Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 132

September 29, 2017

Make America Vigilant Again

I am a Russian, and I support the efforts of the Committee to Investigate Russia. I even think that Morgan Freeman’s much-maligned video remarks are a good thing. Here’s why.

I lived in Russia for almost thirty years before I had to leave it due to threats against my life stemming from my work as a journalist. I know my country and my countrymen all too well, and I understand the cynicism of Putin’s Kremlin and of all the people who serve the regime. I have been covering Russian affairs for TAI for more than a year, and regular readers ought to know by now the general outlines of how I see things. But for those who don’t, let me summarize: Putin doesn’t have any concrete ideas about rewriting the world order, or fundamentally shifting America’s role in it. He is doing what he is doing in order to survive, to preserve his own ill-gotten wealth, and the wealth of those close to him as well.

Putin is nothing more than a kleptocrat with KGB training and an opportunist with excellent tactical instincts. He has used these skills to directly benefit himself and those around him, all the while co-opting and corrupting the rest of the Russian state, which was already weakened in the years after the fall of communism. While the West kept quiet about his anti-democratic tendencies (which, let’s be honest, were obvious from early on in his presidency), Putin enjoyed a friendly relationship with the United States and Europe. And he truly seems to have believed that the principle of reciprocity would apply: the West would let him do what he wanted to do in his country, because he never tried to dictate to Washington or Berlin or London what to do in theirs. But as Putin’s behavior, both within Russia’s borders and beyond them, became too much for the West to ignore, Putin chose to retaliate by the most effective means at his disposal: spreading chaos and making a mess in his enemies’ houses.

To do so, he reached for the best tool at hand, one that his friends in the security services had been perfecting for years. Disinformation campaigns leveraging social media are a powerful, yet not very expensive, weapon. Russia’s infamous Olgino troll factory was created several years ago. Given the egregious corruption in Russia’s defense industry, setting up Olgino cost a lot less than designing and building next-generation missiles. Coupled with Russia’s non-internet media empire, both domestic and overseas, Putin has a powerful megaphone allowing him to spread mistrust, confusion, and fear far and wide. The West has had difficulty adjusting.

If you were to try to measure the success of Putin’s policies in terms of altering Western behavior, you might think that the tools have not worked all that well. But to do so is to misunderstand their purpose. For example, recall the infamous “Lisa” case in Germany. A young Russian-German girl went missing in January 2016, and when she turned up the next day, she told her parents that she had been abducted and repeatedly raped by migrants of Middle Eastern descent. Though German police had interviewed the young girl and had concluded that the story didn’t add up (it turns out Lisa had spent the night at a male friend’s house), Russian television, beamed via satellite to Russian-speaking viewers living in Germany, and social media outlets jumped on the story. Several anti-immigrant rallies sprung up in the following days, and tensions escalated to the point that Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov criticized German authorities for covering up the crime. The goal of the stunt, however, was not to turn voters against Angela Merkel’s migrant policies; those were already growing unpopular enough without the Kremlin’s direct intervention. The goal was to add gasoline to an already combustible situation, and to create social disorder on command. “Lisa” demonstrated to the Germans that the Kremlin’s disinformation toolkit could get people onto the streets with just a little bit of effort.

The combustible situation in Charlottesville last month is a perfect illustration of a parallel vulnerability in the United States, with racial tensions playing the analogue to the fear of migrants in Europe. There is no evidence that Charlottesville was in any way engineered by Russia, but the Kremlin’s social media assets appear to have been trying to capitalize on it after the fact, trying to maximize the disruptive effects of the violence. It would not surprise me if the Kremlin’s cyber-propagandists are even more aggressive and proactive in spreading unrest when the next opportunity presents itself. Nor would it surprise me if Russian “active measures” in the future include creating opportunities out of whole cloth: a Russian agent provocateur killing a white supremacist while posing as an Antifa activist, for instance. (If you can’t imagine Russia going to such lengths, dear reader, I fear you are not nearly cynical enough to properly understand this regime.)

My colleague Sean Keeley fairly criticizes the Committee to Investigate Russia for the lack of expertise of its members. And he is right to worry about what amounts to anti-intellectualism and paranoia being spouted by some of the most fevered activists working to counter Russian propaganda these days. But at the end of the day, Bellingcat didn’t start out as a group of highly trained digital sleuths either; nevertheless the group managed to play a major role in the investigation surrounding the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 by Russian forces in Ukraine in 2014.

In these matters, an excess of vigilance is unquestionably a good thing. The more people are aware of just how cynical and manipulative Russian efforts can be, the less fruits their efforts will bear. 

Disinformation, however, is but one element in a broader strategic approach for Russia. In many ways, it is a junior partner to a far more prevalent means of gaining influence: financial corruption.

Overall, Russia is a weak and poor country dependent on Western financing. But the Kremlin has more than enough money to buy individual Europeans and Americans. As a Russian businessman with business concerns in Europe once told me, the difference between corruption in Russia and in the West is that Russian officials brazenly steal money all the time and at every opportunity, while Westerners will usually wait for their opportunity to cash out. For Russians, life is short and the future is uncertain, so it’s best to have everything right now. In the West, officials are less pushy about it—and less greedy: a couple million dollars for a proper retirement will suffice.

This is the insight that motivated the research and writing of our piece tracing the murky web of connections surrounding Donald Trump, Jr.’s meeting with Rinat Akhmetshin and Natalya Veselnitskaya earlier this year. There is nothing yet publicly known that suggests that Trump, Jr. was in any way compromised. But for those who understand Russia, it’s clear as day what the Kremlin was trying to do.

And as is usually the case, money and disinformation work hand-in-glove. Recall that at the heart of the murky Veselnitskaya affair was a lobbying effort to repeal the anti-corruption Magnitsky Act, as well as to block passage of the related “Global” Magnitsky Act. And at the heart of that lobbying effort was a mendacious film, shown at the Newseum in Washington, DC, that suggested the bill’s sponsors had in fact defrauded Russian taxpayers. Various European countries had refused to screen the film, recognizing it for the propaganda effort it was. But it found an audience in Washington, DC, where it was shown after some back-and-forth in the press concerning the filmmaker right to be heard. Immediately after the film was shown, Akhmetshin was running to and fro on Capitol Hill, lobbying furiously.

The Russian effort came up empty. We here at TAI tried to do our small part to swat down this elaborate propaganda effort at the time, as did others. And ultimately, the Global Magnitsky did pass the House successfully. But just because the Kremlin’s scheme didn’t work out does not mean that awareness is not important. Putin’s regime is extremely cynical; Americans, by contrast, are in general much more optimistic, and as a result have a vibrant, open society to show for it. And while it may be an article of faith among some that openness always triumphs over cynicism, I personally am not convinced. Openness must be coupled with vigilance and a clear-eyed view of the motivations of others to survive. It’s for this reason that I support all the efforts to highlight Russian perfidy and machinations, be they in the realm of financial corruption or disinformation. One can’t have enough of it.


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Published on September 29, 2017 13:30

Escape to Normality: Germany’s Silver-Lined Election

Last Sunday’s election was a turning point for Germany, and not because Angela Merkel squeaked by for a fourth term or the Social Democrats (SPD) nearly collapsed. More fundamental was the steady progress—some might call it “escape”—toward political “normality” that Germans have been seeking for many decades. The new parliament will encompass four smaller parties, and one of them will be a right-wing nationalist grouping. This kind of ideological proliferation is common around European parliamentary systems. The old monolithic “no experiments” German elections are finally a thing of the past.

This was the 19th parliamentary election since 1949. I was already around for the sixth election in 1969. That one was also considered a watershed, because it ushered in the first democratic change of government in Germany since the election of Hitler in 1933. The SPD replaced a government led by the conservative Christian Democratic Union, which had headed every West German administration since 1949.

We at the American Embassy in Bonn were watching carefully for revolts on the streets. There were none. The only hitch was a congratulatory telegram from President Richard Nixon to CDU incumbent Kurt Georg Kiesinger, who got the most votes but had no partner with whom to form a coalition. An unorthodox leader who had spent World War II in exile took over instead—Willy Brandt.

In 1969, there were only three parties in the Bundestag. In the early 1990s there were still only four. Now, the new faces belong to radical anti-European, anti-Atlantic groupings. The Left Party has been around for some time, built on the remains of the East German communists. The four year-old Alternative for Germany (AfD) is above all a product of the upheavals of globalization and automation, as is the case elsewhere in the West. Like voters for Donald Trump in the United States, AfD supporters say they voted more out of emotion than ideology. They feel their world slipping away and blame politicians, and above all “Europe,” for their woes. In other words, it is a “normal” result for these abnormal times, just as in the United States and many places in Europe.

As in the United States, the established parties failed to understand the attraction of these new “deplorables” (as Hillary Clinton infamously called her Trump-supporting rivals) in the AfD. The more the establishment condemned them, the more popular they became. First reactions have focused on nationalist sentiments from parts of the AfD. Gloomy observers have again articulated old worries about German authoritarianism. But the “Germany first” of the AfD is likely to reflect the same radical demands as the Freedom Caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives, or the “True Finns” in Finland.

The AfD focuses on Germans and German interests. The party wants to pay less for Europe and defense. They reject immigrants and refugees—and favor more programs for “real” Germans. President Emmanuel Macron seems already to have drawn conclusions from the new mood in Berlin, by toning down earlier-trailed ideas on improving integration in the euro area.

What comes next? There will be difficult negotiations to form a coalition. Since the SPD opted out of extending its co-operation with Merkel, the Greens and the traditionally CDU-minded liberals of the FDP will be necessary to give Merkel a working majority. A three-party coalition will be another first for postwar Germany.

