I want more

Christina’s toxic cookbook

by DETLEV SCHLICHTER

Keynesian and other mainstream economists cannot explain the present crisis. That doesn’t seem to bother them.

All they can offer is a description of symptoms, such as with their favourite phrase of lack of ‘aggregate demand’, which, if you think about it, doesn’t really explain anything. How come demand dropped? Why did it drop now and not at any other time? Whose demand dropped? (Hint: mine didn’t.)

“Sigmund Freud meets Dr. Ruth”

But hey, when faced with a lack of proper economic explanations, you can always fall back on some amateur psychology. Everything must be down to what goes on in people’s heads, right? People just get all mixed up. Too pessimistic. Animal spirits, anybody? That’s why it is always up to those cool-headed guys and gals in government to use their policy tools to change expectations, change the psychology of people, cajole everybody into some elevated state of positive thinking and hence more economic activity. Save the masses from their own silly notions in their tiny heads, like saving and getting rid of debt. They all just clam up and save. Pitiful. But most importantly, why even worry about explaining the recession if you are confident, if you simply know deep down in your heart, how to get out of it.

Most politicians don’t know any better. They certainly don’t know any economics. So the same toxic policy mix of Keynesian deficit spending and Monetarist money printing has been implemented around the world since this crisis started four years ago. Just like in any other recession of the past forty years, ever since Nixon cut the last link to gold and fulfilled every interventionist’s wildest fantasy: unlimited paper money under full control of the state! Yeah, baby, no more recessions!

 Alas, it is not working, is it?

Rates were cut and the state did not only spent money it didn’t have, as usual, it spent much more money it didn’t have. But the economy did not recover. So more of this policy was implemented. And then, more again. In fact, by any standard, never before in modern times has the economy been ‘stimulated’ more through Keynesian and Monetarist government intervention than over the past four years. Balance sheets of major central banks have tripled, banks have been receiving limitless funds for free and will continue to do so forever, and governments are running deficits the likes of which mankind has only ever seen at the height of major wars, and which are increasingly funded by the printing press.

It is still not working.

You would probably guess that the interventionists of Keynesian and other ilk would be a bit more humble by now. Maybe check a few of those premises in their models? Or maybe start thinking again about those elusive explanations for what’s wrong with the economy in the first place? Are we really suffering from a lack of paper money and government spending? Maybe it is not simply down to all of us being too depressed, morose, and in need of some policy Prozac. Maybe something else is broken.

Alas, no. The academically trained Keynesian economist is too committed to his or her beliefs to let the facts get in the way. Why has policy not worked? Because, wait for it, we have been too timid. We need the same policy. We just need more of it. A lot more.

More monetary madness

Here is the High Priestess of Keynesianism, Christina Romer in her recent op-ed in the New York Times. She suggests a radical policy ‘change’ at the Federal Reserve: toward more money printing.

Rather astutely, she calls for Helicopter-Ben to embrace a Volcker-moment. Maybe by quoting the poster boy of the Reaganites and the hard money crowd she hoped to reach a new audience for her tiring and dreary old policy recipe of more and bolder interventionism. She almost had me fooled. Wait a minute, I thought. Volcker? He is the guy who abruptly stopped the printing press and allowed high real market rates to cleanse the system of the dislocations of previous booms and to squeeze inflation out of the system, thus giving the paper dollar another lease of life – albeit one that is quickly running out. I thought, has Christina finally seen the light? Has she begun to realize how massively disruptive a constantly expanding supply of fiat money is for an economy? Is she calling, as I do, for an end to this monetary madness of zero policy rates and quantitative easing?

Well, no, she isn’t. She wants the Fed to print more money, much more. She wants the Fed to adopt a nominal GDP target. This will allow the Fed to become even more aggressive in its monetary policy and to communicate this aggressiveness better. Make people trust in that aggressiveness. And this is important for Romer. The communication. As we have seen, for the good Keynesian the policy was never wrong. The policy was just not ambitious enough. All it needs is a more ambitious goal and better communication. People just have these bad thoughts and wrong expectations. The public is just not playing ball, not going along with this enlightened economic program. Well, we’ll teach them.

