The Really Inconvenient Blog

The Brookings Institution is the most establishment of establishment think-tanks.  Old-fashioned, genteel, liberal, they do a lot of good work while at the same time perpetuating a lot of ideas whose time passed long ago.  I would never, however, have called them alarmist.  Until today, that is, when its President put his name to an op/ed in the Washington Post that is laughable in its alarmism.  Drawing from the language of the 1980s doomsayers and their Doomsday Clock, the op/ed is entitled “7 Years to Climate Midnight.”

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Couldn’t agree more with the UN, for once in mylife.  They say:

Governments spend as much as $300 billion a year total in subsidies that encourage consumption and discourage efficiency. The subsidies delay the transition from dirty energy to more climate-friendly sources of power, said the UNEP report.

Subsidies “don’t always help the poor who need it most” and often benefit the wealthy, said Kaveh Zahedi, UNEP’s climate change coordinator. “Some countries spend more on subsidizing oil than they do on health and education combined,” he said.

Low electricity prices do not help villages that are not connected to the grid, and poor families consume only modest amounts of fuel, the U.N. report said.

Some African countries are known to spend all the foreign development aid they received to pay for the increase in fuel prices, which may be politically popular but economically damaging.

“In the final analysis, many fossil fuel subsidies are introduced for political reasons but are simply propping up and perpetuating inefficiencies in the global economy,” said UNEP director Achim Steiner, who also is a U.N. undersecretary general.

These are all excellent points and are one of the reasons that the very first step in any no-regrest approach to global warming should be the ending of all fuel subsidies. Watch this space for more details.

Russia is the leading subsidizer, Iran next and Saudi Arabia third.  Sounds like an Axis of Evil to me…

The Breakthrough Institute, whose willingness to think outside the box I greatly admire, issues a challenge of sorts to my friend Jim Manzi, who has been particpating in a debate with them over at Cato Unbound.  They say:

“If Manzi thinks it is not the government’s role to make large investments to enable the emergence of new industries then he should explain how America could have become such a rich nation without having invested in the railroads, the highways, the electrical grid, the Internet, microchips, the computer sciences, and the biosciences.“

Let’s go through them one by one:

Railroads: were actually built by private enterprise, very much following the similar model in the United Kingdom.  Government’s role was not as investor but as facilitator, issuing state charters with limited eminent domain powers that eased the way for quick build.  There was very much competition to build the best routes.  Eminent domain has significant problems, but it is difficult to think of alternatives with linear developments like railroads - or electric transmission lines.  That’s a subject for a future post, but at base, this is an example of private, not government investment.

Highways: There has certainly been massive central government funding of highways since Eisenhower (see here), but government got involved in them for defense-related reasons.  Would it have happened without them?  Well, construction and upkeep of the King’s Highways in the UK was for two hundred years handled by Turnpike Trusts.  When the new private railways came along, the toll income halved overnight (intermodal competition in transport is as important as, probably more important than, intramodal).  Today, new roads around the world are being built on public-private partnership basis, with government handling the political risk and private companies the construction risk.  It is perfectly plausible that future highways will be built largely through private investment.

[Aside on highways: before the vast government investment in highways, privately-owned mass transportation was profitable and efficient.  Without the massive government investment in highways, and assuming light regulation on its development, we probably would have much better developed “public” transportation in the US.  I suspect this is the sort of thing Breakthrough would like to have seen happen.]

The electrical grid: Well, this is a clear case where government screwed up the development of the infrastructure.  America’s fragmented and inefficient grid is a direct result of the Depression Era PUHCA law and other restrictions (see here).  Private development would almost certainly have given us a much more efficient and responsive electric grid.  And, absent “fairness” regulation, we probably would have had smart pricing all over the country for some time, something that again I suspect Breakthrough would have applauded.

The Internet/computer sciences (we’ll take these as one): Granted, DARPA came up with the idea of linking remote computers together - again for defence purposes - to create a whole that was more than the sum of its parts.  But to what extent was it that act that made the Internet the tool it is?  Hyperlinks were invented by United Technologies (despite the then nationalized British Telecom claim otherwise) and bulletin boards were developed by AOL, Compuserve etc.  CERN certainly had a role in introducing the World Wide Web, but the investment that has made it a massive success has been overwhelmingly private.  In a sense, government funding of the Internet was nothing more than seed money.

Microchips:  Texas Instruments and Fairchild separately invented the integrated circuit and, although TI was first, Fairchild’s was better - a great example of competition at work.  Now certainly defense purchases of large numbers of chips for Minutemen missiles lowered the price considerably, making them affordable enough for all sorts of new technologies, but it would be a mistake to say that that could not have happened in the absence of the Minutemen project.  DVDs, for example, replaced VHS pretty quickly after initially being far more expensive.  Integrated circuits were bound to replace transistors whatever happened.

Biosciences: Private pharmaceutical companies spend massive amounts worldwide on bioscience.  There is indeed some small amount of government funding rpoducing breakthroughs at the basic science level, but once again these amount to seed money and certainly aren’t arguments that suggest massive government funding in development and deployment of bioscience products either happens or is necessary.  Indeed, government tends to get in the way of such deployment, often with tragic results.  And there’s also the case of Craig Venter, whose private approach to human genome sequencing almost embarrassed the international government-funded approach, so much so that they strong-armed him into giving up his company’s property rights.

