A Reality Check for Climate Change

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There’s an important article about climate change in the latest IEEE Spectrum.  It’s only two pages long, but there is much to think about.  It is high time to recognize the reality of what we’re fighting.

The article points out that a reasonable estimate for the cost of the energy transition is $275 T.  That’s an enormous, almost unthinkable number.  It may well be right.

While the article itself is not big on drawing conclusions, it does have an important one: “because the world’s low-income countries could not carry such burdens, affluent nations would have to devote on the order of 15 to 20 percent of their annual economic product to the task.  Such shares are comparable only to the spending that was required to win World War II.”  We’ve talked about the “rest of the world” problem before, but without such dramatic support.   No one anywhere is talking about that level of effort.

In fact, as a nation, we still have the idea that climate change is a matter of every country (or state) putting its own house in order.  Once we’ve done our part, it’s up to everyone else to do theirs.  However we in the US have:

  • The highest per capita energy usage in the world.  Only Russia is close.
  • Close to the highest per capita GDP
  • Historically, still the biggest contribution to global CO2 and the climate mess we’re in

And somehow all we have to do is take care of ourselves?  And this can be handled as a small activity on the side?  There’s only one atmosphere, and with that mindset we’ll get nowhere.

Biden has finally started something, but there are still major barriers here.  Here are a few:

  • Oil company control of the Republican Party and many media outlets.  (Let’s call a spade a spade:  the Kochs—an oil services company—are in complete control of the judiciary!)
  • Oil company propaganda about “individual responsibility” versus government action
  • Arrogance in the environment movement that has made climate a culture war item.
  • Splits in the environmental movement on needed electric infrastructure (supported by a kind of religious faith in purely local solutions)
  • “America first” attitudes about aid to the rest of the world

Furthermore internationally the picture has continued to deteriorate:

  • Trump’s catastrophic renouncing of the Paris Agreement has been impossible to walk back.  He killed the idea of world unanimity, so cheating by Russia, Saudi Arabia and others is now the order of the day.
  • There are continuing and intensifying international fights over contributions of rich nations to the climate efforts of poorer ones.
  • Trump’s bullying view of international relations has been taken up with a vengeance by both Russia and China.  So most international discussion and cooperation is effectively dead.

Given the size of the problem and the limited time available, where do we go from here?

One recent answer came in a set of climate scenarios coming from Princeton University.  They claim that they have evaluated a comprehensive set of climate control approaches, but all of their options end up with a huge role for carbon capture. Maybe they were influenced by oil company money, but in any case they have given up on the energy transition itself!  And carbon capture on that (unproven) scale would end up in the same $275 T ballpark.

So the conclusion, I’m afraid, is that we can’t rule out geoengineering.  However distasteful and risky that may be, we’d better find out as much about it as we can.   It is a fact (however often denied) that we don’t have all the technologies we need, and we’ve done well short of what’s needed with the ones we do have.  We may have to buy time until we’re better able to get the job done.  But as we’ve said before, we’d better recognize that geoengineering has a drug-like dependency:  we can never get off of it until all that extra CO2 has been taken back out!

The Depression of the 2020’s

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We’re not paying enough attention.  This midterm election hides a real danger of Depression.  We’re stumbling into exactly what happened in the 1930’s.

The Great Depression of the 1930’s occurred when the financial authorities of the day responded to a sudden downturn with the opposite of what was needed.  A straightjacket of fiscal austerity was applied (by the self-protecting upper classes) in place of the stimulation that would have enabled recovery.   That shut down everything in the US and much of the western world.

We are currently fighting inflation.  That’s a tough battle and will cause a slowdown that is some variety of recession.  It’s what happens next that matters. 

The only reason we got out of the 2008 recession was that there were enough Republicans to join Democrats in passing a stimulus package early on.  Already by 2010 there were few of those Republicans left, and any further stimulus was blocked in the name of the bogus “balanced budget amendment”.  The goal was national pain ahead of the 2016 election.  It worked.

We’re in that situation again, but the dangers are much worse.   To state the obvious, the worldwide economy is in extremely fragile state:  inflation is everywhere (we’re actually on the low side), there is war in Ukraine (with direct consequences for many countries), energy prices are rising from Saudi greed, there’s even a dictatorship-induced slowdown in China, and (compared with 2008) there is very little international cooperation.  Forced austerity is exactly what brought the world economy down last time, and we’re going to get it again.

