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robzo100 on 09 June 2017
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Final-Fan said: 1.  It wasn't a "guess" as in "guess the number I am thinking of between 1 and 10."  It was a "guess" as in "guess whether Microsoft's annual revenue is closer to one million or one billion dollars."  Anyone who is even mildly educated on the subject should be able to correctly make such a "guess".  And while it would be nice to take away the guesswork completely, at what point do you draw the line at providing more and more and more information as opposed to assuming a certain about of pre-existing knowledge in your readership?  It's a judgement call.  Even if they made an error there I think it's an overstatement to say it's evidence of terrible journalism.  


3.  It is absolutely not an oxymoron.  Do you complain about "suggested donations" at charity events?  The "floor" is the point below which the countries will have failed to live up to their agreement; however, this failure will incur no penalty.  I don't see why that's a logically unsound proposition.  Perhaps you might say it's an invitation to failure, but that's entirely different from what you're arguing. 

As for the ramping up, just because the U.S. made a 3-billion dollar commitment to be paid over a certain period or by a certain date doesn't preclude them from later adding additional commitments in overlapping time periods.  It's certainly unlikely under Trump, of course.  My guess is that although countries have been given plenty of space to ramp up, many will procrastinate until close to the end of the period and then be shamed into greatly increasing payments, but probably failing the goal.  The timeframe allotted is reasonable, but that doesn't guarantee countries are using it wisely.  Nevertheless, it's not impossible by any means for them to still put in the target amount in the named year. 

4.  Even if I were to grant that it is reasonable in theory to be looking for places to "make a stand" purely to further the goal of cultivating such an image, this cannot be done in a vacuum.  I do not feel as though your proposition takes into account evaluating whether the gain to his reputation is worth the loss of international agreements that would have benefited the U.S. through its participation if not for the decision to back out in order to achieve that gain to his reputation.  Especially if in order to be consistent he would have to keep doing it.  How would that not incredibly destructive to our nation's standing in the world?  What could Trump possibly gain from his reputation alone that would outweigh such costs? 

5.  I believe palou already said, and I agree, that all the things you said do not adequately address the problem of each individual facing a disincentive to do what is better for everyone, or an incentive to do what is worse for everyone.  I agree that society is going in the right direction in terms of inculcating environmental friendliness into the culture; however, I very strongly disagree that it has succeeded to such a great extent that individual action alone will suffice to meet the challenges we face as a global society regarding those issues without action at the state level.  We are merely to the point where individuals will support the group effort collectively, instead of saying "there's no possible way we could hunt passenger pigeons to extinction; it's hard for me to imagine, so it must be impossible". 

When I said you "dropped the argument" I did not mean that you conceded, but that in my opinion you just restated your position without addressing his argument and left it there without following up, and without explicitly (that I saw) "calling a truce" or agreeing to disagree.  Perhaps that was your intention, and on rereading the relevant posts it does seem like that is what you were doing without explicitly saying so. 

6.  We most certainly have not had this debate.  I will admit that you have made a few more specific statements on this than I have during the course of this thread, such as saying that although we know carbon emissions are bad we don't know how much effect they are having, but while I have issued some contrary opinions and broad statements of some of my own positions I have specifically not gone full-out in calling up counterarguments and evidence on specific topics like that for the very reason that this will inevitably sprawl into a huge debate on many sub-topics of the science of climate change (and apparently science in general) and I wanted to concentrate on this other stuff first.  I believe I have said things to that effect before but I hope I have now made my position entirely clear, which I may not have made sufficient efforts to do before. 

Thank you for bearing with me. 

Feel free to respond or not to this last reply(not much new is coming from this).

 

1. The "guess" was not a reasonable one. The US is capable of 100 Billion so there's no unreasonable logic there. And it happens to be one of the bigger points in the article/agreement in general, so journalistically it's not okay to be reasonable imperfect on that. I'm not gonna bash journalists on the small stuff, but this detail is not a small one.

3. We'll have agree to disagree on this. A floor/cieling on an unmandatory and loose agreement doesn't jive with me. Also, it is in fact guesswork that countries will decide to meet their ramp-up goals only till the last "minute"/year. Proportionally the expectations of the post-2020 payments grossly exceed it's pre-2020 payments. And we are not making good work on pre-2020 even before dropping out.

4. There is of course a cost/benefit to his firm stance on issues. In this case it doesn't have to be win/lose though. In regards to my previous talk of individual efforts overlapping collective ones, dropping out of the agreement puts pressure and responsibility on smaller actors and agents; state level politicians like Bill DeBlasio have vowed to take on the responsibility as have powerful individuals like Michael Bloomberg. The dropping out of this agreement is starting to show where individual loyalities lie - something I, and I hope others now too, will be watching closely.

5. Individuals, especially ones with families, still have individual care for people of the future. Individualism doesn't have to mean self-interest, it's merely the level(the most basic unit of society) at which incentive starts. Many individuals still have external cares about the environment, animals/pets, family, etc. Since you didn't disagree with my point about individuals becoming smarter and more aware of things like the TC with each passing generation, there's no reason they can't avoid specific iterations of the TC when they know it will destroy future loved ones by only caring about themselves. Imo as we get smart and more capable, not all issues need a collective authority pointing a gun at our head to tell us what is right, we can figure it out for ourselves.

6. When you decide to delve into the details yourself you will realize what a holy un-uniform mess it is. To actually be able to tell what processes(transportation energy, methane/cattle, CFCs, litering, etc.) contribute less/greater pollution to a reaosnable certainty, combined with somehow discriminating those process between countries, while taking into account larger planetary climate systems already in place...and then to figure out what solutions to implement, of which Paris-Agreement supporters recognize don't do enough. You said science is evolving on the matter - it better because it's somehwat of a Pandora's Box right now which is why I actually made a serious comment about planetary migration.

Imo it will take more than governments to fix this. We need individual actors, organizations, and smaller levels of government(that aren't bound by the shackles of a ~400million-participant democracy) to step up and look at problems in innovative ways(reversing/slowing climate change is a very straight-forward inside-the-box idea). I veiw it as a child-parent relationship in all seriousness. I want Trump to get rid of the decades of conditioning that have lulled people into the feeling that governments will take care of everything, or that they can take care of everything.

Collective Power is not the answer to everything, hopefully that was felt behind most of my assertions. I think we've been able to bear eachother ;)