On Liberty Watch

The continuing absurdities of Progressive politics are on full display in New York City and Chicago. Let’s start with New York.

Phase 1 of the Second Avenue Subway project will take riders between 96^th and 63^rd Street at a cost of $4.5 Billion, which is $700 million (15%) over budget. If and when it reaches the southern tip of Manhattan—that’s Phase 4—it is expected to cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $17 billion, but no one really knows. Keep that in mind for a minute because the existing New York’s subway system is so decrepit that it is plagued by delays and a train actually derailed in Harlem the other day.

According to John Raksin, Executive Director of the Riders Alliance, a riders’ interest group, the MTA’s capital budget of $30 billion is enough to sustain the system, but not completely update and overhaul it. The MTA’s operating budget is about $15 billion, of which $11 billion is paid by New Yorkers. Now we’re talking real money.

Where is it going to come from? Not from fares, apparently. Read on.

Cyrus Vance, Manhattan prosecutor, has decided that his office will no longer pursue criminal cases of most people arrested for fare evasion. Law enforcement for petty crimes was at the heart of implementing the “Broken Windows” policing strategy that was undoubtedly an important cause of the drop in serious crime in New York from its record breaking highs in the late 1980s to the point where New York is now probably the safest big city in the United States.

But the Broken Windows strategy was problematic (in many progressive circles) because of two of its underlying assumptions. The first is that people are rational decision makers who act in what they believe to be their own best interest. The second is that people are responsible for their own behavior. Listen to Councilman Rory I. Lancman of Queens, the chairman of the Court and Legal Services Committee:

“For too long, prosecution of fare evasion as a crime has disproportionately impacted people of color, bogged down our courts, and even put immigrants at risk of deportation,” he said according to the New York Times.

The “Coalition to End Broken Windows” weighed in as well complaining that Vance’s actions were only a “half-hearted” effort to “combat decades of racist policing”. The policy, they said, perpetuates the idea that people should be punished “for being too poor to use public transportation.”

So once again, individual agency and responsibility go right out the window—over paying the $2.75 fare for riding the subway. Pretty much the same argument employed by Sandra Fluke, the oppressed Georgetown University Law student who was aghast that she might actually have to pay for her very own birth control pills. The horror.

Last year the police arrested about 24,600 for theft of services for fare beating and issued 67,400 civil summonses for the offense.

Enter Chicago

Not to be outdone in the absurdity sweepstakes, the City of Chicago has adopted a new education policy. In order to earn a high school diploma, a student will be required to submit a plan on what he intends to do after high school. If the plan doesn’t appeal to the school, it will not grant a diploma to the student, even though the student has passed all the academic requirements necessary for graduation.

What is more absurd is that they actually go through the mechanics of graduation at all in the Chicago Public School system. It is absurd because the public schools don’t teach the kids anything. According to the latest statistics I could find (2012) only a small fraction of the kids were proficient in math or reading. The U.S. Department of Education found that only 19% of 8^th graders were proficient in reading, and only 17% in math.

So the Mayor and the Chicago Education establishment have decided to continue to hand out worthless diplomas to functional illiterates provided they have a good plan for the future. A better plan might be to fix the schools…

But that would offend the teachers unions, the main beneficiaries of the current system.

JFB

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Overlooking Busan, South Korea © Joe Benning

The Clinton, Bush and Obama Administrations all pretty much followed the same policy with respect to North Korea, which was to attempt to bribe North Korea into giving up its nuclear program in exchange for food and cash. Any remote chance of a policy success died the day that the U.S. turned on Libya’s Gadhafi, who was summarily executed by U.S. backed rebels in that nation’s civil war, after he had surrendered his nuclear weapons. Hillary Clinton engineered that particular piece of statecraft under the newly discovered doctrine “Responsibility to Protect”.

And so now we are faced with a North Korea that is in the process of rapidly acquiring technology that will allow the hermit state to target American cities with nuclear-armed ICBMs. The Trump Administration, who, like the past three Administrations claimed to be leaning on China to rein in its North Korean client, insists that the current state of affairs is unacceptable, while it weighs the unpalatable options. In the meantime, the Washington Post announced that the latest missile test “…underscores the failure of Trump’s naïve approach to North Korea”. This, even though thus far Trump’s approach has been indistinguishable from that of his predecessors.

