Im-Politic: A Billionaire Candidate’s Massive Climate Change Blind Spot

Tags

China, climate change, Democratic debate, Democrats, election 2020, Im-Politic, tariffs, Tom Steyer, Trump

It’s now been five days since I first heard it, but I still can hardly believe my ears because this utterance might have been the single dumbest and/or most ignorant combination of positions I’ve ever heard a leading political figure make. It came from Tom Steyer during the Democratic presidential debate last Tuesday night, and even though the California billionaire’s campaign seems to be going nowhere fast as the 2020 campaign nears its primary phase, it deserves to be spotlighted.

The first of the two statements in question? Steyer’s declaration that “On the first day [of his presidency], I would undo Mr. Trump’s [China] tariffs.” The second? “…I would declare a state of emergency on day one on climate.”

Why is this so mind-boggingly idiotic? Because as should be known by anyone who thinks he or she is qualified to be President, not only has China become by far the world’s largest emitter of the greenhouse gases held to be responsible for climate change, but as shown in the left-hand chart below, it started becoming an emitter in a class by itself at the turn of the century – i.e., right about the time when it was admitted into the World Trade Organization (WTO). And the most important effect of WTO admission was greatly complicating the challenge faced by all the world’s economies – including America’s – in using tariffs to curb the growth of China’s subsidy-fueled carbon-belching export-heavy industries. 

We don’t yet have data for 2019, but the chart also shows that the growth of China’s emissions began to slow (though they’re still growing faster than anyone else’s except India’s) as China’s economic growth (which has always been export-heavy) began slowing. Moreover, over the last year, as literally hundreds of billions of dollars worth of Chinese goods intended for U.S. markets have been hit by President Trump with stiff tariffs, China’s growth hit a 29-year low. Think that’s a coincidence? Think again, as between 2018 and 2019, China’s annual export growth crash dove from 9.9 percent to 0.5 percent in U.S. dollar terms. (The right-hand chart, which measures emissions on a per capital basis, displays similar trends.) 

There’s nothing of course intrinsically wrong with Steyer’s passionate belief in the need to combat climate change. But his utter failure to recognize China’s immense contribution to the danger he sees makes embarrassingly clear – to put the kindest interpretation on the matter – that his knowledge base lags far behind his emotions. To the extent that other high profile climate activists repeatedly let China off the hook as well, they deserve the same criticism. And if this massive blind spot (or delusion) casts big-time doubt on Steyer’s qualifications to be President (which it should), it should have the same effect on all the other climate change resisters who display this shortcoming, too.

Im-Politic: Why You Should be Really Skeptical About the Green New Deal

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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, climate change, Congress, Green New Deal, Im-Politic

Since I have no special expertise on climate change, I can’t comment usefully on the scientific aspects of the Green New Deal (GND) resolution introduced recently in the House of Representatives. As a result, I don’t even believe that I can comment usefully on how the U.S. economy may be affected by a major green refit and the tradeoffs it will inevitably entail even if I had a clear idea of what such a blueprint would entail.

What I do claim some expertise on is political posturing and elementary logic. And on those bases alone, it’s glaringly obvious that the resolution’s Congressional and other supporters aren’t the slightest bit serious about preventing catastrophic global warming.

Here’s the dead giveaway: Nothing in the plan, or about it, is remotely capable of addressing the threat as it’s described by GND-ers.

Let’s assume for argument’s sake that most, or perhaps not even many, of the resolution’s backers don’t literally agree with their leading spokesperson, freshman Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, that “The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change….” (And even this phrasing is pretty fishy. What’s with using fudgy language like “address” in such a cassandra-like clarion call? Did President Franklin D. Roosevelt warn Americans that the country could be endangered if it didn’t “address” the Nazis and the Japanese militarists? Moreover, how many years of planetary survival will be gained by “addressing” the threat? How long does the Earth have until climate change is ended or whatever ultimate goal the GND-ers have in mind?)

Even GND-ers believing the planet has more than twelve years surely view the situation as desperate. But if so, what’s the point of spending precious time working up a document that’s non-binding, and that even many backers view as “aspirational”? (See, e.g., here and here.) What possible excuse could there be for not focusing on whatever it takes to passing a mandatory climate change plan ASAP – and with veto-proof majorities?

In addition, why, given the immediacy of the threat and the literal life and death stakes for humanity as a whole do the GND-ers clutter up their manifesto with objectives and standards such as “ensuring that the Green New Deal mobilization creates high-quality union jobs that pay prevailing wages, hires local workers, offers training and advancement opportunities, and guarantees wage and benefit parity for workers affected by the transition….”? Or “guaranteeing a job with a family-sus4 taining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security to all people of the United States….”?