Assuming such a complex mixture can be assembled, the FDP and the Greens will give Merkel many headaches. They will not wish to be outdone by the AfD in their rejection of “business as usual.” And her Bavarian partners are still licking their wounds from the massive losses in their home state. No wonder Wolfgang Schäuble has been rushed in to keep order as the new President of the Parliament.

This new crowd will make it difficult for Merkel to compromise on pressing European issues or to support the American hard line on Russia, Iran, or even North Korea. As in Trumpland, ensuring the peace will mean more toleration of dictators and fewer interventions to save democracy. On the other hand, Britain’s negotiators handling the strained exit from the European Union might feel a slightly warmer breeze from Berlin. A British-style sense of self is what many Germans are looking for.

Most important will be for Germans and their partners to remain calm. Extraordinary measures to contain the AfD are unnecessary. The party seems already to be splitting into two or more warring camps. Ignoring the AfD will not help either. Better to apply the lessons learned in other electoral “surprises” in America and Europe. A more “normal” Germany should be pushed to help define a narrative for a more normal Europe that is looking to the future rather than still trying to corral the past. Maybe pressure from the AfD will even help move things forward.


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Published on September 29, 2017 09:12

The UK’s Brexit Hand Gets Weaker

When Theresa May arrived in Florence last week for a major speech on Brexit, she intended to turn the page on messy divorce talks and look ahead to a new phase addressing the future UK-EU trade relationship. To show her seriousness, May struck a conciliatory tone, indicating her support for a two-year transition period and suggesting a compromise on the vexing citizens’ rights issue that would allow EU nationals’ rights to be enforced in British courts. Those moves were denounced as a “Brexit betrayal” by hardline Leavers, but they were clearly intended as an olive branch to Brussels to start negotiations toward a favorable trade deal.

Alas for May, the EU’s response is in, and it leaves something to be desired. The message? Thanks for the speech, but concede some more and then we’ll talk trade. Bloomberg:


European Union chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier said it could take months before the divorce talks can move on to trade, in a blow to Theresa May’s hopes for faster progress.

The fourth round of talks, while more positive in tone, failed to deliver the breakthrough that’s needed for negotiations to start on the trade deal that the U.K. desperately wants. Barnier said Britain still hasn’t set out what it thinks the country owes the bloc when it leaves and there’s still no agreement on the role of the European Court of Justice — one of the most contentious issues for both sides.

“It’s positive that Theresa May’s speech made it possible to unblock the situation to some extent and give a new dynamic,” Barnier told a news conference with Brexit Secretary David Davis in Brussels on Thursday. “But we are far from the stage, and it will take weeks or maybe even months, where we will be able to say yes there has been sufficient progress on the principles for the orderly withdrawal.”

Brussels is evidently stalling for time to extract further concessions on two major issues: namely, the amount of the Brexit bill that London owes Brussels and the jurisdiction of European courts over their UK-based nationals. It seems clearer than ever, however, that Brussels has the leverage here and London does not. Hobbled by her electoral shellacking in June and by dissension within her cabinet, May has little credibility with her European interlocutors. And they seem intent on pressing home their advantage.

And it’s not just the Europeans who are complicating May’s Brexit stance these days. On Thursday, a top British business confederation and trade union came together in an unusual joint statement urging May to end “15 months of human poker” and unequivocally guarantee the rights of the 4 million EU nationals residing in the UK. That will be music to the ears of many in Brussels, who reject the compromise May offered at Florence and want to see continued jurisdiction for the European Court of Justice after Brexit.

Opposite pressures, meanwhile, are coming from within May’s own government. Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson continues to lead the charge for a hard Brexit, publicly contradicting May’s position on the two-year transition period and urging a much more dramatic economic break with Brussels. Such prominent displays of disunion from Brexiteers are unlikely to steer May toward their position, but they do undermine her authority.

All of these countervailing pressures would be challenging enough for the beleaguered Prime Minister. To complicate matters further, she may have just been pulled into a major trade dispute with the United States—one that has ominous implications for British trade after Brexit.

The dispute revolves around Bombardier, a Canadian aircraft maker with major operations in Northern Ireland, which was recently threatened with a 219% tariff by the Trump Commerce Department after a complaint from Boeing. That measure could put over 4,000 British citizens out of work, and it has triggered a swift backlash in the UK. As Simon Tilford argues in The Guardian, the controversy also weakens London’s arguments that a post-Brexit UK will enjoy a privileged trade relationship with Washington:


The US has never resorted to such heavy-handed tactics with Airbus and the EU as it now has with Canada’s Bombardier, placing thousands of jobs at the firm’s Northern Ireland factory in doubt. And for good reason: the US would have too much to lose from such action. The EU is a big market with a powerful trade authority, and US producers are too dependent on the EU market for the US to risk retaliation. This case gives us a real taste of how the UK will be treated in negotiations over a US-UK trade deal post-Brexit, and how vulnerable the country will be.

As Tilford points out, the problem is fundamentally one of economic leverage: the UK will have less of it after Brexit, and larger markets like the U.S. will not fear the consequences of retaliation as they would with the EU market as a whole. This is an inconvenient truth for hardliners like Johnson, who have argued that a clean break from Europe’s commercial constraints would empower the UK to make strong bilateral deals—especially with the United States—that make up for the losses from leaving the single market.

The Bombardier saga is just one example of how the UK could be left more vulnerable to trade threats after Brexit. And it helps to explain why May is so eager to clarify the details of a future EU trade deal: ideally, one that would allow extensive access to the single market without the burdens that it imposes. But it’s difficult to see how that circle can be squared. Brussels will not allow the UK to leave the single market without serious consequences, and it is has been slow to take May up on her calls for a bespoke trade arrangement.

The way things are going, then, Brexit promises neither “splendid isolation” (as ideologues like Johnson may hope for) nor a “best of both worlds” scenario (as pragmatists like May are seeking).  Rather, the future portends a messy compromise that preserves some EU jurisdiction where the Leavers resent it, while losing some key economic benefits that the Remainers hope to keep. And as things stand now, the EU is holding all the cards.


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Published on September 29, 2017 08:16

September 28, 2017

Income Gap Narrows as Culture Gap Widens

Americans at the low end of the pay scale have been getting bigger raises than those at the top over the last few years—a marked (if perhaps temporary) reversal of the decades-long trend toward higher and higher income inequality, and the latest sign that the economy is finally making its way out of the crater left by the recession of 2007. The Wall Street Journal reports:


U.S. families’ wealth and incomes rose across the board as the economic recovery continued over the past three years, a shift after the economic fortunes of all but most well-off families stagnated in the aftermath of the recession, the Federal Reserve reported Wednesday.

The report also found that minority households and families with less education had larger proportional gains in income than other families between 2013 and 2016, suggesting the fruits of the recovery spread to a wider swath of society.

It’s significant to note, however, that this short period of economic improvement—the late Obama years through today—has also been a period of major cultural upheaval. This has been reflected in developments like the Black Lives Matter movement, the rise of the alt-right, and the intensifying controversies over sex and speech on college campuses. And it has been reflected in polling on cultural and identity issues: According to Gallup, for example, Americans’ worries about race relations surged dramatically between 2014 and 2017 after gradually declining for most of the first decade of the 21st century. And according to Pew, the gap between Republicans and Democrats on immigration has soared particularly quickly over this same period, opening up a 43 point chasm on an issue where there was once much more overlap.

Of course, the election of Donald Trump as President is the ultimate illustration of America’s widening cultural chasm. His campaign capitalized on all of the trends described above, taking advantage of the Democrats’ drift leftward while doubling down on the cultural views of the GOP’s right flank.

It is of course not possible to draw any definitive conclusions from such a short time period. It may be that our current period of cultural anger and resentment is a hangover from the devastating economic setback that followed the 2007 crash, and that the uptick of the last few years hasn’t registered yet. It’s possible that the culture wars don’t have much to do with economic growth and that polarization and partisan hatred is driven more by geographic sorting and media consumption habits than by wage patterns. In any case, the coincidence of unusually egalitarian growth with unusually intense cultural conflict complicates arguments on the right and left that our current political malaise can be chalked up to economics alone.


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Published on September 28, 2017 12:45

Is Coal Done Growing in China?

On the tree of eco-friendly energy policy options, there isn’t much low hanging fruit left, but in China, where every big energy decision has global consequences, there remains a massive opportunity for emissions reductions: phasing out coal.

China consumes roughly half of the world’s coal, and that heavy reliance is evidenced by the toxic smog that chokes its major cities every winter. The Chinese populace has agitated for change, taking to social media platforms like Weibo to demand action on the country’s deadly air pollution problem, and Beijing has shown signs of taking that unrest seriously.

As a result, projections for China’s energy mix going forward show that coal will occupy a smaller slice of the country’s energy pie. The EIA expects Chinese coal consumption to stay relatively level through 2040, but that means other energy sources will grow to meet the rise in demand that will accompany the country’s ongoing economic development. Today, coal accounts for 72 percent of Chinese electricity production, but by 2040 the EIA expects that share to drop to 47 percent. That’s a major shift.

So how is this happening? Well, as the EIA notes, “[as] part of China’s 13th Five-Year Plan, a total of 150 gigawatts (GW) of new coal capacity has been canceled or postponed until at least 2020.” Restricting the number of new coal plants will level off coal consumption, but that means that Beijing will have lean more heavily on alternative sources. China has the world’s largest reserves of shale gas, but tapping that resource is easier said than done. Nuclear power production is expected to rise to provide a bigger proportion of Chinese electricity than the 3.6 percent it supplies today, but its gains by 2040 will be relatively modest compared to those of solar and wind.

