Paris climate deal: US and China announce ratification | Hacker News Reader

Paris climate deal: US and China announce ratification

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We'll see how this turns out, since it seems this agreement

1. allows each country to set its own reduction goals

2. has no consequences if a country fails to meet its goals

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Agreement#Nationally_det...

Yes, agreeing to do something is very easy compared to actually doing it.

It is interesting how everyone can pass the blame for emissions. In Australia there is an argument from some that even though we are the highest polluter by capita our net emissions are low enough that it doesn't really matter what we do.

A country like India or China could then turn that around a say if other countries that have a very high standard of life won't do anything then why should we.

putting blame aside, the behaviour isn't particularly surprising if we assume that people are more or less rationally looking out for their own interests:

it's not in my own interest to reduce my consumption and emissions. it's very much in my own interest for all of you to reduce your consumption and emissions.

it's easy for me to change my own behaviour, but very hard for me to coerce you to change your behaviour against your own interests.

it is in my interest to support global regulation of everyone's consumption and emissions, including my own, provided i believe i will gain more than i lose by participating.

But it's a false dilemma. Ultimately, it's possible to reduce our emissions without reducing consumption, either of energy or resources.

The coal lobby has done a good job of making renewables look like they're a significantly different way of life. At the end of the day your aircon will still run whether it's powered by coal, nuclear, solar, wind, hydro or literally anything else that can push electrons. Where the power comes from has very little effect on the utility of that power.

Well China started investing in renewables some time ago and are now adding almost half the world renewables. The reality is though climate change can't be changed or reversed by capitalism fast enough. And because of the financial crisis over the last few years the developed world probably doest have the money it needs to finance the developing worlds energy needs. The next 1-2 billion people from Asia Africa will start using electricity a few times more than what they are now and the developed world curtailing their emissions wont be enough.

You are perfectly correct each person (or each state) following its self interest leads in this case logically to a slow motion disaster

Ethics, especially a la Kant, can help to address this shortcoming.

"Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law"

I like eating meal every day, but I cannot wish that this become the universal diet (especially of those 1b Indians). Therefore my ethical compass tell me to alter my food habits

I recall a recent UK Prime Minister (Tony Blair) saying exactly the same thing.

Classic free-rider problem.

Your sentence is a bit ambiguous: was he shifting the blame, or frustrated at all the blame-shifting going on?

Frustrated at the blame shifting and calling for global action. Climate change is one area his govenment had a reasonable record. They put in place many policies to promote better emmissions, subsidise alternative energy and efficiency. They missed a couple of targets they publicy set themselves, but did make good progress towards them.

The Tories pretty much scrapped the lot the moment they got in power and are now full speed ahead trying to force fracking as the future. In locations far enough from London to not care tuppence about.

I will still make that argument, why should a poor guy living in isolated tribal land in India find his dream of basic electricity a bit farther, while people in Europe can take the moral high ground and still pollute nearly an order of magnitude than an Indian.

Also the pollution in the last two-three centuries has been primarily First World led. Tell me how can Im as an Indian, tell the guy that he will have to wait some more time till we can get him to a basic living standard because cheaper options to get you there are off the table.

Per capita human emissions should be equal within reasonable bounds of geographical needs?

There's what's fair, and there's saving the planet.

Except you need the Indian and Chinese person to accept a worse quality of life for the cuts to work. It's tough to make that argument when it doesn't feel fair (and even tougher to get it to stick)

If weather patterns change to the point that agriculture collapses the poor jealous Indian villagers won't be any better off.

It's unfortunately true that you need to get them to accept a slightly stunted quality of life. But expecting him/her/them to do that without leading by example and also making sacrifices is the highest order of duchebaggery.

Dont say "saving the planet". The planet will be here for a long (long) time. No matter how hot or cold it ll be.

