It’s hard to overstate the significance of the agreement announced today by Barack Obama and Xi Jinping to limit US and Chinese greenhouse gas emissions. The limits are significant in themselves: not enough to guarantee stabilization of greenhouse gas levels at the agreed target of 450 ppm, but enough that we can get there just by ratcheting up an existing agreement rather than by looking for something new.
I’ll write more later, but I wanted to note this event as soon as I could
John Quiggin 
@Megan I don’t think that “intend” is a get out; it has a legal connotation in that it precedes an action moreover a particular action ie reducing CO2 emissions.
If it means the same as ‘commit’ then why not say that? Commit is a lt more … Um committal.
😉
Oops .. is a lot more … Damn those train carriage typos …
There was never the remotest chance of the US and China agreeing on a text whose details would pass scientific muster. That’s just a given, so picking holes in the announcement is shooting fish in a barrel.
But an agreement like this is at least as much an intervention in political dynamics as it is a contract, and in that respect there are some grounds for hope. Firstly, as several have pointed out here, it adds much-needed political momentum to international moves limiting greenhouse gas emissions, at a critical juncture. Secondly, it’s surely going to be a useful fillip to the divestment movement (especially coming the same day as India seriously floated the idea of ending coal imports within a few years).
There just is not going to be a single breakthrough agreement that provides a watershed moment saving the globe. Analysing yesterday’s announcement as if it could be that is just a unrealistic frame to consider it within.
Personally, I think we’re probably stuffed, but if there is an chance of maintaining a stable climate, it’s going to happen like this: an accumulation of positive but individually inadequate events.
This article confirms my suspicion that Chinese coal consumption has got so much momentum it will hard to slow
http://theenergycollective.com/robertwilson190/2156011/new-agreement-between-us-and-china-climate-change-not-game-changer
China’s per capita emissions are now higher than the EU. They have 800 GW of coal fired generating capacity, half built since year 2000. I think we now have less than 25 GW of active coal capacity with plants about 30 years old on average.
If most of the manufactured hard goods we buy are made in China then we are our outsourcing emissions without any sense of guilt. Our national carbon accounts should be supplemented to reflect emissions embodied in imports. Some advocate BCAs or border carbon adjustments to correct this. I suggest there will not be much of a global emissions slowdown as long as the West gets China to do its dirty work.
@Hermit
So, we’re the biggest CO2 emitters in the world per capita and we’re outsourcing our emissions?
@rog
I disagree. That’s why I gave the examples of Murdoch and James Hardie. They both solemnly told courts that they “intend” to do, or not do, something. The courts accepted this and gave them what they wanted, whereupon they both promptly went right ahead and did the thing.
In both cases their response to outrage was “we really did intend that at the time, but later we decided to do something kind of the opposite.”
It’s important to note that these are largely actions Obama doesn’t need Congress to approve. As such they have a much higher chance of being enacted than loftier goals which would need Republican approval and a squadron of flying pigs.
Congress may not be able to prevent but it can and will impede and undermine Obama’s efforts. Tony Abbott may feel like his is the template upon which the successful resurgence of the crusade against the paganistic eco-socialists will be built; campaigning on every issue but climate, remaining close mouthed by preference and vague and contradictory when pressed, with a well timed “look out, terrorists” to divert attention and never ever clearly stating openly an intention of eradicating climate as a consideration in government business. An ‘adult’ US President that is certain that climate science is wrong, leading an ‘adult’ Congress that opposes climate action has to look tantalisingly close. With the US firmly onside the beginning of the end of the alarmist climate emergency has to look achievable.
Just as nothing of Gillard’s or Rudd’s Green-Labor climate policies will survive Abbotts term as anything but hollow examples of folly, the expectation that none of Obama’s will survive the turning of the US political tables must seem more than possible. With the world’s most powerful and influential media magnate on side, it may even seem inevitable. Of course it’s all predicated on the science of climate being completely wrong but this kind of conviction politics permits no insidious cultivations of doubts. With the certainty that only comes with conviction, the collapse of the green hyped climate emergency must look inevitable, and being misleading and deceptive to avoid open debate and the indicisiveness of gridlocked democracy will be lauded as foresighted and noble when global cooling kicks in.