Up until now the received wisdom respecting the Korean Peninsula was that (1) North Korea’s leaders were crack-pots who nevertheless could not directly threaten the U.S., (2) China had an interest in reining in North Korea, but (3) had limited leverage where sanctions are concerned because a collapsing North Korea could destabilize China. That view is increasingly difficult to accept given the recent behavior of the players.

China talks a good game, but has actually done relatively little to rein in North Korea. More likely is that China is encouraging the North Koreans. Wait for the outlines of a deal whereby the North Koreans agree to “freeze” their nuclear program in return for the U.S. pulling back from the Korean Peninsula—and the South China Sea. The North Koreans will of course be lying, even as they solidify their position.

A U.S. pullback would greatly expand China’s regional power and leave Japan, South Korea and Taiwan vulnerable and exposed. China and Russia would be in a position to cooperate to push back against the West. While China expands its reach in the South China Sea, Russia would continue to pressure NATO, while adopting a more aggressive posture toward its “near abroad”. Iran, North Korea and Russia would expand cooperation as well.

The West is facing a time of great peril, and its most precious assets—credibility and resolve—are in doubt. Up until this point, the United States has had a deep bench of politicians and policy intellectuals to draw on when the going got tough. There are still plenty of extremely competent policy professionals in think tanks around the country. But it is hard to see where the political leadership is going to come from.

JFB

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To no one’s surprise, President Trump’s decision to exit the Paris climate accords has been greeted by the pre-packaged fury of the climate lobby along with the usual apocalyptic warnings of impending doom. In the event, the environmental left professes to be perplexed at the decision since the accords do not require the U.S. to do anything. After all the argument goes, the Paris accords are voluntary. They amount to what the New York Times describes as “…a voluntary agreement, under which 190 countries offered aspirational emissions targets, pledged their best efforts to meet them and agreed to give periodic updates on how they were doing.”

But even if every aspirational emission target were to be met, according to the consensus view, the effect on global warming would be negligible—something on the order of 0.20 of 1 degree by 2100.

So why the hysteria?

Some Background

For the better part of a half-century climate warriors have attempted to increase their political power under the guise of saving the planet. Apocalyptic rhetoric was, and is, a staple of the game. Take for instance, “The Population Bomb” written by Stanford University biologist Paul R. Ehrlich, a latter day Malthus. The hugely influential book, which sold millions of copies, predicted humanity was at death’s door. There were just too many people for the earth to support.

At the time Dr. Ehrlich wrote, “The battle to feed humanity is over.” He predicted hundreds of millions would starve to death, including 65 million Americans, in the 1970s and that England would cease to exist by the year 2000. Keen observers have noted that England is still with us and that the U.S. has an obesity problem.

One would think that by now Dr. Ehrlich would have had second thoughts. Quite the contrary. According to the Times (in May of 2015), he noted that disaster timetables really have no significance because to him they mean something very different than they do to the average person. He still thinks the end is near. And he wants to control population growth, just as he always did. Allowing women to have as many children as they want, he said, is equivalent to letting them “throw as much of their garbage into their neighbor’s backyard as they want.” Needless to say, Dr. Ehrlich, who thinks people are liabilities, not assets, is an abortion rights fanatic, who supports compulsory population control, including forced abortions. To save the planet, of course.

Then we had the global cooling scare of the 1970s. To be sure the concerns about cooling did not represent a scientific consensus as has been inaccurately claimed by some on the right. (For that matter, neither do the more extravagant claims of the climate warriors today.) In any event, the research into global cooling actually did become part of the starting point for what became research into global warming that eventually got re-branded as the science of “climate change”.

Fast forward to 2017. We are now faced with the climate warriors, fanatics who claim that “the science” compels the U.S. to drastically reduce its use of fossil fuels in order to save earth from impending doom. And anyone who questions that dogma, or even asks awkward questions, must be silenced, as New York Times columnist Bret Stephens learned the other day when he suggested that climate policy decisions should be subject to cost-benefit analysis.

Then there is the matter of the recent 15-19 year hiatus in the measured warming of earth surface temperatures. The hiatus caught the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) flat-footed. Their climate models simply failed to predict a pause in global warming, a pause that is now in its 19^th year. Did the failure of the models change the assessment of the modelers? Nope.

