How Can You Identify White "Oppression" Or "Implicit Bias"?

Here we are multiple decades into the era of affirmative action intended to raise up racial minorities and women in education and in the workforce, and yet by reported statistics certain groups -- women, Hispanics, and particularly blacks -- continue to lag.  Indeed, by many such reported measures, the lags have not shrunk noticeably in all these decades.  Protesters from Black Lives Matter to Antifa to NFL players to various university students and faculties think they have identified the cause:  "oppression" by white males; or maybe, in a less harsh articulation, "implicit bias."  But does that hypothesis hold up to scrutiny?  And, if there is "oppression" or "implicit bias," how can you spot it?

On the subject of the racial gap, Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute has just come out with a lengthy analysis of the extensive literature on implicit bias, titled "Are We All Unconscious Racists?"   It is fair to call her highly skeptical.  Her fundamental point:  how could the explanation for black under-performance be "implicit bias" on the part of whites, when literally every major societal institution is explicitly engaged in some kind of affirmative action program intended to achieve the opposite?

[Blacks] are still not proportionally represented in the workplace, despite decades of trying to engineer “diversity.” You can read through hundreds of implicit-bias studies and never come across the primary reason: the academic skills gap. Given the gap’s size, anything resembling proportional representation can be achieved only through massive hiring preferences.  From 1996 to 2015, the average difference between the mean black score on the math SAT and the mean white score was 0.92 standard deviation, reports a February 2017 Brookings Institution study. The average black score on the math SAT was 428 in 2015; the average white score was 534, and the average Asian score was 598. The racial gaps were particularly great at the tails of the distribution.

Meanwhile, over in my own beloved legal profession, it's all one big guilt-fest over the failure of the profession to achieve percentages of women and minorities at all levels -- including partners of the largest and most profitable firms and lead trial lawyer roles in the most high-profile matters -- strictly in accordance with overall population ratios.  After decades of affirmative action, the percentage of women partners at major law firms remains under 20%, and the percentage of black partners under 3%.  "Implicit bias"?  Reacting to the failure of these numbers to move much over decades, the ABA in 2008 instituted its "Goal III":  to "Eliminate Bias and Enhance Diversity" in the profession.  In its most recent web page on the issue, the ABA lists no fewer than six big initiatives, bodies and commissions:  the Diversity and Inclusion Center; the Commission on Racial and Ethnic Diversity in the Profession; the Coalition on Racial and Ethnic Justice; the Council for Diversity and Inclusion in the Educational Pipeline; the Commission on Hispanic Legal Rights & Responsibilities; and the Commission on Sexual Orientation & Gender Identity.  But the numbers continue to move little if at all.    

As I pointed out in this post back in August, the problem with the "implicit bias" hypothesis in the law firm world is that there are several hundred major law firms, literally all of which claim that they are engaging in affirmative action in favor of women and minorities.  And literally all of them have in place a "diversity" bureaucracy (almost always staffed by people who are either female or minority or both) charged with achieving that goal.  Could it all be a big scam, orchestrated simultaneously by hundreds of seemingly independent entities?

And, even if you could believe that all these law firms are discriminating against minorities and women while loudly proclaiming they aren't, what about the formation of law firms?  After all, any given firm could, if it tried, discriminate in hiring.  But nobody can keep you from starting your own law firm and then trying to grow it.  All of the major commercial firms started from scratch, and remarkable numbers of the biggest and most profitable of them during my lifetime.  AmLaw Media compiles an annual list of the 200 largest and most profitable commercial firms;  here is one of their lists from 2016.  Of these 200 firms, how many were started by blacks?  The answer is zero.  But don't feel too bad, blacks.  How many were started by women?  Zero.  How many by Hispanics?  Also zero.  Was that "implicit bias"?  Or maybe, "oppression"?  If so, how did it work?  Who stopped these people from starting and building their own firms?  The same question could be asked as to firms in the technology business and, I suspect, numerous other fields.

