Paul Krugman has been awfully lathered up lately. His fulminating resentment of conservatives for causing all the world’s ills (and worse, for disregarding his Olympian sagacity) has gotten downright pyretic, and in his twice-weekly tirades he seems — due, no doubt, to the July heat — increasingly indifferent to the need to clothe his recriminations in fact.
He was in fine form in his latest revilement, which appeared in yesterday’s paper, announcing that, among other things, the “Climategate” revelations had been “unmasked as a fraud concocted by opponents of climate action.”
I have no idea what he could possibly be thinking, as this is simply not so, and was all set to upbraid him for it in these pages, when I saw that James Taranto had beaten me to it in today’s Best of the Web. We read:
Former Enron adviser Paul Krugman delivers the good news that 2010 is “the year in which all hope of action to limit climate change died.” Needless to say, he thinks this is bad news, but that’s not why we’re highlighting his column in yesterday’s New York Times. Instead, it is for this passage:
You’ve probably heard about the accusations leveled against climate researchers–allegations of fabricated data, the supposedly damning e-mail messages of “Climategate,” and so on. What you may not have heard, because it has received much less publicity, is that every one of these supposed scandals was eventually unmasked as a fraud concocted by opponents of climate action, then bought into by many in the news media.
Now, it would be one thing for Krugman to argue–wrongly, in our opinion–that the “supposedly damning e-mail messages of ‘Climategate’ ” were not actually damning. But no one has denied that they are genuine. Krugman’s description of them — and every other accusation “leveled against climate researchers” — as “a fraud concocted by opponents of climate action” is flatly false.
Nor is this the first time such a statement has appeared under Krugman’s byline in the pages of the Times. You may dimly recall this passage of his Aug. 17, 2009, column:
In Britain, the government itself runs the hospitals and employs the doctors. We’ve all heard scare stories about how that works in practice; these stories are false.
Again, a categorical statement: not “some of these stories are false” (which is probably true) or “these stories paint a misleading picture; although the British health-care system has its shortcomings, on the whole it is vastly superior to America’s” (which, as a statement of opinion, is at least defensible). If even a single scare story about Britain’s National Health Service is true, Krugman’s assertion is false.
If we were trying to mimic Krugman, we would mimic Mary McCarthy and assert: “Every word he writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’ ” But unlike us, Krugman doesn’t even have the wit to employ apophasis. Instead, he — sometimes! — includes statements in his columns that are so clumsily and obviously false as to open him to easy ridicule.
We’re grateful for the material, but we’re not so self-absorbed as to think that Krugman makes himself ridiculous merely in order to make our job easy. Why then?
Why indeed? The tone on the Left often seems to go beyond mere political opposition, to moral, and often personal, execration.
The same thought seems to have occurred to Dennis Prager, who meditated on the Left’s hatred of conservatives in a recent essay:
Of all the recent revelations to come out of JournoList, an e-mail list consisting of about 400 liberal/left journalists, perhaps the most telling is the depth of their hatred for conservatives. That these journalists would consult with one another in order to protect candidate and then President Obama and in order to hurt Republicans is unfortunate and ugly. What is jolting is the hatred of conservatives on display, as exemplified by the e-mail from a public-radio reporter expressing her wish to personally see Rush Limbaugh die a painful death ”” and the apparent absence of any objection from her fellow liberal journalists.
Every one of us on the right has seen this hatred. I am not referring to leftist bloggers or to anonymous comments by angry leftists on conservative blogs ”” such things exist on the right as well ”” but to mainstream, elite liberal journalists. There is simply nothing analogous among elite conservative journalists. Yes, nearly all conservatives believe that the Left is leading America to ruin. But while there is plenty of conservative anger over this fact, there is little or nothing on the right to match the Left’s hatred of conservative individuals. Would mainstream conservative journalists e-mail one another wishes that they could be present while Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi or Michael Moore died slowly and painfully of a heart attack?
As Finley Peter Dunne pointed out long ago, “politics ain’t beanbag”, and nobody expects it to be. But I can’t remember a time, not even during the Sixties, when the national mood seemed so bitterly divided.
Read the rest of Prager’s article here.
31 Comments
Yesterday, I stopped reading Krugman’s piece when I got to the passage that elicited Taranto’s comments. So yeah, Krugman is definitely spewing BS, and he deserves to be called on it.
He’s really foaming at the mouth these days — more and more like one of those people you see walking down the street muttering at unseen enemies and jabbing a finger in the air.
Krugman is right, and Taranto is wrong.
Krugman did not describe the emails as fraudulent, or deny their authenticity. He described “these supposed scandals” as fraudulent, which they were. They are as phony as the recent right wing brouhaha about Shirley Sherrod, or the doctored video of the ACORN employee who purportedly helped two right wing agitators pretending to hatch a plan to employ illegal aliens (ignoring the fact that this hapless employee, who was fired after the media firestorm, reported the two actors to the police immediately afterwards). Let’s not forget that the supposedly scandalous emails were hacked and stolen, and then taken out of context and blown out of proportion. Three independent panels have reviewed the data and (in the words of the most recent one) found that the researchers’ “rigour and honesty as scientists are not in doubt” and there was no “evidence of behaviour that might undermine the conclusions of the IPCC assessment.” The scandal lies in how the right wing uses deceit, misrepresentation, and stealth to suit their agenda, not in what scientists say to each other in supposedly private communications. The greater scandal is how the media cowers in front of the right wing noise machine, and gives instant credibility to people who are later unmasked as thieves and liars.
http://www.cce-review.org/About.php
Krugman has every right to be steaming mad. If Taranto, or any of the other deniers of climate change, was seriously interested in examining the issue, he would have disputed Krugman’s statement that “Every piece of valid evidence – long-term temperature averages that smooth out year-to-year fluctuations, Arctic sea ice volume, melting of glaciers, the ratio of record highs to record lows – points to a continuing, and quite possibly accelerating, rise in global temperatures.” Lacking any evidence to the contrary, he is left with slinging personal attacks against Krugman, the scientists, and anyone else who takes a serious interest in solving a serious problem.
Obama’s revenge: now that our national health care is improving, those who insist on denying the evidence of climate change will live long enough to see how wrong they were. Regrettably, so will the rest of us.
