Obama to Attend Copenhagen and Commit the U.S. to Emissions Reduction Targets

Oh, Grizzled, you Canadians and your oil sands. :grin:

Once again we find a lot of agreement. Greenpeace and the like (groups who spend even less time with the real data than the denialists, who at least read over to cherry-pick) are a huge problem.

Denying economic reality and pragmatic options is just as bad as denying the underlying technical issues.

So I take it you don't take the conversation to be historic in nature, for the species I mean.

 

No, I think I would agree that it was an historic meeting. It points the way towards how decisions will be made in the future, and to the problems and pitfalls that that will occur in this process. We need to find a way to take the mainstream public discussion to a higher level, it seems to me. Right now the extremists on either end are controlling public opinion on the issue to a significant degree, and politicians react to public opinion. Maybe we need some kind of prominent, neutral, scientific body to step up and debunk the myths on both sides and focus the public debate on the real issues.

 

Sure but another Congress or even the current Congress could change a law. In our government nothing is locked since even the Constitution can be amended. That doesn't undermine the argument though that curently the Executive branch can take action on Climate Change even without Congress.

Not really. The President's negotiation powers isn't limited to treaties, that is why the State Department is under the Executive branch. Yes treaties have to be approved by the Senate but there is nothing preventing the President from negotiating and even committing the US to some other agreement with other countries without Senate approval. In fact things like that happen all the time.

And unless I missed something he didn't commit to that and even if he did as long as they didn't call it a treaty he could still pledge to do so using other tools at the disposal of the Executive branch, through pursuing other laws such as increasing CAFE standards, or other means. Heck he could commit to it even without the intention of following through. It might look bad for the US but Constitutionally he is empowered to do so.

And again you really need to reread the Constitution since you don't seem to understand the separation of powers.

 

Hold on wait a minute..

Weren't you the one getting alarmist about how Obama was commit the US to draconian emission cut backs? So now you are complaining that it d doesn't commit the US to meaningful emission cut backs?

 

Of course coal and gas interests will make the argument that oil sands aren't as critical to the energy infrastructure and if we are cutting down on emissions those should be the first to go.

 

There is no comparison. The CO2 produced by the oil sands is insignificant.



Emissions from the oil sands amount to around 40 million tonnes per year, roughly 0.4% of the total here.

Oil from the oil sands mostly replaces oil that US would otherwise have bought from the ME. Which is worse, “dirty” oil or blood oil? Actually, if you added up the full CO2 cost of buying oil from the ME, including CO2 released in waging wars over oil, I’m sure that ME oil would be dirtier from a CO2 standpoint as well. As I said above, there are legitimate environmental concerns with the oil sands, but CO2 isn’t one of them, and the solution is not to shut the oil sands down.

 

So all your alarmism was for naught.

So what happened to your crystal ball here when you declared:

While I agree Obama didn't do a good job, but largely this was a collective failure, apparently your job at prognosticating and getting all worked up about monarchy was even worse.