Kyoto Protocol Renewal Efforts Struggling 393
Hugh Pickens writes "Economics trumps the environment. The emission targets set by the Kyoto Protocol will expire next year, and negotiators are fighting to keep UN climate talks on track while efforts to save the Euro push the struggle to save the planet down the priority list. In the United States, seen as the biggest single obstacle to a new global climate deal, academic opinion says an 'iron law' means economics trumps the environment in times of crisis. Meanwhile, some leading voices on climate science have suggested the Kyoto Protocol be put to pasture, since clinging to hopes of a renewal of that agreement does more harm than good in achieving meaningful dialogue on how to fight climate change. When the agreement was negotiated in the 1990s, the world was more clearly divided into 'rich and poor' countries. However, China and India have seen unexpectedly strong economic growth since then, and currently make up 58 per cent of global emissions. 'Against this backdrop, it is no surprise that countries such as Japan, Canada and Russia adamantly refuse to assume new binding targets unless the other major economies at present outside Kyoto's reach — most notably, the United States and China — do so as well,' writes Elliot Diringer, executive vice-president of the U.S.-based Center for Climate and Energy Solutions. 'And for now, the odds of that happening are nil.'"
Priorities (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Priorities (Score:5, Insightful)
One world government is a horrible, horrible idea. Where can you escape to when the one world government becomes intolerable?
Truly representative government on such a scale is impossible--we might as well have a global hereditary monarchy.
Re:Priorities (Score:5, Insightful)
pray tell me, where can you escape to now ? Our multinational overlords are everywhere.
The Economy Trumps the Economy (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, we're boned (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's the problem in a nutshell: You have a global common resource, in this case the ability to put CO2 into the atmosphere before it heats things up so much that we all die (regardless of whether you think the current warming trend is anthropogenic, there's very little argument that there is some point at which too much CO2 is a problem). But the short-term incentives for each actor using that common resource are to use up as much of the common resource as quickly as possible, because if they don't then somebody else will, and we'll all be dead anyways.
Now, in most cases, commons problems are solved by government action. For instance, when the population of lobsters off the North Carolina coast dropped precipitously due to over-harvesting, the government put severe restrictions on how many lobsters everyone could get, and it sucked for the lobstermen, but saved the commons and allowed the industry to survive. But in the case of a global commons like the atmosphere, there's nobody who has the ability to enforce that kind of rule, so each country has no choice but to use up the common resource as quickly as possible, collectively racing to disaster.
And it doesn't help that both of the worst offenders in this department, the US and China, are firmly committed to the path of destruction.
Huh?? (Score:3, Insightful)
Looks like some is upset that the USA realized the current Kyoto was a farce when refusing that sign that one.
Just not going to happen until (Score:4, Insightful)
They start erecting sandbags and levees around New York City and Washington DC. They the US won't just participate, but will be pushing the agenda with the threat of economic sanctions and possibly war to those who continue to pump out the greenhouse gasses.
And of course the response to anyone who says, 'Back in 2011 we told you so!' will be a not so diplomatic 'Shut up!'
Re:Priorities (Score:3, Insightful)
In all honesty, the European Union (as the first true step towards one world government) needs saving more than the environment.
No, the EU needs to die. Put a stake in its heart. It was never a great idea in the first place. You can't have a federal Europe when you have so many differing languages and cultures. Canada can barely manage with two languages. A nation... and that was the eventual goal of the whole EU dream... has to have something in common other than the currency. You were never going to erase the French from a Frenchman in an effort to make him some generic "European".
A common market for Europe makes sense. But a common currency still has practical problems (as we're seeing right now), and a common political structure? A disaster waiting to happen.
Re:Priorities (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:Priorities (Score:5, Insightful)
This concept of yours is based on...?
A nation... and that was the eventual goal of the whole EU dream...
Quite simply wrong. The EU, as a concept, was formed in the crucibles of WW1 and WW2.
You were never going to erase the French from a Frenchman
More hyperbole. Where exactly do you get all these kooky ideas from?