Fine, saving civilization. Saving the environment. In the case of India, saving their kids... What's 2 more Celsius going to mean for droughts and heatwaves in India? Worst-case scenario we're talking about hundreds of millions f refugees fleeing countries that are no longer suitable for human habitation.

I'd say humans are much more resilient than you think, and Indians probably even more so, because they are used to hard life.

Or, to say it another way, many parts of India or other countries at this latitude have never been "suitable for human habitation" compared to e.g. France and her tempered climate. But humans adapted to this place, and will adapt to 2 degrees more if needs be.

This pedantry is not constructive.

I'm not sure it's pedantry. We're so used to the pretty Hollywood storyline that I think people assume that any climate issue will just turn out okay in the end. But of course, Nature doesn't have the capacity for happy endings — that's a human construction. We could easily become nothing but a footnote in the history of the planet, if we're not careful here.

Pretty much every species which has roamed the planet has gone extinct. Nature is tough. I think that's the point of emphasizing the phrasing.

Allocating every country the same per-capita quota of emission would be both fair, _and_ would save the planet, if the quota is low enough and exchangeable. But that would imply that we, the high per-capita polluting countries would pay money to poor countries like India to buy their excess quota.

Fair would also be to impose a maximum fertility rate. When the fertility rate is off the charts for the developing countries, unfair is the per capita quota.

If the goal is for humanity to survive on this planet, then clearly an exponential growth in population isn't sustainable. More fair would be to have quotas per square meter actually.

Sure let's have quotas per sq meter of arable land adjusted for number of crops you can grow in a year? Or better still on yield of the soil. Makes more sense than a straight per sq m quota.

A voter living in squalor may not see it the same way, especially when the more fortunate ones are not making the same sacrifices.

I doubt many are suggesting they do wait more time, just that they do it a bit better.

It is in the interests of Indians, as well as the rest of the globe, to try and short-cut past a lot of development that went on in the first world - precisely to avoid the horrific pollution that resulted from our lack of knowledge or greed. The first world should be assisting this.

By avoiding a lot of the smoke-stack development that the West went through they'd end up in a better overall place.

Meanwhile developing nations need to stop accepting our old crap (ships for scrapping, old TVs, stuff collected via roadside "recycling" such as UK cardboard) for disassembly on beaches. The sooner the First World owns the whole problem, the better.

You're pretending there is no a trade-off here, and that just isn't true.

Not at all. Hence my feeling the West should be assisting in making this happen - it's as much in our interests too after all.

You can't "do it a bit better" without human sacrifice today. At any level of first world assistance, that trade-off exists.

For that poor guy living in isolated tribal land in India, the cheapest, easiest, and most direct path to electricity - by far - is solar panels.

Burning coal also contributes heavily to air pollution, which is already terrible in Indian cities. And air pollution isn't just a minor unpleasantness - it has a real impact on life expectancy.

Europe, America, and China are taking real steps to limit their greenhouse emissions. It's working, albeit very slowly. If India and the rest of the developing world don't follow suit, it's going to be a sad story.

If climate change gets worse it's not going to be rich people in London and New York getting hit with droughts, famine, tsunamis, etc.

It's really in their own best interest to take it more seriously.

The senate hasn't ratified it, which is required by the constitution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_Clause

If we're lucky a bunch of climate deniers will be voted out of the Senate this election and the balance tips.

What is denial?

Believing that it's work 1-5 trillion dollars by 2050 to reduce 2100 temperatures by 0.05C?

Believing that climate models which fail to match past or current trends are accurate enough to restructure the global economy? (Compare modeled and measured temperature trends of early 20th and early 21st centuries)

Both sides are guilty of talking past each other, ignoring ("denying") evidence that doesnt agree with their previous opinions, and overstating the strength of the evidence they see.

(I tend to fit in the "lukewarm" camp - my reading of the evidence and scientific research is that the earth has warmed, continues to warm, is affected by human activities, but that the warming and the human impact are routinely overstated or ignored by the warring advocates. Much less so by the actual scientists doing the research)

Actually, the current science shows that impacts are routinely understated. BTW, I'm not a warming "advocate" - this implies some sort of cheerleading. I simply follow the science.

