Obama immigration plan is too tough and too lenient

This has a climate hook, by the way.

Obama's plan, summarized here, takes 13 years to give citizenship to people who have been here just short of forever.  It also legalizes and puts on the same track the people who arrive the day before the proposal would be introduced as legislation.  These are two different sets of people both as far as our ethical obligations and our self-interest are concerned.

The starting point should recognize three categories, and then argue who fits in those categories:

1. Immigrants who have been here a very long time - these people are Americans, basically, and have about as much right and reason to be citizens as the rest of us.  Once we've figured out that they qualify in this category, the wait time should be short to make them citizens.

What constitutes a "very long time" is a devilish detail that could get much debate, but that debate doesn't remove the fact that the category is legitimate.  The law by necessity draws a bright line somewhere in a gray area.  That's just life.

2. People who arrived recently - these are different people.  They aren't Americans, they are prospective immigrants who happen to be here already.  They aren't integrated into society and they haven't given significant investments of their lives into building the country.  The key here is that we owe them no more than we owe other prospective immigrants, so it's up to us to decide whether it's in our interest to give them a different status than other prospective immigrants who haven't come here illegally.

3. People in transition to becoming immigrants - just because you have to establish bright lines in gray zones doesn't mean you have to deny the existence of a gray zone.  So here they are, people who haven't just arrived but also haven't been here for so long that the only ethical and reasonable thing to do is to fast-track them to citizenship.  Some immediate legalization plus lengthy path to citizenship seems appropriate.  Obama's one-size-fits all approach is probably best just for this group.

The climate angle is this aspect (from the link above):  "The White House draft wouldn’t just affect undocumented immigrants currently in America. Spouses and children of newly legalized prospective immigrants could also apply for an LPI visa themselves from overseas if they pass a background check and pay the proper fees."

If you add triple the number of immigrants from the current 11 million, that extra 33 million people will mean a 5 to 7 percent increase our national greenhouse gas emissions.  Global GHG emissions aren't affected in exactly the same way, but it will increase as these people move from lower-carbon footprints to our own.  Even if the effect is reduced by having a total cap on emissions, the cap itself will be determined in part by how easy it is to live within the cap, and increasing the population by 5 percent will make it that much harder.  I don't think LPI visa holders or green card holders should have the right to bring in new immigrants - they should complete the citizenship process first.

Two other points - first, Obama's 13 year proposal is a classic worse-than-unethical-because-it's-a-blunder.  The significant majority of these people are going to be Democratic voters.  You don't make them wait forever to vote, and you don't start off with 13 years as your opening bid and then negotiate something worse than that with the Republicans.

Second, I think the issue underscores the need for future international greenhouse gas regulation to recognize and reward countries for accepting immigrants.  While Europe and Japan have admittedly done a far better job than the US on climate over the last 25 years, it would be an interesting exercise to estimate what their emissions would have been if they had accepted the same level of immigration.  Still far less than the US per person, but maybe not quite as stellar.

Contest for Planetary Solutions

Sustainable Silicon Valley has a contest for Solutions for Planetary Sustainability.  Yours truly has taken the subjects of two Rabbet Run posts (on greening the local and national Chambers of Commerce, and using electric vehicle battery power to supplement diesel generator power in blackouts) and made them into contest entries here and here.  Over 200 other solutions are also on tap.

Per modern convention, anyone who wants can register for free and then vote on solutions and give comments.  A critical soul has even tried to inspire better efforts by giving almost everyone zero out of five stars.  Feel free to support any entry you like, but the opportunity to vote ends on Friday.

A request to readers - give us your Rubio climate rebuttals

I'd like to try a little experiment here - a little over a week ago, Marco Rubio graced the Internet with his nontheories regarding climate change.  I thought about doing a line-by-line rebuttal and then decided you all might be able to do a much better job than me.

So below I'm putting Rubio's claims down, one at a time for your rebuttals and prebuttals.  As a way of responding to the finding that repeating falsehoods reinforces them, even if corrections are added, the way I want to do this is precede each claim with the truth, then give the claim, and then follow up with more truth.

Just leave your rebuttals and links below in the comments - and please say which claim(s) you're responding to. As they develop, I'll add the best.  What's really needed is a special wiki devoted to refuting his nonsense, but in its absence I'll be the referee (Eli too if he wants), adding the best refutations and links.  I'll look for the most concise, most readily-understood refutations with the most-generally-accepted link sources.  No more than two or maybe three before and after each claim - if a refutation gets bumped, it'll be included as additional sources in footnotes.

Let's see if this works.  To the Rubio quotes!

Claim 1.  Relevant truth:
Claim 1.  Ignorance from Rubio:  "Anything we would do on [climate change] would have a real impact on the economy but probably if it's only us doing it a very negligible impact on the environment."
Claim 1.  More truth:

Claim 2.  Relevant truth:
Claim 2.  Ignorance from Rubio:  "Ultimately if you look at the developing countries which are not developing countries any more, China, India, and others, they're now the largest polluters in the world by far."
Claim 2.  More truth:

Claim 3.  Relevant truth:
Claim 3.  Ignorance from Rubio:  "....On the other hand if we unilaterally impose these sorts of things on our economy it would have a devastating impact on economics depending on which measure it is we're talking about."
Claim 3.  More truth:

Claim 4.  Relevant truth:
Claim 4.  Ignorance from Rubio:  "I think that's what more than anything else is standing in the way of doing anything on this, there has to be a cost-benefit analysis to every one of these principles that people are pushing on and the benefit I think is difficult to justify when you realize it's only us doing it, nobody else is doing this."
Claim 4.  More truth:

Claim 5.  Relevant truth:
Claim 5.  Ignorance from Rubio:  (Responding to the question whether he sees global warming as a threat to Florida)"....The fundamental question is whether man-made activity is what's contributing the most to it.  I understand there's significant scientific consensus on that issue.  But I've actually seen reasonable debate on the principle."
Claim 5.  More truth:

Claim 6.  Relevant truth:  "Delaying action is a false economy: for every $1 of investment in cleaner technology that is avoided in the power sector before 2020, an additional $4.30 would need to be spent after 2020 to compensate for the increased emissions."  International Energy Agency 2011 (via ThinkProgress)
Claim 6.  Ignorance from Rubio:  "But beyond that the secondary question is is there anything government can do about that that will actually make a difference.... When you look at the cost benefit analyses being proposed, if you did all these things they're talking about, what impact would it really have on these changes that we're outlining?  On the other hand I can tell you the impact that it would have on certain industries and on our economy, and that's where it falls apart."
Claim 6.  More truth:

Maybe Reid screwed the pooch on climate legislation in 2017, too

Talking Points Memo refers, on Reid's barely-anything changes to the Senate filibuster and how nothing is now happening on Obama's appointments.  To be fair, some of the problem is self-inflicted by Obama putting the task of nominating candidates to all positions somewhere below watching ESPN and filling out his college basketball tournament predictions.

The climate legislation hook is that 60 vote filibuster blockage to pass climate reform in the Senate.  Nothing is going to pass soon anyway, but we do have a shot in 2017.  Chances of success depend in part on how much the filibuster can still trip it up.  Even the strongest filibuster "reform" that was presented this year was weak tea.  I figured we have four years of trying something, finding it's not enough, and then trying something stronger.  By starting us out with barely-anything, we will end up fewer steps down the road to quasi-democratic procedures when climate legislation has a chance.

California dreaming of offsets

I attended a fascinating-to-me workshop* about California using international offsets in the form of reducing deforestation and degradation (REDD) in Acre Brazil and Chiapas Mexico.  The webinar's online, watch me babble a question if you want in the morning session tying their work to our water district's 2020 climate neutrality goal (third video down, at the 02:40:15 time).

