Thoughts on dysfunction

A question worth pondering: Can the Republican Party be salvaged? Yes, the Democrats have their own dysfunctions these days, but it is the Republicans who appear to be in complete disarray and incapable of governing, as the current deadlock for House speaker unfortunately demonstrates. And it is the Republicans who appear to be on track to overwhelmingly select as their presidential candidate an individual indicted on 91 federal counts in four criminal cases, not to mention a series of state criminal cases and civil trials. How did we get to such an impasse, and how can Republicans get out of it?

I should say in passing that it seems to me vital to have two healthy political parties, because usually each keeps the other from straying too far from the center. In the absence of this balance the political system can get seriously out of whack, which seems to me the case right now. 

I have seen three arguments in recent years that bear on this question. Two are examples of the road to hell being paved with the best of intentions, or perhaps examples the Law of Unintended Consequences.

An article I read some years ago noted that legislative bargaining in Congress used to take place behind closed doors, where opponents could horse-trade in private to reach bipartisan agreements that gave both sides some of what they wanted. Then came the well-intentioned movement to make such bargaining more public. The result was that as soon as one side made a concession, visible on TV coverage, they were promptly swamped with threatening emails, orchestrated by online activists. The result was to make it much harder, even impossible, to do the kind of horse-trading that effective bipartisan legislation requires. 

A related argument focuses on the effect that modern air travel has had on Congress. In the “olden days”, when travel to Washington was slow from much of the country, members of Congress tended to live in Washington, and as a consequence to socialize with each other and develop close friendships, even across the aisle. When Sam Rayburn was Speaker of the House (for 17 years in three separate terms), leaders of both parties would adjourn to his office after a day of battling on the floor of the House and drink Bourbon together. With the advent of cheap air travel, many (most?) members of Congress now go back to their districts on weekends, and don’t build social bonds with their opponents across the aisle, or even with fellow party members on their side of the aisle.  In fact there is clearly a lot of animosity among members in today’s Congress, especially in the House.

Then there is the change, again well-intentioned, in selecting candidates. Political parties used to select their candidates in smoke-filled rooms by powerful political pros who attended primarily to whether their candidates were electable or not. It was certainly a system abused at times, so well-intentioned activists pressed for open primaries instead, where the voting public would select the candidates. It certainly sounds like a good idea, but it turns out to have problems. Primary elections aren’t the “real” election, so turnouts tend to be much smaller than in actual elections. And who, then, turns out – mostly people with a burr under their saddle about some issue or other, often those with the most extreme views. As a consequence, in recent years parties have been picking candidates with views more extreme than their voting bases. That is no doubt why we have some many extremists in Congress these days, and in state legislatures as well.

Finally, there is the effect of corporate and private money on Congress, though that isn’t particularly new, and the effect of social media, which is new. Political campaigns have gotten wildly expensive these days, while rulings like the Citizens’ United ruling have magnified the effects of “dark money” (ie – unaccountable money) in campaigns. In particular, a few very wealthy individuals ( George Soros, Richard Uihleon. Kenneth Griffin, Michael Bloomberg, etc) seem to have an outsized effect.

And social media, with its ability to spread information and misinformation widely and quickly, and even target selected voters with selected messages, has clearly changed the nature of campaigning. But then, there must have been fundamental changes in the voting base as well, apparently driven, or at least magnified, by social media.

So if these are important, or even the primary, reasons the Republican Party is off the rails these days, can any of it be reversed? Is there any force that can bring back a substantial moderate wing of the party to hold the extremists at bay? I don’t have an answer, but it is worth thinking about.

Of course The Democratic Party is subject to the same forces, though their hot-button issues are different. Nevertheless, while there is certainly an extremist group on the left as well, Democrats seem marginally less dysfunctional at the moment. Is it perhaps because they are a larger and more diverse coalition than the Republicans, with more internal stresses and hence more need to find compromises and accommodations? That is another question worth pondering.

