The Dish

Rebecca Leber spotlights two reports suggesting that “the world could be largely powered by the sun, instead of coal, within decades”:

The reports come from the International Energy Agency (IEA). It focuses on two kinds of solar—the kind that’s commonly seen installed on homes and businesses in the U.S. (solar photovoltaic) and the kind that generates heat to power (solar thermal). Within 35 years, according to the reports, they could account (respectively) for 16 and 11 percent of the world’s electricity generation.

It wouldn’t be easy to get to this level. Today, solar accounts for less than 1 percent of global energy consumption and 0.2 percent in the United States. To hit the levels IEA projects, there would have to be substantial investment upfront. But advances in technology, in addition to taxpayer subsidies, have helped solar panel costs come down some 80 percent in the last five years. If the IEA is right, costs may shrink another 65 percent by 2050.

Dave Roberts highlights the fact “that solar costs are plunging so fast that even the stodgy IEA is scrambling to keep up”:

At virtually every point in time over the last several decades, IEA has been behind the curve, underestimating the growth of renewables. Raise your hand if you think this is the last time it will reassess and upgrade solar’s potential contribution.

Relatedly, Brad Plumer analyzes the fight between solar and electric utilities. The core issue:

Rooftop solar generation has roughly tripled since 2010. By some estimates, a new solar system is installed every four minutes in the United States.

To electric utilities, this poses a dilemma. As rooftop solar becomes more popular, people will buy less and less electricity from their local power company. But utilities still have plenty of fixed costs for things like maintaining the grid. So, in response, those utilities will eventually have to raise rates on everyone else. Trouble is, those higher electricity rates could spur even more people to install their own solar rooftop panels to save money. Cue the death spiral.

Sound far-fetched? This was the doomsday scenario laid out by the Edison Electric Institute, an industry trade group, back in January 2013. Even a relatively modest increase in rooftop solar power could cause havoc. David Crane, CEO of NRG Energy, has called these trends “a mortal threat to the existing utility system.”

David Hajdu charts the rise of the satirical music video:

Song parodies now generate more revenue than official videos, according to YouTube data provided in the 2014 Annual Report of the International Federation of Phonographic Industries (IFPI), a music-recording trade group. While YouTube once discouraged parody videos on the dubious grounds of copyright infringement – its attorneys must have skipped the readings on Berlin v. E. C. Publications in law school – YouTube now welcomes music parodies, because it has figured out how to make money from them. YouTube is helping record companies and rights administrators to hit up parodists (and others who employ copyrighted music in their content) for licensing fees.

He finds himself ambivalent about the genre. On the one hand, parody amounts to “critique in creative form, and as such it provides a service essential to society”:

These benefits are real and important, particularly at a time when mainstream popular music is subjected to so little serious criticism, and when serious criticism has so little traction in mainstream culture.

On the other:

There is something disconcerting about the dominance of parody in the YouTube musical sphere today. The true purpose of parody is the making of jokes rather than the making of critique. The final test of a parody is its ability to get laughs; it is not the depth, nor even the accuracy, of its insights.

Several readers comment on our praise of Last Week Tonight:

My brother and I have fallen into something of a Monday-morning ritual where we rave about how great John Oliver’s expose-of-the-week had been the night before. Not because the extra 8 minutes have afforded him the equivalent of brutally delivered “long-form comedy-news journalism”, but because Oliver routinely taps into the collective influence of his audience’s Internet fluency toward a sort of “social media civic engagement” we haven’t seen before.

Seemingly without exception, he always gives the audience an opportunity to participate in his issue-of-the-week in surprisingly meaningful ways: send comments to the FCC about net neutrality, donate to other scholarship funds made available to women to supplant Miss America’s status at the top, copy a satirical letter to APSCU lampooning the abuse of student loan subsidies by for-profit colleges.

Where Jon Stewart tends to end his rants with pithy statements that leave us feeling angry but hopeless, John Oliver seems to be going out of his way to channeling that outrage into non-trivial calls for action. Even if his goal is only to dominate the next day’s cable news cycle in replays, it makes the endeavor seem much more traditionally journalistic than The Daily Show or The Colbert Report.

Another sends the above video:

I know how you feel about Michael Moore, but he did much the same thing with his show TV Nation.

The most telling was how he hired a lobbyist to get Congress to declare a “TV Nation Day,” with clips of actual congressmen giving speeches about a show they had clearly never seen based on what the lobbyist told them, or rather, the money they got from them.

Another dissents:

Unlike you, Andrew, I am very disappointed with John Oliver’s HBO program. While I think it serves a useful public service when it gets the word out on under-reported issues like Net Neutrality, I find it lazy and often insulting. The piece he did on for-profit colleges simply took its talking points and best clips from a superb Frontline documentary, “College, Inc.,” which aired four years ago. The show’s segment on Payday loans included a fake PSA from Sarah Silverman in which she encouraged the poor who use their services to make money by debasing themselves (“People will pay you to pee on them”). I spent many Saturday mornings driving my severely disabled mother to Payday loan stores (people were “so nice there.”). I stood by the door to keep her from getting mugged and paid back her interest for her. To even jokingly suggest that people like her should get the money they need through shitting on strangers (which Silverman also does) reveals how callow and insincere the show toward some of the issues it covers. (Don’t even get me started on the cute gerbil eating a burrito as a reward for hearing about death penalty abuses).

