Texas Bans Marriage?

Maybe? They passed a constitutional amendment back in aught-five, as a pre-emptive ban to gay marriage. It includes this provision:

""This state or a political subdivision of this state may not create or recognize any legal status identical or similar to marriage."

I'm only a few months into my legal studies, so I haven't got the expertise to tell you if banning something identical to marriage is identical to banning marriage. I'll let you know once I get this figured out.

In the meantime, imagine the possibilities:

Man: Won't you have dinner with me?

Woman: I'm sorry, I'm married.

Man: Nope.

Woman: ....Pardon me?

Man: You're not married.

Woman: ....um....yes, I am.

Man: Not according to the constitution! Dinner?

Woman: *Swoon*

We Don't Know the Future

I just heard on the news that Obama is finishing up his visit to China. The announcer described them as "the superpowers of the 21st century".

You hear this sort of thing a lot. I think it's silly. Maybe they will be. But maybe they won't. We don't know. You couldn't have predicted who would be the superpowers at the end of the 20th century by looking at the great powers of 1909 (Britain?). The term superpower didn't even come into use until after WWII.

Part of our nature as humans is having a sort of silly tendency to assume that the future will be much like the present. We can look backwards at the past and understand that lots of things changed, but our predictions for the future are surprisingly static. I'm sure people in the past would have thought it impossible that the British Empire would go away. But....it did.

In short, I wish newscasters would stop saying that about the US and China.

Leaders Reach Consensus on Doing Nothing

Oh good. Political leaders have agreed to produce no meaningful agreement at the Copenhagen climate change summit in December. They've agreed to agree on principles, but not to set any binding goals. I wonder what sort of useful principles they will agree upon. Maybe:

"Carbon emissions should be reduced, somehow, sometime, by someone. If it doesn't cost too much."

"People should be nice to each other."

I have great hopes for the coming agreement.

Meanwhile, one of the reasons that our leaders have agreed to do nothing may well be that few people seem to believe climate change is a serious threat, or that it's caused by us at all. Here's a survey showing that only 41% of britons think that climate change is largely man made. And in America, support for that idea has dropped by 11% in a year, so that now only 36% of people though global warming was happening and was man made.

Harrumph. George Monbiot speculates that this denial is related to our fear of death, and as the scientific evidence has become stronger and more frightening, people are turning away from it.

Maybe? Or maybe now that Obama is in the White House, and the Republicans have lost all restraint, more people are starting to hear and accept their messages of climate change denial.

Reality will press forward regardless, heedless of the fondest wishes of those who would stick their heads in the sand. Here's a good post from the resident blogger on climate change at Shell, making clear that we must get rid of carbon emissions entirely, and that it is the total amount of carbon in the atmosphere rather than our annual emissions which is the real measure of the problem.

I actually used to be confused on this point. A good analogy would be that we're drowning in a tank, slowly filling with water. When it fills, we drown. The water is already at a dangerously high level, and more is being pumped in. The big question debated in the media is how much to cut the levels of water pumped into the tank. This is important, but it misses the real issue, which is how high the water level in the tank is.

Our discussion on climate change is similar. The most important thing is how much total CO2 and other warming agents are in the atmosphere.

He points us to this website, which shows how much we would have to cut carbon emissions per year to avoid putting a total of one trillion tons of carbon into the atmosphere. It's currently 2.14% per year, until we hit zero emissions. That's the goal politicians are currently shooting for, and hoping that it would keep us under 2 degrees Celsius of warming.

The website also shows how much we would have to cut emissions to reach a safer goal of 750 billion tons, and we would have to start reducing emissions now by 4.5% per year. It says that if we keep under this limit, there is less than a one in four chance of the planet warming more than 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels.

Meanwhile, emissions are actually rising. Every bit of delay makes the eventually change harder, as we'll have already increased the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, and gotten closer to emitting one trillion tons.

Of course, the really scary fact is that both of those measures might be too lenient, and that we may already have put too much carbon into the atmosphere. The correct goal in that case for CO2 concentrations would be somewhere in the past.

