franknews

Climate Politics In America

by Michael Green

February 27, 2019

Michael Green leads Climate XChange. He’s served as a representative to the United Nations focusing on international climate science and policy since 2012. He was recognized as a Champion of Change by President Obama in 2016 for his focus on climate change as an equity issue.

There has always been a rift between the understanding of climate and energy policy and security in American politics. On the one side, policies are being introduced to guarantee that future fossil fuel needs and energy demand are met by American provided solutions. It focuses on developing our national resources and ensuring security through energy independence. On the other hand, are those who believe that the future security threats of global climate change create the need for a dramatic economic switch towards clean renewable energy through the further development of clean tech and innovation. The themes of energy reliability, security, and economic progress are championed by both sides, yet the reality of the divide between the two visions could not be greater.

On June 1, 2017, President Donald Trump announced that the United States would begin the process of pulling out from the Paris Agreement. Many feared that the international climate treaty’s days would be numbered under the current administration and when the President made the announcement that he wanted to represent “Pittsburgh not Paris”, it became all too clear that the administration would keep to their campaign promise of promoting a ‘new’ energy vision for the country. The decision not only had major ramifications for the United States as it furthered the political divide within the country, but also for global policy, as the administration’s exit from the Paris Agreement left a perceptible gap in global climate leadership.

Since the announcement, federal policy has been dominated by a series of subsequent energy policy and pollution standards rollbacks, all of which prioritize deregulation and short term fossil fuel gain rather than demonstrate a clear understanding of the direction the planet is heading. Over the past two years, policies such as the Clean Power Plan, which were set to reduce carbon pollution by 30% from the electricity sector by 2030, have not seen the light of day. The federal agencies tasked with promulgating and enforcing such policies have shown no interest or direction to see them progress. During this time we have also seen industries related to renewable energy and energy efficiency slow in pace. The administration believes that they will be able to bring back jobs in industries such as coal however during the last two years, we have seen close to no indication that those jobs are coming back.

Almost 20% of the existing coal plants in the country have closed their doors in the past five years, and there are currently no plans to build any new facilities in the country. One of the key drivers in this decline has been the economics of such an investment. Coal fired power plants can take upwards of 50 years to become profitable. At the same time technological development has done little to shorten this timeline, while progress in the R&D of distributed energy systems have cut costs in half, making them more profitable on a much shorter timeline, and therefore a safer investment.

The Republican party has struggled to articulate a clear vision of the american energy future and how they will meet the demands of a growing nation. They seem to be adamantly set on pushing back against, and undoing much of the policy work by the previous administration, without offering a viable or logical alternative. Unfortunately the anti-Obama sentiment is what seems to fuel these choices. They are taking away smart policies because of who put them in place, and not necessarily because what they set out to accomplish.

It was not until the Green New Deal (GND) started grabbing national headlines, and the most recent congressional hearings on climate change, that there has been any sign of interest in charting a new pathway forward from elected leaders in Washington. The Green New Deal has been heralded as ambitious and reflective of the urgency we currently face. The deal has also been the target of strong criticism from the political right and pundits who have branded it as a socialist ploy, and dramatizing cherry-picked talking points from the broad and far reaching policy. While a split down party lines on climate change and policy solutions is nothing new, the debate around the GND has been much more personal and nasty than any climate or energy debate in the past.

As outlined in the popular New York Times piece, Losing Earth, the politicization and partisan divide on climate policy has been going on for almost thirty years. The reasons behind this change and the wider divide on the issue are vast, among them are the current administration, the rise of young political leaders, and their threatening popularity.

Only a few months prior to the Green New Deal making headlines, there was a bipartisan supported climate bill that was making its rounds in Washington D.C., The Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act. Unfortunately, the bill did not garnish nearly as much attention and was unable to capture the news cycle as the GND has been able to. The bill was introduced by a small team of Democrats and Republicans and aimed to put a price on carbon pollution, a policy approach to reducing greenhouse gases, one that has broad support among economists, business leaders, and activists alike. A fee on carbon emissions is a way in which policy can serve to incentivise the move towards a low-carbon economy, without imposing regulation, therefore allowing consumers and industry to make the transition in their own terms. It can also raise vital revenue, that can be used in different ways. Where the bill begins to lose its appeal however, is in its plan to rebate the raised revenue from back to households equitably. A carbon rebate has long been studied and championed as a way to get the a carbon tax away from being perceived as well, a tax. While this may be a smart policy wonk fix, it fails to acknowledge two key points in engaging the larger public in the political process and gaining their attention and support.

