Trump pulling out of Paris agreement

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Another repercussion, Sterman says, is potential retaliation from other countries, which could also leave the Paris Agreement or punish the US in some way. "It's not that far-fetched to imagine a scenario where China, in response to the US pulling out ... implements a carbon tax on all goods exported from the US to China, and others nations could follow suit," Sterman said.

This prospect reportedly led several fossil-fuel companies, including ExxonMobil and the coal-mining group Cloud Peak Energy, to urge the president to stay in the agreement. Sterman said coal, gas, and oil companies knew that while they may be restricted slightly by the Paris Agreement, they could lose their seat at the international negotiating table — with China, India, the European Union, and other world powers — if the US pulled out of the accord..

How leaving the Paris Climate Agreement could affect the US - Business Insider

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Blaming China here is in this case fact free.. They have an enormous pollution problem that kills 1.1 million people a year and threatens open revolt. They're compelled to act, and are doing so with a barrage of clean energy initiatives, creating world beating industries and millions of jobs in the process..

The president's view of China is outdated. Here's what Trump left out:

China is already ahead of schedule. As we reported in March 2016, Chinese emissions may have actually peaked in 2014, and if those emissions didn't peak in 2014, researchers say, they definitely will by 2025, years ahead of China's official 2030 goal. Chinese coal consumption dropped 3.7 percent in 2015, marking two years in a row that coal use in the country declined. That meant 2015 was the first year in 15 years that carbon emissions dropped in China, according to the World Resources Institute.

China is far surpassing the US on investment to create clean energy jobs. In February, China announced that it would spent $361 billion over the next couple of years to create 13 million green jobs, according to the country's National Energy Administration.

China is winning on clean energy technology. In 2016, a Chinese firm topped a global ranking for wind energy production for the first time, beating America's General Electric. China leads the world in solar energy production—and has done so for some time. (Go inside one of the world's biggest solar manufacturing plants with me, here.)

This year China is slated to launch the world's biggest national carbon trading market—stitching together seven pilot carbon trading markets which have been up and running since 2013.

China overtook the US as the world's biggest market for electric vehicles in 2015—and has a big plans for expansion. "We are convinced China will become the leading market for electro-mobility," said Volkswagen brand chief Herbert Diess at a recent Shanghai car show.

Trump Railed Against China While Abandoning Paris. His Views Are Wildly Outdated. | Mother Jones

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Something to keep in mind, it isn't all bad news:

U.S. gross greenhouse gas emissions have been declining since 2000 and look set to keep falling, according to the above chart nicked from The Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street team.

This is happening because of “factors outside of any president’s control: slower economic growth following the financial crisis, the shale gas revolution that has replaced a third of coal use and shifting driving habits,” writes Heard columnist Spencer Jakab.

Other pundits agree that market forces — such as higher adoption of green energy, cheaper natural gas — will pull down greenhouse gases more effectively than any international pledges could do.

“If renewable energy is truly the wave of the future, America will be involved, treaty or no treaty, because sensible people will want to buy new technology if it’s any good,” writes Scragged.com blogger Petrarch.

The technology and economics of green energy have each hit a tipping point — making it cheaper and more attractive to investors — and that matters more than Paris deal politics, says MarketWatch’s Tim Mullaney.

Trump’s Paris pullout won’t be a game changer, say markets-minded pundits - MarketWatch

The point is that policies can speed up or slow down this process, given the seriousness of the threat of climate change, speeding up is a lot better..

Then there is the point what effect the US pulling out might have on the efforts of others.

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Some more good news:

Studies have shown that many climate deniers are not incorrigible, but in fact are surprisingly open to new viewpoints. A recent experiment from Yale University researchers Sander van der Linden and Anthony Leiserowitz, and George Mason’s Edward Maibach found that simply telling people “97% of climate scientists have concluded that human-caused global warming is happening” is enough to increase their confidence that climate change is real.

What’s more, both liberals and conservatives shifted their views equally after learning this fact. Even people who were avid watchers of Fox News became more receptive to the idea of man-made global warming, suggesting that at least some climate skeptics are simply misinformed, not willfully oblivious.

Fox News actually acknowledged that climate change is real - Vox

However..

Part of the problem is that the American media has done a bad job of explaining climate science. According to the survey, only a quarter of liberals and only 5 percent of conservatives were aware that more than 90 percent of climate scientists believe climate change is real and that it is caused by people. The widespread “public confusion and doubt about the state of scientific agreement has limited action on global warming for decades,” the researchers argue.

Fox News actually acknowledged that climate change is real - Vox

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Here is Krugman. lol.

While it isn’t about coal jobs, right-wing anti-environmentalism is in part about protecting the profits of the coal industry, which in 2016 gave 97 percent of its political contributions to Republicans..


Pay any attention to modern right-wing discourse — including op-ed articles by top Trump officials — and you find deep hostility to any notion that some problems require collective action beyond shooting people and blowing things up. 

Beyond this, much of today’s right seems driven above all by animus toward liberals rather than specific issues. If liberals are for it, they’re against it. If liberals hate it, it’s good. Add to this the anti-intellectualism of the G.O.P. base, for whom scientific consensus on an issue is a minus, not a plus, with extra bonus points for undermining anything associated with President Barack Obama. 

And if all this sounds too petty and vindictive to be the basis for momentous policy decisions, consider the character of the man in the White House. Need I say more?

Economist's View: Paul Krugman: Trump Gratuitously Rejects the Paris Climate Accord

[Admin]

Hard to keep up..

Yesterday, President Donald Trump gave a speech announcing that the US would withdraw from the Paris climate agreement.

It is a remarkable address, in its own way, in that virtually every passage contains something false or misleading. The sheer density of bullshit is almost admirable, from a performance art perspective. Trump even managed to get in some howlers that had nothing to do with climate change. He started by citing an act of terrorism in Manila that wasn’t terrorism. He said, “our tax bill is moving along in Congress,” but there’s no tax bill. And so forth.

A proper fact-check would run longer than the speech itself. To keep this quick, I’ve selected the top five deceptions. A note: I’m not calling these “lies,” because that implies Trump knows they are false. It is far from clear that Trump understands anything about any of the issues at stake, or is even capable of forming stable beliefs as such (as I wrote here and here).

The 5 biggest deceptions in Trump’s Paris climate speech - Vox

The rest of the article is distinctly more depressing though, demonstrating a myriad ways in which the facts were raped.