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2020 Climate Madness Looms - The Post & Email thepostemail.com/2019/04/05/202…
The year 2020 is shaping up to be one of madness when it comes to the climate change debate. Several huge milestones are in the cards and these cards are on the table.
One is the US Presidential election, where the entire world wants to see if President Trump can pull off another skeptical miracle, or curse, depending on who you ask.
In UN-world there are two monster milestones in 2020. By far the biggest is the mythical $100 billion a year that is supposed to start flowing from America and the rest of the supposedly guilty developed countries, to the developing countries,
In addition, under the Paris Agreement pretty much all of the countries in the world are supposed to raise the level of ambition in their national climate action plans. Note that for the developing countries these action plans are contingent on getting the $100 billion a year,
So if Trump wins and the big bucks don’t show the whole house of green cards just might collapse. This is going to make for a very tense (and loud) year on the climate change front.
Things are already heating up here in 2019. Topping the list is the truly extreme Green New Deal proposal. Most of the Democrat presidential candidates have endorsed the GND, which guarantees it will be a major nomination issue.
The GOP Senate artlessly failed to debate the explosive GND, while the wily Democrat House silently buried it under 11 different Committees. While Congress may never vote on the GND, it is not about to go away, quite the opposite. The Presidential race guarantees it a large life.
While so far avoiding the GND, the Democrats running the House have promised a never ending series of separate and distinct climate activist bills. The goal of this piecework strategy is to make climate change a big 2020 election issue, no matter who their candidate is.
On the UN side the Secretary General Antonio Guterres is hosting a special September meeting of national governments, specifically designed to elicit increased ambitions in their new 2020 climate action plans. It is billed as the “plans not speeches” meeting.
Unlike the usual UN talkathon, in this case the proposals to speak are apparently being screened for punch. The Secretary General’s invitation is reported as including this unusually tough talk:
“This summit will be action-oriented. The deliverables and initiatives that will be showcased need to be implementable, scalable and replicable and have the potential to get us in line with the commitments of the Paris Agreement.”
So all things considered, 2020 may be the year of the climate crescendo. The volume is certainly picking up here in 2019. Why not, given that in some ways the world order is on the line. It is certainly about time we had a serious debate over climate change policy.
