One person studying climate change at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories opined that the U.S. would not take climate change seriously until it loses a major city.
New Orleans doesn't count.
New Orleans doesn't count.
I'm not sure anything outside the Northeast does. There were many calls to stop funding post-hurricane reconstruction until Sandy hit. Puerto Rico is still struggling to get funding years after Irma and Maria, and Houston is debating if they really want to stop construction in the Addicks reservoir and surrounding areas.
It's difficult to sway public opinion about the immediacy when so many other signals parrot tradition and the staus quo.
We're not stronger than the storm, only amazingly dumber.
Let’s be honest. The only thing that will change is if the Republican party’s power reduces.
- Not invent new rules designed to prop up coal power plants that would otherwise no longer be competitive
- Not delay improvements in fuel efficiency standards
- Continue to allow California to set more rigorous standards
- Not open up wast swaths of the coasts for oil drilling
- Remain in the Paris Treaty, making it harder for other countries to fall back behind their promises
- Not levy 30% import tariffs on foreign solar panels
...and so on
And would admit clearly that it is something we can change and start promoting policies that help move society in the right direction. Instead they are censoring themselves and the organization is all but toothless.
https://time.com/5075265/epa-website-climate-change-censorsh...
So yea things would be different.
It's not obvious what you want to say, but the Paris agreement would have been a piece of cake if we had taken responsibility.
Trump ran on and has tried to revitalize the coal industry: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-18/trump-s-b...
The first step in solving our problems, political or otherwise, is being honest about them. No matter where on the political spectrum you fall, every voting American knows that one side has pushed the idea that climate change is a hoax while the other has been trying to take action.
I’m not sure what the motivation of your question is. Proving that democrats have attempted action while the republicans have chosen to ignore science, is such low hanging fruit that I’m a bit baffled.
> NYC was crippled by Sandy, and that didn’t lead to any changes.
This is what I was referring to. Would the Democrats have implemented more hurricane protections?
I don't think either party has any sort of sane carbon-reducing policy. The Republicans are obviously insane, but the Democrats seem to be focused more on attacking politically charged targets than on actually getting things done. You say they've "attempted" action - I'd say they've implemented things that are more virtue signaling than effective. (plastic bag bans, straw bans... These are not the actions of someone who cares about the environment more than political point-scoring)
While you make fair points, you're not disagreeing with general trends. Democrats have made moves to address emissions, while Republicans are struggling to admit there is even a problem. We do live in a Democracy, and politicians do have to work within the reality of what can be passed. The general public is the problem. Until the public has a strong appetite for addressing climate change, no meaningful change will happen. Any leader making bold moves prior to that is just going to be voted out. The scary conclusion at the root of this thread is that the public will lack that will until a major city is lost.
“We find that, after adjusting for such an estimated number of missing storms, there remains just a small nominally positive upward trend in tropical storm occurrence from 1878-2006. Statistical tests indicate that this trend is not significantly distinguishable from zero (Figure 2). In addition, Landsea et al. (2010) note that the rising trend in Atlantic tropical storm counts is almost entirely due to increases in short-duration (<2 day) storms alone. Such short-lived storms were particularly likely to have been overlooked in the earlier parts of the record, as they would have had less opportunity for chance encounters with ship traffic.”
"It's only on the brink of destruction that people find the will to change."
-- The Day the Earth Stood Still
I so wished that were true. But there are - unfortunately - plenty of examples where even that does not make any difference. Improvement starts with knowing that you can do better and how to do better, upper management can be quite clueless and usually people that have some mobility will have left the company long before such a crisis hits. The people responsible tend to want to do better but do not know how, even when given the resources.
This sort of organizational dis-functionality is more common than you might think.
A massive dam is a great way to deal with a water crisis at expense of the environment.
And that sure looks like a cure worse than the disease to me...
If First World Country A sees Emerging Market Country B as major contributor to global climate change (affecting A) it could impose tariffs on goods from B.
It could be argued, that B’s products were unfairly subsidized by B having no environmental restrictions (from energy production and worker’s health to waste disposal etc).
Of course tariffs also hurt A’s citizens - but I’d consider it a fair deal: A’s people pay a price for being convinced that climate change needs to be tackled.
At least - considering how climate policy is usually a first world issue while those same countries are only contributing small fractions to world’s share of emissions (ex. USA) - it seems odd that those First world countries usually directly punish their own citizens (that have limited impact on climate change) instead of the main polluters in emerging markets.
There could really come a point when the US and other countries truly makes this their primary global policy priority, and both make the sacrifices themselves and applies what pressure they have on others to make this happen.
My "nuclear attack" option is a caricatured and unrealistic version of this, but a humbler version can certainly happen.
Though the problem with these things is that we're talking about a Public Good. In the strict economic sense: I should do something that's bad for me, but good for everybody. These things strongly tend not to get done unless someone is forcing it done.
Which leads us to a world government. Which actually scares me a lot more than global warming!
But there is a massive spectrum of options in there: import-side carbon tariffs to make their goods less competitive, WTO policies to mandate carbon taxes, literally paying them to put emission mitigation in,...
Overall "but China and India" is a cop-out, a convenient excuse for doing nothing. China and India are actually investing in renewable energy - unlike many developed countries who have their heads stuck in the sand. And they're justified in pursuing a growth agenda because otherwise who's going to help them when the climate change sh*t hits the fan? Developed countries haven't done squat so far, so can they be counted on to help in future?
If the US falls apart before New Orleans drowns, I really hope that the Monarch of the Grand City-State of Nawlins has the sense to allocate a lot of her budget of freshly-minted Fleur-Dou-Bloons to the Krewe of Sewerage and Water, because those pumps are about the only thing keeping the city from being a lake bottom.
Is this true?
I’ve also just come back after spending half a life in the furthest corners of the US so what the hell do I know though.
Other countries have not done anything either (lip service doesn't count).
This is a "lack of good alternatives" problem, not a US problem.
Take a look: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany#/media/File:...
Nuclear went down, to be replaced by wind/solar. i.e. they did nothing useful.
Actually it's worse than it looks - they've outsourced their CO2 emissions to China to build all those solar cells, etc.
Germany is an example of a failure, not a success: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19910540
When in reality the exit was already decided as far back as 2000, with the Bundestag ratifying it in 2002 [0]. A decision which was backed up by the EGG [1], a regulatory framework to facilitate and subsidize the large scale expansion of renewable energy sources that has been happening in Germany for over a decade now.
As such, I'd like to think we've been a bit ahead of the curve in terms of recognizing the problem and actually doing something against it. In that context, the still on-going use of coal ain't exactly great, but the reasons for that are way more political (miner jobs) than anything else.
[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomgesetz_(Deutschland)#Novel...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Renewable_Energy_Source...
Germany's decision to pay higher prices for electricity is what really kick started the downward spiral in solar prices. Germany proved solar wasn't just possible, but feasible. And every country has benefited from Germanys decision.
Germany itself has likely benefited, even if they had stops and starts along the way, and some minor setbacks.
8 of them were shut-down in 2011 as they reached the end of their life expectancy, after having been operational for 40+ years.
Would you rather have us keep running old reactors while insisting how absolutely safe and secure they are?
[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_der_Kernreaktoren_in_Deu...