Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 316

Why has Pennsylvania’s solar market plummeted?

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Fred Kraybill’s small apartment building sits on a corner in Point Breeze, one of Pittsburgh’s progressive East End neighborhoods.

Passers-by can’t miss the 40 solar panels in his yard and 34 panels on his roof. Combined, they create enough electricity for his building and then some.

“When I’m at peak sunlight, I’m running completely on solar and actually producing so much that I send some back to the grid,” said Kraybill, a nurse who’s about to retire from the local VA hospital. “The meter will run backwards and credit me for that electricity, and I can take that back for free at night when I’m not producing solar. They send me their dirty coal power back.”

But if Pennsylvania is to add more solar, the market needs a big fix, lawmakers and solar experts say — and they’re hoping a current Senate bill will do the trick.

To recoup the cost of his small commercial installation, Kraybill receives a federal tax credit, and he paid for a portion of his nearly $80,000 installation with state grant money. His electricity bill went down to just a $15 minimum monthly charge.

For him though, it’s not the cost, but the principle.

“Climate change is the greatest crisis the human race has ever faced,” said Kraybill, a member of local climate action groups.

The utility company also pays him a rate for the kilowatt hours he produces — called solar renewable energy credits, or SRECs. But Kraybill said the credits he earns are “nearly worthless.”

The problem: Today, credits are only worth an average of $12 each — down from around $225 in 2008. In that same time span, Pennsylvania dropped from second in the nation for solar to 26th. To meet the state’s mandated 0.5 percent solar target by 2020, the law allows utilities to buy credits from anywhere in the 13-state electricity marketplace to which Pennsylvania belongs.

Large solar-producing states — like North Carolina — flood the market in Pennsylvania and drive down the price. “PA ratepayers are paying for these North Carolina projects,” said Maureen Mulligan, an independent consultant for the solar industry. “That seems like not the best public policy.”

A proposal in the state Senate — S.B. 404 — would close the borders and only allow utility companies to buy credits from within Pennsylvania. The bill would “put us in line with our neighboring states,” said bill sponsor Republican Sen. Mario Scavello, in a written response.

Senators in the environmental committee haven’t voted on the measure, but the provision landed in an omnibus bill that hinges on Pennsylvania’s budget. Meanwhile, the Republican-controlled legislature passed an unbalanced budget in July. Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf allowed it to become law without his signature. Now the state may be looking to borrow nearly $2 billion.

“I think that closing the border is a very important thing. We need to generate that activity in PA, make the air cleaner in PA,” Kraybill said. But he still worries that the bill will grandfather in the established contracts.“It may help but won’t solve the problems immediately,” Kraybill said.

For its part, Gov. Wolf’s office contends that it reinstated state loans for solar installations and is overseeing a “major study” by the Department of Environmental Protection to see how the state can increase solar to 10 percent by 2030.

But any increase remains in the hands of the state legislature.

Are machines driving the future?

The societal move towards automation is happening all around us. Physical maps and self-navigation are a thing of the past, computers, software and robots have taken over jobs—often frustratingly so (has anyone else screamed for a real person during automated phone calls?), and little is required now that Siri tends to our daily needs and commands. But for former rally race driver, Alex Roy, self-driving cars represent the pinnacle of this cultural shift and make clear the humanity that’s at risk when everything becomes automated.

Roy, who is now an editor of TheDrive.com, spoke with Salon’s Alli Joseph about driving innovation and it’s two-fold future: what we gain and what we inherently give up.

Here are some highlights from their conversation. Watch the video for more on autonomous driving.

On the freedom driving affords us:

Technology is only as good as our understanding of it. There were accidents using cruise control when it first came out. We sold cars that are 300, 400, 500 horse power to kids who’s parents pay for them, they crash and kill people all the time and we’re okay with it, because people want an element of freedom and there’s a cathartic element to driving that people crave, beyond all the hassles and expense. But if you release technologies that require people to be smarter, or more thoughtful than they often are, bad things will happen. So autonomy is a good thing, but semi-autonomy requires a parallel approach not a series approach.

On the future of autonomous driving for young drivers:

I think what’s going to happen is you’re going to have over time—let’s skip forward 20 years—this bifurcation, so culturally there’ll be people, there’ll be kids who grew up who never owned a car. They may have drivers licenses, but their skills are very limited. If they’re lucky, they played video games, driving games, they have some basic skills, and they will probably spend a lot of time in self-driving cars and do little to no driving. And if they have a car that requires them to take over, they will be unsafe.

But over time, the equilibrium point where people have never driven and they’re in self-driving cars will rise, that’ll be good. However, I think that there’s a deeper cultural problem, which is that there is a valuable cathartic element to driving a car, to using any machine or device which amplifies human inputs and desires towards an outcome. As we move from a world of analog hobbies, pleasures and expressions to a digital and virtual one, people need an outlet. If you remove from people’s choices their ability to decide how they go, where they go, and then you limit where you go to options within a corporate, marketed, advertised series of GPS choices, yelp reviews on your screen, and there’s no opportunity to make a mistake, and get lost, and discover something new, and there’s no opportunity to take control of the machine and actually learn a skill, then you have removed an element of what it is to be human. So there is a moral and ethical problem to be solved in reducing road deaths, but if we could reduce them without removing the catharsis derived from learning skills and commanding machines and automation, if we can’t do that. then people will have consequence-free lives. in which case nothing is learned and life has no value.

ESPN football analyst quits due to concern over concussions: “I can just no longer be in that cheerleader’s spot”

(Credit: AP/Jessica Hill)

Ed Cunningham, a college football analyst and prominent color commentator for Saturday collegiate games featured on ESPN and ABC, recently revealed that he stepped away from the broadcast booth for good over his serious concerns with the way football affects the brains of young athletes.

“In its current state, there are some real dangers: broken limbs, wear and tear,” Cunningham said in an interview with the New York Times that published on Wednesday. “But the real crux of this is that I just don’t think the game is safe for the brain. To me, it’s unacceptable.”

“I take full ownership of my alignment with the sport,” he added. “I can just no longer be in that cheerleader’s spot.”

Some football players have parted ways with the sport early, out of fear that they may be subject to the harsh realities and consequences as a result of the violent nature of the game. Many retired players were eventually diagnosed with a brain disease known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy, also known as C.T.E. A recent study by the Times concluded that 110 former NFL players were found to have the disease. There were 202 players that were studied.

The Times noted that Cunningham may be the first broadcaster to publicly leave out of safety concerns:

As a color analyst, primarily providing commentary between plays, Cunningham built a reputation among college football fans, and even coaches, for his pointed criticism toward what he thought were reckless hits and irresponsible coaching decisions that endangered the health of athletes. His strong opinions often got him denounced on fan message boards and earned him angry calls from coaches and administrators.

Cunningham explained that as the cases of brain trauma began to roll out publicly, his feelings on the game changed dramatically.

He also pointed out that many fans of the sport may not know how to react or feel about these issues.

“I know a lot of people who say: ‘I just can’t cheer for the big hits anymore. I used to go nuts, and now I’m like, I hope he gets up,'” he said. “It’s changing for all of us. I don’t currently think the game is safe for the brain. And, oh, by the way, I’ve had teammates who have killed themselves. Dave Duerson put a shotgun to his chest so we could study his brain.”

Football has been a major component of Cunningham’s life. After winning a national championship in 1991, he played professional football as an offensive lineman in the NFL for five seasons. Afterwards, he took on a new role in the booth as a commentator.