First, the left puts too much weight on the idea that conservatives are inherently anti-tax. It is not that they don’t want to see public services provided, and many would acknowledge that these things need to be paid for through government spending. Their skepticism is rooted in a distrust of government more generally, and the ways in which money is spent. When told that all the money is going to be rebated, the first thing that crosses a skeptics brain is, “no it wont. Due to a complexity of historic and very real precedents set, people have lost their trust in our government.

Second, when polled on the issue, a majority of people want to see the money spent on programs that further advance the goals of building a clean energy economy. An approach that would use revenue from a carbon fee could also invest that revenue to create more jobs, fund energy efficiency programs, advance clean transportation access, and restore our natural habitat to further protect us from the impacts of climate change.

The Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act came up short because it failed to aspire towards a vision of the future in the way the Green New Deal does. While it might seem that a carbon fee at the federal level is at an impasse, it does not have to be. There is a world in which a price on carbon emissions and the GND can work together to garner true bipartisan support and a feasible way forward. The Green New Deal sets forth a vision for the country where we regain our footing as a global leader, and sets the pace for a national mobilization that would rival that of World War II. From providing meaningful employment in low carbon sectors of the economy, transitioning our energy needs to 100% renewable, reimagining our transportation system and shifting our food systems, the resolution reads like a list of policies previously only imagined in climate policy textbooks. While it covers a wide range of pollution reduction strategies, the framework to fund such ambitious projects is noticeably absent. A Green New Deal for Energy and Innovation would be able to overcome that hurtle.

It fits ever so clearly into the psychic of what has made the Trump administration popular in the middle of the country. By bringing the two bills together we would be building a clean energy economy and have the polluters responsible for causing the problem pay for it. This would strengthen our country, create millions of jobs, and reinstate our leadership globally as a champion on climate action.

While a split political system and constant bickering around policy may be good for the endless cycle of breaking news, it is not what most Americans want. It has done little to support the kind of economic growth and innovation we should be striving for, has provided little certainty to the role we hope to play in the global community, and failed to address the vulnerabilities of communities already facing climate change impacts. Political leaders need to break down their entrenched camps and begin to find solutions where they can work together. Having the Green New Deal provide the vision, and the Energy Innovation Act provide a bipartisan framework, we could bring a larger segment of the american public along in the conversation. The global scientific community believes that we have 12 years left to take dramatic action. We need the creative and brave to step up to the challenge and provide action and meaningful leadership in these challenging and uncertain times.

Reflections on Money

by Kianga Daverington

September 1, 2020

This essay, written by Kianga Daverington of Daverington PLLC , was originally published in January 2020. The piece as been condensed for clarity.

Money is not a physical object like a coin, a bar of gold or a dollar bill. Money is at its core, a technology. It is a human invention designed to solve a specific set of human problems. Consider money, perhaps, in a new way. Think of money as a system for capturing time.

Time is the one thing we each have that is absolutely finite. We are born, we die, and the dash in between is all the time we have.

Think of production. We can usually produce more of some good by adding people to a task (also known as “WORK”). But we are still constrained by time. Whatever we produce is still limited by the amount of humans that can be organized to go into that production. Each of us possesses a limited amount of time available to us individually, so we need to convince or coerce others to add their time to ours if we want to achieve more than we can alone.

Out of this imperative, nations are born.

The most important quality of any particular form of money is how well it preserves the value of time over time. Can you buy the same amount of stuff or more in the future than you can buy today? If yes, congratulations - your money is accumulating time for you and future generations while you relax on the beach. If it takes more and more of a unit of money to buy the same amount of time in the future, well then I’m sorry, but that unit of money is getting weaker and weaker. It’s losing value or said another way – it’s losing purchasing power. The longer you hold it, the less it buys.

In a way, by purchasing goods and services, you are purchasing time. Every product and every service requires time to make and time to deliver - your time and/or someone else’s. The price therefore reflects the collective value of all the time put in. Money is a way we exchange time and move it around from where it is valued less to where it is valued more.

This is where prosperity comes from. It comes out of how well a society, collectively and each person, spends its time. How much time is spent creating and making? How much time is spent consuming? If we make more than we consume, we have something left over called wealth. If we consume more than we make, we are left with debt. You can’t consume what you don’t have, unless someone extends credit. Where does this “credit” come from? Basically –it’s made up.