We're seeing evidence for this. We're told, for example, that arctic sea ice is now effectively gone in the summers. The thick ice that used to build up over many years has now been replaced by thin ice that forms over one winter and melts in the summer. This is decades ahead of predictions made just a few years ago.

What would even more CO2 and warming do?

I recommend not thinking about that question, and instead pretending that nothing is happening, and that if something is happening, then it certainly isn't caused by us. Certainly we shouldn't try and do anything about all of this if it costs any money. After all, we wouldn't want to hurt the economy.

Netherlands road tax

The Netherlands has announced that they are going to eliminate the tax on new vehicles, and replace it with a tax based on how many kilometres you drive. The tax will be higher with high emissions vehicles, and vice versa.

To do this, they will put a GPS tracker in every vehicle, and send the information about where you drive to the government.

I'm usually for carbon taxes, but this one seems iffy. If would be infinitely simpler, and much, much less intrusive to simply tax the gasoline more at the pump. Why they opted for a much more complicated, privacy eroding system isn't clear, though cynicism and/or paranoia could probably help provide you with some explanations.

I don't really like the idea of the government knowing where we drive. Then again, we already accept that google can see everywhere we visit, and that we can be tracked using our cellphones, so I guess this isn't that huge a leap.

But simply taxing gas would be a much better idea, from most points of view. Also, removing the tax on new cars seems odd, as it encourages buying cars. Cutting car prices by 25% would probably convince some people to buy a car if they'd previously been avoiding it for cost reasons. People are more likely to notice big upfront costs than small, steady costs like gas.

Why isn't Obama doing better?

Another recent dysfunctional element in American politics is the filibuster in the Senate.

The Senate has 100 members. You'll often hear or read things like "It is doubtful that the bill will gather the 60 votes needed to pass", with little other comment. You might find this confusing, as normally in legislatures bills pass or fail based on a majority vote, not a 60% vote.

It's actually a fairly recent development. Since 2006, when the democrats won control of Congress, it's gone through the roof, with the Republicans threatening to filibuster every bill. You need 60 votes for a motion of cloture to shut down debate and move for a vote on a bill, so this has meant that 60 votes is now the effective requirement to pass anything.

The weirdest part might be that they don't actually filibuster anything. They just threaten to do so, and so the Democrats don't bring a bill to a vote.

To the extent that this process is understood, some people use it to make excuses for Obama. "Well, he's trying his darndest, but he needs 60 senate votes, so how can he pass a good climate change bill or a health care bill under those condition?". The democrats currently have 60 senators, so they would have to convince every single one of them to vote for cloture.

I don't think this argument holds water however. The democrats could pass better bills if they really wanted to. I think that they're either wussies, or they simply don't want to. Or a bit of both.

If you think that's far fetched, consider that during George Bush's first four years, he only had 50 Republican Senators in the first two years, and 51 in the last two. Not even and then barely a majority. Yet those four years were a time of sweeping change. They passed massive corporate and upper class tax cuts, they authorized the war in Iraq, they passed the patriot act and they made lots of other controversial changes.

You could blame it on 9/11, and the climate of fear that followed, but that climate fear and the message of "you're with us or you're against us" was something created by the Bush administration to bully their enemies into doing what they wanted. The Republicans are excellent parliamentary tacticians and they used circumstances to get what they wanted

Obama just came into power during a massive economic crisis caused by Republicans. It would have been very easy to use this to bully the Republicans, or at least some more Senate Democrats into giving the administration what it wanted. They have sixty senators, 10 more than Bush had. The fact that they're not doing this suggests that either:

a. They're wussies.

b. They don't actually want things like a health care bill that actually helps people if it means hurting insurance companies or an effective climate change bill, or banking sector reform.*

I lean toward b, but I could easily believe a, or both at the same time. But I'm not convinced the evidence suggests any other possibility.

In America, it's an election year 50% of the time

I was listening to the radio, and heard them say that the health care reform bill might run into trouble if it runs past new years, because next year is an election year, and politicians wouldn't like to support a controversial bill before an election.

