[runamok]

The phrase "virtue signaling" is so useless. As if any action that does not have clear and immediate results is just posturing and pandering.

I think change absolutely has to come from governments and thus diplomats. Are corporations going to cooperate at a global scale to fix this with no regard for short term profits? Corporations like Exxon knew about climate change 40 years ago. Personally I think we should be litigating against a corporation that would hide something of global importance like that.

Where is the money to research these technical solutions going to come from? The article you linked showed that there were improvements among the signatories even though without the fall of the USSR it would have been 2.7% vs. 4.7%. Still it was something vs. just saying "this problem is too big to solve, let's hope some smart scientist finds a fix before we all die". Had China and the US been adhering to the Kyoto protocol undoubtedly the impact would have been much greater.

[rayiner]

> The article you linked showed that there were improvements among the signatories even though without the fall of the USSR it would have been 2.7% vs. 4.7%.

That's rearranging deck chairs on the titanic. And acting as if that's an important thing to spend political capital on is precisely "posturing and pandering."

[runamok]

Still not seeing your point. The goal is x. We achieve x/2. We still achieved something. We proved we can actually make an international agreement with long term goals and short term sacrifice and make improvements. I don't really blame politicians for taking further credit and trying to spin their success as even more impressive. Do you think the Paris agreement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Agreement) would ever have happened if not for that initial (however small) success? Reading the aims it seems on the surface to provide reasonable goals that balance growth and fairness with trying to prevent climate change.

What should they spend political capital on? Seems like this section is also going to help develop technological solutions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Agreement#Ensuring_finan...

[ethbro]

The problem I have with pointing to international frameworks as failures because of their less than optimal results is the alternative.

How could we fix the climate more effectively? Elect a world dictator / threaten other countries with nuclear annihilation unless they cut their emmissions.

Would we rather live in that world?

[tptacek]

I agree with you about "virtue signaling". I don't agree with Rayiner about this stuff, but in a good, sort of bracing way --- until I get to the line where he says that everyone trying to do something politically about climate change is doing so in bad faith.

[pvnick]

At some point there's a threshold beyond which alternative enegry sources become more profitable than fossil fuels, and at that point zillions of dollars will be spent on R&D. We're getting there, albeit perhaps a little more slowly than environmentalists would prefer.

One way to ensure that doesn't happen is to put a tax on carbon emissions. Governments then become dependent on fossil fuel usage for revenue and will enact policies that ensure that revenue stream never gets cut off.