The “historic” agreement just concluded in Paris was supposed to be the humanity’s last chance to save the world from catastrophic warming. If that’s the case, then the world is surely doomed. Notwithstanding the giddy talk, not a single major polluter offered anything resembling an adequate plan to slash emissions. In fact, literally every country gamed the process—demonstrating, yet again, the utter folly of trying to save the world by putting it on a collective energy diet. …
Every major climate change initiative to date has gone up in smoke. The 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which sought to cut emissions 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012, was doomed from the start. India and China, even then among the world’s top five polluters, refused to even participate. Meanwhile, President Bill Clinton supported the treaty, but he didn’t have a prayer of getting it past the U.S. Congress, so he didn’t even try. Canada ratified the deal but blew its target cuts by 25 percent and eventually quit. Japan and New Zealand similarly faced a compliance gap. Europe met its target but not because its cap-and-trade program was a roaring success, as environmentalists would have you believe. Rather, it was because the industrial emissions of former Soviet bloc countries were so awful in 1990 that minor access to better Western technology produced major gains. Also, Europe’s 2007 recession helped!
The 2009 Copenhagen conference to hammer out a Kyoto sequel was an even bigger debacle. India and China participated—but only to play spoilsports. They rejected America’s proposed emission cuts as small potatoes that didn’t even come close to atoning for America’s historic role in causing the problem in the first place. The whole thing ended on a sour note with global leaders unable to muster anything beyond a statement noting the need to keep global temperatures 2 degrees centigrade below industrial levels.
Paris was supposed to reverse this beggar-other-countries-before-committing-yourself dynamic by taking what The New Yorkers’ John Cassidy has dubbed the “potluck dinner” approach. Instead of imposing legally binding emission cuts top-down, every country was asked to put its own good faith plan on the table. Even the notion of common metrics to evaluate each country’s plan was abandoned, as was all talk of “punitive sanctions.” Instead, the hope was that ambitious targets by a few countries would put “peer pressure” on others to match their pledges and over time generate, as President Obama put it, “a race to the top”—just like Microsoft’s Bill Gates decision to give away a bulk of his wealth has now inspired Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg to give away his.
But the crucial difference, of course, is that heads of states are not committing their personal resources but their citizens’. They score political points at home not by giving away the store but by protecting it. Even the most committed leaders in Paris were not immune from such pressures.
Consider President Obama, who is nothing if not a crusader on the issue. He issued a lofty philippic claiming, “climate change could define the contours of this century more dramatically than any other.” But this champion’s Paris offer to reduce America’s emissions 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels in 10 years is lower than the Copenhagen target of 30 percent. And he’ll have difficulty pushing even this through a Republican Congress which is also, incidentally, fighting tooth-and-nail Obama’s $3 billion pledge to the U.N.’s Green Climate Fund to help defray poor countries’ mitigation costs. Indeed, developing countries’ insistence (led by India) that the $1trillion Western aid over the next 10 years be made “legally binding” almost derailed the talks with Secretary of State John Kerry threatening to walk out.
There was much high-fiving among global warming activists when, ahead of the Paris talks, China pledged to implement a cap-and-trade program in 2017 to limit emissions. But what was papered over in order to get the final agreement was the fine print noting that China won’t reach peak carbon-dioxide emissions till 2030. Until then, it is proposing only to reduce emission intensity—or emissions as a percentage of its GDP—by 60 to 65 percent. This is a less ambitious target than even business-as-usual scenarios, suggesting that China is building a lot of cushion for itself to meet its phony cuts.
India, which vociferously condemned Western pressure at Paris as “carbon imperialism,” has refused to even set a peak emissions target. It is willing to commit only to cutting emissions intensity by 33 to 35 percent, arguably a slower rate of improvement than it’s seen over the last 15 years. Meanwhile Russian President Vladimir Putin, who remains firmly in the global warming denialist camp, has offered an emission reduction plan that is actually an emission increase plan.
Observing all of this, a frustrated Bill Gates lamented, “It’s nice for people to talk about two degrees, but we don’t even have the commitments that are going to keep us below four degrees of warming.”
But if Paris’ “voluntary” model of climate change negotiations is going to work no better (and possibly worse) than the earlier coercive one, do we all have to resign ourselves to being fried to golden tamales?
Not really.
The Paris talks were suffused with a false sense of urgency. The vast majority of scientists agree that the earth is warming but the severity and pace is hotly disputed given that world temperature has increased only half as much as climate models predicted in 1990. In fact, the two-degree centigrade tipping point being peddled is based less on science and more on the political need to spur action.
This target has led the world to radical solutions that intensify the fight for the scarce carbon spoils. But if we have more time to deal with a less severe problem then maybe we can relax a little and implement cost-effective solutions that don’t require putting each country on some kind of a carbon budget. We can explore other mitigation strategies such as forest sinks to sequester excess carbon dioxide. Or adaptation strategies to deal with the effects of climate change, such as helping low-lying countries erect canals and barriers against rising water levels. Or search for technological fixes such asgeo-engineering to reflect sunlight away from the earth’s atmosphere. Or await the new generation of nuclear powerplants with less prohibitive upfront capital costs to come on line, making the whole approach of emission cuts moot by providing an unlimited supply of clean-burning, safe, and low-cost energy.
The sense of panic driving the global warming conversation has actually made realistic solutions more difficult to achieve. But perhaps when the Paris agreement fails to deliver, the world can finally approach the problem with a cooler head. It might be another decade — but fortunately, there is time for the world to try everything else before doing the right thing.
… for the first time in 95 years, the New York Times published an op-ed on the front page, position A1, above the fold. The subject of that op-ed: “End the Gun Epidemic in America.” The piece is filled with tired arguments and moralistic fervor, and it even includes the most vacuous of all public policy arguments: We gotta do something.
