Slashdot Mirror
The US Is Now the Only Country In the World To Reject the Paris Climate Deal
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Today, Syria announced that it would sign the Paris climate agreement -- a landmark deal that commits almost 200 countries to reducing greenhouse gas emissions to fight global warming. With Nicaragua also joining the deal last month, the United States is now the only country in the world that opposes it. In June, President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. will withdraw from the Paris climate accord, unless it is renegotiated to be "fair" to the United States. But other countries in the deal, such as France, Germany, and Italy, said that's not possible. The Trump administration is also taking steps to roll back regulations passed under former President Barack Obama to achieve the emissions reduction goals set under the Paris deal. The U.S. is the second largest emitter of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the world after China. "With Syria's decision, the relentless commitment of the global community to deliver on Paris is more evident than ever," Paula Caballero, director of the climate change program at the World Resources Institute, told the Times. "The U.S.'s stark isolation should give Trump reason to reconsider his ill-advised announcement and join the rest of the world in tackling climate change."
However the 96% of the worlds population outside the USA may decide buying US made goods is a bad thing for the environment.
Feel free to quit all the trade agreements you have, build as many walls as you like, there rest of the world will learn to carry on without you.
Its 100% your choice to leave.... HOWEVER its 100% OUR choice to let you back in and it will be on OUR terms, not yours.
Which make pulling out of it a move that the rest of the world will see as a giant "Fuck You!"
If it's not binding, then it cannot possibly harm the USA.
The only reason for this is to mug for a few coal miners and an even smaller number of mine owners.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Does anyone believe that a single policy will stop global climate change?
The Paris Climate Accord was a step in the right direction. If Trump wants to say he's taking a different step in that direction, fantastic. On the other hand, if he's saying that climate change is a Chinese conspiracy (or a normal fluctuation, or due to solar flares, etc.), that's another matter.
Ob XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1732/
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
If it's not a binding deal, it's a useless turd.
It is non-binding. However, that doesn't make it useless. It is not unusual to first pass a non-binding resolution, wait to see the effects and problems that arise, and then from the weaknesses pass a binding resolution that's learned from the previous mistakes. Now that said, the resolution was always meant to be non-binding but it was indeed changed quite a bit to allow the US to pass it without Senate approval.
So this isn't unusual in the steps that the nations are taking, but the truth being is that a multitude of nations were having difficulty with getting the respective governments on-board and so there were changes to the original plan, US especially. Did that ultimately change the underlying outcome? Well, we won't really know until after we're a few more years into it. But truth be told, yes it was changed to make it easier to subvert the Senate, however, it being non-binding was kind of the entire goal, the degree and legal basis had to be carefully selected to ensure passage in not only the US but in other countries that were hostile to the plan.
So if you need a sound bite: The Paris agreement was going to be non-binding to start with since that's a normal thing, but because of the level of hostility many nations different legal wording was required to ensure that nations who objected wouldn't have any clear path to objection, especially the US.
I can't stand folks that take such binary viewpoints of insanely complex international agreements. Non-binding agreements do have a point to them. I'm so sorry that human beings cannot in one sitting create a 100% perfect plan for how to change a broad cross section of global industry on massive scales on the first go.