All in all, these examples actually show that government functions best by facilitation - creating the right legal and political environment for innovation and delployment of new technologies.  Sometimes it tries to make us safer through defense expenditure and ends up making us richer.  Sometimes it interferes and delays or perverts the most efficient development of the technological asset.  None of these cases suggest that massive government funding of energy R&D is essential.  They do, however, show that government can very much help by getting out of the way.  And that’s an argument I am currently developing at much greater length.

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Incisive article in the Wall Street Journal today on how Russia is using energy supply as part of its strategic renaissance.  An excerpt:

Despite Russia’s repeated use of energy as a political weapon in Eastern Europe, Western Europeans keep repeating the mantra that Russia has been a reliable supplier to “Europe.” They also choose to ignore that natural-gas giant Gazprom serves as the Kremlin’s leading foreign-policy arm. The company is primarily state-owned, and many members of Gazprom’s leadership are current or former government officials. The Kremlin’s present occupant, Dmitry Medvedev, until recently was the chairman of Gazprom. His replacement there is former Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov.

The Russian plan is rather simple: Punish countries that refuse to come under its influence by building new gas pipelines that bypass them, while rewarding countries and political leaders that cooperate with Russia with lucrative energy deals. Maintaining a monopoly over the transport of Caspian gas to Europe is essential for Moscow to ensure that all those countries that have submitted to a Russian “partnership” will acquiesce to the return of the former Soviet space to the Kremlin’s control.

It is vital to understand that Russia has designs on Eastern Europe and is using its energy supply to buy off Western Europe.  The future looks bad if this is the case.

Yet there is a question here that needs answering first.  Natural gas, while cheap to burn and an efficient form of energy, is not the only source of electricity Western Europe has.  Germany and Britain both possess abundant coal.  France has based its energy profile on nuclear.  Both could provide Russia-free energy across Western Europe, yet both are reviled by environmentalists.  Wind power and renewables, beloved by environmentalists, are simply not up to the job.

It therefore seems that when faced with a choice between empowering Russia and annoying environmentalists, Western Europeans are less afraid of the former.

Let’s also remember that the Kyoto Protocol is designed to see large amounts of Western European money transferred to Russia as European nations purchase credits for emissions reductions banked by Russia following the collapse of communism.  European nations can’t reduce emissions on their own, for the aforementioned reasons, so they need to buy credit from elsewhere.  This was the central reason behind Russia’s ratification of the Kyoto Protocol.  To put it bluntly, the Kyoto Protocol is subsidizing Putin’s military retrenchment.  If the supposed oil wealth funding of madrassas is a problem, then I suggest this one is at least as big.

This is, needless to say, a terrible situation to be in.  When environmentalists get their way, Putin gets his.  If Putin’s energy weapon is to be neutralized, Western European governments need to face down the environmental lobbies in their countries, and allow digging for coal and new nuclear build.  Political calculus, however, suggests otherwise.  And Putin knows this.

A video from my colleague Myron Ebell:

Donal Blaney has tagged (or tigged, depending on where you come from) me with a blog meme.  You know, it’s years since I did one of these, so I’ll shake off the dust and complete it.  Here we go - where was I when each of these events happened?

Princess Diana’s death - 31 August 1997

A few weeks previously I’d experienced the most expensive day trip of my life, having been turned back at Dulles Airport by the INS (ha, I dance on your grave, evil bloated incompetent bureaucracy!), so was not in the best of moods.  I had moved back to my parents’ house on the Thatcherite grounds that home is where you go when you’ve got nothing else to do and was waiting on the mercy of said evil bloated incompetent bureaucray.  Not in good spirit, I came down scruffy, unshaven and depressed to hear the news from my mother.  I immediately thought, “Well, that’s a problem out of the way” and spent the rest of the day hating myself for having such an uncharitable thought.  Much of what I saw over the next few days convinced me that something had changed, unnoticed, in Britain.  I think we’ve recovered slightly since, but it confirmed to me that I was doing the right thing leaving the shores.

Margaret Thatcher’s resignation - 22 November 1990

I was so shocked at work when the news came through that I knocked off early and went up to Oxford to get blotto in the Union Bar.  At least three other Thatcherites of my OUCA generation had the same idea, spontaneously.  We toasted the Leaderene in fine style.

