Obama reaches new low on #climatechange spinelessness

Chinese Premier Li Kequiang laughs at
'naming and shaming' threats
from President Barak Obama.
Wikipedia photo

Yes, the authoritarian leadership in China is really going to stop burning coal because Barack Neoliberal Obama (born not in Kenya, but a business law program's pocket) thinks that "naming and shaming" countries contributing to global warming will make them stop it:

The Obama administration is working to forge a sweeping international climate change agreement to compel nations to cut their planet-warming fossil fuel emissions, but without ratification from Congress.
 In preparation for this agreement, to be signed at a United Nations summit meeting in 2015 in Paris, the negotiators are meeting with diplomats from other countries to broker a deal to commit some of the world’s largest economies to enact laws to reduce their carbon pollution. But under the Constitution, a president may enter into a legally binding treaty only if it is approved by a two-thirds majority of the Senate.
 To sidestep that requirement, President Obama’s climate negotiators are devising what they call a “politically binding” deal that would “name and shame” countries into cutting their emissions.

What B.O. is committing too, actually, is simply updating what happened at the 2009 Copenhagen round of climate talks:

American negotiators are instead homing in on a hybrid agreement — a proposal to blend legally binding conditions from an existing 1992 treaty with new voluntary pledges. The mix would create a deal that would update the treaty, and thus, negotiators say, not require a new vote of ratification.

Yeah, right. That’s technically true, but it’s meaningless, and anybody with a brain knows that.

As far as it doing anything? I’m sure that Chinese Premier Li Keqiang is quaking in his fake Italian shoes at being “named and shamed.”

But, hey, it’s working already. At least one Gang Green environmental group seems to be giving it the thumbs up.

“There’s some legal and political magic to this,” said Jake Schmidt, an expert in global climate negotiations with the Natural Resources Defense Council, an advocacy group. “They’re trying to move this as far as possible without having to reach the 67-vote threshold” in the Senate.

Yeah, yeah.

Carbon tax domestically, plus carbon import tariff for the other countries. Forces us all on the same playing field, protects “cleaner” American business and thus gets the support of CEOs whose middle names aren’t, all of them, “Outsource,” and gives us fixed, written-in-stone targets.

That said, the NY Times doesn’t quite read the GOP right:

The Obama administration’s international climate strategy is likely to infuriate Republican lawmakers who already say the president is abusing his executive authority by pushing through major policies without congressional approval.

Actually, it’s likely to make them laugh hysterically more than be infuriated, for the reasons I’ve just mentioned.

Beyond that, Obama KNOWS this.

Also laughing at Obama's threats?
PM Tony Abbott of Australia, top
coal exporter to China.
Wikipedia photo

And, he knows it won't do a think to stop actual climate change problems, which the U.N. Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change has just detailed in its newest report.

That would be things like grain harvests already declining, the possibility that we've already cooked in the destruction of the Greenland ice sheet and more.

Meanwhile, the IPCC also notes that, "name and shame" aside, this:

From 1970 to 2000, global emissions of greenhouse gases grew at 1.3 percent a year. But from 2000 to 2010, that rate jumped to 2.2 percent a year, the report found, and the pace seems to be accelerating further in this decade.

Yep, Li Keqiang is laughing all the way to the ribbon cutting for the next Chinese coal-fired power plant. And, the new Liberal government in Australia 

Do we have hope?

The new report found that it was still technically possible to limit global warming to an internationally agreed upper bound of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, or 2 degrees Celsius, above the preindustrial level. But continued political delays for another decade or two will make that unachievable without severe economic disruption, the report said.

"There never was much hope, Planet Earth."

We're really headed to about 9 degrees F, or 4 C, by the end of the century. And, we haven't even talked about what will happen if and when India starts industrializing at an even more rapid rate. Or if Brazil wants to become an industrial country. Or, if we find even more undersea methane hydrates starting to bubble.

Meanwhile, for American wingnuts who want to say "so what," er, more ozone in U.S. cities is part of the so what. And, unlike international non-binding "naming and shaming," the Clean Air Act requires that that be fixed, especially in hot red-state cities like Phoenix, Dallas, Houston, etc.

And, want to be really alarmist?

Per a long new piece by Charles Mann, all of this is likely going to spur the "salvific technologism" fake solution of geoengineering.

A single country could geo-engineer the whole planet by itself. Or one country’s geo-engineering could set off conflicts with another country—a Chinese program to increase its monsoon might reduce India’s monsoon. “Both are nuclear weapons states,” (David) Keith reminds us.

Let's hope it doesn't get that bad. 

