Climate warming, climate cooling: the law of unintended consequences

The New Neo Posted on by

These consequences may have been unintended, but they certainly should not have been unforeseen:

When the United Nations wanted to help slow climate change, it established what seemed a sensible system.

Greenhouse gases were rated based on their power to warm the atmosphere. The more dangerous the gas, the more that manufacturers in developing nations would be compensated as they reduced their emissions.

But where the United Nations envisioned environmental reform, some manufacturers of gases used in air-conditioning and refrigeration saw a lucrative business opportunity.

They quickly figured out that they could earn one carbon credit by eliminating one ton of carbon dioxide, but could earn more than 11,000 credits by simply destroying a ton of an obscure waste gas normally released in the manufacturing of a widely used coolant gas. That is because that byproduct has a huge global warming effect. The credits could be sold on international markets, earning tens of millions of dollars a year.

That incentive has driven plants in the developing world not only to increase production of the coolant gas but also to keep it high ”” a huge problem because the coolant itself contributes to global warming and depletes the ozone layer. That coolant gas is being phased out under a global treaty, but the effort has been a struggle.

So since 2005 the 19 plants receiving the waste gas payments have profited handsomely from an unlikely business: churning out more harmful coolant gas so they can be paid to destroy its waste byproduct. The high output keeps the prices of the coolant gas irresistibly low, discouraging air-conditioning companies from switching to less-damaging alternative gases. That means, critics say, that United Nations subsidies intended to improve the environment are instead creating their own damage.

I’m not meaning to pick on the UN, especially (okay, maybe I am). This sort of thing is a hazard in all economic planning designed to shape people’s behavior and encourage one type of action over another, but as I said, it’s a hazard that probably should have been foreseen. I am most definitely not an economist, nor do I play one on TV, but I’m pretty that if something is incentivized/rewarded, that behavior will tend to increase, if it is at all discretionary. In this case, producing the gas and then destroying it became more profitable than not producing it. Companies are in the business of making money, in addition to making things. And so—more of the gas is produced.

The rest of the article is worth reading, as well. It goes into how difficult it has been to change this system once it took hold. The countries that are most involved in the overproduction of the gas are, unsurprisingly, China and India.

Here’s a quote that underlines the “unintended” part of the equation:

“I was a climate negotiator, and no one had this in mind,” said David Doniger of the Natural Resources Defense Council. “It turns out you get nearly 100 times more from credits than it costs to do it. It turned the economics of the business on its head.”

Forget, for a moment, about the controversies in the science of global warming. Even if the science really were incontrovertibly settled, there would still be the problem of the shortsightedness and limitations of interventions designed to change things.

Johnson’s daisy ad

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Baltimoran” makes the following interesting observation in connection with my discussion of the effects of lies in political ads:

I suppose the campaign ads we’ve seen the last few months are worse than what we’ve all gotten used to in recent years, but they aren’t that bad by historic standards. No one’s trying to accuse Mitt of wanting to start a nuclear war for example.

True. Baltimoran is no doubt referring to LBJ’s famous daisy ad, which I discussed previously in this post. Let’s watch it again; it’s pretty abominable:

However, there are quite a few differences between then and now. The most important one is that the ad aired only once and then was pulled by the Johnson forces as being too controversial, because of the hail of criticism it immediately evoked:

“Daisy” aired only once, during a September 7, 1964 telecast of David and Bathsheba on The NBC Monday Movie. Johnson’s campaign was widely criticized for using the prospect of nuclear war, as well as for the implication that Goldwater would start one, to frighten voters. The ad was immediately pulled, but the point was made, appearing on the nightly news and on conversation programs in its entirety. Jack Valenti, who served as a special assistant to Johnson, later suggested that pulling the ad was a calculated move, arguing that “it showed a certain gallantry on the part of the Johnson campaign to withdraw the commercial.”

So was pulling it a cynical move as Valenti suggested? Or did politicians adhere to a higher standard back then, as a result of public pressure? Or would it be more correct to say that, if so, it was actually the public which had the higher standards, and forced the politicians to adhere to them?

Spambot of the day

The New Neo Posted on by

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Politics: lies and the lying liars

The New Neo Posted on by

Anyone who studies history and humanity knows about the technique of the Big Lie. The summary version of the idea of the Big Lie is that propaganda works, and truth has little to do with its efficacy. In fact, the bigger the lie, the more likely it might be to work, because its very audaciousness makes people doubt that someone would be so bold as to concoct something that preposterous and expect people to believe it.

