The Party That Ruined the Planet [feedly]

The Party That Ruined the Planet
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/12/opinion/climate-change-republicans.html

text only content:

The most terrifying aspect of the U.S. political drama isn't the revelation that the president has abused his power for personal gain. If you didn't see that coming from the day Donald Trump was elected, you weren't paying attention.

No, the real revelation has been the utter depravity of the Republican Party. Essentially every elected or appointed official in that party has chosen to defend Trump by buying into crazy, debunked conspiracy theories. That is, one of America's two major parties is beyond redemption; given that, it's hard to see how democracy can long endure, even if Trump is defeated.

However, the scariest reporting I've seen recently has been about science, not politics. A new federal report finds that climate change in the Arctic is accelerating, matching what used to be considered worst-case scenarios. And there are indications that Arctic warming may be turning into a self-reinforcing spiral, as the thawing tundra itself releases vast quantities of greenhouse gases.

Catastrophic sea-level rise, heat waves that make major population centers uninhabitable, and more are now looking more likely than not, and sooner rather than later.


But the terrifying political news and the terrifying climate news are closely related.

Why, after all, has the world failed to take action on climate, and why is it still failing to act even as the danger gets ever more obvious? There are, of course, many culprits; action was never going to be easy.

But one factor stands out above all others: the fanatical opposition of America's Republicans, who are the world's only major climate-denialist party. Because of this opposition, the United States hasn't just failed to provide the kind of leadership that would have been essential to global action, it has become a force against action.


And Republican climate denial is rooted in the same kind of depravity that we're seeing with regard to Trump.

As I've written in the past, climate denial was in many ways the crucible for Trumpism. Long before the cries of "fake news," Republicans were refusing to accept science that contradicted their prejudices. Long before Republicans began attributing every negative development to the machinations of the "deep state," they were insisting that global warming was a gigantic hoax perpetrated by a vast global cabal of corrupt scientists.

And long before Trump began weaponizing the power of the presidency for political gain, Republicans were using their political power to harass climate scientists and, where possible, criminalize the practice of science itself.



Perhaps not surprisingly, some of those responsible for these abuses are now ensconced in the Trump administration. Notably, Ken Cuccinelli, who as attorney general of Virginia engaged in a long witch-hunt against the climate scientist Michael Mann, is now at the Department of Homeland Security, where he pushes anti-immigrant policies with, as The Times reports, "little concern for legal restraints."

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But why have Republicans become the party of climate doom? Money is an important part of the answer: In the current cycle Republicans have received 97 percent of political contributions from the coal industry, 88 percent from oil and gas. And this doesn't even count the wing nut welfare offered by institutions supported by the Koch brothers and other fossil-fuel moguls.

However, I don't believe that it's just about the money. My sense is that right-wingers believe, probably correctly, that there's a sort of halo effect surrounding any form of public action. Once you accept that we need policies to protect the environment, you're more likely to accept the idea that we should have policies to ensure access to health care, child care, and more. So the government must be prevented from doing anything good, lest it legitimize a broader progressive agenda.

Still, whatever the short-term political incentives, it takes a special kind of depravity to respond to those incentives by denying facts, embracing insane conspiracy theories and putting the very future of civilization at risk.

Unfortunately, that kind of depravity isn't just present in the modern Republican Party, it has effectively taken over the whole institution. There used to be at least some Republicans with principles; as recently as 2008 Senator John McCain co-sponsored serious climate-change legislation. But those people have either experienced total moral collapse (hello, Senator Graham) or left the party.

The truth is that even now I don't fully understand how things got this bad. But the reality is clear: Modern Republicans are irredeemable, devoid of principle or shame. And there is, as I said, no reason to believe that this will change even if Trump is defeated next year.

The only way that either American democracy or a livable planet can survive is if the Republican Party as it now exists is effectively dismantled and replaced with something better — maybe with a party that has the same name, but completely different values. This may sound like an impossible dream. But it's the only hope we have.


Paul Krugman has been an Opinion columnist since 2000 and is also a Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He won the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on international trade and economic geography. @PaulKrugman -- via my feedly newsfeed

Who to blame for Johnson winning? [feedly]

time for a "deeper look" indeed...but there's the little problem of "INCOMING!!!!" Duck!

