there is another option. that, even understanding that climate change is real, a group in power has decided that its more convenient for them to ignore than step up and be adults about it.
sorry, thats just a analogy that comes to mind when the issue is taking responsibility for your own actions. don't really believe i'm changing anyone's mind here.
Short term thinking and selfishness are the hallmarks of children. Ignoring climate change so you and your friends can benefit in the short term is pretty selfish and short sighted.
In this case, I'm not sure the details matter. Why should anyone assume Trump has any other reasons for doing this than those which are in plain view? The ideas and intentions behind the action are what matter.
>Acknowledging
that climate change is a common concern of humankind,
Parties
should, when taking action to address climate change, respect, promote and consider their
respective obligations on human rights,
the right to health, the rights of
indigenous peoples,
local communities, migrants, children, persons with disabilities and people in vulnerable
situations and the right to development, as well as gender equality, empowerment of
women and intergenerational equity,
That doesn't sound like it has a whole lot to do with climate change. It could potentially be used to force the United States to accept migrants, which Trump has opposed.
EDIT:
From the White House's Facebook page,
"The United States will withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord but begin negotiations to re-enter either the Paris Accord, or an entirely new transaction, on terms that are fair to the United States, its businesses, its workers, its people, its taxpayers."
If gender equality has a negative effect on the climate (ie. more cars, more refined produce consumed, etc), why would they have this as a requirement in the Paris accord?
I guess where I was getting at is that they seemed to have used this agreement to push a westernized social agenda. Considering that every country is sovereign, I'm not sure this is a proper approach.
Mind you, I would love to have gender equality across the world but it would be preferable to offer opt-in approaches.
> That doesn't sound like it has a whole lot to do with climate change. It could potentially be used to force the United States to accept migrants, which Trump has opposed.
I don't think so. That passage is just acknowledging that countries may have obligations under other agreements, and that these should be respected, promoted, and considered when those countries are trying to address climate change.
I think what they are getting at is that a country should not use climate change and the Paris agreement as a justification for shirking their responsibilities under other agreements.
Consider Saudi Arabia, which is noted for giving women less freedom than men. Saudi Arabia is a party to the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). They are a party to Paris, too. It is not hard to imagine a scenario where increasing the freedom of women in Saudi Arabia in some particular area might in theory raise their carbon footprint.
I think what that passage is getting at is that they should not say, "Hey, we have to meet the Paris goals, so too bad, women! We've got to drop CEDAW to save the planet!". They are supposed to figure out a way to meet Paris goals and meet their CEDAW obligations.
Or to use your example of migrants, what it means to the US is that if we are obligated to accept migrants under some existing agreement, we should not try to say that the migrants have a high carbon footprint and reject them. We should try to meet both obligations.
It's been suggested that if the Paris agreement lasts for the remainder of the century, the reduction in global temperature would be 0.023 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100. This is in practice unmeasurable thanks to rounding errors. Details matter.
I haven't looked at this specific calculation, but at the current levels of CO2, which won't go down in 100 years, Earth will reach a temperature equilibrium about 2°C higher than now.
Unless our science is totally wrong, without environmental engineering, it must be relative to business as usual.
I think that 2nd critique is spot on. I tried reading his paper yesterday and thought the graphs looked rather strange, with weird transitions in 2030, when he assumed all CO2 reduction efforts would stop.
I am very sad, that it is possible, that one man brings us back into the dark ages of early industrialization with all its problems for humanity.
In the 90s we thought, that our generation is better and knows it better than any prior generation. Now we see, that humanity has not made much progress from the middle ages.
Today, we are worse: in the middle ages, humans had no science. But today we have it and ignore it, because it does not fit into our live-plans.
I was trying to look up some of the EPA's prior work on climate early this morning. All the links from search engines went to pages that had been scrubbed. The links to PDFs of substantive reports were 404s.
If we are knowing and willingly exacerbating instability in poorer Central American countries because of climate change, then the "build a wall" policy suddenly makes sense.
No. It's perfectly valid to use science to inform your policy decisions. But the headline demonstrates the recent tendency to assert that scientists should be the ones ultimately making policy decisions. There's an important difference there.
Take two policy makers that both agree on the science of climate change. One advocates for a particular policy to mitigate the effects. The other decides that policy would be too expensive or cause other harms.
The correctness of the science doesn't automatically mean the policy in question is wise.
The people who make informed decisions need to be informed. While unelected scientists are not in a position of dictating policy, reason dictates policy should conform to scientific knowledge.
