As the Roger Ailes legacy plods on through AM radio mind-control, and America's status as steward of the liberal economic world order begins to buckle, will California, Germany, and China emerge as a more perfect economic union, with flyover country factored out, as D.C. further flounders under the yoke of conservative Idiocracy and foreign meddling?

Well at least there's this Paris thing so Trump shouldn't really be able to be considered a failure. Not a complete failure anyway.

Lol

The US was only involved in the Paris Agreement so they could manipulate the process in ways favorable to US businesses. :ssh:

(No, he's a miserable failure in every possible way.)

Let's not mince words here.

Rex Tillerson wanted Trump to stay in the agreement. Every ****in' US CEO wanted Trump to stay in the agreement. The most pollutin'ist of pollutin' states wanted to stay in the agreement. Because as long as the US is at the table, the US government can protect the CEOs and companies who are doing all of the polluting from suffering actual consequences.

So what happens in 2020 if the US isn't at the table anymore? Hey, countervailing tariffs against all goods from countries that don't have effective climate change laws, maybe? Who knows? The US was responsible for de-fanging the current agreement, without American belligerence the next agreement might start doing some real damage to Rex Tillerson's stock portfolio.

Backing out, trying to renegotiate, pulling all of this **** - all Trump's doing is taking - literally, exclusively the people who voted for him - taking them out back behind the White House, and putting a rhetorical bullet into their metaphorical head. Economic mass-murder of America's 30 year olds on "disability" working class poor. And I'm not sure what's more hilarious, the fact that they deserve it, or the fact that both they and Trump are too far gone to understand that's what's happening.

Not to mention all of the insanely lucrative new technologies that are shaking out of the green / alternative power / "oh my god we're all going to die" government funded research programs.

The US is literally cutting that **** so they can spend more money on coal.

Thermal. ****ing. Coal.

Do you know what a backwater country looks like? That's what a backwater country looks like.

Literally THREE countries are not a party to the agreement.

Nicaragua, because they thought the agreement didn't do enough.
Syria, because they aren't really a country anymore.
The United States of America, because an orange goblin with progressive alzheimers took political advice from a 14 year old redditor.

The entire rest of the planet signed.

Like, you literally want to be the odd one out here? For real?

Rest of the planet might as well make the next treaty expropriate all US foreign capital, since y'all so eager to abstain from this international treaty ****.

But Trump, a wimpy weak man like Obama wasn't strong enough to stop global warming. A truly manly man like yourself would REALLY work to save the world!

.

I'd wager that you could easily predict the policy decisions of Donald J. Trump by asking yourself: what did Barack Obama do? And then do the opposite.

It's up to Rush Limbaugh to decide whether or not this level of evil should first be allowed to destroy Trump himself, or the entire country.

I'd wager you can easily predict the policy decisions of Donald J. Trump by taking a lottery winner's brain and ****ing it waaaaay up with beta amyloid.

I am genuinely interested to hear your detailed reasoning behind your support for pulling out of the Paris Agreement. I've spent the last hour trawling the web to gauge sentiment on this issue, and I think I can say that, as far as I can tell, the only people on the planet who agree with you are fellow conservatives, whose worldviews are shaped entirely by Rush Limbaugh and company. CEO's are against it (Elon Musk and Bob Iger are pulling out of the president's council), and Trump's own daughter Ivanka fought desperately to lobby executives to convince her father not to pull out:



It really seems that you guys are isolating yourselves (and by extension the American government) from the entire world.

I mean this really sounds to me like President Trump has gone full retard, and that at this point anyone still aligned with him just failed a very important litmus test.

70% against withdrawing / 30% in favor.

Which basically lines up with the theory, about 30% of people are empty husks. They don't think, they feel, they do everything by instinct and survive only by following others. The whole world is an inscrutable mystery to them. Business, economics, and personal success are as alien to them as hyperbolic geometry. They will never grow beyond where they are right now.

Christ, I don't even know where I got this.