The short version is that a relatively tiny fraction of California's effort to get to 1990 emission levels by 2020 would come through international forestry offsets, but even that tiny amount could be a billion dollars of financing, much larger than anything done to date and a potential kickstart to efforts in those two provinces and elsewhere.  This is truly new - the European cap-and-trade doesn't do it.

The meeting was of a group that provides technical recommendations to California and the other provinces/states, so whether they'll be followed is unclear, but they cautioned about giving offsets for actions that increase carbon storage on degraded and cleared land, because that might create incentives to log the land so it can be "restored".

Much or most of the discussion focused on measurement as a key to ensuring the offsets are real additions to what would have happened anyway.  The scientists are very confident that they can measure forest carbon storage accurately and not too expensively via satellite and airborne lidar.  The tricky part though is measuring what would've happened in the absence of offsets.

Passing over the possibility of time machines travelling to alternative universes without offsets for comparison purposes, they instead proposed reference levels of forest losses based on previous ten-year historical averages, projected into the future with some modifications and safeguards (slightly reduced levels available as offsets, further declining over time).  Reductions of emissions in subsequent years compared to reference levels, after adjustments, are the available offsets.  I'm a little unclear on the timing, but I think the Californians buy the offsets first in anticipation that they'll work, then the REDD program does its stuff and is verified.  I do know that if the buyer is liable if the offsets don't work and has to find carbon savings elsewhere in that case.

The beauty of this is that functions on the provincial level, so it's widescale (less leakage) and tracks provincial results instead of trying to measure every little project and assign carbon savings accordingly.  The controversy (or one of the controversies) is that the offset payments go to provincial governments, so how that money could reach the rural communities is an issue.  Safeguards for that will be discussed at a later meeting, and they have the concept of "nesting" project level credits into the provincial system.

A lot is riding on this, both in terms of global carbon emissions and our global ecology.  There's some danger of course, but also some tremendous opportunity.


*Fascinating enough that I may be interested in this area as a career field, so maybe I might have some bias.

Obama picks up the "it's not a coincidence" theme

From the Union's State:

Now, it’s true that no single event makes a trend. But the fact is, the 12 hottest years on record have all come in the last 15. Heat waves, droughts, wildfires, floods, all are now more frequent and more intense. We can choose to believe that Superstorm Sandy, and the most severe drought in decades, and the worst wildfires some states have ever seen were all just a freak coincidence. Or we can choose to believe in the overwhelming judgment of science and act before it’s too late.

I continue to think the fact that science has a story that provides closure, while science denial relies on "it's all just coincidences, one after another!", is a key advantage in pulling the fence-sitters to our side, and one we need to push a lot harder.  The most scientifically-convincing evidence is about the non-coincidence between warmth and greenhouse gases, but the public can think about the climate weirding throughout the world as additional non-coincidences.

Something else that's more of a tea-reading exercise - here's more of his speech a few paragraphs later:

Last year, wind energy added nearly half of all new power capacity in America. So let’s generate even more. Solar energy gets cheaper by the year. Let’s drive down costs even further. As long as countries like China keep going all-in on clean energy, so must we.

Now, in the meantime, the natural gas boom has led to cleaner power and greater energy independence. We need to encourage that. That’s why my administration will keep cutting red tape and speeding up new oil and gas permits.

Sadly, I think I agree with Eli that Keystone pipeline to take out oil sands will get built, despite my hopes last year (maybe John Kerry demanded freedom on this issue, but I doubt it).  There is another hand though - I'll bet the administration, if it okays the pipeline, will balance its destructive action with something that helps humanity.  They'll marry the two issues just like Obama did in his speech, although they might not frame them the same way as I do.


UPDATE -  the substance of Senator Rubio's response to Obama on climate:

When we point out that no matter how many job-killing laws we pass, our government can’t control the weather – he accuses us of wanting dirty water and dirty air.

Truth hurts sometimes.  More on Rubio soon.

UPDATE 2:  Just listened to David Sirota, who independently made the same prediction that Obama will balance Keystone approval with climate action.

Adding to the war on science: gun research, pregnancy-rape connection....

Keith Kloor is tired of people talking about the war on science. I'd think that he would have a point if other people stopped committing a war on science. It took the news events from the last year to let me know about several fronts in the war on science that I hadn't known:  limits on health research funding that might show gun control as reducing violence (something Obama is trying to get around but is still in the law) and the claim that women couldn't or rarely became pregnant from rape.

Another recent attack, although more of a war on math, is the claim that dividing up the electoral vote from states with a slight Democratic lean by congressional district instead of awarding all the votes to the victor will result in more attention to rural conservative districts. The reality is that attention only goes to electoral votes that are truly in play - you ignore the areas that are certain wins or certain losses. Conservative districts in battleground states have a at least a shot at attention - their votes now make a difference, but not when their effect could be taken for granted.  As has been noted, this issue is just an attempt to skew the national election at the expense of the local interest.

To be fair, the question remains of when a stupid claim by some people on one side, like the pregnancy-rape thing, can be considered a joint responsibility for that side of the spectrum.  I think when it rises to the level of being made repeatedly by the political elite, Congressmen and senatorial candidates, then I'd say they at least have a problem.

Shutting down funding as in gun research takes the attacks on science to another level, from denial to an active refusal to let other people understand the issue (UPDATE:  corrected from "shutting down funding entirely", per a comment request below). Climate denialists must be jealous, although I do recall Republican attempts to shut down earth-monitoring satellites.

Threats to science providers such as bogus referrals for criminal prosecution by powerful senators are the near-worst, though.

Stop making war on science, and I'll stop talking about it.  Calling them out on it is the small good thing that can be done in response.  I think it shows in the general intellectual dissatisfaction with the Republican Party elite, and someday the Republicans will have to come around.


UPDATE:  one missing aspect of the gun research discussion is the political signalling that goes beyond the letter of the prohibition on certain results from research.  The original prohibition is/was a signal of political strength by gun nuts and a warning to government-funded researchers to stay away.  If you fund studying of drunk driving and effect on public health safety, then you get a pat on the head no matter how good or bad the work is.  Fund a study on whether more guns result in more accidental shootings/suicides/illegal guns, and expect to see your work analyzed with great bias, and expect the agency to face funding cuts in the next cycle.  Obama's action is a bit of contrary signalling.

Driverless cars, high speed rail, and climate comedy

1. I'm more inclined than not to support high speed rail in California and elsewhere - we need to get people out of the sky.  OTOH, I've wondered for several years whether the otherwise-beneficial role of driverless cars could turn HSR into a financial dinosaur.  Those driverless cars could hook up together as a pod, and even if they can't go 200 mph, they could go faster than humans could drive them and be an acceptable way to travel from San Francisco to Los Angeles when you can make productive use of the entire time.

Maybe building HSR in stages makes sense so we can cut our losses if needed.

2. Marginally related subject:  American University and Sierra Club are running an Eco-Comedy Video Competition for the funniest, under-three minute original video educating people about climate change.  I plan to submit 179 seconds of Joe Bastardi talking, but maybe you can think of something even funnier.

Bringing 21st Century coal to Newcastle. I mean, to China.

To the Point had a discussion of the effort to take American coal, which is currently having trouble competing with natural gas, and export it to China.  Stanford's Frank Wolack says that it may not be so bad from a climate perspective.  His argument is that China is so hungry for power that bringing new coal to there will not really change its carbon emission patterns but will have a beneficial effect of raising the cost of coal in the US market and therefore assist the transition away from coal.  Opponents cite University of Montana's Thomas Power to argue that China's coal usage is very price-responsive and their energy usage is very inefficient.

So, dueling profs, and what to do.  I've attempted Eli's sneaky trick to RTFA with only partial success.  Power's work is here:

....One recent study found that a 10 percent reduction in coal cost would result in a 12 percent increase in coal consumption. Another found that over half of the gain in China’s “energy intensity” improvement during the 1990s was a response to prices. In other words, coal exports will mean cheaper coal in Asia, and cheaper coal means more coal will be burned than would otherwise be the case.... Lower coal costs will encourage investments in new coal-burning facilities in Asia—which in turn create a 30- to 50-year demand for coal.... 

