Even worse, most of these "commitments" are for after the politician's death. Xi Jingping isn't particularly old for a politician with his 68 years, but by the time 2060 rolls around he would be 107 years old.

I really wish the Queen (who is 95) would say to the world leaders: "it really is your problem: you might live to my age!"

It's definitely tough to have confidence in these sorts of statements - but I just wish we'd get beyond the people who actively fight against even the probably empty promises.

I do too, but I think that “empty promises” empower them. I also agree with Andrew Sullivan (https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/how-to-turn-the-gop-gr...) that conservatives could be persuaded to support climate initiatives if we on the left allow ourselves to prioritize climate above our own tribalism tendencies (those who would reply, “But conservatives aren’t prioritizing climate over tribalism” are missing the point entirely).

The article doesn't support your characterization of it.

Nuclear isn't rejected by the left because of tribalism, as you seem to imply. It is rejected for other reasons, completely unrelated to tribalism, as the article points out. And many on the right reject nuclear for the exact same reasons.

My comment doesn't support your characterization of it. :)

My original remark was about rising above tribalism for sake of the environment. I was specifically thinking about the line in the article:

> Climate is simply too important to be sacrificed to cultural prejudices.

I would say, that in America at least, flip-flopping is only viewed as an insult by conservatives though. People criticized Biden over his busing policies during the election, but nobody critized the fact that he changed his mind on the topic, people discussed how he "grew". I know there are extremist pockets on both sides of the aisle - but I don't think the majority of liberals would really prefer a gotcha "I told you so" moment over actually getting meaningful policies done.

I've always viewed it more as an unfortunate coincidence[1] that social conservatism was so closely tied to climate change denial. In theory those folks wanting to make sure their children can hunt and hike like they did growing up should be strongly set in favour of preserving an environment where that remains a possibility. Instead we have the media pushing this shallow form of conservatism where we specifically want to preserve the unsustainable post-war boom years where every river had a paper mill on it, every driveway had two cars (except they didn't and they weren't SUVs) and nobody realized what the consequences of that were.

How do you overcome conservative media when it's pushing such a strong agenda? Inviting them over for tea isn't going to cause a sea-change.

1. Sorta - I think some folks worked hard to make sure this happened.

Hard to feel guilty about energy usage when the politicians arriving for the summit all arrive by private jet.

Even the loudest politicians usually maintain 3 or 4 homes, often with heated swimming pools.

I'm a bit tired of the extreme hypocrisy. If someone like Jimmy Carter or Ralph Nader (they both live humble lives) were to be the leading voice, I'd feel better about things.

This isn’t hypocrisy. The message from the leaders isn’t “we all need to do our part to emit less carbon”—that kind of personal responsibility approach isn’t going to work. We need to stop subsidizing carbon so that people’s economic interests are aligned with the interests of our planet. We need to solve this systemically.

I really don't want to deflect to "which party is worse"--to do so would be to completely miss my point. Let's tackle the existential threat first and then we can resume politics-as-sport.

Politics isn't going to take a pause for climate change.

At our peril.

> in America at least, flip-flopping is only viewed as an insult by conservatives though. People criticized Biden over his busing policies during the election, but nobody critized the fact that he changed his mind on the topic, people discussed how he "grew"

Both parties are tolerant of drift. Donald Trump wasn't always a Republican.

What then? A real estate developer like described in:

[DaDa] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riverside_South,_Manhattan#Tel... ?

Trump is really weird for a number of reasons. He broke the mold in a significant way from the more traditional conservative politician so I'm not certain if he's that good of an example. I'm trying to avoid "no true scotsman"ing but Trump really was a pretty big contrast to most other republicans.

> Politicians "committing" to things that will happen after they are out of office, are mostly just saying pretty words.

And these same politicians are taking private jets and massive motorcades to summits when there's a much more carbon footprint-friendly alternative available (hint: we've all been doing it for the last 18 months).

They tell us we're "past the point of no return" w.r.t. sea levels rising to the point that some large percentage of our coastal cities will be underwater, yet haven't started building sea walls to at least attempt to prevent the flooding.

And these same politicians are hellbent on importing unlimited numbers of third world immigrants into first world countries, instantly elevating the carbon footprint of those people. All while telling Joe Blow in the first world that he should stop having children, think of the carbon footprint they're producing! How could you be so selfish!

This is why I don't take this stuff seriously. We get lectured about carbon footprint this and "past the point of no return" that by people doing the complete opposite of what should be done to reduce carbon footprint or try to mitigate the disaster that we're too late to prevent.