Monday, December 14, 2015

SAR #15348


Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow: The Paris Agreement is a marvelous congregation of empty phrases: it is only a"partly legally binding" commitment to publicly plan to cut carbon emissions - and not to actually cut them. It is like saying you are going on a diet and the check back in five years to see how it's going. Or else. Or else what? Face public shame, along with the other 190+ countries that will also fail to live up to their carbon diet plans? Except for those who don't plan on dieting, like India... and the US, faced with Republican fantasies.
The signatories will "strive" to peak global carbon emissions "as soon as possible", and to keep global warming to 2ºC or maybe 1.5ºC by 2100 even though all the empty promises guarantee a 2.8ºC rise by then. Minimum. And reaching 5ºC pretty soon after, as various feedbacks kick in.
Little substantive will happen until 2020, while clear deadlines for specific targets are generally absent. "The text is vague on the overall ambition: it does not specify a date for the peaking of emissions, and specifies only that reductions should lead towards “greenhouse gas emissions neutrality” in the “second half of the century”.
Then there's the $100 billion a year in aid to developing countries to help them adjust to drowning. That's going to start in 2020, but quite who is in for how much remains to be settled.
There is absolutely nothing in this glorious victory that will actually address global warming. On purpose.
To actually address global warming on an effective time scale would require $16.5 trillion - most of which would be stolen by those in power and those behind those in power. But this is not a problem because the debt-saddled world cannot come up with such sums.
But none of this is going to happen. Exxon and the Saudis are not going gently into oblivion. Nor will Russia, Iran and all the Barons on Wall Street who have hundreds of billions tied up in the fossil fuel energy complex. If fossil fuels must be left in the ground, who gets left holding the bag on the billions, maybe trillions in bonds? Bailouts?
If this actual serious steps are to be taken to reduce the rise in global carbon emissions, the US must be an active leader; but the Republicans who control Congress are intentional know-nothings, who will block any attempt to cut emissions by crying "jobs, profits, economy" while kissing the Koch Brothers' rings.
Just this week Jeb! Bush suggested Congress eliminate the Obama administration’s regulation of carbon pollution, as a threat to jobs and profits.
Perhaps most telling is the fact that Canada is banning single-use plastic bags - a petroleum product - starting in 2018. If it takes a relatively environmentally sensitive country three years to do away with plastic bags, how long before we can outlaw air travel, gasoline and petro-profits?
The biggest omission in addressing a curtailing of emissions is any discussion of a global effort to reduce the population as quickly as possible. That there is no discussion of cutting the living standards of Americans, Europeans and other developed countries by 75 to 90% within a few decades is another indication of how hollow the exercise has been..
Global warming is a profit opportunity. Companies will line up to take public monies to do nothing. Other companies will figure out how to profit from protecting rich cities from disaster while letting island nations and third world seacoast cities slowly sink - the photos will make great promotional literature.
Only a global government with an effective and transparent global reach could solve this problem and, like the emissions cuts under the COP21 Paris Agreement, it ain't gonna happen.

13 comments:

mike said...

Hey, your advertisement that we have to sit through before seeing the site does not encourage reading your work.

Charles Kingsley Michaelson, III said...

mike - ???
ckm

origin said...

Population reduction is ongoing. The wars in the mid-east are the beginning. War, famine, flooding, etc., will shortly make great inroads in our overpopulation problem. Orderly, it ain't gonna be.

Anonymous said...

Some problems don't have "nice" solutions.

Just the way it is sometimes.

Charles Kingsley Michaelson, III said...

Maybe it's just time for Mother Nature to get a "do over."

Gegner said...

Not getting any commercials over here boss! That said I concur with Origin: there won't be any dots that will lead you directly back to those responsible for the coming genocide.

Anyone paying attention can see them setting up their 'patsy'. (How fortunate for them that he's absolutely clueless?)

'We' (read our betters) will need the remaining fossil fuel reserves to tide them over while they search for a new home among the stars.

Whole swaths of the planet will become unlivable without fossil fuels and that 'unlivability' will result in a serious amount of population reduction.

Naturally there's nothing more fleeting than a secret and all hell will break loose when it's discovered there are significant fossil fuel reserves after billions perish due to the shortages caused by the collapse of global supply lines.

And that's the elephant in the room, we have, defying all logic AND ancient wisdom, become a JIT society in the face of persistently fragile supply system.

And again it wasn't done 'for us' so much as 'to us'...

McMike said...

Occasionally this site gets taken over by a full screen popup. It's not very frequent, and although I wonder if I've clicked on something accidentally to launch it, it seems to be random.

I've never had a problem backing out of the ad back to the site.

McMike (not = mike)

Charles Kingsley Michaelson, III said...

maybe it's a free gift that comes with using google blogger, but strange it should pop up after all these years.

Never has happened to me or First Reader nor the gang in the back room...

Anyone with an explanation...

rjs said...

ckm, i've never seen that on mine, either, or any other non-commercial blogspot as long as i've been doing this...

(but google wouldnt surprise me if they did)

G-fan said...

I kind of lost hope when I read that most people with heart disease won't take the diet measures, exercise nor stay on their medicines to stave off heart failure. If people are not going to make any sacrifice to extend their own short lives and leave their families to deal with the mess, then what chance they will make any real action to relieve the impending doom for their immediate family/descendants?

Anonymous said...

McMike probably has a spamware infection on his pc.

Tulsatime said...

I have never seen any sort of Ad page takeover, but I run adblock, as more and more pages remind me.

Surprised to see the monograph today, very well deserved and not a bit of a shock in the outcome. Nobody has time to break away from the business at hand to recognize that reality has drifted off in a new direction.

I do NOT see any organized population reduction efforts underway, only the rise of chaos as the Overlords keep spinning their various plans, plots, and conspiracies for world and financial dominance. I must say it looks like looney-tunes scene, with the efforts of all drifting out past any support. It's just a matter of time before they realize all the ports are going under, Miami is past tense, and there is no more control mechanism for anybody. A war, with a capital W will not be any sort of planned reduction.

Charles Kingsley Michaelson, III said...

War is highly over-rated as a population reducer- unless it is of the biologic or global nuclear varieties, which is not beyond imagining. And it is so messy and tends to create far more problems than it could ever solve.

Nope, One and Done.