Energy usage per unit of GDP across the Chinese economy is almost four times that in the United States and almost eight times that in Japan. The Chinese government and the large state-owned enterprises that produce, distribute, and use larger amounts of energy are well aware of the burden that high and rising energy cost can impose on the economy. The energy policies embodied in the last several five-year plans have focused heavily on improving overall energy efficiency in order to effectively control energy costs. Lowering coal costs to China would undermine these valuable energy efficiency efforts....

Hmm.

Wolack's technical work eluded me, although there's plenty of mainstream press about it.  I didn't find it on his academic website or elsewhere, but maybe it's out there.  The gist seems to be that China is so power-hungry that its coal demand is relatively inelastic to price, while the US demand is elastic.  Prof. Power obviously disagrees, and I doubt I have the econ chops to sort through it rigorously.

That won't stop me though from first pontificating, and then maybe adding two possibly useful points.  Pontificatingly, I accept the premise that a fast-growing economy is going to have a desperate and therefore more inelastic demand for energy, but not all other things are equal.  In a far poorer society, energy input is a much greater relative cost than in a richer, expensive-labor economy, so its price will drive decisions more in the poorer economy.  Furthermore, the choice of what energy source you use to construct brand new power sources under conditions of growing demand (China) is much more elastic than the choice of whether you will walk away from a recently-constructed coal plant and use a different energy source (America).  Both of these factors weigh in favor greater price elasticity in China.

Possibly-useful point #1:  in the radio podcast, Wolack says opening up US coal to the international market isn't a large enough new supply to reduce overall coal prices and increase consumption.  The problem with this is the choice of scope compared to impact.  Lawyers do this - if they want an environmental impact to look small, they increase the overall area of comparison.  My choice of buying an SUV or an electric vehicle, for example, isn't by itself going to significantly affect the overall vehicle market, but it does matter in the context of many other decisions.  The same is true with a much bigger economic impact of putting more coal on the international market.

My other point is political.  Wolack says "China's increased [coal] imports have almost no impact on how much coal China uses (and thus its emissions from coal) – only on where it comes from."  I dispute that - in the long run.  Humanity's future depends in large part on how much coal is still in the ground 50 and 100 years from now.  As a political matter I think it will be easier to keep a lump of American coal in the ground than it will to be keep of lump of Chinese coal down under.  So, if I have a choice, I'd prefer to take the action right now that keeps more American coal in the ground. This could also be relevant to price elasticity - China's demand growth will eventually slow down, and anything that reduces locked-in preferences to coal could be helpful in the future.

So count me as someone who needs more persuasion on this idea.

Putting bad air down under (in the Up-Goer Five Way)

(I made this in the Up-Goer Five way, using Up-Goer Six.  Also, Up-Goer Five does let me say "Mr. William" and "Goer", so there.)


Mr. William says putting bad air way down under takes too much money, and then says why keep trying it?  One answer would be that it's not working out right now but may in the future, and given we use so many things that make bad air, it's too important to stop.

An even better reason to me is do it because it could make good party-office sense even if it doesn't make the best money sense.  It will be a lot less hard in party-office work to put the bad air business through change that will hurt it than to kill it (not to mention the fire air business down the road that we will need to do something with too).  It's the same reason for saying yes to getting power when we break apart really really small things - the only little-bad-air choice that the party-office right does like - I'll say yes to some of it as part of a big deal to act on bad-air change.

As I've done before, I see this as a lot like the office-party stuff at my water office-work.  We have the most-big city in the US that hasn't put stuff in its water to help keep the hard part of our mouth we use to eat from getting hurt because of the sweet things we eat or drink.  A poor part of the city has many problems in children with this.  While a personal story is not very good way to help reason out this party-office fight, I can say I've felt really bad mouth pain and would never want a small child to feel the same.  So we're going to put that stuff to the water.

But, many people are very angry about this and come when we meet to try to either change our mind or tell us what bad people we are.  One reason they give is that of the three things we can use in the water to help the hard part of our mouth, the one used most is just no-good stuff that comes out from the end of making other no-good stuff, and they say we're being made to drink bad water just as an easy way to throw away the no-good stuff.

I don't really buy that reason, but right now I might say that if we have to pay only a little more for the other two things than that one thing they don't like, then we should use those instead.  As a matter of party-office things, it gets us to a good choice when the "perfect" money-sense choice might cause a lot more of a party-office fight.

For a decision on how to fix bad air over a long time, same thing - we can't keep the party-office side out of it.

You read it here first (or before these other guys, anyway)

(A little update:  a cooking fire from our Vietnam trip.  Time for biochar instead.)

One.  Eli says in 2009 that the developing world's role in climate mitigation should focus on reducing their emissions of black carbon by 90% or more in a decade, and now we learn that black carbon could be the #2 bad guy in the climate biz, displacing poor methane.  For my part, this is one of the few climate issues where I'm pretty optimistic.  Assuming the peak energy arguments are wrong, then economic development means wood burning cookfires and the like are gradually going to be less prevalent.

Another.  I argued last November that Obama should go big on immigration reform, getting immigrants who've been here for a long time on a reasonable path not just to legalization but to citizenship, and that seems to be what he intends.  Personally I doubt even the less-xenophobic faction of the Republican leadership will really go along with a real path to citizenship, despite the extremely vague statements of some.  To the extent they're obstructive, they'll pay the political price, but to the extent we get new voting citizens, it'll take a while before the Republicans live down their past practices.  Gun control is a good example that extends beyond immigration - the new groups are very supportive, especially Latinos.

A third.  At the same post above in November I did my own little calculation to determine there was only a 52% chance that all five conservative Supreme Court justices would defer escape to the Choir Invisible in the next four years, and last week Slate's slightly fancier look found a 54% chance that none would be no more in four.

Good enough for now.  I could add that Libya is looking good while Syria isn't, but maybe another time.

Key the extremes to their context

(via Climate Central.)

I'm not sure yet what I think of Mark Kleiman's post about how people always accept their side's arguments on a position and assume a contrary argument means the arguer is on the other team.  I'm no fan of centrism-worship, or of contrarianism-for-its-own-sake.  OTOH, a critical eye on the arguments used for our own side has some moral value.

In that sense, the 2012 record warmth in the lower 48 states, a record for 1.58% of the planet's surface for a single year, is getting overplayed.  At least, the key front and center should be context, that year after year, record highs generally exceed record lows, and that generally consistent result is significant additional support to the mountain of evidence for climate change.  What's important about 2012 in the lower 48, outside of bringing the American public mainstream a little a closer to the scientific mainstream, is how it reminds us of that context.*

Lose the context and you get big pronouncements like this from Watts Up:  "Low temperature records overwhelm highs in the USA this past week" (emphasis added).  Context may not cure foolishness, but it might help a little bit.


*One exception is if the 2012 record highs are so unprecedentedly big that natural variability couldn't ever explain them, equivalent to rolling two dice and having them come up 13.  That would be important, but I've missed any in-depth discussion of that possibility.

Crowded crowd-funding for solar projects

On Monday, Mosaic announced it would do the first-ever crowd-funding of solar projects, with a $25 minimum investment.  Yesterday I tried to buy in myself but their four new projects are fully funded.  They look like they might be having the same problem that Kiva used to have - more money than projects (it also seems like a different model than Kiva, the money goes directly to the projects rather than paying for a general fund).

Crowd-funding seems like a good way to get micro-investors involved in startups that would otherwise be impossible, to open up a new source of money for investment, to fund smaller projects that are too small for traditional investors, and to fund entirely new and different ventures that venture capital funders find uninteresting.  My impression is that Mosaic serves all but that last interest.  Obviously no one knows if it's going to succeed but it's just as obviously worth a try.  Maybe eco-grandparents will start buying Junior shares in solar projects instead of a stock as a college investment.