Peter, you aren’t making sense. How can a scandal be fraudulent? The outrage was based on the content of the emails themselves, which clearly showed coordinated efforts to conceal data and rig the peer-review process. Whether they were stolen or not has nothing to do with anything; nobody disputes their authenticity.
And as for the “independence” of the reviewing panels, the two I am aware of were conducted by Penn State and East Anglia — the very universities where the central figures themselves were working.
Krugman continues:
Look at the scientists who question the consensus on climate change; look at the organizations pushing fake scandals; look at the think tanks claiming that any effort to limit emissions would cripple the economy. Again and again, you’ll find that they’re on the receiving end of a pipeline of funding that starts with big energy companies…
Well, I can name some “scientists who question the consensus on climate change” on whom this sort of slung mud won’t stick. And note that the guy who’s doing the slinging was once an advisor for … Enron! Pots, kettles, stones, glass houses.
A scandal is fraudulent when it is based on artifice. There was nothing scandalous in what Shirley Sherrod said. Fox News manufactured a “scandal” by ceaselessly displaying a video which was heavily edited to suggest a conclusion which was completely opposite the truth.
Taranto misrepresents what Krugman wrote: the word “fraud” clearly applies to the scandals, not the emails themselves. He then draws the incorrect conclusion that Krugman “denied that they were genuine.”
The fact that the emails were stolen is absolutely relevant: they are purloined evidence. Nobody has the right to intrude on private correspondence, much less distribute it worldwide. Private communication, among scientists or anyone else, has a much wider sphere than publicly disseminated research studies and reports. People should be able to say whatever they want, right or wrong, without fear that it will show up on Fox News the next day. It is shameful that the right wing relies on the work of thieves and presents it to the world with a straight face.
Let’s use a hypothetical example. Suppose Larry Summers sent an email to his researchers saying “this gender imbalance stuff is really explosive stuff — why do you suppose women just can’t cut it in math and science? Ya think maybe they’re just not as smart as guys are?” Let’s further suppose that a feminist group hacked into the Harvard email server and put it on the Internet as proof of his misogyny. Do you suppose this would have a chilling effect on research into gender differences? Don’t you think that Summers should be able to have full and frank discussions with his colleagues without it being exposed to public second guessing?
I care not a fig what the scientists’ motives, indiscretions, or moral fiber happens to be. All that matters is what the scientists publish, which is subject to peer review and can be supported or dismissed based on the quality of the research. Their private communication prior to publication is completely irrelevant to the validity of their research which, as Krugman correctly points out, has not been seriously challenged.
The climate change issue is not terribly complicated. There is a preponderance of evidence which suggests that the Earth is warming, although its extent is unclear. Depending on its severity, the consequences will range from relatively benign to catastrophic. It is also more than likely that the process is irreversible, so it would be prudent to err on the side of caution. There are a number of things which can be done which should reduce the warming trend, each of which will have adverse economic consequences. In my view, taking a financial hit now to avert potential catastrophe is a reasonable and worthwhile course of action, for the same reasons that buying insurance is reasonable and worthwhile. Reasonable people can disagree about which actions to take, but it is entirely unreasonable to gamble the Earth’s future because people are too fearful of upsetting the status quo.
Krugman is legitimately mad that instead of looking at these obvious facts, the forty Republican Senators refused to allow the (watered down) energy bill come to debate, just as they have marched in lockstep to prevent progress on any number of fronts. Some people dispute global warming because they are politicians dependent on donations from the oil and coal industries, or because they are “scientists” who are paid shills. Others dispute it because of an ideological hatred of government which forces them to minimize any problem (because it reduces the need for regulation) and deny the utility of governments in solving problems (although they are the only entities which can do anything about global warming). Some dispute it because they figure that if Al Gore is for it, they’re against it. Because the environment has been more or less a left wing issue (although a true conservative should be all about conserving what we have), many on the right oppose it simply because it is supported by the other side. Absent these groups, there is a small number of scientists who question warming versus a consensus which acknowledge it, combined with a wealth of quantitative data which strongly support it. In our dysfunctional political environment, it is too much to expect any effort to be made to solve potentially catastrophic problems when you can kick the can down the road instead.
Peter –
I must question whether you know what you are talking about. While there are very few scientists who question whether our atmosphere has been warming in recent decades, many question the “consensus” that this is primarily due to an increase in greenhouse gases — CO2 in particular. And these scientists are routinely labeled ‘climate change deniers’, when in fact all they actually deny is that certain sub-theses of the consensus are well-supported by the available evidence.
Further, the so-called “Climategate Scandal” was not primarily about the scientific validity of the consensus view, but about whether various norms regarding the sharing of data and allowing the expression of opposing viewpoints in public fora were violated. These issues, regrettably, were swept under the carpet in the course of investigations which themselves don’t bear close scrutiny.
Bob:
1) The fact that Krugman was an advisor to Enron is irrelevant. Presumably he advised them on economic matters and not energy. Nor do we know what his advice to them was. There is a distinction between someone who advises a company privately, and a “scientist” who surreptitiously accepts money from an energy company and then issues research which support the company’s agenda. One would naturally question the research. The analogy here would be if Krugman took Enron’s money and then recommended that investors buy Enron stock. Moreover, the accounting fraud at Enron was so well hidden that many people — including their CEO — were unaware of it until things unraveled. I doubt Krugman was hired to go through their books; more likely, he was hired to advise on macroeconomic issues, and there is no shame in that.
2) A scientist who accepts the consensus that “our atmosphere has been warming in recent decades” is, by definition, not a climate change denier. If a scientist is labeled a denier because he finds a different cause than others do, the label is false.
3) While the “scandal” may be about scientific norms, its effect was to kill the momentum for meaningful energy legislation (which it did). Clearly, the hackers who stole and published the emails were not interested in an academic debate about what scientists should and shouldn’t do; they wanted to stop any serious efforts to do anything about global warming. It’s a smokescreen to divert attention from rising temperatures by attacking the messengers.
First of all, the Sherrod affair had nothing to do with Fox News; she had already been fired by the time anything had happened on Fox other than a couple of remarks.
As for purloined documents – this sort of thing happens all the time. I don’t remember the Left being terribly upset about the Pentagon papers, for instance. Once the information is out there, if it is genuine, then people have every right to think about what it says, and what it means.
