Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 561

French Consumers Brace for Green Power Rate Hike

Green power isn’t cheap, an expensive lesson French home and business owners will be learning next year when rates go up to pay for the country’s aggressive pursuit of renewables. Reuters reports:

France’s energy watchdog, CRE, said the surcharge needs to raise 7 billion euros ($7.7 bln) in 2016, up 11 percent from this year.

“The increase in the cost between 2014 and 2016 is due to the development of solar and wind energy sectors, which represent 39 percent and 17 percent respectively of the total estimated surcharge,” CRE said in a statement.To cover the surcharge, heavily indebted EDF levies a tax on French households’ electricity bills, called CSPE.

Just as in Germany, France is only able to significantly boost renewables’ share of the national energy mix through heavy government support. The costs of that support are inevitably passed down the line to taxpayers in one form or another, and the French will see that borne out in higher electricity bills in 2016.

For France’s richer households, a 10 percent hike in a monthly power bill might go unnoticed, but this is a very real problem for its poorer citizens. For them, power bills represent a larger slice of the monthly budget, making any significant hike a kind of regressive tax.The current crop of solar panels and wind turbines can’t compete with fossil fuels on their own merit, and rather than hurting the poor by attempting to subsidize these inefficient technologies we’d be much better served funneling funding towards the research and development of iterations capable of surviving and thriving without state support.

GOP Rips MSM

The most devastating takedowns of last night’s Republican presidential debate—”the Democrats have the ultimate Super PAC; it’s called the mainstream media” (Marco Rubio); “the questions that have been asked so far at this debate illustrate why the American people don’t trust the media” (Ted Cruz)—were directed not at candidates, but at the people covering them.

There are, in fact, legitimate reasons why this line of attack plays so well with Republican voters. The legacy press tends to give the liberal establishment a pass while scrutinizing Republicans much more closely. Consider, for example, how the media might have covered the Libya debacle if it was undertaken by a hawkish Republican, or how increasing poverty among African Americans would be spun under President Romney, or how campaign finance coverage might be different if the press scrutinized Hillary Clinton’s megadonors the same way it scrutinizes the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson.Many conservatives charge that reporters have a conscious left-wing bias, but the reality is probably more subtle. After all, left-wing Bernie Sanders fans, and the outlets that cater to them, like the Nation, have a legitimate claim that the “corporate media” ignores many of their interests as well. In our view, part of the rationale for the press’ apparent bias against the Republican Party over the past few decades has to do with the demise of the blue social model and the way this has affected the media’s institutional interests. As Walter Russell Mead wrote in 2012:

Back in the glory days of the blue social model, the journalistic establishment was stable and stratified. The three television networks of the day (ABC, NBC and CBS for you younger readers) held a virtual monopoly on national television news. The Time-Newsweek duopoly included the only two genuinely national sources of weekly news in print. There were, in those days, no national newspapers. Each great metropolitan area was served by what was usually a slowly decreasing number of newspapers, three local network affiliate television stations and, if you were lucky, a public station (no cable or internet, kids, so you could only get the TV stations within range) and a somewhat larger number of AM and FM radio stations. […]

The press was a part and a very important part of the leadership of blue era America. The elite national press at that time was deeply grounded in the assumptions and ideas that shaped the progressive society of the Fordist era and played a significant role in shaping the dominant political ideas of the time.Journalism is one of the elements of our society that has been most profoundly affected by the decay of the blue social model and the rise of the information age. Old worries about news monopolies in local markets seem almost quaint when so much information from so many sources is so easy to get and when online startups (including blogs) are so easy and cheap. The erosion in the power of the great media companies of the past and the efforts of the great media enterprises to rethink their franchises for the new era have transformed the industry almost beyond recognition.The national elite press does not, on the whole, welcome the decline of blue model America and, like academics and others whose interests, self-image and power in the world are adversely affected by the reshaping of American society, it naturally and almost inevitably interprets many of the changes taking place through the conceptual model of the Grim Slide from the time of Ronald Reagan to the present day. The changes in American society look like the systemic erosion of the social achievements and protections of the progressive era, and the economic misfortunes, falling wages and declining job security of many old media journalists reinforce their dark forebodings about what the transformations mean.

In other words, it may be that the establishment press pines for the blue consensus around high regulation, high taxes, and a stable corporate-government alliance, and is fearful and skeptical of the market-oriented economic changes that have unseated it from its midcentury role as the supreme authority in American political and cultural debates. The press’s instincts are still to try to triangulate and report from the “center,” but the center it settles on tends to be that of the liberal establishmentarians—the ideological successors to blue-era elites.

