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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also meet the 2030 CO2 reduction requirements contemplated by the Clean Power Plan—even though it has been repealed.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, 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.