6 years ago
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New York mayor: City will uphold Paris climate agreement if Trump doesn't
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) promised Wednesday that his city would uphold the Paris climate agreement even if President Trump moves forward with his campaign promise to withdraw from the accord.
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Are we witnessing the disintegration of both the US and Europe just because of corruption and greed? It kind of looks like it.
Is this not how the US was built, each state can now decide it's participation... yay 10th Amendment. Seriously, the US doesn't need to join a treaty to support good ideas; states should strive to do the right thing without the need to participate in a treaty, plus they now have a benefit of not having to pay for anything, unlike the Paris Agreement. Plus there will be no problems when they fail to reach the targets.
My only problem was the amount they wanted us to pay for developing countries, and the fact the targets weren't going to be reached, ratification of the agreement would only give us a couple of years to get to the target by 2025, that wasn't likely, IMO.
Hard to buy that a completely nonbinding treaty that couldn't even agree to cut the rate at which CO2 emissions continue to grow was too much of a burden.
Anyone telling you it was, you should be a little bit more skeptical about.
I was under the impression only the targets were non-binding and that we were required to pay the billions for developing nations.
The Republican Party would never agree to ratify a treaty acknowledging anthropogenic global warming, let alone one with the force of law. Because of that, ostensibly, the Obama Administration would only sign on to a Paris agreement that was completely unenforceable in any way. That way it wouldn't need ratification in the U.S. Sound thinking as that was never, ever going to happen.
So global agreement on enforceable, definite steps to address real and impending climate change is impossible not least because of U.S. participation. Matter of fact, the world could do better without the U.S. Would it? We'll see. Hope so. Later U.S. Governments may've paid to accomplish their climate change policy goals, but that would've been a means to their ends, not an end in itself.
Pretending nothing's happening is a controversial decision, I suppose, but at least it's consistent with pretending we haven't been doing anything and pretending we didn't know what was happening for decades now either. It's much, much later than we think.
And the reason for Obama never going to Congress was because of the failure of the 1997 Kyoto Accords in which the GOP controlled Senate would not approve any legally binding treaty with 150 different countries. Bush never tried.
It was an honor system to reduce to the targets each country pledged to. That was one of several arguments against the deal...that it was not enforceable and that if only rich nations took the action required, like, reducing certain industries that supplied fossil fuels (coal and oil), subsidizing green energy products, carbon penalties and the other poorer nations did not (the assumption that economic growth would be more important), then it would hurt the economies of the richer nations while the poorer nations contributed nothing.