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In Volokh Conspiracy, Jonathan Adler blogs about the UN and climate change.
In 2005, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) predicted that there would be 50 million refugees in 2010 due to climate change. An enterprising reporter wondered what happened to UNEP’s prediction, and found that those areas UNEP claimed were most at risk have actually gained population. How did UNEP respond? According to Anthony Watts, UNEP tried to erase the evidence of its initial claim — without success. It seems folks at UNEP were unaware of Google caches.
The original UNEP claim was ridiculous on its face, and UNEP’s subsequent effort to rewrite history is farcical. Regrettably, we’re unlikely to hear much about this story from the environmentalist community or those who allegedly police the politicization of science. And this is part of the problem. Climate change is real, and the evidence of a human contribution to the gradual warming of the atmosphere is strong. There’s no need to conjure fantastical projections of an impending climate apocalypse. But UNEP and various organizations insist on doing so nonetheless — indeed, UNEP is now claiming there will be 50 million climate refugees by 2020 — and the climate community raises not a peep. In the end, this ends up doing more to discredit legitimate concerns about climate change than to encourage action.
Also in Volokh Conspiracy, Kenneth Anderson comments on Adler’s blog and the UN’s goals.
A quick further comment to Jonathan’s post below on the missing 50 million climate change refugees that were supposed to be migrating across the globe by 2010 and, if I read the update correctly, are now supposed to materialize by 2020. We are used to reading such stories as the politicization of science and its corruption by the politics of the UN, funders, and, to be sure, the desire of some scientists to switch professions from research to policy. We hear about it because it is correct.
But there is another — no less unimpressive — way to understand the story. That is from the standpoint of the long term incentives of the United Nations and its many agencies. Seen from the standpoint of climate change and its scientists and environmental activists alone, this story looks to be about hyperbolic claims about the immediate effects of climate change. Seen from the standpoint of the longer history of the UN, it is much more about the long-running movements by the UN to find issues that tend to do two things. One is to increase the institutional UN’s governance responsibilities, authority, legitimacy, and power. The other is to increase the amount of money that runs through UN mechanisms from rich countries to poor countries, with an administrative cut to the UN itself.
…apocalyptic rent-seeking is an institutional feature of the UN, and likewise its complete willingness to throw over one cause for another when it appears that the previous one had run out of steam either in garnering greater governance authority to the UN or attracting cash through a planetary income transfer arrangement. …
John Fund points out the continued need to improve election procedures in the US.
…Wisconsin voters went to the polls on April 5 in an election that could have flipped the state Supreme Court’s majority from conservative to liberal. On the morning of April 6, liberal challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg declared victory by a margin of some 200 votes. But the next day Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus announced that she had excluded some 14,000 votes from the city of Brookfield when she gave her final tally to the Associated Press on election night. The revised tally put conservative incumbent David Prosser more than 7,000 votes ahead of Ms. Kloppenburg, and he has since been verified the clear winner.
Ms. Nickolaus’s error could have been easily avoided through transparency. She had ended the prior clerk’s practice of reporting election results for individual cities because it was “not her responsibility” and she didn’t “have the staff to enter all the data”—an absurd statement given that many smaller counties post such data on their websites. Many states, such as Kentucky, offer user-friendly websites to track returns statewide.
…Mexico—which has a national photo ID requirement for voting—spends roughly 10 times more per capita than the U.S. and has virtually eliminated charges of voter fraud or incompetence. We can vastly improve our system with much smaller investments. …
Michael Barone discusses the problems with White House strategy.
…If Obamacare is so great, why are so many trying to get out from under it? And, more specifically, why are so many Democratic groups trying to get out from under it?
The fact is that HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has granted more than 1,000 waivers from Obamacare. Many have been granted to labor unions. Some have been granted to giant corporations like McDonald’s. One was granted to the entire state of Maine.
By what criteria is this relief being granted? That’s unclear, and the GAO audit should produce some answers. But what it looks like to an outsider is that waivers are being granted to constituencies that have coughed up money (or in the case of Maine, four electoral votes) to the Democrats.
If so, what we’re looking at is another example of gangster government in this administration. The law in its majesty applies to everyone except those who get special favors. …
Peter Wehner comments on how the president is unfairly criticizing opponents rather than dealing with the issues.
In his remarks last week, President Obama had this to say: “When Paul Ryan says his priority is to make sure he’s just being America’s accountant . . . this is the same guy that voted for two wars that were unpaid for, voted for the Bush tax cuts that were unpaid for, voted for the prescription drug bill that cost as much as my health care bill—but wasn’t paid for. So it’s not on the level.”
…Put out of your mind the fact that Bush’s tax cuts, especially the ones in 2003, led to economic growth that in 2007 helped to trim the deficit to barely more than one percent of GDP. Set aside the fact that the prescription drug plan Ryan supported was less than half the cost of what Democrats were proposing. Forget too that the free-market reforms helped the new plan beat its cost projections by around 40 percent. The point is that Obama has decided to get down and dirty this week rather than to engage the fiscal debate in a serious and honest fashion. …
Keith Hennessey sums up the White House playbook.
…The President made his budget strategy clear.
Try for a small short-term bipartisan deficit reduction deal this year – tweaks to Medicare, Medicaid, and other entitlements, maybe combined with some defense cuts. Save maybe $100 – $400 B over 10 years, roughly an entitlement parallel to the recent appropriations deal. Use the new VP-led negotiating process to steer those negotiations. See if you can split off a few Senate Republicans from the pack.
Push for tax increases as part of this short-term deal, but abandon them as needed to get to a deficit reduction signing ceremony.
