@Vidvuds Beldavs. You write English with an enviable precision and fluency. The alethic claims you make are modest- you say some people 'fought' for the Paris Agreement, not that they fought hard or courageously nor that, if they were genuinely, as opposed to strategically or for a purpose of rent-extracting interessement ( vide Actor Network theory) , concerned with the impact of Climate Change on the poorest and least powerful, they lost in every meaningful sense, save the cosmetic or nakedly careerist.

Vidvuds, you have given a plausible account of what happened and I'm sure your heart is in the right place. However, the real scandal here is that the Paris Agreement was non-operationalizable and based on a foolish pseudo Coasian 'cake cutting' problematization which is utterly worthless for any save gesture political virtue signalling.

Perhaps you know the work of Ugo Pagano- re. oversupply of positional goods? You may already have an intuitive verstehen that 'second order' public goods (i.e. raising funds to 'fight' for public goods) crowd out that which they claim to create.

Taken together, these two notions predict there will be a wholly meretricious and highly mischievous oversupply of worthless Paris Agreements and Peter Singer type Siren songs which create a false, Scylla & Charybdis, binary between Moral Fairness and Human Flourishing.

The truth, when it comes to Anthropocene Climate Change, is that the incentive compatible solution is wholly local- not global at all. 'Thinking globally' is mental masturbation at best, sheer mischief at worst.



The working people of Latvia know very well that their livelihoods and life-chances were harmed, not helped, by Manichean ideologies based on false 'global' binaries irrespective of whether they required the liquidation of vast sections of the population based on racial or 'class' criteria.



India isn't upset- contra Tharoor elsewhere on PoSyn- that Trump made us the scapegoat for resiling from Paris. The fact is, we know there is a virtuous circle in 'acting locally' and not buying into some worthless 'global' solution whose imaginary 'transferable utility' would have functioned as a Resource Curse. India and China are ancient Civilisations which have incentive compatible systems of imperative logic- thus even Amartya Sen's Utilitarianism is less foolish than that of Peter Singer and, the fact is, India and China are actively taking steps which Australia won't ever, till its, admittedly very talented people, begin to understand they too are 'Abos'. We all are.

Vidvuds, I suspect that you are a bright guy- perhaps my son's age. To make your career you may feel you have to 'eat a daily peck of dirt'- i.e. assent to a type of, soi disant bien pensant, coprophagy- but, surely, there is a better door open to you? Why not let 'second order' public goods go hang and just concentrate on doing 'first order' good- public or private?

Best wishes.







and if one has a bien pensant view of the world