"We just have an excessively polarized political debate where influential stakeholders want you to either put Israel under sanctions and arms embargo or else go halfsies with them on regional conflict with Iran when the actual correct solution is to be less involved in this."
Speaking of an informed electorate, I asked Gemini for a fact check on the current state of the science on the potential impact of US LNG exports on global warming. The paper I referenced (with a different conclusion than you stated) is "The greenhouse gas footprint of liquefied natural gas (LNG) exported from the United States by Robert W. Howarth (https://www.research.howarthlab.org/publications/Howarth_LNG_assessment_preprint_archived_2023-1103.pdf). This is an excerpt from the reply I got,
"This is why Matthew Yglesias’ statement (highlighted in [Image 0.png]) is factually wrong in a scientific context. He asserts that a reasonable position is to favor natural gas exports "that help keep Europe safe from Russian aggression with no impact on global emissions."
This phrasing is misleading and factually incorrect. Even under the most optimistic assumptions from pro-LNG analyses, the act of liquefying, transporting, and burning natural gas does result in greenhouse gas emissions. The most that can be argued is that LNG might be less damaging than a specific alternative like coal in a power plant, but it does not have "no impact" or a net-zero effect. It is still a fossil fuel and a source of net-positive emissions.
Conclusion: In summary, there is no new research that has changed the fundamental understanding to the point where Yglesias' conclusion of "no impact on global emissions" is correct. The debate is on the precise climate-warming magnitude of U.S. LNG, and whether it represents a slightly better or much worse option than other fossil fuels like coal, but it is unequivocally an emitter of greenhouse gases.
A few MA towns, like Weymouth where I lived for 7 years, have tried to allow apartment and condo complexes near commuter rail stations. Sadly this doesn't work so well if the station is in the center of town where there's no room for parking but you need a car to live there and do anything but commute to work (in Weymouth's case, they actually cut available parking for the station way down to build the housing, which is even worse).
I, too, was not a fan of One Battle (but I liked Anora, in part because it centered on semi -marginal societies without romanticizing them). What would have been your choice for best film? (Among the nominees and non-nominees)?
This year, of the nominees, liked Frankenstein the best. The year before, I was a fan of Conclave. I won’t pretend I can justify why they were better, just I liked them more and thought they were more interesting.
The problem with Conclave was that it was obvious who was going to be the new Pope the moment he arrived on screen. And the characters in Anora were far more interesting, tbh.
I did like Frankenstein, though not as much as I liked some others.
And this is where we part company; the end game for Anora was equally if not more obvious and the characters were less interesting. People see things differently.
It feels as if your point about U.S. natural gas exports to Europe not impacting emissions thinks about the problem a bit too narrowly.
For all the moralizing, the most successful driver of renewable energy adoption is renewable energy beating fossil fuels on price. If the US reduces global supply of natural gas, its price will go up, ultimately driving European adoption.
So, yes, supporting U.S. natural gas exports is anti-climate. While other factors like security could lead someone to believe the US should still support natural gas exports, that doesn’t make the position anti-climate.
Raising the price of natural gas drives up market share of all ways to generate non-natural gas energy, including, most notably, burning coal. (Also wood*, oil, and garbage.)
I am far more of a climate hawk than Yglesias but on this point his argument is unimpeachable-- reduced use of natural gas straightforwardly raises global emissions rates, period, end of sentence.
*The problem with wood-burning is less that it overtly releases CO2, although it does, and more that it deforests countries, reducing forests' capacity to ABSORB CO2.
This assumes that the demand for natural gas is filled primarily by burning fossil-fuel derived products (coal, oil, plastic trash). If it is instead replaced by renewable sources, then my argument holds.
Whether reducing natural gas exports ends up increasing, decreasing, or having no net effect on CO2e emissions globally is ultimately not in the control of Americans. It’s up to other countries and how they respond to our actions. Does Germany invest in carbon-neutral methods of powering its industrial furnaces, or go back to burning coal? Maybe it powers by coal in the short-term, but increases government funded research into carbon neutral high-temperature heating, and the carbon effects of the policy change overtime.
Ultimately, this is an argument about how a pragmatic voter should evaluate policy positions in a primary. And I think a pragmatic politician could take the position that reducing natural gas exports would improve the climate in good faith.
I will point out that the logic you deployed would lead us to NEVER transition to a carbon neutral society.
Table 2 in this link for reputable source on GHG emissions by electricity source:
Why assume that it is replaced by either fossil fuels or renewable sources? Why not assume that it is replaced by magical fairy dust? So long as you've started down the road of ignoring all empirical evidence and replacing it with your personal preferences, I see no reason to stop.
Also, this is just made up nonsense:
"I will point out that the logic you deployed would lead us to NEVER transition to a carbon neutral society."
