Are they open to more states joining, I hope? I'd like to petition my own state government to get on board. If the federal government's going to keep shitting the bed, this is the last hope I have left.
Originally, this is much more in the purview of state government than it would be in federal government, anyway. It's easier for us to affect change, as well as easier for us to shield ourselves from shitty governance, when decisions like this are made closer to home. If this buffoon is accomplishing one thing, it's illustrating the importance of state supremacy - Broken glass half full... while it's plummeting off a cliff... kinda deal.
Your wording for what the federal government is doing gave me a very good and much needed laugh, thank you. The answer is presumably yes; Governor Jay Inslee has expressed confidence that "States have been and will continue to step up."
>Under the auspices of the Paris agreement, the Obama administration pledged to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by between 26% and 28% below the 2005 level by 2025. Much of that change already is well under way, though, as a result of factors outside of any president’s control: slower economic growth following the financial crisis, the shale gas revolution that has replaced a third of coal use and shifting driving habits.
>The Rhodium Group calculates that the U.S. still will come close to a 17% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions as soon as 2020, though it predicts no more significant progress in the remaining five years. The U.S. Energy Information Administration projected shortly before Mr. Obama took office that greenhouse gas emissions would rise by about 1% a year in the next several years, but they fell sharply. Very little of that had to do with Mr. Obama’s decisions.
Progress is and will continue to be made regardless of backing out.
It will be interesting to see if the other countries back out. If people are attaching a lot of importance to this agreement, and other countries back out since the US did, the other countries will look awfully hypocritical.
I would read the full speech from Trump, he makes some good points, although im sure some of it is false and not sure how it compares to other factors.
"For example, under the agreement, China will be able
to increase these emissions by a staggering number of years
-- 13. They can do whatever they want for 13 years. Not
us. India makes its participation contingent on
receiving billions and billions and billions of dollars in
foreign aid from developed countries."
"China will be allowed to build hundreds of additional
coal plants. So we can’t build the plants, but they can,
according to this agreement. India will be allowed to
double its coal production by 2020. Think of it: India
can double their coal production. We’re supposed to get
rid of ours. Even Europe is allowed to continue
construction of coal plants."
"In short, the agreement doesn’t eliminate coal jobs,
it just transfers those jobs out of America and the United
States, and ships them to foreign countries."
"This agreement is less about the climate and more
about other countries gaining a financial advantage over
the United States."
"Beyond the severe energy restrictions inflicted by the
Paris Accord, it includes yet another scheme to
redistribute wealth out of the United States through the
so-called Green Climate Fund -- nice name -- which calls
for developed countries to send $100 billion to developing
countries all on top of America’s existing and massive
foreign aid payments. So we’re going to be paying billions
and billions and billions of dollars, and we’re already way
ahead of anybody else. Many of the other countries haven’t
spent anything, and many of them will never pay one dime."
"Even if the Paris Agreement were implemented in full,
with total compliance from all nations, it is estimated it
would only produce a two-tenths of one degree -- think of
that; this much -- Celsius reduction in global temperature
by the year 2100. Tiny, tiny amount. In fact, 14 days of
carbon emissions from China alone would wipe out the gains
from America -- and this is an incredible statistic -would totally wipe out the gains from America's expected
reductions in the year 2030, after we have had to spend
billions and billions of dollars"
FYI, I'm not into politics and I'm 100% pro environment, I do try to be open and hear every party's point of view.
1. Poor countries are allowed to increase their carbon emissions because their current emissions are already low per person, and requiring then to lower emissions would basically be telling then they're not allowed to become developed countries. They will not sign on.
2. We're paying poor countries to mitigate these effects, by subsidizing their use of cleaner energy to industrialize. And to compensate them, since the areas most negatively affected by climate change are also poor.
3. The United States is not, in fact, particularly generous about foreign aid.
4. The Paris Agreement is intended to be a start - the reductions are so small in part to win over right-wing Americans, who in turn have the audacity to turn around and blast this agreement for not being effective enough.
1. I don't think global warming cares who emits the carbon. If climate change is really as big and life changing an issue as everyone knows it is they will sign on, there is no reason to sign away the livelihoods of Americans to benefit China, what happens when you do that is those people whose jobs you have just ended do in fact have opinions and votes.
2. We are subsidizing them with no benefit to us at all, and in turn we are also giving them the ability to outperform us in manufacturing the capability to create clean energy, if you want to help them use clean energy mandate that it comes from local companies. No one will like someone else showing up with bags full of sovereign wealth and tipping the scales. These countries per capita might be poorer, but from a global markets level they are right on par with their American counterparts.
3. Debate? We are by far the largest foreign aid donor.
4. The Paris Agreement was signed by the President without the consent of congress, partially because it didn't win over right-wing Americans.
At some point we need to be adults about this and do something, the country is not supposed to be run as a Dictatorship by either party, all its doing is slowly killing everyone
2. I'm pretty sure not having oceanic level rise, and drowning out the most expensive real state in the world is a benefit to us! The notion that somehow the developed world gives $100b (over what time frame? That matters a lot) and gets nothing in return is ridiculous. Manufacturing clean energy stuff is not within grasp of most developing countries. So they have to import tools, expertise and goods... from where?
3. The US gave $31b in foreign aid. Which sounds generous, until you do it per capita. In which case the US slips way off. The closest economic comparison would probably be the EU which gave $87b away. I, like many, consider charitable giving and aid a sign of strength, not a reason to whine about how unfair life is when you're the richest.
2. They are not importing tools and expertise, they are have the tools and expertise and they are not only deploying it locally they are exporting it to America. If you want to see some a benefit then write the mandate that American companies must be used to provide the clean energy capabilities to the developing countries. Not only would that be rejected it would be a bad idea for many reasons, but the opposite is deemed to be OK.
3. Even per capita we are 21st in the world, not bad especially when you consider that as that number gets bigger the return you get on it diminishes.
Re. 2: Most of the aid funds are actually transferred in the form of subsidies to deals with companies from the "giving" country. For example, India is massively expanding its solar energy capacities. This is happening partly as a deal with German companies and the German government, which subsidizes the whole trade. That way India gets cheap solar energy infrastructure and Germany supports its solar energy industry.
I honestly don't know if this is happening in the same way with American companies, but to be honest, if it's not that would make me want to take a hard look at the reasons for it. Lack of effort from the government to make those deals, or inability to make attractive deals - which would be a rather worrying indicator of the american industry's health.
By completely exiting, Trump is effectively leaving the field of renewable energies to other countries. By relying more on burning fossil fuels for energy he can definitely give America a short term boost by preventing energy costs from rising further, but he might also cripple its renewable energy industry - which employs more US citizens than Oil, Coal and Gas combined.
Trump wouldn't have had to exit the agreement to do what he wants by the way - the agreement does not have any penalties for not fulfilling it, and it allows every country to adjust its own goals in the agreement, without asking anyone else for permission.
> they are have the tools and expertise and they are not only deploying it locally they are exporting it to America
What countries are you talking about? What mythical poor countries have tools and expertise and what not? And to compete with us against what?
We've moved to a global economy and basically doing what wealth of nation stated, we have specialize in things we do best while other countries specialize on their own thing. If Swiss and Japan wants to make awesome watch go for it. If labor is cheaper in China then okay. But they can't and have not taken higher end skill set. You just can't export those.
And you just side step the world being screw to concentrate on our country. But at the same time OP addresses that with saving our coastal property.
The mega cities that make a boat load of GDP is Los Angeles and NY which will be screwed with the rising sea water.
3. Yeah, why on earth would a super-rich country be expected to be near the top? We agreed to a 0.7% target for aid, and we've been failing to meet it.
With regards to 1), that isn't about global warming caring; that's about people caring. The current international system will not back a plan that prolongs the very low living standards that around half the world lives in. For example, ain't no way that India would sign a treaty agreeing to remain pre-industrial indefinitely.
As an Indian, I am with Trump with this one. Per capita consumption would be the wrong way to look at it at this stage. If these people really cared about the environment they should have been promoting nuclear or promoting less(zero) meat consumption. India and China should have the same targets as everyone else. We don't need concession to set up coal plants. Removing restrictions on nuclear tech would be better.
> I don't think global warming cares who emits the carbon.
It doesn't. Most of the carbon in the atmosphere today was emitted by the western world though and it's up to them to show leadership and address the problem they created.
A major economic and ecological policy agreed on by nearly the entire planet is no small task. It took years to create and is a compromise - we can do better and that was the plan, to iterate on it.
Its bad because its not a level playing field. Its tips the global economy away from Americans because they are too "Developed". Turns out there are lots of Americans in fly over country who disagree.
The fact is the US polluted the living fuck out of the world to get to it's developed status, and then turns around and says "no you cant do that". So a level playing field already makes no sense.
The point of this is to achieve reasonable outcomes, while also allowing developing countries to grow reasonably (and live another billion out of poverty) while helping them with it.
If the developed worlds can't afford another $100b, I really don't know what to say? Especially considering a lot of that comes around to contracts and exported goods from the very same developed countries! They're not about to start printing solar cells in a country that is barely feeding itself!
As for "fly over country"... I really dont know what to say here. The world doesn't work like the simplistic metaphors that are being peddled to them. For example, the 'government budget is like a family budget' is a nonsensical analogy that is false. Or comparing government debt to credit card debt. These analogies stand in to trick the casual reader in to certain points of view (anti tax and anti government spending ones as it turns out).
What to do about this? Well, honestly, outlawing Fox News would probably be a good start.
You are looking at this from a macro level and completely ignoring the actual repercussions these policy's have. These other countries who you are saying need to "Develop" are not behind the "Developed" countries in any metric other then quality of life statistics. However the policy gives them an advantage in a globally equivalent marketplace. So no it isn't a reasonable outcome to ask a sovereign people to not be able to compete for business fairly simply because on average their citizens have more money then another country.
> These other countries who you are saying need to "Develop" are not behind the "Developed" countries in any metric other then quality of life statistics
That little figure happens to be kinda important. In fact, I'll go out on a limb and state that most people consider their quality of life to be somewhat more important than abstract ideas about global economic policy.
"Fairness" had nothing to do with how we got here. Or, to flip it around, why would any country (let alone the ones the U.S. has abused for various reasons, artificially retarding their growth) agree to a model that dooms their citizens to a pre-industrial life?
This is no different than the arguments for flat taxes because progressive income tax is "unfair".
So is this a policy to redistribute wealth or to deal with climate change? Because it is advertised as something to deal with climate change, but all I see in it is a way to redistribute wealth. If we are serious about climate change then write a policy that deals with it. Everyone makes steps to reduce pollution, not half of us makes steps to reduce pollution and give lots of money to countries who do nothing so they can build up their green energy capabilities and use them to undercut a major source of domestic economic growth
I think you're attempting to drive a false distinction. At this scale, doing anything about anything involves "redistributing wealth". And if that's all you see, well, I'd suggest that has more to do with what you're looking at than what's there.
If you approach this sort of global negotiation with a precondition that it not alter the existing economic order, that is the same as refusing to negotiate. If that's your view, then fine; there's clearly no point in discussing further.
But if the goal is to deal honestly with climate change, the reality is that there will be winners and losers. Just like happened in the run-up to where we are now. Guess what: we won the run up. Now we have to decide if we're willing to give up some of the "unfair" share we've had for almost a century in return for our grandkids having something vaguely like the quality of life our parents had.
Some days I really think the U.S. is just doomed by our culture. Thankfully, I'm more chipper other days.
dkhenry, alternatively it is far more unfair to have allowed developed countries to have developed all of their infrastructure while generating 80+% of excess carbon emissions , while banning developing countries from exercising this same path.
