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Comment by thesmtsolver | Hacker News Reader

I feel these agreements are highly asymmetric and are used to gain market advantage by countries that don't have qualms violating these agreements behind closed doors.

This then leads to more pollution.

Before Trump, the US had a higher rating than China (though both were bad):

https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/usa/2024-11-13/

(Same as EU's rating: https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/eu/)

https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/china/2024-09-17/

The sad reality is that unless there is uniform compliance across major countries, these talks are just climate theatre.

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Is there any proof that countries who agree to these accords are cheating behind closed doors?

As far as I can tell it would be a relatively straightforward thing to measure (how else are we getting these per country reports on emissions?)

Given that, I’d expect it to become obvious if they are cheating the accords.

And as far as markets go, I believe quite strongly that’s a failure of our economic system. It fails to account for externalities appropriately. If things were priced with externalities accounted for it would change consumption patterns dramatically

> Is there any proof that countries who agree to these accords are cheating behind closed doors?

Is there any evidence these aren't a fig leaf? What kind of leverage does this give countries to penalize others in the event of a broken agreement?

> What kind of leverage does this give countries to penalize others

In the case of China, it's pushed them to make headway in the process of building a manufacturing infrastructure that is more insulated from global energy price swings. IIRC they can also power much of it more cheaply (e.g. solar has no fuel cost), which provides them with a cost advantage.

As we have repeatedly seen, there is also leverage to be had in not having one's country internally levered to global oil prices.

So it provides leverage, but not to directly penalize.

It's not clear these "climate talks" have anything to do with China's domestic movements.

That’s usually true. But the US has more to lose in such a move. So and without the US it loses energy. So this is more about bringing the world to think harder about resource management

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