So reports Brad Plumer. He explains:

The IEA offers up three reasons for the decline: First, many U.S. power companies have been swapping out coal for somewhat cleaner natural gas, since the latter has become so cheap. That’s helped. The United States also had a mild winter in 2011, which meant less energy was needed for heating. Finally, Americans have been driving less and purchasing more efficient cars of late, which has tempered the country’s oil use. It wasn’t a huge drop. It may prove fleeting. But it was a step toward less carbon.

So, mostly an accident, though a slightly-encouraging one. Which was, of course, canceled out entirely by China—2011 was still the all-time record for carbon emissions. Worldwide, we’re not just doing nothing, we’re accelerating in the wrong direction, releasing more and more every year. Most world leaders have settled on an acceptable increase in overall temperature of 2 degrees Celsius, but it’s slipping out of our grasp.

Brad goes on to detail what will happen if we do nothing, finishing with this tidbit:

North America gets particularly sweaty. And, according to the Met Office, Washington, D.C., would get downright tropical — an extra 13°F or so of heat, on average, by the 2090s. (That’s good news for the approximately zero D.C. residents who walk around saying, “What this city needs is an extra 13°F of heat.”)

This stands out for me because the air conditioning is out in the Monthly offices here in DC and it is uncomfortably hot and muggy already. Another 13 degrees of heat and I’d probably keel over and die.

But stepping back, we should remember that the the 2 degrees C target that everyone has agreed is good is not only slipping out of reach, it’s an extremely risky position itself. It’s one of the many reasons that make covering climate policy so depressing, but it’s important to remember. I’m reminded of the recent New Yorker article about geoengineering to prevent climate change. It’s possible, though dangerous, but the important point is that it’s cheap enough that even a poor country could afford it—like, for example, one about to be swamped by rising sea levels.

I mentioned earlier how Why Nations Fail is one of my favorite books of the last few months. It’s not perfect, but I’ve found its ideas to be very useful in clearing away some of the ideological shrubbery from around various issues. Briefly, the thesis of the book is that countries succeed or fail in the modern world not based on their policies, religion, agricultural heritage, disease load, or other factors, but based on their political institutions. Successful countries have “inclusive” institutions, where property rights are secure, innovation is rewarded, and elites are restrained from corruption and self-dealing. Failed countries have “extractive” institutions, which are basically looted by their elites. Property is taken or given at the whim of the politicians, corruption and self-dealing are rampant, there is no incentive to innovate, and so the country remains poor.

Obviously this is a spectrum, not binary categories, as some institutions are mixtures of extractive and inclusive. But this is a great way to simplify a lot of otherwise too-complicated debates. For example, with the election heating up, people have been focused on Bain Capital, and private equity generally, debating back and forth about whether or not the industry is good for the country. The debate usually gets quickly down into the weeds of tax policy and whatnot, but this extractive/inclusive spectrum is what we’re really talking about.

Conservatives insist that when Bain bought some company which later collapsed and stiffed all its pensioners, it was just “creative destruction,” a clearing out of dead wood, a necessary sacrifice to the free market demiurge. And you know, it’s not immediately obvious that they’re wrong. According to Noah Smith, Japan has laws which make it exceedingly difficult to take over a company, and the result is a lot of sclerotic, dysfunctional companies, and low productivity. On the other hand it’s also easy to imagine destruction that isn’t remotely “creative.” Surely it’s possible for rich people to take control of a company and bleed its life into their own pockets through financial trickery, or abuse of political influence, or manipulation of tax loopholes, etc. Back in the Gilded Age, financiers like Jay Gould were infamous for doing this through stock-watering and the like.

Obviously once we’re clear on this distinction someone has to actually do the yeoman work and figure out exactly what kind of policies we need to prevent extraction. For my part I’d say the vast majority of financial “innovation” has been in the direction of more extraction, and we need a bunch of dumb, blunt, sledgehammer rules aimed right at the pelvis of the financial sector that keep it small, weak, and boring. Even if I’m wrong there, the financial sector still deserves outsize caution, due to their tempting position astride the money streams of the world.

At the minimum, when they break the law, they should be punished severely.

Follow us on Twitter @washmonthly, and Ryan @RyanLouisCooper

I’m late to this particular party, but the news out of the Eurozone keeps getting worse and worse:

The eurozone crisis has led to the region’s economy contracting at the fastest pace for almost three years and sent German business confidence tumbling this month.

