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The Election Is About the Country, Not the Candidates

May 30, 2016 – 10:19 am

Citizens shouldn’t let the media make us forget about ourselves.

Judging by the amount of media attention they got, these were the most important political stories of the week: Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders agreed to debate, but then Trump backed out, leading Sanders supporters to launch the #ChickenTrump hashtag. A report on Hillary Clinton’s emails came out. A poll indicated that the California primary is closer than previously thought. Trump’s delegate total went over 50%. Elizabeth Warren criticized Trump, so he began calling her “Pocahontas”. Sanders demanded that Barney Frank be removed as the chair of the DNC’s platform committee. Trump told a California audience that the state isn’t in a drought and has “plenty of water“. Trump accused Bill Clinton of being a rapist, and brought up the 1990s conspiracy theory that Vince Foster was murdered. President Obama said that the prospect of a Trump presidency had foreign leaders “rattled“, and Trump replied that “When you rattle someone, that’s good.” Clinton charged that Trump had been rooting for the 2008 housing collapse. Pundits told us that the tone of the campaign was only going to get worse from here; Trump and Clinton have record disapproval ratings for presidential nominees, and so the debate will have to focus on making the other one even more unpopular.

If you are an American who follows political news, you probably heard or read most of these stories, and you may have gotten emotionally involved — excited or worried or angry — about one or more of them. But if at any time you took a step back from the urgent tone of the coverage, you might have wondered what any of it had to do with you, or with the country you live in. The United States has serious issues to think about and serious decisions to make about what kind of country it is or wants to be. This presidential election, and the congressional elections that are also happening this fall, will play an important role in those decisions.

That’s why I think it’s important, both in our own minds and in our interactions with each other, to keep pulling the discussion back to us and our country. The flaws and foibles and gaffes and strategies of the candidates are shiny objects that can be hard to ignore, and Trump in particular is unusually gifted at drawing attention. But the government of the United States is supposed to be “of the People, by the People, and for the People”. It’s supposed to be about us, not about them.

As I’ve often discussed before, the important issues of our country and how it will be governed, of the decisions we have to make and the implications those decisions will have, are not news in the sense that our journalistic culture understands it. Our sense of those concerns evolves slowly, and almost never changes significantly from one day to the next. It seldom crystallizes into events that are breaking and require minute-to-minute updates. At best, a breaking news event like the Ferguson demonstrations or the Baltimore riot will occasionally give journalists a hook on which to hang a discussion of an important issue that isn’t news, like our centuries-long racial divide. (Picture trying to cover it without the hook: “This just in: America’s racial problem has changed since 1865 and 1965, but it’s still there.”)

So let’s back away from the addictive soap opera of the candidates and try to refocus on the questions this election really ought to be about.

Who can be a real American?

In the middle of the 20th century (about the time I was born), if you had asked people anywhere in the world to describe “an American”, you’d have gotten a pretty clear picture: Americans were white and spoke English. They were Christians (with a few Jews mixed in, but they were assimilating and you probably couldn’t tell), and mostly Protestants. They lived in households where two parents — a man and a woman, obviously — were trying (or hoping) to raise at least two children. They either owned a house (that they probably still owed money on) or were saving to buy one. They owned at least one car, and hoped to buy a bigger and better one soon.

If you needed someone to lead or speak for a group of Americans, you picked a man. American women might get an education and work temporarily as teachers or nurses or secretaries, but only until they could find a husband and start raising children.

Of course, everyone knew that other kinds of people lived in America: blacks, obviously; Hispanics and various recent immigrants whose English might be spotty; Native Americans, who were still Indians then; Jews who weren’t assimilating and might make a nuisance about working on Saturday, or even wear a yarmulke in public; single people who weren’t looking to marry or raise children (but might be sexually active anyway); women with real careers; gays and lesbians (but not transgender people or even bisexuals, whose existence wasn’t recognized yet); atheists, Muslims, and followers of non-Biblical religions; the homeless and others who lived in long-term poverty; folks whose physical or mental abilities were outside the “normal” range; and so on.

But they were Americans-with-an-asterisk. Such people weren’t really “us”, but we were magnanimous enough to tolerate them living in our country — for which we expected them to be grateful.

Providing services for the “real” Americans was comparatively easy: You could do everything in English. You didn’t have to concern yourself with handicapped access or learning disabilities. You promoted people who fit your image of a leader, and didn’t worry about whether that was fair. You told whatever jokes real Americans found funny, because anybody those jokes might offend needed to get a sense of humor. The schools taught white male history and celebrated Christian holidays. Every child had two married parents, and you could assume that the mother was at home during the day. Everybody had a definite gender and was straight, so if you kept the boys and girls apart you had dealt with the sex issue.

If those arrangements didn’t work for somebody, that was their problem. If they wanted the system to work better for them, they should learn to be more normal.

It’s easy to imagine that this mid-20th-century Pleasantville America is ancient history now, but it existed in living memory and still figures as ideal in many people’s minds. Explicitly advocating a return to those days is rare. But that desire isn’t gone, it’s just underground.

For years, that underground nostalgia has figured in a wide variety of political issues. But it has been the particular genius of Donald Trump to pull them together and bring them as close to the surface as possible without making an explicit appeal to turn back the clock and re-impose the norms of that era. “Make America great again!” doesn’t exactly promise a return to Pleasantville, but for many people that’s what it evokes.

What, after all, does the complaint about political correctness amount to once you get past “Why can’t I get away with behaving like my grandfather did?”

We can picture rounding up and deporting undocumented Mexicans by the millions, because they’re Mexicans. They were never going to be real Americans anyway. Ditto for Muslims. It would have been absurd to stop letting Italians into the country because of Mafia violence, or to shut off Irish immigration because of IRA terrorism. But Muslims were never going to be real Americans anyway, so why not keep them out? (BTW: As I explained a few weeks ago, the excuse that the Muslim ban is “temporary” is bogus. If nobody can tell you when or how something is going to end, it’s not temporary.)

All the recent complaints about “religious liberty” fall apart once you dispense with the notion that Christian sensibilities deserve more respect than non-Christian ones, or that same-sex couples deserve less respect than opposite-sex couples.

On the other side, Black Lives Matter is asking us to address that underground, often subconscious, feeling that black lives really aren’t on the same level as white lives. If a young black man is dead, it just doesn’t have the same claim on the public imagination — or on the diligence of the justice system — that a white death would. How many black or Latina girls vanish during a news cycle that obsesses over some missing white girl? (For that matter, how many white presidents have seen a large chunk of the country doubt their birth certificates, or have been interrupted during State of the Union addresses by congressmen shouting “You lie!”?)

But bringing myself back to the theme: The issue here isn’t Trump, it’s us. Do we want to think of some Americans as more “real” than others, or do we want to continue the decades-long process of bringing more Americans into the mainstream?

That question won’t be stated explicitly on your ballot this November, like a referendum issue. But it’s one of the most important things we’ll be deciding.

What role should American power play in the world?

I had a pretty clear opinion on that last question, but I find this one much harder to call.

The traditional answer, which goes back to the Truman administration and has existed as a bipartisan consensus in the foreign-policy establishment ever since, is that American power is the bedrock on which to build a system of alliances that maintains order in the world. The archetype here is NATO, which has kept the peace in Europe for 70 years.

That policy involves continuing to spend a lot on our military, and risks getting us involved in wars from time to time. (Within that establishment consensus, though, there is still variation in how willing we should be to go to war. The Iraq War, for example, was a choice of the Bush administration, not a necessary result of the bipartisan consensus.) The post-Truman consensus views America as “the indispensable nation”; without us, the world community lacks both the means and the will to stand up to rogue actors on the world stage.

A big part of our role is in nuclear non-proliferation. We intimidate countries like Iran out of building a bomb, and we extend our nuclear umbrella over Japan so that it doesn’t need one. The fact that no nuclear weapon has been fired in anger since 1945 is a major success of the establishment consensus.

Of our current candidates, Hillary Clinton (who as Secretary of State negotiated the international sanctions that forced Iran into the recent nuclear deal) is the one most in line with the foreign policy status quo. Bernie Sanders is more identified with strengthened international institutions which — if they could be constructed and work — would make American leadership more dispensable. To the extent that he has a clear position at all, Donald Trump is more inclined to pull back and let other countries fend for themselves. He has, for example, said that NATO is “obsolete” and suggested that we might be better off if Japan had its own nuclear weapons and could defend itself against North Korea’s nukes. On the other hand, he has also recently suggested that we bomb Libya, so it’s hard to get a clear handle on whether he’s more or less hawkish than Clinton.

Should we be doing anything about climate change?

Among scientists, there really are two sides to the climate-change debate: One side believes that the greenhouse gases we are pumping into the atmosphere threaten to change the Earth’s climate in ways that will cause serious distress to millions or even billions of people, and the other side is funded by the fossil fuel industry.

