Worthwhile IEA initiative

Just read their first paragraph, it's actually kind of cheering:

The role of renewable sources in the global power mix continues to increase. On a percentage basis, renewables continue to be the fastest-growing power source. As global renewable electricity generation expands in absolute terms, it is expected to surpass that from natural gas and double that from nuclear power by 2016, becoming the second most important global electricity source, after coal. Globally, renewable generation is estimated to rise to 25% of gross power generation in 2018, up from 20% in 2011 and 19% in 2006. Driven by fast-growing generation from wind and solar photovoltaics (PV), the share of non-hydro renewable power is seen doubling, to 8% of gross generation in 2018, up from 4% in 2011 and 2% in 2006. In the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), non-hydro renewable power rises to 11% of OECD gross generation in 2018, up from 7% in 2012 and 3% in 2006.

Rest of the International Energy Agency summary is here. Non-hydro renewables used to be such a tiny component of energy that they could be ignored in the big picture, but not anymore. One trick that opponents will use to demean them is to rely on old data. Stuff from four years ago might not sound too old, but it is when you're talking about the status of the industry.

Guess I'll add one more tidbit:

Renewable electricity broadly on track in clean energy scenarios

As a portfolio of renewable technologies continues to become more competitive, renewable power is on track to meet global climate change objectives, i.e. the interim 2020 targets in the IEA Energy Technology Perspectives 2012 (ETP 2012) 2 °C Scenario (2DS), in absolute generation and investmentlevels. That scenario assumes over 7 400 TWh of renewable generation in 2020, versus total generation of 27 165 TWh. Biofuels for transport face a more challenging path. Production must more than double from current levels to meet the 2DS target of 240 million litres per year in 2020. Advanced biofuels production, in particular, needs to accelerate to meet 2DS objectives.

I didn't even know about this 2012 document, might be worth checking out.

Thanks, Ginsburg, and now please retire. Also, Anthony Kennedy's mixed legacy.

Glad that we got some good court rulings out today on gay rights. Definitely good in a policy sense; I haven't made a deep dive to decide if I completely agree on the law. So thanks to Ginsburg for all her good votes, and as I said after the election, now is the time for the 80-year old, two-time cancer survivor to step aside because it's the best chance in at least 4 years to get a decent nominee through the Senate.

End of Court term is a traditional time to announce resignation. If she waits until next year, it'll be campaign season with even fewer Republican senators willing to vote rationally. In Fall 2014, some 21 Democrats will be up for re-election as opposed to 14 Republicans in an off-year election that usually disfavors the president's party, so the Senate make-up is very likely to get worse. Hopefully the make-up will improve after November 2016 when the ratio for that election is reversed, but whether it will meet or beat what we've got today is unclear (not to mention we don't know who'll be President).

Regardless of whether even a healthy 80-year old has good odds of being to work another 4 years, I can guarantee that a 50-something replacement has better odds, as well as lasting through the contingency of four or more years of a Republican presidency. She should quit.

Hopefully I'll soon look like an idiot for my next statement:  she won't do it. Judges have truly impressive sense of their own importance, and I doubt the Supreme Court reduces that sense.

In my "also" about Kennedy, I think the last two days' ruling against voter rights and for gay rights are a decent example of the mixed legacy I've seen since 2005. While he's responsible for many awful decisions, he also supported human rights on some occasions that came at a personal cost during the Bush administration, losing the chance to be Chief Justice.

Still, if you assume he's acting with a legacy motivation (possibly a motivation for Obama on climate too), then I think he personally comes out better this way. He'll be remembered for making the right decision on social values at a minor personal cost, as opposed to being the Chief Justice who made terrible decisions. Think about that, John Roberts.


UPDATE:  yep, Ginsburg refuses to retire. More proof that the Supreme Court and possibly the appellate courts need term limits.

Weapons that don't work for long would be worth a lot

Put this in the category of blogging about a subject I don't know much about, but one of the worries about arming Syrian rebels is that the weapons will eventually fall into the wrong hands. My naive solution is to increase the odds that the donated weapons aren't durable enough to last much beyond the Syrian conflict or any other conflict when we're supporting one side.

