Month: April 2014

John Cassidy worries that yesterday’s SCOTUS ruling in Schuette will have widespread consequences:

Without saying so explicitly, [the ruling] appeared to give its approval to ballot initiatives designed to roll back affirmative action in other areas as well, such as hiring employees, awarding contracts—and ending racial segregation. In effect—and, in the case of the Court’s conservatives, surely in intention, too—the justices on the majority suggested that if voters in individual states want to throw out laws designed to counter America’s long history of racial discrimination, that’s fine by them, and perfectly constitutional.

Bazelon is disturbed by what she sees as Roberts’ blindness to the enduring problem of racism in America:

I still think there is a difference between a local ordinance that bans busing or fair housing, which aim for equal treatment, and a ballot initiative that takes away a preference based on race. That’s how I made my peace with the outcome today. But I had my doubts when I got to a telling exchange between Roberts and Sotomayor. It’s over the basic underlying question that is nowhere resolved in this case: Whether affirmative action—or any awareness of race—is still needed or valid. …

I can’t read this without noting that in previous cases, Roberts has expressed his preference for color-blindness. This is where the conservatives on the court lose me. Good faith or no, it is at odds with reality to imagine that race no longer matters. I hope the states that ban affirmative action continue to enroll more low-income students as they also find ways to admit black and Hispanic applicants. But we still live in a world of race and class considerations. Not either/or.

The Bloomberg editors, on the other hand, support the court in letting the public decide:

On the issue of affirmative action, the court’s reluctance to be clear may be wise. (And if it’s not reluctance but inability, then it’s welcome.) As the court dithers over whether affirmative action is allowed, the public is increasingly deciding that it’s not necessary — not just in Michigan, where the 2006 vote was not close, but in the U.S. as a whole.

The public may well be wrong about that. Affirmative-action programs still have a crucial role to play in helping public institutions reflect America’s diversity. Yet they are not the only way. Programs that focus on class instead of race can have similar benefits. And there is evidence that colleges that make a concerted effort to attract poor and minority students can achieve results. Whether affirmative action has outlived its usefulness, however, is not a constitutional issue.

However, what the public really thinks of affirmative action isn’t always clear. Allison Kopicki finds that it depends on how the question is framed (NYT):

Using the phrases “special preferences” or “preferential treatment” in a question tends to reduce support for affirmative action. Americans want life to be fair: They generally don’t mind assisting groups that need help, but they don’t like the idea of that help coming at the expense of others. A 2007 Pew Research Center survey, for instance, found that when the question included the word “help,” 60 percent of Americans favored affirmative action; in a question that used the word “preferences,” support fell by 14 percentage points.

Specifying groups that would benefit from affirmative action also tends to reduce support for the policies. When specific groups — such as women, African-Americans or gays and lesbians — were named, support for the practice of affirmative action fell significantly, for all groups but one, as a 2009 Quinnipiac University survey found.

The only exception was people with handicaps. In the question that mentioned them, support for affirmative action was higher than for any other groups, and higher than on a broader question that didn’t name any group.

Corn stover, or the stuff left over when a corn crop is harvested, has become a popular source of biofuel, partly because it doesn’t affect the food supply the way that corn or sugar-based ethanol does. Unfortunately, this type of fuel may actually have a bigger carbon footprint than gasoline:

It used to be that the stalks, leaves, and detrital cobs would be left on fields to prevent soil erosion and to allow the next crop to feast on the organic goodness of its late brethren. Increasingly, though, these leftovers are being sent to cellulosic ethanol biorefineries. Millions of gallons of biofuels are expected to be produced from such waste this year — a figure could rise to more than 10 billion gallons in 2022 to satisfy federal requirements.

But a new study suggests this approach may be worse for the climate, at least in the short term, than drilling for oil and burning the refined gasoline. The benefits of cellulosic biofuel made from corn waste improve over the longer term, but the study, published online Sunday in Nature Climate Change, suggests that the fuel could never hit the benchmark set in the 2007 U.S. Energy Independence and Security Act, which requires that cellulosic ethanol be 60 percent better for the climate than traditional gasoline.

Michael Byrne explains what the problem is:

The problem comes in a trade-off: while the actual fuel burning is cleaner, the process of removing the stover from a field releases carbon dioxide from the soil to the tune of 50 to 70 grams per one megajoule (about a BTU) of energy produced. … There’s more to it than just carbon dioxide. Corn stover doesn’t just go to waste if left on a field post-harvest. It helps protect against erosion and it keeps nutrients in the soil. Removing the stuff means soil loss (you know, Dust Bowl) and an increased need for fertilizer. Lead researcher Adam Liska, a professor at the University of Nebraska, notes that his team made numerous attempts to poke holes in their study, only to come up with the same disappointing results. There’s no such thing as free energy.

Jon Terbush chimes in:

That finding puts some hard numbers behind an interesting note in the U.N.’s latest climate change report, which said “indirect emissions” from biofuels “can lead to greater total emissions than when using petroleum products.”

