Guest essay by Larry Hamlin
The L A Times newest climate alarmist propaganda article blatantly conceals the colossal global failure of the phony Paris Agreement and tries to manipulate the story around the flawed hype that the U.S. has the ability to make meaningful impacts on future global emissions reductions without mentioning of course the huge costs, massive bureaucracy and global emissions irrelevancy involved with such schemes.
“Despite President Trump‘s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate accord, the United States hasn’t completely abandoned the landmark international agreement.
In fact, when the president announced his intent to drop out of the deal two years ago, he inadvertently catalyzed a flurry of climate action among cities, states, businesses and other organizations that remain committed to reducing carbon emissions in order to help the world avoid the worst effects of global warming, experts said.
“That was already going on, but the Trump administration really put that on steroids,” said David Victor, a climate policy researcher at UC San Diego.
More than 400 city leaders have joined the Climate Mayors association, and 17 states and territories have joined the U.S. Climate Alliance. Both organizations have vowed to uphold the country’s Paris pledge.”
The Times story completely hides any and all global data showing what the rest of the world is doing with respect to their emissions outcomes. The Times article basically ignores the fact that the Paris Agreement is a “global agreement.”
Global energy and emissions data clearly establish that the Paris Agreement has been a complete failure and offers no possible global emissions outcomes except ever rising and higher levels of CO2 emissions consistent with the increased and unstoppable energy growth by the world’s developing nations none of which have any emissions reduction commitments or obligations under this politically contrived agreement.
Through year 2018 global emissions have climbed by nearly 8 billion metric tons since 2005 (the year Obama pegged as the benchmark starting date for his now appropriately defunct CPP emissions reduction shenanigans) with all of that increase accounted for by the world’s developing nations.
The Paris Agreement was signed in 2015 and yet during the three year period through 2018 since that signing global CO2 emissions have climbed by nearly 1.6 billion metric tons with all of that growth from the developing nations while U.S. emissions changed little (and remain well below the U.S. year 2007 peak) and EU emissions slightly declined during this interval.
In comparison China and India’s CO2 emissions climbed by over 770 million metric tons during the three year interval between 2015 to 2018 which continued their unending and decades long increasing emissions trends as is the case for nearly all of the world’s developing nations.
Furthermore EIA future forecasts show global emissions climbing by an additional about 8 billion metrics tons by year 2050 from 2018 levels with all of that increase accounted for by the developing nations despite the developed nations seeing declining emissions during this period as depicted in the EIA graph presented below.
President Trump made the best possible and reasonable decision for the American people which was to dump the absurd Paris Agreement and continue to achieve emissions reductions in the U.S. through cost effective and energy efficient fuel substitution of natural gas in place of coal.
If the world really wants to undertake trying to achieve the unnecessary and costly emission reductions schemes of the Paris Agreement that are driven by politically contrived flawed and failed computer models that cannot accurately represent global or regional climate then its up to the developing nations of the world to lead this effort.
The Paris Agreement is a colossal flop and needs to be dumped.
“Bad ideas never seem to go out of style.”
Anonymous Heins
“There’s no right way to do something dumb.”
– Shoshin (16th Century Austere Oriental Scholar who predicted the rise of the Twinkie)
“The Paris Agreement is a colossal flop and needs to be dumped.
Insofar as it is a colossal flop, it ,in effect, has been dropped.
All it was to accomplish was to funnel money from developed countries to all the others.
Saving the world is the job of angels and unicorns.
A fund to massively increase nuclear power is needed to slow the output of CO2 – –
not that it is needed for any reason.
John F. Hultquist: “All it was to accomplish was to funnel money from developed countries to all the others.”
You betcha, and you beat me to it.
Long time readers will recall the contemporary analysis of the Paris Accord here on WUWT. The language had little to do with actual CO2 reductions (playing along with that little fantasy that C2 is the control knob of the global thermostat) and everything to do with transferring wealth from developed nations to developing and never-to-be-developed kleptocratic nations.