For heavy weapons, having propellant and explosives that degrade fairly quickly over time doesn't sound all that difficult. For both heavy weapons and small arms, use metal parts that rust easily instead of being rust-proof, or maybe pre-stress and weaken components so that they fail after some amount of repeated use. I suppose this creates the risk that a machine gun might fail after two months of use instead of the intended year or so, but I bet they'd still be accepted by Syrian rebels.

Not a perfect solution, and the risk of blowback is still there, but it might help out in the right parts of the world without creating permanent additions to the global weapon supply. Especially given the weapons shipments are happening anyway.

On a related note, I think ammunition control may have better prospects of actually reducing violence in the US than gun control, and limiting the viability of ammunition could also help.


UPDATE:  I like the suggestions in the comments to work degradation into the software for advanced weaponry, although I think it's one more way to cause degradation and not the sole solution.

We'll be waiting for you on Tuesday

Obama will lay out his climate initiative Tuesday afternoon at my Hoya alma mater (the secret passage rumors there are true, btw, I found one myself in the main auditorium that he might use). Lots of speculation on what will be in it. You've got mine from February and May:  no shutdown of Keystone, but something else substantial, with fingers crossed it's the NRDC proposal to regulate existing coal power plants. The speculation suggests a bunch of other climate-related actions will also get thrown in, both on adaptation (which makes sense practically and politically) and carbon sequestration (which makes sense politically, I'm less sure practically except that it needs to be fully researched).

It would be interesting if the numbercrunchers with the chops to do it, go and figure out which is better for the climate - shut down Keystone, or do everything else he'll propose instead. Yes, better still would be doing both, but I'd like to know if the enviro emphasis on Keystone over coal-plant regulation is right. I'm sure it all depends on how generously one's assumptions favor the result one wants to reach (e.g., do you assume current tar sands production shuts down instantly, or that it continues in some form).

In other news, the new senator from Hawaii has adopted the Eli Rabett approach on climate communication with deniers, ridiculing the know-nothings. Will be interesting to see if he does it prominently.

How's this deal: everyone, including other fossil fuel interests, gangs up against coal

(Ahem.) Wereallyneedacarbontaxorcapandtradebutintheabsenceofsufficientpoliticalwillweshouldturntootherpollitically-viablealternativesfortheshortandmediumterm.

Okay, with that out of the way, here's the basic idea for the US:  natural gas eats coal's lunch but renewable power gets a guaranteed and growing share of the power market. More specifically, natural gas interests support a national Renewable Portfolio Standard guaranteeing an increasing market share to renewables, with some state-level flexibility to make it meaningful and feasible in most states. In return, enviros let better-regulated fracking expand. The deal might need two add-ons:  gas interests support legislation limiting coal exports, and in return, more areas get opened, carefully, to fracking (looking at you, California).

I'm not certain we need a deal on coal exports - enviros can try their luck fighting coal export terminals and rail lines on their own without the help of national legislation. Coal exports to Europe would also fall under Europe's cap, so I could see it being Europe's problem to decide how they'll meet their cap. I also think it's usually better to determine that emissions are caused by the country that emits them, not by countries upstream or downstream in the production chain. On the other hand, this deal is less useful if the coal still gets burnt but in another country. If enviros demand assistance in limiting coal exports though, then they have to offer something in return.

This would be a temporary alliance between natural gas and renewables. After a decade or so of growing renewables and decreasing coal, natural gas would have to start phasing in carbon sequestration and would likely have to be phased out itself. That's a fight in the future, though.

Enviros could turn down this deal, but I'm not sure the present status is better, with fracking sucking up the large scale funding that might otherwise be available for renewables.

I hope this won't be a useful information resource for very long

Via Wonkbook, a World Bank description of all the carbon pricing schemes in place or that have passed some level of approval at national or subnational levels. More than you'd think, and somewhat cheering when you remember that pricing is only one part of efforts to restrict emissions for many of the listed programs.

