Nick Hurd responds to Lawson; Green Articles That Can't Rebut Lawson #3

This is the first in my series of articles about climate change articles that can't rebut Lawson in which the original piece deserves serious consideration. Hurd is better briefed than Franklin and less insane than Bunting. I'll ignore his little 'you're so superficial' quip at the beginning and jump straight into the main article.

"The modern policy maker, faced with an overwhelming scientific consensus about the scale of risk attached to carrying on as we are cannot afford to be quite so complacent. Lawson finds it convenient to ignore the fact that every molecule of carbon stays in the atmosphere for at least 100 years.

This inertia in the climate system means that if we wait for greater certainty onwhat the scientists are already telling us, then the bigger and more expensive the adaptation challenge is likely to get. The next twenty years will be critical because it is in this period that the big investment decisions will be taken on our energy infrastructure. Get this wrong and the scientists tell us that we will be locking ourselves into a serious problem."

That the challenge of adaptating to climate change is set to rise is rather obvious from the fact that it is currently pretty much zero. However, that does not necessarily mean that paying a different cost, that of curbing emissions, now is necessarily a better idea than paying the cost of adaptation in the future. What did Lawson say which could be construed as rejecting the idea the costs of adaptation would accrue over the long term?

One other thing to note: Every generation we roughly double in wealth. We also see technological advances which allow us to do new things. While the costs of responding to climate change may rise our ability to respond to it is likely to increase as well.

"At the extreme end of the risk spectrum, the focus on adaptation alone becomes ridiculous. How is India supposed to adapt to the melting of the Himalayan water source? How does China adapt to the potential loss of one third of her grain production? At that stage people will adapt by moving, which is why Climate Change is a security issue as much as anything."

"At the extreme end of the risk spectrum" is the classic environmentalist ruse to conflate something science expects to happen, the moderate changes Lawson discussed, with the ones that it has hypothesised possibly could happen. At the extreme end of the nuclear profileration risk spectrum a nuclear bomb goes off in London and millions die. At the extreme end of the asteroid risk spectrum the planet is hit by an asteroid and we all die. If we use this risk to justify a 1% doctrine approach we could quickly freeze human progress in a vain effort to frustrate the possibility of our society being destroyed.

"Lawson is understandably silent on both the short term and long term cost of his strategy but the message from the more rigorous Stern Review is that over time it is likely to be significantly higher than taking action now to try and stabilise our emissions and so mitigate the risk of dangerous climate instability."

How was Lawson silent on the long and short term costs? He spent some time discussing the costs of adapting and defending agriculture, combating infectious disease and making the point that combatting these is eminently possible. Putting numbers to these is the work for a new, genuinely rigorous, research effort. His point was that Stern had not given sufficient weight to the idea that humans might respond actively to many changes in climate.

"Lawson argues that there is no point because it will add too much to our energy bill. That position ignores the high probability that the cost of fossil fuel based energy is likely to go up over time anyway because the world is well on our way to exhausting reserves. It ignores the fact that for many importers of energy (including the UK) the issue of security of supply is now a major issue, so why not try and become more self-sufficient? In short reducing our dependence on fossil fuels makes sense irrespective of climate change risk."

This is logic that I have seen from Liam Fox and which is initially plausible, however, it has serious weaknesses. Essentially the problem of declining fossil fuel reserves is one we can expect the market to respond to very effectively as an increase in a factor price is pretty much a classic scarce resource problem. Problems with the security of supply are reflected pretty reasonably in the price of fossil fuels as the relationship between news from the Middle East and the price of oil attests so these are also problems the market can internalise. The idea that replacing steadily rising energy prices with a rapid rise is good policy is utterly absurd; it clearly makes the process more difficult for the economy to adapt to.

This implies that whereas the response to climate change has to involve government artificially raising the price of energy in order to attempt to account for externalities such as climate change the response to declining fossil fuel reserves is probably best left to the market.

In fact, the logic that falls in emissions will have to happen regardless of climate change policy helps those who are arguing against attempts to curb emissions as it establishes that fossil fuel emissions are essentially a short term problem as market incentives will create a solution to emissions in the medium to long term as part of its response to declining fossil fuel reserves. This is the Kuznets Curve in action and argues for the redundancy of attempts to use government power to curb climate change not their good sense.

"The technology is basically in place today to help us move to a low carbon economy. The problem is that it is relatively expensive now but Government has the power to make that technology cheaper by facilitating roll out at scale. They have the power to create new market opportunities by requiring higher energy efficiency standards of the products we use and incentivising us to make the low carbon choices."

This could be argued for almost any technology. We could all drive cars with satellite navigation more cheaply if government taxed cars without satellite navigation and so that the numbers using sat nav increased and economies of scale kicked in. The problem, as I set out in my response to Franklin, is that this suffers from the standard weakness of state planning in the economy; government is bad at picking winners in technology and is as likely to wind up subsidising a bad choice as increasing the pace at which a good one is deployed.

