Friday Video

Neko Case -- "People Got a Lot of Nerve":

The Case for "Vardarska Makedonija"

I missed this Foreign Policy article on the Macedonian name dispute, but it's a good read. Among other things, it argues that Macedonia (or the FYROM, more specifically) should adopt a name that won't be a source of international tension:

Imagine how Californians would feel if Baja California wanted to be called simply "California"? Or how Swedes would react if Norway changed its name to "Scandinavia"? The U.N.'s designated mediator has floated various possible names for FYROM, and Greece has recently indicated it would accept "The Republic of Northern Macedonia." But such a solution implies there is a "Southern Macedonia" in Greece inhabited by the same people, as in North and South Korea. But this is not the case linguistically or ethnically. A more sensible solution would be "Vardarska Makedonija," named for the river that flows through the region, which respects the dignity and identity of Greece's northern neighbor but also distinguishes it from the northern Greek province.

It would be one thing if it were just the name that was in dispute between Macedonia and Greece. But if it's true that the Macedonian government is appropriating Hellenistic history and imagery as its own, and claiming that the Macedonian region of Greece has some connection to the country of Macedonia other than the name*, then I think the UN and the US (which unilaterally recognized the "Republic of Macedonia" in exchange for the country entering the Iraq War -- thanks again, Bush Administration!) need to persuade the Macedonians to soften their stance on this issue.

Also check out the response to this article from the Macedonian ambassador to the US.

* Ethnically, Macedonians are closer to Serbs and other Slavs than they are to Greeks. While there is a large Slavic-speaking community in the northern Greek province of Macedonia, they identify themselves as Greek rather than Macedonian. For more, this Wikipedia article on the Macedonian ethnic group is worth reading.

How a Fact Becomes a Myth

Because I can't leave this issue alone, check out this post by Brendan Nyhan detailing the similarities between the Birthers and the advocates against health care reform. Notice, if you will, how the standard climate denier arguments also fit this pattern:

1. Take a complicated issue that people don't understand (e.g. presidential citizenship reqirements and Hawaiian birth records or the complex health care reform bills pending in Congress).
2. Advance a disturbing hypothesis about the issue that will appeal to your side of the aisle (e.g. Obama isn't a legitimate president; the health bill will take away your freedom).
3. Misconstrue available evidence to construct arguments supporting your point.
4. Promote these myths widely. If you are successful enough in doing so, the media will feel obligated to report on them. Coverage will then frequently be presented in an artificially balanced "he said," "she said" format, giving further credence to your claims.
5. When your arguments are debunked, claim that the media is trying to silence you to prevent the truth from being revealed.
6. Repeat steps 3-5 until various elites (e.g. John Boehner on health, Lou Dobbs on Obama's birth certificate) start claiming you have raised legitimate questions about the issue of interest.

Most recently we've seen this pattern with the right quoting the cost of the Waxman-Markey bill as being several thousand dollars a year for the average family, even though most studies, including the ones cited by the GOP, say that the costs will be far more modest, or even negative.

Simple and Complex

Upon rereading it, my post from yesterday is a bit of a muddle. If you're looking for a clearer discussion of the use and abuse of science in the climate debate, check out Cheryl Rofer:

The climate deniers, like Will, feel that if they find one incorrect measurement, one incorrect calculation, the entirety of global warming is disproved. A public who have learned that oversimplified vision of science is inclined to take such things seriously. But it’s not that simple.

Quite so. Anyone familiar with research methods, either in the social or the physical sciences, knows how popular discussions of matters with lots of technical details can devolve rapidly:

At the same time, we shouldn't let the complexities of scientific discussion get in the way of our responsibilities as citizens to act on threats to the environment using the best knowledge we have available. In other words, the weak version of the precautionary principle applies. In truth, the evidence for global warming is convincing enough that arguing against doing something, even if we don't know precisely what the policy should be, is grossly irresponsible. And arguing that convincing evidence for global warming isn't there at all is downright insane.

Symbolic Belief and Climate Change

David Roberts asks a pertinent question: How can we can have a debate over what to do about climate change when most conservatives don't think climate change is even a problem? He writes:

You might think this would make for short debates. Conservatives could collectively sign on to a one-line op-ed:

"We do not believe in anthropogenic climate change, thus we do not support legislation to address it."

