America Less Alone?

The statistical basis for Mark Steyn’s amusing book, America Alone, and for several articles he has written about the coming "caliphate" in "Eurabia", is not entirely clear. The claim, in Steyn’s own words, is that

by some projections, the EU’s population will be 40 percent Muslim by 2025.

Steyn wrote that in February 2005, just after the admission into the EU of 74 million new people from Eastern Europe, almost all of whom are non-Muslim. This blogger has tried to figure out what the source is. After some exhaustive googling, he comes up with the following possible source:

There was an NIC report released in December 2004, a month before the article was written, where four ‘fictional scenarios’ were considered; one of them, starting on page 83, is ‘A New Caliphate’ in which the moslem population of Europe is projected to go as high as between 22 and 37 million; that is not the same thing, of course, as heading towards 40 percent. Could he have made that mistake?

There is a Scotsman article at about the same time that talks of a CIA report (that clearly seems to refer to the NIC2020 project from which the fictional scenario I mentioned was taken) where it is projected that the moslem population will climb from 22 to 37 percent instead of the 22-37 million in the report. So it seems that the Scotsman author, at least, did make the mistake of switching percent in for millions. The only collapse hypothesised within 15 years, in the NIC report, though, is that of US-EU relations, not of the EU itself (as correctly reported by the Scotsman article).

So did Steyn confuse "million" for "percent"? D’oh! Or is Steyn referring to another source? It is the premise of the entire book, after all.

“Pretty Clear-Eyed”

Obamaclintonbrendansmialowskigetty_1

"I wouldn’t be a U.S. senator or out of Chicago or a presidential candidate from Illinois if I didn’t have some sense of the world as it actually works. When I arrived in Chicago at the age of twenty-four, I didn’t know a single person in Chicago, and I know an awful lot of folks now. And so, obviously, some of that has to do with me being pretty clear-eyed about power," – Barack Obama, in a new piece by Ryan Lizza.

(Photo: Brendan Smialowski/Getty.)

The Best Ad Yet

It isn’t even campaign season. This isn’t even an ad made by or endorsed by the Obama campaign – it’s a self-made, YouTube-distributed anti-Clinton ad from a lone Obama supporter. But everything it expresses about Clinton I feel. I know it’s not an argument; it’s a feeling. But the thought of her on my television screen for four years fills me with a dread I find hard to articulate. With this ad, I don’t have to.

Chill, Everyone

Jon Rauch urges calm in the climate change debate. It’s not an emergency, but it is a problem. Happily there is an obvious and not-too-difficult solution:

The most efficient way to get started is also the simplest, albeit not the easiest politically: tax carbon emissions. "At around $30 per ton of CO2 over a 25-year horizon, experts seem to think this is the kind of price that will encourage the kind of technologies that are necessary," says Billy Pizer, an environmental economist at Resources for the Future, a Washington think tank. That would translate into an additional 27 cents or so on a gallon of gasoline and about a 20 percent increase in residential electricity bills (more like 34 percent for industrial users). Unpleasant, but hardly radical. Perfectly do-able, in fact.

So let’s do it, ok? Taxing carbon will prod the private sector to come up with new energy sources – no government-run Manhattan project, please – and the effect will be gradual but effective in the long run, i.e. the next century. Taxing carbon is good policy anyway, as Glenn Reynolds has pointed out. I know this sounds like a massive suck-up, but easily the best piece I have read recently on climate change is by Gregg Easterbrook in the current Atlantic. He lays out what the likeliest actual effects will be in the next few decades – who will benefit? how? and what difference will it all make? Canada and Russia are in for boom-times. The already poor and equatorial: not so much. There’s an interview about the piece by Tim Lavin here.