You are right: addressing climate change and reaching zero carbon emissions are two different goals.
The ten year deadline has been a deadline since the 80's.
As I have been pointing out to another poster, such claims have rarely stopped at "we have ten years." Rather, such claims are typically "we have ten years
before x.' And read fully that way (i.e. ten years before there will be a hole in the ozone, or ten years before we'll start to see massive floods where there used to be none, or ten years before we'll start to see famine in Africa, etc) those predictions have often been right. They get translated by a certain mindset among affluent Westerners to "ten years before the world ends," which is an obvious straw-man.
In truth, the globe has been warmer, much warmer, at times when the CO2 has been lower, much lower, than it is today. Makes a thinking person want to seek definitions of Causation and Correlation.
OK, so what? Various things can cause the planet to warm. CO2 emission are one of those things, and greenhouse gases we spew into the atmosphere seem to be having that effect. In this case, it's not mere correlation; there's a theoretical link from cause (greenhouse gases) to effect (climate change) that has received experimental confirmation.
No matter what we allow to ruin our life styles with mandated draconian measures, China and India will continue to bring another coal fired power plant on line every week for the next decade or so.
I think part of Beto's point is that if we start now, the measures we need to undertake won't be all that draconian. The longer we wait, however, the more likely they will be. And we all know that
at some point we will have to transition away from fossil fuels. The future appears to be open-ended (that is, there's no known end-date to future time), but the volume of the earth is finite. There can only be so much coal, oil, and natural gas. Eventually, we will run out. It seems wise to set a goal of complete conversion of our energy basis, and to start as soon as we can, to energy sources that won't run out for at least a billion or more years--that is, solar, nuclear, and geothermal sources.
[TQUOTE=code1211;1070029082]he simple truth of the matter is that in the USA technology will very soon find better fuels sources and more efficient materials and processes for various jobs.
We don't need pencil necked government morons telling the geniuses what to do. The geniuses already know. When it makes sense economically to move, the moves will be made as they have been made and are being made.[/quote]
To my knowledge, no one has ever worked up this kind of analysis. Do you have a link to a more in-depth analysis that shows your claim is correct? Because it seems to me that we are continuing to use fossil fuels at an unsustainable rate. We are also depleting other resources at unsustainable rates, and have in fact used up resources to extinction in the past, with pretty bad consequences. Whale oil as a heating fuel comes to mind. Coal in some regions, ditto. In those instances, we knew the resources was being depleted unsustainably, but industry went right along gorging itself on those sources until they were gone, and a massive economic lurch happened, with very bad consequences to a lot of people.
[TQUOTE=code1211;1070029082]
Yes, The U.S. Leads All Countries In Reducing Carbon Emissions
<snip>
According to the 2017 BP Statistical Review of World Energy, since 2005 annual U.S. carbon dioxide emissions have declined by 758 million metric tons.
That is by far the largest decline of any country in the world over that timespan and is nearly as large as the 770 million metric ton decline for the entire European Union.
By comparison, the second largest decline during that period was registered by the United Kingdom, which reported a 170 million metric ton decline.[/quote]
OK. So what? If you're running with the bulls in Pamplona, the important question is not whether you're running faster than everyone else, but whether you're running faster than the bulls.
