Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 587

Gov. Scott Walker Takes on Civil Service System

Burned on the presidential campaign trail, Gov. Scott Walker has hit the ground running back in Madison, seeking to pile up his “throne of skulls” even higher. His latest target: the state civil service system, which he says is inefficient and ill-suited to the realities of the twenty-first century workforce. The Journal Sentinel reports:

Just three days after ending his presidential run, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker sought to reassert his conservative credentials Thursday by backing a proposed overhaul of the state’s civil service system for 30,000 employees, saying its safeguards against political patronage in hiring and firing state workers need to keep up with the times and the crush of retiring baby boomers.

Four years after repealing most collective bargaining for most public employees, Walker and two top Republican lawmakers are seeking to: eliminate the state’s civil service exams, replacing them with a résumé-based system for merit hiring; stop allowing longtime employees to avoid termination by “bumping” other workers with less seniority out of their jobs; and shorten by more than half the process for employees to appeal their dismissal or discipline.

It’s too early to say whether Walker’s plan is exactly on target, as the details won’t be released until next week. But it’s clear that civil service system, based on lifetime employment, is need of a serious rethink in the context of an aging population, an increasingly fluid job market, and ever-more automation of clerical and administrative work. Shaking up the civil service system is key to nibbling away at the vast 19th and 20th century administrative apparatuses that most states and the federal government have constructed.

Walker’s opponents argue that scrapping civil service exams would open up public sector jobs to political influence and patronage. This is a legitimate concern. But as Francis Fukuyama has noted in these pages, the existing civil service system, once a bulwark against patronage and a guarantor of professionalism, no longer performs particularly well in these areas. The civil service has become re-politicized despite tenure rules and merit-based exams designed to shield it from political influence. In other words, political bias is a problem either way.

Whether Walker’s particular brand of reform is the right way to downsize our bloated and inefficient public sector remains to be seen. And even as the ongoing trends mentioned above should change how we run government, some offices and bureaus will still need long-term service from well-qualified professionals. But it is clear that major reform is needed, and its ironic that the people most resistant to any kind of reform—public sector unions, blue model Democrats—are also the people who depend most on an active and effective federal government. Reform-oriented politicians across the country should be experimenting with new models and seeing how the voters and taxpayers—not the public employees—respond. As Scott Walker has shown before in Wisconsin, these two groups don’t always see eye-to-eye.

China to Go Green Without Breaking a Sweat

Chinese President Xi Jinping is set to announce a nationwide carbon cap-and-trade program for China during his official visit with President Obama today. The announcement will be part of a broader pledge by both China and the United States to meet the ambitious goals for CO2 reductions by 2030 agreed to by both leaders when Obama visited Beijing last November.

Details remain sparse ahead of the announcement, but China is expected to build a national program on top of several local pilot cap-and-trade schemes launched in the past few years in its major cities. The program will seek to wring most of the emissions improvements from its paper, steel, and cement industries—relatively low-hanging fruits for a modernizing Chinese economy that is striving to balance away from an export-driven model and toward a service-oriented model.Depending on the details, this could represent genuinely good news for the planet—but not necessarily in the way greens might think.China is undergoing a shift away from metal bashing and other energy intensive applications towards less energy intensive activities like providing medical services and building gourmet restaurants for a growing, urbanizing population. A ballet class adds to GDP but doesn’t burn as much carbon as a tire factory, and China’s economic planners have long been moving to shift from a tire economy to a ballet one. This shift is bringing long-term slower growth rates with it, and if the economy keeps getting more energy efficient as the growth rate slows and China’s developing economy matures, the country will be able to cap and ultimately to cut carbon emissions without breaking a sweat. (Of course, China has another important reason to cut energy intensity: It wants to reduce its dependence on imported energy because it fears the ability of the U.S. Navy to interrupt its energy supply in the event of a serious U.S.-China crisis.)This kind of reality doesn’t play well with the MSM, which will no doubt try to cast the announcement as China having had a sincere change of heart, embracing green austerity and adopting the politics of self denial. Don’t be fooled: China’s policies may end up doing good things for the planet, but the country is pursuing them out of self-interest.And that’s at the heart of why this could in fact be very good news. China—like the rest of the world—doesn’t have to embrace green pessimism and anti-growth economics in order to make real progress in reducing its carbon footprint. Economic growth and technological progress combined with intelligent and forward looking policy choices will do more to bend the carbon curve than the breast-beating and garment-rending so popular among some greens.

