Phooey on U.S.-China Climate Announcement, Says Friends of the Earth

FOEI

While powers-that-be over the Union of Concerned Scientists are hailing the Joint Announcement on Climate Change issued by Presidents Obama and Xi as a breakthrough, the fiercer folks at Friends of the Earth International are sending around a press release that denounces the US-China climate pledges as "just drop in the ocean." And, of course, it's mostly the fault of the United States.

From the press release:

Commenting on new pledges to cut greenhouse gas emissions unveiled by the US and China today in Beijing, Dipti Bhatnagar from Friends of the Earth International said:

"Today's climate announcement by the US and China may be spun as a landmark, but in reality the US pledges are just a drop in the ocean. These figures are very far from being the sea of change we urgently need from the US government." …

US President Barack Obama said that the US will aim to reduce its emissions levels 26-28% by 2025 (compared with 2005 levels).

"The cuts pledged by President Obama are nowhere near what the US needs to cut if it was serious about preventing runaway climate change. These US voluntary pledges are not legally binding and are not based on science or equity," said Sara Shaw, Friends of the Earth International Climate Justice and Energy coordinator.

"This agreement deliberately ignores the issue of equity. Industrialised nations, and first of all the world's largest historical polluter, the US, must urgently make the deepest emission cuts and provide the bulk of the money if countries are to share fairly the responsibility of preventing catastrophic climate change," she added.

While chastising America, the Friends of the Earth praise China: 

"The good news is that China is taking the fight against climate change ever more seriously and intends to peak its emissions in next 15 years. We urge China and all nations to urgently switch from emissions-causing dirty energy to community-based renewable energy."

The Friends of the Earth clearly recognizes that China will pay no attention to their hectoring and certainly won't hand over any free money.

Comments

[Episiarch]

Nothing proves that progs care only about words and nothing about action more than the fact that they praise China here. I mean, I wouldn't believe the US either, but...believing China? Ever? That's like believing the pathological liar who is picking your pocket while trying to sell you the Brooklyn Bridge and that patch of land in the Everglades.

[antisocial-ist]

Even if they did believe China, their goals are insignificant. What they're basically saying is "After 15 years or so, we may reduce emissions by a rounding error". And of course, the watermelons cheer.

[Drake]

After 15 years they may stopped increasing emissions at double-digit growth rates. (Probably because they will build a bunch of nuke plants)

[some guy]

China's pretty big on solar and wind right now too. It's amazing what you can do when money is no object.

[Drake]

I thought they just sold their crappy solar panels to us? Didn't think they would install them there.

[Brett L]

I have also been told that the QC on Chinese solar panels is pretty horrible. I'm sure it varies by brand, but the ones the government buys? Probably already failed at least one QC test.

[anon]

I'm sure it varies by brand, but the ones the government buys? Probably already failed at least one QC test.

Duh, that's why the government's only paying 3x market retail instead of 4x.

[Idle Hands]

The fact that anyone can criticize america for carbon emissions and praise China is Olympian in their ability to conduct mental gymnastics.

LA

Beijing

[Drake]

Your LA link doesn't work - but the air quality there has improved considerably over the past 30 years.

[BakedPenguin]

Pretty sure that was his point.

[Drake]

I was agreeing.

[some guy]

In this context I assume "Olympian" means "childlike"?

[Idle Hands]

I mean like the Chinese gymnastic team in 2008.

[anon]

I thought he was talking about the beer.

[GILMORE]

I Believe China!

Because what they promised? Is to do *whatever they want for another 15 years*

I can believe that. Its being spun as some kind of 'promise to promise something later', which is about as interesting as those Kenner gift certificates they gave out for Christmas when they were too late to have Star Wars toys ready in time.

Actually - scratch that. Kenner actually delivered the toys. China is just going to stiff arm these motherfuckers for another generation.

[Episiarch]

Lying and not giving the slightest shit about your reputation, because the people you are dealing with are dumber than a sack of hammers, must be very freeing. You'd feel like you could lie about anything...oh wait...