For today’s Republican Party a recession is an opportunity.  A Republican (Trump) Congress will do anything to bring back their hero.  As in 2014 there will be no possibility of stimulus no matter how bad things get, because pain is the goal.  By 2024 it will be too late for any short-term way out. 

The Great Depression was so bad, that it seemed that people would always remember what happened and never do that again.  Unfortunately we’re there.

Some Reality for the Midterms

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I’m tired of arguments over whether Republicans or Democrats are better managers of the economy.  The situation for the midterms is starker than that. 

In this election cycle we are parallel to 2014, a mid-term election with an open Presidential election to follow.  What did the Republican Party do with their power between 2014 and 2016?  They shut down government with the “balanced budget amendment” nonsense (forgotten immediately under Trump) in order to cause national pain for the 2016 election.  That is no exaggeration—it was deliberate policy.  The student loan crisis and the pain in “flyover” districts were direct results.

In 2022 we are at an economically delicate moment—trying to control inflation without a serious downturn.  A Republican Congress will do exactly what they did last time—shut down government (this time in the name of inflation) to make sure things get worse for 2024.  Given the risks of the moment, the consequences can be dire. 

We can either elect a Congress interested in avoiding the worst, or we can elect a Congress dedicated to provoking a recession and making sure it lasts. 

Education—Student Loan Debt and the Rest

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The public discussion of Biden’s student loan plan seems to be about some other country—certainly not this one.

Much of the discussion takes the point of view that Biden’s plan is a wildly-expensive and unnecessary change, since post-secondary education is functioning the way it always has.  And further the plan isn’t sufficiently targeted to the poor, so there is no point in doing it.

In fact post-secondary education in this country is so broken you hardly know where to start.  And the people targeted by the plan were so badly screwed by us that we have a responsibility to notice. 

Let’s look at the history.  The following chart is a point of departure:

It’s obvious from the chart that around 2008 something happened to the cost of college—it took off.  A prime ingredient was the George Bush’s 2008 crash, which was a double whammy:  states had less money to spend—so tuition went up—and students and their parents had less money to pay it.  As we all learned during the Covid crisis, states have limited ability to deal with new expenses, as many are prohibited from running deficits.  They need to rely on the federal government to help them out. 

However the Republican Congress blocked all stimulus (remember the “balanced budget amendment”) to provoke dissatisfaction for the 2016 election.  So there was no help to be had.   Unsurprisingly people had to take on new levels of debt.  And with Republicans continuing to sabotage the recovery, there were few jobs for these people when they graduated (or didn’t) and went immediately into arrears.  Student load debt didn’t grow because students were irresponsible, it grew because government was.

Adding to that, Republicans spent years protecting fraudulent private pseudo-educational institutions because of the supposed superiority of the private sector.  At such places you could earn a degree in “culinary arts”, for example, which was considered valueless in any real restaurant.   Essentially all students at those institutions incurred monumental levels of debt and no skills.  The worst of those have now been shut down, but Betsy DeVos did everything she could to defend them.

As a country we screwed a generation of students.  From the numbers on the chart, $10 or $20 thousand seems relevant, but assuredly not profligate. As for inflation, the risk has been exaggerated by false comparison to the stimulus packages.  The cost here is budgeted over decades; its current impact is minimal.

However we should be clear that this is a Band-Aid on a God-awful wound, because for the most part things have only gotten worse.

First of all, averaging over all institutions in the country gets a rather diverse mix of good and bad colleges. That’s appropriate for addressing needs of borrowers.  However If you want to go to a good institution to get yourself a good job, the numbers are basically twice what’s on the chart:  around $20 thousand yearly for a good public institution.   For private colleges, we can be more exact since they act as a cartel:  $80K.   Even applying to these places can cost thousands.  So much for equality of opportunity. 

What’s more the public university system, instead of being strengthened, is under attack.  That’s not just a matter of the well-publicized politization of education, bad as that is.   Public funding in many states has been reduced to the point that public colleges are admitting out-of-state (or out-of-country) students in preference to in-state ones, because they need the extra money.  That has actually become a major contributor to student loan debt!  The financial situation is so dire that colleges are spending more on administrators to raise money than on education itself.