Mike Patrick, Cunningham’s broadcast partner for the better part of the last decade expressed nothing but support for his departing partner.

“I could hardly disagree with anything he said,” Patrick told the Times. “The sport is at a crossroads. I love football — college football, pro football, any kind of football. It’s a wonderful sport. But now that I realize what it can do to people, that it can turn 40-, 50-year-old men into walking vegetables, how do you stay silent? Ed was in the vanguard of this. I give him all the credit in the world. And I’m going to be outspoken on it, in part because he led me to that drinking hole.”

Donald Trump’s pivot to tax reform is quickly panned by his biggest fans: “Jeb! had better ideas”

(Credit: Reuters/Jonathan Ernst/AP/Carolyn Kaster/Photo montage by Salon)

Tropical storm Harvey was still destroying the lives of tens of thousands in southeast Texas and making its way towards Louisiana, but Donald Trump was eager to pivot to tax reform on Wednesday. Delivering another campaign-style speech in Missouri, Trump painted his planned tax overhaul as a populist economic solution that will help low-income and middle-income Americans. Left absent from the speech, however, was any actual substance beyond the promises of economic growth.

“It’s time to give the American workers the pay raise that they have been looking for for many, many years,” Trump said on Wednesday. “We’re here today to launch our plans to bring back Main Street by reducing the crumbling burden on our companies and on our workers,” he added, according to CNN. “The foundation of our job creation agenda is to fundamentally reform our tax code for the first time in more than 30 years.”

Trump’s speech went over so poorly that even far-right provocateur Ann Coulter wasn’t sold on it.

“This is for Wall Street,” the far-right provocateur complained amongst a series of furious tweets regarding Trump’s tax reform speech.

Oh stop pretending this is about letting "families" keep more of their money. HALF OF AMERICANS DON'T PAY TAXES! This is for Wall Street.

— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) August 30, 2017

Coulter couldn’t believe what she was hearing and continued to blast the president for his hollow remarks on tax reform.

“WTF! Why is @realDonaldTrump back to tax cuts? His election was NOT about tax cuts. Has he been talking to @SpeakerRyan again?” Coulter wrote, referring to House Speaker Paul Ryan.

WTF! Why is @realDonaldTrump back to tax cuts? His election was NOT about tax cuts. Has he been talking to @SpeakerRyan again?

— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) August 30, 2017

“This is the worst, most tone-deaf speech @realDonaldTrump has ever given. Jeb! had better ideas,” she wrote in another tweet.

This is the worst, most tone-deaf speech @realDonaldTrump has ever given. Jeb! had better ideas.

— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) August 30, 2017

According to Coulter, tax reform should be an issue Trump focuses on in a second term. He should be focused on his so-called America first policies now, she argued.

Tax cuts are a 2d term issue. 1st term: BUILD THE WALL, End DACA, Deport Illegals, No Refugees, No Muslims, Immigrn Moratorium. SAVE USA!

— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) August 30, 2017

“Cutting taxes doesn’t do a damn thing for wages if you allow businesses to keep bringing in cheap foreign labor!” Coulter continued in her expletive-laced rant that lasted over a dozen tweets.

Cutting taxes doesn't do a damn thing for wages if you allow businesses to keep bringing in cheap foreign labor!

— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) August 30, 2017

“Bush cut taxes! Did it create millions of jobs? Nope. The rich pocketed their tax cut & sent jobs abroad, hired guest workers. F– them,” she added.

Bush cut taxes! Did it create millions of jobs? Nope. The rich pocketed their tax cut & sent jobs abroad, hired guest workers. F– them.

— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) August 30, 2017

The timing of Trump’s speech, mixed with its hollow ambitions, proves that Trump didn’t think this through. The New York Times elaborated:

Wrapping his message in the populist rhetoric that powered his presidential campaign, Mr. Trump called for quick action from Congress on the ambitious tax plan he has promised for months, but he offered few specifics beyond a goal of a 15 percent corporate tax rate, down from 35 percent.

[…]

Still, Mr. Trump made plain the broad outlines of his vision for overhauling the tax code: a combination of deep cuts for businesses large and small as well as investors and the wealthiest, along with as reductions for middle-class people, only partially paid for by eliminating some deductions and boosting economic growth.

 

How to remove Trump

(Credit: AP/Shutterstock/Salon)

With Republicans controlling both houses of Congress, it’s unlikely Trump will be impeached or thrown out of office on grounds of mental impairment. At least any time soon.

Yet there’s another way Trump can be effectively removed. He can be made irrelevant.

It’s already starting to happen. The howling manchild who occupies the Oval Office is being cut off and contained.

Trump no longer has a working majority in the Senate because several Senate Republicans have decided the hell with him.

Three Republican Senators voted against repealing the Affordable Care Act, dooming his effort. Almost all voted to restrict his authority over Russian sanctions.

They’re also pushing forward with their own inquiry into Trump’s Russian connections. Republican senators Thom Tillis and Lindsay Graham have even joined Democrats in introducing legislation to protect Special Counsel Robert Mueller from being fired.

Republicans in the House won’t fund his wall. Many refuse to increase the national debt in order to pay for his promised tax cuts.

After Charlottesville, many more are willing to criticize him publicly. Last week Tennessee’s Bob Corker, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, even questioned Trump’s  “stability” and “competence,” saying Trump hasn’t shown he understands “the character of this nation” and that without that understanding, “Our nation is going to go through great peril.”

The Washington Post’s Dan Balz reports that GOP leaders are “personally wrestling with the trade-offs of making a cleaner separation with the president.”

It helps that Republican patrons in big business are deserting Trump in droves. Last week, CEOs bolted his advisory councils. Many issued sharp rebukes of Trump.

These are the people who raise big bucks for the GOP. Their dumping Trump makes it easier for elected Republicans to do so, too.

Even James Murdoch, the 21st Century Fox CEO whose media outlets include Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, and The New York Post — among the loudest mouthpieces for Trump — is ditching him.

Last Thursday Murdoch wrote “what we watched last week in Charlottesville and the reaction to it by the president of the United States concern all of us as Americans and free people,” and pledged $1 million to the Anti-Defamation League.

This doesn’t mean Fox News or the Wall Street Jounal will call for Trump’s ouster. It does mean their commentators and editorial writers now have clear license to criticize him.

Hey, America as a whole is abandoning him. Trump’s approval hit an all-time low of 34 percent last week.

Even parts of his base are dropping him. A new News/Marist poll shows his approvals have fallen below 40 percent in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — three states that were key to his election, which he won by a whisker.

Inside the administration, there are moves to contain and isolate the manchild.

On foreign policy, the Axis of Adults — Chief of staff General John Kelly, national security advisor General H.R. McMaster, and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson — are asserting tighter control, especially after Trump’s tweetstorm over North Korea.

Reportedly, daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner are stepping up attempts to constrain him as well.

“You have no idea how much crazy stuff we kill,” another White House aide told Axios’s Mike Allen.

Plus, Stephen Bannon is gone.

All this means that, although Trump will still hold the title of President, he’s on the way to being effectively removed from the presidency. Neutered. Defanged.

We’re not out of danger. Trump will continue to rant and fume. He’ll insult. He’ll stoke racial tensions. He could still start a nuclear war.

But, hopefully, he won’t be able to exercise much presidential power from here on. He’s being ostracized like a obnoxious adolescent who’s been grounded.

When the media stop reporting his tweets, his isolation and irrelevance will be complete.