The Volcker-analogy works like this for Romer: In 1979 inflation was too high and small rate hikes didn’t work. So Volcker implemented a much tighter policy and crushed inflation. And it worked because people believed him. Today unemployment is too high. Gradual policy easing – not sure what planet Christina is on but from where she is sitting monetary policy in the U.S. must have appeared to be gradual, hmmm – is not working either. So Bernanke needs to become more aggressive, and publicly so. Because if people believe that you stick to your policy, which – please remember – was of course the right policy to begin with, than the policy will really begin to work. You just need to drill it into those blockheads.

Every first semester economics student, not only those at Berkeley where Romer is economics professor, should be able to tear this apart with ease. The analogy with Volcker is, of course, completely silly. Volcker used monetary policy to fix a monetary problem, inflation. Stopping inflation by not printing money anymore is pretty straightforward. The link is kind of — direct? To be honest, it doesn’t even matter what the public believes or not. If you stop printing money, inflation will drop. Period. The link is that direct. You don’t need the accompanying belief system.

Was there full employment in Weimar Germany?

However, unemployment or the level of ‘aggregate demand’ is decidedly not a monetary phenomenon. Only in the airy-fairy dreamland of macroeconomic models is there a direct link. To assume that we can simply and straightforwardly establish whatever nominal growth rate and level of employment we desire by means of the printing press is precisely the type of naïve ‘building bloc economics’ that got us into this mess in the first place. According to this worldview, the economy is just a machine, and all we need to do is to pull the right levers. Or it is like a cooking recipe, in which we need to simply change the ingredients a bit and – voila! The soufflé will rise!

It is precisely because (a certain type of) economists have been telling us – wrongly! – that we can have more growth and high employment by constantly debasing money that we created this highly levered economy over the past four decades that is so thoroughly addicted to ever larger fixes of cheap credit and that is now choking on excessive debt and weak banks. By printing money and artificially lowering interest rates we have, again and again, bought near-term economic growth at the expense of long-term economic imbalances. That this was bad economics everybody is now learning the hard way. Everybody, that is, except Christina Romer. Her simple worldview is unshaken.

It is this weird combination of childlike belief in the simplicity of the problem (aggregate demand, lack of optimism) and the striking arrogance of the notion that the government can and should control the economy by simply pulling at the right strings hard enough, that makes Romer’s article such an illustrative example of the intellectual dead end that is mainstream economics today.

Romer has apparently no notion of relative prices and of the importance, in particular, of interest rates for coordinating saving with investment. She cannot see that lowering interest rates administratively and injecting new money into the financial system will have many additional effects, other than lifting some statistical measure of aggregate economic activity. Easy money will always change resource use and capital allocation. Cheap credit encourages borrowing and debt accumulation, and will cause additional problems for the economy later.

Romer cannot perceive of these complexities. In her ivory tower, the world is one of simple statistical aggregates and large wholes that you can direct and mend to your liking. You just add the desired real growth rate (2.5 percent) and the acceptable inflation rate (2 percent) and stir it nicely to come up with the nominal growth rate (4.5 percent). How hard can it be?

We have some indication that Bernanke is not very sympathetic to this proposal at present. It doesn’t look like this will become official policy any time soon. But who knows? A lot of what is now accepted monetary and fiscal policy in major countries and debated dispassionately by financial market economists would only a few years ago have been the mark of the economic crank, or the populist policy program of some economic backwater just before it was put under IMF surveillance.

But what is striking is this: Such rubbish emanates from the highest echelons of academic economics in America. Christina Romer is economics professor in Berkeley, California, and I fear that a lot of very bright young people burden themselves and their families with student loans and waste valuable time absorbing such drivel. If Romer is all that economics in Berkeley has to offer, why not emulate the late Steve Jobs and drop out?

The prime importance of individual freedom

Literature and the Search for Liberty

What is lost on collectivists is the prime importance of individual freedom for societies to flourish and economies to thrive.

By MARIO VARGAS LLOSA

The blessings of freedom and the perils of its opposite can be seen the world over. It is why I have so passionately adhered to advancing the idea of individual freedom in my work.

Having abandoned the Marxist myths that took in so many of my generation, I soon came to genuinely believe that I had found a truth that had to be shared in the best way I knew—through the art of letters. Critics on the left and right have often praised my novels only to distance themselves from the ideas I've expressed. I do not believe my work can be separated from its ideals.

It is the function of the novelist to tell timeless and universal truths through the device of a fashioned narrative. A story's significance as a piece of art cannot be divorced from its message, any more than a society's prospects for freedom and prosperity can be divorced from its underlying principles. The writer and the man are one and the same, as are the culture and its common beliefs. In my writing and in my life I have pursued a vision not only to inspire my readers but also to share my dream of what we can aspire to build here in our world.

