Author Archive
Ad Hominem Absurdum
A little story popped up in the press today that offers what my wife and I, in the context of our responsibilities toward our 4 year-old son, often refer to as “a teaching moment.” That opportunity is afforded by an accusation out of Greenpeace this morning that Cato, along with 40 other policy organizations, are wholly-owned subsidiaries of Exxon-Mobil and thus should not be trusted.
The contention that Exxon-Mobil funding colors Cato’s analysis (with contributions, by the way, that accounted for less than 1/10th of 1% of our budget in 2006) is compelling only if Greenpeace has some sort of “motive detection device” that can be produced for public inspection. For instance, I say I’m motivated by genuine skepticism that industrial greenhouse gas emissions will usher in the Book of Revelations. They say I’m motivated by greed. We can settle this argument to the satisfaction of some third-party observer … how exactly? Even administering me with liberal doses of sodium pentathol is unlikely to settle this little spat about the nature of my character.
The truth is that my colleagues at Cato and I are skeptical about the end-of-the-world scenarios bandied about by zealots like Greenpeace, we anchor that skepticism in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, and that skepticism naturally attracts funding from those parties who like what they hear. Arguing that causality actually works the other way is not only an unproved and unprovable assertion (let’s call it “faith-based argumentation”), it is impossible to square with all the work we’ve published arguing against many of the things the oil industry is known to support.
For instance, we have vigorously argued against President Bush’s national energy strategy and the resulting Energy Policy Act of 2005, called for the dismantlement of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, railed against federal oil and gas subsidies, argued for the elimination of the Clean Air Act rules that allow older refineries to escape tough anti-pollution standards, suggested giving the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to the Greens to do with as they wish, argued against allowing cost-benefit analysis to dictate environmental standards, and defended the government’s right to renegotiate drilling leases in the Gulf of Mexico that provided highly favorable contractual terms to some oil companies.
Regardless, Greenpeace’s assertions — even if true — are founded upon a classic logical fallacy. For those who never took a course in logic, it’s called ad hominem. Despite what the body politic might otherwise believe, the merit of an argument has nothing to do with the motives of the person making that argument.
Tony Blair on Global Warming
This morning on NPR’s Morning Edition, we were treated to an interview with outgoing British Prime Minister Tony Blair. The conversation touched on a number of rather predictable subjects, but the discussion of global warming is worth noting. Here, we find Tony Blair at his best — and worst.
Tony the Sensible: Even if Great Britain were to shut down its economy and zero-out all greenhouse gas emissions, growth of those emissions in China would wipe out Britain’s greenhouse gas reductions within about two years. So without an international agreement binding all global actors of note, nothing that any OECD government might do will have much effect on future temperatures.
Tony the Lunatic: The world’s inability to execute a global agreement to seriously reduce greenhouse gas emissions is fueling Islamic terrorism.
Huh? I didn’t know that al Qaeda, Hezbollah, or Hamas has linked up with Greenpeace. Must have missed that in those periodic tirades coming out of Pakistani caves.
I can see it now:
Abdul: “We must strike out at the Crusader/Zionist oppressors and impose the word of Allah and the Koran on the nonbelievers and the Arabic lackeys of the Christian imperialists.”
Muhammad: “Wait Abdul! The Kyoto Protocol has been ratified by a new American admistration and China and India are likely to cut back on their coal consumption as a consequence! I no longer have the heart for jihad. Let us open a falafel business instead.”
John McCain: Out of Energy
Today, Senator John McCain will formally announce that he is a candidate for president of the United States. Which reminds me that on Monday, Senator McCain gave a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies on what federal energy policy would look like under a McCain administration. So is the omnipresent captain of the “Straight Talk Express” prepared to tell Americans things they might not want to hear about energy? Apparently not. An examination of the speech suggests that we may need to rename McCain’s campaign bus the “Hot Air Express.” Let’s look at this speech and deconstruct it line by line.
The Right’s Love Affair with the Military
My post the other day about whether American society really ought to look more like the U.S. Army has induced a vein-popping, spittle-flying tirade over at Right-Thinking from the Left Coast. Apparently, the point I was trying to make was lost on some.
To recap, Robert Wright argued in the op-ed pages of The New York Times (subscription required) for an America that looked more like the U.S. Army. In that piece, Wright went on at some length pointing out all the wonderful things he found in that institution. Fine, although I certainly know people who spent time in the U.S. Army who saw things a lot differently.
But never mind. The author left out one not-so-inconsequential aspect of the U.S. Army – in fact, the one thing that actually defines the institution. To wit, it’s an organization in which people are expected to shut up and do as they are told. And if they don’t, they are jailed or even, in some circumstances, shot. And their job is to kill.