Most people also know that the Nazis were probably the first to use the phrase. Hitler wrote about it in Mein Kampf. But my guess is that few people know how he used it: to refer to the Jews. It is instructive to look at the full passage on the subject from his book (see also this):

But it remained for the Jews, with their unqualified capacity for falsehood, and their fighting comrades, the Marxists, to impute responsibility for the downfall [of Germany in WWI] precisely to the man who alone had shown a superhuman will and energy in his effort to prevent the catastrophe which he had foreseen and to save the nation from that hour of complete overthrow and shame. By placing responsibility for the loss of the world war on the shoulders of Ludendorff they took away the weapon of moral right from the only adversary dangerous enough to be likely to succeed in bringing the betrayers of the Fatherland to Justice.

All this was inspired by the principle–which is quite true within itself–that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation…From time immemorial, however, the Jews have known better than any others how falsehood and calumny can be exploited. Is not their very existence founded on one great lie, namely, that they are a religious community, where as in reality they are a race? And what a race! One of the greatest thinkers that mankind has produced has branded the Jews for all time with a statement which is profoundly and exactly true. Schopenhauer called the Jew “The Great Master of Lies”. Those who do not realize the truth of that statement, or do not wish to believe it, will never be able to lend a hand in helping Truth to prevail.

So here we have an almost beautiful (in the diabolical sense of the world) symmetry: Hitler describes the technique accurately, and then falsely accuses his supposed enemies of using it, and in that very act he promulgates a Big Lie.

Hitler was probably not the first to do this. But he was one of the first to do it so boldly, so frequently, and so successfully (for a while, at least). Never, however, did he own up to doing it. And in fact, he probably believed at least some of his own Big Lies. He was still actively promulgating one of his most famously destructive ones the day before he killed himself, when he wrote his Political Testament in contemplation of that death:

It is untrue that I or anyone else in Germany wanted the war in 1939. It was desired and instigated exclusively by those international statesmen who were either of Jewish descent or worked for Jewish interests…Above all I charge the leaders of the nation and those under them to scrupulous observance of the laws of race and to merciless opposition to the universal poisoner of all peoples, international Jewry.

To be especially convincing in telling a lie, it helps to believe it’s true.

Why am I talking about all of this? I’ve been contemplating the back and forth allegations of lying in political ads in the 2012 campaign—the latest being Romney and whether Obama has reduced the work requirement for welfare, and Obama’s charge that Romney and Bain helped to kill a woman of cancer. There have been various attempts to assess the veracity of said ads. And so on and so forth—including the question of whether the polls that currently show Obama pulling ahead are valid, or instead feature skewed and misleading sampling in order to rally the Obama troops.

Not all of these things, even if they are lies, would constitute a Big Lie. But some are Bigger than others. Whether or not Romney is completely correct about the effect of the recent Obama memo on welfare and work (see this for the arguments that he’s incorrect), a very convincing case can certainly be made that he’s telling the truth, as Mickey Kaus (not a conservative) pointed out a month ago.* That would make Romney’s ad more of a difference of opinion rather than a lie, or at worst an exaggeration. However, the PAC ad about Bain, Romney, and the woman dying of cancer contains so many actual lies (lies in the conventional sense, that is) that it’s safe to say it’s a pack of lies.

Politicians exaggerating, distorting, and even lying is hardly new. But there is something different about the Obama campaign. To a greater extent than any campaign I can remember in my lifetime, it uses these techniques relentlessly, and its lies are not only more frequent, they are more dramatic, more flagrant, more shameless, and thus more akin to the Big Lie.

What’s more, Obama follows the following rules as well, elucidated in a US intelligence profile of Hitler written during the war:

[Hitler’s] primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.

That is the technique in a nutshell—and what’s more it’s Obama’s only technique in his campaign against Romney. Is it working? Maybe; hard to tell—because of that aforementioned difficulty in knowing whether the polls are telling the truth or not. But unless human nature has changed a good deal in the seventy or so years since WWII, it probably has been and will be effective. The only question is whether it will be effective enough to grant Obama a victory.

[*NOTE: Here are some of Kaus’s arguments that favor Romney’s position:

1. The guts of the 1996 welfare reform were a) welfare was ended as an “entitlement” (controlled by the feds) and transferred to the states, as a “block grant” subject to certain requirements; and b) one of those requirements was that a certain percentage of each state’s welfare caseload had to be working or preparing for work. A great deal of effort was put into defining what qualified as work, and making sure that work actually meant work and not the various BS activities (including BS training activities) the welfare bureaucracies often preferred to substitute for work.