Your hypothetical about Larry Summers has nothing to do with what happened here. What appeared in the Climategate emails was apparent collusion among the scientific community to manipulate data and suppress criticism in peer-reviewed publications – the very authority upon which policy decisions are supposed to be based. It was Summers’s critics who were working to interfere with honest, transparent science.
You may care “not a fig” what a scientist’s motives are, and I agree one shouldn’t have to. If, however, evidence surfaces that what a scientist has published has been massaged and manipulated to support a political viewpoint, or for that matter to push the result in some preordained direction in any way at all, then it calls the validity of the science itself into question. If a scientist clearly has an ulterior motive, and is found to be knowingly concealing, cherry-picking, or manipulating data (not to mention deleting the primary data, as these guys did), then it is perfectly reasonable to question whether that scientist’s work should be the basis for revolutionary policy decisions that will affect the economy of the entire world. Add to this the fact that the Climategate emails indicated also a conspiratorial effort to screen dissent from the peer-review process as well, and we have every justification to be skeptical, and angry.
You follow this with a reasonable paragraph:
As I wrote in this post: yes, the Earth may be warming. It has done so many times before, which proves at a single stroke that such cycles can, and do, occur in the absence of anthropogenic factors. The consequences will be good in some ways, and for some people; bad in others. Could we stop it even if we wanted? Nobody knows. Is it worth doing everything we can, establishing a New World Order, and radically re-engineering the global economy in order to try? Maybe, maybe not; it is a legitimate subject for debate. Not if you are Paul Krugman, though: anybody who doesn’t just fall in line is a monster to be demonized and execrated: greedy, corrupt, and morally evil.
For every one of your examples of dissenting voices with ulterior motives, I can give you a corresponding one on the Left: “scientists” who have an enormous vested interest in maintaining their plum jobs and government grants as long as they keep supporting the Global Warmism agenda; a huge and growing class of bureaucrats and investors, like Al Gore, with a great deal to gain from the crippling of the traditional fossil-fuel economy and the creation of an enormous, redistributive “green” industry; Leftists and Progressives of every stripe who simply hate free-market societies, and work at every opportunity to expand the global scope and regulatory power of the enlightened socialist State.
In other words, there is no shortage of ulterior motives and vested interests on your side of this debate, Paul Krugman’s sanctimonious bile notwithstanding. For him to demonize well-intentioned and entirely reasonable critics the way he does is downright childish.
Peter –
I’m glad to know that you don’t use the “denialist” lablel in an uncareful way.
But then you go and say,
“Clearly, the hackers who stole and published the emails were not interested in an academic debate about what scientists should and shouldn’t do; they wanted to stop any serious efforts to do anything about global warming. It’s a smokescreen to divert attention from rising temperatures by attacking the messengers.”
And how do you know this, clearly or otherwise?
1) The Breitbart video was put on the Fox website and discussed on Fox News on the morning of July 19, when Sherrod was still a government employee. BTW, I think the NAACP and the Obama administration acted appallingly in throwing her under the bus. I expect summary (and false) judgment from Fox News, but not from Obama and the NAACP. Shame on them.
2) The Pentagon Papers (or the recent Wikileaks distribution of Afghanistan military documents) are different from the scientists’ emails, insofar as they describe government activity. Sometimes governments withhold secrets because the material should not be divulged; other times they withhold secrets because they are embarrassing, or simply because they don’t want the public to know. The Pentagon Papers showed how the Johnson administration lied us into war (sound familiar?); the Supreme Court found that the public interest in this and other disclosures outweighed the government’s desire for secrecy. There is a role for whistle blowers and investigative journalism. People have a right to know what their government is doing (within limits: you can’t publish troop movements, for example). However, nobody has the right to know what scientists say in putatively private conversations. To be sure, it is distasteful to use stolen documents, but unless you want to rely exclusively on government press releases to know what is doing, there are occasions when it is not only helpful but necessary. There is no similar need to know scientists’ private deliberations, and there is no equivalence between Daniel Ellsberg and those who released the scientists’ emails.
3) The independent review cited above faulted the scientists for lack of transparency and openness, but did not find “collusion among the scientific community to manipulate data and suppress criticism in peer-reviewed publications.” The report is detailed and well documented. It did not find that data were manipulated or deleted; each charge is examined and disputed. The case of collusion is at best arguable — you use the qualifier “apparent” —and its significance is questionable.
4) My point about Summers is simply that there should be a robust give-and-take among researchers as they do their work, and some of it may not be pretty, especially when it concerns sensitive or politically charged topics. However, the only valid criterion is the quality of the end result, not the process. I don’t know whether Summers’s thesis is valid or not, but I certainly think he has the right to publish his argument, and I don’t care how he got there.
5) Positing a scientific establishment which falsifies research to keep jobs and research grants is fanciful. Tenured professors don’t have to worry about job security. Al Gore did a great public service in releasing An Inconvenient Truth (and made a lot of money, too). However, his arguments are there for all to see, and can be analyzed accordingly. The fact that he has investments in green energy is irrelevant, and has no bearing on the truth or falsity of his theses. Nor are his investments hidden from public view, as energy lobbyists’ donations to their shills often are. Your “Leftist and Progressive” straw men who “hate free market societies” and want to expand government simply for the sake of doing so exist on the fringes, if they exist at all. This is not to say that those who acknowledge global warming are all pure of heart, and those who oppose it are uniformly evil. However, the energy lobby is extremely well funded and powerful; there is no equivalent lobby for those who want to safeguard the environment. Suggesting an equivalence between the Goliaths who fund a misinformation campaign and the Davids who pursue the science of global warming is risible.
6) Suggesting that the Republican Senators are “reasonable and well-intentioned” gives them far more credit than they deserve. Doubtless some oppose energy legislation out of principle, but others do it because they are beholden to oil interests (e.g., the Senator who apologized to BP) and most do it because they robotically oppose everything the administration tries to do, regardless of what it is. It is unprecedented in America for the opposition party to unite in opposition to every major piece of legislation which is proposed by the ruling party. Even in the current polarized environment, Bush II got plenty of Democratic support for many of his agenda, ranging from war funding to tax cuts to TARP to Supreme Court nominees. Global warming is a serious and potentially catastrophic problem, and the GOP Senators refuse to even allow a debate. Their excuses for not doing so are hollow and casuistic. For that, Krugman is right to be bilious.