 

The Israel-Hamas battle

 

I see with the current crisis in Israel we are once again into the predictable cycle: (1) terrorists attack Israel, (2) the world expresses outrage against the terrorists for a few days, (3) Israel tries to figure out how to stop the next attack, and (4) the world expresses outrage against Israel for whatever effort they come up with. Rinse and repeat.

It is remarkable how many commentators seem to be completely ignorant of history, and this certainly seems to include the student and academic circles these days. Yes, it was unfair of Israel (or actually, the British) to displace so many Palestinians in the first place when Israel was first established, but remember that Israel was established because Europe and Russia threw out the Jews and persecuted them with pogroms and finally the German Holocaust. And America wasn’t blameless in this either, since at the time we turned away boatloads of dispossessed Jews. In fact, it wasn’t fair that the Israelites conquered the land in the first place from the Canaanites, nor that the Romans then drove the Jews out of Israel 2000 years ago, nor that the Muslims later overrun the area and built a mosque right on top of the most sacred site for the Jews, the site of the second temple in Jerusalem. One can imagine how the Muslim world would feel if the Jews built a Jewish temple on top of the Kaaba in Mecca. Fairness is simply a useless concept in a history as tangled as that of the land of Israel, conquered repeatedly by one wave of invaders after another over the centuries.

Then there is the argument that Israel’s response is disproportionate. What is the proportionate response to a mass terrorist attack killing hundreds or thousands of civilians? The 9/11 attacks against America took down two buildings in New York. In response, we took down two whole nations (Afghanistan and Iraq). Was that “proportional” enough? If Mexico started firing rockets into LA, what do you suppose the American “proportional” response would be?

Yes, it is true that the Palestinians in Gaza seemed to be incapable of governing themselves, at least to the extent of preventing Hamas from doing something stupid that got them bombed every few years. Looking at the clown show in the American Congress these days, from politicians that we the voters elected, I don’t think we are in a position to be judgmental. It is unfortunate that the Palestinians in Gaza are in the hands of a ruthless group like Hamas. But while the world feels for them (or at least claims it does), it certainly doesn’t seem to feel the need to help Gaza to throw off the yoke of Hamas. It is worth remembering that Israel tried to govern Gaza, but under (probably unwise) world pressure withdrew from Gaza in 2005 to let them govern themselves, after which Gaza promptly fell under the harsh rule of extremists. Hamas, remember, when in 2006 they took over from Fatah in Gaza, threw many of the Fatah leaders off high buildings.

And yes, Israel is in the hands of a hard-right government at the moment, with some really fairly nutty parties in the coalition. Again, given the nuttiness of some of our own far-right- and far-left political extremists these days, and given that we may well unwisely elect a convicted felon as president in our next election, are we in any position to judge them?

Yes, the Israeli government has made some questionable choices, especially about expanding settlements into Palestinian areas. Again, looking at our own American history, are we in any position to call the kettle black? Governments are fallible, and government leaders sometimes are foolishly mislead by their own ideologies (Putin, I’m looking at you). That is nothing new in history.

Yes, Israel’s response will no doubt cause some inadvertent civilian deaths, perhaps even many of them. If anyone has figured out how to wage war in urban areas without civilian casualties, especially if the opponent is using civilians as shields and hostages, they certainly haven’t advertised it. The American military certainly hasn’t figured out how to wage war without civilian casualties, so it seems pretty unfair to criticize Israel on this account. And notice that Israel does try its best to warn civilians before striking, something the terrorists certainly don’t do.

Israel is in an impossible position, with mortal enemies embedded in territory right in the midst of its lands, and Arab enemies on all its borders. Enemies sworn to wipe Israel off the map entirely. Imagine if, say, the Midwest of America was inhabited by mortal enemies who constantly sent terrorists across the border and fired rocket into adjoining American cities, and that Canada and Mexico were also mortal enemies. That is roughly what Israel faces.

And then there is the fact that the Palestinian cause is such a handy issue for everyone from Arab and Persian (Iran, I’m looking at you!) governments to American activists and politicians to use cynically as a tool to advance their own interests and agendas, (and incidentally, often to give cover to their own obvious antisemitism) when in fact most of them really don’t give a hoot about the Palestinians themselves, and will happily ignore them or throw them under the bus as soon as they are no longer useful.