Well do I recall the huzzahs and hallelujahs of the feverishly expectant beneficiaries when then US President Obama signed on and then sent the first two payments (illegally diverted from other US funds) of $500 million each to be picked over by the UN and third world buzzards.
The wording of the Paris Accord was picked through and dissected here and the only conclusion was that it did nothing worthwhile except to provide a big payday for all and sundry of the parasitic class.
Yep. Beat me to it, John.
Its true purpose was to look like aid funds going to other countries.
In fact it was/is a funding scheme for the UN, the Vatican, NGOs.
Everyone of the middlemen players are expecting to skim off a piece of the action every year.
A 10% – 20% overhead skim on $100 Billion a year by the UN and NGOs.
$20Billion is No small amount.
Nailed it!
You know, I have a little more optimism than the hard facts might indicate. There was something accomplished in that meeting which was that such a large number of countries agreed to anything at all.
Climate ideologies aside, it is amazing that for the first time in history such a large number of country representatives agreed to a general plan to do something together. That bodes well for the future when important matters must be accomplished such as the establishment of an international commission to permanently set all national borders, thus resolving one of the major causes of war.
As a dry run for really important issues, agreeing on how to create an agreement is a good start. And not just talk. They actually signed for their various reasons, noble or ignoble. Don’t judge too harshly. They were made an offer and they didn’t refuse.
Crispin;
Sadly, I believe you have missed the mark on “why”. International consensus was possible.
Socialists in the US (frequently mistaken for Democrats) and socialists in the rest of the world saw no down side to redistributing (mostly) American money to themselves. No particular national interest would be harmed above any other, and India and China got a free ride on emissions for a bonus. It’s not like trying to figure out who gets to divert how much of the Nile or any other river system draining several national basins. Then you’d get to see the fur fly.
Actually much of the money was already pledged for aid, it has just been rebranded as Climate Aid.
Despite Congress never authorizing and specifically saying they were not going to authorize any such “climate aid” and the leftist Dems cheered Obama’s rebranding. Change the names to “Trump” and “funds to build the wall” and the leftist Dems go nuts and say that’s unconstitutional (despite Trump, unlike Obama, using an actual act of congress that allows him to do just that)
This is the genius of the American system. States and localities can try things. Experiment. And we can sit back and benefit from these experiments.
Like the one in Texas we say a report of here earlier.
so 17 states are willing to risk their industry and loose residents?
let em do it
others will benefit inc the people who leave
Don’t expect India, China, Japan and South Korea to lower their emissions. In the real world it’s impossible, they need to burn millions of tons of coal to produce the energy intensive manufactured goods that the West refuses to do, but desperately requires. If we in the West decide we want the energy intensive manufacturing industry and the associated tax base and jobs back then “the developing nations” will be able to virtue signal. The United States in well positioned to do so, the rest of the West, with their wind and solar, not so much.
The Paris Agreement is worse than no agreement.
In real terms the Paris Agreement of course achieves nothing that makes any substantive difference on emissions trajectories. Only some new tech and/or a push for nuclear power will do that. Alternatively, a global catastrophe of genocide and destruction, brought by the Left and their policies, could lower emissions trajectories. Only the psychotically insane want that latter possibility.
In political terms the Paris Agreement provides only the illusion that something is being done.
It’s an Emperor’s New Clothes fallacy, a fawning over an imaginary result with the GreenSime-bootlicking fraudsters and Globalist-elites all congratulating each other on how magnificent it is.
That lie to the public and the insult to reason is far more damaging IF the climate change believers really think CO2 is problem.
That said, it is also irrational to think the dishonest, corrupt hack editors and reporters at the LA Times, the WaPo, the NYTimes, CNN, or any of the Big 3 Networks in the US are going to suddenly have an epiphany — wake-up and declare in a “Road to Damascus-style” admission they’ve been lying and deceiving their readers and viewer audiences for decades about the climate scam.
So what is solution?
1) Vote out the political Fraudsters (both Democrats and RINO Republicans) at the ballot box. They are irredeemable, because they’ve tasted the Lust for Power over the people and been bought by lobbyists lobbying for the climate scam promises.