2. As of several years ago, the details of these work requirements turned out to matter less than the general signal they sent, that no-strings welfare was over and even low-income single moms were supposed to work. As a result, the welfare rolls shrank so rapidly (roughly by half) that many states never faced the detailed work requirements (since they got credit for everyone who left welfare).

3. But of course the work requirements were part of what sent that general “signal.”

4. To the extent the administration’s action erodes the actual and perceived toughness of the work requirements, which it does, it sends the opposite and wrong signal.

5. The Democrat’s 2009 stimulus bill changed the incentives of the 1996 reform by once again rewarding states that expanded their welfare rolls. If you worry about Obama reestablishing the bad old pre-reform welfare system, though, this is worse.

6. Rector and Bradley of Heritage (among the first to attack Obama’s action) make the case that the law’s work requirements were specifically designed to not be waivable, and that Obama is using HHS’s authority to waive state reporting requirements as a tricky way of voiding the underlying substantive requirements that are to be reported about.

There’s more, much much more, in his article. It would be a good idea to read the whole thing, and then compare it to cursory analyses such as the one at Politifact. As usual, one of the problems is that understanding something like this requires arguments and thinking of some complexity, rather than sound bites. But sound bites are what ads are all about.]

[ADDENDUM: Roger Simon reflects on the role of the MSM in all this.

And Bryan Preston is on the same page as me:

The ad is out there. The uninformed are seeing it in their facebook feeds, twinned up with the latest from MoveOn or whichever smear group is running in parallel today. People will see the ad, and most of them will not see the CNN, PolitiFact or Washington Post fact-checks that declare the ad a total fraud. Out in the wild, the ad is intended do its job of toxifying Romney just enough to peel off a few of his voters and ramp up hate for him among Obama’s voters. That’s the point of the ad, not to tell anything that’s true, but just to stir the pot, sully Romney and depress his potential vote.

As I wrote yesterday, we’re dealing with something in the Obama campaign that we haven’t seen much at the top of American life, except in the worst moments of the Clinton era. We’re dealing with a president who is entirely without any sense of ethics, honor or morals. He has lived a lie for most if not all of his life, hiding his true political convictions in gauzy language that makes him appear reasonable and moderate. Having lived a lie, what’s one more lie, in the service of keeping himself in power? What’s one more lie if, in Obama’s mind, it accomplishes the “good” of keeping Romney out of power?…

The Obama campaign has gone from accusing Romney of boyhood bullying to adulthood felony, to being a murderer in all but name. What accusation is left to throw at him? There aren’t many, but rest assured that the Obama campaign and its allies will find one.]

Obama at Columbia: the “lost” years in more ways than one

The New Neo Posted on by

Now that Reid has escalated the attacks on Romney for not releasing a decade of his past tax returns, the issue of Obama’s secrecy about his Columbia years has resurfaced. The cry is: “Want Mitt to release his tax returns? Then release the Columbia transcripts!”

But I digress.

There is no requirement that a candidate publish a college transcript, of course. But in Obama’s case, since a great deal of his reputation during the 2008 campaign rested on the assumption that he’d been a brilliant student, his failure to do so seems a bit odd.

Let me go on record here as saying that I really don’t care all that much what Obama’s grades were in college, except as a way to shock some of his followers if in fact they turn out to have been be bad. The larger issues are, as speculated in this piece by libertarian Wayne Allyn Root: did Obama enroll as a foreign student? How was his education financed? Were his grades of the sort that would ordinarily lead to entree to a school such as Harvard Law? And another matter, one that would not appear on any transcript but which is of interest nevertheless: did Obama have any friends at Columbia, and if not, why not?

Some of these question were asked before, in a WSJ editorial from September of 2008 [emphasis mine]:

What can be said with some certainty is that Mr. Obama lived off campus while at Columbia in 1981-83 and made few friends. Fox News contacted some 400 of his classmates and found no one who remembered him.…He got a degree in political science without honors. “For about two years there, I was just painfully alone and really not focused on anything, except maybe thinking a lot,” he told his biographer David Mendell.

“Two years” would have been the total amount of time Obama attended Columbia, by the way, since he had transferred there for his junior year.