Period. Done. Right? But that doesn’t happen. Instead you get peculiarities like [Sarah] Palin, droning on for 700 words about how the legislation is flawed because it doesn’t promote domestic fossil fuel without once mentioning carbon emissions or climate change. You get [George] Will analyzing the challenges of international climate negotiations and then mentioning, almost casually, at the end of his piece, "by the way, climate change isn’t real."

[...]

There will never be a policy proposal sensible enough to gain support from people who do not acknowledge the problem the proposal is meant to address. You’d think that fact would merit notice!

It's not uncommon for people (pundits, anyway) to make political arguments for disingenuous reasons. For years, Republicans advocated that tax cuts, especially for the rich, would actually increase government revenue -- a funny thing to claim, given the GOP's reputation as the party of less government. But directly calling for cutting government spending, much of which is popular, is a political non-starter, so Republicans resorted to off-kilter arguments like the Laffer Curve to advance their agenda.

In a similar vein, I think Julian Sanchez's recent post on the Birther phenomenon illustrates that there's a sort of instrumental value to certain political beliefs -- including, and perhaps especially, those that aren't grounded in fact. A large number of Republicans seem to have embraced a nonsensical belief about Barack Obama, but the number of people who embrace it deeply enough to actually do something about it (e.g., Orly Taitz) is likely very few. Mostly (or so Sanchez thinks) it's a way to express their displeasure at Obama being President. Believing the worst about one's political opponents is an age-old tradition -- I've succumbed to it myself -- and conspiracy theories like Birtherism are hallmarks of that tradition.

What does this have to do with climate change and climate change deniers? Well, let me put it this way. I'm not a climate scientist, but like most people, I accept the scientific consensus on climate change. I accept it in the same way I accept that relativity and quantum mechanics best explain the physical universe and that evolution best explains the diversity of life on earth: I'm conversant in the theories, but I'm not an expert in the way that, say, the authors of RealClimate are. To the extent that I can speak knowledgeably about climate change and what to do about it, it's because I'm standing on the shoulders of giants.

Now it could be that the IPCC (and NASA, and NOAA, and the National Academy of Sciences, etc.) are wrong, and the earth isn't warming. And it could also be true that relativity is wrong, and quantum mechanics is wrong, and evolution is wrong too. But the evidence that we have for all those things is quite strong, to the point where they don't really have competitors, in the way that the particle and wave theories of light competed from the 17th to the 20th centuries. Similarly, in the case of climate change, the debate among scientists is no longer whether it's happening, but about the range of possible effects:

If you're a conservative, who believes that government can do no right, and you're presented with the information about climate change, a problem which transcends the ability of the private sector to address it, you can do one of two things. You can either agree with it, but argue that responding to it doesn't entail the kind of government intervention that liberals are calling for -- this is what Jim Manzi and others have done. Or, like George Will, Sarah Palin, and countless more, you can cherry-pick for contrary evidence, speculate about a conspiracy to suppress dissenting voices, or just ignore the issue altogether.

So why has there been so much more of the latter than the former? To loop this back to where I started, I think a lot of conservatives' opinions on global warming are essentially symbolic beliefs, adopted largely because they are positioning themselves in opposition to liberals. Consider, for example, the Pew survey from last year, which found that Republican support for the proposition that the earth is warming declined by 13 percent from 2007 to 2008 (Democratic and independent support also fell, but by insignificant amounts). Given that this happened when Democrats regained control of Congress and made a first attempt at passing global warming legislation, I would venture that the shift in opinion among Republicans didn't have much to do with a reappraisal of the science.

Of course, I could be wrong about all this: Is my belief that the earth is warming a dispassionate read of the evidence, or a way for me to fulfill my earnest liberal desire to meddle in people's lives? I don't think so, obviously, and I appealed to my belief in other aspects of science as a way to justify my layman's opinion on the subject. And by no means am I saying that my opinions on climate change policy are above reproach, or that conservative's opinions on the same are as without merit as the Birthers. In short, I'm saying (rather badly) that the persistence of climate change deniers among conservatives should be seen as a sort of marker of political identity. That that political identity is so relentlessly anti-science, and that it has such a hold on a major political party, is rather disturbing.