"Lawson says there is no point because the USA, China and India are not prepared to play ball. He ignores the significant economic opportunity in being at the vanguard of this new investment frontier. He has nothing to say about the benefits of greater energy efficiency to the UK Economy. He ignores what is actually happening below federal level in the USA where progressive Governors and Business leaders push the Superpower into a more engaged position. He ignores the real concerns that India and China have about pollution and access to water which are forcing them to revaluate the issue."

The pollution bit could have been lifted from Franklin. Here's what I said in response to it the first time:

"China's pollution problem is a matter of having industrial plant sited too near, or in, major cities and is a legacy of a planned economy and has nothing to do with CO2, which is not an element in the clean/dirty air equation."

As for access to water. The difficulties accessing water in China are largely a result of Maoist incompetence. Restoring the balance is being undertaken as an engineering challenge and there is no sign the Chinese see tackling global warming as a part of their response.

That's the end of the substantive matter of Hurd's article. He hasn't rebutted Lawson but has inadvertently highlighted many of the reasons why the market and business as usual might produce less carbon dioxide emissions than Stern, who builds his model on rising emissions intensity of economic growth, expects.

Milton Friedman has died

This is only just filtering onto the wires but it would appear that Milton Friedman died during last night at the age of 94. He was a truly brilliant man and all thinking people will miss his towering presence.

My first experience of his work was reading his account of the Great Depression; it was as much of a revelation to me as it was to the literature when it was first published. It has the mark of truly great thought in that it was never dogma and has not prevented other thinkers moving on but in being surpassed it has not been eclipsed.

I think, in the end, the best tribute to Friedman is in his work. Free to choose is a decent place to start. Unfortunately, the full version of free to choose that was on Google Video, and contained the look into Hong Kong and the association of economic and political freedom, appears to have dissapeared but there is still this wonderful extract available on YouTube:



Also, this from the end of the series:



Update: David Friedman's response is so much more eloquent than mine.

Casino Royale

I am a big fan of the new Bond. Out go the homages to Roger Moore's camp disgrace and in comes a genuine edge.

The on foot chase scene at the beginning was reminiscent of the incredible Tony Jaa running and jumping chase scenes in Ong Bak. The romance was far more convincing than the old James Bond pantomime. While the gadgets have been fun in previous films I didn't miss them in this one. New Bond is a big improvement.

However, while the new Bond has such huge potential, Casino Royale is not a good film. The problem is that it is missing the most important ingredient in a thriller, an engaging central conflict. As we are never introduced to the real bad guy we are never given anyone who seems a worthy foe for Bond. Le Chieffre's strategies (I won't go into detail to avoid spoilers) all seem vaguely petty rather than the work of a real evil genius. Without a convincing threat to provide a proper test of Bond's abilities he can never really shine and the tension is never at the level it should be.

If they can get the script right for the next installment and create a genuinely engaging enemy Craig's bond could become truly great.

Porgy & Bess

This was really, really good. I'm not the only one who thinks so: Paul Taylor for the Independent is absolutely gushing about this show. I've never been much of a fan of musicals and this is the first I've seen which hasn't felt a bit childish. The music is, as expected, incredibly good, they've really let the musical influences, jazz in particular, shine through the songs. The acting was first rate. There was genuine emotion to the story; Taylor is right that it really earns the term "electrifying".

I must confess that I haven't seen it as an opera so I can't really comment on how successful the transition has been but it worked so well as a musical something must have gone right.

If you see one show this winter...

Punishing South Korea

This article over at the New York Sun blog demonstrates clearly the flaws in the "with or us against us" school of international relations.

Essentially the South has said that it will not be taking any significant new action to contribute to the intercepting of North Korean ships suspected of moving nuclear weapons materials. Freedman dislikes this as the logic that "American troops are defending South Korea and they won't support us in halting Kim Jong Il's nuclear proliferation?" is apparently unacceptable. His solution is to punish the South Koreans by threatening to remove US troops.

This would have two concrete harms even if we only ever threatened to remove troops and did not actually remove them:
1) It undermines the deterrent power of the US military by making it appear that we might not necessarily defend the South Koreans if the North attacked. I.e. they might assume US troops would just leave if they came under fire.
2) It would heighten concern about an attack in the South, as their defences would appear weaker, and make it less likely they might stand up to the North.

It would also be a bad idea from our perspective if they were being terribly robust with the North. If we do need to search North Korean vessels this has the danger of creating an international incident. Now, if such an incident involves Americans and makes the North Koreans want to lash out there is little they can do. If that incident involves the South Koreans, on the other hand, they have Seoul within range of their artillery. As such, threatening the South Koreans into being robust with the North is entirely misguided. We want the North Koreans to see as little connection between the people they are fighting and the civilians of Seoul as possible. There are plenty of ships capable of searching North Korean transport available to us; there is no need for the South Koreans to prove their loyalty by providing us with theirs.

