Looks Like Global Action On "Climate Change" Is Dead

As a basic starting point, I suggest that on any story of political importance in the New York Times, the truth is probably exactly the opposite of what they report.  Consider that lead story on the front page of yesterday's Sunday print edition: "World Leaders Move Forward on Climate Change, Without U.S."   Scary!  The U.S. is getting completely isolated from the world community!

In a final communiqué at the conclusion of the Group of 20 summit meeting in Hamburg, Germany, the nations took “note” of Mr. Trump’s decision to abandon the pact and “immediately cease” efforts to enact former President Barack Obama’s pledge of curbing greenhouse gas emissions 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025.  But the other 19 members of the group broke explicitly with Mr. Trump in their embrace of the international deal, signing off on a detailed policy blueprint outlining how their countries could meet their goals in the pact.   

You can definitely count on Pravda not to look into what these other 19 countries have promised to do and let you know if there is any substance to it.  So the hard work falls once again to the Manhattan Contrarian.  If you just Google the letters "INDC" ("Intended Nationally Determined Contribution") along with the name of a country, you can find out exactly what that country has promised to do as part of the Paris Agreement.  So let's take a look at what a few of the big countries are up to.

  • China.  We already know that answer from my post just last week.  China, through its companies, is planning to build over the course of the next decade or so well more than double the number of coal power plants that the U.S. has today.  Its INDC calls for its proceeding to increase carbon emissions as much as it wants through 2030, and only then (when everyone in China presumably has electricity and a couple of cars)  to level things off.  By that time its emissions will probably be at least triple those of the U.S.
  • India.  India's INDC openly admits that it intends to increase its electricity supply by more than triple between now and 2030, with no commitment whatsoever as to how much of that will come from fossil fuels.  Oh, they say that they plan to lower the "emissions intensity" of their energy generation, and greatly expand (useless) wind and solar capacity, as well as nuclear.  Whoopee!
  • Indonesia.   These things get more comical the more of them you read.  The first thing you learn in reading Indonesia's INDC is that the large majority of its emissions come from burning down the rain forest ("most emissions (63%) are the result of land use change and peat and forest fires") and very little from using fossil fuels for energy ("fossil fuels contribute[e] approximately 19% of total emissions").  So they'll promise to burn down less of the rain forest, and nothing whatsoever as to reducing use of fossil fuels for energy.  Their (completely illusory) "reduction target" of 29% by 2030 is not against a fixed amount of past usage (like the United States' benchmark of 2005 emissions), but rather is against what they call a "business as usual" scenario of projected future emissions that are a multiple of today's.
  • Russia.  What, you didn't know that Russia was a member of the G20?  What is the chance that Russia would make an honest promise about emissions reductions?  Their INDC calls for reducing emissions by 25-30% below 1990 by 2030.  Impressive!  Wait a minute!  The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.  Then they closed down all that inefficient Soviet industry.  According to a graph at Climate Action Tracker here, by 2000 their emissions were down by almost 40% from the 1990 level, and they have only crept up a little from there since.  In other words, Russia's supposed "commitments" again represent increases from today's level of emissions.  Yet another total scam.
  • Germany.  Germany is part of the supposed EU commitment to reduce emissions by 40% below 1990 levels by 2030.  Oh, but now that Germany has gotten its electricity production from renewables up to about 30%, it seems that it has hit a wall, and its carbon emissions have actually gone up for both of the last two years (2015 and 2016), according to Clean Energy Wire.  Exactly how do they plan to meet their goal?  Excellent question.

In other words, this whole thing is a total farce.  The G20 "climate" thing -- let alone New York Times reporting on same -- is nothing more than an international effort to bully the United States into crippling its economy while everyone else goes right ahead and uses fossil fuels exactly as they please.  Whatever else you might say about President Trump, he seems to be unusually immune to this kind of bullying.  

Without the U.S. in the game, all the biggest players are going to be increasing emissions, not decreasing them.  In reality, the whole "global action on climate change" thing is completely dead.  

I can't leave this subject without mentioning this great quote from former Obama State Department official Andrew Light:

[T]he U.S. has isolated itself on climate change once again, and is falling back while all other major economies step up and compete in the clean energy marketplace created by the Paris Agreement estimated to be worth over 20 trillion dollars,” said Andrew Light, a senior climate change adviser at the State Department under Mr. Obama.

As you can see, knowledge of basic economics was not a requirement to work at the Obama State Department.  Andrew apparently has no understanding that the forced use of less efficient energy sources destroys wealth.  