Turkish Government Seizes Opposition TV Stations

Turkish authorities seized control of two opposition news channels ahead of national elections Sunday. The Wall Street Journal reports:

The police arrived about 4 a.m. Wednesday at KanalTurk and Bugun TV television stations’ shared building in Istanbul, breaking chains mounted at the main entrance and using tear gas to disperse protesters who had gathered overnight after news of an impending raid.

After a standoff, authorities sealed off the premises and marched into the control room about 4:30 p.m. to take both channels offline during a joint live broadcast.“KanalTurk and Bugun TV are going dark today, dear viewers,” saidTarik Toros, Bugun’s editor in chief. The screens then went blank.

The government is alleging the news channels, which have ties to the Gulenist opposition movement, are part of a coup plot—an all-encompassing charge that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AKP has used before to attack the Gulenist camp and other opposition movements. Since last year, when he cited the supposed “coup” to shrug off corruption allegations, Erdogan has indulged in increasingly widespread conspiracy theories—a strategy which unfortunately resonates in a Turkish political climate obsessed with them.

While this is not the first time the AKP has raided opposition media, the outright thuggery was particularly dramatic this time, with police breaking through fences, using tear gas to disperse protesters, and dragging at least one journalist out in a headlock. Then there’s this bit of Orwellianism:

“As trustees, we will run this organization until there is a new decision,” said Umit Onal, one of the officials taking over Koza Ipek’s media arm, as he marched into Bugun TV’s control room.

“We are now directing this broadcast,” he said, declining to provide an official order when confronted by the channel’s editors about his authority. “You don’t need to see it; we made the decision as the executive committee.”

Sunday’s elections are something of a national “do-over”: when the AKP lost its parliamentary majority in June elections that returned a hung parliament, it cost Erdogan the chance to rewrite the national constitution. So he and AKP Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu refused to enter a coalition, thus precipitating the second round of elections. In the interim, they dramatically increased tensions with the country’s Kurdish minority, in part to drive the Kurdish HDP under the 10 percent threshold for parliament and in part to bring nationalists into their camp. The latest suggest they failed in the former respect (HDP stands at 12.2 percent) but may have succeeded a bit in the latter—AKP is up six points from June.

Clearly, however, Erdogan and the AKP are taking no chances, and leaving no stone unturned in the crucial final few days. All of which suggests that, if they don’t get their way Sunday, things could get really ugly indeed—and also, perhaps if they do.

The Failed Promise of European Shale

One by one, Europe’s shale dreams have evaporated. Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, and even the UK have all seen oil majors throw in the towel on fracking projects that were once seen as a path towards a European energy renaissance. The FT reports on how mismanagement and unfavorable conditions both in energy markets and the natural world have tripped up so many countries in their attempt to follow America’s lead:

The reasons for the bust across the region are varied: sometimes unfavourable regulatory and tax regimes, as well as bans or temporary moratoria on hydraulic fracturing such as in Bulgaria, Romania and the Czech Republic, often following environmental protests. Some senior western officials, including Anders Fogh Rasmussen last year when he was Nato secretary-general, have accused Russia of secretly stirring up such protests, which Moscow denies.

Lower oil prices have also changed the financial equation, in a region where drilling costs are high and which lacks the infrastructure whose development has driven costs down in the US.On top of all that, in the words of one executive from a US oil major, “the rocks aren’t there”. Geological formations that appeared promising in countries such as Poland have turned out to be more difficult to fracture with existing technology than reserves in North America. Some industry insiders say the geology has been the biggest single factor holding back development of central European shale.

Europe’s experience will frustrate governments that had pinned hopes of bolstering domestic energy production (and therefore diversifying away from Russian supplies and all the conditions that come with them) on hydraulic fracturing.

But it also serves as a foil to prove just how extraordinary America’s experience these past seven or eight years has been. Oil production is up 75 percent since 2008, and since 2005 natural gas output has spiked 44 percent. This formula for this boom involves a long list of variables, including (but not limited to): mineral rights incentivizing homeowners to lease land for drilling, evenly-layered “wedding cake” geology favorable to horizontal well-drilling, a deep pool of available capital, wildcatters willing to take risks in a fledgling industry, an already robust oil and gas services industry, preexisting pipeline infrastructure, low population density, and a relative abundance of water. All of these conditions have proven vital to the shale revolution, and for Europe they’ve been difficult to replicate.