The same goes for other actions against North Korea whether military action or economic sanctions. The plan with the highest probability of a good outcome which doesn't involve massive civilian casualties is one that has the least involvement from the South Koreans. At this point the best position for our friends in South Korea to take is to play the sunshine policy good cop to the Western bad cop. Only in economic sanctions is this less clear thanks to the South Korean involvement in the North Korean economy but even here it is probably best if their responsibility is as diluted as possible.

Some states are expected to, and should be judged, by what they contribute to an alliance; Britain, France and Germany, for example, should be judged by what they contribute. For others that is manifestly not the right criteria, Israel, Taiwan and South Korea are states that we defend because it is right and their contribution to any objective but their own survival is not how they should be judged.

The Problem with the UKIP

In response to my piece on the politics of climate change DK lamented that I would not join the UKIP. The main reason I will not do so is that I don't think we should leave the EU. However, I will leave more details on why I am not in favour of leaving the EU till another day as I'd rather focus this post on the reason why, even if I did support leaving the EU, I wouldn't support the UKIP as a way to advance that agenda.

If you are in Germany it would make sense to vote for the UKIP. After the election a coalition would be formed and at that stage you could triangulate the right wing coalition closer to your position. In the UK it doesn't quite work that way, instead, a vote for the UKIP can only work as a vague threat to irrationally hurt the Conservatives even if that means the, more pro-EU, Labour party gets in. This is likely to do as much harm as good for the Better Off Out case within the Conservative party as it removes euronihilists from the debate and upsets the broad mass of loyal Conservative members which causes them to think more negatively of those who wish to leave the EU.

Moderation between the parties goes on in both electoral systems but in Germany that moderation is supposed to happen after the election, when everyone has voted for their parties and the politicians get together to form the policies of a coalition, whereas in Britain it happens in the debate within and outside the parties before the election. The resulting compromise is resolved into manifestos and the parties then offer, at least theoretically, coherent sets of policy to the electorate. I think the British system is preferable as it means that when people vote they know what they're voting for. This should allow for far greater accountability as that manifesto can more effectively form a benchmark against which governments can be judged. Also, it encourages the public to understand that their politicians will have to moderate between different views and leads to a less polarised and angry politics.

I'm not telling those who support leaving the EU they should put up and shut up but that forming a new party is not the way to change the debate. Set up pressure groups, write articles, make your case and change the existing parties. The Conservative Party is not Cameron, it is not the parliamentary party but it is a coalition of members of a broadly conservative disposition. If you think the case for leaving the EU is so strong surely it must be possible to convince these people? If you do not think this is possible then either you need to improve your case or your cause is a hopeless one.

Anthony Lane for the New Yorker on Casino Royale

It sounds like Casino Royale is aiming to do for Bond what Batman Begins did for Batman; make it edgy again. This is probably for the best as Bond films were starting to look a little stale even if the box office numbers remained solid. We'll see how audiences respond to an edgy Bond, there isn't as clear a case for change as there was for Batman but it should restore some artistic credibility which is a risk but offers the possibility of a more glittering future than that of new episodes in a series whose formula was set some time ago.

Anthony Lane's review, which I found via the American Scene, is a good one if you want to get excited about the film.

Soumaya Ghannoushi on the BNP and MI5

Large secions of Soumaya Ghannoushi's piece over at Comment is Free do not really need rebutting as they are simply statements of the blatantly obvious like "hating people of a certain religion is somewhat similar to hating people of a certain faith". This does not mean that it warrants similar regulation of things like speech as there is a far greater danger of stifling legitimate criticism of religion. Other parts of this article do warrant a response.

"We are witnessing the emergence of a new type of hatred, where religion and culture overlap with race and ethnicity. The climate generated by the war on terror - stoked further by the inflammatory speech on Friday of the MI5 director general Eliza Manningham-Buller - has allowed the far-right to redirect its poison of exclusionism from specific racial minorities to specific religio-racial minorities: from the black and Asian, to the Muslim black and Asian."

Nick Griffin has been trying this line for some time. What has made it slightly more effective isn't MI5s statements of a couple of days ago but the fact that we have had terrorist attacks and others convicted of plotting to carry out far worse attacks. Blaming the messenger in Manningham-Buller is utterly backward. Instead, blame the terrorists who have made the BNPs rhetoric sound plausible to more of an otherwise relatively tolerant people.

"With the tragic events of 9/11 and the July 2005 London bombings, the threat of violent groups such as al-Qaida, and the occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, an explosive political climate was born. In this context, a dangerous language emerged, one that moves smoothly from race to religion, from terrorism to Islam, from al-Qaida to Muslims. The dominance of this discourse is such that it is no longer necessary to explicitly link these terms together. It is sufficient to invoke fanaticism, violence and extremism for Islam and Muslims to spring to mind. Today we have slid further towards the explicit and direct association of Islam and Muslims with all that is "wicked", "vicious" and dangerous."