Dying at home in an opioid crisis: Hospices grapple with stolen meds

(Credit: AP Photo/Chris Post)

Nothing seemed to help the patient — and hospice staff didn’t know why.

They sent home more painkillers for weeks. But the elderly woman, who had severe dementia and incurable breast cancer, kept calling out in pain.

The answer came when the woman’s daughter, who was taking care of her at home, showed up in the emergency room with a life-threatening overdose of morphine and oxycodone. It turned out she was high on her mother’s medications, stolen from the hospice-issued stash.

Dr. Leslie Blackhall handled that case and two others at the University of Virginia’s palliative care clinic, and uncovered a wider problem: As more people die at home on hospice, some of the powerful, addictive drugs they are prescribed are ending up in the wrong hands.

Hospices have largely been exempt from the national crackdown on opioid prescriptions because dying people may need high doses of opioids. But as the nation’s opioid epidemic continues, some experts say hospices aren’t doing enough to identify families and staff who might be stealing pills. And now, amid urgent cries for action over rising overdose deaths, several states have passed laws giving hospice staff the power to destroy leftover pills after patients die.

Blackhall first sounded the alarm about drug diversion in 2013, when she found that most Virginia hospices she surveyed didn’t have mandatory training and policies on the misuse and theft of drugs. Her study spurred the Virginia Association for Hospices and Palliative Care to create new guidelines, and prompted national discussion.

Most hospice patients receive care in the place they call home. These settings can be hard to monitor, but a Kaiser Health News review of government inspection records sheds light on what can go wrong. According to these reports:

In Mobile, Ala., a hospice nurse found a man at home in tears, holding his abdomen, complaining of pain at the top of a 10-point scale. The patient was dying of cancer, and his neighbors were stealing his opioid painkillers, day after day.
In Monroe, Mich., parents kept “losing” medications for a child dying at home of brain cancer, including a bottle of the painkiller methadone.
In Clinton, Mo., a woman at home on hospice began vomiting from anxiety from a tense family conflict: Her son had to physically fight off her daughter, who was stealing her medications. Her son implored the hospice to move his mom to a nursing home to escape the situation.

In other cases, paid caregivers or hospice workers, who work largely unsupervised in the home, steal patients’ pills. In June, a former hospice nurse in Albuquerque, N.M., pleaded guilty to diverting oxycodone pills first by recommending prescriptions for hospice patients who didn’t need them and then intercepting the packages with the intention of selling the drugs herself.

Hospice, available to patients who are expected to die within six months, is seeing a dramatic rise in enrollment as more patients choose to focus on comfort, instead of a cure, at the end of life.

The fast-growing industry serves more than 1.6 million people a year. Most of hospice care is covered by Medicare, which pays for hospices to send nurses, aides, social workers and chaplains, as well as hospital beds, oxygen machines and medications to the home.

There’s no national data on how frequently these medications go missing. But “problems related to abuse of, diversion of or addiction to prescription medications are very common in the hospice population, as they are in other populations,” said Dr. Joe Rotella, chief medical officer of the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine, a professional association for hospice workers.

“It’s an everyday problem that hospice teams address,” Rotella said. In many cases, opioid painkillers or other controlled substances are the best treatment for these patients, he said. Hospice patients, about half of whom sign up within two weeks of death, often face significant pain, shortness of breath, broken bones, or aching joints from lying in bed, he said. “These are the sickest of the sick.”

Earlier this year in Missouri, government investigators installed a hidden camera in a 95-year-old hospice patient’s kitchen to investigate suspected theft. A personal care aide was charged with stealing the patient’s hydrocodone pills, opiate painkillers, and replacing them with acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol. Hospice nurses in Louisiana and Massachusetts also have been charged in recent years with stealing medication from patients’ homes.

But many suspected thefts don’t get caught on hidden cameras, or even reported.

In Oxnard, Calif., in 2015, a person claiming to be a hospice employee entered the homes of five patients and tried to steal their morphine, succeeding twice. The state cited the hospice for failing to report the incidents.

In Norwich, Vt., in 2013, a family looked for morphine to ease a dying patient’s shortness of breath. But the bottle was missing from the hospice-issued comfort care kit. The family suspected that an aide, who no longer worked in the home, had stolen the drug, but they had no proof. State inspectors cited the hospice, Bayada Home Health Care, for failing to investigate.

David Totaro, spokesman for Bayada Home Health Care, told KHN that situations like that are “very rare” at the hospice, which takes precautions, such as limiting medication supply, to prevent misuse.

There is no publicly available national data on the volume of opioids hospices prescribe.  But OnePoint Patient Care, a national hospice-focused pharmacy, estimates that 25 to 30 percent of the medications it delivers to hospice patients are controlled substances, according to Erik Jung, a vice president of pharmacy operations.

Jung said company drivers deliver medications in unmarked cars to prevent attempted robberies, which have happened on occasion.

Two recent studies suggest hospice doctors and social workers across the country are not prepared to screen patients and families for drug misuse, nor to address the theft of pain medication.

For family members struggling with addiction, bottles of pills lying around the house can be hard to resist. Sarah B., a 43-year-old construction worker in Vancouver, Wash., said when her father entered hospice care at his home in Oregon, she was addicted to opioids, stemming from a hydrocodone prescription for sciatica.

After he died, hundreds of pills were left on his bedside table. She took them all, enough Norco, oxycodone and morphine to last a month.

“I have some shame about it,” said Sarah, who declined to give her full last name because of the nature of her actions.

Sarah, who was one of her father’s primary caretakers, said the hospice “didn’t talk about addiction or ask if any one of us were addicts or any of that.”

“No one gave us instructions on how to dispose of all the medications that were left,” she added.

Medicare requires hospices to establish a safe way to administer drugs to each patient — by identifying a reliable caregiver, staff member or volunteer to manage the drugs or, if need be, relocating the patient. And it requires hospices to set policies, and talk to families, about how to safely manage and dispose of medications.

But there’s little oversight: Unlike nursing homes, hospices may go years without inspection, and even when they are cited for noncompliance, they rarely face any consequence except coming up with a plan to improve.

And in most states, hospices have little control over the pills after a patient dies. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration encourages hospice staff to help families destroy leftover medications, but forbids staff from destroying the meds themselves unless allowed by state law. Leftover pills belong to the family, which has no legal obligation to destroy them or give them up.

However, some states are taking action. In the past three years, Ohio, Delaware, New Jersey and South Carolina have passed laws giving hospice staff authority to destroy unused drugs after patients die. Similar bills moved forward in Illinois, Wisconsin and Georgia this year.

In Massachusetts, one of the states hit hardest by drug overdose deaths, VNA Care Hospice and Palliative Care advises families to empty leftover pills into kitty litter or coffee grounds before disposal — a common practice to prevent reuse, since flushing them down the toilet is now considered environmentally hazardous.

But families “don’t have to comply,” said VNA Care medical director Dr. Joel Bauman. “Our experience is maybe only half do. We don’t know what happens to these medications. And we have no right, really, to further inquire.”

Hospices across the country told KHN they take precautions, including counting pills when nurses visit the homes, limiting the volume of each drug delivery, giving families locked boxes for medication and giving patients random urine tests. They also said they prescribe medications that are harder to misuse, such as methadone.

Some, like VNA Care, have also started screening families of patients for history of drug addiction, and writing up agreements with families outlining the consequences if drugs go missing.

But “there’s so much moral distress” about punishing dying patients for family members’ actions, said Bauman. He said he tries to avoid doing that: “Why should we fire a patient for having inappropriate pill counts, when it may not be their fault in the first place?”