Japan Offers to Build Submarines in Australia

Last week, it looked like Australia might back off a contract for up to $50 billion of Japanese-made submarines. But in a move that could save the imperiled deal, Tokyo’s ambassador to Australia says his government would be willing to build the warships on Australian soil. Sky News has more:

Japanese ambassador Sumio Kusaka has told The Australian that Japan could work with Australia’s government-owned submarine builder ASC in whatever arrangement best suited the Turnbull government.

‘We will go along with whatever decision the Australian government makes.’Government frontbencher Christopher Pyne says the news is music to his ears, pleased that the submarines ould be built in his home state of South Australia.‘As a South Australian, that is music to my ears but we will go through the proper processes and announce it at the appropriate time,’ Mr Pyne told the Nine Network on Friday.

This is welcome news, considering how wobbly the deal was looking. The new Aussie PM, Malcolm Turnbull, appears more hesitant than his hawkish predecessor, Tony Abbott, to upset Beijing—and there was a further, more significant, sticking point for the deal that traced to the country’s weak domestic economy. Australians wondered why their government was signing massive contracts with Japanese corporations while Australian businesses suffered. If Japan does agree to hire Australian workers to build the submarines, that could go a long way toward making this deal happen.

Improved prospects for the purchase is very good news for Tokyo, but also for the U.S. and other countries: A completed deal would bolster cooperation between the two countries and help strengthen a relationship that we, and many others, want to see flourish.

Philadelphia, Seat of Religious Liberty, Welcomes the Pope

Pope Francis is currently in New York City, but his next stop will be Philadelphia, to attend the World Meeting of Families. That destination brings to mind the city’s history of toleration: 18th century Philadelphia was the only city in the British Empire where the Catholic mass could be legally celebrated, and a long tradition of opposition to religious persecution is, in fact, one of the great contributions of the Quaker movement to the development of Christian thought and practice.

It wasn’t an easy thing for Christians to move from views, going back to St. Augustine, that persecuting heretics was a moral duty to the contemporary idea, stated very eloquently in the Vatican II documents, that religious liberty is a divine gift that we are all obliged to respect. The Catholic church opposed this crucial and vital idea with everything it had for hundreds of years; so did many Anglicans, Lutherans, and Calvinists. It was the despised and marginalized Quakers and Anabaptists (now Baptists) who stood up for the truth at a time when the big churches were deep in error—and they were persecuted for their witness.This history is important to remember, both to remind religious leaders that great institutions can go badly wrong and to promote solidarity with those in the world of Islam now fighting for the rights of freedom and diversity. Those who think that Islam will never change should remember that many of Pope Francis’ predecessors denounced religious liberty as an anti-Christian idea.

Spain Talks Tough as Catalonia Independence Vote Approaches

The strain on Spain is not yet on the wane: an election this Sunday in Catalonia could push the region towards independence from the Madrid. The WSJ reports:

Together for Yes, a slate of legislative candidates who pledge to make Catalonia a new European nation within 18 months, leads in the polls, though falling just short of an absolute majority in the 135-seat Catalan parliament. Secessionists could obtain that majority with support of the Popular Unity Candidacy or CUP, a radical left pro-independence party, but the two factions differ over how strong a popular mandate would be needed to move toward independence.

The national government in Madrid and Catalan unionists are placing their hopes on a high turnout from what they see as a silent majority favoring the status quo.

Last year the pro-independence movement in Catalonia experienced a setback when the country’s Constitutional Court declared a referendum held in November to be unconstitutional. The Spanish executive likewise has been steadfastly opposed to any referendum, rejecting the region’s right to hold any such vote. The upcoming elections are functioning, therefore, as a plebiscite on the independence question, with a victory for pro-secession candidates giving the local government a mandate to press ahead.

