WA, NY and CA Governors Announce Formation of United States Climate Alliance

It is scary how people, even on HN, go on a hating spree with out actually looking into these details. If you go on reddit, you see the same thing, but multiplied 10x.

It is a sickening display of how even "smart" communities, like HIN can harbour stupid behaviors and beliefs as long as the majority shares it....

This was all debated for years, so none of this should come as a surprise to anyone. We went into this eyes WIDE open.

China got a good deal, yeah, because it had leverage: it's the manufacturing capitol of the world. It could very easily have walked away with no commitments at all.

As for developing countries, of course we are going to ship our coal jobs over there - they can't afford to build renewables right now and must bootstrap with cheaper in-country energy stores like coal. Meanwhile we can afford the latter and should not be using dangerous and dirty methods just to save money.

100 billion over many years spread across dozens of countries really isn't that much. This is just another way for Trump to say we should be spending money on the US. We should, but we also have responsibilities to the rest of the world that predate all this stuff. We're part of a global community and he is trying to back out of it.

I seriously suspect his numbers in that last one are off or highly misleading. We should all watch for responses from those in know.

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2017/jun/01/...

China and India need to industrialize and modernize in order for them to transition to cleaner energy sources. Per capita, they produce only a fraction of what we do.

It's unrealistic to expect developing nations to shoulder the same burden as developed ones. The deal is weighted to put more on the countries that have modern economies able to make the transition. Idea being that western developed nations can transition into renewables far faster and make up for the developing world's inability to do so, and at least somewhat mitigating temperature rise.

There's a lot of false dichotomies in this. I haven't fact checked anything either but just addressing the points:

1) China: China is a developing nation, not on par in the US on any quality of life indicator. They still plow fields by hand or with oxen in a large area of the country. We are the most powerful nation on the planet. Obviously, there should be differences.

2) India: India has ~1B people, with about ~250M making like less than $5-10 dollars a day. They basically had no market economy until the 1980s. Again, comparing them to our responsibilities is laughable.

3) "In short, the agreement doesn’t eliminate coal jobs, it just transfers those jobs out of America and the United States, and ships them to foreign countries." This is an absurd comment. We aren't going to buy coal from China. Coal jobs have been dying in the US for decades and will continue to do so because we don't want to use coal. And "be allowed to" doesn't mean they will. China is also building more solar than anyone else in the world.

4) "In short, the agreement doesn’t eliminate coal jobs, it just transfers those jobs out of America and the United States, and ships them to foreign countries." Ok buddy.

5) "calls for developed countries to send $100 billion to developing countries all on top of America’s existing and massive foreign aid payments" - This is a leadership item. If you think as the richest nation in the world we should help the poorer countries find green, economic ways to grow, then what's the problem? Also, it's not like we don't interact with the other parts of the world and aren't affect if they are polluted. I'd take this more to heart if his words on "fixing stuff at home" had any of that in his actual budget. 200B over 10 years? right.

6) "two-tenths of one degree" - This is because we should have started this shit in the 70s. His fears are correct. This is a first step to more and more restrictions because we are altering the planet in ways that probably already can't be taken back. "14 days of carbon emissions from China alone would wipe out the gains from America" - so we should just not have any of our gains at all?

It's just so much "What do I get out of helping? What's in it for me?" rather than, "Hey, let's be leaders and lead by example and show the world that we, the USA, live up to our myths as the 'Good Guys'."

> The fact that the agreement only commits governments to keeping warming below an increase of 2 degrees, rather than a much safer firm target of 1.5 degrees, was lobbied for and won by the United States.

> The fact that the agreement left it to individual nations to determine how much they were willing to do to reach that temperature target, allowing them to come to Paris with commitments that collectively put us on a disastrous course towards more than 3 degrees of warming, was lobbied for and won by the United States.

> The fact that the agreement treats even these inadequate commitments as non-binding, which means governments apparently do not have anything to fear if they ignore their commitments, is something else that was lobbied for and won by the United States.

> The fact that the agreement specifically prohibits poor countries from seeking damages for the costs of climate disasters was lobbied for and won by the United States.

> The fact that it is an “agreement” or an “accord” and not a treaty — the very thing that makes it possible for Trump to stage his action-movie slow-mo walk away, world in flames behind him — was lobbied for and won by the United States.