Too much credit or debt eventually collapses and everyone is mixed up in the collapse.

If we understand that a unit of money represents a unit of time, and we understand time is limited, then a unit in a system of money with unlimited supply cannot have any value. This is the problem we are facing today with the world’s money supply. The supply of money in the world is increasing exponentially as central banks create money by giving loans to national governments, which is where our money comes from.

Our entire world financial system is a powder keg of debt.

National currencies today are known as fiat money, a currency without intrinsic value that has been given its power to be used as money by a government that says it is money by regulation. Wikipedia says, “Fiat money does not have use value, and has value only because a government maintains its value, or because parties engaging in exchange agree on its value.” Well said, Wiki.

A government’s job of maintaining the value of its national money boils down to a confidence game. On what basis do the people who use that government’s money believe it has value?

What happens to the money and those who hold it when the foundation of that belief begins to crumble?

The Four Courses of the Apocalypse

by Joyce E. Chaplin

May 3, 2020

Joyce E. Chaplin (PhD and MA Johns Hopkins, BA Northwestern) is the James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History at Harvard University. You can find her on Twitter here.

In our state of emergency, most Americans want to taste deliverance when they eat. Their wish is important. Humans mask their bare need to eat with culture: customs about when food can be taken, manners for how to consume it, equipment to prepare and serve it correctly, and shibboleths to restrict what can be eaten in the first place. Stockpiling, ordering take-out, gardening, pickling, cooking, baking—by expressing food preferences in a pandemic, US citizens demonstrate what they hope for and fear. What follows is a four-course menu based on popular quarantine options, all of them revealing that Americans hanker after normality. But what is normal? Life before COVID-19 had serious problems. #AloneTogether is a hopeful tag for social distancing. When we’re all, by definition, stress eating in various states of aloneness, are we also sustaining a United States that must, now and in the future, somehow hang together?

4 G 30 10A

We’ll start our meal with sourdough. On Twitter, ongoing convo about bubbly mothers is not about extroverted female parents. Mothers (or starters) are thick, fermented cultures of lactobacilli that, instead of baker’s yeast, leaven sourdough. Carefully cultivated, in jar or crock or Tupperware, starters look like loose, frothy dough. You measure some out for a bake, then tenderly feed the remainder some flour and water. True sourdough is vegan and is one of the world’s oldest foods, with each lactobacillus strain native to a specific place on Earth.

Sourdough is undeniably American. It was the sturdy fare of many a young man (or woman) who followed the call to go west, to wherever the urban supply line of brewer’s yeast gave out, whenever baking powder wasn’t yet commercially available. In Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books, sourdough biscuits are the daily bread. Gold miners ate those biscuits, too, also sourdough flapjacks, fixed from treasured starters. Boudin Bakery claims (credibly) to be the longest continuously operating business in San Francisco. It was founded in 1849, when a Frenchman opened a commercial bakery, using a Forty-Niner’s sourdough mother, which the company says it’s tended ever since. (Bite into Boudin and you’re chewing on something roughly 170 years old.) Onward the bubbly mothers went, to the Klondike, site of the next gold rush. The “Sourdoughs,” as Alaska miners were called, are commemorated in Charlie Chaplin’s Gold Rush (1925). This is the movie in which the Little Tramp and his cabin mate, snowbound together (sound familiar?), get so hungry that Chaplin’s character boils and dines on his boot, and then his roomie seeks to dine on him.

Alas, it’s this vignette, with one starved Sourdough hallucinating that the other is a tasty chicken and chasing him with an axe, that I cannot forget amid the pleasant twittering about rustic boules. What do people think they’re doing when they bake bread at home, one loaf at a time, or even two by two, as if handily adapting ancient divine advice for surviving an impending disaster? Historically, people didn’t do that. Baking whole loaves of bread consumes lots of fuel. The ancient Near East, ancestral land of small-grains like wheat and bread baked from them, lost most of its trees in ancient times—Lebanon and Egypt once had forests of cedar and pine. As timber dwindled, firing an oven got expensive. Quick-cooking flatbreads were what people made at home. In the tree-depleted old world, commercial bakers had to figure the cost of fuel into baking multiple loaves of bread in a large oven. For a fee, a baker might make room for household loaves, or even other cooking, for people who couldn’t afford much fuel. One way or another, it could take a village to bake a loaf of bread. In North America, however, settlers found plentiful wood—great for baking—until they cleared the woodlands nearest the settlements. At that point, they needed a Monsieur Boudin to bake them something other than quick pancakes.

