In an interesting op-ed in the Wall Street Journal the CEO of ExxonMobil and the president of its Low Carbon Solutions arm, Darren W. Woods and Joe Blommaert, explain how the company is positioned to benefit from the carbon capture and sequestration funding in President Biden’s infrastructure plan:

About 80% of the world’s energy-related carbon emissions come from three critical sectors of the economy: power generation, commercial transportation and industrial manufacturing. Meaningful progress toward achieving the world’s climate goals requires emission reductions from these sectors.

One of the proven technologies available that could play a major role is carbon capture and storage, or CCS, the process of sequestering industrial emissions and safely storing them permanently underground. CCS also promises the potential to reduce carbon emissions significantly at a cost competitive to other solutions, especially for the manufacturing sector.

For the past three years at ExxonMobil we have been studying the concept of creating multiuser CCS “hubs” in industrial areas. They would be located near safe geologic storage sites. A CCS Innovation Zone would bring together government incentives and private-sector investment.

IMO CCS is a worthwhile technology for R&D. It’s also something that would require subsidization to make it pay although the subsidies could take a variety of different forms.

There are even better prospective approaches. Imagine a world of plentiful, cheap, highly available energy whose generation doesn’t produce carbon emissions. Captured carbon dioxide could be split into its component elements—carbon and oxygen. The carbon could be reused in a variety of ways including to produce fuel.

All sorts of things become practical in such a world. And to my eye the most likely path to such a world runs through small modular nuclear reactors.

In an op-ed in the Washington Post Stephen J. K. Walters takes a look at what’s happening in Baltimore:

Any objective review of Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn J. Mosby’s recent news conference explaining her approach to the city’s crime problem would be equally pithy: “Baltimore’s crime policy stinks. Marilyn Mosby is the stinkee.”

Mosby’s statement came amid another bloody week in a long parade of such weeks in the United States’ second-most-deadly big city (behind St. Louis). There had been seven murders in the previous six days; in the last month, there have been 33. The 2021 body count of 86 has the city ahead of last year’s pace and even its record 2019 rate. Not a good time to announce that, though elected as a prosecutor, she would not prosecute what she labeled “low-level crimes,” making permanent her policy of dismissing all criminal charges for the possession of drugs and attempted drug distribution, prostitution, trespassing and other “minor” offenses.

What goes unmentioned in his piece is that Ms. Mosby is one of a number of “rogue” prosecutors, sponsored and financed by George Soros, around the country. Here in Cook County was have one of our own: Kim Foxx who was narrowly and to my mind inexplicably re-elected. She, like Ms. Mosby is manifestly incompetent and has abandoned her statutory responsibilities in favor of another political agenda.

Whatever Mr. Soros’s political motivations, he is, among other things, a currency trader and currency traders benefit from chaos and misery. Perhaps he sees those consequences as just a coincidence fortunate to him.

Mr. Walters concludes:

Mosby’s strategy is, then, a roll of the dice — with lives at stake. How many Baltimoreans will continue to tolerate this experiment, and how many will say “goodbye” to their increasingly disorderly, dangerous city?

Add that to the centrifugal forces pushing people out of cities and, indeed, states.

What was the U. S. objective in Afghanistan? In his New York Times column Bret Stephens, with something of a tone of desperation, asserts an objective I’ve never heard before:

There’s a rational argument to be made that the United States went into Afghanistan to serve our national interests, coldly considered, and not the needs of an impoverished country of nearly 40 million people. Foreign policy is ultimately about self-interest, not the interests of others.

But what was the American interest in staying in Afghanistan beyond the fall of the Taliban? It wasn’t, centrally, to kill Osama bin Laden, who was just one in a succession of terrorist masterminds. It was to prove Bin Laden wrong about America’s long-term commitments, especially overseas.

In August 1996, Bin Laden issued his notorious fatwa declaring a war on the United States that he hoped would be long and bloody. He observed that, in one conflict after another, the Americans always cut and run. “God has dishonored you when you withdrew,” Bin Laden wrote, “and it clearly showed your weaknesses and powerlessness.”

The attacks of Sept. 11 were a direct consequence of that observation. That’s why Barack Obama was right when, during his first campaign for the presidency, he called Afghanistan “a war that we have to win.” To lose would not just demonstrate our weaknesses and powerlessness. It would be a vindication of the strategy of jihad. How safe will America be when that strategy succeeds not only in Kabul but also in Islamabad?

I think he’s backing an objective out of a strategy rather than the other way around.

As I have been saying for 20 years now I think our response in Afghanistan was a political one and from one political decision a series of actions grew which led us to where we are now.