Another Earth Day, a few thoughts

It's not a special anniversary Earth Day, but with things like the continued  delay in a Keystone XL decision by Team Obama, even as Dear Leader continues to push the Trans Pacific Partnership, I'll put a few thoughts on blogging paper.

First, though, a look back at my life at a few of those special anniversaries.

For me, 1995 was the first Earth Day special anniversary I really remember. At 25, it was a big one. Sure, Newt Gingrich and gang had just taken over the House. However, the CFC accord to protect the ozone layer was good news and global warming was not yet even a small cloud on most of our horizons. So, things were looking good then.

Next, on to 2000. Global warming was at least a small cloud on more horizons by then. Bill Clinton had negotiated the Kyoto Accords to address this. Unfortunately, he had not submitted them to the Senate. Doubly unfortunately, it was clear they would fail if he did, and that probably no more than half of Democrats, even those not up for re-election in 2000, would support them.

Then things got worse.

In 2005, for the 35th anniversary, we had President Bush having officially rejected Kyoto. After talking about carbon dioxide as a pollutant on the 2000 campaign trail, he had totally ditched that. He had also ditched EPA Administrator Christie Todd Whitman for actually taking him at his 2000 campaign word. Meanwhile, evidence for global warming and broader climate change, and its potential severity, continue to mount.

Then, 2010. Things seemed better with a Democrat in the White House, even though the economy was distracting from too many environmental concerns.

And now, today.

First, Keystone XL. President Obama is clearly, in my book, going to delay a decision until after the midterm elections, then approve it. If you deeply believe otherwise, I've got a sub-95 day in July in Phoenix to sell you.

Second, the Trans Pacific Partnership. How does this relate to climate change?

Simple. "Free" trade treaties that encourage additional international trade without the carbon tariffs to have the globe pay the environmental cost of all the shipping involved are inherently anti-environmental, as well as the labor issues they cause, and the environmental issues in countries such as China with low environmental regulatory standards. And, like the original NAFTA and WTO deals, transnational companies would have a shot at overriding US environmental regulations. Much more here.

Things have changed since 2005, or even 2010, in other ways. We're continuing to improve our degree of certainty on how much human activity is going to affect mean temperature increases across our planet. We're starting to figure out more of how climate change is related to large but sub-global seasonal weather issues, such as the "clipper" that gave the US Northeast a snow-heavy winter while exacerbating drought in California.

There's a third issue which I've briefly blogged about before.

The National Park Service's centennial is in 2016, and so far, I've heard very little "noise" from the White House about the run-up to this, celebratory plans, etc.

I'm afraid that what eventually gets wheeled out will be corporate heavy, too.

I'm not a James Kunstler, but I do sometimes have my degree of despair over the future of our planet. Climate change, as we mark another Earth Day, is one of the main drivers of such, though not the only one.

Add in the deniers, minimizers and skeptics. Add in the fact that Obama seems to have the least amount of focus on environmental issues of any Democratic president since Harry Truman. None of this helps.

Add in that minimizers and skeptics, to the degree they accept anthropogenic climate change, then switch gears to what I have previously called "salvific technologism." That's the belief in technology's saving (salvific) power, so much so that said belief in technology becomes an "-ism."

Well, the human ability to adapt is constrained by something that didn't exist in the Younger Dryas, or even, for the most part, in the Little Ice Age, or its predecessor, the Medieval Warm Period (which is still a bit cooler than we are today), and that's the modern big city, let alone the megacity. It's hard to "pack up and move" 20 million people in greater New York City, London, Los Angeles, Shanghai or other spots. And, all but L.A. of those four cities face definite worries over rising sea levels.

Meanwhile, "Earth Day" isn't even on Google News' list of top "trending" items, as of 1:30 p.m. Central Time.

Add to it the "gang green" environmental groups deciding at the start of the Clinton Administration that cozying up to Democrats for political "access" was more important than being firmer on stances. Then, we have the topper, several years ago, of Sierra Club selling the rights to its name, for branding and marketing, to Clorox. There were certainly a few questions about Clorox's environmental commitment, and a boatload of unquestionable facts on its low standards on labor issues. I blogged more here and here about how this exposed authoritarian tactics of Sierra's national board and then-CEO Carl Pope.

But, when a big, rich (yes, relatively) environmental group pays just $33K a year for copy editors for its magazine, with a job based in downtown San Francisco, we know which "green" is speaking. That's even more true with the made-in-China tchotchkes combined with the wasteful amount of mail, snail mail, not email, sent for solicitation efforts.

I'll stop now before I get into the territory of a new blog post, which I will soon enough anyway.

Perry has a few related thoughts.