The Alex Jones video from today that I found on /pol/, which begins with (emphasis added):



bears a striking resemblance to what AM radio propagandist Mark Levin told his audience today (albeit without Jone's anti-Semitic flourishes).

Summary from Levin's own website (emphasis added):



TL;DR: forget about policy--any power granted to central government for the purpose of correcting economic externalities is necessarily a sinister attempt to undermine your individual liberty and enslave you to environmentalists (or in Alex Jones' case, literally enslave you to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and the Jews :confused:).

So, conservatives, pick your flavor of kool-aid: the anti- Semitic globalist variety of Alex Jones, or the Fox News variety of Limbaugh and Levin that has Paul Ryan terrified into acquiescence.

What's amusing to me is that as I read through some of the Youtube comments of that Alex Jones video (and the /pol/ thread from whence it was linked), is how obviously economically disenfranchised every one of them must be, however opaque the mask of online anonymity makes it.

I mean, you don't exactly steep yourself in anti-Semitic propaganda or spend all day every day watching Fox News if you are reeling in the big bucks.

In other news, Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine has filed suit against five pharmaceutical companies, for their role in promoting the use of opiates to doctors, which are killing at least 10 people a day in his state alone.

Probably just looking for more cash flow to securitize.

Pay down some externality for selling opiates, state sells the revenue to a bank for an instant cash payment today, which they use to pay down the deficit in an election year.

On the topic of ****ty behavior, while on 4chan, I see from /g/ that my PC's inability to reach archive.org, in fact, is the result of Comcast having blocked 207.241.224.2 for all subscribers. Bloody brilliant.

Ew.

And to think I was just about to have the privilege of going through Ted Nelson's junk mail... :-/

What lucrative technologies? For the most part it seems like most of them are lucrative due to the government subsides that you can get by using them.

And no, we aren't going to spend more money on coal, no matter what Trump thinks or wants his supporters to think. That market heavily favors natural gas. And more than that, new power plants will be around for decades. One administration policy wish list isn't going to significantly change the long term risk of coal investment.

It was stupid of us not to sign the agreement, but lets not forget that the president doesn't have the legal authority to ratify it. Even with Clinton in office and a democrat held legislature, it's unlikely that the Senate would have given the go ahead. Which is dumb, because it's a non-binding agreement. No one actually has to do anything, but by not signing, we get to be the scape goat that everyone else points to deflect from their lack of progress. Literally every other country signed it, because there's no reason not to.

I mean, we are probably going to come pretty close to meeting our part of the agreement anyway, due to the expansion of natural gas plants.

The lucrative technologies are the ones that are currently being *developed* because of government grants. Countries that want to meet their Paris Agreement obligations are going to need to buy technology to help them do it. That technology very well might not be made in America now.

I duno about that. US industry seems pretty well posed to take advantage of market opportunities in clean energy. There's been a lot of government grant money and private spending over the years to build up that sector in the US. I just don't see it being that big a market internationally. The treaty isn't binding, and no one is going to invest a stupid amount of money into meeting commitments, and what money they do invest will likely be pretty heavily earmarked for domestic firms for obvious reasons. Clean energy is a welfare program for domestic corporations.

The clean energy market may well take off regardless of the success of the Paris Agreement, but it seems to me it would be rather short-sighted to underplay the significance of the US abdicating its leadership role here.

I'd be interested to know more about this, but I don't imagine that welfare is the right analogy for manipulating the market in favor of clean tech. You can't talk about something being merely "welfare" if the absence of it means that market forces don't converge to an equilibrium that pays for its externalities.

I don't really know what I'm talking about, but I thought I'd pipe up and say something because from what I can see, you may not either....

Economic rents for green tech and clean, renewable energy! noooooo

Basically "clean energy" subsidies have meant giving a of money to companies who develop technologies that have a really positive public image rather than putting money toward a technologically feasible path toward a meaningful timetable for a reduction in carbon emissions.