The level of hypocrisy, and of ignorance, displayed in so many of the media and political commentaries on this unfortunate affair boggles the mind. But then, antisemitism is so firmly embedded in so many cultures, including unfortunately our own, that I suppose nothing Israel does will escape criticism.

There is no good response to this terrorist attack. Wiping out Hamas for good, if they can actually manage it, is probably the best of a series of bad choices, despite the massive casualties on both sides that will probably result. The next time Hamas might have a bootleg nuclear weapon, and they certainly wouldn’t hesitate to use it, so any government worth its salt (in Israel or anywhere else) owes it to its people to do the best that it can to prevent a repeat of this kind of terrorism, despite the costs. 

Learning from the Ukraine war

The Economist had a series of articles recently about what the world is learning from the Ukrainian war.  One of the articles is Western armies are learning a lot from the war in Ukraine. According to the article, the British army is running exercises specifically to learn how to apply the lessons of this war. I would hope the US army is doing the same.

Clearly land warfare has changed radically. Drones and satellites make the battlefield transparent. Precision missiles make possible pinpoint attacks on rear area logistics and command posts, and even on moving targets like tanks. AI and rapid communications make it possible to hit targets within moments of their being detected. We have spent decades fighting insurgencies against third world countries, and learned a lot about what to do and not to do in with insurgencies. But we apparently forgot what it was like to fight a near-peer in high-intensity warfare. One of the things we apparently forgot was the need for a massive wartime industrial capacity to keep up with the prodigious use of munitions, weapon systems, and supplies in a modern high-intensity war.

If land warfare has changed so radically, one wonders what we have to learn or re-learn, perhaps painfully, about naval warfare.  Precision missiles and wide-area satellite coverage certainly changes the threat to surface ships. Are huge aircraft carriers still viable in a modern peer-to-peer naval battle, or are they just big expensive targets waiting to be overwhelmed by barrages of much cheaper missiles fired from hundreds of miles away? (Remember, one doesn’t have to sink a carrier to put it out of action – just damage the flight deck enough to make air operations impossible). Indeed, submarines may be the most survivable components of a modern naval fleet and perhaps we should build more of them. As it is, our U.S. shipbuilding capacity is currently so depleted that 40% of our fast attack submarines are currently out of service, awaiting maintenance (see article here). This would hardly do in a major naval confrontation with, say, China.

Air warfare has also apparently changed dramatically. The enormous losses of Russian aircraft and helicopters to simple, cheap shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles like the almost obsolete Stinger (last built in 1987, more than 30 years ago!) is a sharp lesson. Even supposedly state-of-the-art advanced missiles, like the Russian (supposedly) hypersonic Kinzhal can be brought down with ease by Patriot batteries.  

And what about space? Modern warfare depends heavily on reconnaissance satellites, communications satellites, and geolocation satellite systems like GPS and Glonass (the Russian equivalent). The U.S., Russia and China have all demonstrated the capacity to destroy satellites – indeed all three have successfully tested such systems. How well would our armies fight without satellite coverage, GPS, and satellite communications links? How should we answer this vulnerability?

One of the observations of historians is that militaries tend to prepare to re-fight the last war, especially if they won the last war, often with disastrous consequences. Are we in danger of repeating this mistake?   

It is also important to remember that the industrial capacity behind the military is as important, or perhaps even more important, than the fighting force on the front lines. And this “proxy war” in Ukraine has certainly shown how depleted that industrial capacity has become, not only in Europe but in the U.S. as well. As just one example, there is a single factory in Louisianan that makes a special type of gunpowder used in the primer of all U.S. artillery shells (the main explosive is not gunpowder – but a little gunpowder is used to set off the main explosive), and it is offline after an accident, with no urgent plans to rebuild it.(see story here). There are thousands of similar “single-points-of-failure” in the U.S. weapons manufacturing and support systems.

