Paris Accord and America

I am going to look for a silver lining here so as to perhaps calm any panic that this Trumpian Act of knowing what is best for America by withdrawing the USA from the Paris Accord may have caused my readers.

1st, remember this is only possible because President Obama couldn't get the 67 votes in the Senate to ratify the Paris Accord as a Treaty and the U.S. is still bound by an earlier Treaty.  So, if there is a different President in 4 years, they can presumably reinstitute the Paris Accord in the same manner.

2nd, remember that certain large states can have an outsized influence on how the U.S. actually performs in managing certain issues that will effect how we reduce greenhouse gases.  California, New York and like minded states can issue regulations that force cars throughout the U.S. to use fuel more efficiently.  They also consume a lot of electricity.  So anything they do to encourage renewable energy can assist the U.S. in reducing green house gases.

3rd, coal is not coming back in any large way.  No electricity company is building coal plants.  They are building gas plants because natural gas has a big cost advantage over coal and consumer demand for renewable energy is encouraging expansion of such facilities.  I am for example, by contract, only consuming wind generated electricity.  I don't know how, with a grid composed of nuclear, gas, coal, hydro, wind and solar, they can know that I get only wind, but I suspect since electricity is a commingled energy, that I am paying for wind and then that cost gets subtracted out of the costs everybody else pays.  In effect, I am guaranteeing the wind company my revenue.

4th, the West Coast and the NorthEast (absent Maine & NH), as well as the Democratic minority in every other state, are in open revolt.  We support doing anything within the circle of legality to oppose everything in the Trump Agenda and we will encourage our states to do the right thing where they can get something done in the State government.

But meanwhile, there is absolutely nothing Donald Trump does that makes me anything other than depressed and angry at his supporters.  But we need some of those supporters to switch sides, so we have to respect their opinions no matter how difficult that is and try to convince them with hard examples that Trump is not managing the country to benefit them.

The Environment Cost Hillary the Election

And I don't mean the political environment.  I looked at the initial election results a day or two after the election to see if Jill Stein had cost Hillary any states, and while at that time it was close, it was not sufficient.

But today I saw a column that said otherwise and I went looking for the final state results.  I discovered that Jill Stein, who ran on the Green Party ticket, received a sufficient number of votes, that if they had been cast for Hillary, she would have won Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania by small margins.

So to any of my readers who cast such a vote, look at what your purity has done.  Hillary might not have done everything you wish, but she does care about the environment.  You wouldn't have climate deniers in the White House rolling back Obama's executive orders while working to curb the government's scientific research and you wouldn't have a climate denier in charge of the EPA working to dismantle the organization.

If you think any of that makes your vote worthwhile, please explain why to me.

Dear People Who Want to Ignore Climate Change

I was having a discussion yesterday with some friends, one of whom is a Dr and one of whom is a lawyer.  The Dr. asked the lawyer about how the limitations of human eyesight mean that no one can read 100% of complex X-rays/MRI's/CatScans correctly 100% of the time.  The result is malpractice lawsuits for negligence with payments made by the insurance industry.  After some go around between the lawyer and the Dr about defining the situation, I chimed in with a comment that that is the business of law and insurance, which the lawyer defined as being too cynical on my part as it ignored the role of insurance in society as a means of compensating people who have been wronged and providing them with the wherewith all to be self supporting and not a burden on society.

Now I know many Republicans feel that tort law is out of control in this country and I generally agree with that.  But on the other hand, I do believe in the concept of insurance spreading the cost of loss over a large number of people or over all of society.   And I think most Republicans agree that Insurance is a good thing for individuals to have.  So they agree with the concept of the individual protecting oneself from a sudden unexpected unaffordable losses with insurance.

Now the question that has occurred to me as we see 500 year floods and wild fires occurring all over the place year after year after year is the following:  If insurance is a means of society incentivizing people to have proper behavior to avoid losses that they cannot afford and spreading the cost of such losses which occur even when people have proper behavior (remember insurance is a good concept), then why don't Republicans want to provide a market signal so that people will contribute to a reduction in green house gases that science proved warm the atmosphere in the 1850's.  If the cost is provided in market signals then people will do what they to avoid the price of polluting.  Right now, everyone can pollute with zero cost and the people who are paying are paying through floods and fires and the higher cost of insurance for that.

While the horse may be out of the barn and the barn door closed in regards to global warming, it seems to me that the costs of rising sea levels and rising humidity levels and rising temperatures will only continue to rise and society has an interest in doing what it can afford to to combat that.  We don't know what the future will bring, but wouldn't it be prudent to have some insurance that tries to moves us in a better direction?

Meanwhile, it seems that Donald Trump has used $43 mm of the $80 mm raised for his campaign to pay his shell companies for services and consultants who do who knows what since Donald Trump says he runs his own campaign.  It does appear that Trump is simply using the campaign to enrich his wealth and support his life style.  God forbid he should win and get control of the Federal Budget and get to order the IRS to layoff audits of his taxes.