The US has reduced it's carbon footprint in the last decade, and that's almost entirely due to fracking, which the public, especially on the left tend to hate. Fracking isn't flawless, but natural gas is by far the fastest practical way to phase out coal and realize short term emissions reductions. Even better, it's ability to quickly scale production, is extremely helpful to accommodating wind and solar without creating a net increase in emissions. Fortunately, fracking and natural gas have enough market pressure to keep them expanding in spite of their negative public image.

We are building a huge amount of wind farm and spending a lot on PV, but it's just not a viable path toward fixing the problem. Unless we can get some sort of massive long term grid energy storage technology developed, PV and wind aren't going to be able to replace the majority of our power usage. The trouble is, we don't really have anything that can practically store anywhere near that much energy. Water storage can work for towns that happen to be close to really perfect geography, but for the overwhelming majority of the US, that's not an option. There's some other stuff going on with weird battery chemistries and magnetic flywheels, but they appear to mostly be hype, at least for large scale storage. Mostly they are used for frequency stabilization.

The bottom line is this. We spend a bunch of money on "clean technologies", but we don't really have great answers for how these technologies can viably replace carbon emitting sources. If they can't move past a token few percent of our energy portfolio, they haven't really accomplished anything at all, other than provide a feel good way to make a lot of rich people richer.

Do clean energy companies not reinvest their profits made possibly by government subsidies into research that leads to innovation? Or are you saying that even supposing they do, even with enough incremental progress in tech, we don't have the infrastructure to support PV tech on a large scale?

The issue isn't that there isn't innovation. There's quite a bit of development going in clean energy. It's that the innovation needs to lead us somewhere that it can actually significantly replace our carbon emissions on a large scale.

Energy storage simply isn't the sort of problem that's likely to see a solution by just hoping for some further developments. It's worth putting research effort into, but there aren't really any promising technologies out there to develop, so I don't think it's likely that we will get results in anything close to the time frame we need.

For example, if you are living in the 18th century and you want a way to transport perishable goods across the Atlantic ocean in a day or less, you are going to have a bad time. Investing a lot of money into building faster tall-ships might give you faster tall-ships, but it's not going to really get you any closer to getting you from New York to London in a day. Sure, eventually Boeing will build a 707, and the problem will be solved, but you don't have the tools to even work on the problem, because you don't even know what kind of technologies will need to be developed. Eventually technological progress will get you there, but you have no idea how long it will take or how to go about it.

We're just paying people to come up with faster tall-ships. We can take steps to solving the problem if we are less stubborn about what the solution looks like. Maybe we don't actually need to get across that Atlantic in a day, maybe we just need a way to preserve our goods better.

I think the best case scenario is to continue natural gas development and then have first world nations agree to a government directed, large scale roll out of GenIV nuclear reactors. It's not perfect, but it could substantially improve the carbon situation without depending some speculative technology to show up and save the day.

Dealing with transportation carbon emissions will be a lot harder, but this would be a really good start and hopefully buy us some time to get that figured out.

The Paris Agreement is greenwashing and everyone who thinks the world is going to get ruined now that THE US have pulled out of it are the same uninformed idiots that are glad we pulled out of it. They are a sea of low energy individuals only differentiated by their team colors and whether their reaction to economic issues is bootlicking or racism.

I don't think there are really many conservatives with a worldview shaped by Limbaugh. Perhaps unprincipled Republicans. They're the worst. Interesting, though, that it's somehow seen as a good thing that even the "evil" CEOs wanted to stay in.



I guess the most interesting comparison of this, for me, would be to compare this treaty to the UN. It's easy for some to embrace the notion that we should pull out of the UN. The best counter-argument to that is that with our powerful seat at the table we can veto practically anything as well as foster other things in line with whatever our agenda happens to be at that moment in time. Seems to me that's pretty much how Jon described our involvement in the Paris Accords.



