US begins withdrawal from Paris climate accord | Hacker News Reader

US begins withdrawal from Paris climate accord

dw.com

47 pointspera31 comments

Open articleView on HN

This is an unintentionally good thing: The paris accord:

* was non-binding

* guaranteed that no nation would be challenged or monitored on it's emissions reporting

* allowed countries to just set their own targets and how to meet them

* contained no penalties for not meeting even those targets

It was an agreement for everyone to just do whatever they wanted.

Almost 20 years after the Kyoto was signed and we're no closer to an actual agreement. Worse in fact: Paris is held up as if it matters, it fools people into thinking something is being done.

It's not.

Once more we have to reckon that centralized governments pretending to act upon vast nations won't solve anything.

Worse: their mere existence lets us think that some major public action will efficiently tackle our problems.

You're not actually making the point that withdrawing from the agreement is a good thing. What positive effects for the climate will follow? What better agreements will this enable?

I wonder how much lasting damage this administration - well, let's be frank, this president - has done to the US' reputation when it comes to committing long-term to agreements and contracts it has signed.

Consider the Paris climate accord. Consider threatening to not protect certain NATO members. Consider the Iran nuclear agreement.

... and consider the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermediate-Range_Nuclear_For...

That was probably coming for a long time. USA withdrew from the ABM treaty under Bush: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Ballistic_Missile_Treaty

The Paris and Iran agreements were not submitted to Congress for the good reason that they had insufficient support there. Agreement by only one branch of a divided government was a pretty clear sign that the US was not a reliable counterparty to them. The agreements were honored by the entity that made them -- the Obama administration -- whose power had a clear expiration date. Given the political configuration, relying on more than that was unsupported. Although Trump was hard to predict, several of the other GOP candidates may well have done the same.

I would not expect a Biden or Warren administration to feel bound by a unilateral Trump agreement, and any counterparties aren't doing due diligence if they don't understand that.

Are you suggesting untrustworthyness in foreign politics is something intrinsic to the American democracy? Other countries can be relied upon, in spite of them holding general elections.

I doubt that's what they were saying. It's simply that only 1/3rd of the government signed onto the treaty. That was public and well known.

Any foreign power would realize they couldn't rely on continuity as their only supporters was a president who couldn't hold power for longer than 8 years.

If Congress had signed in, it wouldn't matter who was President afterwards.

Countries like the UK, don't have this issue since they are parliamentary governments so there's really only 1 branch of government with legislative and executive power integrated.

Most countries in North and South America though are presidential democracies, so the US is in good company.

I doubt any at all really, people dont judge teams based on their coaches, or companies based on their CEO's, just as I dont judge my friends in the UK based on their governments decision capabilities around Brexit.

The calculus changes significantly here given we are talking about a democracy. The group chose this person (by intention or inaction).

It also appears he wants to pull out of the Open Skies treaty. That's a treaty from 1992 between, among others, the US, Russia, and the rest of NATO that allows members to conduct unarmed reconnaissance flights on short notice over the others' territories, including over military bases.

When you see a Tupolev TU-204 flying over various highly restricted US sites, you are seeing Russia exercising their Open Sky rights. If you are in Russia and see a Boeing OC-135B cruising around, you are seeing the US using the treaty.

I've not heard any explanation of why Trump would want out of this.

Ironically the US have the highest reduction in CO2 emissions, most likely due to the increased use of gas instead of coal. The cheap gas is caused by increased production of oil and gas due to fracking. Another example of technology making the world better.

https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-in-2017-us-h...

It's still one of the highest rates of per capita emissions in the world!

Per capita is a red herring, what matters is the total emissions under the control of any one government. China is vastly more, on an upward trend, and not required to take any action under the Paris Accord until 2030. Which is after the end of the world by some estimates.

Its not a red herring when huge numbers of people in less developed nations see the amount that people in the US use and aspire to have similar lifestyles.

I find it quite strange that people appear to fall into two camps when discussing this issue. Either The US (and other richer nations) need to cut down emissions because they emit far more per capita OR China / India need to control their population growth and associated emissions. We should be encouraging both sides to do their part not arguing over which one it is.