Renewables are projected to supply the majority of China’s emergent energy demand, and that includes solar, wind, and hydropower. Greens will applaud this outlook, as will Chinese urbanites desperate for breathable air. But consumers—both businesses and households—can reasonably expect to be paying more for their power than they currently do as renewables displace coal. Coal is one of the dirtiest fossil fuels around, but it does have one thing going for it: it’s dirt cheap. Wind and solar have seen costs fall in recent years, but the industry still relies on government subsidies and a whacked-out global supply chain that often relies on companies producing products below cost, especially in China.

Reducing China’s reliance on coal is a low hanging fruit for sustainable development and climate change mitigation, but the bill it’s going to run up is going to make that fruit taste awfully sour.


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Published on September 28, 2017 11:47

The AfDermath

For a rather modestly sized blossom, the lavender-colored corn flower carries a heavy burden. Despite its unassuming, dandelion-esque appearance, it was chosen as an element in the logo of the Alldeutsche Vereinigung political movement way back in the Austro-Hungarian Empire of the 1890s. Alldeutsche wasn’t just any political party, though. It was at the vanguard of the passel of virulently irredentist groups that were popping up across the German-speaking world at the time like fungus after rain. And its founder, Georg von Schönerer, was one of the most radical anti-Semites around. An early proponent of racial anti-Semitism, Schönerer even received the dubious honor of a mention in Mein Kampf as an early, ideological mentor of Adolf Hitler.

Skipping ahead a few years to early 20th century Vienna, a corn flower worn on the lapel became a symbol for anti-Semitic hostility. In the 1930s, when overt Nazi symbols were outlawed in Austria, the corn flower became a way for covert Nazis to recognize each other on the streets.

Ahead of Germany’s Sept. 24 general election, Matthias Helferich, a candidate from Dortmund for the right-wing populist party Alternative for Germany (AfD) was photographed at a campaign appearance with a corn flower pinned to his lapel. It is the kind of stunt that has become common among right-wingers in Austria in recent years, with even Heinz-Christian Strache, head of the Freedom Party of Austria, wearing the pale-purple blossom in parliament on occasion. But in Germany, which has spent decades confronting the horrific crimes of its past, all forms of extremist dog-whistling have traditionally been a political dead-end.

Helferich, it should be noted, isn’t one of the 93 AfD deputies who will soon take their seats in Germany’s federal parliament in Berlin after the party raked in 12.6 percent of the vote in last Sunday’s general election. He lost his bid for to be directly elected. But it almost certainly wasn’t because of the corn flower.

A quick glance at some of those now entering parliament on the AfD ticket makes it clear that the German firewall – the country’s national consensus to never again flirt with right-wing nationalism and identitarian racism – has eroded dramatically. Alexander Gauland, for example, who will lead the AfD parliamentary group in the Bundestag, believes that Germany’s Turkish-German commissioner for integration should be “disposed of” in Anatolia and that Germans “don’t want a Boateng as a neighbor,” a reference to German national-team player Jérôme Boateng, who is black.

The AfD parliamentary group also includes Martin Hohmann, who was booted out of the center-right Christian Democrats for his 2003 plenary speech seeking to relativize the crimes of the Nazis by comparing them to the alleged crimes of the Jews. It includes Wilhelm von Gottberg, who believes the Nazi mass annihilation of the Jews is a “myth.” It includes Judge Jens Maier, who pledged during the campaign that he would fight against “the production of half-breeds that are wiping out our national identity.” And it includes Siegbert Droese, head of the local AfD chapter in Leipzig, whose car bears the license plate number L AH 1818. The “L” is for Leipzig. The rest? It doesn’t take an expert in Nazi numerology to figure it out.

There are some in the foreign media who have sought to sell the election results as a setback for the European populist right and evidence for Merkel’s tight hold on power in Germany. Joe Scarborough of NBC, for example, tweeted not long after the polls closed on Sunday evening: “In Germany, Merkel’s center holds. Reactionary populism is held in check once again in Europe.”

The broader picture, though, is slightly more disturbing. Merkel’s conservatives lost heavily in this election relative to four years ago, winning just 32.9 percent against 41.5 in 2013. Her junior coalition partners, the Social Democrats, were likewise pummeled, limping to 20.5 percent, the party’s worst result since the Weimar Republic. And worst of all, 12.6 percent of the population either welcomed or saw fit to ignore the AfD’s increasingly vociferous embrace of Islamophobic and xenophobic nationalism, granting a right-wing party seats in the Bundestag for the first time in decades. It was almost as though the “wall-pickers” of 1989 had suddenly turned their attentions to Germany’s historically-informed firewall against right-wing extremism.

Early on in the campaign, it looked as though things might turn out differently. To be sure, the AfD entered last autumn on a high, consistently polling well over 10 percent and building on a trio of strong performances in state parliamentary votes in 2016. The party’s high-water mark, an astounding 24.3 percent result in Saxony-Anhalt in March 2016, had many fearing the worst as the general election appeared on the horizon.

But last winter, the party went into a swoon—a dip in support that would grow deeper throughout the spring and bottom out in the summer. During that time, another trio of state elections came and went, and while the AfD managed to squeak into parliament in all three states, its results were hardly convincing. Many began hoping against hope that the scourge of the AfD was fading.

An important pillar of such optimism was a feeling that perhaps the AfD’s strategy for attracting attention had grown obsolete. Right-wing populist parties tend to thrive in situations where they can blast away at the “establishment” and accuse the “elite” of ignoring the true concerns of the “people.” It is a recipe that has worked well across Europe, particularly in those countries where the two big-tent parties on the center-right and the center-left have ruled either alternately or together in a “grand coalition.” Not coincidentally, the AfD’s growth began accelerating soon after Merkel joined the Social Democrats in a grand coalition in 2013, her second such government in three legislative periods.

As 2017 progressed, however, the AfD’s signature issue—the refugee crisis and its aftermath—faded further and further into the background. Not only that, but two other developments seemed to be eating into their support. For one, the slow-motion train wreck of Brexit combined with the election of Donald Trump on the strength of his siren song sung to the white-supremacist right—and the catastrophic start to his presidency that ensued—seemed to send a collective shudder down the spines of Europeans across the Continent. One survey released in June by the European affiliate of the Pew Research Center revealed a rapidly rising approval rate for the European Union in a number of EU member states, including Germany.

The other development had to do with Merkel herself. The AfD had initially planned to run a campaign heavily focused on Merkel herself, due to her direct responsibility for opening German borders to the influx of refugees from Syria (and elsewhere) in September 2015. Indeed, an AfD strategy paper leaked to the press in early 2017 noted: “The AfD would be well advised to transform the 2017 election into a ‘plebiscite against Angela Merkel.'”

But then, Merkel—who many analysts thought had finally jettisoned her reasoned, analytical political style for a more emotional approach to the refugee crisis —turned back into Merkel. In preparation for her run for re-election to a fourth term in the Chancellery, Merkel tightened up her refugee policies, making it easier to deport those refused asylum and making it more difficult for those granted asylum to bring their families in after them. Just as she had spent much of her first 12 years in the Chancellery moving left to capture votes in the center of the political spectrum, she was now moving to the right in an attempt to poach back voters from the AfD—an attempt that looked to many pundits, including this one, as though it was meeting with some success.

Except that it apparently wasn’t that simple. The election on September 24 returned the most diversified—or fractured, depending on your perspective—parliament postwar Germany has ever seen. Fully seven parties are sending deputies to parliament, if you count the Christian Social Union (CSU), the Bavarian sister to Merkel’s CDU, as a separate party. And Merkel’s conservatives saw their vote share drop to its lowest level since 1949. Apparently, the national Merkel-fatigue that become apparent in 2016 hadn’t gone away.

Moreover, when it comes to support for right-wing populist parties, it isn’t clear that policy is the decisive factor. Perception is at least equally important. And in the final weeks of the campaign, the AfD threw everything it had into getting potential supporters to buy into its two-fold message: It was time for Merkel to go; and it was time to throw off the chains of political correctness and speak openly about the problems facing the country.

A result of 12.6 percent for the AfD, of course, is hardly an indication that Germany has completely turned its back on the critical examination of its 20th century history that allowed the country to regain a central place in the European community of nations in the decades following World War II. It does, however, show that the right-wing populists managed to tap into a vein of identitarian frustration in a similar way that Trump mobilized frustrated whites in the U.S. And their campaign slogan—”Show Courage, Germany”—was custom made for those voters who were still wary of breaking the linguistic and ideological taboos that, though eroding, remain strong in Germany.

Furthermore, the AfD proved radically more adept at using social media to get its message out than other German parties – at least partly a result of the decision to team up with Texas-based Harris Media. The marketing agency’s founder, Vincent Harris, has been dubbed by Bloomberg as “the man who invented the Republican internet” and he was involved in the campaigns of both Ted Cruz and Donald Trump. With just weeks to go before Germany’s Sept. 24 general election, the AfD once again began gaining in the polls.

Perhaps the best marketing for a mainstream-rejecting, political-establishment-excoriating party like the AfD, though, came from the establishment parties themselves. Merkel ran a campaign focused tightly on her person, almost completely ignoring the issues altogether. One widely-used poster, in fact, was simply a photo of Merkel with the date of the election printed in bold lettering. For those who were tiring of her leadership, it was essentially an invitation to vote for the party that was most critical in its condemnation of the chancellor. SPD candidate Martin Schulz, meanwhile, proved unable – at least until his televised temper-tantrum after the polls had closed on election night – to convince voters that he was much different from Merkel. When the two took to the television studio in early September for their lone debate, they spent most of the 90 minutes agreeing with each other.