Who to blame for Johnson winning?
http://mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2019/12/who-to-blame-for-johnson-winning.html

When I wrote thisin July I desperately wanted to be wrong. (Of course I was wrong about a lot of the details but alas not the main point.) But it soon became clear that, compared to 2017, the press had had two more years to paint Corbyn as marxist, unpatriotic and racist, and for enough people that would be a reason not to vote Labour. Among others who supported Brexit, they really did believe that Johnson was the man to get Brexit done.

Many will say that Labour lost badly because they had a left wing manifesto. They always do after each election defeat. I doubt that has much to do with this defeat, although the large amount of giveaways to the wrong people was probably a factor. The problem was Corbyn, not Labour's manifesto. And while many voted against the media image of Corbyn more than anything else, it has to be said that Corbyn's past and his failures over the last three years made the media's job very easy.

We should of course blame the media. The right wing press became part of the Tories propaganda war. The Tories lied like never before, just as some of them did in 2016. The BBC was even more careful not to do anything that might upset the government, and it has a real problem when 'accidents' keep advantaging one side. But the moment the BBC played a key role in electing Boris Johnson was very specific, and it goes back to the day Johnson got his deal with the EU.

What the media should have asked at that moment is why Johnson had accepted a deal that was essentially the first the EU had proposed, but which he and other ERG members had said at the time was unacceptable. Why had he capitulated? Was it all just a ruse so he could become Prime Minister?

Nobody thought a deal was possible, gushed Laura Kuenssberg, repeating one of CCHQ's lines to take. No sense from her of what had actually happened. As I noted here, the BBC's Brussels correspondent got it about right, but the tone of the reporting was set by Kuenssberg. Whether this misrepresentation of Johnson's deal was deliberate or the result of ignorance I don't know, but it was critical.

Of course the Tory and Brexit press also took CCHQ's lines to take. The BBC is the only chance most voters have to get a check on what their newspapers say. It did not provide any such check on this occasion. And it is critical because it allows Johnson to say, as he has, that it was his unique abilities that helped him achieve a deal that everyone said was impossible. No doubt he will say the same when he refuses an extension in July next year because the EU have refused to give him the deal he wants.

Voters who still believe in leaving the EU were left with the impression, thanks to the BBC (and of course the Brexit press), that Johnson was the person who could deal with the EU and get Brexit done. They were not told the truth that he was the person who had helped waste almost a year in squabbling in part so he could get to be Prime Minister. So Leavers are left with an image of competence rather than the reality, which is that Johnson is quite prepared to damage the economy and the workings of democracy just for his own personal gain.

But there is little that Labour or the Liberal Democrats can do about media bias while they are out of power. Undoubtedly a key reason Johnson won was because the Remain/anti-Johnson vote was split. It is depressing and very worrying how many people voted for Johnson, our own Donald Trump, but while the Electoral College gifted Trump his victory despite losing the popular vote, so First Past The Post (FPTP) gave Johnson his victory. A lot of people voted tactically, but not enough.

Both Labour and Liberal Democrats are to blame for not cooperating. While Labour's failure was not a surprise, I had hoped the Liberal Democrats would take the opportunity to seize the moral high ground and not put up candidates in Labour marginals like Canterbury. It didn't, and instead it spent too much of its time attacking Labour in the futile belief that this would win over some Tory voters. I suspect they would have been much more successful if they had been honest that the best way to stop Brexit was through a minority Labour government dependent on LibDem votes.

The ultimate responsibility for the split vote must nevertheless rest with Jeremy Corbyn.

The big surge in the Liberal Democrat vote from below 10% to over 20% at its peak began in the Spring of this year, and it coincided with a collapse in Labour's vote. This quite remarkable change in fortunes cannot be put down to a biased media, but is obviously a Brexit effect.

Throughout 2018 Labour had managed to stay the obvious choice for Remainers, as it had been in the 2017 election. But as soon as May finalised her Withdrawal Agreement it was clear triangulating would no longer work, and Labour would have to take a position. The polls suggested Labour would lose votes by not supporting Remain, but as I notedin December last year too many within Labour were in denial.

Labour entering into talks with May to get Brexit done was I suspect the final straw for many Remainers. They didn't go to the new and short lived Remain party but the Liberal Democrats and the Greens. The European election was a disaster, but shifting Labour's policy seemed like trying to get blood out of a stone. I really think if they had moved at the beginning of 2019 to where they ended up things would have been rather different. Instead the Labour leadership single-handedly created the revival of the Liberal Democrats. That, as well as his failure to deal with antisemitism and some of his intolerant supporters, are major factors behind this defeat. 

