Daily Archives: 27 April 2017

An Example of the Climatistas’ Political Failure

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Neil deGrasse Tyson in some recent remarks:

…when it comes time to make decisions about science, it seems to me that people have lost the ability…to judge…what is true, and what is not.  What is reliable, what is not reliable.  What should you believe, what should you not believe.

And

When you have people who don’t know much about science, standing in denial of it, and rising to power, that is a recipe for the complete dismantling of our informed democracy.

Indeed.  And yet guys like Tyson are loathe to look into the mirror and see who it is that stand in denial of science, even of the basic tenets of science, like constant questioning, comparing theory with observation and adjusting theory to fit the observations—rather than the climate pseudo-scientists’ practice of ignoring those offending observations while decrying those who disagree with their settled science.

Climate pseudo-science has a long and venerable track record of failed predictions; it’s models still can’t predict simultaneously the past and the present.  Indeed, its predictions of the present are wildly at odds with empirical observations from satellites and high-altitude balloons.  Global temperatures haven’t risen significantly for nearly 20 years, and the rise since the early 19th century still leaves us below the long-term global average.  Atmospheric CO2, far from being a pollutant (a bald, unsubstantiated declaration of the EPA’s pseudo-science), is a well-known plant food.

The only tangible effect of anthropogenic CO2 to date is that CO2 is greening the Earth, stimulating faster plant growth, and more drought resilience across a broad range of species.

And so guys like Tyson decry the failure of democracy and of democratic principles because other guys, of whom they disapprove, get elected.

Because only the correct outcome is democratic.

This isn’t petty hubris.  It’s dishonesty.

Protectionism and Protectionism

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Yukon Huang and David Stack, in their National Interest piece, worry about a trade war with the People’s Republic of China—it would be borne of American protectionism, don’t you know.

The United States can learn an important lesson from China’s past experience: the key to strengthening competitiveness lies not in protectionist measures but by increasing the productivity of a nation’s workforce through supportive infrastructure investments.

Plainly, they have no understanding of protectionism, of which damaging tariffs are only one aspect, and none of the type or protectionism practiced by the People’s Republic of China.

The PRC’s protectionism begins with its demand that foreign companies seeking to do business inside the PRC take on a domestic partner that will have a significant, if not majority, ownership of the joint enterprise as it operates inside the PRC.  The PRC’s protectionism continues with the government’s demand that, as part of that joint ownership, the foreign company transfer much of its proprietary technology to that partner—as a condition of forming the partnership.  The PRC’s protectionism goes further: the PRC government demands a backdoor into the foreign company’s software so that the government can “monitor” the foreign company for “compliance.”

Rather than focusing on trade frictions, America’s interests should be on strengthening investment relations by concluding a bilateral investment treaty (BIT). The United States can learn an important lesson from China’s past experience: the key to strengthening competitiveness lies not in protectionist measures but by increasing the productivity of a nation’s workforce through supportive infrastructure investments.

Perhaps a BIT could be useful, however, the bit about increasing productivity is a complete non sequitur.  Increasing our labor force’s productivity would be a general good in its own right; that has nothing to do with optimal trade relations.

Beyond that, the only way a BIT—or any multilateral trade agreement involving the PRC—would be beneficial to us (or to the PRC’s citizenry, come to that) would be if, just as a start, those PRC protectionisms were corrected.