It’s really that simple. There are honest scientific disagreements about the pace of climate change and its exact mechanisms, but the basic picture is clear to any scientist who comes to the question without a vested interest: Burning fossil fuels is raising the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. An increase in greenhouse gases causes the Earth to radiate less heat into space. So you would expect to see a long-term warming trend since the Industrial Revolution got rolling, and in fact that’s what the data shows — despite the continued existence of snowballs, which has been demonstrated by a senator funded by the fossil fuel industry.

Unfortunately, burning fossil fuels is both convenient and fun, at least in the short term. And if you don’t put any price on the long-term damage you’re doing, it’s also economical. In reality, doing nothing about climate change is like going without health insurance or refusing to do any maintenance on your house or car. Those decisions can improve your short-term budget picture, which now might have room for that Hawaiian vacation your original calculation said you couldn’t afford. Your mom might insist that you should account for your risk of getting sick or needing some major repair, but she’s always been a spoilsport.

That’s the debate that’s going on now. If you figure in the real economic costs of letting the Earth get hotter and hotter — dealing with tens of millions of refugees from regions that will soon be underwater, building a seawall around Florida, moving our breadbasket from Iowa to wherever the temperate zone is going to be in 50 years, rebuilding after the stronger and more frequent hurricanes that are coming, and so on, then burning fossil fuels is really, really expensive. But if you decide to let future generations worry about those costs and just get on with enjoying life now, then coal and oil are still cheap compared to most renewable energy sources.

So what should we do?

Unfortunately, nobody has come up with a good way to re-insert the costs of climate change into the market without involving government, or to do any effective mitigation without international agreements among governments, of which the recent Paris Agreement is just a baby step in the right direction. And to one of our political parties, government is a four-letter word and world government is an apocalyptic horror. So the split inside the Republican Party is between those who pretend climate change isn’t happening, and those who think nothing can or should be done about it. (Trump is on the pretend-it-isn’t-happening side.)

President Obama has been taking some action to limit greenhouse gas emissions, but without cooperation from Congress his powers are pretty limited. (It’s worth noting how close we came to passing a cap-and-trade bill to put a price on carbon before the Republicans took over Congress in 2010. What little Obama’s managed to do since may still get undone by the Supreme Court, particularly if its conservative majority is restored.)

Both Clinton and Sanders take climate change seriously. As is true across the board, Sanders’ proposals are simpler and more sweeping (like “ban fracking”) while Clinton’s are wonkier and more complicated. (In a debate, she listed the problems with fracking — methane leaks, groundwater pollution, earthquakes — and proposed controlling them through regulation. She concluded: “By the time we get through all of my conditions, I do not think there will be many places in America where fracking will continue to take place.”) But like Obama, neither of them will accomplish much if we can’t flip Congress.

Trump, meanwhile, is doing his best impersonation of an environmentalist’s worst nightmare. He thinks climate change is a hoax, wants to reverse President Obama’s executive orders to limit carbon pollution, has pledged to undo the Paris Agreement, and to get back to burning more coal.

How should we defend ourselves from terrorism?

There are two points of view on ISIS and Al Qaeda-style terrorism, and they roughly correspond to the split between the two parties.

From President Obama’s point of view, the most important thing about battle with terrorism is to keep it contained. Right now, a relatively small percentage of the world’s Muslims support ISIS or Al Qaeda, while the vast majority are hoping to find a place for themselves inside the world order as it exists. (That includes 3.3 million American Muslims. If any more than a handful of them supported terrorism, we’d be in serious trouble.) We want to keep tightening the noose on ISIS in Iraq and Syria, and keep closing in on terrorist groups elsewhere in the world, while remaining on good terms with the rest of the Muslim community.

From this point of view — which I’ve described in more detail here and illustrated with an analogy here — the worst thing that could happen would be for these terrorist incidents to touch off a world war between Islam and Christendom.

The opposite view, represented not just by Trump but by several of the Republican rivals he defeated, is that we are already in such a war, so we should go all out and win it: Carpet bomb any territory ISIS holds, without regard to civilian casualties. Discriminate openly against Muslims at home and ban any new Muslims from coming here.

Like Obama, I believe that the main result of these policies would be to convince Muslims that there is no place for them in a world order dominated by the United States. Rather than a few dozen pro-ISIS American terrorists, we might have tens of thousands. If we plan to go that way, we might as well start rounding up 3.3 million Americans right now.

Clinton and Sanders are both roughly on the same page with Obama. Despite being Jewish and having lived on a kibbutz, Sanders is less identified with the current Israeli government than either Obama or Clinton, to the extent that makes a difference.

Can we give all Americans a decent shot at success? How?

Pre-Trump, Republicans almost without exception argued that all we need to do to produce explosive growth and create near-limitless economic opportunity for everybody is to get government out of the way: Lower taxes, cut regulations, cut government programs, negotiate free trade with other countries, and let the free market work its magic. (Jeb Bush, for example, argued that his small-government policies as governor of Florida — and not the housing bubble that popped shortly after he left office — had led to 4% annual economic growth, so similar policies would do the same thing for the whole country.)

Trump has called this prescription into question.

If you think about it, the economy is rigged, the banking system is rigged, there’s a lot of things that are rigged in this world of ours, and that’s why a lot of you haven’t had an effective wage increase in 20 years.

However, he has not yet replaced it with any coherent economic view or set of policies. His tax plan, for example, is the same sort of let-the-rich-keep-their-money proposal any other Republican might make. He promises to renegotiate our international trade agreements in ways that will bring back all the manufacturing jobs that left the country over the last few decades, but nobody’s been able to explain exactly how that would work.

At least, though, Trump is recognizing the long-term stagnation of America’s middle class. Other Republicans liked to pretend that was all Obama’s fault, as if the 2008 collapse hadn’t happened under Bush, and — more importantly — as if the overall wage stagnation didn’t date back to Reagan.

One branch of liberal economics, the one that is best exemplified by Bernie Sanders, argues that the problem is the over-concentration of wealth at the very top. This can devolve into a the-rich-have-your-money argument, but the essence of it is more subtle than that: Over-concentration of wealth has created a global demand problem. When middle-class and poor people have more money, they spend it on things whose production can be increased, like cars or iPhones or Big Macs. That increased production creates jobs and puts more money in the pockets of poor and middle-class people, resulting in a virtuous demand/production/demand cycle that is more-or-less the definition of economic growth.

By contrast, when very rich people have more money, they are more likely to spend it on unique items, like van Gogh paintings or Mediterranean islands. The production of such things can’t be increased, so what we see instead are asset bubbles, where production flattens and the prices of rare goods get bid higher and higher.

For the last few decades, we’ve been living in an asset-bubble world rather than an economic-growth world. The liberal solution is to tax that excess money away from the rich, and spend it on things that benefit poor and middle-class people, like health care and infrastructure.

However, there is a long-term problem that neither liberal nor conservative economics has a clear answer for: As artificial intelligence creeps into our technology, we get closer to a different kind of technological unemployment than we have seen before, in which people of limited skills may have nothing they can offer the economy. (In A Farewell to Alms Gregory Clark makes a scary analogy: In 1901, the British economy provided employment for 3 million horses, but almost all those jobs have gone away. Why couldn’t that happen to people?)

As we approach that AI-driven world, the connection between production and consumption — which has driven the world economy for as long as there has been a world economy — will have to be rethought. I don’t see anybody in either party doing that.

So what major themes have I left out? Put them in the comments.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged 2016 election, economics, journalism, terrorism | Comments (31)

Climate Denial is a Sunday Truth

May 19, 2014 – 9:29 am

On Monday morning, the business community knows better.

Probably every religion has what in the Christian world is known as Sunday truth: those comfortable notions that make you nod and shout “Amen!” when you hear them from the pulpit, but which conveniently evaporate from your mind by Monday morning when you have to conduct serious business.

Centuries ago, Sunday truth was mostly moral: Lying is always bad; you should never take advantage of the helpless; charging interest on a loan is wrong; and other sweet ideas that businessmen found inconvenient. But when the scientific revolution got rolling in the 1600s, educated people began to experience a different kind of Sunday truth: You’d agree on Sunday that the Earth was the center of the universe, and then on Monday use Copernicus’ methods to compute the dates of future Easters.

From there it only got worse. Now there are biologists who nod on Sunday to the idea that evolution is a satanic lie, and then on Monday go back to work in a profession that makes no sense without the evolutionary theory that holds it all together. Professors of linguistics teach the Tower of Babel in Sunday school, then tell their secular students something completely different on Monday. Astronomers listen without objection when preachers tell them the universe is less than 10,000 years old, then work out better methods for detecting stars billions of light-years away. Geologists likewise acknowledge a young Earth on Sunday, and then (when they are searching for oil on Monday) look for rock formations millions of years old.

Critics of religion have slang for this tendency to forget everything your profession teaches you when you step inside a church: It’s called “checking your brain at the door” — a colorful phrase that conjures images of brains in cubbyholes waiting to be reclaimed when the service is over, as illustrated here by the Naked Pastor.

When political movements become ideologically extreme, they can develop their own forms of Sunday truth and build their own check-stations for brains. As in religion, you say things not because they are true, but because you want to stay in the community. If the community defines itself by a set of bizarre beliefs, then you loudly confess those beliefs in order to assert your identity as a member in good standing. But you’re not stupid, so you don’t act on those beliefs when people aren’t looking and you have serious decisions to make.

