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Your ignorance is breathtaking. The US and other developed countries have always taken the lead on environmental policy that has resulted in real change. The mo

Your ignorance is breathtaking. The US and other developed countries have always taken the lead on environmental policy that has resulted in real change. The most famous is the Montreal Protocol which resulted in the banning of CFCs and saved the Ozone Layer[1]. The policy decision drove technological innovation and created entire new classes of appliances and chemicals which resulted in millions of new jobs. After the Kyoto disaster, and now this, it is going to be hard to anyone to trust The United States. Past Republican and Democratic presidents may not have fully agreed with their predecessor's foreign policy decisions but they always aimed for consistent outward message. All this does it give China and Russia what they wanted, that the United States can't be trusted as a partner. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol

rayiner 9y ago
The CFC problem was a narrow one, and the Montreal protocol was implemented a decade after development started on CFC alternatives. At the time Montreal was implemented, there was a clear picture of how to get from point A to point B. Climate change is in comparison a moon shot. We don't know what will work and how it'll work. There's not some single thing we can ban and fix the problem. It calls for structural change and changes in peoples' way of life and the political system can't achieve that.
- epistasis 9y ago
  Citation needed. Solar, wind, EV and now even electrical storage are being jump started with tax credits.
  - zzalpha 9y ago
    Solar, wind, EV and now even electrical storage are being jump started with tax credits. Were. At least if Trump gets his way: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/05/18/trumps-budget-expected-to-massively-slash-research-on-renewable-energy-and-clean-coal/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/20...
- chadgeidel 9y ago
  "climate change is in comparison a moon shot" This couldn't be more apt. It took a nation-state level of engineering to make it work, but the science (broadly speaking) was pretty well known. I believe that a similar nation-state scale funded engineering project to address climate change. Unfortunately - to torture the analogy even further, we don't currently have a moon base and we've not sent a human outside of LEO since then. Maybe a grand nation-state effort is doomed to fail? I hope not.
  - epistasis 9y ago
    I respectfully disagree on this. The moon shot was a specific engineering challenge, with a clearly defined goal. Decarbonizing our economy is vastly different in two ways: 1) a multitude of approaches and engineering solutions rather than a single path, 2) huge amounts of industry across the world (10s of millions of people) rather than a small (thousands) focused team. A nation-state effort like a moon shot is doomed to fail at something like this. We need lots of experimentation, lots of failures, and a few successes. This is better solved through market approaches. This is what we've been implementing over the past years. We subsidize carbon neutral tech through tax credits (negative tax) rather than placing a positive tax on carbon emission. This is less than ideal, but at least it equalizes things.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- api 9y ago
  Climate change isn't a moon shot. We know how to fix it. Tax carbon emissions and provide tax benefits and subsidies to convert energy infrastructure to solar, wind, and nuclear power, and to convert the automobile fleet to run on electricity. None of the technology required for this is magical. It's all developed and proven and deployed. It's on the market right now. It just needs to be scaled and we need to get over the adoption hurdle. Once that happens it gets exponentially cheaper. Compare the price of a flat panel display today to one 20 years ago and now look at the price history curves for solar panels and batteries. Once we get over the adoption curve this stuff will be cheaper than fossil fuels. That's how industrial scaling works. You might have been able to make your argument 20 years ago. The situation with fossil fuels vs. alternatives today is a lot closer to the situation with CFCs at the time of the Montreal accord. Back then conservatives cried about how we were no longer going to have refrigeration or air conditioning and today they're crying about how doing something about climate change means going back to pre-industrial times. It's total nonsense. EVs are better than internal combustion cars.

rayiner 9y ago

The CFC problem was a narrow one, and the Montreal protocol was implemented a decade after development started on CFC alternatives. At the time Montreal was implemented, there was a clear picture of how to get from point A to point B. Climate change is in comparison a moon shot. We don't know what will work and how it'll work. There's not some single thing we can ban and fix the problem. It calls for structural change and changes in peoples' way of life and the political system can't achieve that.

epistasis 9y ago
Citation needed. Solar, wind, EV and now even electrical storage are being jump started with tax credits.
- zzalpha 9y ago
  Solar, wind, EV and now even electrical storage are being jump started with tax credits. Were. At least if Trump gets his way: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/05/18/trumps-budget-expected-to-massively-slash-research-on-renewable-energy-and-clean-coal/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/20...
chadgeidel 9y ago
"climate change is in comparison a moon shot" This couldn't be more apt. It took a nation-state level of engineering to make it work, but the science (broadly speaking) was pretty well known. I believe that a similar nation-state scale funded engineering project to address climate change. Unfortunately - to torture the analogy even further, we don't currently have a moon base and we've not sent a human outside of LEO since then. Maybe a grand nation-state effort is doomed to fail? I hope not.
- epistasis 9y ago
  I respectfully disagree on this. The moon shot was a specific engineering challenge, with a clearly defined goal. Decarbonizing our economy is vastly different in two ways: 1) a multitude of approaches and engineering solutions rather than a single path, 2) huge amounts of industry across the world (10s of millions of people) rather than a small (thousands) focused team. A nation-state effort like a moon shot is doomed to fail at something like this. We need lots of experimentation, lots of failures, and a few successes. This is better solved through market approaches. This is what we've been implementing over the past years. We subsidize carbon neutral tech through tax credits (negative tax) rather than placing a positive tax on carbon emission. This is less than ideal, but at least it equalizes things.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
api 9y ago
Climate change isn't a moon shot. We know how to fix it. Tax carbon emissions and provide tax benefits and subsidies to convert energy infrastructure to solar, wind, and nuclear power, and to convert the automobile fleet to run on electricity. None of the technology required for this is magical. It's all developed and proven and deployed. It's on the market right now. It just needs to be scaled and we need to get over the adoption hurdle. Once that happens it gets exponentially cheaper. Compare the price of a flat panel display today to one 20 years ago and now look at the price history curves for solar panels and batteries. Once we get over the adoption curve this stuff will be cheaper than fossil fuels. That's how industrial scaling works. You might have been able to make your argument 20 years ago. The situation with fossil fuels vs. alternatives today is a lot closer to the situation with CFCs at the time of the Montreal accord. Back then conservatives cried about how we were no longer going to have refrigeration or air conditioning and today they're crying about how doing something about climate change means going back to pre-industrial times. It's total nonsense. EVs are better than internal combustion cars.