Tax Reform And The Blue State Model

It was not long before I started this blog in 2012 that Walter Russell Mead of the American Interest began writing about what he dubbed the "blue model" of government, and his prediction that that model was "on the way out."   When applied to the states, the term "blue model" referred to the combination of relatively high taxes, high state spending, and extensive regulation typical of Democrat-leaning states like California, Illinois, New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.  Mead's prediction was that the combination of the information revolution and competition from lower-tax and lower-regulation "red" states would put the blue model under increasing pressure and force reform.

Almost six years later, the "blue" states have only doubled down on their policy model.  None of those states have seen any significant cutbacks on state programs.  During this period California and Connecticut have actually raised their income tax rates on top earners.  In the competition against other states, California appears to be doing relatively well, although its population explosion has slowed substantially.  In New York, Connecticut and New Jersey the population has been almost completely flat in recent years.  Illinois has actually experienced a population decline since 2010, but only a slight one.   Meanwhile, the big "red" states, like Texas and Florida, have grown rapidly.  But the very slow and gradual relative decline of the big blue states so far has not created any significant motivation to do anything different. 

Could that be about to change?  As of January 1, the state and local income tax deduction will mostly be gone.  Suddenly there will be a significant shift in the competitiveness between the high-tax "blue states" and the lower-tax "red states."  Will this lead to any serious rethinking of the "blue state model"?

I'm betting against it.  The basic nature of the blue state model is to put in place various government handouts and favors to specified groups, who thereupon become dependent on the handouts and favors and will fight to the death to keep them as is.  Given the overall disinterest of most of the electorate, the recipients of the handouts and favors come to exercise effective control over the political process.  

Consider a couple of examples.  Generous pensions for state and local government workers are a hallmark of the blue state model.  Not that the red states are pure on this issue.  But if you look at lists of states ranked by amount of aggregate unfunded pension debt, or by amount of unfunded pension debt per capita, or by percentage of pension obligations that are unfunded, the big blue states consistently appear at or near the bottom of the list.  A December 2017 Report just out from the American Legislative Exchange Council contains rankings of the states on all of those measures.  In funding percentage at the risk-free rate, Connecticut ranks dead last among the states at 19.7%; Illinois 48th at 23.3%; and New Jersey 46th at 25.7%.  California and New York do better on that measure, but they are kingpins of aggregate unfunded pension debt:  50th place and $987 billion in the case of California (hey, it's less than a trillion!); and New York at 46th place and $345 billion.  (To its credit, New York has been relatively honest in funding the pension obligations it has taken on.  However, it has taken on ridiculously generous obligations, particularly as they concern early retirement ages for workers in many areas.  The result is that pension contributions constitute a high and ever-increasing percentage of government budgets at both state and local levels.)

Are the blue states going to do anything soon to right their pension ships?  New York and Illinois have provisions in their state constitutions that make revisions of pension accruals for existing employees difficult or impossible.  (See my discussion of that issue here.)  In California, there is no comparable constitutional provision, but the courts have imposed a rule of law that may amount to the same thing as a practical matter.  Former San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed has led an effort to enact a ballot initiative that would overrule the court-made restrictions; but after getting off to a slow start, that initiative was pulled in 2016, and its backers are talking about another try in 2018.  They will face major opposition from the public employee unions.

As a second example, consider obligations that blue states have taken on in union contracts.  Again, the red states are far from pure; but generosity to public employee unions is one of the hallmarks of the blue model.  Some insights into the nature of the problem can be found in a big New York Times spread today in the New York section, headline "What Would It Take To Fix New York Subway?"    The impetus for the article is that a recent series of things like derailments and fires has brought calls for an emergency program to "fix" the subways.  Mayor de Blasio, of course, has called for a new "millionaire's tax" to raise the funds.  (Funny how he seems to have the exact same idea for how to "fix" every problem we encounter.)  So, can we free up some money to "fix" things by bringing down the costs of operating the subway through automating the function of running the trains?  They are well on the way to doing that in London and Paris:

London is upgrading its fleet to become automated in the mid-2020s.  In Paris, driverless trains are in operation on two lines.

So how about in New York?