When the U. S. was attacked on September 11, 2001, President Bush immediately felt a political need to do something. Just as was the case on December 7, 1941 the American people were angry. Muslims in the U. S. became concerned that fear would be directed at them. Attacking Afghanistan focused the attention of the American people on the country from which the attack had ultimately emanated.

Afghanistan is not a target-rich country to say the least. Highly focused bombing, at least with conventional weapons, would accomplish little. And mobilizing a Desert Storm-style force over the period of months would neither have satisfied the American people’s thirst for revenge nor been logistically possible as a glance at a time will show you. The decision was made to use a small group of highly mobile U. S. soldiers to mobilize local forces against the Taliban.

But once the Taliban had been removed that meant the U. S. had become the “occupying power” under international law and leaving at that point would have been a war crime. So we began the thankless and impossible task of propping up an Afghan government. And that led to “nation-building”. Which led to the task of counter-insurgency. Which brought us to where we have been for the last decade.

At each and every stage in this process it has been advertised as a temporary measure rather than a permanent occupation.

Or, said another way, if Bret Stephens’s objective was to engage in a permanent occupation of Afghanistan to demonstrate American resolve, we started going about it in the wrong way for the wrong reasons 20 years ago.

I’ve been cooking for more than 60 years. I cooked for my family when I was a kid. I worked in a restaurant and made 300 breakfasts every morning Monday through Saturday for five years. I’ve cooked for as many as 500 people at a time and cooked dinner for two nearly every evening for 35 years. I made every recipe in Mastering the Art of French Cooking in the 1970s—long before Julie and Julia.

I’ve been making gumbo off and on for 40 years and last night I made the best gumbo of my life bar none. A shot of American single malt and a bowl of of gumbo and I was good to go.

My reaction on reading Alexander William Salter’s Wall Street Journal op-ed87 was pretty much the same as my reaction when my wife and I watch Jeopardy and none of the contestants know the answer to a simple question about history, geography, movies, TV, literature, etc. What do they teach young people nowadays? The sad thing about it is that I agree materially with many of his observations. But he’s either grossly oversimplifying or he simply does not know.

Whether public or private, spending doesn’t cause growth. Mr. Stiglitz and his allies have it backward: Consumption is downstream from production. Growth is about increasing the supply of goods over time; you can’t spend if the goods haven’t been produced. Production grows as technology and production processes improve. Such improvement requires saving and investing rather than consuming.

The early details on Mr. Biden’s infrastructure plan aren’t promising in terms of incentives for saving and investment. The bill includes significant tax increases on corporations, which would also hurt households and investors. The president and his team deserve credit for attempting to pay for the plan. But raising taxes, especially on businesses, weakens incentives to invest. The result is lost growth.

Mr. Biden’s plan also largely directs resources away from uses that would increase productivity. Improvements in roads and bridges may boost how much companies can produce, and hence growth, by making it easier to move labor and goods across the nation. But that’s a minority of the bill’s spending; other expenditures will have the opposite effect. Take the proposal to invest in expanding clean energy and electric-vehicle charging stations. This is a rather elastic interpretation of infrastructure, and a wealth-wasting one besides.

He concludes:

The government is not good at picking investments. President Obama promised smart green projects. What we got was the Solyndra debacle, which consumed hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars while producing little of value. Those dollars are resources that could have been invested elsewhere. What Mr. Biden proposes amounts to a great many Solyndras. That’s an enormous amount of productive capital to squander.

Mr. Biden positions himself as the inaugurator of a Newer New Deal and a Greater Great Society, but there’s nothing new or great about the politicization of investment. Policy makers have tried many times, and it’s clear that all the financing in the world won’t boost productivity if it isn’t channeled correctly. More-efficient producers, not partisan spending, create economic flourishing. Though the president’s plans will consume plenty, they’ll produce only disappointment.

As I’ve mentioned before when I was in college and took economics courses Keynes was king. His teachings were Holy Writ. I went farther than most undergraduates and, apparently, most graduate students these days and read primary sources. Not only did I read The Wealth of Nations and Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money but David Ricardo’s On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation and many, many others. That’s one of the things that I learned in high school: don’t rely on secondary or tertiary sources. Keynes’s assumption is that there’s a gap between potential product and actual product. The purpose of the spending is to incentivize bringing unused assets back into production.

I don’t believe that unused assets are our problem today. I think that our problem is that we’re not producing enough of what we consume and under the circumstances massive deficit spending will cause an increase in asset prices, promoting increasing income and wealthy inequality, increase general prices, or worse.