At the end of World War II the U.S. had 29 shipyards supporting the navy. Today it has 4, (Norfolk Naval Shipyard, Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, Puget Sound Naval Shipyard and Intermediate Maintenance Facility, and Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard and Intermediate Maintenance Facility), all strained to capacity and badly needing updating (Dry Dock 1 at Norfolk, still in use, was built in 1834).

Today the US Army has only two producers of artillery shells (Scranton Army Ammunition Plant in Pennsylvania and General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems facility in Wilkes Barre), both fairly antiquated by today’s manufacturing standards. All the shells are filled with explosive at a single facility in Iowa. These facilities currently produce about 24,000 shells a year, which is less than Ukraine fires in just a week. We are hardly prepared for a near-peer land war.

Plato said “if you want peace, prepare for war” (Sī vīs pācem, parā bellum). It is indeed expensive to maintain and train and equip an adequate modern military force (“adequate” meaning visibly powerful enough to deter potential opponents), but it is far less expensive than fighting a war, and far, far, far less expensive than losing that war. If we in the West had had the wit to properly train and equip Ukraine after the 2014 takeover of Crimea, we might possibly have avoided the current war altogether.

The "energy transiton" vs reality

There is of course a lot of media hype about the “energy transition”, lots of politicians who see this as a vote-getting issue even if they don’t understand it, and a whole cottage industry of consultants and companies has arisen ready and eager to cash in on the subsidies offered and publishing a blizzard of optimistic reports.

Here is the reality: the world, especially the first world, and most especially the U.S., has built a culture and economy based on the profligate use of cheap energy, mostly hydrocarbon-based (coal, oil, gas) energy. The rest of the world aspires to the same energy-intensive lifestyle. The current US per-capita energy use (electricity plus transportation, heating and cooking, all converted to kWh) is about 77,000 kWh. A European uses about 44,000 kWh per year, while in India the current per-capita use is about 7,000 kWh.  Between 1950 and 2010 the US essentially doubled the per-capita use of energy. The US, with 4% of the world’s population, now uses about 17% of the world’s total power.

According to the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), to limit global warming to 1.5°C we need by 2050 to reduce coal use by 95%, oil by 60% and gas by 45%.  So roughly, we in the US need to cut our hydrocarbon-based energy use in half or more by 2050, to a level somewhat below the current European per-capita level. And of course, the rest of the world has to make corresponding changes.

How are we doing? Actually, as the current 2023 Statistical Review of World Energy shows, world hydrocarbon production is increasing, despite the slowdown from COVID and the Ukraine war. Global oil consumption increased by nearly 2.9 million barrels per day in 2022, natural gas consumption remained steady in 2022, and coal consumption increased about 0.6%, largely because of increases in coal production in China, India, and Indonesia. Since 2000 the world has doubled its coal-fired power capacity, mostly due to China and India.  

And, predictably, no one in the US is talking about actually reducing our personal power demands, just shifting it to renewables. Hence the (questionable) push from gasoline cars to electric cars. Since 60% of US electricity is generated from hydrocarbons, 20% of it from coal, current electric cars are actually running on average 1/5 of the time on dirty coal, polluting worse than gasoline.  Hybrid cars with regenerative braking, on the other hand, may make sense for local travel, which accounts for most auto travel in the US. (52% of trips are less than 3 miles. Just 2% are 50 miles or more), and of course, for those who can afford it, electric cars are great for virtue signaling.  

Despite the hype, wind and solar power alone, while they can certainly help, cannot support this energy-profligate lifestyle for good technical, physical and economic reasons. Nuclear energy (fission energy) might possibly support it technically (though there are some challenges there, especially for processes that actually require hydrocarbons as feedstock), but for cultural and economic reasons building out enough nuclear power seems unlikely. Fusion energy remains a distant dream.

So what is left? Significantly reducing our energy demand worldwide is what is left. What does that really mean? There is no single thing we can eliminate to solve this problem. We need to eliminate lots of things, gaining perhaps 1% or 3% or 5% here and there until the total is about half of our current energy use. Here are just some of the implications:

Stop buying so much “stuff” that has to be shipped around the world. It’s not just the shipping of the final product, it’s also the shipping of subassemblies and components back and forth around the world to get to a final assembly point. And of course it is the initial manufacturing use of energy. Give up our high-fi systems, our foreign-made clothes and shoes, furniture and home products that aren’t locally made, our cell phones and TVs, and all the stuff we get (and is shipped) from Amazon. The shipping industry uses about 5% of global oil production, manufacturing uses about 38% of global hydrocarbon production.