The other advantage is for people who want to do something renewable but can't do it on their own property.  Our townhouse has a small roof facing east/west with shading on the east - not an ideal place for solar.  Mosaic might be a better use of money to offset our emissions, and as an offset that others can use.

Precautionary principle possibilities

The options:

1. Prove a negative, or no dice.  No technology can be used unless it's proven in advance to never have risks.  That can't be done, so we can't use any technology, new or existing.

2. Risky, smishky.  Defined risks are no reason to stop or alter use of a technology unless the risk has moved from possibly harmful to scientifically-certain harm.  With no certainties in science, this also can't be done.

3. Squishy real life choice.  evidence rising to a level of x for harms whose severity rises to a level of y compared to the technology's benefit of less than z is the point at which you stop or alter the technology's use unless and until additional research changes the value of those variables.  The only minuscule problem with this is it doesn't provide much of a guideline.  But it's right.

Discussion below in this blog and at Stoat are relevant.  Anti- and pro-GMO forces argue for positions 1 and 2 although they're usually vague about it, as a clear description of their perspective doesn't help them win.  Switching over to variables x, y, and z, pro-GMOers like Keith Kloor obfuscate the non-zero value of x, while anti-GMOers exaggerate the other way.

So what to do?  Caution, I guess.

To try to move from saying something squishy to something interesting, how about this:  prior to the 1970s, the correct policy conclusion was that CFCs have no broad-based environmental harms and should be used liberally.  That's not right, it turns out, but that's the information we had at the time.  The key is moving quickly as new evidence for variables x and y came out.  From a political science/international coordination perspective, the world moved amazingly quickly on ozone-depleting chemicals.  From an environmental perspective, my sense is that we barely dodged a bullet (and we still have another 40 years or so of slowly declining CFC concentrations where something new could go wrong).  We'll see how well we'll do on climate change with already, well-established x and a range of bad to horrible values for y.


Moderately relevant:  I've had a sci-fi story in my head for a while, an alternative history where CFCs were invented and widely-used a century earlier than in real life and long before the science could anticipate their problems.  Society would be finding nature melting and cracking around them, along with peoples' skin, and have no idea of the reason.  Not a particularly happy story.  So, caution.

Four out of five dentists say it's the scientific consensus, stupid

I'm late to the game of the Cox/Ince editorial on science and policy, but two points:

1. It's not "science" that matters most at the intersection of science and policy but scientific consensus that does.  If there's a well-established consensus with very few expert dissenters, then you've got factual conclusions as far as policymakers are concerned.  The consensus could be wrong of course, but that's not really relevant to policymakers - they don't have a choice of waiting for a perfect consensus because that won't happen.  What's missing from the commentary I've seen is that policymakers also don't have the choice of second-guessing the consensus by becoming their own Galileos.

Let's forget climate change for a while and take my constrained policymaking field instead.  Should I direct my water district to add fluoride to our water supply?  The vast majority of dentists say it helps teeth, but some disagree.  Does adding fluoride create non-dental health risks for the general population?  The vast majority of oncologists, endocrinologists, and neurologists reflected in the scientific consensus say somewhere between "no" and "not proven," but some disagree.  It's ridiculous to think I could get sufficient expertise in those three fields as well as dentistry to let me judge between experts.

And fluoride is just one issue.  What about water supply decontamination - should we use chlorine or chloramine?  What is the maximum horizontal acceleration that a worst-case earthquake will exert on each of our eleven dams?  Is the stream gauge appropriately sited to be provide accurate data on stream flow during storm events?  How much chromium 6 is tolerable in our stored groundwater?  Can migrating steelhead trout make it up the proposed fish ladder? I'm not second-guessing these things if they have an expert consensus behind it, regardless of a few dissenters.

Incidentally, I don't distinguish between scientific consensus and other expert consensus.  Seismologists tell us the maximum acceleration during an earthquake, and engineers tell us what dams can handle.  I don't see a difference.

The intersection with policy gets complicated if the consensus has an important dissenting faction or if there's no consensus at all, but that's not what we're facing on some issues, like global climate change.

2.  Contrary to what scientists often say, the science can all-but-decide policy because some policy questions are easy.  Scientific predictions of climate change in the next century under business as usual emission scenarios run from "bad" to "potentially disastrous".  That's pretty much all we need to know from a policy perspective to conclude that we have to deal with it.  The question of how we deal with it isn't easy or exclusively a science question, but whether to deal with it was answered by science.

Vietnam

Anecdata from the last few weeks in northern Vietnam.

1.  The government subsidizes fossil fuels via price caps and money-losing, government-owned energy sector companies, and Hanoi's air pollution is eye-stinging bad (I went jogging and wondered how much life expectancy that cost me).  Presumably Saigon and some other industrial areas are equivalent or worse.

No use ignoring the political support that subsidies of staple products create, especially from politically-important urban residents, but it seems like an alternative arrangement of withdrawing the subsidy and using the money in other ways that help urban air quality could create equivalent support.  Mexico is a decent model.

2.  Just as I've decided that other people's personal problems are far easier to solve than my own personal problems, other nation's political problems are far easier to solve than my nation's.  Why can't the US pass a revenue-neutral carbon tax?  Well, that's complicated....

3.  The government does a decent job of hiding political repression from the casual observer, while massive corruption is openly discussed.  Internet access was everywhere and I didn't find any English language websites blocked, although maybe that will change as English fluency and machine translation improve.  Soviet-style propaganda posters and public loudspeakers spouting messages were also everywhere though and more than a little creepy.  Uncle Ho's picture dominated many living rooms, probably a sincere gesture.

Of the two people who opened up to us in our travels, one was fairly supportive of the government and the other strongly dismissive.

4.  On the good side, we lost count after seeing three dozen or so electric bikes.  Hanoi has as many motorcycle scooters as people so the count isn't even a tenth of a percent, but they're there.  Just as electrifying cars and switching to renewable power is a major/the major part of the American climate solution, electrifying two-wheeled transport could be Vietnam's.  The government also seems to do a decent job of supporting infrastructure for two-wheeled transport, with cement paths and narrow bridges.  A huge tax on cars supports the two-wheel system, often doubling the car's costs.  Why can't we do that in the US, at least for luxury cars?  Well, that's complicated....

5.  I didn't spot a single solar PV system but did see plenty of solar water heaters, every one of them brand new.  Lots of hydro capacity and some construction, both of the all-good, small hydro and mixed result large hydro.  A side-note here:  funny how some enviros are reconsidering opposition to nuclear power but no one talks about large-scale hydro, which by contrast to nukes is economically cheap.  Maybe that's because the major dam projects are all finished in the industrialized world.

6.  Climate isn't quite warm enough for year-round rice production in north Vietnam, so many paddies are left fallow.  It seems like there is sometimes (not always) a choice available to farmers whether to flood or keep dry those fallow paddies, and that might affect methane production in the off season.  There might be a policy opportunity here, incentivizing farmers to keep the paddies dry in the off-season, and verification by satellite would be easy.

7.  I have a flood control idea for my water district, of using a smart grid composed of residential rainwater retention systems to shave the peak off of a flood.  I think it has a shot of being feasible in small, urbanized watersheds.  I wonder if the same couldn't be true for watersheds dominated by rice paddies, emptying them in anticipation of a major storm and then letting them take up some of the excess.

8.  Little-founded speculation, but where the hell are the birds?  I know it's winter and the Vietnamese trap and eat even the little birds, but still the forests and skies seem empty.  Maybe Rachel Carson's future has happened here.

Spectacular scenery but don't come for the wildlife, at least in the north.

9.  Touristing note:  Lonely Planet never led us wrong, other than a two bad addresses for hotels.  In particular, Handspan, Blue Swimmer, Asia Outdoors, and Sapa O'Chau all did a great job for us tourists, adjusting for the necessary flexibility and English fluency level of a developing country.