2) Don’t give subscription money to Fraudulent news outlets like the LATimes. Let them die in profitability for their lies and destruction of their own journalism profession. So very much more unemployment for hack “jornalists” and their editors awaits with any luck.
The next Progressive scam on humanity will no doubt eventually replace the climate hustle. Black Swans are everywhere. And we never see them until they have landed and laid their egg.
I understand that under Paris, the US agreed to reduce our CO2 emissions and agreed to pay $100 Billion per year to help less advanced countries reduce theirs. Have any of these States and cities begun to pay this obligation? Somehow, I think not. And if not, while they may have “vowed to meet US climate goals” they are not doing it.
This money is the only reason any other country cares whether we are in or out.
I think Obama intended the US contribution to the UN Climate Aid fund to be around $5Billion per year at first. But $5Billion/yr is chump change to the US annual GDP, that’s about the cost of one new aircraft carrier without airplanes or people. With the rest of $100Billion coming from “developed nations.” But the cost to US economy in terms of GDP growth from the emissions targets and thus future prosperity was far more than 0.025% of the US economy. The destruction of US GDP growth over 30 years and thus the US economy by 2050 was an enormous to mis-allocation of resources under a very inefficient government fiat to support renewable energy fantasies. Renewable energy scams and carbon trading schemes that were to profit the GreenSlime billionaires feeding campaign cash to US Democrats. for more political power. Meanwhile, the US middle class was to be gutted and reduced to serfdom.
It all still could very well happen if enough dumb people keep voting for Democrats and RINOS … voting against their economic interests and freedoms. Because if Democrats in the US are able to secure enough political power like they have in Cali and NY, then any carbon tax or carbon trading schemes still won’t provide them enough OPM to buy votes and power.
They (the Bernie Sanders and Pocahontas Socialists if in power) will next use changes to federal tax laws and courts to come after the very deep retirement savings ,the IRAs and 401Ks, that the middle class has stashed away to pay for votes from those who do not have those savings and with Social Security is bankrupt.
The ‘propaganda’ has nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with wealth redistribution. The fact that California can afford to virtue signal their CC efforts today because of their economic situation will change as industry leaves and people get fed up with their energy costs and taxes to maintain a CO2 free status quo while the majority of the world ignores. But that’s the goal of AGW.
Emission control was never going to work what “prohibition scheme” ever did. Only the politicians and left were delusional enough to think it would and you end at the predictable point of failure.
The challenge for politicians and the left is to come up with plan B.
There is lots of talk about reducing CO2 emissions. Has anything been done that matters? No.
The Keeling Curve is trending same as before.
https://scripps.ucsd.edu/programs/keelingcurve/
So your choices are:
* It doesn’t matter. Don’t worry.
* Doom! Become a survivalist.
* Buy industrial weed trimmers
* Study science daily
* Exercise and take vitamin supplements
* Do more weed trimming
$100 Billion per year
I think that was the total of all the paying countries, not just the USA.
Table here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Climate_Fund
The Green Slush Fund, aka the green climate fund, is a trifle of its intended self,
unaccountable, and unknown as to what has been done with the money.
The same question, almost, was asked by Stephen Moore who wrote “Follow the (Climate Change) Money” about a year ago:
https://www.heritage.org/environment/commentary/follow-the-climate-change-money
The precise amount we The People pay in the West will probably never be revealed and probably too complex to calculate anyway.
Take for example electricity rates currently in Sweden, where net rate is $0.098/kWh but with a monthly usage of 514kWh the total rate with all the Green imposed taxes included is $0.31/kWh. A part of the $0.21 is officially announced as being money for the strengthening of the grid to accommodate wind turbines and solar PV panels and closure of some of the nuclear reactors prematurely in order to “combat” Climate Change.
But, it does not stop with the electricity. Swedish meat also has extraordinaire Green tax to “combat” Climate Change. You have the same thing for gas, diesel, income tax, etc.
Therefore I sincerely doubt it would be an easy task to calculate what the trillions of dollars are going to. The money are supposed to advance Agenda21, thus serving the Climate Change Complex in order to “help us” transform into the perfect society.