Pretending that there isn't a violent threat isn't going to cure this. It would have an effect similar to Napoleon's pretending the army advancing on his right at Waterloo was that of a subordinate when it was actually the Prussians; in the short term that's fine but when people find out they tend to be angry. When attacks happen it is better that people do not think the possibility of them was hidden from them by an elite which thinks it knows best. Far better to have a frank debate with the truth of the threat out in the open.

"On the day that Griffin was cleared, Manningham-Buller delivered a public speech on the terror threat. Instead of the secrecy and discretion we are accustomed to from the intelligence services, the head of MI5 seemed to metamorphose into a politician. We cannot undermine the seriousness of the threat, but these statements are certain to be exploited by numerous media and political players. The MI5 director general insisted she knew of 30 major terror plots. If that is the case, why haven't the plotters been arrested, and why did she give credence to patently unreliable surveys suggesting 100,000 British Muslims supported last year's London bombings?"

Police work involves gathering evidence and then making a conviction. Of course MI5 could just drag them off the street but I doubt that "Liberty" would be impressed; they might not come to Ghannoushi's demo.

As for the surveys being "patently unreliable", why? Because they are inconvenient?

This article was a classic example of a Guardianista using the BNP as an excuse to clamp down on legitimate debate and the frank discussion of important issues.

Sometimes the French redeem themselves so spectacularly...

It's often easy, as a conservative, to get a little dismissive of the French with their combination of preening pretension to leadership in global politics combined with small minded protectionism and a fear of economic change which is slowly killing their nation's strength. However, despite all this, they have moments of such utter brilliance you have to forgive them. The wine, food and general taste go without saying. However, they also have moments like this from 1978:



A reminder that the French, at their best, get the spirit of the West better than anyone. Utterly reckless with a taste for quality (the car is a Ferrari) and an artistic flourish at the end. This video builds over time so definitely don't stop watching till you're at least half way through when it stops using relatively open roads and becomes truly hair raising. For more details on the story behind this video take a look at the post I've lifted it from over at A Very British Dude.

The Politics of Climate Change

As may be becoming clear I am feeling increasingly convinced of the case that curbing our emissions in order to stop or reduce climate change is a bad idea. It would appear that I now have a side in the climate change debate; responding to the well evidenced, but still uncertain in scale and nature, trend that man is contributing to a global warming by adapting to it rather than attempting to control it.

However, choosing a side presents new questions because it would appear my side is losing. There is now no mainstream voice in UK politics which stands in opposition to the consensus behind Kyoto-plus. This should clearly be a cause for the Conservatives if any party, however, those who blame the Tory position on Cameron have missed the point. I was struck by this when I saw Iain Duncan Smith in the 18 Doughty Street commentary on their interview with John Howard. When Howard's rejection of Kyoto came up Duncan Smith simply wrote the difference off as a consequence of European versus Australian norms. There is no mainstream voice within the Conservative party willing to challenge the green agenda openly and, as such, Cameron's commitment to a Kyoto-plus solution to climate change is essentially unchallenged. If we had a different leader we would not have a different policy on this although we might talk about it a lot less.

This lack of political opposition to the Kyoto-plus climate agenda is a result of public opinion. Iain Dale reports a Times survey of top business leaders which found 81% in favour of fighting the threat of climate change with taxation. If the current skeptics of climate change are not succeeding in convincing even those enterprisers at the head of business then they have no hope of convincing the broader population. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that even those who are not in favour of green taxation rarely get particularly angry about it. As a result the environment, as I predicted earlier in his leadership, has functioned as a very effective dog-whistle for Mr. Cameron, building his reputation for being nice and acceptable to the middle class, while costing him little in broader terms. This means that environmentalism is an even stronger political case than the raw numbers imply.

Of course, the strong form of environmentalism as advanced by people like Monbiot cannot win, people will not give up the horizons the 20th century has opened to them, but that does not preclude a costly, Kyoto-plus, solution which appears to be where the current consensus is taking us. That our fiercest enemies are more angry at current policy than we are does not necessarily indicate a victory; that Respect polls poorly does not mean that we have won the fight against statism.

I think that the current strategies deployed by skeptics of Kyoto and other attempts to avoid global warming tend to follow one, or several, of three strategies which are intellectually useful but cannot win the public debate:

Firstly, hey oppose climate change curbing schemes as a violation of free trade, free market or other principles and argue that these, while they may help climate change will be more broadly harmful. Frum, in a recent post on the stem cell debate in the US, highlighted why this is ineffective when he wrote about how the right tends to lose when it pitches principles against visibly suffering or otherwise emotive people.

In global warming you have a big emotive threat promising many losers along with current threats to big cuddly polar bears set against harms to rich, industrial "polluters". This disparity could be compensated for if, when people wrote describing the harms of taxing energy-intensive industries, they took care to point out that the people who will wind up paying most for a tax on carbon will be Northern manufacturing employees whose jobs dissapear to parts of the world where energy is not similarly taxed. A tax on emissions necessarily acts to kick the parts of the UK economy which are down and this will have human consequences.