Though Blackhall helped spark a national discussion about hospice drug diversion, she said she’s also worried about restricting access to painkillers. Hospices must strike a balance, she said.

“It’s important to treat the horrible suffering that people have from cancer,” said Blackhall. But substance abuse is another form of suffering which is “horrible for anyone in the family or community that might end up getting those medications.”

Why is climate change’s 2 degrees Celsius of warming limit so important?

If you read or listen to almost any article about climate change, it’s likely the story refers in some way to the “2 degrees Celsius limit.” The story often mentions greatly increased risks if the climate exceeds 2°C and even “catastrophic” impacts to our world if we warm more than the target.

Recently a series of scientific papers have come out and stated that we have a 5 percent chance of limiting warming to 2°C, and only one chance in a hundred of keeping man-made global warming to 1.5°C, the aspirational goal of the 2015 Paris United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change conference. Additionally, recent research shows that we may have already locked in 1.5°C of warming even if we magically reduced our carbon footprint to zero today.

And there’s an additional wrinkle: What is the correct baseline we should use? The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) frequently references temperature increases relative to the second half of the 19th century, but the Paris Agreement states the temperature increases should be measured from “preindustrial” levels, or before 1850. Scientists have shown such a baseline effectively pushes us another 0.2°C closer to the upper limits.

That’s a lot of numbers and data – so much that it could make even the most climate-literate head spin. How did the climate, and climate policy community, come to agree that 2°C is the safe limit? What does it mean? And if we can’t meet that target, should we even try and limit climate change?

Fear of ‘tipping points’

The academic literature, popular press and blog sites have all traced out the history of the 2°C limit. Its origin stems not from the climate science community, but from a Yale economist, William Nordhaus.

In his 1975 paper “Can We Control Carbon Dioxide?,” Nordhaus, “thinks out loud” as to what a reasonable limit on CO2 might be. He believed it would be reasonable to keep climatic variations within the “normal range of climatic variation.” He also asserted that science alone cannot set a limit; importantly, it must account for both society’s values and available technologies. He concluded that a reasonable upper limit would be the temperature increase one would observe from a doubling of preindustrial CO2 levels, which he believed equated to a temperature increase of about 2°C.

Nordaus himself stressed how “deeply unsatisfactory” this thought process was. It’s ironic that a back-of-the-envelope, rough guess ultimately became a cornerstone of international climate policy.

The climate science community subsequently attempted to quantify the impacts and recommend limits to climate change, as seen in the 1990 report issued by the Stockholm Environmental Institute. This report argued that limiting climate change to 1°C would be the safest option but recognized even then that 1°C was probably unrealistic, so 2°C would be the next best limit.

During the late 1990s and early 21st century, there was increasing concern that the climate system might encounter catastrophic and nonlinear changes, popularized by Malcolm Gladwell’s “Tipping Points” book. For example, continued carbon emissions could lead to a shutdown of the large ocean circulation systems or massive permafrost melting.

This fear of abrupt climate change also drove the political acceptance of a defined temperature limit. The 2°C limit moved into the policy and political world when it was adopted by the European Union’s Council of Ministers in 1996, the G8 in 2008 and the UN in 2010. In 2015 in Paris, negotiators adopted 2°C as the upper limit, with a desire to limit warming to 1.5°C.

This short history makes it clear that the goal evolved from the qualitative but reasonable desire to keep changes to the climate within certain bounds: namely, within what the world had experienced in the relatively recent geological past to avoid catastrophically disrupting both human civilization and natural ecosystems.

Climate scientists subsequently began supporting the idea of a limit of 1°C or 2°C starting over three decades ago. They showed the likely risks increase with temperatures over 1°C, and those risks grow substantially with additional warming.

And if we miss the target?

Perhaps the most powerful aspect about the 2°C threshold is not its scientific veracity, but its simplicity as an organizing principle.

The climate system is vast and has more dynamics, parameters and variations in space and time than is possible to quickly and simply convey. What the 2°C threshold lacks in nuance and depth, it more than makes up as a goal that is understandable, measurable and may still be achievable, although our actions will need to change quickly. Goals and goal-setting are very powerful instruments in effecting change.

While the 2°C threshold is a blunt instrument that has many faults, similar to attempting to judge a quarterback’s value to his team solely by his rating, its ability to rally 195 countries to sign an agreement should not be discounted.

Ultimately, what should we do if we cannot make the 1.5°C or 2°C limit? The most current IPCC report shows the risks, parsed by continent, of a 2°C world, and how they are part of a continuum of risk extending from today’s climate to a 4°C.

Most of these risks are assessed by the IPCC to increase in steady fashion. That is, for most aspects of climate impacts we do not “fall off a cliff” at 2°C, although considerable damage to coral reefs and even agriculture may increase significantly around this threshold.

Like any goal, the 2°C limit should be ambitious but achievable. However, if it is not met, we should do everything we can to meet a 2¼°C or 2.5°C goal.

These goals can be compared to the speed limits for trucks we see on a mountain descent. The speed limit (say 30 mph) will allow trucks of any type to descend with a safety margin to spare. We know that coming down the hill at 70 mph likely results in a crash at the bottom.

In between those two numbers? The risk increases – and that’s where we are with climate change. If we can’t come down the hill at 30 mph, let’s try for 35 or 40 mph. Because we know that at 70 mph – or business as usual – we will have a very bad outcome, and nobody wants that.

David Titley, Professor of Practice in Meteorology, Professor of International Affairs & Director Center for Solutions to Weather and Climate Risk, Pennsylvania State University

Do kids have a fundamental sense of fairness?

(Credit: Getty/martinedoucet)

Children have a reputation for selfishness. Picture a traditional morning-after-Halloween scene: A child is hunched over a huge mound of collected candy while their parent stands by begging them to share their spoils with a younger, less fortunate sibling. The frustrated parent in this scene embodies the common notion that the only way to get children to be fair is to forcibly extract it out of them, like blood from a stone.

After studying children’s fairness behavior for nearly a decade we argue that this reputation is, well, unfair.

We travel to public spaces in different cities and ask children to play a simple game: Two children who do not know each other are paired up and given an unfair distribution of candy. One child gets four candies, the other gets one candy. Here’s where things get interesting. One of the two children — the decider — can accept or reject the allocation. If the decider accepts, both children get their candy. If the decider rejects, both children get nothing. Imagine that, like the Halloween scenario, the child in power gets four and their partner gets one. What will they do?

If you are like most parents watching their children play our game, you probably think the decider will happily accept the four, creating a stark inequality with the peer. Children only focus on getting more for themselves, right? To the surprise and delight of many an unsuspecting parent, children — at least older children — frequently reject this unfair advantage. They are willing to sacrifice their own rewards to prevent someone else from getting the short end of the stick. Getting nothing seems better than getting more than a peer, even a child whom they have just met.

This act of self-sacrifice in the name of fairness is indeed surprising. But more than that, it flies in the face of our intuitions about where fairness comes from in our species. There is a commonly held belief that humans are fundamentally selfish agents and fairness is a construct designed to help us override our selfish instincts. Not only this, but the idea really seems to be that fairness doesn’t come naturally, which is why we need institutions like the justice system to make sure that fairness prevails. Psychologists and economists have begun to gradually chip away at this notion, showing that people are actually pretty fair even when they can get away with selfishness.