In other words, no planet-saving campaign can be approved unless it benefits organized labor? And how long do those paid vacations need to be?

Similarly, why, given the ostensible urgency, does the resolution insist that the program “be developed through transparent and inclusive consultation, collaboration, and partnership with frontline and vulnerable communities, labor unions, worker cooperatives, civil society groups, academia, and businesses….”? What a time sink that’s going to be!

And that leads to the most suspicious substantive feature of the GND movement so far. Even though climate change warnings have been sounded literally for decades, and even though they’ve been issued with increasing frequency by more and more individuals, organizations, national governments, and international organizations, the above phrasing is an explicit admission that there’s no commonly agreed upon plan that would even cover the United States alone.

Principally, on the one hand, the resolution states that its goals (including “meeting 100 percent of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources….”) “should be accomplished through a 10-year national mobilization.” On the other, it proposes achieving these goals through “making public investments in the research and development of new clean and renewable energy technologies and industries….” In other words, after all this time, the GND-ers don’t yet know what these technologies could be, let alone how long it will take to turn whatever laboratory breakthroughs they envision into knowhow usable in the real world.

One of my favorite adages is that necessity is the mother of invention, mainly because its opposite is usually true as well: If there’s no real invention, you can be there’s no necessity. As demonstrated by the form and substance of the resolution, that’s a legitimate conclusion to be drawn about the Green New Deal.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: The U.S. Public Opinion Gap isn’t Only Partisan

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alliances, America First, climate change, Democrats, globalism, Immigration, Jobs, national security, nuclear deterrence, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Pew Research Center, Republicans, terrorism, Trump, weapons of mass destruction

A recent (November 29) Pew Research Center poll on public attitudes toward foreign policy issues was a classic good news/bad news story – at least if you believe that the top priority of American foreign policy should be to promote the security and well-being of the American people.

On the one hand, that’s pretty much what the results show – that’s the good news. On the other hand, these commonsense positions prevail overwhelmingly because adults viewing themselves as either Republicans or Republican leaners hold them. That’s the bad news.  In other words, the views of Democrats and those leaning Democratic reveal a marked disregard for their nation’s self-preservation and prosperity.

According to Pew, 72 percent of all Americans say that “taking measures to protect the U.S. from terrorism” should “be a top foreign policy priority,” 71 percent would assign the same priority to “protecting jobs of American workers,” and 66 percent regard “preventing the spread” of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) with similar urgency.

But now check out the partisan splits: On the terrorism issue, fully 84 percent of Republicans and their leaners regard it as a top foreign policy priority. Only 61 percent of Democrats and their leaners agree. So much, i.e., for the idea that Americans will never forget September 11. And remember – the question only described protection from terrorism as a top priority, not the top foreign policy priority.

On protecting American workers’ jobs, 81 percent of Republicans and their leaners would treat it as a priority, versus only 65 percent of Democrats and their leaners. I’m old enough to remember when the Democrat called themselves the party of working Americans.

The exception here is preventing the spread of WMD: Fewer (64 percent of Republicans and their leaners see it as a major priority than do Democrats and their leaners (68 percent), but these results are very close.

Many of the other Pew poll findings are not the slightest bit surprising. Principally, the biggest partisan divides on foreign policy issues come on “dealing with global climate change,” “reducing illegal immigration into the U.S.,” and “maintaining U.S. military advantage over all other countries.”

But here’s what’s more surprising. The Democrats, and especially their leaders, have enthusiastically assumed the mantle of globalism champions versus President Trump’s proclaimed America First approach. And a hallmark of globalism, whether on the right or the left ends of the national political spectrum, has been international activism. Liberals and conservatives generally disagree on where to place the emphasis (e.g., emerging transnational issues like climate change and migration versus more traditional security-oriented issues), but energetic engagement is favored by all.

Nonetheless, if you look carefully at the Pew results, Democrats and their leaners would place the “top priority” label on relatively few foreign policy issues. Indeed, only one such candidate for this status reaches the 70 percent mark with these groups – “improving relationships with allies.” And only four issues are seen as top priorities by 60 or more percent of Democrats and their leaners – as stated above, WMD (68 percent), protecting American jobs (65 percent), climate change (64 percent) and terrorism (61 percent). 

Overall, then, it’s easy to conclude from these and other findings in the Pew poll that Democrats and their leaners may be globalists, but they’re globalists who don’t seem to regard overseas-related challenges with overwhelming concern. Alternatively, they’re reluctant to support zeroing in on a limited (and arguably more manageable) set of goals. P.S., the relatively low score for climate change seems especially noteworthy given the importance progressive Democrats and others relatively far to the Left have attached to the idea of a “Green New Deal.”