As for those other issues of despair? It seems like racial issues in America have slowed to about the  same glacial rate of progress.

Climate change vs. climate justice, or John Rawls meets reality

Eric Posner is, yes, a conservative of sorts. Actually, he's more of a principled small-l libertarian than a conservative. But, he's an intelligent one and one not always easily dismissed, whatever label one would hang on him.

That's why his piece saying that, on global warming, we can have either a climate treaty or climate justice, is well worth reading. It's worth reading not just for the environmental and public policy issues, but the philosophy ones.

Yes, the philosophy ones.

It's a great illustration of how John Rawls' theories on justice were wrong get well illustrated by this "climate treaty" vs. "climate justice" issue. For a detailed dismantling of Rawls, read Walter Kaufmann's "Without Guilt and Justice," as reviewed by me here. (Kaufmann is a Nietzschean, but you don't have to be, to get a lot from this book. I'm not; indeed, I'm not that close to being one, and I did.)

Posner may overstate the case somewhat, but, to some degree, developing nations have surely benefited from Western industrialization. At the same time, if Posner wants to pull the "benefits" card, Western nations have benefited from pharmaceuticals derived without compensation from plants, even animals on occasion, in non-developed countries.

So, while his arguments rightly undermine Rawls, they also become a petard against himself.

But, on to the broader philosophical point. Because we're all individuals, setting aside issues of greed (and, yes, just as even the downtrodden can have "privilege," victims can be greedy), "justice" simply cannot be a universal, or even close to it. Despite his divergence from Plato in various ways, Aristotle missed this with his values theory of ethics. Rawls definitely missed it. In his case, I think he also, if indirectly, threw in the Golden Rule, which makes things only worse. The so-called Silver Rule, which says, "Do NOT do unto others what you do NOT want them to do to you," makes a much better ethical guide. That said, even a quick glance should tell us it's more individualistic in some ways than the Golden Rule. It's definitely more socially libertarian.

But, as the petard getting ready to hoist Posner shows, sometimes a person can counter "justice" claims from a point that actually is, in the bad sense, "privileged." And, usually get his head and hat handed back to him.

I mentioned uncompensated pharmaceuticals as one way of trumping him. I am sure there are others, but I want to go to another philosophical point.

Rawlsian theories of justice depend, at least in part, on a utilitarian-type point of view. Well, I have a number of problems with utilitarianism. The biggest problem with utilitarianism is that none of us are omniscient. We have no way of knowing how many people an action of ours will benefit. Plus, we really can't step into the "view from nowhere" enough to know if an action of ours is even a benefit as much as we think it is.

Heck, per this particular story, and the pseudo-Chinese proverb with the "could be good, could be bad," refrain, none of us knows what will really be of maximal utilitarian benefit to our own selves beyond the very short term. Let that thought sink in. If we don't know what would be of maximum utilitarian benefit to ourselves, in a situation involving another human being, let alone the psychological version of the Newtonian three-body problem, we probably don't know what the most "just" outcome for ourselves is.

In short, if Samuel Johnson was right to say that "Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel," how close is justice?

And, related to that, this is why I identify myself as a skeptical left-liberal, including being skeptical about at least some left-liberal public policy prescriptions.

That said, I do want to touch on the public policy and international relations side of this particular issue. Head below the fold.

Kyoto carbon poetry

A comment from a friend on Google+, after he posted a haiku, led me to ask myself if I had a copy of this 1998 Kyoto treaty talks op-ed that I wrote all in haiku. And, I did. And yes, what follows was an actual op-ed column. (Small weekly paper, where I was publisher, and nobody to say 'You can't do that.')

Clinton seeks freer trade
With Chilean producers
Free wine, grapes, and fruit

Gephardt says "Never"
Dreaming Presidential dreams
Gore stands idly by

Newt and his minions
Will swap taxes for tariffs
Clinton: "See me next year"

He's to Kyoto
To cut back greenhouse gas growth
Subtle irony

Speaking, not doing
More global warming threatens
With his ev'ry word

Business USA
Claims the climate data is
Still insufficient

They preach doom and gloom
For our proud, strong economy
From mandated change

Clinton will stand and speak
To please Japan, Europe, home
And yet fall far short

Back in Washington
Ere his Orient Express
Reno had good news

Investigation
Of campaign violations
Is terminated

Clinton breathes easy
As does loyal Gore besides
But is it over

On the back benches
Hot Republican firebreathers
Demand impeachment

The outside person
Knows all hands are money-green
Has cynic disgust

EU worried Obama Admin will ditch Kyoto

But, as the Guardian points out, because Barack Obama is not George W. Bush nobody in Europe wants to challenge his administration on the legalese-based sellout of the original Kyoto climate treaty, and by extension of the Copenhagen round of climate change control negotiations.

