The Enlightened Despot

Jerry Taylor is a CATO fellow and a contributor to NRO’s the Corner. As libertarian types go, he’s about as Republican-friendly as you could ask for. He generally posts about issues on which he agrees with the party line and pipes down when he doesn’t. He doesn’t believe the science on man-made global warming is conclusive. But earlier today, he had the nerve to point out that talk radio is stupid. So, naturally, he’s being brutalized over there:

Rush has been on the air three hours a day, 15 hours a week for 20 years. If he’d left that many hostages to fortune in all those thousands of tapes, you’d think Jerry Taylor could find something a little more substantial to link to than a feeble New York Times story that isn’t about talk radio at all. Is this the level of research required for a Cato Institute study? C’mon, man, surely you could at least link to a George Soros-funded “Media Matters” laundry list of outrageous if ellipsis-heavy quotations (or “ransom-note racism”, as it’s known in the trade).

It reflects a bizarre set of priorities when an obscure think-tanker lazily endorses the liberal critique of American conservatism’s only mass outlet. I confess I don’t quite understand where The Corner’s going with this shtick. Perhaps my colleagues will enlighten me…

Take that you lazy, obscure think-tanker! At this point, I don’t think the National Review is serious enough to be worth saving. There are still a few serious, intelligent people working there, but at this point, I don’t know why they haven’t left.

UPDATE:

Bonus question: are there non-obscure think tanks or think-tankers? What would a mainstream think tank do, exactly? Does Christina Aguilera write policy papers on the merits of rocking the vote?

UPDATE 2:

Mark Steyn defends his first attack:

Insofar as I understand it, I thought the critique of conservative talk radio was that these fellows were too “harsh” and “mean-spirited” and “partisan”. So as evidence of what’s wrong Jerry Taylor approvingly cites two books called Lies And The Lying Liars Who Tell Them and Rush Limbaugh Is A Big Fat Idiot. Sorry, I think that’s pathetic on its face, and an embarrassment to National Review.

Here’s what Taylor actually said:

Regarding my claim that Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity often use “dodgy evidence“ to back their claims, I can only plead that on the rare occasions that I’ve listened, this is exactly what I have found. Sure, maybe I just happen to listen in when they go off the rails . . . but I doubt it. Regardless, if you want chapter and verse on that score, you can’t do better than Al Franken’s two books on this subject (Lying Liars and Rush Limbaugh). Now, I know that this will double my hate mail, but the fact is that Mr. Senator-Elect is often spot-on regarding the facts when he goes after these guys.

Taylor says that Franken’s books provide evidence that Rush and Hannity have lied or twisted facts, without saying anything nice about Franken or even endorsing the books. Steyn’s response: Franken is a hypocritical jerk! Stop talking about facts! They’re pathetic! And a disgrace to the National Review!

And Matt Yglesias has the data to prove it:

The YZA’s take on this:

Given a choice of three options, just 24 percent of voters can correctly identify the cap-and-trade proposal as something that deals with environmental issues. A slightly higher number (29 percent) believe the proposal has something to do with regulating Wall Street while 17 percent think the term applies to health care reform. A plurality (30 percent) have no idea.

…

The political press has a very strong structural bias toward overestimating the extent to which the public has real opinions about hot political issues. I wish more pollsters would put these kinds of polls in the field that do something to probe the extent of public ignorance. Polls that attempt to directly probe the public’s views about cap and trade wind up measuring a lot of pseudo-opinion. As you can see right in this result, people are incredibly unwilling to admit that they “don’t know” something or other. Thus 46 percent of the public says they know what cap and trade is about even though they don’t, in fact, know what it’s about.

Yglesias is absolutely right about the media’s tendency to overestimate the general public - a tendency understandably shared by politicians. He’s also right that this is a good reason to view opinion polling about policy matters skeptically. If people were polled about what should be on display at the MOMA, they’d have answers, but that doesn’t mean many of them would notice or care when the decision was actually made.