 

The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time -- Part XV

It's been several months since I've added a post to this series, since this one back on February 22.  There's good reason for that.  With the breakup of last year's big El Niño, global temperatures declined significantly.  The latest global temperature anomaly from the UAH satellite temperature series is +0.21 deg C for June 2017 -- down a remarkable 0.65 deg C from the February 2016 global anomaly of +0.86 deg C.  The Northern Hemisphere anomaly dropped even more, by 0.86 deg C, from +1.19 deg C to only +0.32 deg C.  Those declines represent well more than half of the entire warming that had been present in the satellite record at the peak of the El Niño, and bring recent temperatures below those recorded during many months in the 1980s and 90s.  It's no wonder that the breathless press releases from NASA and NOAA trumpeting "hottest [April, May, June, etc.] ever!" have at least temporarily ceased.

But the lack of "record warming" announcements coming out of the government has not stopped independent researchers from further examining the surface temperature records from NASA and NOAA (and also from a British group called Hadley CRU that gets its starting data from the same source) to try to quantify and understand the "adjustments" that continue to be made.  Readers of my series know that NASA, NOAA and Hadley CRU report global temperatures derived from a different source from the satellites, namely a network of land- and ocean-based surface weather stations known as the Global Historical Climate Network, or GHCN.  These so-called "surface temperatures" are inherently in need of some ongoing adjustments, to account for things like station moves and nearby urbanization.  But somehow the adjustment process has gotten into the hands of some committed global warming zealots, and next thing you know each round of adjustments seems progressively to make the past cooler and the present warmer, thus always enhancing the apparent warming.  Oh, plus the adjusters refuse to release details of the bases and methodology for the adjustments.  After a few decades of this, reasonable people come to have serious and well-justified doubts about whether the reported warming trends can be trusted.

The latest effort at analyzing the adjustments comes from a team of independent researchers led by James Wallace, and including Joseph D'Aleo and Craig Idso.  Their new Research Report can be found at this link, titled "On the Validity of NOAA, NASA and Hadley CRU Global Average Surface Temperature [GAST] Data & The Validity of EPA’s CO2 Endangerment Finding."  The new Research Report has seven highly qualified peer reviewers identified in the paper itself.  From the Abstract:

In this research report, the most important surface data adjustment issues are identified and past changes in the previously reported historical data are quantified. It was found that each new version of GAST has nearly always exhibited a steeper warming linear trend over its entire history. And, it was nearly always accomplished by systematically removing the previously existing cyclical temperature pattern. This was true for all three entities providing GAST data measurement, NOAA, NASA and Hadley CRU.  

As others have previously noticed, the periodic revisions to GAST data from all three entities have brought with them a systematic cooling of the past and warming of the recent and the present, to a degree that hugely strains credulity.  But the new Wallace, et al., paper takes another step, and examines the equally systematic removal from the surface temperature record of a cyclical pattern widely reflected in raw temperature data from multiple regions.  As the paper notes, if you look at much raw (unadjusted) data, a cyclical pattern is immediately obvious:  temperatures gradually increase from the beginning of records in the late nineteenth century through about 1940; then temperatures decrease through about the 1970s; then the increase resumes through about 2000; and finally temperatures level off through the present.  This cycle results in a temperature peak around 1940, sometimes referred to as the "blip."  The "blip" has long been recognized to be a problem for the hypothesis that human greenhouse gas emissions are the principal control knob for global temperatures, because human emissions had barely begun before 1940 -- when temperatures were increasing -- and then human emissions began to increase sharply from the 1950s to the 1970s -- when temperatures were declining.  Doesn't that significantly undermine the hypothesis?  The successive rounds of adjustments to the surface temperature records have systematically removed this "blip," making for a temperature record seemingly supporting the hypothesis.  Could this possibly be honest?  From the Wallace, et al., paper:

As has been clearly shown in Section IV above, the consequences of the changes made to previously reported historical versions of GAST data have been to virtually eliminate the previously existing cyclical nature of their previously reported trend cycle patterns. The notion that there was a 1930 and 40s warm period followed by a mid-1970 cool period now gets lost in the noise so to speak. 

As just one example from the paper, a comparison of the GAST data from NASA from May 2017 versus May 2008 shows that, in between the issuance of those two versions of the data, nearly all annual mean temperatures from approximately 1920 to 1940 have been reduced by between 0.05 deg C and 0.20 deg C, while nearly all annual mean temperatures from approximately 1980 to 2000 have been increased by between 0.05 deg C and 0.20 deg C.  The obvious effects have been substantially to remove the 1940s "blip" and to strongly enhance the warming trend.  Other data revisions at different points in time have made additional changes to the same effect.  The basis and methodology for these adjustments have never been explained.

