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 hav...
Posts
Bloomberg recently reported on the division within Merkel's cabinet on what to do about global warming. The underlying idea under the Paris Agreement is that countries are supposed to define for themselves what they believe they can do by way of carbon emissions, (in recognition, yes, of national sovereignty) but that they should then be detailed and clear about how they go about doing it, so this can all be monitored globally. Germany's pledge was to reduce its emissions 40% by 2020. They are on a path to achieve 32% -- a considerable accomplishment, but still a "miss" on their pledge. The Merkel administration seems to have given up on doing better for 2020, but it is looking further down the road to whether it can make its 2030 target and, if so, how. One body of opinion says the carbon pollution coming from vehicles on Germany’s roads is the place where emission cuts can and should be made. The emissions from cars and trucks (not counting those of th...