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Proposal For United Nations To Study Climate-Cooling Technologies Rejected (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: A push to launch a high-level study of potentially risky technological fixes to curb climate change was abandoned on Thursday at a U.N. environmental conference in Nairobi, as countries including the United States raised objections. "Geoengineering" technologies, which are gaining prominence as international efforts to curb climate-changing emissions fall short, aim to pull carbon out of the atmosphere or block some of the sun's warmth to cool the Earth. They could help fend off some of the worst impacts of runaway climate change, including worsening storms and heatwaves, backers say. But opponents argue the emerging technologies pose huge potential risks to people and nature, and could undermine efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, not least because many are backed by fossil-fuel interests. Observers at the U.N. Environment Assembly in Nairobi said the Swiss-backed proposal was rejected in part because it called for a "precautionary principle" approach to geoengineering the climate. That principle says great care must be taken in starting activities that have unclear risks for human health or the environment. The United States, Saudi Arabia and Brazil were among the strongest opponents of the proposal, with Japan also expressing reservations.
You don't solve a problem by trying to tip the scales in the other direction. You solve it by doing things in a balanced way from now on so that over time, the net result is balanced.
It's not like Lincoln said "okay, that's enough with black slavery, let's make the white man be slaves for a couple of centuries to balance things out"
You fix a problem by doing the right thing, today, and moving forward.
In this particular case, it means passing laws which put stricter limits on emissions than what currently exist, so that manufacturers are forced (yes forced, because as much as we might want them to, they aren't going to do it entirely voluntarily... or certainly not at the speeds that are required) to innovate and come up with long term environmentally friendly solutions to the problems that we are facing.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
We need to understand these things better, knowledge is power, a little knowledge can do exactly as you described, bad things. We need a FULL understanding of this desperately.
[($)]
You don't care about fixing a problem but forcing a preferred solution down people's throats.
You can see the same thing in the way nuclear isn't even a thought in the Green New Insanity.
We'll revisit this proposal in 20 years when its obvious that everyone's efforts to try and curb emissions has completely failed. Keeping with the trend of humanity being completely reactionary in all this.
The problem is that climate change has become totally politicized. It wasn't always this way. In 2007, a debate moderator asked the Republican candidates if they thought climate change was a "serious problem". All but Fred Thompson agreed. That is unimaginable today. Denialism has become a right wing litmus test.
The left isn't much better. They mostly see climate change as an opportunity to push an agenda for taxes, coercive big government, and centralization. So they reject even considering solutions that don't serve that agenda. They don't fear geo-engineering will have unintended consequences. They fear the opposite: That it will turn out to be a good solution.
Um, no. The left does not fear that climate change will have a good solution. You're just being silly.
they would have no reason to attempt to steal all our money and bring poverty to the citizens of the USA.
You would have been spot on with this sharp and super-smart observation, if not for the small fact that The United States, Saudi Arabia and Brazil were among the strongest opponents of the proposal, with Japan also expressing reservations.
Its hard to believe that there are those that do NOT see that this movement is engineered in Moscow in order to damage their chief rival, the USA
This conspiracy theory would have been very interesting as well, except that Moscow is, as a major fossil fuels exporter, among the staunchest opponents of CO2 emissions reductions.
You're probably just as "well" informed about the other aspects of the global warming issues.
Yes, and in order to gain that knowledge you must... NOT study it?
They didn't vote down implementing technologies, they voted down gaining knowledge.
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Um, no. The left does not fear that climate change will have a good solution. You're just being silly.
I don't think so. It is not just geo-engineering that the left opposes. They are also opposed to carbon sequestration and nuclear. Both of these use our existing industrial infrastructure, and don't require any big new government initiatives. The economics of building new nukes is questionable, but shutting down working existing nukes was insane.
The left loves big coercive new initiatives. Yet most of the progress that we have made so far, such as LED bulbs, efficient variable speed motors, better insulation, more efficient engines, better batteries, cheap gas from hydraulic fracturing to replace coal, have all come from innovations by capitalists.
The problem with the "Green New Deal" is that it ignores solutions that are working, and focuses instead on spending lots of tax dollars on things that have failed.
the research could actually go towards helping prove that APGW is real, rather than just a theory.
I disagree with your choice of words, as "just a theory" makes it sound as if it's someone's hunch/idea/opinion/guess/hypothesis. A scientific theory is something very different, and presents both explanatory and predictive claims that have been tested and stood up to falsification attempts. A scientific theory can never be "proved," as those hard statements are reserved for mathematics and philosophy. Religious folk would muddy the waters with the same "just a theory" argument about the theories of evolution and heliocentricism, and it's very misleading.
It may also help identify better metrics so we can make an accurate prediction as well... since we know they have only failed in all of their models.