Have these adjustments been part of an intentional program to alter data to fit the desired hypothesis -- in other words, classic scientific fraud?  The 2009 Climategate emails give additional evidence.  For example, one of the best known of those emails is the September 27, 2009 message from Tom Wigley of NCAR to Phil Jones, head of Hadley CRU.  In that email, Wigley proposes an intentional effort to reduce the ocean part of the surface record by 0.15 deg C, not to make the record a better representation of reality, but rather to make the evidence fit the narrative.  Excerpts:

So, if we could reduce the [1940s] ocean blip by, say, 0.15 degC, then this would be significant for the global mean -- but we'd still have to explain the land blip. I've chosen 0.15 here deliberately. This still leaves an ocean blip, and i think one needs to have some form of ocean blip to explain the land blip (via either some common forcing, or ocean forcing land, or vice versa, or all of these). . . .  My 0.15 adjustment leaves things consistent with this, so you can see where I am coming from. Removing ENSO does not affect this. It would be good to remove at least part of the 1940s blip, but we are still left with "why the blip".

From the conclusion of the Wallace, et al., paper:

While the notion that some “adjustments” to historical data might need to be made is not challenged, logically it would be expected that such historical temperature data adjustments would sometimes raise these temperatures, and sometimes lower them. This situation would mean that the impact of such adjustments on the temperature trend line slope is uncertain. However, each new version of GAST has nearly always exhibited a steeper warming linear trend over its entire history.  That was accomplished by systematically removing the previously existing cyclical temperature pattern. This was true for all three entities providing GAST data measurement, NOAA, NASA and Hadley CRU. . . .  

The conclusive findings of this research are that the three GAST data sets are not a valid representation of reality. In fact, the magnitude of their historical data adjustments, that removed their cyclical temperature patterns, are totally inconsistent with published and credible U.S. and other temperature data. Thus, it is impossible to conclude from the three published GAST data sets that recent years have been the warmest ever – despite current claims of record setting warming.  

The adjustments to the GAST record have been part of a coordinated effort to influence public policy by supporting restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions.  In the United States, the EPA's finding that CO2 constitutes a "danger" to human health and welfare rests on what EPA calls its three "lines of evidence," one of which is the supposedly "record warming" as shown in the GAST data.  Oh, it now seems that the "record warming" is not present in the raw data, but is nothing more than an artifact of adjustments made by government bureaucrats.  The final conclusion of the Wallace, et al., paper:

[S]ince GAST data set validity is a necessary condition for EPA’s GHG/CO2 Endangerment Finding, it too is invalidated by these research findings.      

 On July 6 my co-counsel and I submitted a Supplemental Petition to EPA, citing this new paper, seeking to have EPA reopen and reconsider the Endangerment Finding.  We have called upon EPA to hold hearings on the record and under oath, at which hearings the people who have made the "adjustments" to create supposedly record warming should be called upon to set forth their detailed methods.  It is high time that the people who have made these adjustments justify their handiwork to the American people.

UPDATE, July 9, 2017:  It occurs to me that readers may be interested in this tidbit of information:  That September 27, 2009 email from Wigley to Jones has a cc -- to a guy named Ben Santer.  Do you recognize the name?  He is another "scientist" on the government/taxpayer dime, and another serious global warming zealot, who works at the Livermore Lab in California.  You may have seen his op ed in the Washington Post on June 21, 2017, title "Attention Scott Pruitt: Red teams and blue teams are no way to conduct climate science."  Excerpt:

[C]alls for special teams of investigators are not about honest scientific debate. They are dangerous attempts to elevate the status of minority opinions, and to undercut the legitimacy, objectivity and transparency of existing climate science.

What are you afraid of, Ben?  Time to get this guy under oath!

And here's yet another bit of similar news.  You may recall that several years ago (real) Canadian climate scientist Tim Ball wrote of (fake) Penn State climate scientist Michael "Hockey Stick" Mann that "he belongs in the state pen, not Penn. State."  Mann sued Ball for libel in a court in Vancouver, Canada.  Ball demanded to get in discovery the underlying data and computer code that support Mann's "hockey stick" temperature reconstruction.  Back in February, the Canadian court ordered Mann to produce that information.  According to Principia Scientific, Mann has now defaulted on that obligation and has gone into contempt of court.  According to PS:

[U]nder Canada’s unique ‘Truth Defense’, Mann is now proven to have wilfully hidden his data, so the court may rule he hid it because it is fake. 

