Monthly Archives: April 2009

Cap and Frayed

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Here’s Kevin Drum on what he concedes is the most ambitious cap and trade legislation Democrats can realistically hope for:

First, their [the Waxman-Markey] cap-and-trade program allows a lot of offsets: two billion tons in all, which allows companies to pollute away as long as they “offset” their carbon emissions somewhere else.  In theory, this is fine, but in practice it’s an invitation to abuse, substituting purely fictional reductions for real ones.  Second, it allocates a portion of the emission credits directly to affected industries instead of auctioning 100% of them.  This is yet another invitation to abuse.

It’s possible, of course, that both of these things can be beaten into submission with the proper oversight and regulation.  But what are the odds?

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A bill that started out with no offsets and no allocation might eventually end up with offsets and allocation.  But what happens to a bill that caves in on these issues right at the start?  It gets even worse as it wends its way through the sausage factory, that’s what.

As Ezra says, Markey and Waxman are as good as they come on this stuff, and if they don’t believe that a clean bill stands a chance even as an opening bid, they’re probably right.

Drum is right about those “invitations to abuse,” which is to say, mechanisms that practically gurantee abuse. And Drum’s right that it’s only going to get worse. The “opening bid” comes from some of the most zealous environmental ideologues in Congress. And the sausage factory is about to come online. Yet Drum remains hopeful! We’ll see how he and his comrades feel about what I’ll bet will be a gutted and impotent scheme good for little but corporatist jockeying for government-enforced advantage over competitors. If it turns out that way, will he want to kill it then? The folks who kept telling us that cap and trade and a straight carbon tax are “equivalent” were always full of it. There’s this thing called “politics,” you see, which does not treat them equivalently. 

Here’s my column on cap and trade as a spectacular instance of corrupting and unstable political capitalism.

What Green Government Does When It Picks Winners

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Mother Jones on heavily subsidized biofuels:

Food prices have risen 130% since 2002. The World Bank estimates that up to 75% of the increase is due to demand for biofuels.

Clearing grasslands to plant biofuel crops releases 93 times as much greenhouse gas as will be saved by the fuels grown on the land each year. Destroying Indonesian peat bogs releases 420 times as much.

There were food riots in at least 30 countries in the past 2 years. More than 40 people were killed when Cameroonians protested rising prices.

The US government spent $9.2 billion on ethanol subsidies in 2008. It spent $1.5 billion on food aid.

But now we’ve got better people and won’t destroy the environment and cause food riots this time! Right?

The Meaning Dodge

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E.D. Kain on the fact that kids don’t tend to make us measurably happier:

The happiness we experience from our children is lasting, constant, omnipresent, and far deeper than any material gain.  It is also hard, and frustrating, and the most tiring experience of my life, which makes it all that much more meaningful. 

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Fact is, you can’t break this sort of thing down into a nice, scientific study.  It’s not so simply quantified.

It is not simply quantified. But perhaps it is quantifiable. So we should try to quantify it. Fact is, one can blather about meaning any time one’s preferences or prejudices come under pressure from science. But in the end it’s mostly irrelevant whether something is quantifiable or not. There are some things some people are going to do no matter what. So that’s what I think those people should say: “I am going to do this no matter what.”

As I wrote in the ill-fated Culture11:

Appeals to meaning are nice, but they just push the lump in the rug. What’s so great about meaning, anyway? For that matter, what is it? How does one validate that x is in fact meaningful, or more meaningful than y? If meaning is going to carry a justificatory load in weighty personal and political deliberation, we can’t just wave our hands about it. Intellectual virtue requires care. We need to get started on measuring meaning. There are many questions. How much is meaning worth to us in terms of happiness? How much is happiness worth in terms of meaning? There are no doubt many and varied sources of meaning. With science on our side, we are sure to discover that some of them are corrosive to other of our cherished values while some enhance them. Then we’ll be well-situated to say goodbye to toxic meaningfulness. Goodbye national identity? Goodbye God? Who knows what we might find? Science is a source of excitement as well as wonder.

I don’t anticipate the new field of “meaning research” will be warmly received by those with a refined taste for meaning. Many of these fine folks say that the very attempt to measure happiness scientifically — not to mention the effort to put meaning itself under the microscope — saps life of… meaning. But how do you know? Anybody can say this. You can say it while waving a copy of The Closing of the American Mind. You can say it smoking a pipe. But it doesn’t help. 

I am going to continue making this point no matter what.