taking stock of US green energy policy

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Last week, The New York Times published a piece entitled, “Democrats Once Vowed to Stop Oil and Gas. Now They’re Not So Sure.” (Subtitle: “As the midterm elections approach, many leading Democrats are rethinking their approach to climate change.”)

Today, Paul Krugman has a post entitled “Donald Trump, Champion of Renewable Energy” that predicts the Iran war will shift the world economy to renewables, concluding: “Thus Donald Trump has in practice become the world’s green energy champion.”

What is the state of play?

During the Biden Administration, I am not sure to what extent Democrats and environmentalists argued for reducing carbon consumption. There is often a difference between the main themes that politicians express and what voters hear in the media. What jumped out at me was a reluctance to discuss the environment at all. When the president of one of America’s oldest and most famous environmental organizations, the Sierra Club, published his endorsement of Kamala Harris, he wrote exclusively about her support for abortion rights, not even mentioning the climate. Thus I am not sure that the Democrats were rhetorically committed to keeping fossil fuels in the ground.

Biden did take modest actions to block new oil and has extraction. However, by far the main strategy of 2020-2024 was to subsidize green energy. In fact, the Democrats’ policies could be attacked from an environmentalist angle because they did not impose new taxes or federal restrictions on carbon. But the Democrats adopted a strategy that I happen to endorse.

Their basic strategic insight was that interests are upstream from policy. In the USA and many countries today, the most powerful interests support cheap carbon. These interests encompass not only corporations and investors but also many regular people whose livelihoods depend on carbon. Therefore, policies will always revert to promoting carbon. However, by encouraging new industries that are green, the government can support interests that will begin to demand favorable policies and will no longer care about oil and gas.

This strategy is completely consistent with what Democratic candidates are saying now. According to the Times, Senator Ed Markey “said he isn’t abandoning the Green New Deal and legislation he has sponsored to prohibit new federal oil and gas leasing. But these days, he said, ‘I talk about the positive vision for what clean energy represents as a solution to the affordability crisis.'” This is a way of describing what he and others actually began to accomplish during the previous administration.

Then Trump was reelected, closely aligned with the oil and gas industries and hostile to green energy for both ideological and idiosyncratic reasons. I think that he and his people fully grasped the logic of the Biden-era policies. Krugman opens his post, “On Wednesday the Interior Department announced that it would pay the energy developer Invenergy $765 million not to develop three offshore wind farms. … Trump has so far committed $2.5 billion in taxpayer dollars to killing renewable energy projects.” This seems like an irrational waste (and contrary to Trump’s self-interest in lowering energy costs) unless the administration fears that green economic interests will grow in our country and ultimately take down oil and gas.

But the irony is that Trump has raised the global cost (and the perceived risk) of oil, which is unlikely to return to its previous levels. The Iran crisis hit just as renewable technologies were becoming much cheaper, and Chinese companies were dramatically increasing their production of solar panels, batteries, and electric vehicles. Hence Krugman’s point that Trump is a green energy champion at the global level.

From an environmental perspective, it doesn’t matter whether a solar panel is manufactured in the US or China. It would be good for the globe if the US consumed less carbon and produced more green technology, but it’s worth keeping our economy in perspective. The US accounts for 13% of global carbon emissions and about 16% of global manufacturing capacity. The world can make progress without us. (And we are making slow progress here, with our carbon intensity falling–at least through 2024.)

From a national economic perspective, the US would be much better off with the Biden-era policies. For one thing, US auto manufacturers would have a chance to develop electric vehicles to compete with Chinese cars globally, and American consumers would have cheaper and better alternatives. However, I am far from despondent about the effects of Trump’s policies on the US economy, which is diversified, enormously well capitalized, and dynamic. Maybe China will continue to dominate the world’s markets for batteries and solar panels, but maybe not, and in any case, there are other markets.

