Matt Yglesias

Michael Steele: Warming is Really Cooling

Conservatives are in a weird posture on climate change. Their financial backers are very much against taking action to avoid catastrophe. And they perceive, correctly, that the kind of steps that could avoid catastrophe are likely to offend a large swathe of powerful interests and be met with skepticism by the public at large. But they can’t really say “massive global catastrophe is a small price to pay for short-term political gain.” So you get weird flailing like this:

We are cooling. We are not warming. The warming you see out there, the supposed warming, and I use my fingers as quotation marks, is part of the cooling process. Greenland, which is covered in ice, it was once called Greenland for a reason, right? Iceland, which is now green. Oh I love this. Like we know what this planet is all about. How long have we been here? How long? Not very long.

Iceland is really not green right now; the bulk of the island’s surface is desolate wasteland thanks to massive deforestation and topsoil erosion. But it is true that it used to be a lot warmer in Greenland than it’s been recently. One should dwell on this a bit—Greenland was settled by Norse adventurers back during a warm period, and the subsequent climate shift was a sufficiently serious problem to wipe the colony out entirely. That climate shift was out of the hands of humanity, and since we didn’t just keep getting colder and colder and colder we eventually reached a new equilibrium. But the price paid during the transition was high. Just ask the Greenland settlers. And, unfortunately, the nature of the current warming trend is that the planet could just get hotter and hotter irreversibly. The good news is that it’s not out of the hands of humanity; our activity is the main source of warming and changing our activity can prevent the worst from happening.

Michael Steele Apologizes to Rush

Rahm Emmanuel observed on Sunday that one measure of Rush Limbaugh’s hold over the Republican Party is that “whenever a Republican criticizes him, they have to run back and apologize to him, and say they were misunderstood.” Today’s RNC Chair Michael Steele becomes the latest to cross Rush, get slammed by Rush, and then need to issue a groveling apology explaining that he was misunderstood:

“I went back at that tape and I realized words that I said weren’t what I was thinking,” Steele said. “It was one of those things where I thinking I was saying one thing, and it came out differently. What I was trying to say was a lot of people … want to make Rush the scapegoat, the bogeyman, and he’s not.”

Satyam Khanna observes that he’s merely following in the footsteps of Governor Mark Sanford and Rep. Phil Gingrey.

Steele Promises “Off the Hook” PR in “Urban-Suburban Hip-Hop Settings”

Based on this Washington Times report, I think we can expect Michael Steele to be a gift that keeps on giving:

Newly elected Republican National Committee Chairman Michael S. Steele plans an “off the hook” public relations offensive to attract younger voters, especially blacks and Hispanics, by applying the party’s principles to “urban-suburban hip-hop settings.”

The RNC’s first black chairman will “surprise everyone” when updating the party’s image using the Internet and advertisements on radio, on television and in print, he told The Washington Times.

In putting this post together, I thought I would Google “off the hook” to see if anything funny popped up. And the series of tubes delivered with a link to Off the Hook Restaurant and Ocean View Bar in Highlands, New Jersey. That’s conveniently located in Monmouth County, one of the relatively few portions of the northeast that’s still Republican-friendly.

Meanwhile, my colleague Amanda Terkel recently asked PBS News’ Gwen Ifill about African-Americans and the GOP. She said “they seem to have gone backwards” in some respects from a period when J.C. Watts was in congress.

RNC Chair Steele Says Republicans Are Untrustworthy

Amusing:

Interesting messaging concept.

Michael Steele Was for Fish Passage Barrier Removal Before He Was Against It

Brendan Nyhan has more on the brain-dead appeals to ignorance at the heart of Michael Steele’s strident opposition to the inclusion in the stimulus of a small quantity of funds aimed at removing fish passage barriers from the nation’s streams.

For example, Nyhan reveals that back when Steele was Lieutenant Governor of Maryland serving under Republican Governor Bob Ehrlich, the Steele-Ehrlich administration touted removal of fish passage barriers as an important policy priority. They explained that “migration barriers are anything in the stream that significantly interferes with the upstream movement of fish” and “unimpeded fish passage is especially important for anadromous fish which live much of their lives in tidal waters but must move into non-tidal rivers and streams to spawn.” They warn that fish passage barriers, if unaddressed, create a situation in which “the diversity of the fish community in an area will be reduced and the remaining biological community may be out of natural balance.” They even set up a hotline you could call to report a fish passage barrier so that the state could remove it.

Long story short, the economy requires fiscal stimulus. That requires us to identify projects on which to spend money that are (a) short-term in nature, and (b) useful. Barriers to fish migration are a bona fide environmental problem. Removing them is useful. And since removing them is a series of short-term endeavors, it works as stimulus.

Michael Steele’s Bad Math

One unfortunate aspect of human psychology is that people aren’t good at understanding magnitudes that are far outside the range of ordinary experience. Everyone’s very clear on the fact that 50 eggs is a lot more eggs than seven eggs. But the difference between a $50,000,000 budget item and a $7,000,000 budget item tends to get fuzzy. And it gets worse when you start using words in place of numerals. $5 billion is a lot more than $5 million—$4,995,000,000 more to be exact—but the two words sound similar and look similar on the page. Which brings us to things like this bit of rounding by Michael Steele:

When families keep the money, they spend it, save it, or invest it. And the private sector economy benefits when families and businesses buy consumer goods or invest it for the future. But when Washington spends the money, some of it may flow into the economy, but all too often, much gets wasted.

Democrats in Congress want a one-trillion dollar spending bill. You’ve heard about the pork-barrel programs they want to fund… 45 million dollars for ATV trails and removal of fish passage barriers is one that caught my eye. Exactly what is a fish passage barrier and why does it cost 45 million dollars to stimulate the economy with it?

There are about a million things wrong with this argument (to be saved for future posts) but just note that there’s a big difference between rounding 85 cents up to one dollar and rounding $850 billion up to $1 trillion. Nobody would call a candy bar that costs $1 a “$150 billion candy bar.” And yet $1 is, in absolute terms, closer to $150 billion than $850 billion is to $1 trillion. Of course that comparison isn’t entirely fair, the percentage difference matters as well. But the fact remains that when you’re dealing with very large magnitudes, these kind of decisions to round up or down—especially when the decision is made to add rhetorical force to the point—can wind up obscuring huge actual quantities. It’s true that if you round the recovery package’s cost to the nearest number you can express with one numeral followed by a word that it’s a “$1 trillion” plan. But it actually costs much less than $1 trillion.

Meanwhile, it’s worth saying that to call it a “one-trillion dollar spending bill” is just a flat-out lie. There are hundreds of billions of dollars worth of tax cuts in the package. Some of them are there for good reason, others we’d do better to do away with. But either way, they’re there. Anyone who’s calling the bill a pure spending package is lying.