My neighbors and I all promise to lose 10 lbs during the Thanksgiving/Christmas season. How is this different than this weekend’s climate agreement described by the New York Times as “landmark”?
“Leaders Move to Convert Paris Climate Pledges Into Action” quotes one of the assembled bigshots saying “Today, we celebrate. Tomorrow, we have to act.” Is that distinguishable from me saying “At this evening’s party I can have a few extra plates because tomorrow I am going to eat very lightly”?
Another attendee is quoted as saying “we have to make sure our national contributions are aligned with what the scientists tell us we need to be doing.” Isn’t that like me saying “I have to make sure that my eating and exercise in 2016 are aligned with what the fitness instructor says to do”?
The article: “The Paris Agreement’s provisions will not kick in until 2020.” Me: “My diet starts right after Fred and Beth’s awesome New Years party.”
Related:
- Video of Barack Obama: “President Obama said the historic agreement is a tribute to American climate change leadership.”
My future self is telling me the food and booze were worth it.
One of them involves wildly impossible goals that are pretty much impossible and full of wishful but absurd thinking. The other would involve reducing your caloric intake by about 1200 calories per day (skip breakfast and lunch every day, replace dinner with a side salad, sans dressing).
The USA is paying other countries to make promises. No one pays dieters to make promises.
On the surface of it, your comparison of multinational do-world-gooder climate Paris Agreement, and a private do-self-good diet pledge, both sound like ready candidates for usual devil-may-care negligence. And, to begin with, nothing much will be done to keep to the letter of the first. But because these lofty goals ARE THERE on paper, the lengthy 85-year target range, and because they are a stepping stone to further, regional accords, little by little individual countries will start to adjust their total emission etc rates, adapt their industries pollution, AND HOLD ONE ANOTHER TO ACCOUNT.
Taken one by one, the changes may not amount to much, but their cumulative, observable global warming-slowing effects will not go unnoticed. Especially when the real economic interests of the G7 (or whatever number) countries are visibly threatened. The USA may now consider itself largely unaffected by projected climate harm elsewhere, but drought and other unfavorable weather changes will cascade through entire regions and countries’ economies, and in the end become a threat to American interests as well.
Refugees from Middle East are not readily welcomed onto your shores, but what if in a foreseeable future not even America’s own conservative-hawk planners will have other options than to prepare the nation for the inevitable: that quite a few Polynesian nations (not merely the islands that now are their home), i.e. on your and the Far Asian nations’ side of the world, risk disappearing beneath the waves, and thus several million people from there will need to be resettled onto dryer milieux within, say 2 generations, two-three decades? And all this happening, say, at the same time as the Battery Park on the south tip of Manhattan, and lots of valuable real estate there and elsewhere besides, is heading towards the same underwater fate? American exceptionalism and the can-do spirit can suck eggs [@ $125 a carton].
So in the end your diet-pledge vs. climate-change promises comparison doesn’t hold water[sic!]… or maybe holds way too much of effluent that not even the affluent can do much about.
Writing about soon to be soaked southern tip of Manhattan, I of course forgot about the even more threatened Southern Florida—an act for which I should be, and, if soon to be VPOTUS Jeb Bush has his way, will end up being railroaded (“denying greatness to the State“). As preëmptive penance then, here’s what is said about Florida’s weathering prospects in the Thinking Man’s Playboy, The New Yorker mag:
Letter from Florida “Miami Underwater” by Elizabeth Kolbert: “As sea levels rise and streets begin to flood, South Florida confronts a bleak future. (also recommended in the New.Yorker.Minute newsletter as “The Siege of Miami,” Elizabeth Kolbert among the doomed of South Florida. Pretend the rushed last two paragraphs don’t exist, and you have another Kolbert masterwork. Less untamed than her earthquake opus but more humane + [illustration]).
More pointed fingers: A Skeptical Note on the Paris Climate Deal by John Cassidy; and The Earthquake That Will Devastate the Pacific Northwest by Kathryn Schulz