Bob:
Res ipsa loquitor. When a politically motivated group hacks into emails of a group they disagree with, takes its findings out of context, and then publishes them on the Internet, you can bet that it was not out of the desire to protect the purity of scientific research, just as you know that the film makers who visited the ACORN office were not motivated by the dispassionate search for the truth. Sometimes the thing speaks for itself.
This “might” clear Peter’s misperceptions re: Sherrod. It is a fun watch:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036789/#38341224
As to that ice?
“Although Arctic sea ice extent underwent a strong decline from 1979 to 2009, Antarctic sea ice underwent a slight increase.”
http://nsidc.org/sotc/sea_ice.html
I think this is what’s called chutzpah.
“We suspect that the increasing presence of icebergs broken off from ice shelves and glaciers within the Antarctic sea ice pack is a major contributor to a temporary but increasing trend in the Antarctic sea ice extent. Since the rapid disappearance of the Antarctic ice shelves and glaciers itself is seen as a response to global warming, the slight increase in sea ice extent that we are observing can be paradoxically linked to the same warming trend.”
http://www.noaa.gov/features/monitoring_1008/arcticice.html
http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Blogs&ContentRecord_id=f1f2f75f-802a-23ad-4701-a92b4ebbccbf
1) You are mistaken about this. Leave Fox out of it; Sherrod was fired before Fox had done anything more than give it a brief mention.
2) When scientific results are used as a basis for deciding public policy, the public has a legitimate interest in knowing that the results are the product of impartial science, and not partisan manipulation. If the scientists in question are suppressing data and keeping critics out of the peer-review process, then the policy is based on a false understanding, and the public has every reason to care.
3) Read the emails. There is plenty of talk about hiding data and obstructing access to the peer-review process. This stuff matters.
4) Robust give-and-take in scientific research is fine.
Can you really be serious? The “process” is the only thing that makes science work — and if that process is compromised, either by keeping dissenting scientists from having access to the peer-review system, or by publishing reports that cherry-pick and suppress data, then the “end result” is not trustworthy, and certainly not suitable to be the basis of radically transformative and incalculably costly policy decisions.
5) You cannot actually imagine that there is not an enormous, burgeoning, global-warming industry out there, one whose continued prosperity depends to a very great extent on the adoption of regulations and incentives that will channel money — unbelievably vast sums of money — into the new “green economy”.
If you really don’t think that there are a great many people who aim to bring the global free-market economy under expanded central control, and who see this “crisis” (like every crisis) as an opportunity to ratchet policy in that direction, you are simply denying reality. (Even Rahm Emmanuel made it clear that “you don’t let a crisis go to waste”.) It is no coincidence that every time one of these end-of-the-world situations pops up we hear the same old song: more regulation, more redistribution, more demonizing of corporations, more taxes on wealth-creating industries to provide funds for this or that progressive agenda, more poor nations lining up to shake down developed countries.
That you can with a straight face suggest that global-warming activists are just helpless, good-hearted citizens, poor little weaklings with no way to get their message out, is beyond fatuous. No, Peter, they have vast and powerful lobbies, enormously effective NGOs, and massive philanthropic support — as well as the highly partisan backing of the film and TV industry, most journalists, and of major newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post. And while we are at it, let’s not forget that they also have the support of the liberal-majority House and Senate, as well as the President of the United States, the UN, and most of the E.U.
Little “Davids”, indeed. Nonsense.
6) Well, it’s all in how you look at it, I suppose. I’d say that what is unprecendented is for the ruling party to ram through legislation that is so radical, and so unpopular with the opposition (as well as with the majority of Americans), that the opposition cannot in good conscience support it. A more principled leadership would see how divisive it all is, and work toward something more palatable to everyone. Not this bunch, though.
November — and more to the point, November 2012 — can’t come soon enough.
As for “res ipsa loquitor” [sic]:
When a cadre of scientists are exposed to have been manipulating data and controlling the research process for political ends and personal gain, you can bet that they, and the universities who profit from the lavish grants they bring in, will bend over backwards to insist that it is all just “taken out of context”, even when the plain text of the leaked emails is clear and unambiguous. You can also bet that said scientists, once caught in flagrante delicto, will sheepishly slink away when confronted by inquiring critics.
As you say, sometimes the thing speaks for itself.
There’s no doubt that the email correspondence of CRU staff were published on the internet. But I’m still trying to figure out the identity of the politically motivated group that Peter is so sure hacked CRU computers and took the findings out of context. So far as I know, whether the files were hacked or leaked is unsettled. And they were released naked of context.
1) The video was revealed to the world on Breitbart’s site at 11:18 am, and by 1:40 pm it was on the Fox News website and the Fox Nation TV show.
2-4 & res ipsa loquitor) The supposedly damning emails represent 0.3% of the archives from 1996 to 2009. 1,008 out of the 1,073 emails involved only four scientists, belying the meme of a grand conspiracy. So it was an extremely limited sample, taken over a thirteen year period, which is far too small to draw meaningful conclusions. Needless to say, exculpatory emails — such as the one which explained why some data were deleted (they were pre-instrumental and hence less useful) — were not publicized by the hackers. So the supposedly damning evidence was limited, cherry picked, and taken out of context.
The chief “peer” is a Canadian named Steve McIntyre. McIntyre does not have an advanced degree and has never published in a peer-reviewed journal. He was also exposed for having unreported ties to CGX Energy, Inc., an oil and gas exploration company, which listed McIntyre as a “strategic advisor.” He is not a scientist — he is a paid shill for the energy industry. His requests were frivolous, and the scientists had legitimate reason to think that he would distort and misuse the data. There is plenty of time for peer review once the CRU papers were published. Why should they waste their time with this guy?
That is why, according to Wikipedia, the inquiries all “rejected allegations that climate scientists had colluded to withhold scientific information, interfered with the peer-review process to prevent dissenting scientific papers from being published, deleted raw data, or manipulated data to make the case for global warming appear stronger than it is, but the UEA was criticised for a ‘culture of withholding information.’”