The "family budget" and "credit card debt" analogies aren't too terrible. They are a decent start. They don't crash and burn until you have to account for inflation.
That's where you and I disagree. The different requirements laid on developing vs. developed countries are in my opinion a feature, not a bug. Demanding from India and and Sub-Saharan Africa to remain pre-industrial nations while we get to keep polluting at a much higher per-capita rate is not in any sense a "level playing field" - it's grandfathering in the advantage we currently gain by polluting more.
Yes, it would be "grandfathering in the advantage we currently gain". You don't want that advantage? Are you tired of winning?
Trump said: "We gonna win so much you may even get tired of winning and you'll say please, please Mr. president, It's too much winning! We can't take it anymore!"
Look, it was a joke. You're expected to like winning.
I suppose you could move elsewhere on the non-level playing field if you actually don't like winning. You'd have to make some major lifestyle changes. I bet you do like winning.
Except in this case you aren't winning. We're all losing. The climate isn't just going to be nice on developed nations 20 years from now. It's going to be bad for all nations because we didn't act.
In 10 years regardless of this agreement flyover country will have more renewable energy jobs than manufacturing jobs lol. Iowa, South Dakota, Oklahoma, Nebraska, North Dakota and Kansas generate 25% of their total energy from just Wind and Texas leads the country in total renewables just from Wind. Yes Texas produces more renewable energy than California. And crazy part, this was almost 90% accomplished in the last 6 years only.
These states will turn blue if federal policies harm them. Farms barely surviving put 5 wind turbines on their land and make 50k a year for 30 years. Counties with nothing going for them happen to have the best Wind in the world.
I agree, and we will continue to see those jobs grow. I don't see this as us moving away from green jobs and a reduced carbon footprint. This is about us signing away our competitiveness because someone thinks it makes things fair. We will continue to produce more renewable energy and continue to make it more economic. Other countries are free to continue as well, but we shouldn't give them money so they can invest in industries that will attempt to undercut domestic firms in the global marketplace.
It is true that they disagree. It is not true that they're lives are definitely harder. For every person in the US, there are four in China. Even imagining that China had the same wealth distribution as the US, which it does not, that still means there are vastly, vastly (at least 4x) more people with lives that are empirically more painful, with less medicine, less availability of electricity, and less food. This isn't because China is doing a bad job, it's because there are a lot of people.
You are correct that there are many more people in China and that being poor in China is worse then being poor in America, but the solution is not to export global competitiveness to other countries until their quality of living is on par with Americans. Once that ability goes away it will not come back, and as you can tell no one really cares about the plight of rural Americans who stand to be the biggest losers from the change
No one is talking about giving developing countries a pass until their GDP per capitas are on par with developed nations..
Even with business as usual emissions, China's per capita GDP will maybe be half of what the US's will be in 35 years. I doubt climate mitigation policies would chip away at much of that difference.
But isn't the whole thing non binding in the first place ? Isn't this just supposed to be start so each nation on its know can plan and do it in its own way ?
There is a difference between a) not going along with something is considered "doing something" and b) rejecting an existing "doing something" Treaty that only 2 other countries did not sign, that has minuscule economic impact ... without having a replacement.
That (b) is what happened. That means Trump doesn't think something must be done - which means this administration does not care about climate science and it's predicted (and proven with current findings) disastrous impacts.
There is no alternative - either we begin to fix the problem with a global framework, or we suffer the tragedy of the commons on a global scale - and we're already seeing the effects of global temperature warming and ocean acidification.
While they seem like decent replies to me, there is no reason to think that you'd get the best replies to a complicated policy question from a random commenter in a forum for technology entrepreneurs.
My reading of that idiom is that it implies an assumption that they are the best replies. My comment was to point out that there's no reason to think that would be the case.
You've picked one single response that you don't like. Please read the rest in this thread, and then find a better source because there's no reason to think HN commenters are particularly expert in this area.
>1. Poor countries are allowed to increase their carbon emissions because their current emissions are already low per person, and requiring then to lower emissions would basically be telling then they're not allowed to become developed countries. They will not sign on.
China's current emissions is at 7.7 T/capita. India's current emissions is at 1.9 T/capita. A fair and equitable solution would be to impose a hard limit at, let's say, 8 or 10 T/capita for everyone, no exceptions. This way everyone plays by the same rules.
If you offered these terms to China and India, I'm pretty sure their leaders will take it, despite the harshness of it.
"requiring then to lower emissions would basically be telling then they're not allowed to become developed countries"
It sounds to me like the effort needs to be in making green energy more affordable than non-green energy. This would benefit all nations.
Money talks. If it's cheaper to go green, even the most die-hard conservative will go green (anecdotal case in point: my die-hard conservative grandfather, who drives a Prius).
Right, but it does so by giving them money to spend on expensive stuff, which treats one of the symptoms instead of the root cause.
What I'd sooner advocate is to instead give that money to organizations working to make that expensive stuff actually cheap for everyone (or at least cheaper than the alternative of sticking with fossil fuels). That way, it's more economical for everyone (not just rich countries, and not just poor countries) to skip the fossil fuels stage of industrialization and jump straight to green energy everywhere.
China and India each have over four times the population of the United States. They have to take some collective responsibility for that so their emissions per person should be lower.
China and India have ¼ and 1/11 the per-capita emissions if the USA. Thus the Chinese could triple their emissions output and still be "cleaner" than the USA. India could increase their emissions by an order of magnitude and still be "cleaner" than the USA.
As the 7th most polluting country in the world, the USA should take responsibility to show that their emissions per person should be lower.
This is how Trump carefully frames the debate: talking about increases in emissions without referring to current emissions.
Per capita is the wrong way to look at it. As someone living in India we don't want us to aspire for that kind of emissions. I belive we should start with a freeze on top ten countries. India can grow in other ways.
The USA creates far too much pollution, no doubt about it. If China and India only stop emissions increases when they reach per capita parity with the USA then we're all in a lot of trouble.
Europe is sufficiently integrated to consider it as a bloc with regards to this issue. Europe's population is twice that of the USA and half that of China/India. If Europe's emissions increased to the same per capita level as the USA that would obviously be a bad thing.
In total terms, none - the US is much bigger than other developed countries (unless you count the EU as a bloc, in which case, yes, the EU, by almost three times).
In per-economic-output terms, MANY. The EU average is 0.47% of GNI [1], while the US gives 0.17% of GNI, and Sweden (the outstanding example) gives a whopping 1.4% of GNI. Outside of the EU, Japan gives "only" 30-ish% more than the US, at 0.22%.
Another interesting stand-out is Turkey, which despite being MUCH poorer than the developed world gives 0.54% of GNI.
The United Nations and OECD long-term target is 0.7% of GNI.
[1] GNI is a modified version of GDP which adds income earned abroad by residents and subtracts income earned locally by non-residents.
- US, per capita, has the highest CO2 emissions of any developed country [0]
- It's a little unfair (depending on your idea of fairness) for developed countries to have benefitted from industrialization and polluting the environment only to close the gate behind them and blame other countries for trying to do the same and catch up in development.
- It's expensive to force nations barely entering industrialization to forego the easy route of using coal/oil/whatever pollutant and jump straight to what can, sometimes, be a more expensive energy source.
- Climate change is a global problem that doesn't mesh well with purely isolationist ideologies. This, primarily, is the biggest gripe with the current administration. It doesn't want to lift a single finger without seeing itself as the primary benefactor. This last part is purely opinion.
In this context, unfairness is required. It is unfair to tell the entire planet to stop burning carbon. We have been doing it for the better part of 200 years, why do we have to stop now? It is unfair.
But faced with reality, the realities of the universe, of our planet, fairness isn't on the table, the long term survival of billions of people is.
I disagree with flat out withdrawing from the climate accords, but saying its unfair so the two most populous countries in the world can continue to build up fossil fuel infrastructure for the next decade + is absurd. It should be an international stop, with developed nations subsidizing the cost of development of not-yet-first-world-countries by providing them access to cheaper clean energy, not giving them cart blanche to keep burning carbon.
Just a nitpick. According to the list you referenced, the developed country with the highest CO2 emissions per capita is Luxembourg. The US comes second.
The US is second, the spirit of your point stands though.
Another surprising thing I learned from the list, US emissions have decreased significantly from 19.6 to 16.4 (tonnes per capita) during the obama administration.
> the developed country with the highest CO2 emissions per capita is Luxembourg. The US comes second.
You're right, that was an oversight on my part.
> Another surprising thing I learned from the list, US emissions have decreased significantly from 19.6 to 16.4 (tonnes per capita) during the obama administration.
This may actually be, in large part, due to the EPA. It would be interesting to see data for more recent years as well as end of this year (if it's not too soon) to see how it all changes.
The decrease in emissions is due to increased emissions requirements on coal plants (lots of smaller ones have been shutting down) and fracking.
Fracking makes cheap natural gas which drives electric generation investment towards natural gas which emits about 1/2 as much carbon per unit of energy as coal.
Low gas prices means that the investments required to meet coal regulations won't ever pay off. Plants shut down.
See it's stuff like this that makes me suspect that the climate change debate is more about virtue signaling than any actual threat. Because really if we honestly believed that the earth was warming because of carbon and that this presented a serious threat to the planet, we wouldn't be like "oh well fairness dictates that we let some countries keep emitting high levels of carbon." That consideration wouldn't even come up in a situation where we were faced with a serious planetary threat.
The only reason that this is even coming up is because climate change proponents, deep inside, believe that there will be no serious adverse consequences from climate change.
> The only reason that this is even coming up is because climate change proponents, deep inside, believe that there will be no serious adverse consequences from climate change.
That's not the case at all. The world isn't really a black/white place. In an ideal world, we'd all stop right now and focus -- concertedly -- our efforts on reverting climate change. Unfortunately, life just doesn't work like that.
You go ahead and tell two large, thriving and growing, economies that "oops, we screwed up the planet, but at least we made a ton of money and our citizens live a nice quality of life! Wait, what? You want to improve your country, too? Well, you see, we sort of screwed up the planet and now you need to bear the responsibility on our behalf. Yes, that means stifling your economy and keeping your citizens in poverty. Yes, this also means the world will continue to view you as poor, undeveloped countries. What's that? For how long? Well, we don't really know, I mean, it could be a while..."
In the case of an actual planetary threat the argument you describe about letting poor countries catch up would be incoherent and insane. Let's change the scenario here and make it more extreme, imagine instead of CO2 our industry released lead and we knew over time the whole world would get lead poisoning and all humans would get sick from lead poisoning and die out if we continue on our path. In such a scenario, would we
1) Have rich nations stop emissions out lead but still allow developing nations to have lead emissions cause, hey we may all die, but it's only fair, I mean they should enjoy the same standard of living as us
2) Have everyone stop putting out lead emissions because, as crappy as it is, everyone attaining a western standard of living is not as important as preventing human extinction.
I think we would all agree that option 2 was the only option. Option 1 would be incoherent and insane. The only case in which we would even consider option 1 is one in which there is no real coherent planetary threat.
Now climate change proponents may not be suggesting human extinction but you are suggesting widespread, possibly civilization ending catastrophe. This leaves scenario 1 as the only real choice and scenario 2 as incoherent and stupid. Yet climate changers still advocate and openly push for scenario 2 . . . which would lead any reasonable person to question the sincerity of their belief in planetary environmental catastrophe.
I think I'm not making myself clear enough. Politics often requires compromise. Until we have a global hegemony, there's no way to enforce one set of rules across all others. This is also the reason you can have such wildly different political views and oppositions of governance that can both, simultaneously, work for their respective regions while not working well for the whole.