Re:Just not going to happen until (Score:5, Insightful)
At the current rate of sea-level increase, in about 100 years, you'll need one row of sandbags around Washington DC or New York. And that's if you assume that both cities get water in the streets at high tide now (hint: they don't).
In other words, that particular problem is so far out in the future as to be safely ignorable right now.
If you are really concerned about AGW, I trust you're pushing for nuclear power plants to replace coal plants worldwide? Unlike entirely too many "environmentalists" who seem to think that electricity just happens, and that banning use of coal will magically cause paradise on earth....
Re:Priorities (Score:3, Insightful)
Here's where you've missed the most important lesson the US had to teach the world - you're only ruled by those you accept ruling you.
The historic European model of being the chattel of your leaders is of course a barrier to accepting this.
Re:Priorities (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh piss off. He made a completely valid point and you killed the possibility of rational conversation with your bullshit.
Both points are perfectly valid and worthy of discussion.
Re:Good riddance? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a shell-game and always has been. Rich countries were supposed to pay for poor countries to pollute more heavily (because it was cheap) while they created less polluting technology that would trickle down.
It's no wonder it failed so spectacularly.
The ONLY international GHG framework (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The USA is the biggest obstacle?? (Score:4, Insightful)
The USA won't accept significant change either, but there's enough of an ecomental vote that some token pretence of greenwashing is politically astute. China and India are at least being honest, and that has value as it shows that there's no mileage in beggaring ourselves voluntarily now before [insert current buzzword for global warming] beggars us later.
It's a technological problem, it needs a technological solution. Just setting goals and targets doesn't achieve that. Throwing a trillion dollars at fusion power might, and that's essentially what it's going to take to get us off the fossil teat before the last scrap of coal has been dug up, gas extracted, and oil squeezed out of it.
Re:Priorities (Score:2, Insightful)
One world government is a horrible, horrible idea.
Yet it seems inevitable. Tribes became villages. Villages became cities became city-states became states became nations became trading blocks. There seems to be a pattern. The real question is will we have any say in the One World Government or will we deny that it is going to happen and allow it to be formed by politicians and CEOs.
Re:Just not going to happen until (Score:5, Insightful)
In other words, that particular problem is so far out in the future as to be safely ignorable right now.
That's exactly the type of short-sighted thinking that got us hip deep in shit in the first place. No regard for posterity because we'll be dead by then, right? What about the people who will have to live with the consequences of all our apathy, laziness and greed today? Fuck 'em? That's what you're saying. God-forbid that we as a species come together and do something for the good of the species, something without immediate payoff, something that might be hard.
Re:Priorities (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Yes, we're boned (Score:3, Insightful)
"Here's the problem in a nutshell"
The problem in a nutshell is capitalism, countries will do everything to save their wealth over doing what needs to be done. This is what we get when we turn a political economic model into a religion.
Why would you want one-world government? (Score:3, Insightful)
In all honesty, the European Union (as the first true step towards one world government)
Why on earth would you want a one-world government? The more you remove power from the people, the less popular sovereignty they have, the less representative the government becomes. Bureaucrats in Washington are bad enough at ignoring the people. You want international Bureaucrats running the world? Why?
This is the real world, not Star Trek. Newsflash: People in the world disagree with each other, and frankly, I'd be scared of a Star Trek-like world where everyone on earth agreed on things. I'm almost certain I'd disagree with them.
Re:Just not going to happen until (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm pushing for using less energy. Period.
But that's not what the Kyoto Protocol was about. It was about, "Hey, you rich countries. Stop! Us poor countries need to go through our dirty coal plant and Cadillac with tail fins phase just like you did."
Bullsh*t! Modern, low pollution technologies are available to everyone. And in the final analysis, they tend to be cheaper as well (more efficient). Everyone needs to adhere to the same set of rules.
The alternative 'just use less' philosophy is based upon some crazy idea that 7 billion people can just live in yurts. That is so crazy its not even worth discussing.