Secondly, many attack the science behind IPCC or other reports and the science behind climate change; the classic example of this is Bjorn Lomborg. This is an important contribution to the intellectual debate over climate science but is a poor strategy for winning the public debate over the proper policy response. As the public, quite sensibly, has a limited patience with climate science they will make the decision based on the heuristics available to them such as the availability heuristic (discussed on this blog before). As this is a big public issue it is widely covered in the media and this frequency convinces people it must be true.

Finally, there is the argument that there really is nothing we can do. This is quite an easy argument to make as it is made for the skeptic by the alarmists daily in the pages of the Guardian. All that is needed is to take these arguments to their logical conclusion. The reason that it is less effective in the public debate than this would suggest is that it requires an admission of helplessness which is electoral poison. Admissions of uncertainty or a lack of omnipotence never look good when matched against even a slight possibility of success.

The problems skeptics have in this debate are similar to those I experienced trying to argue against the minimum wage at LSE. Arguing that the minimum wage is illiberal achieved little to no effect, liberalism is, sadly, dead in the populace at large even if it is still the language of the elite. Equally, arguing the ineffectiveness of the minimum wage makes little to no difference; point out that the minimum wage will make someone's situation worse and they'll just tell you how bad their situation is as if that was a rebuttal. What I found effective was a third option: discussing negative income tax style policies as support for those in work. This is a distinctly right wing response and takes better account of economic incentives. Offering this meant that I was no longer arguing 'against' the poor and the emotive advantage of the left was lost to them.

For the climate change debate there would seem to be three important alternatives that the skeptics can promote:

The first is to emphasise the market driven reduction in carbon intensity. A lot of Franklin's arguments about how it could be profitable to reduce emissions highlight why energy intensity has been falling and should continue to at quite a rate, this wasn't helpful to his case but it can be taken as an unintentional part of the human response to global warming that does not involve artificially increasing the cost of energy.

The second is to focus on specifically adapting to some of the concrete harms of climate change, for example flooding and malaria. In Britain this will probably add up to putting extra investment into our coastal defences, the policy of conceding to erosion in certain areas probably needs to be reconsidered. However, in the Third World, where the consequences will be more severe, it is a solid case for international aid to assist with the adaptation, both through assisting with the establishment of superior coastal defences and through both existing methods to combat malaria, DDT, and new ones, the vaccine that GSK and the Gates Foundation are working on.

The third is to think about some of the more outlandish solutions Lawson highlighted. Mechanisms to respond if some of the scenarios envisioned by those predicting a climate change apocalypse. This would be a genuine precautionary principle for an event that we shouldn't expect but which could spring at us. While many of these schemes lack plausibility they share that with the threat they are designed to offset; the match is good.

These strategies offer a genuine right wing response to climate change. They should be the focus of any campaign to unsettle the use of climate change as a tool to drive an agenda fundamentally hostile to liberty and human progress towards an ideal of overcoming the restraints biology and our surroundings have placed upon us.

Another Hiatus for Debating

I'm judging at the Oxford IV this weekend. Normal service will be resumed, hopefully with an enlightening post about the politics of climate change, on Saturday night or Sunday morning depending on when I can find my way back to London.

Ekklesia's Ugly Pacifism

Ekklesia's logic in arguing for the white poppy is desperately weak. The red poppy is no call for war, remembrance day is not a paen to how effective war is but simply a reminder of those who have suffered and died in our name. If you think we were not right to fight the Great War then surely that suffering could be just as worthy of remembrance and empathy?

Ekklesia's comparing themselves to the "No More War Movement" of the twenties who asked the Royal British Legion to print No More War on the actual poppies is significant. The Royal British Legion did not reject the No More War slogan because it is pacifist, I doubt they would print "War Solves Problems" on the poppy either, but because it politiscises a non-political event. Similarly, the problem people have with the white poppy isn't that it is pacifist but that it is hijacking a non-political remembering of those that have suffered, the wearing of poppies on Remembrance Day, to a political cause, the pacifist movement. This is cynical and unprincipled. If pacifists want to "raise awareness" they are, of course, welcome to but there is no need to make this a competitor to or dilution of the red poppy movement.

While I'm discussing this I should note that I consider pacifism a bad principle. If pacifism is nothing more than arguing that war is often costly then it adds nothing to old utilitarianism. If it is to mean something deeper then it has to mean that even if the calculation were that a war would cost ten thousand lives and not going to war would cost ten thousand and one peace would still be preferable. Of course, there is uncertainty but this goes both ways. The idea that war is morally worse relies upon a special kind of moral cowardice, that death over a longer period or that we are only passively responsible for is preferable because it endangers our righteousness less.

The Terrorist Threat

Reuters Alertnet reports that the Director General of MI5 is tracking at least thirty terrorist plots. Five major plots have been foiled since 7/7. I think it is now moving beyond doubt that the frontline in the War on Terror in the West proper is not the US but here. There is no large homegrown population of discontented Muslims in the US like there is here and that means that the threat has to come from abroad. We are not so lucky and that changes the scale of that danger.