Of course, for every white male who started one of these successful law firms, there were probably at least ten -- or maybe more like 50 -- who tried and failed at the effort to build a big and hugely profitable behemoth.  Some such start-up firms just remained small and marginal, while others failed entirely.  But in today's world, where all major law firms are practicing affirmative action for women, blacks, and Hispanics, why would any such person take the huge risk of striking out on their own and trying to make it big?  With affirmative action, the much easier, secure paycheck beckons.

From the University of North Carolina comes a story of affirmative action carried to its logical conclusion.  The NCAA has been investigating UNC for violations of its code of conduct, allegedly for providing its athletes with no-show, easy grade courses where the basketball stars can get an A without ever going to a class and then turning in one meaningless paper.  You won't be surprised to learn that the courses at issue are in the African American Studies Department.  But UNC has just been exonerated!  Its defense:  these were not special courses for athletes, but rather were courses available to all students.

In the bubble of today's higher education, the people who put this together apparently can't see that they are saddling the intended beneficiaries with an incredible handicap in life.  George W. Bush used the phrase "soft bigotry of low expectations."  The phrase seems to me a remarkable understatement.  How about "white oppression"?

What Your Moral Superiors Are Up To

You probably think that the main thing that people claiming to be your moral superiors have been up to for the past few decades is covering up the story of Harvey Weinstein's sexual predation.  And you are right, that has been an important part of their activities, particular those of them who are Democratic pols on the receiving end of Weinstein's largesse, or those who are part of the insufferable Hollywood/entertainment groupthink clique.  But there is another activity that consumes even more of the time and attention of these moral preeners, and that is their never-ending struggle to keep the poor poor.  Of course, they wouldn't put it quite that way.  In their minds, they mainly believe that they are "saving the planet" -- staving off some theoretical and unmeasurable hundredths of a degree of global warming a hundred years from now.  The poor are just the collateral damage.

I have previously discussed multiple instances of our self-proclaimed moral betters getting deluded into supporting programs that have the effect of obstructing the ability of the poor to improve their condition.  For example, in this post I discussed proposals of the IMF to increase the amounts of taxes and grow the size of the state in poor countries; and in this post I discussed the support from none other than the Pope for proposals to restrict access of the poor to cheap and functional energy and electricity.  Sometimes the effort to point out such immoral follies has seemed rather lonely.  Can you ever recall reading a piece in any mainstream source calling out some progressive proposal for its effect in keeping the poor poor?

But today I would like to applaud one of my comrades in true morality, the Global Warming Policy Foundation of England.  This morning they published a new Report titled "The Anti-Development Bank:  The World Bank's Regressive Energy Policies."   The author is Rupert Darwall, the same guy whose new book "Green Tyranny" was covered in my post just a few days ago.

Now the World Bank has never been one of my favorite organizations.  If you wonder why rich countries got rich without any outside aid and poor countries stay poor forever even though they get endless amounts of outside aid, just take a look at the World Bank.  What works in economic development is rather obvious:  limited government, private property, the rule of law, and private investment.  The World Bank model is the opposite:  government-to-government lending for state-owned projects.  The result is endless bad ideas, with limited-to-no market discipline, and with the frequent result of destroying rather than creating wealth.  But on the other hand, it's hard to say that poor countries couldn't use electricity, even if it has to be through a state-owned or state-supported utility.  Surely, the World Bank could at least do that.

But in practice, it can't.  Instead, the World Bank, like all international organizations today, is completely in the grip of the climate change religion, and totally willing to sacrifice the poor at the altar.  Darwall and the GWPF document just how far this has gone.

The World Bank’s stated mission is to alleviate poverty. . . .  [But u]nder its president, Dr Jim Yong Kim, appointed by President Obama in 2012, the World Bank abandoned its core development mission.  It did this by prioritising environmental sustainability over poverty reduction.  In 2013, it adopted anti-coal funding policies, effectively blocking investment in what, for many developing nations, is likely to be the cheapest and most reliable generating capacity. The World Bank’s near categoric refusal to finance coal-fired capacity is worsened by it favouring high-cost, unreliable wind and solar technologies. This amounts to an inhumane and senseless attempt to try to save the planet on the backs of the world’s poor. 

