With every big storm you find a lot of people wanting to talk about climate change again. Sandy, especially with its record coastal surges, is one such storm. In its wake, Andrew Leonard wrote:

• Mother Nature's Wake-Up Call [Oct. 29]: interview with Kevin Trenberth.
• Bill McKibben Does the Sandy Math [Oct. 29]: interview with McKibben.
• Climate Change Hits Home [Oct. 30]
• Sandy: It's a Coincidence [Oct. 31]

It's normally impossible to attribute a specific storm to something with such a broad sweep as climate change, but Trenberth does a good job of putting the factors into perspective:

In general, hurricanes depend tremendously on the environment in which they form. In particular, they depend on the sea surface temperature. Since the 1970s, sea surface temperatures are higher because of climate change by about 1 degree Fahrenheit. The air above the ocean is warmer and moister as a result. Research shows that the water holding capacity of the atmosphere goes up by about 4 percent for a 1 degree rise in temperature.

Now there are fluctuations, of course, on top of that, from natural variability and day-to-day weather and El Nino events and things like that, but that's the general background. So as a general result we expect storms will be more intense, and in particular the rainfall will be heavier as a consequence. The extra moisture in the atmosphere provides fuel for the storm. The estimate is that there is an increase of about 5 to 10 percent in precipitation associated with climate change and we have seen examples of that in the last year or so with Hurricane Irene last year and Hurricane Isaac this year, where the main story was all about the flooding.

Now, on top of that there are some local natural variability components. The sea temperatures along the coast from the Carolinas up to Canada are quite warm, as much as 5 degrees Fahrenheit above normal and maybe 1 degree of that is climate change, but there are some extra elements that are helping to feed this storm and keep it alive. Here we are in late October and the sea temperatures are much more like early September, so that helps to fuel the hurricane part of the storm. But also at this time of year the jet stream is moving south from its summer location over the U.S.-Canadian border and the westerlys are more generally setting in across the country, and as a result there is a strong extratropical component to the storm. What we might call a big trough of low pressure has blended in with this storm and there is even some snow expected on the backside of this storm. So it's really a hybrid storm now; it's a hybrid extratropical storm.

Those numbers sound credible to me: global warming is small part of the storm, and it's easy to see how that small part makes big storms more likely, and given enough time inevitable. However, it's also easy to see why so many people don't get it: weather itself is so much more variable than climate, and unless you're a farmer or someone attuned to subtle climate disturbances weather is what you experience. You're used to temperatures changing 30 degrees or more in the course of a single day, so why should you get wound up over a barely perceptible 1 or 2 degree average change? Ocean levels vary several feet over a single tidal cycle, so how is a sea level rise of a few inches any different? Of course, it is different, as those inches get magnified by tides and low pressure and high winds into a record storm surge.

On the other hand, I'm convinced that there is a mind set that instinctively overreacts to climate change. I've noticed this most convincingly in paleontology, where every extinction event is bound to be written off to climate change before anyone can develop any actual evidence. I've never quite understood how this works, even if I can think of some specific cases where it might. Again, the problem is that climate changes are so much smaller than everyday weather changes, any shift of a degree or two is within what the species has adapted to. Many species can move, and some adapt fast enough. Clearly, there are cases where climate change cause species to go extinct: where mobility is blocked, or where new competitive pressures develop.

Still, we've found many examples where climate change hypotheses turn out to be unsatisfactory. The late Pleistocene extinctions of large animals have become a clear case, despite widespread and often very dramatic climate change. It turns out that what correlates far better with the extinctions is the arrival of human beings -- in Australia 40,000 years ago, in the Americas after 20,000 years ago, in isolated islands like New Zealand much later, in Mauritius (the dodo) in historical times. It may not be true that humans hunted down every last mammoth. It may even be true that their numbers were stressed by the end of the Ice Age, but it wasn't just climate.

Similarly, it's hard to imagine that any amount of climate change would decimate the human population. People have already adapted to nearly every plot of land on earth. Major climate change would push people to move, and cause local problems -- low-lying islands are an obvious concern -- but people would adapt. Property owners would be harder pressed: farms may no longer function as expected, and those premium seaside resorts may vanish under the rising tides. Expect an economic impact, especially from freak events like Sandy. But don't get overly worked up about "saving the earth" -- sheer hubris, especially when compared to a geologic record that shows the planet, if not necessarily much of its fauna, surviving far worse.

Bill McKibben is one such person who overreacts to climate change, especially in his sweeping metaphors like "the end of nature," but he's spent a lot of time and effort distilling the science. And he has a useful critique of the gospel of unlimited growth which is as far out of step with mainstream Clinton-Obama Democrats as it is with Republicans. One nit I'd like to pick is that it isn't human change to the environment didn't begin with greenhouse gas warming: we've been remolding the environment for hundreds, indeed thousands of years -- ever since we got rid of all those mammoths. For me, the full extent of human change on the landscape was driven home some years ago when I drove from Boston to Wichita and couldn't identify a single vista that would have been the same 500 years ago (even if you discount the missing bison).

It beggars the mind to understand how anyone, given how deeply humans have disturbed the world, can doubt that we have had a significant impact on the weather. If you want clear proof, you have to look no further than to the days after 9/11, when all private aircraft were grounded: over three days, the temperature rose three degrees simply because of how much sunlight was no longer deflected by vapor trails. No less clear is the physics of greenhouse gases, something we've understood for more than a century. As carbon dioxide concentration increased steadily over the 20th century, the question wasn't whether the physics was valid, just how the captured heat affected the weather. It's clear now that vapor trails, other pollution, and increased cloud cover helped mask the greenhouse effect -- less so in the Arctic, for reasons that should also be obvious -- but in the last 10-20 years the thermometer has been catching up with the physics, turning predictions we had blithely ignored into news, like last week.

People like Leonard jump on those occasions because the basic facts are so obvious, yet for so many people denial has become hopelessly ingrained -- so much so that they are unapproachable with facts, with reason, with anything. Even people who know better -- Barack Obama being a conspicuous example -- shy away from bringing up the subject, so fierce is the resistance. For many years that resistance was easily traced to a handful of carbon dioxide-producing companies, notably ExxonMobil -- they style themselves as oil, gas, and coal companies, after their immediate products, or as energy companies, after the service we obtain from their products, but in the final analysis most of what they produce ultimately wafts through the atmosphere as carbon dioxide (and a few other noxious chemicals). But in recent years, the company propaganda has gone viral, infecting the oxygen-starved brains of self-appointed conservatives -- you know, the people who'd rather wreck and waste things than conserve them.

I don't know, or at least can't explain, all of the reasons the right has for maximizing the transfer of fossil fuels to the atmosphere. In particular, I'm not sure whether the fundamentalist religious issue is that God gave us dominion over the earth and that makes it property so it's ours to ruin, or that the rapture is coming soon anyway, so why not use it before we lose it? (Either view is simply nuts.) Three reasons are clearer: one is the right's instinctive deference to the rich and powerful, a class that includes plenty of oil and coal magnates; another is that externalities -- unaccounted for side-effects of the sale of products -- are a form of market failure, but the right believes that markets are perfect so they persist in ignoring failures; and the third is that the only way to correct market failure is for a superior party like the government to step in and regulate the market, and that, of course, is the root of all evil.

Ergo, since the only way to arrest or limit climate change is for government to take a more involved role, in order to fight back the government the right winds up denying the rationale -- either that climate change is happening, or that anything can be done about it, at least any intrusion on their lifestyle that the American people will tolerate, at least as long as they don't know any better. Admittedly, the right isn't always consistent about these things: they rarely balk at using government force to limit things they don't like, such as drugs or illicit sex (or its enablers, like birth control and abortions). But oil and coal are things they like, because the far right was literally built on those fortunes.

But as we see -- and as Leonard, among others, keep reminding us -- the right's ability to snuff out debate over climate change in mainstream media and political circles doesn't suffice to make the weather behave itself. The issue keeps bouncing back, because it keeps affecting people in myriad ways. And when people get hurt by the weather, which in the US happens hundreds of times in dozens of ways every year, they tend to look to the government for help, partly because the market is no help, partly because charity is inefficient, but mostly because in the deep recesses of their minds they still harbor the far-left idea that a democratic government works for them. And the funny thing is that when disaster strikes, even confirmed ideological right-wingers -- the very people who laughed at Reagan's joke about the scariest thing you can hear being: "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help" -- demand to be helped.

At some point, you'd think the right would try to sort out its own schizophrenia: to recognize that sometimes markets don't work and sometimes government does and is necessary, and a long list of other related issues that keep driving them crazy. But for now they can't: they'd rather bury themselves in ignorance, blind themselves with superstitions, live in a Dark Age of their own delusion. Or so they think, when they think at all.