Those who love liberty are often ridiculed for their idealism. And at times we can feel alone, as there appear to be very few dedicated to the ideals of true "liberalism."

In the United States, the term "liberal" has come to be associated with leftism, socialism, and an ambitious role for government in the economy. Many who describe their politics as "liberal" emphatically favor measures which desire to push aside free enterprise. Some who call themselves liberal show even greater hostility toward business, loudly protesting the very idea of economic freedom and promoting a vision of society not so different from the failed utopian experiments of history's socialist and fascist regimes.

In Latin America and Spain, where the word "liberal" originated to mean an advocate of liberty, the left now uses the label as an invective. It carries connotations of "conservative" or reactionary politics, and especially a failure to care for the world's poor. I have been maligned in this way.

Ironically enough, part of the confusion can be pinned on some who champion the market economy in the name of old liberalism. They have at times done even more damage to freedom than the Marxists and other socialists.

There are those who in the name of the free market have supported Latin American dictatorships whose iron hand of repression was said to be necessary to allow business to function, betraying the very principles of human rights that free economies rest upon. Then there are those who have coldly reduced all questions of humanity to a matter of economics and see the market as a panacea. In doing so they ignore the role of ideas and culture, the true foundation of civilization. Without customs and shared beliefs to breathe life into democracy and the market, we are reduced to the Darwinian struggle of atomistic and selfish actors that many on the left rightfully see as inhuman.

What is lost on the collectivists, on the other hand, is the prime importance of individual freedom for societies to flourish and economies to thrive. This is the core insight of true liberalism: All individual freedoms are part of an inseparable whole. Political and economic liberties cannot be bifurcated. Mankind has inherited this wisdom from millennia of experience, and our understanding has been enriched further by the great liberal thinkers, some of my favorites being Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, F.A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. They have described the path out of darkness and toward a brighter future of freedom and universal appreciation for the values of human dignity.

When the liberal truth is forgotten, we see the horrors of nationalist dictatorship, fascism, communism, cult fanaticism, terrorism and the many savageries that have defined all too much in the modern era. The problem is less pronounced in the United States, but here there still remain problems resulting from the abandonment of these key principles.

Many cling to hopes that the economy can be centrally planned. Education, health care, housing, money and banking, crime control, transportation, energy and far more follow the failed command-and-control model that has been repeatedly discredited. Some look to nationalist and statist solutions to trade imbalances and migration problems, instead of toward greater freedom.

Yet there is reason for hope here and elsewhere. The American system still allows for open dissent, the hallmark of a free society, and in a healthy fashion both left and right practice this cherished freedom. Throughout the world, anti-Americanism and anticapitalism are in decline. In Latin America, outside of Venezuela and Cuba, dictatorship of the old socialist and fascist varieties is dead, with market reforms sweeping even nominally leftist regimes.

The search for liberty is simply part of the greater search for a world where respect for the rule of law and human rights is universal—a world free of dictators, terrorists, warmongers and fanatics, where men and women of all nationalities, races, traditions and creeds can coexist in the culture of freedom, where borders give way to bridges that people cross to reach their goals limited only by free will and respect for one another's rights. It is a search to which I've dedicated my writing, and so many have taken notice. But is it not a search to which we should all devote our very lives? The answer is clear when we see what is at stake.

The pseudo-scientific scaremongering lobby

Welcome to the era of the post-moral panic

In our morally unanchored society, elite fearmongers prefer to use so-called science rather than moralism to reshape our behaviour.

by Brendan O’Neill 

One question we should ask ourselves is whether it’s possible to have a moral panic at a time when there is no moral consensus. At a time when traditional values are going down the toilet, and when traditional morality no longer holds sway, is it possible to have a panic about ‘folk devils’ who allegedly pose a threat to the moral fabric?

I don’t think it is. Because in order to have a proper moral panic, you need to have some proper morality. You need to have a generally agreed-upon set of moral values that people can be accused of transgressing. And we just don’t have that today. In our era of moral relativism, it is actually increasingly difficult to have an old-fashioned moral panic.

That might sound like good news. No one is really in favour of moral panics, except maybe the Daily Mail. But the tragedy is that moral panics have been replaced by something even worse – by panics underpinned by science rather than by morality. And these new, post-moral panics are having a seriously detrimental impact on society.

