Gullier Travels, Laputa, The American Interest

By Dennis Mullin

STATE OF PLAY:  The Congress appears to be hell bent on going ahead with new climate legislation regardless of the political impact – a draft bill came down last week. The calculation is that with the Gulf oil spill, opponents will be on the defensive; after November the Democrats won’t have this kind of legislative muscle again for a long time; and they have to expand government while they can. But their model relies on the public accepting orders from “experts,” who are now under severe criticism over faulty science. The process may end up creating the very uncertainty on energy prices that the industry wants to end.

DRAFT BILL: A climate-change bill with the best chance of passing Congress was unveiled last week, all 987 pages of it. Despite being riddled with troublesome compromises, the proposed America Power Act is as close to providing certainty about America’s energy future as is politically possible these days.

Introduced by Sens. John Kerry (D) and Joe Lieberman (I), the bill sets long-range targets for the United States to reduce its greenhouse-gas emissions, timetables for industry to comply, and specific subsidies for clean energies, among other things. On paper, at least, these measures would raise the cost for energy derived from coal and oil in order to achieve the kind of price certainty that businesses crave after nearly a quarter century of hot debate about how to curb climate change. Without higher fossil-fuel prices, cleaner energy technologies with little or no carbon emissions would not make attractive investments.

Even among those with doubts about global warming, Washington’s dithering over energy policy, combined with a threat by the Environmental Protection Agency to take bold regulatory action without Congress, has helped create momentum behind the Kerry-Lieberman measure. To win passage, the bill throws bones to powerful interests, such as unions, electric utilities, and coal states. It invests in still-unknown technology to capture coal emissions, for example. It also delays emissions enforcement for many parts of the economy.

In one difficult trade-off, it tries to find a balance between the interests of pro- and anti-drilling coastal states in allowing offshore drilling. That measure alone, if passed, might be politically unstable over time – as the reaction to the Gulf oil spill is revealing now.

COMPROMISES: Such compromises could have the effect of creating a new kind of uncertainty for businesses and consumers. As the world’s greatest emitter of carbon per person, for instance, America might fail in reaching the bill’s targets because of the many political trade-offs it contains, forcing Congress toward stiffer measures in coming years as more evidence of global warming builds up.

As it is, the bill doesn’t even pretend to aim for the goal of reversing global warming by reducing Earth’s atmospheric carbon dioxide to 350 parts per million from the current level of nearly 400 p.p.m. And by one expert measure, the bill would reduce CO₂ emissions in the U.S. by only 3 percent by 2020 from last year’s level.

Another uncertainty is a measure that would raise US trade barriers against countries that are not making similar attempts to cut emissions. Such barriers could easily end up being temporary as they could be deemed illegal or touch off trade wars that spell their demise.

UNCERTAINTY: Another possible uncertainty lies in the appetite in Congress to maintain subsidies for clean energy over time, especially given the high federal debt that lawmakers must solve in a few years. Businesses in solar and wind energy have recently suffered from fickleness on Capitol Hill in tax policy toward the industry.

Carbon-spewing industries that want market certainty for energy prices but also seek loopholes in energy bills cannot have it both ways. In case global warming is all too real, the stakes are too high to play the kind of risky political games normally played in Washington. If anything, the Kerry-Lieberman bill needs stiffer, more certain measures. Climate-change laws cannot be at the mercy of changes in Washington’s political climate.

Lieberman said over the weekend that the bill has a "real shot" at passing. 

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who had been negotiating with Lieberman backed away last week citing complaints about lawmakers' attempts to tackle immigration reform at the same time. The BP oil spill spreading in the Gulf of Mexico despite attempts to contain it had also given Graham, several Democrats and Obama administration officials pause about pursuing expanded offshore oil drilling -- something included as part of the climate bill. 

OIL SPILL: But Lieberman argued the Gulf spill could help build the case for the new package, because it reminds the public of the need to "transition our energy system to one that doesn't depend on oil," a broader goal of the climate package despite its inclusion of offshore drilling. He said the offshore drilling component is needed as a transitional measure to keep U.S. oil money inside the United States.

"We've got to continue to use our domestic energy resources, because every barrel of oil we get from American offshore or onshore is one barrel less we are paying for to enemies of the United States around the world," Lieberman said. "So I think we've got a real shot at this. I think it's about the best thing we could do to create jobs and make America energy independent, clean up some pollution," he said.