By painting the issue as black/white, you're grossly neglecting others' needs. It's easy to say that when, by no stretch of the imagination, you're likely living in a well-off and developed country with a pretty decent quality of life. Please, recognize the advantages and luxuries you've been afforded and take a moment to understand that others don't even have a fraction of that. They're just trying to reach a fraction. Can we resolve this climate problem and simultaneously keep developing countries from stagnation and regression? Sure, it just won't be easy. And that's why there are compromises made.
But potential planetary catastrophe is not a political issue and not an issue that allows for much compromise. Sure there is political hand wringing about whether it is really happening and what its consequences are . . . But once you accept that it is real and potentially destructive it becomes a question of preventing planetary catastrophe which is not political and seems very very black and white and not open to compromise.
>Can we resolve this climate problem and simultaneously keep developing countries from stagnation and regression? Sure, it just won't be easy
If climate change truly has the negative potential that you claim, how could you even risk it - if it really were as bad as you say wouldn't the consequence for both developing and developed countries be much worse by allowing for continued emissions?
> But potential planetary catastrophe is not a political issue...
Tell that to the American Republican party.
> If climate change truly has the negative potential that you claim, how could you even risk it
We've crossed the point of no return already, the question is now "how do we minimize the looming repercussions"? Part of that is to have the world transition, even if at different rates, to renewable energy. There's a lot of hang-up on this different rates part. There's no blank check for China/India on this, they just have a longer period to catch up in renewable energy.
The developed world has committed to a reasonable upcoming transitional period and the developing world will be carried along, financially, to keep up or given a larger transition window.
I'd love for the world to have just done this a decade ago, but that's not the case. I'd love for us to stop today, immediately, all over and just change to renewables, but that can't be the case. Again, the world's complicated and neither one of us armchair politicians really grasp just how complicated geopolitics are.
But it's not as if China, India, etc haven't benefited from the West's carbon-fueled economic growth. It was that economic growth that led to all the various technologies that they've imported. The West has also borne, and is bearing, the costs of R&D on green energy.
If we are talking about "inequities", I would say these countries took an "unfair" leap in technological development because of us, so it is not entirely unreasonable to say the disadvantage of less carbon use has been more than offset by tech transfer. Especially since China and India are both notorious for not respecting IP rights.
If not for the West, neither of these countries would even be in a position to want higher carbon emissions.
Only Australia (another country full of climate change denialism) and Israel fare worse. Canada is rather comparable.
On the other hand, some European countries (e.g. France, UK) are nearly double gdp per emissions. Even Germany with its relatively large industrial sector has far better GDP per CO2 ton.
I don't think there's a single economist in the world, without significant bias, who doesn't believe that China will be a serious economic powerhouse when it becomes a more developed nation.
Worth noting that we can't even really leave the Accord until 2020, so there's a lot of political posturing involved here.
This was all debated for years, so none of this should come as a surprise to anyone. We went into this eyes WIDE open.
China got a good deal, yeah, because it had leverage: it's the manufacturing capitol of the world. It could very easily have walked away with no commitments at all.
As for developing countries, of course we are going to ship our coal jobs over there - they can't afford to build renewables right now and must bootstrap with cheaper in-country energy stores like coal. Meanwhile we can afford the latter and should not be using dangerous and dirty methods just to save money.
100 billion over many years spread across dozens of countries really isn't that much. This is just another way for Trump to say we should be spending money on the US. We should, but we also have responsibilities to the rest of the world that predate all this stuff. We're part of a global community and he is trying to back out of it.
I seriously suspect his numbers in that last one are off or highly misleading. We should all watch for responses from those in know.
What you describe is what everyone is doing anyways. My country, Canada, is "in" the agreement but mere weeks after signing approved a controversial liquid natural gas project in B.C. that just by itself would blow away our ability to meet the Paris agreement commitments completely.
Thanks for posting this. If any of this gets a bit heated, totally not directed at you.
There's a lot of false dichotomies in this. I haven't fact checked anything either but just addressing the points:
1) China: China is a developing nation, not on par in the US on any quality of life indicator. They still plow fields by hand or with oxen in a large area of the country. We are the most powerful nation on the planet. Obviously, there should be differences.
2) India: India has ~1B people, with about ~250M making like less than $5-10 dollars a day. They basically had no market economy until the 1980s. Again, comparing them to our responsibilities is laughable.
3) "In short, the agreement doesn’t eliminate coal jobs, it just transfers those jobs out of America and the United States, and ships them to foreign countries." This is an absurd comment. We aren't going to buy coal from China. Coal jobs have been dying in the US for decades and will continue to do so because we don't want to use coal. And "be allowed to" doesn't mean they will. China is also building more solar than anyone else in the world.
4) "In short, the agreement doesn’t eliminate coal jobs, it just transfers those jobs out of America and the United States, and ships them to foreign countries." Ok buddy.
5) "calls for developed countries to send $100 billion to developing countries all on top of America’s existing and massive foreign aid payments" - This is a leadership item. If you think as the richest nation in the world we should help the poorer countries find green, economic ways to grow, then what's the problem? Also, it's not like we don't interact with the other parts of the world and aren't affect if they are polluted. I'd take this more to heart if his words on "fixing stuff at home" had any of that in his actual budget. 200B over 10 years? right.
6) "two-tenths of one degree" - This is because we should have started this shit in the 70s. His fears are correct. This is a first step to more and more restrictions because we are altering the planet in ways that probably already can't be taken back. "14 days of carbon emissions from China alone would wipe out the gains from America" - so we should just not have any of our gains at all?
It's just so much "What do I get out of helping? What's in it for me?" rather than, "Hey, let's be leaders and lead by example and show the world that we, the USA, live up to our myths as the 'Good Guys'."
> They still plow fields by hand or with oxen in a large area of the country. We are the most powerful nation on the planet. Obviously, there should be differences.
What is that specific thing or infrastructure that china and other developing countries are missing, that makes them unable to do this (stop polluting)?
Where they can't afford the more efficient methods of industrialization and must resort to the dirtier methods? Powering a country by coal is one such example. China has huge reserves of coal but little oil and natural gas. So what are they suppose to do? Renewables are expensive, although it is dropping in price, but they are also not useful at all hours and their production varies on conditions. Not all of China have plentiful sunshine. Coal is cheap, plentiful, and reliable. That's an easy choice for China.
Are you saying poor countries should NOT industrialize to help save the world after the industrialized nations have had 100 years to pollute all they want and generate enormous sums of wealth in the process? Why would any developing nation sign on to that?
>China has huge reserves of coal but little oil and natural gas.
So the real reason is not that china is a developing nation, but it has little oil and natural gas? That is not going to change, right? So you are saying that China can burn coal forever?
And what happens when a country run out of oil and gas. Can it start burning coal if it is available? Doesn't this mean that the source of pollution will keep shifting perpetually, without a net reduction in emissions?
Why not help these countries with setting up renewables, as much as it is possible.
>Are you saying poor countries should NOT industrialize to help save the world after the industrialized nations have had 100 years to pollute all they want and generate enormous sums of wealth...
No one is saying anything about stopping industrialization. But it does not make sense to exclude some countries on matters like this. The US had 100 years to pollute does not make much sense. Other countries also had 100 years to develop. That they weren't able to do so is no fault of US or other developed countries....
> Why not help these countries with setting up renewables, as much as it is possible.
That's precisely what's in the Paris Climate Agreement.
Sorry, I think we may be talking past each other and misunderstanding our views. Yes, agreed that industrialized nations should help and developing countries should cut back on dirtier methods of production. I was trying to inject the viewpoint of developing nations and underline why developing nations are getting aid and some leeway in the Paris agreement.
Just to pop in on this "Other countries also had 100 years to develop. That they weren't able to do so is no fault of US or other developed countries"
That's a real real real strong blind spot on how Western nations have been interfering in developing nations for decades. Africa, the Middle East, Asia all have a long and storied history of the West actively interfering with their development. We 100% are now having to lay in the bed we made.
>storied history of the West actively interfering with their development....
There is no blind spot. I am aware of this possibility. But that does not change a thing....That is like saying since you developing your business ate into your competitors business, you owe them something, and you have to lay low for a while while they grow their business (because of limited resources or something...)....
If there is any valid criticism of the Paris accords, it's that they aren't stringent or BINDING. Which is the exact opposite of Trump's complaints about them. By the very nature of them being non-binding, they don't impose anything on the US.
Just that fact almost entirely undermines whatever Trump said.
In addition, however, new coal is already more expensive than renewables, which are getting cheaper at a rapid pace. However, more importantly, it's significantly more expensive than natural gas. The odds that the US would build a coal plant are minuscule (and even if someone did, assuming that somehow coal got cheaper than natural gas, the amount of money saved over building a natural gas plant instead would be meaningless).
I would have thought a master dealmaker like Trump would know that giving up something you weren't gonna do anyways in exchange for anything is a good deal.
But finally, none of this matters, because Donald Trump could have continued to do whatever he wanted (build coal plants, increase US emissions, etc.) without the Paris accords imposing any sort of mechanism to stop him from doing it.
What this shows is that the US cannot be trusted to stick to even a promise as toothless as the Paris accords. Combined with the lack of reaffirmation of Article 5 in NATO, the only real effect this will have is diminish the US's standing among its allies.
The Paris Accords were largely symbolism but important nonetheless in bringing everyone to the table, and showing a way forward and showing that climate change is something all countries need to handle and worry about. Donald Trump's act is also symbolism showing that the US doesn't care about agreements and pacts and that Climate change is not something they really believe in.
Btw, both Chinese and Indian governments have targets that are much more stringent than what they agreed upon through these accords, and both are well ahead of even those more stringent targets.
Really wish this was at the top, instead of a comment that simply calls the president "shit-the-bed" Trump.
It is scary how people, even on HN, go on a hating spree with out actually looking into these details. If you go on reddit, you see the same thing, but multiplied 10x.
It is a sickening display of how even "smart" communities, like HIN can harbour stupid behaviors and beliefs as long as the majority shares it....
Except this is misleading because those points would only be good if they didn't have a very clear reason, which the top reply to this comment lays out very well.
I think you might want to take a look at that, it supports what he's saying but as is typical of these fact checking sites, couches it in lots of "well yes but" or "broadly correct, but 'needs context'". I mean look at his statement on India:
> Trump: "India will be allowed to double its coal production by 2020. Think of it. India can double their coal production. We're supposed to get rid of ours."
> India does have plans to nearly double its coal production, and the agreement does not prevent that. But the Paris Agreement does not even mention the word coal, nor does it do anything to put a global moratorium on coal.
Oh the Paris Agreement doesn't mention coal so what he's saying isn't correct? The point Trump was making is that the Paris Agreement isn't stopping India (and China) from polluting. It stops _us_, but it doesn't stop _them_.
Seems pretty straightforward as far as fact checks go. The Paris Accord says nothing about coal, it's all about emissions. We could increase coal use too if we wanted to, as long as our emissions go down. So really, the statement from Trump is true but misleading.
"It" doesn't stop us, we negotiated this as part of a global agreement to reduce emissions. Because we're the world's biggest source of emissions and also the richest, our responsibility is greater than that of a developing country like India that can't afford new nuclear plants and whose citizens can't afford solar roofs.
Amen. Every "fact-checking" site seems to go out of its way to editorialize the facts with what I should think about them, instead of limiting their purview to, you know, the facts in question.
What was Trump supposed to say? "The Paris Agreement doesn't have the word 'coal'"?
---
Don't forget: Being technically correct is the best kind of correct.
They are providing additional facts, which may or may not change your point of view. If the additional facts are not interesting to you, that's cool. But consider, maybe the information they provide is interesting to other people? For example, the top-level poster in this thread asked many questions which are explicitly answered in this article.
Unlike the rest of the article, this section doesn't make an explicit summary claim about the truth or untruth of the President's claims. There is no "true but..." header.
