Although the stepping off point for his latest Wall Street Journal column is the conclusion of the UN Climate Conference that just concluded in Glasgow, I think Walter Russell Mead is onto something you may find significant whether you believe in anthropogenic climate change or not:

If there is one thing the world should take away from the Glasgow COP26 summit, it’s that the most dangerous greenhouse-gas emissions come from the front ends of politicians, not the back ends of cows. Pandering is much more dangerous to human civilization than methane, strategic incompetence a graver threat than CO2; and dysfunctional establishment groupthink will likely kill more polar bears than all the hydrofluorocarbons in the world.

The 19th-century writer Thomas Carlyle wrote of an Age of Shams in prerevolutionary France, when the chattering classes and political leaders had so fundamentally lost contact with the underlying realities of the day that they could no longer understand the political challenges facing the French social order, much less respond to them. The elaborate rituals of court life in Versailles persisted, the ministers and bureaucrats went through the motions of governance, and intellectuals sparkled in the salons—while the French monarchy sailed, like the Titanic, toward its rendezvous with destiny.

COP26 was the kind of hollow ritual that characterized Carlyle’s Age of Shams. As one politician after another committed their countries to carefully crafted unenforceable pledges, none had the bad manners to observe that no country anywhere fully honored the climate pledges made with such fanfare in Paris six years ago. Even the pledges are insufficient to meet the stated goals of the U.N. climate process, and nobody is keeping the pledges.

Clearly, he sees it that way, too:

Climate change joins a growing list of vital problems that neither national governments nor international institutions seem competent to solve. The Covid pandemic left international institutions and national governments looking helpless. On the U.S. and European Union borders, mass migration produces a tragic mix of humanitarian crisis and populist rage. Almost 15 years after Vladimir Putin set about to dismantle the post-1990 order in Europe, neither the North Atlantic Treaty Organization nor the EU has found a way to counter him.

China has converted its illegal islands in the South China Sea into military bases without an adequate response. Iran roams unchecked across the Middle East. Developments in cyber and biowarfare threaten to make arms control obsolete. Jihadi violence rages in more places today than 20 years ago; democracy is receding globally, as much of Latin America sinks into deep crisis; ethnic and religious conflicts in countries like Ethiopia, Syria and Nigeria point to a dimming future for much of the world.

As I’ve said before I’m a ways and means kind of guy. Identifying the problem correctly is well and good but if there are no means that will effect the ends you seek you haven’t accomplished very much.

How do we end our “Age of Shams”? Some would blame it on the voters but I disagree, at least based on my experience here in Chicago. When you are faced with a candidate list of five candidates, all of whom are saying approximately the same things, whatever you’re basing your choice on it isn’t outcomes. Maybe its biography or race or ethnicity or whatever but it isn’t outcomes. As an old boss of mine used to say (hearkening back to an ad campaign that began generations ago) “They may promise you anything but what are you going to get? Arpège!” And note that the issue is a common one, not unique to the United States but afflicting France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Japan as well. Returning to Chicago as another data point I would point out that a) 30 years ago the voter turnout rate in my precinct was over 80%; now a 40% turn out to vote it’s a heavy turnout; and b) people are leaving Chicago. That sounds to me more like the voters are despairing rather than embracing their choices.

Maybe our Age of Shams will end the way the original one did. I hope not. My family has not tended to prosper in periods of chaos.

At Bloomberg Tyler Cowen muses about how wonderful a world of “clean, cheap energy” would be:

Maybe nuclear fusion cannot be used to fly a jet plane, but perhaps it could be used to produce relatively clean hydrogen fuel, which could then be deployed in ways fusion could not. A chain reaction would occur, eventually bringing cheap, clean energy across the economy.

As an inveterate traveler, my first thought is that I would be able to get everywhere much more quickly. How about a supersonic or perhaps suborbital flight from Washington to Tokyo? A trip to Antarctica would no longer seem so daunting. Many remote places would be transformed, one hopes for the better.

One second-order effect is that countries with good infrastructure planning would reap a significant relative gain. The fast train from Paris to Nice would become faster yet, but would trains on the Acela corridor?

