[Lore]

Senate Republicans Just Promised To Undermine The Paris Climate Negotiations

At a hearing Wednesday, Senate Republicans said that any financial commitments made by the United States to help other countries curb carbon emissions would not be approved by Congress, effectively promising to undercut the Paris negotiations before they even begin.

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/1 ... otiations/

[Plantagenet]

Senate Republicans Just Promised To Undermine The Paris Climate Negotiations

At a hearing Wednesday, Senate Republicans said that any financial commitments made by the United States to help other countries curb carbon emissions would not be approved by Congress, effectively promising to undercut the Paris negotiations before they even begin.

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/1 ... otiations/

I thought the Paris negotiations were about countries making pledges to keep global Ts from going over 2°C higher than pre-industrial Temps.

Are the Paris negotiations actually about how much money the USA is going to give to other countries?


Which countries want money from the USA? How much money exactly do these countries want from the USA?

[Lore]

That's why I posted a link! The Green Climate Fund goes back to 2010, but you should know that.

[Plantagenet]

That's why I posted a link! The Green Climate Fund goes back to 2010, but you should know that.

Nope. Thanks for enlightening me on this.

I clicked through on your link, and the "Green Climate Fund" operates under the auspices of the UN. Obama has pledged 3 billion dollars to the GCF and he wants Congress to appropriate the money.

I'm uncomfortable giving huge amounts of US money to some other party to administer. The UN has a rather sorry history of theft and corruption in these kinds of agencies.

I support the US establishing some kind of foreign aid program, possible run through the Peace Corps, to aid and assist people in third countries to build windmills, put up solar power systems, and otherwise decarbonize things on a village to village level. However its not very smart for Obama to give billions of dollars to the UN and then surrender all oversight over the money, as much it will be lost to overhead and bureaucrats and graft and theft in the corrupt UN system.

cheers!


The UN has a culture of corruption. It would be nuts for the US to turn over billions of dollars to them and not retain direct oversight of where and how the US dollars are spent.

[Lore]

I don't think our Congress shows much better fiscal responsibility.

[Subjectivist]

I don't think our Congress shows much better fiscal responsibility.

Sadly I agree with both of you, the bigger the government the less fiscally responsible they tend to be.

[onlooker]

I see what Tanada is getting at and he is right. We cannot afford to try and gain political advantage anymore with CC. Any all the politicians who do so should be castigated by the voters. It is now about delivering a clear and simple message, humanity must act and act forcefully and promptly to deal with climate change or else we ALL will doom ourselves and our descendants.

[Lore]

I see what Tanada is getting at and he is right. We cannot afford to try and gain political advantage anymore with CC. Any all the politicians who do so should be castigated by the voters. It is now about delivering a clear and simple message, humanity must act and act forcefully and promptly to deal with climate change or else we ALL will doom ourselves and our descendants.

Long live the munchkins and their decedents; if any!

[onlooker]

Ha, the Wizard of Oz, a classic no doubt.

[Lore]

Ha, the Wizard of Oz, a classic no doubt.

I've always found that line, snucked in, somewhat prophetic about the human condition.

[ennui2]

Most conservatives would take Agents plan

I see no evidence for a groundswell of conservative support to do anything about AGW, regardless of how it stands in regards to big government, because I see no evidence of conservatives even acknowledging AGW!!! There are plenty of statistics to back up my claim that conservatives represent denial and anti-intellectualism. Do I even need to go google for them? So your argument is not very convincing.

[ennui2]

I don't think our Congress shows much better fiscal responsibility.

Sadly I agree with both of you, the bigger the government the less fiscally responsible they tend to be.

And if the GOP had its way, we'd have boots on the ground in Syria. The GOP always has a blind-spot with spending when it comes to the military industrial complex. The only savings it wants to do is to eliminate the welfare state.

I find it very tiring to point out this hypocrisy again and again. Some people's illusions of ideological purity are so ingrained they will just never acknowledge the ways in which it breaks down.

You'd really have to be more of a dove/isolationist in order to maintain ideological purity on fiscal responsibility, which is more of a libertarian platform than GOP.

[Revi]

We're going to end up with another COP 40, like the one in Copenhagen, but this one is going to be worse because nobody is going to want to hang out a second longer than they have to in Paris after what happened. How are they going to hammer out binding agreements when they are worried about being blown up?

It's another last ditch attempt to fix things that will never be fixed.

As the Talking Heads said "stop making sense".

[ennui2]

They probably should have moved the conference somewhere else.

[Revi]

I agree. Maybe they can have the opening keynote and split up to other venues. It is not good for the conference, but I think we are not wired to be able to deal with things like this. It would be nice if we could slow emissions in time, but I think we are headed for the abyss. The only thing that could save us paradoxically is peak oil. Maybe with the Seneca Cliff we will stop using as much carbon based fuels and we might even get enough of a reduction that it might just survive. We aren't going to get it together by ourselves.

[Plantagenet]

... if the GOP had its way, we'd have boots on the ground in Syria.

O has already sent boots on the ground into Syria. Only they were't "boots"---they were real live American special forces soldiers who wear boots.

O's decision to send in a small numbers of troops was announced last month---you must have missed the news while you were busy genuflecting in your personal obama shrine.

-------------------------------------------

The terror attacks on Paris do raise concerns about the upcoming Paris climate conference. But its not realistic to shift to another venue---there are over 100,000 delegates, staff, and related people going to the conference in Paris. AND It would be shame to postpone it ----the world has already waited six years since the last attempt to get a climate treaty signed in Copenhagen in 2009 was derailed by Obama's humiliation of the Chinese president at the beginning of the meeting.

[Apneaman]

350,000 Sign Petition Asking for Federal Probe of Exxon
House Democrats also announced they are planning a broader probe into other fossil fuel companies and their climate research.

http://insideclimatenews.org/news/19112 ... ey-general

[Apneaman]

The Evangelical Christian Climate Deniers Behind Marc Morano’s Climate Hustle Documentary


"One unambiguous video title states that “Climate Policies kill. People will die”, while others scream how moves to cut greenhouse gas emissions “devalues human life” and “kills thousands” in Britain.

All this extremist language comes from the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, a US-based Christian evangelical group that rejects climate science and is preparing to release a new documentary in the coming weeks.

Cornwall has been posting preview clips under the banner “Greener on the other Side: Climate Alarmism – Fact, Not Fear” on its YouTube page.

The views in the clips are extreme but represent a grab bag of climate science denialist talking points, ignoring the mountains of evidence gathered from multiple sources over many decades of the impacts of loading the atmosphere and the oceans with carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels."


http://www.desmogblog.com/2015/11/19/ev ... ate-hustle

[onlooker]

I am sure this new documentary will be devoured by the Christian right here in the US.

[Apneaman]

They can wash it down with a tall glass of the new Florida salt well water.


The phenomenon that can not be spoken in Florida continues as salt water intrusion moves inland



http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/3/19 ... ves-inland