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Climate Progress

Nathan Myhrvold jumps the shark — and jumps ship on Levitt and Dubner (on their blog!) asserting: “Geoengineering is proposed only as a last resort to try to reduce or cope with the even greater harms of global warming! … The point of the chapter in SuperFreakonomics is that geoengineering might be good insurance in case we dont get global warming under control.” Did he even read the book?

By Joe Romm on Oct 20, 2009 at 8:30 pm

Un-friggin-believable.

Nathan Myhrvold, who Levitt and Dubner call the “polymath’s polymath” — who is one of the primary “experts” the authors rely on to make the case for their central geoengineering-only approach to global warming — has just publicly repudiated that approach. Apparently he never read the chapter — or didn’t understand it if he did.  And apparently in their rush to print this “rebuttal” to my debunkings, the Superfreaks didn’t bother to read it closely, since he just wrote this jaw-dropper on their blog:

Geoengineering is proposed only as a last resort to try to reduce or cope with the even greater harms of global warming!

… The point of the chapter in SuperFreakonomics is that geoengineering might be good insurance in case we don’t get global warming under control.

You can’t make this stuff up.

As the Union of Concerned Scientists posted here about Myhrvold’s amazing defense repudiation of Superfreakonomics:

That is exactly the opposite of what the book argues and represents a complete repudiation of the chapter from one of the main sources on which Levitt and Dubner relied.

Or go to the Bloomberg interview of Dubner and Caldeira that backs up my reporting on error-riddled Superfreakonomics for an independent view of what the book is about — and what the authors think the book is about:

Caldeira, who is researching the idea [of aerosol geoengineering], argues that it can succeed only if we first reduce emissions. Otherwise, he says, geoengineering can’t begin to cope with the collateral damage, such as acidic oceans killing off shellfish.

Levitt and Dubner ignore his view and champion his work as a permanent substitute for emissions cuts. When I told Dubner that Caldeira doesn’t believe geoengineering can work without cutting emissions, he was baffled. “I don’t understand how that could be,” he said. In other words, the Freakonomics guys just flunked climate science.

Are you baffled also?  The two leading experts (well, one expert and one F.A.K.E.R.) that Dubner and Leavitt relied on for their geoengineering-only solution don’t believe in it!  Well, Caldeira doesn’t believe in it.  As we’ll see, it’s impossible to figure out what Myhrvold believes.

Myhrvold is not a ”polymath’s polymath.”  He repudiates the Superfreaks, so he’s a contrarian’s contrarian.

Why exactly does Myhrvold think the Superfreaks were so desperate to push the (incorrect) statement about Caldeira that his “research tells him that carbon dioxide is not the right villain”?  Since the Superfreaks made me take the PDF of the book down, go to the NPR interview of Levitt (transcript here):

Read more

Economy

Rep. Hensarling: Banks ‘Ought To Trump’ Consumers

By Pat Garofalo on Oct 20, 2009 at 8:00 pm

Today, during markup of legislation before the House Financial Services Committee that would create a Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA), Republicans proposed an amendment that would give all of the other federal bank regulators — including the Federal Reserve or the Comptroller of the Currency — the ability to veto CFPA rules that threatened the “safety and soundness” of financial institutions.

Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) explained that he supported the amendment because the health of a financial institution “ought to trump” concerns regarding consumers, all of the time:

The safety and soundness of the system, taxpayer protection, ought to trump the ability to ban financial products. And let’s face it, I understand the chairman said that this new CFPA would not have the ability to set goals, but if you control the product mix, if you can ban products, if you can modify their terms, of what some have estimated could be as much as 10 to 15 percent of our economy, then yes, I conclude you can adversely impact the safety and soundness of these institutions.

Watch it:

So if it can’t outright prevent the CFPA from being created, the GOP would like to ensure that it’s a toothless agency that can’t stand up to the bank regulators. (Hensarling presents this as “taxpayer protection,” ostensibly suggesting that, if the banks can make money however they see fit, they’ll never need another taxpayer funded bailout.) But the CFPA will only work if it is on equal footing with the bank regulators, with adequate abilities to write and enforce regulations.

This is because many of the products that led to the economic crisis were premised on obfuscation and taking advantage of consumers — credit cards with retroactive rate hikes, mortgages with payments that exploded after a set number of years, or overdraft fees to which consumers are automatically subjected. As Adam Levitan pointed out at Credit Slips, “the market drives the introduction of bad consumer credit products.” “Some of this obfuscation is through fine-print. Some is through product design, as complexity and exploitation of consumers’ cognitive biases can mask pricing,” he wrote.