Easy to say in hindsight? Not really. I said these things in 2016 in the second Labour leadership election that Corbyn won. I said it throughout late 2018 and early 2019 was the Remain vote became disenchanted with Corbyn. But the behaviour of Labour MPs made an alternative to Corbyn impossible in 2016 then, as it had been in 2015, and after the 2017 general election result he was never going to be removed.

Could we have stopped Johnson if Labour had not allowed the Remain vote to split. To be honest I don't know. That is how negative the media's image of Corbyn has been. Some Lexiters will say it is all Remainers' fault, but that is a nonsense position. As a result of this defeat we have reached the end of the line for the Remain cause. It has been three years of experts and people who made themselves experts trying to explain why Brexit was such a bad idea, but nothing we could do was able to counteract the propaganda of the Brexit press and the knowledge as opinion attitude of the broadcast media, and particularly the BBC. The really striking finding after three years when the truth about Brexit became crystal clear to anyone wanting or able to see it is that the number of people wanting Brexit changed only a little, and that is what gave Johnson his majority.

Now that we have elected our own Donald Trump, I'm reminded of a talk Paul Krugman gave after Trump won. At the time I wrote a postabout it, and I ended it like this:

"We can, and should, continue to rage against the dying of the light. What is difficult, in this time of crazy, is being able to put that rage aside, and engage in a form of quietism, a retreat from the here and now of political discourse. Not a retreat into any kind of acceptance of where we now are, but instead into asking what and why, and from the answers to those questions to planning for the time when facts get back into fashion. But more than that. Using the answers to the what and why to prevent us lapsing back into our current post-truth world."

I will continue to rage, but not quite as often as I have done since the blog began almost exactly eight years ago. It is time for deeper thought about how we get back to the light and ensure that we never again lapse into a post-truth world.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

The Opioid epidemic is not over -- Nor is the inequality crisis, despite low uneployment

The opioid crisis: A consequence of U.S. economic decline?

Iris Marechal  

The opioid epidemic continues to devastate families and communities across the United States, causing serious health and socioeconomic crises. The high prescription rate for opioids and the subsequent misuse of this medication by millions of Americans accelerated addiction and has led to a four-fold increase in the rate of overdoses since 1999. Estimates indicate that more than 90 Americans die every day from opioid overdoses. This drug misuse costs the federal government $78.5 billion per year in health care, addiction treatment, and productivity loss, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton at Princeton University attribute the sharp increase in drug overdoses between 1999 and 2015 to "deaths of despair" rather than to the increased ease of obtaining opioids: That is, their research suggests that higher drug suicides are attributable to social and economic factors such as a prolonged economic decline in many parts of the United States. They show that white Americans are more affected by the opioid epidemic, yet less affected by economic downturns than other racial and ethnic groups in the country. (See Figure 1)

Figure 1

Why are whites experiencing a more dramatic rise in drug mortality than nonwhites? Other researchers associate this growth with the drug and public health environment rather than economic conditions. Research scientist Kyong Ae Ko and his colleagues at the University of Texas MD Cancer Medical Center find that the availability and the use of risky drugs are of particular importance in rising drug fatalities. Health scholars Ashta Singhal at the Boston University School of Dental Medicine, Yu-Yu Tien at the University of Iowa College of Pharmacy, and Rene Hsia at the Department of Emergency Medicine and Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies at the University of California, San Francisco, find similar results. Both studies observe that whites have been prescribed more opioids than nonwhites, and assert that this fact explains the racial-ethnic disparities in drug overdose.

In a recently released paper, public policy professor Christopher Ruhm at the University of Virginia sheds further light on the debate over whether the opioid crisis is health related or economy related. He assesses the relative contribution of the opioid addiction crisis and socioeconomic crisis from 1999 to 2015 in 3,098 counties with consistent boundaries over the time period across the country. As a first step, the author measures the impact of long-run economic changes on drug and alcohol suicide by labor-market outcomes, household wealth, and international trade shocks. Ruhm finds that counties that are more affected by economic decline show higher drug mortality than those with better performance. Yet he also finds that the size of this effect is not large enough to explain the opioid epidemic.

Overall, he estimates that economic conditions explain roughly one-tenth of the drug death increase. Thus, he says the "deaths of despair" theory fails to adequately explain the fatal drug epidemic.