Thought Experiment

I've been kicking this one around for a while now:

Suppose you traveled back in time to Europe and the United States circa 1850. You explain to the political and economic elites of the time that their decision to industrialize through the use of coal and petroleum will set in motion a chain of events that will lead to widespread devastation of the Earth's climate some 200 to 250 years later. Therefore, they must seek to minimize their use of those fuels wherever possible and to develop cleaner alternatives — even if it means higher energy prices and slower economic growth. Assuming that they accepted your version of future events as true, would anybody think that you had made a credible moral claim?

Suppose you traveled to 1900? 1950?

Carbon Tariffs

So a last-minute amendment to the Waxman-Markey bill passed last Friday would require the President, by 2020, to impose a tariff on imports from countries that do not regulate their greenhouse gas emissions. Such a provision has long been controversial (see Tyler Cowen's objection, for one), but as we get closer to actually enacting climate change regulation in this country, I think a carbon tariff needs to be seriously considered.

To begin with, Paul Krugman flags some potentially game-changing news on this front:

There was some question about how the WTO would handle cap-and-trade — whether it would accept the need for carbon tariffs, if some countries (cough China cough) drag their feet, or whether it would adopt a purist free-trade rule. The answer seems to be in — the WTO is going to treat cap-and-trade the same way it treats VATs, with border taxes allowed if they can be seen as reducing distortions.

If you believe, as I do, that international negotiations over climate change can be modeled as an iterated form of the prisoner's dilemma, then a key tool for getting the major polluting countries to cooperate on reducing carbon emissions has to include both positive and negative incentives for compliance — with carbon tariffs being, obviously, a form of the latter. So the WTO ruling is, at first glance, good news.

Having said that, just because something is permissible does not mean that it is necessarily advisable. Even with the WTO's blessing, a trade war with China could easily break out if the US slaps a border tax on carbon-intensive imports. And it's not only US-China relations that we should worry about: Imagine if Waxman-Markey were to fail, support for climate change regulation collapses à la health care reform in 1994, and the EU decides to punish our recalcitrance with a carbon tariff on American exports. It'd be like the just-averted Roquefort War earlier this year, but not nearly as funny.

Some other thoughts:

• Returning to the WTO ruling, a key consideration about a carbon tariff will be one of intent: Is it meant, as Krugman suggests above (and elaborates on here), to merely prevent unfairly privileging carbon-intensive goods — in the same way that a border tax in countries with a VAT prevents unfairly privileging foreign-made goods? Or is it meant to punish non-cooperation, according to the prisoner's dilemma framework? That will likely come down to the size of the tariff: To be simply anti-distortionary, it would have to be set at a rate that restores the trade status quo prior to the implementation of climate change regulation. Of course, that implies that it would have be constantly adjusted to account for non-climate-related changes in the balance of trade. Whether that can be done, and whether the process of setting and adjusting a carbon tariff rate can avoid being abused (as a back-door to protectionism, say), is an open question.


• It goes without saying that a carbon tariff shouldn't be a measure of first resort. It would be best for the US and China to agree on a path to developing a cleaner energy regime, rather than coercing each other into doing so. I'm no China expert, but it seems that a trade war could be as bad for the Chinese as it would be for Americans: They depend on us buying their exports as much as we depend on them buying our Treasury bills.


• Following on that point, one major objection to a carbon tariff (see Cowen again) is that we cannot credibly threaten to use it. That is, one rationale for a carbon tariff is that it would function as a kind of nuclear option for climate change negotiators — a peaceable solution is more likely if the possibility of a destructive trade war looms in the background. Indeed, according to Brad Plumer at the TNR link above, the threat of a US carbon tariff may be prodding the Chinese to the bargaining table. The problem, however, is that, given the trade dynamic with China I just mentioned, can we really risk provoking a fiscal crisis over even something as portentous as climate change? The Chinese face a similar predicament, of course; despite some rumblings about moving away from dependence on the dollar, it's unlikely they can afford to do it — at least in the near term. Getting our trade deficit down to a manageable level will be just as difficult, if not more so.