In a certain sense, one could argue that the country’s firewall is holding up just fine. Even if the AfD did manage to embolden many voters to cast their ballots for the far right, much of the party’s support came in eastern Germany, which due to its communist history, isn’t nearly as well inoculated against political extremism as those in the west. In states belonging to former East Germany, the party won more than 20 percent of the vote whereas in western Germany, it came in fourth place, with just over 10 percent.

But if the vote showed one thing, it is perhaps that people are tiring of the leadership of the country’s two big-tent parties more quickly than was initially apparent during the campaign. Both the CDU and the SPD lost significant chunks of voters to other parties and together, they lost 105 seats in the Bundestag.

For the time being, the AfD is well positioned to profit from that growing fatigue. With Merkel back in power, the populists will be able to continue their attacks on the political establishment. And now that the party has 93 parliamentarians, it will benefit from even greater exposure in the national media than it has already enjoyed.

That, though, also poses one of the greatest threats to the AfD. Ever since its founding as an anti-euro, CDU splinter party, the brainchild of semi-prominent economist Bernd Lucke, it has been moving to the right. And each lurch to the extreme has been accompanied by a leadership battle, bitter infighting and the specter of a split. The most recent such battle has pitted Frauke Petry—who was the face of the party until its April convention, when her attempt to stop the rightward drift at “Islamophobic” rather than “extremist” failed—and Alexander Gauland, who has just been named the party’s parliamentary group leader. Though elected to parliament as an AfD parliamentarian, Petry left the party the day after the election and is by all accounts hoping to be able to take some of the party with her.

Just as dangerous, though, will be the challenge of trying to keep the party’s more radical deputies from completely trampling the standards of decency in German public life. At first glance, though, that doesn’t seem to be much of a priority for the party, if one can take AfD floor leader Gauland as an example. Speaking to his supporters on Sunday night after the first exit poll results were announced, the 76-year-old former CDU member said: “We will hunt her down! We will hunt down Ms. Merkel… and we will take back our country and our people!”


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Published on September 28, 2017 11:27

Where Big Oil Meets Big Green

At the turn of the century, environmentalists and “Big Oil” appeared to be moving toward one another. With the world anticipating a global climate change agreement, companies like Shell and BP made large-scale investments in renewables. Shell was running the world’s largest solar power–producing plant in Germany in 2004. BP had not only invested billions of dollars in renewable energies and low-carbon technologies, it also redesigned its logo to resemble the sun and even declared in 2000 that its name stood not for British Petroleum but “better people, better products, big picture, beyond petroleum.” Big Oil was no doubt motivated to explore cleaner energy sources in part by “the end of easy oil,” whereas greens saw a future reliant on fossil fuels as environmentally unsustainable. Environmentalists and Big Oil did not necessarily agree on the problem, but they seemed in consensus on the prescription: the need to develop alternatives to fossil fuel energy.

Alas, this moment of unusual alignment was short-lived. The majors largely sold off their renewable energy investments several years later, consolidating efforts behind finding and producing fossil fuels.1 Some explained, quite simply, that—at the time—the renewables business was not profitable.2 Faced with a global recession, industrialized countries shied away from policies that would have slapped a price on carbon. Instead of fretting over the need to seek out more difficult-to-extract oil in more difficult-to-operate countries, the oil and gas industry was suddenly able to access huge quantities of unconventional oil at commercial prices in countries with low political risk. That prospect pulled the economic rug out from under the consensus to develop alternative fuels. Soon thereafter, an abundance of unconventional oil found in the United States eased the fears of Americans formerly worried about increasing reliance on foreign fuels.

No assessment of the interaction between energy and geopolitics today would be complete without considering the relationship between the new energy abundance and efforts to tackle one of the greatest transnational challenges of the times: climate change. Although great scope for debate remains, a serious effort to disentangle rhetoric from reality at least allows us to draw some preliminary answers to some pressing questions. First, fears that the new energy abundance will blow a hole in efforts to address carbon emissions—at least for now—are exaggerated; if anything, the evidence suggests that there have already been modest benefits to the climate from more shale gas production. Second, with additional support and direction from policymakers worldwide, the new energy abundance could be an important part of the global effort to address climate change. Finally, taking the need to address climate change seriously does not need to come at the expense of encouraging the oil and—particularly—gas boom in the United States and elsewhere; in fact, too much disregard for climate and the environment could have a boomerang effect on America’s newfound oil and gas prowess.

The New Energy Abundance and Carbon Emissions

Before assessing areas of larger debate, it is useful to address some common misperceptions about unconventional oil and its carbon footprint. One form of unconventional oil—oil sands—is associated with higher emissions, about 17 percent greater than most other conventional crudes.3 These higher emissions are largely due to the greater energy required both to extract and to process this oil. It is, however, useful to keep in mind that oil sands—while accounting for close to two-thirds of Canada’s oil production and for about one-third of all types of unconventional oil—only constitute about one-fortieth of overall global oil production.4 Extra-heavy oil and oil shale—two other unconventional oils—also are associated with higher emissions, but they constitute an even smaller amount of global oil production.5

By contrast, the production of tight oil—which accounted for more than half of all types of global unconventional oil production and half of U.S. crude oil production as of 2017—involves significantly lower emissions than those associated with oil sands.6 The reasons are threefold. First, tight oil is extracted through fracking, a far less energy-intensive process than that used for oil sands, which are produced either by what is essentially mining or by heating the viscous resources to high temperatures while it is still in the ground. Second, tight oil in the United States (the only place besides Argentina and Canada where it is being produced commercially as of 2017) is what is known as “light oil,” meaning that it needs minimal refining before it can be used as gasoline or other end products by consumers.7

In fact, emissions associated with tight oil are similar to and, in many cases, lower than those associated with conventional oil production. Some research outfits have calculated that tight oil actually emits less carbon than the lighter, conventionally produced crudes from Nigeria and elsewhere; it is these imports to the United States that tight oil has tended to displace.8 Stanford professor Adam Brandt, although focusing on the frequent flaring of natural gas produced alongside oil, makes essentially the same point when he says, “if flaring were controlled, the Bakken [tight oil] crude would have lower emissions than conventional crude.”9

The carbon intensity of unconventional oil aside, two entirely reasonable people can make completely contrary arguments about the relationship between the oil and gas boom and carbon emissions and climate change. Common sense, for example, suggests that if the price of oil were lower, people would use more of it, a point supported by two contrasting scenarios of the future created by the U.S. Energy Information Agency in 2017. One scenario, the “High Oil and Gas Resource and Technology Case,” imagines that the United States produces dramatically more oil overall, and more tight oil in particular, in both 2020 and 2050.10 This higher production leads to lower prices than would otherwise exist and does result in greater usage of oil across the decades examined. The implications for carbon emissions are not surprising. In both the reference (or “most likely”) scenario and the high-resource scenario, emissions from the energy sector are lower in an absolute sense in 2020 and 2050 than they were in 2011 due to greater efficiency and the use of more climate-friendly fuels.11 But the high-resource case involves 3 percent greater carbon emissions in 2050 than the reference one due to greater consumption.12 The data on the extent to which the low oil prices of 2014–16 have spurred consumption growth are both limited and mixed; while the world as a whole saw faster demand growth in 2015 and 2016 than in the two years before the price crash, in the United States, one year saw robust demand and the other much more modest demand.13

Another likely impact is that the downward pressure on the price of oil will make it more difficult for alternative fuels to be competitive in transportation. The Paris-based International Energy Agency concluded in a 2013 study that until technology advances, few other fuels will be cost competitive so long as oil remains below $90 a barrel.14

For these reasons, some people will conclude that addressing climate change is easier in a high oil price environment with the threat of scarcity, rather than one of abundance and lower prices. Nevertheless, it is worth remembering that high oil prices also brought with them strong arguments to pursue other technologies that were less carbon friendly than oil. Throughout the mid-2000s, when the price of oil was high and climbing, the U.S. Congress introduced several bills offering greater support for technologies that could convert coal-to-liquids despite the fact that diesel and jet fuel made from coal emit twice as much carbon as oil.15 One such effort was the Coal to Liquid Fuel Energy Act of 2007—cosponsored by 14 U.S. Senators, including Senator Barack Obama—which would have provided government loan guarantees to projects advancing these technologies.16 Enthusiasm for coal-to-liquids was not limited to the United States, but included South Africa and China; Beijing reportedly sought to ramp up its efforts to turn coal into liquid fuel by twenty-fold between 2010 and 2020.17 Generally viewed as only being commercial if the price of oil is around or above $60, coal-to-liquids efforts may have taken off had the new energy abundance not squelched talk of such pursuits.18

We have more facts to draw upon when assessing the impact of the boom in shale gas (as opposed to tight oil) on carbon emissions. In the United States, the trends are clear. The advent of shale gas enabled the United States to bring down its emissions to their lowest absolute level in twenty years.19 Between 2005 and 2015, U.S. CO2 emissions related to the energy sector declined by 12 percent.20 In 2015, U.S. per capita CO2 emissions were as low as they have been at any point since the early 1960s.21 As made clear by the International Panel on Climate Change—an organization considered by many anti-fracking activists to be the gold standard—fracking was “an important reason for a reduction of GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions in the United States.”22 The IEA agreed, declaring in 2013 that, “The decline in energy-related CO2 emissions in the United States in recent years has been one of the bright spots in the global picture.23 One of the key reasons has been the increased availability of natural gas, linked to the shale-gas revolution.”