The Climate Fund is like any help organization, the help rarely reached the intended or the needing, but rather the elite, the administrations and the unworthy. However, the Climate Fund is worse than that, as our administrators pour money into this organization by low, and not as a voluntary contribution.
Other help organizations are authored from time to time, but who are authoring the Climate Fund and the Climate Change Complex?
As other here have been stating: Vote for politicians who denounce the Climate Change Complex, even if you do not agree with other issues that politician may defend.
Instead of President Trump trying to buy Greenland, as several presidents before him, I would encourage him to buy Sweden, so Sweden can get up and running full speed again.
President Trump’s decision was not to “continue to achieve emissions reductions” by other means; President Trump’s decision was to not commit the US treasury to fund the global climate kleptocracy with several hundred billion dollars each year.
But you are correct; it was the best possible and most reasonable decision.
Time for all mayors and city officials to travel by public transit or, even better, by bicycle or Uber Rickshaw.
After all it is a crisis!
Right mayors?
Don’t send money. Grant no subsidies, entitlements or regulations that benefit the green oligarchs. This means most of them.
On the EU graph of power industry CO2 emissions notice the sharp drop in 2009. I suspect that was due to the reclassification of wood pellets as renewable in the 2009 EU omnibus Renewable Energy Directive, which promoted wood pellets as carbon neutral. The slight drop from then to now may be due mostly to conversion of coal plants. like Drax, to wood pellets over the same period of time. All such CO2 emissions are simply ignored in emissions calculations.
Those CO2 emissions from biomass-are still there, but ignoring them creates the impression that wind and solar are responsible for the (imaginary) CO2 reduction because most people associate the term “renewables” with wind and solar, and are not aware of the EU loophole regarding biomass and the burning of wood pellets in converted coal plants.
“due to the reclassification of wood pellets”
In addition there was also a recession 2008-2009.
Further, some of the heavy industry has been outsourced to countries outside the EU.
This trucker is sitting in his truck at our Vandalia, OH terminal. When I arrived last night after doing a 6 stop Toyota “milkrun” for them I noticed the EV yard truck the company had bought to test sitting next to my rig. I asked the yard jockey how he liked it? He chuckled and said it didn’t even have enough torque to slide trailer tandems if they were the least bit sticky. They paid $350,000 for that truck and that did not include the cost of the charging station. Obviously the test is a failure and we haven’t even gotten into the cold winter yet when battery performance declines and the slides for shifting the trailer tandems tend to get slot stickier. The bigwig that authorized the purchase of that unit is no longer with the company.
Interesting. Was the torque issue because of the gear? Asked in another way: Does such a battery trucks have a conventional gearbox?
Most trucks we have in Europe have 12 speed (3 x 2 x 2), and the lowest gear is actually very low.
Anyway Rah, keep us updated about the EV yard truck, in particular when the frost and snow sets in and the battery have to supply cabin heat all day long too. The Greens in EU are all for battery trucks, at least for the short hauls.
Is this really about CO₂ or the climate, or is it really just because all-electric appears so clean, fashionable and supportive to the leader, I mean the administration.
For sliding tandems one needs low for both forward and reverse. I really have no idea about the gearing except to say I suspect it is identical to the diesel yard trucks. The Freightliner I drive has a 12 speed “automatic”.
Automatics in big trucks are not hydrostatic. They are a conventional manual gearbox shifted by pneumatic servo’s controlled by computer. They shift a bit faster than a standard but other than that the sound and feel just like a manual in operation.
Last week I was forced to take a very heavy load of 44,200 lb (400 lb under the absolute maximum to stay under 80,000 lb GVW allowed.) over a stretch of US 20 that has two hills with a severe grade. On one of those hills despite using maximum engine brake running up to 2590 RPM and then repeatedly punch braking hard and fast to get the RPMs down to 13 to 1500 I was smelling hot brakes. Bottom line is I found the limit of what this 2015 Freightliner can handle before brake fade becomes an issue.