That said, the EPA dismissed the study because it assumed all of a corn field’s waste would be used for ethanol production, an assumption the EPA said was “an extremely unlikely scenario that is inconsistent with recommended agricultural practices.” And the study did note that emissions could be offset by planting cover crops, so it’s not guaranteed that cellulosic ethanol production using corn would have to be more harmful to the planet than gasoline.

(Image courtesy of Idaho National Laboratory (INL) Bioenergy Program, via Flickr)

Chris Hayes compares the fight against fossil fuels to the abolitionist movement. He states plainly that “there is absolutely no conceivable moral comparison between the enslavement of Africans and African-Americans and the burning of carbon to power our devices.” But he sees economic parallels:

[I]n the decades before the Civil War, the economic value of slavery explodes. It becomes the central economic institution and source of wealth for a region experiencing a boom that succeeded in raising per capita income and concentrating wealth ever more tightly in the hands of the Southern planter class. During this same period, the rhetoric of the planter class evolves from an ambivalence about slavery to a full-throated, aggressive celebration of it. As slavery becomes more valuable, the slave states find ever more fulsome ways of praising, justifying and celebrating it. Slavery increasingly moves from an economic institution to a cultural one; it becomes a matter of identity, of symbolism—indeed, in the hands of the most monstrously adept apologists, a thing of beauty.

And yet, at the very same time, casting a shadow over it all is the growing power of the abolition movement in the North and the dawning awareness that any day might be slavery’s last. So that, on the eve of the war, slavery had never been more lucrative or more threatened. That also happens to be true of fossil fuel extraction today. …

[T]he parallel I want to highlight is between the opponents of slavery and the opponents of fossil fuels. Because the abolitionists were ultimately successful, it’s all too easy to lose sight of just how radical their demand was at the time: that some of the wealthiest people in the country would have to give up their wealth. That liquidation of private wealth is the only precedent for what today’s climate justice movement is rightly demanding: that trillions of dollars of fossil fuel stay in the ground. It is an audacious demand, and those making it should be clear-eyed about just what they’re asking. They should also recognize that, like the abolitionists of yore, their task may be as much instigation and disruption as it is persuasion.

He goes on to argue that avoiding “planetary disaster will mean forcing fossil fuel companies to give up at least $10 trillion in wealth.” Barro sees “reason for somewhat less despair than Mr. Hayes shows, because there are crucial political and economic differences between abolition and carbon limitations”:

In the case of slavery, slaveholders had an enormous economic interest in maintaining their property, while white abolitionists were mostly seeking moral improvement. Those who stood to gain most economically from abolition were slaves, who were excluded from the political process.

An effective carbon limitation policy should bring large economic gains to people who are not in the business of fossil fuel extraction, in the form of reduced economic disruption due to climate change. While owners of fossil fuels have a strong economic impulse to extract, the rest of us should have a strong economic impulse to limit extraction — and we should be willing to buy off the resource owners, if necessary, to enforce those limits.

Warner Todd Huston raises other objections:

[T]oday’s issue is a worldwide problem, not one centralized and isolated in the U.S. Even if we Americans stopped using fossil fuels this very minute, it wouldn’t matter even a tiny bit to the actual global warming problem as the warmists perceive it. That is because India, China, and every other nation would continue using their fossil fuels, making our purportedly heroic efforts not just pointless, but self-destructive.

Imagine if we fought the Civil War, losing 650,000 Americans in the process, thought we eliminated slavery, and then millions of slaves from other nations just flooded back into our country. It would have made the great loss a pointless exercise, for sure. This is what would happen if we destroyed ourselves over global warming while the rest of the world dallied.

In other climate change commentary, Brad Plumer chronicles the failure to meet our climate goals:

The idea that the world can stay below 2°C looks increasingly delusional. Consider: the Earth’s average temperature has already risen 0.8°C since the 19th century. And if you look at the current rapid rise in global greenhouse-gas emissions, we’re on pace to blow past the 2°C limit by mid-century — and hit 4°C or more by the end. That’s well above anything once deemed “dangerous.” Getting back on track for 2°C would, at this point, entail the sort of drastic emissions cuts usually associated with economic calamities, like the collapse of the Soviet Union or the 2008 financial crisis. And we’d have to repeat those cuts for decades.

What more warming might do:

Four degrees (or 7.2° Fahrenheit) may not sound like much. But the world was only about 4°C to 7°C cooler, on average, during the last ice age, when large parts of Europe and the United States were covered by glaciers. The IPCC concluded that changing the world’s temperature in the opposite direction could bring similarly drastic changes, such as “substantial species extinctions,” or irreversibly destabilizing Greenland’s massive ice sheet. … Here’s an analogy that Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, who helped compile some of the research for the World Bank, likes to use. “Take the human body. If your temperature rises 2°C, you have a significant fever. If it rises 4°C or 6°C you can die. It’s not a linear change. You’re pushing a complex system outside the range it’s adapted to. And all our assessments indicate that once you do that, the system’s resilience gets stretched thin.”

The debate over Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century continues to rage throughout the blogosphere. Weissmann thinks it will be the millennials’ liberal manifesto:

Conservatives have long had an easy framework for their economic ideas: The free market cures all. Liberals, instead of nebulously arguing that they’re fighting for the middle class, now have a touchstone that clearly argues they’re fighting against the otherwise inevitable rise of the Hiltons.

