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Kyoto Protocol Renewal Efforts Struggling
Hugh Pickens writes "Economics trumps the environment. The emission targets set by the Kyoto Protocol will expire next year, and negotiators are fighting to keep UN climate talks on track while efforts to save the Euro push the struggle to save the planet down the priority list. In the United States, seen as the biggest single obstacle to a new global climate deal, academic opinion says an 'iron law' means economics trumps the environment in times of crisis. Meanwhile, some leading voices on climate science have suggested the Kyoto Protocol be put to pasture, since clinging to hopes of a renewal of that agreement does more harm than good in achieving meaningful dialogue on how to fight climate change. When the agreement was negotiated in the 1990s, the world was more clearly divided into 'rich and poor' countries. However, China and India have seen unexpectedly strong economic growth since then, and currently make up 58 per cent of global emissions. 'Against this backdrop, it is no surprise that countries such as Japan, Canada and Russia adamantly refuse to assume new binding targets unless the other major economies at present outside Kyoto's reach — most notably, the United States and China — do so as well,' writes Elliot Diringer, executive vice-president of the U.S.-based Center for Climate and Energy Solutions. 'And for now, the odds of that happening are nil.'"
In all honesty, the European Union (as the first true step towards one world government) needs saving more than the environment.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
This isn't just about the econmy trumping the environment, it's about the economy now trumping the economy in the near future. Global warming will have enormous associated costs... but not yet, so it somehow doesn't count?
Here's the problem in a nutshell: You have a global common resource, in this case the ability to put CO2 into the atmosphere before it heats things up so much that we all die (regardless of whether you think the current warming trend is anthropogenic, there's very little argument that there is some point at which too much CO2 is a problem). But the short-term incentives for each actor using that common resource are to use up as much of the common resource as quickly as possible, because if they don't then somebody else will, and we'll all be dead anyways.
Now, in most cases, commons problems are solved by government action. For instance, when the population of lobsters off the North Carolina coast dropped precipitously due to over-harvesting, the government put severe restrictions on how many lobsters everyone could get, and it sucked for the lobstermen, but saved the commons and allowed the industry to survive. But in the case of a global commons like the atmosphere, there's nobody who has the ability to enforce that kind of rule, so each country has no choice but to use up the common resource as quickly as possible, collectively racing to disaster.
And it doesn't help that both of the worst offenders in this department, the US and China, are firmly committed to the path of destruction.
I am officially gone from
So the USA is the biggest problem in not getting a new Kyoto passed but China and India will not sign and produce more pollution also other countries have said they will not sign without limits placed on China and India?
Looks like some is upset that the USA realized the current Kyoto was a farce when refusing that sign that one.
They start erecting sandbags and levees around New York City and Washington DC. They the US won't just participate, but will be pushing the agenda with the threat of economic sanctions and possibly war to those who continue to pump out the greenhouse gasses.
And of course the response to anyone who says, 'Back in 2011 we told you so!' will be a not so diplomatic 'Shut up!'
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
It's a shell-game and always has been. Rich countries were supposed to pay for poor countries to pollute more heavily (because it was cheap) while they created less polluting technology that would trickle down.
It's no wonder it failed so spectacularly.
No! It's a *SIG*. Keep the Special Interest Groups away! (Con joke!)
The Kyoto Protocol's emissions targets were woefully inadequate to avert the worst of greenhouse gas (GHG) related climate change. However, the Kyoto Protocol was the ONLY international framework for negotiating multilaterally on curbing emissions of greenhouse gasses. The Bush/Obama administration in the US and China sure did a good job destroying that framework putting multilateral efforts to ameliorate climate change on an even more glacially slow path. To quote Stephen Colbert "Enjoy that metaphor, by the way, because your grandchildren will have no idea what a glacier is."
The USA won't accept significant change either, but there's enough of an ecomental vote that some token pretence of greenwashing is politically astute. China and India are at least being honest, and that has value as it shows that there's no mileage in beggaring ourselves voluntarily now before [insert current buzzword for global warming] beggars us later.