On the other hand, Yglesias is way off in his number crunching, leading him to be far too kind to John Q Policywonk. He reasons that since 29% believe that cap and trade has to do with finance, and 17% believe it has to do with health care, 46% of the population is clueless but happy to bluff. The addition is spot on (credit where it’s due) but this only makes sense if you believe that of all the people who blindly guessed between three options, not a single one guessed right. I do not believe that. The disparity between the two wrong answers shows that not all options are equally attractive to those guessing - Wall Street regulation does very well, perhaps because it’s the most visible story right now and because the word ‘trade’ makes it sound financial. So one can’t immediately extrapolate the number of dumb luck answers in the survey. But zero is a very bad guess. I’m inclined to think the correct answer would do at least as well as health care. If that’s even close to right, the number of people who actually know more or less what cap and trade is about is in the single digits.

On the other hand, this is the whole point of cap and trade. People might not understand exactly what a carbon tax is, but they do know it has the word ‘tax’ in it, and that things with the word ‘tax’ in them generally make them angry. That a cap could - depending on the implementation - have much the same effect on consumers is well known to those who know even a tiny bit about it. But polling suggests that that isn’t a demographic worth worrying about.

Douglas Adams wrote about an invisibility device that worked by creating an “SEP-field”, an aura suggesting to the would-be viewer that whatever lies within it is Somebody Else’s Problem. We’d better hope he’s wrong about human nature:

When I said that Ryan Avent was speaking nonsense when he claimed that climate change poses an ‘existential threat’ to libertarianism, I did not mean in any way to deny that there are a lot of people calling themselves libertarians and saying some very crazy things about global warming. There are. The Avent post in question was a response to a full page ad run by Cato in several major newspapers, taking Obama to task for saying that the science predicting dangerous global warming was beyond dispute. It was not an honest or credible effort, and it’s not the only instance of libertarians taking this position. Objectively Biased has a theory of why this is the case:

People who call themselves libertarians have this whole market open to them of conservatives with money who will pay for an intellectual justification for their decidedly non-intellectual views. Similarly (and in a related fashion), specific pseudo-science causes like Intelligent Design and anti-Global Warming think tanks have lower desired qualifications in terms of quality of work done for hiring thinkers and writers than do other mainstream think tanks and especially universities. Basically, if you’re a “libertarian” who has one of these views, you can get hired to speak or even be a fellow at a place that wants to pay people for justifications.

That seems right, but I don’t think it’s the whole story. Libertarianism in America has the very odd distinction of having far more make-believe adherents than actual adherents. There aren’t very many self-described libertarians out there, but there are far more of them than there are actual libertarians, and almost all conservatives claim to be broadly sympathetic to the core principles. The reason for this, I think, is that Americans, by and large, love the sound of libertarianish rhetoric, but hate most of the policy that would result from taking these ideas seriously. Republicans love to talk about smaller government and individual freedom, because it forces Democrats to shuffle their feet and change the subject; they can win these battles on the specifics, but no one wins elections promising bigger government and less freedom. And when Republicans fail to do anything to promote smaller government or individual liberty beyond lowering taxes and fighting off gun control, no one gets mad at them, because they didn’t really want anything else in the first place.

Americans genuinely do like the sound of smaller government and individual liberty, but in most instances these preferences are outweighed by their desire for government assisstance, their aversion to being held personally responsible for their ills, and their fear of individual liberty in the hands of people other than themselves. But while they are very proud of the former, they won’t conciously admit to the latter. So libertarian-leaning rhetoric goes over like gangbusters. Meanwhile, the last state in the Union that lets adults decide for themselves whether or not to wear a seatbelt may be about to change its mind.

I’m heading off to the Old World today, so - barring another flurry of activity from Frederick - posting will be light to non-existent for the next day or so of travel. In the meantime, would someone please explain why this nonsense from Ryan Avent has been so widely cited as an interesting and challenging piece of insight:

That is to say, confronted by a problem [global warming] demanding solutions inimical to libertarian beliefs, libertarians were faced with the choice of reneging on their beliefs or turning their back on science. Tellingly, they chose the latter. One might think that’s a rather drastic decision, given the role scientific endeavors have played in delivering the material prosperity so dear to the hearts of the libertarian world, and one would be right.

