2. We are subsidizing them with no benefit to us at all, and in turn we are also giving them the ability to outperform us in manufacturing the capability to create clean energy, if you want to help them use clean energy mandate that it comes from local companies. No one will like someone else showing up with bags full of sovereign wealth and tipping the scales. These countries per capita might be poorer, but from a global markets level they are right on par with their American counterparts.
3. Debate? We are by far the largest foreign aid donor.
4. The Paris Agreement was signed by the President without the consent of congress, partially because it didn't win over right-wing Americans.
At some point we need to be adults about this and do something, the country is not supposed to be run as a Dictatorship by either party, all its doing is slowly killing everyone
3. The US gave $31b in foreign aid. Which sounds generous, until you do it per capita. In which case the US slips way off. The closest economic comparison would probably be the EU which gave $87b away. I, like many, consider charitable giving and aid a sign of strength, not a reason to whine about how unfair life is when you're the richest.
3. Even per capita we are 21st in the world, not bad especially when you consider that as that number gets bigger the return you get on it diminishes.
I honestly don't know if this is happening in the same way with American companies, but to be honest, if it's not that would make me want to take a hard look at the reasons for it. Lack of effort from the government to make those deals, or inability to make attractive deals - which would be a rather worrying indicator of the american industry's health.
By completely exiting, Trump is effectively leaving the field of renewable energies to other countries. By relying more on burning fossil fuels for energy he can definitely give America a short term boost by preventing energy costs from rising further, but he might also cripple its renewable energy industry - which employs more US citizens than Oil, Coal and Gas combined.
Trump wouldn't have had to exit the agreement to do what he wants by the way - the agreement does not have any penalties for not fulfilling it, and it allows every country to adjust its own goals in the agreement, without asking anyone else for permission.
What countries are you talking about? What mythical poor countries have tools and expertise and what not? And to compete with us against what?
We've moved to a global economy and basically doing what wealth of nation stated, we have specialize in things we do best while other countries specialize on their own thing. If Swiss and Japan wants to make awesome watch go for it. If labor is cheaper in China then okay. But they can't and have not taken higher end skill set. You just can't export those.
And you just side step the world being screw to concentrate on our country. But at the same time OP addresses that with saving our coastal property.
The mega cities that make a boat load of GDP is Los Angeles and NY which will be screwed with the rising sea water.
But not exceptional. Certainly not worth complaining about either.
If not would you give Luxembourg the same carbon emission allowance as india?
I dont think keeping developing countries down by limiting their per capita to a much lower standard will fly in this century.
It doesn't. Most of the carbon in the atmosphere today was emitted by the western world though and it's up to them to show leadership and address the problem they created.
Your point that we could not get anything better is not an excuse for doing something bad.
A major economic and ecological policy agreed on by nearly the entire planet is no small task. It took years to create and is a compromise - we can do better and that was the plan, to iterate on it.
The point of this is to achieve reasonable outcomes, while also allowing developing countries to grow reasonably (and live another billion out of poverty) while helping them with it.
If the developed worlds can't afford another $100b, I really don't know what to say? Especially considering a lot of that comes around to contracts and exported goods from the very same developed countries! They're not about to start printing solar cells in a country that is barely feeding itself!
As for "fly over country"... I really dont know what to say here. The world doesn't work like the simplistic metaphors that are being peddled to them. For example, the 'government budget is like a family budget' is a nonsensical analogy that is false. Or comparing government debt to credit card debt. These analogies stand in to trick the casual reader in to certain points of view (anti tax and anti government spending ones as it turns out).
What to do about this? Well, honestly, outlawing Fox News would probably be a good start.
That little figure happens to be kinda important. In fact, I'll go out on a limb and state that most people consider their quality of life to be somewhat more important than abstract ideas about global economic policy.
"Fairness" had nothing to do with how we got here. Or, to flip it around, why would any country (let alone the ones the U.S. has abused for various reasons, artificially retarding their growth) agree to a model that dooms their citizens to a pre-industrial life?
