Bye bye UBI?

The upside is simplification

My big recommended reading of the week is Jonah Messinger’s takedown of Robert Howarth’s work on the climate impact of liquified natural gas. This is important because it has long been established that burning methane generates dramatically less particulate air pollution than burning coal. Methane, on conventional estimates, also has lower CO2 emissions than coal, albeit by a more modest margin. And because there are plant designs for natural gas power that are easy to turn on and off, it’s a very effective complement to solar and wind power. Which is just to say, that if you believe climate change is real and emissions reductions are desirable, but you’re also not a degrowth maniac and you recognize that people need electricity, then gas looks pretty good.

But the climate movement is committed to pretending not to realize that regardless of what policy choices the United States makes, the world (which primarily comprises non-Americans) is not going to hit semi-arbitrary emissions targets.

It chooses to act as if the US building infrastructure to export fossil fuels “locks in” emissions that would be averted if the US declined to build the infrastructure. The fact that, realistically, American liquified natural gas exports reduce rather than increase global emissions is a big problem for that agenda. So they’ve hit on Howarth’s idiosyncratic outlier science to justify the idea that displacing coal with LNG is bad for climate. And then the Biden administration has catered to the view in a weird way by allowing a bunch of LNG export projects to go forward, but indicating that new ones will have a hard time getting off the ground. The justification for this policy choice, if you talk to people in the administration, is fully circular. They are doing it because the climate groups want it, and they are trying to keep them on the team.

But it doesn’t reduce emissions! It’s good to take climate impacts into account when you are making policy, but that means taking actual climate impacts into account, not doing activist chum. The way I put this in my post on Kamala Harris’ Etch-a-Sketch is that she should commit to science-based evaluation of natural gas. But the broader issue is that the next Democratic administration needs to recognize that energy policy is much too important to the global economy to be treated as a siloed area.

Other recommendations:

• Nick Rafter on Bibi’s useful idiots.

• Shruti Rajagopalan on the Indian-American elite.

• Noah Smith offers some gentle criticism of the post-neoliberal left.

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Good news this week: The Kairos reactor is under construction, human challenge trials are making progress on malaria vaccines, and we may be getting blood tests for Alzheimers. I’d also just note that while Trump is still the favorite, Democrats’ decision to swap in a candidate who can actively campaign on her own behalf has generated a significant improvement in the polling situation.

Comment of the week from Alex: I have heard Harris mention an “assault weapons ban” at least twice since her campaign began, which strikes me as a conspicuously high frequency in such a short timespan. “They want to ban abortion, we want to ban assault weapons,” etc.

Not sure where the polling is on this, but it seems like an unwise subject to promote. I think MY has, in the past, advocated for Democrats not mentioning guns at all. Every reliable Democratic voter understands that the party is trustworthy on gun control stances, so there's nothing to be gained but lots to be lost in associating oneself with the taking away of any firearms in the minds of heterodox swing voters in purple country.

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This week’s question from City of Trees: In a previous mailbag you laid out your rough principles on UBI. Last week, you saw two studies from NBER that you termed on Twitter as “a big [loss] for UBI.” Has this changed your priors on UBI at all? And if so (or even if not), perhaps a more detailed description of your preferred policy changes would be helpful.

I would say this has not dramatically shifted my views about UBI.