Monday roundup

 Amanda Knox offers some rather hard-won insights in a piece at The Free Press entitled "The Life I Refused To Surrender." Knox, you may recall, was the American living in Italy circa 2009 who was wrongly convicted of murdering her British roommate. After she was incarcerated, forensic evidence showed that her roommate had been raped as well, and that one person committed both crimes. Knox was exonerated and released in 2011, returned to the United States, and is now a writer, wife and mother. 

Here's the life lesson she took from her prison experience:

The next day, back in the prison—the word colpevole, guilty, echoing in my head—I silently swept a corridor during my work shift. I overheard one guard say to another: Poor thing. She doesn’t understand what just happened.They thought, since I wasn’t hysterically sobbing, that I hadn’t absorbed the fact that I was going to spend the next 26 years trapped in this place. 

I was quiet precisely because I was sitting with my epiphany. And it was this: I was not, as I had assumed for the past two years, waiting to get my life back. I was not a lost tourist waiting to go home. I was a prisoner, and prison was my home. 

I’d thought I was in limbo, awkwardly positioned between my life (the life that I should have been living), and someone else’s life (the life of a murderer); I wasn’t. I never had been. The conviction, the sentence, the prison—this was my life. There was no other life I should have been living. There was only my life, this life, unfolding before me. 

The epiphany itself didn’t feel good or bad. It just was. If there was a feeling, it was the feeling of clarity: my life was sad. I was in prison for a crime I hadn’t committed. I would be locked away for the best years of my life. I would never fall in love, have children, pursue a career. My world would be so small, trapped within concrete walls and surrounded by traumatized people, many of whom were a danger to themselves and others. This life would inevitably take me further and further down a path that would alienate me from everyone I loved, who, despite their best efforts to be there for me, were on their own paths moving in different directions. 

But—and this was the critical thing, the thing I hadn’t been able to see until that moment—no matter how small, cruel, sad, and unfair this life was, it was my life. Mine to make meaning out of, mine to live to the best of my ability. There was no more waiting. There was only now. 

Every Friday, one of my Ordinary Times colleagues, Ben Sears posts an installment of his "POETS Day!" series. It's - well, I'll let Ben frame it:

This is one of those weekends where POETS Day gets lost in the wash. The first week of March Madness is a triumph of unproductivity. It’s not that the NCAA Tournament is so compelling that even non-basketball fans get into the excitement. It’s that basketball fans get so excited by it that they think it perfectly natural that people who don’t otherwise like the game would suddenly get swept up by the spectacle and those who don’t care realize that by pretending to care as much as basketball fans think they should they get to half ass it at work, take long lunches, use the copy machine to print endless personal documents, call their friends whenever they feel the urge, watch T.V. (television) on their phones at their desk, openly gamble, and leave early to catch the late afternoon game just like everyone else. Their bracket, chosen solely on the basis of which mascot is cuter, is just as likely as the fans’ to win a couple of hundred bucks too. So go do whatever. I don’t even think you have to ask to leave early. Go take a nap, hike a bit, marvel at how uncrowded places without walls of televisions are. Just be ready to talk about a blown call or an amazing comeback in one of the games you were supposedly watching. People will put the important-for-conversation clips on Twitter. As always, don’t let the weekend go by without a little verse. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday… even if everybody pissed off before Thursday’s tip off. If the basketball thing doesn’t spring you, there’s always St. Patrick’s Day to fall back on. Erin Roll Tide!

His featured poet last week was Delmore Schwartz, one of the earliest figures among what we call the New York Intellectuals. He was a classic case of an artistic powerhouse who couldn't tame his demons:

When Delmore Schwartz was twenty-five years old, he made a huge splash in New York intellectual circles with the publication of his first book, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities. The book, a collection of short stories and poems, was well spoken of by two of the time’s giants in Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. He was fresh and talented and people predicted a great deal from him, which he delivered for a while. When he died, it was three days before anyone identified the body. Friends said they hadn’t seen him for nearly a year. Alcohol, drug addiction, and insanity wore him down.

Among the themes he returns to in his work is lack of permanence and the passing of time, especially that things pass because they belong to time. His early life was not a happy one. His parents’, both Romanian Jewish immigrants, marriage was miserable. They split up when he was nine. His father died at age forty-nine when Schwartz was sixteen or seventeen. His most famous short story, the titular story from In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, is a fantasy where the protagonist watches his parents’ early life on screen at a movie theater and yells at them to change course. It’s a past that can’t be changed, and the watcher is dragged screaming from the theater. So much of his work focuses on coming to terms with what is done; that a moment is formed and gone and can never be relived.

In his poem “Father and Son” in a dialogue the father tells his son that time is death as it “dribbles from you, drop by drop.” while the son is skeptical. “But I thought time was full of promises.” The father warns the son that he will, as many do, try on guises to hide from his past and its wear on him, but it won’t work. In one of my favorite images he takes the phoenix, a symbol of rebirth and immortality, and recasts it as a prison that burns away your ability to affect your past and leaves you impotent and guilt ridden at each inescapable return:

Always the same self from the ashes of sleep
Returns with its memories, always, always,
The phoenix with eight hundred memories!

 

Bridget Ryder of The European Conservative says that EU do-gooder collectivism aimed at the continent's ag sector is running into resistance. Isn't this the kind of pie-in-the-sky heavy-handedness that resulted in so much tumult in Sri Lanka recently?

While the EU has moved forward with its plan to abolish the combustion engine, another flagship aspect of the Green Deal—agriculture and food policy—is proving almost impossible to implement. 

The Commission released the Farm to Fork strategy in 2020, proposing some 30 measures to transform both agricultural practices and consumer food habits. It looks to tighten animal welfare standards, triple organic agriculture, reduce pesticide use and fertiliser runoff by 50%, and create standardised consumer food labelling to nudge Europeans’ eating habits away from fats, salt, and sugar, towards more ‘sustainable’ nutrition.