What evidence would convince you it is a large problem? Massive dieoff of coral reefs worldwide? A cruise ship from Alaska to New York?

What evidence would broaden your perspective?

Coral reef recovery in the heat damaged areas since 1998 "massive die off"? Similar arctic melt and temperatures in early 20th century? Significantly warmer Greenland temperatures in the last 1000 years?

There is a lot of evidence on both sides that activists actively ignore or rationalize.

Coral reefs: "the current global coral bleaching event is the longest ever recorded" http://coralreefwatch.noaa.gov/satellite/analyses_guidance/g...

Arctic melt: "there is no precedent as far back as 1850 for the 21st century's minimum ice extent of sea ice on the pan-Arctic scale" http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1931-0846.2016....

Greenland: I haven't seen temperature numbers specifically for Greenland but it probably has to do with the medieval warm period, and we're warmer then that now. http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/globalwarming/medieval.html

Citations?

>Believing that it's work 1-5 trillion dollars by 2050 to reduce 2100 temperatures by 0.05C?

Don't worry, the exodus coming from rising ocean levels is going to cost way more than 5 trillion dollars. And not distributed over 35 years.

Agreed.

A few years ago I visited L'Ans aux Meadows. It's the only known viking settlement in the new world. The logs that were used to build it were grown in a time that is warmer than today. All the trees up there these days are quite small in comparison since they grow so much more slowly. There's all kinds of things like this that can be pointed at.

I do know one thing though. Labeling people 'deniers' or other derogatory things indicates only one thing - that the name caller is unable to articulate a reasonable argument.

So ~10x the amount TARP was authorised for, but spread around the world and over 35 years instead of all at once?

That's the point. This is Obama scoring points with the most gullible parts of his base. If there was any chance of it actually mattering he wouldn't have done it.

This is standard lame-duck presidential politics, making grandstanding moves that have no consensus to actually be carried out and leaving the messy details of actual politics to their successor and/or congress.

Climate deals in particular have a history of meaningless promises like this that won't ever be implemented, going back at least to Kyoto (which was signed by Bill Clinton, to no effect)

If anything, a signature on this deal without a plan for ratification and implementation is a defeat, an acknowledgement that real action isn't possible so symbolism will have to do.

The agreement was formulated as part of an existing treaty which was already ratified by Congress. This gave the administration enough legal room to move forward on the emissions targets without requiring Senate approval. However, it does nothing to bind the next administration unlike a full treaty change.

This is great news. China is and needs to be a major player in all climate change negotiations.

What was their position prior to this? What changed to make this happen? Really curious.

I am guessing that the fact that they very visibly _see_ pollution might have something to do with it. Those that were in Beijing when things got bad with smog know -- after spending a day outside and coming home, you'd find your nose to have black debris. It's a really unsettling thing especially if you're not used to it. Beijing has gotten a lot better recently, the joke is that it's because the Politburo leaders mostly live in Beijing and if affects them the most.

> after spending a day outside and coming home, you'd find your nose to have black debris.

Travelling in to London zone 1 still does this for me, and yes it was unsettling when I first moved to London...

This has never happened to me. Is it possible it's nothing to do with being in central London but due to dust and debris in the tube system? The amount of stuff that gets blown around in the air in the deep level lines is blinding if you don't look away as a train approaches.

China used to be the go-to place for cheap labor and manufacturing.

Now that they're richer than before,

Low-tech and highly pollutive manufacturing has moved to other countries like Vietnam, Bangladesh. [0]

They're willing to pay more for the environment.[1]

[0]: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/23/business/international/chi...

[1]: http://qz.com/769957/chinese-people-want-renewable-energy-mo...

