Biden Rejoins Paris Climate Accord, Works To Overturn Trump's Climate Policies (washingtonpost.com) 345
During his first moments in the Oval Office on Wednesday, President Biden returned the United States to the Paris climate accord and directed federal agencies to begin unraveling Donald Trump's environmental policies. The Washington Post reports: Biden's executive order recommitting the United States to the international struggle to slow global warming fulfilled a campaign promise and represented a stark repudiation of the "America First" approach of Trump, who officially withdrew the nation from the Paris agreement Nov. 4 after years of disparaging it. Biden also ordered federal agencies to review scores of climate and environmental policies enacted during the Trump years and, if possible, to quickly reverse them. Nearly half of the regulations the new administration is targeting come from the Environmental Protection Agency, on issues as varied as drinking water, dangerous chemicals and gas-mileage standards.
Biden is expected to take even more sweeping action next Wednesday, according to a document obtained by The Washington Post. He plans to sign an executive order elevating climate in domestic and national security policy; direct "science and evidence based decision-making" in federal agencies; reestablish the Presidential Council of Advisers on Science and Technology and announce that U.S. data that will help underpin the Climate Leadership Summit that Biden will host in Washington in late April. "While many of Biden's actions Wednesday will take effect over time -- the country will again formally become a party to the Paris agreement 30 days from now," the report adds. He's also planning to rescind the presidential permit Trump granted the Keystone XL pipeline to transport crude oil from Canada across the border into the United States, and is instructing the EPA and Transportation Department to strengthen fuel efficiency standards for cars and light trucks, which Trump weakened.
Furthermore, the report says Biden "plans to impose a temporary moratorium on all oil and natural gas leasing activities in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which is home to caribou, polar bears and Indigenous people."
Biden is expected to take even more sweeping action next Wednesday, according to a document obtained by The Washington Post. He plans to sign an executive order elevating climate in domestic and national security policy; direct "science and evidence based decision-making" in federal agencies; reestablish the Presidential Council of Advisers on Science and Technology and announce that U.S. data that will help underpin the Climate Leadership Summit that Biden will host in Washington in late April. "While many of Biden's actions Wednesday will take effect over time -- the country will again formally become a party to the Paris agreement 30 days from now," the report adds. He's also planning to rescind the presidential permit Trump granted the Keystone XL pipeline to transport crude oil from Canada across the border into the United States, and is instructing the EPA and Transportation Department to strengthen fuel efficiency standards for cars and light trucks, which Trump weakened.
Furthermore, the report says Biden "plans to impose a temporary moratorium on all oil and natural gas leasing activities in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which is home to caribou, polar bears and Indigenous people."
Cancelled the Keystone pipeline (Score:2, Insightful)
In a short-sighted move, he also cancelled the Keystone pipeline that was intended to bring Canadian oil into the United States.
Now the oil that would otherwise have been imported through the pipeline with either arrive on oil trains (less safe and more prone to accidents than pipeline shipping) or be sent to other customers by Canada, leaving the US to make up any shortfall in their oil requirements by making purchases from Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, etc., which will be imported by ocean-going oil tanker. E
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Somebody has to buy all that oil from Iran!!!
Somebody=China
Re:Cancelled the Keystone pipeline (Score:5, Informative)
Where's the win in that?
In the increase in price of oil relative to renewable energy sources.
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Where's the win in that?
In the increase in price of oil relative to renewable energy sources.
So allow the pipeline and use the political capital you get from that authorization to tax the carbon emitted by burning the oil.
It's a more efficient solution and potentially results in lower emissions than just cancelling the pipeline.
Re:Cancelled the Keystone pipeline (Score:5, Informative)
If that drops demand by 4%, then that's about the 830,000 bpd that the keystone XL increases the capacity by.
Maybe the money spent on the pipeline would be better spent on renewable power generations and storage.
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$200 per tonne of carbon is (if my arithmetic is correct) about 60c per gallon of gas.
If that drops demand by 4%, then that's about the 830,000 bpd that the keystone XL increases the capacity by.
Maybe the money spent on the pipeline would be better spent on renewable power generations and storage.
Not to mention all pipelines leak and damage the environment
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I'd rather a leak than https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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I'd rather a leak than https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
So we can agree that we should move on from these fuel sources/ develop safer ways to transport them for the limited use they will provide in our future society?