I need to really sit down with the part on the regional-level projects in China, but the first thing I wanted to check was Mexico. I had been excited to see a climate change law passed in the country, but according World Bank, not much has happened yet on the national level for a pricing scheme (see page 74). Other things are happening at regional levels in cooperation with California's program.

Hopefully the World Bank's descriptions will become incomplete soon.

Thought of the day: cage match between fluoride opponents and climate deniers

Rules are the fluoride opponents have to start out convinced that the climate deniers are wrong, and vice versa. I'd like to listen to their arguments on why the other group is wrong (not very interested in their arguments as to why their own group is right). So what happens in the end? Anyone gets convinced?

I'm being slightly unfair here to the fluoride people. Even though I've voted consistently at the Water District to fluoridate and might take some heat in my district for doing so, I think the consensus on water fluoridation being safe isn't at the same level of strength as that of the climate consensus. To clarify, the consensus that fluoridating water is better than not as a general matter for the public health seems pretty strong, but it gets more iffy on the issue of potential side effects.

Guess I'll repeat the obvious - this national security panopticon thing is a problem

Even though I trust Obama far more than Bush, I don't trust him or the hundreds of other people with access to total information about everything (slight exaggeration) to use it sparingly and only for good. And while I don't like to assume facts for which we have no evidence, the recent disclosures of government spying seem unlikely to be the only spying that's done on the general public. No abuses of the information have been disclosed, but that doesn't mean it hasn't happened, and given enough time and enough people with access to the information, we can assume it will happen at some point.

What exactly to do about it seems far less clear to me. And as much as we environmentalists wished that the public knew more and cared more about our issues, we do a lot better than the civil liberties people do with the public.

One aspect of this issue is that the private corporate panopticon isn't much better than the government one. I've made a distinction in the past between the "reasonable" libertarianism that I sometimes identify with versus "simplistic" libertarianism that sees liberty in black and white terms. This is another case where simplistic libertarians, who see no threat from corporate information-gathering while acknowledging threats from government, just don't make sense. That corporate information is too ripe a target for government not to try to get.

We need some European-style privacy laws.

Motivated reasoning can be re-motivated

After previously snarking at Dan Kahan's snarking, I thought I'd poke around his website's blog a bit more to see what I can learn. Still thinking about it, but there are some useful points.

One that he makes in about every third blog post is that a person's benefit in sticking with the beliefs of one's tribe on communal issues like climate change often exceed the costs to that person of that person being wrong. It's a collective action problem where an individual pointing out that one's tribe is making a huge mistake just causes friction. The individual has a disincentive from even seriously considering whether her tribe is wrong.

The ironic part about this is that I think it makes sense on an intuitive level, but I don't recall Kahan citing evidence that proves it to be true (you can speculate that it explains studies of motivated reasoning, but that doesn't prove the theory). His emphasis on the science of science communication doesn't always follow in practice.

Wonkbook reports a related take on motivated reasoning, which found that partisans severely reduced their motivated reasoning when given a personal incentive to do so. Wonkbook refers to this proving that partisans are just "liars" but I think the psychology might be a little more subtle than that. Kahan's take might be that the cost analysis of thinking for one's self v. believing what the tribe believes is adjusted in the experiment.

Anyway, makes sense to me. I think it might also feed into my pet theory that climate adaptation might be the road to acceptance for climate science, because it's more directly about self-interest.

A (very) hypothetical conservative party not biased in favor of the rich over everyone else

I've wondered how the Republican Party or conservative parties elsewhere could avoid being the party that favors the rich over everyone else, especially the poor. As long as we have progressive taxation, or even a flat income tax that is not a poll tax, then the whole "smaller government versus larger government" dimension biases the conservative party towards the rich, whose economic interest at a simplistic level favors smaller government. So the libertarian angle that's being pushed now isn't one that's going to change the class favoritism.

Fighting and slowing social transformation, the other side of conservatism, doesn't map immediately to class issues. You might even expect the radically-increasing economic inequality today compared to past generations to disturb some social conservatives. I think the rare and usually-unsuccessful efforts by some conservatives to alter anti-tax positions at state levels might stem in part from social conservative viewpoints. On the other hand, social transformation has generally involved acceptance of outsider groups that experience economic discrimination among other harms, so fighting attempts to fix this often aligns with being biased in favor of the rich over others.

