Wednesday, November 23, 2016

Glimmer of Hope Seen in Trump's Climate Plan

It seems that some news sources are stating the Trump administration will not be a "disaster for climate" after all. So he intends to dump the Paris accord which was a joke anyway.
Even ardent supporters acknowledge that the Paris treaty by itself will do little to rein in global warming. The United Nations estimates that if every country were to make every single promised carbon cut between 2016 and 2030 to the fullest extent and there was no cheating, carbon dioxide emissions would still be cut by only one-hundredth of what is needed to keep temperature rises below 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. The Paris treaty's 2016-2030 pledges would reduce temperature rises around 0.09 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century. If maintained throughout the rest of the century, temperature rises would be cut by 0.31 degrees Fahrenheit.
This terrible plan was to hobble our GDP by $150 billion a year so we can maybe reduce temperature by .31 degrees by the end of the century? That sounds like a huge joke. I have to agree with this point raised in this article for sure.

This would be a big change. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development analyzed almost all aid from the United States and other rich nations and found that about one-third is climate-related aid.
This is immoral when 2 billion people suffer from malnutrition, around 700 million live in extreme poverty and 2.4 billion are without clean drinking water and sanitation. These problems can be tackled effectively today, helping many more people more dramatically than “climate aid” could.

So maybe if they took that climate money and used it for cleaner water and such we could actually prevent people (mostly children) from dying in the poorer parts of the world. However some environmentalists are really against saving lives at all. They are old school Bentham-ites that would like to "reduce the surplus population." In any case a pivot from throwing money at a problem that can only get solved by 0.31 degrees in a 100 years, to actually making lives better for those 2 billion "forgotten people," might be quite a win for the Trump administration and for those poor people as well.

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