I don't really think a detailed reasoning is necessary. I think we all know that, at it's essence, this treaty is a massive global re-distributive economic scheme. Surely some see that as a good thing and others don't. Of course I fall into the latter group. Beyond that, we joined illegally. I doubt any intellectually honest and informed person believes any US president has the authority to ratify treaties with the stroke of a pen. The cowardly senate should have put itself on record by shooting it down on their own. I would respect Trump's action more had he not announced our withdrawal in four years but announced that we were out immediately as the previous administration joined the accord fraudulently and without authority to do so.

In any event, Trump is well within his authority to undo an executive action with another one. Blame Obama. He could have at least tried to do it the right way.

I don't think many NFL fans have their worldview shaped by cheerleaders, but I sure don't hear many of them complaining, either.

It's not a "good" thing that evil CEOs wanted to stay in the agreement. It's evidence of what the real purpose of the agreement was.

It's not a treaty, it's not binding, and citation needed.

It's a non-binding accord with a limited scope. By US jurisprudence it would be considered a CEA (allowing the president to sign, with later ratification by 2/3rds of the senate) or just a SEA, allowing the president to sign no matter what. Because it's a non-binding agreement. It doesn't actually mean anything.

I don't think you are quite as knowledgable about what informed people might believe about this subject.

Yeah almost like he did this just to score points with his whipping boys crumbling base.

and the rest of the planet is well within their authority to call you *******s for doing it.

Non-binding with a limited scope? Geez, with all the commotion I could have sworn people considered this thing to be far more important. More fake news, I guess.

Thanks Wookie. Your response was pretty well thought through, and I can see the logic in it.

Unfortunately, thinking about your remarks, it really is clear to me now just how provincial American conservatives are in their approach to politics. Our country is a huge player on the international stage, and you guys lack the perspective to see just how meaningless these little squabbles about D.C. overreach into your red states are to every other democracy. Our national government is being a poor steward of the world order, because you guys more or less don't want the national government to exist at all with its current scope.

You can argue technicalities about how things should have been done, but can you not see that this always just ends in obstruction and finger pointing at the Democrats?

But, you know, I guess the President was elected by the people of Pittsburgh and not Paris?

You may not miss the coming brain drain out of commiefornia, but the rest of the world would be happy to pick up the talent while you guys devolve into an economically contracting oligopoly of corporate fiefdoms.

In all seriousness, I imagine the US will remain strong unless Trump precipitates a major trade crisis, but damn this stuff is embarrassing.

Paul Ryan's House of Representatives is basically a coalition of incumbents who are scared to death of being called a RINO on Limbaugh's or Levin's radio shows. They don't stand up to the president, and senators like Graham and McCain who do are trashed by the base.

What's the difference between having your worldview shaped by a radical, and being afraid to upset those whose worldview is shaped by one? After all, Republicans want to be reelected, and what chance is there of that if they go against a base that has been conditioned to see any and every compromise in their crusade against D.C. power to do anything but enable the private sector as utter betrayal, worthy of being torn to shreds on the AM radio and cable news circuit?

Almost nobody who had the president's ear wanted to pull out of this agreement, except Bannon (and Pruit), who is basically unstable and an out of control propagandist from Breitbart.

Finally, the nefarious influence of Rush Limbaugh's blatantly anti-intellectual tirades against solid climate science, and the sustained campaign of propaganda of Fox News cannot be understated in their effect on the conservative base. This horse**** is why Bannon and Breitbart we're catipulted to the Oval Office, (beginning with their tapping into the blind, ignorant rage of the disenfranchised conservatives, back in the primaries, up through today, where the president disregards all voices except Bannon's in deciding to walk away from the Paris Agreement).

This **** really goes back to the deregulation of media and the loss if the fairness doctrine.

Turns out, given 30 years of sustained media propaganda efforts by balefully shameless corporate henchmen, it's perfectly easy to partition a country into bins of people who either are or are not susceptible to anti-intellectualism, and it turns out to work rather nicely due to existing geography, history, and economic disparities.