It would appear that our intelligence services are doing a good job. However, it would also seem likely that, sooner or later, another major attack will get through.

Yesterday evening I attended an LSESU Question Time society discussion at which the topic of a rumoured government request for universities to watch for radicalism came up. Sajjad Khan opposed this as asking people to spy on each other and then threw in a few other examples of similar government requests such as Reid's call for parents to watch their children. There was an almost pathetic myopia to what Khan was saying. Here were ministers trying to plot the moderate course of, not asking people to spy on each other - that implies something more, but just to keep an eye out for anything suspicious which is pretty standard practice when facing a violent threat. If Khan's condemnation contributes to an atmosphere that people feel they are "spying" for the government if they report something suspicious that might inadvertently allow something horrible to happen. If something horrible happens it seems likely Khan will wind up remembering the kind of moderate measures that Labour ministers are asking for now with real nostalgia.

Also, I asked the speakers whether they thought that, if a book with contents similar to the Satanic Verses were to emerge today it would be published and should be legal that it be published. Khan's response was no and, after some meandering, no claiming that this was analagous to libel and incitement to hatred legislation. His calls for liberalism lost what little credibility they might have had.

Update: Reading the full story in the Sun it is considerably stronger even than the description I sourced from Reuters.

A wonderfully simple analysis of the US mid terms

There is something sensible about this analysis from Kevin Drum (via The American Scene):

. . . I want to add one more thing so simple-minded that I'm almost embarrassed to mention it. Here it is: if you pursue popular policies, you win. If you pursue unpopular policies, you lose. Ideology is secondary.

In George Bush's first term, Republicans passed tax cuts, No Child Left Behind, campaign finance reform, Sarbanes-Oxley, a Medicare prescription drug plan, went to war against Afghanistan and Iraq, and appointed a bunch of conservative judges. Liberals may not have liked all of this stuff, but all of it polled pretty well. They were popular policies.

In Bush's second term, Republicans pursued Social Security privatization, made a spectacle over Terri Schiavo, and fiddled while New Orleans drowned. In addition, they passed a bankruptcy bill and an energy bill that didn't win them any points with rank-and-file voters, fought over immigration legislation, and refused to even allow a vote on widely supported measures like a minimum wage increase. This did not exactly reflect the popular will.

It isn't exactly intellectual hence, perhaps, why it has been so little remarked on in the wider post election discussion but this description makes a lot of sense.

Interest Rates

Interest rates have risen to 5%. I think pretty much everyone saw this coming; certainly very little has happened to the pound. I remain convinced, however, that the case for interest rises is still moderate. Today statistics were released suggesting that the trade deficit is narrowing (bar some concerns about the numbers); this does not suggest an overheating economy.

The US Elections

I'm quite aware of a US election sized hole in this blog's coverage. Essentially I don't think anyone has a convincing generalisation of what went on in the US elections yet. Everyone is using the election as crutch for the exact same views they had before the election and none of these "another piece in the jigsaw" analyses seem much more convincing than the others.

Over at the Corner they had a buzzing, but at times rather sad, argument with most arguing that the solution was more conservatism. At least one Democrat is arguing that this shows the Republicans can only win with a big government platform. The European coverage is emphasising Iraq.

Jonah Goldberg, again on the Corner, summarises the situation well with a quote from a 1986 National Review editorial:

"Elections are the Rorschach blots of punditry. No matter how enigmatic their contours, everyone sees in them his own preoccupations."

Israel vs. France

What the world really, really doesn't need right now is for the following to happen: An Israeli plane buzzes a French UN position in the Lebanon. The French troops are working under new rules of engagement which encourage them to treat Lebanon as their turf which the Israelis have no right to infringe upon. The French shoot down the Israeli plane.

The Israelis are utterly incensed, see this as a part of a general European quasi-conspiracy to side with the Palestinians and undermine their ability to defend themselves. The pilot becomes a national martyr and symbol of the fact that Israel can't rely on the West. By contrast, the French get just as angry that peacekeepers they see as attempting to protect Israel from Hizbollah attacks have been forced into this position by Israel's provocative actions.

This hasn't happened but this BBC report suggests it well could.

What the West, and by extension the world, really needs right now, with the credibility of our power as a deterrent hurt by Iraq, is a demonstration of unity. What it doesn't need is for a mid-ranking member of, what should be, a combined front of the Western powers getting in a spat with the American client in an important region. It would appear there has been some, long overdue, thawing in Franco-Israeli relations with a French minister acknowledging the security success of the Israeli wall. Both the French and the Israelis need to show some restraint and avoid making a collosal mess.

Ancestor Worship vs. Utilitarianism

This article is gives the lie to the left's claims to be the empathic side of the ideological divide.

