change, according to the UN. Not all countries have contributed to the problem equally. Historically, the US and Europe have emitted more than half of cumulative global emissions, and still produce far more climate pollution per capita than other countries. Should the countries most responsible for climate change pick up the bill for everyone else? Politicians in China, and emerging big emitters like India or Brazil, argue they shouldn’t be asked to lift their citizens out of poverty or recover from the pandemic while phasing out the fossil energy resources that Americans and Europeans continue to take for granted.