This Blog Has Moved

All new posts are at Get Money Out Of Politics

Income Inequality Keeps Poorer Americans Away from the Polls

Source: Bryce Covert via the Nation

It’s no secret that money and politics enjoy a nasty love affair in this country. And as Ari Berman has written here, the problem has gotten even worse this cycle after the ill-fated Citizens United decision unleashed the power of Super PACs. As he reports, campaigns are increasingly reliant on that money, yet “Super PACs on both sides of the aisle are financed by the 1 percent of the 1 percent.” That means the rich have an even more outsized impact on the outcome of the election.

At the same time, it’s been hard to miss the GOP’s relentless campaign to roll back voting rights in the name of eliminating the (mostly imaginary) threat of fraud. Many of those tactics will severely impact low-income voters and likely suppress their turnout in November, handing even more power over to the 1 percent.

There’s something else that suppresses their vote, however, even if they are legally able to do so. And that something is income inequality, as a new report from the OECD on the Better Life Index shows. Of the thirty-four countries included in the report, the U.S. ranks second to last in social inequality, bested only by South Korea. When it comes to income inequality we are at the extreme end of the scale, with levels similar to those of Cameroon, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Ecuador, Nepal and Uganda.

This has a huge impact on voter turnout. Across all OECD countries, individual income has an effect on whether citizens show up at the polls, with an average 7 percent jump for those who are in the top 20 percent versus those in the bottom 20 percent. Things are far, far worse here at home, though. Those whose income is in the top 20 percent experience a near 100 percent turnout rate, making full use of their right to vote. But the rate for those in the bottom group is less than three-quarters. That makes for a whopping 28 percent gap between the two on Election Day, which again seems only to be beaten by South Korea. On top of this, those with more education—also often tied to income—are more likely to vote than less educated people, likely augmenting the phenomenon.

This may be a sign that low-income voters feel disconnected from our politics. As the report notes, “Voter participation is the best existing means of measuring civic and political engagement.” In a world where mega-rich donors rule the system and at least one party is determined to make it harder to exercise this constitutional right, it makes sense that one might feel discouraged.

But this is clearly one more way in which America’s sky-high level of income inequality is a self-reinforcing phenomenon. When a Congress elected by the wealthy debates issues that affect the poor, it should be little wonder that budget cuts that disproportionately fall on the latter are passed while programs that would help them out are not. Just take a look at news out today that Congress is prematurely pulling back on benefits for the long-term unemployed, despite the fact that over five million people have been jobless for longer than six months.

While the Great Recession certainly exacerbated income inequality, it was a trend thirty years in the making. The gap between the after-tax income of the richest 1 percent of Americans and the 99 percent more than tripled over the last three decades. And there’s no sign that the trend is going to do anything but continue on. As the gulf between the rich and the poor continues to expand, expect voter turnout among those who are most affected to fall into the void.

OECD - Your Better Life Index

How’s life?

There is more to life than the cold numbers of GDP and economic statistics – This Index allows you to compare well-being across countries, based on 11 topics the OECD has identified as essential, in the areas of material living conditions and quality of life.

Read the whole story at OECD Better Life Index

Billionaires for Wealthcare

Just how dirty are Canada’s oil sands, anyway?

Source: Brad Plumer via Washington Post

Once again, Congress is debating whether to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, which would bring oil from Alberta’s tar sands down to the Gulf Coast. Republicans want to fold it into the transportation bill. And scientists like James Hansen warn that harvesting tar sands would be “game over” for the climate.

A cup of heavy oil from Alberta. (TODD KOROL - REUTERS) So let’s get some numbers: What would the actual impact be? The Congressional Research Service just put out a new report that takes stock of various academic studies on the subject. Crude from Alberta’s oil sands is heavier, more viscous, and contains more impurities than other types of oil. So it takes more energy to extract and process. When you consider the entire life cycle — from digging the stuff out of the ground to burning it in your tank — oil from tar sands produces 14 to 20 percent more carbon emissions than other oil the U.S. imports.

Overall, the CRS report estimates, approving the Keystone XL pipeline would be the equivalent of boosting U.S. global-warming emissions by between 0.06 percent and 0.3 percent per year. (That assumes the pipeline spurs additional production in Candada.) At the high end, that’s like putting 4 million extra passenger cars on the road.

That may not, in itself, be “game over” for the climate. Though seeing as how the United States has pledged to cut its carbon emissions 17 percent by 2020, it would also be a slight step in the opposite direction.

There’s also more than just Keystone XL to consider. Canada has big plans to export its oil around the world. Catherine Mann and Stacy Feldman of InsideClimate News recently tried to tally up all the different pipeline projects in the works to transport Alberta’s tar-sands oil abroad. Some of these projects could get bogged down by protests and opposition (or shuttered by the vicissitudes of the market). But there are plans to send 3.1 million barrels per day from Alberta to export markets — essentially five times as much as Keystone XL. Here’s the map:


 
There’s something else that could throw a kink in these plans. Many countries are now considering measures to reduce the carbon content of their transportation fuels. The European Union is mulling a law to reduce emission from fuel 20 percent by 2020. It would prove tough for oil from Alberta to qualify, given all the recent studies on the crude’s carbon footprint. And granted, Europe doesn’t currently import crude from Canada, but its law could set precedents elsewhere. California has a similar low-carbon fuel law that’s wending its way through the courts, for instance.