The title itself is odd. By focusing on guns themselves as an “epidemic” rather than on the ever-decreasing rate of gun violence, the Times seems to confirm that its editorial staff has a problem with gun ownership per se, regardless of its effects on public safety. The placement of the piece on the front page also suggests that the Times prefers moralizing to simple fact-checking.
But it is even worse than that. At a time when the Times could have placed a meaningful and trailblazing op-ed on the front page, perhaps calling for an end to the drug war and the thousands of gun deaths associated with it, they instead chose to advocate for an impossible public policy goal that will have little to no effect on the problem at hand.
The piece was clearly animated by the recent spate of disturbing mass shootings. First of all, because it apparently needs to be said again and again, focusing on mass shootings when discussing firearms policy is deeply problematic. Not only do victims of mass shootings constitute one percent or fewer of gun deaths (depending on how “mass shooting” is defined), but the perpetrators of mass shootings are the hardest to affect with public policy changes.
This is an incredibly important point to remember for those who are interested in mature and serious public policy solutions rather than vociferous caterwauling. Mass shooters are not marginal perpetrators of gun violence. They are committed to their cause, and will work hard to overcome obstacles in their path.
Both sides of the gun control debate often ignore questions on the margins to focus on non-marginal actors. For the gun rights crowd, they often postulate the “over-motivated criminal,” that is, the person who will stop at nothing to get the weapons he wants and, therefore, will not be affected by background checks, waiting periods, etc. Conversely, the gun control crowd often focuses on the “under-motivated criminal,” a lackadaisical maniac who would have committed a crime but was thwarted by forms and other paper barriers.
Yet, just as there is someone who would decide not to buy a Subway sandwich if the price was raised 20 cents, there are marginal criminals and would-be criminals who can be affected by some restrictions on guns. The important question is: does the person who is stopped by these restrictions forego violence altogether or do they choose other methods, either via bludgeoning or stabbing weapons or by substituting another weapon such as a hunting rifle? The second question is: do restrictions on guns keep weapons out of the hands of marginal law-abiding citizens who could have used those guns to save a life or stop a crime?
Mass shooters are the quintessence of an over-motivated criminal, and in a country with over 300 million guns, there are very few (if any) realistic gun control laws that could stop mass shooters. Policy proposals that focus on identifying would-be mass shooters and protecting would-be victims of mass shooters have a much better chance of succeeding than any proposal that focuses on guns. If there were a magic button that eliminated what theTimes call “weapons of war,” there would likely still be the same number of mass shootings. Many if not most “hunting rifles” have identical functionality to so-called “assault weapons,” not to mention the eternal presence of illegal markets.
Yet, the Times insists that “certain kinds of weapons, like the slightly modified combat rifles used in California, and certain kinds of ammunition, must be outlawed for civilian ownership. It is possible to define those guns in a clear and effective way and, yes, it would require Americans who own those kinds of weapons to give them up for the good of their fellow citizens.” Yes, they argue for confiscation. In other words, in order to enact a policy that would have little to no effect on gun violence, the Times advocates a confiscation scheme that would violate civil liberties and likely result in violence.
But don’t take my word for it. Last year, in what evidently was a fleeting moment of lucidity, the Times published an op-ed by Lois Beckett from ProPublica, “The Assault Weapon Myth,” that thoroughly demolished their own argument:
It turns out that big, scary military rifles don’t kill the vast majority of the 11,000 Americans murdered with guns each year. Little handguns do.
In 2012, only 322 people were murdered with any kind of rifle, F.B.I. data shows.
The continuing focus on assault weapons stems from the media’s obsessive focus on mass shootings, which disproportionately involve weapons like the AR-15, a civilian version of the military M16 rifle. This, in turn, obscures some grim truths about who is really dying from gunshots.
Annually, 5,000 to 6,000 black men are murdered with guns. Black men amount to only 6 percent of the population. Yet of the 30 Americans on average shot to death each day, half are black males.
I hesitate to co-opt the phrase “black lives matter,” but it is telling that–among those tucked away safely in their homes in middle-class neighborhoods–the poster child for gun violence is an “assault weapon”-wielding mass shooter. Most gun violence is perpetrated with handguns and largely involves our inner cities and black males. These guns are often connected to and trafficked in the illegal drug trade. Perhaps the explanation for this disconnect is simple: well-to-do liberals can more easily imagine themselves on a college campus than in a run-down and dangerous inner city neighborhood.
There are things that can be done about gun violence, but few of them involve focusing on guns. Ending the drug war would do more than any other discrete policy proposal, and focusing on alleviating poverty, fixing schools, and providing assistance to troubled youths would also go a long way. As Beckett writes, “More than 20 years of research funded by the Justice Department has found that programs to target high-risk people or places, rather than targeting certain kinds of guns, can reduce gun violence.”
Finally, as it must be constantly reiterated, we’ve done a pretty good job drastically reducing gun violence. For whatever reason (this is constantly debated), crime has dropped precipitously over the past 20 years, but over half of Americans are unaware of this fact. Gun homicides are down 49 percent since 1993, and in that same time we added approximately 100 million guns to the country’s gun stock. At the very least, those facts disrupt the simple “more guns, more crime” narrative.
So does what appears to have precipitated the Times’ abandonment of the pretense of page-one objectivity, which should be even more embarrassing. On the same page where this editorial ran the news side reported that the FBI was investigating the mass shooting in San Bernardino as a terrorist attack, which it clearly was. Fourteen people died and 21 were injured not because of guns, but because of two radical Muslim murderers, who had body armor, pipe bombs, much more guns and ammunition in their garage for future attacks, and an escape route.
Burrus concludes:
Hopefully, the next time the Times decides to publish a front page editorial, they put a little more thought into it.
Don’t bet on it.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 