Nearly 200 Countries Agree On Global Climate Pact Rules After Impasse (reuters.com) 194
"Nearly 200 countries overcame political divisions late on Saturday to agree on rules for implementing a landmark global climate deal," reports Reuters. "After two weeks of talks in the Polish city of Katowice, nations finally reached consensus on a more detailed framework for the 2015 Paris Agreement, which aims to limit a rise in average world temperatures to 'well below' 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels." From the report: Before the talks started, many expected the deal would not be as robust as needed. The unity which underpinned the Paris talks has fragmented, and U.S. President Donald Trump intends to pull his country - one of the world's biggest emitters - out of the pact. At the 11th hour, ministers managed to break a deadlock between Brazil and other countries over the accounting rules for the monitoring of carbon credits, deferring the bulk of that discussion to next year, but missing an opportunity to send a signal to businesses to speed up their actions. Still, exhausted ministers managed to bridge a series of divides to produce a 156-page rulebook - which is broken down into themes such as how countries will report and monitor their national pledges to curb greenhouse gas emissions and update their emissions plans.
Not everyone is happy with everything, but the process is still on track and it is something to build on, several ministers said. Some countries and green groups criticized the outcome for failing to urge increased ambitions on emissions cuts sufficiently to curb rising temperatures. Poorer nations vulnerable to climate change also wanted more clarity on how an already agreed $100 billion a year of climate finance by 2020 will be provided and on efforts to build on that amount further from the end of the decade.
Not everyone is happy with everything, but the process is still on track and it is something to build on, several ministers said. Some countries and green groups criticized the outcome for failing to urge increased ambitions on emissions cuts sufficiently to curb rising temperatures. Poorer nations vulnerable to climate change also wanted more clarity on how an already agreed $100 billion a year of climate finance by 2020 will be provided and on efforts to build on that amount further from the end of the decade.
Re:No details? (Score:5, Informative)
The agreement is legally binding. It sets out how countries will meet their climate goals, and how poorer countries will get financial assistance to do it. For example it sets up rules on carbon trading between richer and poorer nations. It also sets out the legal consequence for climate change and how they will be enforced, and the way that compliance will be measured.
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Strongly worded letters.
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He asked about enforcement, not litigation. Interstate enforcement is done primarily through power politics of various types, ranging from cloak and dagger actions to full blown warfare.
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The idea that trade policies are a functional tool of enforcement is more or less a correct one, when such polities can be backed by physical force to a significant enough degree. That's why it works on individual level, and tends to fail miserably on interstate level, where there is no authority with force to compel members to agree to it.
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How is it going to be enforced?
The same way that the nuclear ceasefire between 1945 and now has been enforced.
The countries that signed this understand the consequences of not meeting their obligations, so we rely on them to act in their own best interests. Unfortunately there is one important country missing from the table that is still in denial due to corrupt politics that places politicians squarely in the pockets of oil corporations and religious zealotry that dismisses the opinions of scientists, ruled by a wannabe dictator who si
Re:No details? (Score:4, Informative)
The agreement requires countries to submit data on their compliance to the UN. It states how such data is to be collected. They rules are designed to prevent cheating and of course countries will monitor each other, e.g. any country with climate science satellites or nearby ground stations can tell if there is cheating going on.
Every country must set targets regularly and they must always be lower than the previous ones.
Enforcement is via the usual UN mechanisms. So for example when the UN enacts sanctions they are widely respected and cause the subject of the sanctions great problems and economic loss. In this case it would probably not be sanctions but would be justification for tariffs or international lawsuits or complaints through the WTO.
In theory a country could just decide to not go along with the agreement. Well, the US already pulled out of Paris. But in practice there will be consequences, and as we have seen in the past countries do tend to make a genuine effort to comply and meet their goals (including China which exceeded its last very aggressive target, and even the US which is being driven by states despite the federal government's position).
Put it another way, if you think people and nations only behave well because they are forced to by law and the threat of legal sanction or military force then you must not have looked at recent history.
Re:No details? (Score:4, Interesting)
>Put it another way, if you think people and nations only behave well because they are forced to by law and the threat of legal sanction or military force then you must not have looked at recent history.
Could you specify which parts of recent history prove this point? I can cite off the top of my head several major items where this statement debunks your argument.
Re: No details? (Score:2)
Not true. Sufficient motivation in the form of money might very well lead to the invention of atmospheric processors that when large enough ones are built and powered with nuclear power could reduce total CO2. Of course that would require massive amounts of capitalism and nuclear energy, both things that most enviroweenies find taboo.
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Not true. Sufficient motivation in the form of money might very well lead to the invention of atmospheric processors that when large enough ones are built and powered with nuclear power could reduce total CO2. Of course that would require massive amounts of capitalism and nuclear energy, both things that most enviroweenies find taboo.