But it is meeting resistance from both member states and industry. Even EU Agriculture Commissioner Janusz Wojciechowski, who has always been sceptical of the plan, recently downplayed its importance.

“The Green Deal is not a law,” Wojciechowski told the Polish Parliament in December 2022. “It is a political program in which all sorts of objectives are included, and which, as is the case with political programs, will be implemented to a greater or lesser extent.”

Indeed, the Commission initially emphasised that the strategy largely consists of aspirational targets. But the EU Parliament’s resolution supporting the strategy called for giving them a “binding nature,” in other words, moving from aspirations to law. In June 2022, the commission proposed a revamp of the bloc’s pesticide rules that includes binding targets to reduce pesticide use in member states. 

Gotta love that binding nature. 

Patterico argues that much in life is situational, that positions such as "tribalism is always bad," or "experts generally can't be trusted" don't hold up as absolutes:

I’ll summarize my conclusion briefly: life involves judgment calls. It’s tempting to place all your faith in principles like opposing tribalism, or sticking with the group no matter what, or seeking commentary that challenges you, or seeking commentary that reinforces your beliefs. But there is a time and place for all of our decisions, and they can’t always follow such simple rules. The only correct principle is to develop a world view about how you know when you are doing the right thing, and then try to do it. There is no easy shorthand for that.

At Discourse, Robert Tracinski makes the case that in the early 20th century, a critical mass of cultural influencers embodied outspokenness and decidedly nonconformist, somewhat brazen persona combined with a ringing defense of the free market, a combination one doesn't see much anymore. 

Aaron Renn offers an even-handed take on the state of the complimentarian-egalitarian divide in institutional Christianity. 

I've been prolific over at Precipice.

My February 16 piece, "Art and Dissolution," looks at what a healthy way to reconcile towering creative figures' indispensable works with their lives of largely self-imposed chaos might look like. 

"Humankind Didn't Spring Forth Two Weeks Ago" takes on a common assumption upon which all too many post-Americans operate. 

"The Philippians 4:8 Standard" asserts that Paul's exhortation ought to be our gauge on what deserves our attention.

"Notes on the Definition of 'Woke'" is my contribution to the latest round of discussion about that term.

 

 

The proposed SEC mandate on the ag sector is not a done deal yet, and there's an encouraging amount of pushback

 As if there weren't enough supply-chain hose-ups and factors increasing food prices already, the Securities and Exchange Commission is poised to impose new levels of cost and bureaucratic distraction on the nation's ag sector.

The SEC's pointy-heads seem to be oblivious to how this kind of thing has worked out elsewhere:

Echoing conflicts from Sri Lanka to Canada to the Netherlands, tensions between farmers and green-minded government policymakers are building in the United States, where producers are squaring off against a costly proposed federal mandate for greenhouse-gas reporting from corporate supply chains.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in March proposed requiring large corporations, including agribusinesses and food companies, to report greenhouse gas emissions down to the lowest rungs of their supply chains as a means of combatting climate change, which environmental campaigners contend imperils the planet and life on it.

This would be yet another instance of the big dogs at the top of the supply chain getting all up in the business of the small operations that continue to provide quality product at reasonable prices because they have time to focus on that instead of a bunch of resource-consuming record-keeping:

Reporting such indirect, “scope 3” emissions would require corporations to demand data on the use of fuel, fertilizer, pesticides, and other chemicals from small-scale farmers who say they lack the personnel and resources to comply. The challenge has been led by the powerful American Farm Bureau Federation and its state affiliates, whose representatives have met with SEC officials and organized their lobbyists in Washington.

“The farmers we represent are already heavily regulated at the state, local, and federal level but have never been subject to things concerned with Wall Street,” said Lauren Lurkins, director of environmental policy at the Illinois Farm Bureau. “Our farmers do not have a team of compliance officers or attorneys, and they don’t have a network of people to help them understand this. They really want to make sure they are growing crops and raising livestock and that [they] take care of the food supply.”

What's driving this is the ESG movement and the institutional investors who think it's the way to go:

The downstream data reporting is required, the SEC claims, to determine larger, publicly traded companies’ green score, called an ESG, or environmental, social, and governance rating. The greenhouse gas measurements would be made at least partly in accordance with a set of standards developed in 2011 by an international consortium of environmental groups and corporations.

While the SEC released its first climate-related disclosure guidance in 2010, the new requirements are driven by the “elevation of climate issues,” Erik Gerding, the SEC’s deputy director of legal and regulatory policy in its division of corporation finance, said in a May webinarput on by the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures, an international group formed to increase reporting by companies of climate-related information.

The proposed rule is not driven by the average individual investor, but rather investment giants managing large portfolios.

“Several institutional investors who have collectively trillions of dollars and investments under management have demanded climate-related information … because of the investor assessment of how climate change poses a risk to their portfolio,” Gerding said.

Most shareholders in the U.S. prioritize traditional corporate performance over environmental and other social welfare concerns, according to a Gallup study released in February. The poll queried its Gallup Panel with $10,000 or more in equities or bonds.

In another survey, investment professionals in the National Investor Relations Institute ranked an ESG score fourth in risk to a company behind performance, crisis, and management troubles.

However, there is an encouraging amount of pushback:

Gary Gensler, the Biden-nominated chairman of the SEC and a long time progressive, said in announcing the plan that “it would provide investors with consistent, comparable, and decision-useful information for making their investment decisions.”

But the plan drew “an extraordinarily high” number of substantive comments to the agency – around 14,000 – during the 60-day requisite comment period, according to Ropes & Gray, a law firm that compiled a report on public comments submitted to the SEC on the climate disclosure proposal. Because of that, the comment period was extended an extra 30 days and closed on June 17.

Agribusiness represented 20% of the total comments received by the SEC, mostly opposing the rule. The SEC was scheduled to adopt the plan in October, but it is expected to finalize the rule later due to the volume of comments and pleas for reconsideration.

