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U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

scientificamerican.com

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Re: U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

#31

Post by mschild »

Ekaros wrote: post #18
Sharlin wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China and the EU can, and should. "Polluter pays" should become the standard policy in international trade in numerous other ways, too.

Wouldn't "user pays" be more logical. I think it is quite dishonest to blame China when consumption happens in Europe or USA... All of the pollution should be transported in calculations where consumption happens.

To a certain extend, absolutely. Much of the richer EU states cause and have caused quite a bit of pollution and without a serious shift in consumption, I don't believe we can achieve our goals.

However, industry is without a doubt a massive resource user. Modern methods in manufacturing can save significant amounts of energy, water, and more. As China is the main producer in many instances, a change also needs to happen there to go from heavy polluting to less polluting methods.

Re: U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

#32

Post by MrBuddyCasino »

originalvichy wrote: post #3

As a European this is the main fear I have during this election. 4 more years of inaction from the government of one of the biggest polluters in the world will really bite us in the ass. Not that I’m super proud of how we are doing in my country, but it can’t get worse.

US entrepreneurism kickstarted the electric vehicle transition (thx Elon1). Batteries prices are falling. PV is already incredibly cheap and getting cheaper. Coal is becoming increasingly uncompetitive. Nuclear is making a comeback, also thanks to US entrepreneurs.

Science, Capitalism and entrepreneurship will be the unstoppable force that will solve our energy crisis, if western governments let them.

Africa, India and China will be the biggest factors going forward.

UPDATE: To be clear, I'm not arguing for laissez-faire capitalism. Government incentives are required to develop markets, as Germany did with PV, and US does with EV. My point is that the US being part of the Climate Accord or not won't matter much, the move away from coal and ICE cars is inevitable due to already existing market forces. A bigger lever would be to de-regulate nuclear where it makes sense, as that is where the biggest cost lie.

Re: U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

#33

Post by m0zg »

Without China (which is a part of the accord, but doesn't have to cut its emissions until 2030, a loophole they're actively using to build insane numbers of coal power plants - whatever their CO2 emissions are in 2030 becomes their "baseline" from which to reduce) this was pretty pointless anyway. Whoever negotiated PCA should not be allowed to negotiate whatever comes after it, because they suck at negotiations.

https://www.wired.com/story/china-is-still-building-an-insan...

Re: U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

#35

Post by toomuchtodo »

roenxi wrote: post #25
cher88 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this the more pertinent graph? https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china?country=USA~IND...

Pretty sure. Nature, being unconcerned with fairness, has little regard for per capita statistics. If we want 8 billion people living in comfort, we need more energy. As always, I think we should have been building more nuclear plants back in the 90s. And again in the 2000s. And the 2010s. Maybe now we can go wind and solar. But we need lots of something.

The definition of comfort is the issue. There are simply not enough resources for everyone on Earth to live like an American. Maybe Europeans if we stretch with renewables and quickly cut down overfishing and stripmining agricultural practices. My money (unfortunately) is on a whole lot of death and despair from crop failures, drought, and mass migrations due to climate change even if we’re able to rapidly decarbonize energy infrastructure. We waited too long to change direction, and aren’t moving fast enough in the right direction.

Re: U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

#36

Post by perfunctory »

corty wrote: post #30
paganel wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And people still say Malthus was wrong. At least some of them have woken up to the realisation that exporting your pollution/nasty stuff to other parts of the world doesn't really solve all that much, but even so, they're still a minority, the great majority still believes in silver bullets like recycling, "clean tech" etc.

The silver bullet is natural self-regulation. Mankind will shrink automatically after hitting a real ceiling.

I guess people who say this kind of things don't believe they themselves will be part of the cohort undergoing the shrinkage.

This so called natural self-regulation will be ugly and painful. I don't envy the generation that will have to go through it.

Re: U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

#37

Post by originalvichy »

roenxi wrote: post #13
originalvichy wrote: post #3

As a European this is the main fear I have during this election. 4 more years of inaction from the government of one of the biggest polluters in the world will really bite us in the ass. Not that I’m super proud of how we are doing in my country, but it can’t get worse.

Here are some interesting graphs from arguably the most transformative economic miracle in human history [0]. The risk isn't the US doing nothing, it is India, Africa, etc, etc deciding that they seriously want a comfortable standard of living. [0] https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china?country=~CHN

I feel like this is a deflection and a critical reason why progress isn’t happening fast enough. Your house is already messy, and the need to clean it up is now. Not when China and a couple billion other people mess their house up.

My country’s ambitious plans are shot down by members of parliament going for the kneejern ”but India and China...” response, and the net result would be no action if they were in power. Luckily we at least have people some people in the government who are willing to make sacrifices. It’s about time the US as a developed country caught up (not just on the state level).

Re: U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

#38

Post by mantas »

Ekaros wrote: post #18
Sharlin wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China and the EU can, and should. "Polluter pays" should become the standard policy in international trade in numerous other ways, too.

Wouldn't "user pays" be more logical. I think it is quite dishonest to blame China when consumption happens in Europe or USA... All of the pollution should be transported in calculations where consumption happens.

At the end of the day, it's always "user pays".

Re: U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

#39

Post by andybak »

corty wrote: post #30
paganel wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And people still say Malthus was wrong. At least some of them have woken up to the realisation that exporting your pollution/nasty stuff to other parts of the world doesn't really solve all that much, but even so, they're still a minority, the great majority still believes in silver bullets like recycling, "clean tech" etc.

The silver bullet is natural self-regulation. Mankind will shrink automatically after hitting a real ceiling.

We've already hit peak child and longer lifespans is the only thing keeping the population growing. Assuming this trend continues then human population will start dropping within a lifetime.

(It's just a shame that renewables and other tech (plus the required behaviour changes) are coming in to maturity a couple of decades too late. Surely we just need to bridge the gap between demographic changes and adoption of cleaner tech. I might be overly optimistic on this front)

Re: U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

#40

Post by koheripbal »

originalvichy wrote: post #3

As a European this is the main fear I have during this election. 4 more years of inaction from the government of one of the biggest polluters in the world will really bite us in the ass. Not that I’m super proud of how we are doing in my country, but it can’t get worse.

The biggest issue with the Paris Accords is that China did not commit to begin any restrictions until 2030. ...and since they are both the world's largest CO2 emitter and world's fastest growing CO2 emitter, the Accords became a corporate strategy to just move more manufacturing to China (and other non-limited countries).

Frankly, I think the Paris Accords does more harm than good by giving anyone the notion that we were solving the problem.

The optimal strategy to combat Global Warming is to bring manufacturing back to the EU and US and regulate emissions strongly.

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