I suppose I'm an "enviroweenie", but I fail to see how "capitalism" can solve the carbon reduction problem. What exactly are the industrial uses of the captured CO2? Greenhouses? Plastics? Remember that the amount we would have to remove is roughly equivalent to the amount we have dug up in the last 200 years and we can only drink so much soda...
I'm all for doing this - nukes and all - but there is no way there is any kind of business model that can take this stuff and turn it into useful materials in suffi
Re: Legally binding? (Score:1)
I shall now quote Al Gore: there is no controlling legal authority.
What he said when busted for very illegal campaign finance violations. Google it.
Re:No details? (Score:5, Interesting)
The agreement is as legally binding as the Kellogg-Briand pact.
From what I can tell, there are no actual new commitments. The existing non-binding Paris agreement targets remain nominally in-effect.
The new agreement provides advice on how a country should self-measure their emissions such that the measurement procedures have some consistency to them.
However, if a country decides to not to follow that advice, there is literally nothing that will be done about it.
Furthermore, if they measure the emissions properly, but emissions are in excess of the Paris agreement emissions targets, there is literally nothing that will be done about that either.
Furthermore, none of reports have to be delivered until 2024, at the earliest.
This is what I was able to tell based on some articles I found. As for all I can tell the text of the actual agreement is secret and no one has ever read it, not even those who wrote or signed it.
If this is not the case, and you have access to either the agreement or a decent summary thereof, you would have posted it already.
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Re:No details? (Score:4, Insightful)
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There are over a hundred posts on this article. Not one of them either links to the rulebook text nor contains any quotes of part of the rulebook text, nor has claimed to have read it.
Gee. Maybe that's because it's HARD TO FIND.
I read TFA. It does not have a link to the text. I went to the official cop24 website. It does not either. I googled the topic. I cannot find the text anywhere.
Have YOU read it? I think not.
This isn't about spoon feeding. This about someone asking a reasonable, on-topic questi
I know it's easy to double-count sometimes... (Score:2)
“From now on, my five priorities will be: ambition, ambition, ambition, ambition and ambition,” it said
It's a snow job! (Score:1, Flamebait)
Donnie, the con man
Was a lying empty soul
With a Putin pipe, a Pinocchio nose
And a scam made out of coal..
'well below' 2 degrees Celsius? (Score:2)
Lots of luck with that. $100 billion? Call me when we spend more on AGW than the military.
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Equal? No. Just childishly wrong.
Sovereign states are sovereign. That is all. 'Equal in status' is far too broad.
After impasse? (Score:2)
Somehow, I can't really see "we decided to put off making the decision required to end the impasse until next year" as making progress toward resolving the impasse....
Using that logic, we can truly say that we've resolved the AGW issue in its entirety at this point, and so nothing else needs to be done....
The article says nothing at all (Score:3, Interesting)
Did anyone actually read it? It doesn't actually say anything.
I love the line about "Exhausted ministers". It must have been a rough two weeks of partying with hookers.
doesn't matter (Score:3)
only matters what China does now, and in a few decades also what India does. Irrelevant what the rest do, irrelevant what the USA does.
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China will likely have fusion in the next 10-15 years, since it, oh, spends money on science. Maybe earlier, if Europe decides to pool resources with it. Which it may well do.
If China does, India will have no choice but to switch to fission for energy or sell up to China. It can't compete on diesel or oil.
The EU will remain important, but you're right, nobody else will. Competition against a technologically advanced society is pointless.
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Fusion on Earth surface remains 50 years away, just as it was 50 years away 50 years ago. It's the eternal conundrum, where solving one problem appears to result in finding an even larger problem that wasn't foreseen. Essentially all wealthy countries already invested in it. It remain unfeasible with current technology and materials.
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You can build a fusion reactor in your home lab, many people have. Making one net energy positive is the tricky part.
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The kind of cold fusion you're talking about is utterly irrelevant for the topic being discussed. It's like saying that interstellar travel is easy because you can make a rocket in your garage.
Re:doesn't matter (Score:4, Insightful)
India and China will keep on using coal/energy imports to provide low cost power to their own nations to advance with. Winning.
The USA will have low cost power and grow its own industrial base. Low cost exports and jobs for the USA. Winning.
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China won't have fusion and neither will we.
Sustained fusion that releases significantly more useable energy than it
takes to get and keep going on the surface of this planet ain't gonna happen.
Even with room-temperature superconductors (which we almost certainly WILL see).
The oil, coal and gas that supply our baseline load will eventually run out.
Solar, wind and wave will never be enough for the world's expanding population.
Fission is the only answer and it can be made as safe as we want it to be.
All the fu
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Sustained fusion that releases significantly more useable energy than it
takes to get and keep going on the surface of this planet ain't gonna happen.