It’s even easier to conclude that Republicans and their leaners are more committed to an America First-type approach. And it looks like this commitment is somewhat stronger. Their highest priority foreign policy issues are the aforementioned terrorism and job protection – where their priority scores are in the 80s percent. And their next three priorities are maintaining a national military edge (70 percent), reducing illegal immigration (68 percent), and preventing WMD spread (64 percent). For good measure, “getting other countries to assume more of the costs of maintaining world order” comes in at 56 percent.

However revealing these Pew results, they still left out two of the biggest questions for politicians and others trying to surmise which approaches to U.S. foreign policy, and what specific initiatives, would garner the most and least public support. The first is how genuine political independents view these issues. The second is how high a priority is assigned to preventing a nuclear attack on the U.S. homeland.

The importance attached to halting the spread of weapons of mass destruction points to great concern about this challenge. But the strong support expressed by Democrats and their leaners for shoring up America’s alliance relations indicates an especially serious lack of awareness on their part that indiscriminately extending nuclear umbrellas over U.S. allies has greatly increased the odds of such attack (principally from the newish NATO commitments to the highly vulnerable Baltic states, and the longstanding commitment to protect South Korea from North Korea and its new nuclear capabilities).

Of course, these Americans can’t entirely be blamed for this knowledge gap, as both U.S. leaders and the mainstream media continue to work overtime to mask the – growing – nuclear war risks inherent in the nation’s alliance system. (President Trump has been only a partial exception.) Hopefully 2019 will see some explicit, intellectually honest discussion of these dangers – and well before they reach critical mass.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: More Globalist Fantasies from The Times’ Friedman

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Africa, China, climate change, Cold War, democracy, Europe, global norms, global order, global warming, globalism, human rights, international institutions, Italy, migrants, migration, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, The National Interest, The New York Times, Thomas Friedman, World War II

Thomas Friedman’s New York Times column today shows that the uber-pundit continues to perform a crucial dual public service. He both articulates as clearly as possible the usually unspoken assumptions underlying the globalist foreign policy approach pursued by the establishments of the two major American political parties for decades, and (unwittingly, to be sure) he reveals how childish they are. 

In his discussion of the African migrants crisis faced by Italy and other countries of southern Europe, Friedman once again credits “global cooperation and rule-making” with making “America, Europe and the world as a whole steadily freer, more stable and more prosperous since World War II.”

As I’ve pointed out, these successes owed not to any institutions-based “liberal global order” but to the American power and wealth that underwrote the defense of Western Europe, Japan, and South Korea and the recreation of a functioning international economy (until the Cold War ended, of course, one confined to the bounds of the non-communist world).

But what distinguishes today’s article – and pushes it into the realm of fantasy – is the author’s claim that this order and its institutions and procedures have “managed the key global issues after W.W. II — like trade, migration, environment and human rights….”

How do we know this is fantasy? Because Friedman himself emphasizes here that the migrants crisis remains out of control. Moreover, the world trade system is proving woefully unable to handle the challenge of China’s predatory government-private sector hybrid economy. The management claim, meanwhile, is sure hard to square with Friedman’s own nearly innumerable warnings that climate change is about to destroy the planet unless dramatic steps are taken immediately.

And although the world is unmistakably freer than before World War II, again it’s been American power – not any set of worldwide institutions and rules – that’s been primarily responsible. Further, a major elite commentator meme nowadays of course is that freedom has taken some important hits lately – e.g., because of the rise of allegedly authoritarian populists on both sides of the Atlantic, because Russia’s post-Cold War experiment with genuine democracy proved so short-lived, and because China’s widely anticipated evolution toward greater political (and economic) openness never even got started.

I’m also grateful to Friedman for creating another opportunity for me to explain why dismissing the importance of international institutions and rules does not amount to dismissing the importance of international cooperation in addressing the varied and important worldwide problems that transcend borders.

As I’ve most recently written in my June National Interest article on the superiority of a genuine America First foreign policy, there’s no reasonable question that in order to deal with pollution and disease and climate shifts (whether man-made or not, they can create terrible common problems) countries will need to meet and figure out how to respond jointly.

