What I want to write about, however, is the broader issue of using this kind of moralistic language when speaking about policymaking. I was reminded of this because of yesterday’s tweet, but I think a much better example is Ezra Klein’s assertion about a year ago that, by threatening to filibuster health reform, Joe Lieberman was “willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in order to settle an old electoral score”.

This claim drew widespread condemnation from across the media, for obvious reasons, but as far as I can tell Klein’s statement was factually correct. The causal link between not passing the bill and causing hundreds of thousands of deaths seems fairly well-established by the medical and policy literature, and Lieberman could reasonably have been expected to understand this link at the time of his threat, so while I doubt his motive was to kill people I think he would have been responsible (in an ethical sense, not a legal sense) for the deaths if he had successfully filibustered the bill.

Matthew Yglesias pointed all this out at the time, and concluded that “there’s a reason [people are uncomfortable with this argument]: stark moralistic language works”.

I’m really sure this last statement is true, however. One problem is that both sides of pretty much every national policy issue can claim with some justification that the other side’s policy preference “will cost lives”. I can easily imagine such arguments for both sides of policy debates over taxes, energy, the environment, health care, national defense, infrastructure, the deficit, or pretty much any issue that requires government allocation of funds. The argument in favor of allocating funds says that the allocation will save lives, and the argument against allocating funds says that the effects on economic growth will have worse consequences than the problem the allocation is trying to solve. It’s worth noting too that these two arguments do not neatly divide into left/right; for example, liberals are generally pro-allocation for health care, infrastructure, and the environment, but anti-allocation on invading countries and cutting upper-income taxes.

I guess my point about moralistic language is therefore that it isn’t effective because it depends on your belief in the premises of the argument. If you believe that health reform will save lives, then Ezra Klein’s moralistic language will persuade you, but you’re probably already in support of health reform. If you don’t believe that health reform will save lives, then Ezra Klein just looks irresponsible.
Of course, when you throw around moralistic language with blatantly false premises, like Change.org did, everyone thinks you’re irresponsible.

I took a class on philosophy of science several years ago, and really enjoyed it. I think we actually discussed Deutsch’s variational theory of science in class, but unfortunately I’ve misplaced my notes and only remember that this stuff seems vaguely familiar. But I definitely do agree with his general introduction and the idea that science is theory-laden instead of positivist, even if I doubt that his specific definition of science is correct in the details. And he actually makes it seem like this stuff matters, which is quite an accomplishment!

Finally, it doesn’t come up at all in the talk, but Deutsch is also apparently one of the progenitors of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which makes the most sense of any interpretation I’ve seen. More on that some other time, perhaps.

He also presented a plot similar to the one above, showing global mean temperature over geologic time (the time axis is logarithmic) that highlights all the variability over different timescales. It’s a really fascinating record, and I would also have liked to know more about this, but then he admitted he hadn’t thought much about this plot, and then demonstrated that by offering essentially no interpretation of it.

Finally, he gave the first simple explanation I’ve ever heard for why there are multiple equilibria in the climate, but it’s not really interesting enough to share here. The next two weeks there aren’t any lectures, so I’ll have to find something else to write about. (revised on Oct. 12 to make it nicer)

It's all gone but the mountains.

Three weeks ago, I started attending a weekly lecture series on climate policy. Since all of the speakers have been very informative, and because I form strong opinions easily, I have a lot to say about each of the talks so far. For some reason, it didn’t occur to me until today that I can and should record my thoughts about these talks here, on my blog. So now I’ll attempt to recap the first three lectures in this post, and then add new posts every week on the subsequent lectures. I think for now I’ll leave the names of the speakers out of the posts for the sake of Google anonymity, but I haven’t really thought about it too much and might be willing to reconsider.

