The KlimaSeniorinnen judgment of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has been the subject of intense debate for several weeks. One focus was on the question of standing, i.e., who can bring a lawsuit connected to climate change and human rights before the ECtHR. However, less attention has been paid to the question of the impact of the judgment on currently pending climate change cases before the ECtHR. This blog post sheds light on "climate change case number four", a case against Austria primarily challenging the shortcomings of the Austrian Climate Protection Act.
Americans have become less committed to organized religion in the past few decades. But does that mean that we are becoming more secular or that religion is becoming more individualized--ie, religious feelings are less connected to organized religion? In 1962, the Gallup Poll asked "Would you say that you have ever had a religious or mystical experience--that is, a moment of sudden religious insight or awakening?" 20% said yes, 73% no, and 7% were listed as "no code or no data." If the last group was "don't know" I'd count it as "no," but since that's not clear I'll treat it as missing. Gallup asked the question again in 1976, and other organizations asked in 1994, 2006, and 2009. The results:1962 22% 78%1976 31% 69%1994 34% 66%2006 48% 52%2009 51% 50%The 2009 question came near the end of a Pew survey that focused on religion, which may have increased the number of positive answers. The 2006 survey also contained a number of questions on religion, although I don't have the whole questionnaire. But even if you discount those, it seems like there has been an upward trend. I looked at group differences in 1962 to see if they gave any hints that a change was coming--e. g., were younger or more educated people more likely to say yes? The only factors that made a clear difference were one's own religion and region--Protestants and Southerners were more likely to say yes. Breaking it down by both religion and region, it appeared that it was specifically Protestants in the South--37% said yes. Outside the South, there was little difference between Protestants and Catholics (18% vs. 15%). Jews were lower, and "other" and "none" were a little higher than Catholics, although the numbers are too small to be very confident. There also seemed to be an interaction with education--in the South, less educated people were more likely to say yes, but outside the South, the relationship was weaker or maybe reversed. But overall, a sociologist who looked at the data in 1962 would probably have predicted a decline, on the grounds that the South was likely to converge with the rest of the country. I'll look at the more recent patterns in a future post. [Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]
On 30 April 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) rejected a request by Nicaragua for the indication of provisional measures in connection with claims relating to Germany's support for Israel in the ongoing Gaza conflict. In a terse, sparsely-reasoned decision, the Court decided 15-1 that the circumstances were 'not such as to require the exercise of its power under Article 41 of the Statute to indicate provisional measures'. While this outcome was not necessarily surprising to those who had followed the proceedings, the Court's approach—in which it declined to address the usual requirements for the indication of provisional measures—was unusual.
Glyn Robbins draws parallels between the neglect and urban decay experienced in the 1970s by The Bronx, a New York City neighborhood, and what many parts of the United Kingdom are now facing following years of cuts to public services and falling local government funding. He writes that, like New York City 50 years ago, … Continued
On 1 June 2023, the new Swedish anti-terrorism legislation entered into force whose primary novelty is the criminalization of membership in terrorist groups. While it thereby aligns Swedish counter-terrorism law with the EU 2017 Counter-terrorism Directive, the move has been controversial for several reasons. In particular, the legislation is widely seen as an attempt to win Erdogan's support for Sweden's still pending NATO application. This, in turn, has raised concerns that the new law is exceeding what is required by the Directive.
Recent laws in the US, along with the Digital Services Act (DSA), seek to provide "due process" for individual content moderation decisions. Due process, understandably enough, often contains a component of treating like cases alike. It seems to follow, then, that if two relevantly similar users are treated differently, there is a problem of inconsistency, and that problem might be addressed by requiring more "due process" in the forms of appeals and clear rules and explanations of those rules to offenders. But it is said that consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds. In internet regulation, it is a damaging goal if taken as a mandate to make individual decisions uniformly consistent with each other.
It's not just Bossier City employees who find the city's staggering debt load forestalling their abilities to receive pay raises; retired Bossier City firefighters face the same hurdle with paying for their health insurance.
Last week, the city approved a budget without a cost-of-living pay raise to employees, but did use one-time money to provide a bonus, costing about $2 million. A downturn in revenues, mainly from reduced sales tax collections, not only prevented locking in higher pay but also forced the city to dip into other funds that normally paid for capital expenses to shore up the budget. Also hampering this was continuing to siphon general fund dollars, around $4 million, to pay down a high amount of debt.