And these actions are often very profitable, which is why the bank regulators didn’t want to stop the banks from using them. Overdraft fees, for instance, could rake in $38.5 billion for the banks this year. Those billions render the banks incredibly safe and sound, but they come at the expense of consumers. And under the Republican proposal — which will come up for a vote tomorrow — the same exact practices would be allowed to continue, and regulators at the CFPA could do nothing but scream from the sidelines.

Politics

Beck says ‘progressives’ share ideological kinship with ‘tyrants’ and ‘slave owners.’

By Matt Corley on Oct 20, 2009 at 7:00 pm

On his Fox News show today, Glenn Beck said that “in the last couple of years” he’s been “trying to read a different Founding Father all the time,” offering that his latest interest is in Samuel Adams. According to Beck, Samuel Adams would have hated modern day progressives. “We call them progressives now, but back in Samuel Adams’ day, they used to call them tyrants,” said Beck. “A little later, I think they were also called slave owners.” Watch it:

It’s kind of odd that Beck deifies the Founding Fathers while attacking progressives as “slave owners,” considering that some of the most famous Founding Fathers owned slaves.

Health

The Case For Taxing Cadillac Health Care Plans

By Igor Volsky on Oct 20, 2009 at 6:20 pm

Cad2The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has given its stamp of approval to a controversial provision in the Senate Finance Committee’s health care bill that would impose a 40% surtax on insurers that offer coverage that exceeds $8,000 for individuals or $21,000 for families. The tax would apply to “the portion” of the plan that exceeds those amounts.

The tax enjoys bipartisan opposition. Labor unions and conservative critics both argue that the provision will lead to unintended consequences, inadvertently taxing individuals in high-risk professions, union members with collective bargaining agreements, or older populations whose health care plans aren’t so much ‘overly generous’ as they are just plain old expensive. But proponents of the measure contend that the Finance Committee’s revised proposal would protect individuals in the aforementioned categories — individuals in so-called Chevy plans — slow the rate of health care spending, and help finance health care reform.

The Center has thrown down its gauntlet with the latter, arguing, in a new report released today, that “an excise tax on very high-cost health plans” “represents a sound way to help pay for health reform”:

The excise tax finances nearly a quarter of the costs of the Finance Committee bill over the first ten years ($201 billion out of $829 billion) and makes a major contribution to the deficit reduction that the bill would achieve in later decades. It would help to slow the rate of health care cost growth, without which health care reform is not likely to be sustainable over time….Of particular note, the excise tax produces savings that rise over time at least as fast as the costs of providing health insurance to those now uninsured. Some important aspects of the tax are widely misunderstood. For example, as the Joint Tax Committee’s analysis of the Finance Committee’s proposal shows, over 80 percent of the revenue generated would come not from the tax on insurance premiums itself, but from income and payroll tax revenue on the tens of billions of dollars of higher wages that workers would receive — as employers modified their health plans to avoid the excise tax and converted what they had been spending for health coverage in excess of the tax thresholds into higher wages and salaries. Indeed, one largely overlooked side benefit of the proposal is that by receiving higher wages and paying somewhat more in payroll taxes, most affected workers would qualify for higher Social Security payments when they retire.

Americans would respond to the tax by trying to avoid it and any unnecessary health care spending, the Center concludes. The policy will encourage employers to offer their employees less costly plans and convert the savings produced by the new policies into higher wages or other compensation. As a result, “more than four fifths of the revenue that the government would collect as a result of the excise tax would come from income and payroll tax revenue on the billions of dollars in higher wages and salaries that employees would be paid.” Only $37.8 billion would come from the excise tax itself, the JCT estimates. (Incidentally, only 7.7 percent of tax filing units would be affected by the excise tax in 2013 and 17.6 percent by 2019).

In other words, the Finance Committee provision goes a long way towards micro targeting the tax towards truly exorbitant policies. As the report points out, “the high-cost insurance plans that the tax would affect generally offer unusually generous benefits that are not available to most Americans. The executive medical and dental program at Goldman Sachs, one of the nation’s largest banks, has become the poster child for lavish health insurance plans. Goldman’s top executives participate in a medical and dental plan that costs $40,543 a year for each participant’s family — three times the national average, according to the New York Times.”

All of this is based on the theory that businesses will change their behavior and offer their employees less substantive policies — plans with higher deductibles and co payments — which will be partially offset by the new higher wages. Progressives can’t be thrilled with this result (after all, they would prefer to reduce the rate of growth by focusing on delivery reforms), but they’re happy to see the extra dollars go into financing health care reform.

Yglesias

Endgame

By Matthew Yglesias on Oct 20, 2009 at 6:15 pm

Your voice was too loud:

— Rush the racebaiter.

— More problems with geo-engineering.

— Does adding details always make poll results flip?

— I’ll agree with the ESPN CW and say the Wizards will finish sixth in the East; note that the health of Brendan Haywood is actually more important than the health of Agent Zero.