Next in line: Desalinating water would become cheap and easy, enabling the transformation and terraforming of many landscapes. Nevada would boom, though a vigorous environmental debate might ensue: Just how many deserts should we keep around? Over time, Mali and the Middle East would become much greener.

How about heating and cooling? It might be possible to manipulate temperatures outdoors, so Denmark in January and Dubai in August would no longer be so unbearable. It wouldn’t be too hard to melt snow or generate a cooling breeze.

Wages would also rise significantly. Not only would more goods and services be available, but the demand for labor would also skyrocket. If flying to Tokyo is easier, demand for pilots will be higher. Eventually, more flying would be automated. Robots would become far more plentiful, which would set off yet more second- and third-order effects.

Cheap energy would also make supercomputing more available, crypto more convenient, and nanotechnology more likely.

Over at his own blog, Tyler links to that piece. The comments there are mostly the typical bickering but there are a couple of good points made.

I agree with the commenters at Tyler’s place who are confident that practical small, modular nuclear fission reactors are more proximate that practical fusion. It should also be pointed out that the primary factors that make large nuclear fission facilities expensive and time-consuming to build are a) financial and b) regulatory. Look up “ALARA” (“as low as reasonably achievable”). The effective outcome of the highly subjective and constantly moving ALARA regime for regulating radiation emissions from nuclear power plants is to make it impossible for them ever to be cost-competitive with non-nuclear power generation.

Wind and solar power will never actually solve the carbon emissions problems their proponents claim for the simple reason that they are unsuitable for baseline power. They require almost entirely fossil-fuel backup power generation which always needs to be running. That’s why I say that although I think there are niches for wind and solar power, if you genuinely want a carbon-free future, you want nuclear power, whether fusion or fission.

At this point it looks highly likely that China and India will realize the future of “clean, cheap energy” before we will.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal remark on the 5th Circuit’s stay of President Biden’s vaccine mandate:

The court’s opinion takes apart the OSHA mandate every which way—on constitutional, statutory and procedural grounds. The Constitution gives states, not the federal government, the police powers to regulate individual behavior to protect public health and safety. The Administration tried to circumvent this limitation on federal power by conscripting private employers via an OSHA “emergency temporary standard.”

Under federal law, OSHA may bypass for six months the notice-and-comment required by the Administrative Procedure Act to respond to emergencies if it determines that “employees are exposed to grave danger from exposure to substances or agents determined to be toxic or physically harmful or from new hazards” and that such a standard is “necessary to protect employees from such danger.”

As the appeals court explains, OSHA failed to satisfy either condition. OSHA couldn’t show exposure or even the presence of Covid at all covered workplaces. Its “attempt to shoehorn an airborne virus” widely present in society and not life-threatening to most workers “into a neighboring phrase connoting toxicity and poisonousness” is a “transparent stretch.”

The panel also lambastes the mandate as both over- and under-inclusive. On one hand, it covers employees regardless of their risk of exposure and doesn’t exempt those with natural immunity. On the other hand, OSHA sets an arbitrary threshold of employers with 100 workers because they “will be better able to administer (and sustain) the Mandate.”

Even so, the “Mandate flunks a cost-benefit analysis,” the panel notes, because OSHA failed to show that the “protection afforded to workers” would “outweigh the economic consequences” such as unvaccinated workers getting fired or quitting.

As for the alleged emergency justification, some 80% of adults have received at least one vaccine dose. The virus has been spreading in the U.S. for at least 20 months, so it can hardly be defined as a “new hazard” under the law. “OSHA itself spent nearly two months” writing the rule, the panel notes, which suggests it doesn’t perceive a true emergency.

Beyond the statutory violation, the panel held the OSHA rule “likely exceeds the federal government’s authority under the Commerce Clause because it regulates noneconomic inactivity that falls squarely within the States’ police power. A person’s choice to remain unvaccinated and forgo regular testing is noneconomic inactivity.”

which you may notice is very much what I said about the vaccine mandate.