You hear this sort of thing a lot, and it helps illustrate how utterly dysfunctional American governance has become. You have a presidential election every fourth year, and then a congressional mid-term election every two years in between that.

To illustrate, these are the election years starting from the millenium: 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2008, 2010.

Literally half of the time it is an election year. This wasn't such of a problem in the past, before the mediatization of American politics, but modern election campaigns generally last the whole year.

So effectively you have a political culture where half the time is viewed as a bad time to do anything that might be controversial. And controversial, as it happens, is also a synonym for "actually helps people" or "makes things better". You'll never get in trouble voting for corporate interests in an election year.

So there is a vanishingly small window of time in which it is viewed as acceptable or possible to make changes.

Update: To clarify how this works, I should note that members of congress have 2 year terms, they all have to run in every one of those elections I mentioned above. Senators have 6 year terms, but their elections are staggered, 1/3 of them are up for re-election each election cycle.

stopping global warming means leaving oil in the ground

To pick up a point from the last post, I think it's worth making clear that reducing and eliminting emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases means reducing and eventually eliminating usage of oil and natural gas.

Which means leaving oil in the ground. Which means not selling the oil. This is pretty straightforward, but the globe's editorial on the issue betrayed a lack of understanding and confusion on these points, so maybe others aren't clear on this either.

They worried that reducing carbon dioxide would harm "a vital canadian industry" and annoy Alberta. That is true, but it's something we'll have to figure out how to deal with, not a reason to throw our hands up in the air and say it's not a good idea to prevent climate change.

Business as usual means that there will be most likely hundreds of millions or billions of deaths over the next century as crop yields decline and drought makes growing food more difficult, as weather patterns change and ocean ecosystems collapse due to acidification.

Not business as usual means that Alberta will be a bit poorer in conventional terms, and annoyed because it is sitting on oil that it could sell for more than it costs to extract it, and not destroying the world means preventing them from making those profits.

The choice is rarely put that way though, so I think it's worth doing. One more time:

Stopping global warming means not extracting, selling and making money from oil which we possess.

Stopping global warming means shutting down oil the oil industry.

Eventually, anyway. Saying "but this will hurt the oil industry!" is not, on it's own, a valid objection to CO2 reduction plans.

That's the point.

Conservative government opposes their own plan

The conservatives have pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 20% by 2020, though they didn't specify how. TD bank produced a report to figure that out, and how much it would cost.

The conservatives responded by calling the report irresponsible. "We oppose our plan, it is a very bad plan," said Mr. Prentice. "Anyone who proposes a plan such as ours is a fool, and it surely won't work. It's too expensive! And we certainly oppose any mechanisms which would make our plan work".*

The Globe and Mail's editorial board doesn't like the plan to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, they fear it might force us to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

Eventually, we will have to move to no use of oil and gas, effectively killing the industry. This will prevent the world from being plunged into chaos, probably a worthy goal.

That the fossil fuel industry must eventually die if we stop using fossil fuels shouldn't be controversial, but the Globe fears that the plan to mitigate climate change could "euthanize a vital Canadian industry".*

They propose, if it's too difficult to stop emitting greenhouse gases, then we simply aim for a smaller target than the one in the government plan which the government opposes.

I'm sure they can get the laws of physics to agree with them and get the earth to slow down it's warming to match the reduced Canadian target.

There is a valid concern buried underneath all of this, which is that people like money, and will protest if you stop then from earning money. Alberta and Saskatchewan currently earn lots of money by supplying people with fuel, which those people use to destabilize the climate. This needs to be stopped. Stopping people from destroying the planet means less money for Alberta, so of course they're going to be pissy about it.

So we need to balance this national unity concern with our other goal of not destroying the world, or, alternatively, destroying it less. The globe and mail shows little awareness of this in its discussion of the issue however. They seem to suggest it might be good to lower greenhouse emissions, but not if it upsets anyone, and they don't really seem to grasp why it might be important.

* This is technically a paraphrase.

* An actual quote