Climate Change: A Conspiracy So Immense
On Monday, the House Energy and Commerce Committee marked up Republican-backed legislation to bar the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gases. Democrats proposed a series of amendments that simply admitted the reality of global warming — they didn’t require regulation or a carbon tax. Just an admission of the state of the science. Rep. Diana DeGette’s amendment was particularly careful in its language: “’The scientific evidence is compelling’ that elevated concentrations of greenhouse gases resulting from anthropogenic emissions ‘are the root cause of recently observed climate change,’” it read. Not one of the 31 Republicans on the committee voted for it, or any of the amendments. Not one. Confronted by one of the most significant threats our planet faces, the 31 House Republicans charged with coordinating America’s response refused to even admit the underlying facts. “I would say it’s not settled,” said Rep. Joe Barton.
- Ezra Klein, Wonkbook: The disaster we refuse to see coming
They didn’t contact me directly, but the House Energy and Commerce Committee nevertheless answers my query about why self-styled advocates of the free-market block action to combat climate change: they think climate science is a vast left-wing conspiracy perpetrated by Al Gore, granola munching hippies, and Marxist anti-American radicals.
Which begs the question: what’s the motive behind our conspiracy so immense?
When environmentalists accuse industry-backed groups of skewing climate science there’s no mystery as to the reason for industry’s obfuscation. The Alliance for Energy and Economic Growth, the American Petroleum Institute, or the Edison Electric Institute are associations of corporations who generate profit from the burning of fossil fuels. EPA regulation, a carbon tax, or a carbon cap will affect their bottom lines. It’s hard to make an industry see, when it makes its profits by being blind.
But for climate hawks like me, the thing about An Inconvenient Truth is that it’s highly inconvenient. A quarter of humanity lives without electricity! There’s immense poverty and suffering that will only be cured with energy-intensive economic growth. In the post-industrial world there are stagnating middle- and working- wages, and now we have to worry about the climate?
Is there some electoral bonus to be gained by talking about the climate? Where can we get in on that? Does anyone think liberal activists push for oh-so-exciting legislation like “Waxman-Markey” because it’s a political winner? Do Democrats harbor some special wish to never win an election from West Virginia to Indiana?
Are there vast financial interests undergirding the work of climatologists?
Are David Cameron and Angela Merkel members of our vast conspiracy? Why?
Why would we care so much about climate change if there were any other choice?
Kind of wonky but can Conditional Cash Transfer help The Precariat?
A new research study paints a sobering picture for individuals raised in a poor environment.
Scientists found children from poorer families do worse in school, are less likely to graduate from high school, and are less likely to go to college.
Researchers found that differences in aptitude presented as early as age 2.
But it is not a genetic difference, rather something about the poorer children’s environment that keeps them from realizing their genetic potentials.
Past research has found that a gap between poor children and children from wealthier families opens up early in life, even before children enter formal education.
“Poor kids aren’t even doing as well in terms of school readiness — sounding out letters and doing other things that you would expect to be relevant to early learning,” said Elliot M. Tucker-Drob of the University of Texas at Austin, lead author of the paper. He and his colleagues, wanted to look even earlier — to see if they could find these differences in infants.
The researchers used data on about 750 pairs of fraternal and identical twins, from all over the country. The children’s mental abilities were tested at 10 months of age and again when they were 2 years old, with tasks like pulling a string to ring a bell, placing three cubes in a cup, matching pictures, and sorting pegs by color.
The children’s socioeconomic status was determined based on parents’ educational attainment, occupations, and family income.
At 10 months of age, children from poor families performed just as well as children from wealthier families. It was over the next 14 months that a gap emerged. By 2 years of age, children from wealthier families were scoring consistently higher than the children from poorer families.
The researchers went on to examine the extent to which genes were involved in the test scores. Among the 2-year-olds from wealthier families, identical twins, who share all of their genes, had much more similar test scores than fraternal twins, who share only half of their genes, thus indicating that genes were influencing their tests scores.
However, among 2-year-olds from poorer families, identical twins scored no more similar to one another than fraternal twins, suggesting that genes were not influencing their test scores. The researchers concluded that something about the poor children’s home life was suppressing their potential for cognitive development.
This study didn’t look specifically into why wealthy children improve more. It could be that poorer parents may not have the time or resources to spend playing with their children in stimulating ways.
A common goal of education policy is to decrease the achievement gap between poorer and wealthier children, said Tucker-Drob. “And I think the first step to achieving this goal is understanding the basis of these disparities,” he said.
The study is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
Between 2001 and 2006 the top one percent took over 53 percent of US income gains. There was an economic expansion (particularly from 1979 to 2006) but the goodies went to the top one percent. The middle benefited a bit (slightly less than one percent a year) but only if one discounts the fact that they were working more (2 income families) and more hours. Without that additional work, the incomes of the middle would have barely budged. The income of those in the bottom would have fallen.
If the economy had grown at the same rate that it actually did and if inequality had stayed at its 1979 levels, the average income of households in the middle would be more than 12,000 dollars a month higher than it is now. Differently put, the rich took our money.
US economic growth wasn’t exceptional. Most of the European economies grew at the same rate. The primary difference: our inequality soared. Another difference: we were working more hours. Put that way, their economies were actually stronger (GDP per hour worked rose faster). And, we should keep in mind that they have more secure retirement and health benefits.
The top .1% collectively rake in more than a trillion dollars a year. Also, most of the executives in this tier get amazing retirement packages—even when most workers have no defined benefits (so we hear all sorts of crap about the cost of pension funds for workers in the auto industry, for example, and nothing about the massive resource suck of executive perks, particularly executive perks for retirees).
A substantial majority of the top .1% are executives and managers (corporate and finance bad guys, the same one’s rolling in the dough right now). In the US gains at the top are driven by outrageous executive compensation and low taxes: “markets have been politically reconstructed to aid the privileged” (45). In 2007, average CEO pay for the top 350 companies was 12 million dollars a year.
The shift toward the super rich is a trend that begins in 1980 and continues to steadily increase (hmm…1980. What—or who—could have started this??). Tax rates on the rich have fallen dramatically. The rich are richer because they are taxed less heavily than they used to be (and our infrastructures are crumbling, schools are failing, people are dying because the rich are taxed less heavily than they used to be). Hacker and Pierson write: “if the effects of taxation on income at the top had been frozen in place in 1970, a very big chunk of the growing distance between the superrich and everyone else would disappear” (49).
And get this: this diminution of taxes for the rich happened even as support was growing for taxing them more. In 1939, 35% of Americans supported making the rich pay more taxes; in 1998 45% did; in 2007 56% did.
Taxes aren’t the only factor. Another is the decline in unions, again a decline that ocurred even as more and more private sectors workers said they wanted a union. This decline also has political causes, most significantly the failure of a major labor law to pass in 1978 not to mention Reagan’s stacking of the National Labor Relations Board with pro management appointees.
This blog is turning into a conversation with the Naum brain trust but that’s OK. What do you all think about the proposition of starting each child born with a trust fund? Others have suggested this idea before but this would seem to be a good place to start investing for the future. Where does the money come from if we are in a deficit already? Again, original thought source is unknown but someone brought up the point that one can not opt out of SSN payments after 65. It becomes taxible income which for some is probably just a nuisance. How about an option to revert those funds into a “life” fund instead of the “death” fund. The “life” fund could then be opted out of as well by families who just don’t need it.