Among the comments was the promise of litigation from a group of 24 Republican state attorneys general, which cited this year’s U.S. Supreme Court decision in West Virginia v. EPA that a federal agency does not have the authority to regulate greenhouse gases.

“If the Commission insists on taking the same inappropriate course, we will be ready to act once again,” the letter stated. “We urge you to save everyone years of strife by abandoning the Proposed Rule.”

It's not just Republicans, though. At least one Democrat with his head on straight is concerned as well:

In a Senate hearing earlier this month, Gensler sought to assuage concern over the proposed rule voiced by Democrat Jon Tester, Montana’s senior senator and a lifelong rancher.

“If the public company says, ‘Hey, we need you … to tell us how much fuel you used, how much fertilizer you used, what your inputs were,’ and all that, it becomes an issue, especially for the little guy…” Tester said.

Gensler responded: “That’s not the intent of what we did … that’s the benefit of public comment.”

Just who are these institutional investors? Well, two of them, Ceres and Trillium Asset Management, have been around forty-plus years. They were both founded by Joan Bavaria, who was instrumental in getting this ball rolling as a "pioneer in socially responsible investing."

A network of activist companies like Ceres with large private equity and financiers on board are working to “transform” the economy over climate concerns, according to Ceres’ self-description.

In adherence, farmers will have to recreate their business model.

“Addressing these emissions will require a shift in agricultural production to more sustainable and regenerative methods…” Kate Monahan, director of shareholder advocacy at Trillium Asset Management, said in an interview this month with ESG Clarity, a website trafficking in ESG news directed at the financial sector. “It’s imperative that food companies keep improving measurement of their Scope 3 emissions’ sources to be able to prioritize actions that reduce their emissions hotspots.”

Let's hope that, even though the SEC's comment period for this proposal, which was extended for 30 days beyond the standard 60 due to the flood of response, is closed, opposition to this disastrous scheme continues to be loud and resolute.

It will increase the cost of food.

It will be tyrannical ("'transform' the economy").

It will deaden souls. 

 

 

 

 

Different lipstick won't change the nature of the ESG pig

 Environmental, social and governance (ESG)  investing is a concept originally cooked up in 2005 at a UN conference. It's of a piece with the Great Reset initiative devised by the World Economic Forum in 2020, and which has newly crowned British King Charles III among its enthusiasts.

It's all very top-down and collectivist. Our pointy-headed betters have assessed the prospects for humankind and determined that it must be steered en masse into a course that is more "fair," "equitable," "green" and "sustainable."

A couple of months ago, I noted here at LITD how it is being used to circumvent government policy or court decisions that aren't to its proponents' liking:

 . . . now that the Supreme Court has said that the EPA overreached in trying to tell coal companies what kinds of products they could offer in the marketplace, those who want you to believe the global climate is in some kind of dire circumstance are going to use ESG as the next available weapon to assault our liberty:

Bill McKibben, the influential head of the climate pressure group 350.org, explains why the left has so promoted the ESG movement — which judges corporations’ performance based on environmental, social and governance metrics — to force companies to put on the straitjacket of unworkable climate controls.

“Convincing banks to stop funding Big Oil is probably not the most efficient way to tackle the climate crisis, but, in a country where democratic political options are effectively closed off, it may be the only path left,” he writes in The New Yorker.

What McKibben is saying is that because climate extremists aren’t getting their way at the ballot box, they will embrace the ESG approach, which is modeled after a union tactic called a “corporate campaign.” Under it, unions pressure firms to follow the union line or face damage to their company’s reputation and alienation from propagandized employees. Not willing to bear the immediate costs, many companies give in. After seeing Tesla dropped from “approved” lists of ESG companies, Elon Musk sadly concluded that ESG has been “weaponized by phony social justice warriors” and is now a “scam.”

You didn't think they were going to fade away quietly, did you? 

The bad taste in the mouth where ESG is concerned has been spreading:

A number of sustainable investing champions say it’s time for the “ESG” label to be shelved and replaced by something less likely to draw attacks from both the political right and left.

Robert Eccles, a professor who’s spent the past 12 years researching sustainability at Harvard Business School and now University of Oxford’s Said Business School, says the term “just doesn’t have value anymore. Let’s change the conversation.” 

“I’m happy to not use the term ESG,” he said in an interview, referring to environmental, social and corporate governance issues. “People are so invested now in hating ESG for reasons that don’t really have much to do with ESG.”

It turns out that defining ESG with any kind of specificity is a lot harder than using the Milton Friedman gauge of a business's health: is it showing a return on owners' investment?

Industry veteran Sandra Carlisle, who’s head of sustainability at $58.6 billion Jupiter Asset Management, said ESG remains poorly defined and inadequately regulated, making it confusing for investors and companies to understand. It’s also left investors in the dark, just when they need more clarity, says Leslie Samuelrich, who’s spent a decade in sustainable investing and is president of Green Century Capital Management.

“It’s time for the industry to explain what ESG means and what it doesn’t mean, to maintain its credibility,” she said. Samuelrich, whose Boston-based firm oversees about $1 billion, says ESG is about using relevant material factors to measure how a company handles risks. “It isn’t ‘sustainable,’ ‘green’ or ‘making an impact.”’

Meanwhile, ESG continues to take up an ever bigger chunk of financial markets. McKinsey & Co. estimates that more than 90% of S&P 500 companies now publish ESG reports. And according to Bloomberg Intelligence, ESG will this year exceed $40 trillionworth of assets. The amount allocated to sustainable investment funds reached around $2.5 trillion at end of June, research firm Morningstar Inc. says. Such figures suggest ESG is too entrenched to simply switch off. 

Before we go any further down this rabbit hole, it behooves us to consider the current situations of three countries that went all in for ESG:

Sri Lanka was the poster child for ESG investment and has suffered the brunt of these principles. Their most recent prime minister just resigned in shame, following months of protests and unrest stemming from the country committing to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 and halving its nitrogen use. 

