Politics

The Revision of IPCC’s Climate Scenarios

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The UN’s international climate group has revised its set of possible climate change scenarios. They eliminated the most damaging scenario, because of progress in sustainable technologies and because details of the scenario itself seemed unlikely to occur. Trump and other climate deniers have seized upon this change to claim it shows all discussion of climate change is bogus. The following piece was done as a comment to an article in the NY Times.

It seems to me one of the problems with this discussion of scenarios is that people want the scenarios to tell them something different than what the scenarios are trying to do. The scenarios are attempts to model different levels of response to the problem of climate change. There is no default case where we do nothing. For that case the only limit to the temperature is the end year in the study—the temperature would just keep increasing.

The main thing that has happened since the original scenarios is that the world has taken some measures that help: costs of wind and solar solutions have come way down to the point that those make up the majority of new electricity generation worldwide. Electric cars have become cheaper, better, and more prevalent. So it’s not surprising that the current view is somewhat more optimistic.

Where that actually leaves us can never be completely clear. I’m willing to bet the models never considered that the most powerful country in the world would be run by someone trying to sabotage the whole effort. Or that data centers would suddenly demand more power than cities. Or that the Iran war would show everyone the risks of imported oil. There will always be reassessments.

This new set of scenarios should make us appreciate the work that has been done. We can make progress against climate change. But there is much that needs to happen and very strong forces against it. This will never be easy, but it needs to be done.

Problems with the Constitution

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There has always been plenty of talk about what is right and wrong with the Constitution of the United States. However much of that was on the back burner until recently. Now it is different. First we saw government collapsed into non-functional partisan chaos, and then Trump demonstrated that what we thought was a government of laws was actually a government of unenforceable traditions.

So what follows is a list of issues. I won’t say it is complete or well-organized, but the problems are all serious.

  • Open to dictatorial takeover

The Supreme Court was a terrible mistake.  There are no limits to its power, and it doesn’t even have to justify its decisions.  The Justices are chosen undemocratically and serve for life.  We’ve now seen they can even declare a President above the law, so that the entire Constitution is out the window.  It is a dictatorship waiting to happen.

  • Open to corruption (only works because of tradition, not law)

The entire electoral apparatus belongs to the states, where it is operated by partisan officials.  It is common practice to make voting difficult in opposition districts, but that is just the beginning. The whole voting apparatus is controlled by people who gain from controlling results.  It works if people are committed to democracy, but not otherwise.  Other democratic countries have established separate, nominally non-partisan organizations to administer voting.

  • Unrepresentative

The Senate is phenomenally unrepresentative.  Two senators per state means residents of small states have astonishingly outsize power.  At the very least, very large states such as California need additional Senators.  The problems of the Senate also affect the Electoral College, so that not only legislation but also Presidential elections are affected.

Then there is the whole question of gerrymandering. Computers have made this both easy and effective. The US Congress is currently so gerrymandered that very few districts have real elections. That severely limits democracy.

  • Doesn’t work for states

These is an urgent need for clarify the division of responsibility between the states and the federal government.  As an example, the federal government has traditionally backed up the states for emergencies of all kinds.  That is necessary because it has greater resources as well as the ability to run deficits if necessary (which many states can’t).  With both Covid and the operation of FEMA Trump decided he was either opposed or lukewarm about it, and that was that.  The Constitution has to be explicit about responsibilities.

  • Doesn’t work for the federal government

The federal government simply doesn’t work as intended.  We’ve reached an era of non-cooperation between parties, so government only works when a single party controls everything.  Between the “Hastert rule” in the House and the filibuster in the Senate, it’s easy to block everything otherwise.  That means the so-called separation of powers in government is largely non-functional  Furthermore the primary system for the nomination of candidates basically disenfranchises the political center, so that parties are by definition extreme.  That means government is either functionally blocked or unrepresentatively extreme.

  • There is no protection for governmental expertise

A functioning national government needs expertise upon which to base its conclusions.  For that reason Congress created a number of bodies intentionally buffered from Presidential politics.  More recently the Supreme Court has decided that any body working in the executive acts at the discretion of the President.  It is now impossible for anyone with necessary expertise to make a career in the federal government.

  • Unclear dividing lines between branches of government

The Trump administration is legislating by executive order, and the Supreme Court has decided that is okay.