In New York, the L train [one of some 26 lines] is the only line where the new traffic control system has been fully implemented and where trains could, in theory, be automated.  But after a brief experiment using only one train operator in 2005, the M.T.A. had to bring back two-person crews to the L after losing a labor dispute.

Yes, we have at least some trains fully equipped for automated operation, but we use not one person, but two to run them.  The union insists!  Oh, and our costs of building new extensions of the subway system run five to ten times international norms.  So, sorry, no money is available for the emergency "fix."

Basically, what the "blue model" comes down to is spending far more money to get the same or worse results.  We spend far more than national norms on healthcare, for no better health outcomes; and far more (more than double) national norms per student on K-12 education for no better outcomes.  But the costs are all locked in place and nearly impossible to control or reduce.

So what will be the result of the tax reform?  My prediction:  the process of relative decline will be somewhat accelerated -- from very, very slow, to merely very slow.  Likely, new "millionaire's taxes," like the one de Blasio has been proposing, will go off the table.  But don't look for any immediate declines in the existing tax structure, unless there are a large number of departures of the wealthy suddenly announced.

UPDATE, December 27:  Turns out that the Daily Caller had a post yesterday on the amount of outmigration from the big blue states, headline "Nearly 450,000 People Fled These Three Deep Blue States In 2017."  The three states in question are California, Illinois and New York.  The post is sourced from Census data that came out on December 20.  Key quote:

Three Democratic-leaning states hemorrhaged hundreds of thousands of people in 2016 and 2017 as crime, high taxes and, in some cases, crummy weather had residents seeking greener pastures elsewhere.  The exodus of residents was most pronounced in New York, which saw about 190,000 people leave the state between July 1, 2016 and July 1, 2017, according to U.S. Census Bureau data released last week.

The outmigration from California was 138,000, and from Illinois 115,000.  In the case of California and New York, they were able to replace the departures with immigrants from abroad.     

The Malicious UN Addresses "Poverty" In The United States

With things like RUSSIA!!!! and the tax bill and the extreme corruption of our law enforcement and national intelligence bureaucracies getting all the attention lately, the subject of poverty in the United States -- aka "the poverty scam" -- has been out of our view for a while.  But something has just happened to bring that particular scam not only back into view, but into sharp focus.  Last Friday (December 15) a guy named Philip Alston, the UN's "Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights," issued a Report (or maybe it's a "Rapport") on a "visit" he made to the "USA."

You may be aware that the UN actually has an official definition of "extreme poverty," which is "liv[ing] . . . on less than $1.90 per person per day."  This March 2017 post from Our World in Data -- using data sourced from the World Bank -- contains a country-by-country list of all the people in the world deemed to be living in this condition of "extreme poverty."  The United States (along with the main countries of Western Europe, and also such places as Canada and Australia) does not even appear on the list.  So undoubtedly you would expect the Report of the UN's Rapporteur on "extreme poverty" as to the U.S. to be a one-liner saying something like "there is nothing like that here."

You would be so wrong!  Remember, this is the UN.  And, because this is the UN, you get exactly what you should expect from the UN.  I mean, these are the people whose main business is keeping the poor people of the world poor by supporting and facilitating every kind of socialism and statism and dictator and parasitic bureaucracy and by intentionally jacking up the price of energy and by every other destructive thing you can think of.   It goes without saying that this Report (and any other report the UN might come out with) comes filled with extreme malice and hatred toward the U.S. and everything it stands for; with complete ignorance of the most basic things about how an economy works, including that capitalism and freedom are the only effective way to alleviate poverty; and with supercilious demands for immediate taxpayer-funded and socialist-model solutions to any and every remaining human problem that can still be found in the U.S.  The combination of malice and ignorance is so extreme that it impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins.

In a short blog post I can only scratch the surface of what is wrong with this Report.  But let's start with this:  Section IV of the Report, titled "The current extent of poverty in the US," buys right in to the completely fake Census Bureau poverty statistics to gin up some large numbers to try to embarrass the U.S.:

In order to define and quantify poverty in America, the Census Bureau uses ‘poverty thresholds’ or Official Poverty Measures (OPM), updated each year. In September 2017, more than one in every eight Americans were living in poverty (40 million, equal to 12.7% of the population). And almost half of those (18.5 million) were living in deep poverty, with reported family income below one-half of the poverty threshold.      

