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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Carnegie Mellon University researchers have found that current forecasts call for the U.S. electric power sector to meet the 2020 and 2025 CO2 reduction requirements in the Paris Agreement—even though the U.S. has announced its withdrawal—and also meet the 2030 CO2 reduction requirements contemplated by the Clean Power Plan—even though it has been repealed.
Despite the absence of a national policy aimed at reducing CO2 emissions, the U.S. is ahead of schedule to meet the short-term and mid-term goals of both the Paris Agreement and the Clean Power Plan, according to a recent viewpoint article published in Environmental Science & Technology.
"A year ago, it looked like our ability to meet these larger carbon reduction targets would have required more proactive steps, such as new regulation or new incentive programs," said Jeffrey Anderson, lead author of the paper and Ph.D. candidate of Engineering & Public Policy (EPP). "However, as renewable energy costs have fallen and are projected to continue decreasing even further, we are now well on the path to achieving even the 2030 goals in the Clean Power Plan."
Based on an analysis of projections from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, these carbon reductions will be met without any additional legislative or regulatory activity, said David Rode, faculty of CMU's Electricity Industry Center. The team also included EPP professors Haibo Zhai and Paul Fischbeck, also a professor of Social & Decision Sciences.
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 10 2019, @02:28AM (5 children)
The projected horrors of climate change are just that - projections. IOW, a load of political talk in an incessant torrent of same.
The increased regulations, taxes and fees on that pretext are the reality. IOW, actual damage dealers.
A rational agent wants to avoid actual damage and any increase thereof, and can be dissuaded by a mere projection only if its source is implicitly believed. Which political class just isn't. And mercenary science isn't either.
Propaganda wars destroyed credibility of all participants. Live with it.
(Score: 5, Informative) by NotSanguine on Sunday November 10 2019, @03:47AM (4 children)
Like I said, "you can't reason someone out of a position that they didn't reason themselves into."
As such, I won't try.
I will point you in the direction of a few things unrelated to AGW that I find relevant. Not to convince or convert you, but give some other perspectives that might inform your thought process and likely improve your rhetorical skills.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Expertise [wikipedia.org] (if you're not big on reading books, here's a presentation and discussion [c-span.org] by the author)
http://theconversation.com/post-truth-politics-and-why-the-antidote-isnt-simply-fact-checking-and-truth-87364 [theconversation.com]
https://www.fastcompany.com/1665526/short-term-thinking-is-our-biggest-problem-heres-3-ways-to-fight-it [fastcompany.com]
I hope you find the above interesting, if not enlightening.
Good luck to you, friend.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 1, Insightful) by khallow on Sunday November 10 2019, @12:42PM (2 children)
Back at you on that one. I find the people who "won't try" to reason, can't try.
Notice how your entire argument is irrelevant to the discussion at hand and dreadfully misguided. Books like "The Death of Expertise" completely miss the corruption of expertise by conflict of interest, for example. For a crucial example, economics is routinely considered to not be a science merely because of the many failed predictions that just so happen to support some special interest. Climatology has conflicts of interest of similar magnitude.
And criticizing other people for not thinking long term is useless, when you're the short term thinker.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by NotSanguine on Sunday November 10 2019, @02:18PM (1 child)
I love how you employ the very tactics you ascribe to me.
Your intellectual dishonesty is both obvious and amateurish.
As such, you don't deserve my time or attention.
Fuck off, jerk.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 0, Redundant) by khallow on Sunday November 10 2019, @02:34PM
I don't share your love for how hard you're projecting here. It's telling here that you aren't willing to defend your assertions about the urgency and harm of climate change, but you are willing to point a bunch of junk links to myths about anti-intellectualism (pro-tip: those links fall prey to the same anti-intellectualism that they claim to care about).
Meanwhile actual warming and secondary effects like sea level rise are far short of predictions (particular when one considers effects from the ongoing end of the last glacial period are lumped in), and harm of climate change is grossly, repeatedly, and consistently exaggerated. Warming exists, but we have bigger problems that the obsessive focus on climate change is harming.
But then what would be the point of trying to understand non-groupthink positions, right?
My take is that you, like most of the movement, ran out of reasonable arguments some time ago. Blaming your opponents for the weakness of your own arguments and evidence is pretty standard fare for climate change debate.
(Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Sunday November 10 2019, @03:42PM
The Death of Expertise ignores the heavy, institutional use of the appeal to authority fallacy over more than a century whether it be 4 out of 5 doctors recommending the product of the ad, tobacco companies publishing a plethora of fake studies on the relative healthiness of smoking, economics - the whole thing, War on Drugs, or contemporary attempts to panic us with dire climate change warnings. There's plenty of reason to be skeptical of the experts.
The second link about "Post-truth politics" signals its unworthiness with the term "post-truth" (and goes immediately downhill from there). There never was an era of "truth", so there never has been a genuine to use the label "post-truth". We and our stories are no more dishonest now than we have been for the entirety of human history. Instead, it's a dishonest term to vilify other speech and ideas.
And the third ("Short-Term Thinking Is Our Biggest Problem. Here’s 3 Ways To Fight It") just doesn't get it. The first solution, "reward people much, much later in life" was tried as pension funds and failed because short termers could raid the funds and pensioners put their interests over the interests of younger people still paying into the fund. It created both a food source for short term parasitism and encouraged conflict of interest. Another example is the creation of a variety of government systems and infrastructure for insuring people and businesses against failure. It encourages short term thinking and risk taking since there's always a sugar daddy to bail you out. In other words, a long term system to encourage short term thinking was created.
Further a lot of peoples' work is genuinely short term. In these cases, to delay payment/reward is to generate near term profit for the business rather than any long term benefit for anybody. Finally, if you guess wrong about the future (particularly of your would-be solution), then every single one of the solutions fails - you have rewards that aren't working right, costly life time products nobody uses, and huge bets that went way wrong. I favor betting markets as a way to address that issue. The subtle difference between that and the third "solution" is that you aren't making one bet on the future, but thousands on a bunch of different possibilities. One can quickly gauge the market's general opinion on the future and what's likely or not. Then you can place those big bets, using the market pricing as a guide and even hedge.
The single unifying problem of these three links is that they're feelgood anti-intellectualism - do these rituals, or buy into these condescending stereotypes, and you'll be better than the people who don't.