There is no smoking gun here: there isn’t even a toy pistol. If you want to insist that the inquiries are all wrong and the scientists falsified data to suit their own purposes, then we will have to agree to disagree. To quote Paul and Art: a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest. What you are disregarding is the plethora of evidence which suggests there is nothing going on here.
5) There is no “enormous, burgeoning, global warming industry.” There are companies like GE and Siemens which will do well if more resources are devoted to clean energy. These are huge companies, to be sure, but I see no evidence that they (or any of the smaller players) are pouring substantial dollars into the political system to enact regulation which would favor them. “Vast and powerful lobbies?” They simply don’t exist. Or if they do exist, they are powerless: they haven’t been able to get anything done. There has never been a sustained or meaningful attempt to control global warming. On the other hand, there are tens of millions of dollars flowing from energy companies to politicians to enact agenda which are friendly to them. The Sierra Club more powerful than Exxon? You’re kidding me, right?
6) As for the supposed desire to regulate: of course we need more regulation and more government power after Reagan and the two Bushes enfeebled the government. It is amazing to me that unregulated financial markets led to the worst economic crisis in eighty years, yet the right wing fights regulation tooth and nail. A government which rubber stamped requests from oil drillers facilitated the worst environmental disaster in American history. It is equally amazing that the right wing is furious at any attempt to regulate the necessary but problematic process of extracting oil from deep waters. Similarly, we may well be heading towards catastrophic climate change, and the government is the only entity which can do anything about it. The move towards greater regulation has nothing to do with a power grab. There is a clear and obvious need for it.
7) The Democrats are not “ramming through” legislation, as they need sixty votes in the Senate to get anything done. Last time I checked, the majority rules. Nor is anything proposed by the administration remotely radical. No public option, no meaningful cap and trade, a stimulus plan which was probably too limited in scope. Hence the disappointment in Obama from progressives. Obama is a middle of the road leader, but the right wing has moved so far off the deep end that he looks radical by comparison.
McIntyre is not the “shill” of the energy industry, and he has never made a secret of his professional links to that industry. Indeed, he has emphasized that background, criticizing the quality control/validation standards of some climate modelers in comparison with the standards he saw employed in the energy industry. He is a very skilled statistician, and when criticizing substantive scientific claims he has limited his criticisms to matters statistical, distancing himself from speculations about the influence of non-scientific motives. And he has never claimed that there was a grand conspiracy, though he is contantly portrayed as a conspirator.
No, the Sherrod story wasn’t mentioned on the air until after she had “resigned”. Sure, Fox posted a link on their website. So what? If you want to get mad at somebody, go pick on Breitbart. The fact is that nobody came out of this looking good.
The percentage of emails that actually were leaked isn’t the point: if you murdered your neighbor, and mentioned it in an email, it doesn’t really matter if you didn’t mention it in most of the other emails you wrote. The point is what the emails that were leaked revealed. And the people involved were not just minor players, but people like Phil Jones and Michael Mann — arguably the most influential researchers in the field, and the go-to guys for policymakers to consult. (Lord knows Al Gore made plenty of hay with that damned “hockey stick”.)
It will be hard for anyone to “distort and misuse the data”, because the primary temperature data at the heart of this affair have in large part been, conveniently, deleted.
There are a tremendous number of players who stand to benefit from proposed carbon regulation: manufacturers of biofuels, solar-energy systems, batteries, smokestack scrubbers, wind turbines, electric cars, and on and on — not to mention the rapid expansion of parasitic companies like this, which exist only to profit from the enormous expenses and difficulties that businesses everywhere will face as they try to comply with yet another layer of suffocating government regulation. Climate-change lobbyists now outnumber Congress 4 to 1. There is plenty of money flowing on your side, Peter; you needn’t worry. An awful lot of people stand to profit from this hoped-for restructuring of the world’s energy economy. (Here, for example, is an examination of IPCC director Rajendra Pachauri’s various interests in the world’s response to the climate change “crisis”.)
Your #7 says it all:
That anyone, even you, can look at the US government as it is today — this bloated, insatiable, blood-sucking, paralyzing Shelob of a federal bureaucracy — and say it still isn’t big enough, or powerful enough, or intrusive enough, or controlling enough, and that what we need to restore the nation’s health are more regulatory agencies, more government bureaucrats collecting more taxes and redistributing more wealth and imposing more burdens of compliance upon an already crumbling marketplace, simply boggles my mind.
The difference between us, Peter, is that you have, for some reason, a cheery, optimistic confidence that the government is wise, and benevolent, and knows what it’s doing, and knows what your best interests are, and has them at heart — and that therefore the more it does, the more laws and rules and regulations and taxes and agencies and programs and initiatives it creates, the better things will get.
Well, I don’t believe any of that. At this point I just want the government to leave us the hell alone; they have done more than enough already. As Mark Twain said: “No man’s life, liberty, or property are safe when Congress is in session.” And that was over a hundred years of legislation-making ago. What would he say now?
Finally, if you don’t think what happened with the health-care bill rose to the level of “ramming”, well, then I don’t know what sort of bars you’ve been hanging out at, but I hope you’re using some protection. And as for “radical”: if placing one-sixth of the nation’s economy under direct government management, while meanwhile mandating, for the first time in the history of Federal law, that private citizens purchase goods in a government-controlled market doesn’t qualify, I guess nothing will.
So as usual, I think we will have to, as you suggest, agree to disagree. Paul and Art were right.
“Depending on its (Global Warming’s) severity, the consequences will range from relatively benign to catastrophic.”
If the range is that big, maybe we shouldn’t speak about a “consensus”. I’m pretty sure that everyhting I do, even wearing shoes, will have a similar range of consequences.
BTW, no one has mentioned that Krugman uses rising temperatures as a proof of Global Warming. Most climatologists have been fighting to end this narrative, which is why “Global Warming” is usually changed to “Climate Change.”
1) Fox reported on the Sherrod video on its website and cable network by 1:40 pm, and her resignation was announced at 7:51 pm, over six hours later.
http://mediamatters.org/research/201007220004
2) Three independent analyses of the scientists’ emails examined each of the charges and have concluded that they are baseless. They are refuted one by one, as being taken out of context, invalidated by other emails, or based on ambiguity (e.g., whether the word “trick” is used in the sense of deceit or a shortcut). That’s good enough for me. The burden of proof is on anyone who still insists that there is a malevolent conspiracy going on to show what these commissions missed.
