Category: Politics

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

Taylor Owen on the Obama victory

Taylor Owen has written a thoughtful post on the Obama election, as seen by a politically aware Canadian. His personal account of the victory and immediate aftermath seems intelligent and grounded:

So all of this makes my reaction to his win all the more odd. The night was emotional, certainly. The weight and responsibility, the fear even, that was clear in his acceptance speech -alone on that long stage- demonstrated the admirable and inspiring marks of his temperament. But the most striking moment for me was after the speech, when he was standing behind the glass wall, looking out at the crowd. He wore the burden that he would from that moment bare. As has been said of Lincoln, Obama perhaps more than anyone since, at that moment, truly knew the melancholy loneliness of the Presidency that awaited him. And like Lincoln, he will likely be a great president. If Lincoln’s challenge was to unite America, Obama’s will surely be to tackle global divisions. A burden if there ever was one.

The next four years will certainly involve a lot of people around the world coming to terms with the reality of an Obama administration. What’s more, it will be an administration that probably never has the freedom it imagined while proposing a platform. Both as the result of events past and upcoming, the Obama presidency will necessary include a lot of reactive behaviour. Hopefully, that will not eliminate the possibility of progressive motion. Indeed, the ability to advance through responding may prove crucial to whether this administration manages to achieve its evident promise or not.

Gore’s five point climate plan

Al Gore has an op-ed in The New York Times in which he argues that energy security and climate change can both be addressed through the same bold set of policies. He highlights five key areas for action:

  1. Incentives for concentrating solar in the Southwest, wind farms from Texas to the Dakotas, and new geothermal capacity.
  2. A national smart grid, including high voltage direct current transmission.
  3. Plug-in hybrids, capable of acting as an energy storage system for the grid.
  4. More efficiently heated, cooled, and lit buildings.
  5. A price on carbon, and an international agreement to succeed Kyoto.

Gore also highlights the importance that those who are now young will play in bringing this about: “The average age of the systems engineers cheering on Apollo 11 from the Houston control room that day was 26, which means that their average age when President Kennedy announced the challenge was 18.” While comparisons to Apollo can be misleading, the exhortation is a convincing one.

Hopefully, Obama realizes the seriousness of this problem and has the political skill to start the rapid transition to a low-carbon economy, and help lead the rest of the world along that path.

Debt and the credit crunch

If there is one thing the ongoing financial crisis demonstrates, it is the need for fiscal discipline. The causes of the crisis call attention to the more problematic characteristics of debt. At the same time, the prospect of bank failures and the curtailing of lending highlight the degree to which debt has a legitimate and important financial role to play. In short, debt incurred to finance investment is often justifiable; debt used to finance consumption is unsustainable.

Perhaps a healthy cultural outcome of the crisis would be the re-stigmatization of debt as a means of accelerating consumption. By all means, it is important for people to be able to access financing in order to fund education and other forms of investment. What is worrisome is the tendency towards low or even negative net savings, as well as taking on debt of an especially pernicious sort: on credit cards. Taking responsibility and making informed choices remains necessary, even if governments choose to regulate financial markets more closely.

People with a clean credit history who are paying credit card interest really ought to look into alternative financing options. Credit card interest rates are often around 20% per year, and minimum monthly payment amounts are just 2% of the outstanding total. That means your debt is growing by 1.67% per month, and you are paying it down by just 2%. The amount of principal being paid off each month is tiny.

Someone who put $1000 on a card with 20% interest, then proceeded to make minimum payments only, would have the debt down to $500 after 210 months (17.5 years), having paid $3043. Sticking to minimum payments, there is still $40 left after 1000 months (83 years), by which time the person would have paid $5838. The credit card company would be delighted for them to keep paying forever. Just by paying off 10% of the balance each month, instead of 2%, the time taken to reduce the debt to $50 becomes 36 months (3 years), at a total cost of $1148.

Both borrowing and lending are activities that need to be undertaken with wisdom and restraint. Hopefully, that will be the message that governments and individuals draw from the world’s present economic woes.

Protecting the new president

Alongside general jubilation about the Obama victory, a number of my friends have expressed their concern about Obama’s personal safety. That certainly seems like a legitimate concern. Four American presidents have been assassinated while in office, and every president since Nixon has faced at least one attempt (though levels of credibility vary). During his victory speech on election night, most people probably noticed the transparent bulletproof barriers set up around the podium.

The Secret Service is certainly taking the threat seriously. According to a Stratfor briefing, Obama got a security detail earlier than any other candidate and, by the end of his campaign, it had grown to the size of a full presidential protection team – unprecedented for a candidate, and a significant strain on the manpower of the service.