Environmental stewardship is actually something that economists refer to as a luxury good --- it's something you'll start purchasing the more disposable money you have. Which makes sense, if I have to choose between starvation and air pollution, I'll take air pollution. Now my belly is full, but I can't breath? Now maybe I'll think about spending some money on cleaner air. That's why I find the West's scolding of developing economies for environmental degradation to be hypocritical. If we really care, then we'll give those countries the money to preserve their environment.

It shouldn't be a zero-sum game where you have to choose between starvation and air pollution. The west did not go about industrial development in an environmentally friendly way and that only increases the onus on the developing countries to learn from their mistakes, instead of repeating them.

The west hasn't ceased industrial development, and we'd be remiss to pretend that we have. The fact that we've outsourced a lot of the costs to China and then to other countries doesn't change the fact that we extract growth from dumping toxins and pollutants into the environment.

If we want to preach learning from mistakes, we should take our privileged position and lead the charge. We do the opposite of that, externalizing the costs of ongoing industrialization to societies that can least afford the costs.

The ultimate math is a zero-sum game. Industrialization produces efficiency and waste, and a lot of the meaningful waste comes in the form of harm to our future environment. We haven't actually devised a way to produce industrial goods without producing massive byproducts that harm people somewhere.

Until we have, the best course of action we can take is to reduce consumption. But so far we've done the opposite.

> The ultimate math is a zero-sum game.

It is most definitely not a zero sum game so far, but there certainly are losers.

>externalizing the costs of ongoing industrialization to societies that can least afford the costs.

We regulate pollution, China mostly doesn't. It's not clear to me what policy you think the West should adopt to fix this.

Tax imports of products that pollute as part of their manufacturing process. There, this both evens the paying field, creates an incentive for everyone to play ball, and promotes non-polluting economic growth.

That's reasonable, but hard to enact without inviting retaliation. I'm not sure if the resulting retaliation would make the overall policy a net win or loss.

The west doesn't really do more than hand wrong China on the environment, and why should they? China is basically destroying their country so they can make cheap junk for the west! I mean, where else can they process rare earth elements so cheaply? Why China continues to do this at this point is a mystery, but the west isn't complaining much. Perhaps the CCP is afraid of moving to a consumer driven economy, people whose lifestyles are raised too much begin demanding political rights....

Honestly, if China wants to avoid complete environmental collapse, they'll have to drastically change their ways soon. You can say the west did it and survived, but the west didn't have 1.4 billion people doing it with the level of toxicity of a modern economy. The brink China is at now (and India is approaching) is unprecedented.

It's funny because we produce more pollution per capita in the US (even if China produces more overall).

Because the level of life of US citizens is much higher on average. The wealthier you are the more you consume and therefore pollute.

I think the problem (for Chinese people) is that China ha much more dense population than the US.

The US has more arable land, so can be a net food exporter, though we have to wonder if China's almonds are worth so much California water during a drought. But otherwise the rest of our net exports are fairly high value, airplanes and IP so to speak, and have low environmental impact.

I must be misunderstanding you - you're not saying that US industry has a low environmental impact are you?

Export industries in the states have lower environmental impact than those in China. For example, the environmental impact of IP, e.g. Software development, is pretty low. Making an airplane is also low impact on a dollar-dollar basis (they have an impact, but it is well amatorized in the price). China, in turn, does $2 of environmental damage to make $1 in profit.

Software development depends on Chinese pollution. It's difficult to say what the cost of software would be if we had to pay full price for the externalities involved in computer manufacturing.

But the Chinese are paying those cost, not us. My point is exactly that China is pooping on their environment mostly for our westerner benefits. It is weird that they stand for it, but the current government doesn't feel like they have a choice.

I'm surprised that making aircraft are is low impact. Things like smelting aluminium are pretty bad. However there is more to a plane than aluminium and more to US industry than aircraft.