But since the agreed-on solutions will not affect every country equally, or benefit every country equally, it will be vital for the United States to push for the measures that most effectively promote and preserve its own interests. Further, since Washington will not be able to count on persuasion solely or even largely to accomplish this goal, it will need to make sure that it possesses the only other advantages capable of shaping the outcomes favorably – power and wealth. Accept no substitutes.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: The Case for a “Made in America” Approach

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Africa, AIDS, border security, climate change, corruption, diseases, foreign policy, foreign policy establishment, globalism, HIV, human rights, internationalism, Iran, Iran deal, Islamic terrorism, Israel, Jeffrey Goldberg, Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Middle East, missile defense, nuclear proliferation, oil, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, population control, Project-Syndicate.org, shale, terrorism, The New York Times, Thomas Friedman

I’m picking on New York Times uber-pundit Thomas Friedman again today – not because of any personal animus, but because, as noted yesterday, he’s such an effective, influential creator of and propagandist for the conventional wisdom on so many public policy fronts. And just to underscore that it’s nothing personal, I’ll also put in my cross-hairs another, though lower profile, thought leader: Harvard political scientist Joseph S. Nye, Jr. The reason? Both recently have provided us with quintessential illustrations of how lazy – and indeed juvenile – the justifications for American international activism served up by the bipartisan foreign policy establishment have grown.

The analyses I’m talking about aren’t quite as childishly simplistic as the establishment theme I wrote about last month – the assumption that American involvement in alliances and international organizations and regimes is automatically good, and that withdrawal or avoidance is automatically bad. But because it’s a little more sophisticated, it can be even more harmful. It’s the insistence that whenever the United States faces a problem with an international dimension, the remedy is some form of international engagement.

A recent Friedman column revealed one big weakness with this assumption: It often logically leads to the conclusion that a problem is utterly hopeless, at least for the foreseeable future. Just think about the only sensible implications of this October 31 article, which insists that the apparently metastasizing threat of Islamic terrorism in Africa can’t be adequately dealt with through the military tools on which the Trump administration is relying.

Why not? “Because what is destabilizing all of these countries in the Sahel region of Africa and spawning terrorist groups is a cocktail of climate change, desertification — as the Sahara steadily creeps south — population explosions and misgovernance.

“Desertification is the trigger, and climate change and population explosions are the amplifiers. The result is a widening collapse of small-scale farming, the foundation of societies all over Africa.”

I have no doubt that Friedman is right here. And as a result, he has a point to slam the Trump administration “for sending soldiers to fight a problem that is clearly being exacerbated by climate and population trends….” (That’s of course a prime form of American international activism.)

But he veers wildly off course in suggesting that other forms of such activism – “global contraception programs,” “U.S. government climate research” and the like are going to do much good, especially in the foreseeable future. Unless he supposes that, even if American policies turned on a dime five or even ten years ago, Africa would be much less of a mess? The only adult conclusion possible is that nothing any government can do is going to turn the continent into something other than a major spawning ground for extremism and refugees.

And this conclusion looks especially convincing considering the African problem to which Friedman – and so many other supporters of such approaches – gives short shrift: dreadfully corrupt governments. For this is a problem that has afflicted Africa since the countries south of the Sahara began gaining their independence from European colonialists in the late-1950s. (And the colonialists themselves weren’t paragons of good government, either.)

So I’m happy to agree that we shouldn’t pretend that sending American special forces running around Africa helping local dictators will actually keep the terrorists under control (although as I’ve argued in the case of the Middle East, such deployments could helpfully keep them off balance). But let’s not pretend that anything Friedman supports will help, either – at least in the lifetime of anyone reading this.

Nye has held senior government foreign policy posts in Democratic administrations and, in the interests of full disclosure, we have crossed swords in print – mainly about the proper definition of internationalism and about a review of an anthology he edited that he didn’t like (which doesn’t seem to be on-line). But I hope you agree that there’s still a big problem with his November 1 essay for Project-Syndicate.org about the implications of America’s domestic energy production revolution for the nation’s approach to the Middle East.

In Nye’s words: “Skeptics have argued that lower dependence on energy imports will cause the US to disengage from the Middle East. But this misreads the economics of energy. A major disruption such as a war or terrorist attack that stopped the flow of oil and gas through the Strait of Hormuz would drive prices to very high levels in America and among our allies in Europe and Japan. Besides, the US has many interests other than oil in the region, including nonproliferation of nuclear weapons, protection of Israel, human rights, and counterterrorism.”

Two related aspects of this list of reasons for continued American engagement in the region stand out. First, it’s completely indiscriminate. And second, for this reason, it completely overlooks how some of these unmistakably crucial U.S. interests can be much more effectively promoted or defended not through yet more American intervention in this increasingly dysfunctional region, but through changes in American domestic policies.

For instance, we’re (rightly) worried about nuclear proliferation, especially in Iran? How can today’s engagement policy help? Even if the the current Iran nuclear deal works exactly as intended, what happens when it runs out? Should we simply assume that Tehran will be happy to keep its nuclear genie in a bottle for another fifteen years? Will Iran be persuaded to give up the nuclear option permanently if Washington cultivates even closer ties with its age-old Sunni Muslim enemies, like Saudi Arabia?

