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David P. Goldman, in Spengler’s blog, makes the case for the US returning to its former policy of supporting Israel.
Why should the US support Israel? There are two reasons.
The first is strictly practical: Israel has the strongest military in the region and America wants to ally with strength. Washington should use its own resources to neutralize Iran’s capacity to build nuclear weapons, in my view, but the fact that Israel has the capability to do so gives America the capacity to achieve just this result without taking directly responsibility if it so chooses. Iran’s nuclear capacity is only the most obvious area in which Israeli capability benefits America (think also of the North Korean nuclear reactor installed in Syria which Israel destroyed last year).
By the same token, it is in American interests to monopolize Israeli friendship as much as possible. If (as the Lebanon Star’s Michael Young suggests) the blunders of the American administration and its failure of will lead to “terminal irrelevance” in the region, the vacuum will be filled by Russia, India and China—and Israel will adjust its policies accordingly. That would make the world a more dangerous and less stable place, and America is far better off having Israel inside the tent shooting out.
But there is a far more fundamental reason for America to support Israel. Israel is part of America’s DNA. As Michael Novak showed so effectively in his book On Two Wings, America’s founding drew on the uniquely Hebrew concept of holiness of the individual and divine love for the weak and powerless, as much as it did on the natural law tradition of Grotius and Locke. The destiny of the United States of America and the people of Israel are inextricably intertwined for that reason, and America’s affinity for Israel and deep interest in the welfare of the Jewish people are bred in American marrow. …
In Newsweek, Robert J. Samuelson takes Democrats and Republicans to task for not dealing with budget deficits. Aside from Samuelson’s inaccurate assumption that raising taxes will increase federal revenues, he makes some important points.
…The truth is that government, again under both parties, has promised far more in benefits than can be covered by existing taxes. Only borrowing could reconcile the rhetorical claims with underlying economic realities. There have been 43 deficits in the past 48 years.
Until recently, the borrowings, though usually undesirable, were not alarming. But the recession and an aging population signify that we have crossed a threshold where actual and prospective borrowings are so huge that no one can foresee the consequences. The best measure of debt burden is its relation to the nation’s annual income, or gross domestic product. The same approach applied to a household with $25,000 of debt and $50,000 of income would produce a debt-to-income ratio of 50 percent.
In 1946, after World War II, the ratio of publicly held federal debt to GDP was 108.6 percent. Since then, the economy (our income) has generally grown faster than the debt. In 1974, the debt-to-GDP ratio reached a post-World War II low of 23.9 percent, and even in 2007, it was only 36.9 percent. That was manageable.
By contrast, today’s prospective colossal borrowings dwarf likely economic growth. The Obama administration’s latest projections, released last week, show nearly $11 trillion of borrowing from 2009 to 2019. In 2019, the debt-to-GDP ratio would be 76.5 percent. This could be too optimistic, because it assumes some spending restraint and tax increases. A projection by the Concord Coalition, a watchdog group, adds about $5 trillion in borrowing in that period. In 2019, the debt-to-GDP ratio could be roughly 100 percent. …
George Will discusses unrealistic legislation that has so many Americans concerned.
…Another reason that reasonable people are wary of any government plan for a grandiose rearrangement of the health-care sector’s 17 percent of the economy is that, regarding grandiosity, the president, after less than eight months in office, is a recidivist. His health-care crusade comes after a $787 billion stimulus (which has effectively made the Energy Department into the nation’s largest venture-capital firm, scattering scores of billions of dollars to speculative energy investments) and the semi-nationalization of two car companies. August ended with the unembarrassable administration uttering a $2 trillion “Oops!” by estimating that the 10-year budget-deficit projection is about $9 trillion rather than $7.1 trillion. The supposed means of paying for the president’s $1 trillion health-care plan include substantial Medicare cuts that will never happen, and the auction of carbon-emission permits that, instead, would be given away by the Waxman–Markey cap-and-trade legislation the House has sent to the Senate.
