The COP15 balloon appears to have lost all it’s air. Nobody’s signing up.
Excerpts from reports in the Guardian and the Financial Times
From the Guardian
The UN has dropped the 31 January deadline by which time all countries were expected to officially state their emission reduction targets or list the actions they planned to take to counter climate change.
Yvo de Boer, UN climate change chief, today changed the original date set at last month’s fractious Copenhagen climate summit, saying that it was now a “soft” deadline, which countries could sign up to when they chose. “I do not expect everyone to meet the deadline. Countries are not being asked if they want to adhere… but to indicate if they want to be associated [with the Copenhagen accord].
The timetable to reach a global deal to tackle climate change lay in tatters on Wednesday after the UN waived the first deadline of the process laid out at last month’s fractious Copenhagen summit.
From the Financial Times:
UN abandons climate change deadline
Nations agreed then to declare their emissions reduction targets by the end of this month. Developed countries would state their intended cuts by 2020: developing countries would outline how they would curb emissions growth.
…
Countries pushing for a new legally binding treaty on climate change will be disappointed, as The waiving of the deadline sets a bad precedent for efforts to finalise a deal this year. The next scheduled meeting is not until late May, in Germany, with another in late November, in Mexico but many officials say more will be needed.
…
The result of Tuesday’s Massachusetts senatorial election, which took away Barack Obama’s super-majority in the Senate, is likely to push climate change further down the US agenda. It was the latest in a series of setbacks that have caused efforts to push a cap-and-trade bill through the Senate to grind to a halt, making it harder for the White House to participate meaningfully in global climate negotiations.
Instead, the administration has been pressing ahead with steps to limit the US’s carbon emissions through regulation. The Environmental Protection Agency has unveiled new draft rules that would sharply tighten regulations on smog-building pollutants, or ground-level ozone, and has cracked down on greenhouse gas emissions by ruling that carbon dioxide and five other gases pose a danger to health.
h/t’s to WUWT readers Thomas Chisolm and Bruce Foutch
Is that because he is full of gas?
The New Mr Brown (no relation to our UK idiot Gordon I hope) is having an effect already.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jan/21/murkowski-congress-vote
From the home of the pink footed Goose
In all this yee-hawing I am reading in the threads, that old worn out “It’s the Sun stupid” mentality is creeping in again. “By gum we don’t know how she does it but I kin tell its that thar Sun ‘cuz when she go down I git right cool!”
People. let’s not go there, k?
From the Weather is not Climate department. It is coooooold in Hawaii this morning! Winter weather advisory atop Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea. I wonder if the highest levels of C02 ever recorded up there are to blame?
In other news, how has the Kyoto Treaty held up? I don’t think any of the countries that signed on were able to reduce emissions anywhere near what they signed up for, so does an agreement really matter? Who enforces it? Apparently no one…
For what it is worth I vote No. I don’t want to sign up. Thank you.
Good news. The UN IPCC fraud should never have happened. We — patriots and thoughtful citizens from all countries — need to follow up on Dubai’s offer to house the UN. Let’s make the New York property a monument to the real hard-working people — maybe a cutting-edge climate science park with interactive topics from paleo-climate issues to meteorological forecasting. Perhaps a well-designed, humorous exhibit could be entitled “Hide the Decline”. Perhaps projects highlighting how to teach science — the real thing — in schools at all levels would be good, too.
The next effort of the “people’s movement” (not “Conservative”, not standard big-government, elitist Republicans — out Gingrich, out Rove) that began in the U.S. in New Jersey and Virginia, became ever more apparent in NY 23 (take that Scozzafava), and has now triumphed in Massachusetts with Scott Brown handily winning The People’s Seat), should be “Out of the United Nations”.
Most members nations are “uniting” to defraud the prosperous nations and to belittle the U.S., representative democracy, and human rights. Let the losers and the fraudsters have it. Dubai, you asked for it! We can compare its efforts in Haiti to those of the U.S. military — who were so capable even the Obama bureaucracy told them to stop dispensing food.
Also I think “knee-capping” the EPA is a fine effort. I hope the law suits can keep it occupied until the next administration significantly diminishes it.
What are the consequences for refusal to sign?
What are the consequences of delaying the deadline?
EPA has cracked down on greenhouse gas emissions by ruling that carbon dioxide and five other gases pose a danger to health.
So why doesn’t this list include water vapour- the principal greenhouse gas?
The EPA is being inconsistent and willfully ignoring “settled” science.
Things seem to be unraveling fast here,could it be that the world does not want to commit econocide?(except possibly the US…?)
“Instead, the administration has been pressing ahead with steps to limit the US’s carbon emissions through regulation”
That’s going to go over as well as moving GITMO trials to NYC.
Or the last attempted amnesty.
As soon as the EPA rhetoric attempts to shift to implementation a great big flop is going to happen.