When you single out Jon Stewart’s failings for comparison, you miss the point. For me, the Daily Show’s genius is its investigative pieces, at which John Oliver once excelled. For an understanding of Russian political culture and how it might be capable of state-sponsored homophobia and invasions of its neighbors, look no further than Jason Jones’ Winter Olympics interviews in Moscow with a leadership delighted to spew their hate and aggression on camera to an American audience. Nothing else in the media comes close to getting at their “epistemic closure.” John Oliver needs to use his long-form platform to get back on the road and do what he does best.

My old friend, Jesse Norman, is an MP in the British parliament and noted something odd in the recent war debate in the Commons:

During the past decade or two, a convention has started to develop that, except in an emergency, major foreign policy interventions must be pre-approved by a vote in Parliament. The idea springs from honourable motives and it is understandable given the present climate of distrust in politics, but in my judgment it is nevertheless a serious mistake … It is a basic purpose of Parliament —above all, of this Chamber—to hold the Government to account for their actions. It is for the Government, with all their advantages of preparation, information, advice and timeliness, to act, and it is then for this Chamber to scrutinise that action.

If Parliament itself authorises such action in advance, what then? It gives up part of its power of scrutiny; it binds Members in their own minds, rather than allowing them the opportunity to assess each Government decision on its own merits and circumstances; and instead of being forced to explain and justify their actions, Ministers can always take final refuge in saying, “Well, you authorised it.” Thus, far from strengthening Parliament, it weakens it and the Government: it weakens the dynamic tension between the two sides from which proper accountability and effective policy must derive.

In the British constitutional system, Jesse is surely right. He reminds us that when Margaret Thatcher recalled Parliament for an emergency session before the launch of the Falklands war, the motion before the House was simply: “That this House do now adjourn.” But what makes this so striking is how the American republic, meanwhile, has turned into the British one. It was long understood as a vital part of the American constitution that declarations of war had to come from the Congress and not the president – precisely to avoid the dangers of a pseudo-monarch using war to bolster his own standing, to project strength or to act as some kind of protector of the realm. None of that really applies any more, the president launches war after war (while calling them counter-terror operations), and the Congress’s only remaining role is to provide the funds. This is precisely what the Founders feared; and it is precisely what is now routine. In a stark review of a new book on presidentialism by F H Buckley, The Once And Future King: The Rise Of Crown Government In America, Gene Healy sees how far the rot has gone:

We’re hardly “the freest country in the world.” As Buckley points out, his native Canada beats the United States handily on most cross-country comparisons of political and economic liberty. In the latest edition of the Cato Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World rankings, for example, we’re an unexceptional 17th. Meanwhile, as Buckley points out, the Economist Intelligence Unit’s “Democracy Index” ranks us as the 19th healthiest democracy in the world, “behind a group of mostly parliamentary countries, and not very far ahead of the ‘flawed democracies.’”

There’s a lesson there. While “an American is apt to think that his Constitution uniquely protects liberty,” the truth “is almost exactly the reverse.” In a series of regressions using Freedom House’s international rankings, Buckley finds that “presidentialism is significantly and strongly correlated with less political freedom.”

In this, Buckley builds on the work of the late political scientist Juan Linz, who in a pioneering 1990 article, “The Perils of Presidentialism,” argued that presidential systems encourage cults of personality, foster instability, and are especially bad for developing countries.

Subsequent studies have bolstered Linz’s insights, showing that presidential systems are more prone to corruption than parliamentary systems, more likely to suffer catastrophic breakdowns, and more likely to degenerate into autocracies. The Once and Future King puts it succinctly: “there are a good many more presidents-for-life than prime-ministers-for-life.” Maybe what’s exceptional about the United States is that for more than 200 years we’ve “remained free while yet presidential.”

Relatively free, that is. The American presidency, with its vast regulatory and national security powers, is, Buckley argues, rapidly degenerating into the “elective monarchy” that George Mason warned about at the Philadelphia Convention. Despite their parliamentary systems, our cousins in the Anglosphere also suffer from creeping “Crown Government”-“political power has been centralized in the executive branch of government in America, Britain, and Canada, like a virus that attacks different people, with different constitutions, in different countries at the same time,” he writes.

But we’ve got it worse, thanks in large part to a system that makes us particularly susceptible to one-man rule. As Buckley sees it, “presidentialism fosters the rise of Crown government” in several distinct ways. Among them: It encourages executive messianism by making the head of government the head of state; it insulates the head of government from legislative accountability; and it makes him far harder to remove. On each of these points, The Once and Future King makes a compelling-and compellingly readable-case.