If you think some of the facts that they provide -- such as the fact that the accord doesn't mention the word "coal" -- are irrelevant, that's cool. PolitiFact does not draw a conclusion from this fact, and suggesting it does and then blasting it for having done so is pretty frustrating.
I also feel that by cherry-picking this one instance, one misses the larger thrust of TFA. You seem to be frustrated that PolitiFact is saying "yes, but" a lot, but what's wrong with that? If the additional context is not useful to you, that's cool. You're entitled not to care. But to me, it's quite useful, and speaks pretty directly to many of the top-level poster's points.
Trump: The Paris Agreement would result in "lost jobs, lower wages, shuttered factories and vastly diminished economic production."
PolitiFact: "Take these statistics with a grain of salt." Followed by an explanation of where Trump's claim comes from and why it is weak.
Trump: "China will be allowed to build hundreds of additional coal plants. So, we can't build the plants, but they can, according to this agreement."
PolitiFact: "China has cut its use of coal three years in a row," with a citation.
Trump: "Even if the Paris Agreement were implemented in full, with total compliance from all nations, it is estimated it would only produce a two-tenths of one degree -- think of that; this much -- Celsius reduction in global temperature by the year 2100. Tiny, tiny amount."
PolitiFact: "[The Paris Agreement] shaves 0.2 C of warming if [it's] maintained through 2100, compared with what we assessed would have been the case by extending existing measures (due to expire in 2020) based on earlier international agreements."
IOW Paris gets us 0.2C under the previous agreement, but by pulling out of Paris, we get no agreement, not the previous agreement, which expires. "Needs context."
Trump: "At 1 percent growth, renewable sources of energy can meet some of our domestic demand. But at 3 or 4 percent growth, which I expect, we need all forms of available American energy, or our country will be at grave risk of brownouts and blackouts."
PolitiFact: Nobody seriously expects us to get 3-4% growth.
Adding additional facts is valuable. To continue your India example, they have pledged to reduce emissions 33 to 35 percent of 2005 levels by 2030. So yes, they may increase their coal production, but now I know they are also taking other steps to reduce emissions.
Agree but the picture they paint with this _is_ a binary one. Anything less than a "his statement is 100% factual, no additional commentary needed!" is treated as evidence that Trump is a big fat liar by people like OP.
The one crucial point that IMO is very false:
That the US is "already ahead". The US produces around
2-2.5x the CO2 per capita compared to EU and China (which interestingly are similar
now after China's economic rise).
Coal isn't really relevant. What's most relevant is the way you do housing and living: Poorly isolated homes spread across the countr, far from work and cultural centers, with its inhabitants insiting on having 20C in summer and 23C in winter and driving huge trucks to work alone.
If you're a U.S. citizen who doesn't work in coal, why would you ever want more coal plants to be built here? Even besides global warming, there are some very real externalities to coal - acid rain, smog, increased asthma & respiratory illnesses.
I live in California and have been to China, and I know which air I'd rather breathe, even despite California's terrain & wind patterns being very conducive to catching air pollution in a bowl. Let them fuck up their own atmosphere...it'd be better if they didn't fuck up ours too, but if somebody's gonna pollute, I'd rather it be them.
I'm sure there are problems with the bill. However, I'm not really interested in after-the-event arguments from a party who've been so anti-science and such deniers for so long.
It's a bit like the Muslim ban that "wasn't" a Muslim ban. If you've been calling it a Muslim ban for a year, retroactively coming back and saying "nah, nah, it's a not a Muslim ban" isn't convincing to the courts. In much the same way, the President cherry-picking bits he doesn't like about the bill sounds hollow.
Yeah that's my biggest beef with the Paris Agreement. If it's about the global environment, why are all countries not compelled to participate equally? Don't let China off the hook and I think a lot of people would be less skeptical of the whole arrangement.
Realistically, poorer countries are going to be able to do almost nothing to help the global situation. The understanding is that richer countries (who, to be fair, have done the majority of polluting historically) will have to grant enormous subsidies to effect change in developing countries if we're going to meet international climate goals.
I guess that's a difficult pill to swallow if you espouse nationalist economic policies, but this isn't about Us vs. Them; we're talking about preventing massive devastation on a global scale. And the Paris accord was just the first step. We'll need to spend much more than Trump is already unwilling to pay if we want to avert disaster.
We're calling China and India poor countries now? In relation to the US every country is poor. But as you stated, it's a global problem. It needs a global solution. Pollute less! Hold everyone to the same standard.
It's easy to say that everyone should be held to the same standard when you're already the richest. The US uses 7032 kg of oil equivalent/capita, China 2029 kg/capita, India 614 kg/capita [1]. If you really want to hold everyone to the same standard you could cut your energy use by an order of magnitude and still use more than India. It's ridiculous to hear an american president try to paint developing countries as energy thirsty when the three most sold vehicles in the US are pickup trucks while most people in China and India can't afford any kind of car [2].
Like you said, it's a global problem. It won't be solved by whining about "unfair" economic terms and bragging about opening more coal mines.
One-size-fits-all policy proposals rarely succeed because they don't take account of historical and political realities. Your comments remind me of developers to treat user requests/complaints as problematic because they're so in love with their code base that they've forgotten that software is meant to serve the needs of the people who use it.
A couple thoughts - what is equally? The US is the historically the largest contributor of greenhouse gases by a wide margin[1]. And last I checked, a vast majority of people support the agreement[2], including half of trump supporters.
> The US is the historically the largest contributor of greenhouse gases by a wide margin
Sure, but guess what: China is right behind us. History means squat. They're a major polluter _right now_. Why are they not held to the same standard we are?
They're not held to the same standard because if they were, they would rightfull refuse to sign on:
China's GDP was 10.87 trillion USD in 2015 vs 17.95 trillion USD for the US. GDP per capita was 7,926 in 2015 vs 55,836 in the US. China is still a poor country.
When China reaches a comparable GDP per capita, then we can expect comparable cuts to be on the table.
Until then expecting sharp cuts from developing countries will not be a viable alternative.
Why are per-capita emissions a more important number than net emissions? With the former, China is behind us (roughly half) whereas with the latter, they're roughly double based on the current Wikipedia numbers.
But as for why they are important, I think that there is some relationship between how people live and per-capita emissions. So if you ignore the population size and only look at net emissions, the people in larger countries would be held to a higher standard than the people in the smaller countries.
China has a a few hundred thousand metric tons before they are close to the historical pollution we have contributed. And last I checked, they are still committed to taking action[1]... if only we could say the same.
Things I've learned in life(mostly the hard way) include that fair is not a thing and does not exist.
Another key sticking point is the unbounded legal liability under the agreement, for other countries to be able to sue the US for climate change effects if the aggressive targets are not met. It's disappointing that the world sees something as serious as climate change as an opportunity to get money from the US taxpayer, and that India and China are held to such low standards.
That said, Trump has a history of not being honest. He campaigned on increasing coal usage. That alone might have been enough for him to spike the deal.
Not meant as an attack on you, but but choosing not to be into politics basically means you occupy a secure enough position in society not to have to deal with personal anxiety about how political developments might impact you personally. Put more simply, you can afford to ignore politics but others cannot.
It's worth trying to imagine yourself yourself in the position of others on a regular basis so as to get a better understanding of why or how political issues might seem more urgent to them, not least people whose outlook you disagree with. I can readily see why economically disadvantaged coal miners in West virginia would support Trump, for example, since they don't see how the shift to carbon-free technology is going to benefit them economically. Of course I also think they're going to be severely disappointed, but I don't regret the effort invested in trying to understand their political alignment.
> The fact that the agreement only commits governments to keeping warming below an increase of 2 degrees, rather than a much safer firm target of 1.5 degrees, was lobbied for and won by the United States.
> The fact that the agreement left it to individual nations to determine how much they were willing to do to reach that temperature target, allowing them to come to Paris with commitments that collectively put us on a disastrous course towards more than 3 degrees of warming, was lobbied for and won by the United States.
> The fact that the agreement treats even these inadequate commitments as non-binding, which means governments apparently do not have anything to fear if they ignore their commitments, is something else that was lobbied for and won by the United States.
> The fact that the agreement specifically prohibits poor countries from seeking damages for the costs of climate disasters was lobbied for and won by the United States.
> The fact that it is an “agreement” or an “accord” and not a treaty — the very thing that makes it possible for Trump to stage his action-movie slow-mo walk away, world in flames behind him — was lobbied for and won by the United States.
This accord already is a massive insult to developing countries, who give up the right to hold those responsible who caused climate effects on their country. India can't sue the West for the costs that climate change, and the refugee crisis in Bangladesh will cost. India can't use any of the quick industrialization concepts that the West used, at massive cost to the environment. All committments are voluntary.
The west has spent centuries polluting the planet, and gaining an economic advantage. And now China and India are asking for a few years — not even a decade — in an entirely voluntary agremeent.
And yet, it's somehow unfair to the US? This is laughable. And I say that as a German willing to pay my 0.40€/kWh electricity.
Perhaps those goods shouldn't be made in China, an ocean or two away from where they are needed, under lax emissions laws. If we held China to the same standard as the US and EU, some of that problem would go away. It wouldn't just make fly-over country happy. Huge container ships do not run on solar power. They burn huge amounts of heavy fuel oil, which is nearly tar and not too far from being coal.
You forget how it got that way. Parts were made in the USA, then shipped to China. Part production moved. Part production can move the other way, back to the USA. It tends to go where the devices are made. The same goes for raw material. The USA has resources to mine.
Moving any part of the supply chain tends to encourage the other parts to move. If part production moved, then both mining and device production would have an increased incentive to move. If mining moved, part production would have an incentive to move, and if that moved then device production would have an incentive to move. It all works both ways, with suppliers and customers tending to move toward each other.
So yes, we can put everything back in the USA, and it can be affordable, but we face an uphill battle. The battle is only lost if you give up trying.
The USA has rare earth mines in California. They got shut down because China supported mining as a strategic asset, meanwhile the EPA was pretty sadistic. Getting that going again is trivial. If we match the legal situation in China, we're back in business.
Another big source is fly ash, which we get from burning coal. This actually has a decently high concentration of the more urgently needed elements. The more coal we burn, the more fly ash we have. Burn more, and get rare earth elements as a bonus.
The amounts needed are tiny. The only trouble with importing from China is that China considers control of rare earth elements to be part of a strategy to dominate the world. China restricts exports, and threatens to restrict them more. This is of course a national security issue for every other country in the world.
I think what this misses is that the per-capita emissions matter too, not just overall emissions. It's kind of unrealistic to ask a country to lower its emissions when its per-capita emissions are already just a fraction of yours.
To give a more concrete analogy - suppose there are two countries, A and B. People in both countries like eating tuna. A has far fewer people than B, but the average person in A eats 10x more tuna than the average person in B. As tuna supplies dwindle, would it be reasonable for A to ask B to reduce their consumption of tuna?
They completely drag down the per capita numbers. You're basically lumping people producing near-US levels of emissions with half the population producing basically nothing.
> Should we also exclude the half of the US population that uses the least carbon emissions?
I don't really understand why the fact that they drag down the per-capita numbers is a rationale for excluding them. Why is it that the people producing no emissions should not be allowed to raise their standard of living to that of people in the US?
Agreed - so is it more fair to have everyone living at the same sustainable level, or is it more fair to restrict people with a low carbon footprint from increasing their footprint, so that the people with a large carbon footprint can sustain their way of living?
Obviously, as a country, you want to get away with whatever you can. I'm just saying it's difficult to get people to agree to something that they think is unfair to them.