Woke up this morning thinking of the folly of drowning the federal government in a bathtub. For starters, like without the US National Hurricane Center would be much more precarious. Otherwise, who would have suspected that when Hurricane Sandy crossed Jamaica on Oct. 22 a week later it would drop 24 inches of snow on West Virginia? More important, of course, were the storm surge warnings and evacuations. For a recounting of death before such warnings see Erik Larson's book on the 1900 Galveston hurricane, Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History, although recognize that even then Isaac Cline was a federal employee, working for the U.S. Weather Bureau. The Norquist mob would have had him in their sights as well, and may well relish how close he literally came to drowning.

Forecasting helps. For the past week responsible authorities have been preparing to repair the inevitable breaks and disruptions that the storm was expected to leave. The cleanup may look messy, but it would be far worse without the preparation and the concern, and that happens because of and through government -- which is right, because only the government represents the interest and will of the people. Private businesses may look out for themselves, and charities may help patch some of the cracks, but only government moves deliberately enough to make a big difference. (That is, of course, when it does try -- something Bush's patronage cronies had trouble understanding.) Ronald Reagan once joked that the most fearsome words in the English language were, "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help." Funny line, except in the midst of a disaster. In such times, no one sits around contemplating how the free market is going to come to their rescue. No matter what their political stripes, they demand action from their government: lots of it, and now.

I suppose the good thing about a disaster is that it helps focus the mind. Otherwise, some people can get pretty confused. Take, please, Mitt Romney. Ed Kilgore quotes Ryan Grim, quoting Romney (for video, follow the Grim link):

During a CNN debate at the height of the GOP primary, Mitt Romney was asked, in the context of the Joplin disaster and FEMA's cash crunch, whether the agency should be shuttered so that states can individually take over responsibility for disaster response.

"Absolutely," he said. "Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that's the right direction. And if you can go even further, and send it back to the private sector, that's even better. Instead of thinking, in the federal budget, what we should cut, we should ask the opposite question, what should we keep?"

"Including disaster relief, though?" debate moderator John King asked Romney.

"We cannot -- we cannot afford to do those things without jeopardizing the future for our kids," Romney replied. "It is simply immoral, in my view, for us to continue to rack up larger and larger debts and pass them on to our kids, knowing full well that we'll all be dead and gone before it's paid off. It makes no sense at all."

Decentralizing government is fine and dandy in principle, but it doesn't necessarily work, and is certain to fail for disaster relief. The obvious problem is that the states have much tighter budgets -- they have to pay as they go, which means they'd have to save ahead of disasters (most likely through buying private market insurance), whereas the feds not only have deeper pockets, they can refill them as needed. You might try arguing that you can have the feds fund (or at least insure) the states, but you'd still get a whole series of inefficiencies and inequities: redundant or missing expertise, coordination problems (many disasters, like Sandy, cross borders), inconsistent policies and red tape. Even now, with the feds doing most of the work, you have vast differences from state to state -- Florida, which has a lot of practice, is relatively effective in doling out federal money, while Mississippi and Louisiana don't seem to be able to do anything competently (or without the taints of corruption and racism).

Romney compounds his ideological delusions about disaster relief with further idiocy about the federal debt. The core fact is that the federal debt, unlike your mortgage or car payment, does not have to be paid off -- not in your lifetime, or in your children's, or in their children's. Sure, that doesn't mean that you can expand it infinitely, but it means there's no clock-running-out scenario. (Also, things get tougher for debts that are denominated in other currencies, as you can see from Greece, Spain, etc. But US debt is exclusively denominated in dollars, and within some limits can be floated in inflated dollars.) Such harping on the debt only works if you assume government have to live like you do -- an assumption that defies our every experience. (Another telling joke: if you owe a bank a thousand dollars, that's your problem, but if you owe the bank a billion, that's the bank's problem.)

The point Romney and other deficit hawks are trying to drive home is the idea that we're broke, and when we're broke we can't afford things no matter how much we need them. (So suck it up, and plod along until you can. Better yet, get rich like Romney -- ignoring that he did it all with borrowed money, the debts for which he was able to pass on to the companies he ruined.) But when disaster hits, debt is often the only way out: e.g., you need to clean up the muck and broken windows in order for your your business to earn the cash to pay for repairs. And disaster shakes loose your illusions about individualism, so it's not just about you: if you repair your business but your neighbors do not, your location is soon worthless. Likewise, you depend on access roads being repaired, the power grid; you depend on public sanitation and health; you depend on police and firemen and courts and a solvent government, and those are all things that federal disaster relief make possible. And you depend on the economy bouncing back so people will buy from your business. The Republican dream of drowning the government will make all of that impossible. "Starving the beast" just withers the hand you may someday depend on to rescue you.

John Nichols has another piece that quotes the same Romney transcript. Alex Seitz-Wald has another; also later a piece not on what Romney was thinking but on what he's doing in face of the actual disaster: collecting canned goods, the ultimate hack charity drive:

Today, we got a look at Romney's charity in action, when he held an event that he swears was not a campaign rally in Ohio aimed at "storm relief" (the choice of a song with the lyrics "Knee deep in the water somewhere" was perhaps ill advised). The Romney campaign encouraged attendees to bring canned goods, clothes and other items to be sent to hurricane victims. "We have a lot of goods here . . . that these people will need," Romney said in his brief remarks. "We're going to box them up, then send them into New Jersey."

This undoubtedly comes from a good place and with good intentions, but is hardly a substitute for the relief efforts -- in fact, it may actually hinder them. The Red Cross, for which Romney is soliciting donations, doesn't even accept goods. "Unfortunately, due to logistical constraints the Red Cross does not accept or solicit individual donations or collections of items. Items such as collected food, used clothing and shoes must be sorted, cleaned, repackaged and transported which impedes the valuable resources of money, time, and personnel," the NGO's website explains. With financial donations, they can buy exactly what is needed closer to the site, and it helps stimulate the local economy in the process.

Most likely he just wanted a photo op to look like he was doing something at a time when the actual president was -- a structural problem which, I think, is one of the reasons why we shouldn't let sitting presidents run for reëlection. Looks like Romney also flipped on getting rid of FEMA, although from what little sense I can make of his new position the least I can say is he didn't make a very clean landing.

While we're at it, Republicans are often confused about who actually benefits from that government largesse they incessantly moan about. Like the old canard about how everyone overestimates how much federal money goes to foreign aid, they also have (and prey upon) a truly irrational fear of supporting the needy (and unworthy). In fact, an awful lot of what government does is to support businesses and their owners, and disaster aid is one of many chunks that fit. Indeed, you have to wonder when the rich are going to wise up and realize that they need the government much more than the poor do, and that the wholesale destruction of public goods and values is going to come back to hurt them. Robert H. Frank has a piece that starts to make this case, although he could go a lot further. The piece is called "Higher Taxes Help the Richest, Too." More on that, later.

Brief piece in the Wichita Eagle today, titled "All-time 100-degree record still in sight":

The temperature reached 100 on Friday in Wichita, vaulting 2011 into second place all by itself in the city's list of most triple-digit days in a year.

Now at 47 days, 2011 moved out of a tie with 1980, which dominates Wichita's list of record highs. Three more 100s will tie this year with 1936 -- and forecasters now say that's not out of the question.

"We could see 100 both Saturday and Sunday," said Vanessa Pearce, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Wichita.

That would bring 2011 within one of tying the all-time high. Stay tuned.

Forecasts for today and tomorrow are 98 and 96 respectively, but Wednesday is projected for 102F. It's not at all unusual to get 100 degree days in the first two, sometimes even three, September weeks. We did catch a break in early August, which is the only reason this is close.

Still, with all due respect to Hurricane Irene creeping up the east coast, the worst weather in the nation looks to be in Phoenix, which hit 117F yesterday topped by yet another duster.

As for hurricanes, I've only experienced two, and both living in Boston which isn't the sort of peak experience you get on the edge of the Gulf or across the Caribbean. Main thing I was struck by was the size and sweep of the storm: I'm used to tornados, which are devastating but tiny, hit or (mostly) miss, but when the hurricane came through everybody got hit. First one offered the whole effect, including a brief calm as the eye passed over, preceded and followed by three hours of heavy winds. That was 50 miles inland, so they probably didn't top 70 mph -- I've lived through winds that fast in Kansas, but they just come and go in a few minutes. I don't recall any hurricanes from when I lived in New York or New Jersey, although I did catch one of New York's massive blackouts. Still, that was short compared to the three days it took them to restore power following my first hurricane.

