Articles by David Roberts

Wherein I ramble on about markets and regulations

If I could persuade everyone in America to read a single paragraph, it would be the second 'graph in Dean Baker's new piece in the Boston Review: "Free Market Myth."

Here it is:

In general, political debates over regulation have been wrongly cast as disputes over the extent of regulation, with conservatives assumed to prefer less regulation, while liberals prefer more. In fact conservatives do not necessarily desire less regulation, nor do liberals necessarily desire more. Conservatives support regulatory structures that cause income to flow upward, while liberals support regulatory structures that promote equality. "Less" regulation does not imply greater inequality, nor is the reverse true.

God yes!

As Baker points out, this kind of framing puts conservatives at a huge advantage. Americans are suspicious of the vicissitudes of capitalism, but they're even more skeptical about the competence of government. If you can claim you're arguing for "less government intrusion," you've got a big head start.

Even more irksome to me is the extent to which progressives and environmentalists cede this framing to conservatives -- indeed, help reinforce it! I can't count how many times I've heard people on this site and elsewhere railing against the "free market" and how it's brought the world to the brink of ruin. Argh. The problem not some inherent moral valence of markets -- no such thing -- but the actual practices of actual people who structure markets to benefit those with power at the expense of those without (and those yet unborn). There are no unstructured ("free") markets.

The very term "free market" embeds the myth of a Platonic market free of government involvement. (It's a species of the "noble savage" myth -- the noble market.) But there is not and could be no such thing. Markets are human institutions created by human decisions and maintained by collectively agreed-upon frameworks.

Newsweek once again deceives its readers about energy alternatives

Two Stanford scholars have taken to the pages of Newsweek to pen a piece on "clean coal" that embodies all the pretzel logic surrounding that subject.

It's called "Dirty Coal Is Winning" -- and the reason dirty coal is winning, we're told, is that we're not dumping enough money into the quest for clean coal. Oh, and those pesky environmentalists:

Environmentalists, in their opposition to coal of any kind, may provide the coup de grâce. Greenpeace, riffing on James Bond, is hawking a "Coalfinger" spoof on the internet and is deep in a campaign to stop all new coal plants. U.S. environmental groups recently announced a campaign to expose clean coal as a chimera. Thanks to such efforts, in the United States it's now nearly impossible to build any kind of coal plant, including tests of clean technology. As the world economy recovers, nations will once again turn to their old stalwart, dirty coal.

Damn greens! Their efforts to expose the fact that there's no such thing as clean coal are preventing us from creating something called clean coal. (But seriously: Can someone point to a bona fide test of coal with CCS that enviros prevented? Not "CCS ready," that is, but actual CCS?)

Notice, though, the unspoken premise here: Our choice is dirty coal or "clean coal." If we don't spend billions on "clean coal," we're stuck with dirty coal.

It says something extremely bad about our energy debate that you can write a piece in Newsweek that simply assumes that premise, without defense. Let's go down the same old path:

Mississippi governor illustrates how the resource curse works in America

If you think of U.S. energy policy in Freudian terms, Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour represents the pure, unbridled id. His energy strategy for the state? "More energy."

If you're wondering what that means, he spells it out:

Mississippi has large deposits of lignite coal, and the Mississippi Power Co. has announced that it will build a coal-fired electrical generation facility that will have carbon capture and sequestration. As I understand it, this coal-fired plant will have the emissions of a power plant powered by natural gas because the captured carbon will be compressed and then injected into older oil wells to boost production.

Rentech has announced that it's building a coal-to-liquids fuels plant near Natchez. In Greenville we've got a biodiesel plant going in. And Entergy has already applied to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build a second nuclear reactor near St. Francisville.

The response of his interlocutor T. Boone Pickens? "The rest of the country might want to take a look at your state."

Yeah, take a look at what the resource curse looks like in America: Among U.S. states Mississippi ranks 50th in infant mortality, first in children living in poverty, second in teen pregnancies, 48th in bachelor degrees, 50th in per-capita income, first in obesity, 49th in overall health, second in unemployment, and first in poverty.

Despite the grinding poverty, Mississippi ranks 14th in per-capita energy consumption, perhaps because it ranks 47th in energy efficiency.

Yes, the rest of the country might want to take a look at what a supply-obsessed "more energy" strategy yields.

Browner included on Obama economic team discussions

Last week John Broder wrote in The New York Times about contrasting views on climate policy among two top Obama administration officials: economic team leader Larry Summers, who favors "safety valves," slow phase-ins, and caution, and climate/energy czar empress Carol Browner, who favors strict carbon restrictions, quickly implemented.

(Broder's article was irksome, by the way. At no point did he see fit to mention that the reason Browner and "environmentalists" favor stiffer carbon restrictions is not that they don't care about costs but that they disagree about costs. The casual reader is left with the impression that economists and other Very Serious people have to do a "reality check" for la-la-land greens who don't care about money or working people. Have we learned nothing from our experience with previous environmental regs? Why is historically ungrounded pessimism the same as "realism"? Grr. Wait, where was I?)

Anyway, one wouldn't want to make too much of this, but it seems like a good sign that earlier today when Obama met with his economic team, Browner was in the room.

Perhaps this is a signal that environmental policy gets a seat at the big kid's table and doesn't get filed under do-gooderism. Maybe we can't persuade the economists to take efficiency or innovation seriously, but at least someone representing an optimistic assessment of costs will be around to temper all the pessimism. Let's hope Summers takes her seriously despite her gender.