 

Ghana also took the “E” prong too much to heart, with its government agreeing to raise $5 billion with international capital with Green, Social and Sustainability (GSS) Bonds. Now experiencing runaway inflation, largely due to these GSS bonds, the country is hoping to be bailed out by the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

 

  The Netherlands similarly adopted a new continent-wide Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR) to boost ESG investment and is now experiencing one of the highest inflation rates in the European Union. This was precipitated by the Dutch government approving a multi-year $21 billion plan to sharply cut ammonia and nitrogen emissions 50% by 2030 which requires one-third of farmers to kill off their herds and shut down indefinitely.

Much has been made of late about how progressivism has shifted from a focus on class struggle to identity politics militancy, but we should take heed of the fact that its tactics for imposing its aims remain those that James Burnham noted in his 1941 book The Managerial Revolution.  It was written at a time when totalitarianism was reaching fever pitch in Europe. However, a number of lefties in the West saw that herding humankind into the collectivist pen to bring about their secular vision of a harmonious world could be achieved by the creation of a revolving door through which corporate managers, government bureaucrats and ivory-tower visionaries would pass as they were needed in particular roles.

I might also add that this is yet another example of why post-America can't have nice things. The Trumpists have seized on the general public's realization that collectivist do-gooderism is a crock, and bastardized it into a lexicon of "globalist elites" and "taking care of our people" when their own prescription is nothing more than rank protectionism. Their vision of what ought to be is as vague as the progressives'.  Their strength as an influential force lies in in their ability to imbue serious public-policy and cultural matters with a yee-haw vibe and conjure images of pitchforks and torches.

The actual antidote is what it's always been: a free market informed by Judeo-Christian morality. 

But it is encouraging to see developments such as this backing away from ESG. 

Eventually, proven verities win out over bizarre schemes. It's often a twisted and rocky road to that point, and the story is never over, but it's reassuring to see that common sense isn't dead. 

 

There is no compelling reason for humanity to convert en masse to play-like energy forms

 This move is positive, not only in and of itself, but because it come from a newly elected non-Trumpist Republican governor. He's not grandstanding or kowtowing to a cult. He's just a guy who understands the basic economic flaws in an agreement his state had entered into:

This week, Governor-elect Glenn Youngkin announced his intention to withdraw the Commonwealth of Virginia from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a pact of 11 states requiring power plants inside those states to purchase “allowances” to emit a determined amount of carbon dioxide.

Governor-elect Youngkin said, “RGGI describes itself as a regional market for carbon. But it is really a carbon tax that is fully passed on to ratepayers. It’s a bad deal for Virginians. It a bad deal for Virginia businesses.”

Would that more leaders around the globe understood this. 

The Biden administration clearly doesn't, pressing ahead as it is with its $5 trillion (yes, that's the figure the CBO has calculated for the cost once everything is taken into consideration) climate alarmism-driven Build Back Better plan even as the Associated Press's feet turn cold given our present inflation reality. 

Most of Europe has yet to get a clue:

Germany's new traffic-light political coalition—the red SPD, the yellow Free Democrats, and the Greens—is making the Paris climate agreement its top priority. In April, Germany's constitutional court ruled that its 2050 net-zero target was so distant that it violated the freedoms of young people. So, along with Sweden, Germany became the first country to legislate a 2045 net-zero target. Yet the new German government's net-zero plan, as outlined in the coalition agreement, may as well have been designed to worsen Europe's current energy crisis and sink its largest and most successful economy.

Under the timetable inherited from the Merkel government, zero-emitting nuclear power—which only a decade ago accounted for one-fourth of German electricity generation—will be phased out by the end of next year. To make matters worse, the new coalition is bringing forward the closure of all Germany's coal-fired power stations from 2038 to 2030 and at the same time raising the share of renewables to 80 percent. Notes energy expert Lucian Pugliaresi, Germany's energy policy initiatives "will not be sufficient to meet demand for electricity in Germany in 2030."

Germany's loss is Vladimir Putin's gain—burning more natural gas will be the only way for the country to keep the lights on. That means higher natural gas prices across northern Europe, and a continent more dependent for its energy on a dangerous geopolitical rival.

The biggest disappointment among would-be climate leaders so far has been the host of the recent U.N. climate conference: Britain and its prime minister, Boris Johnson. Britain made its bid for climate leadership in the waning days of the premiership of Johnson's predecessor in the summer of 2019. Theresa May had already announced her decision to step down when she latched on to net zero as her prime ministerial legacy. After a 90-minute debate in the House of Commons, with no cost estimates and no vote, Britain became the first major country to write net zero into law.

A small clique of politicians close to the outgoing prime minister seized on the prospect of Britain winning the presidency of the 2020 UN climate conference (later pushed back to 2021 because of COVID-19) to save face post-Brexit. One of them, former energy secretary Amber Rudd, told Politicothat she thought it would "help bind the U.K. closer to the EU" on climate and energy. It amounts to a reverse case of Boris Johnson's famed cakeism—instead of having your cake and eating it, Britain would have the disadvantages of being tied to the EU without the benefits of EU membership.

Having gotten into the business of climate leadership, Britain made "keeping 1.5 alive"—the maximum temperature rise of 1.5°C that net zero is meant to deliver—the main goal of the Glasgow conference. The result was humiliation. By its end, UN secretary general António Guterres had declared 1.5 "on life support" and the British president of the conference was fighting back tears.

The facts don't bear out this headlong rush to move away from normal-people energy forms:

What the UN report and the underlying scientific literature do say is that, even as natural and growing human influences have warmed the globe 1.1 C since 1900, most extreme weather events have remained within natural variability. The UN’s best estimate is that we’ll see an additional 1.6 C warming by 2100, an increase that is expected to have minimal net economic impact. That’s quite plausible since the 20th century saw a quadrupling of the global population and the greatest improvement ever in human wellbeing, even with the 1.1 C rise.