It seems that in 2013, early in the presidency of Dr. Kim, the World Bank put out a big Report, "Toward a Sustainable Energy Future for All: Directions for the World Bank Group’s Energy Sector," in which it announced that it basically would no longer finance cheap electricity that works (i.e., coal) and instead would inflict upon the poor countries expensive energy that doesn't work, namely wind and solar.  According to that Report, henceforth new coal plants would only be considered in "rare circumstances."  From Darwall:

To date, the only coal project considered by the World Bank since adoption of these criteria in 2013 is a 600-MW lignite power station in Kosovo, for which it is providing $40m that is deemed crucial to the underwriting of the $2 billion financing cost of the project. The project was the very last coal plant in the World Bank’s pipeline; the Kosovo government has spent more than a decade trying to build it. 

So they're out there in poor countries trying to build an electrical grid from scratch, but with no background of dispatchable power plants, and nothing but wind and solar.  Does anybody realize that this isn't going to work?

There has been no technological breakthrough in the intervening period [since 2013] that has solved the inherent unreliability and cost disadvantages of wind and solar. Rather, what changed was the World Bank’s decision to subordinate the needs of today’s poor to green ideology. . . .  The World Bank’s mission has been subverted by green ideologues who assert that a low-carbon world benefits the world’s poor but fail to acknowledge that making energy much more costly increases poverty.  

So -- let the poor freeze in the dark.  Doesn't that make you feel really morally superior?     

Two Big Cracks In The Climate Hysteria Edifice In One Day

Predicting the impending collapse of climate hysteria is a lot like predicting the impending collapse of Venezuela or North Korea.  Yes, it is so transparently crazy that it can't possibly go on for too much longer.  On the other hand, it is backed by an enormous propaganda apparatus, by near unanimity in the media and academia kept intact by ruthless orthodoxy enforcement, and, at least up until recently, by complete control over vast government funding.  You can see cracks developing in the structure here and there, and clearly, as with Venezuela and North Korea, the entire edifice will definitely collapse eventually; but maybe it will take years or even decades before the final implosion.

Today brings two rather significant new cracks.  First, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has announced that EPA will repeal the so-called Clean Power Plan.  EPA's release can be found here.  The CPP, a regulation promulgated by the Obama EPA in October 2015, was the centerpiece of the prior administration's program to achieve emissions reductions of so-called "greenhouse gases" as prescribed by the Paris climate accord.  Back in February 2016 I called EPA's issuance of the CPP "the biggest-in-history see-how-far-we-can-push-the-envelope-and-get-away-with-it power grab."  The goal was supposedly to reduce CO2 emissions from power plants by some 30 plus percent by 2030.  To achieve that goal, the CPP basically set emissions limits that could not be met so long as coal-burning plants were part of the electricity system, thereby forcing all the coal plants to close.  Likely, oil plants, and even those fired by natural gas, would have also come on the chopping block as the strictures tightened with the approach of the 2030 deadline.  Associated with the CPP were many tens of billions of dollars of costs, all destined to make their way into your electricity bill.  

In February 2016, in response to litigation brought by the majority of states and many other parties, the Supreme Court stayed enforcement of the CPP.  Subsequently the litigation made its way before the en banc DC Circuit, which however has been holding the matter in abeyance while it waits to see what the Trump administration will do.  Looks like that litigation will now be moot -- undoubtedly soon to be replaced by new litigation to be brought by the other states and environmental groups seeking to compel the government to regulate and restrict the GHGs.

EPA's release does not really get into the question of whether CO2 from power plants is any kind of environmental problem, or whether restricting CO2 emissions is or is not a good idea.  Instead, its main thrust is that the section of the Clean Air Act mainly relied on by the Obama EPA, namely Section 111, does not in fact give EPA sufficient legal authority to support the CPP.  According to the new administration EPA's legal analysis, Section 111 only authorizes EPA to regulate emissions from individual sources of pollutants, rather than completely transforming an entire electricity system.  This was actually a principal argument advanced by the litigants in the case challenging the CPP.  And it is a good argument.  In any event, the CPP is going to be withdrawn.