"A genealogist speaking to the Times at the weekend commented: "It is not just about collecting names. It is about understanding who you are, and how you came to be who you are today. It is about knowing yourself." Superficially that doesn't mean much - in the furthest reaches of the nature/nurture debate, nobody has ever suggested one's distant second cousin could be anything more than a curiosity. And yet that tells you all you need to know about the kind of person who family-trees for a hobby - who thinks that's time well spent, getting to "know yourself, understand who you are". If therapy is for people with more money than sense, genealogy is for those with more time than either."

Part of how people understand their lives is by comparison with others, those around them and those who have gone before. Sure, the details you get through geneolocial research aren't great but still it gives some context to our existence. While this is "pointless" in the ugly, utilitarian, sense it is, to go back to Socratic first principles, an entirely legitimate part of the examination of our lives which makes them worth living.

The left claims to be the emphathic side of the political divide. It "feels" for its many designated victims, it describes its enemies as cold Darth Vader parodies. However, for all this the left doesn't really seem to like homo sapiens too much. No real harm is identified in this article; instead the author just wants to vent her rage at how damned irrational we are for our desire to understand where we come from rather than serving the almighty utilitarian calculus.

Why Peter Franklin is wrong on Nigel Lawson; Green Articles That Can't Rebut Lawson #2

Peter Franklin's response to Lawson misses rather a lot of points:

"Given Nigel Lawson’s record on economic stability, I’m pretty disinclined to accept his judgement on climate stability.

[...]

Twenty years ago Nigel Lawson decided that the best thing for Britain would be to shadow the Deutschmark. Twenty years later he is urging us to shadow the Chinese rate of carbon emissions. He is as wrong now as he was then."

"Some years ago Churchill decided that the best thing for Britain would be to return to the Gold Standard at the pre-war level. Now he is urging us to fight on against Nazi Germany. He is as wrong now as he was then". Plenty of politicians capable of sound judgement have fallen under the spell of fixed exchange rates and a strong pound. This is just lazy ad hominem.

"This is just wrong. The bulk of the carbon savings that we need to make will come from greater energy efficiency, not from changes in the way we generate energy. By saving energy we will also save money. And with energy prices on the rise there is more money to be saved than ever."

Lawson made these points. He pointed out that Stern was wrong to assume that energy intensity would rise where most, sensible people, expect it to fall and this would mean the human contribution to climate change would be less than Stern expects. As such, greater energy efficiency can be expected but this is a part of Lawson's case and not a rebuttal to it.

"Energy efficiency and economic progress go hand in hand. The more primitive a society the more energy inefficient it is. Just think about the sheer wastefulness of an open fire, where most of the heat escapes uselessly into the atmosphere. To take a more contemporary example, Chinese homes and factories waste a lot more energy than their western counterparts."

Again, this supports Lawson's case. If economic progress leads, in the end, to greater efficiency, the Kuznets curve, this strengthens the case that we should not risk economic growth in attempting to combat climate change.

"And yet even in the most advanced economies opportunities to save energy go unclaimed. For instance, Britain has millions of homes where proper loft insulation would pay for itself in a couple of years and go on saving substantial amounts of energy, money and carbon year after year. So why do so many people fail to insulate their homes properly? It’s because, contrary to simplistic economic theories, people don’t always act in an economically rational way. Sometimes they need a prod in the right direction."

There are costs to getting loft insulation put in beyond the capital cost of getting it installed. People are busy, it's an interruption to their lives, they might have to miss work to be at home and watch over the building work. There are opportunity costs to spending time improving your home's energy efficiency as well as the straight financial cost. As the money savings are often fairly small amounts it is a mistaken assertion that people are being irrational. In order to see a significant rise in energy efficiency improvements you will need the economic incentives to change and that is, apparently, what Franklin doesn't want to do.

"That’s why I’m opposed to most forms of environmental taxation, which tends to be a blunt instrument that rarely achieves its ostensibly environmental purpose. What we need are sophisticated policy tools designed for a particular purpose and used for no other (such as the raising of tax revenues). For instance we could have a system of energy efficiency credits, which enterprises could earn by implementing various energy efficiency solutions such as insulating a given number of homes or selling a given number of energy efficiency light bulbs. Polluters such as power stations would have to buy a given number of certificates. A market would then operate, generating profits for those supplying the most attractive energy efficiency solutions at the lowest cost. The polluters would have to pay the cost of kick starting the market, but, in aggregate, money would be saved and put to a better use than wasting energy."

This is still an energy tax, it will still hit unavoidably energy intensive industries, force them to relocate to places like China and thereby do, at best, nothing to help the climate change situation.

The difference is that you then have a plan to spend the money on subsidising technologies or investments that you like. Unfortunately, government is rubbish at choosing technologies in this way. It would probably give loads of the money to wind farms, certain forms of biofuel, electric cars or any of the other phony green solutions which turn out to be a lot less efficient than they first appeared but do well through government support. If you genuinely want to save money I would trust to the efficiency of the market far sooner than that of government; saving money is what the market does best.

"Ah yes, the old 2% argument i.e. Britain is only responsible for 2% of humanity’s carbon emissions so what difference can we make?