I've been collecting links about the Republicans' latest brain surge, on how they're going to hold up emergency disaster relief funds to extort further budget cuts, so more on that later. One is a Ron Paul quote about how he wishes we could turn the calendar back to 1900 -- an odd choice of nostalgia for a congressman representing Galveston, TX, where more than 8,000 people were killed by a 1900 hurricane. No matter how bad Irene is, it won't compare, mostly because we know what's coming, where it's going, and every government from South Carolina to Maine (and on into Canada) are working to minimize the damage and expedite repairs. In 1900 people justly feared Acts of God; now we have more to worry about from Acts of Cantor.

Update: Cam Patterson wrote a thoughtful comment on this post here.

Brian Beutler: Cantor Spox: If There's Hurricane Damage, Costs Have to Be Paid for With Spending Cuts: With his brain locked onto a single commanding idea, and perhaps a bit intoxicated by his sense that he can just say things and make them dictates, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor has decided that any unplanned, unbudgeted disaster relief has to be paid for in cash cut from other planned, budgeted programs. I never thought I'd long for the days when Republicans asserted that government should be run like a business. But the fact is that if any viable business was hit by uninsured storm losses the first thing they'd do is go to the bank and take out a loan. Same basic thing for households: say a storm smashes your car and the insurance doesn't cover replacing it, what do you do? Most folks need that car bad enough to go in debt to buy a new (or new old) one. Then, of course, you adjust your budget to cover the cost of the new debt, but you don't stop eating or paying the rent or whatever. You adjust.

The problem is that people with small minds and rigid ideas cannot adjust. They won't bend; they just snap. How such people rose to the leadership ranks of the Republican Party is probably an interesting story, but I doubt that it would come out much different from the case histories in Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed: if you take these rigid, uncompromisable "principles" to their absurd conclusions, you'll find that when you finally see government swirl down the drain in Grover Norquist's bathtub, you'll see civilization vanish with it.

It feels a little weird to have written that last line, because I've always regarded the federal government as an oppressive burden as much as a blessing. I might even have applauded if had Cantor had insisted that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq had to be budgeted out of cuts elsewhere, which at least would have forced Congress to think a bit setting out on paths that would soon cost trillions of dollars. On the other hand, disaster relief is something that only government can do, and that we instinctively look to government to do -- derisively, of course, when government fails miserably, like Bush did after Katrina. Moreover, while Cantor may laugh at tornados (and hurricanes and earthquakes and floods and fires and mudslides and droughts and the pretty good chance that rising sea levels will move the Florida coast to somewhere in Georgia), people who actually administer governments are remarkably fond of the programs -- just ask Gov. Rick Perry, who's been begging for more federal relief for Texas's droughts and fires.

Quite some time ago -- well before Katrina -- it occurred to me that disaster response would be the basic litmus test of competency in government. Clinton was very big on it, raising it to a cabinet level position, while Bush was utterly cavalier, treating it as just another way of dispensing crony patronage. (Of course, Jeb Bush, as governor of disaster-prone Florida, was on the ball and made out as well as could reasonably be expected -- a far different story from the Democrats in Louisiana.) Moreover, between global warming and relentless development especially in risky areas, disasters are becoming increasingly common, and increasingly expensive. So why do Republicans like Cantor want to hamstring government's ability to deal with disasters that affect potentially massive numbers of our own people, on our own land, dependent on our own infrastructure? Stupid doesn't begin to cover it. They are slaves to the fixed ideas they call principles. Next thing you know they'll look at something like Katrina and insist that charities can handle it, or speculate that if only you cut taxes further the private sector would swoop in and fix everything.

Steve Benen: Cantor's Callousness Turns Preemptive: Another link on Cantor and disaster -- an association that even God may have trouble rivaling:

We talked earlier about House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) insisting that federal disaster relief in the wake of this week's earthquake would no longer be automatic. Whereas Congress used to provide emergency funds after a disaster, without regard for budget caps of offsets, Republicans no longer believe in such an approach. [ . . . ]

A while back, during a different debate, John Cole noted, "If these guys were comic book villains, no one would buy it because it's just too over the top." It's a sentiment that comes to mind all the time.

Tom DeLay never went this far. No one has ever gone this far. U.S. officials have always put everything else aside when families and communities are hit and need a hand, but now, thanks to the new House Republican majority, those principles have been cast aside.

There's also a 2012 angle to this, by the way. Mitt Romney in June agreed with the callous right-wing line, saying, "We cannot afford to do those things without jeopardizing the future for our kids."

In context, "those things" referred to aiding American communities ravaged by a natural disaster.

Something I meant to add to yesterday's "The Raw and the Cooked" post but ran out of time and/or patience. One point there is that I recognize that where one stands on global warming is more often than not consistent with one's political stance. Leftists of most stripes not only see the need for aggressive state intervention to mitigate (or even better to reverse) the global warming trend, they tend to insist that the dire threat of global warming commands us to adopt their policy directions. One reason I'm especially cognizant of this is that I've recently read two books that do just that.

One is Bill McKibben: Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet; the other is Juliet B. Schor: Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth. Neither book has much to say about global warming, other than to assert that the global warming crisis makes their economic schemes all that more urgent.

McKibben, whose first book, The End of Nature was one of the first books on the subject back in 1989, does have an introductory chapter which reads like a catalog of horrors, but he's more interested in reprising his 2007 book Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future -- you wouldn't be wrong to think of the new book as a mash-up of the two previous books -- which is to say he's primarily concerned with promoting the ideal of small scale local economies. McKibben builds on a lot of recent work, especially regarding food, but his basic ideas have been kicking around for decades now, developed by people like Murray Bookchin and Paul Goodman who developed them without the slightest concern for global warming.

Schor is a sociologist who at least as far back as the early 1990s decided that the rat race isn't all it's cracked up to be. She's expressed that in at least two previous books: The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure (1992) and The Overspent American: Why We Want Want We Don't Need (1998). The new book goes further toward sketching out a more satisfying economy based on less overwork and overspending. And while global warming and peak oil play into her rationales, there's no reason to think she'd think differently if they weren't factors at all. Again, her ideas aren't terribly original -- Goodman and Bookchin have been there, as well as Marxists like Paul Sweezy and Andre Gorz, and for that matter the notion even shows up in John Maynard Keynes, who -- see John Skidelsky: Keynes: The Return of the Master -- saw capitalism as a path to "the good life" rather than an end in itself.

You can click on the links, including the cover images, to pick up a fair sampling of quotes from each book.

The economic visions of McKibben and Schor are only two of many possible programs that can be hitched to global warming, but all but the most dystopian involve taking deliberate and systematic direction to mitigate (or better still to reverse) the consequences. The proposals of someone like Al Gore or the various thinkers in the Obama administration hardly seem to me to be leftist, but conservatives are stuck in such a rut of denial they can't even warm up to market-oriented approaches like cap-and-trade or tax credits to stimulate investment in non-carbon-based energy sources -- ideas that used to come out of conservative think tanks when thinking was still permitted.

There is, of course, something disingenuous about hoisting one's pet ideas (or nonsense) up whatever flag pole seems to be getting attention, but that doesn't invalidate them -- best to try to sort out each problem and each proposal on its own terms. McKibben and Schor (and for that matter Skidelsky/Keynes) offer attractive notions of how to re-engineer the economy to make is more satisfying, and that seems like something worth thinking about -- at least on the left, where we believe that how we run the world is at least largely a matter of choice.

PS: It finally occurs to me that one defense of Schor and McKibben is that if one adopted their economic ideas, there would be an immediate and substantial reduction in the forces driving global warming. Again, if you choose an economy meant to satisfy the needs and desires of its inhabitants, you'd come up with something that doesn't just drown us in destabilizing pollutants, like we have gotten from laissez faire approaches.

One might also add that the cap-and-trade people are the real conservatives, since they're basically trying to stabilize the existing system using levers that are consistent with its current operation. Again, the right fails to conserve anything; they're happy to let the economy flail itself to death in contradictions they're too ignorant and/or uncaring to even recognize.

Paul Krugman: Who Cooked the Planet? Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid threw in the towel on trying to pass any climate-change legislation this year, so Krugman tries to pin down responsibility for inaction:

The answer is, the usual suspects: greed and cowardice.

If you want to understand opposition to climate action, follow the money. The economy as a whole wouldn't be significantly hurt if we put a price on carbon, but certain industries -- above all, the coal and oil industries -- would. And those industries have mounted a huge disinformation campaign to protect their bottom lines.

Look at the scientists who question the consensus on climate change; look at the organizations pushing fake scandals; look at the think tanks claiming that any effort to limit emissions would cripple the economy. Again and again, you'll find that they're on the receiving end of a pipeline of funding that starts with big energy companies, like Exxon Mobil, which has spent tens of millions of dollars promoting climate-change denial, or Koch Industries, which has been sponsoring anti-environmental organizations for two decades.