Withdrawing the "biggest-in-history" government regulatory power grab -- that's a pretty big development on the climate front for one day.  But I have another one, also from today, that may be even bigger.  Tony Abbott, former Prime Minister of Australia, made a speech today at the Global Warming Policy Foundation in London.  Here is a link to the speech.  With this speech, Australia takes another big step among the governments of the world toward joining the ranks of the climate apostates.

I certainly will not claim to be any kind of an expert on the politics of Australia, but I'll share what I can learn from easily available sources.  Abbott -- a member of the "Liberal" Party (we would call them "conservatives") -- was Prime Minister from 2013 - 2015.  He has been succeeded by Malcolm Turnbull, from the same party.  Prior to Abbott, the Prime Minister (briefly in 2013) was Kevin Rudd of the Labor Party, and before him, Julia Gillard (2010 - 2013), also of the Labor Party.  The Labor Party of Australia strongly supports policies to "save the planet" through mandatory restrictions on GHG emissions.  The Liberal Party has been somewhat conflicted in its positions on this issue.  Abbott famously stated in October 2009 that the science of climate change was "absolute crap."  That did not prevent him from becoming PM in 2013, but on becoming PM he substantially toned down his position on the issue.  Within a couple of years, he lost the job to his colleague Turnbull, who could not be called a climate skeptic, and has moved forward with a so-called "clean energy target" to reduce Australia's emissions.

Meanwhile, Abbott remains a major force in the Liberal Party.  And the "clean energy target" thing has not gone well in Australia.  While remaining a major producer of coal and natural gas (increasingly for export only), Australia has been closing down coal plants and seeking to replace that energy with solar and wind facilities that basically don't work when you need them.  South Australia -- ground zero for massive expansion of wind power -- has had several major blackouts.  With that background, here are some excerpts from Abbott's speech today:

Hydro aside, renewable energy should properly be referred to as intermittent and unreliable power. When the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine, the power doesn’t flow. Wind and solar power are like sailing ships; cheaper than powered boats, to be sure, but we’ve stopped using sail for transport because it couldn’t be trusted to turn up on time.  Because the weather is unpredictable, you never really know when renewable power is going to work. Its marginal cost is low but so is its reliability, so in the absence of industrial scale batteries, it always needs matching capacity from dependable coal, gas, hydro, or nuclear energy. This should always have been obvious. . . .  

In the longer term, we need less theology and more common sense about emissions reduction. It matters but not more than everything else. As Clive James has suggested in a celebrated recent essay, we need to get back to evidence based policy rather than “policy based evidence”.  Even if reducing emissions really is necessary to save the planet, our effort, however Herculean, is barely-better-than-futile; because Australia’s total annual emissions are exceeded by just the annual increase in China’s. . . .  

Should Australia close down its steel industry; watch passively while its aluminium industry moves offshore to places less concerned about emissions; export coal, but not use it ourselves; and deliberately increase power prices for people who can’t install their own solar panels and batteries? Of course not, but these are the inevitable consequences of continuing current policies.  That’s the reality no one has wanted to face for a long time: that we couldn’t reduce emissions without also hurting the economy; that’s the inconvenient truth that can now no longer be avoided.

I particularly like that part about Australia exporting coal but then not using it themselves.  Is it really possible to be that dumb?  But the push back has started.

The Sydney Morning Herald, reporting on Abbott's speech, suggests that the turn toward climate skepticism is driven by party backbenchers who think that energy prices are a far more significant concern than environmental purity.  But whatever the driving force, it now appears likely that Australia will not be adopting a new "clean energy target".any time soon.  Some semblance of rationality has returned.  It has suddenly become acceptable in polite circles to care more about what working people pay for electricity than about multi-hundred-billion-dollar schemes to reduce global warming by 0.02 degrees over the next century.  That actually is a momentous development.  What country will be the next to join the ranks of the climate apostates?  England?  How about Germany?

Anatomy Of An Environmental Scare

I've been reading a new book, "Green Tyranny," just out from Encounter Books, written by a Brit named Rupert Darwall.  The overriding theme is that the project to transform society by doing away with fossil fuels is fundamentally inconsistent with the basic American ideals of freedom and democracy.  As Darwall puts it (p. 263-64):

[T]he United States is the biggest political obstacle to transforming society through deep decarbonization.  America is different from every other nation, something many non-Americans admire and many others deeply resent. . . .  Such a transformation and the means to achieve it are not compatible with the idea of freedom for which Americans declared themselves independent in 1776. . . .  