Lecture 1 was delivered by a professor with a joint appointment in Environmental Engineering and in Business, who advocated strongly for biofuels (especially algal biofuels), as a source of fuel for automobiles. For years I’ve been really opposed to biofuels since I don’t like any fuel source that emits carbon when burned, and the sudden burst of support for biofuels in 2005 seemed to be more a product of congressional politics than scientific reasoning. Now biofuels (particularly ethanol) have fallen somewhat out of favor since they caused a food crisis in 2007 and have been shown to be “anything but carbon neutral”.

After the talk, I am still extremely skeptical. The speaker’s point seemed to be that, among alternative fuel sources, biofuels are particularly wonderful because they have as complicated a supply chain as petroleum, so there is lots of room for innovation in producing biofuels and the industry could eventually grow as large and powerful as today’s oil companies. And algal biofuels are simpler and have less of an environmental impact than land-based biofuels like corn or soy. Plus there is the aforementioned political support for biofuels in America because they can be easily co-opted by existing oil companies and, depending on the specific biofuel, easily produced in agricultural states with powerful lobbyists.

These arguments don’t move me at all. Upon reflection, my opposition boils down to a complete distrust of the motives of these people. In my view, Exxon Mobil is fundamentally a bad actor with respect to global climate change, and so their $600 million investment in algal biofuels research only makes me warier of the technology. While I suppose it’s technically possible, as the speaker argued, for biofuels to become carbon-neutral, it requires careful environmental stewardship of the entire supply chain which leads to increases in fuel costs; I cannot imagine this commitment coming from Exxon Mobil or the other major biofuels investors. Also, the speaker’s talk focused almost entirely on the business opportunities inherent in biofuels (not even mentioning carbon neutrality until it came up in the question-and-answer period) which further strengthened my suspicion that this stuff is just driven by corporate greed and sloth, instead of a serious attempt to produce a sustainable fuel source. So I think biofuels are a cute idea, but I’ll stick with electric cars, thanks.

The second lecture came from one of the working group directors of the UN Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) report, detailing many of the possible negative health impacts of climate change. It was a pretty dire picture, and highlighted many effects I hadn’t considered before. There are of course rises in sea level, more intense storms and hurricanes, longer, more intense, and more frequent heatwaves, and increases in both droughts and flooding (simultaneously – really!). But there are also second-order effects like shifts in habitable zones (e.g., agriculture moves out of some countries, and tropical diseases move in) and increased wildfire frequency (bad news for Melbourne and Los Angeles). These second-order effects aren’t considered in the IPCC report, but their impacts can be even worse than the first-order effects. So the IPCC top-line predictions of climate change causing 0.3% of all deaths and costing 1% of global GDP per year – predictions that are already scientifically obsolete! – were significant underestimates of the total impact of climate change even before the new feedback loops cropped up. And of course these numbers seem much worse when effects are local: for example, Hurricane Katrina caused less than a 0.5% drop in US GDP in 2005. So 1% GDP is sort of like the US facing two Hurricane Katrinas a year, plus other equivalent disasters for everyone else, if you want to think of it that way.

Finally, there is another huge effect of runaway carbon emission the second speaker didn’t mention much: ocean acidification. Carbon dioxide dissolves in ocean water to form carbonic acid, and this effect could render most ocean life extinct in the next few decades. This is huge, and it’s particularly relevant to the third lecture.

This lecture focused on geo-engineering, which is the set of solutions available to mitigate the effects of climate change without reducing carbon emissions. The idea is to accept that the upcoming Copenhagen talks, even in the unlikely event that the world agrees to reduce emissions, aren’t going to result in carbon reductions. And since the climate has 50-100 years of inertia in response to carbon forcings, this means humanity should accept that we’re going to face all the terrible effects outlined in lecture #2, and focus on trying to mitigate the damage instead of worrying about reducing carbon dioxide and saving the people of the future. I find this outlook awfully depressing, but I have to admit the argument is strong.

That said, most geoengineering proposals are terrible. Ideas like orbiting a solar shade, filling the atmosphere with reflective dust particles, or pumping carbon underground or underwater are full of horrifying unintended consequences and really should never ever be tried. But the speaker’s favored idea was intriguing. He proposed pumping sulfates into the atmosphere in the Arctic during clear summertime days, which would reduce the amount of sunlight absorbed there without severe environmental side effects. If this program were adopted within ten years, then it might save the Arctic from complete melting and mass extinction, and I came away from the lecture believing this program is worth a shot.