This gets at the heart of the more interesting debate here. Scientists aren't sovereigns, at least not officially, although many people seem to want them to be. Somewhat counter-intuitively the same people who think government should only make "scientifically correct" policy decisions also seem to be the biggest proponents of Democracy. And yet Democracy is the reason we didn't make a "scientific" decision in this case. If Trump had stayed in PCA we might have had a similar article saying "Democracy was ignored today," after all Trump ran and won on an anti climate change platform. He would have been betraying his base on to exit PCA. The only conclusion I can draw from this is that by and large when people say they want Democracy they really mean "scientifically correct" government, which is to say government that's in keeping with mainstream scientists beliefs. The word "democracy" has become a shibboleth.
Democracy is a broad term. Trump even winning the office would indicate that democracy was ignored, according to most definitions (just not the one encoded by our laws)
This is at best equivocating over definitions. Do more people in the us oppose the PCA than support it? Is Trump only supposed to represent those for votes for him or is he supposed to represent everyone?
Representative democracies exist so that a people can choose representatives who will inform themselves better than the people who elected them can or has the resources to and then make informed decisions that will that will be the most beneficial to the people represented, even if those decisions may not be immediately popular among the represented.
This is why we don't make popular consultations for every policy decision.
40 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 86.1 ms ] threadThis tactic of calling everyone you disagree with "children" doesn't seem to be working.
The use of "adult" here sounds accurate.
From the agreement:
>Acknowledging that climate change is a common concern of humankind, Parties should, when taking action to address climate change, respect, promote and consider their respective obligations on human rights, the right to health, the rights of indigenous peoples, local communities, migrants, children, persons with disabilities and people in vulnerable situations and the right to development, as well as gender equality, empowerment of women and intergenerational equity,
That doesn't sound like it has a whole lot to do with climate change. It could potentially be used to force the United States to accept migrants, which Trump has opposed.
EDIT:
From the White House's Facebook page,
"The United States will withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord but begin negotiations to re-enter either the Paris Accord, or an entirely new transaction, on terms that are fair to the United States, its businesses, its workers, its people, its taxpayers."
I guess where I was getting at is that they seemed to have used this agreement to push a westernized social agenda. Considering that every country is sovereign, I'm not sure this is a proper approach.
Mind you, I would love to have gender equality across the world but it would be preferable to offer opt-in approaches.
I don't think so. That passage is just acknowledging that countries may have obligations under other agreements, and that these should be respected, promoted, and considered when those countries are trying to address climate change.
I think what they are getting at is that a country should not use climate change and the Paris agreement as a justification for shirking their responsibilities under other agreements.
Consider Saudi Arabia, which is noted for giving women less freedom than men. Saudi Arabia is a party to the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). They are a party to Paris, too. It is not hard to imagine a scenario where increasing the freedom of women in Saudi Arabia in some particular area might in theory raise their carbon footprint.
I think what that passage is getting at is that they should not say, "Hey, we have to meet the Paris goals, so too bad, women! We've got to drop CEDAW to save the planet!". They are supposed to figure out a way to meet Paris goals and meet their CEDAW obligations.
Or to use your example of migrants, what it means to the US is that if we are obligated to accept migrants under some existing agreement, we should not try to say that the migrants have a high carbon footprint and reject them. We should try to meet both obligations.
Unless our science is totally wrong, without environmental engineering, it must be relative to business as usual.
And here is the source of the claim: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1758-5899.12295/f...
So rather than try to rebut this myself, I'll let someone qualified do it:
http://www.lse.ac.uk/GranthamInstitute/wp-content/uploads/20...
And also:
https://thinkprogress.org/bjorn-lomborgs-new-paper-appears-t...
Wikipedia isn't very nice to him either: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bjørn_Lomborg#Formal_accusatio...
This is a years old agreement, covered in exhaustive detail. Wikipedia pages are great.
In the 90s we thought, that our generation is better and knows it better than any prior generation. Now we see, that humanity has not made much progress from the middle ages.
Today, we are worse: in the middle ages, humans had no science. But today we have it and ignore it, because it does not fit into our live-plans.
Or, conversely, are you trying to say that policy should be made in a vacuum ignoring science?
"Science was ignored today" doesn't even have an implication of scientists making policy.
Take two policy makers that both agree on the science of climate change. One advocates for a particular policy to mitigate the effects. The other decides that policy would be too expensive or cause other harms.
The correctness of the science doesn't automatically mean the policy in question is wise.
This is at best equivocating over definitions. Do more people in the us oppose the PCA than support it? Is Trump only supposed to represent those for votes for him or is he supposed to represent everyone?
This is why we don't make popular consultations for every policy decision.