The book is filled with one instance after another of leaders of the decarbonization movement appearing to be far more concerned with imposing authoritarianism on society than with any meaningful goal having to do with protecting the environment.  I could choose any of several of Darwall's examples to illustrate the point, but for today, I'll pick just one -- the so-called "acid rain" scare of the 1970s to 90s.  

Have you even heard of the "acid rain" scare?  By the mid-1990s it had almost entirely dissipated, so it's likely to mean nothing to you if you are under 30.  But in the 1980s it was big -- far bigger at the time than the global warming scare, that was then just getting under way.  The idea was that burning coal and other fossil fuels in power plants to generate electricity put chemicals into the atmosphere (e.g., sulfur dioxide) that then caused the rain to turn acidic.  If allowed to continue, the acid rain would kill off the forests, wipe out the fish in lakes, destroy ecosystems, and more generally render the earth uninhabitable.  This was indeed a planetary crisis.  The proposed solution?  Eliminate fossil fuels!

Among many activist groups pushing acid rain hysteria at the time, Darwall focuses on a 1981 Report put out by the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences.  (You will recognize the NAS as a big player in pushing the global warming scare today.)  The Report was titled "Atmosphere-Biosphere Interactions: Toward a Better Understanding of the Ecological Consequences of Fossil Fuel Combustion."  It asserted great scientific certainty as to the imminent ecological crisis to be caused by the acid rain.  Excerpt:

"Perhaps the first well-demonstrated widespread effect of burning fossil fuel is the destruction of soft-water ecosystems by 'acid rain.' . . .  Owing to the concentrated efforts of scientists in the Northern Hemisphere, most notably in Scandinavia during the past decade, we have a much more complete knowledge of the causes and consequences of acid deposition than we have for other pollutants. . . ."  Long-term [acidic] precipitation "is likely to accelerate natural processes of soil leaching that lead to impoverishment in plant nutrients.  When freshwater effects are considered, the positive effects are greatly outweighed by the negative."

Obviously then, government directives to the populace to decrease the use of fossil fuels would be imperative to save the planet!  From the Report:

Strong measures are necessary if we are to prevent further degradation of natural ecosystems, which together support life on this planet. . . .  In the long run, only decreased reliance on fussil fuel or improved control of a wide spectrum of pollutants can reduce the risk that our descendants will suffer food shortages, impaired health, and a damaged environment.        

As you undoubtedly know, governmental restrictions on the use of fossil fuels did not start at all in the 1980s, and only barely got under way with the Kyoto Protocol in 1997.  Surely, then, the acid-rain-induced ecological catastrophe must have been upon us by the mid-1990s?  Actually not.  Not only did the evidence of catastrophe fail to emerge as predicted, but in addition the government funded a big study called NAPAP (National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program) to the tune of some $570 million (!).  NAPAP released an interim Report in 1987, and a final version in 1991.  Some of the conclusions of the NAPAP Reports (in Darwall's paraphrase except the part in quotes):

[T]he effects of acid rain were neither widespread nor serious and less than had been anticipated ten years before.  There was sufficient uncertainty to preclude determination of the need for, or the nature of, abatement strategies such as emissions reductions. . . .  "The vast majority of forests in the United States and Canada are not affected by [acid-rain-induced] decline."

So what happened to the people who had demanded a transformation of the economy and a vast loss of freedom in order to avert the coming ecological catastrophe?  Did they lose their reputations and jobs, and become subject to ridicule and scorn?  Of course not!  Instead, the whole acid rain thing just faded away as if it had never happened:

The world had moved on. . . .  Acid rain had not been "solved."  It faded away. . . .  Scientists claimed trees were being damaged and forests would die.  The evidence showed that they weren't. . . .  At no point did any environmental regulator or any of their political masters acknowledge that the scientific basis for policies against acid rain had gone.  