[citation needed]
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nonsense, the Sun puts out enough energy on the Earth for over 10,000 civilizations. We have effecient enough collection devices and storage tech, and the UHVDC lines to distribute energy across continents. A mere 100 square miles of solar collector would power the USA.
we don't need fission any more. using uranium is just dumb now.
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Don't you have anything better to do than to troll with this nuclear playboy bullshit? Base load is a myth and storage is getting cheaper a hell of a lot faster than nuclear is getting safer.
"All the fusion wastes since 1945 wouldn't even _begin_ to fill 1 cubic kilometer."
Neither would all my flatulence if you made it into a solid. Does that mean you want to suck my farts? If the nuclear waste were all in one safe place we wouldn't be having this conversation, but it is stored in pools next to reactors all
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Ah yes, the "don't look at me or my country, we don't want to do any work, pay anything, or participate in anything that wasn't our (my) idea."
Good stuff. It gets relatively wealthier countries off the hook, it makes a good soundbite, and it appeals to the Deplorables. And that's what this comes down to, really. Deplorable logic for Deplorables.
By all means, let's not talk about how developed countries contribute to pollution. Let's not talk about how many countries will have IP and industrial capacity
This is about control not climate change (Score:1, Insightful)
No where in the article are the words natural gas, nuclear or economy.
It's an obvious scam when real-world solutions are excluded, solutions such as changing coal plants to natural gas or adding nuclear power. You see this when there's no mention of the economic impact.
Troll (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Troll (Score:5, Informative)
They're generally called 'watermelons'. Green on the outside, red to the core.
Same old same old, but they've changed their public reasons for 'smashing capitalism'. Just boring and lame, but they don't have much left to base their arguments on.
It's not the rules, it's the punishment (Score:2)
...for breaking those rules. Is there any?
I didn't RTFA because I've had enough since Kyoto of empty, meaningless virtue-signaling where states promise the sun, sky, and moon but don't accomplish shit. Every single "Climate Summit" results in the same thing: platitudes, much back-slapping, mealy-mouthed statements about what 'should' be done....and 5-10 years later, we find nobody's hit their targets, and nothing happens.
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Well, a good number agreed because there was a payout of $100 billion mentioned.
So where's the agreement? (Score:3)
I've read about a dozen articles now, and every single one talks about there being a final agreement (some say a "rulebook") and talks in broad contours about the contents, but not a single one suggests that anyone has a copy of what was actually negotiated/agreed upon. That's more than a bit interesting given the broad range of documents that routinely get leaked to the press and the stupefyingly broad worldwide implications of this particular document.
Cant depend on the leaders. (Score:2)
again, another joke (Score:3)
In addition, we did to require that no additional coal is burned than what we currently do.
And if Nat Gas replaces coal, then again, it should be no more than 90% of CO2 from the old coal plant.
IOW, no additional burning of fossil fuel, while at the same time, when new places replace old ones, the new plants should either burn slightly less coal, or nat gas that is less CO2 than the coal that it replaces.
And no, this agreement does NOTHING for this.
Another agreement many of the signers will ignore (Score:2)
What a sham ... signers of the Paris treaty didn't follow up with their promises. What makes one think this one will be any different.
Meanwhile, China and India continue to blast out all the CO2 they want under the excuse they need to grow their economy. While the US is chastised even though it is reducing CO2 emissions.
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"No climate agreement without both China and the US can work."
What do you mean by work? Is this what the agreement is about?
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I feel like you're trolling me. Goal: cap global warming at 2 degrees. To attain goal, cooperation of China and US are required.
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I guess my point was that as long as some countries are reducing and giving a good example by doing so, then the agreement they signed, to hopefully help cap global warming at 2 degrees, is working to help reduce global warming.
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Suppose your basement just started flooding. You setup a pump to empty the water at a rate of 1 liter per second. Then someone else sets up a pump to fill your basement at 2 liters a second.
In that context your pump is still helping reduce the damage, it's still working.
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We could, you know, actually do something about poverty?
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Reverse progress is what we're seeing. No more school lunches. Far fewer grants for college education. Rather than fix urban blight, we have cities approving new construction projects for upper middle class gated communities.
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"Without poor people, who will do the work?"
Our economic systems requires poverty to function. In order to fix one, you gotta toss the other.
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:-) Ah yes, fuck the poor!
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Well you're right. If you don't sell your soul, you're pretty much fucked in this world.
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Good luck with your janitor employing tech venture.
You understand that nobody is going to invest and why?
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I hire based on value of work. GGP pretends he hires based on 'value as a human being'. He's deluded to think he can know, but 'virtue signaling moron'.
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Sounds like you *talk to the animals*, but I never said you have to hire bad workers, You're just expected to treat all people humanely regardless of their economic worth, if you want to be considered something other than a sociopathic animal looking for a fast buck.
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This whole discussion started with 'if you want useful work, hire someone with a history of doing useful work'.
