In Just 3 Minutes, Zinke Shows He's A Whore, A Fool Or Just Doesn't Give A Shit On Climate [View all]

[hatrack]

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1. “The Paris Agreement is about 20 pages, and when you get to page 5, I think it’s just a badly negotiated deal.”

The Paris agreement being a “bad deal” has been a primary talking point for Trump administration officials. The agreement — which was signed by almost 200 countries — seeks to limit global temperature rise to less than 2° C (3.6° F) above pre-industrial levels. In order to get almost every country in the world on board with the deal, negotiators built it around individually-determined emission reduction pledges from each country, meaning that every participant got to decide how best to reduce their own emissions in line with the overall global goal.

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Todd Stern, the U.S. Special Envoy for Climate Change during the Paris climate conference, said the deal was a remarkable win for the United States. “We got an awful lot of what we wanted,” Stern told ThinkProgress in December of 2015, just days after the agreement was finalized. “When we sat down and read through the agreement, we were sort of shaking our head a little bit.”

2. “[The Paris agreement] lets China, India, Russia, walk. The CO2 in China actually increases until 2030 because it is structured on people. China has more people, so the world’s greatest polluter takes a walk until 2030.”

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Moreover, the country has announced plans to significantly expand its renewable energy generation, investing $360 billion by 2020 in an attempt to dominate a post-Paris green economy that some economists estimate could be worth $13 trillion. China has also promised to contribute to climate funds aimed at helping developing countries mitigate and adapt to climate change, pledging $3.1 billion to the South-South Climate Cooperation fund and another $12 billion to the South-South Cooperation Assistance Fund by 2030.

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4. “The problem is that we don’t understand what the effects [of climate change] are. There are no models that exist…”

After discussing Paris, Zinke pivoted to his own understanding of climate science, arguing that while he does not view it as a “hoax” and concedes that “man has had an influence,” there is no way to know what the effects of climate change will be. It’s true that climate science is more robust as to causes than to predicting specific outcomes, but there are ongoing impacts that scientists feel confident in linking to climate change, like sea level rise, loss of Arctic sea ice, and more frequent heat waves. Scientists are confident that climate change is creating an environment that favors more extreme weather events, like heavier storms and more devastating floods, because as the Earth’s lower atmosphere becomes warmer, it can hold more moisture. And scientists are confident that an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide is contributing to a greater concentration of oceanic carbon dioxide, making the world’s oceans more acidic and less hospitable to some marine life, including shellfish like oysters.

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https://thinkprogress.org/zinke-budget-hearing-climate-change-falsehoods-7b0253272ddd