Interesting that Trump estimates the cost of the Paris Agreement in terms of the economy - 3.5 trillion in lost GDP by 2040 - but quotes the benefits in Celcius - two-tenths of one degree by 2100.
What exactly is Trump's estimate for the economic cost of climate change by 2100 if the Paris Agreement is not implemented?
Aside from the environmental effects, Paris accord is an excellent vehicle for guaranteed ROI on third world "green" and "renewable" investments. What better plan than to take taxpayer money involuntarily and forward it to third world renewable investments. If everyone chips in just a little bit in the name of doing something good why would anybody try and stop it? A brilliant plan grinding to a halt all because of Trump.
China and India need to industrialize and modernize in order for them to transition to cleaner energy sources. Per capita, they produce only a fraction of what we do.
It's unrealistic to expect developing nations to shoulder the same burden as developed ones. The deal is weighted to put more on the countries that have modern economies able to make the transition. Idea being that western developed nations can transition into renewables far faster and make up for the developing world's inability to do so, and at least somewhat mitigating temperature rise.
Please post what he said is incorrect. I read the article and found he is mostly correct depending on models etc. Perhaps I missed something but there were no blatent lies etc from my reading.
If they could just somehow recruit Texas to the cause, they'd pretty much have the leverage, as anchors of economics and policy for much of the rest of the country.
The primary issue in the Texas legislature the last session was who could go to the bathroom. They couldn't figure it out so now they are going to have a special session to iron out the details. So Texas is not going to lead the country anywhere. http://www.texasmonthly.com/burka-blog/order-timeline-bathro...
In 2008, the overwhelming amount of money and support for that referendum to make gay marriage illegal came from Utah. That same sort of effect cannot happen in Texas in all the executive/legislative offices. Also, in California, Proposition 187 mobilized the Latino/Hispanic vote to help turn the state blue (obviously before 2008) having less fundamentalists in offices of power lessens their bully pulpit so to speak. Texas minorities have not been incentivized by the GOP with an equivalent move in Texas so the historic low turnout among Latinos/Hispanics there has been consistent. They could stage a revolution through the ballot box in the coming years if people would just show up to vote. http://www.texasmonthly.com/burka-blog/latinos-wont-turn-tex...
Also, after Proposition 8 in California, California did not doubled down on hate against gay/lesbians with more measures. Texas had an equivalent vote for equal rights in Houston, it got lots of attention, and it went from winning to losing. The tide turned so much that the state of Texas double down on moves against gay/lesbian rights, the lege moved to not permit cities to have equal rights ordinances and keeps throwing bathroom bills against the wall spaghetti style.
Yeah, but it's more than just % of GDP. Think about the outsized influence Texas has on school textbooks nationwide. Same idea with CA/NY/WA/TX in other areas.
Textbooks are written by publishers and reviewed by boards appointed by the state. However, this is a costly process and most small states do not bother with it. Due to the size of Texas, it makes sense for them to review and direct the writing of their own textbooks.
Thus, small states will often use textbooks originally published and directed by Texas(or another large state) for their school curriculum. This is why it's such a huge deal when <x huge state> removes <x important topic> from their curriculum.
I think the idea of states having national influence in these matters comes from the fact that if a producer of some sort (textbooks, cars, etc) wants to sell something across the US, they need to follow the strictest standards that populous states have, or else they need to have separate cars for California, separate textbooks for Texas, etc. I guess it can be more expensive to do that, so they end up just meeting the stricter conditions nationwide when that makes more sense.
In some states, school districts choose their textbooks. In some states, the state as a whole decides on their textbook. So the states that do that (like Texas) have a much larger impact on the contents, because it's such a large order. Whereas a school district can't afford to have their own textbooks written and published, so they have to go with a version already out there.
In case nobody noticed, former TX gov. Rick Perry did speak out on this, and he was in favor of the Paris accord, also.
Shocking that Trump would go against the current head of Exxon, the ex-head of Exxon who is also his Sec. of State, and another very conservative oil-state politician in Rick Perry.
I believe Tillerson wanted to stay in Paris so the United States would be involved in the program and shape it's direction. I'd say that's quite a bit different than voluntarily taking on the pledges for Texas.
Why would you just plain guess at TX being cleaner than CA, the clear leader among all US states on climate issues, without bothering to look it up? Careless and lazy.
Because Texas has a lot of wind power (so much that the price sometimes goes negative at night) and because, although California gets a lot of its power from renewable energy, most of that is imported (WA hydro) while in-state production remains dirtier.
Don't get me wrong: I live in CA and would be happy never to set foot in Texas again, but this responds to your specific statement.
I'm merely saying while California consumes a lot of energy from renewable sources, most of the energy generated in the state is dirty.
In the specific case of hydro, California has, for all intents and purposes, none. There is some pumped hydro storage (as far as anyone can tell, all the reasonable candidate sites are in use) but actual generation comes from WA which has plenty of water flow. This also means that WA deals with the environmental problems of these generator dams, and California does not.
California does have some wind and solar of course, in additional to its hydrocarbon plants. But lots of gas peakers.
For pollution in general, California might be a leader for policies enforcing cleanliness.
But for clean power generation, they're not the leader, Vermont is [1]. California is ranked #8 (Texas is ranked #22). This is based on a ratio of the power consumed, not raw power generation total.
I'm not sure why Texas would be particularly clean, it has abundant quantities of coal and natural gas. It also has an abundance of wind, but I'd be surprised if its wind power production is even a tenth of its combined fossil fuel power production.
Of course the real problem is their oil industry. They export a shit ton of oil, and they are extremely well connected to every aspect of state politics.
Texas gets about a quarter of its power from coal. That's a lot lower than some states, but "almost all zero carbon or low carbon" is a bit generous. That's also way, way higher than California.
Probably.. but at this point it's really not just about the emissions... it's now also about economics. Renewable energy is set to be a massive industry -- worth trillions and create millions of jobs globally. No state should want to be left behind.
Texas ranks #1 in the US for wind energy capacity and biofuel production. It ranks #2 for employment in the renewable energy sector. It is hardly set to be left behind.
Maybe this will motivate Cuomo not to shut down all the nuclear plants in NY. I'm not sure how he plans to achieve any sort of reduction if you have to replace nuclear as well (which provides NY with 30% of its electricity).
Compared to the amount of health issues from coal the amount is minuscule. Personally I think nuclear is a great source of energy so long as the plants are properly maintained... which seems to be an issue.
Now that's a thing to be happy about. Funny how every time Trump feels that he's about to grab the brass ring it is snatched away from him one way or another. Governing without consensus building is harder than it seems apparently.
I wonder if Trump is secretly happy with the development. In addition to all the European liberals, he now gets to point his fingers at treasonous liberal states. Great for energizing your support base.
Beyond that, puts the burden of cost on some areas rather than his base.
When the political right in Australia cut climate research funding, and private industry and the community stepped up to try to fund it instead, those politicians pointed to this as an ideal response.
1) Good - states' actions are how the constitution was framed
2) Weird - the governors appear to be taking action unilaterally by executive decree, which is how the Paris accord was originally agreed to (Obama) and reversed (Trump)
This might be the best of all worlds. Blue states can join the alliance, and red states can stay out. Everyone's happy and the economic effects can play out as they will.
Most of those countries that would grandstand in front of the public and say they would sign a climate change agreement are full of it!!! If they won't step up and pay their fair share in NATO obligations to defend their own people, how are you going to trust them to abide by some little climate change agreement??? It's a bad deal! Trump was right. It's just another way to get America to pay for most of it! Bravo Zulu Trump!
> But most big city governments are going to be run by liberal Democrats because...they are big cities. Not that they are wrong, just pointing that out.
You are pointing this out why? Obviously the lead in to "just pointing that out" was circular logic that means nothing, and I feel there is a deeper message you wanted to convey but then it's just so easy to type dot dot dot... instead.
> Global warming might be a bad deal for the globe.
Canada and Russia might benefit from it in a perverse way, but I otherwise agree.
> You are pointing this out why? Obviously the lead in to "just pointing that out" was circular logic that means nothing, and I feel there is a deeper message you wanted to convey but then it's just so easy to type dot dot dot... instead.
Most big city executives are not going to like pulling out of the Paris agreement, so you might as well talk about the mayor of Atlanta, Houston, Salt Lake City...they are going to express support for it. So why not mention them all? It doesn't matter if the big city is in a red state or not.
I have a feeling the OP on this comment thread is probably from Phoenix, and was most likely promoting local action as opposed to what may happen in big cities across the country. But it will be very interesting to see how this plays out over time.
From the point of view of role of government in people's lives
My guess has always been that the difference comes about because smaller communities can organize to solve problems without government help, so they lean towards 'limited government'. Larger communities have a naturally harder time organizing, and so they lean towards government programs.
If your community is 1,000 people and 1% of your population is homeless, you probably know the names of all 10 people and figure out a solution case by case. If your community is 10,000,000... that's 100,000 homeless people, which is a wholly different problem.
Large societies and contemporary conservative ideology just don't mix. You can't have a big city and a politician who is anti immigrant, anti gay, anti abortion, anti welfare, anti schools, because being positive on all of those issues is key to the success of that society in the first place. It's like being the executive of a coffee company while hating coffee, it just doesn't work out.
People who don't feel a need for personal space and privacy will move to cities. People who value those things move out. There is a difference in the voting behavior of those different kinds of people.
If you find crowds of strangers exciting in a good way, you move to the city. If they excite you in a bad way, you move away from the city.
There is a massive difference between caring about the environment and following the Paris Climate Agreement. We as a country can do a ton to reduce our damage to the environment. However it is going to be a drop in the bucket to what some third world and massively developing countries will contribute. Follow Amdahl's Law. The biggest emitters should get the biggest spanking.
This is why Paris Agreement is almost completely worthless. China is the largest contributor of green house gasses in the world and emits about a third of all the green house gasses. (if not drastically more given the shady reporting). And they want to give China a free pass to keep polluting the world for another 13 years while every other country gets their emissions under control?
I'm very pro environment and any serious agreement must have China curbing their emissions now. They emit twice the green house gasses as the US (which is the number 2 contributor). That cannot be allowed to continue.
On per capita basis, we're more than double china. Getting US to china levels on per capita basis would make a huge difference in preventing climate change.
Well no it wouldn't. Per capita doesn't matter as much as total emissions. Amdahl's Law. China contributes more than double the next country in terms of green house gasses, and they are contributing more per capita year over year. This is why China curbing their emissions would have a bigger effect than anyone. If they cut their per capita emissions in half, global emissions will be reduced by 1/6th. If US cuts their per capita emissions in half, global emissions will be reduce by 1/12th.
Which one of these alternatives is better for the environment?
The problem is that you solution would require telling developing nations that they're not allowed to reach the living standard you and I enjoy - how is that fair?
Why should that matter? All that matters is the environmental damage is reversed. That requires reducing emissions until we produce technology that can massively pull carbon out of the air.
Continuing to insanely pollute the environment in the name of "fairness" is a great way to destroy the world.
I don't think it is this much of a zero-sum game. You have framed this in an odd correlation != Way; e.g.
As pollution increases so does quality of life.
Uh, what if we plow 100B into battery production and photovoltaic cell system integration? We could build the 5-6 gigafactories to recycle and manufacture batteries...That use solar free energy...To reduce pollution...And cost...To increase quality of life...To cheap to meter
What you're talking about here is an artifact of your sampling method, not an actual problem. China emits roughly double the amount that the US does, but they have four times the population. That is actually a much better number than ours.
Yes but if you care about the environment it doesn't matter. Reducing the overall emissions is all that matters. And giving the biggest polluter a free pass to keep polluting is insanity.