I don’t think most of social media’s sourdough bakers know that their re-enactment of American pioneer autonomy defies a bigger history in which daily bread evoked connection to others, if not dependence on them.

Frankly, American sourdough smells like settler-colonialism, a fragrance of biscuits and flapjacks rising above the log cabins and mining camps that steadily eroded Indigenous land rights while cutting down trees on those lands.

It’s a myth that pioneering individuals or families settled the West—the federal government did that, through policies that favored the spread of white population. The ability to own and maintain a freestanding household (with an oven) is still a legacy of US racial and class privileges.

Maybe, at this point, you’d like a drink with your meal? Lots of other people are having one, or three. The marketing research firm Nielsen found that, compared to a year ago, March 2020 showed a 75 perecent increase in spirits sold, a 66 percent increase in wine sales, 42 percent for beer, and a spike of 243 percent in online alcohol sales generally. (March 2020 cannabis sales also soared in states where it’s legal to buy.)

That’s self-medicating to the point of disaster. An editorial in the Boston Globe pleaded for a ban on alcohol sales during the emergency shutdown, pointing out booze’s role in rising rates of domestic abuse. Under quarantine, vulnerable individuals are miserably close to abusers and distanced from helpers. The nuclear family was supposed to have been cleansed of the worst residues of ancient patriarchal rights. We’re now engaged in a painful test of how much of that work was done. Post-quarantine rates of divorce, (re)marriage, and births will reveal collective confidence, or not, in the American nuclear family, temporarily returned, as it has been, to a state of snowbound homesteading.

Take cheer, for the moment, in our second course, crab rangoon. Aggregate Uber Eats data about early-April deliveries identified this as the nation’s third most popular dish, trailing french fries and pad thai. What is it? Bits of crab (or imitation crab) and seasonings are blended into cream cheese. Dollops of the tangy mass are wrapped in wonton pastry, then deep fried. The crisp bundles are typically served with a sweet dipping sauce. If you think this sounds like bar food, you’re right. Crab Rangoon seems to have been invented at Trader Vic’s, the post-World-War II tiki bar that also claims to have invented the mai tai. Crab rangoon has no connection to Yangon in Myanmar. The fried parcels belong to the chop-suey canon of Chinese-American foods, the knowingly false concoctions that mingle something authentically Asian (like wonton pastry) with some kind of Americana (“Philadelphia” cream cheese), often featuring an expensive treat, like crab.

Is this cultural appropriation? Maybe. Though it was Chinese immigrants themselves who shrewdly sold chop suey to white customers to ensure their grandchildren would never have to work in restaurants. Are crab rangoons culinary abominations? Well, what isn’t? It’s not as if ballpark beer and hotdogs greatly resemble the lager and wurst homesick German immigrants tried to recreate in the United States. Let’s give chop suey and crab rangoon the benefit of the doubt, regarding them as gateway dishes for the timid Euro-American palate. Without those dubious chimeras, would pad thai have become the second most ordered thing on Uber Eats in 2020?

The Uber data proves another of crab rangoon’s essential qualities: it’s not home-cooking; food service workers make it. When it arrives with its jewel-tone dipping sauce, it’s proof that you didn’t have to cook. Even if you buy frozen crab rangoon, somebody else got it ready for you to heat up. For this second course in our pandemic dinner, it still takes a village. One commentator on the Uber Eats data wondered (with studied innocence) what chicken tikka masala and “crag [sic] Rangoon” could possibly be? Sadly, some Americans don’t enjoy any Asian cuisine. (Perhaps they also call COVID-19 the “kung flu.”) The “crag” for crab was probably just a typo, b and g are neighbors on the keyboard, after all. But that mistake conceals the dish’s inherent sociability. No one orders crab rangoon from a distant crag where they can’t get a phone signal. Just remember: if you order anything, add a tip. Everyone in food service is tired, underpaid, and risking infection.

I hope you’re not full, because here comes the main course and it’s Spam. This is neither home-made nor ordered from a restaurant. Each can of Spam yields a dense, pink, rounded-edge oblong that can be sliced or diced, then baked, fried, or microwaved. It predates the microwave, invented in 1937 by the Hormel Company to sell pork shoulder during the Great Depresssion. “Spam” vaguely promised shoppers some nice spiced ham. Spam hit the big-time during World War II, when the US government bought it in bulk to feed servicemen. It remains popular on Pacific islands, including Hawai’i, that have had large US military bases.