The long tail of climate change mitigation

Our Water District recently reviewed a draft energy audit on controlling our energy use.  The Board Chair and I had a lot of questions and comments on how we will relate the energy audit to our new goal of achieving carbon-neutrality by 2020.  Some of my general comments are below:


(Nov. 27, 2012 Board Meeting, Item 4.1)

Later on I suggested that we have a "Climate Impact" discussion included in every agenda item just like we currently have a "Financial Impact" discussion with every agenda item.

My point in mentioning this is that these types of actions fall somewhere in the long tail of actions to fight climate change - a program that can affect a lot of people while falling far short of the headline-generating action on a state or national level.  Just as individuals changing their behaviors can make a difference, though, so can these types of institutional changes.  I don't know of a good way to isolate and measure the effects of voluntary actions by local and regional institutions to address climate change, but they shouldn't be ignored.

Time to show fingerprints on Syria issues

From NYTimes:

The Obama administration secretly gave its blessing to arms shipments to Libyan rebels from Qatar last year, but American officials later grew alarmed as evidence grew that Qatar was turning some of the weapons over to Islamic militants, according to United States officials and foreign diplomats.... 

The experience in Libya has taken on new urgency as the administration considers whether to play a direct role in arming rebels in Syria, where weapons are flowing in from Qatar and other countries.

The Obama administration did not initially raise objections when Qatar began shipping arms to opposition groups in Syria, even if it did not offer encouragement, according to current and former administration officials. But they said the United States has growing concerns that, just as in Libya, the Qataris are equipping some of the wrong militants....  

Relying on surrogates allows the United States to keep its fingerprints off operations, but also means they may play out in ways that conflict with American interests....

“....When you have an intermediary, you are going to lose control.”

The obvious reaction is either stop getting involved or stop worrying about showing your fingerprints. I'll go for Door #2.  I supported making the threat of limited military involvement in February and more actual support for the opposition in July, and I think either case would have shortened the time frame of the civil war and improved a future transition.  I remain concerned about ethnic massacres and religious instability in the post-Assad future.  Supporting groups that are less likely to do this, and especially getting Alawite opposition groups into a prominent position in the opposition military forces, could be crucial for the country's future.  Unfortunately, I think the war might still grind for months more, giving time for this option to work out.

For my less interventionist friends, I'll just mention that until recently I hadn't been too opposed to the drone war in Pakistan overall as a legitimate function of self-defense against Al Qaeda, but I'm reconsidering.  Al Qaeda in Pakistan isn't that big of a threat, while Pakistan itself desperately needs stability.  Pakistan is simply more important, and the drone strikes aren't helping.  Not sure if I'd completely eliminate them, but the go/no go decisionmaking needs to change.

A modest carbon tax has modest carbon reduction results

Been meaning to highlight Brad Plumer's post on a paper about the effect of a carbon tax on emissions (full paper here).  A tax of $20/ton, with an inflation-adjusted 4% annual increase, knocks emissions down 14% by 2020, and a larger number in 2050 if you believe economic projections that far in the future.

I include my caveat about 2050 because economics modeling is far harder than climate modeling.  In particular I can't tell what assumptions they make about the cost of renewables in the future, which seems like a game-changer to me.

Still this seems a reasonable argument that a carbon tax has only modest benefits.  By all means we should do it, but also use the funding for renewables, and pursue stricter regulation.  One aspect that surprised me is how much money this tax would raise, over a trillion dollars in the next decade.  That can really help with deficit reduction and maintaining social welfare programs as well as renewable energy funding.


UPDATE:  I really should've mentioned that an annual 4% real increase is not enough in their model to drive large decreases in emissions.  The implication is that if you choose a small initial tax then you need a higher annual increase.  The California cap's minimum price is even smaller than this study ($10/ton), and has a 5% annual increase.  Still it's just part of the pricing system, with emission allowances hopefully functioning as the real control on the amount, together with regulation.

Good Yglesias, Bad Yglesias

In the Good Yglesias category, we have "the spice must flow" problem in that stopping the Keystone XL pipeline and other pipeline-fighting as led to a boom in shipping oil by rail.  This correctly points the problem with a regulatory approach to carbon reduction - someone looks for a way around the regulation.   OTOH, oil is not the same as Herbert's spice - it's a lot more price elastic in the long run, and anything running up the price will reduce the quantity purchased.

Regulation is an imperfect substitute for a carbon cap or carbon tax, but it's better than nothing.

For Bad Yglesisas, we have a cursory rejection of the idea that people making over $400,000 could have their entire income taxed at the highest rate instead of just the amount falling in the highest bracket.  The flaw is a simplistic approach Yglesias takes - identify a problem and then pronounce the whole thing dead.  Yes, as he describes, a ten-dollar increase in income could result in tens of thousands of dollars in additional taxes.  He fails to take the next step to see if the problem has a solution.  In this case, just alter the proposal so that the more a person's income exceeds $350,000, the larger the share of that person's income under $200,000 that gets taxed at the top rate.  It satisfies the Republicans' inane criteria of not raising the top rate while getting more tax money out of the top earners.  The solution isn't too difficult.

That's not to say it's a good idea when compared to simply raising the rate as Obama proposes, along with restoring estate tax rates to the 2009 level.  John Sides notes this proposal protects the ultra-rich by going after the rich.  That seems to be a common theme in Republican Party policy.


UPDATE:  Pat Robertson finds a nut.



Climate change would also fall under a "revealed science" category to the extent that category equals "about as proven as you're going to get in science."

Ironic that a man named Mead doesn't understand the US Civil War

Maybe his misunderstanding comes from losing the "e" at the end of the name.  The current Mead sayeth:

An endless war of limited intensity is worse, many Americans instinctively feel, than a time-limited war of unlimited ferocity. A crushing blow that brings an end to the war—like General Sherman’s march of destruction through the Confederacy in 1864-65—is ultimately kinder even to the vanquished than an endless state of desultory war.

This Mead wants massive Israeli retaliation against Gaza regardless of civilian casualties and thinks Americans would agree with him.  He appears to be under the impression that not much happened in the US Civil war prior to Sherman's march, and that single crushing blow was all that counted.

The reality was that it took years of unlimited ferocity to win the Civil War.  The side that had better logistics won the war, and Sherman's march was a logistical success, living off the land while destroying its ability to support the enemy.  Not a lot that parallels Gaza here.

More broadly, I think there's little evidence that shock and awe achieves its psychological goals.  The British, German, and Japanese people didn't break over the bombing raids.  Psychology does have its place - the Doolittle Raid heightened American morale and convinced the Japanese to make the stupid mistake of withdrawing carriers to defend the home islands and to undertake the high-risk attack on Midway.  Brutality by itself, though, won't win wars.

Tangentially related:  Brad DeLong has been live-blogging a history of World War II.  Definitely worth checking out.

The California Cap passes its first test, barely

News coverage of the California cap-and-trade auction results diverged fairly sharply into whether it went well or had problems. Put me in the half-full category that it went well enough, but just barely.

The Air Board announced a sale price of $10.09 a ton, just barely above the reserve price of $10 and lower than the expected $11-15. Digging around a little doesn’t make the auction mechanics very clear – many bids were far higher than this. The reports imply that everyone paid $10.09, which would mean some type of Dutch auction setup.  (UPDATE:  confirmed it's a Dutch auction arrangement where everyone pays the same price.  Good explainer of the whole auction by Reed Smith is here.  The reserve price is a minimum that keeps the market from collapsing - if there's not enough demand for all the allowances to keep the price above that minimum, the effect of the reserve price is to reduce the supply of allowances being sold.)