“Despite President Trump‘s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate accord, the United States hasn’t completely abandoned the landmark international agreement”
The “landmark international agreement” is a collection of INDCs. The I is for intended, the ND is for nationally determined and tye C is for contribution. The even bigger joke is that most INDCs are from nonAnnex countries that, according to the UNFCCC have no climate action obligation. Do UN bureaucrats read and comply with their own rules?
The Trump withdrawal is in full compliance with the letter if not the spirit of the INDCs that contains these two criteria: INTENDED & NATIONALLY DETERMINED.
We live in crazy times. It is the age of lies. People make a nice living doing junk science and then the news media and the foundations and the political parties pick up the junk science and exaggerate it.
There simply is no global warming. Global warming is a lie. If anything the world is getting colder not warmer. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs and funny numbers and silly computer games do not add up to extraordinary proof. And the supposed 97% scientific consensus is another obvious big lie. Just where is there any solid proof of global warming?
The Los Angeles Times is symptomatic of a bigger problem – the big lie. It starts out as junk science and then gets repeated endlessly until after a while people forget that it is not real.
When I was a child my older brother told me a Bible story that his Sunday school teacher taught him in class. And I believed him and had no reason to ever question the story. It was a story about how God told Abraham to show tolerance and understanding for an idol worshiper. Many years later in a biography of Benjamin Franklin I was amazed to read that Ben Franklin invented that story in order to demonstrate to the gullible how a fictitious story could spread through society and become an accepted truth. Unfortunately more than 200 years later that fake Bible story is still circulating. A total lie had been transformed into accepted truth that was taught to children in Sunday school. Just like global warming.
+20
Thanks for that.
Given that I have not seen any evidence to support the notion that CO2 is the control knob for the climate, … and given that fossil fuels are a finite source of energy, … I am of the position that we should be building more coal plants, and nuclear plants to supply electricity, converting cars to run on natural gas, reserving oil for planes trains and manufacturing. Solar and wind should be point of service and up to the consumer.
Thus, Paris is a complete non starter .. period. Coal can be cleaned up. I’m not talking carbon capture, I’m talking all the other nasty stuff in it. We don’t need to be decreasing carbon emission, we need to be producing more of it. Plants like it, and that is the end of that story, as plants are the base of the food chain for life.
Dr. Deanster.
My sentiments exactly. We won’t have some economically feasible fossil fuels forever, particularly light crude oil and condensates. Instead of clamoring to shut it all down to combat a non-existent C02 issue, these people should be thinking about what we’ll be doing at some point in the future to provide transportation (not just for people). I’m including general freight, air travel, sea fright, and agriculture. I have a really hard time coming up with the number of wind turbines we would need to power the the trains in Canada that did 275.3 billion ton-miles in 2018. https://www.statista.com/statistics/548481/gross-ton-miles-of-canadian-pacific-railway/. I also can’t envision electric tractors and combines on our country’s immense grain fields, never mind the thousands of electric semi – trailers needed to haul produce to market. I know I’m beating it to death, but then there’s plastics, pharmaceuticals, manufacturing processes, new steel, new wind turbines, new solar panels. The list of things we currently need petroleum for is endless. Why is it so difficult to stop this idiocy?
We can clean virtually everything nasty except C02 out of coal combustion. And we already know C02 isn’t nasty.
If the goal is met by a natural cycle then they can claim success in short order.
But then the real goal is money and power like the income tax to pay for forgotten wars or sales tax to patch state budgets after the Great Depression or the AMT to just tax the rich (middle class).
“Combating climate change” can be translated “destroy the USA first.”
Those cute “stack” graphs are a good way to blur the results. The eye can’t spot small changes between years in one of the items. Find “How to Lie With Statistics.”(Darrell Huff in 1954)
A useful graph puts all the variables at a fixed spot at the start of the graph and draws each variable in a separate color, starting with the least change at the bottom, working to the biggest change at the top.
“Countries need to double and triple their 2030 reduction commitments to be aligned with the Paris target,”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/most-countries-arent-hitting-2030-climate-goals-and-everyone-will-pay-the-price/ar-AAJTGye