If George's question is disingenuous try this one. "What would you do about the all of the coal fired plants that China and India have brought and will continue to bring on line?"
The effects of climate changes are going to be as harmful, if not more so, to China and India that they will be to the United States. We agree to verifiable treaties exactly because everybody is skeptical of each other. The irony of this whole situation is that Canada, the United States, and Russia are the only nations whose fortunes may actually locally improve from a warming world. In addition, China has been the world leader in renewable energy production. India is third behind the United States.
We also know that they generally care about the issue because they are signatories to the Paris Agreement, and even agreed to the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, unlike the United States.
The only thing I'm sure cap and trade will do, is to provide another avenue for the finance industry to make money off of the decline of civilization.
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Would have done." The idea that we could institute a effective cap-and-trade system now impossible. Emissions are way too high. We have done nothing but accelerated GHGs since there was a formal consensus that something needed to be done...
in 1992. The model I'm referring to is the
extremely successful cap-and-trade program to prevent acid rain that was agreed to during the same period.
Again it's also important to remember that this is the same period when the
Montreal Protocol was also put in place do deal with ozone depletion, which was also incredibly successful. Another classic political outcome where people generally don't get rewarded for the disaster they prevent, only the disaster they successfully respond to.
It's a completely valid question. Arguments over emissions make me laugh. You'll never get the right data to know the right answers .. but you will get the data they want you to have.
The conspiratorial accusations of the scientific community continues to astound me in my middle age. You can literally sign up for a university lecture series to understand whats happening and why we know it's happening. They will literally teach you how to verify their research.
Climate catastrophe, like cold fusion, is probably always going to be right around the corner.
It is happening right now. This thread is about golf courses that have existed for hundreds of years suddenly falling into the ocean in multiple places. The Great Barrier Reef is dying... it doesn't get more obvious than that. It is likely that the Syrian Civil War was precipitated by
an extraordinary drought. I guess I just wonder what people think climate change is going to look like. Barring any changes to ocean currents, it's not going to be some singular cataclysmic, things are just going to become more and more
and more expensive. Fire, flood, and other disaster insurance goes way up. Food gets more expensive as we have to move crops 200 miles north. Eco systems are overwhelmed with invasive species that wouldn't have otherwise survived in that region. There will be more and more conflict as people must migrate to other parts of the world, while others fight over fewer resources. It will likely not end the world, but it will cost so much more than if we just started switching to electric renewable power in the early '90s.
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The real painful aspect of it though, is that the
data keeps coming in that the hot models are correct, and there is nothing we can do to stop this, but it's still an
every-little-bit-counts scenario where if we change nothing... it still gets worse.
I know folks might think I'm some lefty partisan, but I assure you I am not. I am still just baffled about how climate change is partisan politics in the United States, when it's primarily an economics issue. When the bills start coming due, like
the current changes to Federal Flood Insurance, people are going to really start feeling the effects of climate change for the first time. I honestly wonder if those on the financial end of Florida golf course development are already modeling the effect of these increased premiums in their income projections, as Florida may see a recession or even exodus in the next decade or two if near coastal real estate becomes uninsurable.