Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 217

A Serious Plan To Flight Climate Change

A new report outlines what the world would need to do to head off severe global warming:

Given what we know about the sensitivity of the climate to added greenhouse gases, it’s possible to calculate how much more carbon dioxide we can admit while still having a reasonable chance of staying within the two degree Celsius envelope. What’s striking about these calculations is how many large changes we’ll have to make in order to get there. According to Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University’s Earth Institute, the per-capita emissions would have to drop from five tons annually (where they are now) to 1.6 tons by 2050.

To accomplish this, Sachs says that all nations will have to undergo a process he calls “deep decarbonization,” which is part of the title of a report he’s helped organize and deliver to the UN [earlier this week]. Pathways to Deep Decarbonization, prepared by researchers in 15 different countries, looks into what’s needed to achieve sufficient cuts in our carbon emissions. The report finds that current government pledges aren’t sufficient, and the technology we need to succeed may exist, but most of it hasn’t been proven to scale sufficiently.

Plumer looks at what Sachs’ plan would mean for the US:

The United States eventually gets 30 percent of its electricity from nuclear power and 40 percent of its electricity from renewable sources like hydro, wind, and solar by 2050. Electric vehicles would handle about 75 percent of all trips. Large trucks would get switched over to natural gas. The coal plants that remained would all capture their carbon-dioxide emissions and bury them underground. Every single building would adopt LEDs for lighting.

David Unger reads through the report’s recommendations:

The biggest need: research and early-stage development. The world underinvests in clean-energy research, development, and demonstration by roughly $70 billion a year, according to the Center for Clean Energy Innovation, a Washington-based organization that designs and advocates for clean-energy policy. That amounts to only 13 percent of what the world spends on global fossil-fuel subsidies, according to CCEI, and 27.5 percent of what it invests in deploying clean-energy technologies.

“The main lesson in history is that targeted R&D works,” says Sachs, who says clean energy needs a large public-private effort along the lines of the Manhattan Project or the push to put a man on the moon. “The remarkable fact is that we have not invested [enough] in an issue that is of existential importance to the planet.”

Chart Of The Day

Casselman debunks common misconceptions about the origins of America’s immigrants:

The immigration debate, now as then, focuses primarily on illegal immigration from Latin America. Yet most new immigrants aren’t Latinos. Most Latinos aren’t immigrants. And, based on the best available evidence, there are fewer undocumented immigrants in the U.S. today than there were in 2007. … The immigration debate gets one thing right: The foreign-born population is growing. In 2012, according to data from the Census Bureau, there were more than 40 million people living in the U.S. who weren’t born here, up 31 percent since 20001; the native-born population grew just 9 percent over that time. The foreign-born now represent 13 percent of the population, near a historical high. The drivers of that growth, however, have changed significantly in recent years.

Furthermore, the Latinos who have already arrived are rapidly assimilating:

Political commentary often treats the issues of immigration and Hispanic ethnicity as two sides of the same coin. But U.S. Latinos are looking more and more like other Americans. Nearly 68 percent of U.S. Hispanics speak English fluently, up from 59 percent in 2000; more than a quarter report speaking only English at home. Latino high school graduates are now more likely than whites to enroll in college, although they are still less likely to graduate. Latinos are becoming less likely to be Catholic and choosing to have smaller families, and they more closely resemble the population at large on social issues such as abortion and gay rights. Nearly half of all Hispanics and about two-thirds of native-born Hispanics consider themselves to be “a typical American.”

Neither A Boy Nor A Girl

Charlotte Greenfield examines the medical profession’s response to intersex children:

During the 1990s, intersex adults who had received surgery as infants came forward speaking about their sense of mutilation. At the same time, an experiment from Johns Hopkins University that claimed to prove young children could safely be assigned any gender with surgical “reinforcement” was revealed to be a failure. The study had been initiated in 1967 by psychologist John Money, who claimed to have successfully given a boy female anatomy and had the child live as a girl. The child, whose penis was burnt off in a circumcision accident, was castrated and operated on to look female at the age of 22 months – eight months before the age at which Money claimed gender became fixed.

Until the 1950s, intersex children had largely been left alone, but Money’s experiment provided support for early surgical intervention. However, one of Money’s rival researchers tracked down his study’s subject and, in 1997, showed that the child had never been happy as a girl and had converted back to living as man, sending shockwaves through the medical profession. Nevertheless, the surgeries continue.

