In an op-ed in the Washington Post John Kerry and Chuck Hagel are outraged over President Trump’s announcement that the U. S. was withdrawing from the Paris Agreement:
Climate change is already affecting every sector and region of the United States, as hundreds of top scientists from 13 federal agencies made clear in a report the White House itself released last year. The past five years were the warmest ever recorded. Without steep pollution reductions, climate change will risk tens of thousands of U.S. lives every year by the end of the century. Rising seas, increased storm surge and tidal flooding threaten $1 trillion in public infrastructure and private property now along U.S. coastlines. The United States has experienced at least $400 billion in weather and climate disaster costs since 2014. The recent hurricanes that slammed America’s southern coasts, as well as historic wildfires in California, resulted in more American victims of severe weather juiced by climate change than ever before.
The problem I have with that is that they’re drawing a straightline connection where none exists. There is no demonstrable connection between the Paris Agreement and CO2 emissions. India and China have sharply increased their emissions. The U. S. has reduced its emissions. Not only has Germany increased its emissions, its approach to doing so is disastrous—replacing the electricity produced by its nuclear plants with wood for home heating, for example, has resulted in the harvesting of old forests to feed German stoves.
It’s at about this point that someone will point out that the U. S. per capita outputs of carbon dioxide are much higher than those of Germany, China, or India. That, too, is irrelevant. To whatever degree atmospheric carbon dioxide contributes to climate change, it is absolute amounts that matter not per capita amounts. Yes, we can decrease our carbon emissions more. Why not continue our success by reducing cement production?
In conflating the Paris Agreement with carbon outputs I’m not sure what Mssrs. Kerry and Hagel are complaining about. Is it that their labor are coming to naught?
I believe it was in 2007 that Chuck Hagel famously called a press conference in Omaha to announce……. That he hadn’t made up his mind whether to run for President or not. If most of the people Hagel socializes with say the world ends tomorrow, he’d go along.
The Paris Accord was just a first step. Hard to see anything positive being accomplish by pulling out of it. The fact that we lead in per capita output does matter. If we are going to ask other countries to decrease their output, while our per capita is much higher, they arent going to do it.
That said, what we should be leading on is research. Finding better ways to create or conserve energy that do not increase CO2.
Steve
I am a lot more interested in results than in statements of intent, particularly statements of intent to act at some future date. Contrary to what you suggest above, I don’t there is too little U. S. leadership but an utter lack of followership. China, India, Japan, and Germany are increasing their per capita outputs. We are decreasing ours. Basically, I don’t care about the Paris Accord as long as we’re going in the right direction.
As I have also said before I don’t believe that plans based on privation will ever be acceptable to Americans. Consequently, I think that nuclear power (especially small scale nukes), CCS, and doing more locally and compactly are better solutions.
The U.S never joined the Paris Agreement; Obama merely signed an executive order. All of the other countries treated it like a treaty and submitted it to the legislature for approval under domestic law. The U.S. interpretation is that the agreement holds no requirements, so it didn’t need ratification. It’s nothing.
The purpose of the Paris Agreement was to enrich third world dictators and one worlder bureaucrats. Period. AGW is merely the latest fad used to fleece the taxpayer. As Dave notes, statements of intent are not deeds, and there is no more political will to enforce the accords than there was to enforce Kyoto.
The USA has reduced carbon emissions partly by exporting them to China, India, and other developing nations who have thus sharply increased their emissions. As manufacturing continues to return to the US, the overall global output will go down because we’re better at reducing carbon emissions than third worlders are.
There is evidence that CO2 increases follow warming, not the other way around. Past warm episodes show little correlation with CO2 levels, and the older ones certainly aren’t due to man’s activity.
Does anybody really want global cooling except maybe a few whacko eco-warriors who consider Homo sapiens an invasive pest species? We know what happened last time we had significant because there is historical evidence for it. A lot of people suffered and died in massive storms that washed away huge chunks of land (the Zuider Zee being one example), months of torrential rain, years of drought, freezing temperatures at terrible times, and more. It was called the Little Ice Age. No thanks.