A dimension that doesn't divide parties right now in the US is opportunity versus compassion. One party could favor spending government money, whatever the total amount may be, on funding sufficient equality of opportunity for the vast majority of citizens to achieve what they want with their lives. The other party could favor spending government money, whatever the total amount may be, on compassionate assistance to people regardless of whether they share some of the responsibility for their problems. The first party seems to me to be logically right of center, and the second to be left of center. The Opportunity Party would also tend to be the party of the young and the Compassion Party that of the older demographics. This is the opposite of the actual situation in the US where younger people are more Democratic-leaning relative to older people.

So that's the first and biggest problem - Republicans aren't very willing or able to switch generational sides in a conflict over resources. The other issue is that Republicans aren't really competing for either the Opportunity or Compassion label. Instead they hug tightly to the Small Government label, leaving both of the other two to the Democrats. The recent noise from the right about achieving equality of opportunity through the destruction of the liberal welfare state is just that - noise. If they start putting more resources behind achieving equality of opportunity than Democrats are willing to do, only then will things start getting interesting. Unlikely.

Dear Slate: please fire whoever wrote the headlines below, immediately. Thank you.

Before you read on, decide for yourself what the two headlines mean. Knowing that Solyndra lost the government a lot of money, I took them to mean that the government lost even more money dealing with Tesla, at least a billion dollars. I assumed then it was an expose that showed Tesla paid back government loans via some surreptitious transfer of government funds.

The article itself is badly written and stupid, but it doesn't say what the headlines claim (and I assume Woolley didn't write the headers). The article admits that contrary to Solyndra, the US government made money from Tesla, but it could have made more money if it had structured the deal as an investment instead of a loan. It skates over what else might have changed, but mainly it fails to address the government was trying to promote technological change, not act as a VC company. I only assume Woolley has busted an artery for every government grant that ended up making money for recipients (maybe he should look into the lost patent opportunities in the fracking research grants). He should have many busted arteries.

I also welcome links where Woolley and Slate wrote in 2009 as opposed to long after the fact that the deal should have been structured to allow conversion of the loan to options.

The deal was a success, and slate-pitching a contrarian viewpoint shouldn't cross over into deception like they did here.

Portland fluoride vote makes sense given limited information and time

Voters in Portland have for the umpteenth time stopped fluoridation of their water, not long after my water district voted to fund it here in Santa Clara County. I used to live in Portland and still visit regularly.

The city relies on a famous-to-Portland protected watershed for its water supply, the Bull Run watershed near Mount Hood. When I lived there in the 1990s, the Forest Service was still trying to log it. Portland voters of all stripes were generally up in arms. People knew that they had great water quality, and the attitude was it wasn't broken, so don't mess with it.

I've looked around the various news sites for exit polls explaining why Portlanders voted down fluoridation by around 60-40. There's plenty of activist reaction that doesn't tell you too much about the typical voter's reasoning, but my best guess is that it's the same reason they opposed logging their water source 20 years ago:  it ain't broke.

Maybe a typical Portlander sat down to mark the ballot with limited information beyond knowing that the water system is pretty good as is. With time ranging from five minutes to maybe one hour total over the previous several months, they learn that there are vicious arguments over fluoridation. At the upper range of that spectrum they might learn enough that there's a scientific consensus in favor of fluoridation, with only outlier experts in opposition.

For this amount of information about their water system, and for voters who put in only a few minutes to think about it, the vote against fluoridation isn't irrational. On the other hand, people who spend more than a few minutes on fluoridation should begin to see where the weight of scientific opinion is, and those people are acting irrationally when they overturn an unanimous decision by the city council that they had elected into office, reject what is the clear weight of scientific opinion and then don't put much time into examining the evidence themselves. I'll acknowledge that people who have put in a lot of time examining the evidence could often be anti-fluoride, but I suspect they began as anti-fluoride and then let that interest drive them into examining evidence and being biased in terms of what they accept.

