Vox Sentences: We’ll always have (the) Paris (climate deal)

We have a Paris climate deal; Bowe Bergdahl faces a court-martial; and the French far right gets humiliated in regional elections.

TOP NEWS

Paris, nous t'aimons

Yann Caradec/Flickr

• 195 countries approved a historic deal to tackle climate change in Paris on Saturday. You can read the full 31-page document here.

  [UN Framework Convention on Climate Change]

• The deal states that the world should try to have greenhouse gas emissions peak ASAP, maintains a lofty if implausible goal of avoiding 2°C of global warming, and includes transparency requirements to verify emissions cuts.

  [Vox / Brad Plumer]

• The deal is largely voluntary. Countries are required to submit plans to address climate change, but the content is up to the countries involved. That may sound like weak sauce, but it follows decades of failed efforts to get a binding global treaty on the issue.

  [Vox / Brad Plumer]

• One reason to be worried: As of last month, countries' voluntary climate pledges added up to about 3ºC of warming, way above the 2ºC target.

  [World Resources Institute / Kelly Levin and Taryn Fransen]

• If you believe, as environmental economist William Nordhaus does, that climate change is fundamentally a "free-rider problem" in which countries have strong incentives to cheat and emit more, a voluntary deal probably won't work.

  [NY Review of Books / William Nordhaus]

• Then again, it's pretty early to get so pessimistic. The Council on Foreign Relations' Michael Levi argues that the real test will come in 2020, when countries are supposed to submit new emissions-cutting plans. If the agreement pushes countries to submit ever-more-ambitious plans, then it could wind up making a big difference.

  [Council on Foreign Relations / Michael Levi]

• Vox's Brad Plumer sums it up well: "These climate talks, by themselves, won't fix global warming. They can't do that. They're not designed to do that. The actual goal is much more modest: to add structure and momentum to efforts that are already underway, in legislatures and laboratories and cities and boardrooms around the world, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions."

  [Vox / Brad Plumer]

Bowe is me

U.S. Army/Getty Images

• Former Army Pvt. Bowe Bergdahl will face a court martial on charges of desertion and endangering soldiers sent to look for him.

  [NYT / Richard Oppel]

• To recap: Bergdahl was a prisoner of war under the Taliban in Afghanistan for five years, and was returned in 2014 in exchange for five Taliban prisoners. But the Taliban didn't capture Bergdahl while he was out on patrol — as the Army had said — but after he had wandered off the base.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• If convicted, Bergdahl faces anything from life in prison to no jail time at all.

  [Washington Post / Dan Lamothe and Thomas Gibbons-Neff]

• Bergdahl will receive what's known as a "general court-martial." Earlier, an Army lawyer had recommended another type of trial known as a "special court-martial" with a maximum penalty of a year's imprisonment; the lawyer also recommended no jail time or punitive discharge. That lawyer's superior chose a more punitive course of action.

  [NYT / Richard Oppel]

• Bergdahl is the subject of the second season of the podcast Serial. Here's a guide to the case to get you up to speed before listening.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• Leaving aside the question of whether Bergdahl did in fact desert, the ethics of desertion are subject to heated debate among philosophers. Jeff McMahan argues that morality "demands of potential volunteers, potential conscripts, and active military personnel that they consider with the utmost seriousness whether any war in which they might fight is just and refuse to fight unless they can be confident that it is."

  [Ethics / Jeff McMahan]

Le Pen isn't mightier

Sylvain Lefevre/Getty Images

• Marine Le Pen and her far-right populist party Front National failed to win a single region in France's regional runoff elections on Sunday.

  [Vox / Matthew Yglesias]

• In last Sunday's first-round elections, Front National had secured 28 percent of the vote, and won six regions. But the Socialists and right-wing Les Republicains joined forces and endorsed each other's candidates in the runoff, successfully foiling FN.

  [FT / Anne-Sylvaine Chassany]

• In a bruising speech after the results, Le Pen blamed her defeat on a conspiracy of the top two parties, which is basically accurate.

  [NYT / Adam Nossiter]

• Under its founder, Marine's father Jean-Marie Le Pen, Front National, was openly racist and anti-Semitic; the elder Le Pen has been convicted on several hate speech charges, including some for Holocaust denial. But Marine had tried to move the party to the center.

  [New Republic / Charles Bremner]

• Case in point: Marine Le Pen condemned Donald Trump's proposal to ban Muslim immigration, saying, "I defend all the French people in France, regardless of their origin, regardless of their religion."

  [Vox / Matthew Yglesias]

MISCELLANEOUS

This is a great explanation of how to interpret, and how not to interpret, polling at this stage in the presidential race. [Kristen Soltis Anderson]

• Top Wall Street analysts' S&P 500 forecasts have been off, on average, by about 14.7 points per year. If you just assumed the market would rise 9 percent every year, you'd only be off by 14.1 points per year. Lesson: Wall Street analysts are not very good at this.

  [Motley Fool / Morgan Housel]

• A hedge fund manager considered suing Karl Rove for fraud, because Rove told donors to his Super PAC that Mitt Romney could win.

  [NY Mag / Gabriel Sherman]

• Undercover videos are a crucial tool in uncovering cruelty against animals at factory farms. And now North Carolina is putting the people who film them in legal danger.

  [Washington Post / Justin Wm. Moyer]

• Leonard Strickland, a schizophrenic prisoner in New York, died after tumbling down a flight of stairs. Prisoners who witnessed this say he was pushed and then beaten by guards — and given how much the guards have lied about the case, that story is looking pretty damn credible.

  [NYT / Michael Winerip and Michael Schwirtz]

VERBATIM

"[Sean] Hannity confided that sometimes, when he’s traveling the country or bored during book signings, he will put 'cute couples' on the spot and pressure the man into proposing to his girlfriend." [IB Times / Brendan James]

• "Many famous social media stars are too visible to have 'real' jobs, but too broke not to."

  [Fusion / Gaby Dunn]

• "It’s difficult to be a human being, and I see that constantly in every single person."

  [Nathan Fielder to Vanity Fair / Kaleb Horton]

• "When the core belief is that accusers never lie, if any one accuser has lied, it brings into question the stability of the entire thought system, rendering uncertain all allegations of sexual assault. But this is neither sensible nor necessary: that a few claims turn out to be false does not mean that all, most, or even many claims are wrongful. The imperative to act as though every accusation must be true — when we all know some number will not be — harms the over-all credibility of sexual assault claims."

  [New Yorker / Jeannie Suk]

• "After flattering Abdullah for his strength and importance in the country, Kerry said, “I will share with you a very personal experience: When I ran for President of the United States, in 2004, against George Bush, in the end, on Election Day, we had problems in the state of Ohio on how the votes were taking place. … The next afternoon, I had a meeting with my people, and I told them that I did not think it appropriate of me to take the country through three or four months of not knowing who the President was. So that afternoon in Boston I conceded to the President and talked about the need to bring the country together. ... One of the main lessons from this is there is a future. There is a tomorrow.” Several days later, Abdullah Abdullah conceded and joined the Afghan government.

  [New Yorker / David Remnick]

WATCH THIS

What people get wrong about climate change [YouTube / Joss Fong and Estelle Caswell]

Vox / Joss Fong and Estelle Caswell