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A compromise is quicker than perfection
Re:Cancelled the Keystone pipeline (Score:4, Interesting)
Yea, train people forgetting to set the parking brakes can be bad. So can cheaping out on maintaining a pipeline, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada... [www.cbc.ca]
And the dilutent in Keystone will burn pretty good.
Without an explosion, train accidents are actually easier to clean up in general then pipelines as well as usually it is one or two tankers that leak in the case of trains and many barrels, in the middle of nowhere in the case of pipelines, or perhaps near a river that people drink out of, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada... [www.cbc.ca]
Re:Cancelled the Keystone pipeline (Score:5, Informative)
As opposed to the Keystone pipeline, which has leaked [pri.org] a lot over the years. [boldnebraska.org]
Oh, wait, you are lying about the scale of the leaks of the Alaska pipeline. [csmonitor.com]
Re:Cancelled the Keystone pipeline (Score:4, Insightful)
Keystone XL is safer and less polluting than the rail transit that it would replace.
False dichotomy. We can instead reduce our dependence on oil.
We are going to continue to use oil for another 30 years.
Yes, and if we are going to continue living on this planet, we are going to have to use less and less of it, and to reduce its carbon emissions per barrel or whatever unit.
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More like $2.00 per gallon if my math is right.
Re:Cancelled the Keystone pipeline (Score:4, Insightful)
Why don't you wait till you have a VIABLE energy alternative out there before you go jacking up the cost of living on common Americans?
Common Americans (and people for that matter) are already paying the externalities in food prices, health as well as damage from drought, floods and fires. The only reason that fossil fuels are still competitive for any application barring air travel, long haul freight, and possibly shipping is that they are allowing everyone else to bear the costs.
Raising prices on travel and product transport by $0.60 will cause a lot of grief in an economy that is already hurting.
Somewhere around there is probably the actual cost.
Now it not the time to shove this down citizens' throats, especially the poorer ones.
That needs to be balanced against the shoving lung disease, fires, floods, droughts and higher food prices down their throats.
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A ten-year-old Leaf has the remaining range of a golf cart. There’s a reason those things are so cheap.
The real fix is giving low income folks a break in other aspects of their living expenses, so they can afford the slight increase in the cost of gas. I’ve never been a fan of EV subsidies, because they generally just amount to giving some well-off people discounts on their Teslas. If the goal was helping the environment, you’d implement a “cash for clunkers” scrap program,
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A ten-year-old Leaf has the remaining range of a golf cart.
What's the range of a golf cart? 10 miles between charges would actually fulfill over half of my needs. If it could manage as much as 50 that would take care of about 95%, so I might just have to rent a car or take a shuttle to the airport which is just over 50 miles from here once or twice a year.
I plan to drive my car until it's cheaper to replace than to maintain and a $3000 EV with a hundred mile range that was reliable would actually make a lot of sense as a replacement for my current car when it ev
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Cash for clunkers. What a joke that was. All that amounted to was destroying tens of thousands of perfectly fine vehicles. And what do you think the people who got cash for their "clunkers" replaced them with, hmmm?
I dunno, we got rid of my wife's 15 year old Explorer with 250,000 miles on it during C4C. Thing was on its last legs and definitely not worth a lot. The dealer had a whole section of C4C trade-ins sitting there waiting to be clunked I guess, they were all gigantic POS's that were not "perfectly fine" vehicles. And if the vehicle was perfectly fine, why would someone trade it in for the relatively small amount C4C paid for these things? Only vehicles that got shitty mileage in the first place were eligi
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Most people where eI live:
a) have a short commute
b) use walk, public transport or a nike for it
Perhaps it is time to get of your ass?
Re:Cancelled the Keystone pipeline (Score:5, Insightful)
Why do you want the poor to spend more and more of their income on artificially inflated energy?
There's a large externality on burning fossil fuels that is not accounted for. The problem is that the cost of fossil fuel energy is artificially deflated.
Re:Cancelled the Keystone pipeline (Score:5, Informative)
You must be well fed and warm, to blithely talk about taking more money, health and jobs from the less fortunate.
Suddenly Republicans care about poor people when it's the handful of poor people employed in the oil industry.
Every gallon of oil burnt also destroys air quality which predominantly kills the poor.
https://www.usnews.com/news/na... [usnews.com]
But the concern for poor people suddenly evaporates if it means oil industry profits are impacted.