Matt Yglesias notes the implications of the continuing “bank jog” (currency is fleeing the Eurozone periphery, as corporations pull their cash out and put it in German banks or elsewhere):

Something to note is that this is exactly what one of the downsides of leaving the euro would be. If Spain reintroduced the peseta, foreign firms would still sell some stuff to Spanish customers. But they probably wouldn’t want to leave many of their profits laying around peseta-denominated in Spanish banks, available as funds for lending to the Spanish domestic economy. Spain would end up capital-constrained and need to spend a lot of time worrying about its foreign exchange holdings. This is a real downside and not just something to gloss over. But the rub is that if you’re going to suffer massive capital flight anyway, then the case for ditching the euro gets that much stronger.

The natural question for Americans would be how much we would be hurt if the Eurozone suffered a disorderly breakup (and, let’s be clear, it would be extraordinarily bad at least within the European periphery, as a bunch of the world’s largest economies watched their banking sectors collapse at the same time). According to Paul Krugman, US exports to the Eurozone only total about 2 percent of GDP, and since imports wouldn’t utterly cease even in the worst case, that mechanical effect of reduced foreign purchases of our goods and services wouldn’t be catastrophic.

But as Krugman notes, the real danger is through the financial channel. Modern banks are huge and heavily interconnected across countries, and some are thoroughly rotten. Bank failures across Europe could potentially trigger a Lehman-like financial shock in the US. One would think, given how long everyone has been watching the Euro problem, that banks would have figured out ways to protect themselves, but JPMorgan’s recent monster loss and MF Global’s bankruptcy (which killed itself gambling on European debt, remember) have thoroughly undermined my confidence.

I don’t think it’s possible to know for sure just what kind of craziness the financial elites have cooked up until the bets are called in. Might be we’ll see soon.

Follow us on Twitter @washmonthly, and Ryan @RyanLouisCooper

1. Ezra Klein explains why neither Romney nor Obama want to talk about Romney’s time as governor of Massachusetts.

2. Michael Kinsley explains what he found on a junket to China.

3. Keith Humphreys gets slightly cranky about the lights and animation in a David Frum video. I thought it was pretty good! He would have apparently preferred a PowerPoint presentation (I jest, of course).

4. John Sides and Jonathan Bernstein take a look at what we can infer from the apparent massive swing on marriage equality among African-Americans. Rather unusual set of circumstances, it seems.

5. From our latest issue, read about the angler and two bureaucrats who may have saved the Atlantic ecosystem, and about the Univision anchor who just might decide the 2012 election.

Follow us on Twitter @washmonthly, and Ryan @RyanLouisCooper

Alec MacGillis was giving Robert Caro some grief about his “great man” fetish and support of the filibuster the other day:

The Senate’s problem is not a lack of “genius.” (After all, it has Chuck Schumer.) As Caro surely knows, the problem goes deeper than that—and has a lot more to do with what these guys are talking about. (And in fact, Caro arguably bears some responsibility when it comes to the Senate’s systematic flaws. The Journal interview notes: “In 2004, when Senate Republicans were threatening to end Democrats’ filibustering of judicial nominees by implementing ‘the nuclear option,’ Kennedy called Mr. Caro “out of the blue” and asked if he would come to Washington, D.C., and explain to the freshman senators the importance of preserving the filibuster.”)

I agree about the “great man” problem, but argued that this was actually Caro doing a bit of logrolling to get Ted Kennedy to help him with the research for his book, which he did after the filibuster speech. In support of that I present a nice little bit of history on the origin of the word “filibuster,” from Caro’s Master of the Senate:

And there took place therefore so many “extended discussion” of measures to keep them from coming to a vote that the device got a name, “filibuster,” from the Dutch word vrijbuiter which means “freebooter” or “pirate,” and which passed into the Spanish as filibustero, because the sleek, swift ship used by caribbean pirates was called a filibote, and into legislative parlance because the device was, after all, a pirating, or hijacking, of the very heart of the legislative process.

Caro spends a great deal of time in the book talking about how reactionary Southern racists in the Senate, particularly Richard Russell, abused the filibuster to stymie try after try at civil rights legislation. It’s scathing, but a great read. And at the end, after Johnson has completely upended the rules of the Senate, and used his position to ram through the first civil rights bill in a century, it’s pretty obvious where Caro’s sympathies lie.

