Climate Deal: US and China Join Paris Climate Accords (bbc.com)

An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes the BBC: The US and China -- together responsible for 40% of the world's carbon emissions -- have both formally joined the Paris global climate agreement... It will only come into force legally after it is ratified by at least 55 countries, which between them produce 55% of global carbon emissions. Before China made its announcement, the 23 nations that had so far ratified the agreement accounted for just over 1% of emissions. This will put pressure on G20 nations over the weekend to move faster with their pledge to phase out subsidies to fossil fuels...
There's a G20 summit starting on Sunday, and the BBC's environmental analyst reports that the accord "will just need the EU and a couple of other major polluters to cross the threshold." Its ultimate goal is to stop global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius -- "well above the aspirational 1.5C heating that the UN accepts should really be the limit" -- though U.K. researchers report that already 2016 temperatures may be rising 1.1C above pre-industrial levels.

Comments

Hooray!

[PvtVoid]

Now please quit arguing that since China isn't doing anything, there's no point in the U.S. doing anything either. Fact is, the U.S. and China together are responsible for more than 38% of global greenhouse gas emissions, more than the EU, Russia, India, Japan and Brazil combined. We have a unique responsibility in the fight against global warming.

Re:Hooray!

[110010001000]

They could sacrifice a virgin to appease the volcano gods. I'll volunteer.

Re:Hooray!

[Kohath]

You seem to have talking about doing something confused with actually doing it.

Re:Hooray!

[Stephan Schulz]

Icelandic vulcanos produce more but thei don't count that. They can't do much about that either.

Well, good thing then that that claim is plainly wrong, by many orders of magnitude. Overall, volcanic activity produces less than 1% of human CO2 emissions. And Iceland is only a small part of the overall picture. This is based on a a well-debunked claim - currently no. 74 of pseudo-sceptical arguments.

Re:Hooray!

[riverat1]

China is currently investing a lot more in renewable and nuclear energy than the USA.

Re:Hooray!

[Sri Ramkrishna]

Maybe you haven't been to China, but the smog there is horrific. If they don't do something their human population is going to suffer. Places liek Beijing is not only has always on smog, but they the Gobi desert is sending sand their direction too. So, regardless they have steps to take. And frankly, global warming will also change food sources, and for a such a large nation that will also create a problem. Finally, it's a national security issue for all countries involved.

Re:Hooray!

[thegarbz]

All of the worlds volcanoes combined emit 65-319million tonnes / year (the low point being natural seepages, the high point being major erruptions)
Humans emit 29billion tonnes / year

So not only does the USA emit more CO2 per year than the largest and most active volcano years, but so does Canada, and Canada has only 10% of the output of the USA.

So not only are your numbers wrong. Even if they were an order of magnitude in your favour they'd still be wrong. Stretch it even further and it would almost be as wrong as your spelling.

The Senate must ratify any Treaty.

[Anonymous Coward]

How Does the United States Ratify Treaties?

        "The President...shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur..." Constitution of the United States, Art. II, Sec. 2

[http://www.childrightscampaign.org/why-ratify/how-does-the-united-states-ratify-treaties]

Re:Trump will reverse it

[known_coward_69]

coal and oil are subsidized. there is a huge federal fund to pay for coal workers health problems which should be paid by the customers via higher prices. same with oil where the government leases land and passes all kinds of laws in case oil companies get sued after a spill

I know you're trolling

[rsilvergun]

but Trump can't do anything about coal either way. Coal is in decline because most of it wasn't being used to generate electricity. It was being shipped to China to make steel. China (and the rest of the world) isn't building infrastructure anymore (those tax cuts have to come from somewhere, amairight?). That's what killed coal. Not the environment. Not outsourcing. Just plain ole fashion drop in demand.

Re:I know you're trolling

[Mark of the North]

Yes, reduced demand in China is the single largest contributor to the ongoing bankruptcies in the coal industry. However, on the electricity generation front, coal is being displaced by cheaper options like combined-cycle natural gas, wind, and solar. This means that coal is unlikely to make a come-back. Those supported by the coal industry would be wise to ignore Trump and get on a different career path.

I used to be very pessimistic that society could reduce its fossil fuel use, but the shift away from coal has forced a change of mind.