That's the point, though — you're not actually identifying the biggest polluter. You're drawing a circle around a group of people who are not the biggest polluters by bulk or per capita and are on average way better then the country that just pulled out of the accord, and you're saying, "These people, they're the problem, and the best way to fight the problem of this group of moderate polluters is for the US to renege on its commitments to fight climate change."
This position is so seemingly unrelated to the facts that it really feels like you're looking for evidence to justify a pre-existing stance rather than examining the evidence dispassionately and arriving at a conclusion through reason. Are you sure there's not a little bit of that going on here?
Please read before replying. I have at no point said "These people, they're the problem, and the best way to fight the problem of this group of moderate polluters is for the US to renege on its commitments to fight climate change." or anything that even implies that.
All that matters is getting the biggest reduction as possible in global emissions. We enter into these agreements as entire countries. Any agreement that gives the world's biggest polluter a free pass to keep polluting is useless. If China cuts their pollution in half, the world wins more than if the next 3 top polluters cut their pollution in half.
Try some dispassionate analysis of your own and you will arrive at the same conclusions as me.
America doesn't need an agreement with another country to positively affect climate change. Do you??? No you don't! Everyone just needs to do their part! Bravo Zulu Trump!
America doesn't need an agreement with another country to positively affect climate change. Do you??? No you don't! Everyone just needs to do their part! Bravo Zulu Trump!
This is starting to sound like the “Rim States” from the science fiction novel Black Man (Thirteen) by Richard K. Morgan. Basically the blue and red states separate in the future because they couldn’t resolve their differences. The blue states go on to prosper and the red states languish.
It struck me how plausible it sounded when I read it. Now with the commander in shit-the-bed Donald Trump and the rising tide self-destructive behaviour, it’s looking like a good option to me.
While I'm happy that the states are picking up the slack, are you really insinuating that the Red states are leading to their own self-destruction, going on to "languish"? I'm saddened that people have this viewpoint over such a large swath of the country.
Red states have lower GDP, higher poverty, lower education, and are largely subsidized by blue states through federal grants.
I am not implying causation and there are other interesting facts (lower cost of living relative to wages in red states) but as it stands now if blue and red split it doesn't seem like it's all that controversial to imply red would suffer.
Of course, I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with the article, but it's always funny when someone posts an article they didn't read. It directly contradicts what you're claiming:
> The red states aren't in fact poorer than the blue states. They're richer: that's why they vote more conservative and more right wing.
The article argues that people who make less move to areas with lower costs of living, because they have more purchasing power in those areas:
> Because those lower income places have even lower prices, making consumption standards higher.
That is, red states aren't poor because of red policies, they're poor because they're cheaper to live in.
Further, the article claims that blue policies hurt the poor!
> What we now need to go on and explain is why those nominally left policies, those blue ones, are so to the disadvantage of the poor they're supposedly helping....
I read the article. I don't think you read my comment. I posted the article to cite a positive interpretation of the statistics I claimed.
I made no claims about which policies were better or worse. If you have issues with the one claim I did make, that the implication that red states would fare poorly without blue states is not farfetched, I do not believe you have adequately articulated them.
From the article:
> Red state economies based on energy extraction, agriculture and suburban sprawl may have lower wages, higher poverty rates and lower levels of education on average than those of blue states
You missed his/her point. We go on and on about this difference between the coast and, as those on the coast have dubbed them, the "flyover states" and then people act all smug about how they are leading to their own destruction and what not instead of being responsible and trying to educate and help. It's, frankly, pretty pathetic that this attitude is so pervasive. I'm not sure what you (not you specifically) are thinking, but if you think that these impoverished areas are somehow just going to go away or that (and seriously lol at this) somehow California is going to merge with Canada, you're (not you specifically) incredibly naive.
While I agree that many coastal liberals are often smug, the notion that people in other areas are groaning in the throes of oppression is not really founded in fact. Large parts of the country have great contempt for the more liberal enclaves on the coast and pour scorn on the people and civic societies established there. Try spending some time reading a conservative forum like freerepublic.com, though you might need eye bleach after you're done. There are a lot of decent, hardworking, and hard-done-by people in the midwest, South, other inland regions etc. etc. who don't want their economies exploited or their dignity insulted, and there are also some vicious mean-spirited people who habitually wish horrible suffering on others.
Background: I am a [former] republican, grew up in flyover country, from a family full of trump supporters, now I live in California.
I believe that the red states are going to languish for the following reasons:
1) Brain drain as young ambitious people leave
2) Public services (education, roads, etc) decrease in quality, increase in expense
3) Older folks increasingly capture all of the economic gains allowed in small towns through consolidation of local political power
It was once possible to be young and ambitious and moderately wealthy in middle America by starting and expanding a small business like a franchise or a car dealership, but if you try to do that now, you'll get crushed in city hall pretty much every step of the way.
I am very open to discussion/debate on this topic if anyone has differing views or questions.
> Tons of smart folks I know are leaving CA for TX or east coast.
That is very true, but CA also has a large in migration of smart folks, leaving the number of smart folks here at a slowly increasing number. Small towns in red states for the most part don't see in migration from smart folks, the best people they have are the children of those residing there, and in my experience the ambitious ones chose to leave.
> omg, this is CA. Have you driven a freeway lately?
CA supports a relatively dense living situation compared to many areas in 'red states'. While CA might not have the best roads, they have the population and economy to support their maintenance. Many areas in red states have decided to stop paving their roads all together, and are crushing them back to gravel, because the cost of maintenance is unable to be supported by the population and density of people using them. We are definitely at "peak road" in red state America.
> CA to the letter.
Yeah, but I can also get a cushy corporate job in California. Most of the people I knew from [small town in a red state] that stayed either inherited a family business, got hooked on drugs, or settled into the life of mid/low paying government work.
> [small town in a red state] that stayed either inherited a family business, got hooked on drugs, or settled into the life of mid/low paying government work.
Again you describe CA. Outside the coastline (sometimes inside the coastline, especially past Marin to the OR border), this is very much the case in CA. The central valley is home to some of the most impoverished rural towns in America. Louis Theroux has a fantastic documentary that hits this point: https://documentarystorm.com/the-city-addicted-to-crystal-me...
I think it's more reasonable to apply your thinking to counties rather than states. I'm in a deep red state, but the county I'm in is slowly turning blue as tech companies move in and startups grow.
Also, red counties are where most of the food comes from. The farmers who have made it this far (through extreme competition in the food market) are quite innovative, clever, and ambitious. I wouldn't count them out. They don't want big business in their towns, but they also depend on basic services like filtered water, police, a fire department, and hospitals, and they'll make sure those continue to survive.
There seem to be a lot of microscale effects where people are moving from [small town where they grew up] to [moderately sized regional center], and most of my experience comes from seeing family members and friends still living in [small town where they grew up].
there are enough example states to refute it. hell Illinois is poster child for failed Democratic policies and their debt is now junk status. Quite a few other blue states are in the same boat with exploding debt.
blue states tend to be such only because of dense city populations in super cities; discounting California. Get outside those big metropolis with their outsides voting power and it shifts.
I am a decidedly red state and not one of the claims is valid so I seriously doubt its valid all places. thousands of successful small businesses are started each year. Where you will get crushed in big city blue states where regulation protects incumbent businsses even more than in rural areas (let alone taxes)
Yea, TBH, this is more of a view about "cities" vs "rural area" and less about "red state" vs "blue state". Id much rather live in the most densely populated county in Nebraska than the least densely populated county of NY/CA in terms of health/opportunity/economy/etc.
do you think your analysis applies to states like texas, virginia, arizona, north carolina, georgia, utah, etc? even the in-between states such as colorado and florida were doing fine before the blue takeover of 2005+.
i've been to all of these places in the last 10 years and they're all doing more than fine.
it seems to me only a handful of states over-whelmingly tied to particularly depressed sectors of the economy are the ones losing their people and tax revenue. and a lot of those were blue states just 5 years ago!
I would limit my "expertise" to rustbelt/midwestern areas, but from what I've seen in both data and experience, things tend to be more correlated with overall density metrics than specific location, and there are a lot of microscale effects. For instance, many ambitious people in the midwest are relocating from [small town they grew up in] to [regional center], like moving from avondale MI to Grand Rapids MI. The macro effects of outmigration from MI en mass show little info, but on a micro scale, people are leaving their smaller counties and moving to more dense ones. Over time, smaller regional centers like Grand Rapids grow, but the 200 miles of 'small town America' surrounding it grow older, more disconnected, less healthy, and less educated.
Interesting you picked those states, of those states, all but North Carolina have been becoming bluer. Using 2012 vs 2016 presidential margin of victory, with blueness being positive, Texas went −15.78% to -9.00%, Virginia went 3.87% to 5.32%, Arizona went −9.06% to -3.55%, North Carolina went −2.04% to -3.66%, Georgia went −7.82% to -5.13%, Utah went −48.04% to -18.08%.
I think you can interpret that as, prosperity leads to bluer policies, or bluer policies causes prosperity, or possible a little of both.
Maybe do a comparison next time there's a more traditional Republican candidate running to get a better idea of how much bluer a state is becoming.
Or compare midterms. Presidential elections can be wonky. Surely you don't think Wisconsin has made a dramatic red shift based on 2012 vs 2016, do you?
Considering for gubernatorial it went 53-45 blue in 2006, to 52-46 red in 2010, to 53-46 red in 2012 during the recall, and back to at 52-47 red in 2014; yes, I do think Wisconsin swung redder as a whole.
haha, except you left out all the states that don't adhere to your hypothesis, like the ones that won the presidential election in 2016. kind of a big oversight.
Except that there is overwhelming truth to it. There are now, effectively, two economic models for states to follow, and they're very partisan models. There is the California model (high taxes, high minimum wage, strong environmental standards, strong labor protections, etc) and the Kansas model (cut taxes, privatization, gutting protections). California's growth rate compared to Kansas' growth rate is a matter of night and day.
California is by no means a utopia, but if you're using the standard metrics of a healthy economy, blue states like it are doing things right, and red states like Kansas simply are not.
There are not 'blue' and 'red' states -- this is an artifact of the electoral college. There are huge 'red' zones mixed throughout 'blue' california. Usa on the whole is purple.
EDIT: Yes, I'm aware of distortions in the electoral college. My point is that some people seem to think that California is this massive blue block and that rural population you know, doesn't matter. The divide is not "red state" vs "blue state" it's cities vs. the rural. Yes the cities have more population. But the rural population exists and if you go for separation they would have to come along too, and maybe they would have something to say about it (such as breaking their rural portions off from your state and rejoining the rest of the USA, for one).
That doesn't change the fact that nearly one out of three Californians voted for Trump (of those who voted, anyways). It's a huge spread politically, but 32% of the population isn't something that can just be handwaved away.
States also have governments which make decisions (like the one being discussed here). That said, the grandparent comment is a massive oversimplification. California itself had tax revenue problems not too long ago.
California itself had tax revenue problems not too long ago.
In 2011, they had state-wide tax revenue of $282 billion. That was the year Jerry Brown followed Arnold Schwarzenegger as governor, and a series of tax hikes were put into policy.
In 2015, tax revenue was $405 billion.
So what you're seeing is a shift in policy from Schwarzenegger to Brown, and a closing of the revenue gaps because of it.
California has "red" areas, yes, but at the level of state government they are drowned out just as they are in the electoral college. State-level policies are heavily "blue".
You might have cause and effect backwards (hard to know when you can't do experiments) but having a strong economy and wealth due to say Silicon Valley, Hollywood, or Wall Street (however those were created and sustained) might allow people to choose to have "(high taxes, high minimum wage, strong environmental standards, strong labor protections, etc)".
We have higher sales tax than most, which is regressive and disproportionately impacts lower incomes. Property taxes in certain areas (Seattle) can be higher as well.
