Donald Trump Now The Hugest Climate Catalyst #OnePlanetSummit #Climate
. Thank Donald Trump For Today's #OnePlanetSummit #Paris #Macron #Climate
Okay now, who will admit to reading with passing interest reports on Trump’s campaign speeches about protecting US jobs, Social Security, Medicare, stopping TPP, and more populist words? Anyone?
Thankfully, I, like most here, had already had the same experience with Barack Obama’s saying all the right things to get elected with little track record of producing results, so didn’t let our deepest heart’s desires cloud our thinking with Monsieur Trump.
What has amazed me though, has been what a great unifier he has become now in office!!! 
Not a real unifier, of course, but the worldwide reaction to the results of his actions —and those of his appointees — has brought many people to take action, in ways that had never done so before.
Take for example, his ‘leadership’ around climate change.
"If we don't win very quickly on climate change, then we will never win" – @billmckibben for @RollingStone. People just go quiet when I tweet about this urgent issue. There won't be trans rights or human rights or anything if we don't save the planet soon. https://t.co/lLXKWS6XTD
— Paris Lees (@parislees) December 5, 2017
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There are plenty of tipping points like this: The Amazon, for instance, appears to be drying out and starting to burn as temperatures rise and drought deepens, and without a giant rainforest in South America, the world would function very differently. In the North Atlantic, says Mann, "we're ahead of schedule with the slowdown and potential collapse" of the giant conveyor belt that circulates warm water toward the North Pole, keeping Western Europe temperate. It's tipping points like these that make climate change such a distinct problem: If we don't act quickly, and on a global scale, then the problem will literally become insoluble. We'll simply move into a dramatically different climate regime, and on to a planet abruptly and disastrously altered from the one that underwrote the rise of human civilization. "Every bit of additional warming at this point is perilous," says Mann.Another way of saying this: By 2075 the world will be powered by solar panels and windmills – free energy is a hard business proposition to beat. But on current trajectories, they'll light up a busted planet. The decisions we make in 2075 won't matter; indeed, the decisions we make in 2025 will matter much less than the ones we make in the next few years. The leverage is now.
Trump, oddly, is not the central problem here, or at least not the only problem. Yes, he's abrogated the Paris agreements; true, he's doing his best to revive the coal mines of Kentucky; of course it's insane that he thinks climate change is a Chinese hoax.
But we weren't moving fast enough to catch up with physics before Trump. In fact, it's even possible that Trump – by jumping the climate shark so spectacularly – may run some small risk of disrupting the fossil-fuel industry's careful strategy. . That strategy, we now know, began in the late 1970s. The oil giants, led by Exxon, knew about climate change before almost anyone else. One of Exxon's chief scientists told senior management in 1978 that the temperature would rise at least four degrees Fahrenheit and that it would be a disaster. Management believed the findings – as the Los Angeles Times reported, companies like Exxon and Shell began redesigning drill rigs and pipelines to cope with the sea-level rise and tundra thaw.”
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/bill-mckibben-winning-slowly-i...
Trump and his Administration has not only energized climate/environmental groups, cities and counties, but in Paris today #OnePlanetSummit began with the surprising meeting of hundreds of political, financial, and other leaders from around the world.
A people’s tribunal met in the days leading up to the summit:
Macron's renewed appeal to US #climate researchers to come to #France came on the eve of today's opening of the #OnePlanetSummit on global #climatechange in #Paris. Private US citizen-activists such as Michael Bloomberg & Leonardo Dicaprio will attend. https://t.co/5oDYvU5mVT
— Douglas Herbert (@dougf24) December 12, 2017
Will be interesting to see the feedback on the summit from those groups.
Special United Nations Envoy billionaire climate activist Michael Bloomberg was there, and recently quipped that protestors owed a debt of gratitude to Mr. Trump for energizing people worldwide to renew work for climate change.