Old family? (Score:5, Insightful)
you already have a hereditary monarchy in the USA. Look at what happened when someone who isn't from an old family got into the top spot.
Did you mean Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton?
Bacteria in a Petri dish. (Score:4, Insightful)
We're supposed to be smarter, but really, not much difference when it comes down to it. Consume all the resources, over breed, destroy the habitat in which we live, die en masse.
Re:Why would you want one-world government? (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the main key point in Star Trek is that it's really easy to get a majority of people to agree to a policy of "Hey, lets use our totally awesome technology to make life comfortable for everyone on Earth, and use the spare resources for R&D, exploration, and defense."
For a greater or lesser degree of comfort, I would say that this has been a possibility for the people of Earth for some time now, and that the major obstacle is the entrenched power blocs who continue to consolidate their hold on our resources.
As Picard says in First Contact "We have an evolved sensibility". I wonder what needs to evolve the most? The 1%, who need to grow up enough to realize that they could be happy and fulfilled just making things better for people and forgoing the 2nd yacht with a gold toilet, or the 99%, who are starting to realize that they are really pissed off with the oligarchs. Or perhaps the trekkers who need to realize that fictional techno-utopia may be beyond the abilities of the human race.
Re:Yes, we're boned (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The USA is the biggest obstacle?? (Score:5, Insightful)
The USA won't accept significant change either, but there's enough of an ecomental vote that some token pretence of greenwashing is politically astute.
What you consider mental illness is the mainstream view in Europe and the EU does a lot to pursue it, even to the point of forcing China and the US to clean up. ROHS is a good example, the EU banned hazardous substances in consumer products and China and the US were forced to comply because Europe is such a large and important market.
Frankly I find the attitude of many Americans completely detached from reality. When Germany, Japan and a few others decided to abandon nuclear power in favour of clean energy most comments were along the lines of "looks like the decided to go back to the stone age". Hyperbole perhaps but it appears many Americans really think that the mainstream green views of the rest of the developed world at actually insane and a road to certain ruin, fuelled by mass hysteria and extremism. Actually we see it as improving out environment (no-one who lives in a city likes pollution from combustion) and getting an early lead in new and lucrative technologies.
At least China just doesn't care beyond the point where it makes economic sense for them. The US actually appears at best to have accepted economic and social ruin through addiction of fossil fuels and labels anyone who dares question this policy as an extremist and mentally unbalanced.
It's a technological problem, it needs a technological solution. Just setting goals and targets doesn't achieve that.
Well the US is one of the most technically advanced countries in the world and hasn't made much headway. The EU and Japan have due to a combination of legally mandated targets and consumer demand.
Re:Yes, we're boned (Score:4, Insightful)
"Nothing to do with capitalism - just good old fashioned geopolitics"
Nonsense, things like oil spills happen because companies are only spend the minimum they can on safety. This is a result of the PROFIT MOTIVE and hence capitalism there is massive incentive to do things as cheaply and badly as possible for maximum profit and this is common knowledge. Corporations externalize costs and download risks because the model itself fundamentally leads to such outcomes we keep learning this lesson over and over again There's REALLY EXISTING capitalism (the human beings that actually make the decisions) and there's the theoretical capitalism that exists in your head. In the real world companies will do all sorts of bullshit and this fact has never been proven wrong by those who wish for utopian capitalism. You americans are really illiterate religious bunch when it comes to free market ideology.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwater_Horizon_oil_spill [wikipedia.org]
It's like you've learned nothing from the bailout:
See here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bP362CWj2fo [youtube.com]
Here:
http://dailybail.com/home/there-are-no-words-to-describe-the-following-part-ii.html [dailybail.com]
And here:
http://www.dailybail.com/ [dailybail.com]
You need to get a clue buddy. Your ignorance of what has occurred just recently is off the charts.
Re:Huh?? (Score:2, Insightful)
The reason the US didn't sign was because China and India and other "developing nations" got a free pass to pollute all they wanted the first time around. they could basically run amok and countries under the treaty would have to spend a lot more to meet the requirements.