The airplanes don't so much have low impact, rather they have a high sales price. Divide it out and it works out well enough. Airplanes have a lot of IP going into them.

Also, there is a good reason Boeing setup originally in Seattle. The smelting of aluminum is much cheaper when an abundance of surplus hydroelectricity is available.

Smelting wouldn't really count as an environmentally friendly activity, but having a relatively low impact source of electricity helps. Interesting regarding their location, thanks.

Production produces pollution, people dont. Per capita pollution is mostly similar to per capita GDP.

The manufacturing centers of China do not employ 1.4 billion people. Lets stop exagerating please. China is still rural at ita core despite a few regions with massive cities.

I didn't make that claim, only that China has a population of 1.4 billion. Chase your shaggy dog elsewhere.

China is now majority urban (more people live in cities than on rural land) and has been for a few years now.

China's urban population is over 740 million[1]. For perspective the USA is almost 260 million[2]. I don't think your assumption holds up in the modern world. Maybe 20 years ago.

https://www.quandl.com/data/WORLDBANK/CHN_SP_URB_TOTL-China-...

https://www.quandl.com/data/WORLDBANK/USA_SP_URB_TOTL-United...

thats still half of China's population. Thats basically still a country in transition from a rural era to an industrial one. In any developed country the percentage of folks living in cities is way higher.

Census in 2000 in the US reported 79% of Americans living in Urban Areas. It is surely even higher now.

It's still wrong to call a country with over half its population in cities "rural at its core". It isn't transitioning from a 'rural era' either. It's more urbanized than Slovakia, Romania, Slovenia, and several other developed countries[1].

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_by_country

Even your Wikipedia link confirms what I said earlier. China is the bottom half for urbanization globally. Morocco is more urbanized than China, and I've never heard of anyone describing Morocco as an urbanized country. So this is really your bias at work. I have travelled in China several times and as soon as you go outside of the large cities, you'll see great poverty and rural life everywhere. It's changing, but it will take time to move hundred of millions of people to the cities.

It doesn't confirm that China is 'rural at its core' at all. When more than half the world lives in urban centers then being in the bottom half doesn't mean anything. If over half a country lives in urban centers then you simply can't call the country 'rural at its core'. It has a massive rural population, but it isn't 'rural at its core'.

To make an edit: I think we're arguing over semantics of terms at this point. I don't think we're actually disagreeing about anything important. I never asked for China to be called urbanized (although I would use that term if forced to use one or the other), just that calling it 'rural at its core' doesn't hold up anymore. If you still think that statement holds true, then I'm sorry that we're going to have different definitions of that term.

What's the point of having your belly full if you have asthma or get cancer at 30 or not have water to drink?

You're making a false dichotomy there, these countries are polluted not necessarily because they are more productive that way, or because it raises the standards of living, but more because of corruption. By saying that other countries should pay up, you're basically saying that other countries should pay for their corruption.

The problem is that we are all in this together. What India does in its territory affects me in Europe, so I'm left wondering why I should pay for that. And don't give me the per capita stats, when they have had a serious natality problem.

I have a better idea. What is hypocritical is for the west to have regulations, but then to allow imports from countries that don't. If this has no other solution, then the logical path is to tax or ban those imports. Wouldn't that be more fair?

> What's the point of having your belly full if you have asthma or get cancer at 30 or not have water to drink?

Making it to 30 as a member of your nation's populace is a better deal for your nation than starvation and food riots. When it comes to citizenry, nations have a weird, unspoken incentive to keep you alive and in the workforce so as to exploit your output. That's not sarcasm or pessimism; one just doesn't often think about it in that simple of terms, but that thought process is a useful illustration around the point you're making. I'm not well educated in economics but I'd wager this is a concept of some kind that is known.

Belly full is near the top of critical sovereign state priorities. Environment is near the bottom. That's not really a dichotomy, one just has to understand the incentives for a nation. If a nation can work you for twenty years that's a start, and helps build the budget for 30, then 40, then clean air. And so on.