The business community understands this. This week I found myself reading a Bank of America/Merrill Lynch report urging its investment clients to invest in stocks related to water. It outlined the global pressures on water supplies, and then titled a section “Climate change is making things worse”:

Given how closely food, water and energy security are connected, an impending perfect storm of events appears to be looming for the food and energy sectors, in a world constrained by extreme weather and climate change.

No caveats, no footnotes, no if-this-turns-out-to-be-true. Politically, Bank of America’s contribution profile leans conservative; their top three recipients are the Republican National Committee and the national committees to elect Republicans to the House and Senate. But if you’re trusting Bank of America to advise you on investing, they want you to know that climate change is happening and you’d better adjust to it.

And that makes me wonder how many BoA/ML clients are making a similar distinction between Sunday and Monday truths. Your investments are between you and your broker, so maybe at that point Tea Partiers retrieve their brains from the check room and act on what they know is real: climate change.

Insurance companies (who also give more to Republicans than Democrats) have been adjusting to climate change for years, because this is money we’re talking about. It’s serious. You don’t choose ideology over science when there’s money on the line. Evan Mills watches the insurance industry’s response to climate change for Lawrence Berkeley National Lab:

Allstate, for instance, has said that climate change has prompted it to cancel or not renew policies in many Gulf Coast states, with recent hurricanes wiping out all of the profits it had garnered in 75 years of selling homeowners insurance (Conley 2007). The company has cut the number of homeowners’ policies in Florida from 1.2 million to 400,000 with an ultimate target of no more than 100,000. The company has curtailed activity in nearly a dozen other states. In 2008, State Farm—Florida’s largest private insurer—stopped writing new policies in the state (Garcia and Benn 2008). This was after suspending sales of new commercial and homeowners policies in Mississippi the year before (Tuckey 2007). A few months later, after being denied a 47% average rate increase, State Farm announced a complete pull-out, (Hays 2009). About 1.2 million customers will be affected. The Florida Insurance Commissioner referred to the decision as “unnecessary destabilization of the insurance market” (Hays 2009). The editor of trade magazine published an editorial about the problem entitled “Like a Bad Neighbor?” (Friedman 2009).

Also in 2008, Farmers announced that they would stop writing homeowners policies throughout North Carolina and not renew existing ones. Such decisions are not taken lightly; Farmers will forego $55 million in annual premiums but claims that losses would be twice this amount (Hemenway 2008). … Insurers are recognizing that simply raising prices to keep pace with the impacts of climate change may be an elusive undertaking.

Munich Re is a reinsurance company — its clients are primarily other insurance companies, not the general public — whose profitability depends on its accuracy in assessing risk. It describes climate change as “one of the greatest risks facing mankind”.

That’s how the business community acts on Monday mornings, when it’s doing serious work. But business is also an important part of the Republican establishment, and Republicanism has become an extreme ideological movement defined by bizarre beliefs, one of which is climate change denial. And so you have moments like this during the debate between GOP candidates for the Senate in North Carolina — one of those states where insurance companies are cutting back coverage because of climate change. “Is climate change a fact?” asks the moderator. Chuckles are heard in the audience and all four candidates — even the eventual winner Thom Tillis, supposedly the “establishment” candidate — say a curt “no”. (The Rand Paul candidate, Greg Brannon, adds: “God controls the climate.“, upstaging Mike Huckabee’s candidate, Mark Harris, who is supposed to represent the GOP’s evangelical wing.)

This is typical. After Jon Huntsman’s failure as the reality-based Republican presidential candidate, no one wants to take up that banner. Increasingly, rank-and-file Republicans (about half nationally*, including 61% of those who don’t identify as Tea Party) believe climate change is real, and about half of those attribute it to human activity. But what Republican leaders are willing to stand up in public and represent that position? Anybody?

Many of them know the facts. In late 2007, I sat in the front row at a John McCain town hall meeting in Nashua, New Hampshire, a few blocks from where I live. He told us emphatically that climate change was happening and the government needed to do something about it. The following May, he still whole-heartedly supported the McCain-Lieberman cap-and-trade bill. But by fall, his ads were implicitly against cap-and-trade, and by the time he ran for re-election to the Senate in 2010, he was openly against his own bill.

Such Galileo-like recantations are a standard feature of repressive religious environments. (See Romney and RomneyCare.) Did McCain learn something new that changed his mind? Don’t be silly; the scientific support for climate change just keeps getting stronger. But he needed to re-affirm his conservative identity, so he accepted conservative Sunday truth the same way he accepted Sarah Palin as his running mate.

The problem with adopting a Sunday truth, though, is that sometimes it’s not enough to nod and say “Amen!”; you may need to defend the Sunday truth against the infidels. And that can be difficult when you’re smart enough to know that it’s nonsense.

That’s what happened to Marco Rubio this week. He has already wrecked his position in the early presidential polls by trying to solve the immigration problem — a conservative candidate isn’t supposed to try to pass bipartisan legislation that addresses a problem — and even recanting hasn’t restored him to grace. He can’t afford to contradict the right-wing catechism anywhere else, so when conservative-friendly interviewer Jonathan Karl brought up climate change Rubio recited the Sunday truth:

I do not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it. … And I do not believe that the laws that they propose we pass will do anything about it, except it will destroy our economy.

But sadly (for him) that wasn’t the end of it. Tuesday at the National Press Club he was asked: “What information, reports, studies or otherwise are you relying on to inform and reach your conclusion that human activity is not to blame for climate change?” He had to dodge, because he had been asserting his conservative identity, not championing a coherent theory that he adopted after prudent investigation. Instead, he put forward a new position:

The truth of the matter is the United States is a country. It is not a planet. … But for people to go out and say if you passed this bill that I am proposing, this will somehow lead us to have less tornadoes and hurricanes. And that’s what I take issue with.

In other words, the United States can’t fix climate change alone — a point even Al Gore wouldn’t dispute. So that response wasn’t satisfactory either, and Rubio had to go on Sean Hannity’s radio show and try again. This time he opted for distraction by flashing the big, shiny object of abortion: Liberals deny the settled science that human life begins at conception**, so why shouldn’t he deny the science of climate change?

I can’t imagine Rubio is endearing himself to the conservative base with these awkward gyrations. But that’s the problem when you show up on Monday morning spouting Sunday truth: You can’t give reasons, because you didn’t adopt the position for reasons. It’s about identity, not evidence or logic.

So that’s how you have to defend it. It’s simple, Marco: The Koch brothers said it. I believe it. That settles it.

* The recent trend line here might be suspect. A lot of polls that track opinion by party identification show a similar divergence between Republican and independent opinion. The reason isn’t that people in those camps are changing their minds in opposite directions, but that a lot of Tea Partiers have begun telling pollsters they’re independent rather than Republican.

** In addition to putting forward a two-wrongs-make-a-right argument — my denial of science doesn’t justify your denial of science — Rubio was also attacking a straw man. I’ve never heard any abortion-rights activist deny that a zygote is alive or that its DNA is human. The argument is about the point at which a fetus has developed sufficiently to merit the moral status we accord to a person. A typical abortion-rights position — mine, for example — is that a fetus grows into its personhood rather than being a person from conception. The disagreement is entirely moral and spiritual, and is unrelated to the science Rubio cites.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Comments (23)

Enough

May 6, 2013 – 1:28 pm

Three things are never satisfied. Yea, four say not “It is enough”:
the grave, and the barren womb, and the earth that is not filled with water, and the fire.

— Proverbs 30: 15-16

This week everybody was talking about industrial accidents

The death toll from the factory collapse in Bangladesh keeps rising, now at 650.

All week, liberal web sites have been full of socially-conscious shopping tips about what brands may or may not be involved in corner-cutting third-world factories like the ones that ordered their workers back into a building whose walls were cracking. But that’s a band-aid at best.

The fundamental problem here is that workers have no power. Without their jobs they’d be so desperately poor that going back into a crumbling factory seems less risky than standing up to their bosses. As long as that is true, all the incentives in the capitalist system work to circumvent the consciences of shoppers. The most “efficient” way for the system to deal with the current situation is not to improve safety, but to fool socially conscious consumers into thinking something is being done. The system will keep working on that “efficient” solution until it figures out a way to do it, because that’s where the money is.

Just ask Walmart, whose greenwashing campaign is working great for the corporate image, even if it isn’t doing much for the environment.

So sure, change your buying patterns in whatever way seems appropriate. But if you’re doing that instead of pushing for worker rights, the corporate power structure thanks you.

Oh, and in case you think this is just a third-world problem, don’t forget about the fertilizer factory explosion in West, Texas. We hear so much about the costs of government regulation, but the costs of non-regulation are even higher.

and Jason Collins

Basketball player Jason Collins became the first active professional athlete in a major American sport to announce he is gay. His article in Sports Illustrated talks about the pressure of hiding a major area of your life not just from the public, but from teammates as well.