Of course, Alston won't even tell you what this "official poverty measure" might be quantitatively, or how it relates to the UN's international measure that is supposedly what his job is about.  The official Census Bureau poverty level for the U.S. for 2017 is $12,060 per year for an individual, and $24,600 for a family of four.  The international standard of $1.90 per day would come to $693.50 per year.  In other words, the U.S. official "poverty level" ranges from about 9 to about 17 times the international standard.  People earning at U.S. "poverty level" rates would be considered quite wealthy in most of the countries of the world where real poverty is prevalent.  And of course, that's only the start.  Alston also completely fails to mention that the U.S. "poverty" statistics:

• Count only "cash income," and therefore sweep in as "poor" millions of people with substantial resources from other sources that do not count as "cash income," such as college students on scholarship, early retirees drawing on savings, and young people living with support from parents and grandparents.
• Systematically exclude almost all of the approximately $1 trillion per year currently spent by governments at all levels in the U.S. to alleviate the "poverty" -- about $25,000 per year for each and every person deemed to be in "poverty" in the country.  That $25,000 of additional resources per person for each person "in poverty" in the U.S. is another 36 times the size of the UN international poverty level.

Tim Worstall, writing in the Washington Examiner on December 18, nails Alston's Report for its total illiteracy about the numbers discussed.  For example, on Alston playing fast and loose with statistics about child poverty:

[W]hen they talk about child poverty (para 25) we’re told that 18 percent of children live in poverty, 13.3 million. Then in paragraph 29, we’re told that food stamps (SNAP) lift 5 million out of poverty, the EITC another 5 million.  So, the number of children “living in poverty” is not 13.3 million, is it — it’s 3.3 million. That comes out to just 4.5 percent of children “living in poverty,” after the effects of just two of the things we do to reduce poverty.

And that's just what Alston has admitted to, if only he understood his own numbers.  But what if we also included all the other forms of assistance to the poor, including other nutrition programs (CSFP, CACFP, WIC, FMNP, etc., etc. -- you mean you've never heard of these things?), housing assistance (HUD alone spends about $50 billion per year), clothing assistance, energy assistance, free cell phones, yada, yada, yada.  What then would be the number of children in the U.S. remaining in "poverty" if all of these handouts were counted as alleviating the poverty?  Could it be as much as 1%?  Of course, you can't actually find out the answer to that question because the government reports the data in a way to make answering the question impossible.

The malice and ignorance of the Alston Report is by no means limited to the issue of the measure of "poverty" and the number of people experiencing it.  Alston veers wildly off his mission, taking the occasion to excoriate the U.S. on everything from tax policy to the criminal justice system to income inequality to alleged racism.  On that last issue, get this:

Who then are the poor?  Racist stereotypes are usually not far beneath the surface.  The poor are overwhelmingly assumed to be people of color, whether African Americans or Hispanic ‘immigrants’.            

Speak for yourself, Philip!  He just throws around such wild accusations, in the passive voice of course, without knowing a thing about what he's talking about. 

To pick one example from many of extreme and embarrassing ignorance from the Report, consider Section 10 on "Environmental sustainability":

10. Environmental sustainability
44. In Alabama and West Virginia I was informed of the high proportion of the population that was not being served by public sewerage and water supply services.  Contrary to the assumption in most countries that such services should be extended systematically and eventually comprehensively to all areas by the government, in neither state was I able to obtain figures as to the magnitude of the challenge or details of any government plans to address the issues in the future.

Hey Phil:  In rural areas in America, people dig wells for water and provide their own septic systems for sewerage!  Even the richest people!  It has to be the same in Europe of course.  Nobody would pay to dig a sewer line for ten or fifty miles to serve one house.  Could this guy really be this dumb?

Ignorance, even ignorance this extreme, I could forgive.  But the malice, no.  Alston excoriates the U.S. for not adopting massive socialist-model "solutions" to ameliorate non-existent poverty, while seemingly remaining completely unaware that the socialist model, foisted on the world by the UN, is what keeps the real poor of the world poor.  And not U.S.-level poor, with a "poverty level" 10 times or so the world standard and additional resources of another 30+ times the world standard provided to be sure they are comfortable in their "poverty."  No, the UN keeps the world's poor in real poverty, $1.90 per day or less poverty.  