I doubt it’s coincidental that the price is just above the reserve – that suggests the ‘market’ expectation is that it won’t be too hard to for California emitters to meet the cap, something that’s uncomfortably close to the problem of the European market that has too high a cap and a collapsed market. OTOH, emitters didn’t have to buy any allowances if they thought they could meet the cap on their own, so their expectation is that the Air Board will keep the California market from collapsing. I put the word ‘market’ in scare quotes because a sealed-bid auction barely qualifies – we’ll get a better idea of market price when trades start happening on a regular basis.

So it worked. A somewhat higher price would suggest a better-functioning market and more incentive for carbon reductions, although a much higher price would provide ammunition to critics’ ridiculous claim that the cap harms California’s economy.

Critics of the system include the state-level California Chamber of Commerce, treading a perilous line against California green energy businesses. The state Chamber filed a lawsuit against the auction on the day before it started. I expect they’ll take some flak for waiting so long to file, but I’ll have to save a look at their legal interests for another day.

The economic interest here is that free carbon allowances actually benefit emitters – the allowances have economic value that can be resold, and California is issuing 90% of the first emissions for free (that percent will decline over time). A 90% benefit isn’t good enough for the Chamber though – they want it all for free, forever. At least they claim they’re not trying to destroy the cap market – they just want free allowances – and that distinguishes them from the evil that is the US Chamber.  This isn't a trivial distinction from the US Chamber, by the way, and shows some-if-inadequate level of responsiveness to in-state business politics.

Even a 100% auction in my opinion would benefit California green businesses and help cement the leadership this state has on the green economy. The state Chamber is being short-sighted on a number of levels, especially if their effort to change the cap market ends up destroying it. This might be a good place for the state legislature to step in and backstop the Air Board’s decision, something that could be possible now that the Democrats have two-thirds majority in both houses, a requirement under the tax-revenue stupidity of California's Proposition 13.

An aside - there is a dividend component to the cap.  In a somewhat complicated procedure, utilities get all their allowances for free but are required to sell some and split the proceeds so 15% goes to reducing greenhouse emissions and the remainder as a credit applied to utility bills.  Seeing that credit will help counter the inevitable claim that the money is just going to solar power fat cats.

Lessons or lack thereof from bipartisan movements

As Obama heads off to Burma, I think back to when I knew something about that country.  I spent two winters there doing volunteer work in the early 90s and then several years in the mid-90s in Oregon focusing on Burma human rights work, comparing the situation to South Africa.  I'm cautiously optimistic at this point, although the ethnic conflict is far from over and even democracy will be no guarantee of good treatment for ethnic minorities.

Relative to most other western nations, the US did pretty well in Burma, backing up Suu Kyi and others in the elected/overthrown leadership.  When we activists went Congress to ratchet up sanctions, the senators we counted on were Patrick Leahy, Mitch McConnell, and Jesse Helms (Ted Kennedy was also good, I think).  Our little Oregon group got every member of the Oregon congressional delegation to support sanctions, with liberal Republican Mark Hatfield being the hardest one to convince.  Burma never became polarized in American politics, as far as I can tell.

In another field that has long been polarized, things are changing.  Washington Monthly has a good piece titled The Conservative War on Prison, with conservatives starting to hop onto the alternatives-to-prison bandwagon.  The article is good on the what and when aspects of conservative change, but less so on the why and why at this particular time aspects.  There was this, though:

At the start of the 2007 legislative session, legislative analysts predicted that Texas was on track to be short 17,700 prison beds by 2012 because of its growing inmate population. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s response was to ask legislators to build three new prisons, but Madden and Whitmire had other ideas. Not only did they bring back a revamped version of their probation proposal—they also took aim at the revolving-door problem by cranking up funding for programs such as in-prison addiction treatment and halfway houses. This time, Perry relented (persuaded at least in part, the duo contends, by a high-stakes meeting they held with him shortly before the opening of the legislative session). Since then, the prison population has not increased, and last year, the TDCJ closed a prison for the first time in decades.

Budget shortfalls do not explain this shift. In 2007 Texas was basking in a huge projected surplus, and the Great Recession was still a year away. Instead, Madden and Whitmire had different winds at their backs. For one thing, the policy context favored reform. One legacy of the state’s prison litigation trauma is that Texas has strict restrictions on overcrowding (unlike, say, California). Under Texas law, when the system approaches capacity, corrections staff must seek certification from the attorney general and the governor to incarcerate more prisoners. The approval process forces state leaders to confront the choice between more prisons and more diversion programming. The political environment had also changed since the GOP completed its takeover of state politics in 2003. As a longtime observer of the state’s criminal justice notes, “Now … all the tough guys are Republicans. They don’t want to be outdoing each other on this stuff.”

I'm not entirely happy with this explanation.  I have my own, which is that ideological movements get bored.  After saying the same thing for a long time, there's a desire to say something else.  I think conservative ideology takes longer to get restless than others, but it still happens.  It's also not always successful:

Of course, there are limits to how far ideological reinvention can go. As political scientist David Karol has argued, it is unlikely to work when it requires crossing a major, organized member of a party coalition. That’s something environmentalists learned when they tried to encourage evangelicals to break ranks on global warming through the idea of “creation care.” They got their heads handed to them by the main conservative evangelical leaders, who saw the split this would create with energy-producing businesses upon whom Republican depend for support.

That's a rather simplified description of what happened among evangelicals, including who started it, how far it got, and whether the movement's truly ended.  It also downplays the difficulty in crossing the ideological and economic barriers of the tough-on-crime mindset and the prison-industrial complex.

I'm not sure what lessons to draw from all this for climate policy purposes.  Sometimes all you can do is wait for people to change - or push change through without their help.  I've also thought for a while that Al Gore has been careful to avoid some of the limelight.  Conservatives are showing some real ferment over immigration, modest change on gay marriage, and tiny little cracks in climate denial.  Maybe we'll get lucky.

Happy California Cap-And-Trade Eve

Nice radio program on California's cap-and-trade allocation auction that starts taking bids tomorrow, and on Monday we'll find out the price per ton, with a minimum price set by regulation at $10/ton.  Second biggest cap-and-trade market in the world after Europe.  Hopefully we've learned from other's mistakes (and I think we have).

One critique deserving a response is whether including a minimum and maximum price on allocations somehow proves a failure of the cap system.  The idea is if a cap's appeal over a carbon tax is that it determines the total amount of emissions, then the floor and ceiling prove the lack of commitment to determine the right amount of emissions.

Three responses:

1. Doesn't matter anyway unless the price hits the floor or ceiling.

2. It's a little simplistic to say a tax focuses on specific price for carbon while a cap focuses on specific quantity of carbon emissions.  The floor and ceiling for a cap just lets society choose a tradeoff between price and quantity.  You could do something similar with a tax by letting the tax price change if total emissions fall through a floor or above a ceiling.

3. If greenhouse gases were as easy to eliminate as ozone-destroying chemicals then we'd have a similar schedule for phaseout.  It's not that easy, so we're doing things less quickly under either a carbon tax in Australia, or cap in Europe and in parts of the US.  Putting a floor is an indication that we overestimated the difficulty in achieving a reduction and therefore will require a larger reduction.  It's actually good news, that we can achieve reductions more quickly than anticipated.

The path to citizenship will be crooked for Republicans

A few more thoughts on the election and then I'll let it go:

Immigration.  The Republicans are in trouble on immigration and citizenship no matter what they do.  No change and they imitate the California Republican Party in relevance.  Much of their elite seems to realize this and want to compromise, but the Democrats should put them through a wringer and demand everything the Ds think should happen:  a reasonable pathway to citizenship for immigrants who have been here for a reasonable amount of time.  The 1987 amnesty applied to people who had been in the country for over five years, setting them on a path to citizenship seven years after being legalized.  Personally I'd lengthen the first period and shorten the second one, but it's a reasonable model for the future.

If the Rs refuse to pass something like this through Congress, then beat them up over it in 2014 while also getting the best compromise possible.  If the Rs do pass something substantial, then they still lose, because those legalized citizens will be Democratic voters for a generation and a fraction.  The Rs painted themselves into this corner, it'll be a long time to get out.  The white vote share of the presidential electorate is declining 2 points every four years, probably translating into a one-percent gain each cycle for the Democratic candidate.