— Can you guess who’s the highest-paid player on the Thunder?

— Speaking of which, wouldn’t it make more sense for the Shock to move to Oklahoma City?

Weezer doesn’t really write good songs anymore, but their dual cover of “Kids” and “Pokerface” is good.

Politics

McConnell mistakenly claims Republicans and Democrats are ‘close to even’ in the polls.

By Faiz Shakir on Oct 20, 2009 at 6:03 pm

At a press conference this afternoon, a reporter asked Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to explain why such a low number of Americans (approximately 20 percent) self-identify as Republicans. McConnell responded by dodging the question, saying, “You can pick out of polls what you want to focus on.” He then proceeded to pick out a number he wanted to focus on:

I think a very interesting question of most of the polls I’ve seen in the last few months is the question of the party generic ballot. That is, if the election were held today, would you be more likely to vote for the Republican or the Democrat? Most of the surveys that I’ve seen in the last three weeks or so have us close to even.

Watch it:

McConnell is sadly mistaken. As The Plum Line’s Greg Sargent reports, a new Washington Post poll shows the gap between the two parties is currently as wide as it has been in the previous two elections:

Right now, the poll finds that when respondents are asked whether they will vote for a Dem or a GOPer in the 2010 elections, 51% pick the Dem and 39% pick the Republican.

In June of 2008 (the most recent historical data in the WaPo poll), Dems led the generic matchup 52%-37%. And in early November of 2006 the Dem lead was 51%-45%. Today the spread is largely unchanged.

Despite this, GOP cockiness about the midterms is widespread.

Update

Asked whether he’s concerned about declining support for the GOP, RNC Chairman Michael Steele responded: “Not really.”

Climate Progress

Limbaugh to NY Times environment reporter Revkin: “Why don’t you just go kill yourself?”

By Joe Romm on Oct 20, 2009 at 5:42 pm

From today’s The Rush Limbaugh Show (via Media Matters):

LIMBAUGH: I think these militant environmentalists, these wackos, have so much in common with the jihad guys. Let me explain this. What do the jihad guys do? The jihad guys go to families under their control and they convince these families to strap explosives on who? Not them. On their kids. Grab your 3-year-old, grab your 4-year-old, grab your 6-year-old, and we’re gonna strap explosives on there, and then we’re going to send you on a bus, or we’re going to send you to a shopping center, and we’re gonna tell you when to pull the trigger, and you’re gonna blow up, and you’re gonna blow up everybody around you, and you’re gonna head up to wherever you’re going, 73 virgins are gonna be there. The little 3- or 4-year-old doesn’t have the presence of mind, so what about you? If it’s so great up there, why don’t you go? Why don’t you strap explosives on you — and their parents don’t have the guts to tell the jihad guys, “You do it! Why do you want my kid to go blow himself up?” The jihad guys will just shoot ‘em, ’cause the jihad guys have to maintain control.

The environmentalist wackos are the same way. This guy from The New York Times, if he really thinks that humanity is destroying the planet, humanity is destroying the climate, that human beings in their natural existence are going to cause the extinction of life on Earth — Andrew Revkin. Mr. Revkin, why don’t you just go kill yourself and help the planet by dying?

Yes, one of the few remaining intellectual leaders in the conservative movement — whose views dominate conservative discourse because few if any conservative politicians will publicly disagree with him — has just told the lead climate reporter for the New York Times to commit suicide.  Who among the deniers and delayers will have the courage to denounce Limbaugh here?

What incited Limbaugh?  Here is Revkin’s NYT blog today (emphasis added by MM):

Read more

Yglesias

Race in America and Europe

By Matthew Yglesias on Oct 20, 2009 at 5:28 pm

Pat Buchanan says, of white people, “America was once their country. They sense they are losing it. And they are right.” I affiliate myself with what Adam Serwer has to say about this, but it also seems like a good jumping-off point for something I’ve been meaning to write about since I came home from Europe.

Ebony Statue

There’s often a kind of conventional idea on the left that the United States is an unusually racist society. And I think there’s also often a kind of image of Europe as a place where more of the progressive agenda has been achieved than in the USA. But I think that you’ll find if you look at Europe through the eyes of the liberal agenda that while the German left has certainly been more successful than the American left at securing universal health care, it’s been much less successful at promoting a tolerant, integrated, multicultural society. And allowing for the errors implicit in making any kind of sweeping generalization, I’d say that’s pretty generally the case across Europe. This Swiss People’s Party campaign poster would, I think, make Jesse Helms blush. And I’m not even sure which of the Northern League posters from Italy is the most egregious.