He also finds evidence that the "drug environment hypothesis"—that the availability and the cost of drugs in legal and illicit markets mostly explain the increase in overdose deaths—is valid. Ruhm observes a shift in the nature of the drug involved in fatal overdoses: The beginning of the analysis period was dominated by a rise in opioid analgesic overdoses, while since 2010 overdoses mainly involved illicit opioids such as heroin. If economic conditions were the key driver of the increase in overdose deaths, then there would be no reason for such a shift.

Moreover, he also finds that overdose death rates vary with sex and age, further validating the drug environment hypothesis. Indeed, the groups at higher risk of abusing prescription opioids (females and older adults) have the largest increase in drug death rates early in the analysis period, while males and young adults (a group with higher risk of illicit drug abuse) experience an explosive growth in drug death rates around 2010. Thus, he argues that a change in the drug environment over these years and the people more at risk of specific drug abuse were differently affected.

President Donald Trump in October declared the opioid crisis a national health emergency. Further research into the economic causes of the crisis identified by economists Case and Deaton and the drug environment causes pinpointed by an array of health experts would go a long way toward developing federal, state, and local policies to combat the opioid crisis effectively.

Iris Maréchal is a Fall intern at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth and a French exchange student at the Johns Hopkins University within the Aitchison Fellowship Program.

--

John Case
Harpers Ferry, WV

Enlighten Radio

Socialist Economics

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War on Terror Rages on because the West Won’t Learn from Two Decades of Failure [feedly]

War on Terror Rages on because the West Won't Learn from Two Decades of Failure
https://www.globalpolicyjournal.com/blog/13/12/2019/war-terror-rages-because-west-wont-learn-two-decades-failure

Eighteen years ago the head of the UK's military warned against relying on military solutions alone. But governments still aren't listening.

Things are not going as well in Afghanistan as the US government would have you believe. Not from a US point of view, anyway. This week The Washington Post claimed that classified government reports reveal a persistent campaign to put the war in the best light, "making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable". This may come as a surprise to many, but not to those few media outlets that have taken a more distanced view of the war and its supposed progress.

Right from the earliest days there were indications of major problems, but such was the euphoria that the US military had been able to defeat the Taliban and al-Qaida within three months of 9/11 that these counted for nothing in the public mind. George W. Bush drove on regardless: barely a month after that victory he used his 2002 State of the Union address to extend the war against al-Qaida into a far wider conflict with an 'axis of evil'. Iraq, Iran and North Korea were the first enemies to be dealt with, but with Libya, Syria and Cuba also in line for action.

Not all the western military were convinced that this was a good way forward. One of the most remarkable indicators was included in a report in openDemocracy in January 2001, months before 9/11 and the 'war on terror' that Bush declared against the evil axis. It reported a speech that the head of the UK's armed forces at the time, Admiral Michael Boyce, gave to an influential audience at the Royal United Services Institute in London:

He warned against the idea that a war on terrorism could be won by intensive military action while failing to recognise the root causes of the problem. More than that, he warned that the use of excessive force could even tend to radicalise Islamic opinion.

Why is it significant to recall this, eighteen years later? Dig a little further and an interesting element emerges which is as relevant now as then. Boyce was a much less political chief of defence staff than his predecessor General (later Lord) Guthrie. He tended to draw his analysis from astute military sources, so it is especially significant that he was prepared to be so blunt just as the US was area-bombing the Taliban. Over the following months, there were all too obvious signs that all was not going well for the Pentagon in Afghanistan.

By 31 December, openDemocracy was reporting that the great majority of the several thousand al-Qaida militias in Afghanistan had simply disappeared from view, with only a few hundred of captured or killed. If that was true for al-Qaida then it was even more so for the tens of thousands of Taliban militias. Time after time they had retreated and dispersed in the face of the combined US/Northern Alliance warlord forces, often taking their weapons with them. For most of the Taliban it was a matter of slipping back into their own towns, villages or city districts, while many al-Qaida fighters went over the border into Pakistan.

Furthermore, by early 2002 and within weeks of Bush defining the axis of evil, the war against the Taliban and al-Qaida was expanding. One example was a US-led coalition operation against insurgent forces around the town of Sirkanel in the mountains south of Kabul. What was intended as an operation involving a thousand US troops backed up by local forces went badly wrong almost from the start: the strength of opposing forces was badly underestimated. As openDemocracy reported in March that year:

As the conflict developed, US capabilities had to be reinforced by five Cobra attack helicopters and two UH-53 transport helicopters flown in from an amphibious support ship, the Bon Homme Richard, in the Arabian Sea.

