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Tag Archives: Regressive Policy

Green Climate Policy Wreaks Poverty

03 Friday Sep 2021

Posted by pnoetx in Climate science, Environmental Fascism

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Assessment Report #6, Carbon Emissions, Cooling the Past, Deforestation, Democratic Republic of Congo, Diablo Canyon, Disparate impact, Economic Development, Energy Poverty, Fossil fuels, Hügo Krüger, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, Jennifer Marohasy, Jim Crow Environmentalism, Joel Kotkin, Judith Curry, Michael Schellenberger, Natural Gas, Net Zero Carbon, Nuclear power, Rare Earth Minerals, Regressive Policy, Remodeled Temperatures, Renewable energy, Steve Koonin

Have no doubt: climate change warriors are at battle with humanity itself, ostensibly on behalf of the natural world. They would have us believe that their efforts to eliminate the use of fossil fuels are necessary to keep our planet from becoming a blazing hothouse. However, the global temperature changes we’ve witnessed over the past 150 years, based on the latest Assessment Report (AR6) from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), are well within the range of historical variation.

“Remodeled” History

Jennifer Marohasy posted an informative discussion of the IPCC’s conclusions last month, putting them into a broader climatological context and focusing in particular on measurement issues. In short, discussing “global” temperatures with any exactitude is something of a sham. Moreover, the local temperature series upon which the global calculations are based have been “remodeled.” They are not direct observations. I don’t think it’s too crude to say they’ve been manipulated because the changed records are almost always in one direction: to “cool” the past.

Judith Curry is succinct in her criticism of the approach to climate change adopted by alarmist policymakers and many climate researchers: 

“In a nutshell, we’ve vastly oversimplified both the problem and its solutions. The complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity of the existing knowledge about climate change is being kept away from the policy and public debate. The solutions that have been proposed are technologically and politically infeasible on a global scale.”

We need a little more honesty!

The Real Victims

I want to focus here on some of the likely casualties of the war on fossil fuels. Those are, without a doubt, the world’s poor, who are being consigned by climate activists to a future of abject suffering. Joel Kotkin and Hügo Krüger are spot-on in their recent piece on the inhumane implications of anti-carbon ideology.

Energy-poor areas of the world are now denied avenues through which to enhance their peoples’ well being. Attempts to fund fossil-fuel power projects are regularly stymied by western governments and financial institutions in the interests of staving off political backlash from greens. Meanwhile, far more prosperous nations power their economies with traditional carbon-based energy sources. Most conspicuously, China continues to fuel its rapid growth with coal and other fossil fuels, getting little pushback from climate activists. If you’re wondering how the composition of energy output has evolved, this time-lapse chart is a pretty good guide.

One of the most incredible aspects of this situation is how nuclear energy has been spurned, despite its status as a proven and safe solution to carbon-free power. This excellent thread by Michael Schellenberger covers the object lesson in bad public policy offered by the proposed closing of the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant in California.

In both the U.S. and other parts of the world, as Kotkin and Krüger note, it is not just the high up-front costs that lead to the rejection of these nuclear projects. The green lobby and renewable energy interests are now so powerful that nuclear energy is hardly considered. Much the same is true of low-carbon natural gas: 

“Sadly, the combination of virtue-signaling companies and directives shaped by green activists in rich countries – often based on wildly exaggerated projections, notes former Barack Obama advisor Steve Koonin – make such a gradual, technically feasible transition all but impossible. Instead, it is becoming increasingly unlikely that developing countries will be able to tap even their own gas.”

Energy is the lifeblood of every economy. Inadequate power creates obstacles to almost any form of production and renders some kinds of production impossible. And ironically, the environmental consequences of “energy poverty” are dire. Many under-developed economies are largely dependent on deforestation for energy. Without a reliable power grid and cheap energy, consumers must burn open fires in their homes for heat and cooking, a practice responsible for 50% of child pneumonia deaths worldwide, according to Kotkin and Krüger.

Green Environmental Degradation

Typically, under-developed countries are reliant on the extraction of natural resources demanded by the developed world:

“The shift to renewables in the West, for example, has increased focus on developing countries as prime sources for critical metals – copper, lithium, and rare-earth minerals, in particular – that could lead to the devastation of much of the remaining natural and agricultural landscape. … Lithium has led to the depletion of water resources in Latin America and the further entrenchment of child labor in the Democratic Republic of the Congoas the search for cobalt continues.”

Unfortunately, the damage is not solely due to dependence on resource extraction:

“The western greens, albeit unintentionally, are essentially turning the Third World into the place they send their dirty work. Already, notes environmental author Mike Shellenberger, Africans are stuck with loads of discarded, highly toxic solar panels that expose both the legions of rag-pickers and the land itself to environmental degradation – all in the name of environmentalism.”

Battering the Poor In the West

Again, wealthy countries are in far better shape to handle the sacrifices required by the climate calamitists, but it still won’t be easy. In fact, lower economic strata will suffer far more than technocrats, managers, and political elites. The environmental left leans on the insidious lever of energy costs in order to reduce demand, but making energy more costly takes a far larger bite out of the budgets of the poor. In another recent piece, “Jim Crow Returns to California,” Kotkin discusses the disparate impact these energy policies have on minorities. 

“This surge in prices derives from the state’s obsession — shared by the ruling tech oligarchs — with renewable energy and the elimination of fossil fuels. Yet as a recent Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) report has shown, over-reliance on renewables is costly, because it requires the production of massive (and environmentally unfriendly) battery-storage capacity — the price of which is invariably passed on to the taxpayer.