Now let’s repeat my question: why is the administration wasting time on this? Why aren’t they wooing states rather than trying to rule by edict? There’s more to politics than having 50%+1 of the votes and then ruling by edict. Why isn’t Congress changing OSHA’s empopwering legislation and courting Republican Congressmen to support the bill?

Today is the centenary of my mother’s birth. Or maybe not.

As I think I’ve mentioned before we have three different birth certificates for my mom. They’re all for November 15. They all list the same parents and place of birth. But they’re for three different years: 1921, 1922, and 1923. We suspect that my grandmother gave a phony date of birth (1921) to get a birth certificate that would allow my mom to start school early but it’s just a suspicion. There were no pre-schools back then. So 1921 it is!

The picture of my mom above was taken by my dad, probably while they were dating or just after they were married. I like publishing these early pictures because I believe that none of my siblings remember my mom when she was young and slim and pretty as I do.

It’s been a while since I published one of my dad’s newspaper editorials. This was written more than 80 years ago:

Seldom has the United States Supreme Court been more emphatic in upholding civil liberties than it was in the opinion written by Justice Hugo L. Black reversing the conviction for murder of four Florida Negroes who had “confessed” under pressure of third degree methods which the court said were “calculated to break the strongest nerve and the stoutest resistance”.

The specific issue involved was whether the requirement of due process had been complied with. The court said it had not. Yet Black’s opinion went far beyond the narrow legal ruling . . . and it is because of that that the case is important. Black added a declaration which makes it clear that all those who come before the court on similarly “manufactured” evidence will be accorded jealous protection.
“Under our constitutional system, courts stand against any winds that all as havens of refuge from those who might otherwise suffer because they are helpless, weak, outnumbered, or because they are non-conforming victims of prejudice and public excitement.”

Thus it is apparent that the court was thinking not only of this case, but of persecuted peoples of all races and persuasions. Such a vigorous assertion of American minority rights in these days of totalitarian practices, is something to warm the blood with new hope.

There were other factors that made this decision significant. Among them is the fact that Black wrote it. In 1937 Black was under fire because of his former membership in the Ku Klux Klan—which suggested he might have narrow, prejudiced conceptions inconsistent with the traditions of the court. Yet now he appears as the voice of the bench on civil liberties, backed by a unanimous court, giving him the authority to read the decision in full—a sharp departure from the customary procedure – The court has given an admirable expression of its concern for justice and equality. As long as its holds such lofty ideals, there need be little fear that dictatorship will become the order of the day in America.

for the St. Louis Star. I’m proud of the opinion he expressed there and it may give you some notion of the home in which I was reared.

The graphic above was derived from this World Bank site. There are a couple of interesting things illustrated by that map.

U. S. CO₂ emissions per dollar of GDP are about the same as Germany’s and a lot less than China’s or Russia’s. I found it particularly interesting that the figure for the U. S. is lower than that for Canada. Scroll through the list that is below the graphic and you’ll see all sorts of interesting things.

What prompted my search was this AP report:

GLASGOW, Scotland (AP) — Going into overtime Friday night, negotiators at U.N. climate talks in Glasgow were still trying to find common ground on phasing out coal, when nations need to update their emission-cutting pledges and, especially, on money.

Talks are at a “bit of a stalemate,” and the United States, with support from the European Union, is holding back talks, said Lee White, the Gabonese minister for forests and climate change.

No agreement was ready by the 6 p.m. local time scheduled end of the conference. And sometimes that helps diplomats get in a more deal-making mood.

“The negotiating culture is not to make the hard compromises until the meeting goes into extra innings, as we now have done,” said long-time climate talks observer Alden Meyer of the European think tank E3G. “But the U.K. presidency is still going to have to make a lot of people somewhat unhappy to get the comprehensive agreement we need out of Glasgow.”

Three sticking points were making people unhappy on Friday: coal, cash and timing.

I really wish they’d stop comparing the U. S. with countries a tenth our size. The usage appears to be completely opportunistic. A better comparison is to compare the U. S. with the European Union. Their aggregate GDP is a little less than ours but not drastically so. Yes, Greece is a relatively poor country. Mississippi is a relatively poor state.