Follow the Monthly on Twitter @washmonthly, and Ryan @RyanLouisCooper

Adam Serwer had a good point months back, during the Libya intervention:

More to the point, though, is that President Obama faces what you might call a “hack deficit.” There simply aren’t many legal scholars on the left who are willing to give Obama a pass. Unlike right-wing legal writers, left-leaning ones are treating Obama and Bush equally. Bruce Ackerman, who called for the impeachment of torture memo author Jay Bybee, has now blasted the White House, claiming it “has shattered the traditional legal process the executive branch has developed to sustain the rule of law over the past 75 years.” His colleague Jack Balkin wrote: “If one is disturbed by Bush’s misuse of the process for vetting legal questions, one should be equally disturbed by Obama’s irregular procedures.” Liberal writers like Eugene Robinson and James Fallows have also rejected Obama’s attempt to redefine the term hostilities. Even in his own administration, State Department Legal Adviser Harold Koh was the only one of Obama’s top legal advisers who backed his interpretation of the War Powers Act while the OLC, Pentagon Counsel Jeh Johnson, and Attorney General Eric Holder all disagreed.

Jon Chait chimed in:

read more »

Time for a break! In case you’re leaving soon on vacation for the Memorial Day weekend, have a lovely holiday. Mr. Kilgore should be back in the saddle come Monday. For now, here are some links from around the web, chosen by carefully crafted algorithms (as in, if I don’t close some tabs on Chrome, I’m going to crash the internet).

1. The term “jaywalker” was coined by the auto industry to distract people from their then-horribly dangerous machines.

2. Behind the scenes during JPMorgan’s huge loss. What is up to now, $3 billion? I hope someone’s keeping track.

3. DIY weather ballooners get an awesome shot of the annular eclipse from 90,000 feet.

4. PG Wodehouse random quote generator. I could play with that thing all day.

5. Lovely profile of George Romney in New York Magazine. A surprisingly sympathetic character.

6. Very interesting review of what sounds like a good documentary on the obesity crisis.

7. Over at the College Guide, Daniel Luzer discovers a strange case of a man paying off his student loan with a duffel bag full of cash.

Follow us on Twitter @washmonthly, and Ryan @RyanLouisCooper

Another point about the decay of the conservative intelligentsia is just how far people go when they finally quit the movement. They don’t just fade into retirement or neutrality, they get angry. Bruce Bartlett, a former Reagan adviser, says things like ““I think a good chunk of the Republican caucus is either stupid, crazy, ignorant or craven cowards, who are desperately afraid of the tea party people, and rightly so.” David Frum, former speechwriter for George W. Bush, wrote a piece titled “When Did the GOP Lose Touch With Reality?”

Most recently, Michael Fumento wrote a take-no-prisoners piece in Salon about how “I worked for Reagan and wrote for National Review. But the new hysterical right cares nothing for truth or dignity:”

…now I find myself linked not only with the Unabomber, but also Charles Manson and Fidel Castro. Or so says the Chicago-based think tank the Heartland Institute, for which I’ve done work. Heartland erected billboards depicting the above three declaring: “I still believe in Global Warming. Do you?” Climate scientists now, evidently, share something in common with dictators and mass murderers. […]

This is nuts! Literally. As in “mass hysteria.” That’s a phenomenon I wrote about for a quarter-century, from the heterosexual AIDS “epidemic” to the swine flu “pandemic” that killed vastly fewer people than seasonal flu, to “runaway Toyotas.” Mass hysteria is when a large segment of society loses touch with reality, or goes bonkers, if you will, on a given issue…

I know these words coming from somebody identified with the right are heresy - as defined by this new right. An invite to a marshmallow roast with you as guest of honor. Or worse. It’s to be labeled with the ultimate epithet: RINO. Republican in name only. GOP Sen. Scott Brown bears that mark of Cain. Coming from super-liberal Massachusetts, he only has a 74 percent American Conservative Union rating. There you go, then!

The conservative movement is exceptionally good at propaganda—sloganeering, message discipline, unending repetition, and coordinated attack. But for anyone who likes to consider herself an intellectual, propaganda is inherently uncomfortable. A movement which is increasingly defined by propaganda and unmoored from reality will eventually drive the intellectuals out. And when they leave, the fresh air seems to taste pretty good.

