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U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

scientificamerican.com

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Re: U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

#81

Post by he0001 »

noworriesnate wrote: post #65
originalvichy wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. L…

If we bring jobs back to the U.S., we will no longer be outsourcing our pollution production. The same jobs will produce less pollution in the U.S. than in China. Of course prices will go up for the goods being produced. So there is something we can do about China and India being major polluters.

Isn’t this something that’s up to the companies that put their production there to decide?

Re: U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

#82

Post by pixl97 »

andybak wrote: post #39
corty wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cle…

This depends if we've already overshot maximum sustainable population. You can run many different machines at over 100% capacity. The issue is they break down much more quickly. Water would be a good example of a resource that has stores we can use at a speed much faster than 100% of replacement rate.

Re: U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

#83

Post by mola »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #32
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 a…

You under appreciate Obama's administration push towards renewables.

Re: U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

#84

Post by VLM »

xondono wrote: post #67

Good. The Paris accord is not worth the paper it’s written on. It’s non-biding, it has no enforcement, and the goals where self imposed and for some countries ridiculous. Even if it’s not for the right reasons, the US leaving might force world leaders to actually do something.

It was a big virtue signaling show where nobody involved made any changes. Which some will always see as a huge success because it avoids any need to do anything as long as declarations of support are cheered and awareness is raised and verbal support is given.

Re: U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

#85

Post by astura »

koheripbal wrote: post #47
notRobot wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if Biden wins. We won't know for sure yet, for a while.

Not looking good.

It looks like that because unlike most states, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania didn't start counting their mail-in votes until after in person votes. Mail in votes will almost certainly heavily skew blue and there's substantial numbers of them this year.

Not saying Biden will definitely win, just we can't tell yet.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/04/whats-behind-trumps-leads-in...

Re: U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

#86

Post by emptyfile »

xondono wrote: post #67

Good. The Paris accord is not worth the paper it’s written on. It’s non-biding, it has no enforcement, and the goals where self imposed and for some countries ridiculous. Even if it’s not for the right reasons, the US leaving might force world leaders to actually do something.

>the US leaving might force world leaders to actually do something

Hah! No, the Paris accord, the "no enforcement, and the goals where self imposed and for some countries ridiculous" Paris accord is the world "doing something".

Even that will not be reached.

Re: U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

#87

Post by wwright »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #35
roenxi wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 decarboniz…

I’m really not sure this is the case. For example, we know that we have far more than enough capacity to produce food for the entire world, we just simply don’t do it.

Of course, Americans are very wasteful, and we can’t scale that amount of wastefulness to the entire planet.

Re: U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

#88

Post by throwaway0a5e »

ForHackernews wrote: post #54
throwaway0a5e wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The things you'd need to do to get the world to accept a definition of "comfort" that doesn't include eating meat (vegan definition) several times a week, living and working comfortably climate control buildings and access to a wide array of consumer products would not be pretty to put it mildly. Making people's standards of living go backwards make them shoot you. Holding down people's standards of living makes thei…

We can also just have fewer people: If you lower infant mortality, educate women and give them access to family planning, all evidence suggests they will choose to have fewer children. It's much easier for the planet to support a high standard of living for four or six billion people than eight or ten billion.

I agree with the premise but the fundamental question is whether we can get from the current status quo to a hypothetical sustainable equilibrium without the squeeze of climate change causing a ton of pain along the way and in a manner that is at least kinda sorta ethically tolerable (i.e. genocide and/or picking who gets to reproduce are not options on the table).

The developing world population growth is peaking soon or looks to be. But standards of living growth there is exploding so their impact will peak at some unknown point in the future. The already developed world is staying roughly static in terms of population and environmental impact per person is declining slowly there. To use a metaphor, it's like we've got a half full bucket, are very slowly siphoning out water and are also half way through rapidly pouring in an unknown amount of water. Will it overflow? Nobody knows. It would be prudent to try to remove more water and pour in less though.

Edit: Anyone care to tell me why I'm so wrong? Is genocide back on the table or are people just annoyed that this is a hard problem with no shovel ready silver bullet?

Re: U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

#89

Post by giantg2 »

Ekaros wrote: post #46
giantg2 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you would be charging people who have no control over the production. The producer nation sets the laws and standards for their facilities.

They do have the option to pick up option that has less attached taxes. Or not to buy something.

Who imposes the taxes then? The exporting country (China) is unlikely to do it. The importing county is only likely to do it if the government and people support it. The problem is that even with a tax on the import, polluting in a developing nation would likely be cheaper than not polluting anywhere else. Many items do not have options to buy from various countries (economies of scale usually consolidate factories and leave little room for competitors). Not to mention that drastically reducing consumption (your comment about not buying) will cause most economies to fail since we are consumer based.

Re: U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

#90

Post by wwright »

ptr wrote: post #66
perfunctory wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If every woman gives birth to less than ~2.1 children, we're shrinking. Is having <= 2 children painful and ugly?

Humans live for decades. Catastrophic climate change is less than a generation away. It would take hundreds of years for the population to shrink enough to stop it.
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