You choose to disagree with that. Using a janitor as an example. BTW Janitors do useful work, it's just paid for shit as anyone could do it.
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I'm not 'society'. I hire based on value to _me_.
Never trust anyone who claims to be a judge of 'value to society'. Especially nolife, worthless to everyone including themselves, trolls.
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I'm not 'society'.
Like it or not, yes, you are... until you cease to interact and leave. You're are not in isolation.
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Wiping ass is good money for the incompetent. All supply and demand. Some of the best paying mechanic work is working on trash trucks. It's the 'trash juice' they get to roll around in that makes it better paid.
People need to eat. Duh. Doesn't change a thing about how useless most poors are.
The ones that stay poor are too good to wipe ass. Why they're still poor and why wiping ass is relatively well paid.
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Also as an American in Brazil, we produced probably double the trash or more than our neighbors...... no
Re: Chile banned plastic bags too (Score:2)
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Or they could use something called a "lunchbox" and something called "reusable shopping bags" just like many people do.
Re: Chile banned plastic bags too (Score:2)
You mean like in the shithole which is San Fran which surprise, surprise had a massive hepatitis outbreak after plastic bags were banned?
Re:Chile banned plastic bags too (Score:5, Insightful)
Some of those bags, a tiny fraction, are used for carrying lunches or taking out trash or whatever. Most just find their way to landfills. Now you have to intentionally buy the bags you're specifically going to use. I see that as a win. Go boo hoo back to "I hate change" shack.
You tell'em Francois! (Score:2, Funny)
I live in hot ass Florida with all those hurricanes! And it's aggravating to see Chewbacca in Star Wars with all that fur! It makes me feel even hotter!
And as we can see, my argument PROVES that Global Warming is a Hoax because Chewbacca has all the fur and he couldn't have it if the Global Warming Hoax wasn't real!!
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I drive a gas guzzler. In fact I've been driving it since 2006.
Thing is, I work from home and only have to drive to the office once a month. And while I do have to use it for practical purposes and such (groceries, etc), I'm not the type to putz around driving "for fun" on weekends. It's 12 years old, and the odometer just turned 86,000km early this year. A tank of gas typically lasts me a month and a half.
I have a neighbor driving a Prius, and he got a tax credit for buying a hybrid. His car has burne
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Quit slacking and install some race parts on your motor.
Re: Only One Thing Needed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Only One Thing Needed (Score:1)
BS. Absence of a tax to pay for things you think people should is not the same as presence of a subsidy.
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Still an improvement. I've heard 'them' claim a tax on gasoline was a subsidy. Not just some random /.er, a citation counted gas tax as subsidy.
Re: Only One Thing Needed (Score:4, Informative)
https://www.treasury.gov/open/... [treasury.gov]
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Better than the other one.
Still lists business expenses as subsidies, rather than the difference in present value between expensing and amortizing. Lots of industries have those kinds of rules.
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Most people missed it, but we just had a major event that told us exactly where the breaking point of people of a major Western country that is widely invested in cutting CO2 emissions is.
Yellow jackets. That increase in fuel taxes to fund fighting global warming was too much for the people.
Re:Ha. Poor countries agree to loot the rich (Score:5, Insightful)
The fuel tax increase did not happen in a vacuum. Macron's government reduced taxes on the wealthy. The contrast between reduced taxes for the wealthy and increased taxes for ordinary people added to the motivation for the yellow jackets.
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Who in France needs more and constant support from the French tax payers?
Re:Ha. Poor countries agree to loot the rich (Score:4, Insightful)
But none of the actions you mention caused the reaction. Fuel tax however did. Don't forget that international coverage didn't really start until Yellow jackets got really big.
And what caused it was the fuel tax. Sure, once the fire was lit, and started burning in a manner visible to people outside the Yellow jacket protests, you started getting many jumping on the bandwagon (citation: that idiotic, self-contradictory manifesto some members released).
But what got people to the breaking point and over it wasn't taxes on the wealthy, nor the contrast. What got the people to the breaking point and over it was the fact that they could no longer afford a reasonable lifestyle outside major cities because fuel costs got too high.
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That's like saying that building a pile of wood, then adding gasoline didn't cause a fire and the only thing that caused the fire was lighting it.
Revolutions are never entirely about the final event just before the revolution.
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I didn't make the claim you're implying I made. Intentional misunderstanding of a clearly outlined point is the last defence of someone who doesn't have any arguments left.
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This seems to be the problem in descriptors. Traditional left wing is socialist and globalist. Traditional right wing is capitalist and nationalist.
So how do we rate Macron, who's globalist and capitalist? Those who are far enough on the left to classify "right = bad" classify him a right winger because of his economic policy. Those far enough on the right to classify "left = bad" classify him as a left winger because of his internationalist policy.
Can we simply agree that correct descriptors in this case a
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We are ashamed of you and your ilk.