(08-24-2019 02:16 PM)Fort Bend Owl Wrote:  

(08-24-2019 01:00 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  

(08-23-2019 07:02 PM)Fort Bend Owl Wrote:  In terms of climate change, Biden will absolutely get us back in the Paris Agreement.

Speaking of leadership, despite our withdrawal from Paris, we still seem to be leading the world in reducing greenhouse gases. We never ratified Kyoto, but I believe that while it was in effect we reduced our greenhouse gases more than anybody else, and may very well have been the only country to achieve our Kyoto goals. The same thing appears to be happening with Paris, from what I have been able to find. I think a reasonable policy is to say, "Hey, instead of signing feel-good sham agreements, we are going to go out and actually reduce our greenhouse gases. How about the rest of you joining in?"

You keep saying that but you're wrong. You're using old data. We did have a 3-year decline from 2015-17 and led in overall emission decline but not percentage. But sadly, we went up 3.4 percent in 2018 (our 2nd largest increase in 20 years) and are projected to have another increase in 2019. And this link shows that transportation is a bigger cause of emissions than power, so we're going to have to figure out a way to get people to drive less. And that's not going to be easy to do in this country.
https://www.vox.com/2019/1/8/18174082/us...sions-2018

That's one group's opinion. I've seen others that say the opposite, not so much about 2018 and 2019, but primarily that the reduction since 1990 has been greater than that states. It's an uncertain target, and slight variations in methodology can produce differing results.

ETA: For example, this chart from EPA shows significant decline since 2005, and current levels back at about 1990 levels, which I think was the goal of either Kyoto or Paris (not going to look it up, you can and will correct me if I'm wrong).

https://cfpub.epa.gov/ghgdata/inventorye...onsect/all