  • The unspecified role of parties can undercut everything else

Everything about our two-party system is outside the Constitution.  So that, as mentioned earlier, we have a primary system that disenfranchises the political center, and there is nothing in the Constitution that has any bearing on it.  The Constitution needs at the least to say how elections work.  Anything not specified is vulnerable to corruption and takeover. Non-partisan primaries with rank choice voting is a possible step in that direction.

Message for Business

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We’ve spoken here before about how the evangelical community needs to understand that Trump is not their guy.

However the issue is more general.  It’s too easy to dismiss evangelicals as disconnected from reality and perhaps swayed by self-interested leaders. In fact all of us have spent lifetimes insulated from the reality of authoritarian government.  The US elections and democratic system are certainly not perfect, but we the people still do have power.  It’s hard to recognize that once that goes, the world is different.

Even the well-heeled and well-educated business community has that problem.  Much was made of Jamie Dimon’s comment at Davos that Europeans in particular should stop worrying about Trump, because ultimately nothing serious was going to happen.  A recent Edsall piece pointed out that many other business leaders believe the same thing.  Like the Evangelical’s focus on abortion, the business focus on the Trump tax cuts has convinced business people that he’s their guy.

As Edsall’s article points out, the history of authoritarian takeovers tells another story.  Once government is unaccountable, what follows is massive corruption and shakedowns of all players.  That’s in addition to the whims and the uncorrectable mistakes of the leader.  Businesses–and in particular their leaders–have much to lose, as their counterparts elsewhere have found out to their shock and surprise.

For now Trump’s threats–combined with the taxcut carrot–seem to hold sway with much of the business community.   But the Trump people have made no secret of their plan to end democracy in favor of an  Viktor Orban-like regime.  As a threat, there is nothing in Biden’s program that comes close to matching that one.

Republicans and Guns

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With all the conversations about guns in this country, it’s worth being clear that the Republican Party is, was, and will ever be the party of guns. 

As we’ve noted before, the big donors to the party don’t care about guns—they care about money.   But guns are important as a means to that end.  Guns elect Republicans, and Republicans deliver tax cuts and relief from regulation.  All of that money has certainly pumped up guns as an identity issue.

However guns are not just one issue among many being promoted.  Guns are central to the whole Republican project.

Going back to Nixon’s “southern strategy” and before, Republicans are all about fear.  They have institutionalized and spread the long-term Southern terror of black insurrection.  There’s a big dangerous black man (or an immigrant) behind every tree, and he’s out to get you and your family.  Blacks control the Democratic Party, so it’s complicit.   Democrats want to take aware your guns and leave you exposed and unprotected.  Joe Biden refuses to help.  You’ve got to take matters into your own hands.  Republicans are the only thing between you and chaos.

As always in this election campaign the big issue is crime.  This isn’t about statistics or really addressing crime in any organized way.  It’s all about that big dangerous black man you have to be ready to shoot.  This isn’t a matter of convincing individual politicians–Republicans can never give up on guns.

The only option is to defeat them.

What To Do About TikTok

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It seems to me that the discussion of TikTok is distorted by the kind of xenophobic paranoia that frequently gets in the way. It’s not that there isn’t a problem, it’s that the real problem is not solved by a fixation on nasty foreigners.

There are two frequently discussed problems (that often get confused with each other):

  1. We’re giving a whole lot of information to TikTok that could be used by the Chinese government for nefarious purposes.
  2. The Chinese government could use their state-sanctioned control of TikTok to propagandize to TikTok’s base of customers.

The first point is pretty close to nonsense. Monumental amounts of information on the American population are already being collected, organized, and merchandized by companies who do this for a living. The last time I looked at this issue, more than ten years ago, you could already match what TikTok knows. Today it’s far worse. We need legal controls on information gathering. The fixation on TikTok for this issue is a distraction.

The second point is a more serious issue, as we’ve had more than enough experience with the coercive effects of social media. The problem, however, is that the dangers from TikTok are not an awful lot different than the dangers from good old American social media. There’s nothing that stops the Chinese government from putting propaganda on TikTok, but we’ve already had the Russians (and the Koch people) doing the same thing on Facebook. Unless we put up legal barriers to deliberate manipulation, social media are for sale to the highest bidder. Banning TikTok is just plain not the issue. (To my mind, any network operator that selects content for unsolicited distribution to users should be legally responsible for that content.)

You can even say flatly that the reason there is such bipartisan agreement on banning TikTok is that it is a handy way to make it seem that you’re doing something about a serious problem–without upsetting the real perpetrators much at all.

