World’s nations agree on rules to implement Paris climate deal
politico.eu
politico.eu
This part is just enraging. I mean, for USA, who won’t even participate in the paris agreement, to show up at the meeting at all, just to sabotage and try to derail the entire process.
It’s bad enough to not want to participate, but actively throw wrenches at the people who do is just evil.
"To support efforts to implement the Paris Agreement and to increase ambition and climate action, UN Secretary-General António Guterres will bring world leaders, from government, finance, business, and civil society to the Climate Summit on 23 September 2019. He has asked these leaders to bring bold announcements and actions to the Summit that will reduce emissions, strengthen climate resilience, and mobilize political will for an ambitious and meaningful agreement in Paris in December 2015."
Looks like success is guaranteed at this one. Nothing could possibly spoil the party. I'm sure organic, responsibly harvested vodka will be served.
More oil was burnt last week than ever.
https://www.eia.gov/petroleum/weekly/article_images/twip1812...
Otherwise all the oil will be burned, no matter how many global regulations there are. There is no global governemnt which could enforce a carbon tradung scheme and I doubt is is a good idea in the first place. Too complicated to check and therefore too many holes to circumvent any regulation. And since many states(and people) are really struggeling and in conflict, the danger of global warming is too abstract for most, to provide enough motivation to serious limit their economy which would weaken them, when they do not trust their neibhours to follow it.
Also ... is it just? The west and especially the US used soo much more oil to get to where we are now and now all the others who want to get in the same place are supposed to not fuel/kickstart their economy like we did? I doubt it.
So I would focus energy directly to invest in all the alternatives. The sun still provides much much more energy than we need, we just have to use (and store) it adequately. So lots of work to be done there, but we are getting to it.
But I doubt the efficency of conferences. There have been so many and the outcome so little than talk talk talk and some papers.
This isn't really true. We could make a global rule that each country is only allowed to extract a certain amount of oil, gas, or coal from the ground, and if they want to extract more, they must buy the right to from another country who does not. It's fairly easy to track that - it's quite hard to smuggle millions of tonnes of coal!
That in turn will cause the price of oil, gas, and coal to include the environmental cost. Suddenly, green technologies will be a sensible investment because they are cheaper, rather than because they cause good PR.
How do you implement that? You get as many countries as possible to get on board, have a big negotiating phase to decide the caps each country should stick to, and then everyone sign a deal that they will close their borders to any country who does not participate in the deal. That forces everyone to participate unless they want to be the next North Korea.
So many glitches here.
If country A transports to country B which is their neibhour - who can check how much was traded? You want to have the UN to check every border?
And then of course you can just use the coal directly and just export the gas from which you can export much due to better carbon tax.
"You get as many countries as possible to get on board, have a big negotiating phase to decide the caps each country should stick to"
and good luck with that. During sunshine days you get good intentions and when tensions rise like they do now since a while, not even that anymore.
In my oppinion a waste alltogether. All those energies (and actual lots of fossil energy used to make those conferences happen) should have gone to really constructive things instead. Organizing cooperation in research. Infrastructure. etc.
Technical solutions to a technical problem. You can't heat peoples homes nor power industries with nice speeches or resolutions.
Almost 40 years of proven science and we're sitting on our hands.
And don't get me started on the fact that the current approach of ignoring the problem, sabotaging efforts and rolling back legislation is a politically enforced solution itself, of the negative type. More than half Of all us citizens recognise climate change as a threat and want something done. We have leadership that have hijacked that will to stifle progress.
But in the contrast declaring CO2 as bad is something very arbitary. We all exhale CO2. So suddenly CO2 is bad, exhaling is bad?? ... is a bit off worlds for the common people. As CO2 clearly is something normal. Nature needs CO2.
The excess is the problem. That we suddenly release all the stored carbons from millenias. But still this is less clear. How much is too much. Because burning fires is something humans do since we are humans - very counter intuitive to declare it all wrong now.
So corrupt leadership is not really the problem if the common people are not fully convinced that CO2 is really that bad. And we are talking about the global population. Not just the intellectuals in the western world.
And even if they are aware that it is not ideal - if they feel cold now, they will burn coal to warm themself now, if they lack (affordable) alternatives. (I do). So they also would not push their politicans to forbid this. And in a democracy it is the will of the common people that matters. So the problem is just a little bit more complicated, than you make it. Saying politics should do something is easy - but is still not a real solution.
Solutions would be affordable alternatives. And if you look at the developement of prices of solar panels and batteries for example ... you see that change is happening. I just don't see it is comming from politics. Politics can maybe help the process, yes. But not so easy. As out whole industry is based on fossil energy. Changing that simply takes time. So teach people about is, yes. But don't preach to them nor force them. Otherwise they will circumvent it.