Given the likelihood that Obama will be targeted by white supremacists or others – as well as the colossal impact his assassination would likely have – I certainly don’t envy the Secret Service at this point in time. While they have plenty of resources to provide physical protection, as well as identify and break up conspiracies, the risk from disciplined and capable lone wolf operators is impossible to eliminate while maintaining public appearances. Even with the assistance of the FBI, CIA, NSA, etc, there will be a measure of luck involved in ensuring that future close contact with the public does not produce disaster.

Town and country: liberal and conservative

One feature of political geography seems to leap out whenever I look at a map of election results: the more closely together people live, the more liberal they tend to be. Big cities vote Liberal or NDP in Canada, Democratic in the United States. By contrast, small towns and rural areas tend to be more conservative. Two hypotheses occur to me immediately:

  1. Liberal people choose to live in cities.
  2. Living in cities encourages people to be liberal.

To some extent, I think both are plausible.

The first trend is self-reinforcing. Because cities are mostly full of liberals, they attract liberals from conservative areas. Just think of the stereotype of the young gay person who moves to the big city to find a more tolerant community. While it is a stereotype, it does have the ring of truth to it. Similarly, one might expect clustering even within urban areas: with some predominantly liberal areas continuing to attract new liberals, while other relatively conservative areas do likewise.

The second hypothesis is more interesting. I can think of a few reasons for which it might be true. Mostly, they have to do with being exposed to large numbers of other people. Spending time in the company of people of differing races, classes, sexual orientations, and so forth may well reduce your chances of fearing them. I think it is likely that working with and befriending people with cultures and experiences different from your own is generally likely to make you more empathetic, tolerant, and socially progressive. It may also be the case that people in cities tend to get exposed to new ideas more rapidly and often, putting them ahead of the curve in terms of incorporating them into their own philosophies and lives.

At the same time, just spending time in close proximity to a lot of people reinforces the fact that we are all dependent upon one another, and we cannot live our lives in ways that do not affect those around us. In short, people in cities are constantly exposed to economic externalities: both in the positive form, as with public transit, and in the negative form, as with noisy neighbours or automobile exhaust.

Those in sparsely populated regions may be better able to sustain the myth of self-sufficiency, despite how virtually all rural lifestyles in rich states are just as mutually interdependent as urban lifestyles. Arguably, the lack of contact with both different forms of people and with large numbers of densely-packed people contributes to important elements of political conservatism. I realize that two of the underlying arguments above are likely to bother conservative people: essentially, that social conservatism is the product of isolation and fear and that self-reliance is largely a myth. Feel free to debate those positions, as well as the general question of why people of different political inclinations cluster the way they do.

The oil sands in the Obama era

With the election of Barack Obama, Canadian politicians seem to be taking the initiative in raising the issue of future climate change policy in North America. The situation is a complicated one, particularly given tensions between climate change mitigation objectives and aspirations for energy security. A further complication arises because of overlapping jurisdictions. US states, Canadian provinces, and regional initiatives are all working on climate change mitigation. To some extent, this federal government-to-government bid seems designed to supplant that. Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon has expressed the hope that a Canada-US deal could “provide uniformity and supplant the patchwork of plans that are being implemented in various states and provinces.” While uniformly good policies would certainly be a step forward, there is the distinct danger that more innovative and committed jurisdictions will be forced down towards mediocrity, and that time will be wasted as reorganization occurs.

In the end, the oil sands are both a huge financial temptation and a hugely sensitive regional issue. How they end up being treated will have a lot to do with the extent to which national governments are willing to consider overall societal welfare, as opposed to the more volatile interests of specific groups, as well as the degree to which either government is willing to bear political risks in order to achieve their existing mitigation targets. I don’t think it can be realistically argued that current oil sands policy is anything other than selfish and reckless. That is on account of both the near-term ecological damage arising from oil sands extraction and refining, as well as the long-term climatic threats associated with using such dirty fuels.

One element of the Globe and Mail reporting is rather misleading. It says that “the oil sands are comparable to conventional sources of oil, if the companies implement so-called carbon-capture-and-storage technology.” It is a bit laughable to say that two things are comparable, provided an entirely untested technology is instantly deployed in a widespread fashion. Particularly given the falling price of oil, the possibility that oil sands extraction with carbon capture and storage has the potential to be a low-carbon and economically attractive source of energy seems very dubious.

Obama elected

Judging by the blogs I read and the company I was in last night, the historical significance and emotional force of Obama’s victory was universally felt. It was certainly a remarkable evening. After almost a decade in which the American president was selected by slim margins in single swing states, it was impressive to see the election called before Florida had even been decided. Obama clearly has a strong mandate, and we should all be hoping that he proves as effective and capable in government as he has been on the campaign trail. Obviously, there are a lot of immediate problems that need to be sorted out, at the same time as we need to be laying the critical groundwork for the transition to a sustainable global economy.