This accord already is a massive insult to developing countries, who give up the right to hold those responsible who caused climate effects on their country. India can't sue the West for the costs that climate change, and the refugee crisis in Bangladesh will cost. India can't use any of the quick industrialization concepts that the West used, at massive cost to the environment. All committments are voluntary.

The west has spent centuries polluting the planet, and gaining an economic advantage. And now China and India are asking for a few years — not even a decade — in an entirely voluntary agremeent.

And yet, it's somehow unfair to the US? This is laughable. And I say that as a German willing to pay my 0.40€/kWh electricity.

To give a more concrete analogy - suppose there are two countries, A and B. People in both countries like eating tuna. A has far fewer people than B, but the average person in A eats 10x more tuna than the average person in B. As tuna supplies dwindle, would it be reasonable for A to ask B to reduce their consumption of tuna?

2. We're paying poor countries to mitigate these effects, by subsidizing their use of cleaner energy to industrialize. And to compensate them, since the areas most negatively affected by climate change are also poor.

3. The United States is not, in fact, particularly generous about foreign aid.

4. The Paris Agreement is intended to be a start - the reductions are so small in part to win over right-wing Americans, who in turn have the audacity to turn around and blast this agreement for not being effective enough.

It's a bit like the Muslim ban that "wasn't" a Muslim ban. If you've been calling it a Muslim ban for a year, retroactively coming back and saying "nah, nah, it's a not a Muslim ban" isn't convincing to the courts. In much the same way, the President cherry-picking bits he doesn't like about the bill sounds hollow.

- US, per capita, has the highest CO2 emissions of any developed country [0]

- It's a little unfair (depending on your idea of fairness) for developed countries to have benefitted from industrialization and polluting the environment only to close the gate behind them and blame other countries for trying to do the same and catch up in development.

- It's expensive to force nations barely entering industrialization to forego the easy route of using coal/oil/whatever pollutant and jump straight to what can, sometimes, be a more expensive energy source.

- Climate change is a global problem that doesn't mesh well with purely isolationist ideologies. This, primarily, is the biggest gripe with the current administration. It doesn't want to lift a single finger without seeing itself as the primary benefactor. This last part is purely opinion.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

Coal isn't really relevant. What's most relevant is the way you do housing and living: Poorly isolated homes spread across the countr, far from work and cultural centers, with its inhabitants insiting on having 20C in summer and 23C in winter and driving huge trucks to work alone.

Not meant as an attack on you, but but choosing not to be into politics basically means you occupy a secure enough position in society not to have to deal with personal anxiety about how political developments might impact you personally. Put more simply, you can afford to ignore politics but others cannot.

It's worth trying to imagine yourself yourself in the position of others on a regular basis so as to get a better understanding of why or how political issues might seem more urgent to them, not least people whose outlook you disagree with. I can readily see why economically disadvantaged coal miners in West virginia would support Trump, for example, since they don't see how the shift to carbon-free technology is going to benefit them economically. Of course I also think they're going to be severely disappointed, but I don't regret the effort invested in trying to understand their political alignment.

That said, Trump has a history of not being honest. He campaigned on increasing coal usage. That alone might have been enough for him to spike the deal.

I live in California and have been to China, and I know which air I'd rather breathe, even despite California's terrain & wind patterns being very conducive to catching air pollution in a bowl. Let them fuck up their own atmosphere...it'd be better if they didn't fuck up ours too, but if somebody's gonna pollute, I'd rather it be them.

Just that fact almost entirely undermines whatever Trump said.

In addition, however, new coal is already more expensive than renewables, which are getting cheaper at a rapid pace. However, more importantly, it's significantly more expensive than natural gas. The odds that the US would build a coal plant are minuscule (and even if someone did, assuming that somehow coal got cheaper than natural gas, the amount of money saved over building a natural gas plant instead would be meaningless).

I would have thought a master dealmaker like Trump would know that giving up something you weren't gonna do anyways in exchange for anything is a good deal.

But finally, none of this matters, because Donald Trump could have continued to do whatever he wanted (build coal plants, increase US emissions, etc.) without the Paris accords imposing any sort of mechanism to stop him from doing it.

What this shows is that the US cannot be trusted to stick to even a promise as toothless as the Paris accords. Combined with the lack of reaffirmation of Article 5 in NATO, the only real effect this will have is diminish the US's standing among its allies.

The Paris Accords were largely symbolism but important nonetheless in bringing everyone to the table, and showing a way forward and showing that climate change is something all countries need to handle and worry about. Donald Trump's act is also symbolism showing that the US doesn't care about agreements and pacts and that Climate change is not something they really believe in.