This is no different than the arguments for flat taxes because progressive income tax is "unfair".
If you approach this sort of global negotiation with a precondition that it not alter the existing economic order, that is the same as refusing to negotiate. If that's your view, then fine; there's clearly no point in discussing further.
But if the goal is to deal honestly with climate change, the reality is that there will be winners and losers. Just like happened in the run-up to where we are now. Guess what: we won the run up. Now we have to decide if we're willing to give up some of the "unfair" share we've had for almost a century in return for our grandkids having something vaguely like the quality of life our parents had.
Some days I really think the U.S. is just doomed by our culture. Thankfully, I'm more chipper other days.
So your final analysis is to tear up the Bill of Rights?
Trump said: "We gonna win so much you may even get tired of winning and you'll say please, please Mr. president, It's too much winning! We can't take it anymore!"
Look, it was a joke. You're expected to like winning.
I suppose you could move elsewhere on the non-level playing field if you actually don't like winning. You'd have to make some major lifestyle changes. I bet you do like winning.
We're all losing. Already.
These states will turn blue if federal policies harm them. Farms barely surviving put 5 wind turbines on their land and make 50k a year for 30 years. Counties with nothing going for them happen to have the best Wind in the world.
I could throw out statistic too.
> Seven out of 10 Americans support remaining in the agreement, according to a national poll conducted by the Yale Program on Climate Communication
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/05/most-ame...
Even with business as usual emissions, China's per capita GDP will maybe be half of what the US's will be in 35 years. I doubt climate mitigation policies would chip away at much of that difference.
That (b) is what happened. That means Trump doesn't think something must be done - which means this administration does not care about climate science and it's predicted (and proven with current findings) disastrous impacts.
There is no alternative - either we begin to fix the problem with a global framework, or we suffer the tragedy of the commons on a global scale - and we're already seeing the effects of global temperature warming and ocean acidification.
Do not let perfect be the enemy of the future of this earth.
China's current emissions is at 7.7 T/capita. India's current emissions is at 1.9 T/capita. A fair and equitable solution would be to impose a hard limit at, let's say, 8 or 10 T/capita for everyone, no exceptions. This way everyone plays by the same rules.
If you offered these terms to China and India, I'm pretty sure their leaders will take it, despite the harshness of it.
It sounds to me like the effort needs to be in making green energy more affordable than non-green energy. This would benefit all nations.
Money talks. If it's cheaper to go green, even the most die-hard conservative will go green (anecdotal case in point: my die-hard conservative grandfather, who drives a Prius).
What I'd sooner advocate is to instead give that money to organizations working to make that expensive stuff actually cheap for everyone (or at least cheaper than the alternative of sticking with fossil fuels). That way, it's more economical for everyone (not just rich countries, and not just poor countries) to skip the fossil fuels stage of industrialization and jump straight to green energy everywhere.
As the 7th most polluting country in the world, the USA should take responsibility to show that their emissions per person should be lower.
This is how Trump carefully frames the debate: talking about increases in emissions without referring to current emissions.
In per-economic-output terms, MANY. The EU average is 0.47% of GNI [1], while the US gives 0.17% of GNI, and Sweden (the outstanding example) gives a whopping 1.4% of GNI. Outside of the EU, Japan gives "only" 30-ish% more than the US, at 0.22%.
Another interesting stand-out is Turkey, which despite being MUCH poorer than the developed world gives 0.54% of GNI.
The United Nations and OECD long-term target is 0.7% of GNI.
[1] GNI is a modified version of GDP which adds income earned abroad by residents and subtracts income earned locally by non-residents.
[2] Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_development_aid_countr...
2. We're paying poor countries to mitigate these effects, by subsidizing their use of cleaner energy to industrialize. And to compensate them, since the areas most negatively affected by climate change are also poor.
3. The United States is not, in fact, particularly generous about foreign aid.
4. The Paris Agreement is intended to be a start - the reductions are so small in part to win over right-wing Americans, who in turn have the audacity to turn around and blast this agreement for not being effective enough.