Category: Politics

All posts on what Bismarck called “the art of the possible”

America’s upcoming midterms

In some ways, it is not surprising that American policy-makers are intensely focused on short-term popularity. Every two years, the entire House of Representatives and a third of the Senate are up for re-election. Anxiety about getting turfed about by annoyed voters naturally makes politicians hesitant to support anything where the pain is near-term and the benefits far off.

Looking forward to this November’s midterm elections, most people expect the Democrats to get a thumping. Just how big a thumping is, of course, a matter of discussion. During the past few months, many people have raised the possibility that the Democrats could lose control of the House of Representatives. Now, some are wondering if they might lose the Senate as well. That possibility is certainly less likely, since only a third of the Senate is elected at a time. For the Republicans to gain control, they would basically need to win every competitive seat while not losing any that are considered safe for them.

Turnouts are always lower for midterm elections than for those that also include presidential voting. Indeed, mechanisms for getting supporters to actually vote are a key part of electoral tactics. That can include things like incorporating referenda on issues that fire up your base, whether they are on banning gay marriage or trying to simplify unionization. Another is to instill fear in your supporters that their opponents are about to triumph. Indeed, one reason why members of the Obama administration have been hinting about the possibility of Republican victories in November is to try to frighten Democratic supporters to the polls.

Tattoo motivations

I had never given much thought to why people in their teens and twenties are so often interested in getting piercings and tattoos. Recently, however, it occurred to me that one rather valid reason for doing so is so they can assert ownership of their own bodies, particularly in defiance of their parents. Having never felt as though I had less than complete ownership of my body, that potential motivation had never occurred to me before.

Arguably, it is especially important for young women to take such a stance (though there are obviously many ways of doing so). That is because their bodies have much more commonly been seen as the property of others, or at least under their control – whether the outside entity is the state, family, or some religious structure.

Open thread: the future of Russia

After the collapse of communism, many in the West assumed that democracy and free market capitalism would triumph in the former Soviet Union. Instead, it seems the chaos in the post-communist period permitted the emergence of economically powerful oligarchs, as well as massive growth in the wealth and power of organized crime groups. Now, former members of the security services, led by Vladamir Putin, are continuing to cement their own control.

There is much about Russia that is worrisome: the suppression of the free press and murder of journalists; continued appalling conduct in Chechnya; ongoing attempts to dominate neighbouring states, including through war; the exploitation of Europe’s dependence on Russian fossil fuels; and more.

What do readers think might happen to Russia in the next 25 or 50 years? What are the most desirable and undesirable plausible outcomes, from the perspective of the Russian people, the world as a whole, central European states, the European Union, and the United States? What effect would different potential outcomes in Russia have on Canada?

How to shift the US Congress?

Writing for Grist, Randy Rieland has come up with a summary of arguments about why cap-and-trade is dead in the United States for now. He is right to say that the blame lies primarily with Congress, rather than with the Obama administration. Congress is the most powerful branch of government, and has been highly effective at blocking environmental legislation in the past. While the Democratic leadership in Congress is theoretically allied with the administration in the White House, even the two together clearly haven’t been able to overcome the wall of opposition to meaningful climate policies that has been constructed by Republicans, or the cowardice of moderate Democrats who are unwilling to fight to address this key problem.

The stragic question now becomes how to change Congressional behaviour, and do so before climate-related disasters become so frequent as to finally discredit climate change deniers completely. We cannot afford to wait that long, both because of the physical lags in the Earth’s climate system and the lags in our own infrastructure deployment. By the time the full danger of climate change is unambiguously on display, it will be too late to avoid some terrible effects. It will also be too late for the relatively unintrusive policies being proposed today to work. Sterner stuff will be required.

Age and openness to new ideas

I wonder whether there is a time in life by which our aesthetic and political preferences have been essentially locked in, after which we are no longer fully capable of integrating new ideas. It certainly seems plausible that this could be true. It could also help to explain the broader pattern of social change in society; as each generation rises to positions of influence, they bring with them the intuitive assumptions about politics and ethics that they absorbed when they were younger. Often, that means being willing to accept things that were outside the bounds of what was acceptable for the generation before, but which are less radical than what will be accepted by the generation after.

If true, this dynamic could also be a major reason for which people dying is an important form of social progress. To take one example, as there have been fewer and fewer surviving parents who would not tolerate having their child in an inter-racial relationship, the less taboo such relationships have become within society generally. I have also read about how scientific progress depends to some extent upon the death of highly respected individuals who have become overly wedded to new ideas in their old age, and who are now keeping the mainstream from accepting what the latest research has shown to be true about the universe.