> if I have to choose between starvation and air pollution, I'll take air pollution

Exactly this is driving the push for GMO food crops in Asia and Africa. I have a few biologist friends who've been around on field trips and conferences, meeting people who are absolutely outraged at how certain people in the West are trying to ban/sabotage GMO food.

If you have the choice between mass starvation and death versus maybe hurting some part of the local ecosystem, it's really a no-brainer.

China wasn't inclined to join climate deals when the US wouldn't

Their is little evidence that their position has changed on the ground. Green peace says China is still building a ton of coal. http://energydesk.greenpeace.org/2016/07/13/china-keeps-buil...

Their position on CO2 hasn't changed all that much. The major issue for them is particulates and other side effects from burning coal. However, switching to renewables and/or anything non-coal is something that would also help with the air quality problem they have. And there's been alot of diplomacy pushing them towards that anyway so why not sign up.

Not long ago I saw a documentary about a Chinese entrepreneur that started a "clean coal" company, by doing a SpaceX, redesigning plants from scratch, he claimed to be near pollution free (implying other plants pollute only because of naive careless design, not physics). I wonder if the claims are proven and if it influenced China decision.

I guess he was talking about soot and other aerosols. That's huge for air quality, but climate change is primarily driven by the fundamental law of coal burning: C + O_2 -> CO_2. If he managed to reduce the emission of sulfate aerosols (a likely target, since those are the primary cause of smog and acid rain) he is actually making the warming problem worse:

http://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2008/06/common-climate...

This should make #1 on HN. Oh, sure, there are many doubts as to how and when this will actually be implemented, but still, it's a great step forward. We are finally starting to do something about the fact, that our grandchildren will not have a planet to live on, and even our children might be affected.

depends, they get to set the goals and they don't get penalized if they don't. its not a treaty.

if the numbers get set to per capita then they will be bullshit numbers and we effectively have zero progress.

Not to dismiss the seriousness of climate change, but "our grandchildren won't have a planet to live on" is a completely unfounded assertion with no roots in reality. Humans are vastly good at adapting.

Also, humans have a good history of taking too much to time to do the right thing (slaves, women rights, gay rights). Added to that, there are gigantic economic forces slowing down the change this time. I'm sure human will thrive at least for the next centuries, but the current mass extinction is a sad thing.

You couldn't stand mentioning the woman's rights and gay rights as rights stuff... How are you sure those are the right thing? I think your ideology should not be mixed into scientific topics, as climate change.

I don't brag about my religion in the topic, nor should you.

Women and homosexuals arent human enough to be accorded rights given to every heterosexual male?

We are currently over using the earth's resources by a factor of 1.5. If everyone on earth lived like people in the US do, we'd already need five planets [1]. I wish I could share your optimism, but it seems like nothing much is done to change this. The Paris agreement is at least a step in the right direction. Let's hope more will follow.

[1] http://m.phys.org/news/2009-11-mankind-earth-resources-alarm...

Well, we may or may not be overusing the planet's resources; people have been saying that since Malthus in 1798, when the world population was less than 1 billion. The fact remains that global food production per capita has been consistently growing since 1960, at a rate of about 0.5% per year.

However, this is entirely unrelated to climate change caused by CO2 emissions, which is what the Paris agreement covers.

Unfortunately, the article you cite attempts to conflate the two, and freely admits that most of their "ecological footprint" is down to CO2 emissions. This is quite literally comparing apples and oranges, and dressing it up in fancy language to make it pass peer review.

I imagine the Easter Islanders were similarly convinced as they felled the last tree.

We're using resources at an unprecedented and thoroughly unsustainable rate, and we're not slowing. So unless we have a few spare planets lined up...

The Easter Islanders were not hit just by consequences of deforestation, but simultaneously by invasive rat species and overpopulation, while being one of the most remote islands in the world.