Do I think American society ought to look more like that? Uh, no.
Now, how do we get from that — which should have been obvious to most readers – to this shrill “you hate the troops” stuff out of Right-Thinking from the Left Coast? My guess is that there are a lot of people on the Right who worship the Pentagon and everything it stands for because they see it as representing the country as a whole. And, well, they love the heck out of their country.
I understand this, but to me, the military has always been less of a mirror image of the country I love than a mirror image of the Post Office I don’t so love – but a Post Office with heavy ordnance. Sure, we need the military to protect ourselves from bad actors abroad, but let’s not lose our perspective. We need construction workers to protect us from big potholes on the road too, but that doesn’t mean I’ll go into a conniption every time I run across someone with a none-too-rosy view of the U.S. Department of Transportation.
NYT Quote of the Day
If all of America were more like the Army, it would be a better country.
– Robert Wright, “My Life In the Army,” New York Times, April 3, 2007, p. A23.
I bet you won’t find many founding fathers expressing this sentiment. Well, unless you’re looking at the founding fathers of the Third Reich or Soviet Russia ….
Does OPEC Run the World?
Last week, I appeared on CNBC’s Morning Call to discuss OPEC’s impact on the world oil market. On the show with me was Raymond Learsy, author of Over a Barrel: Breaking the Middle East Oil Cartel. Learsy argues that the OPEC cartel single-handedly sets the world price for crude oil, thoroughly manipulates petroleum markets and, presumably, fixes the World Series. I spent most of my time on the show qualifying those assertions. (If you want to watch the five-minute exchange for yourself, click here.)
Well, yesterday, Learsy posted over at “The Huffington Post” (where he’s something of a regular) and decided to initiate Round 2. OK, I’m game — not just because I hate letting someone else get the last word, but because the issues in play are quite interesting.
Let’s consider Learsy’s arguments in turn:
First, he contends that OPEC sets price. Well, as I noted on the show last week, that’s not quite right. The cartel does not set price; it imposes production limitations on its members (theoretically, anyway). Price is established in world spot markets, where Mr. Supply and Ms. Demand come together to do the voodoo that they do so well. OPEC has a lot of say over the former (OPEC nations produce about 40 percent of global supply) but little say over the latter. OPEC nations certainly influence price, but they do not set price.
Since Learsy is a former commodities trader, I assume he knows this as well as I do, so it’s a mystery to me why he insists on making this “OPEC sets price” claim. After all, if you believe that OPEC sets world crude oil prices, then you have to come up with some explanation for why OPEC set the price at $10 a barrel back in 1998–1999. Were the oil sheiks simply in a kind and generous mood? Were they so enamored of Bill Clinton that they decided to send him an economic love note? Did they get so thoroughly drunk over the course of several months that they had no idea what was going on in market? Similarly, why did OPEC’s ministers cut prices from $70 a barrel to $50 a barrel a few months back? Did they take a collective happy pill?
The Grey Lady Strikes Again
Did Al Gore really deserve that Oscar for “An Inconvenient Truth”? The Left says yes – only the ideologically disabled or intellectually dishonest deny that the four horsemen of the environmental apocalypse (drought, disease, sea rise, and hurricanes) will soon devastate our fair planet. Reporter William Broad in the New York Times today, however, says not so fast – a backlash is brewing among REAL scientists who are getting sick and tired of bed-wetting hysteria surrounding climate change.
The gist of their concern is this: while most (but not all) scientists are willing to accept that industrial emissions are an important driver in the planetary warming we’ve experienced since the late 1970s, they aren’t anywhere near so eager to embrace politically inspired warnings from non-scientists about how “the end is near.” Al Gore, according to many of the scientists interviewed by William Broad, is too shrill and too apocalyptic given the scientific evidence.
Case in point: Al Gore warns in his documentary that sea levels will rise over 20 feet if warming continues. Yeah, well maybe in a thousand years or so if trends continue indefinitely, but the former Vice President leaves that little bit of perspective out of the movie. What might happen during our lives and the lives of our children and grandchildren? A sea rise of 23 inches, max, according to the new report just out from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. That’s hardly going to flood Manhattan, but acknowledging that would spoil the wonderful special effects visuals offered in the slideshow, now wouldn’t it?
Gore’s scientific advisors, friends, and admirers defend the documentary and the book that followed by conceding that he may be a bit dodgy here and there, but that he gets the big picture right. That’s ridiculous. The fact that the planet is warming and that industrial emissions might well have something to do with it is not what this debate is ultimately about. This debate is whether we should or should not care. And if the former, how much should we be willing to sacrifice to do something about it?