But this still doesn’t tell us where fairness comes from. Is fairness something that must be learned via extensive experience? Through explicit teaching from adults? To answer this question, we need to look to children. Indeed, a suite of recent studies with children suggests fairness is not something that takes a long time to develop or that must be enforced through formal principles and institutions of justice. Rather, fairness is an integral part of our developing understanding of how to social world operates and, perhaps more surprisingly, it guides children’s behavior from very early on.

Indeed, children apply a strong sense of fairness not only to themselves — they also stand up for others. We invited children to play a different game in which they learn about a decider who selfishly wanted to keep all candies for themselves, refusing to share with another peer. Our child participant then faces a choice: Do they stand by and do nothing or do they get involved and prevent the injustice? To make it especially difficult, children must pay a cost for intervening — they have to give up some of their own candy to prevent unfairness. Nevertheless, children regularly intervene, choosing to pay so they can prevent the selfish child from getting away with unfair behavior. Together, these findings show children hold themselves and others to high standards of fairness.

We are now sitting on a mountain of evidence from our studies as well as those conducted by others that suggests fair behavior has deep roots in development. Infants as young as 12 months expect resources to be divided equally between two characters in a scene. By preschool, children will protest getting less than peers, even paying to prevent the peer from getting more. As children get older, they are willing to punish those who have been unfair both when they are the victims of unfairness as well as when they witness someone else being treated unfairly. Older still, children show what we described above: They would rather receive nothing than receive more than a peer.

More recently, many developmental psychologists, including our team, have begun studying these behaviors across different cultures, asking whether children everywhere show a similar developmental pattern. What we have found is that certain aspects of fairness appear to be universal. For example, children everywhere seem to dislike getting less than a peer. Other forms of fairness, however, appear to be more culturally variable, perhaps shaped by local customs.

Of course, a mature sense of fairness consists of more than just reactions to inequality and, indeed, we see more sophisticated concepts of fairness in children as well. One bedrock of fairness is that you should share the spoils of your joint labor—equal work, equal pay. Children as young as three years are sensitive to this: When they have to work toward getting a toy or a treat, they are more likely to share the spoils equally with a peer co-worker than when each one worked on the task by themselves. They even track how hard each person worked and reward the one who worked more accordingly.

The bottom line here is that children, even young ones, show remarkable sophistication not just in their understanding of and conformity to norms of fairness but also in their ability to enforce fairness in others and to flexibly tune fairness to different situations. These exciting developments dovetail beautifully with work showing that adults are often fair even when they could be selfish, and suggest we need to overhaul the notion that humans are fundamentally out for themselves at the expense of others. Instead, we should adopt the idea that fairness is a key part of our developing minds from as early as they can be studied.

So, sure, children are selfish sometimes. We should recognize, however, that just like in adults, alongside their impetus for self-maximization runs a deep and maturing concern for fairness — not just for themselves but for others as well.

Exploring the shadows of America’s security state

(Credit: AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File)

In the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks, Washington pursued its elusive enemies across the landscapes of Asia and Africa, thanks in part to a massive expansion of its intelligence infrastructure, particularly of the emerging technologies for digital surveillance, agile drones, and biometric identification. In 2010, almost a decade into this secret war with its voracious appetite for information, the Washington Post reported that the national security state had swelled into a “fourth branch” of the federal government — with 854,000 vetted officials, 263 security organizations, and over 3,000 intelligence units, issuing 50,000 special reports every year.

Though stunning, these statistics only skimmed the visible surface of what had become history’s largest and most lethal clandestine apparatus. According to classified documents that Edward Snowden leaked in 2013, the nation’s 16 intelligence agencies alone had 107,035 employees and a combined “black budget” of $52.6 billion, the equivalent of 10% percent of the vast defense budget.

By sweeping the skies and probing the worldwide web’s undersea cables, the National Security Agency (NSA) could surgically penetrate the confidential communications of just about any leader on the planet, while simultaneously sweeping up billions of ordinary messages. For its classified missions, the CIA had access to the Pentagon’s Special Operations Command, with 69,000 elite troops (Rangers, SEALs, Air Commandos) and their agile arsenal. In addition to this formidable paramilitary capacity, the CIA operated 30 Predator and Reaper drones responsible for more than 3,000 deaths in Pakistan and Yemen.

While Americans practiced a collective form of duck and cover as the Department of Homeland Security’s colored alerts pulsed nervously from yellow to red, few paused to ask the hard question: Was all this security really directed solely at enemies beyond our borders? After half a century of domestic security abuses — from the “red scare” of the 1920s through the FBI’s illegal harassment of antiwar protesters in the 1960s and 1970s — could we really be confident that there wasn’t a hidden cost to all these secret measures right here at home? Maybe, just maybe, all this security wasn’t really so benign when it came to us.

From my own personal experience over the past half-century, and my family’s history over three generations, I’ve found out in the most personal way possible that there’s a real cost to entrusting our civil liberties to the discretion of secret agencies. Let me share just a few of my own “war” stories to explain how I’ve been forced to keep learning and relearning this uncomfortable lesson the hard way.

On the heroin trail

After finishing college in the late 1960s, I decided to pursue a Ph.D. in Japanese history and was pleasantly surprised when Yale Graduate School admitted me with a full fellowship. But the Ivy League in those days was no ivory tower. During my first year at Yale, the Justice Department indicted Black Panther leader Bobby Seale for a local murder and the May Day protests that filled the New Haven green also shut the campus for a week. Almost simultaneously, President Nixon ordered the invasion of Cambodia and student protests closed hundreds of campuses across America for the rest of the semester.

In the midst of all this tumult, the focus of my studies shifted from Japan to Southeast Asia, and from the past to the war in Vietnam. Yes, that war. So what did I do about the draft? During my first semester at Yale, on December 1, 1969, to be precise, the Selective Service cut up the calendar for a lottery. The first 100 birthdays picked were certain to be drafted, but any dates above 200 were likely exempt. My birthday, June 8th, was the very last date drawn, not number 365 but 366 (don’t forget leap year) — the only lottery I have ever won, except for a Sunbeam electric frying pan in a high school raffle. Through a convoluted moral calculus typical of the 1960s, I decided that my draft exemption, although acquired by sheer luck, demanded that I devote myself, above all else, to thinking about, writing about, and working to end the Vietnam War.

During those campus protests over Cambodia in the spring of 1970, our small group of graduate students in Southeast Asian history at Yale realized that the U.S. strategic predicament in Indochina would soon require an invasion of Laos to cut the flow of enemy supplies into South Vietnam. So, while protests over Cambodia swept campuses nationwide, we were huddled inside the library, preparing for the next invasion by editing a book of essays on Laos for the publisher Harper & Row. A few months after that book appeared, one of the company’s junior editors, Elizabeth Jakab, intrigued by an account we had included about that country’s opium crop, telephoned from New York to ask if I could research and write a “quickie” paperback about the history behind the heroin epidemic then infecting the U.S. Army in Vietnam.

I promptly started the research at my student carrel in the Gothic tower that is Yale’s Sterling Library, tracking old colonial reports about the Southeast Asian opium trade that ended suddenly in the 1950s, just as the story got interesting. So, quite tentatively at first, I stepped outside the library to do a few interviews and soon found myself following an investigative trail that circled the globe. First, I traveled across America for meetings with retired CIA operatives. Then I crossed the Pacific to Hong Kong to study drug syndicates, courtesy of that colony’s police drug squad. Next, I went south to Saigon, then the capital of South Vietnam, to investigate the heroin traffic that was targeting the GIs, and on into the mountains of Laos to observe CIA alliances with opium warlords and the hill-tribe militias that grew the opium poppy. Finally, I flew from Singapore to Paris for interviews with retired French intelligence officers about their opium trafficking during the first Indochina War of the 1950s.