Collins is a 12-season NBA veteran who has never been a star and seldom starts, but consistently fills a role a lot of teams need: a 7-footer who can come off the bench and provide defense and rebounding when your starting big guys are in foul trouble or need a rest. He played for the Celtics and Wizards last season and is currently a free agent. He is in his declining years as an athlete, but Nate Silver’s comparisons to similar players in the past indicates there was a somewhat better than 50-50 chance he would have a job next season before his announcement. (So whether he gets signed next year is not necessarily proof of either prejudice or favoritism.)

Comparisons to Jackie Robinson are appropriate in some ways but not others. Robinson was a uniquely talented athlete whose statistics (compiled over only half a career, since he was kept out of the majors until age 28) could have put him in the Hall of Fame even without his off-the-field significance. Obviously, Collins is not in that class. And I’m sure Robinson would have had an easier time if he could have played 12 years in the majors and then announced he was black.

Still, Collins’ announcement required courage. (Anyone who thinks it didn’t needs to explain why no one has done it before.) He has made himself a symbol. Like Robinson, Collins will be cheered and booed for what he is, not who he is.

Some commenters clearly resent the fact that Collins is being cheered by many. There’s an intentional cluelessness in Ben Shapiro’s tweet: “So Jason Collins is a hero because he’s gay?” What’s striking, though, is the way such views are being rejected in neutral forums. Check out the comments on this anti-Collins editorial by a small-town Illinois sports editor.

Naturally, this popular rejection of bigotry is being spun as some kind of unfair discrimination against bigots. There’s a name for that: privileged distress.

But the biggest significance of Collins’ announcement (and the generally positive response) is on the many closeted gay athletes in high school and college, like the one profiled by Sunday by the Portland Press Herald.

But I wrote about sustainable economics

I reviewed the recent book Enough is Enough in Prosperity Without Growth?

and you also might be interested in …

The observatory at the top of Mauna Loa in Hawaii is recording atmospheric carbon dioxide approaching 400 parts per million “for the first time in human history“. The graph tells the story.

This re-emphasizes a point I’ve made before: When someone says they don’t believe in global warming, or don’t believe humans cause it, ask them which part of the argument they doubt. Here are the steps:

Burning fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. (Duh.)
The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been going up more-or-less continuously since the Industrial Age got rolling. (That’s this graph.)
Atmospheric carbon dioxide warms the Earth through a greenhouse effect. (Infra-red radiation that would ordinarily dissipate into outer space gets reflected back to the planet surface.)

Given these rising carbon levels, which we can measure directly, global warming is what a rational person would expect. The argument against it needs to be a little stronger than just “maybe something else will happen”.

The public got its first look at the George W. Bush Library this week. I had been hearing about the Decision Point Theater game, where visitors supposedly hear the kind of advice Bush got at some key point in his administration, then get to make a decision. Now we finally see what that looks like.

You know what it looks like? The whole Bush administration. The single thing most typical of Bush was his shameless spin — rhetoric that made you think of one thing, but then if you challenged it as a lie, his people would explain that it was true because of something else entirely. So Saddam “supported international terrorist organizations” — which was supposed to make you think he was helping Al Qaeda plan the next 9-11. But if you pushed back you’d hear about connections to Hamas or Abu Nidal, not Al Qaeda or Bin Laden. They’d talk about Al Qaeda affiliates “operating in Iraq”, but if you pushed you’d find they were talking about a Kurdish zone Saddam had lost control of. And so on.

Bush is still spinning in exactly the same ways. Rachel Maddow shows clips from the DPT section on invading Iraq, calls BS on it, and then comments:

The case to invade Iraq was not “mistaken”. The case to invade Iraq was cooked up. It was a hoax perpetrated on the American people. And they are still cooking it up, right now.

Here’s one of those polls that makes you wonder if people really believe what they say. By a 44%-31% margin, Republicans agree with the statement “In the next few years, an armed rebellion might be necessary to protect our liberties.” (Democrats disagree 61%-18%.)

If I actually believed that, I think I’d be doing more than just stockpiling assault rifles. (After all, the government has tanks and planes.) I’d for sure have my escape route out of the country planned and a stash of money at my planned destination. Are people really doing that kind of stuff? In large numbers? Or has answering polls become part of some big fantasy game?

If there’s anyplace in America that might need an armed rebellion to maintain democracy, it’s North Carolina. The Republican leadership in the legislature is so intent on getting rid of the state’s renewable energy program that they declared victory in a voice vote and refused requests to have votes actually counted.

Mitch McConnell is catching on to this social-media thing. If your campaign video is getting as many hits as you want, you can buy the extra hits.

I often find myself telling non-religious people that right-wing Christians really aren’t as bad as they think. Well, the science education at Blue Ridge Christian Academy in South Carolina is worse than you think.

It’s been a heavy week. Let’s end with some entertainment:

By weeklysift | Posted in Weekly summaries | Also tagged culture wars | Comments (3)

A Hotter Planet is in the Pipeline

March 18, 2013 – 11:04 am

If you want to construct a simple, suitable-for-casual-conversation argument in favor of the Keystone XL Pipeline, you probably already know everything you need. The ideas are easy to grasp, and the people who want you to construct such arguments have a lot money to get their message out. Here are the pieces:

The oil sands are just sitting up there in Canada. BP says: “The province of Alberta contains recoverable oil sands reserves of approximately 170 billion barrels, the third largest reserves in the world.”
Giving our oil money to Canada makes a lot more sense than giving it to Saudi Arabia or Iran or Venezuela. For a lot of reasons: Of all the people in the world, Canadians are the ones most likely to send that dollar right back to us by buying something we make or coming here on vacation. They’re also probably not going to use the money to fund terrorism or anti-American propaganda. And we don’t have to worry much about them shutting the oil off to manipulate us or punish us politically.
Building the pipeline would employ a lot of people. Paul Ryan’s budget claims (page 48) “20,000 direct jobs and 118,000 indirect jobs.” But the construction-job figure appears to be inflated by a factor of about 10, and the “indirect jobs” are just wild guess.

Probably you know that the case against the pipeline has something to do with global warming, but unless you’ve gone out of your way to study the issue, the pieces of that argument don’t come quickly to mind and aren’t as easy to assemble. It’s not actually a difficult argument, it just doesn’t have as much money behind it, so you don’t have it constantly in front of you.

So let’s start at the beginning.

Global warming is real. It’s not “controversial” or “disputed” in any genuine scientific sense. People who profit from selling fossil fuels have spent a lot of money to buy political controversy and to dispute the scientific results in the media, but that’s different from there being any real scientific controversy about whether the planet is getting hotter, whether greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are causing it, or whether burning fossil fuels puts more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Our solar system already gives us a clear example of a runaway greenhouse effect: Venus, which otherwise is the planet that most resembles Earth. The atmosphere of Venus is 96% carbon dioxide, and its surface temperature is over 800 degrees Fahrenheit — even hotter than the hottest parts of Mercury, which is much closer to the Sun. Nobody’s saying that lead is going to start boiling here on Earth, but the greenhouse effect is not some speculation out of science fiction. It’s happening on the next planet over.

There’s a time lag between putting more carbon in the atmosphere and the Earth getting hotter. It’s not like the thermostat on your furnace. (It’s more like putting on a sweater that you can’t take off.) So we can’t wait until apocalyptic things start happening and then say, “Damn. I guess we better do something about this.” If tomorrow, we stopped burning fossil fuels completely — not that anybody expects that to happen — the planet would keep getting hotter for the next several decades.

Estimating how much carbon results in how many degrees warmer how fast is where the science gets iffier. (This is where there is honest debate and more research is needed. Of course, the fossil-fuel people and their minions want to cut off this research, so they can keep exploiting the uncertainty.) In general, though, this graphic sums the best guesses we have:

So, for example, carbon already released (say, by that driving vacation you took ten years ago) is going to increase the global temperature by 1.5 degrees Centigrade, or about 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit. A carbon budget that would keep further warming down to 2 degrees C (3.6 F) beyond that is already starting to look impossible.

And this is the mainline scenario, not the worst case. Short of Venus, it’s hard to know what the worst case is, because we could at some point set off some feedback loop we currently know nothing about. At some point, for example, the methane frozen into the Siberian permafrost starts to evaporate into the atmosphere. Methane is a greenhouse gas, so after that the hotter it gets the hotter it gets.

If we don’t want to have an ecological catastrophe, a lot of fossil fuels will have to stay in the ground. Nobody wants to hear this, and people who hear it have a way of forgetting. But take another look at that graphic: Just burning the gas, oil, and coal that corporations already list on their books will take us to a point about 12 Fahrenheit degrees warmer than we are now. That’s about the difference between Chicago and Atlanta, or Atlanta and Baghdad. The entire state of Florida would need a serious seawall, and hurricanes would hit New York or Boston every few years. I’m not sure what happens to the cornfields of Iowa or the vineyards of California, but I bet it’s not pretty.

The drill-baby-drill scenario, where we find every last hydrocarbon on the planet and burn it, is much, much worse.