What we have seen over the past few years is a massive rupture between panic and morality, a massive dissociation of the politics of fear from any system of moral meaning. These days, panics are not motored by moral sensibilities – they’re motored by scientific claims or health advice or what are presented to us as objective facts.

Consider the panics about young people. In the past, there were moral panics about young people drinking too much, fornicating and being generally depraved. These randy, alcoholic youth were accused of sinning against the natural moral order.

Today, there are still panics about young people’s behaviour, but they’re presented as health advice. So young people are warned off underage sex and sex outside of a committed relationship through adverts telling them they will get chlamydia or gonorrhoea. They’re warned off boozing with graphic photographs of what too much drink might do to their livers.

A society that has no clear moral line on marriage or sex or hedonism is forced to fall back on a grisly, bovine form of moral pressure. Incapable of telling young people what is right and what is wrong, our society prefers to spread panic about physical decay and physical ailments. It appeals to us to modify our behaviour, not in the name of morality and decency, but in the name of protecting our own livers and genitalia from disease.

Often, what we have today is the rehabilitation of old forms of moral disgust in a new pseudo-scientific language. So one of the most unhinged panics of modern times – the panic about the so-called obesity epidemic – is really just the resurrection of the sins of gluttony and sloth. But because society lacks the moral resources to lecture people about being gluttonous and slothful, which would involve making moral judgements and behaving with explicit superiority, it instead spreads all sorts of nonsense about Body Mass Index, calorie counting, and so on.

Even the moral panic about football hooligans, one of the great mad panics of the 1970s and 1980s, has been put through the de-moralisation process and turned into a pseudo-scientific issue. So recently, Cardiff University published a report arguing that gatherings of 70,000 or more football fans are a threat to the environment. Apparently such gatherings leave an eco-footprint 3,000 times the size of the pitch at Wembley. This eco-unfriendly mass of people leaves behind it 37 tonnes of glass and eight tonnes of paper.

It reveals a lot about the moral disarray of today’s cultural elite that even one of their favourite, easiest moral panics, even their disgust with working-class football fans, now has to be swaddled in a kind of neutral academic lingo.

The rise and rise of these post-moral panics has led to some extraordinary double standards in the arena of the politics of fear. Because the new post-moral panic-mongers are often the people who are most sniffy about old-fashioned moral panics promoted by the likes of the Daily Mail.

So the broadsheet journalists who criticise right-wing tabloids and politicians for spreading panic about terrorism are the same ones who argue that actually global warming is going to burn us all to death and it’s all the fault of unthinking people taking too many cheap flights. The people who argue that the working classes are making themselves sick by eating Turkey Twizzlers are the same ones who balk when the Daily Mail says that chavs undermine moral decency.

This double standard was really brought home at the end of October. After the Lib-Con government published its report on the August rioting in England, which revealed that 42 per cent of the rioters had received free school meals, some clever members of the Twitterati started tweeting: ‘Oh I bet I know what the Daily Mail’s headline will be. It will be “Free School Meals Cause Riots”.’ Hilarious, right? But what these Twits forgot is that actually that panic has already been done. Over the past few years, respectable publications like the Times Higher Education have published articles with headlines like ‘Unhealthy school dinners linked to anti-social behaviour’, a fancier way of saying ‘School meals cause rioting’.

So the moralists at the Daily Mail can be slated for even thinking about pursuing a panic that had already been done by others, in post-moral, respectable language, of course. Today, there is no real constituency for traditionalist moral panics – it’s the new post-moral, pseudo-scientific panics that make a big impact.

The post-moral panic-mongers have developed their own language to try to distinguish themselves from their forebears. So where they accuse right-wingers of ‘playing the fear card’, they claim that they are simply trying to ‘raise awareness’. They’re always ‘raising awareness’, whether it’s about the imminent collapse of the biosphere or the gastronomical depravity of the working classes. Where they accuse old-style moral panickers of using shame and stigma, they claim only to be interested in ‘modifying behaviour’. Through such terminology, they seek to make their own playing of the fear card and their moral fury with the little people appear good, decent, driven by expertise rather than moral judgementalism.