Indeed, Darwall states that as of the time of his writing the book, EPA's website still falsely proclaimed that "acid rain is a serious environmental problem that affects large parts of the United States and Canada."  (That line appears to have been removed in the recent re-write of EPA's website by the Trump administration.)

Many of the parallels between the acid rain scare and current global warming hysteria are obvious, and come in for extensive discussion in Darwall's book.  But he also insightfully draws the following distinction:  the promoters of forced decarbonization were not again going to make the mistake of having fulfillment of their goal turn on a hypothesis that was falsifiable "in the present tense."  For the next round, the prognostication of planetary disaster would be a good 100 years out.  But don't worry, the certainty of the prediction of disaster is expressed completely without qualification or doubt.  As it was with the acid rain scare.    

Inside The Ignorant New York Times Echo Chamber

Yesterday, the New York Times ran an article reporting on the goings on at EPA as the agency moves toward rescinding the Obama administration's regulations aimed at controlling the weather by tripling your cost of electricity.  The headline was "Trump Takes a First Step Toward Scrapping Obama’s Global Warming Policy."  Lede:

The Trump administration will repeal the Clean Power Plan, the centerpiece of President Barack Obama’s effort to fight climate change, and will ask the public to recommend ways it could be replaced, according to an internal Environmental Protection Agency document.

I noticed that there were a couple of hundred comments on this article, so I decided to take a look.  This was quite a revelation.  Of course, the comments ran about 30 to 1 negative to what EPA is proposing to do; but I expected that.  And of course, many of the comments had a high degree of anger and vitriol and name-calling in them; but I expected that as well.  No, the revelation was the extraordinary extent to which the commenters at Pravda show themselves to be completely ignorant and uninformed on the issues relevant to the debate.  But then, these people rely on Pravda as the principal source of information on this subject.  I guess I should not have been so surprised.

For example, a substantial number of commenters had somehow gotten the impression that implementation of Obama's Clean Power Plan would be an effective measure toward staving off a catastrophic global warming.  For example, we have this from "Austin Al":

The planet is cooking, so strong actions are necessary to reduce greenhouse emissions. Going backwards is not the answer. We need to cooperate to insure survival of the species, apparently Mr. Pruitt doesn't get it.

Or, from "winthropo muchacho" of Durham, NC:

The power industry knows full well the consequences of continued unabated carbon emissions to the atmosphere and deliberately chooses profitability over the health of humankind and numerous other species threatened with extinction.  It's that simple.  

From "RLW" of Chicago:

To all of you out there who have children and grandchildren, be aware. This Trump presidency is on the way to destroying the planet for your grandchildren and all who follow.

From "SR" in the Bronx:

[T]heirs is a homicidal streak, that will roast us all in a stormy cauldron of hurricanes, ozone, and CO2 that no witch trio would want.

OK, NYT readers: Do you have any idea how the CPP is supposedly going to stop the "planet" from "cooking" and avoid "roasting us all" and "insure the survival of the species"?  The CPP has as its goal the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from the U.S. electric power sector by about 30%.  The electric power sector is about 40% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, so the overall reduction in U.S. emissions from this regulation, assuming that it is fully implemented and that it completely works as intended, is about 12%.  Can we please calculate how much global warming by the year 2100 will be avoided by this reduction?  If you think that the whole "GHGs cause global warming" thing has not been proved and is a scam, your answer will be "zero."  But I ask you to assume for purposes of this question the accuracy of the worst-case models used by the U.S. government associating GHG emissions with increasing world temperature.  

Patrick Michaels and Chip Knappenberger at Cato undertook that exercise when the CPP was announced back in 2015.  For their calculations, they used the government's own model, known as MAGICC.  The results:

The EPA’s own policy analysis model, called MAGICC*, tells us how much global warming will be prevented by the new plan:  0.019°C by the year 2100 (based on procedures similar to those we detailed here).  That’s the amount of temperature change a person will experience in about every second of life. It is simply impossible to detect this change in any global temperature history.

Even that is an overestimate of the actual impact of the plan.  The EPA has also published a “base case” which includes emissions reductions expected from existing state and federal regulations.  The difference between the plan and the base—i.e., the future temperature savings directly attributable it drops to 0.009°C—let’s be generous and call that 0.01°C. 