Systems Theory for Losers

[epine]

though U.K. researchers report that already 2016 temperatures may be rising 1.1C above pre-industrial levels

Anyone who has ever done the classic experiment of heating ice water while recording the temperature increase will know that the word "already" has no place here.

The temperature dynamics of the earth's biosphere are a Rube Goldberg contraption. It's not even clear that adding heat couldn't lead (for some period of time) to a temperature decrease.

For example, let's suppose that the gas trapped in the permafrost was not methane, but a methane-like gas that promotes a net global cooling (under the condition of maximal sustained release); however, the net cooling effect is not evenly distributed, the permafrost at the poles continues to melt, this entrenched source of anti-methane is ultimately exhausted, and then the earth's temperature begins to warm again, now in a rapid rebound.

This story is not even a huge change in the particulars as we found them.

Just imagine if scientists were presently gasping in alarm at a global cooling of 1 degree C which presages (in accepted theory) a rapid rebound in the other direction. Then we'd be writing (perhaps correctly) that we've already experienced a fatal 1 degree C of cooling en route to an impossibly dire 2 degree C global warming.

The word "already" is being used here to cue the naive reader into the lazy presumption that we can cast off the nefarious ashes of system theory, and bust out instead narrative compass and straightedge.

No. We. Can't.

The US has not joined the climate accord

[blogagog]

To be ratified, Congress must vote for the accord. That has not happened, and likely will not any time soon.

Re:The US has not joined the climate accord

[swillden]

Without Senate passage the accord has no binding authority in the USA. The House has no constitutional role in treaty ratification.

Not true at all.

The House has no role in the constitutionally-defined form of treaty ratification, but that's not the only kind there is, and not even the kind that is used most often. The US engages in three different kinds of international agreements, all of which look like treaties to the rest of the world:

1. Sole-executive agreements. These are cases where the treaty commitments fall within the scope of the president's authority. The most common example is Status of Forces Agreements (SoFA), where the president's authority as commander-in-chief enables him to sign agreements about what the US military will and will not do in foreign nations.

2. Congressional-executive agreements. This is the most common way the US handles foreign treaties that can't be sole-executive. Basically, the executive negotiates and signs a treaty which is a promise to bind the US to the terms of the treaty. The executive then drafts legislation to enact the terms and gets them introduced to Congress. The House and the Senate then pass the enacting legislation with a majority vote in each chamber and the president signs it, just as with any purely domestic legislation, making it federal law.

3. Constitutional treaties. The executive negotiates a treaty and presents it to the Senate for ratification by a 2/3 majority. The ratification makes it federal law, without the involvement of the House. This process is rarely used because it's generally harder to get supermajority approval in the Senate than to get majority approval in both houses.

Arguably, there's also a fourth type, which the courts have called "self-executing treaties", which don't require any legislative action either because the relevant laws already exist, or because the treaties don't actually commit the country to anything, or for some other reason don't require any new law. Sole-executive treaties can also be considered self-executing, though there are self-executing treaties which are not sole-executive treaties.

Re:Trump will reverse it

[Kjella]

The US 'formally' joining the Paris Accord is based on Obama's claim that it's not actually a treaty, and therefore doesn't actually require Congressional ratification, despite the fact that that it incorporates compulsory actions on the part of the signatory countries, and is therefore a treaty.

Well it doesn't have any penalties. JFK could say "we will send a man to the moon by the end of the decade" without any legal problems of binding Congress and future presidents because it's no more than a statement of intent. The Paris accords are pretty much the same, we promise to work to reduce climate change. If we don't... we don't. Nothing has been explicitly regulated or banned, no money has been explicitly promised, it's basically a statement of good intentions put to paper. It's a symbolic agreement with less teeth than the Kyoto protocol exactly so it can pass anywhere, like the UN declaration of human rights even though they're regularly violated in many countries of the world.

Only possible if we go nuclear

[blindseer]

When it comes to carbon footprint the top two on energy produced per greenhouse gasses emitted are hydroelectric and nuclear. Wind and solar are close behind. So close that if anyone wants to argue with me on this I'll call them all equal, perhaps I'd even grant wind and solar a 10x lead because even then nuclear is so much better than coal and oil. Geothermal is up there somewhere too but, like hydro, it is highly location dependent. Wind and solar are still location dependent but much less so. There are few places we cannot put nuclear.

