The Post-Normal Times

Just a few convention highlights :

Josh Marshall has it on good authority that John Kerry wrote his whole speech himself – here is an excerpt that bears repeating:

I have known and been friends with John McCain for almost 22 years. But every day now I learn something new about candidate McCain. To those who still believe in the myth of a maverick instead of the reality of a politician, I say, let’s compare Senator McCain to candidate McCain.

Candidate McCain now supports the wartime tax cuts that Senator McCain once denounced as immoral. Candidate McCain criticizes Senator McCain’s own climate change bill. Candidate McCain says he would now vote against the immigration bill that Senator McCain wrote. Are you kidding? Talk about being for it before you’re against it.

Let me tell you, before he ever debates Barack Obama, John McCain should finish the debate with himself.

TPM also has a videoclip of the whole thing.

And Bill Clinton said “Thanks but no thanks” to what the last 8 years has given us – excerpt from the NYT transcript:

But on the two great questions of this election — how to rebuild the American dream and how to restore America’s leadership in the world — he still embraces the extreme philosophy that has defined his party for more than 25 years.

(APPLAUSE)

And it is, to be fair to all the Americans who aren’t as hard- core Democrats as we, it’s a philosophy the American people never actually had a chance to see in action fully until 2001, when the Republicans finally gained control of both the White House and the Congress.

Then we saw what would happen to America if the policies they had talked about for decades actually were implemented. And look what happened.

They took us from record surpluses to an exploding debt; from over 22 million new jobs to just 5 million; from increasing working families’ incomes to nearly $7,500 a year to a decline of more than $2,000 a year; from almost 8 million Americans lifted out of poverty to more than 5.5 million driven into poverty; and millions more losing their health insurance.

Now, in spite of all this evidence, their candidate is actually promising more of the same.

(AUDIENCE BOOS)

Think about it: more tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans that will swell the deficit, increase inequality, and weaken the economy; more Band-Aids for health care that will enrich insurance companies, impoverish families, and increase the number of uninsured; more going it alone in the world, instead of building the shared responsibilities and shared opportunities necessary to advance our security and restore our influence.

They actually want us to reward them for the last eight years by giving them four more.

AUDIENCE: No!

CLINTON: Now, let’s send them a message that will echo from the Rockies all across America, a simple message: Thanks, but no thanks.

(Bill Clinton on youtube).  If you can spare a dime, you might want to help get this ad on the air during the Republican convention next week, from the Campaign for America’s Future, saying “Thanks for the memories – we’ll take it from here”

And if you missed it, watch, (vs read) what Dennis Kucinich had to say. He was never seen as a realistic contender during the campaign, but I met someone from him home district who told me that much of his base is actually formerly Republican Democrats who he won over when he fought against privatization of the power company, and won. And during the primaries, he was the only candidate to show up in person at a candidates forum at the NCSE annual conference that addressed climate issues. So I think he at least deserves a bit more respect than he has received.

It looks like you can see all of the video clips at the Dem Convention site if you have the right software installed.

In follow-up to the last post -  now both Gary Yohe, and Richard Tol, both co-authors of an economics paper that Lomborg cited, incorrectly, in an article in the Guardian, and that is also the foundation for his “Copenhagen Consensus”, conclude that he is misrepresenting their work and deliberately confusing things. For details, see the comment thread on Pielke’s post. So Lomborg has no legs to stand on. In theory, that means he is history. But I expect he will continue to repeat what he has been saying, as long as there is anyone listening.

Last fall, in a series of posts about what I dubbed The Lomborg I made the case that Lomborg was misusing Cost-Benefit Analysis to say that cuts in CO2 emissions will cost more than they are worth. I also added that “I hope we will hear from some environmental economists on this” – and also get statements from those experts listed as signing off on the ” Copenhagen Consensus” – an expert group convened by Lomborg to rank priorities for addressing the major challenges of our time, based on their costs and benefits.

Not that I had anything to do with it but, shortly after that, Nature published a book review by Sir Partha Dasgupta – a well-known and respected economist, that reinforced my point. Which is that, even if you fully accept the tenets of neo-classical economics, Lomborg’s arguments are basically crap. And that’s without even going into the flaws in his argument about expected sea level rise (which has been repeatedly debunked but, without responding to any of his critics, Lomborg keeps repeating the same thing. This post is not a response to him but to all publications that have given him a platform.)

Now we also have some critical words from Gary Yohe – an economist who was a member of the IPCC, and also participated in Lomborg’s “Copenhagen Consensus” project, for which he wrote the principal climate paper, on which Lomborg’s conclusions are based. Responding to a Lomborg article in the Guardian, Yohe says:

But there’s just one problem: as one of the authors of the Copenhagen Consensus Project’s principal climate paper, I can say with certainty that Lomborg is misrepresenting our findings thanks to a highly selective memory.

Lomborg claims that our “bottom line is that benefits from global warming right now outweigh the costs” and that “[g]lobal warming will continue to be a net benefit until about 2070.” This is a deliberate distortion of our conclusions.

We did find that climate change will result in some benefits for developed countries, but only for modest climate change (up to global temperature increases of 2C – not the 4 degrees that Lomborg is discussing in his piece). But developed countries are relatively prepared to handle climate change’s effects – they tend to be in colder areas, and they have the infrastructure to mitigate severe depletion of resources like fresh water and arable land.

That is precisely why our analysis concluded – and Lomborg ignores – that climate change will cause immediate losses for developing countries and the planet’s most vulnerable, millions of whom are already facing challenges that climate change will exacerbate.