All of that sounds like a hard problem, but as with healthcare, just about every other developed country has found a way to do it.  We need to strengthen the public system with necessarily more of a role for federal funding.  Public education has to be first-rate and affordable—and available to everyone in every state.  We’ve got to banish the preposterous model of education as a severely-limited resource with parents ready to kill to get their children into the right places!  In addition we need to limit the size of loans people need to take and be rational about the payback.  The Australian system, with payback based on ability to pay, is one working option.

It’s worth stating the obvious fact that with the current cost of education, the only way we’re keeping this country going is by importing foreign graduates (and telling them how much we hate their being here!).  We’d have to shut down Silicon Valley otherwise.  We should also be clear that when we talk about national security we’re talking not about aircraft carriers but about our national competence in key technologies.

It is also worth stressing the problem is NOT (despite rumblings from both the left and the right) that we’re sending too many people to college.  Good jobs need sophisticated training.  You can look at the government’s own (or anyone else’s) expectations of the jobs we’re going to need to fill.  Sure there should be more specifically vocational training also, but that’s not the answer to the problem we know we’ve got. Also we’ve learned from the Covid experience that online instruction is no silver bullet to replace teachers.

Finally it’s worth responding to the charge that we’re not sufficiently targeting our payments to the poor.  The fact is that the only route to equality of opportunity is making sure that there is a first-class system available to everyone.  We used to understand that.  We were the first to recognize that secondary education needed to be available to everyone.  Eventually other countries caught on, because there was a big advantage to the country in doing it.

This has been proven so many times it’s ridiculous to have to state it—education is the backbone of the strength of the country.  Despite some rhetoric, there’s nothing either left-wing or right-wing about this. Even Adam Smith knew it—he didn’t futz around wondering how little training poor people could get by with, he wanted universal literacy in the eighteenth century.  If we want to succeed as a nation, we need to succeed at education.

Propagandists for Power

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This note is occasioned by John McWhorter’s piece in the NY Times, basically praising Clarence Thomas as a thinker who has been too easily dismissed.

While I agree with Mr. McWhorter on some subjects, I think he is very wrong on this one.  And his mistake is the same one made by other people about other public figures.

First about Clarence Thomas:

  • He is someone who has received help every step of his career, but who has nonetheless declared himself self-made.  His autobiography is emphatic to the point of absurdity on the subject. 
  • His general philosophy is heavily influenced by that mythology.  Like many other pseudo-self-made people (there are admittedly more rich than poor of them), he asserts “I did it, so can anyone else who has what it takes.”  No one should be asking government for help.  That he sincerely believes this does not make it either true or admirable.
  • Despite his self-delusions, he has not achieved his success as a thinker.  He has achieved success as a propagandist for power.  His ideas, however well or badly thought-out, are irrelevant to his current position.  He is a tool in the Koch organization’s (and Republican party’s) battle plan.  The position being propagated is simple and convenient:  we just don’t have to care.
  • Contrary to what you sometimes read in the papers, he has not driven the Supreme Court to its current position on the extreme right.  That is a Koch-managed and funded enterprise that has put a succession of Federalist Society judges on the Court.

We should now talk more generally.  There were places and times in the past when people seemed at least worried about selling out.  That is, whether they were putting personal advantage above some notion of morality.

We are no longer at that place or time.  In the United States (and elsewhere) today, there is no morality stronger than financial success.  People don’t need to agonize anymore, because riches are proof of morality.  That’s the Clarence Thomas problem, and he is far from the only example.

I’d even put Milton Friedman in that category (along with a good chunk of the Federalist Society).  Milton Friedman was certainly capable of understanding the logical flaw in his argument:  it’s okay to declare that corporations serve their stockholders—but only if someone else is minding the store.  If those same corporations are also running government, then no one is minding the store.  Instead he made himself a wealthy and respected genius, again as a propagandist for power.

No one should be venerating propagandists for power, no matter how sincere such people believe themselves to be.

Democracy’s Enemies are No One’s Friends

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Today about half the United States electorate seems to think that the end of democracy would be great—they could just keep on winning.  It’s not said enough: that’s a fallacy regardless of where you sit on the political spectrum.  The end of democracy means the end of leverage.

As history has proved over and over again, the winners when democracy dies are the real elites who hold power.  In this case were talking about the Kochs, the Thiels, the Mercers, the Murdochs.  In the absence of democracy, no functioning elections means no power for anyone else.  All other leverage is gone.