[Old Man With Candy]

"Friends of the Earth International Climate Justice and Energy coordinator."

Nice career goal.

[Scruffy Nerfherder]

Justice for who?

[Clown Hunter]

Justice for the Climate, as near as I can tell.

How one can achieve justice for a planetary energy transfer system, is an exercise for the reader.

[Sevo]

"The cuts pledged by President Obama are nowhere near what the US needs to cut if it was serious about preventing runaway climate change."

Which is exactly the reason sensible people can ignore these twits.
The proposed cuts are not going to happen, since there is no way shy of the commercialization of fusion to achieve them.
And if that impossibility is not going to satisfy them, why bother to listen to them?
They're like petulant GF who isn't satisfied with anything less than a chartered jet.

[UnCivilServant]

The proposed cuts are not going to happen, since there is no way shy of the commercialization of fusion to achieve them.

Didn'tcha hear? We've gone from Fusion ebign perpetually twenty years away to Fusion being perpetually ten years away!

(Actually, the Lockheed work has been very rational and very interesting. Because the smaller prototypes are cheaper, they can iterate faster than the gargantuan European reactors, and thus have a better chance of overcoming the engineering obsctacles.)

[Sevo]

I haven't seen much at all about the Lockheed effort besides a headline a month or so ago.
I'm still looking.

[NotAnotherSkippy]

I haven't seen anything new or significant from the Lockheed work, just a lot of fluff. Two confinement mirrors in a classic magnetic bottle and 3 coils inside to do, um, er, look over there!

[Spencer]

"preventing runaway climate change"

They use those words, but I don't think they mean what they think they mean.

[UnCivilServant]

This runaway two-decade trend of nothing happening has to end!

(Acutally the data looks like we're at a maxima of a centry-long climate cycle, and if the sine wave pattern continues, we'll be seeing a cooling pattern soon)

[Drake]

Not this?

http://www.cnn.com/2014/11/11/.....index.html

[Arthur45]

Of course China's top scientist sees no threat from carbon emissions. China is reducing harmful, unhealthy emissions and is not doing it using much "renewable" (unreliable, expensive) producers, bu tby building nuclear plants at an astonishing rate - currently 27 plants are under construction, with plans for hundreds and even thousands more. The Chinese aren't stupid like the environuts.

[Brett L]

Honestly, better scrubbers on their coal plants would cure about 80% of their smog problem which is mostly particulate.

[Brett L]

So the US -- one of the top 10 largest producers of their much hated carbon in 2005 -- is going to cut 1/4 to 1/3rd of their emissions and the answer from the Greens is "not even a good start"? My days of not taking these people seriously have probably reached a middle.

[AlmightyJB]

OT: Nice.

"white supremacist, heteropatriarchal capitalism."

http://humanevents.com/2014/11.....nal-fraud/

[mr lizard]

Sweet, I was looking for mobile hookers and landscaping business.

[anon]

Hmm. I do consider myself superior to less intelligent people that would like to run my life, and I am white. Does that actually make me a white supremacist?

[Dr. Fronkensteen]

WTF is "community-based renewable energy" supposed to be?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bottled Unicorn Farts.

[DesigNate]

Soylent Green?

[AlmightyJB]

Poo

[Suthenboy]

Methane from compost. These people are dumber than dirt.

[anon]

Oh man, I forgot about that. Those types generally love their "green" compost gardens or whatever the fuck they imagine they're doing with their trash to SAVE LANDFILLZ! Honestly, I don't know why they compost shit, but whatever.

I'd be willing to bet the aggregate methane production of "green" peoples' compost heaps has far more of a "greenhouse gas effect" than every car ever produced.

[anon]

Powered by imagination!

And by that, I mean imagining they have power.

[UnCivilServant]

Welfare recipients will be put on giant gerbil wheels to drive dynamoes and try to take up the slack from wind and solar. I don't know what the gear ratio would be from human speed to dynamo speed would be, nor how many wheels you'd need per dynamo, but it can be made to work (if only the people staffing the wheels could be made to work...)