3) In his Reign of Error, George Bush systematically enfeebled the government by reducing staff, funding, and scope of action, as well as putting nincompoops at the helm. We all know the results. Let’s use the financial crisis as an example. The Treasury and the Fed allowed banks to do whatever they want — including levering up 30 to 1 — and inevitably some of them bet the wrong way and failed. OFHEO had a mandate to regulate Fannie and Freddie, but allowed them to do whatever they want, and they failed. The SEC has a mandate to make financial markets transparent and fair, but under Harvey Pitt they basically did nothing. And so forth and so on. Bush and his administration were so enamored of “the magic of the markets” that they prevented the government from regulating them, and the inevitable result was coming dangerously close to an economic nuclear winter. The issue is not the size of government per se, but its competence and effectiveness.
Once we were in the ditch, it was only massive government intervention, in the form of stimulus and bail-outs (although the latter term is misleading, as the Treasury is being repaid) which saved it. Absent this intervention, we would have had a Depression as bad or worse than the 1930’s.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/28/business/economy/28bailout.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=zandi&st=cse
Government does some things very well: fight wars, deliver mail, maintain a stable currency. Other things it does not do as well: control illegal immigration or the sale of illegal drugs. However, to complain incessantly about government regulation, as the right wing regularly does, is to open the door to the many catastrophes which unfettered markets will bring.
For example, chemical companies regularly dumped toxins in rivers and lakes until the government restricted them from doing so. My guess is that, as a proponent of free markets, you would stand up for the right of chemical companies to pollute the Hudson River, as government regulation adds costs and reduce profits. My response would be that the environment is a national resource which trumps corporate profits.
Absent government regulation, we would live in a world where pharmaceutical drugs are unsafe, airplanes are not maintained, monopolies crush competitors, children work in mines, and so forth. In each instance, companies are restricted in their sphere of operations and burdened with compliance costs, but there is a greater societal good which is achieved. While one might think these things are no-brainers, one would also think that regulating financial markets and deep water drillers would also fit in this category. To judge by the fierce opposition the Obama administration is running into, one would be wrong. Apparently the GOP prefers to return to the halcyon days of Lehman Brothers, AIG, and BP than to do something which would prevent these disasters from reoccuring.
4) Even with Obama’s health reforms, our level of health coverage is still less than virtually every other developed country. Closing the gap with the level of care which other, less prosperous countries offer their citizens, rather than being radical, is long overdue.
It’s been awhile since I looked at the original emails, but I have access to a few, like this one:
“The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.”
And there are many others like that. It was not a conspiracy, and they are all good men doing good work, but there is reason to believe that the so-called consensus is not as strong as some claim.
We are both looking at the same MediaMutters page. Again, Art and Paul were right.
Ah yes, everything is all Bush’s fault, as usual; it wasn’t until we replaced all his nincompoops with the enlightened statesmen now at the helm that we began to share in the widespread economic blessings we currently enjoy, like the fantastic recovery in private-sector jobs we are witnessing all across the nation — as promised.
And of course, the collapse in the financial industry had nothing whatsoever to do with the relentless pressure from the Left to end “racist” lending practices that prevented obviously unqualified borrowers from obtaining mortgages (pressure to which president Bush, to his discredit, acquiesced; readers will know that I am scarcely more a fan of his than Peter here).
As for the Great Depression, a solid argument can be (and has been) made that it was greatly prolonged by the government’s actions. We really didn’t emerge from it until World War II.
It seems you think I am advocating the repeal of all government regulation. I am not; I agree with you that there is a necessary place for common-sense government regulation. Limiting the dumping of poison into rivers, in order to safeguard a public resource, is such an example.
There is also, however, such as thing as too much regulation, too much taxation, too much government in general. At some point you cross a line between a government whose role is to stand aside as much as possible, letting a free society function in an organic and natural way, and acting only to ensure that commerce runs smoothly and uniformly between the states, to provide for the national defense and administer public lands, to issue currency, and attend to a modest number of other, carefully enumerated functions — and a government that sees its purpose being to micro-manage and re-engineer every aspect of society at all levels in accordance with a top-down master plan, further curtailing liberty with every new regulation, relentlessly diminishing individual autonomy and significance, and tending toward a maximally regulated polity in which everything that is not forbidden is mandatory. We are headed very rapidly in that direction. I’ve quoted this before, but Tocqueville saw this coming 175 years ago, and his observation is still right on the money:
A society is more like a living organism, or an eco-system, than a machine, and it is the height of hubris to imagine that you can arbitrarily re-engineer it, again and again, without making it sicken or die. A mature culture is the result of a long and natural process of growth and evolution that has tuned, trimmed, and adjusted its parts and functions to act in stable and harmonious inter-relationships. Such a system is simply too complex for anyone, even the most far-sighted savant, to understand its workings in all their immense, interlocking detail, and every re-jiggering of its inner workings, every well-intentioned tinkering with its functions and organizing principles, will without fail have a great many unforeseeable and unintended consequences, which in turn require further intervention, and further disruption of the system’s natural, organic operation. This is where we have got to now.
Many of us simply do not share your confidence, Peter, that our politicians are so wise, so far-seeing, and so benevolent that they will heal, and not kill, with their scalpels and forceps. Perhaps they have already done enough; it might be wise to let the patient regain his strength somewhat before making him undergo further surgery.
Bush inherited a government which was running a surplus and an economy which was running smoothly. 23 million jobs were created during the Clinton administration; 3.5 million jobs were created under during the Bush administration. Obama inherited a government which had record deficits and an economy which was failing at an accelerating rate. Some of the deterioration was caused by exogenous events (9/11), but the bulk of it was caused by reckless spending, overly generous tax breaks, monetary policy which was too loose, and the willful failure to regulate the financial markets. Yeah, I would say it is Bush’s fault.
When Obama took office, the economy was losing between 600,000 and 700,000 jobs every month. We are currently adding 150,000 to 200,000 jobs per month. Yeah, I would say that a net gain of about 800,000 jobs every month qualifies as a “fantastic recovery in private sector jobs.”