China enviro-bull claim on carbon tariffs

China claims the idea of carbon tariffs on individual products is protectionism in disguise.

It also claims the Kyoto treaty bans them from being imposed on developing nations.

True enough, but, we’re not in Kyoto anymore, President Hu Jintao and Chinese communists, we’re on the way to Copenhagen.

So, after several weeks of promising news about China on environmental issues, it’s now back to being worse than the U.S.

Bush intransigence aside, Kyoto II needed

It looks like China is officially No. 1 on the list of carbon-dioxide emitters. And India could soon be third, passing Russia.

It’s part of a larger global shift, as “developing” countries now emit more than half the world’s man-made CO2.

More at the link on how scary this is in terms of long-term Earth history.

Shock me the U.S. would want to move the Kyoto base year

Japan wants the base year for calculating Kyoto treaty greenhouse gas targets moved from 1990 to 2005. It cites its long-term financial slump of the 1990s and the fact that Eastern Europe was just starting to clean up after escaping the Soviet bloc as reasons for this.

The U.S. has no such excuse. Nonetheless, chief U.S. climate negotiator Harlan Watson called the Japanese proposal “an interesting idea.”

Of course you think it’s interesting. Another opportunity to deny and stall.

Does the WTO allow carbon cap-and-trade “tariffs”?

I’m afraid that or something similar is the only way the European Union and the United Nations will get a breakthrough on post-Kyoto global warming efforts, as essentially demanded by U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. The sensible EU position, opposed by the U.S., Japan and Canada:

The European Union wants a reference by industrialised countries that a cut of 25-40 percent in their emissions by 2020, compared to 1990 levels, will be a guideline for the post-2012 haggle.

The United States, Japan, Canada and others however are against that.

“We want to be sure that the text that we have before us is going to be neutral — it will leave all options on the table and, again, will not prejudge outcomes, which should be something that comes at the end of the two-year process,” said US negotiator Harlan Watson.

For “prejudge outcomes,” read, “not force the U.S. to take serious action.”

Also still on the table: how much and what sort of help developed nations should offer developing ones.

That said, there is one big problem with the Kyoto framework — its lumping of all but the most prosperous nations into one “developing nations” grab bag. China, India and Brazil may not be the U.S. or E.U. member states, but, they’re not Zimbabwe, Bolivia, or Myanmar in terms of development, either. I think a post-Kyoto round does need to two-tier “developing” nations.

Will Sarko give a slap to Shrub’s CO2 face?

Or, in plainer English, could a European Union carbon excise tax on non-Kyoto countries push even Bush to actually address global warming?

Because that sort of excise tax on countries that have not ratified the Kyoto treaty on carbon dioxide emissions is exactly what French President Nicolas Sarkozy has just proposed:

French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Thursday called for a national "carbon tax" on global-warming pollutants and a European levy on imports from countries outside the Kyoto Protocol.

It’s part of a larger tax package, and Sarkozy’s drive to realign France’s economy and public service sector.

Wrapping up a four-month forum on the environment that brought together the government, industry and the green lobby, Sarkozy said he would consider shifting part of France's tax burden from labour to pollutants, a key demand of environmentalists. …

“We need to profoundly revise all of our taxes... to tax pollution more, including fossil fuels, and to tax labour less.”

And, it’s drawing rave domestic reviews.

France's star environmentalist Nicolas Hulot, who pushed green issues to the top of the agenda of the last presidential campaign, said he was “happy and confident” following Sarkozy’s speech.

Arnaud Gossement, spokesman for France Nature Environment, an umbrella group of 3,000 associations, also reacted positively.

“For the first time, we have a president who does not pit economy, growth and ecology against each other... even though he was elected on a pro-growth platform,” he said.

I don’t know exactly what World Trade Organization regulations have to say about such a levy. But, so far, not a peep from Bush, so Sarkozy may just be on firm ground.

Arguably, this is a good reason for getting a Kyoto II started, that would include China and other developing countries, even if they’re not held to the same standards as the EU, US or Japan. It would finally, in a way, include environmental standards in international trade issues.

China to participate in “Kyoto II”

OK, with Beijing officially agreeing to participate in the next global warming treaty talks, the Bush Administration and Shrub personally have zero, zip, zilch, nada excuses for us not getting on board Kyoto the original now.

And: In addition, Japan would announce that it would assist China with energy-saving technology, the (Japanese paper Yomiuri Shimbun) added.

Make that LESS than zero excuse.