That legislation is a particularly lurid illustration of why no serious person nowadays takes seriously Washington’s increasingly infantile bandying of numbers. The point of cap-and-trade is to impose a ceiling on the nation’s greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions—primarily carbon dioxide. The legislation endorses the goal of holding the global carbon–dioxide level to a maximum of 450 parts per million by 2050. That. Will. Not. Happen.
Steven Hayward and Kenneth Green of the American Enterprise Institute do the math. The 450 level is less than the 2030 projected level for all countries other than the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s 30 developed nations. Which means the global goal would be unreachable even if in 2030 those 30 disappear—if they have zero emissions. Waxman–Markey endorses the goal of reducing all of this nation’s GHG emissions 83 percent below 2005 levels by 2050. In 2005, the United States’ carbon-dioxide emissions were 6 billion tons, so an 83 percent -reduction would permit about 1 billion tons—what America’s emissions were in 1910, when the population was 92 million and the economy was one twenty-fifth of today’s. But by 2050, the population probably will be about 420 million, so per capita carbon-dioxide emissions would have to be 2.4 tons—one quarter of 1910′s per capita emissions. …
Peter Foster, in Canada’s National Post, writes that the debate on global warming is not settled simply because the “authorities” have spoken.
…We rely on authority for the vast majority of what we believe, but global warming theory does not rank as knowledge of the same order as whether Iceland exists or the moon is made of green cheese. My reason for believing in the existence of Iceland is that a conspiracy to conjure it out of geographical thin air is passing unlikely. But anthropogenic global warming is different. Far from being an established fact, it is a hypothesis whose allegedly disastrous consequences will occur sometime in the relatively distant future. It also comes attached to considerable psychic satisfactions and political advantages for its promoters.
It conforms to a broad view — long and fondly promoted by fans of Big Government — that capitalism is essentially short-sighted and greed-driven (just look at the subprime crisis!). This stance is not merely appealing to activist politicians and bureaucrats, it is pure gold for the vast and growing army of radical NGO environmental lobby groups, whose raison d’être — and fundraising — are closely related to the degree to which nature is seen to be “endangered.” It is also appealing to rent seeking businessmen who see the profit potential in the vast array of controls and subsidies.
Nevertheless, most ordinary people reasonably imagine in the face of such a weight of “authority” that the case must be closed. It isn’t. For a start, the weight of authority is based on the political doctoring of studies that are in any case designed to countenance no other conclusion than that man-made carbon dioxide drives the climate. Moreover, the very fact that the theory’s promoters are so reluctant to actually engage in scientific debate (No time to talk. Must act!) is highly suspicious. …
Claudia Rosett fills us in on the UN’s latest excuse to spend money.
From the United Nations, source of so many wonders, we now have word that “The past is no longer a good indicator of the future.”
So says Michel Jarraud, the French head of the UN’s World Meteorological Organization, opining about climate change at a press briefing in Geneva. Jarraud, who is part of the UN gang pushing for a multi-trillion dollar attempt to re-engineer the climate of the planet, seems to believe our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived in a world of unswerving certainties about the future — possessed of all the relevant facts and armed with collated crop statistics. Today’s uncertainty about the future, he said, “Is something completely new — to make decisions not on facts or statistics about the past, but on the probabilities for the future.” …
…But what’s Jarraud’s answer to all this uncertainty he now predicts? You guessed it — he wants the UN to plan the future for you. To this end, in the approach to the grand climate jamboree scheduled for Copenhagen this December, the UN is convening yet another in its endless series of conferences, this one to be held next week in Geneva and attended by what Reuters describes as “About 1,500 policy-makers, researchers and corporate leaders.” (For these UN hunter-gatherers, there is of course endless justification for the jet fuel, carbon emissions and meat entrees they would like to ration to the rest of us). …
Bjørn Lomborg believes that global warming is occurring and that we can do something about it. In a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, he discusses climate engineering options.