China Ends One-Child Policy

Faced with a rapidly-aging population and slower growth, China has announced it will end its controversial one-child policy. Bloomberg reports:

The party’s Central Committee approved plans to allow all couples to have two children, the official Xinhua News Agency said Thursday, citing a communique released at the end of a four-day party policy meeting in Beijing. The move, which had been expected, comes after a previous effort to relax the policy fell well short of the goal of boosting births by 2 million a year.

“It shows the party wants to take action as soon as possible, and shows there is no time to delay for China to modify its population policy,” said Wang Yukai, a professor at the Beijing-based Chinese Academy of Governance. “They couldn’t wait for the legislation to pass next year. The leaders want the new policy now.”

However, the one-child policy may be more ingrained in the culture than the Central Committee would like. When Beijing’s last effort to raise the birth rate failed, we wrote, “Human beings aren’t machines that can be adjusted in ideal ways every few years to ensure some sort of maximal societal utility.” It may be that even if they are allowed to have multiple children, Chinese parents will still choose to have only one.

Turkey Takes Gazprom to Court

Last December, Vladimir Putin announced Russia would no longer be pursuing the construction of the so-called “Southern Stream” gas pipeline, meant to connect Gazprom with its southern European customers through the Black Sea, through Bulgaria. Southern Stream’s scuppering was seen as a diplomatic defeat for Putin and a win for the West—the project was unpopular in both Washington and Brussels—but in response Vlad proposed a new pipeline project through Turkey. Now, that “Turkish Stream” project seems all but dead. This week Ankara announced it would be taking Gazprom to court to secure cheaper gas prices. The FT reports:

Turkish state-owned pipeline company Botas this week filed a case for international arbitration to seek a price discount for Russian gas supplies, Gazprom confirmed…Turkey is Gazprom’s second-largest export market after Germany, accounting for 27.3bn cubic metres of its gas sales last year, while Russia supplies more than half of Ankara’s gas imports. […]

Gazprom, which had already spent billions of dollars improving infrastructure on the Russian side of the Black Sea and ordering pipes for the project, had wanted a rapid agreement. But Turkey’s insistence on a discount slowed down the negotiations.Both sides said this summer they had agreed on a 10.25 per cent price discount for Gazprom’s supplies to Turkey, but no agreement was signed and Moscow scaled down its vision for the pipeline, cutting its planned capacity in half.

Russia needs this pipeline. It pursued first the South Stream and now the Turkish Stream in large part because it wanted to insulate itself from the risk that Ukraine would siphon off gas meant for customers farther to the West (it’s fair to say that Ukraine and Russia’s energy relationship has never been amicable and is volatile of late, for obvious reasons). It’s put up huge amounts of money to install preliminary infrastructure, so Moscow is now especially keen to see something concrete come of all of this time and effort.

Turkey, of course, knows this, and has sought to leverage its unique position in the form of pricing discounts. Now it’s apparently willing to resort to legal arbitration to secure better prices. Hanging over these proceedings is Turkey’s unhappiness with Russian air strikes in Syria, but even before that aggression this looked like a partnership born of circumstance rather than a natural pairing. For Gazprom’s part, it’s finding yet another European partner dissatisfied with its terms, and these niggling rebellions are starting to add up to one massive headache for the state-owned gas firm.

Campus Free Speech Poll: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

The wave of political correctness that has swept across American college campuses for the past year—the trigger warnings, the microaggressions, the safe spaces and the speech codes—has been analyzed up and down by pundits, legal experts, and education officials alike. But one important piece of information has mostly been missing from the debate: the actual views of the college students who are at ground zero of the PC explosion. As a result, it’s always been unclear just how entrenched PC is on campuses—whether the kinds of outrageous stories that make it into the popular press are the workings of a small minority of students, or whether they represent the campus consensus.

A helpful new nationwide survey of college students’ attitudes toward PC-related issues conducted by McLaughlin and Associates gets us somewhat closer to understanding how college students feel about these issues. The full results of the survey, which was commissioned by Yale’s William F. Buckley Institute, are available here. Some of the findings suggest that “we have failed a generation,” in one journalist’s words—but not all of them. We’ve read the survey and highlighted some results that strike us as especially important:The good: 

Ninety-five percent of students said free speech on campus is personally important to them. Of these, 70 percent said it was “very important.” As David French notes, this conviction tended to soften when the pollsters gave specific examples of offensive speech (more on that later), but at least the results of this question show that the concept of “free speech” still carries moral weight in the abstract for the great majority of students.
Sixty-three percent of students said political correctness is a “problem” on campus. This suggests that advocates of open debate on campus can continue to have political success by exposing—and mocking, and rebutting—PC overreach.
Eighty-seven percent say “there is educational value in listening to and understanding views and opinions that I may disagree with and are different from my own.”

