Slashdot Mirror
Mayors of 7,400 Cities Vow To Meet Obama's Climate Commitments (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Mayors of more than 7,400 cities across the world have vowed that Donald Trump's decision to withdraw from the Paris accord will spur greater local efforts to combat climate change. At the first meeting of a "global covenant of mayors," city leaders from across the US, Europe and elsewhere pledged to work together to keep to the commitments made by Barack Obama two years ago. Cities will devise a standard measurement of emission reductions to help them monitor their progress. They will also share ideas for delivering carbon-free transport and housing. Kassim Reed, the mayor of Atlanta, told reporters he had travelled to Europe to "send a signal" that US states and cities would execute the policies Obama committed to, whether the current White House occupants agreed or not. Reed, whose administration has promised that the city of Atlanta will use 100% renewable energy by 2035, said 75% of the US population and GDP lay in urban areas, where local leaders were committed to fighting climate change. "We have the ability to still achieve between 35% and 45% CO2 emission reductions without the involvement of the national government and it is why I chose to be here at this time to send a signal to 7,400 cities around the world that now should be a time of optimism, passion and action," he said.
Cities and states are the ones that are meant to participate under the Constitution.. not the feds. And this method goes on without the US sending billions more that we don't have to other countries.
It's amazing that all it took for the left to rediscover the general principle of "government at the lowest level" was the election of Donald Trump, really.
So you agree, Donald Trump's denunciation of the treaty was pointless, just an act of grandstanding as he boldly claims that he'll negotiate a better deal, pretending that it was, in some way a harmful injury to America that he saved us from, when in fact, it was not, and he could have simply managed to do nothing, and still gotten away with saying it was working, making his actions pointless. He didn't even get the credit he would have if he'd submitted it to the Senate.
Glad you realized this, because while it's not an impeachable offense, it is something to which you should make Trump realize is a fool's victory. He's really bad about that, taking wasteful actions that cause more harm to his interests than they advance.
Much like his faked Time Magazine covers. Seriously, an act of vanity like that? I bet the writers for SNL wish they weren't on summer hiatus. Oh well, at least the satirical shows will have plenty of fodder come the fall.
The percentage (75%) does not mean much by itself until you figure out the breakdown of how many people are actually with you in any significant way.
We know from the last election where both sides were portrayed as elemental roots of all evil, that only 59% of eligible voters even voted. That means there's something like 40% of the people in the cities who do not give a whit for the agendas of either side, and frankly think people like you are a loon.
Then of the people who DID vote, only about half of those were for Hillary (a bit more, or a bit less depending on the area). Even more damning for your assertion though. is that just 88 percent of black voters went for Clinton, and around 64 percent of hispanic voters - both of those groups make up large elements of the bigger cities, so that further erodes the original 75%.
In the end the people of the large cities are maybe with your ideas about 40-50% or so. What happens when you adopt policies that has locals actually feeling pain, in terms of jobs lost or a shattered economy? They will boot out people who share your ideals and pu in power people who present alternatives... and that is exactly how the Republican party came to enjoy such a widespread lead in local political positions across the country.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
When your two kids turn 18 and are trying to get jobs, there is also one immigrant competing for those same jobs.
The other side of this is without immigration the US population would be shrinking. If we stopped immigration completely, then "Who will your two kids be working for when there is 10-20% fewer consumers than now?" Our economy is still heavily dependent on the idea of forever growing demand.
I have heard this argument so many times, but it is flawed. You are looking at jobs as if they are static fixed things like physical goods. That is simply not the case. Many immigrants move to a new country and START a business. Are they stealing your children's jobs too?
What happens to your 'they are stealing the jobs' argument in the next 50 years as the Earth's median population gets older and older? In 1950 the average age of a human being on earth was under 30. Right now the average age worldwide is around 33 years old. In the USA it is 38 years and that 5 year difference represents a vast population of aging baby-boomers born after WWII that require ever increasing care. (Well at least for the next 25 or 30 years) Demographically at some point you are going to have to choose whether you want your parents to be taken care of by immigrants or robots. There simply won't be enough working age 'americans' to do the work. In case you think I'm lying or making things up, just visit any assisted living facility anywhere in the US. It's already happening. There is and always will be a place in America for immigrants. If there were no jobs here for them they would not come here legally or otherwise. My grandparents came here from eastern europe fleeing tyrany, war and starvation in the early 20th century. Who am I to turn down someone coming here today for the exact same reason?! What kind of hypocrite would I be?