Federal spending could, indeed, incentivize additional investment and increasing of productive assets but a) not in the near term and b) as Dr. Salter notes, the government is not good at picking investments. That’s why I support what I’ve characterized as “mass engineering projects”. Examples of those are the Manhattan Project, the Mercury and Apollo projects, Boulder Dam, and the like. Medical research is good but may take a long time to bear fruit. Nixon began his “war on cancer” in 1971 and it’s still going on. Given the length of time it takes to become a medical researcher, the mostly likely near term consequence of investing more money in medical research will be to increase the wages of medical researchers, producing the paradoxical result of getting fewer results per dollar spent. Such increases need to be done much more slowly and carefully.

And, as has been mentioned here before, the “infrastructure spending” plan of which about 5% is devoted to increased infrastructure and about 95% is devoted to consumption is likely to increase deadweight loss, another paradoxical result.

The editors of the Washington Post caution Senate Democrats:

EVERY FEW years, whichever party is running Congress encounters an obstacle: The nonpartisan scorekeepers at the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT). These professionals issue the official estimates on what major legislation would accomplish and how much it would cost, and they have a way of puncturing the narratives federal lawmakers construct to justify their policies. They tell Republicans that tax cuts are not likely to pay for themselves, and they tell Democrats that expanding government-subsidized health-care coverage may reduce the number of hours Americans work.

When majority lawmakers get a score they dislike, they and their ideological allies often try to work the refs — making their case to the CBO and JCT staff, or issuing statements challenging the estimates. Sometimes, and increasingly, they go further, threatening to eviscerate the scorekeepers’ independence. Mother Jones’s Kara Voght reported last week that Senate Democratic staffers are talking about firing CBO Director Phillip Swagel, after the CBO released an analysis projecting that increasing the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour would result in 1.4 million job losses over a decade. Staff on the Senate Budget Committee, which Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) runs, have even sent Senate Democratic leaders a list of possible replacements. This is a terrible idea.

They don’t just want to “work the refs”. They want to replace the CBO director with someone who’ll give them the answer that they want:

The CBO also does not get everything right. Its experts provide highly educated guesses. Sometimes this helps Democrats, as when the CBO concluded that repealing Obamacare would increase the deficit. Sometimes it hurts their case, as it did on the minimum wage. CBO estimates force caution on those who have an interest in the numbers turning out a specific way, and its careful approach means that both parties’ legislation is measured against the same yardstick over time. It cannot perform either function if each passing congressional majority stacks the CBO in its favor.

The difference between an expert and an “expert” in this particular case is that an expert provides an unbiased assessment of the consequences of a policy change. Not a perfect assessment but a professional one. An “expert”, regardless of credentials, is someone who give you the answer that you want. Replacing experts with “experts” will temporarily provide political cover but it also cast doubt on every expert. Short term benefit and long term cost.

If the Congress wants someone to rubberstamp their policy judgments, why bother? They should have the courage to defend their own actions.

AS you’re presumably aware, a few days ago a 13 year old kid was killed by a police officer in Chicago in the little Village neighborhood. There’s a video making the rounds which most media reports are portraying as proof of a cold-blooded police killing but that’s a subject for another post. In an op-ed in the Washington Post law prof Sheila Bedi presents her diagnosis:

Change requires entirely new approaches to public safety, informed by the experiences and expertise of the Black and brown communities most likely to experience police violence.

Adam Toledo’s death demonstrates that the CPD — and, indeed, police departments across the nation — simply can’t be “fixed.” For more than 100 years, Chicago city officials have made public pronouncements of their intent to “reform” the CPD. None of those purported reforms has rooted out racist police violence and corruption, or created safe communities.

and her prescription:

Justice for Adam Toledo requires investments in our Black and brown communities and disinvestments in policing. One would be a proposal by the Chicago-based, Black youth-led GoodKids MadCity collective called the Peace Book, which would create neighborhood peace commissions with resources sufficient to meet community needs. The resources include funds for positive youth spaces, political and art education, mental health treatment, restorative justice, and conflict resolution services.

The Peace Book could operate with a diversion of just 2 percent, or $35 million, from the CPD’s budget. Other major cities have diverted far more from policing into communities.

Second, the Treatment Not Trauma ordinance, sponsored by Chicago Democratic Socialist Alderwoman Rossana Rodriguez-Sanchez and backed by a diverse, citywide coalition, would prohibit CPD officers from responding to people in mental health crises and instead fund community-based mental health professionals. Similar programs in Oregon both reduce police violence and better serve community needs.

