It's official: the United States is no longer going to cooperate with other nations to reduce global warming. The withdrawal from the Paris climate accord happened yesterday. We are the only nation to withdraw. Joe Biden says that when (positive spin at this time) he wins the election, he will immediately rejoin the agreement. A Trump victory means more initiatives such as drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and canceling regulations on methane release.

I recall that our most informed person on climate, Robert, agreed with Trump's decision in 2017 to get the U.S. out. I don't know what he may think now, but his reason then for liking Trump's move was that it held out hope that Trump's administration, released from the focus on emission reduction, would take action that would really make a difference--carbon removal or geoengineering. Of course, such actions have been shown to be nowhere in the administration's plans.

It doesn't seem possible to address a global problem without banding together with other nations, so for that reason alone the U.S. should rejoin. The Paris agreement still is mainly about reducing emissions, but the IPCC has inched toward recognition that more powerful means must be joined with decarbonizing energy. So it's important to get back to the table rather than relinquish leadership on climate to China.

DWill wrote:I recall that our most informed person on climate, Robert, agreed with Trump's decision in 2017 to get the U.S. out. I don't know what he may think now, but his reason then for liking Trump's move was that it held out hope that Trump's administration, released from the focus on emission reduction, would take action that would really make a difference--carbon removal or geoengineering. Of course, such actions have been shown to be nowhere in the administration's plans.

I admit I was wrong in my previous opinion. It was not clear to me the depth of insanity and corruption and fantasy of the Trump attitude. The inability of the Republican Party to take a fact based approach to policy is extreme, polluted by money and narrow short term perceived self interest, exploiting popular fear of progressive culture. While I retain sympathy for cultural and economic conservatism, I hope Biden wins the election. Good riddance to bad rubbish. You can't make a silk purse from a sow's ear.

The reason for my rather perverse suggestion was that the Paris Accord is also based in fantasy, with its false assumption that government commitments to cut emissions offer the only path to stabilise the planetary climate. So I took the rather desperate view that a shakeup of this complacent policy framework could lead to a more informed debate about the need for massive immediate investment in research and development of carbon removal technology. The interests of the fossil fuel economy would be served by this policy, which would buy time to allow a slower transition to renewable energy. Unfortunately, the moral corruption of the old energy industry is so great that they appear unable to engage in strategic analysis of their own best interests.

The Paris Accord proposes to increase annual world emissions by 5% over the next decade, in a situation where climate stability requires a decrease of 200%, through new technology that can mine carbon from the air to convert it into useful products. Against that scale of ambition, emission reduction is marginal. The world now adds 15 gigatonnes of carbon to the air every year, and should establish a rapid path to remove that same amount, a gross annual removal of 30 Gt, of which emission reduction might realistically contribute 1 Gt. That is the only way, together with albedo enhancement, to deal with the security peril of committed warming from past emissions, which has barely entered public awareness, despite the mixed efforts from the IPCC in its 2018 report on keeping below 1.5 degrees. Otherwise the prognosis is mass extinction, melting of the poles, sudden sea level rise, ocean acidification, vast release of methane, wild fire, extreme weather, economic collapse and world war.