The bad:

Fifty percent of students said they had “often felt intimidated to share beliefs that differ [from] their classmates.” Interestingly, there was not much of a difference between liberal and conservative students in this regard—51 percent of Democratic students, and 53 percent of Republican students, said they had felt intimidated. This does not speak well for the kind of intellectual environment campuses are fostering.
A fairly large proportion of liberal students—30 percent—think that the First Amendment is “an outdated amendment that can no longer be applied in today’s society and needs to be changed.” Only 10 percent of conservative students felt the same way. Liberal students were once the champions of campus free expression, but on most of the survey questions broken down by political orientation, liberals are more hostile. Still, the fact that 64 percent of liberal students thought the First Amendment is “an important amendment that needs to be followed and respected in today’s society” may suggest that the more extreme anti-free speech activism we have been seeing on campus comes from a faction within the campus left that is still limited in size.

The ugly:

Seventy-two percent of students said that students or professors who use language “that is considered racist sexist, homophobic or otherwise offensive should be subject to disciplinary action.” It’s no wonder so many students are afraid to express views that are different from those of their peers—almost three-quarters of think they should be punished if they say something that is “offensive”! Needless to say, the threat of official sanctions for speech on sensitive topics makes rigorous conversations about those topics nearly impossible.
Fifty-one percent of students say that their university “should have speech codes to regulate speech for students and faculty.” The term “speech code” used to be politically loaded in favor of free speech advocates, because it was assumed that no one wanted their expression to be regulated in this way. Now speech codes appear to be rather popular—including, by the way, among conservative students, who favor them by a 44 to 42 margin. This suggests that the popularity of speech codes is just as much of a function of young peoples’ demand that they be coddled as it is a function of the rise of leftist politics on campus.
Sixty-three percent of students favor trigger warnings—disclaimers on books and articles warning students that they might be offended. One wonders if students whose sensibilities are this fragile belong in college in the first place.

In sum, the results are grim, but there are also glimmers of hope. It’s as important as ever that liberals—that is, people who believe in open debate, pluralism, and intellectual diversity—keep fighting to make sure America’s campuses don’t descend further into coddling and politically correct orthodoxy.

Does Obama Have a Plan for the South China Sea?

After the U.S. conducted a high-profile freedom of navigation operation in the South China Sea on Monday, we’ve been wondering what President Obama’s next step will be. We aren’t the only ones, according to Josh Rogin at Bloomberg:

U.S. officials told me Tuesday that the Chinese reaction was as expected and that the Obama administration had publicly signaled for months that the freedom of navigation operation would take place. There is no expectation that one ship’s action will deter the Chinese expansion in the South China Sea. Instead there is a new internal debate over what the U.S. should do next and when.

Bill Bishop, who pointed us to Rogin’s article in his excellent Sinocism newsletter, asks, “Does the author mean the U.S. sent the ship without a longer term plan?” It’s a worrying thought—the possibility that the U.S. would conduct such provocative activities without a follow-up plan is deeply troubling. At first blush, it may appear to be a ridiculous suggestion. Yet it would be only too consistent for a White House that doesn’t seem to like longterm strategic planning. So, alas, we find ourselves worried that the President hasn’t properly thought through even one of his wiser foreign policy maneuvers.

Austria to Seal Off Border with Slovenia

The Balkan migrant corridor is about to get much more congested, as Austria announced this morning that it is getting ready to erect a border fence with fellow Schengen member Slovenia to help control the flow of people. AFP:

“We do not believe that the current migrant crisis that Europe is facing can be resolved with the building of fences or walls,” said German government spokesman Steffen Seibert, adding that the problem could only be dealt with if countries stood united. […]

Austria’s move is bound to intensify concerns about the EU’s cherished Schengen system, a crucial part of European integration efforts, which allows for the free movement of people and goods.

But Interior Minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner insisted the planned barrier was “not about shutting down the border”.

“This is about ensuring an orderly, controlled entry into our country. Also, a fence has a gate,” she told Austrian media Wednesday.