I have mixed feeling about her prescription and even more about her authority to make it. Maybe that would work in Hyde Park where Ms. Bedi lives. Hyde Park isn’t known for either gun violence or gang activity. It’s where Barack Obama’s Chicago residence is. It’s about as dangerous as where I live which is to say not particularly dangerous at all.

Why doesn’t Ms. Bedi live in Austin or Englewood or Garfield Park or North Lawndale? Or in Little Village? Because those neighborhoods are much more dangerous and have lots of gang activity. Little Village is split between the Latin Kings and the Two Six. My offhand guess as to what would happen if Ms. Bedi’s plan were adopted is that in the neighborhoods most at risk the money would be given to NGOs that were affiliated with the gangs, that were in fact fronts for the gangs. Why do I think that? Because it’s happened before. It’s not a lack of money that makes these neighborhoods dangerous. It’s gang activity.

Consequently, while I have no problem with increasing the funding for city-run crisis response units, I’m pretty suspicious of funding NGOs for that purpose.

And that would have done nothing for Adam Toledo. I agree that his death is a tragedy. But the question that no one seems to be asking is what the heck a 13 year old kid was doing wandering around at 3am in the morning with a gun? I don’t know what would happen if the officer who fired the gun that killed Adam Toledo and is on the video attempting to render assistance to the kid just shot and audibly sobbing when he realized that the kid was dead were brought to trial. I don’t know what I would have done in the fraction of a second the officer had to make a decision. I don’t know if the case could even come to trial.

But I believe wholeheartedly that whoever put the gun in that kid’s hand should be prosecuted and I hope convicted and sent to jail.

in his latest New York Times column Thomas Friedman, quoting from his journal, explains how people like Sen. Biden and himself who knew nothing about Afghanistan or, indeed, the region got the U. S. to spend 20 years on a fool’s errand in Afghanistan against the advice of people who actually understood the country, its circumstances, and its history:

I was not surprised that Joe Biden decided to finally pull the plug on the U.S. presence in Afghanistan. Back in 2002 it was reasonable to hope that our invasion there to topple Osama bin Laden and his Taliban allies could be extended to help make that country a more stable, tolerant and decent place for its citizens — and less likely to host jihadist groups. But it was also reasonable to fear from the start that trying to graft a Western political culture onto such a deeply tribalized, male-dominated and Islamic fundamentalist culture like Afghanistan’s was a fool’s errand, especially when you factored in how much neighboring Pakistan never wanted us to succeed because it could wrench Afghanistan from Pakistan’s cultural and geopolitical orbit.

Biden was torn between those hopes and fears from the very start. I know because I was with him on his first visit in early January 2002 to postwar Afghanistan. It was just weeks after the major fighting had subsided and the Taliban were evicted from Kabul.

It was always a fool’s errand, as people like, for example, Rory Stewart, attempted in vain to explain.

After quoting a number of passages from his diary of his and Sen. Biden’s visit to Afghanistan he concludes:

Our nation’s effort there was worth a try; our soldiers and diplomats were trying to make it better, but it was never clear that they knew how or had enough Afghan partners. Yes, maybe leaving will make it worse, but our staying wasn’t really helping.

Our leaving may be a short-term disaster, and in the longer run, who knows, maybe Afghanistan will find balance on its own, like Vietnam. Or not. I don’t know. I am as humbled and ambivalent about it today as I was 20 years ago, and I am sure that Biden is too.

All I know for sure are: 1) We need to offer asylum to every Afghan who worked closely with us and may now be in danger. 2) Afghans are going to author their own future. 3) It is American democracy that is being eroded today by our own divisiveness, by our own hands, and unless we get that fixed we can’t help anyone — including ourselves.

I agree with his conclusion. But you didn’t need to fly to Kabul via Bagram Air Base and spend a week basking in the poverty and misery of Afghanistan’s largest city to realize that committing to staying as long as it took to “get it on its feet again” presumes that it was ever on its feet in the first place. Doing what Mr. Stewart did—walking across the country—would have proven that to them. Staying in the U. S. Embassy? Not so much. And you didn’t even need to go to Afghanistan. A quick glance at a map should have shown the impossibility of the task.

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has rejected the rumors of a sex scandal which would impel her to resign. From NBC 5 Chicago:

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot on Sunday slammed unspecified “rumors” circulating online as “trash” as she vowed to “continue to lead” the city.

In a five-part Twitter thread posted Sunday morning, Lightfoot called the virtual chatter “homophobic, racist and misogynistic” as she warned anyone not willing to work with her on problems facing the city to “get out of the way.”

Never believe anything until it’s been officially denied.

She’s also being pressed by activitists to resign over the police killing of Adam Toledo.