A belief system that cannot grapple with the fundamental reality of a situation is, quite simply, not a belief system worth having. If I were a part of a movement that demanded I not get out of the way of oncoming cars, and that challenged the conclusion of the fields of physics and biology that an impact between the car and my person would leave my person badly damaged, I would begin to suspect that this movement was maybe full of crazy people with very bad ideas. I suspect most people, and perhaps nearly all people would arrive at this conclusion. And if that movement couldn’t come up with a better way to approach the problem of the oncoming car, well, it would eventually find itself abandoned, destroyed by the insistent encroachment of reality.

Global warming is serious business, but in terms of general political theory it is neither new nor particularly interesting. The effect of carbon emissions on the earth’s climate is simply one big, bad negative externality, and no serious political theory could fail to allow for externalities. It is true, in my opinion, that many people calling themselves libertarians have either used some pretty shakey reasoning to deny that externalities can present a case for government intervention, or lied about the science, or both. But the idea that global warming poses an ‘existential threat’ to any political theory is not just wrong, it’s absurd.

The other day, I asked why honest opponents of aggressive carbon-reduction policies don’t do a better job of calling out those who rely on dishonest or crazy denialism. I specifically cited Jim Manzi, because he shares a forum with some of said lunatics. Today, Manzi lays the smack down on these folks:

Yes, the case for alarm usually is overstated by advocates (and assuming that the first sentence of the open letter refers specifically to the quote from President Obama, it certainly is overstated in this case, in my view). That doesn’t mean, however, that there is no cause for alarm.

Yes, it’s true that it is very difficult to assign material historical damages to AGW, and global temperatures have been pretty much flat for a decade, and global climate models have not demonstrated that they can pass falsification trials for prediction of temperature change on a decadal scale. But on the other hand, no respectable scientist disputes that CO2 redirects long-wave radiation but not short-wave radiation. At some point, with high enough concentration in the atmosphere, it will create severe problems. There are trade-offs involved around how much wealth we sacrifice today in order to reduce by some hard-to-quantify amount the chance of large losses in the future.

President Obama ignored the trade-offs and uncertainties, and instead chose to make the simpler, but false, argument that (to paraphrase) “science says do what I tell you or we’ll all going to die.” Of course, he’s a politician. It would have been nice to see scientists acting like scientists, and explaining both sides of the issue in terms of the deep uncertainties that surround it.

Refreshing, no? This is yet more evidence for my sneaking suspicion that despite its incredibly small readership, the Despot is somehow, secretly influential. Anything is possible.

Anyway, Jim Manzi, we salute you!

Here’s some more hard-hitting analysis from the same Representative Shimkus Frederick quoted earlier as worrying about the potential for lower carbon levels to starve plant life:

The evidentiary worth of the Bible’s testimony is not universally agreed upon, and in any case, the two arguments conflict with each other. If the Bible is literally, infallibly accurate, then the era of high carbon levels Shimkus references never occured - Earth is only a few thousand years old, after all. And anyway, God just said he wouldn’t drown us all; he never said we wouldn’t get our feet wet.

Meanwhile, over at the Corner, Andrew Stuttaford links to this from the Sunday Telegraph:

But if there is one scientist who knows more about sea levels than anyone else in the world it is the Swedish geologist and physicist Nils-Axel Mörner, formerly chairman of the INQUA International Commission on Sea Level Change. And the uncompromising verdict of Dr Mörner, who for 35 years has been using every known scientific method to study sea levels all over the globe, is that all this talk about the sea rising is nothing but a colossal scare story.

Despite fluctuations down as well as up, “the sea is not rising,” he says. “It hasn’t risen in 50 years.” If there is any rise this century it will “not be more than 10cm (four inches), with an uncertainty of plus or minus 10cm”.

I suppose it’s possible that the man who knows more about sea levels than anyone else in the world is also a guy who believes in dowsing, also known as ‘divining’ or ‘water witching’, and that magnetometry mapping should make it possible to map individual footprints made by Ancient Greeks at a site the rest of the archaeological community thinks is a hoax, but it doesn’t seem all that likely.