Even a responding victory for Together for Yes and CUP, however, isn’t likely to convince Madrid to step aside. The region is one of the wealthiest in Spain, and the government has threatened Catalonia with a bevy of consequences if it breaks away from the country, including lost Spanish and EU citizenship, and the exclusion of Barcelona from the Spanish soccer league La Liga.A victory for the secessionists could lead to a public, aggressive, and high-stakes showdown with Madrid, with uncertain results. Interesting times on the European continent.

Aquatic Robots Deployed to Fight Climate Change

Here’s a bit of hopeful climate news: scientists have developed “micromotors” capable of trawling our planet’s oceans and converting carbon dioxide out of solution into calcium carbonate, the same material that makes up seashells and coral, which could then be stored. Wired reports:

The micromotors, described in a new study, would be powered by the environment itself, using enzymes to move around the sea, converting carbon dioxide into a solid as they swim. “In the future, we could potentially use these micromotors as part of a water treatment system, like a water decarbonation plant,” said Kevin Kaufmann, co-author of the study. […]

In the experiments, the micromotors quickly decarbonated ionised water solutions containing carbon dioxide. Within five minutes, the motors removed 90 percent of the carbon dioxide from the solution. In seawater, 88 percent of carbon dioxide was removed. Converting carbon dioxide to calcium carbonate, a compound found naturally in shells and coral, is currently one of the most environmentally reliable methods for reducing reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in water.

Our oceans absorb roughly one quarter of atmospheric carbon dioxide, and in that sense act as natural “sinks” for storing the greenhouse gas and preventing surface temperatures from rising. Just recently scientists found that the Southern Ocean—the waters surrounding Antarctica—is capable of storing a lot more carbon dioxide than previously thought, and that was good climate news, for a change!

But like so many phenomena in our planet’s climate, oceanic carbon absorption produces a new problem, even as it solves one. As the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL) explains, “the CO2 absorbed by the ocean is changing the chemistry of the seawater, a process called ocean acidification.” Changed chemical compositions can affect oceanic ecosystems in ways we understand (scientist say lower pH water can be harmful to a wide variety of aquatic species) but also, you can be sure, in many other ways we don’t yet grasp.In other words, this looks like a big problem associated with climate change. That said, like the rest of climate change’s ill effects, its scope shouldn’t intimidate us into thinking we’re helpless—these micromotors could help us mitigate the effects of acidification. We’re constantly reminded of humanity’s culpability for our changing climate, but fear-mongering greens too often ignore the flip side of our species’ ability to effect change. We have an extraordinary capacity to adapt, to innovate, and, above all, to solve problems. True, the sheer size of the problem of climate change is daunting, and it’s one we’re still far from fully understanding, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to lie down and wait to be cooked or to be swept away by rising sea levels, no matter what the eco-Malthusians of the world might have you believe.

No End in Sight for the VW Scandal

How deep does the Volkswagen cheating scandal go? After the EPA charged the German company with designing software that, in the words of EPA enforcement officer Cynthia Giles, “turns off emissions controls when driving normally and turns them on when the car is undergoing an emissions test”, the company’s share price fell off a cliff. The U.S. government can levy $37,500 for each vehicle that circumvented Clean Air Act regulations, which adds up to a whopping potential fine of $18 billion. VW’s CEO apologized earlier this week, saying he was “sorry that we have broken the trust of our customers and the public”, but that mea culpa wasn’t enough to save his job and he recently resigned from his position. Volkswagen’s board is mulling over candidates for its next CEO, with Porsche CEO Matthias Müller looking to be the .

Then we learned that the software VW used to dupe American regulators was installed in as many as 11 million vehicles worldwide, expanding the scope of this problem and leading European regulators to wonder whether they too had been had by the unscrupulous workaround. In response, French, German, and Italian lawmakers all called for a review of their own emissions testings programs, and the UK transport secretary was compelled to request that “the EU to conduct a Europe-wide investigation into whether there is evidence that cars here have been fitted with defeat devices.” And Berlin is being forced to confront the problem at home because, as the BBC reports, VW used its “defeat device” software in Germany as well:

Volkswagen has admitted using the same fake emissions test in Europe as it used in the US, Germany’s transport minister has suggest […]

Mr Dobrindt said he had been told vehicles with 1.6 and 2.0 litre diesel engines are “affected by the manipulations that are being talked about”.The company’s Jetta, Beetle, Golf and Audi A3 models in the US from 2009 to 2015, and the Passat from 2014-15, were fitted with the devices which produced doctored results. However, diesel cars are far more popular in Europe than in the US.