[Brett L]

I figured it out once based on power to a bike crank, assuming that all the power at the crank goes into the generator at the other end of the gearing. The output at the crank from someone who is fit enough to ride for an hour could probably keep your TV on, but not your TV, cable box, and wireless router. Elite riders could probably power all of those plus a light and a fan, but to heat a house, the waste heat given off by three adults working hard is a closed room will raise the temperature faster than trying to run an electric heater (which are not particularly efficient) by pedal crank.

[JWatts]

Pretty much.

"Amateur bicycle racers can typically produce 3 watts/kg for more than an hour (e.g., around 210 watts for a 70 kg rider),"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B.....efficiency

[UnCivilServant]

So we'd only need about 11,000 people working together to run a 3Mw facility!

/willfully blind to energy loss and unreliable supply from muscle power

[Clich? Bandit]

human energy output has to be even less efficient than a solar plant that never gets built.

[kbolino]

the waste heat given off by three adults working hard is a closed room will raise the temperature faster than trying to run an electric heater (which are not particularly efficient) by pedal crank.

Actually, the efficiency loss is in the waste heat from the dynamo. An electric heater is basically perfectly efficient; it converts 1 joule of electric energy into 1 joule of heat. The problem is that typically the generator used to produce 1 joule of electric energy consumed more than 1 joule of stored energy, wasting some as heat in the process.

If the generator and heater were located in the same place, then both setups would be equally efficient. Of course, this defeats the purpose of using electricity in the first place.

The reason electric heaters are seen as "inefficient" is because in conditions of small temperature differential, you can use less electricity to move heat from one place to another than to simply convert the electricity directly into heat.

This is why the heat pump runs when you have your thermostat at 65 and it's 55 degrees outside, but the electric heater will take over when the outside temperature drops to 35 degrees. There isn't enough readily available heat outside for the heat pump to pull in.

[NotAnotherSkippy]

An electric heater is basically perfectly efficient; it converts 1 joule of electric energy into 1 joule of heat. The problem is that typically the generator used to produce 1 joule of electric energy consumed more than 1 joule of stored energy, wasting some as heat in the process.

No, no, NO, NO. Don't talk efficiency when you talk heating. What matters is COP. Even ASHP's are good down to below freezing. Usually somewhere around 14-16degF is when the COP for heat pumps drops below just direct electric heating.

Just stay away from the word efficiency here. It's not really relevant.

[Hyperion]

All of the plebes running on treadmills for 12 hours shifts.

[DesigNate]

Fuck these people. We've already cut emissions to, what, 1992 levels? They can go and bitch to all of the developing countries if they're that concerned with C02 (or, I don't know, plant a fucking tree).

[Suthenboy]

Plant a fucking tree?

http://deforestation.geologist-1011.net

Oh. Look at that. Plant a fucking tree. Or two. Or a 1,000,000.

[anon]

Fuck, I wish we'd come out of this ice age already.

[Hyperion]

We have to cut down all the forests for wind and solar farms.

/derp

[Clich? Bandit]

some day someone will take the time to show me evidence that CO2 is a greenhouse gas (outside of a turtle terrarium of course). I am being dead serious. Ron may make fun of me for this but two "scientific" presuppositions I reject are c is a speed limit and CO2 is a greenhouse gas in a planetary weather system.

To the first point, while "evidence" abounds that c is a speed limit all of that evidence is based on observations using a perspective relative to light (think prop plane trying to go faster than the speed of sound in air, same problem).

To the second...well...there is no evidence.

[Suthenboy]

You only say there is no evidence because the CO2 in the atmosphere is causing the deep oceans to heat up and not the atmosphere. You will see mr. smartyguy.

[Brett L]

CO2 most definitely does absorb light in the visible spectrum and emit in the infrared spectrum. This is essentially the entire definition of the greenhouse effect with regard to atmosphere. It might follow then, that more CO2 in the atmosphere would probably cause more photons in the visible spectrum that would have escaped to be re-emitted as IR photons and heat. And these lower energy photons would be released in a random direction rather than the escape trajectory the initial photon was on.