An unconfirmed report from the BBC suggested that the five helicopters were to replace a similar number damaged during the fighting. The fighting has involved intensive use of bombers, AC-130 gunships and thermobaric (fuel-air explosive) weapons, with 450 bombs dropped by US and French aircraft in the first four days alone.

Within four years, the Taliban were spreading their influence right across Afghanistan. Western troop numbers grew from barely 5,000 at the end of 2002 to 130,000 a decade later. Yet the war continues to this day.

Where that early experience fits in to the present day is that we are now assured that the 'war on terror' is finally dying down. Donald Trump even declares that the West has won. In Western media there is little mention of the return of ISIS and their like in Syria and Iraq, hardly any coverage of Libya, Yemen, Somalia or Afghanistan, and little awareness of what is happening across the Sahel region of the Sahara.

Occasionally there is an event that attracts attention, a mass attack by several hundred paramilitaries in Niger this week being an example. Groups reportedly linked to al-Qaida and ISIS overran a military base killing 71 Nigerien soldiers as fighting across the country escalated in spite of the presence of thousands of French and regional forces supporting the Nigerien government in its counterinsurgency operations.

Behind the scenes, even now, experts may be telling the British, US, French and other Western governments that Admiral Boyce's eighteen-year-old thoughts on the need to recognise the root causes of violence and to avoid inciting further radicalisation are just as relevant now as then. None of them seems able to take this on board, however, and it may be another two decades before we learn of their wilful disregard for a painful reality.

 

 

Paul Rogers is professor in the department of peace studies at Bradford University, northern England. He is openDemocracy's international security adviser, and has been writing a weekly column on global security since 28 September 2001; he also writes a monthly briefing for the Oxford Research Group. His latest book is 'Irregular War: ISIS and the New Threat from the Margins' (IB Tauris, 2016), which follows 'Why We're Losing the War on Terror' (Polity, 2007), and 'Losing Control: Global Security in the 21st Century' (Pluto Press, 3rd edition, 2010). He is on Twitter at: @ProfPRogers

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 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Update on Carbon Capture and Storage [feedly]

summarizing a new UN report on carbon capture and its role in meeting emissions targets.

Update on Carbon Capture and Storage
http://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2019/12/update-on-carbon-capture-and-storage.html

In my experience, carbon capture and storage (CCS) is often viewed as a quirky technological possibility, not of central significance to the overall issue of reducing the rise of atmospheric carbon. This perception is incorrect. The Global CCS Institute provides an overview in Global Status of CCS 2019. As the report notes: 

Analysis by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and International Energy Agency (IEA) has consistently shown that CCS is an essential part of the lowest cost path towards meeting climate targets. The IPCC's Fifth Annual Assessment Report (AR5) showed that excluding CCS from the portfolio of technologies used to reduce emissions would lead to a doubling in cost - the largest cost increase from the exclusion of any technology. ... To limit global temperature rises to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, the world must reach net zero emissions by around 2050. Most modelling scenarios show that this will require significant deployment of negative emissions technologies. Bioenergy with CCS (BECCS) is one of the few available that can deliver to the necessary scale.

In the report, Nicholas Stern adds:

One of the opportunities that we have at hand, carbon capture, use and storage, will play a vital role as indicated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Report on Global Warming of 1.5 ºC. The diversity of its applications is immense; from direct air capture delivering negative emissions, to the ability to prevent infrastructure emissions lock-ins by abating existing infrastructure in the industrial and power sectors, capturing, using and storing carbon will be a vital instrument in reaching net-zero emissions goals.

The report offers a detailed overview of report of CCS facilities around the world in various stages from early development to actually operational. However, the actual operational CCS facilities are currently measured in dozens, when they need to be measured in hundreds or thousands. Sally Benson, a professor of energy engineering at Stanford, writes about CCUS, or "carbon capture, utilization, and storage":

Over the last 20 years, the role of carbon capture and storage has evolved from "nice to have," to "necessary," and now, CCUS is inevitable. We need Gt* scale CCUS now. ... [W]e have an ambition gap between the rate that CCUS is growing today – about 10 per cent a year, compared to the rate needed to reach a Gt/year by 2040. If we could just double scale-up rate to 20 per cent per year, and sustain that to 2040, bingo, we reach 1 Gt/year by 2040.

