US will meet Paris accord commitments even if Donald Trump withdraws

bill von novak

Solray said:

Not partisan political views

Solray: "before the Democrats started their policies of global redistribution of wealth"

And, NO we do not want the US to lead this at all. We want every country to lead themselves

Solray: "My goal is getting the US back on top in the global community"

As for solar, I don't see storage as the next big hurdle

Note that California is now producing so much power during the day that they have to give it away, but still import some at night.  In Hawaii, people are producing so much that whole segments of the grid are close to being unstable because they are no longer sinks but sources.  Those are problems that storage can solve.

I see the waste it produces as the main thing holding it back.

I don't see that, since again it is not a zero sum game.  Solar panel production is not clean; however, it is much cleaner than most other forms of power.  If toxic waste is your big issue, then closing coal plants in favor of solar manufacture will reduce such waste.

Solray

There are other options with coal plants you may not be aware of.
I am not a proponent of coal though anyways, so your argument that it has to be coal or solar is a wasted effort.
Switching from coal  to solar will reduce some toxic waste and greatly increase other types. You are giving up heroine by using cocaine.


http://www.canadiancleanpowercoalition.com/files/2912/7299/7032/3 Ways to Reduce Emissions from Coal Plants - Factsheet.pdf

http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/energy-and-the-environment/clean-coal-technologies.aspx

In California, power is not the biggest problem at all, it is the water or lack of it and the brown air from cars and the trash all over the state along the roads.

BB.

California is having to pay neighboring states (such as Arizona) to take the excess power.

California power is (very roughly) 50% more than Arizona's residences.

http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-electricity-solar/

The advantage to California citizens? Unreliable grid and having to import around 33% of our electricity.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/judeclemente/2016/04/03/californias-growing-imported-electricity-problem/#638a8e5f4469

- Bill

Solray

Sounds like they need to start investing in storage mediums. Too bad Nevada already got the gigafactory, they could use such a thing there helping to develop state infrastructure in return for tax cuts.

Back to the OP.
Trump cannot withdraw from the Paris Accord on Climate Change because the US never even joined into it in the first place.
The Accord is a treaty and as such requires approval from the senate. The Senate never gave approval and Obama chose to adopt it with an executive order.

The Paris Accord has a 4 year withdrawl waiting period and should not be entered into by the US regardless of what internal policies and laws it enacts. Doing so would create a lot of constitutional problems since the government changes every 4 years in the US.

Estragon

> @Solray said:
> > @bill von novak said:
> > Solray said:
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> > I'd much prefer more CO2 in the air, since that fluctuates naturally and is absorbed by the earth without long term damage, than create billions of tons of toxic waste from solar panel production.
> >
> >
> >
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> > Coal power plants put far more toxic waste in our atmosphere, land and water than solar panel production - including nuclear waste, some of which ends up in US schools.  So if your goal is reduction of toxic waste, prioritizing solar over coal makes a lot of sense.
>
> Nope. My goal is getting the US back on top in the global community where it was before the Democrats started their policies of global redistribution of wealth. Who can forget Hilary's stove bill that had US stove manufacturers shipping free subsidized stoves to places without any electricity to run them? Lol

Sounds pretty partisan to me.

Solray

OK I am sure that is the litmus test for all things in the world, how it sounds to you.

The Republicans are guilty of just as many stupid things as the Democrats, so I guess my party is the US party.
And yes, I am biased towards things that help the US and not things that hurt it. 

Photowhit

The world's problems are directly created by over population. 

Greater population, creates demands on dwindling resources. 

I'm bias to things that create a healthy world. We aren't moving away...

Solray

Only the cities are overpopulated, between those are vast uninhabited regions. Where I live there is no other person living for more than 50 miles around. Not exactly over populated here.
I agree about too many consumers relying on too few producers and think we would do better with more people able to be self sufficient.
A lot of people don't have the skills or intelligence to do that though.

mike95490

Clustering generation/usage is much more efficient than every house having a "just big enough" system and backups.  Rural and city conditions are vastly different.

bill von novak

Solray said:

There are other options with coal plants you may not be aware of.

There are definitely ways to reduce the toxic emissions of coal power plants, just as there are ways to reduce the amount of toxic materials generated when solar panels are made.

Switching from coal  to solar will reduce some toxic waste and greatly increase other types. You are giving up heroine by using cocaine.