Denialists lost seats.  In under-reported news, four out of five Congressional Representatives dubbed the "Flat Earth Five" by the League of Conservation Voters for denying climate reality lost their seats, and eleven of twelve generally anti-environment candidates also got beat.  These people were specially targeted and I've been looking for more specifics; the League needs to update their website (a little update here).  This is a nice bit of karmic payback for 2010, when most of the eight Republicans who voted to do something about climate lost their seats to primary challengers.

Citizens United redistributed income.  Some billionaires redistributed a few percent of this year's income to the somewhat-less wealthy without causing too much harm at the federal level in this election.  I'm not quite as sure they were harmless at the state and local level this cycle, and even the dumbest of rich people may learn to spend their unlimited campaign money more effectively in the future, again most likely by targeting it at the state and local level.  Watch out for next time.

Overturning Citizens United.  Obama will probably nominate 2-3 justices over the next four years.  Ginsburg, age 79 and with previous cancer bouts, should have retired a year or two ago but took a huge risk hanging on.   Hopefully she'll do the right thing, and Breyer, age 74, might do the same.  The conservatives' ages are 76 (Scalia), 76 (Kennedy), 64 (Thomas), 62 (Alito) and 57 (Roberts).  They'll do their best to last out four years, but might not have a choice.

Bahrain Silence = Climate Silence.  Juan Cole had an interesting post about continuing repression in Bahrain against the Shiite majority.  Too bad that Romney wasn't asked to compare his relative activism over Syria, which I liked, to the situation in Bahrain.  Maybe the Republican talking heads on the Sunday shows could still get asked - this is the worst situation of the US looking the other way, for somewhat obvious military reasons.

Hanging up my local politics crystal ball.  My water district had three elections, and I called all three wrong.  It doesn't make the results bad - I'm actually thrilled that our funding measure that needed two-thirds' support under California law received 72.65% support, and it includes $24 million that helps prepare for sea level rise along San Francisco Bay.  Staff's first draft had $5 million for this; I can (and will) take credit for much of the increased funding.

UPDATE:  forgot to add my plea to reduce the Senate filibuster bottleneck, along with the actually-still-alive hope that Harry Reid might do it.

UPDATE 2:  with actuarial tables and my trusty calculator, I get a 79% chance of four-year survival for each of Scalia and Kennedy, 93% for Thomas, 94% for Alito, and 96% for Roberts, leaving a 52% chance that all five will survive four years.  Their health probably makes this an underestimate, but severe disability might also get one or two of them to leave if they really couldn't serve.

Sixty seconds of Sergio

Not sharing Eli's hesitation about blogging on subjects beyond my expertise, I thought I'd fix the dearth of spaghetti western blogging here at Rabett Run:



I've been watching the above clip for more times than I can count as part of a little project I'm working on.  It's the climax from Sergio Leone's The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, the second best of Leone's westerns, and the best climax.  The rest of this post is all spoilers, of course.

The part that really interests me is the final 60 seconds of the face-off, starting about 6:30 in the video.  Watch it once and it seems to end in a swirl of faces and a gunshot.  Watch it a couple dozen times and you get a story.

A timeline:

6:30 Angel Eyes starts inching his hand over to his gun.

6:33  Blondie looks at him, and he brings his hand back

6:49  Blondie looks at Tuco and gives him the slightest nod.  Now we who know the outcome also know there's no direct reason for Blondie to give a signal to Tuco - Blondie had tricked him and unloaded his gun.  It's what happens next that shows the reason - Angel Eyes saw the nod and flickers his view back and forth, unsure if there's a plan against him.

7:01  Unnerved, Angel Eyes starts slowly reaching for his gun, looking for Blondie to spot him moving.  Blondie never looks at him again, staring straight ahead at Tuco.

7:16  Angel Eyes takes an almost-last look at Tuco, hand inching closer.  Tuco's starting straight at Blondie.

7:17 - 7:27  Confusing closeups accelerate.

7:28 - 7:31  Tuco finally glances at Angel Eyes.
                  Angel Eyes nervously shifts his view between both opponents and makes his move.
                  Tuco sees the move and begins drawing himself (not that it matters).
                  A shot rings out, and Angel Eyes falls.  Blondie shot him without ever looking away from Tuco.

We learn later that Blondie had tricked Tuco by emptying Tuco's gun, so Blondie never had to really worry about Tuco.  Only by watching it closely do you see that Blondie also tricked Angel Eyes with the meaningless head nod to Tuco, and then by seeming to not pay attention to Angel Eyes, while watching him with peripheral vision and waiting for him to draw.

Nice.  Really nice.

Couple other points:  I had trouble with Angel Eyes walking across the line of fire between Tuco and Blondie earlier in the clip, but I finally realized it helped conceal his draw from Blondie even if it made the hand more visible to Tuco.  Maybe he wasn't quite as worried about Tuco.

At 7:32 you can see Tuco shooting his empty gun at Angel Eyes, i.e. not at Blondie.  Maybe it was just a response to Angel Eyes, but it might have been a choice.  Maybe that had something to do with Blondie's decision to spare Tuco at the end of the movie (not in the clip).

Speaking of the movie's end, Blondie tortures a guy with a fake execution/near strangling and he's "The Good"?  Maybe it was less jarring in the days before enhanced interrogation.  That's just one more good thing about re-electing Obama.

In the preceding movie, Angel Eyes was a good guy.  Nice climax as well, clip here.  Interesting how much swarthier Leone made the kind-of same character and same actor when he was The Bad.

I started watching this clip over a month ago, and immediately started getting lots of Romney ads on YouTube.  I thought that was amusing.

The time window for a revenue-neutral carbon tax is 2017-2018, so get cracking

My theory that our time for serious climate legislation is the two years after the 2016 election relies on the following reasons why up to 2016 won’t work:

• Before 2014 is no good because the current House majority would never pass it (and the Senate minority would filibuster).
• 2014-2016 is no good because the president’s party almost always loses seats in the House in the off year.

Then there’s 2016, the counterpart of the lucky fate of 2012 Senate elections. The Senate gets elected in three separate waves, with a few more Ds than Rs. Fate decreed an uneven distribution with a large minority of Ds up for election in 2012, 23 Ds versus 10 Rs, a big reason why this election was supposed to be bad in the Senate, until the Rs pulled out their unregistered pistols and shot up their own feet. Fate said 2014 would be somewhat closer in distribution between parties, so Math said that 2016 is the vulnerable year for Rs, with 24 Rs up for election compared to 10 Ds.

While far from certain, it’s possible that for two years after the 2016 election, and only for those two years, Ds will have somewhere in the vicinity of 60 votes in the Senate. That’s the chance. The 2018 election puts the Ds back on the defensive, 25 D seats versus 8 R seats.

I suggest two alternatives for explaining climate politics. One is Roger Pielke Jr.’s so-called Iron Law:

When policies focused on economic growth confront policies focused on emissions reduction, it is economic growth that will win out every time.

The other is the acronym BOSO, or Brian’s Obvious Statement of the Obvious:

Getting 60 votes in the Senate is hard.

Only one of these is likely to display true insight into climate politics. The Iron Law appears to be unfalsifiable because it’s not applied where it doesn’t work, so you can probably guess which way I lean. If you go with the Iron Law though, then you make a few bets on technology and just hope for the best (and please don’t annoy Godwin by pointing out that was Hitler’s end-game strategy too). If by contrast you’re just a BOSO, then look for the best strategy to get to 60.