If I'm right about this, the people who put very little time into considering the issue would be anti-fluoride, those who put a moderate amount of time would be somewhat more pro-fluoride, and those who put a lot of time would be all over the map, but quite possibly anti-fluoride and highly motivated.

As to its relevance to climate policy, the one advantage we have is that doing nothing seems like the conservative, do-no-harm option on fluoride, but climate activists have a strong argument against that. Still I think this indicates that we have to have a winning argument for people that spend five minutes thinking about the issue. My best nomination is

Climate change is real. Our modern weather isn't what our grandparents had, what we ourselves experienced in previous decades. You feel it in your bones to be true - that's why the other side is denying it so loudly, trying to overcome what we know is right.

Not the most scientific, but not completely unscientific, and maybe it works.

On opposing the National Rifle Association:

What Bloomberg has embarked upon now is nothing less than the construction of a mirror image to the NRA. There is plenty of latent public support for gun control, his logic goes, but politicians only see a risk in voting for it. He wants to reverse that calculation.

To that end, Bloomberg created a Super PAC, Independence USA. In 2012, it spent $10 million on ads supporting pro-gun-control candidates running against NRA-friendly opponents in districts where polling suggested such a stance should be a liability. This investment was credited with unseating Democratic Representative Joe Baca of California. In the past year, Mayors Against Illegal Guns, which now has 975 mayors, has expanded from 15 paid staff to more than 50, with lobbyists in Washington and field organizers around the country who will likely be deployed to states with legislative fights looming. The organization is also developing its own candidate rating system.

We should do this on climate change. Absent Bloomberg's billions, maybe the aim should be lower, like state legislative elections where a state is teetering on the edge of doing something about climate.

(I'm also stealing this idea from someone I had dinner with the other day. Not always sure when someone would want credit.)


UPDATE:  I'll add that given the number of targets we would have, there's no need to be as knee-jerk as Bloomberg's group is (e.g., their attack on a moderate Dem like Begich in a conservative state like Alaska). My favorite would be to fund a climate-realist Republican who's challenging a Democrat who had voted against climate legislation. That's impossible at the federal level but not necessarily so at the state legislative level.

Gradually-increasing gas tax that's buffered against price shocks

That's the answer. The question is what's better environmentally and economically than the current situation of an inadequate gas tax and a price that swings widely.

We need to increase the gas tax, a lot, to cover the economic externalities, decrease overconsumption, accelerate the transition away from internal combustion engines, and pay for infrastructure previously paid for by gas taxes on inefficient engines. At the same time, the public hates increasing gas prices and the more environmentally responsible leaders get beat up politically every time the price goes up, more than they recover politically when the price goes back down.

I think the public would prefer predictability and less variability even if the price goes up on a gradual basis. So here's my suggested deal:  set the federal and/or state gas taxes at the wholesale level and increase them at 5% annually (or whatever set level we can get, hopefully better than the usual inflation rate). That tax increase holds, if the wholesale price of gas doesn't change. If the wholesale price drops, the tax increase goes up even more so the year-on-year change is +5%. And if the wholesale price increases, the tax increases less or even decreases to get the same net increase.

This idea stabilizes the wholesale price, not retail which will vary with other costs, but overall it should dramatically reduce variability.

The downside is that the price doesn't react to temporary price signals so it's less efficient. On the other hand, an increasing tax captures more economic externalities, making the price more efficient compared to the present. I'd say the good outweighs the bad.

Second, the revenue stream is far more variable, but overall it will be better than present.

Just an idea

Unsolicited and sadly unpaid game endorsement: Geoguessr

That is all.

Live blogging Jim Hansen et al.

I'm trying this out as an experiment, will expand as he and others talk. We're at the WEST 2013 Sustainable Silicon Valley Summit. I'll occasionally throw in parenthetical comments.

Their big new thing is a Consensus Statement on Science, seeking endorsers here.

2 degrees C rise = 6 meter (feet? didn't catch it) sea level rise in the long term

Renewables just a small sliver of energy use relative to fossil fuels, can't do it on its own.

