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Paris Summit Finds New Money, Tech To Fight Climate Change (apnews.com)
An anonymous reader shares an Associated Press report: World leaders, investment funds and energy magnates promised Tuesday to devote new money and technology to slow global warming at a summit in Paris that President Emmanuel Macron hopes will rev up the Paris climate accord that U.S. President Donald Trump has rejected. Trump wasn't invited to the event but his name was everywhere. One by one, top world diplomats, former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, business leaders like Michael Bloomberg and even former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry insisted that the world will shift to cleaner fuels and reduce emissions regardless of whether the Trump administration pitches in or not. Central to Tuesday's summit was countering Trump's main argument that the 2015 Paris accord on reducing global emissions would hurt U.S. business. Macron, a 39-year-old former investment banker, argues that the big businesses and successful economies of the future will be making and using renewable energy instead of pumping oil. Macron's office announced a dozen international projects emerging from the summit that will inject hundreds of millions of dollars in efforts to curb climate change. "The United States did not drop out of the Paris agreement. Donald Trump got Donald Trump out of the Paris agreement," Schwarzenegger said. The projects also aim to speed up the end of the combustion engine to reduce the emissions that contribute to global warming. With that aim, World Bank President Jim Yong Kim announced that his agency would stop financing oil and gas projects in two years, except in special circumstances for very poor nations.
I will be the devil's advocate here. The money will be coming out of the US Treasury sometime, a "pay me now, or pay me later" item.
Pay me now means working ways to reduce the carbon footprint, redoing arrangements for corporate responsibility so nuclear power (like thorium reactors) can be widely used, allowing trees to grow and work on better carbon sequestering, and food research.
Pay me later means spending money to have troops ready to shoot starving people protesting in the streets in a food riot, dealing with revolutionaries storming the borders because their place of living is underwater, constant unrest in cities, all the while having to deal with constant warfare world-wide, between people whose land has turned into desert or gone underwater versus people with food/land.
The "pay me later" is a far greater cost, and may cost us our country. However, the idea of looking at consequences or long term thinking is not a Randian ideal, so maybe it should get thrown out. Five Year Plans are socialist, and all that jazz...
I've always said that even if you don't buy into climate change that simply ignoring it is stupid because it's a huge economic opportunity. I think it's simply been that politicians have been paid enough to turn a blind eye and keep the status quo for as long as possible. The reality is that renewable energy sources are not limited to locations that a small collective of companies own which means that there can be lots of competition that will drive the price of energy way down. Energy companies want to bleed the all the money they can out of people and some idiots think that's a good thing.
The age of hydrocarbons is coming to an end... and now we have to clean it all up.
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>Spend all the money you want. As long as it doesn't come out of the US Treasury we're all good.
Yep, you wouldn't want to do anything to better your world with that money, it's more important to give tax breaks to the ultra-rich.
Better cut back on health care, too, just to be sure.
No you're not. Climate change is climate change. Doesn't matter what or who causes it. At the end of the day we are getting bigger storms, bigger floods, and bigger disasters. You think the past 10 years have been bad? The US is going to spend trillions rebuilding cities and infrastructure or else face succession of multiple states that are pissed about FEMA fucking up over and over again. You know what? Just get a blue crayon so you can start filling in those stars. You should be able to afford that.
Sig. Sig. Sputnik
Bettering my world means spending money on roads, schools, and children, not on killing people.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Much like Obama became the greatest gun salesman of all time, it appears like Trump might actually save the environment.... by trying to ignore it.
Show me on the 1st Amendment bobblehead where the moderator touched you...
I totally agree, which is why I see no need for giant government programs costing billions of dollars.
Then why haven't you been screaming about them subsidizing coal and oil for the past century?
The economic benefit of moving to renewable sources is eventually so cost effective it is inevitable; so we do we need to try to force people into something we know is eventually inherently compelling?
It will cost more to clean up the longer we pump CO2 into the atmosphere so it's actually saving money in the long run.
There's no way the larger warming predictions are accurate because they are all predicated on CO2 levels staying where they are. That's simply not going to happen as people everywhere switch to cheaper non-carbon energy.
Of course not because there are going to be industries that continue to put out CO2 and methane and trees are not going to be able to "suck it all up" because that's not how trees function. Other feedback mechanisms we don't know or haven't fully considered are going to make the planet even hotter. The only way out of the mess we are in is to actually remove CO2 from the atmosphere with machines. "just plant trees" the the usual reply which is totally ignorant of how the ecosystem actually works as well as the effectiveness of our machinery.
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Do you think the US will be getting free pass forever? Eventually other countries will start taxing US goods based on their carbon footprint.
