I know people on the right who are aware that climate change is real and problematic, but who somehow don’t really feel that engaging with the denialists on their side and trying to educate people is an important thing to do. It seems like an odd point of view to me. Meanwhile, in the alps:

Melting glaciers in the Alps may prompt Italy and Switzerland to redraw their borders near the Matterhorn, according to parliamentary draft legislation being readied in Rome [...] “This draft law is born out the necessity to revise and verify the frontiers given the changes in climate and atmosphere,” Narducci said. “The 1941 convention between Italy and Switzerland established as criteria [for border revisions] the ridge [crest] of the glaciers. Following the withdrawal of the glaciers in the Alps, a new criterion has been proposed so that the new border coincides with the rock.” [...] Narducci said the same negotiation will be proposed to France and Austria.

Fortunately, boundary adjustments between Western European countries are almost certain to be handled in an amicably bureaucratic manner rather than a violent one thanks to the success in turning international relations within Europe into a rule-governed enterprise. The rest of the world, however, doesn’t have these kind of luxuries and as de-glaciation unsettles established patterns of land- and water-use we’re going to see some very serious political problems.

Ezra Klein writes that Republicans are drawing the lines of opposition to the progressive health care agenda in pretty narrow terms:

Does that matter? It’s hard to say. Rhetorically, the GOP has staked out a very narrow corner of opposition. Last week, Mitch McConnell, Chuck Grassley, Mike Enzi, Orrin Hatch, and Judd Gregg — essentially, all the Senate Republicans with jurisdiction over health reform, and McConnell — co-signed a letter to President Obama. I’ve obtained a copy, and it’s up for download here. They draw two lines in the sand. First, they warn against using the budget reconciliation process to pass heath care. Doing so would “make it difficult to gain broad bipartisan support” and “do a disservice to this important issue.” Substantively, they fear a public insurance option. “Forcing free market plans to compete with these government-run programs would create an unlevel playing field and inevitably doom true competition,” they say. “Ultimately, we would be left with a single government-run plan controlling the market.”

When I was in Switzerland, I learned a bit about their health care system. In essence, it looked like the plan Democrats were talking about on the campaign trail but without the public option. And that, it seems to me, would be compatible with what the Republicans are saying here. And just in time, Regina Herzlinger from the Manhattan Institute chimes in at the Corner in praise of Switzerland:

Republicans, full of complaints about the Obama plan, have not coalesced around a viable alternative. Mired in fantasies about a replay of 1992, they think they can face down universal coverage and that their impossibly wonky ideas, full of tax takeaways and mysterious high-risk pools, will defeat Obama’s brilliantly clear proposals. [...] There is only one viable Republican solution: A consumer-driven system that passes the employer tax exemption and funding onto consumers, so they, and not the government, control all health-care costs. Switzerland, which enables universal coverage without any governmental insurance through this system, benefits from costs 40 percent lower than the U.S. and, unlike the single-payer systems in the U.K. or Canada, excellent results for the sick.

Obama has formally committed himself to the idea of a Medicare-like public option, but the availability of such an option is not one of the administration’s eight principles for health reform. This suggests the possibility of a compromise if the GOP wants it. My strong guess is that if leading Republicans were really willing to offer a Swiss-style system as a compromise measure, that Democrats would leap at the chance to take a clean legislative victory and start haggling over funding mechanisms rather than fight to the death over a public plan.

At the same time, for that very reason until such an offer is made I think it’s vital to fight like crazy for a public plan since it’s the risk that such a plan would be rammed through the Senate via budget reconciliation that gives conservatives their incentive to come to the table and strike a deal over something more modest.

In case you were ever wondering whether guys who pilot boats for a living have big white beards even when their boats are on Lake Geneva rather than the icy waters of New England:

As you can see, the answer is: “yes.”

A few days ago, John Quiggin wrote the following:

Not only major institutions but whole national economies are up for grabs now. The national bankruptcy of Iceland seems likely to followed by something similar for Switzerland. As Citi itself points out, UBS and Credit Suisse are bigger, relative to the Swiss economy, than Kaupthing was for Iceland. Felix Salmon (also predicting doom for Citi, has been all over this).

Given a failure and rescue, Switzerland would probably have to follow Iceland in a rush application to join the EU (which might have its hands full rescuing some of its own members). It’s a safe bet that the end of secret bank accounts, “wealth management” through tax minimisation and the like would be part of the price. The UK isn’t quite as vulnerable, but seems likely to be forced into the eurozone before long (for a contrary view, see Martin Wolf) And this will be accompanied by a big structural shift away from the dominance of these economies by the financial sector.

Fortunately, this blogger has recently been on a trip whose whole purpose was to inform him about the views of the Swiss political and business elite. And I have to say that they all struck me as remarkably sanguine on this point. I have no idea how to assess the solidly of UBS’s risk exposure and everything else. But on the rest, I can say that I had no understanding pre-trip of the weirdness of Switzerland’s relationship with the EU.

But basically, Switzerland isn’t in the EU. Not on the Euro, not a member. But there is free trade between Switzerland and EU states. And also free movement of people, à la the Schengen Agreement. This sets Switzerland up nicely to serve as a kind of “Delaware of Europe” — suggesting itself as a nice tax haven for wealthy European individuals, and also as an appealing location for the European Headquarters for an Asian or American firm. Zurich or Geneva becomes as good a place as any from which to conduct EU-wide business operations, but without the burden of paying the high taxes to support European welfare states.

