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61 Mayors Commit To Adopt, Honor and Uphold Paris Climate Accord After US Pulls Out (curbed.com)
After President Trump announced his intent to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Climate Accord, 61 mayors across the country have pledged to adopt the historic agreement themselves. The group of mayors, who represent 36 million Americans and some of the largest U.S. cities, outlined a plan to align with the other 194 nations that adopted the accord. From a statement provided by the climate mayors: We will continue to lead. We are increasing investments in renewable energy and energy efficiency. We will buy and create more demand for electric cars and trucks. We will increase our efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions, create a clean energy economy, and stand for environmental justice. And if the President wants to break the promises made to our allies enshrined in the historic Paris Agreement, we'll build and strengthen relationships around the world to protect the planet from devastating climate risks. The world cannot wait -- and neither will we.
Look how he unites the American people.
What a hero.
What part of this do you think violates Article II? They're not talking about joining into a treaty, only abiding by it.
It's funny, but when the Right wants to limit black voters or take away some woman's rights to birth control, it's all about the 10th Amendment and "states' rights", but when states want to do something that Donald Trump doesn't like, they forget everything about federalism and insist on a strong centralized government.
I don't mind hypocrites, as long as they're honest about it.
You are welcome on my lawn.
And when the left wants to smoke weed, they suddenly remember states' rights and the 10th Amendment, but when they don't like what the local board of education is doing or don't like that people are allowed to own and carry firearms, that memory fades into a cloud of pipe smoke.
Both sides do plenty of picking and choosing about when and where they respect the rights of states. Conservatives tend to more frequently side with states' rights over the Federal government because that fits with their fundamental principles, but obviously isn't applied in all cases. Let's be honest about the fact that nobody is 100% consistent with their principles in all cases, though that doesn't mean we shouldn't point out hypocrisy. Just don't get too holier-than-thou about it.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Some questions:
.) Does pulling out of the Paris agreement prevent us from making as good or better climate decisions?
Yes it does, because it diminishes the ability of nations to coordinate their actions. It leaves US-based corporations (a large constituency among polluters) free to continue flouting established science and driving their aging, archaic business models along, dragging the American economy with it. This is bad for voters.
No. China and the EU see a strategic opportunity here to use technological advances to do the the USA in the 21st Century what the USA did to Britain in the 19th Century—use newer industrial technology to out-compete the established corporate interests.
There is a global cost to this, but China especially is willing to suffer in order to win. Its more interventionist economic policies have already given it a strategic advantage in terms of alternative energy tech (especially solar), and if it has to accept a 1-2% mid-term drop in GDP in order to sideline the USA, it will happily pay that price.
Fuck your straw man.
Just because you can't see the wisdom of a largely voluntary commitment process, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. The Obama administration managed a near-miracle in the way this was structured, so that the bulk of the commitments came into the non-binding schedule 2 portion of the agreement. This meant that countries would not be straitjacketed into onerous commitments that they had no hope in honouring. By allowing signatories the right to choose how far they want to go, and when they'll get there, they made it possible for everybody to sign the same document. And the genius of that is because it allows recalcitrant countries to be singled out and cajoled into coming along for the ride without having to deal with corrupt, backward, reactionary legislatures like the American Senate, just to take a random example out of the air. But more on that in a moment....
Redistribution of the ability to survive. Because countries don't survive climate change, species do.
... or don't.
You know what cheating is? Cheating is when simply fucking lying about climate change because you're fat and rich today and "fuck you that's why" becomes your ruling mantra. That is pretty much what the Republican party had done. Nowhere else in the world is the question of climate change a partisan platform issue.
The only other nations who didn't ratify the Accords are Nicaragua and Syria. Syria didn't attend COP21, because they were kind of distracted. Nicaragua refused to sign on because they didn't think the Accords went far enough. The USA is literally alone in this folly.
The Senate majority's willingness to put party before country (or species, for that matter) is the cheat. President Obama acted in the national and global interest, doing everything within his legal power to ensure that American came along, even if the Republican party didn't want to.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Only it's not quite so simple. This particular issue cuts widely across party, ideological, religious, and other divides. What we have seen in the marijuana legalization movement is a true bottom-up, single-issue, grassroots, non-affiliated reform movement. It's a result of people analyzing the facts available to them and seeing that the laws don't match up. And there was no party or ideology guiding all these disparate individuals, over half the population now, to the same conclusion. Having followed this particular issue very closely, from without and within (knowing personally activists involved with NORML and MPP), I feel qualified to make this statement. You can either take my word for it, or look at the polls, or really any other hard data you can find. None of it contradicts what I am saying.
Doubtlessly, there will be political groups trying to claim the mantle of marijuana law reform. I have even heard, in the wild, things like "Trump is relaxing marijuana laws" when he is totally disinterested in the issue, and his appointees (Jeff Sessions) are taking direct action in the opposite direction. It should be noted that what Sessions is undoing is the Obama-era, states-rights policy of not enforcing federal marijuana laws in states that have voted to bypass them.
I'm sure you can cite examples of libertarians calling for marijuana law reform, because I've heard it too. But to say that it can be claimed as a "libertarian success" - how is that? Do most reform advocates identify as libertarian? Have libertarians campaigned anywhere in the same league as non-affiliated groups like NORML and MPP? Have elected libertarians swung the marijuana vote in any state legislature? Hell, do they even have any representatives in the legislatures in question?
In Colorado the left and the right supported legal weed. That is how it passed. The best arguments though for legal weed where from some of the groups on the right. The argument boiled down to locking up pot heads is a waste of money. None of them hurt anyone else, the vast majority held stable jobs and the cost of locking them up was bankrupting the state so even if the state made no money from tax revenue it would still be a huge net win. The state does actually get quite a lot in tax revenue from weed at this point.
Part of the reason I voted for legalization of weed was the conservative arguments. I have never used it in my life, I have no real intention to use it but I don't rule it out but spending money to lock up pot heads that mainly threaten bag of chips and pizzas while playing video games or considering how deep a flower is wastes a lot of money. All the money spent to arrest them, charge them, convict them, lock them up etc for someone that is not a threat to society is a gigantic waste. If we are going to spend that much money it needs to be worth it.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!