Fee and dividend - put cost at mines or point of entry

Start at $10/ton, increase $10 year


Arrgh, he's done already. Okay, on to Anthony Barnosky to discuss impacts

Incredible extinction crisis, this is the sixth. The current extinction rate is faster than anything since the dinosaurs.

90% of big fish are gone. From one to three centuries from now, we'll lose 75% of species will be gone.

40% of land surface is already transformed, and we're going to add another 2.5 billion people to population. Sometime this century the percentage will be 50% plus.

Standard Beijing air pollution reference.

More work days lost to enviro pollution than malarai AIDS and tuberculosis.

(Seems like he's talking about non-climate impacts we're having on environment)

Technology isn't obstacle to solutions. In 50 years we've built enough roads in the US to go around earth twice.

Cooperation from local to global (yes!)

(More below the jump, including Gov. Jerry Brown who's sitting in the audience right now listening to scientists)

The "doing something that's short of everything is nothing" fallacy

Above is the best name I've got for the fallacy I keep seeing in many contexts. Somebody else should come up with a better name.

There are some good arguments against expanding nuclear power as a solution to climate change (economics economics economics), but saying we shouldn't do it because by itself it won't solve the entire problem isn't a good argument. I've also seen it locally when some people argued that funding to remove barriers to fish passage is useless when it removes 90% of the barriers on a stream but not 100% of the barriers.

There's some inability to see one effort as part of a broader effort instead of being the magic solution. Maybe the name is "You're Not the One, So Go Away Fallacy"? "Magic Solution or Bust Fallacy"?

The latest manifestation of this is Dan Kahan, who should know better, and his unhappiness over/despite the spate of publicity for the Cook et al. survey of climate abstracts (see Kloor for the same but there's little hope for him). Eli's been blogging about our prequel survey - I would've pushed harder if I had realized how much coverage it could have received.

In essence, Kahan visually demonstrates all the media this study's achieved in a short time period and then says it hasn't solved denial of climate change, so what's the point? To be fair, he isn't claiming ownership of the Magic Solution himself and just poses questions.

Maybe my best response to Kahan's question are a few of my own. Let's forget the rejectionists right now and focus on the fence-sitters and those who generally accept climate change. Do all of those people understand just how strong the scientific consensus is? They're not the ones predisposed to reject these facts.

I'm just a lazy blogger and won't dig it out, but my guess is the Pew and Stanford polling would show that a large fraction of them don't know the strength of the consensus, and those are people that should be receptive to this information. Getting people to move from wishy-washiness and tribal loyalties to increased personal understanding and commitment to the issue is a significant part of the battle.

As for the Magic Solution, you got me. I think we do have to beat the drums for the truth, and having a consistent story that 97% of the abstracts and 97% of the relevant climatologists and over 95% certainty in the IPCC all say the same thing, is really helpful. We have a complete story that satisfies the need for closure while rejectionists have coincidences and conspiracies. The 97% agreement among abstracts reinforces the story.


UPDATE:  and this:

Republicans’ aggressive campaigning against Obama’s clean-energy agenda was “an overreaction,” Feehery said. “It made us seem like enemies of the environment. The idea that government has absolutely no role, that the climate is absolutely not changing—it’s not smart,” he said. “It’s also not smart if you’re talking about all the farmers in red states that make money off windmills. A lot of the base is there.”

The Magic Solution might be to quintuple wind production in Texas.

A message from the recovery room

Eli's immediate post below as reference. I haven't written anything yet because I've been meaning to first set aside several hours to recover where everything ended up. I think where my hubris messed things up was in that wasn't just those skepticalish abstracts I wanted to understand, but an attempt to get all discrepancies in any category resolved by forgetting the abstracts when reviewers disagreed and reading the source papers instead. That bridged too far for us volunteers and ended it.

Still could be a good thing just to read the papers for the skeptical abstracts. I think some of the implicit doubting might go away (not all of it). That info could feed into the other studies.

Eli's done a great job resurrecting the work we all did.