I must disagree here as well. Climate models tend to do pretty well at making predictions that are subsequently backed up by observations. See https://www.skepticalscience.c... for a primer on the topic, along with some illustrative videos.
Why was the whole point of the Paris agreement to take money from America and give it to hostile countries who hate us? It was a scam. We have tons of our own people who need help, after we fix their problems we can start meddling in other countries.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
1) We could possibly, in time, figure out how to do it cheaper, but this would be a start.
2) Is it more or less expensive than wack-job politician's "Green New Deal" that is currently tagged at somewhere around $90T and will NOT actually be capable of solving the problem? ("Solving the problem" means doing so without killing millions of people, which the raising of the price of energy would do by casting more and more people into poverty. Poverty kills. Smoking may take 7 years off your life, but living in poverty is good for a 10 year reduction.)
3) Has it escaped everyone that we are currently adding about $1T to the National Debt every year and NOBODY has a clue what to do about it - at least nobody in Washington (Clue: The last year that the National Debt didn't go up was 1957. We've raised and lowered the income taxes numerous times since without achieving that desired result. It's blinding obvious to me that income taxes are absolutely incapable of funding the gov't, and should be abolished. The Founders set up the nation to run on consumption taxes such as excise taxes and tariffs. We should abolish all the income taxes - personal, corporate, capital gains, payroll, self-employment, alternative minimum, gift, estate, etc. etc. - and replace them all with consumption taxes once again. The FairTax is the best proposal since it is the only progressive consumption tax, but something - anything along those lines would have a better chance of funding some solutions that we need fairly urgently.)
All the things mentioned are much less a problem than the simple fact that new nuclear costs over ten cents per kWh. Nobody's going to build such a thing anymore. Why, when wind turbines cost 60-70% less?
Ezekiel 23:20
The solution can only allowed to be a political one, it can never be an economic or technological one.
Cleaner energy sources are destroying coal in the US because they are cheaper, despite politicians trying to stop it. The solution very clearly can be economic.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Oh, and #4, the subject of the whole thread is that the powers that be have decided NOT to research any such generalized solution such as sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere with machinery, but instead attempt to continue going down the impossible road of leaving the carbon in the ground. That is, of course, what would be necessary to start lowering the CO2 in the atmosphere - we have to stop putting it in the atmosphere in the 1st place, and can only do that by stopping the fossil fuel burning. We can't do the transportation sector without some dramatically improved batteries that are also cheap - it does no good to have a battery that costs too much because poor people still have to have a way to move around the USA without it costing too much, otherwise they die from living in poverty, which can take 10 years off your life - a big chunk when compared to smoking that can take up to 7 years off your life. But we don't even want to TRY to avoid having to do the impossible by researching other approaches. This still screams "conspiracy to bankrupt the USA via bogus science" to me. Its like phishing attacks in the email, they give you information designed to scare hell out of you, such as you supposedly just requested that your email be discontinued, and then give you a bogus link to click that will send the malware to your computer to encrypt everything on your drives that looks like your personal data so they can sell you the decryption key at an exorbitant price. Only this bunch is telling us we have to stop using the thing that makes modern life enjoyable, cheap energy, and go back to either farming with animal power or use expensive energy and kill some millions of folks. I call BS, and think we should study things like actually sucking the CO2 out of the atmosphere by machinery - expensive, too, but at least theoretically possible without killing millions of folks.
Fixing the refrigerator without killing a lot of folks that are on the lower income end of the economic chart is currently impossible. The GW Alarmists are all about increasingly sucking $$$ out of the USA, and thus killing American citizens via casting them into poverty. Some of us would rather research approaches that do NOT kill millions of Americans by casting them into poverty while trying to pay for the approach of fixing the refrigerator, which is actually beyond repair with the technology we have available to us now. We'd rather turn down the AC, and continue with the refrigerator that is still working, just somewhat poorly. Maybe someday someone will invent the magic battery that is cheap and high enough capacity to compete with fossil fuel cars and cheap and lightweight enough for automotive use and cheap and recharges fairly quickly and cheap and power dense enough to shoehorn it into vehicles and... oh BTW, cheap enough to be used by other than rich people. Then the transportation sector can go full-electric, we will have fixed the refrigerator with new technology, and can then run on energy which can be generated by solar and wind and geo and tidal and so forth - and we can leave the carbon in the ground. But ignoring realities and killing folks via massive poverty is not something I'm inclined to favor.
I don't know who you mean by "The Left" but most liberals are just regular folks who are concerned about the environment. They are not Trotsky-ite subversives, just like "The Right" isn't all Neo-nazi hate mongers. They are just poorly-informed Fox-viewers (just kidding)
Just look at the New Green Deal. It's ostensibly about climate, but almost entirely about social justice, communism, and the destruction of America as a world power.
Yes, but surely it has SOME downside?
*rimshot*
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it