I think Democrats and environmentalists should indeed support diversified and cheap energy, leaving ambitious anti-carbon policies for later. There is much more to be gained by supporting green technology now than by struggling to trim carbon consumption against deep and broad opposition. However, no one really controls these trends, and some of them are turning favorable.

See also: the Gulf War and the energy transition; the major shift in climate strategy; the theory of the Biden environmental policy may be proven right; what if climate change isn’t a tragedy of the commons?; A Civic Green New Deal etc.


universities and newsrooms as laboratories or debating societies

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Higher education and the press are important sources of knowledge and insight in modern societies. I think that many people who are interested and concerned about these institutions view them as similar to either 1) labs or 2) debating societies. Both metaphors contain some truth but also mislead.

If you imagine an academic program or a newsroom as similar to a lab, then you will presume that its outputs are information and knowledge. You will probably expect the professionals (professors or reporters) to apply rigorous methods. Any good method counters biases, emotions, and other forms of subjectivity. For example, your own political views should not affect the results of a survey that you conduct if your sample is representative and your statistical techniques are appropriate. In this respect, sampling Americans’ views of Donald Trump is just like taking water samples to measure pH levels. Likewise, your opinions shouldn’t matter if you report on the municipal budget after interviewing a range of insiders and experts.

On this model, you would expect students and novice professionals to learn methods and to be aware of the best supported findings of previous research. Methods and findings should constitute the primary content of education.

When you see a professional consensus about a topic, that is a sign that its methods are working well. Disagreement is problematic, although you can hope that new data or new methods will resolve any temporary dispute.

On the other hand, if you imagine a college as similar to a debating society, then you will think first of a seminar room where there is a free-flowing discussion of a contentious issue (or perhaps a late-night argument in a dorm room). Similarly, you will think first of the op-ed page of a newspaper or a broadcast talk show.

Then you will expect to observe people expressing opinions. Disagreement is desirable–a debate is pointless if everyone agrees–and consensus can be a warning that the whole institution is biased. When someone makes an authoritative claim, along the lines of “We know that X,” you will be quick to suspect them of suppressing alternative views. Your evaluative criteria may include whether the expressed opinions are diverse, whether participants are appropriately open to alternative opinions, whether certain views should be excluded because they are out of bounds, and whether the institution reflects the range of opinions of some appropriate population. (For example, maybe a US broadcast network should present all opinions popular in the US electorate–although that claim is debatable.)

One drawback of the debating society model is that it overlooks the main activities of most professors and reporters: collecting information, applying methods, and reporting results. A session of a college course is much more likely to be spent discussing p-values or prosody than debating politics. In the case of journalism, the number of Americans paid to collect news has fallen by about 77 percent, on a per capita basis, since 1990. There may also be a declining public commitment to academic research across a range of fields.

Also, people who see universities and newsrooms as debating platforms may simply fail to reckon with stubborn information. Sometimes a professional consensus reflects facts, whether we like it or not.

However, if you assume that a university or a newsroom is like a lab, then you will not admit that any question pursued by a journalist or a professor reflects values–beliefs about what is important and why–and assumptions about which methods and sources are legitimate. There may be a neutral way to apply Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression to a dataset, but there is no such thing as a neutral dataset. Someone chose to measure certain things because they seemed important.

Instead of being willing to debate and justify your own values and hear critiques of them, you may try to claim that values are irrelevant to your professional work. You will be most comfortable with domains where methods and findings seem relatively uncontroversial, such as the natural sciences and certain kinds of “hard news.” (There either was or was not a fire on Main Street last night).

As topics become controversial, you will become increasingly wary of the observers’ objectivity. For instance, humanities scholars study religion without endorsing specific religions, but you may wonder why something as contestable as a religious belief is a worthy topic, let alone whether an interpretive scholar of religion can be reliable.

For people who see research as value-free science, ethics is unintelligible. It clearly isn’t like a lab science, but if it’s just a matter of opinions, then it isn’t a discipline at all. At best, ethics is a set of legalistic boundaries around the research enterprise, like “Don’t collect data without people’s permission.”