There is one really key difference between old moral panics and the new post-moral panics. Where the old moral panics were attempts to express or enforce an already-existing moral outlook, the new post-moral panics are a substitute for any coherent moral outlook. Today, fear is used not as a complement to morality but as a stand-in for morality. We have a situation today where society tries to reconstruct something approaching a moral outlook through fearmongering. This is quite new, and it is giving rise to a situation where basically we haveconstant panic – one fleeting scare after another, as our superiors try to magic up some behavioural norms and behavioural barriers in our morally bereft society.

As to what impact post-moral panics have on the public – it is a bit weird and contradictory. On one hand, precisely because the new fearmongering is detached from any bigger moral picture it doesn’t have the purchase that the old moral panics had. It doesn’t connect with the public in the same way. The politics of fear is no longer experienced collectively, as it was when we were all told to be scared of the prospect of Hell, but rather is experienced in a super-individuated way, as people are encouraged to panic about their own livers or hearts or waistlines. But on the other hand, because there are so many post-moral panics, there is a cumulative effect. The fleeting scares build on each other to create a kind of free-floating sense of unease and dread – and often unease and dread about the most mundane things, such as eating and socialising and having half a glass of wine.

Even the moralistic panic-merchants of old never achieved something as destructive as what we have today, courtesy of the pseudo-scientific scaremongering lobby: a kind of everyday, run-of-the-mill doom.

"Peak Oil" is "Peak Idiocy"

New Research Reveals Huge Geothermal Resources in U.S. Accessible with New Advanced Technology

By Mark Perry
As a green energy source, geothermal heat is tough to beat, but until recently, it was believed to be economically feasible only in areas with shallow tectonic (volcanic) activity. Now, with a generous grant from Google.org, the search engine giant's philanthropic arm, two scientists from Southern Methodist University (SMU) have pooled together the results from more than 35,000 data sites to paint a very different, almost rosy, energy picture for the United States and, indeed, the world.

We now know that potentially exploitable EGS resources can be found in all 50 U.S. states and countless regions around the globe as well, so it's only a matter of time before abundant clean energy begins to flow from tapping into that massive molten furnace churning below our feet.

SMU Geothermal Lab Coordinator Maria Richards and Geophysics professor David Blackwell's research has revealed, however, that a much larger portion of the earth's crust can yield usable energy than was previously thought, especially in the eastern U.S. The project's findings indicate that, with advanced technology already available, the continental U.S. harbors a staggering 2,980,000 MW of potential energy! That's especially impressive considering the current global geothermal generating capacity is only 9,000MW.

"Both Google and the SMU researchers are fundamentally changing the way we look at how we can use the heat of the Earth to meet our energy needs, and by doing so are making significant contributions to enhancing our national security and environmental quality," said Karl Gawell, executive director of the Geothermal Energy Association.

To view the new Enhanced Geothermal Systems maps constructed with SMU's data , go here to get the latest version of Google Earth, then download and open the file here."

Believe it or Not

Chairman of China's SWF Lectures Europe on the Accumulated Troubles of Worn-Out Welfare State

At about 12:30 in the interview above with Aljazeera (link here), Jin Liqun, the chairman of China's sovereign wealth fund, gets tough with Europe and criticizes its welfare state:

"If you look at the troubles which happened in European countries, this is purely because of the accumulated troubles of the worn out welfare society. I think the labor laws are outdated. The labor laws induce sloth, indolence, rather than hardworking. The incentive system, is totally out of whack. Why should, for instance, within the Eurozone, some members' people have to work to 65, even longer, whereas in some other countries they are happily retiring at 55, languishing on the beach? This is unfair. The welfare system is good for any society to reduce the gap, to help those who happen to have disadvantages, to enjoy a good life, but a welfare society should not induce people not to work hard."

The world sure has changed. If you had told me 10 years ago that China would be preaching the virtues of capitalism and the pitfalls of a welfare state to Europe (and be right), I would have never believed you.

Transforming citizens into clients

Quotation of the Day…

by DON BOUDREAUX 

… is from pages 168-169 of H.L. Mencken’s priceless 1956 collection, Minority Report; I recalled it upon reflecting on Pres. Obama’s warning, in a speech a couple of weeks ago to his supporters in San Francisco, that (quoting Mr. Obama) “The one thing that we absolutely know for sure is that if we don’t work even harder than we did in 2008, then we’re going to have a government that tells the American people, ‘you are on your own.  If you get sick, you’re on your own.  If you can’t afford college, you’re on your own.”

Imagine being responsible for yourself.

