The one per cent doctrine

OK, it’s the “one-percent AND we’re on the line” doctrine :-)

that’s ‘collapse’. Carry on.

“We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.”
-Kurt Vonnegut

I only add that the Cheney doctrine can be (and, it would appear, has been) conveniently calibrated by appeal to the physicist’s observation that 1 is approximately equal to 10.

Cheaper and more entertaining to read “The Black Swan”.. as all these “issues” are disposed of before the introduction is done..

Cass Sunstein is “brilliant, he’s dazzling, he’s aggressively masculine and has a tremendous level of emotional articulateness!”.

http://www.02138mag.com/lists/PC/1111.html

Nussbaum: “Cass wants to be liked for what he says when he goes to Washington to talk to the Republicans. He wants them to be won over by his sweet reasonableness. I wouldn’t care what they thought.”

I promise, promise, promise! not to take over the thread this time with multiple posts. But Jesus, Sunstein sounds awful (both in the LRB piece and in mq’s link). Has he any awareness of the actual world he lives in, the one with the actual Republicans in it? Tom Delay, Trent Lott, et al?

Reasonableness is not reason, though I’m against both of them. Is there any evidence that Sunstein’s diligent and systematic application of his prodigious legal and philosophical intelligence to reasoning about global warming has done any good? Has there been any payoff? He just seems to have produced a more complicated version of man-in-the-street inertia, with a somewhat larger than average does of American selfishness (“SCREW those shitty little poor tropical countries and they’re whining about problems that we cause and they suffer from! Isn’t their bias evident?”

At times I may seem to think that the problem with analytic philosophy is its detachment from real-world problems, but whenever they do try to use their powerful analytic tools to reality, I start hoping that they’ll go back to grue-bleen possible-world trolley cars.

Also, you gotta love the textbook Mommie/Daddie division of labour the Cassbaum’s got going on…

Cass: constitutional law, being ‘aggressively masculine’, anything that might actually impact on US policy, climate change denialism…

Martha: emotions, animals, thinking beautiful thoughts, crazy left-wing stuff…

It’s always good to know where Brett stands on an issue.

It may come down to the simple difference between not wanting to do anything but open-mindedly waiting to be convinced you should v. wanting badly enough to do something that it becomes a driving need.
B.Bellmore’s question “How do you deal with that?” is more apt than he realizes.
The difference between sitting on the status quo waiting until you have a reasonable plan with a reasonable outcome, and needing to do something, anything – that’s crucial.
We’re going to be dealing with it, whether fighting with everything we have or just passively watching it roll on toward us.
On a more realistic note, I think the instigators and primary beneficiaries of all this are neither human, nor resident locals.

“It’s always good to know where Brett stands on an issue.”
Posted by John Emerson ·

I agree. It’s not a 100% reliable guide, but I’m sure that it’ll get there, with more input from him.

Kind to his mother, liked animals.

Some studies show, he [Sunstein] says, that each execution in the United States deters 18 murders

Much of the responsibility for this piece of nonsense should probably be placed at the door of Steven Levitt. If not for the ridiculous finding itself, then Levitt is at least responsible for popularizing and lending the weight of intellectual repute and commercial success to the use of the econometric method for producing such absurd claims.

John- I liked Sunstein’s book on free speech from several years ago (I think it’s from ’94, though it might well be older than that), _Democracy and the Problem of Free Speech_. His earlier work on judicial review, in the book _One Case at a Time_, puting forward a veiw called “judical minimalism” was also interesting if not really satisfactory, to my mind. I believe he first made his name writing about administrative law. So, his earlier work was better and more careful. I think he’s one of those people who would be twice as good if he wrote half as much and really lets the fact that he’s able to write stuff like mad keep him from being good. His work hasn’t been very good for several years.

At least Sunstein isn’t too harmful. I feel like he wastes my time, but doesn’t nauseate me like some other public intellectuals these days.

The aggressively masculine Sunstein has now moved on to dating Samantha Power. Martha Nussbaum is single, guys! She took a real step down going from Amartya Sen to Cass Sunstein, maybe she’s ready for a blogger now.

The funniest/saddest thing on that “power couples” site I linked was the one on Elliot and Silda Wall Spitzer. Sort of tragic in retrospect.

http://www.02138mag.com/lists/PC/1105.html

yeah sunstein’s early stuff isn’t bad. There’s a whole bunch of books he wrote on judicial minimalism (After the Rights Revolution, the partial constitution, one case at a time)–basically, that judges should eschew broad theories and keep their decisions as narrow as possible. and before that he was a proponent of civic republicanism in the 80s. but you know, even then I always felt sunstein’s work was workman-like. He always uses the ‘latest’ idea but makes them palatable to liberals. He reminds me a bit of malcolm gladwell. A kind of friendly bricoleur.

but what #26 and #27 said. I think it’s a real problem amongst US legal academics, actually.