Here's a partial sense of the range of possibilities for CCS. Perhaps the most obvious is to apply this technology at places where fossil fuels are being burned. For example, when burning natural gas:

Eliminating almost all greenhouse gas emissions along the natural gas value chain is necessary if we are to meet the target of net-zero emissions by mid-century. More than 700 Mtpa of indirect CO2 emissions – almost equal to the emissions of Germany in 2016 – could be eliminated from oil and gas operations through the application of CCS. Applying CCS at gas processing facilities costs around USD 20-25 per tonne of CO2.

But the technology can also be applied to other industrial operations that emit high levels of carbon, including factories that make cement, steel, and certain chemicals.

The good news is that as CCS expands in various ways, the cost of reducing carbon emissions in this way is falling.

There is strong evidence that capture costs have already reduced. ... Two of the projects, Boundary Dam and Petra Nova are operating today. The cost of capture reduced from over USD100 per tonne CO2 at the Boundary Dam facility to below USD per tonne CO2 for the Petra Nova facility, some three years later. The most recent studies show capture costs (also using mature amine-based capture systems) for facilities that plan to commence operation in 2024-28, cluster around USD 43 per tonne of CO2. New technologies at pilot plant scale promise capture  costs around USD33 per tonne of CO2.

Just storing carbon underground is certain possible, but from an economic view, it's more productive to store the carbon in a form that gets some additional economic value from it.  One of the most prominent existing economic uses for stored CO2 is--heavy irony alert here--injecting it underground to extract more oil. But there are other examples: captured CO2 might be used as a feedstock for certain chemicals, polymers, concrete, and even fuels.

One possible future use for captured carbon emphasized in the report is in the production of clean hydrogen. There some recent buzz that clean-burning hydrogen might be greatly expanded in the future, but the question is how that hydrogen gets produced in first place. The report notes:

Currently, 98 per cent of global hydrogen production is from unabated fossil fuels, around three quarters stemming from natural gas. CO2 emissions from its production are approximately 830 Mtpa, equivalent to the annual emissions of the UK in 201894. ... Low-carbon hydrogen has been produced through gas reforming and coal gasification with CCS, for almost two decades. For example, the Great Plains Synfuel Plant in North Dakota, US, commenced operation in 2000 and produces approximately 1,300 tonnes of hydrogen (in the form of hydrogen rich syngas) per day, from brown coal.  Hydrogen produced from coal or gas with CCS is the lowest cost clean hydrogen by a significant margin and requires less than one tenth of the electricity needed by electrolysis.

Finally, discussions of this topic inevitably veer into the possibility of "bio-energy with carbon capture and storage," or BECCS. This notion here is to burn biomass of some kind for energy--like wood pellets--but then to capture and store the carbon. This would be a form of "negative carbon" energy. This approach might only make economic sense in a limited number of locations, but it's because it's an actual subtraction of carbon from the atmosphere, it's worth keeping in mind. 

I'll just add that focusing carbon capture and storage on the industrial sector does not exhaust the possibilities. For example, I've noted some evidence that saving the whales could lead to increased ocean plankton and store additional carbon in that way.  As another approach, certain agricultural methods have the result of sequestering more carbon in the soil, as discussed by Greg Ip in the Wall Street Journal, "How to Get Rid of Carbon Emissions: Pay Farmers to Bury Them," September 11, 2019).  For exampleA Boston-based company called Indigo Ag Inc. is setting up a market where those who want or need to reduce their carbon emissions can pay farmers $15 to follow practices that will have the effect of sequestering  one metric ton of carbon dioxide in the soil.

Perhaps the most aggressive and unproven possibilities for carbon capture and storage involve finding ways to extract carbon from the air directly. Of course, such methods only work if most of the energy going into them comes from non-carbon sources. For example, there's ageothermal power plant in Iceland which is drawing carbon out of the air--admittedly at modest scale--and then using a chemical process to turn the carbon into rock. If this technology advances and becomes more cost-effective, it will be interesting to calculate whether geothermal energy sites around the world might be used for this purpose.

Another technology that seems like a promising long-shot (if that's not a contradiction in terms) is being pushed by Project Vesta. Their website is full of position papers and background research arguing that if olivine rock was spread on beaches, it will undergo a chemical reaction as it mixes with seawater that absorbs CO2 from the atmosphere and turns it into rock. The project offers theoretical calculations that this approach could negate all of the current levels of atmospheric carbon emissions at a plausible cost--but they are just now working on a "test beach" experiment to get hard evidence.