Or look at the politicians who have been most vociferously opposed to climate action. Where do they get much of their campaign money? You already know the answer.

He then lashes in to "climate cowards" like Sen. John McCain. Fair enough. But as a card-carrying Keynesian, shouldn't Krugman suspect that ideology ("bad ideas") is more to blame than mere interest? For a better explanation, turn to: Ross Douthat: The Right and the Climate:

There was no way to get a bill through without some support from conservative lawmakers. And in the global warming debate, there's a seemingly unbridgeable gulf between the conservative movement and the environmentalist cause.

To understand why, it's worth going back to the 1970s, the crucible in which modern right-wing politics was forged.

The Seventies were a great decade for apocalyptic enthusiasms, and none was more potent than the fear that human population growth had outstripped the earth's carrying capacity. According to a chorus of credentialed alarmists, the world was entering an age of sweeping famines, crippling energy shortages, and looming civilizational collapse.

It was not lost on conservatives that this analysis led inexorably to left-wing policy prescriptions -- a government-run energy sector at home, and population control for the teeming masses overseas.

The fundamental political issue of our times is whether government should act as a counterbalance against the various problems kicked up by capitalism, or whether government should be limited to support of the capitalist order. The latter position, which had been gaining ground from the 1970s up to the current Great Recession, seeks to do three things: 1) to concentrate wealth in private hands; 2) to make the regulation of business private and discretionary, not subject to public policy; 3) to make government as unattractive as possible to anyone without significant money, and thereby keep them from looking to government for any kind of support. The latter isn't easy: we live in a putative democracy, where government is supposed to belong to and serve the people, and the people actually served by deregulation and wealth concentration are inevitably a tiny minority. That they have any chance of ruling at all is due to their skill at spinning a story line -- an ideology -- that seems to back their case.

They're good at spinning that story -- indeed, they should be, given that they have most of the money and practically all of the media -- but sometimes they run into trouble, like when the economy crashes, and then their spiel loses credibility. That happened big time in 1929-32 when many people concluded that capitalism had broken beyond repair. That led to desperate efforts at reform, all of which involved deliberate massive government intervention: communism (which was too anti-capitalist), fascism (which was too anti-worker), and Keynesian liberalism, which sought to save capitalism by rebalancing productive forces, and by using public spending to make up for shortfalls in demand. And it happened on a smaller scale in 2008 -- the mitigating factor is that we've kept relatively high levels of government spending all these years even though the ideology disparages it.

So conservatives reject doing anything about global warming because only government can do anything about -- worst still, only most world governments acting in concert -- and they've been trained to see any government effort at solving any problem as an existential attack on the privileges of the rich (err, on conservative principles, God and country, family values, all that we hold near and dear). That story about alarmists in the 1970s being proven wrong is just window dressing. Still, that doesn't mean they're right now, or were even right in the 1970s.

Ehrlich is certainly right that persistent population growth will eventually exceed the feeding capacity of the earth. What caught him unawares was the increase in productive efficiency caused mostly by putting more oil into agriculture. That such an increase happened doesn't mean that further increases will continue to happen, especially if energy inputs get much more expensive. (The other main hope is genetic manipulation, which is harder to predict -- especially side-effects.) The 1970s also saw an oil crunch, in large part politically concocted but also tied to peak oil being passed in the US. This led to a glut in the 1980s partly driven by politics -- the UK tried to drain its North Sea fields in record time -- and in any case unlikely to be reproduced.

In retrospect, Ehrlich's biggest mistake may have been to think that limiting population would conserve resources. The best counterexample is China, where drastic restrictions led to an extraordinary growth spurt and corresponding demand for natural resources (energy and materials, of course, but even food demand increases especially if it involves meat). The same correlation applies throughout the developing world, where economic growth is closely tied to limiting population growth -- which for one thing means that the right's pronatal obsession works to keep the developing world from developing.

Still, the issue is something else: conservatives maintain that concerted government action to mitigate climate change would cause more harm than benefit, at least compared to what unregulated markets may (or may not) accomplish. It's hard to see why that might be the case, unless you believe that even a successful governmental intervention would be a bad thing for your political standing. It's certainly easy to see how government action could go wrong, especially given our system of political influence peddling. On the other hand, if you take the threat seriously, it's even harder to see how an unregulated private sector would solve it except through a painful process of crash and retrenchment -- a cycle that unregulated markets never tire of repeating.

I don't have much to say about the threats posed by global warming. It should by now be obvious that we tend to take some threats more seriously than warranted and others less. Climate change splits both ways, probably because it's been reduced to a right-left litmus test, but also because climate seems so basic it must matter greatly while at the same time it is so changeable day-to-day that the projected ranges don't stray much from our experience. (I've followed many paleontological debates about climate change vs. other causes for extinction events, and have never found climate change to be convincing as an explanation, so I tend to be skeptical about disaster models. On the other hand, we are dreadful at evaluating rare but extremely dire prospects, which certainly are possible here.)

Douthat does say one more thing of special interest here, about "global-warming heretics" like Bjorn Lomborg and Freeman Dyson:

Their perspective is grounded, in part, on the assumption that a warmer world will also be a richer world -- and that economic development is likely to do more for the wretched of the earth than a growth-slowing regulatory regime.

In one sense I don't see the assumption. A warmer world will be one where a lot of resources will be dislocated, which will favor some people while disfavoring others, but at least in the short run such shifts are most likely to destroy more wealth quicker than they will allow new wealth to be created. Maybe in the long term that balances out, but I don't see how you can count on that. Moreover, the change will disproportionately take its toll on those who own wealth now, simply because they have the most to lose. It is, therefore, easy to see why Europe and the US should be more worried about global warming than the developing world -- even aside from fairness issues, or the suspicion that we are trying to lock in a permanent advantage. For the developing world -- especially the part that really is growing its economy -- the tables are reversed. For countries like China, India, and Brazil there is virtually no reason to sacrifice growth now for climate stability later. (Research shows that more money does make you happier, but only to a point: once you've broken out of poverty it makes less and less difference.) Douthat concludes:

Not every danger has a regulatory solution, and sometimes it makes sense to wait, get richer, and then try to muddle through.

Indeed, if you're a developing country that is growing fast enough that it's not just the rich who are getting richer, that sounds like good advice. On the other hand, that doesn't sound like America, where government inaction and irresponsibility over the last 30 years has eroded everyone's wealth except for the upper crust's. For most people in America the time to act is now -- if not on climate change, at least on the more basic political dispute.

I haven't had much to say about BP's deepwater oil gusher. I knew all along that deepwater oil would be expensive and risky and in the end of marginal value. I expected they'd have lots of trouble trying to plug it, but I hadn't been aware of the 1979 Ixtoc I spill, which took over nine months to plug in a mere 160 feet of water: the long list of failed gambits on Deepwater Horizon recapitulate the list at Ixtoc I. (Indeed, the explosion, the sinking of the platform, and the failure of systems intended to prevent spills are uncannily similar.)

I knew that Washington was awash in oil company money, and that the regulatory agencies had long ago been captured by the companies. And I knew about BP, which in its former guise as Anglo-Iranian Oil Company is the main reason the US and UK have been hated in the Middle East for the last 57 years -- the CIA's Iran coup was done to save AIOC's bacon. So I've been pretty much tempted to treat this as business as usual, but the feature quotes in Tim Dickinson's Rolling Stone piece, The Spill, the Scandal, and the President, finally hit home:

BP has received all but one of the 761 citations issued against oil refiners for "egregious" safety violations.

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BP's response plan -- cut and pasted from its plan for the arctic -- was so sloppy that it promised to protect walruses in the gulf.

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Obama left so many pro-industry regulators in charge of drilling that interior staffers call it "the third Bush term."

Originals were all caps. Some quotes from the article:

During the Bush years, the Minerals Management Service, the agency in the Interior Department charged with safeguarding the environment from the ravages of drilling, descended into rank criminality. According to reports by Interior's inspector general, MMS staffers were both literally and figuratively in bed with the oil industry. When agency staffers weren't joining industry employees for coke parties or trips to corporate ski chalets, they were having sex with oil-company officials. But it was American taxpayers and the environment that were getting screwed. MMS managers were awarded cash bonuses for pushing through risky offshore leases, auditors were ordered not to investigate shady deals, and safety staffers routinely accepted gifts from the industry, allegedly even allowing oil companies to fill in their own inspection reports in pencil before tracing over them in pen.