That may turn out to be an overprediction of how bad this will prove for Mann.  Still, it is very remarkable that Mann would think he could be a plaintiff in a libel case and not have to produce the data and code that support his statements.  Another guy to get under oath!

For all articles in this series on government temperature data tampering fraud, go to this link.

Independence Day Thought: Thank God That We Finally Got Rid Of Obama

Readers here know that President Trump was not my favorite candidate, and I have had numerous reasons to differ with him ever since he first became a candidate and up to the present.  But then, in a presidential election, the perfect candidate is never one of the options.  All you can do is choose between Option A and Option B.  Every candidate is badly flawed, and it's only a question of how badly.

So, now that we've had almost 6 months of Trump after 8 years of Obama, have things gotten better or worse?  OMG, it's not even close.  In honor of Independence Day, we should all thank God that we have finally gotten rid of Obama.

I will emphasize one of my recurrent topics, which is energy policy -- a subject which has somehow gotten completely intertwined with something called "climate change."  I find it beyond comprehension that this country elected as President, not once but twice, a man who not only thought impoverishing the people by increasing energy prices was a good idea, but promised, and then in office tried, to do everything he could to make that happen.  If you have never watched this January 2008 video of candidate Obama promising to make electricity rates "skyrocket" ("Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket"), you should.  The man actually thought he could change the weather by making you poorer!  And he looked down with supercilious scorn on anyone who dared to question him on that subject.  

And then, upon becoming President, he tried to push the plan through.  He briefly got control of both houses of Congress, with a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, but couldn't get the cap-and-trade price increase plan to advance.  Whereupon he set about to try to accomplish the same ends with the "pen and phone."  Next thing you know he was blocking pipelines; obstructing energy exploration on federal lands; forcing the closure of close to half of our electricity-generation capacity and replacement of same with uneconomic, expensive, intermittent and ultimately useless "renewables" like wind and solar; and agreeing at Paris without Senate consent to hobble the U.S. economy by forcing decreases in carbon emissions while the entire rest of the world (excepting the guilt-ridden dopes in Europe) got a pass and continued to build multiple times the coal generation capacity than we ever had.

This was not mere incompetence.  It was intentional, active effort at destruction of American prosperity.  Only by the grace of God did we have an energy sector not under the thumb of the President, that was able to circumvent Obama's efforts and produce the fracking revolution in spite of everything the President tried to do to stop it.

Over at the Supreme Court, Obama appointed people (Sotomayor and Kagan) who, whatever else, were completely reliable votes for unchecked expansion of the administrative state and of the total discretion of the President and his minions to do whatever they want by pen and phone and without checks and balances.  A third Obama appointment -- who would have cemented a solid majority for more of same for a decade or more to come -- was only staved off by a near political miracle.

Obama declared "income inequality" to be "the defining challenge of our time."  And then he proceeded to demonstrate that he knew nothing about the subject and to do everything he could to make things worse for low income people.  That is, everything other than increasing handouts and dependency.  But maybe that was the real point.  Food stamps exploded.  Social security disability exploded.  But how about making it easier for low income people to earn enough money to get ahead and be independent?  See above on intentionally increasing energy prices.  Did he even realize that the burden of such price increases would fall most heavily on the poor?  Of was he planning to fix that with a new handout program and more dependency?

Pushing income inequality as a moral issue, Obama lectured Americans that "at some point you've made enough money."  The Wall Street Journal reported over the holiday weekend that Barack and Michelle have just contracted to buy the mansion in Washington's Kalorama neighborhood that they have recently been renting.  It is 8200 sq. ft., and the price is $8.1 million.  I guess that moral lecture did not apply to ex-Presidents of the correct political affiliation.

And the kowtowing to foreign leaders and to international groupthink!  The United States does not have to apologize to anyone for its success.  We have the economic model and the economy that work, that have made us successful, and that we should offer as a model to the world.  And we had a President who did not like our economic model, was ashamed of our economy and of our success and of our country, and went around the world apologizing.  If you have not seen it, you might enjoy this article from Bloomberg over the weekend headlined "China, Germany Step Up As U.S. Retires From World Leadership."    Don't worry, it's not just Bloomberg.  Our entire press has no idea that "world leadership" comes from economic success and not from going along with international groupthink.

Our current President?   He issues too many tweets, some of which we might wish he could take back.  Big deal.  Meanwhile, he actually thinks that the idea of America is a good idea.  Undoubtedly that is the main reason that he is vilified by the Left.