Interesting to learn that bankers were so terrified of “the relentless pressure of the Left” that they made loans without asking for income verification or creditworthiness. Who knew? Doubtless the Left is also responsible for these loans being collateralized and then sold as derivatives, which because of the multiplier effect was a far greater cause of the financial meltdown than the loans themselves.
Most economists would argue that the Depression went on longer than it might have because the government tightened monetary and fiscal policy in 1937, which choked the recovery. Some economists, including your BFF Paul Krugman, argue that we are in a similar moment now.
I am gratified that you agree that preventing chemical companies from dumping toxins is a legitimate use of government power. I would argue that preventing climate change, when done in a responsible way, is an equally legitimate use of government power.
I agree that there are times when government regulation is excessive. In most instances, I do not believe that we are at that point now. Nor do I think there is an inexorable trend towards increased regulation. What Obama is doing is restoring the level of government involvement which existed before it was gutted by Bush.
Adding 150,000 to 200,000 private-sector jobs a month? Where did you get that from? As far as I can tell the private sector added a paltry 83,000 jobs last month, not even enough to keep up with the influx of new workers. And there is a widespread sentiment that business are holding off on hiring precisely because they have no idea what new and costly government meddling is about to come next.
That the banks rolled up debt into arcane and opaque financial instruments certainly contributed to the problem. But the weakness of the system’s foundation was due in very large part to the enormous number of mortgages that never should have been issued in the first place, and which later defaulted. This in turn was in large part due to government efforts to bring the “American dream” to millions of unqualified people.
I’m not at all persuaded that in this day and age, with confidence in Keynesian economic theory in free-fall (thanks to its having been a consistent failure again and again) that “most economists” would argue that the Depression lasted as long as it did because of insufficient government largesse, or too-tight fiscal policy. But we can have that argument another time.
As for “preventing climate change”, embedded in that idea are several others, that we should unpack: A) that the Earth is in fact warming; B) that for it to do so would be, as you have said, a “catastrophe”; C) that it is within our power to prevent it from changing; and D) that we ought to do whatever we can, at any cost, to implement C).
Even if I grant you A), there is reasonable debate about B) — among other things, a warming climate and higher C02 levels would increase the growing season and agricultural productivity of many parts of the world. There is, furthermore, very little reason to believe C) with any degree of confidence — and given all that, reasonable people have every right to be very, very, leery of D).
As for your last point: to call, for example, the enormous, incredibly intrusive and expensive new health-care bill nothing more than “restoring the level of government involvement which existed before it was gutted by Bush” is a truly jaw-dropping assertion. I’ll leave it to our readers to digest that one. As for there not being an inexorable trend toward more regulation (a trend that you must be sorry about, to go by your earlier remarks), I invite you to give me any example of any ongoing decline in such regulation. I also invite you to investigate whether the number of lines of Federal legislation has gone up or down over the past 50 years.
At this site …
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t01.htm
… you can see the employment figures going up and down between June 2009 and June 2010. The trend, if one exists, is flat, possibly going down.
Banks made loans “without asking for income verification or creditworthiness” because they were required to do so by law. The best book on the subject is The Housing Boom or Bust, by Sowell.
1) If you are going to limit job creation to the private sector, then obviously you will have a lower number than total job creation. In 2010, private sector job creation has averaged roughly 100,000 jobs per month. The only statistic I could find covered the period December 2009 through June, when the country added 593,000 jobs. However, since the gain in December was negligible, the 593,000 jobs were nearly all created within the past six months. So the net gain is about 750,000 private sector jobs per month. By any standard, that is a fantastic recovery in job creation.
http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2010/07/private-sector-jobs-increase-for-6th.html
However, given the pervasive right wing tilt of the mass media, one would think that the Obama administration has done nothing but lose jobs. Needless to say, one would be wrong. A cable news viewer would probably also think that Obama raised taxes, when in fact taxes are lower than when he assumed office. One would think that TARP was a huge government expense, when in fact the loans are being repaid and likely to turn a profit. The auto loans are being repaid. The Fed announced today that the value of the toxic mortgage portfolios it purchased last year is now greater than what the Fed paid for them. Do you think that Fox News, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and other leading lights of the right wing would ever admit that the things they purportedly want are actually being achieved? Don’t count on it.
2) Confidence in Keynesian economics is in free fall? It is? Says who?
3) No argument with paragraphs four and five. However, if those who propose energy regulation are wrong, the downside is a (manageable) hit to economic growth, along with the benefits unrelated to climate change which accrue from having less carbon in the air. If the climate change deniers are wrong, the planet cooks. Given the huge disparity between the two possible outcomes, and the risks associated with each, I would make that trade off any time.
4) Things which were formerly regulated which are no longer regulated? Let’s start with probably the biggest one. Federal regulations prohibited banks from using excessive leverage until Hank Paulson, as CEO of Goldman Sachs, persuaded the Treasury Department to allow banks to lever up as much as they wanted. Other examples? We no longer have just one phone company, with the government setting the pricing and terms of service. The airline industry has been deregulated, and the cost of a ticket from JFK to LAX is about a fifth of what it was twenty years ago. The trading of securities has been deregulated. The media industry has been deregulated, and the restrictions of ownership of media properties within the same city have been largely eliminated. The Fairness Doctrine, in which the FCC required the discussion of controversial issues on television to be balanced, has been eliminated. I could go on, but I think you get the point here.
Again, Peter, you make a telling remark:
Yes, to assess our fiscal health, I think I will indeed focus on the private sector — which is, after all, the only place that the money can come from that pays for all those cushy government jobs. In a perfect world there wouldn’t even be anything but the private sector, and I think it is safe to say that when the Founders were designing a carefully limited Federal government, redistributing private-sector wealth in order to become the nation’s largest employer was not foremost amongst its frugally enumerated purposes. I think they would be rather dismayed to know that there are now more people working for the government than there are goods-producing workers in private industry.
Confidence in Keynesian deficit-spending prestidigitation is indeed in free-fall, and with good reason: the magical “multiplier” has been shown to be a boondoggle, and frankly, the data simply have never borne out the counterintuitive notion that a nation can tax and spend itself into prosperity. The E.U. has turned its back on deficit spending, and the climate in the US, as we languish in high unemployment for the foreseeable future, is the same.