The situation is especially curious because at Occidental, the college where Obama spent his freshman and sophomore years, he did have friends. But at Columbia, just as he describes above, he seems to have had almost no contact with his fellow students. Even his roommate was not a Columbia student—or a student at all, for that matter. He was Sohale Siddiqi, a Pakistani employed as a waiter and boutique salesman, given to drugging and partying. Obama had met Siddiqi through Obama’s Pakistani friends at Occidental.

Siddiqui later described Obama (and himself) in similar terms to what Obama told Mendell:

We were both very lost. We were both alienated, although he might not put it that way. He arrived disheveled and without a place to stay.

Perhaps at least part of the reason for this was that Obama was a transfer student; after all, it’s not so easy to make new friends in a large school after transferring junior year—as I know from personal experience, since I did the same thing. But although I never made tons of friends when I transferred to a large school in my junior year, I certainly made some, and if called open to name them I could come up with quite a few.

The MSM’s lack of curiosity on the matter (of Obama’s transcripts, that is, not mine) is striking. It shouldn’t be all that difficult to do some investigative reporting on this, if the will to do so existed. But right now it remains a fringe cause, hammered home by people such as Root, but mostly ignored or ridiculed.

Should Romney press the issue? I’m not at all sure it would have the desired effect. It might be more likely to make him look like a birther, who have been widely discredited and labeled tinfoil outliers. Perhaps best to leave this to others, and to make sure someone keeps digging to find the truth.

It may be that the truth is exactly what Obama says it is: that he was a troubled loner at the time. And it may be that his grades were indifferent, which really wouldn’t change any votes at this point. The real smoking gun would be some more unusual facts, such as foreign student status for Obama, or other funding irregularities. Another red flag (pun intended) would be if the subject matter of most of his courses would reveal him to have been a young leftist-in-training.

Richard Landes on Romney’s “culture” remarks

The New Neo Posted on by

Richard Landes, blogger at the Augean Stables and creator of the site Second Draft, has written a very fine opinion piece at the WSJ, criticizing the criticism of Romney’s “culture” remarks in Israel.

Landes is uniquely positioned to make the argument. He’s a writer and historian, yes. But he also happens to be the son of the author of one of the books Romney cited in his speech, Harvard professor David Landes, who wrote Wealth and Poverty of Nations.

It’s ironic that Romney’s remarks have been treated as a gaffe when they are nothing of the sort. PC thought has triumphed over truth, logic, and knowledge. That’s not a good sign.

[NOTE: I might also add that Richard Landes is a brilliant man as well as a friend of mine.]

Those athletic hips again

The New Neo Posted on by

For all of you who were fascinated by our recent discussion of hip shape in female athletes, here’s some more research you can do.

Of a serious scientific nature, of course.

You may note in the photos (among other things you may note) that most of these athletes appear to have the more masculine hip style I’ve already remarked upon in modern-day gymnasts. Again, these hip shapes seem to be a question of selection for and then exaggeration of (through training) a certain basic body type in each sport.

Exceptions to this hip shape seem to be (to my eye, anyway) #10, Melanie Adams, vaulter; #14, Ivet Lalova, sprinter; #16, Sarah Galimberta, middle distance runner; #17, Allison Stoke, valuter; and #20, Leryn Franco, javelin thrower. Note that there are two vaulters and one javelin thrower in that list, sports that apparently favor more of a tall thin model type and less of a mesomorph than so many other sports do.

I’ve noticed this in watching the hop, skip, and jumpers (otherwise known as the triple jumpers) the other day. If you dressed these women differently, some of them might be models. They look like someone took a piece of woman-shaped taffy and then pulled and pulled and pulled.

[ADDENDUM: And while we’re at it, thighs matter (hat tip: Althouse).]

The shooter at the Sikh temple

The New Neo Posted on by

The first thing to say is that this was an abominable act.

Information on the shooter is coming in slowly, but the best we can tell so far is that he was a white supremacist who had been discharged less than honorably from the Army in 1998.

I note that authorities were awfully quick to label this domestic terrorism, compared to how slow they often are for shooters connected with Islam, such as the Fort Hood shooter. And yet I agree that this has all the marks of domestic terrorism, or at the very least of a hate crime.

If the shooter turns out to have been a white supremacist, no doubt those on the left will accuse the right of inspiring him. However, white supremacists are outside mainstream politics on either side, a group onto themselves motivated by their own racist thinking that transcends the usual categories of left or right. This is a separate issue from the historic one concerning whether the Nazi Party was on the left or on the right; neo-Nazis don’t necessarily sign into, or care about, Hitler’s (or other fascists’) economic policies.