Links tagged “paris”

European leaders have spent years trying and pointedly failing to solve the climate crisis with regulation. Whether intentionally or not, U.S. policymakers have mostly avoided top-down solutions. And counterintuitively, or perhaps it should have been intuitive, the U.S. now leads the developed world in reducing carbon emissions.

Policymakers can learn an important lesson from this. The key to fighting climate change is to unleash the power of the free market, not to embrace every green politician's or activist's nutty new idea.

"Bottom line: the climate activists are decisively winning. The science no longer matters in the public policy debate. Activists have moved beyond it and the major science institutions no longer defend it against the activists’ exaggerations and misrepresentations. There are rumors are that the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report will break with the past and fully embrace the hysteria. Meanwhile, skeptics are talking to themselves, like characters in Alice in Wonderland – vocal but effectively locked out of the news media."

"Instead of banning fossil fuels outright, the U.S. embraced natural gas amid a boom in its production. Thanks to a process called hydraulic fracturing or "fracking," we've managed to tap new reserves of natural gas. In 2015, the U.S. surpassed Saudi Arabia and Russia to become the world's top producer of natural gas. By 2018, energy companies produced over 60% more natural gas than they had two decades earlier. This newfound abundance of natural gas has helped our nation transition away from coal, which emits twice as much carbon dioxide.

Thanks to this shift, U.S. carbon dioxide emissions have hit 30-year lows, even as global emissions have increased by 50% during the same period. And since 2005, natural gas has done more to reduce power sector dioxide emissions than all renewable energy sources combined, according to the Energy Information Administration.

By eschewing regulation, America has also spurred additional emissions-reducing innovations in the private sector. Freed from red tape, U.S. energy firms have been able to devise and implement a host of groundbreaking green technologies.

CO2 emission "declines in rich countries balancing out a rise in poor nations, according to data published Tuesday. The International Energy Agency said emissions of the main man-made greenhouse gas stayed at 33 gigatons in 2019, even as the world economy grew by 2.9%.

“This was primarily due to declining emissions from electricity generation in advanced economies, thanks to the expanding role of renewable sources (mainly wind and solar), fuel switching from coal to natural gas, and higher nuclear power generation,” the Paris-based agency said. “Other factors included milder weather in several countries, and slower economic growth in some emerging markets.”

The country with the biggest drop in energy-related CO2 emissions was the United States, which recorded a fall of 2.9% to 4.8 gigatons on the back of coal-fired power plant closures and lower demand for electricity. The European Union saw its emissions fall by 5% to 2.9 gigatons, while Japan's dropped 4.3% to just over 1 gigaton in 2019. By contrast, emissions in the rest of the world rose by almost 400 million tonnes last year, led by higher coal use in Asia.

Morano speaks:

Here’s what Morano had to say about it being a conspiracy.

I asked Marc if he’s getting backhanders from “big oil”.

Donald Trump pulled the United States out of the Paris Agreement! And Marc reckons that it was a genius move.

It’s about power and money.

And it has nothing to do with climate change.

NYT: Let’s Quit Fetishizing the Single-Family Home - By NYT Columnist By Farhad Manjoo: "The single-family home is out of step with the future... a big house with a backyard should be a rarity... single-family zoning has a history in segregation."

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Sen. Warren Seeks To Ban Construction of New Homes in America Unless They Are ‘Zero Carbon Footprint’ - Sen. Elizabeth’s Warren’s energy deprivation plan for America: No new houses or buildings, ‘zero carbon’ cars & electricity production & no drilling on federal lands and no nuclear energy.

Dem presidential candidate Andrew Yang: Climate Change May Require Elimination of Car Ownership – Suggests ‘constant roving fleet of electric cars’ - “We might not own our own cars. Our current car ownership and usage model is really inefficient and bad for the environment,” Yang said.