Those people have been very clear about what that means.  What they want is what’s good for them.  No taxes on rich people and corporations.  No regulation.  No government services they don’t need—that is no social security, no Medicare, two-tier education, nothing for climate, no safety net.   Back to the glory days of the nineteenth century, when businesses could get away with anything.

For now a section of the population finds common cause with those people on guns and abortion, but those were never the main issues.   The only reason we’re talking about those issues today is that we do have a democracy today and voting matters.  Guns and abortion are a path to power, but not a commitment to support anyone in any way.

Once democracy goes, we’ll have nothing to say.  And nothing is what everyone—both their supporters and their opponents—is going to get.

Down with Monotheism

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Monotheism amounts to an imperialistic assertion of primacy.  That sounds like one of those wild-eyed slogans from the radical left or right.  But in fact it is a simple statement of what drives quite a lot of policy, both domestic and international.

Let’s start close to home.   In both Britain and the US there is a big problem with past imperial grandeur.  The Brits just can’t get over their lost empire, and they keep doing completely illogical and crazy things (e.g. Brexit) in hopes of getting it back.  The fact that the world has changed since then, with new powers and new bases for strength doesn’t register.  Since the empire is taken to be an expression of British superiority (and of God’s grace raining down on Britain) there is no reason why it can’t just happen again.  There is only one God and he’s ours.

The US has a similar problem, just a little later in time.  We had the 1950’s and even 60’s when in the years following the destruction of the World War II the US was unquestionably the world’s only remaining superpower.  If anything we were more dominant than the British as their peak.  And we’re just as blind in looking back to it.  Our dominance was a result of national superiority and God’s grace.   We are the chosen rulers of the world and there’s nothing that ought to stop that.

The Chinese and the Russians have similar issues.  Having lived in Italy at one point, there’s more than a bit of it (going back several centuries) there too.

The Old Testament (as I understand it) had a more limited notion of monotheism:  each nation had it’s own god or gods and international struggles were also struggles of those gods.  That sounds a little more accurate.  Contemporary monotheism amounts to assertions of primacy.  An astounding percentage of Americans are ready to talk about God’s protective shield over the US and our God-given role in running the rest of the world.  That gets in the way of any notion international cooperation or any workable national objectives.  With God on your side, reality just doesn’t matter.

The Brits have already driven themselves to at least a short-term future of poverty.  It is relevant to notice—although seldom mentioned—that the pre-EO version of Britain was much slower than the continent in recovering from World War II and generally poorer per capita. 

The US is on the brink of doing the same thing.  We’ve got a dictatorial theocracy going, as well as a “we don’t need anyone” ethos on the right that denies any need to interact with the rest of the world except under terms of dominance.  Furthermore the pervasive xenophobia denies the (currently enormous) contribution of foreigners to the economic strength of the US.

However the biggest problems are not even that.  As climate change and also Covid and the Ukraine crisis show us, we have only one world.  All the national gods are going to have to cooperate if we’re going to get out of this mess.  Enough with national monotheism.

We’re Doing Climate—Next the Court

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Schumer and Manchin seem finally to have reached agreement on meaningful climate action. If we can do that, the next step has got to be reforming the Supreme Court.

This Court is responsible for even more than it gets blamed for.  Roe v Wade is the tip of the iceberg.  This court is dedicated to the project of overturning democracy by enforcing and maintaining minority rule.

That starts with the defense of gerrymandering.  This is the single most important factor in the polarization of the political environment—a political minority is given vastly exaggerated and untouchable power.  Punting to Congress is a joke, since that asks the beneficiaries to give up power. To that gets added Citizens United and the provocatively-announced ruling on “replacement electors.”

As both Alito and Thomas have made clear, this court has decided to use its unchallenged power to rule—and the proper response of the population should be obedience. Democracy has no place is this vision.

Changing the Court’s size is a matter that requires majorities in both houses of Congress and the President.  Democrats have that.  Taking that action is not radical.   What is radical is a rogue Supreme Court that is using it’s unchallengable powers to rule—certainly not the intention of the founding fathers.  It should of course be noted who is actually rulling—the Koch organization that created and managed the  Federlist Society, to which all conservative justices have dedicated their careers.

This is a chance to save democracy in this country.  Second only to saving the planet.