Then there are lives lost per terawatt hour produced. Nuclear gets 0.04 lives lost per TWh produced, and this includes Fukushima, Chernobyl, and deaths by mining uranium. Rooftop solar has 0.1, wind has 0.15, hydro has 1.0 (mostly due to China, 0.1 otherwise), with the world average around 47, mostly due to coal, oil, and natural gas. Again, even if we take the nuclear number and multiply it by 10 it is still not bad compared to the rest.

When it comes to costs I'll take average numbers from the EIA because I feel like it and I found their numbers real quick. Nuclear is $95.2/MWh, conventional coal is $95.1, hydro is $83.5, peaking natural gas is $113.5, combined cycle natural gas is $75.2, wind is $73.6 onshore and $196.9 offshore, Solar is $125.3 for PV and $239.7 for thermal. Nuclear doesn't have a 10x advantage here but If someone wants to argue the numbers I'll grant a 2x advantage since then it still beats out the unreliable wind and solar in many cases. What I will not do is allow claims that wind and solar prices will improve but nuclear will not. If we grant that future technology improvement grants a better price for one energy source then we should be able to assume an equal gain on any other energy source. This is especially true if discussing any technology that turns heat or mechanical motion into electricity since nuclear power uses those just as much as wind or solar thermal.

Then it comes down to whether or not we can actually build it all. I saw a comparison on these energy sources based on a cubic mile of oil. This comparison spreads the construction over 50 years, and if we assume a 50 year lifespan of these power sources then it turns into a continuous rate of construction. We'd need one new 900MW nuclear power plant every week. 200 new 18GW hydroelectric dams every quarter. 1200 new windmills every week with 1.65MW capacity each. For PV solar we'd need to cover 250,000 roofs per day with 2.1kWh capacity each.

Here's where I think the final nail in the coffin on the idea that we can replace coal with wind lies. To replace coal with wind worldwide would require 10 billion tons of steel and concrete, and current annual production is 1.5 billion tons. Wind requires over 500 tons of steel and 1000 tons of concrete per MW installed, about ten times that of nuclear, coal, or gas. I got most of these numbers from the EIA and from Morgan Stanley.

I've heard people claim it is impossible for us to produce one new nuclear power plant per week worldwide. I call bullshit because nuclear power takes no more resources than coal or natural gas and we are currently building them at a similar rate. Arguments against nuclear on costs in lives and dollars also go out the window to anyone that does an honest analysis. Comparing nuclear to wind on resources required makes nuclear look so much easier. I tried to do a similar analysis on solar but my calculator doesn't do numbers that big.

I've largely ignored issues like reliability, location restrictions, etc. that count against wind and solar because I don't have to go there to make my point. If someone wants to argue about nuclear being unreliable but wind and solar can be predicted then I'll go there, but you'll lose.

Re:Only possible if we go nuclear

[blindseer]

1. I cannot put my own nuclear plant beside my house. I can put solar panels on my roof.

That's true but if you and some like minded people get together to pool your money you'd have that nuclear power plant, which would give twice as much energy per dollar. This is not a plan for the individual since an individual is not producing those solar panels, it's a large corporation made of many people pooling their resources.

Also, I'm not arguing that you should not be able to put solar panels on your roof. What I'm pointing out is the comparative costs of these energy sources, in dollars, lives, and CO2 released into the air. If you want solar panels then you need to know what you are getting into. Don't put up solar panels because you think you'll save humanity from itself, you won't. Don't put up solar panels thinking you'll save money, unless you live in a highly optimal location. Do it because it takes you off the grid and independent from it, or whatever else you might be trying to do.

2. There is an idea to diversify our sources of energy. Please stop talking in absolutes like "replacing coal with wind".

I mention the case of replacing coal with wind because that is what I've seen people claim we can do, or at least replace coal with a mix of wind, solar, hydro, or whatever else is "green" where wind is a large portion of that. Take the numbers I've found and scale them as appropriate to fit your vision of the future and see what you get. Even if we assume we can replace 10% of "dirty" energy with wind we'd still have to double our annual output of steel and concrete to meet the demand that much wind power would create.