To say that Al Gore is to some extent out to lunch on the “should we care” argument but relatively sound on the question about whether we’re warming the planet (at least, if we measure these things by that most holy of metrics, the “scientific consensus” as defined by the IPCC) is akin to saying that the fellow proclaiming that a wrathful God is about to incinerate the planet is contributing to social welfare by usefully pointing out to the unbelievers that there is a God. That bit about God being particularly angry or plotting to destroy the world - Well, that’s a bunch of nonsense, but hey, he got the big picture right.
One of the scientists interviewed in the article – Roger Pielke, Jr. – wrote an essay recently for our own Regulation magazine pointing out that science is inevitably corrupted when politicians decide to effectively delegate policymaking power to those who wear white frocks. So if you want to know why scientists aid and abet this kind of thing, go there.
The Gray Lady Deflates “Peak Oil” Fears
An excellent article by reporter Jad Mouawad in today’s New York Times knocks the stuffing out of those warning for the nth time that we’re about to run out of oil. What the doomsayers overlook is that existing fields typically deliver about 35% of their oil to the market. Until recently, the rest had been deemed unrecoverable for economic reasons.
But as technology improves and oil prices go up, what was once deemed unrecoverable becomes, well, recoverable. And that has a big impact on supply. Oil analyst Leonardo Maugeri has estimated that if recovery rates (which hovered around only 10% a few decades ago) were to move from 35% to 40%, that would be akin to adding a new Saudi Arabia to the global crude oil market. Maugeri’s recent essay in Newsweek covers a lot of the same ground.
Mouawad’s piece well demonstrates this dynamic at work in the Kern River oil field in Bakersfield, California. First discovered in 1899, the field has been producing for about a century and is still going strong despite numerous predictions over the years that the field was on its last legs.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the New York Times does a better job reporting business news, industrial trends, and microeconomic developments than any other newspaper — and perhaps magazine — in the world. Today’s piece is an excellent example of why serious people need to read that newspaper.
Pots & Kettles at the RNC
Somehow, I’ve found myself on an email distribution list for the Republican National Committee’s opposition research team. Every couple of days or so, I get something documenting how the Democrat of the moment is out to lunch on this or that issue, speaking or acting hypocritically about some matter, or is an all-around crook or ne’er-do-well. These packaged emails – intended primarily for the press – are the equivalent of political drive-by shootings with footnotes.
Today’s edition, however, is exquisite. Titled “Hillary’s Kerryaoke on Energy,” it purports to document Hillary Clinton’s crazy statements and votes on energy policy. Here’s what we learn:
- Hillary Clinton is a big proponent of energy independence and calls for a big Manhattan-style project to get us there. “‘If we landed a man on the moon and brought him back safely to Earth within a decade as President Kennedy had promised in 1961, we know we can do this,’ said Clinton to the AP the other day in the course of promoting her $50 billion program to reduce the nation’s dependence on foreign oil. The RNC’s complaint? She sounds just like John Kerry did in 2004. My complaint? She sounds just like President Bush, who proposes to spend at least that much to jack-up the Strategic Petroleum Reserve – and that’s before we even begin tallying up the costs associated with his ethanol madness, his clean coal, nuclear power, and renewable energy subsidies, and a plethora of related costly interventions.
- Hillary Clinton wants to impose special taxes on oil company profits to help fund this $50 billion initiative of hers. Can’t complain with the RNC attack here. But someone ought to remind these young operatives that George Bush is likewise happy to levy special taxes on oil companies to fatten government coffers.
- Hillary Clinton voted 17 times against ethanol subsidies and even once dared to cast a procedural vote against an energy bill containing clean coal subsidies. The RNC is outraged – OUTRAGED! – that the New York Senator would eschew federal attempts to rig energy markets and intervene in private investment decisions.
- Hillary Clinton has voted eight times to prevent drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. I’m not sure that the “free market” position is to drill, but I am pretty sure that drilling there would have no appreciable impact on U.S. energy security.
You’ll probably hear some echoes of this RNC hit-piece on right-wing talk radio shows over the next week or so. The point the RNC is trying to make is that she TALKS a good game regarding energy independence, but hasn’t always voted that way. Well, if I have to choose between someone who means the crazy rhetoric he is dishing out and one who really doesn’t, I’ll take the latter.
The Wall Street Journal‘s Baby Talk on Energy
Today’s Wall Street Journal features a special insert titled “Energy: The Journal Report” (subscription required) featuring 12 articles on the glories of renewable energy and energy conservation and the case for government subsidy thereof. Those articles are so bad that it’s hard to know where to start. Let’s look at the highlights.