However, another common atmospheric chemical that absorbs visible spectra light and re-emits IR is water. In the lower atmosphere, the number of water molecules is huge compared to the number of CO2 molecules (CO2 being about .035% fairly evenly distributed, H2O being from 0 to 5% depending on location -- much closer to 5% in the 70% of the earth's surface covered by liquid water).

So its no that there is no basis for the mechanism. Just that there's no good evidence controlling for other variables that I've seen.

[Clich? Bandit]

The effect of re-emitting IR photons in the aggregate towards the surface would be a greenhouse effect on its own, yes, but if increasing the thing that emits those photons ALSO puts a giant fan down which blows then back out into space (or absorbs them, or dissipates them or sends them to another dimension) then that would NOT be a greenhouse effect.

I am essentially agreeing with your premise but disagreeing with your definition of a green house effect. If it doesn't cause the house which is green to get warmer it ain't green house effect.

[Brett L]

Okay. You can argue with me, but Arrhenius coined the phrase specifically to describe the effect of IR re-emission by CO2 and H2O retaining heat in much the same way a greenhouse does.

[NotAnotherSkippy]

It doesn't. Most solar radiation is above IR (call it 1000nm). The means it's above the absorption bands for CO2 and penetrates to the Earth's surface. The majority of what the Earth emits IS IR, and since that is underneath the CO2 blanket, it's subject to the poorly named greenhouse effect.

It is correct to note that the actual effect in a greenhouse is at least as much an effect of convection suppression as it is in the radiative sense.

[NotAnotherSkippy]

CO2 most definitely does absorb light in the visible spectrum and emit in the infrared spectrum.

NO!! That is not the greenhouse effect. The effect is caused by shortwave radiation (visible light) striking the Earth, getting absorbed, then getting re-emitted as longwave radiation (IR). CO2 (and H2O and Methane and other polar molecules) then absorbs the emitted IR and re-emits. Some of that is back in the direction of the Earth and so there is warming as a result. Essentially the heat cycle is stretched out with more energy resident in the Earth/Atmosphere system and so we end up hotter in the final equilibrium.

[NotAnotherSkippy]

They aren't presuppositions. Relativity has been measured repeatedly and Lorentz transformations perfectly describe what happens as objects approach the speed of light. All of that is consistent with it being a limit.

The fact that CO2 and H20 absorb and emit IR is also well documented and is also predicted by first principles.

Now what isn't said is that the IPCC assumes some magical positive feedback causing us all to burn. the reality is more like Arrhenius' ~1.5C/doubling. So the dirty little secret is that they're lying to you about the magnitude of warming, but that's just because you're a stupid voter.

[DesigNate]

Hey, at least planting 1,000,000 trees would keep the watermelons busy.

Especially if you make them do it by hand.

[GILMORE]

I have to say = I appreciate the greens for once for calling "BS theatrics" what they are.

I've been seeing an emerging trend amongst the progerati, which seems to be eating itself after the mid-terms with a kind of identity crisis. The hard-lefties are reviling against some invisible 'sellout' lefties, and claiming that they need to go Full Progtard now to Win The Future.

I've always thought they were their own worst enemy, and i believe that will prove to be the case in the coming year.

[anon]

It's hard to bind a group who's belief system is devoid of all logic and reason.

[Episiarch]

You don't understand. They always need to go FULL PROGTARD. That is where they end up strategically after every loss. They have no other strategy. It's kind of amazing.

[Counterfly]

What's amazing is how often it works. Unless you consider their victory is derived from the American public. And then it's really more depressing than amazing.

[GILMORE]

"Episiarch|11.12.14 @ 1:12PM|#

You don't understand. They always need to go FULL PROGTARD. That is where they end up strategically after every loss."

'yes, but you see bo has some watered-down examples of similar 'blaming compromise'-rhetoric from the Right, so they're all exactly the same...'