Science also confirms that we have time. As first recognized in the Nobel prize–winning work of William Nordhaus, an optimal path to “net zero” emissions would balance the disruption of too-rapid a reduction of carbon dioxide emissions (or decarbonization) against a growing risk of detrimental climate impacts. While there are many uncertainties in estimating that balance, future impacts appear to be small, thus suggesting that today’s mitigation plans are too hasty. To enable a graceful and economically viable energy transition in the coming decades, we must better observe and understand the changing climate and develop better emissions-lite technologies.

The alarmists are wont to exploit every natural disaster of newsworthy magnitude, but the fact is that natural-disaster deaths have been in sharp decline for a century:

Not that you’d know it, if you had half an eye on the headlines this summer. The floods, fires and heatwaves that plagued the world were, for many observers, proof that the impacts of climate change have already become catastrophic. In Europe, more than 150 people died in flooding. In the United States, wildfire season started earlier and lasted longer, razing hundreds of thousands of acres. Around the world, hundreds died from heatwaves.

But again, it’s worth reminding ourselves of the facts: there has been a 92% decline in the per decade death toll from natural disasters since its peak in the 1920s. In that decade, 5.4 million people died from natural disasters. In the 2010s, just 0.4 million did. Globally, the five-year period ending in 2020 had the fewest natural disaster deaths of any five-year period since 1900. And this decline occurred during a period when the global population nearly quadrupled — and temperatures rose more than 1°C degree centigrade above pre-industrial levels.

You see, there's an important factor in all this that must be taken into account: human ingenuity:

What determines whether people die in heat waves is not whether temperatures rose to 110°F — or even 115°F— instead of 109°F. It is whether or not they have air conditioning. Heat-related deaths have halved in the US since 1960 — even as the population expanded and heat waves grew in frequency, intensity, and length — because more and more people did.

Though climate alarmists steadfastly ignore it, our capacity to adapt is extraordinary. We are very good at protecting people from natural disasters — and getting better. To take just one example, France in 2006 had 4,000 fewer deaths from a heat wave than anticipated thanks to improved health care, an early-warning system and greater public consciousness in response to a deadly heat wave three years earlier. Even poor, climate-vulnerable nations like Bangladesh saw deaths from natural disasters decline massively thanks to low-cost weather surveillance and warning systems and storm shelters.

Climate alarmists have been wildly off the mark with their predictions for over 50 years.  The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times were, with a straight face, reporting Paul Erlich's prognostications of famine by 1975 and humanity's disappearance "in a cloud of blue steam" within twenty years in 1969. In the early 1970s, the Washington Post and the Boston Globe ran stories taking alarmists' (scientists, doncha know) claims that an ice age would be upon us by the end of the twentieth century seriously. Acid rain had its run as the star crisis of the 1980s, until the National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program said "never mind" in 1990. James Hansen's drought predictions were proven to be a lot of hooey. And, of course, there's the polar ice cap disappearance that wasn't. 

Still, the overlords will not brook any suggestion that some reconsideration might be in order:

Take the experience of statistician and sceptical environmentalist, Bjorn Lomborg. Earlier this year he was invited to give a public lecture at Duke University, only to be met by high-profile calls for it to be cancelled from Duke professors and assorted climate activists. Duke held its nerve, and the lecture went ahead, but not without Lomborg being denounced as a ‘professional climate denier’ – and all because he questions the economic wisdom of certain aspects of climate-change policymaking. 

Or take the decision of the BBC in 2018 to ban, effectively, any debate over climate change. This decision followed activists’ outcry over its 2014 decision to allow Lord Lawson, a former chancellor of the exchequer and a critic of climate alarmism, to appear on Radio 4’s Today programme. The BBC said it had got its coverage of climate change ‘wrong too often’ and told staff: ‘You do not need a “denier” to balance the debate.’ 

Now even those who are concerned about climate change, but who ‘downplay’, as the Independent put it, ‘the need for immediate and radical cuts to greenhouse gas emissions’, are being accused of denialism. Apparently, ‘delay is the new denial’.

Indeed, influential climate scientist Michael Mann argues that anyone who inhibits the need for drastic action right this very moment, perhaps by talking hopefully of ‘adaptation’, ‘geoengineering’ or ‘carbon capture’, is just a climate denier in optimist’s clothing. ‘The greatest threat’, concludes one politician, ‘is now posed by those who purport to accept the scientific consensus, but refuse to respond at the pace science demands’.

Let's speak plainly. Climate alarmism is one piece of a larger impetus that has seen to it that Western civilization declines to the point of being  unrecognizable. Human advancement that has made possible the safety, comfort, convenience and variety of modern life, and lifted millions out of poverty over the last two centuries, is, in this reading, a negative, an arrogant assertion of privilege by our species, which, since, in this reading, is no better than any other in this relativity-governed universe.

It is such a glaringly off-base vision that it will surely play itself out someday. The question is how much harm it will do in the meantime. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If Republicans seriously want to foil Biden's statist plans, they're going to need better leaders than yay-hoos like these

 So President Biden is going to Pittsburgh today to unveil yet another exercise in redistribution and central planning on steroids:

President Joe Biden will unveil a $2.25 trillion U.S. infrastructure plan Wednesday -- paid for by steep tax hikes on businesses-- that his administration said will prove the most sweeping since investments in the 1960s space program.

The four-part, eight-year plan dedicates $620 billion for transportation, including a doubling in federal funding for public transit. It would provide $650 billion for initiatives tied to improving quality of life at home, like clean water and high-speed broadband. There’s $580 billion for strengthening American manufacturing -- some $180 billion of which goes to what’s billed as the biggest non-defense research and development program on record -- and $400 billion to address improved care for the elderly and people with disabilities.

Biden’s plan would increase the corporate income tax to 28% from 21%, and set a 21% minimum tax on global corporate earnings. The White House said tax increases will be “fully paying for the investments in this plan over the next 15 years.”