@Megan
This is surely true of any commitment about the future, however it is worded. Are you saying that the choice of some word other than “intend” would have led you to conclude that the statement was a substantive step towards mitigation? If so, what word?
Comment from Grist
@John Quiggin
No, that’s taking my position too far.
I’m highlighting that the, very deliberately chosen, wording doesn’t even meet the requirements of a “commitment”, “promise”, “guarantee” or “undertaking”.
“Intend” is a weasel word here.
I hope they meet these goals, and much more, but I’m also aware that “delay” is a core principle of proponents of BAU.
Risking eternal moderation, here is the wording.
@Troy Prideaux
Yep it’s bizarre. We send coking coal from the east coast and iron ore from the west coast and odds are they meet up somewhere in Asia to make steel and CO2. That’s thermochemical smelting. We do the same for alumina which requires electrochemical smelting no doubt supplied in part by Aussie thermal coal. We get some cash but no emissions on our books.
The town of Whyalla immortalised in song by former trade minister Emerson has a token steel mill but they now send far more iron ore to Asia than they use locally. Perhaps the ore ships and coking coal ships pass by each other en route to what is in effect a carbon tax haven.
@Megan
The clause to which you object begins with “Today, the Presidents of the United States and China announced their respective post-2020 actions on climate change”. That’s about as clear-cut as you can ge.
@John Quiggin
Then it goes on to state those “clear-cut” “actions”:
The “action” words there are “intends to achieve” and “make best efforts”.
If they intended to say something stronger than that they would have. There is no reason to imply into the wording something that isn’t there.
As I pointed out before, the best part of this announcement is paragraph 1 read in its entirety:
If anyone cared to ask my opinion, I would strongly suggest shouting that paragraph from the roof-tops and bashing deniers over the head with it.
That bit is unequivocal.
While taking Megan’s point, namely that “intends” is a weasel-word when used in a statement of commitment to do something, the agreement as I read it states clear measurable objectives for the USA, and arguably clear objectives for China, to achieve on specific time frames. Even with the weasel-word in the statements, we can nevertheless measure progress, or the fairly there-of, along the way to meeting those objectives. In the case of the USA, we really can expect to see progress within the next two or three year, or we can point to their failure to get change happening rapidly enough. For China, it is a bit more challenging to measure, for the nature of their target means it has a post-hoc measurement problem, i.e. the assessment of whether they will achieve their target is done after the (f)act: it is impossible to measure a peaking of emissions until we are over the hump and trending downwards; on the other hand, should that situation occur well before 2030, then China has arguably met its commitments as stated. Either way, both China and the USA have set targets which allow them to be tracked for success or failure. That’s a heck of a lot better than what we’ve had in the past.
To inject some cynicism though, I’d say the fairly broken token democracy of the USA could quite easily undermine these objectives even before they begin the task.
Damn spell checker: in “or the fairly there-of” I of course meant “or the failure there-of”.
Mindful of the Greens’ position a couple of elections ago, I think the ALP have done the right thing in walking away from negotiating with the LNP on what is a broken promise in the first instance. I just hope Bill Shorten talks with the various independents to explain why it is important to stick to the RET as originally agreed. The absolute target of 41TWh was set for a reason, and it has been working brilliantly.
The argument over whether that is a “real” 20% relies on confusion over whether that 20% is measured at the commencement of the RET scheme, or after it has succeeded in driving out the dirtiest of the fossil fuel GHG emitters (or forced them to adopt cleaner technologies, either way same deal). Measuring the whether we’ve achieved 20% at the end of the RET target date does two things: a) it pre-supposes we can successfully predict the national mix of energy production ahead of the end point—a difficult feat of occult reading; b) if the RET is even more successful than we expected, we are penalising it for that potential extra success if we cut the target energy production back now.
In fact, those two points invite a further consideration: if we predict that the RET is not going to meet its final target, does that mean we’ll have a big meeting and raise the target to a higher TWh of RE production? That is a rhetorical question, of course.