The big challenge for Alberta’s oil industry, then, is to figure out how to reduce the carbon intensity of tar-sands oil. In this InsideClimate interview, Adam Brandt, an engineering professor at Stanford, explains a few possible options, from reducing the amount of steam injected into the oil to using natural gas instead of petroleum coke for extraction and processing. “The hope,” he says, “is that as the science improves, they can continue to reduce these emissions, and reduce this difference between the oil sands and conventional oil.”

Until that happens, Alberta’s vast tar sands are likely to remain the center of controversy. As the CRS report suggests, Keystone itself won’t make the difference between the world making or missing its climate goals. And the United States could still have plenty of other reasons to want Canada’s oil — boosting supplies, for one. Yet the overall carbon impact of tar sands appears to be noticeable enough that it’ll likely remain a part of any debate about tackling global warming.
 
Update: Sabrina Fang, an analyst with the American Petroleum Institute (which represents the oil industry) takes issue with the CRS report. She stresses some of the uncertainties involved in such analyses, though her most forceful point is that Alberta’s oil sands production is likely to boom in the coming decades regardless of whether the Keystone XL pipeline is approved. For those concerned with the climate aspects of oil sands, that’s probably not the most comforting thought.

Lost in the 0.1% Bubble

Source: Paul Krugman

So the Heartland Institute seems to have blown itself up with its billboard equating climate change researchers to the Unabomber. Of course, anyone who believed that the right-wing”think” tank was objective in the least was a fool; but now even the fools have been put on notice.

But how could they make such a stupid mistake? I think there’s a process going on here, in which wealth and power creates a bubble in which people are so eager to please the paymasters that they lose any sense of what it sounds like to those not already answering to the same paymasters.

You can see the same thing with Grover Norquist’s comparison of anyone trying to stop wealthy Americans from using abandonment of citizenship as a tax dodge to Nazis — hey, remember Steve Schwartzmann comparing attempts to close the carried interest loophole to the Nazi invasion of Poland?

And my guess is that the Cory Booker thing is ultimately related; I didn’t know this, but apparently Booker is so close to his Wall Street donors that it never occurred to him that echoing their over-the-top reactions to Obama’s very mild populism would destroy his own political future (which I believe it has).

And no, the same thing doesn’t happen on the left, at least not that part of the left that is remotely serious about actual results. Right-wing apparatchiks, living in their billionaire-funded bubble, can forget that not everyone shares their extremism; progressives don’t have that luxury.

Anyway, let’s be glad that we’re getting a better look at how the other 0.1% and its clients think.

The end of fish, in one chart

Source: Brad Plumer via Washington Post

Want to see how severely we humans are scouring the oceans for fish? Check out this striking map from the World Wildlife Fund’s 2012 “Living Planet Report.” The red areas are the most intensively fished (and, in many cases, overfished) parts of the ocean — and they’ve expanded dramatically since 1950:

 
To measure how intensively these areas are fished, Swartz et al., (2010) used the fish landed in each country to calculate the primary production rate (PPR) of each region of the ocean. PPR is a value that describes the total amount of food a fish needs to grow within a certain region. (WWF)

Between 1950 and 2006, the WWF report notes, the world’s annual fishing haul more than quadrupled, from 19 million tons to 87 million tons. New technology — from deep-sea trawling to long-lining — has helped the fishing industry harvest areas that were once inaccessible. But the growth of intensive fishing also means that larger and larger swaths of the ocean are in danger of being depleted.

Daniel Pauly, a professor of fisheries at the University of British Columbia, has dubbed this situation “The End of Fish.” He points out that in the past 50 years, the populations of many large commercial fish such as bluefin tuna and cod have utterly collapsed, in some cases shrinking more than 90 percent (see the chart to the right).


 
(WWF, Living Planet Report 2012) Indeed, there’s some evidence that we’ve already hit “peak fish.” World fish production seems to have reached its zenith back in the 1980s, when the global catch was higher than it is today. And, according to one recent study in the journal Science, commercial fish stocks are on pace for total “collapse” by 2048 — meaning that they’ll produce less than 10 percent of their peak catch. On the other hand, many of those fish-depleted areas will be overrun by jellyfish, which is good news for anyone who enjoys a good blob sandwich.

The full WWF report (PDF), meanwhile, is chock full of brightly colored graphs charting the decline of wildlife across the globe. All told, global vertebrate populations have declined by some 30 percent since 1970. But that number masks a lot of variation. Wildlife actually appears to be recovering in the temperate areas, while it’s utterly collapsing in the tropics. (It seems there have been some modest conservation successes in the wealthier temperate regions — the European otter is staging an impressive comeback, for instance.)

The big thing the WWF paper emphasizes, however, is that human consumption patterns are currently unsustainable. We’re essentially consuming the equivalent of one and a half Earths each year. This is possible because we borrow from the future, as is the case with fish — one day the world’s fish population may collapse, but there’s plenty for us now. WWF doesn’t quite call it a Ponzi scheme, but that’s the first metaphor that comes to mind.

So is there any way to stop this slide? After all, it’s not like people can just stop eating fish altogether. Pauly, surprisingly, is fairly optimistic. He argues that strict government quotas on catches can help stop the slide. “There is no need for an end to fish,” he writes, “or to fishing for that matter.” (He’s not sold on aquaculture, or fish farming, since it often requires huge harvests of smaller fish to feed the big carnivorous ones in farms.)

The hitch is that when governments have tried to institute such quotas in the past — as they’ve recently attempted with Atlantic bluefin tuna — the rules tend to get, uh, watered down under intense lobbying. Or else shadowy black sushi markets emerge to flout the rules. But no one said it was easy, halting the end of fish.