In the US, in other words, racial problems have been more salient for a long time since we’ve been a racially diverse society for a long time. But by the same token, for all the problems we have with us today, we’ve made enormous progress over the years. Racial and ethnic tensions are a common problem in the world, and the United States manages diversity pretty well in comparison with other places (not just in Europe) even if we fall short in some absolute terms. Just look at Barack Obama. I think we’ll be waiting a while yet before someone of non-European ancestry is elected head of government in a European country. Denmark has some great public policy ideas, but it’s also kind of made itself into the gated community of nations in a way I don’t find particularly appealing.

At any rate, in some sense it’s probably true that white America has “lost” “its” country, but that’s a good thing. It’s everyone’s country!

Economy

Republicans Love To Bash The Fed, But Still Trust It To Protect Consumers

By Pat Garofalo on Oct 20, 2009 at 5:10 pm

At The American Prospect, Tim Fernholz noted that Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) has engaged in a bit of confusing rhetoric regarding regulatory reform. Grassley seems to simultaneously believe that the Federal Reserve should do nothing but monetary policy, but shouldn’t have its consumer protection responsibilities removed and placed within a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA).

As Fernholz wrote, “thank goodness Grassley is not on the relevant committee” (the Senate Banking Committee). However, Grassley is not the only one with this contradiction running through his head. Sen. Jim Bunning (R-KY) is struggling with the same thing, and has a seat on the Banking Committee, from which he announced today that he sees “very little chance of getting a consumer protection agency past this committee.” And his reasoning is that the Fed already has consumer protection duties that it simply didn’t use:

In 1994, we handed the Federal Reserve the power to regulate all banks and mortgage brokers on the loans that they make. That’s all of them! In 1994 they didn’t do a thing…Now, why would we write a new protection agency, if they’re not using the power we have to the Federal Reserve to start with?…They didn’t do their job, and now you want to create a new institution because the Federal Reserve didn’t do their job. I say you’re wrong to create a new institution. We should insist that the Federal Reserve does their job.

Watch it:

But just a few months ago, Bunning declared that the Fed should not be designated as a systemic risk regulator for the financial system because “the Fed has proven they can not be trusted with the power they have. They get it wrong, do not use it, or stretch it further than it was ever supposed to go.” In fact, he “promised to do everything in his power to stop the Fed.”

So the Fed has proven that it can’t be trusted, but it should still be trusted to protect consumers? There’s an odd dynamic at work here, because Bunning’s diagnosis is spot-on — he just comes to the wrong conclusion. The Fed undeniably failed to police the consumer market, even though it clearly had such powers. It received regulatory authority over mortgage lending in 1994, but didn’t release its “Guidance on Nontraditional Mortgage Product Risks” until 2006. This lackadaisical approach to consumer occurred not just within the Fed, but with all of the federal bank regulators.

Therefore, we should take consumer protection duties away from all of them and place them within a new agency, which will have no mission other than watching out for consumers. But Republicans — who love to hate the Fed the rest of the time, because it plays well politically — are willing to give the Fed another swing of the bat when it comes to protecting consumers.

Politics

Pennsylvania state lawmaker: Veterans who support climate change legislation are ‘traitors.’

By Amanda Terkel on Oct 20, 2009 at 5:10 pm

Daryl Metcalfe A coalition of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, under the name Operation Free, is on a 21-state bus tour to alert the public about the dangers of global warming and its threat to national security. Upon hearing about the group’s visit to Pennsylvania, State Rep. Daryl Metcalfe (R) blasted the veterans as “traitors” and compared them to Benedict Arnold:

“As a veteran, I believe that any veteran lending their name, to promote the leftist propaganda of global warming and climate change, in an effort to control more of the wealth created in our economy, through cap and tax type policies, all in the name of national security, is a traitor to the oath he or she took to defend the Constitution of our great nation!” Mr. Metcalfe’s email reads. “Remember Benedict Arnold before giving credibility to a veteran who uses their service as a means to promote a leftist agenda. Drill Baby Drill!!!”

Rep. Metcalfe, who served in the U.S. Army from 1980-84, today defended the remarks, saying that “if the type of policies that an individual promotes undermines the Constitution and the law of the land in our country, then they are not patriots.”

Global warming is inextricably linked to national security, with the potential to “aggravate existing problems such as poverty, social tensions, environmental degradation, ineffectual leadership and weak political institutions” around the world, which “could increase the pool of potential recruits into terrorist activity.” In the past, Metcalfe has refused to support Domestic Violence Awareness month in Pennsylvania because the resolution referenced domestic abuse suffered by men, which Metcalfe interpreted as part of a “homosexual agenda.” He also opposed a vote to “honor the 60th anniversary of a Muslim group in the state, because ‘Muslims don’t recognize Jesus Christ as God.’”

Featured

Chris LeJeune says: “Jon Powers wrote an excellent article on this here.”

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