John Kerry is an idiot.

[purduepat1969]

Yes, and look how our economy fell apart when all of our private corporations decided to send their manufacturing operations overseas.

Yes and look at where the one income lower middle class families went. They no longer exist. Look at the rust belt. Look at all of the Democrats whining about a liveable wage. Do you think there are no longer term consequences for the loss of manufacturing?

 

[DG Boiler]

since pollution/global warming is not a concern,
R's should be complimenting china for not caving & cutting their emissions (if its true they are not)

Great point!

 

[purduepat1969]

Well, if you're getting into insults I'll be ending our conversation after responding to your most recent posts. I'm not gonna play that game.

Does the acknowledgement that some countries picked easy targets necessarily that mean China is one of them? Do you have information about the relative difficulty level of every country's commitment? I didn't make a claim that there was guidance, you claimed that there wasn't. Burden of proof is on you, but do you think climate scientists didn't have any information available on what it would take to meet the goal? Guidance comes BEFORE the targets are developed.

Goodness sakes. Yes, I'm sure scientists have some rough idea on what might need to happen (80% reduction of greenhouse gases). But what you don't seem to get is there was no guidance by country. I can't prove something didn't exist when I can't find ANY evidence it EVER existed. And I've looked for it in numerous articles. You can see below each country was asked to define their own mitigation goals prior to COP 21. A good analogy to this would be if you were allowed to set your own goals at work with no critique or guidance from your management. That's what has happened in the Paris Climate agreement.

Even John Kerry admitted that:
"President Biden’s climate envoy, John Kerry; the U.S. Secretary of State when the agreement was signed; admitted as much at the time, stating on Fox News Sunday, “It doesn’t have mandatory targets for reduction and it doesn’t have an enforcement, compliance mechanism.” Even James Hansen, often referred to as the “father of climate change,” was more scathing in his assessment of the agreement. He told the Guardian, “It’s a fraud really, a fake. … There’s no action, just promises.”"

What are nationally determined contributions?
In 2013, at COP 19 in Warsaw, parties were encouraged to submit their intended NDCs to the Paris Agreement well in advance of COP 21. These submissions represented each country’s self-defined mitigation goals for the period beginning in 2020. Final NDCs were submitted by each party upon its formal ratification or acceptance of the agreement, and are recorded in a UNFCCC registry. To date, 190 parties have submitted their first NDCs and eight have submitted their second NDCs.

Developed countries have offered absolute economy-wide emissions targets (the United States, for instance, pledged to reduce its emissions 26-28 percent from 2005 levels by 2025).

Developing countries offered a range of approaches, including absolute economy-wide targets, reductions in emissions intensity (emissions per unit of GDP), reductions from projected “business-as-usual” emissions, and reductions in per-capita emissions.

Countries committed to submit new or updated NDCs by 2020 and every five years thereafter. Each new or enhanced NDC should progress beyond its previous one and be as ambitious as possible.

 

[purduepat1969]

This supports other countries asking, not Kerry, but I'm prepared to stipulate that Kerry's position is much the same as the "some countries" mentioned here.

You just have a problem admitting you're wrong...

 

[BoilerJS]

Answer for #3. I'll explain it in simple terms. If you've ever worked in manufacturing, you'd know this. The issue with going green is that China won't be doing so proportionately. So in other words, US companies will have to comply with heavier environmental restrictions placed on manufacturing relative to Chinese companies. This means added cost to US manufacturing. China is currently at a major advantage in this regard as well as labor costs. That's going to hurt US manufacturing in their ability to compete in the world market. It's that simple.

You know what really frustrates me is you have to explain this to these people.
Well said by the way.
And who will make our wind mills and sola panels, all the while polluting the atmosphere more than is allowed by companies, making the some products, here in the US.
Add the UAE is pushing green. Why? Because they have no oil or coal. Wind mills and solar panels puts them at an economic level playing field.

 

[purduepat1969]

Nope, simply correcting incorrect claims about China, according to the information available. A policy argument about whether China should be getting foreign aid from us or anyone else is a different discussion. China's human rights violations is also another discussion. But it's wrong to say that China is not doing anything about climate change when they are actually doing the exact thing they said they would do about climate change, namely, to peak emissions by 2030 according to the Paris Agreement and, more recently announced, to be carbon neutral by 2060. If and when they don't meet those two targets, THEN you can get upset about them not doing their part.

Building newer, more efficient coal plants and closing older, less efficient coal plants is part of and has been part of their plan to ultimately reduce emissions. So, that's whey they're apparently doing. Incidentally, all of China's 100 most efficient coal plants are more efficient than our MOST efficient one. Getting higher percentage of power from renewables is also a part of their plan. Their target was 20% by 2030. They're currently just under 30%, so they're ahead of pace.

Folks keep saying "they're bulding more coal plants so clearly they don't care about climate change." While the data point is true, the conclusion is not warranted because there's a bigger picture. Similarly, if I were to say "they're building more wind and solar plants so clearly they care about climate change" as the only evidence, that's not enough. They could be just doing it as a token gesture, without really, making much of an impact on their overall power generation. But, as it turns out, not only are they building more, they doubled their renewable capacity in 2020.

A lot of the argument supposedly proving China's not doing their part seems to rely on the fact that the Chinese government is untrustworthy (I agree, it is) and must then be lying to us. The supposed evidence for this particular lie is that they keep building coal plants. But, if they were lying, why in the hell would they tell us they're building coal plants? If their government is THAT bad at lying, I don't think we have anything to worry about. All of this ignores that much of the information we have doesn't actually come from the Chinese government but from independent observers who went there to see what they were doing, such as the group of energy experts that visited in 2016. Others have said they say one thing and do something else, which I've demonstrated to be false, at least so far. We can check back in after 2030.

It really looks like China's committed to our climate...

Report: China's 2019 greenhouse gas emissions exceeded all other industrialized nations combined

When it comes to greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change, China is No. 1, and it's not even close.

news.yahoo.com