If you’re going to leave any oil in the ground, the Canadian oil sands are a good choice. While not as bad as coal for generating energy in general, oil sand is a carbon-intensive way to produce liquid fuels like gasoline. There’s some debate about how much worse than ordinary crude oil it is, with estimates running from 12% worse to 22% worse. Another way to look at that: If carbon is the limiting factor on how much gasoline the world can have, producing five gallons of gas from oil sands might prevent us from producing six gallons from crude oil somewhere else.

Also, the sands are in the early stages of development; leaving them in the ground is a much easier decision now that it will be after we’ve spent a bunch of money to build a pipeline and install other infrastructure. And they’re in a rich country. (Imagine telling a poor country that its people will have to starve rather than develop known energy resources.)

What’s Plan B? Pipeline advocates want to take that argument off the table by saying that the oil sands are going to be developed anyway. At its worst, this is a defeatist the-planet-is-already-hosed-so-we-might-as-well-live-it-up-now argument.

But even ignoring that, the argument is disingenuous. The point of building the pipeline is that it makes developing the oil sands more economical. No energy deposit gets completely exploited — there’s always some oil at the bottom of the well that is recoverable, but only at a higher price. So building the pipeline clearly changes how much of the oil sand will be exploited.

And finally, the economic projections are based on a world that has no carbon tax or cap-and-trade system, which is another way of saying that we’re acting as if changing the climate had no cost.

But if the Canadian oil sands are going to be burned in their entirety (or close to it), what is going to be left in the ground? And if the answer is nothing, then what’s the plan for mitigating the damage? What’s the plan for relocating all the Bangladeshis when that country is underwater? How high does the seawall around Florida have to be? What’s the food-supply plan when Iowa turns into a desert and the ocean is too acidic to support fish?

Pipeline advocates would have you believe that the opponents are being impractical, that even if you believe in climate change (i.e., if you believe in science), this is not the place to take a stand.

So: where is the place to take a stand? And will it still be above sea level when we get there?

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Comments (25)

Peak Oil? Maybe Not

July 23, 2012 – 11:01 am

The hardest thing about living in the reality-based community is that you have to change your mind when new facts emerge. Lately, after a several-year flat period, global oil production has started growing again. The trend has reached the point where people who backed the Peak Oil Theory a few years ago are publicly changing their minds.

Here’s what George Monbiot wrote a few weeks ago in The Guardian:

Some of us made vague predictions, others were more specific. In all cases we were wrong. … Peak oil has not happened and it is unlikely to happen for a very long time. A report by the oil executive, Leonardo Maugeri, published by Harvard University, provides compelling evidence that a new oil boom has begun.

In Foreign Policy, Steve Levine is proclaiming “new age of fossil fuel abundance” and assessing the global winners (the U.S. and a variety of “new petrostates”) and losers (Russia, Venezuela, and OPEC).

My cynical first reaction was to check the sources for phony Exxon-funded think tanks, but that’s not what I’m finding. This looks legit to me.

Economists vs. ecologists. I view peak oil as one more chapter in the decades-long debate between ecologists (who know that in the natural world exponential growth always ends, and so worry that unlimited economic growth makes unsustainable claims on the planet’s resources) and economists (who have two unshakeable beliefs: handling scarcity is exactly what markets are designed to do, and human ingenuity is the one resource we will never run out of).

It’s an asymmetric debate: The economists are almost always right and we muddle along without catastrophe. But catastrophes being what they are, the ecologists only need to be right once. If civilization does go off a cliff someday, it won’t be much comfort to remember all the previous cliffs we avoided.

So a typical ecologist/economist debate goes like this: The ecologist says, “We only have X amount of commodity Y, and we’re using up Z of it every year. So unless we change our ways, it will all be gone in X/Z years, give or take. And if consumption keeps growing exponentially, it will all be gone even faster.” And the economist says, “Chill. In X/Z years we’ll have so many new discoveries, new technologies, and new ways of doing things that it won’t matter.”

Bad bets. The debate starting getting mass-media attention when the Club of Rome published The Limits to Growth in 1972. The report didn’t actually predict the world’s oil would run out by 1992, but that was the easiest headline to write. Those headlines generated a lot of panic, and (needless to say) 1992 came and went a long time ago. Every resource-depletion debate since has included an economist crowing about The Limits to Growth.

The classic economist-beats-ecologist story is the Simon/Ehrlich bet. In 1980, economist Julian Simon made the kind of put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is challenge that probably ought to happen more often: Pick any five commodities you want, Simon offered, and I’ll bet you that in 10 years they’ll be cheaper than they are now. Paul Ehrlich took the bet, picked chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten — and lost. All five were more plentiful and cost less in 1990, and Ehrlich paid up.

Peak oil. So why did anybody think oil production would peak?

Production from individual oil fields follows a well-established pattern: It starts slow, ramps up as more wells are sunk, then eventually peaks and declines. The production peak usually happens when about half the oil is still in the ground.

In the 1950s, geologist M. King Hubbard asked the question: What if we think of the United States as one big oil field? He used the single-oil-field model to predict U.S. oil production would peak between 1965 and 1970, which it did.

Hubbard extended his model to predict a world peak in 1995, and his protege Kenneth Deffeyes later updated it to get a peak sometime around 2005-2010, which for a while seemed to be accurate. The prediction graphs looked like this:

But recent production has moved above the Hubbard curve. At least for now, the price spike of 2008 seems to have done what the economists say price spikes are supposed to do: encourage conservation and stimulate production.

So now we’re seeing world oil production graphs like this:

(Notice production flattening out from 2005 to 2009.) Meanwhile, the supply of natural gas in the U.S. is booming (thanks mainly to fracking), and the price has collapsed.

Why didn’t the prediction hold? All along, the speculative part of the Peak Oil theory was that you could extrapolate from the well-supported model of oil field depletion to the depletion of oil on the whole planet. The fact that Hubbard did so well with his U.S. peak prediction made that problem seem smaller than it was.

The economists’ argument was always that as the price went up, new fields and production techniques that hadn’t been tried (because they were too expensive) would come into play. The ecologists responded, “Why didn’t that happen in when U.S. production peaked?”

In retrospect, the answer to that question is obvious: It didn’t happen because there was somewhere else to go. When production peaks in one oil field or even one country, the easiest thing to do isn’t to invent new techniques, it’s to take your old techniques somewhere where they still work. But when there’s nowhere to go, you get creative.

Global warming. In some ways, peak oil was a convenient theory for environmentalists: If we need to shift away from oil anyway, then why not deal with global warming at the same time by developing more sustainable energy sources? (Of course, the debate could have gone the other way: If we’re running out of dirty oil, then maybe we should use even dirtier coal.)

Now, environmentalists who worry about civilization’s carbon footprint are on their own; they won’t get any help from the geologists. Monbiot observes:

There is enough oil in the ground to deep-fry the lot of us and no obvious means to prevail upon governments and industry to leave it in the ground.

More and more it looks like that’s what needs to happen: Somebody who owns a king’s ransom of oil in the ground needs to be persuaded to leave it there. How exactly are we going to do that?

The resource we really do seem to be running out of is the atmosphere’s ability to absorb carbon dioxide while maintaining a biosphere productive enough to support a human population now expected to grow beyond 10 billion. That resource is not conveniently expressible as the price of a commodity, so it’s not clear exactly how markets will deal with it.

So the ecologist/economist debate will continue. And the ecologists only have to be right once.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged energy, peak oil | Comments (4)

Carolina Rules the Waves and other short notes

June 4, 2012 – 10:38 am

Mindful of the warning from Cracked, I try not to get too excited about proposed state laws that haven’t passed at least one house. The 50 states have around ten thousand legislators, so one is bound to be proposing something crazy whenever you happen to look. That shouldn’t be news.

King Canute orders the tide not to come in

Still, this might pass if sane people don’t pay attention: North Carolina is trying to regulate the rise in sea level.

OK, that’s not exactly true. Scientists say sea level is rising at a slow-but-exponentially-increasing rate. So by the end of the century it will most likely be 1-to-2 meters higher. That’s important if you’re building coastal infrastructure that’s supposed to last a long time, like a bridge or a highway. You don’t want it to be underwater in 50 years.

But North Carolina’s 20 coastal counties (and the beachfront developers who dominate politics there) want to reject that reality and substitute their own. So Replacement House Bill 819 says:

Rates of seas-level rise may be extrapolated linearly to estimate future rates of rise but shall not include scenarios of accelerated rates of sea-level rise.

As Grist’s Jesse Zimmerman explains, linear estimation

will lead to predictions that are much less catastrophic, and much more reassuring for people building resorts in the Outer Banks. The predictions will also be flat-out wrong, but that’s nothing new for North Carolina.

So North Carolina’s planners could consider seas rising 8 inches, but would be legally bound to ignore science’s 1-2 meter best guess. Any sane North Carolinians might want to notice RHB-819 and do something about it before it becomes law.

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So imagine you’re a pregnant woman and your boyfriend deserts you. You get so depressed you attempt suicide. The ER doctors save you, but not your fetus. What should happen next?