We’re Wrong About Divisions

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The most important division in American society is not between Republicans and Democrats.  It’s within the Democratic Party itself.

As an indication of what I’m talking about, I think about an episode of the program Peaky Blinders.  In that episode the hero Thomas Shelby’s sister’s boyfriend is a communist, and the hero has to figure out how to keep him alive.  When the subject comes up with the police, the answer is “Normally we don’t have to worry about those people.  They’re so busy killing each other that they’re just not a problem.”

The Republicans can say amen to that for our tamer version of the left:

  • We’re still living down “defund the police”
  • We’ve had an endless supply of articles about how privileged, racist whites just have to get used to taking a well-deserved hit, including for education.
  • Virtually any statement made about “neo-liberals” is a whitewashing of Republican failures so that chosen Democrats can be blamed instead. One hopes George W. Bush is duly grateful.
  • We had a chance to pass a Biden agenda, but the Democratic Party spent so much time posturing and pretending that Manchin and Sinema didn’t exist that when they finally got around to voting it was too late–inflation was THE issue and it was easy for Manchin to hide. The left wing of the party is gleefully blaming Biden, without any alternative policy or blame for Republicans.
  • Democrats are actually fighting over whether Biden will be the nominee in 2024—when the real issue is the 2022 midterm election.  The only result of this fight is weaking the remaining days of the Biden administration and undermining the Democrats’ message for 2022.

With friends like this who needs enemies.  As in the Peaky Blinders quote, they hate each other so much that it trumps any desire to do anything good for anybody. It’s hard even to count the self-inflicted wounds.

Just think about it.  That Democrats can do anything good at all—given this nonsense—means that they could perhaps do something really big if they could get organized and stop the knife stabbing. If they stopped providing amunition to Republicans, they might just be able bridge the other divisions we hear so much about.

Guns are Money

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After the latest outrage of gun violence in Texas, the newspapers are full of articles about guns. However when people talk about Republicans and the gun lobby they tend to get things backwards. The gun lobby sounds like a rather limited thing, maybe financed by the manufacturers. It’s sort of odd the power they exercise over the Republican Party.

Not so odd. The reason guns are untouchable in this country is that guns are a potent identity issue used by the Kochs and the Mercers and the Thiels and the mainline Republicans to put money in their pockets. It’s core Republican money driving the gun lobby, not the other way around. That’s why there’s so much of it. The only legislative achievement of the Trump years was the monumental tax cut for the rich. Bought by guns.

Thirty years ago we didn’t have this problem with hysteria around gun ownership. It was recognized that there was a need for gun control, and there was no notion of evil liberals just looking for a chance to take away all your guns. The sense of grievance around guns was deliberately created as a means to a financial end with the active assistance Murdoch and Fox News. Why is the Supreme Court also supporting this stuff? Well all of the so-called conservatives on the Court come from the Federalist Society—which was created and managed by the Koch Organization (an indisputable fact).

Guns are money. That’s the only real story. It will continue as long as we let them get away with it. (As for what to do about it, there’s an old piece here that’s still relevant.)

The One Million Covid Victims Have a Message

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At least half of these deaths were due to deliberate misinformation from political interests calling the whole pandemic a left-wing plot.  For month after month the most popular story in the Wall Street Journal was the latest reason why there was really nothing going on:  it was just like normal flu; it was worst in New York because it was only in disgusting cities full of disgusting people.

Everyone in the country suffered, including very many who bought into the party line because they thought the propagandists were on their side.  Since vaccines were coming, deaths delayed could be deaths avoided. What’s worse, almost of half the people who died were unvaccinated when they could have been, convinced by the arguments of people like the Fox hosts-who were actually vaccinated for themselves.

This Covid story is unfortunately typical of what’s happening in this country.  The “populists” are the Kochs and the Mercers and the Thiels—people with the money to fill newspapers with issues they don’t care about (abortion, guns) so they can ride them all the way to the bank.  The only major piece of legislation passed in the Trump years was the monumental tax cut for the rich.  As with Covid, the supporters drawn in with identity issues are the ones who will suffer—in jobs, healthcare, education, climate, you name it.

Taking this one step further, it is worth noting that the damage with Covid was not from action but from inaction.  Most of the endless discussions of our fractured political system are missing the point.  The country is ungovernable because they want it that way.  If government can’t act, the powers that be are running things.  As Steve Bannon put it, all we need to do is create chaos. 

This story isn’t complicated, just lost in the cacophony of bought media.