I suspect the EPA and Obama administration will recognize at the 11th hour the disaster in moving forward and will suspend that stunt just like Copenhaugen is now merely some European city.
For those not familiar with the American political system:
The problem with passing a bill to remove the EPA findings is you first need a simple majority of the House and Senate to approve such a bill. At that point, the law goes to Obama’s desk for action. If Obama signs the bill, it’s a done deal and becomes law.
But if Obama vetoes the bill, the bill has to go back to the House and Senate and has to pass by a 2/3rds vote in both houses to over-ride Obama’s veto. Then Obama must then sign the bill and thereby make it law. He would have no choice.
Of course, if the bill got 2/3rds approval by both houses on the first go-round, then vetoing would just delay the inevitable for Obama unless enough people in one or both houses are willing to change their mind and not go against Obama’s wishes so that one of the two houses don’t get the 2/3rds majority. It is politically dicey to pull that last stunt as Clinton found out when he got virtually veto-proof majorities for the Welfare Reform Act which he opposed. Clinton gritted his teeth, signed the Act and then took credit for the successful results of the Act.
The problem here is that the ideologue Obama will likely veto any bill that gets to his desk if the bill passes without a 2/3rds majority in both houses. He can calculate that the Democratic hold on both houses is strong enough that at least one house won’t get the 2/3rds majority for an over-ride. So the bill would die after the House and Senate votes and the EPA restrictions would take effect. The danger for Obama is that a number of Reps and Senators facing re-election in November elections may want to boster their creds for independence by voting for the bill after the veto. If the 2/3rds still don’t show up, then the consequences of the EPA mandates will become associated with Obama (and those who voted against the bill) and all the consequences are on his and his acolytes’ shoulders.
This, of course, assumes that the law suits don’t get the EPA diktats thrown out for one reason or another. And there’s always the possibility that Obama can simply tell the EPA to back off since the EPA is part of the Executive Branch of government and Obama may not want to take the heat or have this disaster as part of his legacy.
And one last possibility is that the EPA has to go back to Congress because the Clean Air Act dictates, IIRC, that all generators of 250 tons per year of a specific pollutant are to be regulated by the CAA. And CO2 is now deemed such a pollutant. This would crush every enterprise down to small multi-unit apartment buildings. The EPA isn’t completely stupid. They know this would cause major hurt for hundreds of thousands if not millions of enterprises across the country. The EPA wants the threshold to be brought up to 25,000 TPY (which would include the 30,000 biggest enterprises in the U.S.), but I don’t think they can modify CAA pollutant threshold requirements without Congressional approval. If the Repubs want to play hard ball, they may let the Dems approve this change on a party-line vote and then let all the big enterprises decide who they’ll make campaign contributions to in the next election – the Dems who are crushing them or the Repubs who stood by them from the get-go. And that will go doubly for the employees of the biggest enterprises who get laid off or see their companies get hurt competitively because of the EPA. Of course, the Repubs may decide that this change in thresholds is reasonable and vote for it. But they’d also face the same problem as the Dems – penalizing the biggest enterprises and putting them in a less competitive position versus the enterprises just below the threshold who got a pass on the rules. Follow the campaign money.
We are living in interesting times.
Sorry about the multiple posts, but I now have the link I want:
I have a “soft deadline” for everyone I know to give me $100
So like, whenever you all feel like it, get in touch with me or something.
“Whatever route is taken, the president of the United States committed to a 17 percent emissions reduction in Copenhagen,” de Boer said. “The president of the United States committed to more ambitious emissions reductions for 2030 and 2050. And it is those statements to which the international community will hold the government of the United States accountable.”
Whoa there Mr. DeBoer! The US Constitution grants no such power to the president except for treaties but only when 2/3 of the Senate concurs. I don’t think he is going to get the 2/3 now. So you can take Obama’s promise and shove it.
should be the end of the idea of one Global Governence also. Pound sand UN comes to mind….
Not quite where this fits into the mix but the Guardian (ha! Ha!) reports that US Senator Murkowski (Alaska) is putting forth bill to strip the EPA of its abilities to regulate in this regard (which would limit the executive branch in general)
@Jerome Hudson from Boston
That was a very good summary of the possible legislative scenarios for overturning of the EPA’s (absurd) finding re CO2.
Myself, I am content to let the current legal challenges hinder any EPA attempt to implement regulation until after the bloodbath that will inflicted upon the Dems in the November 2010 congressional elections.
If healthcare reform, a much more publicized and important issue, is now apparently DOA for this Congress, Cap’n Trade (yo-ho-ho and a bottle o’ AGW Kool-Aid) has just fallen way farther down the priorities list, if not off the gang-plank altogether.