Well, no, you are giving up heroin by using aspirin.  Can aspirin kill you?  Definitely - but it's a much lower risk.

Coal kills about 13,000 people a year (from the 2010 ABT study) and that's declining as tougher emissions standards kick in and older plants shut down.   I have not seen any evidence that solar has killed anyone, beyond the few people that fall off roofs every year trying to install it.

In California, power is not the biggest problem at all, it is the water or lack of it and the brown air from cars and the trash all over the state along the roads.

I first visited LA in the 1980's.  The air was brown; you could see it (and smell it) as you descended into the valley.  Doctors were telling their patients with asthma to move.

The last time I was there was about a month ago.  You could see the mountains from the valley.  Pollution is down between 50% and 95% depending on the pollutant, due mainly to the advent of CARB emissions limits.  So things are headed in the right direction, even though progress is slow and often expensive.

Water is a problem, due largely to some very old and very byzantine water-rights laws.  There is a farm in Yuma (i.e the middle of the desert) that grows catfish; they feed them, suck them into tanker trucks and sell them to restaurants.  They do this because this particular farm has "use it or lose it" grandfathered water rights.

So they grow fish in the desert while other places have to give up even drought-tolerant crops.  It's nuts.

bill von novak

Solray said:

Trump cannot withdraw from the Paris Accord on Climate Change because the US never even joined into it in the first place.
The Accord is a treaty and as such requires approval from the senate. The Senate never gave approval and Obama chose to adopt it with an executive order.

Nope, it's not a treaty. It's a voluntary agreement (i.e. accord) between almost all of the world's countries.

Solray

You might want to read this, by Eugene Kontorovich, a professor at Northwestern University School of Law, and an expert on constitutional and international law. He also writes and lectures frequently about the Arab-Israel conflict.

This is what I was basing my statement on. You can argue it with him.

President Trump is expected to announce today that the United States will not be party to the Paris agreement on climate change. What he should say is that the United States never properly joined the accord: It is a treaty that requires the advice and consent of the Senate. Instead, President Barack Obama choose to “adopt” it with an executive order last September.

Two features cut heavily against it being treated as the kind of arrangement that can be entered into by a president on his own authority. First, it has a four-year waiting period for withdrawal, quite unlike traditional executive agreements. Second, it is a large multilateral deal, and the other parties apparently believe it requires domestic ratification. Whatever that means for U.S. constitutional purposes, it does suggest that other countries should hardly protest if Trump merely follows their example to seek domestic ratification.

Some general principles are worth reviewing. In international law, the term “treaty” is one of the many terms for a binding international agreement. Not all agreements that are “treaties” in the international law sense — i.e., that create a binding international obligation — are “Treaties” in the constitutional sense. It is well accepted that there is a class of international agreements that the president can commit the United States to on his own authority, without invoking the treaty process. However, the scope of the “sole executive agreement” (SOE) category is a matter of great dispute.

Some scholars have gone so far as to argue that the Paris agreement represents an exotic and previously unidentified species of international deal that does not have to be treated as a treaty. But even in this view, if Obama was within his rights to treat it as a non-treaty, Trump would be entirely within his executive rights to interpret it differently — as a treaty requiring Senate consent, which has not even been sought yet.

While there are no clear rules about the treaty/executive agreement, the Paris accord has some features, not yet analyzed in this context, that do not follow the pattern of past SOEs. So simply pointing out that there are such things as SOEs does not mean this is one of them, given that it departs from the SOE model in significant ways.

1. The four-year withdrawal provision.
The climate accord has a four-year delayed exit period, which would raise serious constitutional problems if it were a SOE instead of a treaty. A country party to the deal can withdraw only four years after giving notice of its intent to do so. This is quite extraordinary. Most treaties do not provide for any waiting period for withdrawal; it is a fairly significant substantive term. But many treaties do have such terms — almost invariably shorter than four years. Indeed, six months or a year are the most common waiting period, and I know of no treaty to which the United States is party with one as long as four years.

But for an executive agreement, such restrictions are truly remarkable and go far beyond the kind of “thin” agreement allowed under sole executive authority. Indeed, I am not sure there is a single SOE that has any substantial withdrawal restriction at all. The justification of SOEs is that they are an inherent part of a president’s foreign affairs powers, because the conduct of foreign affairs requires frequent formal arrangements between countries. But the president can also unmake them as needed.