There are still rational, honest people out there making the case that global warming won’t do as much harm as we’re told, and that proposed measures against it are therefore not worth pursuing. I think these folks are wrong, but I don’t think they’re stupid or crazy. But I do wonder why they don’t make more of an effort to call the liars and lunatics out for what they are. I will never get back the minutes of my life I spent reading about Morner’s views and checking into whether he was worth taking seriously. That makes me less inclined to bother with the next article purporting to present anti-alarmist science. If these people were ridiculed by people on both sides of the issue, it would be a lot easier to seperate the wheat from the chaff. So, attention Jim Manzi: when the Stuttafords of the world peddle this garbage on a blog to which you are a contributor, why don’t you call them on it?

Via Kevin Drum, a neat chart tracking mentions of global warming in the media:

Drum is upset that media discussion of global warming has gone down dramatically over the past two years in Europe and America, just as predictions are getting gloomier. I agree that this is too bad; people are presumably more likely to respond to a problem if it’s being discussed in the media. But media coverage is always going to depend on dramatic new developments. This is true even when the importance of an issue is huge. “The end of the world is coming” is a great headline, but “the end of the world is still coming” isn’t. Beyond merely affecting which stories are covered, this leads to distortion of how stories are covered. Take the Democratic primary this year; after Super Tuesday, sensible people crunched the numbers and saw that it was more or less all over, barring a DGLB. But Hillary obviously wasn’t going anywhere, so that story simply wouldn’t do.

In the case of global warming, I don’t think this is as big a problem as it seems. Yes, it would be nice if the media were reminding people of this problem more often, but we have already reached the point where there is a lot of political momentum, so coverage is likely to track actual political activity, rather than driving it. Not much has been going on there recently, but when cap-and-trade schemes start being debated in Congress, one should expect the volume of articles on climate change to spike.

In the Kevin Drum post I quoted before, he linked repeatedly to Climate Progress, “an insider’s view of climate change, politics and solutions”. The lack of a comma after the word ‘politics’ in the blog’s subtitle might lead one to conclude that this is the view of a British insider, but the author, Joseph Romm, is actually a quasi-illiterate American. Reading his blog is no picnic. His sentences are put together poorly, and almost every post is a scattered collection of links to his other posts, filled with indiscernible jargon.

The bad news is that I recommend you take a look at it anyway. This guy knows a lot about climate change and energy policy. Here’s a pretty staggering claim:

In the past three decades, electricity per capita has stayed flat in Californian while it has risen 60% in the rest of the country. If all Americans had the same per capita electricity demand as Californians, we would cut electricity consumption 40%. And if all of America adopted the same energy efficiency policies that California is now putting in place, the country would never have to build another power plant.

As you can see, he likes to put things in bold, or sometimes italics, and his links are a hideous, unreadable green, which is unfortunate, because there’s hardly any text that isn’t linked. This is the least aesthetically pleasing blog I’ve ever seen. But I’m afraid it demands reading anyway.

Kevin Drum has a very bleak update on global warming:

This is why climate scientists have been running around with their hair on fire for the past couple of years. It would be nice to think that perhaps our current climate models are too pessimistic; or even that they’re right but maybe we’ll end up at the low end of the predicted warming ranges; or at worst that the models are right and we’ll end up right at the center. But that just doesn’t seem to be the case. What it really looks like is that our current models aren’t pessimistic enough and that the growth in greenhouse gas emissions is exceeding even the modelers’ highest estimates. We are fast approaching a point of no return that will likely kill hundreds of millions of people, destroy much of the world’s food supply, and spark resource wars that make Rwanda look like a mild family quarrel.

That sounds bad.

I think everyone who isn’t crazy is agreed on the point that selling Americans on higher gas taxes will never be politically viable. But it is also true that we are going in to an election in which both candidates have embraced a policy which is slightly less effective than, but more or less equivalent to a carbon tax, and whose sole advantage over such a tax is that it enables supporters to lie to the public and say it’s nothing like a carbon tax. I am not so confident as Sullivan that this means that America will really be able to move ahead with this, but it’s certainly not inconceivable. A lot will depend on how the Republican party attempts to put itself back together after the coming catastrophe. If they tell McCain and his ilk to go fuck themselves and double down on Palinite lunacy, they can probably make enough trouble to ensure that the Dems don’t dare impose a cap and trade system that actually does anything.