Media pretty excited about 'landmark' climate deal that would kill fossil fuels industry

By Dan Calabrese —— Bio and Archives December 14, 2015

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One of the ways you can tell the media's bias is from the descriptive words they use about something that happens. When a development is "landmark" or "historic," that means they're in love with it. When it's "controversial" or "divisive" . . . yeah, you get the idea. So it's a measure of just how smitten with state power they've become that an international agreement designed to decimate the fossil fuels industry while putting crushing controls and regulations on all manufacturing - not to mention massive new taxes and fees - has got them throwing flowers and lecturing everyone about how they got the deal this time because "the world learned its lesson" from its previous failure to come up with a global warming deal.

Just reading Reuters's description here is hilarious as they try to parse the distinctions between "shall do" and "should do," which means some countries are obligated to observe limits and others are not. With Obama negotiating on America's behalf, I bet you can guess which category we fit in:

Not all developing countries were easily won over, however. A central sticking point throughout the talks was the degree to which the agreement would be legally binding on countries, especially the rich ones who are expected to provide the hundreds of billions of dollars in funding to cover the transition to a low carbon future. The differences were expressed in wrangles over wording. Hard, legally binding commitments were proceeded in the text as items that countries "shall" do. Those items that were simply good intentions fell into the "should" do category. Facing unbudging demands to put their financial commitments into legal language, U.S. negotiators knew they had to break the poor vs. rich country divide. Their tactic was to sign up to a loose coalition of countries called the High Ambition Coalition. The European Union takes credit for starting the group as far back as 2011, when it was a loose alliance between the EU and small island states. As Paris approached, it expanded to include African, Caribbean and Pacific nations, developing an agenda that included the goal of keeping the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) over pre-industrial levels by the end of the 21st century. The number had almost been banished from serious discussion ahead of Paris. But the American decision to "join" the High Ambition Coalition brought the 1.5 goal back into play, sweetened with pledges of hundreds of millions of dollars to help island and developing states mitigate the ill-effects of climate change.

And you know where the joke is really on you? All this doesn't accomplish a damn thing:

Oh and by the way, the harder goal--limit warming by another half a degree Celsius (0.9 Fahrenheit)--is probably already impossible, said Joeri Rogelj at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria. Most likely the best the world can hope for is overshooting that temperature by a few tenths of a degree and then somehow slowly--over decades if not centuries--come back to the target temperature. That may involve something called negative emissions. That's when the world--technology and nature combined--take out more carbon dioxide from the air than humanity puts in. Nearly 90 percent of scenarios of how to establish a safer temperature in the world involves going backward on emissions, but it is also so far not very realistic, said Kevin Anderson, deputy director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in Britain. Negative emissions involve more forests, maybe seeding the oceans, and possibly technology that sucks carbon out of the air and stores it underground somehow. More biomass or forests require enormous land areas and direct capture of carbon from air is expensive, but with a serious sustained research effort costs can probably be brought below $100 per metric ton, said engineering and policy professor Granger Morgan of Carnegie Mellon University.

So the bottom line is that we've agreed to do something we have no idea how to do, and oh by the way, China doesn't have to make any changes right away while the U.S. and its allies "go on Slim Fast" as one participant said. The only good news here is that the Senate will never ratify this as a treaty, so it's not legally that the U.S. has to do anything in the agreement. The bad news is that Obama is president, and he won't care that it's not the law. He'll use executive power to govern as if it is the law, and that will surely include lots of EPA (and probably IRS) pressure on oil companies and every manner of carbon-emitting industry. If you thought rejecting the Keystone XL pipeline was bad, just wait. That was just the start. It's all the more reason we need to elect a president in 2016 who will not only reject this agreement, but the global warming nonsense entirely. If it's important to emit less carbon, then the private sector will develop the technology that will accomplish that goal. It's not going to happen through international deals like this, no matter how much the media cheerlead for them.