The Latest: Bloomberg notes climate protest 'debt' to Trump - Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg says in a tongue-in-cheek statement that environmentalists owe President Donald Trump a debt of gratitude for acting as a "rallying cry" for action o... https://t.co/x7nYqv6hTt
— Amanda Underwood (@techglamgirl) December 12, 2017
Wonder if the President will have anything to say about what Special Envoy Bloomberg has been doing?
Companies coming clean on climate change - Hundreds of companies have pledged to report climate-related information, joining an environmental campaign led by billionaire Michael Bloomberg and U.K. central banker Mark Carney. https://t.co/1xfCuXLBgz
— Social Media (@Social_Media_b7) December 12, 2017
Exxon is now actually claiming it will be transparent.
Also there were Gates, Branson, Schwarzenegger.... heh. Kerry. Mr. Tesla .We’ll see what they came up with, but lawd knows the climate is changing quicker than ever imagined.
We could go on and on about the many groups working on other issues that have been energized . For example:
The election of Donald "grab her pussy" Trump may in hindsight been a defining moment for the fight against sexual harassment. Then came Harvey Weinstein et al., to launch the #MeToo movement. Roy Moore could take this over the top.https://t.co/KzGWRlBBGZ
— Jack Toy (@jacktoy) December 11, 2017
Ahhhh, but let’s not.
As Bill Mckibben argues :
In fact, that's the problem with climate change. It won't stand still. Health care is a grave problem in the U.S. right now too, one that Donald Trump seems set on making steadily worse. If his administration manages to defund Obamacare, millions of people will suffer. But if, in three years' time, some new administration takes over with a different resolve, it won't have become exponentially harder to deal with our health care issues. That suffering in the interim wouldn't have changed the fundamental equation. But with global warming, the fundamental equation is precisely what's shifting. And the remarkable changes we've seen so far – the thawed Arctic that makes the Earth look profoundly different from outer space; the planet's seawater turning 30 percent more acidic – are just the beginning. . "We're inching ever closer to committing to the melting of the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, which will guarantee 20 feet of sea-level rise," says Penn State's Michael Mann, one of the planet's foremost climatologists. "We don't know where the ice-sheet collapse tipping point is, but we are dangerously close." The latest models show that with very rapid cuts in emissions, Antarctic ice might remain largely intact for centuries; without them, we might see 11 feet of sea-level rise by century's end, enough to wipe cities like Shanghai and Mumbai "off the map."
Comments
Whoa, this is amazing:
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A truth of the nuclear age/climate change: we can no longer have endless war and survive on this planet. Oh sh*t.
FWIW, here’s Bill Gates on why this is important
A truth of the nuclear age/climate change: we can no longer have endless war and survive on this planet. Oh sh*t.
This would not be happening if Hillary won
She was fake climate change. Only someone so outwardly outrageous about his anti-climate agenda would have inspired people across the planet to make this our no. 1 priority. With Hills it would have been more of the same platitudes while working behind the scenes to protect her fossil fuel lobbyist friends.
"You can't just leave those who created the problem in charge of the solution."---Tyree Scott
SD she would have massaged the original Paris agreements
and rode them till it was too late for us all.
She would have continued and expanded on Obama’s all of the above energy ‘policy,’ doing the bidding of the oil and gas companies but less out in the open than Cheney or Trump.
Don’t think she would have dismantled all the bureaucracies like DT and company have, though, do you? She was to ‘centrist’ for that. /s
What ‘LOLA wants, Lola gets’ just popped into my mind.
More Mckibben :
I think Hills would have been all up wit dat.
A truth of the nuclear age/climate change: we can no longer have endless war and survive on this planet. Oh sh*t.
You nailed it,
. Good luck convincing the Hillbots, though.
"I’m a human being, first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.” —Malcolm X
Global carbon dioxide emissions are on the rise
again after three years of little to no growth, dashing hopes that they had peaked for good.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/global-carbon-emissions-are-r...
It looks like it is India and others who are the problem children.
Donnie The #ShitHole Douchebag. Fake Friend to the Working Class. Real Asshole.