Although I’m a missile defense skeptic – especially when it comes to the near-term threat from North Korea – isn’t figuring out a more effective way to repel an Iranian strike more likely to protect the American homeland? It’s certainly a response over which the United States will have much more control – and indeed, any control. In addition, if the United States withdraws militarily from the Persian Gulf region, Iran’s reason for launching such an attack in the first place fades away and, as I’ve argued in the case of North Korea, America’s own vastly superior nuclear forces become a supremely credible deterrent for any other contingencies.

Of course the United States faces a big Middle East-related terrorism problem. But as I’ve argued previously, the keys to America’s defense are serious border security measures. They, too, pass the “control test” with flying colors, and consequently seem much more promising than the status quo approach of trying to shape the region’s future in more constructive ways. But as I’ve also written, it would also make sense to keep in the Middle East small-scale American forces whose mission is continually harassing ISIS and Al Qaeda and whatever other groups of vicious nutballs are certain to appear going forward.

Nye’s point about the integration of global energy markets is a valid one. But in the same article, he acknowledges how the U.S. domestic energy revolution’s “combination of entrepreneurship, property rights, and capital markets” has changed the game for America. Why does he suppose that its effects won’t spread significantly beyond our borders?

As for Nye’s other two reasons for continued U.S. Middle East engagement, the notion that Washington can do anything meaningful to promote the cause of human rights simply isn’t serious, and Israel has amply demonstrated that, with enough American military aid, it can take care of itself.

Moreover, as you may recognize, the arguments for mainly focusing on border security to handle the Middle East terrorist threat applies to the African menace that’s preoccupying Friedman.

The main takeaway here isn’t that U.S. international engagement will never be needed to protect national security, safeguard the nation’s independence, or enhance its prosperity. It’s that Made in America approaches will turn out to be vastly superior in many cases – and certainly in many more cases than the bipartisan globalist foreign policy establishment recognizes. How long will it take for President Trump to get fully on board?

By the way, I first began exploring the idea of Made in America solutions to foreign policy problems and international threats when I read this article by current Atlantic Monthly Editor Jeffrey Goldberg. He argued in 1999 that the nation was making a big mistake ignoring Africa in its diplomacy because the continent was likely to become a source of deadly diseases sure to cross oceans and eventually afflict Americans and others; that “H.I.V., of course, is a particularly vicious warning shot”; and that it was high time for Washington to deal with “poverty, poor sanitation and political instability” as well as put “a global system of public health and disease surveillance in place.”

Not that Goldberg presented a stark either-or choice, but my reaction was “If we do need to figure out whether to place more AIDS-fighting emphasis on promoting African economic development, or on finding a cure through medical research, isn’t the latter much likelier to deliver major results much sooner?”

As is clear from the Friedman article, Africa’s array of problems continues unabated. And according to no less than the (devoutly globalist) Obama administration, as of last year, the United States was “on the right track to reach most of its “National HIV/AIDS Strategy” goals for 2020 – which seek an America that’s “a place where new HIV infections are rare” and where “high quality, life-extending care” is available.

Making News: A New USAToday Op-Ed – & More!

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automation, climate change, Germany, Jobs, Lifezette.com, Making News, manufacturing, Paris climate accord, Trade, Trump, USAToday

I’m pleased to announce the publication of my latest op-ed article – a piece that appears in USAToday this morning on President Trump’s criticisms of Germany’s trade policies. Here’s the link.

Incidentally, the article ran as a rejoinder to an unsigned USAToday editorial on the subject that also was published today.  The paper’s editors have been using this “pro-con” format for many years, and I think they deserve great credit for seeking out viewspoints with which they disagree.

In addition, a June 1 post on Lifezette.com included my (skeptical) opinions about claims that Mr. Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris climate change accord will cede global leadership on the issue to China.

Moreover, a May 25 Lifezette article quoted me on a new study finding that trade and offshoring have been responsible for much more manufacturing job loss lately than automation.

And keep checking in with RealityChek for news of upcoming and recent media appearances and other developments.

 

 

Im-Politic: Americans are Far from Bitterly Divided on Everything

Tags

Affordable Care Act, border wall, climate change, criminal illegal immigrants, Democrats, deportations, Gallup, illegal immigration, Im-Politic, infrastructure, Mexico, Obamacare, polls, regulations, Republicans, tariffs, taxes, TPP, Trade, Trans-Pacific Partnership, United Nations

America today is deeply divided on the new Trump presidency and many substantive issues. But the message sent by a new Gallup poll is that there’s considerable consensus when it comes to identifying the nation’s major challenges. And although polls have recently gotten a deserved black eye over their election performance, this fundamental finding tracks intriguingly with that reported (by a different organization) that I wrote about a little over a year ago.

