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Natural Gas is Now Getting in the Way; US Carbon Emissions Increase by 3.4% (arstechnica.com)
AmiMoJo shares a report: "The US was already off track in meeting its Paris Agreement targets. The gap is even wider headed into 2019." That's the dire news from Rhodium Group, a research firm that released preliminary estimates of US carbon emissions in 2018. Though the Trump administration said it would exit the Paris Agreement in 2017, the US is still bound by the agreement to submit progress reports until 2020. But the administration has justified regulatory rollbacks since then, claiming that regulation from the US government is unnecessary because emissions were trending downward anyway. But it appears that emissions have increased 3.4 percent in 2018 across the US economy, the second-largest annual increase in 20 years, according to Rhodium Group's preliminary data. (2010, when the US started recovering from the recession, was the largest annual increase in the last two decades.)
This reversal of course -- the first increase in emissions in three years -- came from a few sources. Carbon emissions from the US electricity sector increased by 1.9 percent, largely because the installation of new natural gas plants has outpaced coal retirements. Cheap natural gas has been credited with killing coal, which is a dirtier fossil fuel in terms of emissions. But natural gas is a fossil fuel, too, and burning more natural gas than is needed to simply replace coal will result in more carbon emissions. But electricity wasn't the main culprit. Transportation was.
This reversal of course -- the first increase in emissions in three years -- came from a few sources. Carbon emissions from the US electricity sector increased by 1.9 percent, largely because the installation of new natural gas plants has outpaced coal retirements. Cheap natural gas has been credited with killing coal, which is a dirtier fossil fuel in terms of emissions. But natural gas is a fossil fuel, too, and burning more natural gas than is needed to simply replace coal will result in more carbon emissions. But electricity wasn't the main culprit. Transportation was.
Last time I checked, we're done with the Paris agreement in 2020 (specifically on Nov 4). By trying to slip it through as an executive thing (to skip Senate ratification as a binding approval), Obama allowed the next President (Trump) to kill it, and kill it he did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_withdrawal_from_the_Paris_Agreement
> And thank you for understanding that no amount of taxes and regulations on the United States will cause the biggest polluters in India and China to reduce their output
"Well those guys over there are pissing in the pool, so why should I stop?"
That's the logic here, in a nutshell.
=Smidge=
The post (suspiciously) left out the most important explanatory part of TFA:
"The transportation sector held its title as the largest source of US emissions for the third year running, as robust growth in demand for diesel and jet fuel offset a modest decline in gasoline consumption," Rhodium wrote. Industrial emissions from various types of manufacturing as well as emissions from buildings both saw significant increases in their carbon emissions in 2018.
...
In 2018, gasoline demand decreased by just 0.1 percent. But growth in the US trucking industry increased diesel demand by 3.1 percent, and demand for air travel increased jet fuel demand by 3 percent.
Are you trolling or do you actually believe that protecting the environment for future generations requires harming the economy?
Hanlon's Razor says I should assume the latter, so this will probably go over your head, but people smarter than you and I agree that correcting market failures such as negative externalities makes the market work better, not worse.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.