Goerge W. Bush: "it exempts 80% of the world, including major population centers such as China and India, from compliance, and would cause serious harm to the US economy" (Dessai, 2001, p. 5) (Taken from the wikipedia article)
Re:The Economy Trumps the Economy (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is the costs to the environment are intangible. There's no easy way to say emitting a tonne of CO2 costs $X. Or that cutting down a tree or removing carbon from the ground and putting it in the air (fossil fuels) how much it will cost.
Because of this, it's usually taken as free. If you're paying and your neighbour is not, then you're seen as a chump. This is especially true since the effects are often not seen until many years later.
Really, the environment is a tragedy of the commons. It's too big for any one individual to have a large effect, and the effect of many individuals is seen only years later. It's why ecosystems are so diverse and why there seems to be an organism for every job (enough that disrupting one can have untold effects).
But even though humans are forward-looking people (generally), the environment is just something that's too big to comprehend, and our minds and models (including economic models) are incapable of understanding it all.
Re:Yes, we're boned (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Priorities (Score:5, Insightful)
EU started out with the goals of guaranteeing food security for Europe with agricultural programs to stabilize prices, and also to boost international trade by harmonizing safety and export legislation.
No. I hope you're American, because at least you have a reason to be clueless about the reason behind the existence of the EU. If you're british..... well, I hope the US won't save your ass next time the continent decides to blow up again.
Here's how the EU got started: http://europa.eu/about-eu/eu-history/1945-1959/index_en.htm [europa.eu] The start of the EU was a steel and coal industry treaty. It's purpose? To keep countries from trying to monopolize steel and coal to build the best armies. In short, the EU has its roots in a very simple idea: the only way to prevent Europe from being engulfed in another massive war is to economically integrate everybody. France won't start a war with Germany for the same reason you don't shoot your foot (on purpose, at least).
That is why everyone is up in a fucking tizzy over the possible breakup of the Euro, and consequently the EU. There WILL be another war in Europe in our lifetime if that happens. There might be one if the EU sticks around, but it's far less likely.
Re:Is global warming science or a religion? (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, if give credence to the whole peer review thing, and acknowledge the fact that 97% of the world's scientists say it's real and caused at least in part by man:
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/sciencefair/post/2010/06/scientists-overwhelmingly-believe-in-man-made-climate-change/1 [usatoday.com]
Then it's science.
In fact, I'd argue that it is deniers who are going for the faith based approach. Something like believing that hiding under the blanket will protect you from the monsters under the bed.
Re:Priorities (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't understand this. If there's one thing I've learned from the media (and from Slashdot in recent years), it's that Europeans are peaceful, enlightened New Humans, in contrast to us backwards, redneck, violent hicks in the states. Are you telling me Europeans have any concept of war?
Yeah right. Show me one example.
- aj
Could it be (gasp!) Climategate? (Score:4, Insightful)
Throw in that the UAH temperature anomaly since 1981 -- evaluated with openly accessible methods from openly available datasets and not susceptible to e.g. UHI "corrections" liberally applied, unlike e.g. HadCRUT3 -- is a whopping 0.11C. That would be 30 years, call it a third of a century, and 0.11C net warming as of October. Over that time, CO_2 has gone from 335 ppm (Mauna Loa) to around 390 ppm. That is a 55/335 = 16% increase. Since the 1998 El Nino peak (and the end of the series of Grand Solar Maxima of the 20th century) global temperatures have gone down (or held nearly steady). The most pessimistic trending of post 1997 data is 0.2 C. During that interval CO_2 concentration went up around 8%. Even the IPCC is backing off from predictions of much warming "for a while" and of course everybody but Al Gore is sober enough to be able to see that there is no correlation between e.g. the frequency or energy in tropical storms and either the UAH (fairly reliable satellite derived) data or the God-knows-how derived HadCRUT data and especially not with raw CO_2 concentrations.