Anticlimactic (05:42:28) :
“And also to back away from AGW in general : once a political party, usually in opposition, adopts an anti-AGW stance they can point to the destructive policies adopted by governments in power. As the majority of people seem to be generally skeptical it could be a vote winner : why harm the country for no real gain?”
That’s logical, but in the UK we have three main political parties, Conservative,Labour and LibDem and they are all fully signed up to AGW. Note the near unanimity with which the Climate Change Bill was passed recently.
With the Conservatives, the membership appears to be sceptical but the leadership is not. Cameron nailed his colours to the AGW mast early on and is known as Windmill Dave, Glacier Hugging Dave etc. His enthusiasm isn’t shared by much of the party hence the recent decision to send election candidates on a “green course”.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/4c33e386-0468-11df-8603-00144feabdc0.html?nclick_check=1
I get the impression that it’s much the same in other countries. The leadership of main political parties is pro AGW legislation, a few politicians disagree, the public is becoming increasingly fed up with what they see as an excuse for taxes and useless schemes. There’s a growing disconnect between the politicians and the public, but there’s no clear practical choice on the matter in elections.
In the UK, much of the environmental legislation is a direct result of EU legislation and I don’t see any party likely to form a government defying it.
I’d agree with you that when a gap between the public and its elected representatives gets too wide, it has to close eventually, but there’s no sign of that happening any time soon.
“why harm the country for no real gain?”
This is no place to talk about that, but suffice it to say it doesn’t seem to be a watertight consideration when you look at politicians’ actions.
There are still people calling in on various programs on NPR (well, not the most moderate of stations, I know) absolutely FREAKING OUT that the world is going to come to an end because we are not doing things fast enough in regards to “carbon”. They are quite serious and scared. It’s a shame.
‘Canned’ Greenism
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IfyEZj35L8&hl=en_GB&fs=1&]
Alan the Brit (01:33:27) :
Andrew P (00:01:17) :
A point of information:-)The UK & all others in the EU were not Sovereign states at the time of the Copenhagen booze-up fest, we were all by the time (1st December 2009) mere provincial states in the new nation called Europe.
Alan – yes but I was refering to Scotland pre 1707 – before the Act of Union with England! I agree with about the EU – and so regret that the people of Scotland didn’t/don’t have the guts to go for real independence and stay out of the EU like Norway.
Pamela Gray (06:46:20) :
We live in a biosphere, and in that biosphere life is responsible for both impounding and releasing C02, and that life is Carbon-based. So are external and internal energy systems that are not alive, yet very active. And changing.
We do not live on a Planet that has only animal life that expels C02, nor do we live on a Planet with no external(solar) and internal heat (geologic).
AGW was founded on the assumption (making an ass out of everyone) that only animal life (man in particular) affects the balance of energy.
Let’s call it a badly misguided oversimplification.
Whatevery energy is in this Planetary/Solar System/Galactic soup has been imparted long ago. Gravity conspired to create the anomaly of the Milky Way, then the Solar System proto-disc, then the Sun & bodies, and finally the balance of the 3rd planet through condensation to anomaly.
We could say
“It’s gravity, stupid”, but people need to know what we are talking about.
As far as the Earth presently and for the next 5 billion years, “It’s the Sun, stupid” that regulates the overall changes on Earth, not the internal species of man or his wild imaginations, holding the balance between the hostile Galactic energy-sources and the biospheric energy-transfer systems.
To really boil it down, “It’s the Sun, stupid” is humbling anathema to “AGW”.
Man is along for the ride.
We are the dominant species in this biosphere, but we do NOT control the biosphere, internally or externally.
Wealth = (Value of assets – debt), last time I noticed. Material goods purchased by going into debt do not equal wealth, but are mere trappings or appearances of wealth. Simple economics, which “economists” seem to have forgotten all about.
James Chamberlain (09:03:46) :
Those people have been scared by others who contrived to keep them in the dark and feed them garbage.
The HG Wells story “The Time Machine” fits into this, in a way.
They have been farmed like mushrooms, to be harvested, a human crop, by the intellectual Morlocks of our time, to do thier bidding.
Cold reality of a cooling climate will be the educator now.
They’ll understand what’s going on just as soon as they get shocked into examing the world around them.
As a follow-up to my earlier post, if I understand the latest news:
In a dramatic development today, the U.S. Supreme Court just rejected just about all features of the Campaign Finance Reform Act (McCain-Feingold) and now allows commercial and non-profit enterprises (which would include unions) virtually unfettered contributions to run partisan ads during local, state and national political campaigns, provided such ads are clearly identified as to their origins and funding sources. These enterprises can can now work for and against any political campaigns or referenda using funds out of their general budget. This means that affected commercial enterprises can now enter the political fight against cap-and-trade and, I think, advocate changes to or abolishment of the EPA rules.
This, I believe, is HUGE! Anyone else have any thoughts on the implications of this development?