@Donald Oats Tony Abbott frequently uses the argument that a pre election commitment amounts to a mandate post election. The Coalition Govt are mandated to maintain RET and other objectives regarding renewables.
@Donald Oats
I agree that it is better than the nothing at all we have had so far. I’m just not as excited as I’m presumably supposed to be about what it actually IS.
If it is accepted that the wording was chosen very deliberately, what do you make of the choice of the word “in” rather than “by” immediately before “2025”?
I’m told there will be a stinker of a heatwave in Brisbane this weekend. Strangely appropriate.
@Tim Macknay
Weather isn’t climate, that ol’ trope, but weather is certainly dependent upon climate, as we all know. On that note, it is sadly ironic to read of the Brisbane mayor advising the G20 participants to slip, slop, slap, and then apologising that of the things we can’t control, one of them is the weather.
I agree Tim, strangely appropriate.
Megan, I’m hardly jumping for joy myself, I’m simply noting that in their “commitments” they have at least given some numerical targets (in the case of USA) and some time frames, which means assessing performance is possible. Honestly though, this should all have been happening many years earlier, but we can’t change that sad historical fact. I’m just happy that they have shirtfronted our egregious PM Tony Abbott as a moment of comedy, and here’s to the Bondi Beach ostriches with their heads in the sand, protesting PM Abbott’s intransigence on all things climate related.
There’s an interesting discussion here of the concept of wiggle room that is germane to this discussion:
http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-opinion/tony-abbott-stifling-australias-climate-change-ambitions-20131113-2xfm3.html
Now clearly, any politician, no matter what words are used, can say they mean less or more than their normal meaning as it suits them at the time.
I note that Australia had binding commitments under the MDG process and totally squibbed on them.
Megan’s point was, AIUI, that if they aren’t even using strong language now, then even at the start of the process, when backpedalling ought to be hardest and the desire to make splash greatest they are using equivocal language. That shows bad faith.
That said, I have greater confidence that China will meet its ‘intent’ than that the US will meet its stated intent.
One of the advantages of a stable autocracy is predictability. The Chinese regime doesn’t have to worry about public opinion — well not much anyway. They know their resources. They tend to put the best people in charge, punish failure harshly and get stuff done — for good and ill.
They are determined to cut their pollution, because that’s one area where public opinion ir germane. They have the freedom to design their abatement entirely as they please. If there are deniers in China, they are keeping quiet.
So only technical constraints can stop them.
@jungney
I do think the proposition holds that “the greater the immiseration of the masses then the greater the likelihood of rebellion”. Rebellion could mean open, violent rebellion or a kind of peaceful rebellion against bourgeois politics at the ballot box where the ballot box is effective.
This likelihood increases IMO when the people being immiserated are the Western middle-classes collapsing into poverty. There is no doubt the middle class is collapsing in the USA and it is being seriously squeezed in the other Anglophone countries. The educated middle class will not take kindly to the collapse of all its hopes.
The trained intellectuals of the professional bourgeoisie are mostly bought and suborned by corporate capital. There is no hope there. A revolutionary intelligentsia is now more likely to come from highly educated but unemployed youth and from older intellectuals made redundant. If you are well employed and part of the system then by definition you have no stake or incentive in changing the status quo. The unemployed, dispossessed and rejected will have to combine with rapidly growing working poor (downwardly mobile middle class people) against the corporate oligarchs and their apparatchiks.
Planet – not saved.
But a small step in the right direction.
The wording “intends” and “best efforts” – may fool some and tempt them to claim victory, but wiser minds should wait and see.
No child will live in poverty.
One bit of news that suggests why China is willing to look at peak emissions occurring before or around 2030: perhaps the PTB (Powers-That-Be, an “Angel” thing) think their economy is likely to be suffering from the debt boom overhang, making a peaking of emissions sufficiently likely for them to “intend to commit to potentially probably peaking before/near/on/around/in an open neighbourhood of/close to 2030” and feel that it isn’t too onerous a stretch to ensure that outcome.