Now let's see. The earth's mean temperature is roughly 280 C give or take a bit. Let's assume that the thirty year anomaly is 0.28C, in rough agreement with UAH -- it won't matter for this argument. CO_2 up by 16%, T up by -- what would that be? Yes, that's right, by 0.1%! I won't even bother discussing climate sensitivity -- that's dead in the water right there! There are two things anybody can see from simple back of the envelope calculations, the sort one should do just to see if complex models (in the end) make sense. One is that 0.1% -- hell, 1% -- is surely within the bounds of natural variability for a tipped planet with warm, complex oceans, and the most cursory glance at temperatures over the entire Holocene stand is clear evidence that it is a lot larger than that, with or without human civilization. The other is that if 100% of that gain was pure response to CO_2 forcing without any confounding factors or fudge factors contributing, the noise from non-CO_2 fluctuations greatly exceeds this signal and we cannot explain the noise!. For the last decade, temperature trends haven't even had the same sign as a nearly 10% increase in atmospheric CO_2.
This leaves a CAGW enthusiast doubly damned. If solar state is irrelevant, decadal oscillations are irrelevant, oceanic heat reservoir forcing (with up to 1000 year timescales, so some fraction of the energy contributing to the current SST comes from sunlight that warmed the ocean when Columbus was sailing the ocean blue!) is irrelevant (and unpredictable besides), and volcanic aerosols over that decade irrelevant, then that leaves only CO_2 and the sign of the tempera
Re:The USA is the biggest obstacle?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah, some of us Americans are actually engineers and whatnot. People need energy. You need to produce energy semi-locally. If you move power from Maine to California, you're going to lose a lot of juice along the way. This is very important, because reliability can be more important than just the base cost of electricity production.
A power grid needs large, cheap, reliable electricity generation. Solar/wind are not (yet?) reliable, even if they could scale cheaply. Reliable as in "It WILL make X, on demand, with a guaranteed uptime of 99.99%." Tidal/geothermal may pan out in the scaling, availability and cost. We'll see, and we should explore it. Hydro, coal and nuclear are RELIABLE. That is why we are dependent on them for electricity. Base cost is not everything.
Nuclear power currently is the cleanest and safest power source that can scale, is highly available and cheap enough. Safest, if you factor number of deaths per TWh. We can build reactors that are even safer, cheaper and more efficient, and very much should. Being environmentally clean is a form of efficiency, of course. Problem is, America and the world is filled with too many folks with superstitious beliefs regarding nuclear power. But we cannot do without nuclear power. As a result, we are stuck with aging, marginally safe reactors. Largely because of anti-nuclear activists who are attempting to create a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Don't get me wrong. Anything involving nuclear power should be monitored very closely. It does have danger, and only a fool would think otherwise.
Big surprise, any specific industry has considerations that are complicated. Simple "clean energy is our only consideration" positions are nice and all. Some of us have to actually keep the lights on while the ideology debate rages on. All I ask is you do your homework, and counterbalance your ideology with education. I don't necessarily want you to agree with me, just be informed enough to actually have a knowledgeable opinion.
Re:Old family? (Score:2, Insightful)
"..Ford was not elected to the Presidency."
Yes, he was. When people vote for a vice president, they know that they are "just one heartbeat away" from being the president. Usually, that's why the VP candidate causes people to vote for the other guy.
Re:Priorities (Score:4, Insightful)
One world government is a horrible, horrible idea.
Yet it seems inevitable. Tribes became villages. Villages became cities became city-states became states became nations became trading blocks. There seems to be a pattern. The real question is will we have any say in the One World Government or will we deny that it is going to happen and allow it to be formed by politicians and CEOs.
You seem to believe that mankind will continue 'forward' in it's attempt to homogenize the planet. It is just as likely, perhaps more likely, that mankind simply cannot manage to create planet spanning governments but will instead devolve into smaller, more manageable groups. Which will later merge together over time, form nation states, form regional cooperatives, fight other regional cooperatives, form larger entities and collapse again.
That's more along what has happened historically.