TOUGH POSITION: But the pursuit of a comprehensive energy bill in the middle of campaign season puts a lot of Democrats in a tough position. Republican campaign strategists have already decided to make the energy package a centerpiece of their efforts and plan to target those Democrats who have expressed support for it.

The loss of Graham from the potential coalition also means Democrats in the Senate would have to peel off one Republican member, without losing any of their own, to reach a 60-vote filibuster-proof majority. Graham said that the current political environment would make it "impossible" to pass the bill. 

The senator had recently threatened to withhold support when talks over an immigration bill loomed, but he made it official in a statement. "We should move forward in a reasoned, thoughtful manner and in a political climate which gives us the best chance at success. Regrettably, in my view, this has become impossible in the current environment," Graham said.

MELTDOWN: Meanwhile, the American Interest’s Walter Russell Mead offers an interesting review of the state of play. It continues to be the worst of times for the climate change movement, and the outlook continues to darken, he says. Last week, that failed to dim the glory of at a majestic moment in Amsterdam when the part-time UN IPCC chair and part-time sleazy book author Rajendra Pachauri emerged from the seclusion in which he has unwillingly been lurking,

He was bitterly attacked and met international outrage over some high profile and amateur efforts by the IPCC to exaggerate the threats of global warming. He also was called down on his vituperative and vindictive attacks on quite justified critics of his role, and denies that he has personally turned a tidy profit through the climate-change industry – on some would call a protection racket.

He became an international laughingstock at the beginning of the year, despite sharing the Nobel Peace Prize with the other Three Ring Master Al Gore. The occasion for the prominent Indian novelist’s return to the limelight was the first open session of a review commission convened by the UN to examine the work of the IPCC.

VULNERABLE: It was hoped the commission would also make recommendations to insure that the IPCC’s next report on climate change will be less vulnerable to critics than the document produced under Dr. Pachauri’s lackadaisical supervision last time. Politically, the commission will fail. That is, the panel will not satisfy the hundreds of engaged and vocal critics pushing back against the ‘consensus’ on climate change -- and will do even less to convince and increasingly skeptical public that a strict global treaty on climate change is humanity’s only hope of escaping devastating consequences in the near future.

No matter what the commission does, the world will continue to walk away from the corpse of the global climate change movement of the past decade. The structure of the international system, the different agendas and timetables of the different countries involved in negotiations, and the clumsy architecture of the UN’s cumbersome treaty, make the procedures any might ensure a global treaty too poorly designed, to wrongly funded, too vague, too inefficient, and too hard to enforce to work. Even if the faulty process were to achieve anything substantive at all, it would prove too unpalatable to win the two-thirds majority needed for ratification in the United States Senate.

CONSERVATION: Movement toward conservation, renewable and alternative fuels, and a decreasing reliance on hydrocarbon fuels per unit of GDP will continue and accelerate in most of the world’s most important advanced and developing economies. This will happen whether or not the IPCC issues another report, because it is in the interests of the major economies to cut fuel use to be economically competitive and to increase their national security.

Efforts to establish comprehensive monitoring of CO2 emissions around the world will also continue -- even if for no other reason than that agencies like the CIA, organizations like the IMF and corporations like hedge funds and investment banks would like to have faster access to reliable data on shifts in global economic activity.  The sheer blind bureaucratic lust for power that drives the culture of the United Nations and the world’s governments will also ensure continuing efforts to give politicians and their appointees the last word on regulating as much economic activity as possible.

REVOLUTIONARY: This is partly because the goal that the climate change movement so unwisely set out by Al Gore, is so unrealistic that almost nothing could make it work. A universal treaty that effectively regulates global economic activity would be a revolution in the international system significantly greater than the establishment of the United Nations and the world is very far from ready for that kind of change.

But the climate change movement is also in trouble because it relies on a social vision that never worked well and is now melting faster than a Himalayan glacier. That model is gnostocracy: the rule of experts, Mead goes on. The initial ‘g’ is silent in English.. The word blends two Greek words: Γνωσις (pronounced GNOsis with the ‘o’ long and the ‘g’ audible) meaning ‘knowledge’ and Αρχον (pronounced ARkhon) meaning ‘ruler’.  In a perfect gnostocracy, the smartest, best educated people make all the decisions for the rest of us.  This system of government by experts and peer-reviewed literature is what William F. Buckley denounced when he famously said that he’d rather be ruled by the first three hundred names in the Cambridge phone book than by the faculty of Harvard.