Gallup sought Americans’ views on which of President Trump’s campaign promises they believe that it’s “very important” for him to keep. Here are the top four – which were also the only choices that topped 50 percent:

>”Enact a major spending program to strengthen infrastructure” 69 percent

>”Reduce income taxes for all Americans” 54 percent

>”Establish tariffs on foreign imports” 51 percent

>”Deport the more than 2 million illegal immigrants who have

    committed crimes” 51 percent

At least as interesting, three of these four stated Trump priorities enjoy strong bipartisan support:

>infrastructure: 68 percent of Democrats, 71 percent of Republicans

>tax cuts: 46 percent of Democrats, 62 percent of Republicans

>tariffs: 45 percent of Democrats, 62 percent of Republicans

The exception – interestingly – is

>deport criminal illegal immigrants: 33 percent of Democrats, 70 percent of         Republicans

Now here are the Trump priorities that Gallup found Americans regard as least important (note – which does mean that they oppose them):

>”Cancel billions in payments to UN climate change program” 30 percent

>”Withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership” 26 percent

>”Build a wall along the border with Mexico” 26 percent

>”Require that for each new federal regulation, two must be

    eliminated” 23 percent

Just FYI, the administration has already announced officially that it’s pulling out of the Pacific trade deal.

And guess what? There’s a great deal of bipartisan consensus on the relative unimportance of these matters, too:

>UN climate change payments: 23 percent of Democrats, 38 percent of Republicans

>Trans-Pacific Partnership: 19 percent of Democrats, 32 percent of Republicans

>border wall: 12 percent of Democrats, 38 percent of Republicans

>regulations: 14 percent of Democrats, 31 percent of Republicans

Finally, I couldn’t help but notice that the most divisive Trump priorities, according to Gallup, are the aforementioned deportations of criminal illegal immigrants and…repealing Obamacare. A total of 46 percent of Americans told Gallup this move was “very important,” but although 68 percent of Republicans were on board with scrapping the Affordable Care Act quickly, only 26 percent of Democrats agreed.

I know that the president has his own pollsters – and of course his own opinions. But I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if their list of top White House priorities didn’t wasn’t very similar to those identified by Gallup as the public’s. Nor would I be surprised if achieving these goals – and softpedaling many of the others – made for a great first 100 days.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Which Paris Message Will ISIS Hear?

Tags

Bill Gates, carbon emissions, climate change, Congress, counter-terrorism spending, France, ISIS, military spending, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Paris attacks, Paris Climate Conference, Security Council, terrorism, United Kingdom, United Nations

President Obama has made a pretty good point in arguing that going ahead with the global climate change conference in Paris this week despite the recent terror attacks on that city is an “act of defiance” against ISIS and other extremist groups – Islamic or not. Unfortunately, he and other major world leaders have missed a message they’re inevitably sending to the terrorists with other recent decisions – which signal the absence of anything close to similar resolve to develop a credible military strategy for defeating them.

No one should have any illusions that the Paris talks themselves will produce meaningful progress toward controlling the carbon emissions widely thought to be dangerously warming the planet. In fact, none of its decisions will be legally binding (although there have been some interesting attempts to parse this concept). But not only has the issue been persistently on the international agenda for decades. More than 170 countries – including the largest sources of the problem – have made specific proposals to reduce emissions. In addition, eight of the biggest emitters have collectively promised to double their supplies of renewable energy.

There also seems to be broad agreement on a specific goal – avoiding an average global temperature increase of 3.6 percent more degrees Fahrenheit. Even the private sector is joining in, led by Microsoft founder Bill Gates’ pledge to spend $2 billion of his own money to foster green innovation. This commitment is conditioned on greater government efforts, but other wealthy individuals reportedly are interested in contributing, too.

Contrast these developments – inadequate and flawed as they are – with global efforts so far against ISIS. In the wake of the Paris attacks, President Obama has declared only that the United States will “intensify” its current strategy – and that no major deployments of American ground troops will be made. The leaders of Britain and France have announced their intent to increase defense spending, but early indications are that at least some of the new counter-terrorism funds will come from other defense accounts – even though Europe faces a more aggressive Russia, too. Moreover, these increases come after years of major defense spending decreases and (at least in retrospect) shockingly inadequate budgeting against terrorism in particular.

And although the United Nations has condemned the Paris attacks and the Security Council has authorized military action against ISIS, no member state (as usual) is required to spend a penny or risk a single life to vanquish this “global and unprecedented threat to international peace and security” and no follow-up actions – or even words – appear in the offing. Moreover, let’s not forget that the U.S. Congress has failed even to pass a new authorization to use military force in the region in response to President Obama’s request.