Stop building new buildings, roads, bridges, etc. Reuse and repurpose existing buildings instead. Cement production accounts for about 2% of global energy production, steel production accounts for about the same. Production and road construction with hot asphalt is estimated to account for about 5% of global greenhouse gases.

Change our diet. Stop eating meat (livestock farming contributes about 15% of global greenhouse gas production). Eat only locally-sourced foods to reduce the shipping, meaning eat only plant foods that happen to be in season locally. Eat only fresh foods to limit the use of refrigeration.

Stop using the internet and cell phones. Individual phones and computers don’t account for much energy use, but the vast server farms that support the internet and phone services use enormous amounts of energy. The U.S. DOE estimates a typical data center uses about 50 megawatts of power. That’s enough to power 80,000 typical homes for one year. We have over 2500 such data centers in the US alone, and are adding over 100 new ones per year, again just in the US.

Give up flying anywhere. Flying accounts for about 3.5% of global greenhouse emissions (and certainly give up private jets and motor yachts). And in fact give up vacation trips altogether. Take vacations locally. Give up destination weddings. Use only local doctors and hospitals for medical care. 

Give up all night life, turn off the lights and go to sleep when the sun sets. In the US about 5%  (213 billion kWh per year) of total electricity generated is used to power lights at night, both in residences and in industry and on streets.

Give up our cars, or at least get down to only one small car per family, and certainly give up any RVs,,SUVs, and trucks (unless your work requires a truck). Increase the density of public transportation. Rebuild all our country to be less car-dependent and better suited to public transportation (ie -co-locate housing, shopping and work locations in urban enters and empty out the suburbs)– a wildly expensive proposition.

In winter keep the home heat at 65 or below and wear heavy clothes indoors. In summer give up air conditioning. Air conditioning and refrigeration is estimated to consume about 20% of global electricity.

Can we manage this, and perhaps other similar culture shifts? Consider how hard it is just to get people just to change their diet. What will it take to get them to give up their cars, their cell phones, their steaks and burgers, their access to Google and the internet, their air conditioning, their nice suburban home? What will be the impact on the economy? How many jobs will be lost? How will costs increase when the economy of scale is lost? How many products will simply disappear because they require a wider market to be worth making? And what politician is going to try to peddle this message?

The point I am making is that the real solution to global warming is not technical – better wind turbines, solar panels and batteries. It is cultural – get everyone (including especially the relatively wealthy in the world, which includes most of us in the US) to give up our current energy-intensive lifestyles and learn to live a much leaner life. And because it is cultural, the solution is much harder to achieve, perhaps even impossible.

 Some references for further study;

Renewables vs Hydrocarbons: The Energy Reality

The Energy Transition Confronts Reality

IPCC Sixth Assessment (2022)

The Energy Transition Has Not Yet Started

The Energy Transition Isn’t 

Statistical Review of World Energy

Are electric cars worse for the environment?

Global Energy Trends 2023

Climate change and flying

Our World in Data: Energy use per person

About the Supreme Court

Yes, the Supreme Court is now heavily loaded with so-called “conservative” judges. Yes, I am uncomfortable with the consequences of some of their recent decisions. And yes, the heavily-liberal media is having a field day being “outraged” by some of the decisions.

And yet… and yet...

Ignore the emotional, political, and largely tribal overtones, and just look at the logic of the decisions. I find I agree with most of the recent decisions.

Remember, it is the explicit task of the elected representative of Congress to write the laws. It is the explicit task of the courts to help interpret the laws as they are written, especially in complex situation not necessarily anticipated when the law was written. It is explicitly NOT the charge of the court to “create” new laws, even if we wish such laws existed and yet Congress won’t pass them.