Plenty of other island nations have seen similar mass deforestation, like Iceland, Sicily and New Zealand, without disastrous consequences.

I'm not saying we should all party on and waste all we can, but this nonsense of "we need five planets" etc. is just that, nonsense. It muddies up the debate, especially when it's based on an arbitrarily weighted sum of different ecological impacts to compute a "total footprint".

I've seen that theory, and it seems to be just that, rather than the consensus. Regardless environmental destruction and overpopulation are now global so either analogy still applies.

As for number of planets anything >1 is a problem, but it seems a reasonable means of helping the public visualise the issue, just as the media use busses or football fields for comparative measure.

As you might have noticed, I didn't write "our grandchildren won't live", just that they "won't have a planet to live on". I'm sure they will adapt. It's just that they won't be able to experience the same green planet that we do.

http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/avoid.html

It hasn't been ratified in the US. The lame duck Obama administration may have agreed to it, but it still needs to pass the senate by a two thirds vote before it becomes a treaty and binding on the US in any way. I doubt that they will even bother submitting it.

Can any climate scientists comment on the 2C degree number and what it entails?

There's a paper from 2014 that frames global warming in terms of global cumulative CO2 emissions. By that metric we can fix a global cumulative CO2 emission budget that has a decent chance of limiting warming to +2C. As of 2014 we had used 2/3rds of that budget, with the remaining 1/3 of the budget projected to be used up in 30 years if global emissions continued at the 2014 level.

I find it unrealistic that temperature increase will be limited to +2C, that would require serious efforts and a change in focus and behaviour that to date has not been observed.

In terms of the impact, there was a conference in 2009 focusing on +4C scenarios that might be worth a look at. [2]

(i am not a climate scientist, but there are plenty of articles written by climate scientists)

[1] - https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/bitstream/handle/10871/2...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4_Degrees_and_Beyond_Internati...

It seems bbc can't get math right - increase of 2 degrees Celsium doesn't equal increase of 36 degrees Fahrenheit

35.6 degree Fahrenheit then.

Wrong. Anyway bbc fixed it by removing any complex Celsium to Fahrenheit conversions :)

while we're at correcting things:

it's celsius not celsium :)

Celsius, not Celsium.

1 diff C = 1.8 diff F, so 3.6.

Meanwhile fslr, spwr, jks, csiq all sit near 52 week & longer lows.

The stock market thinks that solar power won't happen -- or at least the next year will be rough for solar due to a drop-off in demand.

All these agreements are worthless. The question is, will there be a technology that prevents earth from heating up from burning fossil fuels.

We have the technology for large scale carbon capture, that's no problem. The problem is that carbon capture is pure cost, no gain (measurable on a company balance sheet).

To solve this, we need a global carbon tax, probably close to $100/ton. For reference, US emissions per capita is ~17 tons.

> To solve this, we need a global carbon tax, probably close to $100/ton. For reference, US emissions per capita is ~17 tons.

This seems... remarkably affordable. For the US, this is less than TARP. We really need to get our act together.

There is. Constructing nuclear power at the same rate as France did successfully in 70s and 80s would be a big part of the solution.

France constructed 40+ reactors for population of 60 million in ~20 years. If we did same everywhere, we could build ~9000 reactors in 40 years. If one reactor would be on average 1000MW, producing roughly 8TWh yearly, we would get 72000TWh from the nuclear power alone. That is about a half of world's current energy production (155,000TWh).

This would be of course a gigantic political and engineering project, but no major new scientific or technical breakthrough would be needed.

For a start, there are bikes...

No deal an American president makes is binding until approved by the Senate. Wake me up when that happens.

If you'd actually read about this, you would see that the agreement is binding as it was made within the framework of an existing treaty. However, it may not be binding on the next administration unless ratified by the Senate.

Meanwhile Donald Trump promises he'll get the USA out of this agreement when he gets to be dictator... [0] http://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2016-36401174

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