Can't speak to the burgers. Teslas are a good thing -- the tech will trickle down to cheaper cars until electric cars will be cheaper than gassers, and cheaper to run and maintain (electric motors and 1-speed gearboxes don't need much maintenance, and regen braking means you have to change the pads once every 150,000 miles). Can you imagine owning a car that costs 5 cents per mile to run and does 0-60 in 4 seconds? Awesome!
Range is an issue, but that's improving too. And it would be great if global warming pressure would force the railroads to electrify. Take a fast electric train from NYC to Chicago -- 5.5 hours at 150mph -- then rent an electric car (possibly self-driving) on the other end. Far better than the airport delays, lines, etc involved in flying.
The future doesn't have to be bad if the people doing the planning think of other people versus only their own dollar.
Hopefully that's gonna be postponed 'til I'm dead. As the Germans say, "hinter mir die Sintflut" (it loses a bit in translation, basically it means "for all I care, the deluge may follow when I'm gone"). Literally.
You do know that this is just the German translation of the well-known Louis XV quote "Après moi, le déluge", right?
(Wikipedia tells me that is probably better attributed to Madame de Pompadou: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki... )
Doubling down on the crazy "predictions" doesn't fly anymore. Sky didn't fall in two decades, and now no one but the terminally gullible will believe it's ever going to.
But nobody ever predicted the sky would fall in two decades in the first place. People did predict about two degrees of warming by 2100, though, if that's what you mean.
--and for the record, Montecito California has an elevation of 180 feet above sea level. It's not likely to flood any time this century. I'm no fan of Al Gore, but looks like he's smart enough to not buy property that's only a few feet above sea level.
You think the past 10 years have been bad?
Um, no, not really actually. The previous 10 years were worse (Katrina, Indian ocean tsunami, etc).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Fine, but first, stop taking 300 BILLION to fund ongoing Navy patrols in the Gulf of Oman to benefit Oil companies!
Then take away the 40 BILLION in tax credits Oil magnates get for "Oil Depreciation"
THEN take away the 70 BILLION in healthcare costs from oil-coal pollution
THEN take away the 8 billion in direct subsidies to the Nuclear Power industry
THEN....stop whining about your share of the burden of undoing 130 years of "energy" company corruption of government
I happen to agree pulling out...no reason to obligate $$$ from the US treasury that is already quite stretched with domestic needs.
Then the Congress passes "tax reform" that will add another $1.5 trillion the the debt.
Or maybe give the money back to people who grow the economy. The ultra-rich did not get that way by stealing money from everybody else despite what the SJWs want to believe.
With interest rates so low and investment money searching for things to invest in how do you expect the ultra-rich to grow the economy? If you want to grow the economy give money at the bottom end and it will filter up to the ones on top. Giving it to people already at the top just increases their rent seeking investments. If people down the economic scale can't afford to buy it why would they invest in something productive? Supply side/trickle down economics is a joke that's never worked.
The entire Earth is nothing but a giant CO2 recycler, given time.
If we had millions of years, sure. However, if we put out 0 CO2 emissions starting today, the trees wouldn't be able to cope with it giving the next 1000 years.
You do realize that historically the Earth has had different levels of CO2, right, including some higher?
The Earth hasn't had higher levels of CO2 than we have now for millions of years. If you are talking about the cycle of the ice-ages, well, you need an ice-age for that to happen.
If it's not possible for the Earth to re-absorb it, what happened in your mind, hmm?? Aliens, obv.
Apparently you are unaware of the evolution that occurred. Microbes learned a trick (via mutation) and thus become able to consume dead trees, producing CO2 in the process. If not for this, trees would still end up as coal after enough time.
I'll let you have the last response since you are clearly of a one-track mind about this, having been already told what to think and not really willing to divert from your faith on the matter.
What I've told you is based on science. A little education on climate change myths will do you a lot of good.
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The rest of the world will make America pay for it now, by setting standards and tariffs that account for emissions and pollution. The US will have to choose between that and isolationism.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Spending money now has been evaluated as being drastically cheaper than trying to fix things up later.
If the glacier dams give way, and we get a fairly sudden sea level rise, flooding most coastal cities, eg nyc, can you imagine the costs, the loss of life, the mad dash of millions to escape?
It sounds expensive. And of course there are humanitarian issues, but these seem to be ignored by the current USA government.
Itâ(TM)ll be way cheaper to dive in now, and get some real reductions, and possibly reduce the temperature rises to something tolerable.
Or do you believe all these scientists, polar bears, migrating trees, and retreating glaciers are all fake news?
"Cats like plain crisps"