The drug traffic that supplied heroin for the U.S. troops fighting in South Vietnam was not, I discovered, exclusively the work of criminals. Once the opium left tribal poppy fields in Laos, the traffic required official complicity at every level. The helicopters of Air America, the airline the CIA then ran, carried raw opium out of the villages of its hill-tribe allies. The commander of the Royal Lao Army, a close American collaborator, operated the world’s largest heroin lab and was so oblivious to the implications of the traffic that he opened his opium ledgers for my inspection. Several of Saigon’s top generals were complicit in the drug’s distribution to U.S. soldiers. By 1971, this web of collusion ensured that heroin, according to a later White House survey of a thousand veterans, would be “commonly used” by 34% of American troops in South Vietnam.

None of this had been covered in my college history seminars. I had no models for researching an uncharted netherworld of crime and covert operations. After stepping off the plane in Saigon, body slammed by the tropical heat, I found myself in a sprawling foreign city of four million, lost in a swarm of snarling motorcycles and a maze of nameless streets, without contacts or a clue about how to probe these secrets. Every day on the heroin trail confronted me with new challenges — where to look, what to look for, and, above all, how to ask hard questions.

Reading all that history had, however, taught me something I didn’t know I knew. Instead of confronting my sources with questions about sensitive current events, I started with the French colonial past when the opium trade was still legal, gradually uncovering the underlying, unchanging logistics of drug production. As I followed this historical trail into the present, when the traffic became illegal and dangerously controversial, I began to use pieces from this past to assemble the present puzzle, until the names of contemporary dealers fell into place. In short, I had crafted a historical method that would prove, over the next 40 years of my career, surprisingly useful in analyzing a diverse array of foreign policy controversies — CIA alliances with drug lords, the agency’s propagation of psychological torture, and our spreading state surveillance.

The CIA makes its entrance in my life

Those months on the road, meeting gangsters and warlords in isolated places, offered only one bit of real danger. While hiking in the mountains of Laos, interviewing Hmong farmers about their opium shipments on CIA helicopters, I was descending a steep slope when a burst of bullets ripped the ground at my feet. I had walked into an ambush by agency mercenaries.

While the five Hmong militia escorts whom the local village headman had prudently provided laid down a covering fire, my Australian photographer John Everingham and I flattened ourselves in the elephant grass and crawled through the mud to safety. Without those armed escorts, my research would have been at an end and so would I. After that ambush failed, a CIA paramilitary officer summoned me to a mountaintop meeting where he threatened to murder my Lao interpreter unless I ended my research. After winning assurances from the U.S. embassy that my interpreter would not be harmed, I decided to ignore that warning and keep going.

Six months and 30,000 miles later, I returned to New Haven. My investigation of CIA alliances with drug lords had taught me more than I could have imagined about the covert aspects of U.S. global power. Settling into my attic apartment for an academic year of writing, I was confident that I knew more than enough for a book on this unconventional topic. But my education, it turned out, was just beginning.

Within weeks, a massive, middle-aged guy in a suit interrupted my scholarly isolation.  He appeared at my front door and identified himself as Tom Tripodi, senior agent for the Bureau of Narcotics, which later became the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). His agency, he confessed during a second visit, was worried about my writing and he had been sent to investigate. He needed something to tell his superiors. Tom was a guy you could trust. So I showed him a few draft pages of my book. He disappeared into the living room for a while and came back saying, “Pretty good stuff. You got your ducks in a row.” But there were some things, he added, that weren’t quite right, some things he could help me fix.

Tom was my first reader. Later, I would hand him whole chapters and he would sit in a rocking chair, shirt sleeves rolled up, revolver in his shoulder holster, sipping coffee, scribbling corrections in the margins, and telling fabulous stories — like the time Jersey Mafia boss “Bayonne Joe” Zicarelli tried to buy a thousand rifles from a local gun store to overthrow Fidel Castro. Or when some CIA covert warrior came home for a vacation and had to be escorted everywhere so he didn’t kill somebody in a supermarket aisle.

Best of all, there was the one about how the Bureau of Narcotics caught French intelligence protecting the Corsican syndicates smuggling heroin into New York City. Some of his stories, usually unacknowledged, would appear in my book, “The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia“. These conversations with an undercover operative, who had trained Cuban exiles for the CIA in Florida and later investigated Mafia heroin syndicates for the DEA in Sicily, were akin to an advanced seminar, a master class in covert operations.

In the summer of 1972, with the book at press, I went to Washington to testify before Congress. As I was making the rounds of congressional offices on Capitol Hill, my editor rang unexpectedly and summoned me to New York for a meeting with the president and vice president of Harper & Row, my book’s publisher. Ushered into a plush suite of offices overlooking the spires of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, I listened to those executives tell me that Cord Meyer, Jr., the CIA’s deputy director for covert operations, had called on their company’s president emeritus, Cass Canfield, Sr. The visit was no accident, for Canfield, according to an authoritative history, “enjoyed prolific links to the world of intelligence, both as a former psychological warfare officer and as a close personal friend of Allen Dulles,” the ex-head of the CIA. Meyer denounced my book as a threat to national security. He asked Canfield, also an old friend, to quietly suppress it.

I was in serious trouble. Not only was Meyer a senior CIA official but he also had impeccable social connections and covert assets in every corner of American intellectual life. After graduating from Yale in 1942, he served with the marines in the Pacific, writing eloquent war dispatches published in the Atlantic Monthly. He later worked with the U.S. delegation drafting the U.N. charter. Personally recruited by spymaster Allen Dulles, Meyer joined the CIA in 1951 and was soon running its International Organizations Division, which, in the words of that same history, “constituted the greatest single concentration of covert political and propaganda activities of the by now octopus-like CIA,” including “Operation Mockingbird” that planted disinformation in major U.S. newspapers meant to aid agency operations. Informed sources told me that the CIA still had assets inside every major New York publisher and it already had every page of my manuscript.

As the child of a wealthy New York family, Cord Meyer moved in elite social circles, meeting and marrying Mary Pinchot, the niece of Gifford Pinchot, founder of the U.S. Forestry Service and a former governor of Pennsylvania. Pinchot was a breathtaking beauty who later became President Kennedy’s mistress, making dozens of secret visits to the White House. When she was found shot dead along the banks of a canal in Washington in 1964, the head of CIA counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton, another Yale alumnus, broke into her home in an unsuccessful attempt to secure her diary. Mary’s sister Toni and her husband, Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, later found the diary and gave it to Angleton for destruction by the agency. To this day, her unsolved murder remains a subject of mystery and controversy.

Cord Meyer was also in the Social Register of New York’s fine families along with my publisher, Cass Canfield, which added a dash of social cachet to the pressure to suppress my book. By the time he walked into Harper & Row’s office in that summer of 1972, two decades of CIA service had changedMeyer (according to that same authoritative history) from a liberal idealist into “a relentless, implacable advocate for his own ideas,” driven by “a paranoiac distrust of everyone who didn’t agree with him” and a manner that was “histrionic and even bellicose.” An unpublished 26-year-old graduate student versus the master of CIA media manipulation. It was hardly a fair fight. I began to fear my book would never appear.

