Ok, so global CO2 emissions continue to rise, except for a pandemic-induced dip in 2020. But look closely at the above chart and you’ll see definite signs of progress, especially since 2010. For one, CO2 emissions are increasing more slowly than global population and GDP per capita. Two, energy intensity - a measure of energy inefficiency - has been declining steadily for over 30 years. And, three, there’s an accelerating decline in “carbon intensity”, which means…
Mastery is that feeling of riding the wave, of knowing what adjustments to make as it tries to throw you off. You may still lose your balance. The wave may win. But you're not overwhelmed; you’re focused and you keep trying.
“Stop all grants to advocacy groups?” I’m assuming “advocacy groups” refers to environmental groups, many of which employ scientists and policy wonks with expertise directly relevant to EPA concerns…Why in the world should the EPA simply stop using these groups? It’s possible to have strong convictions about the environment (whether nature-or human-centered, whether left or right) and maintain a high level of professional integrity. Environmental activists can still provide high quality information and advice. The EPA doesn’t have to embrace their ideological convictions to benefit from their input.
There was a time when Republicans embraced the cause of environmental protection. Think Progress noted that “some of the greatest conservationists ever to take the oath of office were Republicans.” Both Greenpeace and the Union of Concerned Scientists rated Richard Nixon one of the greenest president ever. And we're not talking ancient history here: both Presidents Bush supported cap and trade policies to reduce pollution…So what happened?
The American public has largely come around to Carter’s vision of protecting huge swaths of wilderness in the US. For example, by 2017, 70% of American voters opposed drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. This included 84% of Democrats, 64% of Independents, and 52% of Republicans. (Leiserowitz et al, 2017). However, Trump was not among those Republicans…on his last day of office, his administration “issued drilling leases on more than 400,000 acres (160,000 hectares) of Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge” (Reuters, January 19, 2021)
“Abstraction is the enemy of personal empathy, but it’s essential for equitable elections. Villages are communal, but they aren’t truly democratic. A level of abstraction is necessary to imagine other citizens as equal agents with rights, not clan histories.” - Adam Gopnik, To Fix Democracy, First Figure Out What’s Broken
Excerpt from Plan for Trump Administration: “The next Administration should champion the elimination of the Conservation Reserve Program…The USDA should work with Congress to eliminate this overbroad program.”
Comment: Note that the Conservation Reserve program, established during the Reagan administration, already targets highly erodible land and areas with “significant adverse water quality, wildlife habitat, or other natural resource impacts related to activities of agricultural production”. Those are specific and concrete environmental harms – not overly broad at all.
From Chapter 10 of Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise , a project led by the Heritage Foundation that outlines policy goals for a second Trump term: “For a conservative USDA to become a reality, and for it to stay on course with the mission as outlined, the White House must strongly support these reforms and install strong USDA leaders… There would be strong opposition from environmental groups and others who want the federal government to transform American agriculture to meet their ideological objectives.”
Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise is a project led by the Heritage Foundation that outlines policy goals for a second Trump term. William Perry Pendley is the author of Chapter 16: Department of the Interior. Pendley was appointed to deputy director of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in 2019 and later served in an unofficial capacity as acting director of the BLM for the remainder of the Trump administration. My intention for this series of posts is purely informational, so for now I’m keeping my opinions to myself.
Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise is a project led by the Heritage Foundation that outlines policy goals for a second Trump term. Mandy Gunasekara is the author of Chapter 13: The Environmental Protection Agency. Gunasekara was Chief of Staff to EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler from March 2020 – January 2021. Here are excerpts from Chapter 13. Note that my intention in this series of posts in purely informational. For now, I’ll be keeping my opinions to myself.
The following are excerpts from articles written during or shortly after the Trump administration. List of articles:
The Trump administration’s major environmental deregulations.
The Trump Administration Rolled Back More Than 100 Environmental Rules. Here’s the Full List.
Trump Cuts EPA Budget Again.
Latest Trump proposal on endangered species could limit future habitat, critics say
The environmental legacy of President Trump.
“If a Buddhist Newton had been sitting under that tree, he would have seen the apple falling and, reaching for Enlightenment, experienced each moment of its descent as a thing pure in itself. Only a restless Western Newton would say, “Now, what story can tell us best what connects those apple-moments from branch to ground? Sprites? Magnets? The mysterious force of the mass of the earth beneath it? What made the damn thing fall?” That’s a story we tell, not a moment we experience.” - Adam Gopnik, What Meditation Can Do for Us, and What It Can’t: Examining the science and supernaturalism of Buddhism.
Consumer sentiment measures are the best predictor of how Americans feel about the economy, especially the University of Michigan’s Consumer Sentiment Index (CSI). The CSI provides a composite consumer sentiment score, based on answers to the following 5 survey questions…
The responses to another survey question shed a little light on the matter. In response to Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? “The economic and political systems in the country are stacked against people like me”, 51% of respondents either strongly or somewhat agreed. But what does that even mean?
Actually, “findings” is too strong a word. The data is all self-report and thus subject to desirability bias. The homeless individuals in the study know the researchers want the intervention to be successful. They form relationships with the “phone buddies” who ask them all these questions. I imagine some participants would hesitate to tell the whole truth and nothing but.
In previous posts I’ve explored the relation between violent crime and incarceration rates in the US, which got me wondering: how much do incarceration rates reflect violent crime rates in other countries? Hence, this exploration - and I stress ‘exploration’, because good data is hard to come by and cross-country comparisons can be misleading. For example, countries may not define criminal offenses the same way or have different levels of unreported crime. But iffy data can still reveal real patterns, provided the numbers aren’t not too far off. With that hope in mind, I decided to check out the data and see what patterns I could find.
This post includes excerpts from a Campbell systematic review of surveys and studies on the impact of school-based law-enforcement strategies, followed by a few observations of my own.
Note how the violent crime rate tripled between 1965 and 1980, and although the violent crime rate has been falling since the mid-1990s, it is still close to double the 1965 rate.
First, the numbers for homicide, aggravated assault, robbery, burglary and motor vehicle theft…Next, a comparison of Oakland and U.S. crime rates… Verdict: …
Of course, causes rarely work like that in the real world, which is why scientists speak such in such convoluted terms. To say “x partly accounts for a portion of y given certain assumptions and conditions and only at high levels of x” lacks the emotional bunch of “x causes y” but that’s often how the world works.
So when people say x is the cause, or the ultimate cause, or the root cause, of some phenomenon: doubt and try to disconfirm the proposition - with a Wason test.