Granted, implementation is no sure thing: 

What is really going on is that many Democrats are hoping to use Biden's presidency to "jam" into law a variety of Democratic agenda items old and new. Their vast ambitions are hampered by the fact that they have a very narrow majority in the House -- so narrow that Democrats are trying to grab a seat in Iowa that has already been certified by state election officials -- and the Senate is tied, 50-50. American voters have not given Democrats the kind of dominant majorities needed to "transform" the country.

But preventing even the partial success of this agenda requires an opposition party able to articulate a consistent body of principles and not clever marketing aimed at "the working class," a strategy that smacks of industrial policy and protectionism, not the free-market economics that ought to be front and center: 

On a flight Tuesday from Indianapolis to Fort Wayne, Ind., two leaders in the House Republican conference discussed a memo that argues that their party's future demands they "embrace our new coalition" because "President Trump's gift didn’t come with a receipt."

Why it matters: The document, titled "Cementing GOP as the Working Class Party," leaves no doubt that Republicans — at least in the House of Representatives — will be doubling down on Donald Trump for the foreseeable future.

The two leaders would be Kevin McCarthy, he of the changing of his tune from shouting into the telephone as the Capitol was under siege on January 6 to the Very Stable Genius, "Do you know who the f--- you're talking to?" to making the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago for an audience with that same VSG, and Jim Banks, whose district includes Fort Wayne and who is proud of the fact that he objected to the certification of Joe Biden's victory. This memo is full of language disparaging corporate donors and Wall Street.

It's pandering of the rankest sort. It's pitting classes of Americans against each other. 

Isn't the point of conservatism supposed to be that it's universally applicable? That it works for people in small heartland towns, suburbs and coastal metropolises? That it's impervious to shifting trends?

Why aren't the tree pillars 

1.) Free market economics: A good or a service is worth what buyer and seller agree that it is worth.  Period.  No other entity - certainly not government - has any business being involved in reaching that agreement.  Therefore, public-policy inquiries that concern themselves with macro-level phenomenon such as wealth inequality or “fair” wages are not only pointless but tyrannical by definition.

2.) The understanding that Western civilization is a unique blessing to the world: Both the Greco-Roman tradition from which the West has distilled the political structure of a representative democracy and the above-mentioned free-market economy, and the Judeo-Christian tradition from which it acquired an accurate understanding of the Creator’s nature and humankind’s proper relationship to the creator are the two most significant avenues of advancement our species has ever discovered.  (And much falls under this point that needs serious discussion at this time, such as the fact that there are only two genders, male and female, and that their is no fluidity between them, and that the family structure of a husband, wife and children thereof is the overwhelmingly normal one and the one most conducive to a happy and prosperous society.)

3.) A foreign policy based on what history tells us about human nature:  Evil is real and always with us.  A nation-state seeking a righteous world(such as the United States of America) should only form close alliances with other nations that have demonstrated a track record of common values.  Regimes that are clearly tyrannical and / or expansionist should never be appeased.  Indeed, foreign policy should be guided by thinking on how to at least eventually remove such regimes as problems on the world stage.

still the lodestar for the party seeking to roll back statism?

But McCarthy and Banks seem determined to double down on the GOP's status as the stupid party.

Whether leadership can be wrested from such types is not at all certain. At the least, it's a daunting task, given how large Trump still looms over it. But whether done inside the party or some new vehicle for promulgating actual conservatism, it's going to fall to those who still understand that it is the only viable road forward to see if  actual conservatism can be tried. 

Alison Collins and the ongoing great collectivist leveling

 I'm no Randian. I generally cede the floor to Whittaker Chambers on this matter, who in his 1957 National Review takedown of Atlas Shrugged , made plain the reasons why objectivism was a different critter from recognizable conservatism.

There is one scene in The Fountainhead, though, that I think has had lasting value in the marketplace of ideas. Ellsworth Toohey, the architecture critic for The Banner newspaper, explicitly tells Howard Roarke why he's strived at every turn to thwart Roark's career as an architect. It's because he knows that Roark's designs are excellent, that his work is identifiable by its fealty to integrity on all levels. Toohey can't have that. He's after a world in which mediocrity and sameness characterize human endeavor. 

The scene was brought to mind when I came across the news item concerning San Francisco school board member Alison Collins, who has the same mission with an updated identity-politics twist.

I was heartened to see that she'd gone a bridge too far even in one of post-America's most progressive cities. She's facing a storm of backlash:

San Francisco School Board member Alison Collins is under significant pressure to resign after tweets she posted about Asian Americans back in 2016 were brought to light by a parent group seeking to oust her. As I pointed out yesterday, one of Collins tweets said, “Many Asian Am. believe they benefit from the ‘model minority’ BS…They use white supremacist thinking to assimilate and ‘get ahead.'” Today the San Francisco Chronicle reports on the significant backlash to those statements.

School board member Jenny Lam called for Collins to resign from the board.

“I’m shocked, dismayed, personally hurt by the remarks about Asian American students, parents and teachers,” Lam said, adding the board makes decisions that affect tens of thousands of people and it’s critical to have leaders representing all students.

Lam said she spoke to Collins on Friday.

“I asked, and I think it’s in the best interest of the school district and leadership for her to step down from the Board of Education,” Lam said…

Mayor London Breed also strongly condemned the posts, but did not directly call for her resignation.

“All of our young people in our schools need to feel respected and supported, and you simply can’t use words like that,” she said in a statement. “Asian people in this country have long faced very real racism, including here in San Francisco, and you can’t just broad brush their experience in a way that is so harmful and offensive.

Mayor Breed didn’t initially call for Collins’ resignation but she has since changed her mind. She now says the Asian community deserves better:

Collins has tried to backtrack, with some kind of drivel about how people have to understand the context of her 2016 statements, that she was in a lather because Donald Trump had just won the election.