So although it’s encouraging to see a business-as-usual attitude on climate change issues adopted by world leaders in defiance of terrorists, the lack of comparable resolve on the battlefield seems all too likely to overwhelm its intended effects.

Following Up: Can Climate Change Challenge be Met Without Curbing China’s Trade?

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China, climate change, coal, Following Up, greenhouse gases, Nature Climate Change, Obama, Peterson Institute, The New York Times, Trade, Xi JInPing

Time for a little back-patting – which also has the virtue of presenting a crucial link between issues that’s way too often ignored by policymakers, especially in Washington. It’s the link between U.S. trade policy on  the one hand, and China’s responsibility for mounting world levels of greenhouse gas emissions and widespread concerns about global warming on the other. More specifically, the case has just been strengthened for an argument I made years ago that fending off the global warming challenge didn’t seem possible without major limits on exports of China’s emissions-intensive products.   

For years it’s been evident that China’s jaw-dropping economic development has been a major contributor to global greenhouse emissions in recent decades. That’s not grounds for condemning Chinese practices per se. After all, even though Beijing’s environmental policy record is unmistakably terrible, strong grounds existed for believing that China was simply behaving similarly to the United States and other currently wealthy countries – which had the undeserved good fortune to enjoy their own industrialization takeoffs, and the high living standards they made possible, way before such climate concerns emerged.  As a result, they could emit to their heart’s contents without any apparent costs to the planet’s future.

But there’s been another crucial difference between the U.S. emissions record and the Chinese emissions record, and one that can’t justify continued passivity over the latter: America’s 19^th century industrialization stemmed mainly from the operation of free market forces. China’s ongoing industrialization phase has been planned and carried out overwhelmingly by government, meaning that its course and structure have reflected national policy choices.

The point here isn’t to tout the superiority of markets. Instead, it’s to note that, as a result, China’s modernization is an especially artificial creation, along with the resulting volumes of emissions. They’re not the consequence of the kind of natural economic evolution undergone by earlier generations of developed countries, even when – as has been the case especially in Europe – government was hardly an economic bystander.

I was thinking about these patterns of development several years ago when I came across a research report that documented my instincts. Moreover, this Peterson Institute study emphasized not only the state-directed nature of Chinese industrialization. It showed how the nation’s move into emissions-intensive heavy industries like steel and cement and chemicals clashed violently with how free markets would have shaped China’s economy. For China’s overwhelming natural, competitive advantage – the assets from which early industrial success should have originated – was a huge pool of low-cost labor.

As a result, a freer China both would have started off in labor-intensive industries and stayed largely in those sectors for many years. The kinds of industries China rushed into, however, were capital-intensive industries – where China had major natural disadvantages that Beijing tried to offset with a wide range of trade barriers to fend off foreign competition, and with subsidies aimed at speeding up progress whether much demand existed for Chinese products or not.

In fact, the study found, these heavily emitting industries had grown so enormous that their greenhouse gas-boosting role greatly exceeded even that of China’s breakneck adoption of personal cars, air conditioners, and other signs of growing consumer prosperity.

Most important for U.S. policymakers, because these and other parts of China’s economy were so export-oriented (since like other low-income countries, China lacked the wealth to finance its own development adequately mainly by supplying its own demand), China’s stunning export success had turned into a major engine of global warming. And this engine’s immense scale, and carbon footprint, also owed mainly to Chinese government interventions that flouted not only free market norms but free trade norms – typically at the expense of U.S. and other foreign industries and workers.

So in early 2008, I wrote an article for a syndication service that advocated using trade policy to fight global warming by slowing the Chinese export machine with tariffs on Chinese imports. Seven years later, I’m pleased to report the emergence of new evidence linking China’s emissions growth to its export growth. As this New York Times article summarizes, economists and climatologists now agree that up to a third of China’s total emissions come from its exports. But a September study in the journal Nature Climate Change also found that China’s exports generate eight times the emissions levels of its imports. For the United States, the ratio is 0.5, and even for India, another very low-income country, it’s only 1.3. Therefore, consuming goods from China adds much more to climate change dangers than consuming goods from elsewhere.

China’s outlier status, the Nature Climate Change authors conclude, results overwhelmingly from China’s coal-based energy mix and the very high emissions intensity (emission per unit of economic value) in a few provinces and industry sectors.” Therefore, they’re optimistic that the greenhouse gas dangers created by China’s trade can be reduced with targeted efforts to improve production technologies.