This mess has huge implications for the German economy. One in seven Germans are employed by the auto industry and VW is the biggest company of them all, employing more than a quarter of a million people. Bad news for VW (like the fact that Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s are considering downgrading the company’s credit rating) is therefore bad news for Germany. As ING chief economist Carsten Brzeski told Reuters, “[i]f Volkswagen’s sales were to plunge in North America in the coming months, this would not only have an impact on the company, but on the German economy as a whole…All of a sudden, Volkswagen has become a bigger downside risk for the German economy than the Greek debt crisis.” And, as the Times of London reports, this problem may extend outside of VW and across the auto industry:

Shares in BMW fell nearly 10 per cent today as the German luxury carmaker was dragged into the diesel emissions scandal that has convulsed VW. Road tests carried out by the same group that exposed VW’s rigging of diesel emissions tests have shown that BMW’s X3 xDrive 20d emits the air pollutant nitrogen oxide at a level 11 times higher than the legal European limit, a German car magazine reported today.

But that’s not all! This software malfeasance is also a PR disaster for diesel fueled vehicles, which can provide greater gas mileage at the cost of increased local pollutants (like nitrous oxide (NOx), the gas the EPA caught VW caught covering up). Over the past twenty years Europe has pushed diesel fueled cars and trucks to lower carbon emissions, but many of its cities have been choked by the resultant smog—Paris actually banned cars from driving for a day this spring in an effort to clear its toxic skies. The Volkswagen scandal is a bad look for a fuel already under increased scrutiny. “People are starting to become more wary of diesel”, said Citi commodities analyst Chris Main.

Last, but certainly not least, are the potential health impacts of these unreported NOx emissions. Analysts estimate that VW cars may have been emitting as many as 900,000 more tons of NOx annually than it was previously reporting. As Reuters notes, that amount of emissions has serious consequences for public health:

In 2012, the WHO’s specialist cancer research agency reclassified diesel engine fumes as carcinogenic, saying they can cause lung cancer and belong in the same potentially deadly category as asbestos, arsenic and mustard gas. The WHO says epidemiological studies show that symptoms of bronchitis in asthmatic children increase with long-term exposure to NOx and nitrogen dioxide (NO2). Reduced lung function is also linked to NO2 at the concentrations currently measured in cities of Europe and North America, it says.

VW isn’t the first green cheat, nor will it be the last, but it seems safe to say that the size of this scandal is unprecedented. It broadens and deepens with each passing day, and with less than a week gone since the story first broke you can be sure the fallout is far from over.

Russia Building Another Base Near Ukrainian Border

In Kiev on Monday, Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s secretary-general, declared, “NATO can rely on Ukraine, and Ukraine can rely on NATO.” Apparently, however, the Kremlin is undeterred, for even though the ceasefire still holds, Russia is building a second base along the border. Reuters reports:

The new base will house 5,000 soldiers and heavy weaponry, according to public documents and people working at the site.

It is further east than one under construction in Belgorod region reported by Reuters earlier this month but still close to the border with separatist-held parts of Ukraine’s eastern Luhansk region, where there has been heavy fighting.The bases are part of a Russian military buildup along a new line of confrontation with the West, running from the Black Sea in the south to the Baltic in the north, which carries echoes of the Cold War-era “Iron Curtain”.

By putting more infrastructure in place, Putin signals that he is playing a long game of destabilizing Ukraine. He is not looking to annex all of the country; he simply wants to keep it from becoming a successful Western state. By applying pressure along the border (and over it), Putin knows he can upset domestic Ukrainian politics at any moment, and this new base will make it easier to create headaches in Kiev.

A weak Ukraine separated from Europe is all Putin needs to keep his dreams alive. He will work very hard to make that happen—and nothing NATO has so far done seems to be stopping him.