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Salazar also failed to remove Chris Oynes, a top MMS official who had been a central figure in a multibillion-dollar scandal that Interior's inspector general called "a jaw-dropping example of bureaucratic bungling." In the 1990s, industry lobbyists secured a sweetheart subsidy from Congress: Drillers would pay no royalties on oil extracted in deep water until prices rose above $28 a barrel. But this tripwire was conveniently omitted in Gulf leases overseen by Oynes -- a mistake that will let the oil giants pocket as much as $53 billion. Instead of being fired for this fuckup, however, Oynes was promoted by Bush to become associate director for offshore drilling -- a position he kept under Salazar until the Gulf disaster hit.

"Employees describe being in Interior -- not just MMS, but the other agencies -- as the third Bush term," says Jeff Ruch, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, which represents federal whistle-blowers. "They're working for the same managers who are implementing the same policies. Why would you expect a different result?"

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MMS has fully understood the worst-case scenarios for deep-sea oil blowouts for more than a decade. In May 2000 [before Bush], an environmental assessment for deepwater drilling in the Gulf presciently warned that "spill responses may be complicated by the potential for very large magnitude spills (because of the high production rates associated with deepwater wells)." The report noted that the oil industry "has estimated worst-case spill volumes ranging from 5,000 to 116,000 barrels a day for 120 days," and it even anticipated the underwater plumes of oil that are currently haunting the Gulf: "Oil released subsea (e.g., subsea blowout or pipeline leak) in these deepwater environments could remain submerged for some period of time and travel away from the spill site." The report ominously concluded, "There are few practical spill-response options for dealing with submerged oil." [ . . . ]

Enter the Bush administration. Rather than heeding such warnings, MMS simply assumed that a big spill couldn't happen. "There was a complete failure to even contemplate the possibility of a disaster like the one in the Gulf," says Holly Doremus, an environmental-law expert at the University of California. "In their thinking, a big spill would be something like 5,000 barrels, and the oil wouldn't even reach the shoreline." In fact, Bush's five-year plan for offshore drilling described a "large oil spill" as no more than 1,500 barrels. In April 2007, an environmental assessment covering the area where BP would drill concluded that blowouts were "low probability and low risk," even though a test funded by MMS had found that blowout preventers failed 28 percent of the time.

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Nowhere was the absurdity of the policy more evident than in the application that BP submitted for its Deepwater Horizon well only two months after Obama took office. BP claims that a spill is "unlikely" and states that it anticipates "no adverse impacts" to endangered wildlife or fisheries. Should a spill occur, it says, "no significant adverse impacts are expected" for the region's beaches, wetlands and coastal nesting birds. The company, noting that such elements are "not required" as part of the application, contains no scenario for a potential blowout, and no site-specific plan to respond to a spill. Instead, it cites an Oil Spill Response Plan that it had prepared for the entire Gulf region. Among the sensitive species BP anticipates protecting in the semitropical Gulf? "Walruses" and other cold-water mammals, including sea otters and sea lions. The mistake appears to be the result of a sloppy cut-and-paste job from BP's drilling plans for the Arctic. Even worse: Among the "primary equipment providers" for "rapid deployment of spill response resources," BP inexplicably provides the Web address of a Japanese home-shopping network. Such glaring errors expose the 582-page response "plan" as nothing more than a paperwork exercise. "It was clear that nobody read it," says Ruch, who represents government scientists.

"This response plan is not worth the paper it is written on," said Rick Steiner, a retired professor of marine science at the University of Alaska who helped lead the scientific response to the Valdez disaster. "Incredibly, this voluminous document never once discusses how to stop a deepwater blowout."

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In March 2006, BP was responsible for an Alaska pipeline rupture that spilled more than 250,000 gallons of crude into Prudhoe Bay -- at the time, a spill second in size only to the Valdez disaster. Investigators found that BP had repeatedly ignored internal warnings about corrosion brought about by "draconian" cost cutting. The company got off cheap in the spill: While the EPA recommended slapping the firm with as much as $672 million in fines, the Bush administration allowed it to settle for just $20 million.

BP has also cut corners at the expense of its own workers. In 2005, 15 workers were killed and 170 injured after a tower filled with gasoline exploded at a BP refinery in Texas. Investigators found that the company had flouted its own safety procedures and illegally shut off a warning system before the blast. An internal cost-benefit analysis conducted by BP -- explicitly based on the children's tale The Three Little Pigs -- revealed that the oil giant had considered making buildings at the refinery blast-resistant to protect its workers (the pigs) from an explosion (the wolf). BP knew lives were on the line: "If the wolf blows down the house, the piggy is gobbled." But the company determined it would be cheaper to simply pay off the families of dead pigs.

After the blast, BP pleaded guilty to a felony, paying $50 million to settle a criminal investigation and another $21 million for violating federal safety laws. But the fines failed to force BP to change its ways. In October, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis hit the company with a proposed $87 million in new fines -- the highest in history -- for continued safety violations at the same facility. Since 2007, according to analysis by the Center for Public Integrity, BP has received 760 citations for "egregious and willful" safety violations -- those "committed with plain indifference to or intentional disregard for employee safety and health." The rest of the oil industry combined has received a total of one.

The company applied the same deadly cost-cutting mentality to its oil rig in the Gulf. BP, it is important to note, is less an oil company than a bank that finances oil exploration; unlike ExxonMobil, which owns most of the equipment it uses to drill, BP contracts out almost everything. That includes the Deepwater Horizon rig that it leased from a firm called Transocean. BP shaved $500,000 off its overhead by deploying a blowout preventer without a remote-control trigger --- a fail-safe measure required in many countries but not mandated by MMS, thanks to intense industry lobbying. It opted to use cheap, single-walled piping for the well, and installed only six of the 21 cement spacers recommended by its contractor, Halliburton -- decisions that significantly increased the risk of a severe explosion. It also skimped on critical testing that could have shown whether explosive gas was getting into the system as it was being cemented, and began removing mud that protected the well before it was sealed with cement plugs.

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As BP was cutting corners aboard the rig, the Obama administration was plotting the greatest expansion of offshore drilling in half a century. [ . . . ] Undeterred, Obama and Salazar appeared together at Andrews Air Force Base on March 31st to introduce the plan. The stagecraft was pure Rove in its technicolor militaristic patriotism. The president's podium was set up in front of the cockpit of an F-18, flanked by a massive American flag. "We are not here to do what is easy," Salazar declared. "We are here to do what is right." He insisted that his reforms at MMS were working: "We are making decisions based on sound information and sound science." The president, for his part, praised Salazar as "one of the finest secretaries of Interior we've ever had" and stressed that his administration had studied the drilling plan for more than a year. "This is not a decision that I've made lightly," he said. Two days later, he issued an even more sweeping assurance. "It turns out, by the way, that oil rigs today generally don't cause spills," the president said. "They are technologically very advanced."

Eighteen days later, on the eve of the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, the Deepwater Horizon rig went off like a bomb.

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From the start, the administration has seemed intent on allowing BP to operate in near-total secrecy. Much of what the public knows about the crisis it owes to Rep. Ed Markey, who chairs the House Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment. Under pressure from Markey, BP was forced to release footage of the gusher, admit that its early estimates put the leak as high as 14,000 barrels a day and post a live feed of its undersea operations on the Internet -- video that administration officials had possessed from the earliest days of the disaster. "We cannot trust BP," Markey said. "It's clear they have been hiding the actual consequences of this spill."

Andrew Leonard has some more quotes from the article here. He calls it "the most damning account of the Obama administration's reaction to and responsibility for the BP disaster I've seen so far." I haven't felt like piling onto Obama over this, but it shows several faults that we've seen repeatedly since he took office. For starters, his refusal to expose the Bush administration and make a thorough housecleaning -- Robert Gates and Ben Bernanke are merely the most famous Bush apparatchiki to hang on to their jobs and perpetuate Bush policies. Another is his willingness to kowtow to a "collective wisdom" that exists for no real reason that the media keeps repeating it over and over -- the nonsense about running deficits in a depression, the idea that a public option for health insurance is politically toxic, the incessant chant of "drill baby drill" -- often directly contradicting what he himself said when running for the nomination. Someone with more conviction and backbone would use his office's "bully pulpit" to discredit myths and push programs that would actually work rather than constantly compromise.

I'm beginning to think the characterization of the BP oil disaster as "Obama's Katrina" isn't so far off. Like Obama's recession, Obama's Iraq, Obama's Israel, even Obama's Afghanistan, everything he touches pales in comparison to Bush's originals, and has the mitigating excuse of being something he inherited rather than started from scratch, but nowhere has he managed to clear himself from the entangling traps Bush stuck him with. BP has done a breathtaking job of cutting corners, but so has Obama.