When is Alston going to pay a visit to Venezuela?

The Manhattan Contrarian Stands Up For President Obama -- Sort Of

On Monday, December 18, Politico published a rather important piece by reporter Josh Meyer titled "The secret backstory of how Obama let Hezbollah off the hook."   The thoroughly sourced (mostly not anonymous!) and lengthy (some 14,000 words) piece tells the story of Project Cassandra, a Justice Department effort that ran from about 2008 to 2015, and investigated criminal activity of the Iranian-backed Hezbollah organization.  In Meyer's telling, Project Cassandra uncovered criminal activity (mostly drug dealing) in the range of about $500 million, but was systematically shut down by the Obama administrations via directives "from the top," in connection with Obama's efforts to reach the 2015 Iran nuclear deal that was a hallmark of his foreign policy.

A few choice quotes from Meyer's introduction will give you a sense of the scope of his findings:

In its determination to secure a nuclear deal with Iran, the Obama administration derailed an ambitious law enforcement campaign targeting drug trafficking by the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah, even as it was funneling cocaine into the United States, according to a POLITICO investigation.  The campaign, dubbed Project Cassandra, was launched in 2008 after the Drug Enforcement Administration amassed evidence that Hezbollah had transformed itself from a Middle East-focused military and political organization into an international crime syndicate that some investigators believed was collecting $1 billion a year from drug and weapons trafficking, money laundering and other criminal activities. . . .  

[A]s Project Cassandra reached higher into the hierarchy of the conspiracy, Obama administration officials threw an increasingly insurmountable series of roadblocks in its way, according to interviews with dozens of participants who in many cases spoke for the first time about events shrouded in secrecy, and a review of government documents and court records. . . .  “This was a policy decision, it was a systematic decision,” said David Asher, who helped establish and oversee Project Cassandra as a Defense Department illicit finance analyst.  “They serially ripped apart this entire effort that was very well supported and resourced, and it was done from the top down.”

That sounds rather damning!  So how could the Manhattan Contrarian possibly be standing up for President Obama?

The issue is that a number of right-wing sources have jumped on Obama's shutting down of Project Cassandra as an example of presidential "obstruction."  Admittedly, it's not a large number of sources, at least as far as I can find.  But consider these examples:

• New York Post, headline of a December 19 column by Jonathan Tobin:  "Now, this is presidential obstruction."
• Conservative author and radio host Mark Levin on Facebook, December 19:  "Barack Obama actually DID obstruct criminal investigations involving Hezbollah and Iran. But most of the media either downplay it or ignore it."  
• Carteret County News-Times, December 20 (OK, not a major source):  "It’s . . . no surprise that the leftist media doesn’t mention the Obama administration’s decision to kill Project Cassandra, a federal investigation into international drug smuggling, money laundering and terrorism by Hezbollah, the terrorism arm of Iran.  That would be obstruction of justice."

The use of the term "obstruction" by these sources may well be in reaction to the use by dozens of progressive or "mainstream" sources of the same term to describe some actions of President Trump (such as asking then-FBI Director Comey to "go easy" on Michael Flynn, and/or then firing Comey), and even to support calls for impeachment of Trump.  Certainly, if you find Trump's conduct in those instances to be objectionable, let alone a basis for impeachment, it's hard to understand how you would not find Obama's conduct as to Project Cassandra (as described by Meyer) to be far more objectionable.

But the problem is, none of this conduct, by either Trump or Obama, is "obstruction" -- at least as the term "obstruction" is used in the context of "obstruction of justice," which is a federal crime, and thus a potential subject for a criminal prosecution and/or impeachment of a President.  As I have pointed out in multiple posts, for example this one,  "the prosecutorial discretion function of the government belongs to the President."   Under the Constitution , the Justice Department, including all the prosecutors, reports to the President, and the President has the right, if he wants, to direct who will and who will not be investigated and prosecuted.  The fact that the President rarely exercises this right does not mean that he does not have it.  Thus Obama was completely entitled to let Hezbollah off the hook, just as Trump was completely entitled to let Flynn off the hook.  (Of course, in fact, Trump did not let Flynn off the hook, at least not yet.  Trump does still have the ability to pardon Flynn.)  