This is not bad news for the tech oligarchs, who have been prominent among those profiting from ‘clean energy’ investments. But many other Californians, primarily those in the less temperate interior, find themselves falling into energy poverty or are dependent on state subsidies that raise electricity prices for businesses and the middle class. Black and Latino households are already forced to pay from 20 to 43% more of their household incomes on energy than white households. Last year, more than 4 million households in California (30% of the total) experienced energy poverty.”

Kotkin touches on other consequences of these misguided policies to minority and non-minority working people. In addition to jobs lost in the energy sector, a wide variety of wage earners will suffer as their employers attempt to deal with escalating energy costs. The immediate effects are bad enough, but in the long-run the greens’ plans would scale back the economy’s productive machinery in order to eliminate carbon emissions — net zero means real incomes will decline! 

Energy costs have a broad impact on consumer’s budgets. Almost every product imaginable is dependent on energy, and consumer prices will reflect the higher costs. In addition, the “green” effort to curtail development everywhere except in high-density transit corridors inflates the cost of housing, inflicting more damage on workers’ standards of living.

Tighten Your Belts

These problems won’t be confined to California if environmental leftists get their version of justice. Be prepared for economic stagnation for the world’s poor and a sharply reduced standard of living in the developed world, but quite unnecessarily. We’ll all pay in the long run, but the poor will pay much more in relative terms.

The Left Always Hurts the Ones They “Love”

28 Monday Jun 2021

Posted by pnoetx in law enforcement, Leftism, Lockdowns

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Tags

Defund the Police, Disparate impact, Family Instability, George Floyd, Gun Control, Leftism, Lockdown Orders, Marxism, Non-Pharmaceutical interventions, Police Bias, Police Homicides, Regressive Policy, Rent Controls, School Discipline, Shelter at Home, Unintended Consequences, Wage Floors, Welfare State, Work Disincentives

The policies foisted upon the country by the Left always hurt those constituencies they think they’ll help, and they backfire in very predictable ways. There are too many instances of that truism to recount, but just a couple of examples follow.

Economic Perils of Precaution

We can start with the interminable non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) imposed in many states during the pandemic. These included shelter-at-home orders, limits on public gatherings, school closures, and the like. These lockdown measures were more severe in so-called blue states controlled by the Democrat Party. But NPIs were a policy failure and did little to stem the pandemic or excess deaths. Moreover, they resulted in the closure of many businesses and massive job losses. The economic burden fell especially hard on low wage earners, as the following chart shows:

For high earners (the red line), the employment decline at the start of the pandemic was small and relatively brief. Less fortunate were those earning under $27,000 annually (the blue line). They suffered a much larger initial decline in employment and had a continuing loss of almost 24% of jobs. While those who lost jobs ultimately received enhanced unemployment compensation and other benefits, the idleness and loss of work experience inflicted long-term damage to health, psyches, and future prospects. Thus, the party with pretensions of championing the cause of the downtrodden was pleased to intervene with policies that undercut the working poor.

But Some Precautions Are “Racist”

Another prominent case in which leftists have harmed those for whom they claim to advocate is the effort to “defund the police”. Low income and minority populations do not favor such a policy because they understand the value of protection against criminal elements who victimize their communities. The residents of these communities are most at risk from gangland violence and homicide. Furthermore, nearly all “victims” of police homicides are armed, and police homicides are closely associated with crime. And again, the sad fact is that crime is heavily concentrated in minority neighborhoods. The statistics do not support assertions of bias in policing. Obviously, these citizens have taken notice that the riots cheered on by the Left have been destructive to their communities.

Crime has spiked in Minneapolis and elsewhere since last summer, when George Floyd’s death sparked interest in the “defund the police” mantra promoted by the Left. And there followed a reduction in police budgets of about 5.2% in aggregate in the 50 largest cities in the country (though not all of these cities made cuts). Moreover, the effectiveness of policing has been undercut more broadly by the substantial legal risk now facing officers who earnestly attempt to enforce the law, as well as more restrictive use-of-force policies.

These changes are an unambiguous disaster for so many good people having the misfortune to live in high-crime areas. And the political disaster is starting to sink in among Democrats, who are already attempting to change the narrative (and see here). It’s pretty transparent that the “black lives matter” dialectic appeals to Democrats primarily as a selling point of convenience, and not so much when there’s actual blood in the streets.

Only the Obvious Matters

Destructive lockdowns and efforts to “defund the police” are just two examples of a perverse phenomenon. It’s well known to keen observers of the history of Marxism in action that it usually victimizes its presumed beneficiaries. That dynamic is at play under school discipline policies that seek to avoid “disparate impacts” on minority students, leaving other minority school children in disruptive learning environments; gun control initiatives making it difficult for minority residents and businesses to protect themselves; rent controls leading to a deteriorating stock of low-cost housing; wage floors causing low-skilled workers to lose hours, benefits, and jobs; energy policies with regressive impacts on household budgets; tax policies destroying incentives for job creation; and a welfare state creating disincentives to work and promoting family instability. This list goes on and on.

The difficulty leftists have in coming to grips with these unintended consequences is that they can’t see past first-order effects. Like spoiled children, they grasp only the ostensible benefits of their demands. And like bad parents, they behave as if to seek approval of the most spoiled among their presumed charges.

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