Capital will change the political conversation in a more subtle way as well, by focusing it on wealth, not income. Discussions about income can become very muddy, in part because Americans don’t like to begrudge a well-earned payday, and in part because it can be tricky to decide what should count as income. If you start adding health insurance and government transfers such as food stamps into the equation, as some do, the top 1 percent don’t dominate quite so severely.

Wealth is a different story. Americans don’t like the idea of aristocrats—there’s a reason campaigning politicians bring up family farms and steel mills, not Shelter Island vacation homes, when they run for office. Moreover, you can’t save food stamps or a health plan, and because wealth only includes what you can save, it’s a measure of who wins in the economy over the long term.

Robert M. Solow supports Piketty’s proposal for a global wealth tax:

Annual revenue of 2 percent of GDP is neither trivial nor enormous. But revenue is not the central purpose of Piketty’s proposal. Its point is that it is the difference between the growth rate and the after-tax return on capital that figures in the rich-get-richer dynamic of increasing inequality. A tax on capital with a rate structure like the one suggested would diminish the gap between the rate of return and the growth rate by perhaps 1.5 percent and would weaken that mechanism perceptibly.

This proposal makes technical sense because it is a natural antidote to the dynamics of inequality that he has uncovered. Keep in mind that the rich-get-richer process is a property of the system as it operates on already accumulated wealth. It does not work through individual incentives to innovate or even to save. Blunting it would not necessarily blunt them. Of course a lower after-tax return on capital might make the accumulation of large fortunes somewhat less attractive, though even that is not at all clear. In any case, it would be a tolerable consequence.

But McArdle doubts it would solve the real problems of the poor and middle class:

If we look at the middle three quintiles, very few of their worst problems come from the gap between their income and the incomes of some random Facebook squillionaire. … Crime is better, lifespans are longer, our material conditions have greatly improved — yes, even among the lower middle class. What hasn’t improved is the sense that you can plan for a decent life filled with love and joy and friendship, then send your children on to a life at least as secure and well-provisioned as your own.

How much of that could be fixed by Piketty’s proposal to tax away some huge fraction of national income from rich people? Some, to be sure. But writing checks to the bottom 70 percent would not fix the social breakdown among those without a college diploma — the pattern of marital breakdown showed up early, and strong, among welfare mothers.

Deploying the more standard attack from the right, Harsanyi calls Piketty a Marxist:

Like many progressives, Piketty doesn’t really believe most people deserve their wealth anyway, so confiscating it presents no real moral dilemma. He also argues that we can measure a person’s productivity and the value of a worker (namely, low-skilled laborers), while at the same time he argues that other groups of workers (namely, the kind of people he doesn’t admire) are bequeathed undeserved “arbitrary” salaries. What tangible benefit does a stockbroker or a Kulak or an explanatory journalist offer society, after all? …

The thing is, some of us still believe that capitalism fosters meritocratic values. Or I should say, we believe that free markets are the best game in town. Not that long ago, this was a nearly universal position. A lot of people used to believe that even the disruptions of capitalism — the “caprices of technology” as Piketty dismisses them— that rattle “social order” also happen to generate mobility, dynamism and growth. Today this probably qualifies as Ayn Rand-style extremism.

David Corn, who dug up the video footage above, notes:

These days, Paul, who is stuck in a civil war within the GOP over foreign policy issues, is trying to Reaganize himself and demonstrate that he’s not outside the Republican mainstream. (His Senate office did not respond to requests for comment.) But not long ago, Reagan was a foil for Paul, who routinely pointed out that the GOP’s most revered figure actually had been a letdown. It’s no surprise that denigrating Ronald Reagan—and commending Jimmy Carter—is no longer common for Paul. Such libertarian straight talk would hardly help him become one of the successors to the last Republican president who retains heroic stature within the party Paul wants to win over.

For me, though, these clips make Paul’s candidacy more appealing, not less. What the GOP needs is an honest, stringent account of how it has ended up where it is – a party that has piled on more debt than was once thought imaginable and until recently, has done nothing much to curtail federal spending. Reagan was a great president in many ways, as Paul says explicitly in these clips.

But Reagan introduced something truly poisonous into American conservatism.

It was the notion that you can eat your cake and have it too, that tax cuts pay for themselves and that deficits don’t matter. This isn’t and wasn’t conservatism; it was a loopy utopian denial of math. And the damage it has done to this country’s fiscal standing has been deep and permanent. It is one of modern conservatism’s cardinal sins. And Paul is addressing it forthrightly – just as he is addressing the terrible, devastating consequences of neo-conservatism for America and the world in the 21st Century.

What we desperately need from the right is this kind of accounting. It’s what reformers on the left did in the 1990s – confronting the failures of their past in charting a new future. Taking on Reagan on fiscal matters may be short-term political death, as Corn suspects and maybe hopes, but it is vital if the GOP is to regain some long-term credibility on the core question of government solvency. Compared with the ideological bromides and slogans of so many others, Rand Paul is a tonic. And a courageous one at that.