We also don't need to convert hundreds of square miles of desert into solar collection. People have roofs. Farms have space for wind mills. The environmental impact of deploying wind farms or solar roofs is miniscule compared to the offset oil especially tar sands oil which destroys hundreds of square miles of Canadian tundra.
But I'm sure none of that matters because you know all of this as an industry shill, you just don't care about the truth as long as it sounds good.
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You must be well fed and warm, to blithely talk about taking more money, health and jobs from the less fortunate.
If my understanding is correct, then the economics of renewable energy vs fossil fuels is very much in the other direction.
It is fossil fuels that takes money, health, and economic activity from people.
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In the increase in price of oil relative to renewable energy sources.
Then the goal of the people fighting global warming is to just drive the price of energy higher, bringing more poverty to the USA.
If the goal is to increase the price of oil relative to renewable energy then perhaps the best means to do that is lower the costs of renewable energy to that of oil instead of lifting the costs of oil to match that of renewable energy.
Taxing our way into more renewable energy only lasts until the next election. Bringing the real and actual costs of renewable energy down through technological development, economies of scale, and other market forces will last more than two years. People will not vote themselves into energy poverty. People will buy cheaper energy willingly though. So, stop trying to legislate renewable energy into affordability. Such tactics leave people poorer, bitter, politically divided, and did I mention poorer?
Carbon taxes is one of the biggest bullshit tactics I've seen in reducing the harms of global warming. Taxing carbon emissions doesn't fix the problem. I'm not seeing these funds going to people to rectify the harm done. People burn fossil fuels because of a lack of options. Raising the price of fossil fuels with taxes doesn't give more options, it removes them. And again these taxes are not likely to last an election because people will not vote themselves into poverty and out of energy options.
Do people not realize that it takes energy to build windmills and hydroelectric dams? What happens when the price of energy goes up? The price of windmills and hydroelectric dams goes up too. Carbon taxes only makes building of more energy options more expensive, and therefore delays any real and lasting solutions.
Carbon taxes is a demonstration of a lack of education, a lack of intelligence, and a lack of creativity. It shows that when people have only a government hammer then everything looks like a tax and subsidy nail. There's other tools to address this problem besides government. Tools that don't bring more poverty and fewer options.
The hidden , unaccounted costs of fossil fuels and carbon far outweigh the cost of renewables. Unhide them. Get off your soapbox and get a job. Do something useful instead of trying to convince people that what is good for them is actually bad. Figure it out
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Even more hilariously, Canada is on board with the Paris Climate Accord, and the Keystone Pipeline which helps its near-term energy plans. So now tens of thousands of U.S. and Canadian jobs went up in smoke, and the oil and jobs will go outside the NA continent.
Re: Cancelled the Keystone pipeline (Score:3, Interesting)
So now tens of thousands of U.S. and Canadian jobs went up in smoke
I spent the summer on a drilling crew, laying fiber in Colorado and pipeline in New Mexico. These are bullshit, disposable jobs.
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These are bullshit, disposable jobs.
Why did you do it then? For fun?
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The heroin, I imagine.
Re: Cancelled the Keystone pipeline (Score:5, Insightful)
So now tens of thousands of U.S. and Canadian jobs went up in smoke
I spent the summer on a drilling crew, laying fiber in Colorado and pipeline in New Mexico. These are bullshit, disposable jobs.
Lots of people are thrilled to find "bullshit, disposable jobs". That's how they support their families.
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One of the left wing's biggest liabilities is a general callousness toward working class Americans, particularly in trades.
Type44Q is on the political right, not left.
Re:Cancelled the Keystone pipeline (Score:5, Informative)
leaving the US to make up any shortfall in their oil requirements by making purchases from Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, etc.
Kindly make up your mind. Either the U.S. is oil sufficient or it's not. Every time oil is brought up we're told the U.S. is energy independent when it comes to oil. In fact, we have so much oil we're one of the top exporters in the world.
So which is it?
P.S. The U.S. no longer imports oil from Venezuela [eia.gov].
Re:Cancelled the Keystone pipeline (Score:5, Informative)
Kindly make up your mind. Either the U.S. is oil sufficient or it's not. Every time oil is brought up we're told the U.S. is energy independent when it comes to oil. In fact, we have so much oil we're one of the top exporters in the world.