As for your last paragraph, fair enough. Those are good examples of areas where government interference in free markets has diminished. Lets see if, going forward, the government exercise similar restraint, and can manage to keep its hands in its own pockets, and out of ours.
Well, if you are going to rely on the Hoover Institute and the Wall Street Journal, of course you would think that Keynesian economics were discredited. Their raison d’etre is to dispute Keynesian economics. It would be like saying that capitalism is discredited because I found two guys on Kos who think that corporations are evil.
The NY Times article above refers to a study done by Mark Zandi (a McCain economic advisor in 2008) and Allen Blinder (former Fed President). It found that absent the stimulus (and let’s be clear: the stimulus money was about two thirds spending and one third tax cuts) the economy would have 8.5 million fewer jobs and a GDP which is 6.5% smaller. While nothing is certain in economics, these are two top rank economists with no ideological axe to grind. Let’s assume that they are correct.
I don’t have the data to do the calculation, but it certainly seems obvious that the government deficit would be far larger if that scenario came to pass, both due to reduced tax receipts and increased cost of benefits. Not to mention the human costs of another 8.5 million unemployed, or the fact that the stimulus was a one time expense and an economy which would be 6.5% smaller is in a much deeper ditch whose trough would be larger and longer.
Had Obama and the Democrats done what the right wing demanded — continue the policies which got us into this mess — and the unemployment rate risen to 16%, the Wall Street Journal and the Hoover Institute would have slammed Obama for that. What-ever. The fact is that massive government spending was the catalyst which prevented an economic nuclear winter, and the most pressing problem for monetary and fiscal policy is to find the right calibration between government stimulus and fiscal discipline. Was the initial stimulus package too big? Too small? Do we need more now? Not easy questions to answer — but to suggest that the correlation between government spending and economic recovery doesn’t exist is Tea Party mumbo jumbo. We went from an economic contraction of 6% to growth of 2.5%. Moving the US economy is like changing the direction of an ocean liner. How else to explain a net growth of 8.5% in a one year period?
The economic prescriptions of the Journal and the Hoover Institute were enthusiastically adopted by the Reagan and Bush administrations. These were years of economic stagnation and high deficits. The economic policies which have been mainstream since FDR — including higher marginal tax rates — were adopted by the Clinton administration, which were the most prosperous eight years in our lifetime (and ended with a government surplus). As a member of the Church of What Works, I’ll go with traditional economics.
As for the size of government: I’m not here to bang a drum for bloated government. However, those who get off fulminating against big government have the obligation to declare exactly what parts of government they would like to get rid of. Delivering mail? Taking care of veterans? Military spending? Federal prisons? The Times recently had an article about voters in South Dakota, who were steaming mad about a government spending which was “out of control.” However, South Dakota receives more from federal largesse than it pays in taxes. Were the voters willing to give up their crop supports? Of course not. Help for urban areas? Well, that’s wasteful. Talking about big government in the abstract as the root of all (or most) of our problems is a non-starter. It’s only when you are specific enough to define what parts of government ought to be abolished (or reduced) that you can start getting anywhere.
Oh, and did I mention that the average temperature in San Francisco this summer has been 63 degrees, or three degrees below normal? So maybe this global warming stuff is a crock. Football weather is OK, but it sure would be nice to get some nice beach days.
No, in this instance it would be like saying that Keynesian economics is discredited because its central prescriptions have been tested against reality, and shown not to work as promised. Your response is nothing more than an ad hominem attack: if the WSJ said it, it can’t be true.
But it is easy enough to descend into appeals to authority when it comes to economics; I could, for example, cite the recent letter by 100 prominent economists to president Obama insisting that the stimulus, even almost a trillion dollars of it, hasn’t got the job done, and that we need instead to back off and let the engine of the free market do what it does best.
That there can be so much fundamental disagreement amongst economists (as opposed to, say, physicists) makes it very clear that economics is not really a “science” at all. Having just gambled a trillion dollars on a Keynesian crap-shoot, with double-digit unemployment more than a year later and no sign of improvement anytime soon, should we really, as Krugman insists, double down?
At the end of the Carter administration, inflation was over 12%, by the end of Reagan’s it was less than 4.5%. Unemployment dropped by almost a third. Despite lower taxes, tax revenues increased. Etc., etc. Most of the foundation of the recent financial meltdown was laid during the Clinton administration, in particular key revisions of the Community Reinvestment Act. We can probably have an endless pissing contest here, if you like.
As for your voters in South Dakota: it’s easy enough to find stupid people on both sides of the aisle, for every ignorant conservative you can find an interview with, I can find you a corresponding moron on the Left. (Here, for example, is a truly outstanding specimen.) As for where to cut spending, just returning to 2007 levels of discretionary spending would balance the budget in less than a decade; instead we have Obamacare. There are hundreds or thousands of redundant programs and agencies that could go: price-supports in a range of industries (look, for example, at this item about the Chevy Volt that President Obama just took for a triumphant test-drive), farm subsides, Diversity programs, you name it. Do we really need to be giving Pakistan half a billion more dollars just now?
You say:
But that’s hard to square with:
But we are repeating ourselves now; we’ve already been through all of this, and not too long ago. We tend to get to the point in these quarrels of ours where we start talking past each other, and I think we’ve reached it now (or some time ago, more likely). I think we must, as I think you suggested many comments ago, agree to disagree.
Finally: 63 degrees? Really?? Having just lived through the hottest, stickiest July on record here in Gotham, let me tell you: you don’t know how lucky you are, amigo. Seriously.
Where I live it’s a few degrees warmer than San Francisco, as we don’t get much fog. Ten miles down the road is Redwood City, whose welcome sign on El Camino says Weather Best By Government Test. Apparently the government analyzed which city has the best weather in the country, and it’s Redwood City. (Your tax dollars at work.) In the summer, it is reliably sunny and between 68 and 72 degrees. I have an air conditioner (somewhat unusual for the area) but I haven’t used it yet this year.
I’m always mindful of how lucky I am to live here. Aside from the weather, I see palm trees and the San Francisco Bay every day, several times a day. Silicon Valley is an incredibly robust and vibrant place, filled with brains, innovation, and entrepreneurship. I’m an easy half hour from San Francisco, and not much more to Napa, Santa Cruz, and Monterey. If there’s a better place to live than here, I haven’t found it.