Now, it's a completely different question whether it's a good idea to let all of Hezbollah off the hook on a massive criminal conspiracy involving hundreds of millions of dollars as well as associated terrorist activity.  That seems like a major political issue going to the heart of whether U.S. foreign policy was being competently conducted and whether the safety of the American people was being properly protected.  No, I am not standing up for President Obama on those questions.  Why the Meyer/Politico revelations have not yet caused a firestorm of coverage in the progressive press, I cannot explain.  I guess these revelations just don't fit the preferred narrative of the moment.    

U.S. Regains The Ability To Identify Real National Security Threats

Maybe Donald Trump is just not your type of guy, and certainly not the guy you would want to be President; but keep in mind who was the alternative.  Before these things fade into the memory hole, bring back to mind a few of the wildly incompetent policies of the previous administration.  Looking around today for a candidate as the policy of the previous administration that could be the very most wildly incompetent of all, with a very real potential to put the security of the country in serious jeopardy, my leading contender is the decision to declare "climate change" to be a top-priority national security risk.

Do you remember Obama doing that?  It wasn't that long ago.  In his second inaugural address in January 2013, Obama declared that “no challenge – no challenge – poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change.”  Then, over the next couple of years, he ramped up the claimed "challenge" of climate change from mere "greatest threat to future generations" to an "immediate threat to national security."  Think about that for a minute -- how would it even work?  Suppose the temperature goes up a few degrees over the next few decades.  Does it mean that we don't have an army any more?  Does it mean that our weapons won't work?  Nevertheless, in a National Security Strategy document in February 2015, the Obama administration declared climate change to be “an urgent and growing threat to our national security,”  Then in May 2015, Obama gave a commencement address at the Coast Guard Academy in Connecticut.  Excerpt:

I am here today to say that climate change constitutes a serious threat to global security, an immediate risk to our national security, and, make no mistake, it will impact how our military defends our country.  And so we need to act, and we need to act now.

Supposedly, something like sea level, or maybe wildfires, or maybe floods -- all completely speculative -- would somehow make the country harder to defend.  Meanwhile, when Obama talked about "acting now," what he meant was restricting production fossil fuels in the United States.  What did he think was the fuel that powers the planes and ships and missiles, let alone powering the economy that provides all the logistical support to keep the military functioning?  As far as I could tell, he had no idea.  In the name of "national security" he would hobble and ultimately shut down our own oil and coal and gas industries, leaving us to go begging for the necessary fuel to -- where?  OPEC?  Russia?  Venezuela?  You really need to be delusional not to be able to distinguish the real national security threat here from the imaginary one.

As you probably know, in a new National Security Strategy document released yesterday President Trump reversed this ridiculous policy of President Obama.  The new document does not contain any section explicitly dealing with "climate," but it does have a section titled "Embrace Energy Dominance."  Key quote:

Access to domestic sources of clean, affordable, and reliable energy underpins a prosperous, secure, and powerful America for decades to come.  Unleashing these abundant energy resources—coal, natural gas, petroleum, renewables, and nuclear—stimulates the economy and builds a foundation for future growth. Our Nation must take advantage of our wealth in domestic resources and energy efficiency to promote competitiveness across our industries. . . .  Climate policies will continue to shape the global energy system. U.S. leadership is indispensable to countering an anti-growth energy agenda that is detrimental to U.S. economic and energy secu- rity interests. Given future global energy demand, much of the developing world will require fossil fuels, as well as other forms of energy, to power their economies and lift their people out of poverty.  The United States will continue to advance an approach that balances energy security, economic development, and environmental protection.  

Bullet dodged, at least for the moment.