I think an important challenge of the JCPOA is whether America can credibly guarantee a noninterventionist approach to Iran on a bipartisan basis (the answer is obviously no). Can America guarantee military interventions against Iran on a partisan basis when it builds towards a nuclear weapon? Absolutely
Matt -- it sounds like your movie tastes in the 1990s were not great -- the Best Picture winners you named were actually good movies worth watching, and Hollywood is now making crappy pictures you happen to like, perhaps because they strive to be films. So nothing has really changed with you. One Battle After Another was barely watchable on fast forward, despite another great DiCaprio performance. Sinners was pretty much recycled (and I love vampire movies) but seemed to get slobbered over because of the racial angles, not the actual filmmaking. AA for movies.
Your music tastes seem ok if you like the current Muzak.
I don’t think Obama fully realized that foreign policy was becoming partisan, to the point that agreements made by a Democratic president would be casually torn up by the next Republican president. Prior to his time, that hadn’t been the pattern; “politics stops at the water’s edge” used to be the rule, Bush got plenty of Democratic support for his foreign policy, and Obama himself largely kept the commitments of his predecessors, trying to revise things rather than blow them up.
Trump’s erratic behavior is unprecedented, and I don’t think we can fault Obama for not predicting it, even though we can see in retrospect that the conditions for it were forming during his presidency. It also wasn’t inevitable; if Obama’s successor had been a more traditional Republican it would not have happened. Recall that John Bolton was against tearing up the JCPOA even though he’d been against the agreement itself, because he believed that the US needed to keep its word.
Neither Charlotte nor the Outer Banks feel like North Carolina, the Outer Banks especially.
I don’t know how to express this well, but the Outer Banks is basically an in-joke with my husband and I. We both have deep roots in the state of North Carolina. Basically, the only people who frequent the Outer Banks are well off tourists from New England and the locals who provide services to them.
Charlotte is a containment area for Yankees.
If you want to see a city in the state that feels like North Carolina, visit Greensboro or Wilmington.
Better yet, visit any small town. This state is still very rural.
I will plug The Assembly for great local journalism if you want to know what’s going on in the Old North State.
I don't know that much about 19th Century Mexican history but why would continued rule by Maximillian have done authoritarian modernization any better than Porfirio Diaz? (And modernizing liberal nationalist autocrats were a thing in lots of countries - it only worked some of the time.)
My young adult daughters just can't seem to get enough of Radiohead these days.
"We just have an excessively polarized political debate where influential stakeholders want you to either put Israel under sanctions and arms embargo or else go halfsies with them on regional conflict with Iran when the actual correct solution is to be less involved in this."
Perfect!
Thanks for answering the foreign policy question. It’s clarifying and about what I expected.
I lived in China for a couple years over the past decade. They are and will continue to eat our lunch, it is a damn shame.
Speaking of an informed electorate, I asked Gemini for a fact check on the current state of the science on the potential impact of US LNG exports on global warming. The paper I referenced (with a different conclusion than you stated) is "The greenhouse gas footprint of liquefied natural gas (LNG) exported from the United States by Robert W. Howarth (https://www.research.howarthlab.org/publications/Howarth_LNG_assessment_preprint_archived_2023-1103.pdf). This is an excerpt from the reply I got,
"This is why Matthew Yglesias’ statement (highlighted in [Image 0.png]) is factually wrong in a scientific context. He asserts that a reasonable position is to favor natural gas exports "that help keep Europe safe from Russian aggression with no impact on global emissions."
This phrasing is misleading and factually incorrect. Even under the most optimistic assumptions from pro-LNG analyses, the act of liquefying, transporting, and burning natural gas does result in greenhouse gas emissions. The most that can be argued is that LNG might be less damaging than a specific alternative like coal in a power plant, but it does not have "no impact" or a net-zero effect. It is still a fossil fuel and a source of net-positive emissions.
Conclusion: In summary, there is no new research that has changed the fundamental understanding to the point where Yglesias' conclusion of "no impact on global emissions" is correct. The debate is on the precise climate-warming magnitude of U.S. LNG, and whether it represents a slightly better or much worse option than other fossil fuels like coal, but it is unequivocally an emitter of greenhouse gases.
A few MA towns, like Weymouth where I lived for 7 years, have tried to allow apartment and condo complexes near commuter rail stations. Sadly this doesn't work so well if the station is in the center of town where there's no room for parking but you need a car to live there and do anything but commute to work (in Weymouth's case, they actually cut available parking for the station way down to build the housing, which is even worse).
Thanks for helping to cushion the blow of “One Battle After Another” winning the Oscar, a year after the similarly uninspiring
and overhyped “Anora” winning, of the Academy’s long history, much of which I’ve lived through, of rewarding mediocre film making.
I, too, was not a fan of One Battle (but I liked Anora, in part because it centered on semi -marginal societies without romanticizing them). What would have been your choice for best film? (Among the nominees and non-nominees)?
This year, of the nominees, liked Frankenstein the best. The year before, I was a fan of Conclave. I won’t pretend I can justify why they were better, just I liked them more and thought they were more interesting.
The problem with Conclave was that it was obvious who was going to be the new Pope the moment he arrived on screen. And the characters in Anora were far more interesting, tbh.
I did like Frankenstein, though not as much as I liked some others.
And this is where we part company; the end game for Anora was equally if not more obvious and the characters were less interesting. People see things differently.
