How Not Not to Fix Climate Change

I'm trying to make some sense of Joe Nocera's climate change article in today's NYT. Here's the meat of his argument, I think:

so long as the demand is there, energy producers are going to search for new supplies of fossil fuel — many of them using unconventional means like tar sands extraction. “With growing global demand, the economic pressure to develop unconventional resources is enormous and not going away,” he said. “Can environmental groups expect to win a series of fights for decades to come, when the economic forces are aligned very strongly against them in each round?” The answer is obvious: no. The emphasis should be on demand, not supply. If the U.S. stopped consuming so much of the world’s oil, the economic need for the tar sands would evaporate.

If I'm understanding correctly, Nocera believes that it's futile to try to prevent the production and distribution of tar sands oil because demand is so high. But why? History is full of examples of governments enacting and enforcing environmental protection standards to inhibit or slow production not just in spite of but in response to high demand for some product. That is because the very fact that there's high demand necessitates the enforcement of constraints so as to ensure that its production doesn't come at the cost of ecological damage. It would be nonsensical to attempt to implement limits on production only for things for which there was no demand. And in fact if we effectively forbid or constrain the production of tar sands oil the demand is mitigated exactly because we've increased the costs to reflect actual costs to society.

Nocera then goes on to attack the notion of a carbon tax: "He [James E. Hansen] told me he would like to see oil companies pay a fee, which would rise annually, based on carbon emissions. He said that such a tax could reduce emissions by 30 percent within 10 years. Well, maybe. But it would also likely make the expensive tar sands oil more viable."

But why would it? Production of tar sands oil generates more emissions, so, in fact, a carbon tax doesn't make tar sand oil more viable. Relative to other energy sources it would be affected more heavily by a carbon tax.

Finally, Nocera argue, " If you really want to eliminate expensive new fossil fuel sources, the best way is to lower the price of oil, which would render them uneconomical." Setting aside the question of how we go about lowering the price of oil without opening up new supplies like the tar sands, the problem with this suggestion is that it increases demand and emissions while decreasing the oil supply. This, of course, will force us to look more quickly to alternate sources, like the tar sands.  The solution to a problem caused by the overconsumption of oil can't be steps that are likely to further increase the consumption of oil.

Anti-Semitism and those NRA Hitler arguments

A few articles I've seen in recent days have been trying to refute the arguments of the NRA and its ilk that Hitler's tyranny was facilitated by gun restrictions on the citizenry. See, for example, The Hitler gun control lie  or Was Hitler really a fan of gun control or The Myth of Hitler's Gun Ban. I'm not going to try to address the soundness or validity of the NRA argument that Hitler used gun control to establish tyranny and the Holocaust. But I think it's worth noting even if Hitler and Stalin had exploited gun control to establish tyranny, (and it's not clear to me that they did), it would be wrong to assume that the second amendment is the only or even the most efficacious way to prevent tyranny.

But setting that aside, a common point in these refutations is arguing that Hitler's 1938 gun law in fact loosened gun control.  There are two things wrong with this as a refutation of attempts to prove that gun control had anything to do with tyranny and the Holocaust. First, gun rights advocates are correct to observe that Hitler's regime was preceded by the establishment of a gun registry in 1928. This wasn't Hitler's doing, as at least one of these articles stresses, but isn't that entirely beside the point? The argument, presumably, is that gun control can facilitate tyranny, not a less interesting historical argument about whether or not Hitler established the gun registry. Secondly, and more importantly, in my opinion, the argument is  just wrong about the law being pro-gun rights.  Hitler's 1938 gun law (wikipedia link) apparently did loosen gun laws for *some* people, but it didn't do away with a registry, only removed rifles from the list. However, the '38 gun law *completely forbade* Jews from owning guns. Arguments that Hitler wasn't really a gun control proponent must dismiss or trivialize this fact, but that's a pretty important fact to trivialize or dismiss. The line of argument strikes me as anti-semitic. To interpret it as pro-gun rights we have to assume that the rights of Jewish people are irrelevant or not particularly relevant to the overall rights question.

Suppose that someone were trying to persuade us that some dictator actually wasn't an opponent of democracy and to demonstrate that s/he pointed to some legislation the dictator's administration implemented that made it slightly easier for white males to vote but stripped away that right from all women. Wouldn't we argue that that actually didn't show the dictator was pro-democracy at all, but only that the historian was quite sexist?

GOP, Change your policies because they're wrong, not because you lost

E.J. Dionne's latest article in the WaPo involves a line of argument that I've heard a number of times since the election. That line of thinking goes something like this: Insofar as the Republicans haven't changed their positions since the election they're at worst failing their obligations as politicians and at best being thickheaded, unwise or imprudent. Because they lost they should change their minds and positions; even Ann Coulter is saying it. I should say up front that I find most of the GOP platform odious and I wish they'd change their positions on many things -- I think their policies and intransigence on the environment, (particularly global warming), taxation, government spending, foreign policy and civil liberties are dangerous and hurting America. But the reason they should change their policies isn't because they lost the election, it's because they're bad policies. Whether or not policies get you elected should be largely beside the point. We want our politicians to win because they've convinced people of the rightness of their positions, not win because they've simply adopted the positions they think people want to hear. We have a word for the latter, it's called pandering,  but pandering is exactly what people seem to expect the GOP to now do.

The obligation of someone running for office is to present his/her ideas to the electorate. If the candidate isn't elected we can conclude that the voters rejected those ideas or that the candidate failed to explain them clearly enough or that the voters didn't trust the candidate or some combination of these options. But it's not the case that it would also behoove the candidate to change his/her positions *because* the voters were disinclined to vote for them. In fact, wouldn't this be the most despicable candidate of all, i.e., the candidate who cares more about victory than principles? But the GOP and their critics are being remarkably transparent as to what they perceive as their obligations. For example, we suddenly see the GOP saying that they need to have a more tolerant policy on immigration. Not because their last one was morally repugnant or ill-conceived or economically counterproductive, but because they need to suck up to Latinos to get votes from them.