 

What "Climate Leadership" Really Means -- Lots More Coal

Three weeks or so ago, we all got a good laugh from the New York Times fretting that China was in the process of seizing "climate leadership" from the United States.  As reported here on June 8, Pravda had just reported that China was aiming to win the "economic and diplomatic spoils" that would come from dominating the world markets for wind and solar energy.  Of course, this was big front-page news.

But wind and solar as sources of electricity are intermittent and fundamentally useless to power a 24/7/365 grid.  Are the Chinese really this stupid?  Or are they just putting up some token Potemkin village demonstration projects to deceive the deluded climate cultists into pressuring the U.S. to hobble its economy, even as China floods the world with hundreds of more coal plants?

Today's Pravda has the answer.  Of course, since the answer is inconvenient, it's not big front-page news, but rather buried on page A10.  The headline is "As Beijing Joins Climate Fight, Chinese Companies Build Coal Plants."   It seems that a German consultancy called Urgewald has gone out and compiled data on plans for new power plants around the world.  The compilation comes after a recent highly-publicized announcement that China had scaled back plans to build coal power plants, and had canceled more than 100 of them that had previously been planned.  That's "climate leadership"!  But according to the Urgewald data, even after the cancelations China seems to be gearing up to build some 700 new coal plants, both in China itself and in countries around the world:

China’s energy companies will make up nearly half of the new coal generation expected to go online in the next decade.  These Chinese corporations are building or planning to build more than 700 new coal plants at home and around the world, some in countries that today burn little or no coal, according to tallies compiled by Urgewald, an environmental group based in Berlin.

To give you an idea of the scale of this, the U.S. currently has around 600 coal generation units, of which close to 50 are currently scheduled for closure.  So, what the Chinese companies have in the pipeline for just the next few years is more than the entire U.S. capacity for generating electricity from coal.

And, of course, China is not the only one out there building new coal plants:

Over all, 1,600 coal plants are planned or under construction in 62 countries, according to Urgewald’s tally, which uses data from the Global Coal Plant Tracker portal. The new plants would expand the world’s coal-fired power capacity by 43 percent.  The fleet of new coal plants would make it virtually impossible to meet the goals set in the Paris climate accord, which aims to keep the increase in global temperatures from preindustrial levels below 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

Did you somehow have the impression that the Trump administration was going to destroy the world's environment by declining to join the Paris climate agreement and failing to cut back U.S. carbon emissions by around 25%?  Well, how is this even relevant to anything when the rest of the world is currently in the process of planning and building some three times as many coal electricity plants as the U.S. ever had?  See if you can find the answer to that question anywhere in Pravda!

The whole climate thing is quickly devolving into a game where countries around the world make preposterous and obviously false statements of intent to appease the climate cultists, while at the same time going ahead and developing the fossil fuel resources -- particularly coal -- just as fast as possible.  I just hope that you appreciate the humor.   

What's Going On In Afghanistan?

While everyone's attention has been diverted for the past few months onto insane conspiracy theories about Russia and, now, twitter wars with CNN hosts, what has been happening with some of the things that are actually important?  For example, have you heard anything lately about the war in Afghanistan?

Afghanistan is famous as the country that no one can subjugate.  In the nineteenth century Britain fought endless wars there without ever bringing the place to heel.  In the 1980s the Soviet Union invaded and made a big push to gain control; but by 1991 it was the Soviet Union that had collapsed, and Afghanistan was basically back to its wild state.  After the 2001 World Trade Center attacks, when it emerged that Osama bin Laden had been using remote areas in Afghanistan for his training bases, the U.S. decided to take its chance.  

Seven years later, it was the same old morass.  If you are old enough to remember when Barack Obama was first running for President in 2008, you will likely recall that he made a big distinction between the two foreign wars that the U.S. was conducting at the time.  The war in Iraq was a "dumb war" that "never should have been authorised and never should have been waged."  But the war in Afghanistan was "the good war" that could be a success if only we did it right.  If it was going poorly, that was just due to Bush's incompetence.  What we needed to do was to make the effort to go ahead and win it, say, within 16 months, and then bring the troops home.  

After his election, Obama got going with a "surge" to over 100,000 troops in the country.  The coalition forces were led by the highly-regarded General Stanley McChrystal.  In the spring of 2010, I was invited to a seminar in Washington at which McChrystal (on a brief trip home) spoke.  After his talk, I got to ask a question, which went something like this:  "The Afghan economy is hugely dependent on the production of opium, with some estimates of the percent of Afghan GDP from opium in excess of 50%.  Yet the U.S. says it plans both to turn Afghanistan into a functioning country and also do away with the opium production.  How is it possible to eliminate the Afghans' dominant source of income without turning them all against us?"  I still remember how McChrystal's began his answer, which was "It's difficult."  The answer went on some from there, but it was completely clear that there was no idea or strategy that had any real chance to work.