To his credit, Canfield refused Meyer’s request to suppress the book. But he did allow the agency a chance to review the manuscript prior to publication. Instead of waiting quietly for the CIA’s critique, I contacted Seymour Hersh, then an investigative reporter for the New York Times. The same day the CIA courier arrived from Langley to collect my manuscript, Hersh swept through Harper & Row’s offices like a tropical storm, pelting hapless executives with incessant, unsettling questions. The next day, his exposé of the CIA’s attempt at censorship appeared on the paper’s front page. Other national media organizations followed his lead. Faced with a barrage of negative coverage, the CIA gave Harper & Row a critique full of unconvincing denials. The book was published unaltered.

My life as an open book for the agency

I had learned another important lesson: the Constitution’s protection of press freedom could check even the world’s most powerful espionage agency. Cord Meyer reportedly learned the same lesson. According to his obituary in the Washington Post, “It was assumed that Mr. Meyer would eventually advance” to head CIA covert operations, “but the public disclosure about the book deal . . . apparently dampened his prospects.” He was instead exiled to London and eased into early retirement.

Meyer and his colleagues were not, however, used to losing. Defeated in the public arena, the CIA retreated to the shadows and retaliated by tugging at every thread in the threadbare life of a graduate student. Over the next few months, federal officials from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare turned up at Yale to investigate my graduate fellowship. The Internal Revenue Service audited my poverty-level income. The FBI tapped my New Haven telephone (something I learned years later from a class-action lawsuit).

In August 1972, at the height of the controversy over the book, FBI agents told the bureau’s director that they had “conducted [an] investigation concerning McCoy,” searching the files they had compiled on me for the past two years and interviewing numerous “sources whose identities are concealed [who] have furnished reliable information in the past” — thereby producing an 11-page report detailing my birth, education, and campus antiwar activities.

A college classmate I hadn’t seen in four years, who served in military intelligence, magically appeared at my side in the book section of the Yale Co-op, seemingly eager to resume our relationship. The same week that a laudatory review of my book appeared on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, an extraordinary achievement for any historian, Yale’s History Department placed me on academic probation. Unless I could somehow do a year’s worth of overdue work in a single semester, I faced dismissal.

In those days, the ties between the CIA and Yale were wide and deep. The campus residential colleges screened students, including future CIA Director Porter Goss, for possible careers in espionage. Alumni like Cord Meyer and James Angleton held senior slots at the agency. Had I not had a faculty adviser visiting from Germany, the distinguished scholar Bernhard Dahmwho was a stranger to this covert nexus, that probation would likely have become expulsion, ending my academic career and destroying my credibility.

During those difficult days, New York Congressman Ogden Reid, a ranking member of the House Foreign Relations Committee, telephoned to say that he was sending staff investigators to Laos to look into the opium situation. Amid this controversy, a CIA helicopter landed near the village where I had escaped that ambush and flew the Hmong headman who had helped my research to an agency airstrip. There, a CIA interrogator made it clear that he had better deny what he had said to me about the opium. Fearing, as he later told my photographer, that “they will send a helicopter to arrest me, or . . . soldiers to shoot me,” the Hmong headman did just that.

At a personal level, I was discovering just how deep the country’s intelligence agencies could reach, even in a democracy, leaving no part of my life untouched: my publisher, my university, my sources, my taxes, my phone, and even my friends.

Although I had won the first battle of this war with a media blitz, the CIA was winning the longer bureaucratic struggle. By silencing my sources and denying any culpability, its officials convinced Congress that it was innocent of any direct complicity in the Indochina drug trade. During Senate hearings into CIA assassinations by the famed Church Committee three years later, Congress accepted the agency’s assurance that none of its operatives had been directly involved in heroin trafficking (an allegation I had never actually made). The committee’s report did confirm the core of my critique, however, finding that “the CIA is particularly vulnerable to criticism” over indigenous assets in Laos “of considerable importance to the Agency,” including “people who either were known to be, or were suspected of being, involved in narcotics trafficking.” But the senators did not press the CIA for any resolution or reform of what its own inspector general had called the “particular dilemma” posed by those alliances with drug lords — the key aspect, in my view, of its complicity in the traffic.

During the mid-1970s, as the flow of drugs into the United States slowed and the number of addicts declined, the heroin problem receded into the inner cities and the media moved on to new sensations. Unfortunately, Congress had forfeited an opportunity to check the CIA and correct its way of waging covert wars. In less than 10 years, the problem of the CIA’s tactical alliances with drug traffickers to support its far-flung covert wars was back with a vengeance.

During the 1980s, as the crack-cocaine epidemic swept America’s cities, the agency, as its own Inspector General later reported, allied itself with the largest drug smuggler in the Caribbean, using his port facilities to ship arms to the Contra guerrillas fighting in Nicaragua and protecting him from any prosecution for five years. Simultaneously on the other side of the planet in Afghanistan, mujahedeen guerrillas imposed an opium tax on farmers to fund their fight against the Soviet occupation and, with the CIA’s tacit consent, operated heroin labs along the Pakistani border to supply international markets. By the mid-1980s, Afghanistan’s opium harvest had grown 10-fold and was providing 60% of the heroin for America’s addicts and as much as 90% in New York City.

Almost by accident, I had launched my academic career by doing something a bit different. Embedded within that study of drug trafficking was an analytical approach that would take me, almost unwittingly, on a lifelong exploration of U.S. global hegemony in its many manifestations, including diplomatic alliances, CIA interventions, developing military technology, recourse to torture, and global surveillance. Step by step, topic by topic, decade after decade, I would slowly accumulate sufficient understanding of the parts to try to assemble the whole. In writing my new book, “In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power“, I drew on this research to assess the overall character of U.S. global power and the forces that might contribute to its perpetuation or decline.

In the process, I slowly came to see a striking continuity and coherence in Washington’s century-long rise to global dominion. CIA torture techniques emerged at the start of the Cold War in the 1950s; much of its futuristic robotic aerospace technology had its first trial in the Vietnam War of the 1960s; and, above all, Washington’s reliance on surveillance first appeared in the colonial Philippines around 1900 and soon became an essential though essentially illegal tool for the FBI’s repression of domestic dissent that continued through the 1970s.    

Surveillance today

In the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks, I dusted off that historical method, and used it to explore the origins and character of domestic surveillance inside the United States.

After occupying the Philippines in 1898, the U.S. Army, facing a difficult pacification campaign in a restive land, discovered the power of systematic surveillance to crush the resistance of the country’s political elite. Then, during World War I, the Army’s “father of military intelligence,” the dour General Ralph Van Deman, who had learned his trade in the Philippines, drew upon his years pacifying those islands to mobilize a legion of 1,700 soldiers and 350,000 citizen-vigilantes for an intense surveillance program against suspected enemy spies among German-Americans, including my own grandfather. In studying Military Intelligence files at the National Archives, I found “suspicious” letters purloined from my grandfather’s army locker.  In fact, his mother had been writing him in her native German about such subversive subjects as knitting him socks for guard duty.

In the 1950s, Hoover’s FBI agents tapped thousands of phones without warrants and kept suspected subversives under close surveillance, including my mother’s cousin Gerard Piel, an anti-nuclear activist and the publisher of Scientific American magazine. During the Vietnam War, the bureau expanded its activities with an amazing array of spiteful, often illegal, intrigues in a bid to cripple the antiwar movement with pervasive surveillance of the sort seen in my own FBI file.