Unquestionable Right, Unbearable Stunt

Tweet @Target and let them know that open carry in their stores is #OffTarget http://t.co/ZKP0z5KbFW momsdemandaction.org/offtarget/ via @MomsDemand—
Helen Magnavita (@helenmag) July 02, 2014

Last week, after Target asked customers not to bring guns into its stores, Waldman commented that “just as there’s a culture of guns, and cultures where guns are plentiful, there are also tens of millions of Americans for whom an absence of guns is a cultural value”:

Despite what some extreme gun advocates believe, no right is unlimited, whether it’s your right to own a gun or your right to practice your religion or your right to freedom of speech. But beyond the legal limits, there are also the limits we all respect in order to have a society where we can get along despite our differences. My neighbor has a First Amendment right to write pornographic “Hunger Games” fan fiction, but if he hands his manuscripts to my kids he’s just being a creepy dirtbag, First Amendment or not. And depending on the laws of your state, you may have a legal right to take your rifle down to the Piggly Wiggly. But that doesn’t mean that doing so doesn’t make you a jerk.

Barton Hinkle is sort of on the same page. Though staunchly pro-gun rights, he argues that the antics of the open carry movement are bad for the cause:

Gun-rights advocates who delight in making suburban mothers nervous are practicing libertarian brutalism. They resemble those abortion-rights supporters who think it’s funny to wear a shirt that says, “Why did the fetus cross the road? Because they moved the dumpster.” Feeling put-upon, they have an urge to lash out at the other side, to rub the other side’s nose in the dirt and teach it a lesson. But lashing out rarely achieves much. Often such brutalism does nothing but generate resentment. Having a given right means never having to show consideration for how others feel about it, if you don’t want to. But advocates for individual rights should want to. We make a more persuasive case for liberty when we show such consideration. If, as one of the Carytown gun-toters put it, they wish to raise awareness about “responsible gun ownership,” then behaving responsibly would be a good place to start.

The View From Your Window

Bethesda, Maryland, 7.30 pm

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Scandal

Germany is investigating another suspected spy in Berlin:

[Yesterday] German police raided the Berlin-area apartment and office of a man suspected of spying for the US, the second case in less than a week. The investigation is ongoing, but German authorities are taking it “very seriously,” a spokesperson told reporters. Last week, a German intelligence officer was arrested for working as a double agent and feeding documents back to Washington. The 31-year-old intelligence officer, which The Daily Beast has dubbed “Herr Wannabe,” apparently volunteered to work for the CIA. He got caught when he tried to spy for Russia as well.

All this comes, of course, after revelations that the US had been tapping German chancellor Angela Merkel’s cellphone since 2002. Germany tried to use this embarrassing fact to negotiate a non-spying agreement similar to the ones the US has with the UK, Canada, and other countries. However, the US has resisted out of fear that more countries will want the same thing.

Today, the German government asked our top CIA official there to leave the country. Morrissey is somewhat surprised at this reaction:

One has to assume that the Germans are not so blinded by outrage here as the public stances might suggest, as they know well how the intelligence game is played.

The French have been stealing industrial secrets for years, even though the two nations work much more closely together on the EU project than the US and Germany do in other areas. When these details about business-as-usual get made embarrassingly public, it forces everyone to make a public show of the outrage. Removing a key link in the partnership through the mechanism of a diplomatic expulsion, though, goes a bit farther than contrived outrage. That’s a step one would expect to see between two antagonists, or two loosely-affiliated nations, not between close partners like the US and Germany.

Kirchick defends our espionage activities in Germany, which he calls “a less than trustworthy ally.” In particular, he highlights the country’s ties to Russia and Iran:

German outrage at American spying would also be easier to swallow if it weren’t so hypocritical. According to former NSA intelligence and computer systems analyst Ira Winkler, the BND has penetrated the SWIFT financial messaging network, passing on the information to German businesses. In his book Spies Among Us, he writes of “the apparent willingness of German businesses to funnel sensitive information and technology to nations that are hostile to the United States,” including Iran. Germany remains one of the Islamic Republic’s largest trading partners.

American espionage in Germany—home of the Hamburg Cell, the circle of 9/11 hijackers who hung out in the port city, unmolested, for years—is aimed at protecting the national security of both America and its allies, Germany foremost among them. And while the BND cooperates extensively with America’s intelligence services, it also has worked toward giving a leg-up to German businesses, an unwritten no-no in the intelligence world.

But the latest news doesn’t much trouble Mataconis:

Understandably, there will be some degree of a diplomatic price to pay from these latest spying allegations. Allies spying on allies is, as I said, one of those things that everyone does to some degree but which is never spoken of publicly. At the same time, though, it strikes me that we shouldn’t really be all that embarrassed about what’s been revealed here, except to the extent that we got caught and the President apparently spoke to the Chancellor without being aware of what had happened earlier that week. There are good reasons to keep an eye on what’s going on in Germany and, indeed, some of those reasons ultimately benefit the national security of Germany as well as the United States. Furthermore, foreign espionage does not raise the same civil liberties issues that the N.S.A.’s domestic programs do so it’s best not to conflate the two. Foreign intelligence is sometimes an unpleasant business, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t necessary and in this case it seems like its necessary.

