Here is climate change policy in a nutshell:
Almost everybody is willing to make promises for 2030 or 2040 or 2050. But almost nobody is willing to make promises for 2022 or 2023 or 2024. I leave the rest as an exercise for the reader.
25 thoughts on “Promises, promises”
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And this is why I agree with you that massive investment in green technology is our only hope. It's the one thing that can make a dent in the problem without requiring the short-term sacrifices that no one will ever make.
This Swede just listened to Australian PM Scott Morrison in a clip on my morning news promising Australia reaching “net” zero by 2050 .
He was talking more about protecting economy and the Australian way of life than about the climate and ecological crisis.
He is a little more “direct” about it but just about all his colleagues around this planet is saying the same , promising someone else will handle this in some distant future .
Glasgow is said to be a turning point but will be just the same… words to no obligations .
The United States of America will arrive at the climate meeting in Glasgow with an empty briefcase.
Representatives from the United States of America will just strut around trying to impress , trying to act as if you are leading the fight against climate breakdown.
Science is telling us we must reduce emissions with something like 50% by 2030 but predictions says we are going to increase by at least 16% .
We cannot handle this without changing our lives, especially we few privileged who are having it all , we who has caused it.
We cannot handle this by continuing as usual.
A comment from a disillusioned Swede
PS “Net” zero is a scam!
Maybe the Swedes can step up and lead the rest of us towards the sacrifices needed. I mean, you’ve already said the Australians and the Americans aren’t going to do it. Be the change you want to see in the world. I’m sure if all Swedes are as know-it-all as you are to us here, the rest of the world will happily listen. Everyone loves hearing how wrong they are and being told what to do better from an outside voice, especially one that carries tones of judgement and schadenfreude.
Sweden, as a notoriously neutral country (never joined NATO, is in EU & not looking to Swexit but isn't joining the Eurozone anytime soon) & Nazi collaborator state in World War II that never really reckoned with their embrace of antisemitism (with Sweden being in the running with Poland & Croatia as most warmly embracing Hebraic extermination among countries invaded by the Nazis), has repeatedly manifestly refused to do any part in making the world better.
We should just let Norway annex the mainland portion & give Finland those islands back.
Harsh.
It might be tough medicine, but is it bad?
Even Jon Bongiovi would say no.
You should maybe check facts before you post on another nation…
“Ugly American" is a stereotype depicting American citizens as exhibiting loud, arrogant, demeaning, thoughtless, ignorant, and ethnocentric behavior mainly abroad,
We never joined NATO but we were a regional superpower during the Cold War .
This tiny nation had the fourth biggest Air Force on the planet building fighters second to no one .
Sweden kept things calm on the Northern flank during those dangerous decades and you should say thanks ..
WW2?
I am so tired of always getting this comment, and it’s a stupid one
Let’s remember history correctly my friend.
When the war started was Sweden a tiny country, population 5m and a nonexistent military.
France was subdued in weeks, Denmark in less than 24 hours and Norway in days.
What did you expect us to do ?
Send the few outdated bombers we possessed to bomb Berlin?
We could not provide them with fighter escort since our old double deckers was in Finland helping them to fight Stalin who unprovoked attacked them.We were the only ones who assisted them
We tried to buy modern fighters from USA but you refused to sell and we didn’t get any help from anyone else either.
We could have acted differently if we had been a superpower, as you were.... but we wasn’t!
We were totally cut of from the outside after the occupation of Norway and Denmark, Hitler allowed us to land just four shiploads/year from the outside
We gave protection to the Danish Jews when the resistance managed to ship them across the straight of Öresund and Raul Wallenberg must be known even by all those Americans who rarely knows what’s happening outside of their own backyard
USA denied Anne Frank asylum
You weren’t that eager to participate , you sure would not have assisted us . An influential political group with the device “ America first” made sure you stayed out until Japan attacked and Hitler declared war
That was another time , we are talking about the time of our grandparents or even great grandparents but many Americans are stuck in those days, the golden age of USA
We are facing other threats today and your nonfunctional political system has sure caused us a lot of problems since the beginning of this millennium.
Historically correct sture..........and you know we cannot change the past.
Americans believe that "we" are the biggest, and the best and the most helpful nation on earth and that everyone who has benefited from that help should kiss our "ring" now so that we don't have to suffer from changing our lifestyle.
But you know that already. You HAD to rebuild the countries in Europe not once, but twice because of war. Our last rebuild due to war was in 1812 and even that wasn't damaging to our populace.