Thanks COE. What hell it must be to live China just now
Only overnighted there on the way to Kenya back in the 90s and don’t remember much except Bombay hills looked like Hawaii from the air. Was pretty clear. Now?
China is working on it, but China may reach parity with US again if Trumpco have there way?
A truth of the nuclear age/climate change: we can no longer have endless war and survive on this planet. Oh sh*t.
In martial arts like jiujitsu and aikido, there’s the concept of
using force against itself. Rather than resisting, you magnify an opponent’s momentum in the direction of movement.
After decades of debate and deadlock, Trump seems to be saying, ahh, eff it, let’s just go ahead and push the please-Israel policy and the “damn the climate, grow the economy” stuff forward to the extreme and see what happens.
Wouldn’t it be funny if that’s the shock that finally makes new things possible?
Yes, it would.
A truth of the nuclear age/climate change: we can no longer have endless war and survive on this planet. Oh sh*t.
It is happening
Perhaps it is the only way it could happen.
Other nations have stepped up their game now that the US has dropped out of the Paris accord. At the time the US announced it would not participate in the Paris Agreement, the agencies that monitor and measure policy impacts on the planet estimated that the US non-participation could equal .32°C. drag on the climate change goal.
Almost immediately, however, innovation increased in other partner nations. China has pulled the world forward by installing extensive solar power installations, arrayed like beautiful works of art that can be seen from space. The amounts of clean energy being produced on these fusion farms is an unexpected bonus.
Meanwhile, India – soon to be the world’s most populous country – is about to commit fully to a rapid clean energy mandate for all vehicles. That, alone, will remake Tesla and India as the key transportation market makers of the world.
These two countries are exceeding their Paris pledges, making up for the loss of US's begrudging participation. Together, they have 2.6 billion people of the planet’s 7.3 billion – 35% of the world – and whatever they do will drive what happens to all of us. The world may be better without the United States involvement.
In fact, the three independent European research groups that track the temperature estimations associated with both the Paris pledges and real policy — has noted, for first time since it began studying the challenge in 2009, an unexpected lowering of temperature estimations for the year 2100.
Both US right wing parties are bitter that some undeveloped nations were not required by the Paris Agreement, to complete their pledges until 2030. They complained that the US would have to contribute an unfair amount up front. So the world is pitching in and taking up the US slack.
The progressive idea behind the Paris Agreements structure is that each country would revisit their pledge continually, and better their benchmarks as they learned and advanced. This has happened much earlier than was originally pledged by China etc.
Innovation in China has just barely started, but it is moving fast. Little wonder that the world's key physicists are flocking there, where the world's most powerful super-computers have been produced and where the world's largest particle collider is being built — which is at least twice the size of the Large Hadron Collider at Cern.
So, you see, it's not a far fetched idea at all. If only China could transcend their totalitarian tendencies, which are ugly toward disidents. We are all broken by our pasts, I suppose.
IMAGINE if you woke up the day after a US Presidential Election and headlines around the the world blared, "The Majority of Americans Refused to Vote in US Presidential Election! What Does this Mean?"
Trump is a dissident with respect to the elite consensus
United in hatred of anyone and anything that doesn’t follow the approved line — currently among them Putin and Trump — the U.S. elite is a lot more totalitarian than I realized.
After abolition of the Equal Time provision and Clinton’s repeal of bars to U.S. media consolidation, dissidents in America lost access to mass media and with it, any chance to give people alternative ways of understanding the news.
In recent years, via RT — no thanks to Hollywood or New York — U.S. dissidents were finally getting airtime on TV and reaching a larger audience. So how does our power elite react? By pulling RT’s accreditation, and smearing and threatening dissidents as alleged tools of Russia.
With the whole establishment and the mainstream media against Trump, I have to admit he’s got a lot more fight in him than I gave him credit for. The Washington establishment and the press gave Jimmy Carter the cold shoulder too, promoting all sorts of b.s. (Exhibit A: the so-called “killer rabbit” incident) “to frame Carter's presidency as hapless and enfeebled” and he seemed too decent a human being to fight back.