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Germany and the Paris Agreement II



The news from Germany I discussed yesterday is fairly typical of developments around the globe.

The Paris Agreement allowed nation-states to adopt their own targets. One might naively have expected that they would adopt easy-to-meet targets, i.e. "we will emit no more than twice as much carbon into the atmosphere next year than we did last year."

But no, the politics hasn't worked that way. As a matter of what one might fairly call virtue signalling, governments have set difficult targets, such as cutting emissions by 40% as of 2020 and 50% as of 2030. They can't and won't meet these targets. Then the different political parties can flagellate each other over whose fault it is that they didn't.

Meanwhile, of course, the sort of tough medicine that might make such targets in principle reachable will be blocked by the political pull of the affected interests, because the virtue signalling can't stop the politics of ass protection.

All in all, I have no confidence in the ability of nation states to save the world. I do think the world will be saved, but what will do it will be human entrepreneurial ingenuity. And we hace to look for such ingenuity in ways that will allow us as a species to adapt to the climatic changes that now seem inevitable, to adapt to and thus to survive them.

No, I don't have an ark in mind....
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