It's a technological problem, it needs a technological solution. Just setting goals and targets doesn't achieve that. Throwing a trillion dollars at fusion power might, and that's essentially what it's going to take to get us off the fossil teat before the last scrap of coal has been dug up, gas extracted, and oil squeezed out of it.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
In all honesty, the European Union (as the first true step towards one world government)
Why on earth would you want a one-world government? The more you remove power from the people, the less popular sovereignty they have, the less representative the government becomes. Bureaucrats in Washington are bad enough at ignoring the people. You want international Bureaucrats running the world? Why?
This is the real world, not Star Trek. Newsflash: People in the world disagree with each other, and frankly, I'd be scared of a Star Trek-like world where everyone on earth agreed on things. I'm almost certain I'd disagree with them.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
you already have a hereditary monarchy in the USA. Look at what happened when someone who isn't from an old family got into the top spot.
Did you mean Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton?
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
We're supposed to be smarter, but really, not much difference when it comes down to it. Consume all the resources, over breed, destroy the habitat in which we live, die en masse.
Check your premises.
The USA won't accept significant change either, but there's enough of an ecomental vote that some token pretence of greenwashing is politically astute.
What you consider mental illness is the mainstream view in Europe and the EU does a lot to pursue it, even to the point of forcing China and the US to clean up. ROHS is a good example, the EU banned hazardous substances in consumer products and China and the US were forced to comply because Europe is such a large and important market.
Frankly I find the attitude of many Americans completely detached from reality. When Germany, Japan and a few others decided to abandon nuclear power in favour of clean energy most comments were along the lines of "looks like the decided to go back to the stone age". Hyperbole perhaps but it appears many Americans really think that the mainstream green views of the rest of the developed world at actually insane and a road to certain ruin, fuelled by mass hysteria and extremism. Actually we see it as improving out environment (no-one who lives in a city likes pollution from combustion) and getting an early lead in new and lucrative technologies.
At least China just doesn't care beyond the point where it makes economic sense for them. The US actually appears at best to have accepted economic and social ruin through addiction of fossil fuels and labels anyone who dares question this policy as an extremist and mentally unbalanced.
It's a technological problem, it needs a technological solution. Just setting goals and targets doesn't achieve that.
Well the US is one of the most technically advanced countries in the world and hasn't made much headway. The EU and Japan have due to a combination of legally mandated targets and consumer demand.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Well, if give credence to the whole peer review thing, and acknowledge the fact that 97% of the world's scientists say it's real and caused at least in part by man:
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/sciencefair/post/2010/06/scientists-overwhelmingly-believe-in-man-made-climate-change/1
Then it's science.
In fact, I'd argue that it is deniers who are going for the faith based approach. Something like believing that hiding under the blanket will protect you from the monsters under the bed.
Check your premises.
Having just worked my way through many of the Climategate 2 emails (and yes, read a rather lot of the literature) it isn't all that surprising that Kyoto is about to be a major fail. The science is far from settled, the primary researchers are perfectly aware that it is far from settled and openly admit it in their internal discussions, but they are far more concerned with things like having a person's Ph.D. revoked (for the sin of disagreeing with their conclusions), having journal editors fired (for the sin of publishing a paper that weakened their "cause"), winning the "PR war" (what about figuring out the science?), verifying on their own that the infamous MBH hockey stick graph is crap (yes, in the internal climategate letters you discover that the primary hockey team members know perfectly well that trend-fit white noise put into Mann's algorithm produces nothing but hockey sticks at this point, but do they openly admit the mistake and remove the graph from all of the public policy presentations on the subject? Hell no! Both MBH and MJ are still there on the wikipedia pages for global warming, because admitting error and removing crap results that are known to be completely wrong weakens the message and undermines the PR war).
