Meeting the Paris Climate Goals Was Always Hard. Without the U.S., It Is Far Harder. By BRAD PLUMER JUNE 2, 2017. Continue reading the main story Share This Page. Continue reading the main story. Share; Tweet; Email; More; Save. Photo. A gas flare …
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/02/climate/climate-goals-paris-accord.html?_r=0
It’s official — on June 1, President Trump announced that “the United States will withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord,” but suggested that he would be open to new negotiations that are “fair” to the United States.
Here at the Monkey Cage, we’ve provided in-depth analysis over the years on the Paris accord, climate change, energy security and environmental developments. For a full listing of these posts, see below.
In our June 1 post, Joshua Busby at the University of Texas answers the big questions: What does this mean, and what’s next? He writes, “Under the normal rules of the agreement, the United States cannot withdraw until November 2020,” but “there is a nuclear option.”
Jessica F. Green, an New York University professor and frequent contributor on environmental policy topics, explains why the Trump decision would not roll back the considerable U.S. progress on environmental protection. She notes, “States, cities and many companies in the United States realize that sensible climate policy is, well, sensible.” With U.S. companies pursuing green options and U.S. utilities phasing out coal-powered plants, she points out that the U.S. government does not control — or make — many of these decisions.
ttp://www.washingtonpost.com/video/business/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-paris-agreement-on-climate-change/2016/09/30/b3d0a8c6-8747-11e6-b57d-dd49277af02f_video.html
Monkey Cage contributors have also looked closely at the Paris accord itself. Was there too much flexibility in the wording? What made the Paris accord different from other climate change negotiations? More broadly, what happens to global security if the effects of climate change force millions to migrate? And what are the nuts and bolts of energy politics, aviation emissions and U.S. energy conservation programs? We invite you to keep reading.
or the past decade, Fox News has been a haven for climate change denialism, shielding viewers from the evidence that humans are causing global temperatures to rise. Perhaps no other news outlet has done as much to harden the view, among conservatives, that global warming is a fiction.
But on Thursday, just a few minutes before President Donald Trump’s announcement that the United States would back out of a major international climate agreement, Fox did something startling and utterly off brand.
Viewers tuning in to watch the president’s speech saw anchor Shepard Smith lecturing them that climate change was not, in fact, a hoax:
Climate change is real and our activities do contribute to it.
As the New York Times reports today, scientific studies show if the world’s carbon emissions continue unchecked, atmospheric temperatures will continue to rise. The planet will not just be hotter but also suffer from rising sea levels, more powerful storms, droughts that lead to food shortages and extreme conditions.
Supporters of the accord argue it’s the right thing to do for the environment, and for people — future generations.
On the matter of climate change, Smith has been one of the few dissenting voices at Fox News. In 2014, he stirred up a minor controversy when he declared, on air: “Climate change — it is real. The science is true.”
Trump’s Paris speech Thursday fell squarely in the middle of Smith’s 3 pm show, which gave the anchor a chance to remind his conservative viewers about the scientific consensus on climate change.
Smith’s forceful acknowledgement of the science is startling only in the context of Fox News, a channel that has long been blamed for perpetuating right-wing ignorance of the science on global warming. In 2011, researchers from American, George Mason, and Yale universities found that Fox News programs overwhelmingly rejected or ignored the scientific evidence on climate change, and promoted a false sense of balance by favoring guests who denied the planet was heating up.
“Notably, Fox also provided substantially more coverage on climate change than the other two networks, thereby amplifying doubt about global warming within the cable news landscape,” the researchers write.
People who already doubt climate change are much more likely to watch Fox News, of course, but there’s evidence that Fox News, in turn, has suppressed public recognition of global warming.
Studies have shown that many climate deniers are not incorrigible, but in fact are surprisingly open to new viewpoints. A recent experiment from Yale University researchers Sander van der Linden and Anthony Leiserowitz, and George Mason’s Edward Maibach found that simply telling people “97% of climate scientists have concluded that human-caused global warming is happening” is enough to increase their confidence that climate change is real.
What’s more, both liberals and conservatives shifted their views equally after learning this fact. Even people who were avid watchers of Fox News became more receptive to the idea of man-made global warming, suggesting that at least some climate skeptics are simply misinformed, not willfully oblivious.
Part of the problem is that the American media has done a bad job of explaining climate science. According to the survey, only a quarter of liberals and only 5 percent of conservatives were aware that more than 90 percent of climate scientists believe climate change is real and that it is caused by people. The widespread “public confusion and doubt about the state of scientific agreement has limited action on global warming for decades,” the researchers argue.
As this issue becomes more and more politicized, one fear is that it will be harder to change people’s minds. Over the past 20 years, Democrats have become more confident that humans are causing global warming, while Republicans have become more skeptical. This reflects, in part, how politicians and pundits have increasingly turned climate skepticism into a matter of political identity.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/6/2/15727170/fox-news-acknowledged-climate-change-real
U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called the orchestrated “civil society” propaganda campaign a “tsunami trend” on Monday during an 8-hour, globally-streamed talkathon titled, “Earth To Paris,” in the French capital’s Petit Palais exhibition hall. The talkfest was slated to continue for four hours on Tuesday at UNESCO’s Paris headquarters.
Among other things, supporters were urged to bombard world leaders with “love letters,” organize neighborhood “watch parties” for the event, and post messages of support with a #EarthToParis hashtag on social media accounts.
Slashing meat eating should be one of the central pillars of the global warming agenda when world leaders meet in Paris to discuss climate change Nov. 30, according to a new report.
The London-based Chatham House think tank says cutting down on meat consumption is essential to prevent warming by two degrees by the end of the century. Cultivating animals is responsible for around 15 percent of the world’s carbon emissions, according to the report.
“As governments look for strategies to close the Paris emissions gap quickly and cheaply, dietary change should be high on the list,” says report author Laura Wellesley.
Appearing together in the White House East Room, Obama and Hollande each made a statement on the current state of the effort to counter the Islamic State before taking questions from the press.
After expressing solidarity with France in the wake of the recent terrorist attacks in Paris carried out by Islamic State and discussing more broadly the campaign against the jihadist group, Obama stated, “And next week, I will be joining President Hollande and world leaders in Paris for the Global Climate Conference. What a powerful rebuke to the terrorists it will be when the world stands as one and shows that we will not be deterred from building a better future for our children.”
More than 100 world leaders will attend the upcoming U.N. climate conference in Paris, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, France’s foreign minister said Sunday during a three-day ministerial meeting in the capital to prepare the negotiations.
Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said that Putin has accepted an invitation to attend the conference in Paris. He will be among the speakers on the conference’s first day, along with President Barack Obama and the leaders of India and China.
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