Anyway, here’s Mencken on FDR:

Roosevelt transformed millions of Americans from citizens into clients.  The direct effect of this was evil, and the indirect effect was even worse, for all these people were robbed of their self-respect.

An epidemic of stupidity

E.Coli in Organic Food Leads to 50 Dead in Germany

By THEODORE DALRYMPLE

As everyone knows, Mother Nature not only knows best but means us no harm: and therefore, the less we mess around with her and her products, the better. Although many people may have remarked, more in sorrow than in anger, how small and shriveled organic vegetables often appear by comparison with those that have been treated with chemicals, it is obvious that they (the organic ones) must be better for us because they are nearer to what Mother Nature intended.

This item of faith took something of a knock recently with the outbreak of Shiga-toxin-producing E. coli food poisoning in Germany. It was no small matter: more than 4000 people suffered from it and more than 50 died.

Papers in the latest New England Journal of Medicine from the Robert Koch Institute in Germany trace the epidemic and describe its characteristics. Anyone who doubts the brilliance of modern epidemiological methods, and the astonishing rapidity with which they permit the cause of an outbreak to be traced, notwithstanding initial mistakes, should read this paper. What once took millennia to understand now takes weeks.

The authors used three methods, knowing as they did from clinical and laboratory studies that the epidemic was caused by E. coli. First, they asked people who had suffered from food poisoning, and a series of controls, what they had eaten.  Second, they asked the same question of people who had eaten in a restaurant in a town geographically central to the outbreak. Finally, they traced individual outbreaks to an original, single source.

The epidemic was caused by eating raw bean sprouts grown at an organic farm where the products had probably been contaminated from seeds imported from Egypt as long as two years before. One of the curious things about the epidemic was that more women suffered from it than men, presumably because women are (at least in Germany) more anxious to eat healthily than men.

It is important to find the source of outbreaks not only for health but economic reasons. Before the source had been traced to an organic farm in Northern Germany, German health officials had suggested that Spanish cucumbers might be the source, and Spanish cucumber-growers had to destroy much of their crop. The European Commission generously awarded $300,000,000 of other people’s money to compensate the farmers for the initial, though understandable, mistake. A blanket ban on European vegetable exports to Russia was enforced, thus impoverishing the Russian diet yet further, until the elucidation of the cause of the outbreak. Overall, the cost of one organic farm in Germany to European horticulture is said to have been in the region of $600,000,000.

The E. coli that caused the outbreak was a new strain, and it will bring some comfort to believers in the benevolence of Nature to know that one of the evolutionary pressures under which it developed was the widespread use of antibiotics. Nevertheless, perhaps it would be a good idea to print on all health-food packaging and vitamin supplements the following words: WARNING: OVER-CONCERN FOR YOUR HEALTH MAY BE DAMAGING TO YOUR HEALTH

At least $97 billion per year is being provided to “climate finance.”

Wasted ‘Climate Change’ Cash Could Save Lives Instead

 A million people die of malaria every year. It is easily and cheaply prevented by using DDT, for a fraction of the dollars spent on the fantasy of global warming. But DDT has been banned in many countries, and no doubt many of the same scientists who prattle on about the menace of global warming decades from now endorse the ban of a substance that can save human lives today. Al Gore has saved exactly zero human lives by scaremongering about the UFO that is global warming — in the years since he won the Nobel Prize he could have contributed to saving 4-5 million humans, mostly kids. Bad science, bad economics, opportunity to make a real contribution lost.

By TOM HARRIS AND ROBERT M. CARTER

When it comes to climate change, our leaders would do well to follow Buddhist advice: when struck by an arrow, first remove it before seeking out your assailant. Otherwise, you will die.

But most governments and charitable foundations today do exactly the opposite. They try so hard to appease climate activists — who seem more concerned about the possible plight of people yet to be born than those suffering today — that millions of people have been abandoned to misery and early death in the poorest parts of the world.

The Canadian government is providing what might appear to be a generous $142 million to help victims of drought and famine in East Africa. Australia has also committed over $103 million. That is certainly far more money than either China or Saudi Arabia — the latter situated just across the Red Sea from the disaster area — are contributing. But it pales in comparison with what Canada and Australia are paying to fulfill their entirely voluntary Copenhagen Accord climate change commitments. Australia committed $599 million and Canada $1.2 billion between 2010 and 2012.