Rebecca Smith’s lead story for the insert, “The New Math of Alternative Energy,” sets the tone. While she’s happy to report the fact that no renewable energy can compete effectively in the market at the moment, she understates the cost differential between renewable and conventional fuels and is happy to parrot the industry’s optimistic forecasts about the future. From her article, you’d never guess that there was anybody on planet Earth not bullish on 13th century energy technology.
Ms. Smith, for example, argues that wind energy costs 6-9 cents per kilowatt hour “not counting the subsidies,” which means that they are ”approaching the point where wind power may be able to prosper without subsidies.” But not even wind energy investors would buy that. A recent presentation from Ed Feo of Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy, for instance, noted that two-thirds of the economic value of wind projects comes from federal and state tax benefits. The U.K. Royal Academy of Engineering likewise recently estimated that even with a $45 per ton carbon tax, wind was substantially more expensive than conventional energy.
The Climate Change Inquisition
Yesterday, the Washington Post ran an article highlighting accusations that our friends over at the American Enterprise Institute are trying to bribe climate scientists to take shots at a forthcoming UN report on climate change, an article which aped an earlier piece in The Guardian. Shocking stuff. Apparently, AEI scholars Ken Green and Steve Hayward commited the unpardonable sin of asking scientific experts to critique the upcoming report for a book of collected essays on the subject in return for a $10,000 honorarium.
Although the blogosphere has gone wild, it’s unclear to me why. While the letters they sent out soliciting contributions for the book highlighted their concerns about the IPCC process overall and the spin their work products are given in the media, they apparently did not stipulate what the authors were to say or the arguments they were to make. For instance, the letter to Prof. Steve Schroeder at Texas A&M stated:
We are looking for an author who can write a well-supported but accessible discussion of which elements of climate modeling have demonstrated predictive value that might make them policy-relevant and which elements of climate modeling have less levels of predictive utility, and hence, less utility in developing climate policy.
Well, God forbid somebody write an article like that! And may God doubly forbid the possibility that one might want to be paid for writing an article like that! And may God strike down in righteous fury the scientist willing to air even a whiff of critical thought concerning the report in question.
The fact that some environmentalists are trying to characterize the Green & Hayward letters as demonic invitations to lie for profit is understandable enough. The fact that prominent reporters are willing to give these accusations column inches in crowded newspapers is not.
Even more distressing is the emerging concensus among the intellectual elite that some UN documents are akin to holy script that cannot be challenged, criticized, or even examined critically in civilized company. Since when did scientific reports earn the status of the Hadith or the Koran? Since when did science rule critical examination of popular hypotheses (no matter how well grounded) to be out of line? And when exactly did otherwise smart people come to the conclusion that ad hominem attack was a perfectly good and reasonable line of argument?
For a more detailed examination of the issues in play – more than this story really deserves – see Jonathan Adler’s riff on the Volokh Conspiracy.
Taylor vs. Woolsey this Sunday on Foreign Oil
This Sunday, I’ll be debating former CIA chief James Woolsey at a “conservative summit” in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the National Review. The topic: “Resolved: That the federal government should act to reduce America’s dependence on foreign oil.” James Woolsey, of course, will take the affirmative.
Unfortunately, it seems as if there’s no room for new attendees, so if you’re not already registered for this weekend confab, you probably can’t get in. There is a good chance, however, that the debate will air live on C-SPAN (either I or II). So if you’ve got nothing better to do at 10:30 am EST Sunday, you might want to tune in.
The last time I tangled with Woolsey directly, it was during a hearing of the House Armed Services Committee in July 2005. Both he and I were part of a four-member panel to testify about the Chinese National Oil Company (CNOOC) bid to buy a controlling interest in UNOCAL. Woolsey argued that the merger was the first shot of WWIII. I argued that it’s no business of ours whether UNOCAL stockholders sell their shares to CNOOC and that it’s no skin off America’s nose one way or the other. For those who missed the resulting fireworks, let me just say that I tore him apart and did so in grand style. I fully expect to do so again this weekend.
Each of us will have five minutes at the NR event to state our case. That’s a tall order. There is a lot that can be said — and has been said — about the alleged evils of foreign oil. Rather than get too deep into the policy weeds (that can wait until the Q&A), I think I’ll use the few minutes I have at the start to say something like the following:
The case for importing oil is the same as the case for importing, say, computer chips. If it’s cheaper to buy something from abroad than to produce it here at home, then the economy in general — and consumers in particular — are made wealthier by imports. Governmental interventions to discourage energy imports are, by definition, government interventions to discourage the use of cheap energy.
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