While The GOP/Media Idiots Were Babbling About Bowing…
Posted by Phoenix Woman on November 24, 2009
While the GOP/Media clowns were babbling about bowing, US President Barack Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao were hammering out a climate-change deal in advance of the great Copenhagen climate summit.
Because of this deal, President Obama is now able to go to Copenhagen with the following good news:
The news that President Obama will seek a emissions target at global talks in Copenhagen has animated a once-moribund meeting and given hope to environmentalists that something tangible can come from them.
The emissions target is expected to correspond to numbers that have been discussed on Capitol Hill, namely a reduction of 17 to 20% below 2005 emissions levels by the year 2020.
This is a direct result of the meeting with China’s Hu Jintao and was expected by those news outlets that were actually paying attention instead of freaking out over bows. As I mentioned last week, both the US and China have now agreed to stop playing climate-change chicken.
And it’s not just China that’s agreed to join the US in working to curb emissions. Obama has met with the leaders of India as well, and got commitments from them on this.
This may be the most significant news of the last decade.
[UPDATE: And no, it’s not too late. The economic downturn has bought us an extra 21 months in which to retool our economies to lower emissions. That’s 21 extra months for China to retool the older, grossly inefficient and polluting steel factories it has idled because of the downturn. That’s 21 extra months for India to do similar upgrades to its factories. That’s 21 extra months for the US to do the same thing with its factories. Considering that these three nations account for 56% of the world’s CO2 emissions, that’s not a small thing.]
(Crossposted at The Seminal.)
6 Responses to “While The GOP/Media Idiots Were Babbling About Bowing…”
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Mercury Rising 鳯女 
Phoenix Woman said
Oh, and by the way: Kyoto (and cap-and-trade) works.
Stormcrow said
I’ll believe China is going to curb emissions when they actually, verifiably do it.
Us too, for that matter.
The appropriate term is “regulatory capture”. It most certainly applies to the United States government these days. Obama’s inauguration didn’t change a bit of this. By this time, it’s also clear it’s never going to.
Phoenix Woman said
China’s already starting on it, unofficially. When the depression hit last year, the older steel factories, by far the worst of the polluters (and the ones that weren’t contributing much to the economy anyway), were the first to be idled. Even as they’re kept idle (and under consideration for retrofitting to more modern, less polluting standards), China is putting up windmills and solar facilities at an astonishing rate — China had less than a gigawatt’s worth of wind turbines at the end of 2004 and it’s now the fourth-largest wind-power producer in the world, soon to be the second-largest.
Another thing is that China’s current lack of official emissions limits didn’t cause a stampede of European manufacturers to its shores when Kyoto was implemented.; nor were these countries hurt economically by the Kyoto protocol, even as they’re cutting emissions by over half again as much as their original target. Thus, two key incentives for not having limits are no longer operative.
Finally, China’s last argument for not putting any limits on its CO2 emissions was that the US under Bush wasn’t going to do so. However, that argument is being taken away from Beijing as well, pending Congressional approval of Waxman-Markey.
Phoenix Woman said
Oh, and China has a very big reason to start lowering emissions — namely, the loss of the glaciers in Tibet, glaciers that feed the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article6907919.ece#cid=OTC-RSS&attr=797093
MEC said
It may be a good thing that The Usual Suspects were getting their knickers in a twist over The Bow. It distracted them from doing all they could to undermine the discussions with China.
Phoenix Woman said
A-yep.