Thomas Stocker, a climate scientist at the University of Bern who co-chaired the assessment is quoted in Nature as follows, “I am proud that we have been able to convince politicians that we have come up with a robust assessment of climate change. The scientific essence of previous drafts has not changed and the main messages have all been kept.” Stocker went on to say, “Comparing short-term observations with long-term model projections is inappropriate…We know there is a lot of natural fluctuation in the climate system. A 15-year hiatus is not so unusual even though the jury is out as to what exactly may have caused the pause.” He went on to say that claims that there might be something fundamentally wrong with climate models are unjustified unless “temperature were to remain constant for the next 20 years.”

This, by any reasonable definition, is a non-falsifiable hypothesis. Consider: we now have a 19-year hiatus in recorded global warming. Nevertheless, climate alarmists are demanding action now—even though it will take another 20 years of disconfirming data for them to consider the possibility that their modeling may be seriously flawed. This is simply preposterous on its face. A sensible approach would be to go back to the drawing board and find and correct errors. That is not going to happen because by now the faithful cling to climate models as sacred symbols of their Manichean struggle against climate “deniers”.

Some in the climate alarmist community recognize the problem that the hiatus represents; so much so that there is a serious possibility that the authors of a paper published in Science Magazine relied on falsified data to “prove” that the hiatus does not exist. The article “Possible Artifacts of Data Biases in Recent Global Surface Warming Hiatus” was published in June 2015, shortly before the Paris meeting on climate impact mitigation.

Dr. John Bates, who for 10 years led the data program of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has accused the study’s lead author, NOAA official Tom Karl, of malfeasance. Bates charged that Karl used unverified data sets, ignored mandatory agency procedures, and failed to archive the data.

Karl, former head of the office that produced NOAA climate data, claimed that he developed a better data set by collecting readings of sea water collected by ships, instead of the buoys NOAA had used previously. Karl then adjusted the buoy data to reflect the measurements from ships. But data collected from buoys are cooler than data collected from ships, so adjusting the buoy data had the effect of raising measured surface temperatures, thereby eliminating the hiatus. Problem solved.

Except that the ship data are inferior because the ships themselves are a natural warming source, which means the data are tainted. Moreover, according to whistle-blower Bates, the Karl study ignored satellite data. And that’s not the worst of it. As it happens the computer used to process the data “suffered a complete failure” which means that Karl’s paper cannot be replicated or independently verified since, in violation of the rules, the data were never archived or otherwise shared. (Julie Kelly reports this sorry story in National Review Online).

So Why the Hysteria?

Roughly no one thinks that the Paris accords would make any real difference to climate change by the turn of the next century. And yet, there is an insistent demand for action now, even though it is unrelated to the stated goal. And for comparison purposes think about this. In the event that there is no remedial action taken, it is an absolute certainty that the U.S. will be unable to meet its financial obligations with respect to entitlement spending. But the same progressive forces that demand action now on climate change will resist the prospect of remedial action with respect to entitlements.

Why?

The reason is that the underlying agenda of the Paris Climate Accords is to increase the size and power of a global bureaucracy of experts that seeks to diminish the sovereignty of the United States. This is simply about political power, not environmental stewardship.

The political question we face is whether the primary organizing unit of world politics will be the sovereign Westphalian nation-state or ever-growing epistemic networks that operate through supranational organizations like the European Union.

For over 200 years the Westphalian nation-state has served as the foundation of a liberal world order based on the rule of law, individual liberty, property rights, freedom of contract and trade. On the other hand, the naïve utopian instinct that drives Europe’s Kantian cosmopolitanism combined with its relentless bureaucracy building is the perfect recipe for the disaster that Europe has worked so hard to create.

Europe, as it is presently constituted, is incapable of defending itself against external aggression; it is being over run by immigrants who have no interest in assimilation; its labor markets are sclerotic; it is stuck in low growth mode, in part because of the structure if its welfare state, and significant portions of member country populations are flirting with fascist candidates for public office.

So take your pick: the political accountability of the nation-state or rule by stateless experts. It shouldn’t be a tough choice.

JFB

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