Throw in that the UAH temperature anomaly since 1981 -- evaluated with openly accessible methods from openly available datasets and not susceptible to e.g. UHI "corrections" liberally applied, unlike e.g. HadCRUT3 -- is a whopping 0.11C. That would be 30 years, call it a third of a century, and 0.11C net warming as of October. Over that time, CO_2 has gone from 335 ppm (Mauna Loa) to around 390 ppm. That is a 55/335 = 16% increase. Since the 1998 El Nino peak (and the end of the series of Grand Solar Maxima of the 20th century) global temperatures have gone down (or held nearly steady). The most pessimistic trending of post 1997 data is 0.2 C. During that interval CO_2 concentration went up around 8%. Even the IPCC is backing off from predictions of much warming "for a while" and of course everybody but Al Gore is sober enough to be able to see that there is no correlation between e.g. the frequency or energy in tropical storms and either the UAH (fairly reliable satellite derived) data or the God-knows-how derived HadCRUT data and especially not with raw CO_2 concentrations.
Now let's see. The earth's mean temperature is roughly 280 C give or take a bit. Let's assume that the thirty year anomaly is 0.28C, in rough agreement with UAH -- it won't matter for this argument. CO_2 up by 16%, T up by -- what would that be? Yes, that's right, by 0.1%! I won't even bother discussing climate sensitivity -- that's dead in the water right there! There are two things anybody can see from simple back of the envelope calculations, the sort one should do just to see if complex models (in the end) make sense. One is that 0.1% -- hell, 1% -- is surely within the bounds of natural variability for a tipped planet with warm, complex oceans, and the most cursory glance at temperatures over the entire Holocene stand is clear evidence that it is a lot larger than that, with or without human civilization. The other is that if 100% of that gain was pure response to CO_2 forcing without any confounding factors or fudge factors contributing, the noise from non-CO_2 fluctuations greatly exceeds this signal and we cannot explain the noise!. For the last decade, temperature trends haven't even had the same sign as a nearly 10% increase in atmospheric CO_2.
This leaves a CAGW enthusiast doubly damned. If solar state is irrelevant, decadal oscillations are irrelevant, oceanic heat reservoir forcing (with up to 1000 year timescales, so some fraction of the energy contributing to the current SST comes from sunlight that warmed the ocean when Columbus was sailing the ocean blue!) is irrelevant (and unpredictable besides), and volcanic aerosols over that decade irrelevant, then that leaves only CO_2 and the sign of the tempera
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
Ah, some of us Americans are actually engineers and whatnot. People need energy. You need to produce energy semi-locally. If you move power from Maine to California, you're going to lose a lot of juice along the way. This is very important, because reliability can be more important than just the base cost of electricity production.
A power grid needs large, cheap, reliable electricity generation. Solar/wind are not (yet?) reliable, even if they could scale cheaply. Reliable as in "It WILL make X, on demand, with a guaranteed uptime of 99.99%." Tidal/geothermal may pan out in the scaling, availability and cost. We'll see, and we should explore it. Hydro, coal and nuclear are RELIABLE. That is why we are dependent on them for electricity. Base cost is not everything.
Nuclear power currently is the cleanest and safest power source that can scale, is highly available and cheap enough. Safest, if you factor number of deaths per TWh. We can build reactors that are even safer, cheaper and more efficient, and very much should. Being environmentally clean is a form of efficiency, of course. Problem is, America and the world is filled with too many folks with superstitious beliefs regarding nuclear power. But we cannot do without nuclear power. As a result, we are stuck with aging, marginally safe reactors. Largely because of anti-nuclear activists who are attempting to create a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Don't get me wrong. Anything involving nuclear power should be monitored very closely. It does have danger, and only a fool would think otherwise.
Big surprise, any specific industry has considerations that are complicated. Simple "clean energy is our only consideration" positions are nice and all. Some of us have to actually keep the lights on while the ideology debate rages on. All I ask is you do your homework, and counterbalance your ideology with education. I don't necessarily want you to agree with me, just be informed enough to actually have a knowledgeable opinion.