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This blog is a layman's view of what's wrong with the world economy and, perhaps, how to correct them. Included in this blog will be renewables, green, sustainability and other such topics. I hope some of these will be "good news".

I hope my readers will also share their views of both the problems and their solutions, and offer their examples of sustainability and 'good news'..

US and China ratify Pris Climate agreement

The United States has joined China to formally ratify the Paris agreement to curb climate-warming emissions, the world's two biggest economies said on Saturday, which could help put the pact into force before the end of the year.

U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping submitted their plan to join the agreement to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who is in China to witness the announcement.

Senior Obama adviser Brian Deese said the joint declaration should push other countries to formally join the agreement.

"The signal of the two large emitters taking this step together and taking it early, far earlier than people had anticipated a year ago, should give confidence to the global communities and to other countries that are working on their climate change plans, that they too can move quickly and will be part of a global effort," Deese told reporters on Friday.

India is also poised to join the agreement this year, Deese said, adding that Obama was expected to meet Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the sidelines of a Group of 20 nations meeting in Hangzhou, China, this weekend.

Obama and Xi committed to cooperate on two other global environmental agreements this year - an amendment to the Montreal Protocol to phase down air-conditioning refrigerants and on a market-based measure to reduce carbon emissions from aviation.

"Today's announcement is the strongest signal yet that what we agreed in Paris will soon be the law of the land," said Mattlan Zackhras, minister-in-assistance to the president of the Marshall Islands.

"With the two biggest emitters ready to lead, the transition to a low-emissions, climate-resilient global economy is now irreversible."

Saturday's joint statement could spur further ratifications by the likes of Brazil and Canada.

"We expect a surge of ratifications around the U.N. Climate week later in September," said Bill Hare, chief executive of Climate Analytics.  

In Paris last December, nearly 200 countries agreed on a binding global compact to slash greenhouse gases and keep global temperature increases to "well below" 2 degrees Celsius.

Experts have said the temperature target is already in danger of being breached, with the U.N.'s weather agency saying 2016 is on course to be the warmest year since records began.

'LIGHT SPEED'

While 180 countries have now signed the agreement, 55 nations - covering at least 55 percent of global emissions - need to formally ratify the treaty to put it into legal effect.

Before China and the United States, 23 nations had ratified - including North Korea - but they collectively accounted for just 1.08 percent of global emissions, according to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.      

China represents just over 20 percent of global emissions while the United States accounting for 17.9 percent, Russia 7.5 percent and India 4.1 percent.

The announcement is a major diplomatic achievement for the U.S. president, who ends his term in January.

But the ability of the United States to achieve its Paris targets could be affected by the outcome of a federal court hearing this month, in which 27 U.S. states are trying to block the federal Clean Power Plan that slashes CO2 from power plants, the largest source of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

The U.S. Republican Party Platform has also questioned the legality of the executive order used to ratify the Paris deal, saying it will need the consent of the Senate before it becomes binding.

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Li Shuo, a climate adviser with Greenpeace, said both China and the United States were determined to put the treaty into force as soon as possible in order to avoid the risk that any new Republican administration would reject it.

"It now looks like the Paris agreement will enter into force before the end of the year and that will really be light speed compared to almost all other international agreements," he said. 

U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is a strong supporter of the accord, but her Republican counterpart Donald Trump has dismissed man-made climate change as a hoax and says he will abandon the Paris agreement if elected.

Countries that ratify the deal will have to wait for three years after it has gone into legal force before they can begin the process of withdrawing from it, according to the agreement signed in Paris.

Ratification, however, does not mean the work is over.

Alden Meyer, international director of the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the Paris agreement's detailed rules will likely take another year or two to finalize.

"All countries will need to raise the ambition of their commitments under the agreement if we're to avoid the worst impacts of climate change and reach a goal of net zero global warming emissions by mid-century," Meyer said.

"But this is an important step forward that reinforces the U.S. and China's continued leadership in building a robust, durable international climate framework." 

Robotics

Regardless of the assurances, I am concerned that we have started down a very slippery slope and in a generation or two we will have personless factories and maybe personless offices.  When that happens where will humans be earning salaries and hence, are going to be buying the stuff the factories will be churning out and who will pay for the offices; and - indeed - what will be done in those offices?

Is anyone in government, whether Chinese, Swedish, Japanese or American, putting their minds to this frightening future?

Source: Electronics Maker Automates as China Costs Rise - China Real Time Report - WSJ

"A new generation of machines is gradually transforming this electronics factory in China’s manufacturing hub.Inside the sprawling factory, owned by Jabil Circuit Inc.—the world’s third-largest contract manufacturer for companies such as Apple Inc. and Electrolux SA—robotic arms assemble circuit boards as driverless components-laden carts glide nearby. Machines also are starting to replace workers in checking circuit-board assemblies for errors.

“This is the past,” said David Choonseng Tan, an operations director at Jabil, pointing to a line of workers hunched over the assembly line. “And this,” he said, gesturing to a line of machines next to them, “is the future.”

Rapidly changing product models make it challenging for electronics companies like Jabil to automate all aspects of the assembly process, according to John Dulchinos, a vice president at the company. Still, Jabil has increasingly embraced automation and advanced technology, a shift encouraged by the Chinese government as the world’s second-largest economy grapples with labor shortages and high costs that are making neighboring countries like Vietnam increasingly competitive for mass production.

Manufacturers elsewhere in the world are also investing in automation and robotics in an effort to wean themselves off “chasing the needle”—moving to ever-lower-cost countries in pursuit of cheap labor.

In Stockholm, Sweden, roughly 8,000 miles away from China, fuel-cell maker myFC has built a 2,000 square-foot smart factory that will eventually have five robots doing the work of 20 full-time humans. The robots assemble power cards used for portable electronic devices while 3D printers churn out prototypes of new designs.

“We are building one cell, then we can export that to any country, any customer,” says Bjorn Westerholm, chief executive of myFC.

Jabil says that it’s hoping that a key piece of its automation—a boxy white platform it calls Flexi-Auto Cell—can also be redeployed at factories elsewhere in the world. The idea, according to Jabil, is for technology to be able to emulate the worker’s flexibility in switching from one task to another.

Jabil’s vision of manufacturing, however, isn’t one in which machines will replace workers completely, but rather one in which they’re freed up to focus on less-tedious tasks.

“We are not going for a lights-off factory,” says KC Ong, a senior vice president of operations for Jabil. In the factory of the future, “we’ll still have a lot of people.”"