Colour me cynical, as always.
@Fran Barlow
I am puzzled by the suggestion that the Chinese regime tends to put the best people in charge. I’m not affirming that it’s false — I’m wondering how any of us could possibly tell one way or the other.
@J-D
As I understand it, the education and qualification structures imposed on people seeking to rise through the ranks mock those imposed here. Tony Abbott’s qualifications wouldn’t be good enough for a low ranking village official in China. This applies as much to the CCP as it does to officialdom, and given they are interchangeable, that’s probably as well.
Hubby is a course adviser at one of our universities and gets to see the academic records of some of the overseas students here from China and those that appear to be angling for careers boast academic accomplishments that would make most of us blanch — multiple languages, several kinds of engineering or science or maths, plus political theory and economics, piles of post graduate stuff. These are people at the bottom rungs of their careers, who might become an assistant to some district official after they done the hard yards in some menial position.
Schmoozing and nepotism n a system like that won’t get you anywhere.
@Ikonoclast
My real concern with the idea that immiseration equates to rebelliousness is that sometimes it doesn’t. It leads to its opposite. Still, I agree with your general assessment of the available forces on the ground. Every member of the professional bourgeoisie, the managerial class and the ruling class we can win over is a good win. There is a new class of radical intellectuals being mentored and very well from what I have seen.
.
The Chinese system is fundamentally (though not entirely) a meritocracy. For example, it is the top students in high school who are invited to join the Communist Party. This is the Mandarin tradition.
@Fran Barlow
What would lead you to think that schmoozing and nepotism can provide no assistance in the accumulation of certificates and diplomas? The campaign the Chinese government is currently mounting against corruption implies that they see it as a widespread problem, and it seems unlikely that the purveyors of educational credentials are unaffected.
But even supposing the educational credentials were awarded impartially, what further conclusion does that support? Are the most skilled engineers best suited to be in charge? Does multilingualism make a leader? Do we want economists to run the country? Wait a moment — are economists not already running our country? And do I need to remind you that Tony Abbott is a Rhodes Scholar?
On the other hand, Abraham Lincoln and Lázaro Cárdenas were both autodidacts.
@J-D
Let me say clearly — even if someone could show me that such a system better approached the production of tangible benefits than could any other system, I’d oppose it on the grounds that it was deforming of individual possibility. I accept inefficiency, if I must, as the price of having humane and respectful society.
You ask whether the most skilled engineers are best suited to be in charge. I’d say that wherever high skill in engineering most closely matches the demands of a position — absolutely. They may need multilingualism and skill in economics too, or need ready access to those skills and they should have it.
Officially at least, economists are not ‘running our country’. Officially, ‘our country’ is being run by people who have merely heard about it and apparently find it tedious, or feel they need to pretend to things they barely grasp. Hockey’s interview on BBC’s ‘Hard Talk’ underlined this very point. Officially, ‘our country’ is being run by spivs and buffoons. Unofficially, it’s really being run by bankers, extractors of minerals, property developers and their brokers in the mass media, here and elsewhere. They aren’t for the most part economists either, and whatever merit they have serves, so far as they can manage it, their interests alone.
It is true that Abbott gets the title ‘Rhodes Scholar’ but it demands only a cursory glance at that title to see that it refers barely at all to anything most would associate with cognitive accomplishment and indeed, in so far as some of it was awarded for his ability to swing wildly at the heads of other men with gloves on, it was awarded for both demonstrating the want of it and the desire to diminish it in others.
I have no doubt that there is corruption in China, and one may even suppose that some of the corruption that Chinese officialdom really qualifies for the title. There are however, savage penalties for perceived failure in their system so one would need to have a care to just whom you endorsed as worthy. In Australia, failed executives get golden handshakes. In China, you and everyone you’ve ever been close to might get death and official dishonour. Eddie Obeid was lucky not to be an official in China. He now follows me on Twitter.