Well, in Indiana you get charged with murder.

An unexpected consequence of having an African-American president: People’s opinions on race are starting to affect their opinions on everything, even the president’s dog.

At the end of a fascinating New York Magazine story about turmoil at the top of the New York Times Corporation, we find this:

That has led to speculation, and not for the first time, that Mayor Bloomberg, a long-fabled white knight for beleaguered Times staffers, could swoop in and save the paper from itself

According to the story, the current market capitalization of NYT-corp (which also owns the Boston Globe) is about $1 billion. So if you’ve got a billion dollars jangling around in your pocket (as Mayor Bloomberg does) you can remake two of the most prestigious newspapers in the country however you want.

Komen continues to suffer from its dip into partisan politics. Participation in the Race for the Cure is down.

The unconstitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act is working its way up the ladder. A 3-judge panel of the Court of Appeals in Boston unanimously upheld a lower court’s ruling in favor of legally married same-sex couples who are being denied federal benefits. Next stop: Supreme Court.

Insurance mandates have been part of the healthcare reform debate since the early 90s, when they were a conservative alternative to single-payer proposals for achieving universal health care. So when did the idea that mandates might be unconstitutional surface for the very first time? July of 2009, a few months after President Obama proposed his plan. Until Obama got involved, nobody published any doubts about a mandate’s constitutionality.

Nicholas Kristof is also interested in Michael Sandel’s “What Money Can’t Buy” (book, article), which gave me the Sift quote two weeks ago, and I discussed in “Citizen of the Highest Bidder“.

Follow-up to last week’s “Food-eaters Are Not a Special Interest Group“: John Robbins asks “Why are twinkies cheaper than carrots?“.

24 states have considered taxing sugary drinks. In the face of massive lobbying by Coke and Pepsi, only one proposal passed (in Washington state). It was repealed after an expensive and deceptive referendum campaign financed by the big beverage companies.

What if we taxed unhealthy foods and subsidized healthy ones? Nobody would be forced to eat brocoli, but the incentives would change a little.

About that big increase in federal spending under Obama … it never actually happened.

The list of former Republican senators critical of their party’s radical turn is getting longer: Alan Simpson, Chuck Hagel, and John Danforth, in addition to the recently defeated Dick Lugar.

Glenn Beck never went away. He’s just behind a paywall.

You know who are uniquely qualified to discuss women’s health issues? Men.

By weeklysift | Posted in Short Notes | Comments (1)

“If you can’t hear it from me …” — 3 voices that might get through to your conservative friends

May 21, 2012 – 1:23 pm

If you’re a liberal who has any conservative friends or relatives, you know how well defended they are against anything you might say. Any fact you know is wrong. Any source you might quote is biased: Academia is biased (except for institutes funded by the Koch Brothers). Major newspapers are biased (except for the Washington Times). TV news is biased (except for Fox). Government agencies are biased (unless a Republican president has had their reports vetted by a political appointee) … and so on.

Here are three points of view that might sneak under the conservative radar, because of where they come from and how they’re pitched.

A former climate-change denier explains how that game works in the YouTube lecture “How to Avoid the Truth about Climate Change“. In a similar vein, Republican meteorologist and entrepreneur Paul Douglas blogs “Acknowledging Climate Science Doesn’t Make You A Liberal“.
Christian author Rachel Held Evans asks for an end to the culture wars and describes how politics is damaging the Christian message in “How to win a culture war and lose a generation” and its follow-up.
Entrepreneur Nick Hanauer’s TED talk debunks the idea that rich people like him create jobs.

Now let’s look at those one-by-one.

BYU’s Barry Bickmore on climate-change denial. Bickmore’s talk isn’t about climate change. It’s about “How to Avoid the Truth about Climate Change“. (If you don’t have time to watch, scroll down the comments to Anna Haynes’ notes on the talk.) In other words: What techniques make it possible for honest and intelligent people to deny something that virtually all the experts in the field believe?

Bickmore knows why people don’t believe in climate change, because he used to agree with them on two points: There’s lot’s of scientific controversy about global warming, and the is theory based solely on complex computer models which are easy to screw up.

When he looked into the issue more closely, though, Bickmore discovered that each of those points is wrong: Around 97% of actively publishing climate scientists believe that human activity is causing the planet to get hotter, and their opinion is verified by a variety of techniques that may not give exactly the same projections, but do agree within the bounds of the published error estimates.

He wondered: Why didn’t I already know that? What led to my confusion?

First, there were those “thousands of scientists doubt global warming” articles. Bickford explains the strategy that generates them: First, expand the field of “experts” to include a lot of people who aren’t really experts at all, and second, report a raw number that sounds big rather than doing a poll and getting a percentage.

So the Oregon Petition (claiming there is “no convincing scientific evidence” of human-caused global warming) claims 30,000 signers. But signers don’t have to be experts or even scientists. They need only have a bachelors degree, not necessarily in a relevant field.

So why is this impressive to people — 30,000 scientists? … People think about scientists as “Well, you know science, so why don’t you tell me?” Right? But in reality we’re much more specialized than that. If you have cancer, you don’t go to your podiatrist. You go to your oncologist.

Ditto for the 900 peer-reviewed journal articles skeptical of climate change. It sounds like a big number, but in what universe of journals? Apparently, a universe big enough to include journals that publish “research” articles on dog astrology and UFO abductions.

Bickford continues, similarly destroying the “What about Galileo?” and “We don’t need experts” objections, leading to this conclusion:

There’s always room for doubt. But there has to be a point — if we’re going to make any attempt at all at trying to be objective — that we have to admit that we’re trying too hard [to avoid the truth]. And I think that for people who are on the side I was a few years ago, I think we should admit that we’ve reached that point.

Rachel Held Evans on the damage Christianity is suffering from the culture wars. After reviewing some research showing how young adults (even those raised in Christian households and even young church-goers) view Christianity’s anti-gay image negatively and are shamed by what they see as un-Christ-like hostility towards their gay and lesbian friends, Evans gives her personal observations. When she speaks at Christian colleges, she finds that “every single student I have spoken with believes that the Church has mishandled its response to homosexuality.“

On the evening when North Carolina’s anti-gay Amendment One was passing by a wide margin, Evans saw a pattern in her Twitter feed:

Christians over 40 were celebrating. Christians under 40 were mourning. Reading through the comments, the same thought kept returning to my mind as occurred to me when I first saw that [pro-amendment] Billy Graham ad:

You’re losing us.

I’ve said it a million times, and I’ll say it again…(though I’m starting to think that no one is listening):

My generation is tired of the culture wars.

Back when gays were in the closet, you could make them out to be any kind of hobgoblins you wanted. All the scary talk about a “gay agenda” depends on that image: sinister conspirators out to destroy everything good and decent in the world.

But to folks under 40, gays and lesbians are their friends from high school. They decorated homecoming floats together and washed cars side-by-side to raise money to send the French Club to Paris.

We know too many wonderful people from the LGBT community to consider homosexuality a mere “issue.” These are people, and they are our friends. When they tell us that something hurts them, we listen.

Evans says her generation wants to “stop waging war and start washing feet”. Translating for those who don’t speak Christian: They want to help people rather than beat them down, and practice their religion humbly rather than be authoritarian ideologues. If they can’t do that inside the church, she says, they’ll do it somewhere else.

Nick Hanauer. This guy was an early investor in Amazon, and then made several other piles of money by starting little-fish companies that he eventually sold to bigger fish like Microsoft. In other words: not a communist, not a fifth-generation Rockefeller who has forgotten where his trust fund came from, not an academic economist who has never made or sold anything.

Hanauer’s 6-minute TED talk addresses one question: Who are the job creators? You might expect him to answer, “People like me.” But he doesn’t.

If there was no one around who could afford to buy what we had to sell, all those companies [I helped start] and all those jobs would have evaporated. That’s why I can say with confidence that rich people don’t create jobs. Nor do businesses, large or small.

Jobs are a consequence of a circle-of-life-like feedback loop between customers and businesses. And only consumers can set in motion this virtuous cycle of increasing demand and hiring. In this sense, an ordinary consumer is more of a job creator than a capitalist like me.

… Anyone who’s ever run a business knows that hiring more people is a course of last resort for capitalists. It’s what we do if and only if rising consumer demand requires it.

After displaying graphs of rising income and falling tax rates for the rich since 1980, he comments:

If it was true that lower taxes for the rich and more wealth for the wealthy led to job creation, today we would be drowning in jobs.

But when the middle class thrives, businesses grow and everyone does better. So he concludes:

In a capitalistic economy, the true job creators are middle-class consumers. And taxing the rich to make investments that make the middle class grow and thrive, is the single shrewdest thing we can do for the middle class, for the poor, and for the rich.

At first, Hanauer’s talk didn’t appear on the TED website — not all of them do — leading National Journal to bill the talk as “too hot for TED“. This prompted a TED official to post “the real story“, claiming that the audience gave the talk mediocre ratings:

a non-story about a talk not being chosen, because we believed we had better ones, somehow got turned into a scandal about censorship.