The US is an oil exporter because the oil companies can make more money selling US oil overseas and importing / processing foreign oil for US consumption because their facilities are designed to process certain types of oil better than others and this import/export shuffle means they don't have to upgrade their facilities (again). From Why The U.S. Exports Oil [forbes.com]:
I am often asked why we are exporting oil at all. It comes down to the quality of the oil that is being produced, versus the kind of oil U.S. refineries are built to process.
Over the years, U.S. crude oil has gotten progressively heavier and sourer (meaning it contains larger hydrocarbon molecules as well as more sulfur.) Globally, heavy crude production increased in places like Canada, Venezuela and Nigeria. A wide price differential developed between heavy, sour crudes and light sweet crudes like WTI and Brent. Because crudes that are heavy and/or sour can produce about the same amount of finished products as lighter, sweeter crudes, refiners had a strong financial incentive to process the discounted crudes.
So U.S. refiners spent billions of dollars installing fluid catalytic crackers (FCCs), cokers, and hydrotreaters that are needed to process heavy sour crudes. After investing all of that money into processing the heavy crudes, the economics of running Bakken or Eagle Ford crudes in a heavy oil refinery are far less appealing than running a heavy Canadian or Venezuelan crude.
Heavy oil refiners would rather simply continue to import oil more suited to their needs, while the light, sweet crudes coming out of the U.S. shale plays are often a better fit for certain foreign refineries. Or, logistically it may simply be easier for Canada, for instance, to import U.S. crude for their East Coast refineries, while they export their heavy oil from Alberta to U.S. refineries that are equipped to process it.
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Notably, those types that U.S. refineries are most suitable for do not include the crude from oil sand in Canada.
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Let's say the climate apocalypse people achieve their wildest dreams and in 20 years there are zero hydrocarbon burning energy producing machines operating on the planet.
That would not reduce the desirability of the pipeline.
Crude oil is still a valuable feedstock for fertilizer, lubricants, solvents, and plastic production. I somehow doubt the need for any of those is going away.
Re: Cancelled the Keystone pipeline (Score:4, Insightful)
It is truly stupid to cancel the pipeline.
Even dumber than extracting from tar sands??
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In a short-sighted move, he also cancelled the Keystone pipeline that was intended to bring Canadian oil into the United States.
The U.S. is currently a net exporter of oil. https://www.eia.gov/todayinene... [eia.gov]
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'ER' hello, is there any one at home there. The fossil fuel era is ending, pipelines are a really shitty investments at this time, except if they deliver fresh water to deserts. A glut of oil on the market and Canada's rubbish extreme polluting oil, well, it should be shut down.
It makes sense to buy from the cheapest locations and the cheapest locations will be stuck with a lot of less than valuable oil in the end. Electric vehicles are taking over the market and ignore the lies about grids unable to cope,
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And the young people of today wonder why they are worse off than the boomers?
Re:Cancelled the Keystone pipeline (Score:5, Insightful)
Lots of wins:
* No longer endanger the Ogallala aquifer.
* No longer being in conflict with indigenous tribes.
* Stop demand for Alberta tar sands, which has been an environmental disaster there.
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The article you linked is not about fracking.
It evens says, right at the beginning: 'The development of "oil shale" (not to be confused with "shale oil") . . . ' and then goes on to describe the destructive nature of oil shale exploitation, which is not a description of fracking.
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Re:Cancelled the Keystone pipeline (Score:5, Insightful)
As a Canadian, hopefully it means that there will be more pressure to leave that oil in the ground. The less profitable it is, the sooner the industry will be wound down.
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The oil from Canada is more expensive because getting it out of oil sand is more expensive than pumping it from a well in the Gulf. There's no reason that any Canadian crude that's practical to buy shouldn't go to one of the many refineries in the North East.
Would you feel the same about the pipeline if it was going to be in your back yard?
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Biden is in office like 10 hours(while I'm typing this).
And you already "know" he has canceled a pipeline project?
How plausible is that?
That oil is just on it's way to China (Score:2)
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The oil produced by Canada is barely economical as it is, and it is vastly more polluting than oil produced elsewhere. If the Keystone XL pipeline is not built, less of that oil will be produced. This is absolutely a win both for the environment and for the climate.
This policy of undoing previous administration.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Really, that's what the USA got with Trump, who spent so much time and energy undoing Obama era stuff.