In the modern world, we are confronted with the challenge of navigating both facts and values when the two are deeply connected. We must respect both rigorous methods and free debates. We are trying to grasp truths and honor other people who believe different things. These combinations are difficult.

We might also remember that institutions that are a bit like labs and a bit like debating societies are also other things. Colleges are literal homes for resident students, large-scale employers, institutional investors, landlords, developers, performance venues, and gatekeepers to valuable credentials. Many news agencies are for-profit companies, employers, advertising platforms, and entertainers. Blindness to those realities can make us too comfortable with either model–the lab or the debating society.

See also: when does a narrower range of opinions reflect learning?; what must we believe?
Max Weber on institutional neutrality etc.

Americans’ attitudes on the Bicentennial and at age 250

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I played a very modest advisory role in the new NBC News Poll with More Perfect headlined “America 250.” As the graph above shows, most Americans say that we have succeeded (either a great deal or a fair amount) “over these 250 years in achieving the ideals for which this country was founded, as you understand them.”

I was a little surprised that these answers were quite similar at the Bicentennial–just a bit more positive in 1976 than they are today.

However, there are very big differences in how various groups answer these questions. More than twice as many older people than 18-24s think that we have achieved “a great deal” in pursuit of our ideals. Republicans are nearly four times more likely than Democrats to agree with that statement (51% of Republicans versus 13% of Democrats). Compared to both Blacks and Asian-Americans, both Whites and Latinos are far more likely to say that we have achieved a great deal toward our ideals.

IPSOS asked the same question this April and got the same response (77% thought we have succeeded a great deal or a fair amount). IPSOS also asked in what ways we have affected the world over 250 years, for good or ill. I show those responses below.

In brief, a plurality of respondents think that our impact on every category has been mixed, but more people perceive positive than negative outcomes. People see the biggest positive impact on technology and scientific innovation and the smallest on education and literacy, with democracy in between. As with the NBC poll, there is a sharp upward gradient with age.

I share these results without editorial commentary, except that I was a bit surprised that these surveys do not show much change compared to 50 years ago.

how markets predict news

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I am absolutely no expert on Iran or international relations more generally. I happen to hold a theory, for whatever it might be worth. I think that the Iranian regime is hoping that the current war will cause a real economic crisis in the US–not a modest uptick in our inflation rate, but a serious recession.

For the Iranian leaders, a crisis would have two major advantages. First, once the American public believes that tangling with Iran can cause a recession, that would deter future US attacks. Second, once we’re in crisis, the Iranian regime may be able to get substantial cash or put pressure on Israel at the negotiating table.

They may be surprised (as I am) that a recession has not begun so far for the USA. (Other countries are already in serious pain.) But they are betting that the US will hit a recession before they lose power.

If this theory is true, then we would expect repeated news stories about negotiations (offers, counteroffers, boasts, and promises), yet no real progress. All statements about a pending “deal” would be meaningless.

If I were an investor who made independent decisions about stocks, then my prediction would have encouraged me to get out of the market early in the war. In that case, I would have missed a 16 percent increase in the S&P between the first day of bombing and June 1–a lot of profit. Even today, the market is well above where it was on Feb. 28.

On an hourly basis, the markets have risen when either combatant suggests that a deal is on the table but have fallen whenever either side acts aggressively. From my perspective, these moves are irrational because no such news has any meaning. But again, my superior wisdom would have prevented me from earning a 16% return if I were an independent investor.

For me, the interesting question is how to think about the predictive power of markets. Millions of decision-makers who have the means to obtain specialized information and the motivation to focus on reality should make better decisions than any individual. In this case, investors have been right, and I have been wrong.

Yet I suspect that many of those investors expect a crisis to hit, or at least they view it as a risk. One explanation for their behavior is rational but short-term thinking. Even if we treat any statement from Donald Trump as hot air, it is also reasonable to predict that the market will rise immediately after he says something optimistic. So it is rational to bet on the short-term gain.