Even that spin, though, implies that TED and its audience are not very representative. Once the YouTube got out, it quickly went viral and has been seen (so far) by over 400,000 people.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged culture wars, inequality | Comments (11)

Seven Issues the Election Should Be About

April 9, 2012 – 12:05 pm

You may not have noticed, but the general election campaign started this week. I say that for two reasons:

Mitt Romney’s victory in Wisconsin pretty well seals his nomination. Republicans understand now: No white knight is coming to save them. It’s Romney or four more years of Obama.
President Obama’s speech Tuesday was essentially a keynote address for the fall campaign.

We can already see what that campaign will be like. Romney won the GOP nomination by raising massive amounts of money and carpet-bombing any prospective rival with negative ads. President Obama is projected to raise just under a billion dollars. In either case, you really can’t spend that kind of money on warm, fuzzy stuff. Constant advertising annoys people, so the best you can hope for is to transfer their annoyance to your opponent.

Given how politics has been going, we can anticipate that major issues will be dodged, misrepresented, and even lied about. The media, which ought to be ferreting out the information voters need to make a wise choice, will instead focus on whatever gaffes or stinging comebacks they can find or manufacture, no matter how irrelevant or trivial.

That’s a shame, because there really is an important debate to be had. I don’t claim to know what Mitt Romney believes in his heart – recently his campaign has suggested that we don’t know his “real views” yet – but I know what his party and the conservative movement stands for. Similarly, I’m never sure exactly how much liberalism President Obama is going to defend, but I have a good idea what liberalism means.

It’s a significant contrast. A honest debate between those two worldviews, resulting in a clear choice by a well-informed electorate, would be a tremendous plus for this country.

OK, it won’t happen. But we shouldn’t just shrug and let the candidates off the hook. Even as we see the waters start to circle around the sewer drain, let’s review what this campaign should be about.

1. Inequality. We’ve been in a vicious cycle for 30 years now: The rich get richer; they use that money to buy more political power; and then they use that political power to lower their taxes, weaken the the regulations they have to follow, and otherwise game the system in their favor – plus make it easier to buy political power.

The Republican Party has been the main (but not the only) vehicle for the rich, so it will be interesting to see whether President Obama succeeds in raising this issue, or if conservatives manage to label it all as envy and class warfare. I thought Obama laid it out pretty well Tuesday:

In this country, broad-based prosperity has never trickled down from the success of a wealthy few. It has always come from the success of a strong and growing middle class. … And yet, for much of the last century, we have been having the same argument with folks who keep peddling some version of trickle-down economics. They keep telling us that if we’d convert more of our investments in education and research and health care into tax cuts — especially for the wealthy — our economy will grow stronger. … Now, the problem for advocates of this theory is that we’ve tried their approach — on a massive scale. The results of their experiment are there for all to see.

2. The National Security State. At a time when government is supposed to be tightening its belt, we continue to spend more on defense than all our potential enemies put together. Is that really necessary? How much money could we save with a less aggressive foreign policy that didn’t inject us into every conflict?

Would the world really be a worse place? We’ll never know how the Arab Spring would have handled Saddam if we hadn’t spent all that blood and treasure in Iraq.

And then there’s the internal effect on our liberty and democracy. Government surveillance gets ever more intrusive, and more and more of the government’s actions are secret. How necessary is that?

The opposing case is that the world is a dangerous place, and would be even more dangerous if the US didn’t police it. Maybe Norway can keep its freedom defended with (and from) a relatively small security force, but the US doesn’t have that option.

It’s President Obama’s fault that we won’t have this discussion. (Ron Paul was the only Republican candidate who wanted to talk about it.) He has largely continued the Bush national security policies rather than challenge them.

3. Climate change. There are lots of legitimate liberal/conservative issues to hash out concerning how to deal with climate change: Should we lower CO2 by market mechanisms (cap and trade), by a carbon tax, or by direct government regulation? Should we bargain hard to get other countries to do their part, or should we take the lead? What CO2 level should we be shooting for and how fast should we try to get there? How do we balance the expense of current CO2 reduction versus investments in future research? Can geo-engineering play a role?

We aren’t having those debates because the fossil fuel corporations have spent enormous amounts of money to make the existence of climate change the issue, when in fact the science is well established. The Republican Party has been acting as a wholely-owned subsidiary of the fossil fuel companies, and some Democrats have also been either bought or intimidated by energy-industry cash.

4. The Deficit. Elsewhere I’ve presented the idea that the deficit is not the doomsday device many would have you believe. But it is a symptom of a broken political process. Congress’ main job is to figure out what we as a people want to buy and how we’re going to pay for it. If it can’t do that, what can it do?

A big chunk of the problem is the misinformed electorate. Survey after survey shows that we grossly overestimate how much money is spent on welfare, foreign aid, and whatever National-Endowment-for-the-Arts-type program we find most offensive. We also grossly underestimate how many government services we use personally, and we’re misinformed about how our taxes compare to Americans of recent decades. (Hint: Our taxes are far lower, especially for corporations and the wealthy.)

About half the country thinks we can eliminate the deficit with spending cuts that don’t touch “programs that benefit people like you”. That wishful thinking allows candidates to get away with proposing big-but-vague spending cuts that exempt defense, Social Security, and Medicare — just about everything we spend big on.

5. Immigration. Both liberals and conservatives are conflicted about immigration. There is no ideologically pure answer to our immigration problem, which is why the conversation never goes anywhere.

The centuries-old dream of American employers is to have a workforce that can’t vote. So their ideal is to have temporary foreign-worker programs: We bring people in for ten years or so, get them to work hard for very little money, and then send them home.

But working-class whites see immigrants-taking-American-jobs as one of the social changes they want the Republican Party to protect them from. Hence the rhetoric about rounding up the millions of undocumented Hispanic workers and sending them home.

The last thing the Republican Party wants is millions of poor, non-white new citizens — who would probably vote for Democrats. Democrats would like that, but the unions that support Democrats probably wouldn’t, for the same reason as conservative working-class whites.

Everybody agrees that we shouldn’t have millions of undocumented people wandering around. It’s a security risk, makes our worker-protection rules unenforcible, and generally undermines the rule of law. But since neither side has a solution it wants to take to the voters, both will posture about the issue rather than try to make progress.

6. Health care. Our health care system is a mess. We spend way more per person than any other country, and we get worse results. This is a great country for someone as rich as Dick Cheney to get a heart transplant, but it’s a terrible country for a poor pregnant woman to get pre-natal care. When you average it out, our life expectancy sucks and we lead the industrialized world in unnecessary deaths.

ObamaCare (like the RomneyCare it’s based on) is an imperfect first step at reform. I think it gives away far too much to health insurance companies and drug companies, but that’s politics. If Congress repeals it or the Supreme Court throws it out, we’re essentially nowhere, because the “replace” part of the Republican “repeal and replace” slogan is just a word; there is no actual plan that addresses any of the substantive issues.

And liberals shouldn’t let Obama say “Done now.” ObamaCare has a lot of holes that need filling.

7. The future of democracy. This issue runs through a lot of the others. Ideally, individual voters would educate themselves about the issues that concern them and elect candidates to represent their views. If they really felt strongly, they’d donate $20 or $50 to a campaign.

We’re far, far away from that ideal, and moving farther all the time. The Supreme Court has ruled that money equals speech, and that more speech is better than less. So elections are dominated by massive spending that produces better propaganda — not better educated voters.

In addition, while voters may wake up in time for an election, the big-money interests never sleep. Defeat some special-interest measure like SOPA, and within a few months it will be back in a different form. The big banks can hire entire staffs of lobbyists to write loopholes into new regulations. Voters don’t have the time to ferret that stuff out, and if they did, they couldn’t organize themselves fast enough to do anything about it.

We aren’t having this discussion because no candidate who took it seriously could raise enough money. Worse, neither party even has an ideal vision of how to handle it. The closest thing to a practical reform vision I’ve seen so far is Lawrence Lessig’s.

Resist. Chances are, this election will be decided by something stupid: a blip in the unemployment numbers, a new Romney gaffe on the Etch-a-Sketch scale, or Obama’s inability to prove that he is not a shape-shifter from the Gamma Quadrant. Heck, we’ve had elections decided on the Pledge of Allegiance.

But we don’t have to give in to that. Collectively, social networking ought to give us Arab-Spring-level power, if we exercise it. We can refuse to respond to nonsense. We can keep coming back to the real issues. It may not work in this cycle. But eventually, we might be able to drag the candidates back to what’s important.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged 2012 election, democracy, economics, health care, Mitt Romney, Obama, peace | Comments (8)

Covering Climate Change Seriously and other short notes

March 26, 2012 – 1:00 pm

Buried deep in an insight-filled exchange between Grist‘s David Roberts and The Roost‘s Wen Stephenson about media coverage of climate change is this brilliant analogy:

It’s quite instructive to compare coverage of climate with coverage of the deficit.

Both are long-term threats whose short-term symptoms don’t seem that serious. But they’re covered very differently.