I’m assuming the president will be a Democrat, or a Republican who favors action, and that the House will pass a bill like they were able to in 2010. Getting Republican and possibly squishy Democratic support is the reason, really the only reason, to do a revenue-neutral carbon tax. A revenue-generating tax could do positive things for climate mitigation and adaptation, or a cap-and-trade law could provide similar incentives. It’s the possibility of getting a few Republican votes and the difficulty of BOSO that makes me think we should explore a revenue neutral tax.

And I’m saying “possibility,” not probability for all the above. On the hopeful side, science will continue to beat over the heads of the ignorant, and not-hopeful tragedies like Sandy may do the same.   Renewables will continue to expand while costs decrease, and shale gas can cut into the stranglehold that coal has over electricity politics in swing states like Ohio.  Demographics also favor reality. On the other hand, two election cycles between now and 2017 aren’t that many to get reality into Republican politics, which is actually getting more ideologically rigid at the state and local level.

Still, it’s an opportunity that we should plan for as much as possible, and revenue-neutral carbon tax might be the best way to do it. Meantime, stick with Eli’s strategy of regulating our way through this via the Clean Air Act (and I expect eventually through the Clean Water Act for ocean acidification).

 If the Republicans don’t bend in 2017 and there aren’t enough votes to get around them, then their rigidity will eventually make them a national version of the California Republican Party, a group so unpopular and powerless that it will have less than one third of the seats in both houses of the state legislature. That, however, will take even more time before it happens.

Taking on our toughest challenges

The Christie cameo is probably no accident - enviros would love to split him off from the denialists.


P.S.  For my wonderful Santa Clara County voters, please vote Yes on Measure B!

If campaigns are zero-sum games, why will neither side talk about climate?

I've seen the justified lamentations about the lack of climate discussion in the campaign, and occasional discussion of why Obama hasn't talked that much about it.  (I provided my own explanation - Ohio.)  There's less discussion of why Romney doesn't talk about it, and little about why the interaction between candidates doesn't produce discussion.

In zero-sum politics, a disadvantage for one candidate should be an advantage for the other candidate, so why doesn't at least one of them push his opinion?

Unlike Karl Rove, I don't have THE answer, but I do have possibilities:

1.  This NYTimes article says their positions aren't that different.  Both acknowledge people are changing climate, so there's no reason to talk about that as opposed to their actual differences over energy policy.

I'm not buying it, first because it far overstates Romney's acceptance of climate change: "there remains a lack of scientific consensus on the issue."  That leaves plenty of room for a fight between reality and denial.  Also the strong difference in energy policy - support a growing sector versus abandoning it to China in favor of a declining and polluting sector - should easily reference back to climate.

The article does provide a service in saying Obama hasn't been completely silent.  And Romney's oblique references have been mocking Obama's intention to do something about it.  Let's refine the question to why both sides say so little instead of being silent.

On to more promising ideas.

2.  One or both sides overestimate the risk to their position.  If each side thinks the issue can backfire and hurt their side relative to the other, then neither will bring it up.  Both campaigns might think the issue has a 55% chance of helping the other side - that's not possible in zero sums, but would mean someone has bad political judgment.

I think this plays a role.

3.  It's not climate as an issue but their own ability to hurt themselves.  Maybe the candidates figure anything they say is more likely to motivate the other side than it is to motivate their own side, so again they keep quiet.  The analogy would be to Romney's relative silence over his abortion position, and the Democrats' relative silence about their somewhat-tepid opposition to torture and civil rights violations.

Problem with this one is that surrogates and Superpacs would likely go on the attack over climate, but everyone has little to say.

4.  It's like space policy - not enough people cared to force it on the agenda.  If Hurricane Sandy had happened in September then things might have been different.  If last summer's heat wave had more time to get into the public mindset, it also might have changed things.  The idea here though is that while the policy elites may be thinking of these things, most of the public isn't.

Sadly, I'm giving this last option the most credit, with an assist from overestimating risk.  It doesn't excuse a lack of leadership, but again helps explain it.  And it means those of us who care about climate have to do more.


For a little respite from climate silence, here's a debate between campaign surrogates with the last part discussing climate.  Romney's surrogate flat-out lies in the debate about current coal technology not producing pollutants, but admits that Romney would eliminate greenhouse gas controls that the EPA is currently phasing in under the Clean Air Act.  He also says the government should provide some money for energy research, but nothing to reduce carbon emissions.  So much for the NY Times article.

How dare Nate Silver suggest that someone put his money where his mouth is

The public editor at the NY Times is aghast that Nate Silver proposed a $1000 bet for charity against Joe Scarborough over the election outcome.  Silver thinks the math and data shows a high likelihood of Obama victory, while Scarborough doesn't like math and think people that use it should be told to shut up.  Perhaps sensing that her pearl-clutching isn't too convincing, the editor suggests people think he's a journalist when he's clearly a columnist discussing his own view of things, and gets a news editor to suggest discomfort with a journalistic slippery slope.

I honestly don't get why people have problems with other people proposing bets.  My guess is they don't like betting themselves and therefore think nobody else should be allowed to bet, so they make statements like it's "classless" to bet with money going to charity.  I kind of like incentives, myself, but maybe I'm classless.

As for that scary slippery slope, I would gladly give a push and would love to see other columnists put their money where their mouths are, because it might rein them in a little bit, or their critics.  Kind of harder to do that on the straight news side where it's an institution that's reporting out, not just the names on the byline, but if the institution can figure out a way to do that, then more power to them.  What a wonderful world it would be.

A better critique, also noted by people in Silver's Twitter feed, is that if Scarborough believes the odds are 50-50, and all Silver is offering is an even odds bet, then there's no advantage to Scarborough in taking the bet.  No disadvantage either, but there's no incentive from Scarborough's perspective.  Silver should put up $1250 against $1000 to fix that.  Also the money shouldn't go to the same charity but ideally to different ones that the two sides rank differently in preference.  Part of betting is to make people think carefully about their claims, and if the same charity gets the money then you lose some of that incentive.

And while I'm on the subject - there are many many reasons why Mitt Romney would be terrible for the country, especially on climate change, but I don't think his $10,000 bet offer was one of them.  As a gotcha line in the debate it might have been kind of lame, the outcome might have been deceptive, and the cavalier attitude towards that kind of money is unfortunate, but the simple concept of betting someone over a false statement isn't wrong.  Bloomberg has much better reasons for voting for Obama instead of Romney.

Blackouts a reminder of the potential advantage of Vehicle-to-Grid power supply

NYU Langone Medical Center:

At times with only flashlights to illuminate the way, NYU Langone Medical Center began evacuating about 260 patients, carrying some of them down 15 flights of stairs to awaiting ambulances ready to take them to the safety of other hospitals.... 

But between 7 and 7:45 p.m. Monday, the hospital's basement, lower floors and elevator shafts filled with 10 to 12 feet of water, and the hospital lost its power, according to Dr. Andrew Brotman, senior vice president and vice dean for clinical affairs and strategy.
"Things went downhill very, very rapidly and very unexpectedly," Brotman said. "The flooding was just unprecedented." 

Emergency generators did kick in, but two hours later, about 90% of that power went out, and the hospital decided to evacuate patients.

I wrote a while back about an idea I'm researching of using electric vehicles to supplement backup power during blackouts, a bridge to the truly big idea of Vehicle-to-Grid battery power storing energy from intermittent renewable sources, for release when needed.  This article suggests another reason for EVs as additional power backup - in case your emergency generators fail.

Hospitals strike me as pretty power-hungry, so I'm not sure how long EVs could support them, but you could probably triage crucial uses and cut off the rest.  Any extra time would likely be appreciated.

Somewhat related - I attended a lecture by a Japanese consular official last summer on recovery from the tsunami.  He said that electric networks took only days to get back online, while gasoline supplies took weeks.  The implication is that a system relying more on EVs than gas engines will be more resilient.  Unfortunately we have another chance to see how that plays out here, albeit on a much smaller scale of tragedy.


UPDATE:  as of Saturday Nov. 3, it appears that power is coming back faster than fuel supplies.