Why was this the case? The boom in cheap, plentiful American natural gas changed the economics of power plants. Due to the shale gas bonanza, the Henry Hub price of natural gas in the United States dropped from roughly $15 per mmbtu in 2005 to approximately a fifth of that price ten years later.24 Utilities did what made simple economic sense: They switched from fueling their power plants with coal to firing them up with natural gas, which has only half as many emissions associated with its use.25

Given the relative newness of the unconventional boom, there is not yet enough data to conclude definitively whether the consumption effect or the substitution effect will have a bigger impact on overall emissions. But we do have some basis for insight—at least for the question of unconventional gas, if not unconventional oil.

Several studies have sought to clarify the vexing question of whether the boom in unconventional gas is a blessing or curse for climate change. After a series of complex computations and modeling efforts, Richard Newell and Daniel Raimi, then both of Duke University, concluded that increased shale gas supply has a positive effect on climate by lowering greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. economy as a whole.26 But their study suggests this decrease is extremely small (1.4 percent), a negligible amount compared to the reductions required to avert climate change. Lower emissions that result from less coal usage are largely—although not completely—offset by the displacement of renewable and nuclear energy and greater overall energy consumption. Interestingly, depending on which figures are used to calculate just how much methane is released into the atmosphere during natural gas production—still a subject of great debate—these results could move in either direction.

The IEA sought to make a comparable assessment at the international level. In a 2011 report, Are We Entering a Golden Age of Gas?, it compared expected global emissions in 2035 with emissions that would emerge in a scenario in which there was even more extensive global gas development.27 Natural gas displaces coal worldwide, with nearly half of the coal displaced coming from China. But, similar to the other studies focused on the United States, the net benefit in terms of overall emissions reductions is small, because of a decrease in the deployment of renewable and nuclear energy and an overall rise in energy consumption.28

The key takeaway is that the boom in shale gas can be an ally in the battle to combat climate change. But several steps are required in order to ensure that natural gas plays this positive role. Richard Newell, now the president of Resources for the Future, has underscored what is needed for natural gas to “be part of the climate solution, not part of the problem.”29 Perhaps most important, it is essential that natural gas substitute for coal.30 While this occurred seamlessly in the United States, the market does not necessarily ensure this will always be the case. With abundant natural gas, policies such as a carbon tax or a cap and trade system allowing companies or governments to trade allowances in carbon emissions, if designed correctly, can be cheaper to realize and can help ensure that it is coal—not renewables or other alternative energies—that lose out from a surge in natural gas.31 Ultimately, technologies such as carbon capture and storage will be essential if natural gas and other fossil fuels are to remain part of the global energy mix over the longer term;32 most scenarios depicting a global energy system where the threat of catastrophic climate change has been averted envision a “zero emissions” power sector.33

In Tension but Not Necessarily in Opposition

In sharp contrast to the mood at the turn of the century, when Big Oil and environmentalists found common cause, there is an emerging political strain in the United States that perceives a zero-sum game between nurturing the unconventional boom in American oil and gas and protecting the environment and combating climate change. There are some places where the two are in obvious tension—such as with the question over whether Federal lands should be open to oil and gas development. But, in general, an approach that sees the two as completely in opposition—and overwhelmingly prioritizes energy development over climate and the environment—is not only misguided, but carries real risks to U.S. interests generally and even to the unconventional boom specifically.

One of the greatest benefits of the rapid expansion of American oil and gas production has been in the realm of geopolitics. The shale boom and the consequent decrease in U.S. carbon emissions was essential to America’s ability to re-exert leadership at the global level on climate change. The fact that President Obama could approach China with a proven track record of decreasing emissions helped lubricate a U.S.–China climate agreement in November 2014; this bilateral accord was a springboard to the agreement forged at the Paris meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change thirteen months later.34

In the months that followed, 175 of the 193 UN member states signed the agreement and pledged specific steps to lower their own carbon emissions. Not only did this turn of events provide China and America a rare platform for cooperation, but it generated significant soft power for the United States. In playing this catalytic role on an issue of importance to so many countries in both the developed and developing world, the United States affirmed its interest and its ability to lead globally. These geopolitical gains are at risk since President Trump decided to formally withdraw the United States from the convention. Even if technology and civic activism enable America to decrease its emissions outside the climate agreement, the United States will have still lost the soft power it gained as its champion.

More tangibly, backtracking from the Paris agreement might—perhaps surprisingly—actually have a dampening effect on America’s unconventional boom. Although other countries have pledged to abide by the agreement even in the absence of U.S. leadership, concerns remain that other large emitters such as China, India, and Brazil will walk back their efforts to rein in carbon emissions. Should they do so, the world would consume more coal and almost certainly less natural gas; as discussed earlier, future global demand for natural gas in part depends on the seriousness with which the world approaches the question of climate change. This shift toward a less climate-friendly approach could dampen the expected surge of U.S. LNG, the export of which is completely consistent with the Trump Administration’s efforts to bolster oil and gas production and the number of jobs associated with it. Howard Rogers, a scholar at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, demonstrates that should demand for natural gas in Asia be less than anticipated in the five years out from 2017, the market would balance in one of three ways, including the curtailment of U.S. LNG exports.35

Those seeking aggressive deregulation in the interest of promoting the oil and gas boom should also keep some other risks in mind. While some regulations of the industry can and should be removed, the industry also needs to maintain a “social license” to operate. This license is not just a formal law or regulation, but is the trust and confidence of the communities in which the companies produce energy. In Europe, companies have essentially lost, or never gained, the social license for fracking and, as a result, European shale gas development is at a virtual standstill. Even in the United States, proposals to severely restrict or ban outright fracking—or the development of infrastructure to transport oil and gas—are on the rise.

Thus far, successful statewide bans on fracking have largely been limited to areas where little fracking has yet occurred or where resources are not believed to exist in commercial quantities. Maryland, for example, prohibits fracking although developers have shown little interest in the state. By contrast, New York sits atop part of the prolific Marcellus shale formation, but has never allowed the practice. Yet over the course of 2015 and 2016, a raft of proposals surfaced across the country that, if implemented, would place significant curbs on fracking.36 A large increase in fracking prohibitions—particularly in resource-rich states or on the national scale—would severely undercut the new era of U.S. energy abundance.

The industry could lose its social license to operate in a variety of ways. Fracking has in many ways already tried the patience and risk tolerance of some American communities. Just ask the residents of Sparks, Oklahoma, whose Saturday night on November 5, 2011, was interrupted by an earthquake—later attributed to the disposal of waste water from fracking—that registered 5.6 on the Richter scale.37 Or solicit the views of Hugh Fitzsimons, a bison rancher in Dimmit County, Texas, who attributes the two-thirds drop in his well water that occurred from 2009 to 2012 to the large volumes of water used for fracking operations in neighboring counties.38 Or you may wish to talk to Mike Lozinski, an air traffic controller in Denver, who complains that the noise from local fracking operations has disturbed his sleep so fundamentally that he is sometimes no longer capable of doing his job safely.39 Or even chat with the residents of Pavillion, Wyoming, who in 2010 were told by the Federal government not to shower without proper ventilation while it investigated concerns that fracking had caused serious water contamination.40

Even as the benefits of the energy boom to the United States have mushroomed, public discomfort with fracking has increased. Many question whether any amount of regulation can make the practice safe. Others, such as “Keep It in the Ground” environmental groups, seem less interested in this question, focusing instead on stopping the production of fossil fuels regardless of the alternatives. They have grown in strength and prominence, successfully influencing policymaking and public opinion at both the national and subnational levels.

A Goldilocks Solution?

Fortunately, the tradeoff between advancing America’s oil and gas abundance and protecting the environment and addressing climate change is not as stark as some in both the Trump Administration and the environmental community contend. There is certainly room to remove some regulations on oil and gas production and to support the construction of oil and gas infrastructure that will help increase production and benefit the economy more generally—without assuming that these steps need to come at the expense of the environment.41 In other instances, new technologies and practices may provide the answer to legitimate environmental concerns surrounding fracking.

Yet even with advances in technology, certain regulations will be important to maintain. Advocates for oil and gas industries should think of these regulations as dual-purpose: They both protect the environment and help companies maintain the social license to operate. Happily, such regulations need not be “job killers.” In fact, a number of initiatives have identified a set of best practices and measures that can help ensure the development of tight oil and shale gas in a responsible, sustainable way. Concerns that the implementation of these best-practice measures will undermine the economic competitiveness of the boom are also understandable, but not well founded.42 The work of Michael Porter of Harvard Business School demonstrates that embracing such best practices would increase the costs of developing these resources by only a nominal amount.43

Americans will continue to differ on the question of what is the appropriate amount of regulation and even whether the states or the Federal government is the desirable entity to legislate and enforce regulations. But we should all stop viewing a desire to nurture the energy boom and to protect the environment and address climate change as pursuits in total opposition to one another. Yes, there are places where the two will be in tension. But in many other domains, they have complementary objectives.

Certainly, a drive to keep oil and gas in the ground or to obstruct any and all pipelines could backfire, especially if the alternatives are coal and the transport of oil through riskier means like railways.44 Similarly, oil and gas development with little consideration for the environment or climate change carries costs and risks—from diminishing America’s soft power to potentially curbing LNG exports to risking the loss of the social contract companies require to operate. Moreover, whereas some deregulation creates more space for economic activity, other regulations have in the past spurred significant innovations and helped keep U.S. businesses competitive abroad.45 In a world increasingly cognizant of the importance of meeting its energy needs while protecting its environment, America’s global companies will not only be focused on domestic requirements, but will also keep one eye on the need to meet standards in their foreign markets.46

What America needs now is not the zeal of either extreme, but the moderation of a Goldilocks solution. Such an approach is not as farfetched as American political discourse might make one think. It is not only in the realm of academia or think tanks where such compromises can be envisioned. Several U.S. companies, including ExxonMobil and General Motors, have voiced support for a carbon tax.47 Some environmentalist groups—such as the Environmental Defense Fund—have dedicated themselves to working with industry to find mutually agreeable solutions. For those interested in finding a Goldilocks solution, the building blocks are in place.48


1In 2016, some majors began once again to make investments in renewable energy, although such investments were very small in relation to their overall capital budget. See Joe Ryan, “Big Oil Unexpectedly Backing Newest Non-Fossil Fuels,” Bloomberg, May 10, 2016, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-10/big-oil-unexpectedly-backs-newest-non-fossil-fuels.

