After some throat-clearing, H. R. 109 gets down to its kernel:

Resolved, That it is the sense of the House of Representatives that—

(1) it is the duty of the Federal Government to create a Green New Deal—

(A) to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions through a fair and just transition for all communities and workers;

(B) to create millions of good, high-wage jobs and ensure prosperity and economic security for all people of the United States;

(C) to invest in the infrastructure and industry of the United States to sustainably meet the challenges of the 21st century;

(D) to secure for all people of the United States for generations to come—

(i) clean air and water;

(ii) climate and community resiliency;

(iii) healthy food;

(iv) access to nature; and

(v) a sustainable environment; and

(E) to promote justice and equity by stopping current, preventing future, and repairing historic oppression of indigenous peoples, communities of color, migrant communities, deindustrialized communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low-income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities, and youth (referred to in this resolution as “frontline and vulnerable communities”);

(2) the goals described in subparagraphs (A) through (E) of paragraph (1) (referred to in this resolution as the “Green New Deal goals”) should be accomplished through a 10-year national mobilization (referred to in this resolution as the “Green New Deal mobilization”) that will require the following goals and projects—

(A) building resiliency against climate change-related disasters, such as extreme weather, including by leveraging funding and providing investments for community-defined projects and strategies;

(B) repairing and upgrading the infrastructure in the United States, including—

(i) by eliminating pollution and greenhouse gas emissions as much as technologically feasible;

(ii) by guaranteeing universal access to clean water;

(iii) by reducing the risks posed by climate impacts; and

(iv) by ensuring that any infrastructure bill considered by Congress addresses climate change;

(C) meeting 100 percent of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources, including—

(i) by dramatically expanding and upgrading renewable power sources; and

(ii) by deploying new capacity;

(D) building or upgrading to energy-efficient, distributed, and “smart” power grids, and ensuring affordable access to electricity;

(E) upgrading all existing buildings in the United States and building new buildings to achieve maximum energy efficiency, water efficiency, safety, affordability, comfort, and durability, including through electrification;

(F) spurring massive growth in clean manufacturing in the United States and removing pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from manufacturing and industry as much as is technologically feasible, including by expanding renewable energy manufacturing and investing in existing manufacturing and industry;

(G) working collaboratively with farmers and ranchers in the United States to remove pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from the agricultural sector as much as is technologically feasible, including—

(i) by supporting family farming;

(ii) by investing in sustainable farming and land use practices that increase soil health; and

(iii) by building a more sustainable food system that ensures universal access to healthy food;

(H) overhauling transportation systems in the United States to remove pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector as much as is technologically feasible, including through investment in—

(i) zero-emission vehicle infrastructure and manufacturing;

(ii) clean, affordable, and accessible public transit; and

(iii) high-speed rail;

(I) mitigating and managing the long-term adverse health, economic, and other effects of pollution and climate change, including by providing funding for community-defined projects and strategies;

(J) removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and reducing pollution by restoring natural ecosystems through proven low-tech solutions that increase soil carbon storage, such as land preservation and afforestation;

(K) restoring and protecting threatened, endangered, and fragile ecosystems through locally appropriate and science-based projects that enhance biodiversity and support climate resiliency;

(L) cleaning up existing hazardous waste and abandoned sites, ensuring economic development and sustainability on those sites;

(M) identifying other emission and pollution sources and creating solutions to remove them; and

(N) promoting the international exchange of technology, expertise, products, funding, and services, with the aim of making the United States the international leader on climate action, and to help other countries achieve a Green New Deal;

(3) a Green New Deal must be developed through transparent and inclusive consultation, collaboration, and partnership with frontline and vulnerable communities, labor unions, worker cooperatives, civil society groups, academia, and businesses; and

(4) to achieve the Green New Deal goals and mobilization, a Green New Deal will require the following goals and projects—

(A) providing and leveraging, in a way that ensures that the public receives appropriate ownership stakes and returns on investment, adequate capital (including through community grants, public banks, and other public financing), technical expertise, supporting policies, and other forms of assistance to communities, organizations, Federal, State, and local government agencies, and businesses working on the Green New Deal mobilization;