The first thing to understand is that the purveyors of this argument are either deliberately or ignorantly blurring the distinction between the stock and flow of carbon emissions. Atmospheric concentrations of CO2 are already at a level unprecedented in human history thanks to an industrial history that goes back a lot further in the developed world than the developing world. Thus Britain has contributed 6% not 2% of the accumulated problem to date, with other developed nations contributing almost all of the rest.

So while China and the other developing giants are making a growing contribution to the future problem, there is strong moral case for the West to get the ball rolling in terms of a solution. There’s a strong practical case too – because there’s an awful lot of money to be made here."

I have no problem with understanding the difference between stocks and flows but that makes little difference to this debate. Lawson did acknowledge that this was largely a developed country created problem and cited this as the reason we had a moral responsibility help poor countries, in the most effective way possible, by helping them adapt to changing climate conditions.

However, this clearly makes no difference to the debate over whether we can stop climate change because our historical contribution to climate change has happened; it is a sunk cost and hence needs to be ignored. The important thing for now is that changes in Britain's emission levels are going to make next to no difference compared to the vast rises in emissions coming out of the developing world, and particularly China. Just like Lawson said the idea of our "getting the ball rolling" and the rest of the world gleefully following is at the CND end of the foolishness spectrum.

"For one thing, the developing giants are desperate to escape their dependency on fossil fuel imports, which is why Brazil is already leading the world in ethanol fuelled cars. The giants also have an appalling problem with the local pollution caused by fossil fuel use – just asks the organisers of the Beijing Olympics. As mentioned above, the developing world has even more to gain from energy efficiency than we have; and the micro-generation of energy could allow whole regions to leapfrog the expensive requirement for centralised energy networks in the same way that mobile phones are enabling them to dispense with fixed line telephony."

This is ridiculously naive. The main way, as Lawson highlighted, that China and India are getting away from fossil fuel imports is building coal power plants to make use of their plentiful reserves of that fossil fuel. China's pollution problem is a matter of having industrial plant sited too near, or in, major cities and is a legacy of a planned economy and has nothing to do with CO2, which is not an element in the clean/dirty air equation.

It may be that new technology will allow the developing world to avoid having as carbon intensive a development as we have. However, this again helps the case of those arguing against action to curb climate change as this technological development will make far more of a difference to the climate change outcome and does not demand the economic sacrifice of hurting energy intensive industry.

"We in the West have the expertise, the intellectual freedom and the capital to develop these solutions, but the developing giants have got the deepest need and the fastest growing markets. If you want proof, look to the investment community which is well ahead of the politicians. The hard-headed money men are convinced by the climate change science and they can see the business opportunities. As one of them said to me the other day, “we know this is going to be a massive area for capital formation because it bloody well has to be.”

So the question facing western governments is whether to give their economies a prod in this direction or whether to subsidise the dinosaur industries of the past by allowing them to pollute without paying."

To complete my fisk I should respond to the argument we are allowing the dinosaur industries to pollute without paying. Fortunately, Lawson has already done so. If we tax these industries they will not cease to exist or use energy; they will move.

More importantly, this last couple of paragraphs really sum up this article's central weaknesses. The problem is even unwittingly acknowledged "look to the investment community which is well ahead of the politicians". Exactly. So why are you trying to use the government to pick winners by manipulating the tax system towards favoured technologies and investments instead of trusting those investors to see what is efficient?

The argument that the market cannot be trusted to look after the environment makes some sense when the argument is that it can be uneconomical to do what is right for the planet. This is what Stern was arguing and Lawson was responding to. However, the argument that it is economical to do what is right for the planet but the market is just too useless to make it happen requires an extraordinary lack of faith in free markets and generous faith in government initiative and foresight for someone who claims to be a conservative. It requires us to believe that over the mass of small investment or technological decisions that will determine our society's energy usage the government knows better than individual decision makers. Hayek responded to the fallacy of state planning's efficiency some time ago and I don't think I really need to go over it again now.

18 Doughty Street Covering the US Elections

I received this press release in my e-mail from 18DS:

Doughty Street American mid term elections special

From 8:00pm until LATE

18 Doughty Street the UK's first live Internet TV station will be broadcasting live coverage and unrivalled analysis of the US mid term elections from 8:00pm until late tonight, the first time the station has extended coverage from its normal 8:00pm to Midnight slot.

Will the Iraq war have seriously damaged the Republicans? Will the Democrats take control of the House of Representatives. What are the implications for the race for the White House? Will George W Bush become a lame duck President?

A heavyweight panel of experts in US politics have been lined up including Simon Burns MP, and representatives from both the Republicans and Democrats abroad.

Make sure you visit www.18doughtystreet.com from 8:00pm for live streaming.

Good luck to them. I'm distinctly unimpressed by the Republicans at the moment but I'm still thrilled that 18DS might mean that we'll finally get coverage in the UK in which they aren't portrayed as lovechildren of Satan and Al Capone.