Both nations have already donated the first third of this commitment, an amount that is almost exactly the current shortfall in the international Horn of Africa Drought fund, a deficit that may lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people if it is not rectified.

The Copenhagen Accord specified that contributions should be split 50-50 between helping people adapt to climate change and stopping (or “mitigating”) climate change. Australia is generally following this formula, but 90% of Canada’s first $400 million donation is dedicated entirely to mitigation.

This undue focus on mitigation of a hypothetical human-caused dangerous warming that has yet even to be measured comes at the expense of the urgent needs of the world’s most vulnerable peoples. For example, ClimateWorks Foundation — an American climate activist group that has donated millions to Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection — received over $500 million from charitable foundations when they launched in 2008. This was twice as much as foundations contributed to the World Health Organization, and over seven times as much as they donated to UNICEF in that year.

Over the last two decades ending in 2009, the U.S. government spent a total of $68 billion for climate science research and climate-related technology development. Worldwide, it is estimated that Western countries alone are pouring at least $10 billion annually (2009) into global warming related research and policy formulation.

There are untold amounts being spent by corporations around the world on greenhouse gas reduction schemes, the costs of which are passed almost entirely on to consumers.

On October 27, the Climate Policy Initiative issued a report showing that at least $97 billion per year is being provided to “climate finance.” Tragically, just $4.4 billion — about 5% — of the total is going to help countries and communities adapt to climate change.

All the while, aid agencies remain drastically underfunded, even in the midst of East Africa’s worst famine in decades. Developing countries are pressured by eco-activists, media, and the UN to enable impractical “climate-friendly” energy policies that even developed nations cannot afford. At the same time, millions of the world’s poor lack access to electricity, running water, and basic sanitation.

And what is the world getting in return for this sacrifice? If the science being relied upon by the governments and the UN were correct, and all the countries of the world that have emission reduction targets under the Kyoto Protocol actually met their targets, then 0.05 degrees Celsius of warming might end up being prevented by 2050. In other words, trillions of dollars of expenditure will be wasted for an impact on climate that is not even measurable.

Clearly, the time has long since passed to take an entirely different approach to the climate hazard issue. We need to pull out the arrow, address the real wound, and leave learning more about the possible assailant to another day.

Despite the demonstrated failure of the hypothesis of dangerous human-caused global warming, a very real climate problem does exist. It is the ongoing risk associated with natural climatic variations. This includes short-term events such as floods and cyclones, intermediate scale events such as drought, and longer-term warming and cooling trends.

That such climate change is natural does not imply it is benign or gentle. Coming out of the last glacial period, during which sea levels were over 100 meters lower than today and kilometer-thick ice sheets made Canada, the northern U.S., and northern Eurasia uninhabitable, warming and cooling many times faster than our 20th century changes occurred. Even as recently as the 1920s, the “average annual temperature” rose between 2 and 4 degrees Celsius (and by as much as 6 degrees C in winter) in less than ten years at weather stations in Greenland.

Such natural changes have serious impact on human societies. From the demise of the robust Greenland Vikings to the sudden disappearance of the powerful pre-Incan civilizations of the Moche and the Tiwanaku, history is littered with examples of what happens when societies are unprepared for or unable to adapt to climate change.

Even when civilizations do not completely collapse due to extreme climate and weather changes, great calamities often ensue. Witness the extreme hardship and famine in Europe during the most severe phases of the 1250-1875 Little Ice Age, and similarly in the 1930s Dust Bowl event in America. Or how about the 1998 ice storm that paralyzed much of Eastern Canada and the Northeastern United States?

We need to prepare for such events by hardening society’s infrastructure through activities such as burying electricity transmission lines underground. Had this been the norm, the freak October snowstorm that just hit the northeast U.S. would not have caused widespread power outages.

Similarly there is a need to “waterproof” southeastern Australia, which can be expected to experience irregular drought periods in the future naturally — quite irrespective of speculative human causation. This could be accomplished through pumping fresh water into the Murray Darling Basin from northern rivers, by recycling of waste water, by the construction of new dam reservoirs or desalinization plants, and by the prevention of water waste through evaporation and leakage from irrigation systems.

There is no question that climate change adaptation measures can be expensive. But unlike today’s completely futile and even more expensive attempts to stop the world’s climate from changing, expenditure on preparation for and adaptation to dangerous climatic events will pass on a more robust and wealthy society to future generations.