The difference as far as i see it is that the Right has at least had a distinct 'tea party'/libertarian element that confronted the former socon-influenced establishments failures and over-reach; there is actually an ongoing process of self-evaluation. Whether its working or not, i can't make a sold case for, but there is at least a dynamic there.

The progs? They can't even reconcile themselves to the realities of the ACA, much less Obama's foreign policy: a bumbling 'Bush-Lite'. They are more TEAM than ever, even when the things the 'team' is ostensibly about are demonstrably failing in practice.

[Suthenboy]

They are true believers. They don't get that global warming, the patriarchy, racism, etc. are fabricated issues for silencing opposition, achieving power and extorting money. They don't understand why nothing is ever actually done about them besides talk.

Mr. Bezmenov had something to say about them:

"You need the ideology of Marxism Leninism pumped into the soft heads of at least three generations of students without being challenged by the basic values of Americanism. The result you can see. The people who graduated in the 60's dropped out as half-baked intellectuals and are now occupying positions of power in government, civil service, mass media, and in the educational system. You are stuck with them. You cannot get rid of them. They are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern. You cannot change their mind even if you expose them to authentic information, even if you prove that white is white and black is black you still cannot change their basic perception and the logical behavior. For these people the process of demoralization is complete and irreversible....

[Suthenboy]

Cont.

" Most of these people would be marked for extermination because the psychological shock of what they will see in the future, what the beautiful society of equality and social justice means in practice they will be very unhappy. Obviously they will join the ranks of the dissidents. Unlike the present United States there will be no place for dissent in the future Marxist Leninist America. Now you can get popular like Daniel Elsberg or filthy rich like Jane Fonda by being a dissident. In the future these people will be squashed like cockroaches. No one will pay them anything for their beautiful ideas of equality. This they don't understand and it will be the greatest shock for them of course."

If you havent seen it, watch it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLqHv0xgOlc

[Hyperion]

I've come to a conclusion that all leftists are part of a cult.

[John]

That is a pretty good description of it. The only thing Suthenboy's guy gets wrong is the assumption they will ever be competent enough to get that kind of power.

There is this seen the original Hannibal Lector movie they made back in the 1980s where the detective who caught Lector goes and sees Lector in prison for advice on catching a new killer. Lector tells him that he shouldn't need his help because he was smart enough to catch Lector so why not this guy? The detective says "well I had a certain advantage in doing that, you were insane and I wasn't".

The rest of us are a bit like the detective and the left Lector. As evil and devious and committed as they are, we have the advantage of not being insane.

[kbolino]

Mentally substituting Wesley Mouch in place of any bureaucrat or government fluffer has a surprising (and scary) amount of predictive power.

[Hyperion]

That appears to be the trend that I'm seeing. Double down on what is already causing people to run away from them en masse.

Just wait until an announcement comes that the first commercial fusion generators are going to be built and watch them freak the fuck out and start finding reasons to attack fusion.

These people do not want abundant cheap energy, despite how clean it is. Just like they don't want abundant cheap food, thus their attacks on GMO.

What they want is a constant crisis that only a massive authoritarian government can save us from.

[Suthenboy]

"Just wait until an announcement comes that the first commercial fusion generators are going to be built and watch them freak the fuck out and start finding reasons to attack fusion."

^This.

"These people do not want abundant cheap energy, despite how clean it is. Just like they don't want abundant cheap food, thus their attacks on GMO.

What they want is a constant crisis that only a massive authoritarian government can save us from."

And what Rhywun says below; massive piles of corpses.

[Scruffy Nerfherder]

I highly recommend David Brin's latest book, Existence. It's a meditation on apocalypse and the human obsession with it.

[GILMORE]

He's the guy who wrote "the Postman", no?

That's also a meditation on the apocalypse. and the role that mailmen play afterward.

[Scruffy Nerfherder]

In a strange sense, Existence is similar. But with less Costner.

[GILMORE]

I read 2 of Brin's books in high school. Along with some things by this guy, whose first 2 books involved a guy who has sex with a unicorn in a post-apocalyptic world, and a guy who is transported to an alternate dimension where Racoons are the dominant species. Good times.