Start with the abortion decision, the overturning of Roe vs Wade. I personally think women should have absolute control over their own reproductive processes, and the state has no right to interfere in any way until the point that a live baby is actually born. But I could live with a reasonable compromise, such as a late-term abortion ban (say from the point where a fetus could survive outside the womb) except in cases where the women’s life is at risk.  Nonetheless, Roe vs Wade was based on very questionable law, as even Justice Ginsberg admitted. There is no “right to privacy” anywhere in the Constitution, but an activist court in 1973, loaded in this case with “liberal” judges, “inferred” such a right, and then stretched it all the way to the abortion issue to “create” new law.  It was poor law, and the court was, in my opinion, correct to overturn it. Women absolutely should have the right to abortion if they want it (if men could get pregnant this wouldn’t even be an issue!), but this was the wrong way to achieve that. Of course I am uncomfortable with the consequences, but that does not detract from the argument that it is not the Court’s job to “create” law where it does not exist, just to satisfy some ideological cause, however desirable. That task is expressly reserved to the legislature, whose members are elected, not appointed for life.

Consider the affirmative action case just decided. As I argued in my previous post, the language of Title XI is absolutely clear: “No person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin……”.  It couldn’t be more explicit. And in fact, affirmative action was actually being used by the colleges to favor (actively discriminate for) one group of politically powerful minorities (blacks and Hispanics) against another less-powerful minority (Asian-Americans), clearly illegally (remember the national origin part above).

Consider the decision against President Biden’s plan to forgive student loans. That was estimated to cost the taxpayers something like $300 billion over the next decade. The Court’s logic, which I agree with, is that the executive branch, including all executive branch agencies, cannot impose rules which incur major monetary or political costs without express instructions from Congress. The underlying principle is that the power of the federal purse lies exclusively with the House of Representative. Agencies can make minor adjustments, but anything that has a major impact (and $300 billion is a pretty major impact) requires explicit direction in law from Congress.  The IRS (an executive branch agency), for example, cannot on its own decide to raise the federal tax rates, nor do I want them to have that power - only the elected representative in Congress should have that power.

An aside – I always thought the proposal to forgive the college loans of students, mostly middle-class people who with their college degrees are better able to pay off loans than the non-college-degreed population – was highly unfair, and really just a political sop by the elites to the elites. Why should the 2/3 of the nation that doesn’t choose to go to college have to pay off their loans, but the college-degreed people don’t?

Consider the religions freedom case just decided – that a Christian designer of wedding websites isn’t required to build websites for a same-sex wedding, when same-sex weddings are against their religion. It’s hard to see on what basis the government – local, state or federal – should be able to require creative people to create things they find offensive or against their religion or beliefs.  Should a kosher store be required to carry ham? Should a Catholic priest be required to marry two divorced people? Should a halal chef be required to cook pork chops? Just where does this end if anyone can demand a repugnant service from any store? Yes, some religions do object to some LGBTQ+ practices (like same-sex marriages). Do we really want the federal courts to be requiring by law that those religions change their doctrines – how is that going to work? (Not well, I would guess).

The same issue came up in the recently-decided case of the religious postal worker who objected to being required to work on Sunday (presumably to deliver Amazon packages, because what else does the postal service do on Sundays?). Again, the court reasoned that unless it imposed a significant cost penalty, employers had to accommodate the reasonable religious requirements of their employees. Having Sunday off in a mostly-Christian nation hardly seems like an excessive request.

So on balance I find I agree with the legal logic in most of the recent cases decided by the Supreme Court. And in fact it seems to me the dissents by the three liberals have mostly been emotional and ideological reactions, not well-thought out legal arguments worthy of a Supreme Court justice. They don’t like the results. Fine. I don’t like the results either in some cases, but I still think the court’s legal logic was correct.

The social and ideological issues posed, and they are real and important, need to be solved by laws written by elected representatives in the legislature, not by unelected judges. The fact that the supporters of these causes haven’t (yet?) managed to elect enough representative to Congress to get the laws they want doesn’t mean that the judiciary is the right way to bypass the system.