Plan B Forum

Or will he puss-out and follow the lockstep GOP line?


He is supposed to make an announcement later on today.



yrs,
rubato

Pulling out of the agreement was a big part of his campaign; he's already "pussed out"--hell he led that charge. I doubt he will change his position, but who knows?

I have very mixed feelings about this...

On the one hand, it is a terrible deal...a complete joke...

Terrible for the US, and also terrible for the environment...we should never have signed on to it in the first place..

The deal requires the US to take the economic hit from a 26-28% reduction in in carbon emissions between now and 2025, while requiring the world's number one carbon emission producer...

China....

To do absolutely nothing between now and 2030...

Zero, zip, nada, bupkiss...

Not a 10% reduction, not a 1% reduction, not an agreement to at least not increase their rate, not even agreement to at least slow their rate of increase...

Goose egg, a big fat zero...

(And btw, another major carbon emission producer, India, also agreed to abide by these "tough" terms)

The funny/sad thing about this was the amount of time and effort that John Kerry poured into getting this splendid "deal"...

You wouldn't think it would take all that long to convince the other major player to agree to a deal where you take a 26-28 percent hit over 7 years while they have to do absolutely nothing, but Kerry sure managed to make it look like a long and difficult process...

One can only imagine how long it would have taken him to negociate a deal where the China actually agreed to do something...

But on the other hand...

As much as this deal stinks (quite literally stinks) one also has to consider the context and larger picture involved here at the present moment...

We have a President who in a few short months has done his level best to alienate just about every ally we have, (well, the allies with democratically elected governments, any way) and greatly undermine the international stability that relies on these alliances...and also severely damage trust in the word of the United States...

For this President at this moment to withdraw from and/or undermine yet another international agreement, (no matter how much the agreement sucks; and this one sucks badly) may have even worse effects then just sticking with this shitty deal would...

He followed the charge led by the GOP for more than a decade now with both global warming as well as with his anti-immigrant hysteria.

And I see on the 'net that he has gone ahead with it against the advice of all of science, most fossil-fuel companies, nearly all of the first world countries, and most businesses.


yrs,
rubato

"show leadership" when was that ever a GOP trait?

2:35 p.m.

Five Nordic countries have written a last-minute letter to President Donald Trump urging him to "make the right decision" and keep America signed onto the Paris climate accord.

The leaders of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden say the 2015 Paris Agreement to reduce global warming was a commitment "to our children."

In a letter sent hours before Trump was due to announce on Thursday whether the U.S. would pull out of the accord, the five leaders say the effects of global warming are already visible in all parts of our planet.

They say it's "crucial.. that all parties stick to the Paris Agreement."

The letter is signed "Your Nordic Friends" and urges Trump "to show global leadership - and to make the right decision."

As an advanced economy we stand to benefit the most from avoiding the worst effects of climate change so that paying some fraction more of the costs is reasonable. Also, the countries which develop the technologies to transition to a lower-carbon energy profile stand to profit the most by selling those technologies around the world.

yrs,
rubato

Lord Jim wrote:The deal requires the US to take the economic hit from a 26-28% reduction in in carbon emissions between now and 2025, while requiring the world's number one carbon emission producer...

China....

To do absolutely nothing between now and 2030...

Zero, zip, nada, bupkiss...

Not a 10% reduction, not a 1% reduction, not an agreement to at least not increase their rate, not even agreement to at least slow their rate of increase...

Goose egg, a big fat zero...

That is, of course, blatantly untrue. China's emissions are supposed to peak by 2030. That cannot happen if it does nothing between now and then, because, of course, if it did nothing, then emissions would not peak in 2030, they would continue to rise. Obviously the rate of increase in emissions will have to slow drastically in that timeframe, and there are several measures China has committed to in order to make that happen, including massive increases in renewables. In actuality, it looks like emissions will peak several years earlier than 2030. By that point in time, emissions per unit of GDP are supposed to be 60-65% less than they were in 2005. There may be some other countries that will have met that goal, but neither the U.S. nor Canada will be among them.

So it may be argued that China is not doing enough, whatever that might be judged to be, but to say they are required to do nothing before 2030 is bullshit.

China is the global leader in the photovoltaic industry because of huge government subsidies to install solar. Their current committment is to install 110GW by 2020 or an amount equal to 55 large nuclear plants at peak production.

We were the global leader in photovoltaic technology under Carter but Reagan killed it putting us behind Japan and Germany.



yrs,
rubato

https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-quitti ... 54896.html

"... The economic consequences could be worse. The United Nations estimates that the U.S. stands to lose jobs in the rapidly growing clean energy industry ― estimated to be worth $6 trillion by 2030 ― to Europe, India and China. Countries that tax emissions may put tariffs on American-made imports. And big companies that expect the U.S. to eventually regulate carbon are likely to see ditching the deal as delaying the inevitable, while also sowing the sort of instability that investors don’t like.

