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Governments 'Not on Track' To Cap Temperatures at Below 2 Degrees: UN (reuters.com)
Governments are not on track to meet a goal of the 2015 Paris agreement of capping temperatures well below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) before the end of the century, a United Nations official said on Sunday ahead of climate-change talks in Bangkok this week. From a report: Patricia Espinosa, head of the Executive Secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which steers the climate talks, said both the public and private sector need to act with urgency to avoid "catastrophic effects". The Paris climate agreement, adopted by almost 200 nations in 2015, set a goal of limiting warming to "well below" a rise of 2 degrees C above pre-industrial times while "pursuing efforts" for the tougher goal of 1.5 degrees C. "1.5 is the goal that is needed for many islands and many countries that are particularly vulnerable to avoid catastrophic effects. In many cases it means the survival of those countries. With the pledges we have on the table now we are not on track to achieve those goals," Espinosa told Reuters in a telephone interview on Sunday in Bangkok.
This is Government, which is run by partisan politicians.
The right wont accept solar and wind and the left won't accept nuclear.
It's not really about right or left anymore. When I grew up, we had ethics, we had heroes, heck Superman's "Truth, Justice, and the America Way." was a real thing or at least it seemed to be.
Trump created MAGA without actually defining what great meant, so it meant whatever people wanted it to mean. It worked, to a point at least. People wanted things. The biggest appeal seems to be mostly to racism, and it is a very common lever to pull, when you want to motivate a group. Find a group that isn't going to support you anyway. Blame everything on them, then whenever something new goes wrong it is the "other's" fault.
What does all this have to do with climate change? Everything. Politicians that win tend to sell fix it quick solutions, that don't really fix much and may be a sham. Why? Because it gets them into power. Along the way many may become indebted to questionable people. That doesn't help.
But people might say, well all we need is enough politicians willing to do what is right, even if it costs them getting reelected. Simply put, those kind of people rarely get elected in the first place.
Overall democracies weakness is its voters. Sure we may be inundated with propaganda of late, some of it even foreign, but it wasn't foreign influence that created juggernaught's like fox news. We did that all on our own.
The duty of a citizen doesn't decrease when things get worse, when propaganda thrives, and truth becomes a hunted species. No, it increases.
1. Value truth. Do not do business with companies and people who do not value truth.
2. Vote for people who value truth and put country first. Initially you may have to compromise on a candidate who can win, but enough of a showing by a third party could, eventually, make a difference, though it may take decades of work growing that party.
3. Vote for changes that help the process, such as instant run off voting and source control for all bills.
4. Vote for changes that promote honesty. If you are a candidate for office, all confidentiality agreements they hold over other people are null and void. For instance, boycotting every company that contributes to Trump is fair game.
5. Promote and pay for good journalism.
Finally as far as shutting down fossil fuel plants. It is fair game for government to put its thumb on the scale, if it means long term health for the planet. Simply phasing in penalties on ways of generating and using energy that are particularly harmful is likely enough. That way government is only picking losers. The market is probably better at figuring out what is optimum with what is left.
Except in Australia where a really advanced solar panel manufacturing tech came out of the CSIRO, the Conservative Prime Minister refused to spend Any money developing it for domestic markets, so the scientist took his patents to South Korea, helping them cut Australia largely out of the solar panel manufacturing industry.
We'd have to put younger people into office, all right, but for another reason: They will still be alive in 30 years and live in the hellhole they'd create. Those in power today know fucking well that they'll be dead in 30 years.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Not really. The reason French nuclear energy companies are struggling to stay in business and desperately looking overseas for business is that the French taxpayer got fed up of them living off nuclear welfare. It was supposed to be cheap and clean, but turned out to be neither and as usual all the costs were socialized (i.e. taxpayers pick up the bills).
Of course now they want the same level of subsidy from other governments, but are maintaining their standard level of incompetence with cost overruns and the most expensive form of energy on the planet. The new reactors being built in the UK by French company EDF (with Chinese investment money) are guaranteed to get 3x the price of current wind energy, and that ratio is getting worse every day.
They should have put the money into offshore wind + storage, but lacked vision and EDF is good at bribery.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
You're spot on. I'm a coal and natural gas steam turbine engineer and I have seen the industry evolve even in my short career of just 12 years. We have made tremendous progress in a very short time. But it is and never will be enough for some people. Many of those in the industry are fed up with helping to provide a vital service to support the wind and solar ramp up and getting nothing but distain and "we'll eliminate your job" from the public. It's no wonder that energy policy has become extremely polarized. I've had enough of it, and am leaving to start a small business in a completely unrelated field.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.