This kind of Nationalist, Populist, B.S. will be the death of us all. I for one want the Star Trek future promised to me by Gene Roddenberry and Bill Hicks. The one where we quit being greedy selfish beasts and become civilized. After all, it's just a ride
States, cities, and the people themselves are indeed supposed to take on anything they choose to that is not specifically allocated to the federal government by the Constitution. International relations (including war,diplomacy,international treaties and agreements, etc) are however among the things specifically allocated to the feds.
If some state, or county, or city wants to enforce some super-strict environmental policies of their own, that's perfectly fine - as long as they do not interfere in interstate commerce as they do it and as long as they do not do it in a manner that runs afoul of the Constitutional rights of their citizens. Signing on to some international agreement is a different critter and is a violation of the Constitution.
The people doing this present save-the-planet crap are NOT principled people; they are nearly all doing it out of spite over the loss of the 2016 election and I doubt a single one of them supports the 10th Amendment on ANY other subject. I doubt ANY of them are for the feds no longer funding planned parenthood, or social security, or Obamacare, or foodstamps, or the feds keeping out of all the sex-and-gender politics, or dropping all federal regulations of what people do on their own land, or letting states decide on their own education funding or their own transportation funding and policies, etc. Nope. I'd bet none of these jerks support ANY degree of the 10th amendment at all; they're just pretending this is a sorta 10th amendment "thingy".
Again, if they do thiis as a stand-alone thing they're probably hypocritical but legally fine (though on the modern leftist-judge idea that what you SAY can be used to block your perfectly legal actions, perhaps not) but if they sign international agreements they coulf be in trouble.
You haven't really thought it through, have you?
What do you think has caused solar prices to reduce? Did it ever occur to you that technological progress which has driven costs down might be related to the government incentives in many countries?
As for the "billions of dollars". Do some research on how much the US was supposed to contribute and how much it actually has (hint, the latter number isn't measured in billions).
In future, please try to avoid getting your facts from the Koch brothers and other fossil fuel backers.
Oh, and finally, the program under which the Federal government provided loan guarantees to Solyndra actually made a profit for the US government.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Yeah because carbon reduction would have happened naturally and has nothing to do with investments from governments. /Sarcasm
There are countries far ahead of the USA who analysts say will struggle to meet the emissions targets. So good luck doing it by natural attrition with the fed's opposed to it at every turn.
I wonder if these cities ALSO plan to funnel billions of dollars to third world slush funds, which was the real goal of the Paris accords.
Not sure what upsets me more, that you don't understand the agreement or that as an American who rose to power by climbing up the general decay of the environment and who stand on your hill of moral superiority ignoring your almost unmatchably high CO2 emissions per capita, with that sentence you're effectively the biggest arseholes to ever arsehole.
Typical of 'Climatedot' - every single day they have at least one 'climate change - the sky is falling in' bullshit article, spreading the myth of 'catastrophic man-made global warming' and the 'evils of CO2'.
This is the kind of insanity this leads to:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/06/28/study-another-example-of-how-california-bollixes-carbon-regulation-through-biofuels/
Growing corn to use as FUEL instead of as food, when we have more than enough oil and coal to last for hundreds of years.
We even have the insane situation where trees from RAINFORESTS are being cut down and shipped to the U.K. to be BURNED in power stations as supposedly 'green fuel', and 'carbon friendly', absolute insanity.
It was Bill Clinton, A FUCKING DEMOCRAT that federally deregulated the banks and federally instituted the racist 3-strikes law.
We were told that this sort of stuff would have been a Republican wet dream. THE DEMOCRATS DID IT
"His name was James Damore."
Oh, and finally, the program under which the Federal government provided loan guarantees to Solyndra actually made a profit for the US government.
The 'program' was much greater than Solyndra.
Solyndra 'cost' the program over a half-billion dollars, with which they built a factory in Silicon Valley with singing robots that made very fragile, very expensive, solar panels.
Solyndra was predicted to fail by the Bush administration, then a well-placed campaign contributions later the new Obama administration rejected the prediction of their own experts that Solyndra would fail by a certain date and issued the half-billion in loan guarantees anyway. Solyndra went bankrupt almost exactly on schedule, less than a month before the obama administration's predictions.
Not quite sure how the government 'profits' from loan guarantees - please explain how that works. The loans weren't issued by the government and the interest wasn't paid to the government.
Ken