Now, perhaps on reading this, you remain skeptical that hobbling U.S. fossil fuel energy production could jeopardize national security by making the U.S. dependent on the likes of OPEC or Russia for fuel needed to run the military or the economy.  If so, I would urge you to pay attention to what has just been occurring in the UK.  The UK is thought to have substantial natural gas-bearing shale formations (full extent unknown due to lack of exploration) that could be tapped to supply fuel for the country.  However, during the whole time of the shale gas revolution in the United States, the process of horizontal drilling and "fracking" for gas has been essentially shut down by regulators over concerns of environmentalists.  The first exploratory well after the moratorium finally got going just this August.  From the Financial Times, August 17:

Drilling has started on the first UK shale well for six years even as debate intensifies among geologists over how much gas is available for fracking. Cuadrilla, the company leading the push to bring US-style shale gas production to the UK, said on Thursday it had begun drilling a vertical well expected to reach 3.5km beneath its site near Blackpool, Lancashire. . . .   Fracking has been on hold in the UK since 2011 when two small earth tremors were blamed on exploratory operations by Cuadrilla at another site near Blackpool. Cuadrilla was given the go-ahead by the government last year to resume drilling, reflecting ministers’ hopes of replicating the shale revolution that has cut US gas prices and bolstered American energy security.

Lacking a home-grown, land-based gas supply from fracking, the UK has been relying on gas from the aging North Sea fields, as well as gas that comes from the Middle East and also Norway via pipelines across Europe.  Both of those sources then suddenly experienced supply disruptions in the past couple of weeks.  From the Telegraph, December 13:

Around 40pc of the UK’s domestic [natural gas] supplies have been wiped out until the new year due to the emergency shutdown of the North Sea’s Forties pipeline, operated by Ineos. Supply from Europe has also been constrained by the explosion at a hub in Austria and technical problems in the Norwegian North Sea.    

Time to crank up the vast reserves of solar panels?  No, dummy, those don't work in the winter.  Wind turbines also have zero ability to step up in an emergency.  The first result of the supply disruptions was a huge spike in natural gas prices in the UK:

[R]ocketing demand in Europe [has driven] the price for gas delivered to the UK to more than $10 per million British thermal units.

For comparison, a representative recent spot price in the U.S. was $2.84 per million BTUs.  But you've got to get your energy somewhere.  So who will sell you gas at a gouging price when you are desperate?  The answer, of course, is Russia:

Britain has emerged as the unlikely first recipient of gas from a sanctioned Russian project after fears of a winter supply crisis drove prices close to five year highs. . . .  Now a deal has been struck to bring the debut cargo from Yamal to the Isle of Grain import terminal via a specially built ice-breaking tanker by the end of the month.

The Telegraph includes this picture of a smiling Vladimir Putin:

It's really hard to believe how dumb these people are to have put themselves in this position.  But then, when they make their decisions, they do it against the backdrop of the U.S. military shield, let alone of the frack-happy U.S. as an alternative emergency supplier when Russia puts on the squeeze.  But if we had shut down our fracking over concerns about "climate change," we would have been dependent on OPEC and Russia like Europe and the UK are now.  Who would have been our emergency supplier when those guys decided to put on the squeeze?  And, rest assured, Hillary, following in Obama's footsteps, would have enthusiastically put the country in this position.  

California And New York Double Down On Plans To "Save The Planet"

With the Trump administration backing off schemes to impose huge reductions in "greenhouse gas" emissions on the populace, some of the blue states are stepping up to "save the planet."  Or so they claim.  The leaders are California and New York.

The California Air Resources Board ("CARB") has just announced its next moves.  On December 14 CARB approved something called its 2017 Climate Change Scoping Plan, and issued a big press release to tell the world about it.  From the press release:

Building on the state’s success in decarbonizing its economy, the California Air Resources Board today approved a bold plan to accelerate the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions over the coming decade while improving air quality and public health, investing in disadvantaged communities, and supporting jobs and economic growth.  “At a time when science shows us that climate change is happening faster than anticipated, California is responding with a bold plan that rises to meet this global challenge,” said CARB Chair Mary D. Nichols. “It builds on proven actions and presents a template for other jurisdictions who are also committed to preventing the worst impacts of a warming planet.”

The "bold" goals are to reduce these evil "greenhouse gas" emissions back to 1990 levels by 2020, and then by an additional 40% by 2030, and then by 80% by 2050.  Can we get an idea of how that is going, and of how much it is likely to cost?  I'm spending quite a bit of time here trying to find answers to those questions, and all I can say is, it looks to me like the entire state of California has agreed to a suspension of critical thinking on these issues.  

