It's in the financial interests of the US to be involved on the international stage. I listened to Trump's speech today and heard nothing but "Boohoo, it's so hard to be America". The reality is that the US is the gorilla in every room - we have the largest economy, largest military, and American hegemony has been a massive benefit to the country. Countries bend over backwards to gain access to US markets and millions still aspire to move here looking for better opportunities.
The whole situation reminds me of a quote from Interstellar - "We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars. Now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt."
We've giving up our global leadership for the sake of a few extra dollars in our pocket now - never mind the cost of inaction or every bit of scientific evidence that tells us something must be done. Even the Department of Defense believes that climate change is real and will have significant consequences for the US.
When did American exceptionalism turn into "It's too hard so I'm going to do nothing"?
That's been a painfully common refrain in the current generation of political discourse (though the generational line is difficult to pinpoint; there seem to be as many young people talking about it as 60 year old lifetime senators).
Climate change? Hard to deal with, we should do nothing.
Gun control? They will take all our guns, or take none, and the second amendment said I could have guns. There is no middle ground.
But the root cause is polarization; rather than middle grounds, shades of gray, or compromises, everything in the current political climate seems to boil down to black or white, right or wrong, with no space between.
It's... Hard to watch, some days.
After the Kyoto disaster, and now this, it is going to be hard to anyone to trust The United States. Past Republican and Democratic presidents may not have fully agreed with their predecessor's foreign policy decisions but they always aimed for consistent outward message. All this does it give China and Russia what they wanted, that the United States can't be trusted as a partner.
This couldn't be more apt. It took a nation-state level of engineering to make it work, but the science (broadly speaking) was pretty well known. I believe that a similar nation-state scale funded engineering project to address climate change.
Unfortunately - to torture the analogy even further, we don't currently have a moon base and we've not sent a human outside of LEO since then. Maybe a grand nation-state effort is doomed to fail? I hope not.
Decarbonizing our economy is vastly different in two ways: 1) a multitude of approaches and engineering solutions rather than a single path, 2) huge amounts of industry across the world (10s of millions of people) rather than a small (thousands) focused team. A nation-state effort like a moon shot is doomed to fail at something like this. We need lots of experimentation, lots of failures, and a few successes.
This is better solved through market approaches. This is what we've been implementing over the past years. We subsidize carbon neutral tech through tax credits (negative tax) rather than placing a positive tax on carbon emission. This is less than ideal, but at least it equalizes things.
None of the technology required for this is magical. It's all developed and proven and deployed. It's on the market right now. It just needs to be scaled and we need to get over the adoption hurdle. Once that happens it gets exponentially cheaper. Compare the price of a flat panel display today to one 20 years ago and now look at the price history curves for solar panels and batteries.
Once we get over the adoption curve this stuff will be cheaper than fossil fuels. That's how industrial scaling works.
You might have been able to make your argument 20 years ago. The situation with fossil fuels vs. alternatives today is a lot closer to the situation with CFCs at the time of the Montreal accord. Back then conservatives cried about how we were no longer going to have refrigeration or air conditioning and today they're crying about how doing something about climate change means going back to pre-industrial times. It's total nonsense. EVs are better than internal combustion cars.
Were. At least if Trump gets his way:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/20...
I disagree in large part, though I do think the world would be stabler if the USA took much less military action and was a bit more respectful of zones of influence of other countries.
But even if I strongly agreed, I'd think the USA should make an orderly retreat from its existing obligations. Instead it's creating vacuums of power and chaos based on fits of pique by a literal maniac.
> The fallacy here is assuming that international cooperation is going to solve climate change.
It's worked on other issues. And political environments drive technological change.
But, yes, I agree it's a particularly thorny issue, and I wouldn't say I'm too optimistic of its probability of success compared to other international collaborations. But that's something to bemoan, not something to celebrate.
Technological fixes will not be adopted unless climate-related externalities are internalized into transactions, because of the tragedy of the commons. A political fix is a necessary prerequisite to the adoption of any technological fix.
[1] http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/...
If we're going to see reductions in emissions for economic reasons, we need emissions to cost something.
Political "fixes" are by nature temporary in the scheme of things. Regimes come and go, governments rise and fall, etc. They can possibly serve as useful incentives in the short term to drive certain changes, assuming there is sufficient faith in the longer term stability of the political "fix". Such faith has been shaken due to various reasons.
Technology, on the other hand, does not regress so easily IMHO. A technological advance that is sufficiently compelling - say fusion power for the sake of a dramatic illustration, can make previous "dirtier" technologies obsolete, and price them out even in the presence of improperly calculated externalities.
Another way to put this: the asteroid does not care if your financial markets have factored it in the models or not. It just hits you.
Politcal can reserve funding, can align businesses and academics, can make that technological windfall we haven't yet invented a little mote likely.
What if there is no technological solution, or we fail to find it? Having political agreement and unity to fallback on is a good thing. Even if we do something terrible to the planet, we can mitigate that together, instead of ignoring it or making it worse.
The focus on finding consensus and political will on climate change is putting the cart before the horse. There's no consensus or deal making to be had with this degree of division and anger.
Then we're going to see a dramatic transformation of the planet due to significantly rising global temperatures. That is the grim reality.
Yeah, it really does. The US might be a big economy, but not-US is an even bigger economy.
ITER for example is an international project which if it were successful would change the energy landscape and by extension the climate change issue dramatically.
This and projects like this requires international cooperation.
Also look at when the world united to outlaw HCFC refrigerant. That made a huge difference to the planet's outlook.
We can't afford to do nothing, it is simply too expensive.
Sounds like we'd better get working, then? Emissions controls to stimulate private innovation, plus public research grants to help longer-term innovation. We need to set up incentives wherein fundamental technological leaps are the goal.
China is rising, and China is In. That means China will be leading where the US is off on its own.
The belief that the U.S. needs to be involved in the international stage is based on the fallacious assumption that international cooperation can fix climate change. There is no scenario in which that happens.
Without fundamental technological leaps, we'd have to decrease the standard of living in the developed world to reduce emissions while accommodating increased standard of living in the developing world. The math doesn't add up.