Anyone notice: We got an awesome climate deal to save the earth:
“The U.S. set a new target to reduce its emissions of heat-trapping gases by 26 percent to 28 percent by 2025, compared with 2005 levels. That’s a sharp increase from earlier in Obama’s presidency, when he pledged to cut emissions by 17 percent by 2020.
China, whose emissions are still growing as it builds new coal plants, didn’t commit to cut emissions by a specific amount. Rather, Xi set a target for China’s emission to peak by 2030, or earlier if possible. He also pledged to increase the share of energy that China will derive from sources other than fossil fuels.”
China is laughing their asses off as they make vague comments while our president rushes to kill our economy with specifics. I wonder what people will do when their utility bill exceeds their mortgage payment or even the " help the poor pah their electric" tax gets implemented.
Well, from my back of the envelope calculations our CO2 emissions are already down ~7% from 2005. If we continue swapping out coal fired power plants for natural gas we should be able to continue the trend downwards. Still, we won’t get to a 26% to 28% reduction without some extra-market force coming into play. We’ll have to see how the economics of solar continue to fare over these next 5 - 8 years.
The Chinese are in a better position. They get to wait until 2030. They get even longer to realize the improving economics of solar, and they get to wait and see the results of the continuing maturation of climate science.