(B) ensuring that the Federal Government takes into account the complete environmental and social costs and impacts of emissions through—

(i) existing laws;

(ii) new policies and programs; and

(iii) ensuring that frontline and vulnerable communities shall not be adversely affected;

(C) providing resources, training, and high-quality education, including higher education, to all people of the United States, with a focus on frontline and vulnerable communities, so that all people of the United States may be full and equal participants in the Green New Deal mobilization;

(D) making public investments in the research and development of new clean and renewable energy technologies and industries;

(E) directing investments to spur economic development, deepen and diversify industry and business in local and regional economies, and build wealth and community ownership, while prioritizing high-quality job creation and economic, social, and environmental benefits in frontline and vulnerable communities, and deindustrialized communities, that may otherwise struggle with the transition away from greenhouse gas intensive industries;

(F) ensuring the use of democratic and participatory processes that are inclusive of and led by frontline and vulnerable communities and workers to plan, implement, and administer the Green New Deal mobilization at the local level;

(G) ensuring that the Green New Deal mobilization creates high-quality union jobs that pay prevailing wages, hires local workers, offers training and advancement opportunities, and guarantees wage and benefit parity for workers affected by the transition;

(H) guaranteeing a job with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security to all people of the United States;

(I) strengthening and protecting the right of all workers to organize, unionize, and collectively bargain free of coercion, intimidation, and harassment;

(J) strengthening and enforcing labor, workplace health and safety, antidiscrimination, and wage and hour standards across all employers, industries, and sectors;

(K) enacting and enforcing trade rules, procurement standards, and border adjustments with strong labor and environmental protections—

(i) to stop the transfer of jobs and pollution overseas; and

(ii) to grow domestic manufacturing in the United States;

(L) ensuring that public lands, waters, and oceans are protected and that eminent domain is not abused;

(M) obtaining the free, prior, and informed consent of indigenous peoples for all decisions that affect indigenous peoples and their traditional territories, honoring all treaties and agreements with indigenous peoples, and protecting and enforcing the sovereignty and land rights of indigenous peoples;

(N) ensuring a commercial environment where every businessperson is free from unfair competition and domination by domestic or international monopolies; and

(O) providing all people of the United States with—

(i) high-quality health care;

(ii) affordable, safe, and adequate housing;

(iii) economic security; and

(iv) clean water, clean air, healthy and affordable food, and access to nature.

I take that as a statement of objectives and my commentary on it has largely been devoted to pointing out that those objectives cannot be accomplished by the means also in the plain text of the resolution without dire secondary effects. For example:

(C) meeting 100 percent of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources, including—

(i) by dramatically expanding and upgrading renewable power sources; and

(ii) by deploying new capacity;

cannot be accomplished with existing technology and there is good reason to believe that the technology to accomplish it will never exist.

Recently, I have been taken to task for taking the resolution seriously and I should withhold my commentary until implementing legislation is made available. My view is that a it’s completely fair to respond to a statement of objectives by demonstrating that the objectives cannot be accomplished.

Remarks?

Donald Trump has become an obsession with the New York Times. The Trump angle is sought for every news story and slanted against him. Every editorial or op-ed if not explicitly anti-Trump has an obligatory anti-Trump passage, usually near the beginning. What would have been deemed ordinary political bloviation in any other president (“a chicken in every pot!”) is now termed a lie.

They have little to say that hadn’t been said in 2016. It has become incredibly tedious, preaching only to the choir.

You don’t have to take my word for it. Read Peter J. Boyer’s analysis at Esquire:

Trump was referring to a front-page New York Times article published on August 8, 2016, under the headline “The Challenge Trump Poses to Objectivity.” The opening paragraph posed a provocative question:

“If you’re a working journalist and you believe that Donald J. Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalistic tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?”

he author of the piece was Jim Rutenberg, an important byline at the Times. He writes a media column for the paper, a feature deeply informed by Rutenberg’s experience covering politics and as an investigative reporter. Rutenberg has a keen sense of current thinking in the media hive, and when he wrote that “everyone” was asking the questions he raised in his Trump “demagogue” column, it carried the weight of mainstream newsroom consensus. Reporters who considered Trump “potentially dangerous,” Rutenberg wrote, would inevitably move closer “to being oppositional” to him in their reporting—“by normal standards, untenable.” Normal standards, the column made clear, no longer applied.