…Other more speculative approaches deserve consideration. In groundbreaking research, J. Eric Bickel, an economist and engineer at the University of Texas, and Lee Lane, a researcher at the American Enterprise Institute, study the costs and benefits of climate engineering. One proposal would have boats spray seawater droplets into clouds above the sea to make them reflect more sunlight back into space—augmenting the natural process where evaporating ocean sea salt helps to provide tiny particles for clouds to form around.
Remarkably, Mr. Bickel finds that about $9 billion spent developing this so-called marine cloud whitening technology might be able to cancel out this century’s global warming. The benefits—from preventing the temperature increase—would add up to about $20 trillion.
Climate engineering raises ethical concerns. But if we care most about avoiding warmer temperatures, we cannot avoid considering a simple, cost-effective approach that shows so much promise.
Nothing short of a technological revolution is required to end our reliance on fossil fuel—and we are not even close to getting this revolution started. Economists Chris Green and Isabel Galiana from McGill University point out that nonfossil sources like nuclear, wind, solar and geothermal energy will—based on today’s availability—get us less than halfway toward a path of stable carbon emissions by 2050, and only a tiny fraction of the way towards stabilization by 2100. …
The Daily Mail, UK reports on the inconvenient truths about the UK weather supercomputer.
The Met Office has caused a storm of controversy after it was revealed their £30million supercomputer designed to predict climate change is one of Britain’s worst polluters. …
…It is capable of 1,000 billion calculations every second to feed data to 400 scientists and uses 1.2 megawatts of energy to run – enough to power more than 1,000 homes. …
…However the Met Office’s HQ has now been named as one of the worst buildings in Britain for pollution – responsible for more than 12,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year.
It says 75 per cent of its carbon footprint is produced by the super computer meaning the machine is officially one of the country’s least green machines.
Green campaigners say it is ‘ironic’ that a computer designed to help stave-off climate change is responsible for such high levels of pollution. …
…It is the second time the Met Office has been criticised this year – after the machine famously helped predict a “BBQ summer” which turned out to be another wash-out. …
Chicagoans probably don’t think much of the global warming hype. CBS Chicago tells why.
…The record low for Aug. 31 is 47 degrees, set in 1872. Overnight Sunday into Monday, the nippy readings were close, and in some areas even lower. …
Overall in Chicago, this August has hardly been what one would call the dog days of summer. There was only one day where the temperatures reached the 90s. On Aug. 9, temperatures climbed into the mid-90s.
In fact, Aug. 9 was only one of four days this summer where the temperature exceeded 90 degrees. Temperatures also reached the 90s in June 23, 24 and 25. July had no 90-degree days at all.
Consumer Reports turns into government tattletale. Story in The Corner.
The venerable Consumer Reports reviewed shower heads in its latest issue. Now what would you expect they’d do if they found one that provides an excellent shower, with a really forceful spray? Recommend it to its readers? No, it reported it all right, but to the EPA. CEI’s Sam Kazman takes up the story:
Consumer Reports states that the British-made Hudson Reed Theme Thermostatic Shower Panel had a forceful spray that “seemed too good to be true—or legal.” Environmental Protection Agency regulations limit shower head water flow to no more than 2.5 gallons per minute. Consumer Reports acknowledges that many shower fixtures get around this rule by using several shower heads, but the magazine decided to report the new single-head fixture to authorities, anyway. (In its words, “We’ve contacted EPA….”)
“Consumer Reports has it backwards,” stated CEI General Counsel Sam Kazman. “Its duty is to consumers, not bureaucrats. It should not be acting as a nosy bathroom cop, trying to toss good products in the slammer just because they violate some intrusive federal regulation. More basically, people ought to be able to use whatever shower fixtures they want, just like they can decide how long a shower to take. This is a really victimless crime.” …
And Scrappleface makes fun of the Justice Department.