Reading Richard Heinberg's Blackout: Coal, Climate and the Last Energy Crisis (paperback, 2009, New Society) is quite the bummer. Heinberg has written a number of gloomy books about a near future where oil production has peaked and is in permanent decline (e.g., The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies and Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines). His most profound insight has been the upslope correlation between energy use and population, with the implication that once energy use peaks -- we draw so much energy from petroleum that the two are close to inextricably linked -- population too will be forced into decline. In previous books he has been similarly pessimistic about coal and nuclear. Here he addresses coal in much more details, and comes up with a triple whammy: peak oil is imminent (if it hasn't already peaked) with a fairly steep decline over the next 30-40 years; estimates of hundreds of years worth of coal reserves are shriveling as declining quality and increasing extraction and transportation costs marginalize coal fields; plus any coal that we do manage to burn just adds to a near apocalyptic climate problem. In short, he has combined three worst case scenarios into a massive economic decline in short order -- well within the expected lifetimes of today's youngsters.

Heinberg posits three hypothetical scenarios: a "do nothing" which actually allows for a lot of wind, solar, and nuclear, with disastrous results; a major "clean coal" push, which does little better (it does slow down coal depletion a bit); and a presumably recommended solution that involves a lot of government-managed rationing -- in some ways that's even more of a bummer than the "do nothing" trainwreck. I'm sympathetic to each of the arguments, and the long thrust of my thinking is to come up with ways not so much to solve these problem as to live within resource limits, but I always figured we have more time to work it all out. For instance, the way the world works now means that post-peak oil scarcity will be rationed through higher prices which will in turn reduce demand, first by wringing most of the unnecessary consumption out of the system, then eventually by imposing all sorts of hardships. This will mean that the world 30 years after peak will be much different than now, and it probably means that the economy will be somewhat smaller. There are things we can do about it to make the transition less painful, and most likely we will not do many of them, but even so it won't be for lack of understanding or ideas -- it's more because so many people only learn things the hard way.

Climate change is trickier for lots of reasons: it's less clear what's happening, and it's less clear how hard it will be to adapt to whatever does happen, but most of all because some climate change functions are catastrophic -- minor changes can push past thresholds where the results radically change. My impression is that thus far we've been pretty lucky that greenhouse gas warming hasn't disrupted the climate more than it has, but that happens sometimes when you're gambling, and there's no guarantee that luck won't change. (In fact, if luck is the right word, it will change.)

Paul Krugman: Building a Green Economy: Straightforward survey of most of the serious thinking on the economics of doing something about anthropogenic climate change. Sure, that means he ignores the people who deny that there's a problem or who deny that there is a solution, which leaves several arguments: command or market (cap-and-trade) approaches to limiting greenhouse gases, differences in urgency (gradual ramping or "big bang"; I would have named the latter "shock treatment," drawing an analogy to the forced privatization that wrecked post-Soviet Russia). One thing of note viz. Heinberg above is that Krugman cites various studies concluding that the costs of doing nothing, resulting in a global temperature rise of up to 9 degrees F, are on the order of 5% of GDP, while the costs of limiting emissions is more like 2% of GDP. Both of these numbers seem small, not things that would radically alter our way of life -- pace Heinberg. They are, however, far from certain. One key paragraph:

You might think that this uncertainty weakens the case for action, but it actually strengthens it. As Harvard's Martin Weitzman has argued in several influential papers, if there is a significant chance of utter catastrophe, that chance -- rather than what is most likely to happen -- should dominate cost-benefit calculations. And utter catastrophe does look like a realistic possibility, even if it is not the most likely outcome.

Weitzman argues -- and I agree -- that this risk of catastrophe, rather than the details of cost-benefit calculations, makes the most powerful case for strong climate policy. Current projections of global warming in the absence of action are just too close to the kinds of numbers associated with doomsday scenarios. It would be irresponsible -- it's tempting to say criminally irresponsible -- not to step back from what could all too easily turn out to be the edge of a cliff.

Andrew Leonard: Paging Paul Krugman: More apocalypse, please: A brief comment on the above piece, mostly dealing with the issue of whether Krugman was forceful enough in describing the dire consequences of unchecked global warming. More relevant to my concerns viz. Heinberg:

Maybe economists are just constitutionally incapable of imagining a future without an economy?

Krugman's stock-in-trade is explaining things with simple models. His models can be simple because they assume everything else remains essentially the same. That works all right most of the time, but almost by its very nature doesn't work so well here. In fact, we don't know what works. And the problem isn't doubting the science. It's our ability to understand what it all means. I suspect Krugman understands this well enough: that's why he cites Weitzman. Think of it as a hedge against a really bad possible scenario -- the sort of thing the banking industry didn't do because their models didn't admit the possibility of risk on the level that actually occurred, let alone factor in the cascading failures that ensued. Moreover, the sort of risk we are running on the climate isn't something we can easily fix just by inventing more liquidity. It impacts things like whether land is above or below sea level, whether we can grow food on it and what kind of food, whether we will have adequate water where we want it, at the same time as the fossil fuel energy we have depended on is certain to go into decline.

Steve Benen: Georgia Senators Forget the President's Name: This is a good example of how Obama can't get any credit even when he does something wrong -- and wrong not in the sense of carrying on a discredited Bush policy like Guantanamo or military tribunals or free money for banker bonuses or bombing Pakistan with drones trying to provoke a civil war or carrying Netanyahu's water in his diversionary campaign to stir up trouble with Iran. More like wrong as in something he did completely on his own, trying to jump start nuclear power plant building by guaranteeing massive loans, saddling the public with all the risk while private companies reap the profits. Needless to say, Georgia's Republican senators are into that sort of thing, but not to the point of acknowledging that it wouldn't have happened but for Obama:

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution's Jay Bookman noted yesterday, for example, that Sens. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.) and Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) issued a seven-paragraph, 392-word joint statement, lauding the new nuclear initiative. Number of times Isakson and Chambliss used the words "president," "Obama," and/or "White House"? Zero. Even though the senators were delighted to hear the president's announcement, as Bookman concluded, the two "just couldn't bring themselves" to agree with Obama by name.

I can see the political logic, but usually when you can get the other party to do your bidding, you're at least civil about it -- if only to claim that even-so-and-so sees the wisdom of your policy. I suppose one can come up with several theories why the Republicans are behaving this way. One is that they're really worried that Obama will consolidate a center-right that effectively stifles the left while avoiding the pitfalls of the far right, thereby rendering the Republican Party useless to the ruling class: in this scenario, anything they can do to delegitimize Obama, even if it's just a rude slight, is necessary. Another is that they're just racists, pretending (as their forefathers did) that blacks are (or should be) nothing more than invisible servants. Of course, you'd think Georgia Republicans would know better.

As for Obama's pro-nuclear power stance, I can't say I approve, nor that it's one of his biggest mistakes. My UK missile defense correspondent wrote back that he was surprised and disappointed that I oppose nuclear power. That's not exactly what I think, but it is an approximation. I think the US nuclear power industry has a huge problem with waste management, and that until someone does something to get that under control it's irresponsible to build more power plants. I also think that proliferation hasn't been adequately thought through. In the beginning nuclear power plants were a front for nuclear arms production, and that aspect has never been cleanly separated out -- in large part because the demand for nuclear arms has never been extinguished. One major consequence of this is that the industry has never had anything resembling transparency, which has meant that it has never been possible to accurately assess risks. (One of the few assessments we have is that private capital has been unwilling to invest in nuclear power plants since the 1970s, or really forever given the role the AEC played.) More generally, there are lots of externalities associated with nuclear power plants, which have historically been ignored but really need to be reckoned. (On the other hand, one can argue that coal-fired power plants have greater externalities, but it's hard to compare without having full transparency.)

Moreover, there are political issues. In particular, we had the spectacle of George Bush running around the world promoting nuclear power yet recoiling when Iran bought into the argument. I am, quite frankly, more worried that an Iranian nuclear power plant might melt down than that Iran would be able to blackmail the world with nuclear bombs. This in turn gets wrapped up in the global geopolitics of energy use. I've read various things about how much usable uranium exists, which make it more or less attractive, but either way it poses a race to see who can use it all up first. And that gets to my deeper misgivings: I expect that we are headed into a period of energy use contraction, and expect that to have profound effects on how we live -- maybe for the worse, or possibly, if we get smart about it, for the better. I don't see a lot of value in throwing more energy investments at the problem just to avoid the day of reckoning -- although I don't mind relatively safe investments to soften the blow. It may well be that in the long run we need to figure out how to do nuclear power right, and make use of that. But we're not there yet, and I don't see a lot of evidence that we're headed in the direction of getting smarter. Indeed, judging from the Georgia Republicans in the Senate, I'd say the opposite is the case.