Trump said that was an important article because “they basically admitted that they were frauds.”

“They admitted in that story that they didn’t care about journalism anymore,” he continued, “that they were just going to write badly. That was an amazing admission.”

It’s an essential Trumpian assertion—wildly hyperbolic, but containing what much of Red America would consider a sort of rough truth.

The Rutenberg column was an astute and honest piece of analysis. The unavoidable takeaway from it was that Donald Trump, in shattering the norms of presidential politics, had baited the elite news media into abandoning the norms of traditional journalism—a central tenet of which was the posture of neutrality.

Read the whole thing. Like Mr. Boyer I’m uncertain as to whether the Times or the Washington Post or CNN can ever recover from the Trump presidency. I’m uncertain as to whether the very notion of the role of the major media outlets can.

In his column in the Washington Post Robert Samuelson muses about whether high asset prices are signalling an incipient recession:

To test his theory, Steuerle compared U.S. household net worth (what people own minus all they owe) to the economy’s annual output, gross domestic product (GDP). Since 1950, the ratio has mostly remained 4-to-1 or less. Americans’ assets, from homes to stocks, grew roughly in tandem with the overall economy.

But there were two glaring exceptions. In early 2000, the ratio jumped to 4.5-to-1, and at the beginning of 2007, it rose to 4.9-to-1. There are two possible explanations for these leaps: Americans had become permanently richer — their accumulated wealth was rising faster than their annual incomes (GDP); or for some reason, the value of their assets had temporarily increased.

With hindsight, we know that the second answer is correct, because in each case, the economy soon entered a recession that reduced the ratios. What worries Steuerle is that the same pattern is now unfolding. Toward the end of 2018, the ratio hit an all-time high of 5.3-to-1.

The implication is that asset prices — particularly for stocks and real estate — are artificially high and that, when the bubble inevitably pops, a serious recession will occur, Steuerle writes in the journal Business Economics. People will feel poorer; joblessness will rise; confidence will slacken; business investment will weaken.

It would be about damned time. Make no mistake: artificially inflating asset prices was the explicit objective of quantitative easing. Said another way, the academics at the Federal Reserve’s response to the Great Recession was to exacerbate income inequality in the hope that the newly-endowed ultra-rich would start investing in the United States. The strategy did make the ultra-rich even ultra-richer. It did not spur business investment in the United States.

I agree that Stephen Moore should not be appointed to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors and, if appointed, should not be confirmed. I also agree with the editors of the Washington Post that we need experts there.

However, the experts I’m interested in lean more towards practicum than prowess as a researcher or teacher. Only theoreticians would have given us an abomination like quantitative easing.

I want to commend to your attention an article at The American Interest by Frank DiStefano on the history of party realignments in the United States. Here’s a snippet:

America throughout its history has had five distinct sets of parties, which scholars call party systems. Each underwent a similar cycle of birth and collapse. During each party-system era, America had two major parties competing on fairly equal terms for about half the national vote. Those parties ruled for decades, attracting consistent coalitions around stable ideologies that were nothing like the Democrats and the Republicans we know today. After decades of battles, however, America slowly changed. When the issues America designed those parties to debate were resolved or faded away, the parties turned into weak institutions coasting on old ideas. Eventually, they crumbled in what the scholars call a realignment. Realignments are the moments in which we tear an entire old order down and build a fresh new era with new coalitions, new ideologies, and new ideas. In the rubble of the old system’s collapse, the American people then create two new coalitions designed to debate new solutions to the nation’s new problems. Sometimes new people or ideas take over the husk of an old party. Sometimes a party simply dissolves and a new one takes its place. Either way, a new era begins with two new coalitions trumpeting new ideas ready to engage in the next era’s great debate.