The central point remains. Collins cannot abide by anyone rising above the average and distinguishing himself or herself by attaining levels of achievement, that, from a statistical standpoint, are by definition rare. 

She can't stand the thought of the human being digging deep into himself or herself to explore the potential of his / her mettle. 

This has been the common thread of the leftist vision as it has morphed from Marx and Engels through Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Castro to - well, Collins. 

The individual soul is worth nothing to the leftist. The point is to take away that which makes a human being more than just another member of the animal kingdom, his or her nobility, his or her ability to distinguish between bad, good, better and best. 

Collins doesn't seem to have been chastened by the response to her pronouncement, but at least it's served to demonstrate that most people are still aghast at that degree of collectivism. Or maybe, and this is a less sunny consideration, merely the candor with which it's been expressed. 

The prospects for reversing course and taking a free-market approach to health care grow dimmer by the day

 James C. Capretta at the American Enterprise Institute has a piece today that, in a just-giving-you-the-facts-folks tone, asserts that the "Affordable" Care Act is about to get expanded and that that expansion will be irreversible.

As usual (think the original farm bill from 1933 that has turned into a cyclical five-year renewal pattern), the expansion is being touted as a necessary emergency measure:

President Biden established the financial parameters of the current bill by calling for a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 response plan. The measure is wide-ranging, with provisions focused on vaccines, testing, and public health, as well as unemployment and economic support. To relieve some of the pressure on families struggling financially, the president wants to increase ACA subsidization of their health insurance premiums. Because the legislation is advertised as an emergency measure, most of the provisions suggested by the president are billed as temporary, including the expanded ACA subsidies.

You'll recall that, in the early days of the ACA rollout, some states stood their ground and resisted Medicaid expansion. The Biden administration says, "We can't have that":

The bill also includes a new incentive for states to expand their Medicaid programs as authorized by the ACA. Thirty-seven states (plus D.C.) already have adopted the expansion. The new lure — a two-year bump in federal matching payments of 5 percentage points — is aimed at encouraging the hold-outs to drop their opposition. CBO estimates this provision would cost another $16 billion over ten years because it would accelerate adoption by a certain number of states.

In the early years of this blog, I used a term that I've largely backed off from. I would refer to the American public as the "cattle masses." But I think it may be time to revive it.

What I meant by it was that, over the course of the last 90 years, people have had a dependency mindset ingrained into them. They have come to see government as in the business of "providing services" and inserting itself into areas that were previously and properly the domain of the private sector.

See if Capretta's observation about "political realities" doesn't fit with this:

As Robert Laszewski has noted, and history confirms, the political pressure to extend the added ACA subsidies beyond 2022 will be immense. Without an extension, many families with incomes above 400 percent of the FPL would see large premium increases in January 2023, as would all households with incomes between 100 and 400 percent of the FPL. The number of people affected could approach 10 million or more.

Republicans in Congress are opposed to the current pandemic response bill in part because of its expense, but that does not mean they will fight an extension of the ACA subsidies when the time comes. The iron law of American politics — that voters are never more enraged as when existing benefits are threatened — will scare them off from taking such a position. Even if a first extension is only for a year or two, the political momentum toward permanence will be clear, and unstoppable.

By the way, this situation points up once again why Donald Trump was completely worthless as president. In his 2016 campaign, he was asked about his health care policy, he responded, "We have to take care of everybody."

What a stupid thing to say.

Who is "we" and what does "take care" mean? He had no clue as to what a viable health care policy would look like.

Now at this point, some readers' feathers may be ruffled. There may be a reaction along the lines of my position being heartless and devoid of compassion for what actual people have to deal with in caring for their health.

This is why it behooves us to look at a bit of history regarding how present arrangements came into being, and the best source for that, in my estimation, is this 2012 Forbes article boy Avik Roy:

Because much of America’s work force was off fighting World War II, the Roosevelt administration feared that the domestic demand for workers would outpace labor supply, leading to a spiral of higher wages and runaway inflation. The 1942 law [the Economic Stabilization Act] mandated wage ceilings for a broad range of occupations, and required federal approval for any changes thereof.

But fringe benefits, such as health insurance, were not covered under the 1942 wage controls. As a result, many employers started offering health benefits as a way around the new federal wage limits. This loophole gained further strength when, in 1943, a federal court held that employer-sponsored health insurance was exempt from taxation.

In the early postwar years, courts and the IRS continued to struggle with how to treat the tax status of health insurance. Then, under President Eisenhower, Congress passed a comprehensive revision of the federal tax code called the Internal Revenue Act of 1954. Section 106(a) of the 1954 Internal Revenue Code officially excluded employer-sponsored health insurance from taxation:

General rule — Except as otherwise provided in this section, gross income of an employee does not include employer-provided coverage under an accident or health plan.

The employer tax exclusion disproportionately benefits high earners

The enshrinement of health insurance as non-taxable income meant that employers and their workers had a huge incentive to divert dollars of salary into dollars of health insurance. For example, a worker who pays federal and state income taxes at a combined rate of 30% will receive $7,000 for every $10,000 his employer provides in gross salary. But the same employee will receive $10,000 in benefits for every $10,000 his employer spends on health insurance—a 43% improvement.

This subsidy is even higher for the highest earners. A Wall Street banker who pays federal and state income taxes of 50% will receive $5,000 for every $10,000 his employer provides in gross salary. But by receiving $10,000 in benefits, he gets a 100% improvement on his taxable income. And because he’s a high earner to begin with, he’s likely to benefit from an especially generous health insurance plan.

This exclusion of employer-sponsored insurance from taxable income—known as the employer tax exclusionfor short—is what ties Americans’ health insurance to their jobs. If you lose your job, and stop paying for health insurance on your own, and then get sick, an insurer is under no obligation to cover you, due to what is now your “pre-existing condition”—and, in rare cases, the insurer may do just that.

This flaw in the setup became more glaring as time went on. What to do about it?