2See, for instance, Lord John Browne, Executive Chairman of L1 Energy and former CEO of BP, “The New Energy Environment” (seminar, Harvard Kennedy School of Government, Cambridge, MA, March 10, 2016).

3Richard K. Lattanzio, “Canadian Oil Sands: Life-Cycle Assessments of Greenhouse Gas Emissions,” Congressional Research Service, March 10, 2014, 2, www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R42537.pdf. Some studies calculated this percentage to be significantly lower. See, for instance, IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates, Oil Sands, Greenhouse Gases, and US Oil Supply: Getting the Numbers Right (Cambridge, MA: IHS CERA, 2010), https://cdn.ihs.com/ihs/cera/Oil-Sands-Greenhouses-Gases-and-US-Oil-Supply.pdf.

4International Energy Agency, World Energy Outlook 2016 (Paris: OECD Publishing, 2016), November 16, 2016, 136, http://www.iea.org/newsroom/news/2016/november/world-energy-outlook-2016.html.

5See Adam R. Brandt, “Converting Oil Shale to Liquid Fuels: Energy Inputs and Greenhouse Gas Emissions of the Shell in Situ Conversion Process,” Environmental Science & Technology 42, no. 19 (2008): 7489–95, http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/es800531f; Stefan Unnasch et al., Assessment of Life Cycle GHG Emissions Associated with Petroleum Fuels (Portola Valley, CA: Life Cycle Associates, LLC, February, 2009), 61, www.newfuelsalliance.org/NFA_PImpacts_v35.pdf.

6Global unconventional numbers are from International Energy Agency, World Energy Outlook 2016, 136. As for the United States, tight oil production constituted 53 percent of U.S. oil production as of January 2017. “Table: Oil and Gas Supply,” Annual Energy Outlook 2017, U.S. Energy Information Administration, https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/data/browser/#/?id=14-AEO2017&region=0-0&cases=ref2017&start=2015&end=2018&f=A&linechart=ref2017-d120816a.23-14-AEO2017~ref2017-d120816a.8-14-AEO2017~ref2017-d120816a.10-14-AEO2017&ctype=linechart&sid=ref2017-d120816a.10-14-AEO2017~ref2017-d120816a.8-14-AEO2017~ref2017-d120816a.23-14-AEO2017&sourcekey=0.

7Jesse Esparza et al., “Argentina Seeking Increased Natural Gas Production from Shale Resources to Reduce Imports,” U.S. Energy Information Administration, February 10, 2017, https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=29912.

8For instance, see IHS Energy, Comparing GHG Intensity of Oil Sands and the Average US Crude Oil (Calgary, IHS, May 2014), 11, https://www.ihs.com/products/energy-industry-oil-sands-dialogue.html?ocid=cera-osd:energy:print:0001.

9Brandt is quoted in Tona Kunz, “Analysis Shows Greenhouse Gas Emissions Similar for Shale, Crude Oil,” Argonne National Laboratory, October 15, 2015, https://www.anl.gov/articles/analysis.... A more recent study concludes that life cycle greenhouse gas emissions in the Bakken are comparable to other crudes because flaring is “largely offset at the refinery due to the physical properties of this tight oil.” Ian J. Laurenzi, Joule A. Bergerson, and Kavan Motazedi, “Life cycle greenhouse gas emissions and freshwater consumption associated with Bakken tight oil,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113, no. 48 (2016): 11, http://www.pnas.org/content/113/48/E7672.full.

10In the “High Oil and Gas Research and Technology Case,” the United States produces 14 percent more oil overall (crude plus NGLs) and 25 percent more tight oil in 2020 than in the EIA’s reference case. These numbers jump to 53 percent more oil overall and 90 percent more tight oil in the high-resource case than in the reference one when one looks out to 2040. “Table: Oil and Gas Supply,” Annual Energy Outlook 2017, U.S. Energy Information Administration, https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/data/browser/#/?id=14-AEO2017&region=00&cases=ref2017~lowprice~highrt&start=2015&end=2020&f=A&linechart=highrt-d120816a.23-14-AEO2017~ref2017-d120816a.23-14-AEO2017~ref2017-d120816a.8-14-AEO2017~highrt-d120816a.8-14-AEO2017~ref2017-d120816a.10-14-AEO2017~highrt-d120816a.10-14-AEO2017&ctype=linechart&sid=highrt-d120816a.23-14-AEO2017~ref2017-d120816a.23-14-AEO2017~ref2017-d120816a.8-14-AEO2017~highrt-d120816a.8-14-AEO2017~ref2017-d120816a.10-14-AEO2017~highrt-d120816a.10-14-AEO2017&sourcekey=0.

11See U.S. Energy Information Administration, Annual Energy Outlook 2017 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Energy, 2017), https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/data/browser/#/?id=17-AEO2017&region=1-0&cases=ref2017~highrt&start=2015&end=2050&f=A&linechart=ref2017-d120816a.40-17-AEO2017.1-0~ref2013-d102312a.41-17-AEO2013.1-0~highrt-d120816a.40-17-AEO2017.1-0&map=highrt-d120816a.3-17-AEO2017.1-0&c.

12“Table: Energy-Related Carbon Dioxide Emissions by Sector and Source,” Annual Energy Outlook 2017, U.S. Energy Information Agency, https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/data/browser/#/?id=17-AEO2017&region=1-0&cases=ref2017~highprice~lowprice~highrt&start=2015&end=2050&f=A&linechart=ref2017-d120816a.43-17-AEO2017.1-0~highrt-d120816a.43-17-AEO2017.1-0&map=highprice-d120816a.3-17-AEO2017.1-0&ctype=linechart&sid=highrt-d120816a.43-17-AEO2017.1-0~~~~ref2017-d120816a.43-17-AEO2017.1-0~~~~~&sourcekey=0.

13See “Global Liquid Fuels,” Short-Term Energy and Summer Fuels Outlook, U.S. Energy Information Administration, April 11, 2017, https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/rep... International Energy Agency, Oil Market Report (Paris: OECD/IEA Publishing, 2017), https://www.iea.org/media/omrreports/tables/2017-03-15.pdf.

14Pierpaolo Cazzola et al., “Production Costs of Alternative Transportation Fuels: Influence of Crude Oil Price and Technology Maturity,” International Energy Agency, 2013, 9, www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/FeaturedInsights_AlternativeFuel_FINAL.pdf.

15This method is officially called the Fischer-Tropsch process. It was developed by Germany during World War II as the country struggled to maintain adequate access to oil. For more information on coal to liquid technology, see James T. Bartis, Frank Camm, and David S. Ortiz, Producing Liquid Fuels from Coal: Prospects and Policy Issues (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2008), http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/MG754.html.

16“Coal-to-Liquid Boondoggle: A Risky Solution to America’s Energy Woes,” Washington Post, June 18, 2007, www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/17/AR2007061700945.html; “S. 154 (is)-Coal-to-Liquid Fuel Energy Act of 2007,” U.S. Government Publishing Office, https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-1105154is/content-detail.html.

17“Accelergy Unveils Pilot Plant and Signals Move Into Chinese Market,” Business Wire, June 29, 2011, www.businesswire.com/news/home/20110629006179/en/Accelergy-Unveils-Pilot-Plant-Signals-Move-Chinese.

18This in $60 in 2007 dollars. Bartis, Camm, and Ortiz, Producing Liquid Fuels from Coal: Prospects and Policy Issues.

19Christopher Martin, “U.S. Carbon Emissions Falling to Two-Decade Low in Coal Shift,” Bloomberg, April 9, 2015, www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-09/u-s-carbon-emissions-falling-to-two-decade-low-in-coal-shift.

20“U.S. Energy-Related Carbon Dioxide Emissions, 2015,” U.S. Energy Information Administration, March 16, 2017, https://www.eia.gov/environment/emissions/carbon/.

21“CO2 emissions (metric tons per capita.”) The World Bank, http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC?locations=US; “Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks,” Environmental Protection Agency, April 14, 2017, 3-33, https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2017-02/documents/2017_complete_report.pdf.

22Thomas Bruckner et al., “Energy Systems,” in Climate Change 2014: Mitigation of Climate Change. Contribution of Working Group III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, ed. Ottmar Edenhofer et al. (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 527, https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg3/ipcc_wg3_ar5_chapter7.pdf.

23International Energy Agency, Redrawing the Energy-Climate Map: World Energy Outlook Special Report (Paris: OECD Publishing, June 10, 2013), 28, www.worldenergyoutlook.org/media/weowebsite/2013/energyclimatemap/RedrawingEnergy/ClimateMap.pdf.

24“Henry Hub Natural Gas Spot Price,” U.S. Energy Information Administration, November 2, 2016, https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/hist/rngwhhdd.htm.