I'm not saying that what Trump did was right, but what country is going to be able to count on the USA to have any consistency when a country keeps flipping directions every time it has an election?
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That's why running a country via executive order is dumb. Executive orders are designed for accomplishing specified short term goals. If you want long term change, legislate it properly.
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If the previous administration implemented a bad policy then that policy should be undone. The problem is that our government is rife with special interests all trying to feed from the trough by directing public policy in their favor.
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I'm not saying that what Trump did was right,
Either it was wrong and we should undo it, or it was right and we shouldn't. Doing the right thing is more important than giving other nations confidence that we won't change our minds. If we acted the way you suggest, the takeaway is that we won't admit that we can be wrong. I submit that this is the wrong message.
Re:This policy of undoing previous administration. (Score:5, Insightful)
Then Biden should submit the treaty to the Senate for ratification, because absent ratification, the Paris Accord has no legal weight in the US other than through the edicts of the President, which tend to be temporary.
Re:This policy of undoing previous administration. (Score:4, Insightful)
Instead the US should unilaterally pass legislation (simple majority) self-imposing environmental standards that are consistent with (or better than) the Paris Accords.
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Really? Trump managed to get the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement ratified in early 2020, if only the President would bring something reasonable to the Senate for ratification... which is exactly why Obama didn't.
Yup, Obama should have done the same... a
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Better even still? Get California to pass the restrictions, then most industries in the US blanket follow. California is massive, and companies really don't want to have to comply with 30 different laws, many times they just opt to comply with the most restrictive in order to simplify things. This is already happening.
Re: This policy of undoing previous administration (Score:3)
Great. Enjoy red states turning blue as a result. I know I will.
Re:This policy of undoing previous administration. (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree. You have been able to rely on European countries to abide by the Paris Accord consistently. The US needs to do it the same. Biden should make it so it is irrevocable. Climate Change is the highest importance after COVID.
This is about more than just the climate, it is about who will dominate the technologies that take over from coal, oil and gas. The US has been busy going back to dying fossil fuel technologies for the last four years under Trump which is about the same as fighting the internal combustion engine and electricity back in 1900 and wanting to go back to steam, coal gas, hose drawn buggies and kerosene lamps. The US can either continue pissing about with trying to breathe life into the corpse of the fossil fuel industry and miss the bus on emerging tech or go full force for new technologies like renewables and electric cars, ships and aircraft. If they choose the former option, which seems entirely realistic given the popularity of Trumps luddite policies, the US will miss the bus. If that happens, one thing is certain, America's Trump country will not blame this failure on the stupidity of their own decision to bet the bank on fossil fuels, they will blame it on everybody else.
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It didn't take legislation for the computer to displace the abacus. If fossil fuels are a dying technology, why do we need government intervention?
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Because we'd like for it to happen fast.
Re: This policy of undoing previous administration (Score:4, Informative)
why do we need government intervention? There are more government subsidies and tax write offs for the fossil fuel industry than there are government investments in renewables. Care to rephrase your question?
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So the solution to government intervention is yet more government intervention? May I reiterate that I am opposed to government intervention?
Re:This policy of undoing previous administration. (Score:5, Insightful)
It didn't take legislation for the computer to displace the abacus. If fossil fuels are a dying technology, why do we need government intervention?
Environmental pollution and carbon emissions are super cheap on the frontend.
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"It didn't take legislation for the computer to displace the abacus."
It absolutely did, in fact it took countless acts by the government to do so. Without government actions there would never have been computers capable of "displacing" the abacus in the first place. Take for example, that computers are predicated on electrical standards defined by legislation.
How clever you are. I guess it didn't take legislation for the automobile to displace the Conestoga wagon either, right?
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If you're driving along a one-way road and somebody grabs your steering wheel and makes a U-turn, you don't then say, oh well, I have to keep going in this direction now because double U-turns are bad.
The problem is... (Score:5, Informative)
The UN says it's a treaty. Every other country that signed it says it's a treaty.
When Obama "signed on" to the treaty, it had no legal force, since he didn't run it past the Senate. The theory was that it was an "agreement." Except it was agreeing to a long-term commitment, which makes it a treaty.
So when Biden "signed off" on it, it has no actual legal force, just like Obama's signature.