. . . the policy solution to the pre-existing condition problem is to make sure that people own their own insurance policies, and don’t have to change plans when they change or lose their jobs. This is what wonks call continuous coverage.

Put health insurance on the same footing - ownership-wise - as home or auto or life insurance. 

Now, on to the question of why health insurance came to cost so damn much:

The second most important reason why we have a pre-existing condition problem is because insurance is too expensive. And the high cost of insurance is also largely due to the employer tax exclusion.

Because people don’t buy insurance for themselves, they have no incentive to shop for value and buy the plans that meet their needs, without extraneous coverage. In addition, this fourth-party system in which third parties buy insurance on our behalf makes us all insensitive to the cost of our care. We go to the doctor and expect our costs to be covered. We don’t have any reason to think about how much one hospital costs versus the next.

The private insurance market can be divided into three subgroups: the large-group market, for employers with more than 50 workers; the small-group market, for those with 2 to 50 employees; and the individual or non-group market.

The individual market is dysfunctional in America because few Americans use it. Insurers have a hard time building economically viable risk pools with a heterogeneous group that consists of young people,

Economists of all ideological stripes agree that the employer-sponsored system in America is a key reason why health insurance is so costly here. And, in turn, because insurance is so costly, people with low incomes can’t afford it, and go without it for long periods. And if they get sick when they’re uninsured, they have a pre-existing condition.

By the way, in the course of running down the above-excerpted article, I came across a great piece Roy wrote for The Atlantic in 2016, in which he refutes economist Kenneth Arrow's 1963 paper's five objections to putting health care on a free-market footing. Arrow's five objections:

1. Unpredictability. Arrow points out that people's needs for health care are unpredictable, unlike other basic expenses like food and clothing. But while we can skip the occasional meal or sale at Old Navy, our need for health care can be far more urgently necessary.
2. Barriers to entry. Arrow notes that you can't just set up shop on the side of a road and practice medicine: you must have a license to be a physician, and gaining that license requires years of expensive schooling and training. As a result of this constraint on the supply of physicians, there is a constraint on the supply of medical services.
3. The importance of trust. Trust is a key component of the doctor-patient relationship; if a surgeon makes a serious mistake during an operation, for example, the patient may die or become permanently disabled. The patient must trust that the surgeon knows what he's doing and can't test-drive the surgery beforehand.
4. Asymmetrical information. Doctors usually know far more about medicine than do their patients. Therefore, the consumer of medical services (the patient) is at a serious disadvantage relative to the seller (the doctor). Patients are therefore vulnerable to exploitation. In addition, third-party payors of medical bills, such as insurers or the government, are that much more removed from the particulars of a given case and unable to effectively supervise medical practice.

 

1. Idiosyncrasies of payment. Unusually, patients pay for health care after, not before, it is received (that is, if they pay for health care at all). Because patients don't see the bill until after the non-refundable service has been consumed, and because patients are given little information about price and cost, patients and payors are rarely able to shop around for a medical service based on price and value. Compounding this problem is the fact that patients rarely pay for their care directly.

Roy's refutations:

Unpredictability is hardly unique to health care. Indeed, in the five decades since 1963, an entire industry has emerged to address the problem of unpredictability. Think of the extended warranties you're offered when you buy a new television, in case the product stops working. If you worry about being suddenly short of money, or accidentally making a mistake with your checking account, you can buy overdraft protection. If you're afraid of flying, you can buy traveler's insurance. And I haven't even brought up the classical forms of insurance, such as homeowner's insurance, auto insurance, and life insurance.

It's true that we have instituted barriers to entry in the delivery of medical care. It's a problem that Paul Starr documents well in his definitive history of the subject, The Social Transformation of American Medicine. But again, this is hardly a problem that is unique to health care. It's a lot easier to get a medical degree than it is to start an airline or a bank from scratch. We require licensure of lawyers, but Ken Arrow never managed to write a paper advocating for the nationalization of the legal industry. And it's not just doctors and lawyers: in many parts of America, you need a license to become a cat groomer, tattoo artist, or a tree trimmer.

Trust is certainly important in medicine. But trust is also important in many, if not most, commercial transactions. We trust that the manufacturers of car brakes have thoroughly vetted their products. We trust that cruise ship captains are sober when they're on duty. And if we feel our trust has been violated, we trust properly licensed lawyers to sue on our behalf.

As any Megan McArdle fan knows, asymmetries of information are everywhere. The ancient Latin aphorism caveat emptor ("let the buyer beware") has been enshrined in property law for centuries. The idea is that sellers know more about the defects of what they are selling than do buyers. Hence, traditionally, we hold buyers responsible for understanding what they are buying, so long as the sellers haven't engaged in fraudulent misrepresentation. We accept that auto mechanics know more about our car's problems than we do, and we take our business elsewhere if we feel like they've been ripping us off.

When it comes to medicine, the internet has made great strides in reducing asymmetries of information. A parent of a child with a genetic disorder, or Lyme disease, is likely to know as much, if not more, about available treatments than will your garden-variety family practitioner. Patient forums and websites like WebMD give people access to medical knowledge in a way that they didn't have it before.

The last of Arrow's concerns is the most important: that we pay for medical services in a non-standard way, especially through third parties. Free-marketeers have long sought to remedy this problem. On the other hand, Arrow's proposed solution to third-party payment--government-sponsored insurance--makes the problem worse, by further removing patients from the price and value of the care they receive.

To conclude, though, I'd like to get back to Capretta's point that subsidies are here to stay. 

Subsidies. 

Let that term really sink in.

It's a synonym for redistribution. Using government's monopoly on the coercive use of force to take your hard-earned money and give it to someone else to satisfy his or her individual need or want. 

Once your freedom to do as you see fit with your own money is gone, we are looking at a very different kind of country than the one James Madison envisioned. 

Whether that concerns you or not indicates a great deal about the extent to which you have either retained your humanity or decided to be a dull animal willing to be herded into the pen for your daily gruel.