In THAT respect we are spoiled as a nation. You rebuilt your infrastructure from the ground up. You rebuilt transportation, electrical grid, and water distribution systems. And you did it with a population that after the war was dominated by females because most males were gone. Thats why women achieved so much more there. They had female leaders both in government but in business. And that government saw that they had to provide healthcare and child care to keep the women working and serving in government functions until they could rebuild their population.
History cannot be changed. The damage has been done. But where Europeans suffered horrible damages and loss of life the US set about manufacturing everything you needed without a care in the world back then about what it was doing to the environment.
Attitudes have to change, We have to be better. But in order to do so we need to make sure that what we do today will have long lasting affects. You will NEVER convince Americans that mass transit works, and works well because we built cars, and drilled for the oil that powered them. We fed and clothed NOT just Americans but many world wide.
For anyone to IGNORE this and say America is the largest polluter I say yes, we are and have been but we did this in response to events outside of our country. Yes we had to be convinced to join in WWII. Yes we helped win the war and sadly - YES we helped destroy many nations. Yes, we helped rebuild them as well.
America has many faults and we along with the entire globe went on a baby making festival after WWII. We were still asked to clothe and feed these additional folks, not because of war but because we could. We took our capitalist economy and profited off of helping many outside of our nation.
But to sit here now and say WE are at fault does NOT tell the whole story. If we had gone back to being isolationist after WWII we would be the most reviled nation on earth and millions would have died as a result. We didn't.
We do need to do more, for sure but we are not the cause of the four fold increase in the global population since the 50s.
We need to change our attitude to help the globe. We've done it twice already in WWI and WWII.
I don't know how successful we will be in convincing ourselves we need to do it.
Remember, this is the opinion of unbiased international experts…
https://ccpi.org/
Basically the opposite of what needs to be done. Deep cuts as fast as possible.
And cuts have to be real, not just outsourced to other countries.
But hey, Tesla is valued at over a trillion dollars. So investors think we'll be left with one car company?
They make a bot more than cars, and their growth and construction is massive.
That said, it's frankly amazing how much heat and fire that a populace can take and not be willing to make more cuts. Australia has had it worse than California.
Bots for building, bots for cars....but it will still take time to get production and profits per vehicle up.
We do have to more--but it has to be done as a collective we. More home weatherization programs along with electrification programs. And we need to greatly improve public transit and movement of goods in this country to make everything more energy efficient. Instead of moving to electric cars--how about moving away from cars? Maintaining a car runs almost $1K/month (payments, repairs, insurance, gas, etc.).
So be it. There is no stopping climate change. Those who imagined humanity would cooperate to save itself were delusional. We wage war on each other. We steal from each other. We can’t even agree on the danger posed by Facebook!
There will always be a Donald trump or a Joe manchin or a Kevin drum to argue that it’s a hoax or simply isn’t as bad as we think it is (with charts!).
Good luck!
Um. I don’t know that Kevin has ever said climate change was a hoax or not bad. (For that matter I don’t know that even Manchin has said it’s a hoax or not bad… he just doesn’t think it’s worth doing anything about.)
Given how much you seem to disagree/hate/misunderstand/lie about everything Kevin says, maybe you should find a new blog to read. But that assumes you’re here in good faith, and not just to troll.
Kevin's not saying it's not real. He's saying that all the happy talk by politicians about how they're "taking action" to stop it is bullshit.
True, but wokeness will end us as a civilization long before warmness.
As sea levels rise Abbott, McMaster, DeSantis, and Kemp will feel the pain more so than most governors.
Unfortunately the coastline of NY, and NJ will provide the biggest blows to the economic system here. The FED RES, Wall St will need to move
Heck our nations capital will flood when the Potomac rises.
Never mind what will happen when the 108 nuclear power plants sitting along the ocean front world wide shut down. That number is ONLY nuclear plants there are many more coal and oil fired plants along the ocean as well.
Fukishima was a test, a dry run if you will of what COULD happen. Now multiply that by 108. Sea level rise affects the entire globe, not just the US.
When they start planning for this we will need to worry...........
In recent years, Australia has been the California of the southern hemisphere in terms of taking it in the nads repeatedly with severe weather exacerbated by climate change. Half the continent burns up in the summer, and then floods in the winter. I guess you still have people down there, though, standing in the charred remains of their house going "this is because two chicks can get married!" and politicians willing to pander to them.