Slovenia, which is expecting up to 400 additional border guards from other EU countries to come to its aid, had also threatened to build a fence along its border with fellow EU member (but not Schengen member) Croatia. Croatia might be likely then, in turn, to close its border with Serbia, which is more-or-less demarcated by the Danube. (Croatia’s exceedingly long border with Bosnia would be much harder to secure, though with winter coming, Bosnia’s more mountainous terrain might be enough of a deterrent—at least for a time.)

What we’re witnessing is a slow-motion car wreck. The idealistic policies of Angela Merkel—which are themselves coming under increasing fire back home in Germany—are running straight into the reality of European politics to produce what may end up being an intractable humanitarian catastrophe. A column of tens of thousands of stateless, homeless people are now splayed across a set of countries—Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Macedonia—least capable of providing for their basic needs as winter sets in. Slovenia has less than half the GDP per capita of Austria; Croatia, in turn, has just a bit more than half that of Slovenia; and Serbia and Macedonia, in turn, have about half that of Croatia.As one senior European policy analyst told Politico EU’s Playbook:

“It’s one thing for people to die at sea” as most people can block that out as a distant problem, except when the tragedy is huge (an overcrowded ship sinking) or poignant (a dead child washed ashore). “But it’s another thing for people to die on land around us.”

These are the wages well-meaning humanitarian impulses untethered from political realities.

Study Finds Evidence of Ferguson Effect

FBI Director James Comey, who was rebuffed by the White House after suggesting that a “Ferguson Effect” could be behind the latest uptick in crime, may have found at least some vindication from a recent study posted on the American Psychological Association’s website, entitled “The Alleged ‘Ferguson Effect’ and Police Willingness to Engage in Community Partnership.” The study is paywalled, but Tom Jacobs of the Pacific Standard has a good summary:

A new study focusing on one mid-sized sheriff’s department found negative publicity about policing has indeed reduced some deputies’ motivation, as well as their willingness to form partnerships with members of their communities. […]

In February, the researchers surveyed 567 deputies at a mid-sized sheriff’s department in the Southeastern United States (an impressive 85 percent response rate). The deputies were asked a series of questions regarding how recent negative publicity about police actions has impacted their work. They indicated, on a five-point scale, the extent to which such coverage has “made it more difficult for you to be motivated at work,” and “caused you to be less proactive on the job.” […]

“It appears that officers in our sample have been affected by negative ‘Ferguson-type’ press,” [the authors] write. “Some officers indicated being less motivated to perform their duties. This is important from a managerial standpoint, because feelings such as these need to be subverted if possible.”

The study does not determine—or attempt to determine—whether officers’ post-Ferguson disengagement has actually caused the spike in crime. It also found—crucially—that the effect is smaller or nonexistent for officers who feel more supported by their departments, as Jacobs emphasizes. Nonetheless, the finding that recent protests against police practices have made many officers—at least in the department surveyed—fearful of performing their regular duties poses real challenges for those who suggest there’s nothing at all to see here.

The debate over this issue has thus far split along ideological lines, with law-and-order conservatives like Heather MacDonald sounding the alarm about the Ferguson Effect and left-wing criminal justice reformers like Ta-Nehisi Coates insisting that it’s a scare-term that has essentially been fabricated for ideological reasons. But this survey actually highlights the fact that the existence of a Ferguson Effect could actually be a good thing for criminal justice reformers in the long run.

There is strong evidence that crime has gone up in major urban centers over the last few months, and there is good reason to believe that if this crime spike persists, it could imperil promising prison reform efforts currently underway. If the cause of the rising crime is really the “Ferguson Effect”—officers’ desire to lay low in the current environment, for fear of being swept up in a high-profile controversy—then it is likely to turn out to be transitory. Moreover, as the study says, police departments can take relatively straightforward steps to make officers feel more confident.

If, on the other hand, there is no Ferguson Effect, then we have no idea why crime has been rising, no idea if it will continue to rise, and no clear way to counter it—except, of course, more draconian criminal justice policies.

Mass incarceration was a result of the high crime rates in the 1970s through the 1990s (the causes of which are still a matter of debate, but which likely had deep social and demographic roots), and the current moment of opportunity for prison reform is a result of the historically low rates of crime we are experiencing today. If crime rates remain elevated over the long term, that window of opportunity may close. Prison reformers should be hoping that the cause of the latest spike is something as simple, tractable, and likely temporary as the Ferguson Effect.