For example, we can look to something called the California Energy Commission, a state agency with jurisdiction over things like electricity production and usage.  One thing they are charged with is tracking progress on the goals for producing more electricity from "renewables."  So they have put out a big report, just updated this month, called  "Tracking Progress -- Renewable Energy."   This is 30 pages, chock full of rah! rah! Soviet-style statistics of how much new wind and solar electricity capacity they have been installing.  But with the continuing need for back-up from fossil fuel sources to make the electric grid work, does increasing wind and solar capacity actually reduce GHG emissions to any significant degree?  You won't find an answer to that question here.  As an alternative, go to page ES3 of the CARB Scoping Plan linked above, and you will find that -- despite massive installation of wind and solar capacity now providing some 17% of California's electricity -- California's GHG emissions at the latest measurement remain above the 1990 level, and all of the supposed 40% and then 80% reductions that are promised are allegedly going to occur between 2020 and 2050.  Oh, and the peak of emissions was about 480 MMTCO2e in 2005, less than 10% above the 1990 (and projected 2020) level of about 440 MMTCO2e.  So after 20 years or so of effort, they haven't yet succeeded in reducing emissions by 10%; but they're going to achieve a 40% reduction in the next 12 years, and 80% in 32.  Sure!

Meanwhile, for better or worse, in New York we have a state government that is going down more or less the same path.  The difference is that not every single person in this state has suspended critical thinking -- only about 99.7% of them.  And thus we have an August 2017 Report from Jonathan Lesser of the Manhattan Institute titled "New York's Clean Energy Programs: The High Cost of Symbolic Environmentalism."    First, what so-called "clean energy" goals has New York adopted?  From the MI Report:

In 2016, the New York Public Service Commission (NYPSC) enacted the Clean Energy Standard (CES). Under the CES, by 2030, 50% of all electricity sold by the state’s utilities must come from renewable generating resources.  At the same time, emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG)—principally carbon dioxide (CO2) but also such gases as methane and chlorofluorocarbons—must be reduced by 40%.  The CES also incorporates New York’s previous GHG emissions reduction mandate, established by Executive Order in 2009,2 which requires that the state’s GHG emissions be reduced 80% below 1990 levels by 2050 (the “80 by 50” mandate). 

So the "goals" are more or less the same as those of California.  And now, are the goals achievable, and at what potential cost?  Key finding:

Given existing technology, the Clean Energy Standard’s 80 by 50 mandate is unrealistic, unobtainable, and unaffordable. Attempting to meet the mandate could easily cost New York consumers and businesses more than $1 trillion by 2050, while providing scant, if any, measurable benefits.     

A trillion dollars -- that's real money!  And for "scant, if any" benefits.  This is climate politics at its best.  There are lots of other conclusions illustrating the total absurdity of the proposed program.  Here is one of my favorites:

Even with enormous gains in energy efficiency, the mandate would require installing at least 100,000 megawatts (MW) of o shore wind generation, or 150,000 MW of onshore wind generation, or 300,000 MW of solar photovoltaic (PV) capacity by 2050. By comparison, in 2015, about 11,300 MW of new solar PV capacity was installed in the entire United States. Moreover, meeting the CES mandate likely would require installing at least 200,000 MW of battery storage to compensate for wind and solar’s inherent intermittency. 

No problem!  And now, let's assume that the most alarmist of the climate models are completely accurate in their predictions.  How much global temperature rise can the state of New York avoid by going down this road?

The primary reason for the CES, to reduce GHG emissions, will not lead to any measurable impacts on climate and thus no climate-related benefits.  

None, nada, and zilch.  But of course there's this:

Lower-income New Yorkers will bear relatively more of the above-market costs necessary to achieve even the interim [2030] CES goal.

Oh, and meanwhile the world carries on building some 1600 coal power plants (mostly in China, India and Africa).  They are laughing at the likes of California, New York and, for that matter, Europe.

The good news is that there is a 0% chance that these ridiculous carbon-reduction programs will be carried through to conclusion.  I'm just wondering why I got picked to be the guinea pig in an experiment so obviously doomed to failure.  

Good News For Christmas: You Don't Have To Pay Any Attention To Government Dietary Advice

I don't know what you're doing on this weekend before Christmas, but I'm about to head off on a whirlwind round of holiday parties.  It's a hard burden to bear, so I'm looking around for a little encouragement.  And I've found it!  Here's the good news:  All government dietary advice is literally worthless.  You can ignore it completely.  Indeed, it appears that in most instances you are best off doing the opposite of what they recommend, which is likely what you wanted to do in the first place if left to your own devices without their meddling.