I disagree with his interpretation of events to some degree. I don’t think that political developments in the United States have been so driven by charismatic individuals as he seems to or completely immune to exogenous factors. So, for example, I think that many party realignments through our history have been produced by people who hadn’t been here a generation before or their children trying to make sure that their voices were heard. That explains, specifically, the realignments at the turn of the 19th century and that during the Great Depression. I also think it’s a factor in the resurgence of support for socialism we’re seeing today.

At Bloomberg Leonid Bershidsky lends some support to the point I made a little while ago—that automobile ownership is not becoming obsolete:

Knittel and Murphy found, using U.S. government data, that millennials own 0.4 percent fewer vehicles per household than baby boomers did. But controlling for socio-demographic variables including income and the family life cycle explains away this entire difference. Doing the same for vehicle miles travel data reveals that millennials are more active travelers than older Americans.

Millennials, Knittel and Murphy wrote, “operate under many of the same constraints as prior generations, and they still have strong preferences for personal vehicles.” Most of the U.S. isn’t really built for any transportation solution other than private cars. In Europe, where public transportation and car-sharing networks are better developed, various studies show that millennials are less likely to own cars than previous generations, but robust studies such as Knittel and Murphy’s are lacking, so it’s unclear whether, as in the U.S., most of the difference is explained by socioeconomic factors rather than preferences.

I’ve heard many young people say they choose not to own cars because of environmental awareness or the convenience of sharing options. But do they actually mean what they say — or is it simply that they can’t afford to buy a car and would rather frame that reality as a choice?

He goes on to observe that particularly in the developing world vehicle ownership is driven by a desire for prestige, something that is likely to increase rather than decrease as those countries become more prosperous.

Any decline we’re seeing in automobile ownership is largely a run-on factor of our overemphasis on higher education. That has additional run-on effects as well, everything from delay of marriage, childrearing, and home ownership—factors in the acquisition of wealth—to an adolescence prolonged into their 30s and a lack of adult skills, including the ability to be a self-starter or shoulder responsibilities.

When the Constitution was signed the voting age was set at 21. At that time by age 21 most men had borne adult responsibilities for 5 years and, consequently, had more adult judgment. Nowadays that may be delayed until as late as 40.

But I digress. Don’t expect owning a car to become “quaint”. That isn’t going to happen for the foreseeable future.

I wanted to draw your attention to this post at the Progressive Policy Institute by Ryan Craig on the “skills gap” which I found variously interesting, thought-provoking, and, occasionally, infuriating. I don’t think the “skills gap” is as real as he does but I do think it is important. Here’s an example of something I found infuriating:

Those who haven’t ever worked in the private might be forgiven for being skeptical about the existence of a skills shortage.

I have worked for 50 years in the private sector and I will affirm that the skills shortage is greatly exaggerated. During most of that period I have been a hirer—reading resumes, interviewing candidates, making offers, and so on. To the best of my ability to determine Mr. Craig’s actual private sector experience is pretty scanty. Instead his primary involvement is with education, rightly considered a “handmaiden sector”, either part of the government or intimately related to the government. The same can be said of finance, at least when what you’re financing is organizations heavily dependent on government grants.

The measurement he’s using, jobs on offer, is wrong. It is impossible to determine how many of the jobs that are being advertised actually exist or how many are merely stalking horses to justify bringing in somebody on an H1-B. The Minneapolis Fed, on the other hand, notes this:

Wages in STEM have been stagnant for 20 years, just as wages in most of the rest of the economy. If there were actually a shortage, you would expect wages to be rising.

Now there is an actual skills deficit but it’s not in skills taught by universities. It’s in the skilled trades and the skills needed by manufacturing workers. It’s in the basic skills that all employees need to be effective workers, things like showing up on time and having the right attitude.

As I read this post from NPR, imagining a low carbon emissions future, I was impressed at what a thorough-going work of fantasy it was. It’s a pleasant fantasy but a fantasy nonetheless. You can read it if you care to. It’s very attractively presented.

In response I’m going to make four claims about carbon emissions. Rather than attempting to prove them, I’ll just suggest why I believe them to be true.

It doesn’t much matter what we do here.

There are many things we can do here. We can commute less. We can build less. We can use energy more efficiently. Unfortunately, none of those will actually solve the problem that people are complaining about. We can reduce U. S. carbon emissions to zero and, assuming that the models are correct, the effect on climate change will be negligible. This is the reason:

What does matter is what China, India, and, increasingly, the countries of Africa do.