Get a signing ceremony for this bill to demonstrate the President can work with “reasonable Republicans.” The photo op of the President signing a bill with Republicans standing next to him is critical for the 2012 campaign. Frame the bill as a demonstration of good faith and a first step toward a long-term solution.
Use the photo, combined with claimed but unsubstantiated deficit reduction from yesterday’s speech, to build credibility with independents for November 2012.
Blast away at Republicans on the big spending issues. Take long-term entitlement reform off the table, reassuring his base. Demagogue on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
Pick a fight over the top tax rates, exciting your political base. Try to restore the Clinton 90s framing of “Medicare and Medicaid vs. tax cuts for the rich.”
The President’s new strategy guarantees two more years of fiscal stalemate and poisons the well on the most important economic policy question facing American policymakers: how to permanently solve the long-term fiscal problem caused by the unsustainable growth of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
Investor’s Business Daily editors have stark economic data in this editorial.
…• The U.S. dollar has fallen so much and foreign nations have so little confidence in our ability to run our fiscal affairs that the “BRIC” nations — the mostly fast-growing former Third World nations of Brazil, Russia, India and China — are talking about replacing the U.S. dollar in foreign trade with the Chinese yuan.
• Just 45.4% of Americans had jobs last year, the lowest since 1983, according to census data crunched by USA Today. Among men, just 66.8% had work last year, the lowest ever.
• …last year’s real private sector GDP was in fact still down 1.1% from its peak in 2007 — so all of the “expansion” has been in government, not the private sector.
• …under Obama, spending has risen farther and faster than under any president in history. At current rates, government at all levels will take up more than half of all economic activity by 2050. …
Peter Wehner says that with a record like Obama’s, all that’s left to campaign with is partisan attacks and provoking class resentment.
…The White House strategy is clear: argue that Obama wants to restore fiscal balance by raising taxes on “millionaires and billionaires” while those who don’t favor higher taxes on the wealthy are fundamentally unserious. As a political matter, of course, class warfare does not have a particularly successful track record. But, to keep it that way, Republicans need to provide a compelling response to the Obama strategy. Fortunately such a response exists.
Obama’s argument is built on sand. A tax increase on the wealthy would fall far short of the revenues needed to reverse our fiscal trajectory. Our budget problems are significantly worse today than they were in the 1990s. There are not nearly enough wealthy people in the nation to tax in order to tame our debt. If the president wants higher taxes to improve our fiscal imbalance, he will need to embrace a massive middle-class tax increase and/or a value added tax (VAT). But Obama hasn’t shown the slightest preference for that option. It’s pure fiction to pretend that higher taxes on those making more than $200,000 will make much of a dent in our debt, given the size of our long-term spending problem. Obama’s argument isn’t with Republicans. It’s with basic arithmetic.
…Barack Obama has amassed a dismal economic record as president. (Former senator Phil Gramm points out that if Barack Obama had matched Ronald Reagan’s post-recession recovery rate, 15.7 million more Americans would have jobs.) Obama can’t campaign on his record—so he’s betting his reelection chances on stoking embers of anger and resentment. That’s about all that’s left of hope and change.
In the NYTimes, Joe Nocera thinks we should switch to natural gas.
Some readers of The New York Times are unimpressed with the idea of substituting natural gas for imported oil, even though such a move would help wean the country from its dependence on OPEC. Or so it appears after I made that argument in my column on Tuesday, noting that natural gas is a fossil fuel we have in abundance and is cleaner than oil to boot.
…The truth is, every problem associated with drilling for natural gas is solvable. The technology exists to prevent most methane from escaping, for instance. Strong state regulation will help ensure environmentally safe wells. And so on. Somewhat to my surprise, this view was seconded by Abrahm Lustgarten, a reporter for ProPublica who has probably written more stories about the dangers of fracking than anyone. In a comment posted online to my Tuesday column, he wrote that while the environmental issues were real, they “can be readily addressed by the employment of best drilling practices, technological investment, and rigorous regulatory oversight.”
The country has been handed an incredible gift with the Marcellus Shale. With an estimated 500 trillion cubic feet of reserves, it is widely believed to be the second-largest natural gas field ever discovered. Which means that those of you who live near this tremendous resource have two choices. You can play the Not-In-My-Backyard card, employing environmental scare tactics to fight attempts to drill for that gas. …
Ed Morrissey gives a thumbs up to the new film, Atlas Shrugged Part 1.
While some people waited excitedly for the premiere of the first cinema installment of Ayn Rand’s seminal novel Atlas Shrugged, I have to admit that I didn’t hold out high expectations for the film. The book was a smashing exercise in philosophical, economic, and political study — absolutely brilliant. As entertainment, however, the novel has its problems, and even the most determined reader can find getting through the book’s massive size a daunting and patience-testing task. I read Atlas Shrugged twenty-five years ago, and while I appreciated its brilliance, I have had little desire to revisit it since.
So it’s fair to say that I prepared myself for a difficult slog, but to my surprise, Atlas Shrugged Part I turned into an intriguing, stylish film that did not water down the Randian message in the least. In fact, the film format seems to free the characters in some sense from the limitations of Rand’s prose and give more clarity and purpose to the story, while keeping its message firmly at the film’s center.
…The best word to describe Atlas Shrugged Part 1 is … surprising. It’s surprisingly well-paced, surprisingly intelligent, surprisingly well-acted, and surprisingly entertaining. Perhaps most surprising of all, it has me thinking about re-reading the novel again. I would highly recommend it to friends and their families. …