I see a future where nuclear makes up something like 50% to 80% of total energy demand. The rest would be a mix of wind, hydro, natural gas, and a small bit from solar. We will not rid ourselves from coal for a very long time but if CO2 reduction is the goal then nuclear power is the best choice we have right now.

It is possible that some future technology will make nuclear look bad by comparison but we don't have that technology yet. If we wait for that technology to come then we are just making a bad problem worse. I'm not a big believer in CAGW because that is a trio of things that have to pile up just so for this to be a problem we can fix. First we must have global warming. The globe may be warming, or it may not, we don't know what the future holds. We've already seen a 15 year "pause" in warming and the "pause" may end soon, or it may not. If there is global warming then we must still prove that human activity is causing it. This may be something easier to prove but then it comes to the last part. We still don't know if this global warming can be considered "catastrophic" or not. We might see many places become inhospitable but the world already has many inhospitable places, there's a chance we'd be just moving them around. That would suck for many people but people can move and at the rate it's happening people might barely even notice. It's possible that we'd make the world better for us.

Even if catastrophic anthropogenic global warming does not happen I believe we still have many reasons to move to nuclear power. The air quality in China is a good example on why we should do so.

Re:Beside the point

[Kjella]

Is that the relevant point? You don't think that agreements should be ratified when they don't have penalties? You're saying it's okay for the president to speak for the country and make agreements without oversight? Could there be any bad consequences down the road if we let it pass this one time?

Well, it'd hardly be the first time (source):

Presidents often have chosen to exclude the Senate in making some controversial and historic international pacts through the channel of executive agreements, among them, the destroyer-base deal with Great Britain in 1940, the Yalta and Potsdam agreements of 1945, the Vietnam peace agreement of 1973, and the Sinai agreements of 1975.

If you can end WWII with a few executive agreements, a fluffy climate promise seems like small potatoes. It's constitutionally controversial, but there's also tons of small practical agreements made here and there with other nations. It was probably never the intent that the president had to run back to Congress to get their permission to give an embassy an extra parking spot. It's actually an odd coupling, Congress can declare war but the President can apparently end one, seems like a mismatch even though he's commander-in-chief. Unfortunately I don't think you'll get a do-over to make it clearer any time soon.

Re:this is STUPID

[doom]

China needs to be brought under control QUICKLY.

Right. Time to attack. You can lead the ground troops.

Here's an idea: why don't we let them figure out that they've been killing themselves with air pollution, and they really need to clean up their act. It could be they'll even start doing some pilot plants to do research into nuclear technology where the United States has dropped the ball. Oh, and it could be they'll start playing around with manufacturing photovoltaics as well.

Re:It Sounds Like...

[BlueStrat]

Energy is mostly a fungible resource. Whether you produce it with fossil fuels or renewable energy it's still the same thing. It's time to let go of the past and look to the future.

What replaces fossil fuels must have comparable energy densities and portability/replenishment/refueling cycle times and ranges.

What many fail to factor seriously enough is the effects of energy price increases on the poor and working-poor.

The effects of rising energy costs can be measured in lives lost among the most vulnerable. How many grannies freezing to death and babies starving per kilowatt/hour are you willing to pay for pushing energy costs up by pushing alternative energy sources that aren't yet mature/ready to meet energy needs at comparable costs etc (as outlined above)?

As electric vehicles grow in numbers a large amount will need to be spent on recharging infrastructure and they will also require a huge increase in electrical generation capacity of the US grid to basically switch all the energy formerly consumed by IC vehicles over to mostly being drawn from the national electrical grid which is already heavily stressed and at dangerously-low capacity due to the large numbers of coal plants taken offline and their capacity not being replaced (by anything, renewable/green or not) at anything like a 1:1 ratio.

Strat

Re:Aniother day, another tyranny

[DaHat]

Obmam actually took it easy on them for a long time before he realized the Republicans were do-nothing obstructionists who were loyal to party but not country.

False. While he did limit his number of 'executive orders', he issues more 'executive memorandum' than anyone else. What's the legal difference between the two? Not a thing, but parrots like you can keep saying he didn't do as much and blame the GOP despite the underlying facts not supporting your argument.