If Biden wants to be a part of the Paris Accords, he can run it past the Senate. Where it needs a two-thirds vote.
Good luck with that.
Re:The problem is... (Score:5, Insightful)
So when Biden "signed off" on it, it has no actual legal force, just like Obama's signature.
The Paris Climate Agreement has no legal force even if it was ratified. It allows nations to set their own CO2 emissions goals and offers no real punishment for not attaining them.
Since France has in the past been producing 70% of their electricity with "zero carbon" nuclear fission power then they have every right to tell most of the world to go fuck themselves on any demands that France lower it's CO2 emissions. (I put "zero carbon" in scare quotes because nothing is truly zero carbon, just nuclear fission is as close to zero as we have so far.) If the nation's of the world are serious about lowering CO2 emissions then they will invest big on the energy sources that bring high energy return on energy invested, have low demands on land area and materials, are reliable, are abundant, and therefore have low CO2 emissions. That means onshore wind, geothermal, hydro, and nuclear fission. France, Germany, and other nations that are closing nuclear fission power plants and building offshore windmills are going backwards. Even so the nations with a big head start, like France, deserve a little room on their CO2 goals. The worst offenders, like China and Russia, don't deserve such room. But because nations get to set their own goals, and nations like France want to do the right thing, then I expect France to fail to meet their goals while China and Russia get to claim that they met theirs.
The USA being a member of the Paris Climate Agreement means nothing because the agreements mean nothing.
I find it amusing how people make a big deal of the "symbolism" of the Paris Climate Agreement. I don't care about symbolism. I want to see results. The USA doesn't need to be in the Paris Climate Agreement to lower its CO2 emissions. What it needs to do is build things. Things like onshore windmills, hydroelectric dams (or upgrade the ones it has for pumped hydro energy storage), geothermal power, and most of all nuclear fission power.
Biden said he'd see to it that the USA built more nuclear fission electrical generation capacity. I'm waiting for him to follow through on that.
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"The Paris Climate Agreement has no legal force even if it was ratified. It allows nations to set their own CO2 emissions goals and offers no real punishment for not attaining them."
Well that doesn't make sense, since the former President made a big deal about getting us out of that shitty, nonbinding agreemennn.. oh, wait[
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Yes, he did make a big deal out of it. He should not have. Biden is also making the mistake of making a big deal out of it.
What I want is a president that puts action over symbolism. Is that too much to ask? The Paris Climate Agreement was signed by Obama on his way out the door, he was under no obligation to uphold it's provisions and did nothing to get it ratified. That's what made it such a simple matter for Trump to negate it. If Biden wants this to mean anything then he will submit this for ratif
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When Obama "signed on" to the treaty, it had no legal force, since he didn't run it past the Senate.
Same thing happened with the Iran deal (JCPOA) Obama signed. It doesn't really matter though. The media will keep telling people it's a treaty and that the US is going back on it's word if it doesn't follow through. Once the lie has been repeated often enough everyone thinks it's true and keeping up the fight will be politically unpopular.
Re:The problem is... (Score:5, Informative)
That's because the US uses different terminology. The US makes a distinction between treaties and "executive agreements" that only makes sense within our peculiar constitutional system. That's because we have a very unusual Constitutional provision requiring a 2/3 supermajority to ratify a "treaty".
This is nearly impossible to obtain in most kinds of multilateral international agreement, so 90% of the time Presidents don't even try. This makes the treaty non-binding in US law, but binding under international law. US governments can violate signed but non-ratified treaties with *domestic* impunity, but it would create a big stink internationally. Instead they trigger the withdrawal clause that always gets built in.
An unintended side effect of the Treaty Clause is to create a new role for the president entering and exiting international accords that have no de jure legal force in the US but for practical reasons are still important. If you look at the Paris Agreement, there is no actual binding obligations or enforcement mechanisms, so pretty much it amounts to a MOU.
Technology and free market (Score:2)
This isn't necessary. Technology and mass manufacture of "green" technologies has progressed to the point that it is both cost effective and en vogue to use solar power, electric cars, etc. Elon Musk is now the richest man in the world, and that is primarily due to Tesla, which exclusively makes electric cars.
These announcements by Biden are simply to win brownie points with those concerned about environmental issues, even though they aren't necessary.
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Tesla, which exclusively makes electric cars.