It feels as if your point about U.S. natural gas exports to Europe not impacting emissions thinks about the problem a bit too narrowly.
For all the moralizing, the most successful driver of renewable energy adoption is renewable energy beating fossil fuels on price. If the US reduces global supply of natural gas, its price will go up, ultimately driving European adoption.
So, yes, supporting U.S. natural gas exports is anti-climate. While other factors like security could lead someone to believe the US should still support natural gas exports, that doesn’t make the position anti-climate.
Raising the price of natural gas drives up market share of all ways to generate non-natural gas energy, including, most notably, burning coal. (Also wood*, oil, and garbage.)
I am far more of a climate hawk than Yglesias but on this point his argument is unimpeachable-- reduced use of natural gas straightforwardly raises global emissions rates, period, end of sentence.
*The problem with wood-burning is less that it overtly releases CO2, although it does, and more that it deforests countries, reducing forests' capacity to ABSORB CO2.
This assumes that the demand for natural gas is filled primarily by burning fossil-fuel derived products (coal, oil, plastic trash). If it is instead replaced by renewable sources, then my argument holds.
Whether reducing natural gas exports ends up increasing, decreasing, or having no net effect on CO2e emissions globally is ultimately not in the control of Americans. It’s up to other countries and how they respond to our actions. Does Germany invest in carbon-neutral methods of powering its industrial furnaces, or go back to burning coal? Maybe it powers by coal in the short-term, but increases government funded research into carbon neutral high-temperature heating, and the carbon effects of the policy change overtime.
Ultimately, this is an argument about how a pragmatic voter should evaluate policy positions in a primary. And I think a pragmatic politician could take the position that reducing natural gas exports would improve the climate in good faith.
I will point out that the logic you deployed would lead us to NEVER transition to a carbon neutral society.
Table 2 in this link for reputable source on GHG emissions by electricity source:
https://world-nuclear.org/images/articles/comparison_of_lifecycle1.pdf
Why assume that it is replaced by either fossil fuels or renewable sources? Why not assume that it is replaced by magical fairy dust? So long as you've started down the road of ignoring all empirical evidence and replacing it with your personal preferences, I see no reason to stop.
Also, this is just made up nonsense:
"I will point out that the logic you deployed would lead us to NEVER transition to a carbon neutral society."
Good luck with that one. I'm out.
I think an important challenge of the JCPOA is whether America can credibly guarantee a noninterventionist approach to Iran on a bipartisan basis (the answer is obviously no). Can America guarantee military interventions against Iran on a partisan basis when it builds towards a nuclear weapon? Absolutely
You should really see Yellowstone. It’s a landscape unlike anywhere else on earth.
Yikes. OBAA was not PTAs best. And that is putting it charitably.
Matt -- it sounds like your movie tastes in the 1990s were not great -- the Best Picture winners you named were actually good movies worth watching, and Hollywood is now making crappy pictures you happen to like, perhaps because they strive to be films. So nothing has really changed with you. One Battle After Another was barely watchable on fast forward, despite another great DiCaprio performance. Sinners was pretty much recycled (and I love vampire movies) but seemed to get slobbered over because of the racial angles, not the actual filmmaking. AA for movies.
Your music tastes seem ok if you like the current Muzak.
Sorry man.
We're like twin brothers of different mothers. Matt's taste in movies is questionable at best.
Reach out when you eventually visit Charlotte!
I don’t think Obama fully realized that foreign policy was becoming partisan, to the point that agreements made by a Democratic president would be casually torn up by the next Republican president. Prior to his time, that hadn’t been the pattern; “politics stops at the water’s edge” used to be the rule, Bush got plenty of Democratic support for his foreign policy, and Obama himself largely kept the commitments of his predecessors, trying to revise things rather than blow them up.
Trump’s erratic behavior is unprecedented, and I don’t think we can fault Obama for not predicting it, even though we can see in retrospect that the conditions for it were forming during his presidency. It also wasn’t inevitable; if Obama’s successor had been a more traditional Republican it would not have happened. Recall that John Bolton was against tearing up the JCPOA even though he’d been against the agreement itself, because he believed that the US needed to keep its word.
Criticizing Obama for not winning the Republicans over to his policies is the Miller's Lite of performance evaluation. No substance and no enjoyment.
Neither Charlotte nor the Outer Banks feel like North Carolina, the Outer Banks especially.
I don’t know how to express this well, but the Outer Banks is basically an in-joke with my husband and I. We both have deep roots in the state of North Carolina. Basically, the only people who frequent the Outer Banks are well off tourists from New England and the locals who provide services to them.
Charlotte is a containment area for Yankees.
If you want to see a city in the state that feels like North Carolina, visit Greensboro or Wilmington.
Better yet, visit any small town. This state is still very rural.
I will plug The Assembly for great local journalism if you want to know what’s going on in the Old North State.
I don't know that much about 19th Century Mexican history but why would continued rule by Maximillian have done authoritarian modernization any better than Porfirio Diaz? (And modernizing liberal nationalist autocrats were a thing in lots of countries - it only worked some of the time.)