Just a couple of weeks later, Obama fired McChrystal (replacing him with David Petraeus).  A few commanders later, in 2014, Obama decided to declare the American "combat mission" over and bring most (although not all) of the remaining troops home.  But several thousand troops still remained, and as Obama's presidency wound down, the insurgency in Afghanistan just wouldn't go away.  In July 2016 Obama decided to raise the number of troops back up.  A Bloomberg report on a statement Obama made on July 6, 2016, got the headline "Obama Finds He Can't Escape Afghan War He Once Vowed to End."  Over to you, Donald Trump!

What's the latest from Afghanistan?  I mean, we've now spent an estimated $800 billion plus in just direct military expenditures on this war (per the Watson Institute here) -- and that doesn't count plenty of things to come, like future healthcare costs for the vets.  You can be forgiven if you haven't noticed anything about this important subject lately, what with the Russia thing and the CNN twitter exchanges and whatever.  But Afghanistan involves serious questions of national security, let alone the trillion plus bucks.  What's going on?

The short answer is that fighting continues seemingly without end and the security situation has only deteriorated recently.  On May 31 a huge truck bomb went off right in the middle of Kabul, killing more than 80 and damaging much property, including several foreign embassies.  From a report in the Globe and Mail on that event:

Sixteen years after the United States and its NATO allies launched Operation Enduring Freedom – promising to deny safe haven to terrorist groups and to liberate Afghanistan’s people, primarily its women – the country’s unity government is dangerously fragile and its army controls a shrinking share of territory.  The Taliban are rapidly regaining ground, and women’s rights in the parts of the country back under their control are little different than in the days before the U.S.-led invasion.

The most recent substantive report in the New York Times was on June 28.  Excerpt:

Two Taliban groups that recently switched allegiance to the Islamic State have overrun an embattled district in northern Afghanistan, killing at least 10 government fighters and a large number of civilians, according to Afghan officials in the area. . . .  Last week, Islamic State fighters overran all of Darzab, according to the acting district governor, Baz Mohammad Dawar. Government officials were able to regain control of the district’s center, but not most of the rest of the territory; 10 police officers or soldiers were killed in the fight, he said.

How could it be possible that things are going so badly?  Amazingly, almost nothing you read on the subject addresses the fundamental issue, which is that the people are just never going to support a regime imposed from outside that intends to take away the major source of their income.  The major source of their income is opium.  How much of their income?  Unfortunately, there are no trustworthy numbers from Afghanistan.  The UN Office of Drug Control did a big survey of Afghan opium production in 2014, which claims to show that opium exports declined from close to 100% of Afghan GDP in 2002 to maybe 15% by 2014 (page 16).  I'm highly dubious that the recent figure could be so small.  For one thing, the same report shows opium production increasing from 3400 tons annually to 8400 tons over the same 2002-2014 period (page 17).  And then, what is supposedly the rest of the Afghan economy that has grown so rapidly?  They don't say, but the likely answer is foreign aid and contractor disbursements from the U.S. and other countries, counted at 100 cents on the dollar as they tend to do with these things.  But when the foreigners withdraw, all of that goes away, and the people who have been working for the foreigners become unemployed.  The thing that is left on which they can rely is the opium.

Looking for a serious article that actually addresses this subject, I find a long piece in The Nation from February 2016 by Alfred McCoy, titled "The Drug That Makes the Taliban Possible."  The prescient subtitle is "Until Washington deals with Afghanistan’s economic dependence on opium, the Taliban aren’t going anywhere."  The article describes how, over the course of the 16 years of the U.S. operation, Washington continuously engaged in ineffective eradication efforts against the opium fields, even as production soared.

Washington came to rely on private contractors like DynCorp to train Afghan manual eradication teams. However, by 2005, according to New York Times correspondent Carlotta Gall, that approach had already become “something of a joke.” Two years later, as the Taliban insurgency and opium cultivation both spread in what seemed to be a synergistic fashion, the US Embassy again pressed Kabul to accept the kind of aerial defoliation the United States had sponsored in Colombia. President Hamid Karzai refused, leaving this critical problem unresolved. . . .  [In 2007] UN stated that Taliban guerrillas had “started to extract from the drug economy resources for arms, logistics, and militia pay.” A study for the US Institute of Peace concluded that, by 2008, the movement had 50 heroin labs in its territory and controlled 98 percent of the country’s poppy fields. That year, it reportedly collected $425 million in “taxes” levied on opium traffic, and with every harvest, it gained the necessary funds to recruit a new crop of young fighters from the villages. Each of those prospective guerrillas could count on monthly payments of $300, far above the wages they would have made as agricultural laborers.