Since Tesla absorbed SolarCity it is also a producer of solar PV panels and grid scale electrical storage, and appears to have at least attempted to enter the market of medical ventilation systems. Tesla doesn't just make electric cars.
These announcements by Biden are simply to win brownie points with those concerned about environmental issues, even though they aren't necessary.
"Brownie points" don't lower CO2 emissions. Building things does. Not building the Keystone XL pipeline is a step backwards. Restrictions on over the road shipment of LNG is going backwards. Those will get him "brownie points" but with people that are ignorant about what
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Limits on pipelines and trucking of LNG only encourages coal burning.
Nah. They'll just ship it by rail [patch.com]. Or tanker ship.
Now we can all breathe a sigh of relief... (Score:2)
cuz, you know, clean air and all is rather important for life in general, and even just good health.
This is dumb (Score:3)
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I agree. Trump's changes in policy were stupid and bad for business.
The Left is Already Trying to Overturn Biden (Score:2)
https://twitter.com/zenpundit/... [twitter.com]
The Portland crowd has now gone to the local headquarters of the Democratic Party, smashing windows and writing "F*** Biden"
https://mobile.twitter.com/ByM... [twitter.com]
Fuel efficiency (Score:2)
for light trucks
Beware the law of unintended consequences [tumblr.com].
During the Obama administration, the local GMC dealer had a bunch of these on the lot. This is how we got SUVs. Gas guzzler tax on full size station wagons. And then when they moved the GVWR line up for 'light trucks', we got Excursions and Escalades. Truck builders have enough commercial chassis options that they can build the next model faster than Congress can move. And pretty soon, city folks won't be able to eat if working trucks are restricted.
Re:foolish (Score:4, Informative)
And yet, it's better than nothing and has had a discernible impact
https://abcnews.go.com/Technol... [go.com]
It must suck seeing everything in stark terms of black and white Being that this is /. I assume you dig binary, but that's no way to live your life
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Well, there are 10 ways to look at it...
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That's wasting a quarter of the capacity of looking at it, though.
Re:foolish (Score:4, Funny)
Well, there are 10 ways to look at it...
"There's no such thing as two" - Philip J. Fry
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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And yet, it's better than nothing
Is it? It gives an illusion of progress that leads to complacency.
https://abcnews.go.com/Technol... [go.com]
This article says that the Paris Accords were signed 5 years ago and some good things happened since then, and therefore the signing of the Paris Accords caused that progress.
So about five logical fallacies in one article.
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Have no goals and you'll hit them every time.
There are goals in the PCA and some countries are actually on track to achieve them. Notably EU27 and India. Now you could argue that the goals are insufficient, but they do exist and are being achieved by some.
Re:foolish (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't act like it tied our hands.
By withdrawing, the previous administration did not seek to enhance our response (and the PCA never prevented that). It was crystal clear that Trump loathed environmental responsibility.
Rejoining the PCA tells the world that we are no longer fighting them and their efforts to increase environmentalism.
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This is probably more important than almost anything else the US can do. At the end of the danger its the large developing economies that are most at stake in terms of both production and harms if nothings done. China, India, Brazil, Nigeria,(All at varying stages of economic development). The whole talk about American Leadership can be jingoistic, but you better believe that when other countries start evaluating their response much of thats going to be "If America and Australia are shirking their responsib
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the Paris Accord has no set goals and nothing for noncompliance, a worthless symbolic bunch of vapor. It can be used to justify any stupid and foolish actions.
So ... why are Trumpsters so desperate to leave it? Enlighten us.
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EU did implement a ban on smoking indoors.
The loophole was that if management puts up a sign saying its okay to smoke then enter at own risk. Last time I visited Portugal in the 2010s, most pubs were still a haze of cigarettes.
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When I lived in Japan they were introducing curbs to smoking in public areas, which places like cafe terraces owing to their encroachment on the footpath counted as. If you were smoking outside, they would come around and tell you to go inside to smoke instead. It always takes a while for the laws to catch up and achieve their intended aim.
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EU did implement a ban on smoking indoors.
The loophole was that if management puts up a sign saying its okay to smoke then enter at own risk. Last time I visited Portugal in the 2010s, most pubs were still a haze of cigarettes.
There are still pubs near me TODAY in the north east United States that are still a haze of cigarette smoke.
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So fuck off with your pretend outrage, because cunts like you show that qualifications meant nothing to you in the first place.
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