“They did it why can’t we” is not a basis for serious policy making, is why. The environment doesn’t care about anyone’s lifestyle aspirations. The West in general has recognised the problem and is managing its environmental impact downwards in a controllable way. China and India are increasing their emissions as fast as they can to keep their present governments in power and no regard for the long term consequences which will ironically hit their own people hardest.

> China and India are increasing their emissions as fast as they can

The metric that the Paris Accords (rightly) judges China, the US and other countries on, is the change in emissions per PPP $ of GDP.

By this measure China is absolutely destroying the United States, and is on track to meet it's Paris commitments. Holding your emissions almost constant while tripling your GDP is an impressive achievement; if the US had done the same thing they too would be meeting their Paris commitments.

The Europeans may have reason to criticize China for not doing enough. Americans do not.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/sep/25/lambas...

I think western governments also manage their environmental impact downwards only as much as is possible without redistributing significant amounts of resources to the problem. I.e. they currently only look at lower hanging fruit , and to me it does not look like this will be sufficient to stay within the 1.5 deg warming target (even when disregarding countries reducing their emissions by less amounts). Look for example at the actions Germany is taking [1].

[1] https://www.aicgs.org/2019/10/germanys-new-climate-package-t...

> Per capita is a red herring, what matters is the total emissions under the control of any one government.

Per capita is useful due to the fact that it offers a view of the consumption habit of an aggregate of people. Part of the what made outsourcing economically viable was the lack of regulations in the targetted countries. What drives the demand for this production is consumption habits.

But why don't these governments just tighten regulations? In doing so, they would be opening the door for manufacturing to leave because there are other opportunistic nations wanting that economic boon. How exactly are do you think the people within these nations are going to react when they start losing their jobs, when their country is lent money from the IMF, and then said new regulations have to be rolled back on condition of these new loans.

Note that I don't think the blame can be blamed solely on consumption habits, but you need to acknowledge that there are very real material concerns here and that putting all of the blame on any single government is missing the forest for a single tree.

> Which is after the end of the world by some estimates.

I don't think anyone worth consideration believes this.

Per capita including trade or nationally including trade would make far more sense - many aspects are supra national.

The developed world's multinationals relocated much of our emissions to the developing world by putting manufacturing over there, where there are fewer environmental and labour protections. Much of China and India's emissions are really the UK's or the USA's as they're now making our T shirts and electronics, scrapping obsolete ships and electronics or burning our plastic recycling.

> Per capita is a red herring, what matters is the total emissions under the control of any one government

By that argument, if China and India were each to split up into several much smaller countries, with every person in each of those countries still emitting as much as they do now, or even increasing greatly their emissions--they would be doing great as far as climate change goes, because each of those small countries would only be responsible for a small amount of the total?

The atmosphere does not care about national boundaries, which is why per capita is the correct way to access a countries emissions compared to other countries.

> Another example of technology making the world better.

Fracking isn't without its drawbacks. And since there is essentially no public information on what chemicals they even pump into the ground (which almost certainly leaks to groundwater sometimes, because things go wrong - like oil spills) it's a little hard to assess its environmental impact. At least in the US, the fracking companies don't have to tell anybody (including the government) what chemicals they are using.

> At least in the US, the fracking companies don't have to tell anybody (including the government) what chemicals they are using.

This is utterly terrifying. Private companies can pump unspecified junk in to the ground with ZERO oversight? That cannot be right! This is why British people are always worried when we hear talk of closer alignment with US environmental "protections".

They have flint experience level to deal with whatever happens right

That reduction in CO2 emission might be offset by an increase of methane emissions due to fracking [0].

[0] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/08/frack...

Why in the world do people cite non-normalized emissions? If you cut a country's size in half wouldn't you expect half the emissions, reductions, etc.? Does that mean suddenly half of your country is suddenly not putting in its fair share compared to your full country?? How does that make any sense?!

> Another example of technology making the world better.

Surely this is sarcasm?

After the withdrawal it is up to individual states to try to keep pace with Paris accord. California is mentioned a lot and gives hope that US will not become a hopeless laggard in renewable energy & climate innovation. I wonder where other states stand on this, and how their efforts will be hampered by a federal government not being on their side.

Well, that's one campaign promise Trump is delivering on...

I guess it's because it's a discounted cost into the future whereas building the wall would require funds now.

Looks like some sections of "the wall" have been/are being built, though apparently it's feasible to saw through it with $100 tools: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/smugglers-are-sawing...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com