The downside is that geoengineering doesn’t remove carbon dioxide from the oceans, so ocean acidification continues apace, and this is about as dangerous for humanity as climate change. The only way to fight ocean acidification is to remove carbon from the atmosphere, which has the happy side effect of also solving climate change. Thus, the first priority should still be carbon reductions, not geoengineering.

The first is last week’s episode of the Diane Rehm Show on natural gas. It starts off with twenty minutes of interviews with a natural gas executive and two sympathetic experts, congratulating each other on the amazing progress and future prospects of natural gas as a fuel source. Then they start taking calls from the listeners, and spend the rest of the show desperately trying to play down the barrage of angry callers recounting how natural gas drillers have devastated their homes and poisoned their water. It’s worth noting that the whole hour was sponsored by the natural gas industry. Whoops.

Second is yesterday’s episode of Fresh Air, featuring an interview with Taylor Branch about his new book, “The Clinton Tapes”. Branch and Clinton secretly recorded interviews throughout the Clinton presidency in an effort to produce an oral history for posterity. Amazingly, these tapes remained secret, even throughout all the subpoenas and investigations Clinton faced. Most of the interview is a summary of the history Clinton administration, but it’s told almost in first-person present, since Branch is drawing off contemporary secret interviews of the main character in this history. Pretty fascinating.

I just spent the last 36 hours watching people driven mad, murderously mad, by their own racist, crazy stuff, whipped into a frenzy by powers that don’t care about them, and know they’re past caring if they even understand what’s behind the fear. Health care is the new gay marriage. In some ways it’s stupider — mostly it’s less stupid, because nothing is stupider than fighting about gay marriage — but all of it acts on nothing approaching facts or common sense. The birthers, the deathers, they scream the most appalling imaginary things, and none of them can tell you why they’re so angry: just that something precious is being taken away from them. And something is. I’m not denying that. Something precious is being taken away from these people, whether or not I agree with it. And that’s sad; it makes me sad to think of what that must be like. It’s super fucked up, but mostly it’s scary and sad.

People who don’t share my worldview will probably read this passage as condescending or pretentious, but I think it’s pretty apt. The incredible passion of the angry white old people protesting health reform is undeniable, and yet the absolute lunacy of their arguments boggles my mind. Seriously: death panels, eugenics, and Stephen Hawking? But I think the Democratic talking point about “astroturfing” isn’t really fair either. Obviously the demographics at town hall meetings this month aren’t representative of the population as a whole, but the protesters who show up seem really legitimately upset, if for ludicrous reasons.

So the point that he makes, which I think needs to be more broadly mentioned and understood, is that the protests actually do have a cause. It’s not what the Republicans are saying, that these people’s crazy arguments are correct, but it’s also not what the Democrats are saying, that these people are just crazy.  It’s more like what the Daily Show is saying, that this is actually a racial issue. Not on its face, of course, but there is a reason the old scared white protesters are always saying they “want their country back”, and I do agree that it’s both scary and sad.

The best explanation of what is meant by this being a racial issue comes from Ta-Nehisi Coates, my favorite source for comment on any issue that requires a nuanced and compassionate perspective on humans. Read over the last three paragraphs of this post in particular, and I think the madness will make a lot more sense.

One thing to keep in mind is that race, and racism, have rarely ever acted alone. One of the best points that Phillip Dray makes in his classic history of lynching is that epidemics of lynching often coincided, not just with an expansion of black rights, but with increased labor mobility among white women. So fear of white women, and their independence, as well as fear of sexual competition, all worked in concert. It wasn’t simply “I hate niggers”–it never is. It was “I don’t much like black people, and prices are going up, and I have to let my wife work, so I can survive, and I’m scared she won’t stay with me if she’s not dependent on me and I’d die if she left me for a black guy.” Or some such.