McCoy says that he foretold in 2009 that continued military efforts without a transformation of the Afghan economy would never work.  But when Obama came in, the strategy was just more of the same straight military approach:

By attacking the guerrillas but ignoring the opium harvest that funded new insurgents every spring, Obama’s surge soon suffered that defeat [that I had] foretold. As 2012 ended, the Taliban guerrillas had, according to The New York Times, “weathered the biggest push the American-led coalition is going to make against them.” Amid the rapid drawdown of allied forces to meet President Obama’s December 2014 deadline for “ending” US combat operations, reduced air operations allowed the Taliban to launch mass-formation attacksin the north, northeast, and south, killing record numbers of Afghan army troops and police.   

For the latest, we have this from the New York Review of Books on June 18, "Afghanistan: It's Too Late":

Until now, Western forces have been able to keep the government in power by financing the budget and paying salaries and maintaining the Afghan army in the field. But it has become increasingly difficult, with the Taliban advancing in many parts of the country making US and NATO forces look increasingly irrelevant.

What about President Trump?  He has barely spoken on the subject of Afghanistan.  But new Defense Secretary James Mattis addressed the issue a couple of days ago.  It will not surprise you to learn that Mattis's idea is -- more troops:

[Mattis] appeared to place blame on the Obama administration for cutting the number of troops "too rapidly."  "We may have pulled our troops out too rapidly, reduced the numbers a little too rapidly, but the difference today is that the Afghan army is actually able to carry the fight. . . ."

Well, he's a military guy.  You can't expect him to come up with a plan other than a military plan.

McCoy at The Nation, has an alternative plan:  The U.S. just needs to transform the Afghan economy by putting U.S. taxpayer money into supporting real agriculture, like "orchards" and "flocks":

[I]nvesting even a small portion of all that misspent military funding in rural Afghanistan could produce economic alternatives for the millions of farmers who depend upon the opium crop for employment. Such money could help rebuild that land’s ruined orchards, ravaged flocks, wasted seed stocks, and wrecked snowmelt irrigation systems that, before these decades of war, sustained a diverse agriculture.            

It is completely unclear why the Afghans would go along with this when opium pays far more.

I hate to say it, but there almost certainly is no perfect answer for Afghanistan.  Any hope of relative peace and calm in Afghanistan means living with widespread production of opium for the foreseeable future.  Alternatively, we can aggressively pursue eradication of the opium, and face the increasing ascendancy of the Taliban, widespread fighting, and the likely overthrow of the current Afghan regime within a few years.  Take your choice!  I guess it's no wonder that nobody wants to talk about it.

Update On The Disaster Of Crony Capitalism In New York

Here in high tax New York, the City continues to grow and prosper (although at a slower pace than low tax places like Texas and Florida), but upstate is a different story.  Who exactly wants to take on a tax burden almost as high as New York City, only to find yourself living, for example, in Utica?  In the upstate region, the population has been in absolute decline since 2010, and according to data compiled by the Empire Center, the decline only seems to be accelerating in the more recent years.  What to do?

For our New York City-dominated, progressive political culture, the idea of cutting taxes and regulations and trying to create a good business climate upstate is completely beyond the pale.  That leaves as the main alternative the idea, essentially, of bribing companies to move to, or remain in, upstate locations.  In other words, crony capitalism.  

Not that we are the only state engaged in this idiotic practice, but the scale of it in New York is quite breathtaking.  Compared to a total state annual budget of about $147 billion, of which about $105 billion comes from state funds and only $75 billion from all taxes, the state government lavishes about $8 billion per year on what are euphemistically called "economic development initiatives."  The annual $8 billion puts New York in the number one spot among the states for such largesse, which I guess should surprise no one.  Look into the matter, and you find that there are many dozens of projects and grants and handouts -- and yet you struggle to find even one that is anything other than a total failure.

Here is a round up dated June 7 from the Democrat & Chronicle (an affiliate of USA Today).  The headline is "NY spends $8B each year on job programs. So where are the jobs?"  