But the lack of income tax and higher wages make up for it. My tax burden is about 30% of my income, whereas in other states, Red and Blue alike, it would be anywhere from 30-40%. In general it's a low tax state, which is great for high income earners but not great for the state budget. We've had constant battles over funding education and Washington schools are woefully underfunded.
I'm not sure you can take the economic analysis and simply break into red vs blue. It's interesting to look at rural vs urban within those states too.
Texas isn't as strongly on the same policy track as many red states, and it also has a strong oil industry as a big input into it's economy. Though I think they have been looking forward and trying to diversify more recently.
I had a caveat in there about Texas that I decided to remove, should have kept it, but I'll respond here instead.
I think Texas' situation is too unique. They're effectively a petrostate right now. Now, they seem to be doing the right thing with things like the PSF and PUF, so I'd say that their approach, like their politics, is deeply purple, and it's not a terrible approach. But it's very specific, and not necessarily a model that other states can use.
Yes, California is third on a list where Texas is 1st. I don't think that disproves my point. Texas produces 35% of the country's crude oil.
In March of 2017, California produced 14,907,000 barrels of crude oil. Texas produced 102,443,000. That's 7x more. Play that against the fact that Texas' GDP is 2/3rd of California's. Oil has a massive impact in Texas that it simply doesn't have in California.
Texas and California are diversified economies. Texas is more exposed to the oil & gas industry. However, it is still not a petrostate. Which state is the closest to being a petrostate? Alaska (25% exposure).
It is very easy to validate this. Look at the price of oil. It has taken a massive beating over the last years.
In March of 2017, California produced 14,907,000 barrels of crude oil. Texas produced 102,443,000. That's 7x more. Play that against the fact that Texas' GDP is 2/3rd of California's. Oil has a massive impact in Texas that it simply doesn't have in California.
This is not a good measurement to determine the exposure of the industry to overall economy. It just shows the amount the barrels that can produce. The reason why there is a massive increase in production is due to shale (fracking). The cost of producing oil through fracking is a lot higher than pumping it out of the ground. Because they still have to sell it at market prices, the margin is a lot less for these producers. To compensate for this, these producers have to frack more out of the ground to stay afloat.
It's not really their 'own self-destruction' in so much as that the world over coastal regions tend to be a lot richer than inland areas. If you took a 300 Km swath of all the land bordering the oceans world wide you'd have captured a very large portion of the wealth.
Of course there are some exception (Switzerland comes to mind) and large inland cities tend to be at least a lot wealthier than the surrounding country side but as a rule it is a pretty good one.
Yes, it is sad. But people in the developed countries are relatively free to move around and it can be a conscious choice to live in a place that is a bit slower paced and has a different landscape.
I think a lot of left-wingers have difficulty reconciling the fact that poor people often don't vote left - and in the case of their two largest recent defeats, Trump and Brexit - they overwhelmingly did not.
The barely concealed contempt against those ignorant working class people who didn't vote the right way is fascinating - especially since the left consistently takes the moral high ground on the working class.
Don't forget all that poor people vote at far lower rates than middle class and rich people. Rich & middle class white people and culture war evangelicals with a small but relatively unusually large smattering of poor people in a few key states put Trump over the top.
Trump managed to lie his way into power, no politician in recorded history has said so many things that were patently un-true in order to get to where he is today.
Those 'left-wingers' you refer to are also right wing, the United States doesn't currently have a left wing, all it has is right wing and elitist (or maybe slightly more right wing).
A functioning left would probably take more votes away from the Republicans than from the Democrats. Good luck getting that off the ground with the electoral college and the influence of money the way things are today.
If you adjust incomes for cost of living, the notion of which states are "behind" has much less correlation to political voting patterns. Here's a comparison from the Bureau of Economic Analysis: https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/10/05/which-stat...
According to this comparison, after accounting for cost of living the average Arkansas resident has more disposable income than the average Californian. Having lived in both states, I agree with this (but my friends in California can't fathom this).
There was an interesting analysis a while back that showed US states and presented which ones contributed the most federal taxes, and which received the most federal aid -- and then showed that breakdown according to political affiliation.
From what I recall, many of the "red" (majority Republican) states receive significantly more federal aid than they contribute in taxes, and many "blue" (majority Democrat) states contribute much more than they receive. I can't find the exact analysis I'm thinking of, but here are some articles with similar data:
> The reddest states on that map at the top—Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, New Mexico, Maine—have exceptionally high poverty rates and thus receive disproportionately large shares of federal dollars. Through a variety of social programs, the federal government disburses hundreds of billions of dollars each year [...]
> As it turns out, it is red states that are overwhelmingly the Welfare Queen States. Yes, that's right. Red States — the ones governed by folks who think government is too big and spending needs to be cut — are a net drain on the economy, taking in more federal spending than they pay out in federal taxes.
> Take a look at the difference between federal spending on any given state and the federal taxes received from that state. We measure the difference as a dollar amount: Federal Spending per Dollar of Federal Taxes. [...] Of the twenty worst states, 16 are either Republican dominated or conservative states.
Yep. The Democratic states not only enjoy diminished influence through a representation sham, they're also forced to finance bad ideas & issues that are morally diametric to their own. This is really a story as old as time when you think about it in that light, it's a powder keg.
It's not surprising that the poorest states would both pay the least taxes and receive the most welfare, that's just the way the math works, regardless of anything else about them.
That Business Insider link directly contradicts the Tax Foundation numbers. Business Insider puts North Dakota and Virginia near the top, but the Tax Foundation puts them at the bottom.
> That Business Insider link directly contradicts the Tax Foundation numbers. Business Insider puts North Dakota and Virginia near the top, but the Tax Foundation puts them at the bottom.
That is because the Tax Foundation is (rightly) looking at Federal aid that hits state budgets while Business Insider us making the mistake so many others do of totalling Federal spending. It is not accurate to claim a state where the government chose to site a national lab or a bunch of military bases (or where the actual organs of government I are spilling into, like Virginia and Maryland) is receiving "welfare" from the Federal government.
Your comment was reasonable until you called him "commander in shit-the-bed". I'd suggest holding back on that kind of rhetoric if you want people to consider your opinion.
Civility is very important, but it is not of the utmost importance. I'm being pedantic, but not in the linguistic sense; when you're faced with existential threats or severe attacks upon one's moral principles, then it's appropriate and sometimes even necessary to express anger.
Suppose, for examples, that the allegations swirling around DC these days are well-founded and the administration has been lured or willingly entered into being co-opted by a hostile foreign foreign power. For all the jokes over glowing orbs and handshakes, there's a strong argument that the post WW2 international political consensus is under deliberate attack designed to create strategic instability.
If you're a student of history, this is deeply worrying, and there's a small but realistic chance of the US sliding into autocracy and a similar chance of a third world war breaking out in the coming years. Not every conflict can be solved by polite engagement and mutual understanding. If you are dealing with a bad actor who does not subscribe to your moral calculus, then putting civility above all else can mean putting yourself at a significant strategic disadvantage.
surely you are aware of the increase in racially and politically motivated violence across the country. I can readily direct you to prominent political figures with significant public followings who are openly advocating ethnic genocide within the US; nazis, to put it bluntly. IT is facile and dangerous to sugarcoat things for the sake of preserving a superficial tranquility.
I'm not defending the crude comment above, but asking you to take a little time out to evaluate your political norms and mores while you have the space in which to do so, lest you find yourself taken by surprise by future events.
could work out that way...I can see a similar alliance on things like healthcare, education..etc...of course civil rights could be a complicating factor.
Our medicaid costs are below the national average. Per-capita education costs are also some of the lowest (at the state level - IL depends heavily on local property taxes)
Our Republican governor has been unable to cut any state-level waste for that very reason: The entire state government is already runs lean.
We're in a budget mess because of pension obligations, not because we're a bunch of hippie spendthrifts.
It's unconstitutional and would trigger a second civil war? The federal position on the secession question has been pretty affirmatively settled: "no."
Quite a few conservatives have been planning a second civil war anyway due to demographic anxiety about whites no longer having an absolute popular majority, and their goal is to instead establish a majority white ethnostate founded on hardline religious principles. I'm not being hyperbolic here, and will happily supply you with abundant academically rigorous documentation of this. It's not a fringe movement either, but one of national scope and ambition that has been following a gameplan first developed in the 1980s.
Now, I don't expect the western states to secede any time soon, but by 'soon' I mean within the next 5 years. A breakup of the US is fairly unlikely, but large-scale civil unrest is a significant and real possibility.
Sure, but if the point of separation is to resolve a crisis where two sides can't agree I don't see how you'd get them to pass the one piece of legislation that requires the ultra-highest bar of consensus, across both the state and federal levels of government.
A group leaving the country doesn't give 2 shits about the constitution. It comes down to how much you are willing to fight for it, and both sides would end up with nukes.
Mostly because no cost would be seen as too high for maintaining access to the Pacific. Also, the Pacific Coast and Sierra Nevada range are crucial elements of US defense strategy. The US also has some substantial military bases and accompanying sympathetic populations in CA, especially in the San Diego area.
Seems like these problems are solvable. Give the USA some corridors to the Pacific, going through low density areas. Keep the military bases and a unified defense strategy; California can pay USA for defense. US has military bases in lots of countries; why not in California?
We'll trade you Alberta for the West Coast. I know, you're probably telling yourself "This is a terrible deal! Cali has a bigger population and economy than all of Canada!" But just remember, we helped you score Alaska for dirt cheap, so you owe us one.
"When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among..."
I mean, I really want us as a country to follow the agreement, but not so badly that I want to dissolve the entirety of the United States and legally unravel our entire country over it. This, IMO, is not Civil War-worthy.
Would anyone be under any illusion that an armed US retaliation against the Pacific Northwest joining Canada would be anything other than just an invasion.
"... it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."
I'm not sure why it hasn't happened before. We've built this patriotism about our specific borders as if that's the thing that holds us together...when in reality our borders are the result of a crazy delusional idea called Manifest Destiny from the 1800s. Californians have about as much in common with Alabamians as they do with Australians.
From a purely pragmatic perspective we should probably break up the US anyway. Our political divisions have gridlocked progress basically to the point of no return. We're basically legislating and repealing the same damn things every couple of years.
> Californians have about as much in common with Alabamians as they do with Australians.
Californians in Redding have about as much in common with Californians in San Francisco as Californians in Crescent City have in common with Californians in San Diego as... oh wait. I suggest you spend a little more time traveling around CA before you form such an absurd opinion about these mythical "Californians."
Now I'm just plain confused -- how could somebody who grew up in the Central Valley and regularly saw trucks with confederate flags feel that Californians are some bloc that are so dissimilar from Alabamans? I'd argue that San Franciscans are way, way closer to Sydneysiders than Alabamans, but that's besides the point and misunderstands what sets the US apart from other commonwealth nations culturally. While in some ways there are huge differences, there is a common vein.
Because it has practically nothing to do with our political divide (you can find left and right anywhere in the world) and everything to do with geography and how it shapes the things we care about.
For example, find me an Alabamian who cares about how the Oroville Dam situation is resolved. Or whether California regulates housing growth at the state level instead of the city level. About how to fund or build CHSRA. Or how to preserve Sierra Nevada forests from climate change and pestilence. Or even how to build sidewalks in suburban Merced.
These things materially and significantly affect Californians, but Alabamians and Australians honestly couldn't give a fuck. But for Californians they get drowned out, both financially and in mindshare, by things that are of far less consequence. We send the majority of our taxes into to the federal ether, never to be heard from or seen again, and it should be the other way around.
Show me a government that is successful, prosperous, and popular with its people, and I'll show you one that is limited in geographic scope.