And perhaps some of the billions of dollars that we choose not to squander on futile mitigation measures can instead be committed to helping populations already living at the edge of survival.

For the cast-iron reality is that all countries need to have available to them the financial resources to cope with the natural climatic hazards that nature will inevitably continue to throw at us all.

Rallies don't win elections

Occupy Wall Street gets the ink, Tea Party gets the voters

By: Glenn Harlan Reynolds 

Occupy Wall Street and the movement's brethren in other cities ranging from Chicago, to Baltimore, to Oakland, to London -- has been getting all the press lately.

But it's the Tea Party movement and its small-government ideology that continues to win elections. Is that a harbinger for 2012? Probably.

There's no doubt that the Occupy folks have been getting the lion's share of the ink, and the pixels, over the last month or so. Love them or hate them, their approach is mediagenic, reminding Baby Boomers of protests from their lost (or imagined) youths, and inspiring younger folks who missed the Sixties to take a shot at creating their own protest mythology.

Though they've mobilized a fraction of the people who turned out for just one Tea Party rally -- the 9/12 rally in Washington, which drew well into the six figures -- the Occupy protests have generated far more publicity. And, at least until recently, that publicity has been mostly favorable.

But while lefty share-the-wealth demonstrations have seized the imagination of our nation's mainstream media, they once again failed to persuade taxpayers to loosen their grips on their pocketbooks.

In Colorado, a tax-increase effort, massively supported (to the tune of about 20 to 1 in terms of spending) by teachers unions, failed miserably. Not only did it lose by a nearly 2 to 1 margin, it failed to carry a majority even in heavily Democratic Denver. (It barely eked out a majority in Colorado's farthest-left enclave of Boulder County.)

As Colorado talk-radio host Ross Kaminsky blogged, "The wide margin of defeat for Proposition 103 could only happen with a substantial majority -- something on the order of two-thirds -- of unaffiliated (independent) voters opposing the measure, something which portends well for Republican hopes in 2012 elections." This despite the fact that Colorado went for Obama in 2008.

More troubling still for the Obama Administration is that the rhetoric of the tax increase's supporters sounded much like that coming from the Obama camp -- lots of talk about "investments" and lots of pictures of children. But taxpayers didn't buy it.

Why not? Perhaps because the past couple of years have demonstrated, in a fashion hard to miss, that no matter what politicians promise, new government spending seems, somehow, to wind up in the pockets of politicians' cronies.

So when "new revenues" are sold as "investments in the community," voters hear instead "taking my money to give it to your buddies and buy votes." Not surprisingly, this doesn't sell.

Indeed, though education is often used to sell tax increases, that approach now seems to be foundering on a lack of results. Nearly every voter knows that spending on education at all levels, though perennially characterized as inadequate, has in fact grown enormously over past decades, but without any visible result.

So, despite vast increases in spending, few would argue that students graduating from high school are better educated today than they were 50 years ago, and few believe that colleges have improved at the same rate that tuitions have gone up, if, indeed, they have improved at all in terms of education.

In this, interestingly, the Occupy movement may have unwittingly lent a hand to the Tea Party. Everyone who has followed the wall-to-wall news coverage has seen the sad stories of protesters who went deeply in debt for college degrees (admittedly, often degrees in things like Peace Studies, but nonetheless, still college degrees) and who now say they are unable to find work.

Faced with those stories, voters may understandably have concluded that more spending on colleges and schools was unlikely to do much to promote employment, regardless of what the political ads from the teachers' unions and higher-education folks claimed.

If education is so great, after all, why are so many educated people unemployed and camping out in public parks?

This is a good question, and similar ones might profitably be asked with regard to other public programs whose spending climbs faster than inflation but whose results remain unimpressive -- which is to say, most public programs.

It's not that the education system is our only public-spending failure, it's just that the Occupy movement has done such a persuasive job of illustrating the particular failures of the education system.

Or course, the Occupy movement has helped the Tea Party in another way: By keeping lefties busy. While the occupiers have been holding their drum circles, the Tea Party movement -- now long past the mass-rally stage -- has been going about the less conspicuous work of registering voters and organizing.

As I wrote back in 2010, "Rallies without follow-through are just rallies. And the Tea Party movement is now following through with the grunt work of politics: Organizing precincts, waging primary battles, registering voters, and compiling mailing lists."

Rallies don't win elections. Neither do drum circles. Organizing does. Let Occupiers and Tea Partiers alike take note.