25See Nathan Hultman, Dylan Rebois, Michael Scholten, and Christopher Ramig, “The Greenhouse Impact of Unconventional Gas for Electricity Generation,” Environmental Research Letters 6 (2011), http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/6/4/044008/pdf; Ernest J. Moniz et al., The Future of Natural Gas: An Interdisciplinary MIT Study (Cambridge: MIT, 2011), https://energy.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/MITEI-The-Future-of-Natural-Gas.pdf; Stephen P. A. Brown, Alan J. Krupnick, and Margaret A. Walls, “Natural Gas: A Bridge to a Low-Carbon Future?,” (Issue Brief 09-11, Resources for the Future and National Energy Policy Institute, December 2009), www.rff.org/RFF/Documents/RFF-IB-09-11.pdf; Michael A. Levi, “Climate Consequences of Natural Gas as a Bridge Fuel,” Climate Change 118, no. 3 (2013): 609–23, www.cfr.org/natural-gas/climate-consequences-natural-gas-bridge-fuel/p29772.

26Richard G. Newell and Daniel Raimi, “Implications of Shale Gas Development for Climate Change,” Environmental Science & Technology 48, no. 15 (April 22, 2014), http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/e.... Also see Haewon McJeon et al., “Limited Impact on Decadal-Scale Climate Change from Increased Use of Natural Gas,” Nature 514 (October 15, 2014): 482–85, www.nature.com/nature/journal/v514/n7523/full/nature13837.html.

27International Energy Agency, World Energy Outlook 2011 Special Report: Are We Entering a Golden Age of Gas? (Paris: OECD Publishing, 2011), 37–38, www.worldenergyoutlook.org/media/weowebsite/2011/WEO2011_GoldenAgeofGasReport.pdf.

28Ibid., 37–38.

29Richard Newell, in-person conversation with author, Houston, Texas, March 9, 2017.

30Richard Newell also stressed the importance of minimizing the release of methane in natural gas production, as indicated by his study referenced earlier.

31Newell and Raimi, “Implications of Shale Gas Development for Climate Change.”

32For more on carbon, capture, and storage, see Michael Gebert Faure and Roy A. Partain, Carbon Capture and Storage: Efficient Legal Policies for Risk Governance and Compensation (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017).

33The IEA makes this point in another way in its 2016 World Energy Outlook. “On the one hand, gas is too carbon intensive to take a long-term lead in the decarbonisation of the energy sector. Uncertainty over the extent of leakage of methane, a potent GHG, along the gas supply chain also cast a shadow over the fuel’s environmental credentials. On the other hand, natural gas is the least carbon intensive of the fossil fuels and thus burning gas is a much more efficient way to use a limited carbon budget than combusting coal or oil. Gas is especially advantageous to the transition if it can help smooth the integration of renewables into power systems along the way.” International Energy Agency, World Energy Outlook 2016, 163.

34It is important to note two things, however significant this agreement was in catalyzing further action. First, China agreed to reduce its carbon intensity and to cap total CO2 emissions, but it did not agree to decrease emissions. Second, even if all countries keep to the pledges they made in the Paris Agreement, the effort will still fall short of what is needed to avert “catastrophic” climate change.

35Howard Rogers, “The Forthcoming LNG Supply Wave: A Case of ‘Crying Wolf ’?” (Energy Insight: 4, Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, University of Oxford, Oxford, U.K., February 2017), 8-9, https://www.oxfordenergy.org/wpcms/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/The-Forthcoming-LNG-Supply-Wave-OIES-Energy-Insight.pdf.

36For instance, a contentious place of legislation in Colorado would introduce significant setback provisions that some see as effective bans on fracking. See John Fryer, “oil, gas school setbacks bill clears Colorado House in party-line vote, “Longmont Times-Call, March 29, 2017, www.timescall.com/longmont-local-news/ci_30887589/colorado-house-approves-lafayette-rep-mike-footes-oil.

37John Daly, “U.S. Government Confirms Link Between Earthquakes and Hydraulic Fracturing,” Oilprice.com, November 8, 2011, http://oilprice.com/Energy/Natural-Gas/U.S.-Government-Confirms-Link-Between-Earthquakes-and-Hydraulic-Fracturing.html. Also see National Research Council et al., Induced Seismicity Potential in Energy Technologies (Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press, 2013).

38Kate Galbraith, “As Fracking Increases, So Do Fears About Water Supply,” New York Times, March 7, 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/03/08/us/as-fracking-in-texas-increases-so-do-water-supply-fears.html?pagewanted=all.

39John Fryar, “Weld County Resident Says Fracking Is Costing Him Sleep,” Times-Call Local News, August 16, 2014, www.timescall.com/longmont-local-news/ci_26350144/weld-county-resident-says-fracking-is-costing-him.

40Abrahm Lustgarten, “Feds Warn Residents Near Wyoming Gas Drilling Sites Not to Drink Their Water,” ProPublica, September 1, 2010, https://www.propublica.org/article/feds-warn-residents-near-wyoming-gas-drilling-sites-not-to-drink-their-wate.

41For instance, deregulation makes sense where federal regulation duplicate state regulation of fracking.

42Some technological innovations will be more expensive to deploy. For instance, David Burnett, a professor at Texas A&M, estimates that producing shale gas with waterless fracking could be 25 percent more expensive. (Waterless fracking, however, is not considered among the “best practices” as the technology is still nascent.) This number, however, is likely to fall as the technologies are perfected—and could seem less burdensome if policy changes increased the now extremely low cost of freshwater in many states. See Patrick J. Kiger, “Green Fracking? 5 Technologies for Cleaner Shale Energy,” National Geographic, March 21, 2014, http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2014/03/140319-5-technologies-for-greener-fracking/.

43In a 2016 presentation, Michael Porter demonstrated that complying with the performance standards suggested by the Center for Sustainable Shale Development in the development of an average well in the Marcellus would only cost 1–2 percent of the lifetime revenues of the well. This is less than the average daily price change in the Henry Hub spot price. Michael Porter, “Realizing America’s Unconventional Energy Opportunity” (presentation, GLOBE 2016, Vancouver, March 3, 2016), Slide 12.

44For an interesting preliminary study that concludes the costs of air pollution and CO2 emissions are significantly greater for rail than pipeline, see Karen Clay et al., “Economics and Externalities of Moving Crude Oil by Pipelines and Railroads: Evidence From the Bakken Formation” (presentation, American Economic Association, Chicago, IL, January 8, 2017).

45See “Innovation through Regulation,” Economist, June 2, 2009, www.economist.com/node/13766329.

46See, for example, Trefor Moss, “Ford to Make Electric Cars in China Amid Green Drive,” Wall Street Journal, April 7, 2017, https://www.wsj.com/articles/ford-to-make-electric-cars-in-china-amid-green-drive-1491475032.

47Many companies favor a taxes on carbon in order to provide certainty around investment decisions. Tim Puko, “Big Oil Steps Up Support for Carbon Tax,” Wall Street Journal, June 20, 2017, https://www.wsj.com/articles/big-oil-steps-up-support-for-carbon-tax-1497931202?mg=prod/accounts-wsj#.

48The Environmental Defense Fund openly states that part of its ability to make an impact depends on its partnerships with corporate actors. See “Partnerships: The Key to Scalable Solutions,” Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), https://www.edf.org/approach/partnerships.



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Published on September 28, 2017 06:19

September 27, 2017

Brussels Spins New Refugee Policy

The European Commission today announced a new two-year plan to resettle refugees, after the EU’s mandatory relocation scheme expired earlier this month. According to Deutsche Welle, the new program aims to resettle up to 50,000 migrants by October 2019, with a focus on vulnerable refugees from North Africa:


The plan announced by the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, on Wednesday involved setting aside 500 million euros ($587 million) for the resettlement effort.

It would involve bringing at least 50,000 people considered the most vulnerable and in need of protection directly to Europe over the next two years. The focus should be on people in North Africa and the Horn of Africa, the commission said, mentioning Libya, Egypt, Niger, Sudan, Chad and Ethiopia. Libya is the main departure point for people making dangerous journeys across the Mediterranean in smugglers’ boats to reach Europe.

“Europe has to show that it is ready to share responsibility with third countries, notably in Africa. People who are in genuine need of protection should not risk their lives or depend on smugglers,” EU Migration Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos told media in Brussels.

The Commission’s announcement of the new plan seems to depict it as a minor adjustment to a largely successful migration policy, the natural next step in getting migration under control. Here, for instance, is European Commission Vice President Federica Mogherini offering her best take (emphasis mine):


“Over the last two years, we finally built an EU policy on migration, which is starting to deliver. It is about managing one of the most complex, structural phenomena of our times, not a temporary emergency. Our cooperation with our partners in Africa, but also with the UN, has started to bear fruits by ensuring a better protection of migrants, making traffickers and smugglers’ business less profitable, and offering alternatives and legal avenues. We will keep working on the same track: We’ll only succeed by working in a united and consistent manner.”

This statement is worth unpacking as a particularly egregious case of euphemistic spin—one that papers over obvious flaws in the EU’s approach to migration while putting a humanitarian gloss on a rather ugly policy.

First, consider the claim that the EU’s migration policy is “starting to deliver.” This comes as a surprise, considering that the EU abandoned its mandatory relocation scheme earlier this month after it had resettled less than a fifth of its intended quota. That same policy also triggered a protracted, politicized legal battle between Brussels and Visegrad capitals like Warsaw and Budapest. The latter group refused to take in a single refugee and are still sounding defiant after losing their court challenge. Indeed, the EU’s failure to enforce its mandatory relocation policy is the reason that the new resettlement plan is voluntary; in other words, the new plan is born of the failure to implement the last one. This hardly suggests a migration policy that is “starting to deliver.”