I have previously posted on this topic multiple times, for example here back in January 2016.  But it only gets worse.  The latest salvo comes in an open letter today to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine from two guys named Edward Archer and Carl Lavie.  The title is "Nutrition Has a 'Consensus' to Use Bad Science."  This is scathing, to say the least.  Excerpt:

'Nutrition' is now a degenerating research paradigm in which scientifically illiterate methods, meaningless data, and consensus-driven censorship dominate the empirical landscape. . . .  Over time, the sustained funding of demonstrably pseudo-scientific research methods has subverted the self-correcting nature of science and suppressed skeptical scholarship. Consequently, many decades of politics taking precedence over critical inquiry produced contradictory dietary guidelines, failed public policies, and the continued confusion over 'what-to-eat'.

Yikes!  Could this be as bad as climate "science"?  That's a close call.  But the essential problem is identical:  an enforced "consensus" causing billions upon billions of federal taxpayer dollars to be spent on worthless research that is then used as a basis for coercive government policy.

The particular issue on which Archer and Lavie focus is the use of "Memory-Based Methods" of assessing diet, which they refer to as "M-BMs."  It seems that most nutritional studies, as well as the government dietary guidelines, are based on assessments of diet derived from these "M-BMs," where people are surveyed and report from their own memory on what they have eaten over some period of time.  It turns out that many people -- and particularly overweight and obese people -- dramatically underreport their caloric intake.  So the nutrition scientific community has just developed protocols where they let researchers delete data that "look wrong" and go with the rest.  How's that for "science"!

Archer and Lavie refer to one of their own studies from December 2015 in Mayo Clinic Proceedings, titled "A Discussion of the Refutation of Memory-Based Dietary Assessment Methods (M-BMs): The Rhetorical Defense of Pseudoscientific and Inadmissible Evidence."    A few choice quotes:

[T]he data generated by memory-based dietary assessment methods (M-BMs) of nutrition epidemiology are pseudoscientific and inadmissible as scientific evidence. . . .  Nutrition epidemiology often uses statistical machinations and post hoc data exclusions to “correct” or simply delete implausible data and alter results. . . .  These procedures are not merely correcting erroneous data entries or removing nonrepresentative data (ie, statistical outliers). The result of these machinations is to alter and/or delete the data of individuals most representative of the population of interest. For example, the US population is predominantly overweight and obese, and these individuals are the most likely to misreport. In other words, when the numbers did not add up, nutrition epidemiologists simply changed, ignored, or deleted the implausible data (regardless of the systematic biases they introduced) rather than acknowledge the invalidity of M-BMs. 

So why is this important now?  Because the government, through the National Academies, is in the process of developing a new round of dietary guidelines, and as a major step in that process has just come out with a Report titled "Redesigning the Processes for Establishing Dietary Guidelines for Americans."    And of course, they've gone right ahead and relied on all kinds of research based on these "M-BM" studies.  From today's open letter:

Briefly, the M-BMs employed in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) and other major nutrition studies produced data that were physiologically implausible, incompatible with life, and inadmissible as scientific evidence. . . .  Implausible dietary data should not be used to establish the DGA; yet that is exactly what the National Academies’ report recommends, and you as Presidents, endorse.

So the next round of government dietary guidelines is going to be just as worthless as all the previous rounds.  No surprise there.  I'm going to go on eating what tastes good and paying no attention whatsoever to government directives.  I hope you do too!

I do find one thing to disagree with in the Archer/Lavie work.  Commenting in their 2015 piece on use by nutrition researchers of data that has had inconvenient portions deleted and altered, they say this:

We are not aware of any research domain in which this type of data doctoring and consequent message distortion would be tolerated. We think that DGAC’s use of these manipulated data and consequent distorted messages to inform public health policy constitutes dubious scientific practices.

Apparently they are blissfully unaware of the field of climate "science."  For a good day's worth of reading on data deletion and alteration in that field to create a surface temperature record that fits a political narrative, see my seventeen-part series "The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time."