Rumsfeld forgot the unknown knowns

I'm slogging my way through Steve Pinker's Better Angels book on the history of violence so I can finally write about how it's convincing and give it a negative review. Not done yet though, I'm only on page 534 and still have several hundred pages to go.

Way back on page 514 there was something worth writing about, an update on Donald Rumsfeld's sole contribution to humanity:  he talked about known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns, a useful way to look at problems. What Rumsfeld missed, says Pinker citing Dominic Johnson citing Slavoj Zizek, is unknown knowns, which are things known or knowable but are ignored or suppressed.

The context for Pinker was unknown knowns that Rumsfeld and the Bushies had in front of them about Iraq - lack of nuclear weapons development particularly, and the lack of a plan for governing the country. Unknown knowns applies even better to climate change - the evidence is hitting us in the face, literally so in some cases, and mountains of data and history available for anyone to see, but half of American politics refuses to see it. I doubt we'll get the hardcore denialists to know them, but we need to move the fencesitters so they're not stuck by the same unknown knowns.


UPDATE:  lifted from someone else's comment:

If the rational course of action involves admitting that you cannot have what you most want, don't bet on the persons involved being rational.

Non-negligent mistake vs negligence vs strict liability vs Benghazi

Tort law was one of my favorite classes in law school, gruesome injury cases being more interesting than contractual disputes over international chicken shipments.

The usual rule of non-negligent mistake is that you lump it. I drive over a virtually-invisible oil patch and go into a skid and injure you. No one would've seen it, so the injuries are your problem.

Negligence is when I failed to see an otherwise-visible oil patch because I was adjusting the car radio instead of carefully watching the road, and this time I owe you. The classic Reasonable Person wouldn't have adjusted the radio except in absolutely safe conditions. The RP isn't superhuman, supersmart, or superskilled, but he or she doesn't make easily foreseeable mistakes.

Strict liability reverses the rule of non-negligence:  if the harm was from something that even RP would not have avoided, the victim gets compensated. Same as the first case, I drive over a virtually-invisible oil patch and injure you, only that now, your injury results from the fact that I was transporting explosives that then exploded. Strict liability is considered a mostly-modern legal invention but there were earlier forms. Collapsing dams for watermill ponds were examples, and my favorite case was a pioneering, late 19th-Century balloonist who landed on a woman's vegetable patch. She hauled him into court for her veggies. He rightly pointed out that ballooning is brand new and no one knows how to land them - the judge said tough luck, if you do something abnormally risky like ballooning then you're strictly liable for any harm.

Negligence and strict liability seemed like separate concepts until Professor Grey pointed out that the Reasonable Person acts reasonably every time, but no actual human being does. It is unreasonable to expect someone to be reasonably prudent every time, but the law expects that, so a corner of strict liability is embedded in the law of negligence, presumably for the same societal reasons that we apply strict liability in other situations.

So this brings us to Benghazi - it's hard to figure out what the right wingers are screaming about, especially when their bizarre claims about coverups seem tangential to the real issue of inadequate security in the lead-up to the tragedy. I don't know if the inadequate security was a non-negligent mistake or negligence on someone's part, although I'd lean towards the latter. As far as the response  once the attacks started and the hurt feelings of the people who believe they didn't get accurate information in the near-term aftermath, the first of those two things is hard to judge and the second isn't all that important.

But that still leaves the screw-up in the security preparations. Even if it's negligence that resulted in four deaths, I don't hold that as a major screw-up of the Obama Administration. They make thousands of security decision, and they will screw some of them up. Someone should pay for it somewhere in the chain of command (assuming it is negligence), but this is small potatoes - it would be unreasonable to go from this to concluding that the administration as a whole is negligent.

I wish the worst thing we could say about the Bush Administration was that they screwed up and four people died.


UPDATE:  I need to do some additional research but I think Paul Ryan lied to the public on national television about a national security issue in the vice-presidential debate when he said there was virtually no US security in Libya compared to what we have at the Paris embassy, while knowing that CIA was nearby. He should get hit with this when he runs in 2016.