I wonder if nussbaum regrets being so public? I remember being both impressed and surprised at her public declarations of love for sunstein. Well, anyway, that’s not really relevant.

Ok, jokers, how DO you deal with the growing economies of the world, with no interest in lapsing back into poverty, and the capacity to put out more CO2 than we could reduce even if we shut our economies down completely?

Even if we wanted to do something enough that it became a driving need, what would it be? I’ve suggested geo-engineering, what’s your contribution? Giving your friends efficient light bulbs every time you fly around the world? See above: It doesn’t mean squat.

Fortunately there are serious people working on more practical ideas, and they do seem feasible. Because I really do NOT think we could persuade China to stop burning coal.

I find the notion that the straightforward application of engineering principles can be dismissed by being labeled “science fiction” rather tiresome. I supposed I could describe the idea that we’re going to avert global warming by nations voluntarily crippling their economies as “political fiction”; There, now don’t you feel silly for proposing it?

BTW, how does suggesting a way of dealing with global warming that you don’t like amount to global warming “denialism”?

I guess that’s what dealing with GW comes down to– are we going to re-engineer our technology and our economy to stop screwing with the atmosphere, or are we going to re-egnineer our atmosphere so that our technology and economy can continue unaltered?

The thing is, technology and economies are things that human beings constructed in the first place, so it’s perfectly reasonable to expect human beings to re-engineer them to reduce harm.

The atmosphere and biosphere, OTOH, are complex, dynamically changing systems were here for hundreds of millions of years before we were. The word “engineering” is completely inappropriate here–any assumptions we make about how the atmosphere will react to our modifications are completely unwarranted. “Geo-engineeering” and ordinary air pollution are dangerous for the same reason–we really don’t understand how our planet works and we should be a lot more cautious when mucking with it.

That’s what makes it science fiction. It’s assuming a level of knowledge about our planet that we just aren’t going to get.

I find Brett’s assumption that there are sure to be be cost-free engineering solutions to global warming rather tiresome. He no longer seems to be a straight denialist, but his main motivation seems to be an insensate need to oppose whatever liberals propose.

I too sometimes fear that no one will be willing to pay the cost of doing something about global warming. For me that’s a real fear, because I think that the consequences of that refusal will be very serious. But for Brett it’s a debating point.

Since the Reagan-Carter campaign the Republican / conservative / libertarian response to any environmental proposal has overwhelmingly been automatic rejection. That’s one reason to throw the bastards out, and also a reason to blackball permanently anyone who’s ever played the denialist game.

George Monbiot has a multi-faceted plan to reduce CO2 emissions in the UK by 90%. How credible it is I do not know. See a review here.

Naturally, I screwed up the link:

http://webcast-law.uchicago.edu/podcast/posner_sunstein_climatechangeEdited.mp3

Shorter Brett Bellmore:
Well okay, the world is sort of on fire.
Who’s gonna put out that fire?
The guys who started it.

Why does anyone still argue with Bellmore?

Engels, it’s better than getting a job and being a contributing member of society.

(au)ABC Radio National: Background Briefing: The climate engineers. The podcast is up, transcripts probably in a day or two.

The piece in the LRB starts off with Cheney hearing that Osama bin Laden has met a high-level nuclear scientist from Pakistan. Cheney says that even if there is a one per cent chance that Al-Qaida is interested in obtaining nuclear weapons the USA has to act.

But how did the USA act? It invaded Iraq! It is completely unclear what the USA is doing about OBL and about the nuclear complex in Pakistan.
There would seem to be some added twists to the one per cent doctrine that haven’t been explored !

Is this the same Eric Posner who’s over at Slate, “putting into context” the Yoo torture memos?

I never ceased to be amazed by the capacity of those who advocate ‘personal responsibility’, ‘self-reliance’, and suchlike for blaming all their problems on the Chinese.

Brett’s on the money here guys. geo-engineering. We get everyone in China to jump at exactly the same time, in the middle of the day. When they land the momentum will shift the earth into a slightly wider orbit, and everything will get cooler.

Only a white man with a huge IQ could think of it though.

we brought about the deaths of tens or hundreds of thousands of Iraqis

Nice move, Waldron. Wouldn’t want to go out on a limb there, would we? After all, one mustn’t appear to be a radical if one wants to be taken serious at faculty luncheons.