China, a backwater in 1980 and a semi-feudal country recovering from occupation in 1949, and from massive purges in the mid 60s and 70s is now one of the world’s leading economies. That suggests they learned a fair bit about what needs to be done to enter the modern world. Since 1980, the US has stagnated, with its working folk going backwards in relative income. In the last five years, the building programs of the Chinese have utterly dwarfed those of the US and the US is in debt to them, having spent much of its wealth attacking and destroying lands far from its shores. One doesn’t have to admire Chinese usages — I certainly don’t — to see that China is rather better governed that the US.
@Fran Barlow
You write that in the US ‘working folk [are] going backwards in relative income’. The Gini coefficient has been increasing in the US. The Gini coefficient has also been increasing in China. If increasing inequality is the index of bad government, then both the US and China are being badly governed.
Mitch McConnell, the new majority leader of the Senate (USA), reckons this new agreement is an ideological war on coal. Now, sure, McConnell is playing politics in calling it an ideological war; however, to simply factor environmental issues into the economic picture is hardly an ideological stance, more a recognition of how neglecting the costs to the environment—which we live in and use every day—allows for a distorted market, one in which fossil fuels become economic. How on Earth is it an ideological war on coal just to finally recognise the free discount fossil fuels have received over cleaner alternatives, and to move to take it into account (finally)?
We should not let this be framed as a war against coal, for it manifestly isn’t; it is about avoiding or diminishing the consequences of emissions of greenhouse gases into the environment. It is hardly our fault if coal happens to be one of the worst choices for clean energy production. It is hardly our fault that people of like mind with Mitch McConnell have ignored warning after warning that we need to shift to cleaner energy production options. And it is hardly our fault that, once GHG emissions are costed in an economically meaningful way, the relative price advantage of fossil fuels is severely eroded.
Any fool who has invested heavily into fossil fuels has only themselves to blame, quite frankly. You would have to be deaf, dumb and blind to miss all the information streaming in about how risky it is to keep on increasing GHG emissions, and even then you would probably find out about it.
@J-D
You don’t necessarily need the best academic qualifications to run the country, but you have to be able to think. Some sort of filtering process to weed out contenders who can’t think is useful. My main problem with Joe Hockey as treasurer is that I think (a) he is no smarter than me (although much harder working), and (b) his heart is in the wrong place.
I always thought that Keating was much smarter than me, and that Hawke was infinitely better with people than me. Howard, he was fantastically pragmatic, but took us the wrong way. Rudd, way smarter than me, but huge personality problems. And Julia, just fantastic at getting stuff done.
Now maybe Tony and Joe are smart, but they do an awfully good job of pretending not to be.
Of course the really smart people in the Australian government should be the public servants.
@Hermit
Oh really? I have three independent sources suggesting that China’s coal consumption may have peaked already: here, here, here. It’s not any cyclical downturn, though hydro production has had a good year. The change reflects a permanent transition to a modern service economy.
If that’s so, why did the Chinese only accept an emissions peak in 2030, if it’s going to come much earlier anyway? My take is that the Chinese diplomats got too clever, defending the freedom to run a policy that is both obsolete and unacceptable to the Chinese people. I speculate that Obama may have realized this, counting on internal Chinese politics to tighten the target.
@J-D
Context is key here. As an egalitarian, I see inequality as always a bad thing and something that policy should always seek to abate. We ought to settle the burdens and benefits of both social labour and private work as equitably as we can, but that doesn’t stop me from distinguishing between varying instantiations of inequality and evaluating them accordingly.
As noted, in 1949 China was amongst the poorest countries in the world and had a quasi-feudal set of arrangements relating to labour. It was a largely agrarian economy with some deeply mediaeval practices in relation to women. It had been occupied by the Japanese regime.
The US emerged from ‘WW2’ as the most powerful and wealthy country of the world, declaring that this would be ‘the American Century’. There was full employment, and though spatial and racial inequality were obvious and brutal, the average difference between the wealth of CEOs and full time employees was on average a factor of around 25. This persisted until about 1971. The top tax rates at the top ran at or above 80%, and briefly, over 90%. The proportion of government revenue from corporations was much higher than now. America was not an egalitarian society, but it was less inegalitarian than than today.
Inequality in China today largely reflects spatial inequality — the urban rural divide — whereas in the US gross inequality is a feature of urban life as well. Whereas in China, the wealthy have got relatively more wealthy by capturing larger shares of high year in year growth and labour productivity, in the US, especially since 1980, the rich have got rich substantially by immiserating the middle classes and those below them, in circumstances where growth has tended to track population quite closely. The closer you get on the timeline today, the more pronounced this effect is, with the richest 10% often capturing more than 100% of growth in GDP. This represents a radical and regressive maldistribution.
In China, inequality is seen as a serious problem for the elite to solve, whereas in the US it’s often seen as a badge of honour and the driver of productivity, or at best, an intractable problem. In the US, policy settings remain blind to maldistribution and the party more unambiguously keen in inequality has advanced in the mid-terms.
So these are different and tell us different things about the two instances of governance.
There is an enormous difference in the current trajectories of China and the USA. Quite simply, the Chinese are out-smarting the Americans by a wide margin. China is rising and the USA is falling relative to China. The reasons for this are complex. I can only give an outline here. At the same time, limits to growth will favour the USA against China so there are countervailing forces to the rise of China.
China is an old culture. As Confucianism makes a comeback in China the view that the state is fundamentally important is reinforced. Cummunism is giving way to a new Confucian culture. The USA continues to support extreme individualism and great concentrations of welath at the expense of good governance and at the expense of the common people. China has a cohering tendency, the USA a disintegrating tendency.
Beginning in the 1990s (or maybe earlier) China sent out cadres of students and functionaries (numbering in total 100,000 or more IIRC) all over the world to gather information, study every society and bring back all knowledge and ideas for study and evalutation. We can be sure they also trawled the internet for very piece of knowledge obtainable in that manner. At the same time, China has pursued a policy of rapid industrialisation, the concomittant result of which is the progressing deindustrialistion of the rest of the developed world. The USA in particular is de-industrialising rapidly in heavy engineering and perhaps now even in electronics as its electronic consumer goods are more and more made in China.
China is pursuing a policy for economic domination. It is pleased to see the USA de-industrialise and squander its productive power on ruinous and pointless wars. Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake! It’s bad mannners. China currently does not have to do anything to destroy the USA. It can sit back and allow the USA to destroy itself.
On the other had, the limits to growth (LTG) threaten more danger to China than the USA. The major regions already badly overpopulated according to footprint analysis are Africa, the Middle East, the Indian sub-continent, China, S.E. Asia and even much of Europe (sans Russia).
Regions still in a passable ecological footprint condition (as opposed to the parlous ecological condition of the above regions) are Russia, the Americas and Oceania (mainly Australia and N.Z.).
Climate change is the final wild card. It’s very hard to tell which countries will do well or badly out of it. Australia and China will be hard hit by climate change. The USA will take a fair hit too. Russia might suffer less than most as the temperate zone moves north and opens up Russia’s cold regions.
But on current political and economic trends the USA is heading for severe trouble and probably martial law to stem collapse. Europe is headed for collapse as are Africa, the Middle East, the Indian sub-continent and S.E. Asia. The Chinese will suffer but avoid collapse, IMO.
As Barak Obama has noted, Australia is well placed to be smashed by climatic change. Not only is much of the wildlife adapted to niche environments, the arable land is strongly contingent on the temperature profile. Water is a perennial problem for much of the continent, and some of our best land has urban sprawl built over the top of it. Unless the changes somehow make great tracts of the northern area suddenly agriculture friendly, we will lose a lot of agricultural independence. What then? Tony’s answer is to keep doing what we are doing, only with the average clock-puncher doing the heaviest lifting, the mega-corps doing the most leaning. Tony’s answer is a wildcard bet, hoping against (virtually all) expert analysis that AGW is little or no threat to our current and future economy. Surely we don’t pay prime ministers to make such appalling decisions.
@Fran Barlow
It seems to me that, if your analysis is correct, what it tells us about Chinese and US governance is that they are incommensurable. On your reading of the situation, there’s no usable index to compare the performance of the Chinese leadership, facing one set of problems in one set of circumstances, with the performance of the US leadership, facing radically different problems in radically different circumstances.
@J-D
A nice dodge! First they’re comparable and just as poor, and now we can’t say because we haven’t a common yardstick.
I’d say we do have a common yardstick. Given their constraints and opportunities at each given moment, how much have they advanced the general utility of their citizens over meaningful periods of time? One meaningful period of time would be 1949-1980 and another might be 1980-2014.
To take a sports analogy, when we assess the contribution of a team coach to a team’s performance we usually look first to compare how many wins, losses and draws a competent coach with the resources at his or her disposal should anticipate and compare that with the actual record. We might look at how well the team plays with unscheduled losses of key personnel, or in circumstances ill-suited to the players’ skill sets. If the coach seems to be able to manage adversity well and keep competitive, he or she is credited more highly than those managing teams who only have to turn up to win.
The Chinese have had a very steep hill to climb since 1949 whereas the Americans could have coasted and done better. The Americans didn’t coast. They began a social version of the climax in that Marx Bros epic, Go West!’ In which to keep the train going, the Marx Bros cannibalise the carriages to feed the steam engine.
It’s a hilarious film, but also an apt metaphor.
The US House of Reps has just voted to approve the Keystone XL pipeline that would carry diluted tar sands bitumen from Canada to the southern US. When operational an additional 121 Mt a year of emissions is expected split between both countries. The US Senate has yet to vote on it but plenty of Democrats will support the bill. Then it goes to Obama who I guess will think it’s not much compared to China then there’s the happy motoring way of life to consider. Like I say, talk is cheap.
@Fran Barlow
You referred to the direction of change in economic inequality, which is something that can be measured (subject to data availability) by the Gini coefficient. I discussed that as a standard for comparison not of my own motion but only because you brought it up, so when you reject it after it proves not to support your conclusion, it looks to me as if you’re the one who’s dodging.
We can measure a sporting team’s performance by wins, losses, and draws because those are determined by an agreed standard. You can’t say the same of ‘general utility of citizens’. If we were able to measure that, then the advancement of it would provide a common yardstick. But we aren’t able to do so, even without your additional qualification (at least equally unfeasible to measure) of given constraints and opportunities, piling Pelion on Ossa for impracticability.
So is there a capitalist country where the Gini coefficient is decreasing?
If not, then according to J-D, all capitalist countries are ‘badly governed’?
@Ivor
I wasn’t setting up my own standard of what counts as good government. Fran Barlow referred to the increase of inequality in the US as evidence of its being badly governed. For anybody who accepts the criterion of increasing inequality as the standard of bad government, the only consistent conclusion is that every country where inequality is increasing is badly governed, including China. From a more recent comment, however, it appears that’s not Fran Barlow’s position after all.
So, do you think there’s any standard, criterion, test, or measure that can be used to compare how well countries are governed?
Megan, breathe deep; because it ishttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rZbvi6Tj6E beyond words.
I don’t have much time for Lenore Taylor.
I find her to be as good as an ALP stooge rather than a journalist.
Given all the excitement about what US/China “intend” to do in the next few decades (I see Lenore refers to that as a “pledge” – so there is another word they could have used if they were serious), it exhibits double-standards to write this about Abbott:
See that? When US and China release a weasel-worded non-committal sop it’s a “pledge” and we can all just shut up because an “intention” is exactly the same as a “promise” or a “guarantee” or a “commitment” about which we must become ecstatically happy and pleased.
But when Abbott (who, by the way, I despise) agrees to words that don’t bind him he is a big bad climate destroying fiend who must be replaced by Bill Shorten as soon as possible (OK, again I improvised on that last bit about Shorten – but that seems to be the idea).
Why else would we not be getting as excited about Abbott’s wording as we were about the other?
Unless you have a strong stomach, I don’t recommend reading the G20 communique.
The only paragraph that deals with climate change – the one Abbott is criticized for – is this:
I’m afraid the planet has not been saved in Brisbane. And it wasn’t saved at APEC (in Beijing) either. We’re doomed.