Obviously, not everybody has their preferences and instincts ossified at exactly the same time, or to the same extent. That said, if there is evidence for such a phenomenon existing generally, it could have political and sociological importance. For one thing, it would highlight the importance of the education system and the overall collective of information available to youth, when it comes to determining what society is going to look like a few decades from now.

Do people think such a phenomenon is real? If so, what would the most important consequences be?

Costing legislation

In the United States, the Congressional Budget Office has a mandate to provide non-partisan advice on the economic and budgetary decisions on the wide array of programs covered by the federal budget. They have a staff of 235, and a budget of $44 million per year.

By contrast, Canada’s Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) has a staff of 11, and can only undertake analyses on a selected subset of bills. This is problematic for a few reasons. For one, it gives the impression of some level of partisanship, when the PBO can choose which bills to study and when to release results. For another, it leaves Members of Parliament ill informed about what the costs associated with legislation will be. They really ought to have an accurate non-partisan analysis before the second reading vote.

Perhaps it would make sense if Canada enlarged the role of the PBO, to include a mandatory analysis on any piece of legislation likely to cost over a certain amount, such as $500 million. By making the selection of projects for analysis largely automatic, the PBO would be made to seem non-partisan. The quality of the data that drives Parliamentary decisions would also likely be improved.

US Senate fails again on climate

So, it seems the possibility of a cap-and-trade system in the United States to help deal with climate change has been killed by Congress, at least for the moment. As I have argued before, if the current generation fails to take action to prevent dangerous or catastrophic climate change, that failure is what history will remember us by. We will be remembered as the people who had all the necessary information, but who were so selfish and dysfunctional that they couldn’t step up and take even the first small step.

I remain unimpressed with humanity.

Carbon pricing and competitiveness

Writing in The Globe and Mail, Roger Martin and Alexander Wood argue that carbon pricing could make Canada more economically competitive:

The logic underlying such an argument is fairly straightforward. Carbon pricing can help drive innovation in technologies and business models that promote resource efficiency, particularly in relation to energy. For a country such as Canada, which annually ranks among the most energy-inefficient economies in the world, this presents a huge opportunity. That is because there is an increasingly strong case for how improving resource efficiency translates into improvements in productivity, which is the Holy Grail of competitiveness for economies such as Canada’s.

Every new argument in favour of carbon pricing is potentially useful, given the key role such policies seem likely to play in encouraging the transition to zero carbon forms of energy. Quite possibly, it is especially useful to develop strong economic arguments, so as to be able to respond to the frequent assertion from those who don’t want to take action on climate change that carbon pricing would cause serious economic harm.

Emotional responses to oil production

When I was a child, I remember seeing working on terrestrial or offshore oil rigs as an heroic profession: using knowledge and technology to do something difficult and important, at considerable risk to your personal safety. No doubt, that view was partly formed through exposure to advertising. Like the military and space programs, oil companies realized a long time ago that the combination of high technology with human dedication is an image that people find compelling. Throw together footage of people in hardhats riding helicopters between giant machines, with intense music in the background, and you can pretty easily create a sense of your company and personnel as impressive. Nonetheless, it still has a certain emotional validity, as long as the interactions you think about are all the voluntary ones: companies accessing oil reserves and then upgrading their crude contents into useful products that serve important functions.

Of course, when you start to think about the involuntary interactions, the waters get substantially muddied. Oil producers and users are both guilty of putting their own needs and desires ahead of those who are inevitably harmed as a consequence of their activities, through routes like air and water pollution and climate change.

Now, when I see ads for oil companies, I respond to them like personal insults. They look like taunts from powerful and politically influential companies that are fully aware of how much damage they are causing, but are happy to continue to do so, while continuing to try to foster the image I used to hold of them as brave technical experts.

Of course, there are still people out there who factually reject the idea that oil production and use causes significant suffering for third parties. From that mindset, it is almost inevitable that you would end up with a profoundly different view of oil producers and consumers. It is not all that surprising, then, that deep aesthetic and political disagreements about how the industry should be treated are ongoing.

Now, it seems like a real shame that so much energy, effort, and money have gone into building up an industry that has proven to be so harmful. If all the intellectual effort that has gone into extracting and processing fossil fuels during the last few decades had been applied instead to the development and deployment of renewable forms of energy, we would be a lot farther along the path to carbon neutrality today.

Top Secret America

Over the last couple of years, The Washington Post has undertaken a major project to document the growth of the government security apparatus in the United States. It is entitled: ‘Top Secret America.’

Three long and interesting articles are now online:

One inescapable conclusion is that none of this – the massive secret compounds, the turf wars between agencies, and the changes in how government functions – could be undone quickly or easily.

It is just a new reality for the United States.