Failing to meet commitments
No shit. In a world that still watches placidly as cruise ships burn 80 thousand gallons of fuel a day each, it turns out that nobody, nobody, is living up to the Paris climate agreement.
Every one of the world’s leading economies, including all the countries that make up the G20, is failing to meet commitments made in the landmark Paris agreement in order to stave off climate catastrophe, a damning new analysis has found.
Less than two months before crucial United Nations climate talks take place in Scotland, none of the largest greenhouse gas emitting countries have made sufficient plans to lower pollution to meet what they agreed to in the 2015 Paris climate accord.
This means the world is barreling towards calamitous climate impacts.
But that’s the future; right now people are enjoying those cruises. There are 323 of those ships toddling around.
Under the Paris deal, nations vowed to prevent the world’s average temperature rising 1.5C above pre-industrial times in order to avoid disastrous heatwaves, flooding, storms, drought and other consequences that are already starting to unfold. But the new analysis, by Climate Action Tracker, finds almost every country is falling woefully short of that commitment.
Well you can’t expect people to give up cruises. It would be inhuman.
This intransigence comes despite the looming climate talks and increasing signs of the climate crisis manifesting itself in catastrophic weather events, including massive floods in Germany and China, severe wildfires in the US and dangerous heatwaves sweeping several countries.
108F here in Seattle in June.
“An increasing number of people around the world are suffering from ever more severe and frequent impacts of climate change, yet government action continues to lag behind what is needed,” said Bill Hare, chief executive of Climate Analytics, another partner in the new study.
Elected governments can’t do much, and unelected ones don’t give a shit.
[John] Kerry risks entering the talks with no major climate victory to brandish, with emissions reduction provisions as part of a huge $3.5tn piece of Biden’s legislative agenda still a matter of disagreement even among Democrats in the US Congress.
This is what I’m saying. Reducing emissions isn’t popular, and elected governments are necessarily about what’s popular.
We’re just walking through an increasingly hostile wilderness toward the edge of a cliff.
My industry does, to my surprise, seem to be taking climate change seriously and making changes, but it’s far too little far too late.
I must take exception to the Paris agreement being considered landmark; it wasn’t. It was, like all the other climate agreements, woefully inadequate and wimpy. Since there are no legal obligations to follow, and no consequences, there is no reason anyone would.
It’s kind of a media word, “landmark” – doesn’t mean anything but sounds as if it does.
So is the “group selection” theory looking more promising specifically when applied to homo sapiens sapiens?
Ophelia, sorry for threadjacking, but your #3 reminds me of an excellent book by Australian author and speechwriter Don Watson, Death Sentence: The Decay of Public Language. It is an excellent skewering of the way language is twisted and distorted so that it sheds all meaning and yet sounds so powerful.
But is not just a dull boring book by a dull old man shouting at clouds, it is intelligent, funny, and above all, clear in its purpose. It is one of several books Watson has written on public language. I recommend this to you, and all your readers.
One of the things that drew me into your blog was your clarity of writing and your hatred for “weasel words”.
Thank you Roj, I’ll seek it out. And what’s this about dull boring book? Books about public language are not boring!! I mean, they are if they happen to be written by boring writers, but the subject is FAR from boring.
And your recommendation is no thread hijack.
Dull and boring? Yes, I was thinking about the sludge that emanates from Judith Butler, et al.
Oh she writes a completely different kind of book altogether. Her own writing is in fact very bad, as we’ve discussed – deliberately clotted and pseudo-technical, to make the innocent think she’s saying way more than she actually is.
Dull old man shouting at clouds? I can relate to that. :D
See, this is another of those things that made me go meh during the election. I just couldn’t help thinking exactly this whenever left-leaning people told me how great it was that Biden would reenter the Paris climate accords.
Les sigh.
Yes, Nullius, it’s a feel-good measure that allows countries to assuage whatever small guilt feelings they might have without actually changing much. Recycle? Of course! Drive a monster truck or SUV to the market, which is in walking distance? Yes, but we’re in the Paris Accord again! Yay!
Recycling requires little of people, and we can only get roughly a third of households to do it. Reducing emissions costs lifestyle, and makes people unhappy, so we give them an opportunity to feel like they are doing something marvelous while doing little to nothing. By the way, recycling is over hyped, especially here where a lot of our recycling ends up in the landfill. (By here, I mean US, not Nebraska specifically). Reduction is key, and no one wants to do that, and businesses won’t even let ads suggesting that on television, even paid.
So, yeah, meh.