Rand Paul got a genuinely interesting idea passed yesterday:

Today the U.S. Senate voted to pass the Food and Drug Administration Safety and Innovation Act (S.3187), which included language inserted by Sen. Rand Paul. This language would force the FDA to accept data from clinical investigations conducted outside the United States, including the European Union, to speed the process of getting life-saving drugs on the market by the FDA.

Alex Tabarrok would go even further:

Any drug or medical device introduced into say the EU, Japan, Canada or Australia ought to be automatically approved in the United States within 90 days. Such a procedure would reduce delay, eliminate needless duplication and cut costs.

I can’t think of any reason not to do at least what Paul is suggesting, and probably Tabarrok’s idea as well. Perhaps in a perfect world we could have some agreement between nations with standards, best practices, and a division of labor, but given the already quite malign influence the drug companies have on the scientific process, this wouldn’t make things worse, and would speed things up considerably. This could even possible dilute the influence of the pharma lobby, as it would be more difficult to influence scientific trials across several continents.

After all, our brethren in the industrialized world have every bit as much incentive to protect their citizens as we do.

UPDATE: For more on this issue, see this Steve Teles piece from a couple years back.

These are just a few titles that I’ve been reading recently that I’ve found to be relevant to our life and times.

1. The Great Divergence, by Monthly alum Tim Noah. This isn’t a work of art so much as a kind of handy guidebook to how the elites are siphoning off an ever-increasing share of our economy. Everyone should read this enough times so the arguments and statistics are right at hand.

2. The Years of Lyndon Johnson, by Robert Caro. This is a lot to work through, but it’s an excellent history of Johnson and a rare non-tedious look inside our political institutions as they were, which provides an interesting contrast to things today. All four are worth a read, but to get the most important bits, start with Master of the Senate and then The Passage of Power.

3. Why Nations Fail, by Acemoglu and Robinson. This is ostensibly a “big history” book, but I’ve found its distinction between “extractive” and “inclusive” institutions to be so useful that it has changed my thinking on a whole host of issues. Lively, interesting, and worth a read.

4. Twilight of the Elites, by Chris Hayes. There are not many writers and pundits who have really grappled with the fact that our institutions have failing at their most basic tasks. Hayes has an explanation for why this failure is happening, and a good one, but the best part of the book is how it captures what it feels like to be living in such times. Not out yet, but pick up a copy come June 5th.

What books would you add to the list?

John Quiggin pulled together a very interesting list of happenings the other day. Simply put, many pillars of the conservative universe look to be in trouble:

* Rush Limbaugh’s attack on Sandra Fluke and subsequent abandonment by sponsors

* The failed attempt by rightwing operatives at the Komen Foundation to blacklist Planned Parenthood

* The exposure of ALEC’s responsibility for the “stand your ground” laws that played a critical role in the Trayvon Martin case

* Most recently, the Heartland Institute has seen sponsors bail and its entire Washington team (mostly focused on insurance issues) decamp, promising that their new operation will have nothing to do with climate “scepticism”

In addition to this, but arguably sui generis are

* the attempt (which looks like succeeding) by the Koch Brothers to take control of Cato, easily the most credible thinktank on the right of politics

* the denunciation of the Republican party by Norman Ornstein, long presented as the intellectually respectable face of the American Enterprise Institute

Taken all at once, this list is quite remarkable, especially given what happened to the likes of Limbaugh. A few months ago I would have said his position was nigh-invincible, and nothing short of biting the head off a rabbit on a live show would have caused him trouble. But as John says,

…the simple proposition that “truth will out” seems to be working at some level. As long as things are going well, these organizations and pundits benefit from the reflexive assumptions of balance, two sides to every story and so on. But they’ve lied so often and so blatantly that this requires a lot of cognitive dissonance. When they overreach and screw up in the process, the cognitive dissonance is resolved against them.

The Overton Window is a bit elastic, apparently. I would add that the increasing ideological extremism and purging of “RINOS” has led to a palpable decay of ability across much of the conservative apparatus. How else to explain their bizarre fascination with “vetting” the president? No one in charge seems to understand that the idea of vetting is to look at prospective candidates to find out how they might govern; if they’re looking for a second term, why you just skip a step and look at how they actually governed.

Hello devoted Political Animals! I’ll be your guest blogger for today, filling in for Mr. Kilgore who is taking unexpected leave due to a medical issue in his family. Send your thoughts and/or prayers his way.