A extended withdrawal period in a SOE would allow one president to unilaterally pre-commit his successor and limit the latter’s powers. Moreover, the four-year period does not appear accidental, but rather, designed to limit Trump’s ability to exit: If he does not do so now, his potential successor will have the ability to cancel the withdrawal before it takes effect.

To be sure, a president can always quit a SOE as a matter of domestic law, but if the SOE is valid ab initio, this would breach international commitments, making it harder for the subsequent president to use his executive authority. Indeed, this is precisely the argument made against Trump now.

Such a deep commitment cannot be made without the involvement of the Senate. This quite unusual feature of Obama’s agreement strongly suggests it cannot be treated as a SOE, and thus has no force until the Senate ratifies it.

2. The United States is an outlier in not seeking domestic ratification for the accord.
Some argue that even if Trump’s non-acceptance of obligations under the agreement would be consistent with the Constitution, it would be a breach of an international obligation and weaken foreign trust in U.S. commitments. Yet foreign countries are in no place to complain if the United States insists on treating the agreement as a treaty requiring submission to the legislature — because that is exactly how they have treated it themselves.

Indeed, the real U.S. exceptionalism would be not in Trump’s action, but in Obama’s – in not seeking ratification.

Countries seem invariably to have accepted the agreement as a treaty that requires going through their internal treaty-ratification processes, typically submission to the legislature. Countries from the United Kingdom to China to Jamaica have ratified it through their legislatures. So has Brazil, Japan, the Philippines and Australia. In the latter, the question of whether it was a binding international accord requiring submission to Parliament received some discussion, and a parliamentary analysis concluded it was a “major treaty” that needed to be submitted.

I know of no country that has taken the U.S. approach. All countries seem to understand that ratification requires using the domestic procedure for ratifying treaties.

The universal interpretation of the agreement as a treaty cuts against Obama’s insistence that it is not one. (It should also be noted that SOEs for multilateral agreements are themselves almost unheard of, and certainly not for global ones.) A treaty is an international agreement, and in a multilateral treaty, the views of other signatories are at least probative of the question of whether it creates binding obligations upon ratification.

To be sure, the question of what kind of agreements must be submitted to the Senate is not governed by foreign countries’ rules about treaty ratification. The U.S. definition of “treaty” for constitutional purposes is considerably narrower than the definition of treaty in international law. The definition in various other countries’ constitutions may also be broader and narrower. So it is not the other countries’ decision to seek legislative ratification that is relevant, but rather, the view that it creates binding international commitments.

That is not to say that the status of agreement in international law and practice is irrelevant to its domestic constitutional status. Indeed, from the earliest cases, courts have looked to international law for the purpose of distinguishing treaties from other agreements. The writings of Vattel, the international law author most familiar to the framers, have played a large role in these discussions.

Indeed, the Supreme Court has suggested that the international legal trappings of an agreement are relevant to the constitutional treaty/sole executive agreement distinction. See Holmes v. Jennison, 39 U.S. 540, 571 (1840) (“For when we speak of ‘a treaty’ we mean an instrument written and executed with the formalities customary among nations.”) (Taney, C.J.)

In short, Trump is not quitting the Paris accord. The United States was never in it in the first place.

I should note that these observations are culled from an ongoing academic look at the provisions of the agreement. Some of the issues — such as the relevance of other parties’ ratification practice — are quite interesting and complex. I offer them here now to shed at least some light on the events of the day.

Photowhit

bill von novak said:

Solray said:

Trump cannot withdraw from the Paris Accord on Climate Change because the US never even joined into it in the first place.
The Accord is a treaty and as such requires approval from the senate. The Senate never gave approval and Obama chose to adopt it with an executive order.

Nope, it's not a treaty. It's a voluntary agreement (i.e. accord) between almost all of the world's countries.

I believe congress still holds the purse strings, and I believe there is some financial aspect of the agreement...

Developed countries aiding developing countries.

engineer

Photowhit said:

The world's problems are directly created by over population. 

Greater population, creates demands on dwindling resources. 

I'm bias to things that create a healthy world. We aren't moving away...

The problem isn't over population. It is over consumption. We are wasting resources and using much more than we need.