EXPERTS: Gnostocracy, like all systems of government, works much better in theory than in practice. In theory, having the smartest, wisest and most qualified experts make all the decisions means that most of the decisions will be the best that can be made. In some ways gnostocracy comes closest to the proposals Plato made in his famous Republic, when he calls for the rule of philosopher kings.

Let the best and the brightest among us rule: the Harvard and Yale kids with the best law school grades should be on the Supreme Court. Congress and the President should hand over authority to un-elected boards of experts who can decide political questions on the basis of actual knowledge rather than letting the dirty scramble of lobbies and interest groups (to say nothing of the foolish preferences of the ignorant rabble) decide important matters. In practice it has only five little flaws.

Gnostocrats even at their best are prone to mistakes because scientific knowledge is by its nature evolving; the social sciences and the science of extremely complicated systems (think economics) most vital to politics like economics are the most error prone and the least capable of achieving accurate knowledge; political choices involve matters of morals and personal preference which cannot be decided by scientific procedures.

No process of selection can be designed which promotes only ‘good’ and ‘honest’ gnostocrats to power and keeps out the charlatans, and the frauds; and finally as a group scientists have interests other than pure science and knowledge (such as promoting gnostocracy thereby gaining power and wealth for themselves).

FAIRY TALE: The closest fictional representation of a perfect gnostocracy appears in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels in the floating island of Laputa governed by absent minded professors. It is far and away the least happy and the most ludicrous of the imaginary places Gulliver visits. This is something like the global economic and development policy model the climate change industry is seeking to create, Mead says.

The trouble for the movement is that this, the most ambitious and grandiose gnostocratic initiative ever proposed, comes just as faith in the experts is receding worldwide. Faith in experts is often a product of early economic development: the scientists have so many new ideas, and new technologies have such prestige that many people in society begin to think that the guys in the white coats have all the answers.

In rapidly developing countries like the U.S. in the 1920s (and China today), the experts and technocrats have enormous prestige. Emptying whole districts of the countryside to make lakes, uprooting neighborhoods to build highways, re-engineering whole ecosystems to improve productivity; challenging ancient and traditional religious and cultural values in the name of modernity: the scientists and technicians are like wizards, waving their wands and producing unimaginable changes.

In Europe, the dispassionate scientists and civil servants gained enormous moral and political authority after the horrors and disasters of the first half of the twentieth century. Populism brought communism, fascism and war. Dispassionate experts and civil servants created the EU and engineered prosperity and peace. It was better to ignore the siren songs of left and right populism and turn instead to the technocratic politics of Brussels. Government by qualified civil servants guided by the best available technical knowledge made sense -- certainly better sense than entrusting your affairs to a charismatic failed Austrian art student.

RETREAT: But faith in gnostocracy is taking a beating these days. After all, it was experts armed with extremely complex computer models who devised the financial system now falling down around our ears. Experts and economists told the Europeans that their new ‘euro’ currency was ready for prime time. Experts and computer models produced the massive and apparently unnecessary shut down of air travel in Europe following the Icelandic eruption. Experts and computer models were telling us that the hazards of undersea drilling in the Gulf of Mexico were well understood.

In some ways it’s a healthy trend, in other ways it’s quite dangerous, but the Atlantic world today is in the grip of populist revolt.  On the left (as in Greece) and on the right (just ask your local Tea Party chapter) people feel lied to and betrayed. The emperors have no clothes; the experts busy certifying one another and vouching for each others procedures and computer models seem less and less relevant to real life.

Meanwhile, life is becoming more expensive as the so-called experts keep coming to us for more money and sacrifices which they in turn squander and waster. We trust the experts less and less. In this atmosphere, the fight for a massive global treaty to fight climate change that involves annual payments of $100 billion and more to (mostly) corrupt and incompetent governments in developing countries that make Greece look as tidy as Sweden has no chance. Taxpayers will want to keep their money closer to home and they will be worried about disasters like the euro blowing up next week rather than the sea level rising twenty years down the road.