That's exactly what a carbon trading system should be doing, taxing emissions and subsidizing renewables, maybe even subsidizing geo-engineering solutions if that becomes necessary.
> And since many states(and people) are really struggeling and in conflict, the danger of global warming is too abstract for most, to provide enough motivation to serious limit their economy which would weaken them, when they do not trust their neibhours to follow it.
I agree this is the biggest problem in the west, with the growing gap between rich and poor increasing the cost of basics like electricity is a political minefield.
Each country needs to put a price on carbon, taxing fossil fuels at the point where they enter the national economy (mine, refinery, port, whatever). They also need to put a price on imports that embody carbon emissions (especially steel, cement,...). But if the origin country has already imposed a fee on the emissions, the fee imposed on import can be waived.
If a few large countries adopt such a policy, the rest of the world will be incentivised to follow suit, and we'll get a global price on carbon emissions.
There's such a bill in the US Congress right now, though one whose chances are abyssmal under the current administration.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Innovation_and_Carbon...
Also consider where the fee goes... Lets say you're Saudi Arabia. You decide this plan is great, so you stick a massive $50 per barrel fee on oil out of your wells. You then realise that your oil isn't selling great in the world market, so you end up giving the oil industry support in the form of investment to dig new cheaper wells, since to do so is good business for both you and them. As long as you only give them $49 of support, you're still coming out ahead overall.
Unless the 'tax' is given to a benevolent world leader, then whoever collects this carbon tax will have an incentive to increase carbon emissions to collect more tax.
> what would the import tax be on a macbook? How about the tax on a google search?
This policy, like any other, is less than perfect. In particular, many imports will likely go untaxed. But the administrator of the program can continuously iterate. Start with the obvious things like steel and cars, and then keep attaching prices to the most egregious outstanding goods and services.
I'm not saying this is trivial, but there are all ready many scientists who have put a lot of work into calculating the carbon footprints of things like smartphones and agricultural products.
> whoever collects this carbon tax will have an incentive to increase carbon emissions to collect more tax.
I was (perhaps mistakenly) trying to keep my comment short, and left out one or two crucial aspects of the policy I'm advocating. Definitely read the wiki page and/or the bill if you're interested. They're both quite short.
The tax can be revenue-neutral, with the proceeds divided equally among all residents of the country, who can receive it as a monthly check or deposit.
People will be paying increased prices for all the goods and services that they consume (energy providers will have raised prices in accordance with the new tax they have to pay). The result of this is that those whose carbon footprint is smaller than average will receive a dividend that is larger than the mark up they have to pay as a consumer, while those whose carbon footprint is above average will receive the same dividend, but will have to endure a markup that is greater.
That’s no accident, and not the inexorable progress of science. It’s the direct result of first Germany, then the EU and Obama admin incentivizing research & deployment.
https://edition-m.cnn.com/2018/11/23/health/sun-dimming-aero...
This would be a great opportunity for stalling (or even reverting) part of the problem till batteries and other clean products get crazy cheap.
Edit: I think this is important because it's much more doable. It is a much easier sell - fits the general story of economic growth, that almost everyone believes that economies (especially their economy) should expand. This would be a cross-national collaboration in which many people would take pride (we own the planet, and we're handling it well) and could have technological side effects like the flight to the moon. The current ideas which find it hard to get themselves divorced from slowing down economies are simply much less palatable.
So I really don't think it should be hogging the Limelight, now that we actually making some progress, even if it's clearly very late.
These took out much of the heat from greenhouse gasses. And in my opinion you either buy the climate change models (which are very aware of aerosols), or you don't. It doesn't make sense to believe that the planet will heat up more, that it is due to humans, but aerosols are not a part of the story.
It seems difficult to reduce carbon, while adding carbon based lifeforms that breathe carbon, eat things that create more carbon and use electricity which creates more carbon.
Instead govts love to ban, control, mandate, and penalize.
For example in austin they banned bags. They then spent 3 million in marketing to let people know about the ban. If they taxed it they would have generated revenue and reduced bag usage. Yet people or stores that really needed to use bags could still do it.
Another example, we had a drought. The city restricted use of water. They hired a ton of people to enforce the bans and gave out fines to those who got caught. Water use dropped, but then the water utility started losing money so they had to raise prices. If they had instead just taxed the higher tiers of usage, water use would have dropped. People that had a need to use more water could still do it. People could make tradeoffs, like Im not going to wash my clothes but I am going to wash my car. Instead the city decided for us which water using behaviors were acceptable and which were not.