New York City had an explosion yesterday, demonstrating once again that stupidity and incompetence can do things that terrorists can only dream of. David Caruso, writing for AP, picked up in the Wichita Eagle today, writes:

With a blast that made skyscrapers tremble, an 83-year-old steam pipe sent a powerful message that the miles of tubes, wires and iron beneath New York and other U.S. cities are getting older and could become dangerously unstable. [ . . . ]

"This may be a warning sign for this very old network of pipe that we have," said Anil Agrawal, a professor of civil engineering at the City College of New York. "We should not be looking at this incident as an isolated one."

From Boston to Los Angeles, a number of American cities are entering a middle age of sorts, and the infrastructure propping them up is showing signs of strain.

DePaul University transportation professor Joe Schwieterman said his city of Chicago, where much of the infrastructure dates to the early part of the 20th century, is now faced with tough choices on what to fix first.

"The aging infrastructure below the streets is an enormous liability for the city," Schwieterman said. "We know it needs modernization but the cost is staggering. We're forced to pick our battles wisely."

Thousands of miles of underground water and sewage pipes are nearing the end of their expected life, sometimes with a bang and a flash flood.

Electrical systems, operating with components that are decades old, have been groaning to handle record power demand.

Parts of New York were plunged into darkness for a week last summer when a series of power cables failed in Queens, and much of the Northeast was blacked out when power transmission systems failed across several states in 2003.

In New York and Boston, aging sidewalk utility panels were blamed for delivering electric shocks to pedestrians and pets in wet weather.

The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that it will take $1.6 trillion over the next five years to get the nation's roads, bridges, dams, water systems and airports into good condition.

$1.6 trillion is, like, double what Iraq and Afghanistan have cost the US since 2001. It is a number that is both prohbitively huge and more/less manageable. The only real difference is that nobody selling the Iraq war in 2002-03 came out and stated that the war would cost us a trillion dollars or more but would be worth it. Rather, we were told that the war would practically pay for itself -- mostly because no one would believe that anything over there would be worth spending trillions of dollars. For the warmongers, myopia was a necessity. But facing up to the infrastructure deficit requires exactly the opposite condition: it's easy to see that the investment is worth it in the long run, but hard to work it into the budget just now. Of course, as things do break, budgeting will get easier -- cf. the levies of New Orleans.

There are people who argue that government should be run like a business, which is scary given how notoriously short-term businesses think. The exact opposite is more like it: anything that a business can do most likely will be done by a business, unless government flat out obstructs it -- some businesses, like recreational drugs, even survive prohibition. The private sector responds to immediate demand, at least within frameworks where supply can be metered. On the other hand, government can act deliberately, subject only to politics. So government can do things that businesses cannot, like plan for the long term, or create public goods that need not be metered. The big problem is getting to where we can make sound political decisions. Politicians and government bureaucrats have notoriously poor reputations in that regard, in large part because government is relatively immune to the market corrections businesses respond to -- cf. the Iraq war. Getting better at political decision making requires that we get smarter about what we need government for, clearer about how we conceive of a public interest to counter against overly powerful private interests, more transparent and honest. It may even mean that we need to be willing to sacrifice some private interests to a broader, deeper good. That in turn requires trust and faith that most of our experience under unregulated power and greed turns us against.

Needless to say, this is going to get worse before it gets better. That much is clear from the people in power now and the trendline they represent and do so much to further.

Elizabeth Kolbert has a note in The New Yorker (May 28, 2007) about Rachel Carson, on the 100th anniversary of her birth. The piece starts with a discussion of the USDA's efforts to eradicate red imported fire ants, using pesticides that caused major ecological damage, while denying or ignoring scientific reports. This inevitably segues into a survey of the the home front in Bush's long war:

Six years into the Bush Administration, it's basically the ant wars all over again. At key agencies, a disregard for inconvenient evidence seems to be a prerequisite. A memo prepared by the Democratic staff of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in mid-March, for example, revealed that officials of the White House Council on Environmental Quality had made more than a hundred and eighty changes to a status report on global warming, virtually all of which had the effect of exaggerating scientific uncertainties and minimizing certainties. (The official responsible for most of the changes, Philip Cooney, had come to the White House from the American Petroleum Institute and now works for Exxon Mobil.) A report by the Inspector General for the Department of the Interior, also issued in March, chronicled numerous instances in which a high-ranking department official, Julie MacDonald, had pressured government scientists to alter findings on threatened species. MacDonald, the report pointedly noted, had "no formal educational background in natural sciences, such as biology." (She has since resigned.) As it happened, the report on MacDonald was released right around the time that the former second-in-command at the Interior Department, J. Steven Griles, pleaded guilty to lying to Congress.

Meanwhile, the Administration has done its best to gut the safeguards put in place after [Carson's book] Silent Spring. When, for instance, the EPA proposed new rules on mercury emissions from pwoer plants, the proposal turned out to contain several paragraphs lifted, virtually verbatim, from an industry lobbyist's memo. (With minor changes, those regulations are now in effect.) Just last month, the Administration proposed new rules on the retrofitting of old power plants. The more or less expllicit purpose of the rules is to accommodate a power company, Duke Energy, that the EPA had itself sued for violating the Clean Air Act. Also last month, the EPA announced that it would once again delay taking action on two drinking-water contaminants, perchlorate, an ingredient in rocket fuel, and MTBE, a fuel additive.

This kind of thing doesn't get reported much, mostly because with all of Bush's malfeasances the media's triage operations never seem to get past the most acute disasters. But Bush (or Cheney or Rove or whoever pulls the strings behind Incurious George) made sure from inauguration day that every nook and cranny of the federal government was staffed with operatives enforcing the party line. The old knock on Ronald Reagan was that he talked a good game, but didn't actually deliver much. You can't say that about Bush and Cheney: they've made damn sure that their sponsors got their money's worth.

The true costs of Bush's rollback on environmental protections may be impossible to tally up. Degradation is often incremental, its costs only becoming apparent when some "tipping point" is crossed. But one thing that is clearly lost is time. Some problems may be easy enough to recover from, but others, like oil depletion and global warming, look suspiciously like ticking bombs, and things like extinction are by definition permanent, irrecoverable losses. Every bit as troubling is how Bush and company have convinced many that politics trumps everything else, including science and for that matter fact. I don't doubt that overvaluation of science has gotten us into trouble, but swinging to the other extreme leaves us bewildered and helpless. That in general seems to play into the right's political agenda, as long as the accumulation of disaster doesn't shake the faith of the ignorant following the blind. The other side of that equation is that the more Bush succeeds, the worse disasters it will take to steer us back to reality.

Tony Judt wrote a piece in The New York Review of Books called "Is the UN Doomed?" It covers a screed by Eric Shawn called The UN Exposed: How the United Nations Sabotages America's Security and Fails the World, a more positive book by Paul Kennedy, and a cautionary one by James Traub on Kofi Annan. Pretty much everyone has reasons to be disappointed by the UN, while few acknowledge that it does do some good work when given a chance. That's neither here nor there, but the following bit of gloom got my attention:

All in all, then, it seems unlikely that even the humiliating defeat of the Iraq war will change many Americans' minds about the virtues of international cooperation. Something else, however, just may. For there is one common twenty-first-century international experience that American citizens and politicians cannot avoid sharing with the rest of the globe, however little they know of the outside world and however barnacled and prejudiced their views about it. Within the lifetime of many readers of this essay, the world is going to slip ever faster into an environmental catastrophe.

It is no coincidence that the two countries most responsible for this prospect -- China and the United States of America -- are also the two Security Council members least amenable to collective action in general; nor is it surprising that the man they have chosen to suceed Kofi Annan as UN secretary-general is Ban Ki-moon of South Korea, not someone hitherto known for pressing inconvenient agendas or speaking out of turn. His initial pronouncements, notably his equivocation over the propriety of Saddam Hussein's execution, have not been reassuring. But in the coming decades we are going to face "natural" disasters, droughts, famines, floods, resource wars, population movements, economic crises, and regional pandemics on a wholly unfamiliar scale.

Individual states will have neither the means nor -- thanks to globalization -- the practical authority to limit the damage or make good the losses. Substate actors such as the Red Cross or Doctors Without Borders will at best be able to apply band-aids. "Acting with others" -- the emerging post-Bush mantra -- will be utterly insufficient: mere coalitions of the willing (or the subservient) will be powerless. We shall be forced to acknowledge the authority and guidance of those who know what has to be done. In short, we shall have to act through others: in collaboration, in cooperation, and with little reference to separate national interests or boundaries, which will in any case lose much of their meaning. Thanks to the United Nations and its various agencies, such as WHO, Paul Kennedy writes, we have already "established international early-warning, assessment, response, and coordination mechanisms for when states fray or collapse." We shall have to learn to apply these to circumstances in which it is not states but whole societies that face collapse or failure, and where even Americans will not have the reassuring option of fighting "them" over "there" in order not to have to fight them "here."