Mainstream journalists routinely tell us that a trillion-dollar-a-year deficit will lead to disaster. They don’t worry about sounding like activists or alarmists. When a newsmaker warns about the consequences of the deficit, journalists don’t hunt up some fringe economist to give an opposing view. Further, journalists will bring the deficit into a story even when the sources don’t. If a politician is proposing something related to taxing or spending, a common question is “What would that do to the deficit?”

None of that happens when mainstream journalists cover climate change. Roberts sums up:

the deficit is mentioned not just in stories about the deficit but in almost every story about economics or government, period! You can recommend economic austerity measures that are absurd to professional economists and never, ever get your reputation dinged. There is no social risk to over-worrying or talking too much about the deficit; there’s only upside, reputation- and career-wise. It is the paradigmatic Very Serious issue, divorced from the facts but reinforced by herd behavior.

Climate is the mirror image. The facts support a far more alarmist case, but not only can objective journalists not take that for granted — they’re barely allowed to take the existence of climate change for granted. Even the mildest of carbon-pricing schemes is deemed radical, unrealistic, bad politics. “Everybody knows” we’re going to keep accelerating through oil, gas, and coal until they’re gone. To say otherwise is to be un-savvy

When action on climate change is blocked, it’s typically reported as a defeat for “environmentalists” — a special interest group. But when action to cut the deficit fails, it’s a blow to our grandchildren.

Roberts’ analogy provides a very simple way to explain what we should be demanding from the media: Cover climate change the way you cover the deficit. It’s not impossible or impractical or a violation of journalistic ethics. They’re already doing it on a different issue.

Today’s wishful thinking: Maybe outright lying by politicians will become less acceptable. I’m not talking about the lies everybody tells about their inner process (like “I don’t pay attention to the polls”), I mean checkable black-is-white lies about history and the state of the world. Maybe the media will start calling attention to these lies and make them counterproductive.

This pollyanna-ish thought is motivated by NPR’s new journalistic ethics handbook, which emphasizes truth over balance.

At all times, we report for our readers and listeners, not our sources. So our primary consideration when presenting the news is that we are fair to the truth. If our sources try to mislead us or put a false spin on the information they give us, we tell our audience. If the balance of evidence in a matter of controversy weighs heavily on one side, we acknowledge it in our reports.

Journalism critic Jay Rosen sees this as a rejection of he-said/she-said coverage, where opposing true and false statements are presented without comment.

AlterNet’s Sarah Jaffe thinks she has found an example of the new policy: On February 27, NPR ran a Mitt Romney quote and then corrected the part of it that was false. Maybe that practice will catch on with other journalists.

Correcting lies is a good first step. Ultimately, I’d like to hear journalists objectively report “That guy just lied to us” as Rachel Maddow does here:

The Romney Etch-a-Sketch gaffe just underlines what I wrote about him last week:

his general-election strategy depends on voters doubting his honesty: Come fall, he’ll need to convince independents that he didn’t mean any of the stuff he’s saying now.

Lauren Zuniga’s poem for the Oklahoma legislators is painful to listen to, but that’s what’s so good about it.

Oklahoma is one of many states passing laws whose main purpose seems to be to humiliate and cause anguish to women who want an abortion. Zuniga strips away all the facades and reacts to the spiteful intention behind the law.

While we’re talking about transvaginal ultrasounds, have you ever wondered how doctors feel about the state using them as tools of humiliation against their patients? This one doesn’t like it, and even thinks some civil disobedience is in order:

When the community has failed a patient by voting an ideologue into office…When the ideologue has failed the patient by writing legislation in his own interest instead of in the patient’s…When the legislative system has failed the patient by allowing the legislation to be considered… When the government has failed the patient by allowing something like this to be signed into law… We as physicians cannot and must not fail our patients by ducking our heads and meekly doing as we’re told.

Zuninga’s poem is an example of the Left getting more aggressive on social issues, a trend I hope catches on. For the longest time we’ve been passive. Unless “family values” types took crystal meth with gay prostitutes, we’ve mostly not challenged their claims to be well-intentioned moral people, motivated by conscience and authentic religious conviction.

It’s time for that to stop. That’s why Fred Clark’s recent article The ‘biblical view’ that’s younger than the Happy Meal is so important: He points out the suspicious timing of the evangelical revelation that a newly-fertilized ovum has a soul.

They haven’t always believed that. They started believing it after Roe v Wade, and it became undebatable in evangelical circles after abortion became the center of a right-wing political movement.

In other words, this isn’t a political view motivated by theological conviction. The theology was invented to support a political movement already in progress.

Two weeks ago (in the weekly challenge) I proposed that the Left go on offense on women’s issues by pushing the Equal Rights Amendment again. I wasn’t the only one to think of that.

The American public has basically the same view on abortions that it has on guns: There are too many of them, but if my family ever decides that we need one, I don’t want the government telling us we can’t have it.

So whether the public is pro or anti depends on how the question is phrased. This poll bears that out on abortion: In every religious group, large numbers of people who disapprove of abortion still want it to be available.

If you’re not watching Cara Santa Maria’s videos on Huffington Post, you’re not just missing good coverage of science and society, you’re missing a hot chick with glasses whose tag line is “Talk nerdy to me.” I mean, I like Bill Nye the Science Guy, but …

Here she tells us about a new state law to return Tennessee to the days of the Scopes Monkey Trial.

If you’ve ever wondered about those “Proof Jesus Never Existed” ads that show up in the back of magazines or pop up on the internet, Biblical scholar Bart Ehrman has a new book out. I don’t think this is too much of a spoiler: He concludes Jesus existed.

I don’t expect President Obama to raise the Romney dog-on-the-roof issue explicitly. I just think we’ll see a lot of pictures like this:

If a prospective employer asks you to give them your Facebook password, what other morally dubious demands will they make?

And why would an employer trust applicants who are willing to violate FaceBook’s rules and compromise their friends’ privacy like that?

A week ago Friday, the Daily Show had one of its best episodes ever. The opening monologue was funny as usual, but the next two segments were John Oliver’s amazing take-down of our defunding of UNESCO. It culminates with Oliver in Africa (really — not via green-screen) explaining to cute African children why Israel-Palestine politics means they can’t have an education.

By weeklysift | Posted in Short Notes | Also tagged media | Comments (1)

Culture Wars Rise with the Economy and other short notes

February 13, 2012 – 12:17 pm

A simple reason why Rick Santorum and the culture wars are on the upswing in Republican primaries: As the economy improves, the rationale of the Romney campaign falls apart. Social issues were supposed to stay on the sidelines so that Mitt the Financial Wizard could pound Obama the Economic Failure.

Salon’s Alex Parene asks: “Would it be conspiratorial to note that these divisive cultural issues began attracting a great deal of right-wing attention very soon after the release of a positive jobs report?”

Not at all, Alex.

Purple cow? No. Purple squirrel? Here.

The difference between liberal nonsense and conservative nonsense is that liberals let the audience in on the joke.

It looks like another surge of global-warming denial is building. A couple weeks ago the Wall Street Journal printed a letter from 16 scientists and engineers saying “There is no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to ‘decarbonize’ the world’s economy.” They compared global warming to Lysenkoism and presented a picture of scientific community heavy-handedly enforcing a rigid dogma.

If you look at the list of signers, most of them have no connection to climate science, so their opinion is no more significant than mine or any other educated person’s. Skeptical Science finds them “worth noting for their lack of noteworthiness”. Only two have “published climate research in the past three decades” while 7 have received funding from the fossil fuel industry. Skeptical Science also debunks the letter’s claims, and includes a wonderful graph explaining how an energy-industry flack can make a warming trend look like a cooling trend.

At the same time, the WSJ refused to print a letter from 255 members of the National Academy of Sciences defending the scientific process and claiming:

Many recent assaults on climate science and, more disturbingly, on climate scientists by climate change deniers are typically driven by special interests or dogma, not by an honest effort to provide an alternative theory that credibly satisﬁes the evidence.

Forbes called the WSJ’s actions “remarkable editorial bias“, which shouldn’t surprise anyone, now that it’s owned by Rupert Murdoch.

Some of the same misinformation appeared simultaneously in a British tabloid, from which it migrated to the Washington Times and other right-wing publications. Kevin Drum debunks.

New re-election plan: Surround Obama with kids and gadgets, and he’s irresistible.

James Fallows writes an insightful analysis of what we’ve learned about Obama during his first term.

When I wrote last week’s article on Komen and Planned Parenthood, it wasn’t clear yet whether Komen had really reversed itself or the right-wingers inside Komen had just stepped back until public outrage faded a little. “[Karen] Handel is still on the job, after all.”

Not any more. Tuesday morning Handel resigned. So maybe Komen is serious about de-politicizing itself and getting back to its mission.

The anti-public-employee jihad that is getting Wisconsin’s Scott Walker recalled has spread to Utah and Arizona.

Just for the cuteness of it: Video of a wolf pup playing with a bear cub.

By weeklysift | Posted in Short Notes | Also tagged culture wars, Obama | Comments (1)

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