Yes, this whole thing is to avoid 0.01 deg C of anticipated warming.  Frankly, it's pathetic.  No world temperature measuring system in existence or conceivable could even measure if such a reduction of previously-anticipated warming (over nearly a century!) had been achieved.  Of course, you can scour the archives of the New York Times, and you will never find this information.  

And how about the economic impact of the CPP?  The whole idea here is to force premature closure of a few hundred perfectly functional power plants running on coal and oil, and their replacement with new sources, many of which will be much more expensive and intermittent solar and wind facilities.  It's impossible to put a precise number on the costs, because the CPP leaves it up to states and utilities how they will respond to the new strictures.  But it's hard to imagine that the costs could be less than several hundred billion dollars.  These costs will go into your electric bill.  Is there any possible way that this could be anything but a gigantic negative for the American household?

Well, here is how a few commenters at Pravda view the economics.  From "leptoquark" in Washington:

It's so sad that Trump et al. would cede the enormous economic opportunity available in cleaning up power generation. He, and the GOP, can't hold back the country forever, though. At least the dam seems to be breaking on electric vehicles.

So in leptoquark's calculus, spending hundreds of billions to replace cheaper energy with more expensive energy is "ceding an enormous economic opportunity."  From "Jim" in California:

That the Trump-Pence administration, claiming to possess keen business acumen pursues a fiscally idiot policy of pouring funds into high cost coal energy is beyond idiotic.

Jim has somehow got the idea that EPA is proposing to "pour funds into high cost coal," rather than simply rescinding regulations that restrict coal.  From "Blue Moon" in Old Pueblo:

China will pick up the slack by developing green energy alternatives; the U.S. will be left behind. China will wind up being the key in staving off global warming and climate change . . . .    

It's the old theory that the way for the people to get rich is for the government to waste as much money as it can as fast as it can.  Where did we learn that economic theory?  Oh, I remember -- Paul Krugman!  But here's the news for Blue Moon:  while China is putting out press releases about some Potemkin village wind and solar projects, what it is actually doing is flooding its own territory and the world with coal power.  

They read their Pravda every day, and they think they know what is going on in the world.  Sad.

What Is The Biggest Corruption In Politics Today?

Over the past few years, this blog has discussed the prosecutions of numerous prominent politicians accused of corruption.  Those have included Joe Bruno (former Majority Leader of New York State Senate), Sheldon Silver (former Speaker of New York State Assembly), Bob McDonnell (former Governor of Virginia), Dean Skelos (another former Majority Leader of New York State Senate), and Bob Menendez (current Senator from New Jersey).  In each case the question was, how can you tell when one of them has crossed the line from normal constituent service for friends and donors and into corruption?  You will note that the first four of these individuals were all convicted at trial, but all four then had their convictions reversed or vacated by appellate courts.  Bruno was actually acquitted on re-trial.  The original Menendez trial is ongoing at the present time.

One of the remarkable things about each of these cases has been that the amounts of money involved in the alleged corruption have not been particularly large.  The linchpin of the Bruno case was alleged forgiveness of an $80,000 debt for an (allegedly worthless) racehorse.  That case also involved a few hundred thousand dollars in allegedly mischaracterized "consulting fees."  The McDonnell case involved about $175,000 in personal gifts, allegedly as quid pro quo for setting up meetings with officials of the Virginia state university system.  Skelos had allegedly leaned on supporters to provide "no-show" employment to his son, in total amount of about $220,000.  With Menendez, we get up to about $600,000 in contributions to super-PACs supporting his campaign, plus some private jet travel and stays at resorts.  Silver's case is the only one of the bunch that breaks the million dollar barrier, with about $4-5 million of "referral" fees for asbestos injury cases going to the former Speaker.

Of course, with all of these convictions reversed or vacated, it's not clear that any of these people committed actual crimes.  You could get the impression that all of these prosecutions are just to divert your attention away from the really big corruption that is occurring right under everybody's noses and never prosecuted.  Surely, if the whole game of politics is "inherently corrupt" as the Manhattan Contrarian contends, and with the federal and state governments passing out trillions of dollars per year to favored interests, there must be far bigger corruptions than these paltry hundreds of thousands of dollars (or maybe single-digit millions)!  