To be clear, none of this is to argue that the GOP has been a principled party coming into the election and that should remain on the high road. My only contention here is with the unspoken assumption  that a politician's first obligation isn't to have defensible ideals and a commitment to carefully thought out principles, but rather to winning and to rejecting any and all policies and practices that are unlikely to increase the odds of that.

Ohio (with deepest apologies to Neil Young)

 Refreshing Marshall's Poll Tracker
Best app on my phone
This autumn I'm so distracted
Four up in Ohio

Gotta get off my laptop
Bloggers are cutting me down
Shoulda been at work by now
What's with Florida
How can we be 6 points down?
And what's Joe Scarborough know

10:30, still watching Maddow
Romney, that witless clown
This autumn I keep repeatin
Four up in Ohio
Four up in Ohio
Four up in Ohio ...

On Obama and the popular vote

The events surrounding Hurricane Sandy increase the chances of a scenario in which Obama wins the presidency but loses the popular vote. Many argue that that would undermine the legitimacy of an Obama win and the nature of his mandate. I found those arguments unpersuasive when posed against Bush and I find them unpersuasive now. Candidates and the voters behave in response to the parameters of the election. The fact that Obama is likely to win California and New York while Romney is likely to win Texas affects turnout in those states. Why go to the polls if you know your guy is going to win or lose? Similarly, it affects the way candidates campaign. If winning the popular vote were the relevant consideration, candidates wouldn't be spending all this time in Ohio at the price of their other sources of potential supporters.

Measuring candidates by popular vote when they've been aiming for electoral college votes is like changing the baseball criterion for success to net runs over the season after teams having been simply pursuing wins. Teams would object that had they been told that net runs had been the relevant criterion they would have followed much different strategies in games in which they were far ahead or far behind. We can't define success by one criterion and then measure success by a very different one particularly when the metric's definition has such a direct effect on the nature of performance.

On garbage pickup fees and universal health care

Some years ago I had a discussion with a friend about the prudence of a municipality charging a nominal fee (~$1) for each bag of garbage it picked up. I argued in favour of the policy as I thought it would discourage waste and, I argued, my friend should also support it based on his support for the principles of free market economics. Surely a $1 fee in which users are forced to recognize and absorb some of the cost of moving garbage was preferable to one in which the government absorbed all costs and the user of the system was almost completely insulated from actual cost of the service. His argument was that the public's interest in making it maximally easy for people to keep their homes and yards clean and tidy far outstripped such considerations. In other words, the government should absorb all the costs because it was funding a key  public good and keeping it cheap / free greatly enhanced the value of that public good.

I've been thinking about that argument recently because the town in which I live recently made it much easier to get rid of all sorts of household waste, yard waste, etc. It used to be the case that getting rid of non-standard garbage required a call to the city and required paying a substantial fee after a household's quota was exceeded. Now the town simply picks up all forms of garbage on every garbage disposal day. I realize that it has actually made us a lot more ambitious about doing yard, basement and shed cleanup. We no longer wait until we have a significant amount of potential waste before underaking a cleanup project and it has indeed resulted in a much tidier yard and shed. (the basement, well ...) So, I'm going to acknowledge that my friend was right. It certainly hasn't increased our consumption or wastefulness, just our cleaning efforts.

An article by Sarah Kliff in today's Washington Post reminds  me that there's a version of the "free garbage pickup" argument in support of providing affordable (free?) universal health care. Kliff summarizes a study observing that as health insurance costs for workers rise, productivity drops. Unsurprisingly, making it difficult to go to the doctor results in people going to the doctor less, being or becoming less healthy and, as a result, being less productive on the job. For the same reason that it makes good sense from a productivity perspective for employers to give their employees free flu shots, it makes bad sense from a productivity perspective for employers to make it expensive to go to the doctor. Similarly, data indicate that concerns about maintaining health insurance coverage are a huge disincentive to people contemplating kicking off a business start up. (In fact, there's a heavily disproportionate number of people of Medicare age who participate in startups because they don't share the worry about need a health care plan backup.) Or consider how the high costs of funding private health insurance act as a significant disincentive to global companies considering the possibility of starting a business in the US.

Perhaps the health care debate needs to focus on such things to bring the free-marketeers onside for a universal health care system. There's not just an obvious moral argument for doing so, there's an excellent economic reason for doing so. The introduction of a universal health care system may well pay for itself in terms of increased economic productivity, innovation and competitiveness. A single payer system may not in itself be a manifestation of pure free market ideology, but it's well worth it because of all the grease it gives to the turning of the cogs in an effective market economy. 

NCAA PSU sanctions

I'm no defender of PSU or Joe Paterno, but the  "vacating of wins" announced in the NCAA's penalty to PSU over the Sandusky child abuse doesn't make much sense to me. I'm glad they've pulled down Paterno's statue and I wouldn't have minded if they'd simply shut down the program (of course, I wouldn't mind if they'd just shut down all Div. 1 athletics), but unless there's reason to think that the misdeeds contributed to the PSU victories in some meaningful way, I don't understand how we can reasonably try to claim that those wins didn't occur. Does the guy who now has the record for most football wins think that this somehow proves he actually coached more football wins than Paterno did? He presumably is a better human being than Paterno was, but seems to me that the "number of wins" metric still records what it always seemed to recorder regardless of what we know about Paterno's willingness to cover up child abuse. "Number of wins" is, to my mind, a simple metric, not a reward that the NCAA can somehow grant and retract.