The decision would also defy the desires of many major corporate and fossil fuel interests. Oil giants including Exxon Mobil Corp. and Royal Dutch Shell have pleaded with the administration to stay in the deal, as have coal producers and corporate behemoths such as Walmart, General Mills and DuPont, all of which operate internationally. ... "

Imagine where we'd be today if Reagan had embraced solar energy technology . . .


Of course Trump did the wrong thing, prefaced by another doom/gloom speech. Scott Pruitt's speech made me feel momentarily homicidal - I freaking loathe that man!

What Scooter said about China's obligations under the Paris treaty. You can argue that it's inadequate, but it's not nothing. And China is now poised to become the global leader in electric vehicles (as rubato notes, it's already the global leader in photovoltaics). Trump wants the US to abandon the technology of the future and go back to coal.

China's emissions are supposed to peak by 2030

But of course they have made no commitment as to what that "peak" is going to be...

But fair is fair, so rather than say they have agreed to do nothing, I will amend my remarks to say they have agreed to do "next to nothing"...

My preference would have been if Trump had said that we would remain a signatory to the treaty "for the time being", (after all there's no rush on this; the reductions agreed to are not even set to go into effect until 2020) and then gone into the bit about reopening discussions to improve it.

Once again, like with his jettisoning of TPP (the only good agreement the Obama Administration was able to negociate) and his hostile, oafish antics in Brussels, Trump has demonstrated that he places pleasing his nativist base above larger US national interests...

As long as this guy wants to totally fuck up the environment, why doesn't he let the nuke power industry run wild too?  There's only been three major 'incidents' (Three Mile Island; Chernobyl; and Fukishima), and it took a god-damned earthquake and tsunami to trigger one of them.  And we can store the depleted fuel elements in the big-assed holes all these coal and iron miners are going to dig now that we don't have to worry about the shit we pour into the air by burning coal.

Please, God ... just one little ol' lightning bolt and make him go away?



-"BB"-

70,000 coal mining jobs in the entire country. 100,000 clean energy jobs just in Massachusetts and increasing by 10,000 per year. Paris is good for the economy. It is good for innovation, science, and technology. The new economy jobs are there and it is time to stop pretending the old economy jobs are ever coming back. They are not, and abdicating our world leadership on climate change won't make a damn bit of difference on that score except to those who want to live in a very warm, very wet, very delusional universe.

For 2013 per the World Bank, the US released 17.1 metric tons per capita while China released 7.6. India is way behind at 1.6. That may have something to do with it.

http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC

https://www.vox.com/2017/6/1/15726726/t ... epublicans

Don’t just blame Trump for quitting the Paris deal — blame the Republican Party

"... But beyond a few notable exceptions, the upshot is generally the same no matter where someone sits in the GOP: that addressing climate change shouldn’t be anywhere near the top of the president’s agenda. This is the consensus that the vast majority of the Republican Party, from donors to politicians to intellectuals to voters, has arrived at. Which makes it the crucial context for Trump’s move Thursday.
Trump had widespread support in the conservative coalition for pulling out of the Paris deal

Though Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris agreement has been received by some as a shocking move, it was hardly a fringe position in the Republican Party — he was being outright pressured to do it.

Twenty-two Republican senators, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, sent a letter to Trump in May urging him to withdraw from the accord.
Forty conservative think tanks or activist groups, including the Heritage Foundation, Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform, the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity, and the longtime climate science–denying Heartland Institute, signed on to a similar letter calling on Trump to pull out.
Pro-Trump conservative media outlets like Fox News and Breitbart praised the move as expected — but so did the Trump-critical National Review, with top editor Rich Lowry saying it was the right call on Twitter and writer David French (who once considered waging an independent presidential run against Trump) authoring a post headlined “Trump defends the Constitution and the economy by withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement.”
And back when the Paris deal was first struck in late 2015, other GOP presidential candidates harshly criticized it too. Marco Rubio called it an “unfunny joke,” John Kasich mocked the idea of a “climate conference over in Paris” when they “should have been talking about destroying ISIS,” Ted Cruz promised to withdraw from the agreement, and Jeb Bush said he probably wouldn’t have attended the negotiations because they’d likely result in “policies that will hurt our economy.”
... "

What makes the Trump presidency a disaster is that he is a true Republican and follows Republican ideas.


yrs,
rubato

And next month, the rest of the world goes to the WTO asking for a ruling that the lack of environmental regulations, the use of dirty energy and the failure to provide health care to its citizens constitute unfair subsidies to business that justify countervailing duties on all U.S. exports.

Wouldn't the US dependency on employer-provided healthcare be a DISadvantage to US business????