Attack on the Twin Towers - 11 September 2001

I’d dropped a friend off at the Pentagon at about 8:15am for him to do the tour.  When I got to work I received a phone call from my wife to get to a TV.  Being in a media monitoring operation, we had one in a colleague’s office.  We watched dumbfounded as the towers fell. I was due to have a meeting with Jim Bennett of Anglosphere fame and a contact flying in from New York, so I quickly became aware of the closing down of airspace.  Then we heard about the Pentagon attack (which had rattled the windows of our home) and the rumors started to swirl about another plane heading towards DC.  The building closed and I had to work out how to get home.  Using a circuitous route I got back to Van Dorn Metro where my abiding memory is of the number of soldiers being picked up by their families with overwhelming emotion on display (an interesting contrast to the emotion of Brits in ‘97).  The next couple of days saw estimates of 30,000 possibly dead.  You can read my reactions of a day or so later here (scroll down to “War”).  Yes, I was an early blogger…

England’s World Cup Semi-Final v Germany - 4 July 1990

Back that long ago, I used to go to a games night every week and the pub where it was held had a big screen (or what counted for one then) telly installed for the World Cup.  So I got myself a pint of Tiger and started watching rather than playing games.  I never felt we were going to win, and when Gazza started crying I thought, “No point, kiddah, we’re not going to be in the final anyway.”  The contrast with 1996, where I felt up until the Southgate miss that we were going to get through, is interesting - I was completely gutted by the 96 loss and blase about the 90 loss.  Odd that.

President Kennedy’s Assassination - 22 November 1963

I was between consciousnesses, although I wish I’d been around for momentous happening the next day.

Nominations?  Hmmm.  Let’ see if I can prod Natalie Solent and Peter Briffa back into action.  Let’s also try Stephen Pollard (without any mention of Djibril Cisse’s superb winner yesterday, erm…oops), Laban Tall and Gawain Towler.

Me old mate Michael Gove has come in for a fair amount of criticism for his remarks about the “lads mags” Nuts and Zoo in his speech the other day. And, let’s face it, when Iain Dale, Donal Blaney and Guido Fawkes are all critical of you, there might be a smidgeon of evidence that you’ve made a boo-boo.

(For those who aren’t cognizant of what “lads mags” are, they are - how can I put it? - a celebration of the hedonistic male lifestyle that became dominant in the UK in the mid-late 1990s and are centered around large numbers of near-topless, topless and nude - but not full-frontal - pictures of attractive young British women. Indeed, a whole science of “boobonomics” is starting to emerge to explain the various stages of exposure).

Anyway, my take on this is that Michael was wrong to frame the debate in the way he did, but not necessarily wrong in general. He castigated the publishers of “those who make profits out of” these magazines, asking “what [do] they think they’re doing”? Well, the clue is in the question. They’re making a profit by answering a substantial demand.

Come with me, if you will, to a parallel universe, where the Church of England did not self-destruct in the 1960s, and “traditional morality” was still in vogue. What would the publishers of Nuts and Zoo be doing in that universe? Probably publishing magazines examining moral themes and printing hymns authored by Sisters Keely and Lucy - in other words, satisfying a substantial demand.

That simple thought experiment (and I have ideas of warming to that theme) should reveal that Michael was slightly off-target, criticizing a symptom, not a cause of the broken society of Britain.

Why do young men in Britain today have a view of women that they are “permanently, lasciviously, uncomplicatedly available”? Not because of a few magazines, but because there is a culture in which the complicated relationship - that of permanent commitment - is increasingly rare. The boy who is raised by a mother who has no permanent father and in a situation where such a mother is not expected to act like a nun is, let’s face it, exposed from very early age to the idea of a woman entertaining a succession of male admirers, as they used to be called. It may well also be that their ideal of womanhood is also likely to dress less than modestly. Impermanence becomes permanence. Lasciviousness and lack of complication reinforce themselves. It is a “positive feedback loop,” in the language of my normal beat. The society that allows men to father sons without any expectation that they are actually going to act as fathers rather than increasingly balding “lads” is one that stores up exactly this problem for itself.

Now, here I’m going to go back to one of the great old themes of the predecessors of this blog - “social Thatcherism” - and quote Burke:

“Men are qualified for freedom in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there is without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot be free.”

Therefore, the libertarian critics of Gove go too far. True libertarianism entails strong, privately set social signals, otherwise we have anarchy, which is not libertarianism. Any father of a daughter with access to a gun will back this up. In a truly free society, we would not “collectively” stand for feckless male behavior, or feckless female behavior for that matter, and magazines like Nuts and Zoo would wither on the vine, but we don’t have a free society. Instead, we’ve decided that government can act as father, paying for and deciding the content of the education of children. The utter inadequacy of this settlement is exhibited in the existence of Nuts and Zoo as popular magazines.

Now none of this is to say that in a free society without “government as father” there would be no such things as magazines without pretty girls with no clothes on in them. However, they would not sell as much, and young girls - with better female role models - might be less willing to appear in them, because they would have less money and therefore would provide less of a quick route out of poverty (note how these girls are rarely, if ever, called Camilla or Tamsin*). Yet it appears to me to be quite plain that the libertarian society would see less of this rather than more.

So, Michael, if you want to see the end of Nuts and Zoo, don’t criticize the publishers, but instead dismantle the welfare state. I suspect that’s actually what you want. So follow the argument through!

*Yes, we have Paris, but she is more of a brand than anything else, and may well be the exception that proves the rule.

A few technical and non-technical (ie general busy-ness) problems have conspired to derail this blog.  I shall attempt (emphasis on the attempt) to rectify this in the near future.