Btw, both Chinese and Indian governments have targets that are much more stringent than what they agreed upon through these accords, and both are well ahead of even those more stringent targets.

What exactly is Trump's estimate for the economic cost of climate change by 2100 if the Paris Agreement is not implemented?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_Gross_S...

But most big city governments are going to be run by liberal Democrats because...they are big cities. Not that they are wrong, just pointing that out.

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

From a purely pragmatic perspective we should probably break up the US anyway. Our political divisions have gridlocked progress basically to the point of no return. We're basically legislating and repealing the same damn things every couple of years.

The inverse of Atlas Shrugged, as it were.

The coal industry is the last holdout of the climate change skeptics. Everyone in oil and gas has seen the future and have started to push research and investments into renewables to limit their risk exposure.

Obama pledged $3B by 2020.

http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/why-trump-seeing...

But it's hard for me to see how failing to tax externalities of fossil fuels are not making it that much harder for renewables and nuclear to win. I actually find you a bit optimistic; natural gas is extremely cheap these days (in part because the externalities aren't taxed); while it is much better than coal (in many dimensions), switching all fossil fuels to a "less bad" fossil fuel aren't enough to hit necessary emissions targets.

What exactly are you referring to here? The sun expanding and becoming hotter as it ages? If so we're talking about the timeline of a few billion years. Climate change is something that has already begun to affect us and will continue to worsen over the course of the next few decades, which makes this issue far more pressing than whatever "natural warming" you're referring to.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Holocene_Temperature_Vari...

By the time global warming is unstoppable hopefully we'll have the technology to mitigate its effects on humans.

By my understanding the natural cycles in climate that you refer to occur in hundreds of thousands of years time scales, and we know a reasonable amount about them with regards to Milankovitch cycles, but there are other factors like solar cycles that can influence climate that still add some uncertainty. How we might go about cooling the earth or whether we even need to in response to a natural warming cycle may be entirely different to our response now, because of this difference in time scales.

Over hundreds of thousands of years, populated areas that would be affected by rising sea levels are likely to be rebuilt many times. Any increase in sea levels is likely to be accounted for in this naturally, and such issues may never arise in large enough cities. Other places that cannot be built up will likely be abandoned and eroded by the sea over time, with abandonment not unusual for localities that are deemed no longer habitable or economically feasible.

As far as cooling the earth if it is necessary, I expect that we will be looking toward space exploration to help us here. Any science toward terraforming other planets will help, so colonizing Mars may be a useful near-term goal. I assume technologies to control the heat retained by the planet would be important, either by reflecting solar radiation before it reaches our atmosphere, or by controlling the levels of greenhouse gases. If we had the technology now, we could essentially do the same thing, however we don't, and won't.

The difference in time scale involved here is the main point. Man-made climate change is occuring on a time scale that our current technology has no ability to counter directly, and this has huge ramifications on short time scales economically, and for the quality of life for coming generations. Natural climate change occurs on a much longer time scale, so any economic impacts are likely to be amortized across the duration of the change and will probably end up in the noise, with technology likely to be able to keep up if we are intelligent about managing our own contributions.

Are you talking about Milankovitch cycles? We're about 10,000 years past the warmest point of the last cycle so, absent anthropogenic warming, we should be cooling for a few more thousand years. Then an ice age would last for around 80-90 thousand years, followed by another 10-20 thousand year warm period.

http://ossfoundation.us/projects/environment/global-warming/...

So you're basically asking about the next warming period expected roughly 100,000 years from now? What are we supposed to do about that?

Not sure how well we'll deal with that.

[0] http://www.wired.co.uk/article/mini-ice-age-earth-sunspots

The problem with climate change is that it might overwhelm our ability to solve it in the "short term" where "short term" is defined as on the scale of a few generations to a century.

In the long term humanity will, if trends continue, be so incredibly wealthy and technologically advanced that we'll be able to tackle problems like CO2 in the atmosphere a lot easier. We'll be able to seriously consider remediation efforts (deciding what the ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere we want is and then making that happen). We'll be more able to respond to climate change by moving our cities, changing our food production strategies, and so forth. That's pretty much guaranteed as long as humanity continues advancing technologically.

But we're not there yet. Much of the world is still impoverished and developing. And there's a great potential for vast human misery. The point of these efforts is to give ourselves enough time to not get completely screwed by climate change before we have the power to deal with it more easily.