You're right about your overall point of the common vein, but your statement about Stockton seems a bit uncharitable. I lived in Stockton for 3 years and never noticed all the trucks with confederate flags. Sure, it was 20 years ago but I can't recall even one such truck.
Not in the urban centers at the bottom of the valley, but in the Sierra Nevada and its foothills. You're way less likely to encounter people like that in the Bay Area or around LA.
It's unfortunately more about rural vs urban as others have pointed out. Ian Buruma's "Occidentalism" which is my favorite nonfiction book does an amazing job analyzing that situation in very terse and well researched form.
The difference between Californians and Alabamians is more in line with the difference between Urban vs Rural. You will find similar differences within the UK, Australia, Germany and basically every other advanced country.
Patriotism is barely related to any borders, but the culture of a group of people snapshotted in time. Unfortunately, so much tension in the world comes from reality and cultural fluidity outpacing any snapshot.
I doubt it gets that far, but it really does seem like something needs to change. The country doesn't necessarily need to shift as far left as california, but right not a set of old laws working with the modern shift towards cities is really reducing the power of a vote in CA/NY. That's a pretty big problem.
Noting that all three are (D). Statement of fact, and not opinion attempt. The actionable items on renewables are also huge with deregulation of energy sectors in these three states which is huge impact. Also noting, the lobbyst are all renewable folks - et al Tesla. :) SolarCity ... wonder who was pushing this? ya. Again .... not a political statement. Just pointing out the obvious.
ExxonMobil, Chevron, Royal Dutch Shell and BP are all in favor of America staying in the Paris climate agreement, and if you look at those company's websites, they all accept the prevailing scientific consensus on climate change.
The coal industry is the last holdout of the climate change skeptics. Everyone in oil and gas has seen the future and have started to push research and investments into renewables to limit their risk exposure.
What lobbyists are you talking about? Are you claiming there aren't any companies outside the renewable energy space lobbying in favor of the Paris Agreement? Have you heard of Exxon?
I think my point has been lost and it's tough to transmit tone-of-voice in a comment on a website. My failings. The comment wasn't about shaming him, it was parodying the lazy "I'm just saying" rhetorical technique of casting aspersions on something.
If clicking two links to see what someone wrote in public on this very site is a problem -- jeez. I don't know what to say. I do it all the time when I read a comment that's really insightful or when I see something silly or off-kilter and am just curious. It's not like I dug up his credit score.
There is only one party, Capitalism, and they have two departments: Democrats and Republicans. The others whom stand against them are the DINOs and RINOs like JusticeDemocrats, BrandNewCongress and Sanders whom are currently at the margins attempting reform. (Third parties are mere delusions without an overwheling majority of power players that can jump ship together.) If the grassroots has any hope, it will be a grassroots-demanded trend to clean money politics and push out establishment decay these insurgents bring to the table.
As a taxpayer in one of those states, I'm more worried about whether they plan to pony up the $100B/yr that the US was obliged to under the agreement. If they do, I'd like to know where it'll come from. And if they don't, then what exactly will this alliance do?
Quote: "To help developing countries switch from fossil fuels to greener sources of energy and adapt to the effects of climate change, the developed world will provide $100 billion a year". And further: "Developed countries won inclusion of language that would up the ante in subsequent years," Chris explains, "so that financial aid will keep ramping up over time."
Or straight from the agreement: "Agreement shall set a new collective quantified goal from a floor of USD 100 billion per year, taking into account the needs and priorities of developing countries"
While that's $100B/yr from the "developed world" as a whole, we all know by the example of NATO what that _really_ means.
This is a graph of what members spend on their own military, not what they contribute to NATO. It's still relevant, because we have an obligation to defend other members and how well they defend themselves affects our behavior, but it's not a zero-sum game. Greece decreasing its defense budget does not mean we need to increase ours, and Poland increasing theirs doesn't mean we can decrease ours.
NATO members absolutely should spend what they agreed to spend, but we aren't forced to spend 3.6% of our budget on defense because they don't. That's something we choose to do, and we could stop if we wanted to.
NATO mandates that members of NATO spend at least 2% of their GDP on their own militaries. The vast majority of them do not, they just count on the US stepping in for free if shit hits the fan. The point of NATO is that countries keep up their militaries to the acceptable standard so as to lend a helping hand if the need arises, not that they contribute equally to the NATO's doughnuts budget.
Kinda obvious, though: it's not like Obama could realistically pledge more. He entered into this agreement unilaterally as it is, with no vote of Congress (treaties do require 2/3rds majority), so pledging the "fair share" would be politically risky at the time. The strategy was to get HRC elected, and get democratic majority in the House/Senate, and then pony up the funds. None of those things quite worked out the way establishment was hoping it would.
So now the only avenue available to address the issue is re-negotiation of the agreement. Assuming the world leaders do actually want to save the climate, and not just bilk the US out of $100B/yr, they have no choice but to negotiate.
If by "citizen" you mean a "silicon valley yuppie", then sure. But then it's also considerably more than that. I hate to break it to you, but the vast majority of people in this country are struggling as it is. You don't see them or hear from them, but they do vote. This is the direct result.
In some ways, it doesn't really matter. Regardless of how hard people try to fight against alternative energies, the market forces will seek out inefficiencies. Consumers are driving demand for electric cars, cheaper energy and states are turning away from coal more and more every year. States that adopt alternative energies will see long term advantages and those that don't will eventually be forced to confront it. Some states have already adopted measures far beyond what the US has ratified or even proposed.
Trump can posture as much as he wants, he's against a huge tidal wave of change and on the wrong side of history.
The agreement doesn't per say matter all that much (Trump wasn't going to obey it anyway).
But it's hard for me to see how failing to tax externalities of fossil fuels are not making it that much harder for renewables and nuclear to win. I actually find you a bit optimistic; natural gas is extremely cheap these days (in part because the externalities aren't taxed); while it is much better than coal (in many dimensions), switching all fossil fuels to a "less bad" fossil fuel aren't enough to hit necessary emissions targets.
Taxing fossil fuels would speed up the process, but the writing is on the wall when it comes to fossil fuels as a whole. You know when Exxon Mobil and other big players are starting to get into the alternative energy business the tide is turning.
One thing I never see addressed with all the talk about climate change:
Let's say we managed to cease our CO2 production, even reverse the current man-made warming trend (save me the "impossible hypothetical scenario" talk, substitute in whatever values of "cease" we would have accomplished with the Paris Agreement, whatever).
Eventually, the earth is going to warm significantly without the aid of mankind. What are we supposed to do about that? Global warming is an eventuality, and no amount of carbon taxes that apply to a certain set of countries and not to others is going to change that. So someone enlighten me, what's the long, long-term view plan for global warming?
> Eventually, the earth is going to warm significantly without the aid of mankind
What exactly are you referring to here? The sun expanding and becoming hotter as it ages? If so we're talking about the timeline of a few billion years. Climate change is something that has already begun to affect us and will continue to worsen over the course of the next few decades, which makes this issue far more pressing than whatever "natural warming" you're referring to.
No, he or she was just observing that natural warming/cooling moves pretty randomly, and even if we can null out the human effect on it, we need to be able to withstand a dramatic change in global temperature.
Sure, but those kinds of changes happen on the order of thousands of years. The climate change we're talking about preventing is something that, again, will affect us now and even moreso in the coming /decades/ due to anthropological causes.
Frankly, if we're going to die out because of "natural cycles" so be it. I just don't want our species to die out because of something we could have prevented by being less selfish/exploitative.
> Eventually, the earth is going to warm significantly without the aid of mankind. What are we supposed to do about that?
Are you talking about Milankovitch cycles? We're about 10,000 years past the warmest point of the last cycle so, absent anthropogenic warming, we should be cooling for a few more thousand years. Then an ice age would last for around 80-90 thousand years, followed by another 10-20 thousand year warm period.
Postpone immediate danger until we're sufficiently technologically advanced to deal with other issues? Or, in other words, build MVP first instead of starting the heavy project which ultimately cannot be finished by the deadline.
Well I mean give me a taste here, what technology are we talking about that will keep the earth's climate stable in the face of natural warming and cooling periods that have occurred throughout its existence?
In the short to medium term, improvements in energy/battery technology that would help maintain habitations and agriculture in areas that would otherwise become problematic. It will take time for that to reach poor/remote areas of the world and limit migration issues we've already seen.
The problem with climate change is that it might overwhelm our ability to solve it in the "short term" where "short term" is defined as on the scale of a few generations to a century.
In the long term humanity will, if trends continue, be so incredibly wealthy and technologically advanced that we'll be able to tackle problems like CO2 in the atmosphere a lot easier. We'll be able to seriously consider remediation efforts (deciding what the ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere we want is and then making that happen). We'll be more able to respond to climate change by moving our cities, changing our food production strategies, and so forth. That's pretty much guaranteed as long as humanity continues advancing technologically.
But we're not there yet. Much of the world is still impoverished and developing. And there's a great potential for vast human misery. The point of these efforts is to give ourselves enough time to not get completely screwed by climate change before we have the power to deal with it more easily.
This is a reasonable question, though tangential to the original article so you're going to find some criticism among those who miss the nuance. I assume you're not making an argument against climate change being an issue, but asking a related question.
By my understanding the natural cycles in climate that you refer to occur in hundreds of thousands of years time scales, and we know a reasonable amount about them with regards to Milankovitch cycles, but there are other factors like solar cycles that can influence climate that still add some uncertainty. How we might go about cooling the earth or whether we even need to in response to a natural warming cycle may be entirely different to our response now, because of this difference in time scales.
Over hundreds of thousands of years, populated areas that would be affected by rising sea levels are likely to be rebuilt many times. Any increase in sea levels is likely to be accounted for in this naturally, and such issues may never arise in large enough cities. Other places that cannot be built up will likely be abandoned and eroded by the sea over time, with abandonment not unusual for localities that are deemed no longer habitable or economically feasible.
As far as cooling the earth if it is necessary, I expect that we will be looking toward space exploration to help us here. Any science toward terraforming other planets will help, so colonizing Mars may be a useful near-term goal. I assume technologies to control the heat retained by the planet would be important, either by reflecting solar radiation before it reaches our atmosphere, or by controlling the levels of greenhouse gases. If we had the technology now, we could essentially do the same thing, however we don't, and won't.
The difference in time scale involved here is the main point. Man-made climate change is occuring on a time scale that our current technology has no ability to counter directly, and this has huge ramifications on short time scales economically, and for the quality of life for coming generations. Natural climate change occurs on a much longer time scale, so any economic impacts are likely to be amortized across the duration of the change and will probably end up in the noise, with technology likely to be able to keep up if we are intelligent about managing our own contributions.
I mean, there are some predictions like this [0], but I don't know how credible they are. It is true though, that a transient spike or dip in temperature could cause famine, and the like. The Little Ice Age and other similar natural oddities are evidence of that.
We're talking about the difference between linear fluctuations and order-of-magnitude changes. For visual aid, please refer to this relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1732/
"Instead of trying to make fossil fuels so expensive that no one wants them – which will never work – we should make green energy so cheap everybody will shift to it." [1]
Bjorn Lomborg explains that The Paris Climate Agreement will cost at least $1 trillion per year, and climate activists say it will save the planet. The truth? It won't do anything for the planet, but it will make everyone poorer - except politicians and environmentalists.
What is the solution? Copenhagen Consensus has consistently argued for a R&D-driven approach. Fortunately, more people are recognizing that this approach is cheaper and much more likely to succeed –including the Global Apollo Program which includes Sir David King, Lord Nicholas Stern, Lord Adair Turner and Lord John Browne. [1]
NOTE: Please do not down-vote if you disagree with my post. If you disagree, please explain yourself in a relevant comment. Thank you.