[Redmanfms]

Just wait until an announcement comes that the first commercial fusion generators are going to be built and watch them freak the fuck out and start finding reasons to attack fusion.

It wouldn't even take (gasp) nuclear. If some miracle of physical law-breaking happened and suddenly solar and wind became both reliable and equally cheap they'd hate those too.

Just like they did with natural gas.

These people are animists, their religion makes absolutely no sense.

[Suthenboy]

""This agreement deliberately ignores the issue of equity. Industrialised nations, and first of all the world's largest historical polluter, the US, must urgently make the deepest emission cuts and provide the bulk of the money...."

I have a suspicion that this isn't about global warming.

[Anonymous Coward]

All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of Gaia, America most of all. Therefore, as the worst of sinners, America must repent the most and do the heaviest penance so that Gaia's Wrath shall turn away from us.

[Hyperion]

All of this cold weather makes me start to think that Gaia is playing a massive practical joke on the warmist cult.

[JWatts]

No need to suspect. It's right there in the quote:

"and provide the bulk of the money"

It's about wealth redistribution.

[Suthenboy]

That is why I put that in there. I was being sarcastic.

*headsmack*

[Scruffy Nerfherder]

It's about wealth redistribution.

In the same way the Cuban Revolution was about empowerment of the people.

A Serbian acquaintance summed it up best. He called them all ignorant peasants enamored with their own power. And he wasn't far from the truth. The Yugoslav communist party would enlist poor farmers and serfs to act as agents of the government. People whose only qualification was gratitude to the government for giving them power. A gratitude which made them ruthless in seeking out dissent.

[John]

This is exactly happened in Southeast Asia. North Vietnam was the poor backward area of Vietnam. It was the South that was sophisticated and cosmopolitan. The North was nearly all the type of people you describe. The same is true of the Khmer Rouge. It was a movement of murderous, ignorant peasants turned lose on urban dwellers.

[kbolino]

The whole gun politics thing in the US is quite fascinating in light of the history of communism in most places.

It is precisely cheap weapons that enabled the peasantry to violently overthrow the aristocracy in so many places. Martial strength no longer carried enough weight; all you really needed was greater numbers.

If you really believed the narrative about right-wingers being nothing but "plutocrats" or apologists for the same, then how would you explain their ardent support of gun rights?

[Rhywun]

the world's largest historical polluter

I'm too lazy to look it up but I wouldn't be surprised if China has already surpassed the US in that regard.

Anyway, these people are beyond parody. I would laugh at them if it wasn't for the fact that what they really want is massive piles of corpses.

[John]

There is no way total US pollution even approaches the pollution generated by the old Soviet Union. You will of course never hear a green admit that. Government generated pollution is not pollution pollution.

These assholes need to be kicked out of the public discourse. It is a shame that the conservationist movement and real concern for the environment was coopted by socialists. But it was and the only solution to such an infestation is to blow up the movement and start over.

[Suthenboy]

Remember when chlorofluorocarbons were banned to save the ozone? The very first time we looked at the ozone layer we discovered a hole in it in the antarctic region and decided that it must have been recently created by refrigerants. A hole not where refrigerants are used and one in a magnetic POLAR region.

The US government exempted itself from the ban. That same government consumed 2/3 of all the chlorofluorocarbons on the market and consumes more now than they did then.

You never hear a peep about that crisis anymore. Cuz' there is no money in it.

[John]

CFCs were fabulous and cheap chemicals that were stable and lasted forever. As a result, the real money in producing them ended in the 1960s. The big chemical companies had replacements but they were inferior replacements. So what they did was paid off the scientific community and got the pinhead greens to help them ban CFCs creating a market for their inferior replacements.

[Tonio]

Yeah, I'd want a look at those figures, and how they deal with regime change. I suspect that China (including pre-communist governments) is indeed largest what with that huge population and all those smoky cook-fires; India is probably a close second.

