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Kids Win the Right to Sue the US Government Over Climate Change

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Re: Kids Win the Right to Sue the US Government Over Climate Change

#91

Post by pdonis »

fsloth wrote: post #14
pdonis wrote: post #10

What are these kids doing to develop non-CO2-emitting energy sources? Why don't they spend their time and energy on that instead? Even if we assume for the sake of argument that such lawsuits are justified, all they do is suck up resources that could be used for developing energy technologies to fix the problem.

See todays Marrakech meeting. Turns out we have most technology solutions available to cut down CO2 considerably and all that is required is policy to implement them. Not research - not even productize - all of the suggested approaches are based on productized approches.

> See todays Marrakech meeting. Turns out we have most technology solutions available to cut down CO2 considerably and all that is required is policy to implement them.

Can you give a reference for this? I'm not finding anything helpful on the conference website.

Re: Kids Win the Right to Sue the US Government Over Climate Change

#92

Post by pdonis »

chrischen wrote: post #11
pdonis wrote: post #10

What are these kids doing to develop non-CO2-emitting energy sources? Why don't they spend their time and energy on that instead? Even if we assume for the sake of argument that such lawsuits are justified, all they do is suck up resources that could be used for developing energy technologies to fix the problem.

Well that's the point. It's to suck up resources from the government spent on other things, and reallocate it to climate protection.

> It's to suck up resources from the government

Instead of doing productive work themselves? That's what it looks like to me.

Re: Kids Win the Right to Sue the US Government Over Climate Change

#93

Post by kwhitefoot »

akerro wrote: post #20
estefan wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's people who rape people, murder people, poison people... oh wait, they're all illegal too.

So let's sue government for rapist and murderers to end it?

If there were no laws or no enforcement of laws against such things you would certainly sue (especially in the original sense of to plead and make arguments for a point).

The US is a uniquely litigious country so going through the court system in an adversarial sense makes perfect sense. In The UK system you might instead ask a court to determine who or which state organ has responsibility to fix the problem or who has authority to do something. See for instance the judgement on the Brexit case: https://www.judiciary.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/judg....

Re: Kids Win the Right to Sue the US Government Over Climate Change

#94

Post by greeneggs »

eggy wrote: post #88
greeneggs wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Buy local produce, and let your local supermarket or grocer know this. Educate others. It saves on all of the transport emissions from air or truck freight of goods. This doesn't make much sense intuitively, and a quick Google search seems to confirm that most of the environment impact of produce comes from the growing efficiency and production methods, not from its transportation. Feel-good measures that do very l…

I should have been more clear on what I meant by 'local produce': Local, or US Feta cheese, not imported from Greece. California pistachios, not Turkish. USA/NJ tomatoes, not from Holland or elsewhere. Farmer's markets. Every little bit helps, and it is not like you are taking any austerity measure between Greek or US Feta for example. People rely too much on government to legislate intelligence. Emergent properties…

I don't know. Shipping is incredibly efficient these days. If only 10% of the CO2 footprint of your food comes from shipping (which is roughly right according to quick Google searches), optimizing shipping distance is really the wrong thing.

Instead, you should choose the most efficient producers, wherever in the world they are located---that is, optimize the 90% term. How? Buy the cheapest food! If Turkish pistachios are cheaper than California ones, then they are probably being grown more efficiently, with lower CO2 emissions. Price presumably reflects producer costs.

We certainly don't export $149 trillion of food annually. US GDP is only $16.8 trillion. I see $133 billion of agricultural exports in 2015, according to [1]. But again, I don't think this matters, and don't think that reducing food exports and imports would reduce total CO2 emissions.

[1] http://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/foreign-agricultural-t...

Re: Kids Win the Right to Sue the US Government Over Climate Change

#95

Post by fsloth »

pdonis wrote: post #91
fsloth wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See todays Marrakech meeting. Turns out we have most technology solutions available to cut down CO2 considerably and all that is required is policy to implement them. Not research - not even productize - all of the suggested approaches are based on productized approches.

> See todays Marrakech meeting. Turns out we have most technology solutions available to cut down CO2 considerably and all that is required is policy to implement them. Can you give a reference for this? I'm not finding anything helpful on the conference website.

Sorry, the references can be found under the title 'nordic green to scale'. e.g. http://www.greentoscale.net/en/events/climate-change/nordic-...
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