It doesn’t much matter what ordinary people in the U. S. do.

I’ve posted on this extensively. Carbon emissions rise geometrically with income. Mark Zuckerberg’s 5,600 square foot home doesn’t require twice as many carbon emissions as the average home it requires a lot more than that. Add his flying around the country via jet and all of the other ways in which he causes carbon emissions and you’ll see what I mean. The implication of this is that the results of market-based strategies for reducing emissions will be disappointing.

We will need heavy industry for the foreseeable future.

Here’s just one example. Millions of people require insulin to live. Consider the industrial process by which artificial insulin is created. Here’s a production plant for the production of artificial insulin:

That’s heavy industry. It takes steel and power and people commuting to work. We won’t locate insulin-production plants in midtown Manhattan or in the Loop in Chicago. “Urbanization” is a fantasy. Moving insulin production to India won’t help. It will just be out of our sight and beyond our control. If India’s approach to heavy industry produces more carbon emissions than ours does, that will actually produce more emissions. Multiply insulin by the tens of thousands of other similar products on which our lives depend.

Too many of our policies over the last half century have been counter-productive.

We have subsidized road construction, home-building, and offshoring our manufacturing to places where it is safely out of sight and beyond our control. All of these things increase carbon emissions beyond what they otherwise would have been. These policies are popular which is why they’re likely to continue.

What the heck just happened? The charges of disorderly conduct (in Illinois filing a false police report is disorderly conduct) against Jussie Smollett have been dropped. The Sun-Times reports:

Prosecutors on Tuesday dropped charges against “Empire” actor Jussie Smollett that accused him of staging a hate-crime attack against himself.

The actor was indicted March 8 with 16 counts of disorderly conduct for allegedly hiring two men to attack him near his Streeterville home in January. The $10,000 posted for Smollett’s bond will be turned over to the City of Chicago Law Department.

The hearing lasted less than 5 minutes. Cook County Circuit Judge Steven G. Watkins sealed the case file.

Here’s the telling quote in the piece:

First Assistant State’s Attorney Joseph Magats said the decision to drop the charges was not a statement that Smollett did not, as police and prosecutors said when the actor was charged, pay his assailants to fake the attack and then falsely report the incident to police and detectives.

Asked if the dropped charges meant the actor was, in fact, the victim of a crime, Magats was emphatic.

“Absolutely not. We stand behind the CPD investigation done in this case, we stand behind the approval of charges in this case,” Magats told the Sun-Times. “They did a fantastic job. The fact there was an alternative disposition in this case is not and should not be viewed as some kind of admission there was something wrong with the case, or something wrong with the investigation that the Chicago Police did.”

Before we conclude that Smollett’s case is, like Schrödinger’s cat, simultaneously dead and alive, I think there’s an interpretation that explains the decision to drop charges. Under Illinois statute the state’s ability to seek damages and penalties is quite limited, in all likelihood far less expensive than pursuing the case would be. Is it possible that the decision not to pursue the charges is actually a cost-saving measure?

At RealClearPolitics Charles Lipson declares that “a boatload of shoes is about to drop”. He divides that boatload into four “baskets”:

• Basket No. 1: More information about the Mueller Report and the basis for its conclusions.
• Basket No. 2: Will House Democrats push ahead with other investigations of Trump?
• Basket No. 3: Expect serious backlash as voters ask, “Who led us down this rabbit hole?”
• Basket No. 4: Did the FBI, Department of Justice, and intelligence agencies commit their own wrongdoing?

I think he’s overreacting. Baskets #1 and 2 are likely to happen. Basket #3 will almost certainly not happen—it’s more important to political junkies than it is to most people and try as they might neither party will gain much traction with it. They’d be better off sticking with bread and butter issues.

It is very difficult to believe that Basket #4 will take place. We have had a provable case of perjury on the part of the Director of Central Intelligence for a long time—nothing has come of it. Even if there are similar cases in the FBI and DoJ I it will take more than a mere scandal to bring those agencies to account for their malfeasance.