One thing I want to draw your attention to is the quotes Judt puts around "natural" qualifying disasters. One euphemism we have for such events is "acts of God" -- things we ascribe to nature or unseen forces not because we didn't cause them but because we refuse to take responsibility for them. That refusal is above all a political bias. Indeed, the better we understand the science, the more it becomes a matter of political choice, as opposed to mere ignorance.

The problems Judt mentions, and there are more where they came from, are not just unintended consequences of foolish choices, like global warming. Most of them have to do with testing the limits of earth's tolerance for human saturation -- what's known as the planet's "carrying capacity." We've dodged more than a few potential crises along the way, which has swayed too many of us to deny any such threats. The result is that necessary skills -- not just science but the art of cooperation and willingness to make prudent sacrifices -- are being beat to death by the closed minds of the political right.

The following appeared in the Wichita Eagle back on Aug. 29, one year after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. It's titled "New Orleans Today" -- really just a list of numbers:

A year after the deadly and costly hurricane hit the Gulf Coast, many things are very different in the New Orleans area.

• New Orleans' work force has dropped to 444,200 from 633,800 before the storm.
• 135,000 homes and apartments were damaged or destroyed by Katrina. Only 38,600 building permits have been issued since the storm.
• Six of nine New Orleans hospitals remain closed.
• Only 54 of 128 public schools are opening this fall.
• 60 percent of homes in New Orleans are hooked up to electricity.
• 17 percent of the city's buses and streetcars are working.
• 23 percent of day care centers are open.
• 33 percent of restaurants and grocery and convenience stores are open.

There are lots of interesting things you can unpack from those statistics, although there is certainly more to the story. For one thing, the federal government has spent quite a bit of money in the area. That money has stimulated the economy, which would otherwise be even worse off. But that money has mostly been spent on major infrastructure projects, like rebuilding the levees. That's not so unreasonable, but it's clear that the short-term construction boom isn't reinvigorating the city. That's one reason for the discrepancy between getting back to 2/3 of the pre-storm workforce but only 1/3 of the various service metrics.

But the other reason is that the disaster disproportionately drove from the city its numerous poor. The services shortfalls are just one reason the poor will be slow to return. But a deeper reason is that the poor depend on castoffs and hand-me-downs, and that's what the floods destroyed first and foremost. People of little means get by on whatever marginal environments they can find. We're blind to such niches, and when we do notice we seem them in negative terms -- as slums, as blight. So we can't conceive of rebuilding the city as it was, even though it's politically fashionable to assert that the city will rebound.

The rhetoric comes from our steadfast belief in progress. There are many instances where progress has stalled, and indeed where we've lost ground, but the slippage has usually been gradual. What happened to New Orleans was sudden: half a major city was wiped out in a day. Even if no similar storm returns -- not a prognostic to bet on -- New Orleans will never come back, least of all like it was. A big part of this is that we remain very confused about what happened and why, but we're also quite confused about what New Orleans was and how it got that way. Much of this confusion, both before and after the fact, comes from our faith in the free enterprise system. The idea that the invisible hand works to our mutual benefit is comforting myth; what is certain is that the invisible hand does things we don't see let alone comprehend -- like growing and decaying cities.

I went to the Wichita Public Library tonight, for the first time in 3-4 weeks. I saw thirty or so books that looked like they might be worth reading. I won't be able to read more than a couple of those -- I'm stacked up to a ridiculous degree already -- but I'm impressed with how hard so many people are working to try to clear up many of the problems we face. I remember searching through bookstores after 9/11 for anything that might help me to understand that had just happened and finding virtually nothing. Now there are dozens of books covering virtually every aspect of that and the misbegotten War on Terror that followed. On the other hand, all that effort has had little impact either on those in power, on their apologists, on their so-called opposition, or on anything having to do with popular opinion. I'm reminded once again that in my own experience with companies on the brink of failure, no amount of reason could alter their course.

Among those books, half-a-dozen were on Katrina, and another was on a 1969 hurricane that took the same course with much the same devastating effect. That book is Category 5: The Story of Camille, Lessons Unlearned From America's Most Violent Hurricane. The gist seems to be that political authorities were unprepared for Camille and botched every aspect of responding to it, much as they did with Katrina. As interesting as that one looked, I figured another book looked more immediately useful. This is by Ivor van Heerden and Mike Bryan, called The Storm: What Went Wrong and Why During Hurricane Katrina -- The Inside Story From One Louisiana Scientist. From the back cover:

It was a natural disaster -- but magnified enormously by government's crushing incompetence in both preparation and response. The storm leveled the Mississippi Gulf Coast, but man-made problems destroyed New Orleans. The catastrophic flooding there should never have happened. Properly designed and constructed levees would have protected the city. Instead, they collapsed. Never in American history was a natural disaster so fatally coupled with the systemic failure of our government to protect and serve the people. The result is the national tragedy known forevermore as simply Katrina.

Not sure I'll get to it either, but I like the technical emphasis. Still, beyond that is a whole range of political and economic issues, which I don't expect this book to handle. But understanding starts with the technical details, and this book looks to be useful for that.

Looking again at the Eagle article quoted above, I find it curious that the front page major title is "To dream amid decay" and that the main picture has these words spread across the top: "A year after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleanians hope their city isn't squandering its chances for rebirth." Both messages signify confusion.

Here's a rather apocalyptic quote from Bill McKibben, writing for TomDispatch:

Here's another way of saying it: In the last century, we've seen change in human societies speed up to an almost unimaginable level, one that has stressed every part of our civilization. In this century, we're going to see the natural world change at the same kind of rate. That's what happens when you increase the amount of heat trapped in the atmosphere. That extra energy expresses itself in every way you can imagine: more wind, more evaporation, more rain, more melt, more . . . more . . . more.

And there is no reason to think we can cope. Take New Orleans as an example. It is currently pro forma for politicians to announce that it will be rebuilt, and doubtless it will be. Once. But if hurricanes like Katrina go from once-in-a-century storms to once-in-a-decade-or-two storms, how many times are you going to rebuild it? Even in America there's not that kind of money -- especially if you're also having to cope with, say, the effects on agriculture of more frequent and severe heat waves, and the effects on human health of the spread of mosquito-borne diseases like dengue fever and malaria, and so on ad infinitum. Not to mention the costs of converting our energy system to something less suicidal than fossil fuel, a task that becomes more expensive with every year that passes.

Our rulers have insisted by both word and deed that the laws of physics and chemistry do not apply to us. That delusion will now start to vanish. Katrina marks Year One of our new calendar, the start of an age in which the physical world has flipped from sure and secure to volatile and unhinged. New Orleans doesn't look like the America we've lived in. But it very much resembles the planet we will inhabit the rest of our lives.

McKibben's book, The End of Nature (1987), was one of the first important arguments made about the dangers of global warming caused by humans burning fossil fuels. I read it in the mid-'90s on an August trip to Florida, where the local (if not global) warming was quite a revelation -- a model to make sense of the coming world. McKibben is a writer I don't quite trust, but can't quite dismiss either. The science he writes about has only grown more convincing over the years. The metaphors are something else. Nature may have ended if we view nature as a global system independent from human effects, but if that's the definition it ended long ago -- and by many measure, including human longevity and population levels, one can argue it's a good thing. One can also argue that nature hasn't ended at all: nature continues in ever new forms as we perturb it, its newness upsetting our understanding of how it works. McKibben aludes to this when he talks about once-per-century storms becoming once-per-decade storms. But what happened to New Orleans had more to do with local and national breakdowns in our political and economic system than it had to do with global anthropogenic effects on climate. The real fear is not so much that nature is going to become deadlier as that we might lose our ability to understand and respond to its challenges.

To do so in what stands to be an increasingly perilous world, we're going to have to get smarter -- which includes more mutual support, fairness, justice, and a better understanding of what technology can and cannot do. Otherwise McKibben's prediction stands a good chance of becoming true. The shocking thing about Katrina wasn't the power of the storm so much as the utter breakdown in competency in response to it. That represents a much more urgent problem than global warming, and perhaps more important as well. I don't discount global warming: I think it is real now, and going to get worse, and I really doubt that there's much that can be done to slow it let alone to reverse it. On the other hand, what we can learn to do is to respond better to both the ordinary and catastrophic events it worsens. If we don't, McKibben is sure to be right.