What is your nomination for a really significant corruption?  Note that there is no requirement for an actual prosecution, or even an investigation, for a nominee to be considered.  Indeed, for a given corruption to get really, really big, it is almost a given that either the perpetrators will be too big for the prosecutors to take them on, or that the whole scheme must have received a legal blessing of some kind.

I know what you're thinking -- the Clinton Foundation!  Now we're on the scale at least an order of magnitude or so bigger than any of the instances mentioned above.  That Foundation raised some $2 billion over the period 2001 - 2016, during most of which time Hillary was either a sitting U.S. Senator, and/or known to be about to run for President, and/or Secretary of State, and/or known to be about to run for President again.  Even if you assume that all of the allegedly "charitable" work of the Foundation was legitimate (an assumption that has been challenged in many quarters), that still leaves many tens of millions of dollars that went to cover the Clintons' travel and hotel expenses, and expenses for assistants and a full staff of campaign-in-waiting, all somehow declared exempt from the strictures that apply to gifts to government officials and outside of the limits on campaign contributions.  And the donations were tax deductible!  It's obvious that many to most of the contributors had some kinds of interests before the U.S. government for which they were hoping for or expecting favorable treatment.  You can't tell what all the interests are from reviewing bare lists of contributors, but some of the connections have been widely reported.  For example, we have Canadian mining magnate Frank Giustra, who had purchased a bunch of uranium assets and wanted to sell them to the Russians, which he did in a series of transactions from 2009 - 13 (basically Hillary's tenure as Secretary of State).  Giustra donated over $60 million to the Clinton Foundation, significant portions of it during Hillary's tenure at State.  Or there's the country of Qatar, which seems to have made a fairly regular $1 million annual donation, including while Hillary was Secretary of State.  There are plenty of other examples.

That is a very excellent example of a very large unprosecuted corruption.  But I have an even bigger and better one:  the forced contributions by public employees to their unions that are then used for the political and electoral support of the Democratic Party.  This particular corruption takes place under what I called above a "legal blessing," in this case a Supreme Court decision from 1977 called Abood, where the Supremes upheld forced deduction from public employee salaries of moneys that are then used for political advocacy of various sorts, almost always on behalf of Democrats and/or issues supported by Democrats.

A recent amicus brief filed in the Supreme Court by the Competitive Enterprise Institute details some of the extent of the use of forced contributions for political advocacy by one public employee union, AFSCME.  Matters for which forced dues were used included:  advocacy for the Hillary Clinton campaign, against right-to-work legislation, for gun control, for higher public infrastructure spending, for higher public spending on education, for paid family and sick leave, against private contracting of municipal services, for a higher minimum wage, for gun control, for D.C. statehood, and on and on.

What is the total annual value of the legally enforced annual contributions, all going to one side of the political divide?  I can't find a recent and definitive analysis.  But this analysis from the Wall Street Journal from 2012 (may be behind pay wall) puts the total of union cash plus in-kind political contributions in the range of $600 million to $800 million per year.  That includes both public and private sector unions.  Since the public sector unions are about half of the total membership, that would put the public sector piece at around $300 million to $400 million per year.  It makes the Clinton Foundation look small time.  And it has undoubtedly gone up since 2012.

You may know that the Supreme Court just accepted cert in a case called Janus that promises to revisit the rule of Abood.   The betting is that Abood is highly likely to be overruled.  However, here's the incredible piece:  the four "liberal" justices (Ginsburg, Breyer, Kagan, Sotomayor) are virtually assured to vote to keep Abood in place.  In a case (Friedrichs) raising the same issue that reached the Supreme Court earlier this year, after the death of Justice Scalia, the result was a four-to-four affirmance of the Ninth Circuit, with the four "liberals" all unable to recognize that this was an extreme example of corruption.  For them, momentary partisan advantage for the Democratic Party appears to be more important than the integrity of our democracy.