Mogherini also touts “cooperation with our partners in Africa,” presumably a reference to Italy’s recent cooperation with local Libyan leaders to restrict migrant flows. Here, too, the euphemism is telling: many of the Libyan “partners” the EU claims are ruthless militia leaders, whom the Italian government is effectively paying off (with Brussels’s blessing) to stop crossings across the Mediterranean. This policy has lately been effective in curtailing migrant flows, but it should by no means be mistaken for humanitarianism. The EU is not “ensuring a better protection of migrants” by leaving them under the care of Libyan warlords in overcrowded detention camps. And when Mogherini speaks of “making traffickers and smugglers’ business less profitable,” she fails to mention the new profits that such figures are earning by cracking down on smuggling. The current situation in Libya is not a sustainable long-term solution but a temporary and mercenary arrangement, where “yesterday’s traffickers are today’s anti-trafficking force,” as one Libyan security official put it.

Finally, the plea to work in a “united and consistent manner” only underscores how fractious, inconsistent, and short-sighted the EU’s migration policy has been all along. European officials have often worked to close off one transit point only to have migrants immediately surge to another, a game of whack-a-mole most recently seen in Morocco after the Italian-Libyan crackdown. And the EU’s members have never presented a united front on migration issues. Poland and Hungary have long resisted entreaties to reform Europe’s common asylum system, and they are unlikely to be won over now by calls to resettle more refugees.

Brussels’s announcement of the new policy hardly seems to acknowledge such difficulties. To be fair, some of the EU’s new ideas may be baby steps in the right direction: making resettlement voluntary rather than mandatory could cool tensions on the continent, and the EU’s pledge to step up the returns of unauthorized migrants is at least an acknowledgment that Brussels needs to improve its enforcement and disincentivize further migration.

But most of the rhetoric surrounding the new policy promises more of the same, exaggerating the effectiveness of past policies in a way that suggests a state of denial. Brussels may feel buoyed by the current reprieve in Mediterranean crossings, but there is still plenty of reason to doubt that the EU has a grip on the problem—or that its new resettlement policy will fare any better than the last one.


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Published on September 27, 2017 14:47

Saudi Women in the Driver’s Seat at Last

Saudi Arabia announced yesterday that it plans to issue drivers licenses to women for the first time. Women won’t be allowed to drive immediately, but it’s a huge step forward for women in one of the world’s most repressively patriarchal societies. As Reuters reports:



Saudi Arabian women rejoiced at their new freedom to drive on Wednesday, with some taking to the roads even though licenses will not be issued for nine months.[….]


“Saudi Arabia will never be the same again. The rain begins with a single drop,” Manal al-Sharif, who was arrested in 2011 after a driving protest, said in an online statement.


King Salman announced the historic change on Tuesday, ending a conservative tradition which limited women’s mobility and was seen by rights activists as an emblem of their suppression.


Saudi Arabia was the only remaining country in the world to bar women from driving.



Freedom of movement for women in Saudi Arabia remains a major human rights concern. The guardianship system, in which male relatives can exercise veto power over women’s rights to education, employment, or travel, is still in place. As difficult as that is for Saudi women, conditions are far worse for Saudi Arabia’s female migrant workers who often endure physical, sexual, and other abuses with little or no recourse to justice. Addressing those issues would be the next step for women’s rights following the end of the driving ban.


But the Saudi monarchy is engaged in a much larger project than human rights reform. Though the driving ban isn’t explicitly mentioned, the decision fits comfortably within the reforms laid out in Saudi Arabia’s “Vision 2030.” Vision 2030, the brainchild of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (with the help of a few good management consulting firms) lays out radical reforms for Saudi society, notably by diversifying the country’s economy away from oil.


Those are laudable goals. But the driving ban is one of many examples where Saudi Arabia is going to have to carry out reforms that Saudis regard as radical but that are already taken for granted virtually everywhere else in the world.


Take entertainment. Vision 2030 aims to “increase household spending on cultural and entertainment activities inside the Kingdom from the current level of 2.9% to 6%.” Increased spending is good, but half of the potential audience for soccer games or the kingdom’s rare concert are excluded because women aren’t allowed into the stadiums. That may change too, but because Saudi sensibilities require retrofitting the stadiums with a dedicated women’s section, it’s a reform that has been promised and failed in the past.


Vision 2030 can basically be summarized as “Be more like the United Arab Emirates.” The UAE’s efforts at economic modernization and diversification have largely been a success. Dubai, especially, derives only a small fraction of its revenues from oil, though both Dubai and the country as a whole remain vulnerable to the economic fortunes of the region, and therefore ultimately to oil.


Unfortunately, it’s an example that Saudi Arabia will likely find impossible to emulate. One critical element of the UAE’s success, for example, has been in drawing 15 million tourists each year. Vision 2030, along the UAE model, calls for “large areas along [Saudi’s] coasts [to] be dedicated to tourist projects.” Leaving aside that alcohol is banned in Saudi Arabia, leaving aside that men and women can’t bathe together in Saudi Arabia, leaving aside all of the other reasons why tourists would obviously prefer to go the UAE, or Jordan, or Israel among all of Saudi’s would-be tourism rivals—Saudi Arabia does not issue tourist visas.


I’ve made it a point so far to limit the reforms under discussion to those that have no real cost. It would cost Saudi Arabia nothing to issue normal tourist visas. It would cost Saudi Arabia nothing to allow women to buy soccer tickets. There are countless other examples. Some of them, like additional freedoms for women, have obvious potential social and political consequences. Others, like relaxing restrictions on foreign ownership and investment, do not. Quite often, as in the case of tourism or the Saudi ban on movie theaters, reforms that would have enormous economic benefit do carry some potential social downside. But Saudi Arabia’s reticence to enact even basic social reforms calls into question the viability of the entire economic project. All of that is before considering those reforms that would also require real investment, like overhauling the kingdom’s abysmal education system.


Americans might balk at the notion that this is their concern. Whether or not Saudis can go to the movies is ultimately a trivial question. But American support for the Saudi monarchy, repressive as it is, has always been predicated on the fact that Saudi Arabia without the monarchy would probably be even more religiously radical and dangerous to American interests. The survival of the Saudi monarchy was never in much doubt with oil at $120 a barrel. With $50 oil and a declining market share, the Saudis have to find some economic alternative to maintain the viability of the state. Americans should wish them well, but the Saudis need to start moving faster.


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Published on September 27, 2017 14:38

The Crisis of Elite Authority in the West

Over the past two years the increasingly skeptical citizenry of the United States and Europe has been treated to a stream of op-eds and television appearances lamenting the looming collapse of the liberal world order, to be accompanied by a surge of illiberalism, nationalism, and fringe politics. Rarely, however, does such hand-wringing stray beyond shopworn comparisons of the “complex interdependence” of the glorious past and the parochialism and narrow-mindedness of the current era. In truth, we are not witnessing a dramatic systemic change driven by conniving external forces, but a meltdown of political authority in the West caused by the relatively straightforward indolence of its political class. Our troubles are less about liberalism’s decline or the ascendancy of left or right politics. Simply put, the citizenry in the West has been frustrated for decades with its elites’ inability to deliver workable solutions to the problems of slow growth, deindustrialization, immigration, and the overall decline of self-confidence across the West.

The legitimacy, and hence stability, of the international system rests to a degree on the ability of the leading powers to deliver at home—or, simply put, to govern. The increasing volatility of international politics is in part a byproduct of systemic dysfunction across the West at the level of domestic politics. Americans and Europeans alike are running out of patience with the governing class. In Europe, the government’s inability to control mass migration or develop effective solutions to domestic terrorism are two important drivers of the growing public discontent. In the United States the middle and working classes have been frustrated for decades with the government’s inability to remedy de-industrialization, urban decay, and declining economic opportunity.

The U.S. and European publics may vary in their reactions to these phenomena—for instance, by electing the non-establishment Emmanuel Macron in France and the anti-establishment Donald Trump in the United States—but the broader drivers of these choices are similar. After the recent German election, the anti-establishment Alternative für Deutschland, a party that did not exist a few years ago, is now the third largest party in the Bundestag, with the CDU/CSU suffering its largest drop in support since 1949 and the SPD forfeiting its chances to recapture its former glory. In this election there was no greater issue for the German public than the wave of MENA migration into Germany since 2015 and popular discontent with the government’s policy of continuing to accept immigrants. Following the shocks delivered to the political establishment earlier in the in Dutch and French elections, the German election says a lot about the public mood in Europe. One of my European interlocutors put it succinctly: “Nothing of importance gets done.”

To further complicate matters, in addition to the explosion of public discontent, we are witnessing a seeming inability in the West to pass the baton of political leadership to a younger generation. In Germany Angela Merkel is poised to become the longest-serving German Chancellor in the Federal Republic’s history, outstripped only by Otto von Bismarck during the era of empire. Even when generational change does take place (Barack Obama in the United States, Emmanuel Macron in France), the star quality of these young new leaders isn’t matched with the executive experience needed to meet popular expectations. And in the United States over the past quarter century we have seen the progressive “dynastization” of political leadership, with the Bush and Clinton families dominating the political landscape.

The increasingly self-selecting, self-contained nature of the political class has been at the center of the systemic dysfunction bedeviling Western democracies. It has led voters in 2016 to view with suspicion anyone connected to politics. Trump’s election is a case in point, as is Brexit, the rise of the AfD in Germany, and the progressive re-nationalization of European politics overall. At the same time, domestic institutions are increasingly characterized by sclerosis throughout the West. It has manifested itself in tandem with the growing crisis of political leadership at home. If unchecked, it will further undermine faith in state institutions, and could even delegitimize democracy itself.

Because Western elites continue to fail to deliver real solutions to problems like immigration and deindustrialization, an irreversible loss of public support for fundamentals like free trade, liberalism, and multilateralism is no longer just a theoretical possibility.


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Published on September 27, 2017 08:35

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