Somewhat surprisingly, I think the best speech of the night was actually McCain’s concession. It was the best speech I have ever seen him give. One might cynically observe that it was only after losing that he felt he could step back from some of his campaign’s more baseless attacks against Obama. More optimistically, perhaps the graciousness of the gesture will be mirrored in at least a temporary willingness on the part of Congressional Republicans to support the new administration in dealing with the trickiest and more immediate difficulties facing the country.

It’s a shame the open-mindedness demonstrated in the presidential election didn’t extend to some of the ballot initiative races that took place. I remain confident that, in fifty years, we will view bans on gay marriage as just as reprehensible and absurd as we would view a ban on interracial marriage today. The pathetic bigotry that drives voters to amend their state constitutions to strip basic rights from their fellow citizens is a demonstration that the slow process of building a tolerant and empathetic society, even within a single state, has a long way to go.

Election night in the US

Back on October 13th, FiveThirtyEight.com projected that Obama would win the presidential election by 351 electoral college votes to McCain’s 187. Their final projection, based on yesterday’s polls, was Obama 349, McCain 189.

Tonight, we get to see how good their projections really were (provided the election doesn’t degenerate into another drawn-out legal fiasco, that is).

[Update: 2:10am] The victory was decisive and exceptional. It cannot help but make a person more optimistic about our collective future.

Hard Choices

Edited by Harold Coward and Andrew Weaver, Hard Choices: Climate Change in Canada is a mixed bag. The chapters vary considerably in their usefulness, as well as their contemporary relevance. Clearly, a lot has changed since the book was published in 2004. Topics covered include climatic science, projected impacts in Canada, carbon sinks, technology, economics, adaptation, legal issues, the Kyoto Protocol, and the ethics of climate change. Of those, the science section has probably held up best.

The most problematic chapters are those on technology and economics. The technology chapter criticizes renewables, boosts nuclear, and promotes the ‘hydrogen economy’ without a great deal of strong analysis or argumentation. For instance, it argues that the costs of nuclear power are almost fully internalized: a very strange position to take given the hundreds of millions of dollars worth of subsidies, loan guarantees, and liability restrictions granted to nuclear operators around the world. The chapter also singularly fails to address the many problems with hydrogen as a fuel. Finally, the assertion that crippling the world economy would be “as deadly as any climate change scenario” underscores the degree to which this volume fails in general to consider the real but unknown probability of a catastrophic outcome that threatens civilization itself.

The economics chapter basically asserts that since the Kyoto Protocol would cost money and not stop climate change in and of itself, we should simply focus on adaptation. It ignores both the fact that international action on problems like climate change (ozone, acid raid, etc) needs to be built up progressively, starting with instruments not capable of single-handedly addressing the problem. Having the international community jump instantly from no legal constraints on greenhouse gas emissions to a regime that controls all emissions in an effective way is asking far too much. The chapter also fails to take seriously the possibility of catastrophic outcomes from unchecked warming. Not all levels of change can be adapted to.

The chapter on ethics is very strange. After a brief secular portion focused on which entities are owed moral duties, it becomes a survey of world religions, arguing that each one sees selfishness as wrong. From this, it is concluded that Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, etc all yield an ethical obligation to fight climate change. A more practical and serious consideration of who owes what to who on account of climate change would have been a lot more useful. Even in terms of comparative religion, the chapter feels rather sloppy. Just because you can point to a few statements about selflessness in the doctrine of many different faiths does not mean they would all come to the same moral position on climate change. All kinds of real moral questions persist: from how much risk it is allowable to impose on future generations, to who should pay the costs of adapting to the additional warming already locked into the climatic system. The chapter fails to shed light on issues of this type.

In the end, I don’t think there is anything in Hard Choices that isn’t said in a better or more up-to-date way somewhere else. For those seeking to educate themselves on climate change, this book is not a good investment of time.

Canada: asbestos booster

Chrysotile asbestos is the only version of the material that is still sold. Nonetheless, it has been judged to post major risks to human health and the environment. As such, it is especially shameful that Canada has been trying to prevent its international restriction, apparently in deference to a few companies in Quebec that still produce it.

The other states seeking to block its inclusion in the Rotterdam Convention are India, Iran, Kyrgyzstan, Peru and Ukraine. All its inclusion would mandate is the “prior informed consent” of both exporting and importing states, before the substance is traded internationally. In practical terms, that means the material must be properly labelled and include instructions for safe handling. It also requires that importers be informed of any known restrictions or bans on the use of the material. The Canadian Medical Association has accused Canada of participating in a “death-dealing charade.”

Hopefully, the Canadian government can be shamed into changing its position. The fact that Parliament has spent more than a decade laboriously removing asbestos from its own buildings is a clear sign that they understand the danger.