Mental Health Break

One reason many Americans can’t take the World Cup too seriously:

Update from a reader:

I appreciated today’s MHB because I think Neymar is the perfect example. Here is Neymar and his various dives. Here is Neymar and his real injury. When a player is acting, he rolls around on the ground and makes a spectacle of himself. When he is truly hurt, he lies still and tries to minimize the pain.

But another reader points to a video compilation “from the American sport with just as much flopping as soccer”:

How Our Political Identities Form

When you were born has a huge impact on your politics:

A new model of presidential voting suggests President Obama’s approval rating — currently in the low 40s — will inform not only the 2016 election, but also the election in 2076. The model, by researchers at Catalist, the Democratic data firm, and Columbia University, uses hundreds of thousands of survey responses and new statistical software to estimate how people’s preferences change at different stages of their lives.

The model assumes generations of voters choose their team, Democrats or Republicans, based on their cumulative life experience — a “running tally” of events. By using Gallup’s presidential approval rating as a proxy for those events, Yair Ghitza, chief scientist at Catalist, and Andrew Gelman, a political scientist and statistician at Columbia University, were able to estimate when political preferences are formed.

Leonhardt wonders whether today’s impressionable youngsters will skew conservative:

Some political analysts believe that teenagers are already showing less allegiance to the Democratic Party than Americans in their 20s, based on recent polling data. My own sense is that their argument rests on small, noisy sample sizes, and Mr. Taylor, of Pew, is also skeptical. The larger point, however, remains: The Democrats face challenges with today’s teenagers that they did not face with today’s 25- or 30-year-olds.

By any measure, Mr. Obama’s second term lacks the political drama of his first, when Democrats were passing sweeping legislation and the Tea Party sprang up in reaction. But the generational nature of politics means that the second Obama term still has enormous political import.

Dreher reflects on how his politics have shifted over time:

For me, the ages of 14 to 24 corresponded to the years 1981 to 1991 — the Reagan/Bush years. It was during that time that the feel-bad 1970s were dispelled (the first significant political memory I have was the Iran hostage crisis), and the Cold War concluded with the fall of the Berlin Wall. The liberalism of that era was thoroughly ossified and reactionary. John Paul II was at the height of his influence, and that did a lot to bring me into the Catholic Church.

What shattered my faith in my 1980s conservative worldview were three things that happened in the 2000s: the Catholic sex abuse scandal, the Iraq War, and the financial collapse. These things happened from 2002 – 2008, a period that takes in ages 35 to 41. The connecting thread of these three events is how they all destroyed my belief that the Roman Catholic Church and the Republican Party could be trusted to exercise sound judgment — on moral matters for the Church, and on social, economic, and foreign policy matters for the GOP — and strong leadership.

A High Price For Legal High

Washington state’s legal weed looks like it will fetch a premium, at least in the short-term:

[Hillary] Bricken [an attorney working with Washington marijuana businesses] expects the product that will be available — most likely on Wednesday at most locations, if not later — will be fairly expensive. From what she’s heard, recreational marijuana will likely sell for about $3,000 a pound. In comparison, marijuana on the medical side sells for at most $1,300 a pound.

“Those numbers haven’t been seen in Seattle for five years,” Bricken explains. “I think smart producer-processors are going to gouge away to meet that demand.”

Sullum fears the steep prices will drive people back into the black market:

Until the [Washington State Liquor Control Board (LCB)] develops rules for edibles this fall, Washington’s stores will be selling buds only, and they won’t have much to sell. The LCB started licensing growers in March. So far, according to a list it posted today, it has granted just 86 applications, with more than 2,500 others still pending. In addition to the shortage of legal growers, high taxes and and regulatory costs are pushing prices up.

Although customers lined up today for the novelty of buying legal pot, the new shops probably will have a hard time competing with dispensaries and black-market dealers. “My old supplier just texted me,” Deborah Greene, Cannabis City’s first buyer, told The Seattle Times. “[He] said, ‘I saw you on TV. Now I know why you’re not calling me.’” She may have been joking, but a lot will hinge on whether that sort of anecdote sounds plausible a year from now.

Why Dominic Holden is more than happy to fork over the extra cash:

I bought a bag of marijuana today at Cannabis City, Seattle’s first legal retail pot store, just after they opened at noon. (Surprisingly for a pot store, they opened on time.) It was a different experience from every other time I’ve bought pot—and I’ve bought a lot of pot before—not just because there were dozens of TV crews swarming outside. What legalization provides, prohibition never could: explicit certainty about what I purchased, what it contains, what it doesn’tcontain, where it came from, where the money goes, and the promise that every time I purchase this product it will be essentially the same.

The View From Your Window

Sydney, Australia, 7.57 am