This is a depressing review. When I was a law student at Columbia, I had some exposure to Waldron and was unimpressed. But that was nothing compared to the semester I cross-registered at NYU for a “Behavioral Law And Econ” class taught using Sunstein’s textbook. It was billed as an antidote to the batshit crazy psychological assumptions underlying L&E, but it turned out actually to be a sort of fig leaf lying on top of them. Completely useless, and offensively easy to debunk. Like most L&E, its primary purpose seemed to be to educate young corporate lawyers in the reasons poor people deserve to be poor and rich people deserve to be rich. My role in the class seemed to be to interrupt the class once at every session to offer an alternative, and more coherent, explanation for whatever Sunstein was using that day to illustrate the tragic irrationality of poor people; these alternative explanations often had to do with racial discrimination, imperfect information, logistical limitations, and other aspects of the actual lives of actual poor people that were incompatible with the L&E model. That these factors seemed never to have occurred to the instructor confirmed my suspicion that L&E — and perhaps neoclassical economics generally — is not an academic discipline, but a religion.

It’s true that, compared to Dick Cheney, Sunstein seems like a real bright bulb. And Waldron, in turn, looks pretty impressive standing next to Sunstein. But the fact is that they’re both intellectual lightweights who would probably have a hard time making it in a real academic department and so opted for the world of “Law and …” instead.

Ah, I see that Waldron has been stolen away by NYU now. I don’t know whether this is a further sign of Columbia’s decline into stodgy irrelevance or of NYU’s continuing policy of recruiting flashy, sexy, second-rate thinkers. Perhaps both.

Great Zamfir neglects the possibility of getting people to jump higher.

Oh god. I don’t want to read this thing if Sunstein has bought into the utterly moronic “revealed preferences values of life” crap that’s coming out of — well, mostly out of people like Kip Viscusi.

With what?

How about weaponry? Works for Egypt and Israel. “Works” to be defined later.

We CAN’T do that but we CAN build a Giant Space Gadget! C’mon kids, we have a show to put on!

I believe the decision to change the nature of the Earth may require politics. Just me though.

Is your back yard large enough for this project? My guess is you’d need to fit this amount of people.

Well no. Some may like zippy numbers and some might like a relatively placid samba. You have to consider these things carefully.

Got enough crayons for the invites?

Get real, will you? Any even moderately democratic government which attempted to divert that large a portion of it’s GDP to the benefit of other contries, (We’re talking here of an effort that would make the war in Iraq look cheap.) would fall. The only question would be whether the lynch mobs would wait for an election to resolve the matter.

You’re talking about the political equivalent of a violation of the laws of thermodynamics: Logically possible, but so wildly improbable as to be a practical impossiblity.

“We pay them.”

Or we could restrict their oil supply.

Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran. Not to worry about end-times scenarios, the Chinese would have to be able to raise a 300 million man army in order to show up as the biblical dragon from the east… oh, wait.

Sortition – I’ll leave that one as an exercise for you. Don’t start until you’ve put away that bong, though, okay?

engels,

Before moving to substance, I’ll note that it is curious that the person who accuses others of “trying to win some kind of Junior High debate contest” is the same one who refuses to answer a specific and relevant question and instead deploys schoolyard insults.

Moving on: I had a look at the ippr article you linked to. The article is full of high rhetoric about “historical responsibility”, but its policy proposals fail to live up to the rhetoric. At no point in the article is it said that the West should submit to the same per-capita quota as the less-polluting countries. Through the use of shifty argumentation the authors are suggesting maintaining emissions inequality through some kind of quota trading system in which the West would either buy or be granted the right to pollute more.

Also, laughably, the authors talk about the difficulty for West to be “altruistic” enough to give $80G yearly to China and other countries as compensation for polluting less. If such an amount could be used to make significant dents in the level of emissions, why hasn’t the West applied its resources already to lower its own per-capita emission to below the Chinese level? Also, since it is China that is giving the rest of the world over $200G every year through its trade surplus, it seems unlikely that a portion of a $80G-a-year rebate would make a significant change in China’s economic and ecological considerations.

Unfortunately, the approach presented in the article is part of the problem, not part of the solution. Focusing on how others should change rather than on how the West should change is convenient but is both ineffective and immoral.

Is this an integral part of the one per cent doctrine: when there is a one per cent risk of an extreme event you become hyperactive in some displacement activity?

Good point. Maybe you respond to the extreme event with one percent of your energies.