New York's economy . . . pours at least $8 billion a year — more than any state in the nation — into dozens of job-creation programs that haven't met their goals.  A six-month-long investigation by the USA Today Network in New York found myriad problems with the state's economic-development efforts, ranging from under-performing programs to a lack of transparency on how taxpayers' money is spent.  And despite the spending, the labor force outside New York City continues to shrink.

The investigative report is loaded with one dispiriting example after another.  I'll give you just a taste:

In late 2015, New York announced a sweeping agreement to save four Kraft-Heinz production plants across upstate, vowing to invest $20 million to save the 940 jobs.  Now, less than two years later, [in] the small town of Campbell in the Southern Tier . . . [e]fforts are teetering to keep open a Kraft cheese plant in the community of fewer than 3,700 people, and the company announced in May it will continue to look for a new buyer until August, leaving 330 jobs in the balance. . . .  

In December, Austrian computer chip maker ams dropped plans for a multi-billion technology campus in Utica with SUNY Poly. A nearly $5 billion SUNY Poly deal with IBM and other computer-chip makers ended in 2016, and now some of the equipment from the sprawling nanocenter in Albany is being auctioned off.  In Batavia, unrelated to SUNY Poly, a massive yogurt plant owned by Muller Quaker Dairy with Pepsi shuttered last year after three years and after hoping to create 200 jobs, leaving one of the largest dairy producing plants in the nation vacant.

And so forth.  But all of this pales next to the Big One, known as the "Buffalo Billion," which is the state-funded effort to turn around the economy of the state's second largest city with a big billion bucks of taxpayer loot.  I previously reported on how it was going in two posts last year, one in July and the other in September.   Things were bad then.  But, you won't be surprised to learn, they have since gotten far worse.  A guy calling himself Montana Skeptic has a long write-up June 26 at a site called Seeking Alpha (requires registration).  The post is titled "Tesla Has Stiffed New York State On The Riverbend Factory."

To jog your memory, I'll repeat some of the background.  Super crony capitalist Elon Musk somehow convinced the credulous New York functionaries to devote some $750 million of the "Buffalo Billion" to just one facility -- a brand new, (supposedly) state-of-the-art factory to make nifty-difty solar panels and solar roof tiles.  The facility is called the "Riverbend Factory" after its location along the Buffalo River.  To avoid getting the taxpayers on the hook for things like losses and loan guarantees and liabilities, our sophisticated representatives decided on a structure where they would just build the factory at complete taxpayer expense and lease it to Musk's company SolarCity for $2 per year.  Well, actually, the lease was not with SolarCity, but with an essentially asset-free sub of SolarCity called Silevo.  SolarCity (actually Silevo) then made a series of promises to New York, the most important being to hire and retain 4,900 employees and to spend at least $5 billion in capital, operating expenses, and other costs over ten years.

It seems that in December 2016 SolarCity (and its parent Tesla) basically bailed on the deal, and proceeded to sign a series of agreements with Panasonic under which Panasonic would take over and operate the factory, making who knows what.  There have been public disclosures of the deal, including in SEC filings.  No reason is given for SolarCity bailing, but Montana Skeptic suspects that the reason is that they could not get the technology to work.  A statement about the transaction from Governor Cuomo (which Montana Skeptic calls "utter nonsense") somehow spun the transfer to Panasonic as a good thing for New York:

[T]his agreement further cements Western New York’s position as a national leader in clean power technology and cutting-edge innovation.   

The Gov omitted just one small thing from his effusive praise of the agreement:  Panasonic explicitly declined to assume any of SolarCity/Silevo's obligations to the state, including the business about the 4,900 jobs and the other business about the $5 billion investment.  Here is the paragraph from the Panasonic agreement:

It is understood that (Panasonic) has no direct obligations or rights under the (Riverbend Agreement). If SolarCity is required to reimburse, refund, or otherwise return any financial benefits received under the (Riverbend Agreement), Tesla will have the sole obligation to pay such amounts directly to (New York State).

But of course, those obligations of "Tesla" are actually obligations of Silevo.  Good luck collecting on any of that!

Who knows, Panasonic may even succeed with this venture.  It might help that they are paying way below market rent, but we don't know because the amount of rent that Panasonic is paying to Tesla is not disclosed.  Anyway, where we are now is that the New York taxpayers are completely out $750 million, and we have a completely speculative upside that maybe Panasonic will hire some people or make some investment.  Great!

By the way, Montana Skeptic discloses in his article that he is short Tesla.  You may want to take that into account in evaluating his version of the events.  However, as far as I can see, in this situation Tesla has taken New York State to the cleaners.