It’s nice work if you can get it, but obviously a lot of EU officials wish Switzerland couldn’t get it, and have been pressuring Switzerland to participate in some “tax harmonization” vis-a-vis the rest of the Union. They don’t, however, really have a great deal in the way of levers at their disposal with which to make this happen. But if UBS and/or Credit Suisse were to need serious rescuing, then, as Quiggin observes, the situation would change a great deal. Meanwhile, EU entry for Switzerland would put a great deal of additional pressure on the country’s already fraying tradition of government by a four party grand coalition.

Just for the record, the following appears to be the policy agenda of Swiss business who may or may not have bought my loyalty with a trip to their Magical Land of Chocolate.

• Rolex wants us to clamp down on counterfeiting of their product.
• Swiss Re wants you to believe that their business isn’t exposed to the kind of systemic risks that brought the financial sector down.
• Swiss business in general doesn’t want to be forced into the EU’s tax harmonization scheme.
• Nestle doesn’t want people to give bottled water a hard time, and thinks we should reduce trade barriers in agriculture.
• Swiss private bankers want to maintain strong bank privacy rules.

So that’s the word.

UPDATE: Note that I’m not endorsing these claims, just passing them on.

After a nice Geneva-JFK flight, I was supposed to transfer to a flight to DC but they all got canceled on account of the rain. And by the time I got around to it, there were no slots left on the SUPERTRAIN. Fortunately, Chris Hayes was sufficiently un-jetlagged to safely pilot a rental car to DC. And so now I’m back! And tired. But mostly back. And back on to your regularly scheduled blogging.

Meanwhile, many thanks to everyone at the American Swiss Foundation for making my recent trip possible. It was both an extremely enjoyable junket, and also massively informative. And, yes, for readers of the blog this does mean you ought to be scrutinizing every post for a sign of “dual loyalties” or that my policy views are mere cover for the nefarious Swiss agenda. What if, for example, my belief that it would be smart to increase tax rates on richer Americans in order to finance more generous social services is really just part of a plot to increase demand for tax shelters?

Some observations from Switzerland that may be relevant to the ongoing talking point from some libertarian institutions that a lack of fealty to small government orthodoxy somehow did the GOP in. They have over here a party of the populist right called the Swiss People’s Party that takes a Euroskeptic, immigration restrictionist line that on economics generally favors low taxes, deregulation and stingier social services. At the same time, their main electoral base of support is among Switzerland’s highly subsidized agricultural communities. So they strongly support those subsidies. This doesn’t really “make sense” as a matter of philosophical consistency, but the political logic is clear enough — it’s a mix of issue positions designed to appeal to the interests and attitudes of rural Switzerland.

At the same time, there’s a party called the Free Democrats who follow the standard European liberal line of being pro-Europe, welcoming to immigrants, and favoring low taxes and deregulation. These guys have strong support from the Swiss business community. As a result, it has been known to “abandon its liberal values at times, e.g. by its support of import protection for medicine or of the expensive 2002 government bailout of the failing national airline, Swissair.”

Again, the philosophical logic is lacking but the political logic is very clear. A party has a basic orientation, that orientation gives it a constituency, and then a successful party is going to need to stand up for the interests of its constituency.

In the US, we have only two political parties and a much larger and more diverse country. Consequently, you don’t see as much of the systemic sectoral biases like that. Instead, what you get is that Democrats and Republicans compete vigorously across the country on a fairly consistent left-right axis, but in the states that benefit from farm subsidies everyone’s for farm subsidies while in Michigan everyone’s for auto bailouts and in Delaware everyone shills for credit card companies and so forth. But the basic principle is the same — politicians have ideologies, but they also have constituents and their constituents have interests, and to succeed in politics you’re going to have to serve those interests and that means you can’t be a really rigid ideologue. You’re never going to have a pure free market politics getting anywhere.

Someone in comments quipped sarcastically when he read I was going to be in Geneva that he was looking forward to jejune commentary on Geneva public transit. I don’t really know what jejune means, but it doesn’t sound good. At any rate, as this alert fellow noticed, I don’t like to go anywhere without offering uninformed remarks on local transit issues.

So as for Geneva, let’s start with the trolleybus. There seem to be quite a lot of these around, and I also saw a bunch in Nizhny Novgorod and a few (but only a few) in the Boston area but I think they’re generally rare in the United States. The idea is that you take a bus (albeit in Geneva a long articulated bus) and power it by electricity rather than gas or diesel. The electricity is supplied not via an awesome new engine/battery technology, but rather by an overhead wire à la a streetcar. This combination gives you the low emissions of a streetcar, the low operating costs of a streetcar, and much of the air of permanence of a streetcar but with fewer of the fixed startup costs of a streetcar. In other words, it’s some pretty useful technology that would probably be worth considering in many cities for the most popular bus routes.

That said, whenever I see a low emissions modification of a bus (trolley bus, bus powered by natural gas, etc.) I worry that forests are getting missed for the trees. Even if you take the dirtiest bus imaginable, two dozen people taking the bus to work every day creates much less pollution than two dozen people driving two dozen cars. And the availability of a good bus commuting option for some of your city’s citizens also reduces the volume of car ownership per capita which has further pollution-reduction effects. In other words — getting people to take the bus, any bus, rather than drive is a big win for the environment.

Under the circumstances, the precise environmental quality of your buses should be a distinctly secondary consideration. Your primary concern, even in strictly environmental concerns, shouldn’t be trying to reduce the footprint of individual buses it should be trying to make the bus a more appealing option. Spending marginal dollars on increasing the frequency and overall cleanliness/appeal of your buses and bus shelters can have major environmental impacts. So can creating and enforcing key stretches of dedicated bus lanes. Better maps to help sporadic users and new residents come to understand their bus network are nice. And using modern technology to allow shelters to provide digital readouts showing how soon the next bus is coming (as the DC Metro does for trains, and as a few of the shelters here in Geneva seem to do) makes the whole enterprise lower stress.