Another explanation is that masses of investors are being misled by mistaken premises, including the assumption that the two parties are motivated to negotiate and that the US side is competent.

Friedrich Hayek made a powerful case for markets, but his theory would not rule out systematic bias in a situation like this. He argues that the world at large is too complex for anyone to model it, yet alone predict it. No one knows what will happen. However, markets typically function because actors need not predict the future state of the society or the world. If you own a business, you must only predict the costs of your inputs and the willingness of consumers to pay for your products. External events like wars and elections may affect those variables a bit, but usually you can make predictions by knowing your own market. Such choices aggregate to produce prices and market conditions.

When the critical variable is a non-economic event like a war, then large numbers of investment decisions do not reflect such local knowledge. Like surveys, markets simply aggregate what lots of people believe about the world despite their cognitive, informational, and motivational limitations and biases. And in this case, the demographic traits of many investors (based in the US and the global north, familiar with business, but unaccustomed to war) may make them systematically biased to trust Donald Trump to resolve a problem that he cannot come close to managing.

See also: how markets “think” about politics; The truth in Hayek.

is your consciousness a stream?

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I recommend do-it-yourself (DIY) phenomenology. It is good for mental health to attend closely to our own experience, especially the ambiguous aspects of our inner lives, such as how we experience the will, the past, or our relationship to our own bodies. We should think about what we find when we introspect.

The goal is not to discover truths that will make us happy. Instead, we want to reveal complexities and depths that we can appreciate. By seeing ourselves as much more than suffering machines, we can increase how much we can enjoy being ourselves.

Here is an example of a phenomenological question that might attract your curiosity: Is your consciousness (or, you might say, your attention) a single “stream”?

William James coined the phrase “stream of consciousness” in 1890 as part of an argument that consciousness “does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as ‘chain’ or ‘train’ do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A ‘river’ or a ‘stream’ are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life” (James 1890, p. 239, italics in the original).

James acknowledges that we can be interrupted, but he thinks that interruptions are always absorbed into the stream. For example, “what we hear when the thunder crashes is not thunder pure, but thunder-breaking-upon-silence-and-contrasting-with-it” (p. 241). He also acknowledges that our consciousness has an uneven pace. He says,

As we take, in fact, a general view of the wonderful stream of our consciousness, what strikes us first is this different pace of its parts. Like a bird’s life, it seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings. The rhythm of language expresses this, where every thought is expressed in a sentence, and every sentence closed by a period (p. 243).

However, other close observers of themselves do not find anything that looks like a “stream.” The philosopher Galen Strawson finds this metaphor “inapt.” For him, “Thought has very little natural continuity or experiential flow—if mine is anything to go by. It keeps slipping from mere consciousness into self-consciousness and out again” (Strawson 2018, p. 350). Strawson observes that his own consciousness seems to launch repeatedly from “prior state[s] of complete, if momentary, nonconsciousness. …. It’s as if consciousness is continually restarting. It keeps banging out of nothingness. It’s a series of comings-to.” (p. 380)

I do not think this dispute has been resolved, which is good news if you want an open question to whet your curiosity about your inner life.

It could be (as Strawson thinks) that people vary. Some of us have streams of consciousness, while for others, experience comes in disconnected blocs. If that is the case, an interesting question arises about what consciousness is, if it is subject to such variation. (This question is relevant to debates about whether a computer can be conscious.) Or it could be that either James or Strawson is right about consciousness, and the other one is interpreting his own inner life wrong.

Meanwhile, you are free to decide for yourself.

Sources: William James The Principles of Psychology, 1918 (first edition 1890); Galen Strawson, Things That Bother Me: Death, Freedom, the Self, Etc. (New York Review Books, 2018). See also: joys and limitations of phenomenology; some basics; people as clusters of attention