Dept. of Ed.: Princeton Does Not Discriminate Against Asians

In a decision that highlights the growing number of stakeholders in ongoing debates about affirmative action in college admissions, the U.S. Department of Education has rejected Asian American students’ claims that Princeton University illegally discriminated against them in the application process. Inside Higher Education reports on the decision, which Princeton announced yesterday:

Rejected Asian applicants and some Asian-American groups have had high hopes that the investigation would find bias. They have pointed to the very high academic qualifications of Asian-American applicants who are rejected, even as some applicants from other backgrounds and seemingly lesser credentials have been admitted.

Those who complained to OCR, for example, pointed to research by two Princeton scholars, published in Social Science Quarterly, that looked at admissions decisions at elite colleges. The scholars found that without affirmative action, the acceptance rate for African-American candidates would be likely to fall by nearly two-thirds, from 33.7 percent to 12.2 percent, while the acceptance rate for Hispanic applicants probably would be cut in half, from 26.8 percent to 12.9 percent.

The investigators from the Department’s Office of Civil Rights did not address these or any other studies in the 20-page decision, instead focusing narrowly on whether Asians were subject to an explicit quota, and whether students were “sorted, read, or processed according to the race of the applicant.” Based on OCR’s reasoning, it appears that a university wouldn’t be punished for taking race into account so long as it can show that it “engaged in a holistic review process that considered each applicant as an individual.” In other words, universities do not run afoul of Supreme Court precedent if they penalize Asians in their admissions processes, so long as they do so in the context of a “holistic process” that takes many factors into account, rather than segregating all Asian applicants into their own pile and disadvantaging them automatically.

The fact that existing affirmative action law is such a mess might be one of the reasons that the Supreme Court announced in June that it would consider the issue again in the coming term. The case before the Court—Fisher vs. University of Texas—involves a white plaintiff. But if the justices decide to strike down or curtail affirmative action, it is probably Asian students like the plaintiffs in the Princeton case who would benefit the most. This means that affirmative action debates are likely to get even more politically tangled, since they will pit various Democratic-leaning constituencies against one another. It’s unclear how long this system can last.

The Amazing Disappearing Climate Fund

The Paris climate summit might be dead before it even begins. That’s because a fund created by the last major climate meeting (the disastrous Copenhagen conference of 2009) meant to be paid into by the developed world and distributed to at-risk countries to deal with the effects of climate change remains, well, underfunded. That fund is supposed to reach $100 billion annually by 2020, but so far just $10.2 billion has been pledged towards that goal. That’s already unimpressive, but consider too that almost half of that pledged $10.2 billion hasn’t actually been paid, and that’s almost entirely because of the United States. With Congress holding the purse strings, it’s not looking likely that the U.S. is going to pony up for what many in the developing world consider an essential condition to signing on to any Global Climate Treaty. Reuters reports:

President Barack Obama had requested $500 million in the 2016 budget for the first tranche of its $3 billion pledge into a UN-administered Green Climate Fund (GCF) that would help poorer countries make a transition to clean energy technologies and adapt to climate change.

But Congressional Republicans have vowed to oppose that spending request, and the wider dispute between the President and Republicans over the federal budget has raised the possibility that Obama will not be able to guarantee that U.S. funding before the December summit. Some U.S. officials have started to warn island states and developing countries – among the fund’s main potential beneficiaries – of the looming shortfall. […]So far, 43 percent of the $10.2 billion pledged to the climate fund has not been fulfilled, with the United States responsible for most of that shortcoming. “If there’s not a firm commitment to financing, there will be no accord, because the countries of the (global) south will reject it,” French President Francois Hollande said this month.

On the one hand, developed countries are wary of committing to a blank check to the rest of the world, to paying in to what could amount to a bottomless money pit for goodness knows how long. And on the other, poorer countries don’t want to sign on to a deal that puts green goals over economic growth without any sort of financial compensation. Both sides are entrenched in their positions, and it’s hard to see either budging enough to push a binding treaty through.

A fog of mistrust hangs over these talks already. The disparity in responsibilities for and exposure to climate change between the developed and the developing worlds is the largest problem negotiators have in front of them, and this $100 billion annual climate fund is a crucial component for papering over those differences. The fact that the rich world has not met the obligations poorer countries are demanding is bad news for anyone hoping for a breakthrough in Paris.