Let me tell you a bit about myself before I get started. I’m from the Southwest originally, Utah and then Colorado. I went to Reed College, graduating in 2008 with a degree in chemistry. I served in the Peace Corps in South Africa from 2009-2011, and wrote an article about the experience which was published in the March-April issue of this magazine. After my service, I took an internship here, eventually coming on as part of the business staff. You may already be familiar with me if you follow the Monthly Twitter account (@washmonthly), as I do many of those tweets. I keep my own blog here, and you can follow me on Twitter as well (@RyanLouisCooper).

Pleasure to meet everyone, and I’m honored to be following in the footsteps of Kevin Drum, Steve Benen, and the Mighty Kilgore. First, let’s have some music.

Apologies again for the somewhat light blogging today. I’m en route to Georgia tonight to be with my mother and stepfather, and someone that you may remember from Washington Monthly posts in the past, Ryan Cooper, will be stepping in tomorrow, with (God willing) an occasional post from me.

In the meantime, here are some of the remains of this day:

* Jury in John Edwards headed for sixth day of delberations, apparently now focusing on late donor Fred Baron instead of 101-year-old donor Bunny Mellon.

* Alam Abramowitz looks at past presidents and current models, and suggests looking at late performance of economy and late job approval rates before making predictions.

* At College Guide, Daniel Luzer discusses Sarah Lawrence College’s walk-back of its earlier decision not to look at SAT scores.

* TPM’s Sara Libby analyzes exceptional impact of redistricting on women from both parties.

* Also at TPM, Josh Marshall hears crickets in Wisconsin, at least for recall backers. Hope it’s calm before storm.

And in non-political news:

* Big Bang Theory’s Jim Parsons officially comes out as gay. Sheldon’s mom might be upset, but the rest of us are fine with it.

Gotta run for the shuttle for the long ride to long flight from SFO.

Selah.

At Ten Miles Square today, Ezra Klein provides a neat summary of why the entire hep political world is talking about Mitt’s background at Bain Capital rather than as governor of Massachusetts, his most recent gig that did not involve downhill skiers or running for president:

Neither campaign really wants to. The Romney campaign wants to avoid it because Romney governed from the center in ways that could now alienate the right. In a Republican Party looking for a true conservative, Romney sees little but danger in his record. His signature legislative accomplishment was the forerunner to “Obamacare.” Meanwhile, his state ranked 47th in job creation during his term. (So much for the secret knowledge gleaned from Bain about how to create jobs.)

The Obama campaign doesn’t want to discuss it because Romney’s centrist record as governor might comfort independents, who otherwise may fear that Romney is a creature of the right. “I think people recognize that I’m not a partisan Republican, that I’m someone who is moderate, and that my views are progressive,” Romney said in 2002.

Ah, but there’s a third thing the Obama campaign could talk about:

We don’t have to pore over every decision Romney made in Massachusetts to discern what he would do in Washington if elected. Romney and the Republicans in Congress have explained exactly what they intend to accomplish — and their plans are remarkably in sync.

The budget prepared by Paul Ryan, the House Budget Committee chairman, and the Romney campaign’s general-election platform look quite similar. Both would cut taxes while flattening the tax code. Their Medicare-reform plans look similar; Ryan even modified his original draft to make it look more like Romney’s, which allows seniors to choose between traditional fee-for-service Medicare and private options. Their plans to increase defense spending are alike, as are their plans to cut domestic spending and to turn Medicaid, food stamps and other safety-net programs over to the states.

Because it’s difficult to imagine a scenario in which Romney is elected and Republicans don’t hold the House and win control of the Senate, Republicans wouldn’t be stymied by Democratic opposition. They would have the votes to pass their agenda. True, they won’t get a filibuster-proof majority of 60 in the upper chamber, but Ryan’s budget is, well, a budget, which means it could be passed through the budget reconciliation process — and couldn’t be filibustered. To enact a radical change of direction, Republicans need only a simple majority of votes.

Given that stark reality, perhaps I should rephrase my initial question: Why are we spending so much time discussing what Romney did at Bain … instead of what he will do as president?

It would obvious make it all easier if Romney just put Ryan on the ticket. But presumably, Team Obama does plan at some point to follow the path not taken so far and pay special attention to the promises he made to his party in order to win the nomination.