But they also allow that “reducing trade volumes” from these sources may be needed, and one major finding suggests that broader trade curbs may be needed: the fact that “production in China is several times as carbon intensive as the same production in other countries” regardless of product. In fact, although the emissions intensity of Chinese exports from wealthier provinces is much lower than that for products from poorer provinces, even these levels are three, four, and even five times higher than U.S. levels.

President Obama seems to have other ideas. His summit last month with Chinese leader Xi Jinping produced a statement that Beijing would launch a national cap-and-trade system by 2017, saw a reaffirmation of an earlier Chinese promise to stop the rise in its emissions by 2030 at the latest, and elicited a promise by China to spend more than $3 billion helping other developing countries to deal with climate change. Mr. Obama and Xi also offered a “common vision” for progress at an upcoming United Nations meeting to create a framework for a new international climate change agreement. But given China’s penchant for breaking international agreements, it’s still clear to me that if you’re serious about attacking climate change, you need to be serious about dramatic curbs on China’s exports.

Following Up: Trump & Sanders, Obama’s Katrina Moment, Manufacturing Fakeonomics – & an Overdue Thank You

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2016 elections, Bernie Sanders, climate change, cyber-security, Democratic Party, Donald Trump, Following Up, hacking, Hillary Clinton, Immigration, Institute for Supply Management, ISM, Katherine Archuleta, manufacturing, Obama, Office of Personnel Management, Open Borders, OPM, Populism

For some reason, Hillary Clinton’s campaign website isn’t technologically up to speed enough to have posted a transcript of the “economic vision” speech she delivered this morning. So instead of analyzing it, I’ll try something a little different on RealityChek – a “Following Up” offering covering multiple subjects.

The first starts off with an apology. In last week’s piece on how Donald Trump could (but probably won’t) help generate long-term change in American politics, I wrote that his president candidacy nonetheless seemed more likely candidate than Democrat-Socialist Bernie Sanders’ to foster badly needed ideological realignment. My stated reason was that the big obstacle to Trump efforts along these lines is his personality, whereas the big obstacle to the Vermont Senator playing such a role is his ideology.

But then when I discussed in detail Sanders’ prospects as a change agent, I wrote that “he seems to be a more plausible candidate to help create an enduring populist alternative to the two major parties.” And my stated reasons included the ideological flexibility he’s displayed on issues like gun control! So what gives? In a word, I messed up. So let me try to clarify.

I still believe that Trump’s “superstar CEO” nature and consequent unwillingness to take advice from anything but Yes-men will prevent him from trying to turn his presidential campaign into a lasting movement once the former runs its course. Nor do I see any reason to change my mind despite some new comments from him suggesting the possibility of running as an independent in the fall campaign and continuing his political work beyond the current election cycle.

I also remain impressed with Sanders’ pragmatism and willingness to reach across the aisle for both legislative support and also counsel. But I don’t believe that he’ll display the same traits on the immigration and climate change issues I focused on. Re the former, he seems to be too personally invested to moderate much. Re the latter, I don’t believe he’ll want to buck the overwhelming tide I see in the Democratic party for ever more Open Borders.

Hence my conclusion – that a Trump personality change relevant to creating a new, bipartisan American populism is a better bet than a similar Sanders ideological change. But that doesn’t mean I view such a Trump transformation as even close to likely. And I do apologize for the confusion I might have created.

Second, my post on how unqualified Katherine Archuleta was to head the mega-hacked federal Office of Personnel Management left out the strongest evidence for that argument: She wasn’t only a veteran Democratic political operative (with zero background in technology). She was also a senior official in President Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign. In other words, in an age of mounting cyber-threats, the president treated the government’s main personnel agency like a cushy ambassadorship to some Caribbean island mini-state. And he still hasn’t caught much heck from the Mainstream Media for this dangerously cavalier decision.

Third, one of my longtime bugaboos is how seriously economic journalists and even economists themselves take the monthly reports on domestic American manufacturing’s health by the Institute for Supply Management (ISM). In particular, I’ve shown that neither ISM’s headline readings, nor its sub-readings on production and manufacturing orders, correlate well at all with the more reliable output and orders data put out by the federal government.

Imagine, therefore, how pleased I was to discover that, a few years ago, a Commerce Department economist came to pretty much the same conclusions. According to this study, the ISM surveys don’t even do an especially good job at what’s supposed to be their strong suit – not precisely gauging the state of manufacturing in any given month, but presenting evidence of approaching changes in its fortunes and the broader business cycle. As author Daniel Bachman demonstrated exhaustively, “While more information about the state of the economy is always better, analysts of the business cycle should realize that the ISM surveys do not supercede or fully anticipate more comprehensive official data.”

Finally, one house-keeping point: an overdue thank you to the growing ranks of RealityChek followers. Your interest is greatly appreciated – and I hope you’ll spread the word!