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February 24, 2022 Volume XXIX, Number 25 As Boulder County's only independently owned newspaper, Boulder Weekly is dedicated to illuminating truth, advancing justice and protecting the First Amendment through ethical, no-holds-barred journalism, and thought-provoking opinion writing. Free every Thursday since 1993, the Weekly also offers the county's most comprehensive arts and entertainment coverage. Read the print version, or visit boulderweekly.com. Boulder Weekly does not accept unsolicited editorial submissions. If you're interested in writing for the paper, please send queries to: editorial@boulderweekly.com. Any materials sent to Boulder Weekly become the property of the newspaper. 690 South Lashley Lane, Boulder, CO, 80305 p 303.494.5511 f 303.494.2585 editorial@boulderweekly.com www.boulderweekly.com Boulder Weekly is published every Thursday. No portion may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher. © 2021 Boulder Weekly, Inc., all rights reserved.
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Conservator not hegemon by Tom Mayer
H
ow can the United States achieve lasting greatness? I claim that the best way of gaining really durable eminence is by dismantling our pernicious military-industrial complex and becoming a comprehensive environment conservator. Evidence about climate change, reviewed below, provides strong support for this contention. The Paris Climate Accords (PCA) is an international treaty on climate change adopted at the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference held near Paris, France. The Accords have been accepted by 193 countries. The United States left the PCA under Trump but returned in 2021 under Biden. Iran is the only major carbon emitter that has not accepted the Paris Climate Accords. The purpose of PCA is to keep mean global temperatures well below 2 degrees centigrade above pre-industrial levels. Preferably, mean global temperatures would be limited to 1.5 degrees centigrade above preindustrial levels, but this would require global carbon emissions to be cut in half by 2030. A related goal of PCA is to achieve global
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net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. The Paris Climate Accords require that each country set carbon emission targets and report regularly on progress toward reaching these targets. Every five years new and more stringent emissions should be established. The Accords also encourage developed (i.e. rich) countries to provide financial support to developing countries enabling the latter to reach their emissions targets. Environmentalists have criticized the PCA on several grounds. First, countries are free to set whatever emissions targets they wish. Second, there is no enforcement mechanism requiring that countries actually meet their emission targets. Third, the targets actually chosen are entirely insufficient for reaching even the 2 degree centigrade objective. Supporters of the PCA acknowledge the validity of these criticisms but interpret the Accords as a valuable base from which progress can be made. Every two years the United Nations Environment Program, in collaboration with the Stockholm Environment Institute, publishes a comprehensive Production Gap Report that “tracks the discrepancy between governments’ planned fossil fuel production and global production levels consistent see JUST ECONOMICS Page 6
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