Memory of the FBI’s illegal surveillance programs was largely washed away after the Vietnam War thanks to Congressional reforms that required judicial warrants for all government wiretaps. The terror attacks of September 2001, however, gave the National Security Agency the leeway to launch renewed surveillance on a previously unimaginable scale. Writing for TomDispatch in 2009, I observed that coercive methods first tested in the Middle East were being repatriated and might lay the groundwork for “a domestic surveillance state.”  Sophisticated biometric and cyber techniques forged in the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq had made a “digital surveillance state a reality” and so were fundamentally changing the character of American democracy.

Four years later, Edward Snowden’s leak of secret NSA documents revealed that, after a century-long gestation period, a U.S. digital surveillance state had finally arrived. In the age of the Internet, the NSA could monitor tens of millions of private lives worldwide, including American ones, via a few hundred computerized probes into the global grid of fiber-optic cables.

And then, as if to remind me in the most personal way possible of our new reality, four years ago, I found myself the target yet again of an IRS audit, of TSA body searches at national airports, and — as I discovered when the line went dead — a tap on my office telephone at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Why? Maybe it was my current writing on sensitive topics like CIA torture and NSA surveillance, or maybe my name popped up from some old database of suspected subversives left over from the 1970s. Whatever the explanation, it was a reasonable reminder that, if my own family’s experience across three generations is in any way representative, state surveillance has been an integral part of American political life far longer than we might imagine.

At the cost of personal privacy, Washington’s worldwide web of surveillance has now become a weapon of exceptional power in a bid to extend U.S. global hegemony deeper into the twenty-first century. Yet it’s worth remembering that sooner or later what we do overseas always seems to come home to haunt us, just as the CIA and crew have haunted me this last half-century.  When we learn to love Big Brother, the world becomes a more, not less, dangerous place.

This piece has been adapted and expanded from the introduction to Alfred W. McCoy’s new book, “In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power”.

“Narcos” returns with a fresh approach and a season steeped in violent paranoia

Pedro Pascal in "Narcos" (Credit: Netflix/Juan Pablo Gutierrez)

The proposition of “Narcos” has been an odd one since it first debuted on Netflix as a period piece. The drama’s focus on Pablo Escobar, rendered with an engrossing vibrancy by Wagner Moura, gave the man’s portrait greater weight than the ravages of the cocaine business upon Colombia and its people.

Escobar is long dead and enough removed from American consciousness to make his mugshot appropriate for outlaw T-shirt designs. This is what happens when people forget the impact monsters have on a nation and its people.

This is also the effect of launching a drama steered by the tale of a notorious criminal, his family and his empire, in an era profoundly shaped by “The Sopranos” and “Breaking Bad.” When viewers are made to see murderous ogres as loving parents and devoted spouses, they are no longer relegated to the nightmare domain where history tells us they belong. Some even become anti-heroes.

Decentralizing the focus of “Narcos” in its third season, debuting Friday, provides a chance for the series to remedy such a side effect it that one monster has been replaced by a cadre of them whose influence perverts a nation’s entire government. The Cali Cartel, the second most powerful cocaine distribution network after Escobar’s Medellin-based kingdom, is treated here as a flamboyantly violent group, a cross between the Corleones and the loosely-connected rival families of “Dynasty.”

They’re also much more dangerous, having learned from Escobar’s mistake of styling himself as a hero of the people to keep their moves secretive and their reach higher. By enlisting the collusion of government officials to give them cover as their expanse their business, the Cali families succeed in taking their business global.

This tactical shift changes the nature of “Narcos” significantly in season 3 from the hunt of a single terror into the quixotic quest to destroy a violent network that begets other savage networks in other countries. It also makes the narrative more closely resemble our understanding of the drug war’s lesson, largely that it’s a never ending series of battles that may never be won, with the main fronts shifting to different countries and old targets constantly being replaced by new ones.

“To kill a monster, sometimes you have to get in bed with other monsters,” says this season’s narrator Javier Peña, played by Pedro Pascal. “If that surprises, you, pick up a history book.”

Or, just read the news.

Netflix already picked up a fourth season of “Narcos,” and those with a passing familiarity of what happened to the Cali Cartel and an awareness of where the main hotspots exist today may appreciate the way season three brings the story out of a past it treated with the same romance as a mafia film to set up its examination of the drug-fueled violence currently tearing through Mexico.

In case you don’t, there’s always Google or the hint the streaming service dropped Tuesday in announcing an October 20 debut for “The Day I Met El Chapo: The Kate del Castillo Story.” The three-part allows Castillo to reveal never-before-seen footage and details of the actress’ meeting with the famed head of the notorious Sinaloa Cartel.

Before venturing into that realm “Narcos” uses the downfall of the Cali syndicate in the late 1990s to rectify some of the first and second season’s more significant flaws while indulging in other over-the-top tendencies that make it a mainstay of the gangster drama genre.

Foremost is the perspective shift from DEA agent Steve Murphy (Boyd Holbrook, who is absent in this third season) to Javier. Pascal grants Javier a tangible earnestness and common grit Holbrook’s cowboy lacks, immediately making him a more captivating guide into this frustrating territory.

And the four Cali bosses he and his colleagues are hunting — Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela (Damian Alcazar), Miguel Rodriguez Orejuela (Francisco Denis), Chepe Santacruz Londono (Pepe Rapazote) and Pacho Herrera (Alberto Ammann) — operate with varying degrees of strategic acumen and impunity. Instead of treating the cocaine trade as a gang activity, the Cartel operates like a corporation, expanding exponentially and enlisting political allies. It also perfected wiretapping and communications interception, so much that the DEA has problems finding insiders to provide intelligence.

Much of season 3’s point of view remains within the flamboyant, dangerous world of these criminals, converting their coked-up machismo into palace and chamber intrigue. This is the first noticeable difference between the Escobar seasons and the third — there’s less of the collateral damage caused by the cartels in these episodes, although it was certainly present.

Instead, season 3 of “Narcos” is an examination of how paranoia can bring down giants. The Cali network’s interconnected web of bosses proclaim its intent to abandon their drug empire while they are on top. Understandably this announcement is met with varying degrees of mutiny and conspiratorial plotting by their less-wealthy underlings who anticipated getting their shot at reaping the benefits that come with occupying the top tier.

This instability breeds escalating levels of distrust within the network, making the bosses vulnerable to infighting and open to conquest from outside forces, including a U.S. government eager to do whatever it takes to stem the flow of white drugs into its cities.

Season 3 grants its female characters a bit more profundity — a bit — although most of the women are still either sex workers and wives enjoying glamorous lifestyles in exchange for their silence, all of whom teeter on the edge of becoming casualties the around the suspicions of a boss. “Halt and Catch Fire” star Kerry Bishé enjoys a guest star turn as the American wife of a management level figure in the cartel, but the actress’ recognizable face doesn’t necessarily ensure her character’s safety. (The same is true of a cameo role played by comedian Gabriel Iglesias.)

The American audience’s relative ignorance of these recent chapters in Colombia’s history allows “Narcos” showrunner Eric Newman a wide latitude in dramatizing these events. Even though there are enough people who lived through this history to set interested viewers straight with regard to the story’s departures into fantasy, the interspersing of archival news footage grants each episode the illusion of authenticity.

Of course a viewer would have to care about such matters for those details to affect his enjoyment of this series. The truth is, most “Narcos” enthusiasts are content to accept any history lesson the series offers as auxiliary to its operatic machismo. And its directors still rip plenty of pages from Martin Scorsese’s playbook, including one scene placed midway through the season featuring a solemn Catholic service in a brightly decorated church interrupted by a bombastic strongman.

In the flow of the story the moment is appropriate. In the larger context of the series, it’s still signature “Narcos.”