Other than the enthusiasts at Project Vesta, none of the sources described here make any claim that carbon capture and storage can be a sufficient answer to holding down the rise of atmospheric carbon. But many of the sources here see it as a necessary and underappreciated part of the overall puzzle. Ultimately, the growth of a CCS industry is going to depend heavily on government. If the government provides clear incentives for carbon emissions to decline, like a carbon tax or regulations, then CCS will grow faster. If the government in addition makes it straightforward to site carbon storage areas without undue regulatory delays or legal risks, and add some financial incentives for such investments, then CCS will grow faster still  

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Rents Have Risen More Than Incomes in Nearly Every State Since 2001 [feedly]

Rents Have Risen More Than Incomes in Nearly Every State Since 2001
https://www.cbpp.org/blog/rents-have-risen-more-than-incomes-in-nearly-every-state-since-2001

Growth in median rents has outpaced growth in median renter income since 2001 in nearly every state, as we explain in our updated state rental assistance fact sheets. About 23 million low-income renters pay more than half of their income for housing, partly due to this gap between rental costs and income. While the need for additional federal rental assistance continues to grow, federal investment largely remains stagnant.

Renters' incomes generally are recovering from the 2001 and 2007-2009 recessions but, in nearly half of states, the median renter household still earned less in 2018 than in 2001 in inflation-adjusted terms. At the same time, rental costs have risen, including in states where real incomes have fallen. The inflation-adjusted cost of the typical apartment (median rent and utilities) has grown in every state since 2001, with some states home to extreme spikes: rental costs rose 30 percent in California, 40 percent in Hawaii, and 59 percent in the District of Columbia between 2001 and 2018. Delaware and New Hampshire have some of the largest gaps between median rents and median renter incomes; in the latter, real incomes fell 19 percent between 2001 and 2018, while real housing costs grew 8 percent during that time. (See graphic below.)

Rental costs haven't risen as dramatically in every state. In Arkansas, Indiana, Ohio, and Wisconsin, inflation-adjusted rental costs have grown less than 3 percent since 2001. Nevertheless, the real incomes of many renters in these states have dropped since 2001, meaning more affordable housing is still out of reach for many. In Ohio, the typical apartment costs essentially what it did in 2001, but the typical renter household earns 9 percent less.

Typical workers haven't seen their wages grow in years, yet the cost of rental housing continues to rise, squeezing household budgets. A parent working full-time earning the federal minimum wage cannot afford a modest two-bedroom apartment in any state without receiving rental assistance or making tough choices between paying the rent or meeting essential daily needs such as food, medicine, and child care. Parents aren't the only ones struggling to afford their rent. Most working-age, non-disabled renters are working, but at jobs with wages too low to pay the rent.

When low-income renters can't find a decent, affordable home, they're likelier to face eviction and homelessness. Renters across the country pay more than half their income for rent, our fact sheets show, and people in every state, particularly children, experience homelessness. (For more on how to use our rental assistance fact sheets, see our new guide).

Despite the need for rental assistance, more federal dollars go to homeownership subsidies that mainly benefit higher-income households. Fully 3 in 4 low-income renter households in need don't get rental assistance due to limited federal funding. If rents continue to rise, housing affordability problems could worsen, particularly if another recession strains family budgets.

In the short term, the President and Congress should fully fund federal rental assistance for the 10 million low-income renters who now rely on it to afford their homes. Given the overwhelming need, states and localities should also develop or strengthen their own rental assistance programs.

In the long term, policymakers should make significantly expanding rental assistance a top priority for housing policy. Our communities only thrive when we all have access to decent, affordable housing and a roof over our heads.