Hiroshima, Japan, nine months after the atomic bombing

“They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they experience war any more.” – Isaiah 2:4

whatever gets done will be much too expensive because the political system is very afraid of harming any of the relevant industries. Taibbi is right that [health care reform], like climate change, is a litmus test for our government. Both are serious, foreseeable and solvable threats to our society. One threatens to bankrupt the country. The other threatens irreversible damage to the planet we live on. Responding to such threats is the test of a political system. And our system will fail it. We will not avert catastrophic climate change. We will not protect ourselves from health-care inflation… The country, and the system, will continue to whistle while our wages get eaten up and our government tumbles further into debt and our interest rates rise and other priorities get squeezed out and a serious and painful fiscal reckoning inches ever closer.

I think these statements are obviously correct, but if anyone disagrees I’d be interested to hear why. One of the Economist’s anonymous Democracy in America bloggers was also struck by these comments, and wrote a nice post about how every generation of young progressive intellectuals starts off idealistic about politics and then gets disenchanted and either moderates or radicalizes. The DiA commenters were generally pretty dismissive of the concerns of Klein and Taibbi (e.g. “Um, I can sum this up in one word: whining”), which made me think more about the issue. Reflecting on it for a while, instead of coming to a conclusion I ended up with another dialogue, which I have reproduced below the fold:

Young Progressive Intellectual: The system is broken. It can’t respond to the fundamental issues of our time such as health care coverage and climate change.

Very Serious Intellectual: It’s no surprise that you think so. People your age have been saying that in every generation, but civilization is still here!

YPI: But today’s issues are much more serious! Runaway health care costs are ridiculous and swallowing up the whole national budget while producing second-world level quality of care! And climate change could trigger a feedback loop that would literally end civilization on the planet.

VSI: Those do seem like serious problems. But every generation thinks its problems are the most important in history. The Port Huron Statement was written almost fifty years ago by young progressive intellectuals, and they were just as self-important as you are, writing that “our work is guided by the sense that we may be the last generation in the experiment with living”.

YPI: Okay, so I guess I do feel the same way that they do. But, look, those students fifty years ago were right! They anticipated the civil rights movement and their severe judgments on American hypocrisy with respect to both civil rights and the Cold War are now almost universally accepted. In the future, people will look back on our wanton pollution and our tolerance of horrifying practices like rescission, and their judgments will also be harsh.

VSI: But you’re also naïve! The Civil Rights Act, while morally correct, still incurred a massive political backlash from which progressives are only now beginning to recover – remember President Johnson’s famous quip that by signing the bill, Democrats “have lost the South for a generation”? The Civil Rights Act was morally correct, and probably politically correct as well, but you need to remember the two aren’t the same. Politics is more than just morality. Sometimes what’s morally right is politically suicidal; that’s why Dick Cheney is still loose, for example.

YPI: Now you’re just trying to turn this into another of those age-old arguments between extremism and moderation. That’s a fun argument, but it’s not relevant to my specific complaints. For example, with respect to health insurance, a big majority of Americans supports a public option, but there’s a very real chance we won’t get one because of pressure on Congress from insurance companies. That’s not moderation, that’s just corruption!

VSI: Okay, fine, and we can all agree that corruption is bad. But you seem to think it’s apocalyptic instead of just bad.

YPI: This stuff is apocalyptic: if you get sick and screwed over by your insurance company, your life is over. You either go bankrupt, or die.

VSI: That’s true, and terrible, but it’s not what I’m talking about. In that earlier quote, Ezra Klein is using fall-of-empires type rhetoric to describe these issues.

YPI: Sometimes, empires do fall!

VSI: Eventually they do, but I don’t think it’ll happen any time soon, and I certainly don’t think your pet issues are going to  be the cause.

YPI: We’ll find out in a decade or two, I guess.

VSI: But by then you’ll be all grown up, and you’ll become a Very Serious Intellectual yourself.