Downplaying the threat of climate change allows Lomborg to focus on his claim that “unlike even moderate CO2 cuts, which cost more than they do good, we should focus on investing in finding cheaper low-carbon energy.” He attributes this finding to our analysis as well, but again he overlooks a key element of our work.

Of course the world needs to make significant investments in cheaper, low-carbon energy. But making those investments without also implementing a constraint on emissions would fail to address the problem. …

To make things even more confusing, Roger Pielke in turn cherry picks Yohe’s remarks to say that he doesn’t see where Yohe’s conclusions differ from how they are represented by Lomborg, citing the Yohe et al analysis which concludes “[g]lobal warming will continue to be a net benefit until about 2070.” But he ignores Yohe’s qualification that that only applies to developed countries, and assumes temperature changes within two degrees by that time, rather than the four degree plausible scenario that Lomborg is reacting to, commented on in another Guardian article by Oliver Tickell. Since the expected temperature change by the end of the century under a business as usual scenario is 3.5 degrees, Roger can’t figure out the discrepancy, but if you click the links, you will find that Oliver Tickell was responding to a recommendation made by Bob Watson, the former chair of the IPCC and now Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, that the UK should plan for a 4 degree C change in temperature, which has a 20% chance of occurring by the end of the century.

As Lomborg notes, the IPCC projection is between 1.8 and 6, Celsius. The sea level rise projection is 18-59 centimeters. But he fails to note that the IPCC projections explicitly exclude consideration of “rapid dynamical changes in ice flow”, or melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets. Lomborg’s basic pattern is to simply pick conservative or mid-range estimates, without any justification, and to ignore the qualifications. But there are many good arguments as to why the IPCC analysis, and science in general, tend to err on the side of being conservative to begin with. And there is a good argument why even the economic damage estimates such as those presented by Yohe et al are likely to be a serious underestimate, as was explained by Paul Baer, in his discussion of The worth of an ice sheet. All worthy of further comment.

For now, I would simply like to challenge all economists is to get on the bandwagon, and make as big of a fuss about Lomborg as they did about an infamous paper that added up the “values” of ecosystem services to $33 trillion…

I was a bit miffed that anyone would make a campaign issue out of opening up California and Florida to offshore drilling. As I recall*, drilling was suspended in those areas by Ronald Reagan, when Bush Sr. was running for president. The only credible explanation for stopping it in those places, and not in Alaska, which is much more critical from an ecological perspective than most of California – as beautiful as it’s coast is, was because California and Florida have more electoral votes. Property values probably also had something to do with it.

I’m not a budget wonk but, allow me to suggest another motive, besides satisfying the desires of the oil companies. Revenue from offshore oil and gas is the largest source of non-tax government revenue. Not that today’s disenchanted so-called “principled” conservatives have ever been concerned with government revenue.** However, once a Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) lease sale is included in the 5 year plan that MMS is required to develop, the projected revenue can be included in the federal budget. If this process is expedited, as MMS is clearly seeking to do, Bush – and the Republicans could present a “balanced budget” for the coming years, in time for the November election, even if the figures are wishful thinking. Even if they don’t get elected, the wrecking ball will have been set in motion to paralyze the next administration when the projections aren’t realized.

This kind of maneuvering is not without precedent. A bit of googling turned up this Sierra Club press release from October 2005 which states:

In addition, there will be a major vote, likely following the Columbus Day recess, on the fate of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and possibly on lifting the moratorium on off-shore oil drilling. Drilling proponents in Congress are trying to use the Budget process to advance these controversial issues. Congress has included anticipated revenues from lease sales in the Arctic in the Federal Budget Resolution, even though the revenue projections are inflated to 80 times the current average.

Google also turned up this bit of analysis by Richard Fineberg (pdf), pointing out that “If the entire $5.0 billion in [projected] lease bonus revenue is not realized, the federal portion of that shortfall must be added to the increase in the federal deficit caused by the reconciliation package.”

And MMS has already started preparing a new 5-year plan – for which it has requested comments by September 15, specifically asking:

Although OCS oil and gas leasing is typically conducted through an extensive, long-established process, are there alternative ways to ensure appropriate consultation and to streamline our leasing procedures? Should the OCS Lands Act be amended to allow changes in the 5-year plan without starting the process all over again in cases of acute supply or demand shift affecting national security?

In other words, expect an amendment to the OCS Lands Act to be attached to something Congress will have to vote on, in September or October, to legitimize amendments to the existing 5 year plan, that MMS is already hard at work on.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

*Disclosure: at that time, I was the research assistant for a committee and three panels at the National Academy of Sciences, that were engaged in a review of the Minerals Management Service Environmental Studies Program. After Bush Sr. was elected, that same committee was asked to determine whether the scientific information was adequate to support leasing decisions in California and Florida. It was not, and California and Florida have been off limits to new lease sales ever since. I have no idea whether there has been any change in the quality and relevance of studies undertaken since then but note that, at the time, the committee also made a point of highlighting numerous studies conducted by previous NAS committees, which had had little if any effect on program decisions. To its credit, MMS did actually sponsor some of the first studies regarding the contribution of onshore OCS facilities to the loss of Louisiana’s wetlands. Those were among the exceptions.

Now, if I could only remember the name of the MMS official who, in an offhanded comment, said that, if only there were another gas crisis, there would be no need to produce environmental studies because people would just want the gas… Which would back up what Naomi Klein is saying.

**For more on the ideology of “starving the beast”, there is an excellent discussion this week at the TPM book club regarding The Predator State – a new book by James K. Galbraith that I am adding to my reading pile, along with The Wrecking Crew by Thomas Frank.