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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.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
>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
Do you think the US will be getting free pass forever? Eventually other countries will start taxing US goods based on their carbon footprint.