I'm sorry, *sheilas
What happens on the sheep station stays on the sheep station, though.
This subject is very complex and we "armchair" quarterbacks are all experts it seems.
Look climate has changed 7 times in the last 650,000 years just based upon glacier growth and retreat. It last changed 11,700 years ago.
The industrial revolution has been ongoing for about 100 years maybe 150.
Up until the 50s everyone was fat dumb and happy with how the world was treating "Mother Earth"
Then we quadrupled the earth's human population. What happened?
We needed more fuel to transport all these new folks
We needed to feed all these new folks
We needed to clothe all these new folks
We needed to keep them warm so we quadrupled our raping of Mother Earth for minerals, oil, and food.
An IMMEDIATE switch to electric cars will do NOTHING to stop climate change. Why? Well, we would also need to quadruple our replacement of the biosphere - woodlands that absorb carbon as well. That means we sacrifice. What do we sacrifice? How about homes?
No more paper.
No more over fertilizing to feed the world
No more over fishing
So which society should bear the brunt of this sacrifice? Which one are we willing to say "Die mf" to?
We can't get Americans to vote
We can't get Americans to ride public transport
We can't get Americans to give up on eating out.
And we somehow expect us to get all teary-eyed over climate change? After being "exceptional" since our inception? We believe we deserve the good life. We believe we can pollute without remorse because we saved the world, on multiple occasions from war, famine and disease.
Now we are asked to suffer?
I GET IT
But we cannot expect the rain forest of Brazil to be replanted any time soon. We won't stop oil, gas and mineral extraction to stop any time soon. Because our attitude has become the world's attitude.
Saudi Arabia with its oil, Russia with its natural gas. China with it's coal.
C'mon lets make the hard choices here. Which population do we sacrifice? Ours? The Russians? The Chinese?
Lets switch to electric cars and extract all the available battery minerals from the ground !!!!! Would that make us happy? And if we generate huge amounts of carbon to do it - will it be worth it?
It goes way beyond electric vehicles. It goes way beyond mass transit.
Who will replant those carbon absorbing trees? And Where? Who will stop polluting the oceans and taking stuff out of them?
We seem to think we can stop this by stopping our own use of cars. This is wrong. We are waiting for some technological breakthrough that will take carbon out of the atmosphere so we can go living our lives without sacrificing anything.
We are a lazy global population that doesn't want to sacrifice, anything
Why is Antiwoke Katie Porter Democrat Kevin Drum worried about global carbon emissions in 2050 when the danger is here n' now as seen in Ivory Tower Liberal Yale University laying the smack down on a Federalist Society undergrad's Pimps n' Hoes Party?
If the Woke Left can shutter an ersatz traphouse in New Haven before it even opens, what hope does the Chapo Traphouse have to survive when clearly the first amendment means nothing to the neoliberal identitarians now running the country?
Many pundits, bloggers and commenters and even economists keep saying that to defeat global warming we will all have to just make up our minds not to use fossil fuels and turn to alternatives no matter whether this degrades our standard of living or not. Couldn't we all just cut back on some of our excesses such as getting an iPhone upgrades every year (and many other things)? Some economists have long claimed that governments can enforce this by carbon taxes, which would make everything more expensive for lower-income people, thereby cutting back on their standard of living (it would not really affect the rich because they have more money than they can spend).
This is just not going to happen, at least until the direct effects of global warming on individuals get far worse than they are now. People do not change their habits in prospect of future dangers. Carbon taxes and other restrictive measures will not get passed in democracies because that would be political death and actually in any individual country because it would lessen competitiveness.
As I have said for a long time and Kevin says now, degradation of standard of living can be avoided if non-fossil energy generation can be made distinctly cheaper than fossil energy. Some people claim that it is cheaper now, but that claim is belied by the actions of less-democratic countries such as China, which are choosing to invest in coal. Maybe if the problem is vested interests in fossil fuels, non-fossil energy will have to be so much cheaper as to overcome those interests. Private enterprise is not going to invest massively by itself in the research which might lead to much cheaper non-fossil energy. The US made huge investments in research on atomic fission when the object was mainly to kill foreigners (before they killed us - Germany was thought to have a nuclear program) - can it do so when the object is to counter global warming, a more distant danger?
Better put more money into geo-engineering and air capture of carbon dioxide technology. Or better yet, have the government purchase emission capture offsets from them ("Capture 1 billion tons of CO2"), because they can then use that contract to go raise investment capital to do it.