United StatesAlabamaAlaskaArizonaArkansasCaliforniaColoradoConnecticutDelawareDistrict of ColumbiaFloridaGeorgiaHawaiiIdahoIllinoisIndianaIowaKansasKentuckyLouisianaMaineMarylandMassachusettsMichiganMinnesotaMississippiMissouriMontanaNebraskaNevadaNew HampshireNew JerseyNew MexicoNew YorkNorth CarolinaNorth DakotaOhioOklahomaOregonPennsylvaniaRhode IslandSouth CarolinaSouth DakotaTennesseeTexasUtahVermontVirginiaWashingtonWest VirginiaWisconsinWyoming

Change in Median Rents and Incomes Since 2001

adjusted for inflation

• Median rent (including utilities)
• Median renter household income

'01

'03

'05

'07

'09

'11

'13

'15

'17

-20%

-10%

0%

10%

13%

0%

Source: CBPP tabulations of the Census Bureau's American Community Survey

CENTER ON BUDGET AND POLICY PRIORITIES | CBPP.ORG

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Dean Baker: General Trump’s Strange Offensive in His Trade War [feedly]

General Trump's Strange Offensive in His Trade War
http://cepr.net/publications/op-eds-columns/general-trump-s-strange-offensive-in-his-trade-war

Just when many policy types thought that Donald Trump was about to wind down his trade war with China and work out a deal, he announced that he was in no rush to reach an agreement. He said that he might wait until after the election next year, boasting about the "massive" amount of money he was pulling in from his tariffs.

In addition to his China attack, Trump also imposed tariffs on steel and aluminum from Argentina and Brazil, complaining that they were manipulating their currencies. Moreover, his administration announced plans to put a tariff as high as 100 percent on wine and cheese imported from France in retaliation for France's plans to tax internet services. This tax will largely hit U.S. tech giants like Google and Facebook.

Each of these moves by themselves would seem a bit peculiar; taken together they are truly bizarre. This is similar to a general ordering randomly fired artillery shots. Some hit the opposing army, some hit civilian targets and some shoot backward at his own troops. There is very little sense in what Trump is doing here.

Starting with the China trade war, which is certainly the most economically important, the cycle of retaliatory tariffs is the largest cause of uncertainty in the economy today. Economists often overplay the risks posed by uncertainty, but in this case, they are very real.

It is difficult for a company to plan an investment strategy if it has no idea if tariffs against China will be near zero next year, 25 percent (as they are now for many products), or whether imports from China will be banned altogether, as Trump once threatened. Investment has actually turned negative this year, and the uncertainties created by the trade war are almost certainly the major reason. This has been a major drag on the economy's growth in 2019, which now looks to continue into 2020.

Trump's boast about the "massive" amount of revenue he is getting from his tariffs is bizarre. Apparently, he does not understand that tariffs are taxes, and they are being paid almost entirely by consumers and retailers in the United States.

We know this because the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports every month on the price of goods imported from China. Over the last year, they have fallen by just 1.6 percent. This means, as a first approximation, that if we have a tariff of 25 percent, U.S. retailers or consumers are paying 23.4 percent more for the items they buy from China.

Usually, presidents don't want to be boasting about raising taxes on the middle class in an election year, but apparently Trump feels differently. As I have argued elsewhere, there is a reasonable case for pressing China to raise the value of its currency to make U.S. goods and services relatively more competitive in the world economy.

However, Trump's trade agenda with China has put currency on the back burner and focused on protecting the intellectual property of U.S. corporations. That makes sense if your goal is to redistribute even more income to Bill Gates and other rich people, but it is 100 percent antithetical to a progressive trade policy.

Instead of locking down Boeing and Microsoft's patents and copyrights, we should be focused on pooling innovation, especially in areas like clean energy and health, so that the whole world can benefit from new technology as quickly as possible. But don't look for forward thinking on trade from Trump, or really anyone else in elite policy circles.

Trump's other shots in his trade war are also difficult to understand. While the currencies of both Brazil and Argentina have fallen sharply in the last year against the dollar, this certainly has not been a policy choice. Both countries have actually made considerable efforts to stabilize the value of their currency.

Trump's steel tariffs have a sort of kick-them-when-they-are-down quality. There may be a political motivation in the case of Argentina, where a left-of-center government is taking power this month, but Brazil is being run by a far-right president who is often compared to Trump. To paraphrase the old proverb, there is no honor among fools.

Then we get to the Brie tax. France and other European Union countries are planning to tax internet companies like Google and Amazon based on where their business is rather than where they claim their profits. As it stands now, these companies claim most of their profits in low-tax countries like Ireland.

Taxing corporate profits based on sales is a policy that has been widely supported by economists, including many in the United States. A Democratic president would likely include this in a reform package if they take office in 2021.

Anyhow, to protect Google and the rest, Trump wants to make his campaign contributors pay more for their cheese and wine. This doesn't seem like good policy, but on the plus side, most of us won't have to worry about it too much.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed