Leaded petroleum was such an easy, local problem that solving it just happened at the national level, no need for binding international agreements.
I actually think the smart approach to serious action to prevent global warming would be similar to that taken for Nuclear non-proliferation: The big, strong countries force the others to accept they cannot have emissions and anyone who doesn't agree gets (at least) sanctioned into poverty or maybe "liberated"...
But most countries are much more interested in cheap energy (and meat and construction and other CO2e sources) than they ever were in nukes. Most citizens don't personally care if their leaders have nukes, but they care if they can afford meat and electricity.
And of course, for this to work, we would need those strong countries to ALSO give up their CO2e, something no world power has done and which the US and China are actively headed in the OPPOSITE direction of.
The ban on whaling is also a good example of a few bad actors ignoring the consensus and making the whole thing much less efficient. And that's (again) only for "whale meat", hardly as interesting a product as <almost everything that causes climate change>...
As the international whaling ban has demonstrated, it doesn’t matter if one or two bad actors (even large and powerful ones like Japan and Norway) don’t comply, as long as the majority and the most powerful nations do. Many whale species became critically endangered and it looked for a moment like they all would and we would simply loose whales from our oceans. That didn’t happen because the world came together and made the decision to kill the whaling industry instead of the whales.
With regards to global warming the responsibility of inaction lies solely on one bad actor, the USA, and only [initially] one political sub-faction in the USA. In 1997 all the world (including USA and China) came together and approved the Kyoto protocol, and made this painful discussion that would deeply affect our fossil fuel industry but save our climate. It was on its way to be ratified everywhere, public support was in its favor, so was the Clinton Administration, all European powers, and the Communist Party of China. Everybody agreed that the cost of climate change was greater than the benefits of cheap energy.
However at some point the oil industry in the USA fought against it, it got stalled in the USA senate and finally killed by the George Bush administration, in order to save their fossil fuel industry. If the USA hadn’t killed it, and even if they would have only half-assed the implementation, and even though China would come to ignore it, we would still be much further along the way of reducing our emissions.
You see, the world can come together and make painful decisions that affects all of us. It has done so multiple times in the past (even with respects to climate change) and it will in the future. It is really only because a certain industry has a disproportional hold over a certain country’s discourse that despite these agreements we have failed to act.
It's easy to say China, or even India, agreed to the Kyoto protocol when that didn't bind them to any goals. It just encouraged developing countries to adopt policies that encouraged reductions.
Aside from that, the US is currently below its 1990 levels while China is 4x its 1990 levels and double the current US production. It doesn't seem to line up with what you're saying about the US not taking action.
I didn’t say that USA didn’t take action. Arguably Biden’s 2022 Climate and Spending bill is the most ambitious climate bill by any country (if so, then god help us, we need 100x that and 100x more). What I did say was that USA was very hostile to any international pact which would have enabled collective action. It is USAs fault that “8bn people [haven’t] agree[d] to painful, expensive changes simultaneously over a long term”, despite the fact that USA did agree to it before it changed its mind.
I’m not listening to the China argument, I’ve heard it many times before, it is always the same, and it is always done in bad faith. It was even the reason claimed by the USA senate to stall the Kyoto protocol over 20 years ago. We now know it had nothing to do with the supposed unfairness and everything to do with the fossil fuel lobby muddying the water,
> With regards to global warming the responsibility of inaction lies solely on one bad actor, the USA
Sure sounds like you’re saying the US isn’t taking action. And in calling them a bad actor you’d think that emissions are going up out of control instead of down below levels that predate the protocol by 7 years. It sounds like your arguments are in bad faith.
> With regards to global warming the responsibility of inaction lies solely on one bad actor, the USA.
> I didn’t say that USA didn’t take action.
It sure does sound like I just moved the goalpost here doesn’t it. However if you continue reading the paragraph it surely should be clear I’m talking about inaction in commit to an international agreement. That was also what my parent was talking about, getting people to agree to act, not the action it self.
However even if you didn’t misunderstand me, and I’m actually being disingenuous here, you’d still be wrong. The Kyoto protocol called for industrialized nations to reduce 8-20% of their 1990 emissions by 2012. Most countries stayed within their targets, with a notable exception of Canada. Canada notable followed USA and withdrew the protocol after USA failed to ratify it. USA was still at +4% emissions in 2012 and didn’t go back to 0% until 2020, where Covid pushed them over the edge. 2020 was supposed to be the second target with most nations targeting -20% reduction. USA will not reach that in another decade.
USA is responsible for a huge part of historic emissions, prior to 1997 China was responsible for almost none of it. Had the Kyoto protocol held, China could still be a party to the 2020 target.
This is the graph you should be looking at, when judging fairness of the protocol, and bad actors. You should ask your self in 1997 when China had the population of Europe and USA combine, while still only responsible for the equivalent of the UK alone. If in 2001 USA and Europe would start to flatten out while China stay under Europe. You should look at the top line, the biggest historic emitter, and ask, why were the USA the first country to bail on the protocol, and why have subsequent trials of another protocol mostly failed.
It sounds like doublespeak to me. Inaction is a lack of action. You're saying they didn't act, but you they did act and therefore what you said is correct. You're argument is quite convoluted at this point.
That graph is good at pointing out that historically the US has contributed more than anyone. I didn't dispute that. It just seems like a silly argument to go back hundreds of years before any powers recognized it was an issue and use that as a basis for what should be done going forward so that other countries can catch up to the US's historically awful record. You see something, you fix it.
The argument in the Kyoto protocol was that industrialized nations were already industrialized and had the economic and industrial capabilities to replace their infrastructure with less polluting ones. Poorer nations didn’t have this benefit, so it would be unfair to ask the same of them.
You can say this argument is not sound, if you do, just be aware this is the same tactic used by the oil lobby that killed the protocol, it was not done in good faith back then, and I think the same is true of modern incarnation of these refutations.
Actually in more resent climate proposals, delegates from poorer nations, and climate justice advocates, have actually been trying to push for a development fund in which richer nations fund green infrastructure projects in poorer countries, the historic polluters—especially the USA—have predictably pushed back against this and landed on a much weaker climate relief fund at the last COP. If the oil lobby (and by extension the USA government) was sincere about the supposed unfairness of the Kyoto protocol, this would be a great compromise, and totally align with You see something, you fix it. But alas, they are bad actors, and such proposals yielded limited results.
I don’t think it is fruitful for us to be arguing about what I meant by inaction in my previous posts. You obviously misunderstood me, I tried to clarify but you still persist that I didn’t mean what I say I meant. The original point was that there exists a historic president for an international agreement of reducing carbon emissions, which everyone agreed to. Future agreements should therefor be possible. Identifying bad actors and pointing fingers at those at fault for previous agreements failing seems relevant to this discussion.
It just seems squirrely to double down that inaction doesn't mean inaction. You seem to be pushing your ideas more than you seem to be thinking about what they actually sound like.
But it is right, inaction to commit to international agreements does not mean inaction to reduce carbon emission. Those are separate things. And when the conversation is explicitly about the (im)possibility of international agreements, it should be clear which inaction I’m talking about.
And of course I’m pushing my ideas. The history of who killed the Kyoto protocol is still up for debate. I’m of the opinion that the death of the Kyoto protocol and all subsequent agreements rests in one bad actor, the USA. There is not a historic consensus about this, and you’ll find historic accounts that disagree with this (or more likely you’ll find historians putting less importance on the Kyoto protocol than I do). I’m pushing what I believe is the most accurate—or rather the most relevant—narrative of history here.
Complaining about someone saying they aren't committing to do something while they generally do that thing doesn't seem like a good complaint. Diplomacy has a lot of moving parts.