Spam is newly coveted because it’s shelf stable, a prepper protein the Greatest Generation bequeathed to us. It joins several related revivals. Backyard gardening and home canning are also on the rise, just as victory gardens and adaptation to food rationing supported war efforts in the early twentieth century. It must be said, however, that today’s prepping also descends from the bleaker survivalism of the Cold War. In the 1950s and 1960s, Spam-stocked bomb shelters were not so much parts of a collective program to defeat the enemy as they were ways to outsurvive one’s neighbors. Nicely browned, Spam has a crisp keep-calm-and-carry on quality. But also a Dr. Strangelove sizzle.

Spam sales are part of pandemic enthusiasm for animal products, even those produced from factory farms—even though we should know better. Spam is a branded product. People have heard of it even if they’ve never eaten it. It’s the antithesis of farm-to-table, also of vegetarianism or veganism. It’s not just processed food, but highly processed—and cruelly so. Spam is extracted from hogs, a highly sentient and social species. They are bred in metal cages with concrete floors and slaughtered on an industrial scale. Producing protein this way is inhumane and environmentally unsustainable. And yet meat is a high priority for many Americans. On April 28^th, President Trump signed an executive order to declare meat processing plants “critical infrastructure.” He is indifferent to the hogs, and to the meat-industry workers who now cannot practice social distancing. Who cares about them? Recent analysis of the most-Googled recipes in each US state showed that iterations of hamburger or ground beef were the top choice in twelve states, chicken in five, pork in three more—twenty of our fifty states seek animal flesh. But whatever industrial meat’s current merits as comfort-food, we cannot plan to subsist on it in the decades to come.

Time for dessert? Maybe you’re trying to avoid “the COVID 15,” the fifteen extra pounds stress-eating is packing around some self quarantiners. How about a healthy orange? Fruit isn’t a bad choice. Even grapes or apples, which are little more than bags of fructose and water, with trace vitamins, are better than actual candy.

But, first, give thanks to the people who pick your fruit and to the natural world that makes all food possible. Agricultural piece workers have unenviable jobs that poorly match the attractive pyramids of bounty in the produce section. This isn’t one of those (vanishingly rare) problems that the pandemic has made better. Most US farm workers are undocumented migrants, to whom many labor regulations never apply. They are now, in the pandemic, categorized as “essential workers,” out of concern to maintain the food supply. But this means the workers can’t stay home, either to recuperate if they’re sick or avoid people they know are infected—and those two factors feed on each other, even out in the fresh air of a field of antioxidant-rich strawberries. If we want to continue to enjoy berries or oranges, we’ll need to reconsider the compromised labor conditions for agricultural workers in an increasingly exclusionist United States.

Also, whether we want to think about it right now or not, climate change is threatening most crops, including those, like citrus, that are Goldilocks-picky about their temperature and rainfall.

Now, back to those antioxidants. Many fruits (and vegetables) have super-nutritional qualities. These are critical for maintaining health. Your body will disintegrate from scurvy if you cease to ingest Vitamin C; the known range of vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and micro-nutrients have similar prophylactic functions. Together, they boost the immune system’s defense against infections, including COVID-19.

But fruit alone doesn’t ward off contagious diseases. We also need immunizations, which shield individuals from horrors like smallpox while giving populations the herd immunity that prevents outbreaks of measles, whooping cough, and the like. Anti-vaxxers, the people who think inoculating children creates autism, preach instead the efficacy of diet. In parallel, right-wing survivalists are peddling pandemic decoctions of colloidal silver. Silver has antibacterial properties; these have no effect on viruses like COVID-19, however. Nor will an orange a day truly keep the doctor away. If anti-vaxxing survives the pandemic, can anything kill it? More to the point, if civic intelligence about science could also be described in terms of herd immunity, at what point might we be collectively doomed by the ignorance of a minority?

I offer a fortune cookie at meal’s end. And the fortune reads:

Eat wisely—#AloneTogether is forever.

frank news is dedicated to storytelling across all mediums. A space for debate, discussion, and connection between experts and a curious readership. Topics are presented monthly with content delivered daily.

Founders

Newsletter

Issues

Categories