[Tonio]

smokey cook fires over thousands of years...

[John]

And forced heavy industrialization. The old Marxists were obsessed with heavy industrialization. Unsurprisingly the people who were willing to murder millions in the name of progress were not too concerned with the damage their programs were doing to the environment.

Even post Mao, the Three Gorges Dam project is one of the worst environmental crimes in history.

[GroundTruth]

I'm too busy to dig out the numbers, but my recollection is that China has far surpassed the US in CO2 output AND we have already cut by 20%. FoTE needs to either sit down with pencil and paper and check their math, or be honest that what they really want is the end of western liberal republics like the US. (That's the "old fashioned" liberal, as in Liberty, not the newer sort as in progressivist fascism.)

[Tonio]

When you hear the word "equity" and it's not referring to the actors union, keep an eye on your wallet.

[Tonio]

"community-based renewable energy" = government-run utilities, with rationing

[John]

You wish it were that good. They mean a grid consisting of a few communal neighborhood solar panels that give you a few hours of power sufficient to charge your cell phone on even numbered days of the month. I am not kidding. Go read what the hard core renewable energy people actually advocate. It is all based on getting people to reduce their lifestyle and consumption and learning to live in a new reality where we "learn to use power when it is available and not just whenever we want it". It is some really disturbing and sick stuff.

[Suthenboy]

I will paraphrase that quote:

'...getting people to....get used to having a boot on their neck.'

[Hyperion]

It's very funny just how not self aware these people are supporting this crap. It all feels warm and fuzzy until they suddenly find out that their iPhone isn't going to work outside of a few select hours a day. Then they will be the first to freak the fuck out and go into hysterical shreeking toddler fits. 'Whaahaahh, not me! It wasn't supposed to happen to me!! Mommmyyyyy!!!!'

[John]

That is right. And when that happens the backlash is going to be brutal. People are not going to tolerate living like that.

I actually care about the environment and it causes me to hate the assholes even more. They are going to end up completely discrediting any concern for the environment. When the backlash comes it is going to be brutal and the pendulum will swing back so far that we will end up with a whole bunch of needless damage to the environment.

[GroundTruth]

John, you're 100% right on that.

The surest way to safeguard the environment is to encourage private ownership of bits of it (such as "my yard" or "my lot"). People are generally much less likely to abuse something they own, than something that is "owned" communally.

[BakedPenguin]

If there were only a historical example of that exact phenomenon.

[GroundTruth]

Yes, one of my colleagues regularly used that term, although as an example of why the government need to control how much CO2 I am allowed to produce.

[GroundTruth]

I have no problem with "living off the grid", but I'll damned well do it on my own terms and for my own reasons.

[OldMexican]

Phooey on U.S.-China Climate Announcement, Says Friends of the Earth

Don't you just love it when they eat each other?

[Jackand Ace]

Really? Friends of the Earth? Who cares?

More importantly, Ronald, Mitch McConnell said "phooey." But the GOP, well, as always you give them a pass. You've put up 2 postings about this deal, and have yet to tell us if you believe we should do more, or do nothing. I know the GOP wants to do nothing. How about you?

In the world of Inhofe telling us he just isn't interested in science, at least some comfort can be taken in the world's 2 biggest emitters admitting a problem and STARTING a process of doing something about it. Friends of the Earth is probably right about one thing...its not enough. But McConnell and Inhofe are wrong about everything when it comes to climate.

And you hold your tongue. Shameful.

[Jackand Ace]

Tell you what, lets see what the Director of Policy at American Meteorological Society, Paul Higgins, says about the deal:

"Efforts to reduce U.S. emissions have been blocked, in part, by people who argue that the U.S .should wait for China to act. The deal] has potential to get us all beyond what has been a major ? maybe the major ? political challenge for emissions reductions in the U.S."

He's right...its a start, something to build on. Maybe you'll let us know of all the GOP efforts to scuttle, rather than tell us what Friends of the Earth think.

[John]

It is a building block of a much poorer and more primitive future!!!