BTW, Germany uses coal to generate twice as much of their electricity as we do. Not all fossil fuels are created equal. While I’m on the subject some of Germany’s claims about renewables are bogus. They use compressed wood chips for heating. Those count as renewable only if you’re not cutting down old growth forests in the U. S. and Brazil to make them.

Here are the opening paragraphs of Jeffrey Snider’s most recent offering at RealClearMarkets:

If you had the ability to compute the long-run stable price level from nothing more than the long run trend of money velocity and a good idea of what potential GDP should be, tied together with a money supply you can count, then any prediction of or for inflation would simply compare current price levels to this calculation. Because price levels must converge at the long run trend any temporary deviation from it would force current prices to adjust predictably over time.

Should current price levels end up below the long run, inflation is inevitable. That is, prices must accelerate from their low current state to reach the more stable longer-term equilibrium.

What follows is a brief history of rather futile attempts by economists over the last 150 years to understand the money supply (M) and its velocity (V). Like all of Mr. Snider’s posts, it’s quite dense and may require some pondering to understand but, also like all of Mr. Snider’s posts, I found it quite worthwhile. It didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know but it did present it in a compact form.

TL;DR: if inflation is transitory, it will take it a while to transit.

The graphic above is from an article at Bloomberg by Mark Gongloff:

As Conor Sen points out, investors are throwing money at EVs while dooming fossil-fuel-burning cars to the same fate as brick-and-mortar retail and print media: being stripped by private equity for parts and profits and left to die.

That’s sort of a good thing — except that putting all polluting companies into shadowy private hands could leave them free to roll coal without any investor oversight, as Mark Gilbert notes.

And anyway, electric cars don’t just grow on trees, to be gently harvested by well-paid union workers. They are built of aluminum and rare metals and other stuff that must be dug from the ground and smelted and mashed into car-like shapes at great expense of energy, writes Anjani Trivedi.

What conclusions should we draw from that chart?

Albert Hunt adds his advice to Democrats to the scrum of pundits offering advice in his piece at The Hill:

There is a path to recovery. It starts with passing the child, heath care, climate bill — on top of the just approved infrastructure measure. Next, the party’s left wing needs to recognize the public is not with them on any radical agenda, like defunding the police or open borders. Then the centrists should stop posturing over worries about short-term deficits.

What I think that Mr. Hunt along with the Biden Administration are missing is that the Build Back Better Bill is not production; it is consumption. It reminds me of a story about Abraham Lincoln:

Few subjects have been more debated and less understood than the Proclamation of Emancipation. Mr. Lincoln was himself opposed to the measure, and when he very reluctantly issued the preliminary proclamation in September, 1862, he wished it distinctly understood that the deportation of the slaves was, in his mind, inseparably connected with the policy. Like Mr. Clay and other prominent leaders of the old Whig party, he believed in colonization, and that the separation of the two races was necessary to the welfare of both. He was at that time pressing upon the attention of Congress a scheme of colonization in Chiriqui, in Central America, which Senator Pomeroy espoused with great zeal, and in which he had the favor of a majority of the Cabinet, including Secretary Smith, who warmly indorsed the project. Subsequent developments, however, proved that it was simply an organization for land-stealing and plunder, and it was abandoned; but it is by no means certain that if the President had foreseen this fact his preliminary notice to the rebels would have been given. There are strong reasons for saying that he doubted his right to emancipate under the war power, and he doubtless meant what he said when he compared an Executive order to that effect to “the Pope’s Bull against the comet.” In discussing the question, he used to liken the case to that of the boy who, when asked how many legs his calf would have if he called its tail a leg, replied, ” Five,” to which the prompt response was made that calling the tail a leg would not make it a leg.

Calling it either infrastructure or investment makes it neither.

When you produce more and save more, you can consume more. You can also borrow but borrowing to pay for operating expenses is a sucker’s bet. It increases your operating expenses. This is known in the trade as a “positive feedback loop”. Without some exogenous braking mechanism it is inherently unstable. And applying the brakes will be very, very painful.