But money that would have been available for raises eaten away by debt servicing also could have gone to maintain the city's subsidization of retired firefighters' health insurance. A recent television news story brought to light that several years ago the city halted this, forcing retirees to pick up the entire tab. Louisiana state government picks up a portion that grows the more years a retiree worked for the state, and local governments do the same for the most part. By way of example, twenty years of service for a state employee usually means the retiree pays just a quarter of the monthly premium.
However, not in Bossier City and only excluding firefighters since 2018, according to the city's comprehensive annual financial reports it must file with the state. The 2017 version, as had those in previous years, when referring to the city's obligations to retirees concerning postemployment benefits mentions that employees in the Municipal Employees' Retirement System, the Municipal Police Employees Retirement System, and Firefighters Retirement System receive medical and dental benefits as members of the systems into which the city must pay, with the individual plans determining rates.
For that year, the city paid out about $900,000 for employee premiums and almost $600,000 for retiree premiums. Yet it also coughed up $1.7 million additionally because of decades of chronic lowballing on past contributions required by the systems to its member governments, to reduce the resulting unfunded accrued liability.
For Bossier City, that had begun in 1980, when a state law kicked in allowing local governments to delegate their pension responsibilities to FRS. The city for decades had its own Firemen's Pension Fund that handled this, but with the switch it phased out participation in its own system, with new hires going into FRS. Still, the city had to continue funding FPF to ensure fully funded pensions through the life of every participant or eligible family member, but it also underfunded that which ensured after ceasing to enroll new members it still had to make an additional contribution annually. Money for the unfunded FPF contribution that affected both pensions and postemployment benefits, which in 2017 amounted to just over $200,000, until a few years ago came from a 1982 half-cent sales tax, and the state's refund of fire insurance premiums if the city scored well enough in fire protection coverage, which in 2017 amounted to just under $300,000. That year, the total FPF cost came to $4.359 million.
This all changed in 2018. That year, it was determined that the amount of money then in the FPF, which ended up at over $73 million, was enough actuarially to meet all future obligations after an additional payment of about $1 million. Since then, the city has paid nothing into that, freeing up general fund dollars that previously it had shoveled into the FPF which through 2015 had amounted to over $6 million annually. This came years after the freeing of the 1982 half-cent sales tax from this obligation, which now goes into the general fund but earmarked for salaries of city employees that could serve as a basis for pay raises.
Whether coincidental, the 2018 CAFR also reported that employees in FRS no longer counted as an obligation, negating the city's necessity of paying firefighter retiree health care premiums. How this decision came about is unclear from city records on the Internet. In this period City Council minutes reveal no ordinances or resolutions that withdrew the city's participation, nor do FRS meeting minutes shed any light on the city stopping its contribution.
Regardless, it had an impact on retirees, who until retiring have their health care insurance premiums footed entirely by the city. Last week, a news story featured former assistant chief Steven Anderson, a 27-year veteran. He reported the city contribution stopped for him in 2019, which raised his premium hundreds of dollars monthly and this year paid about $1,500 every month.
Using the 2017 figure without any adjustment for premium inflation and assuming firefighters' portion comprised 29 percent of that, the city has an extra $167,000 available by not paying its portion of the premiums. That amount seems small compared to the several million now not paid into the FRF – which the CAFR for 2022 reports has over $57 million despite losing $7 million in investments that is an estimated $3 million over the amount needed to service the existing 33 retirees and beneficiaries for their covered lifetimes – and the over $500,000 in fire insurance rebates also not going to the FRF, pocketed by the city for other continuing expenses.
In short, the city easily could have kept paying for retired firefighters' health care insurance premiums, at the very least by continuing to divert the rebate, if not by apportioning a trickle of the funds saved by zeroing out previously-mandated contributions. It didn't in the face of nearly $450 million in debt, just under half not related to water and sewerage enterprise operations on which $9 million was paid in interest alone, fueled by the $77 million and counting splurged on the Walter O. Bigby Carriageway, a road halfway to nowhere that only halfway creates a north-south corridor from Barksdale Boulevard to Interstate 220, celebrated on route by a $350,000 statue with long-serving current City Council members' names carved into it. This provides another demonstration of where their priorities lie – with monuments to themselves, not to the people who served the city or whose tax dollars they misused.
Kevin Drum points to an obscure, but radical proposal to change the way the US government does benefit cost analysis. The Office of Management and Budget has released draft guidance saying One practical approach to implementing weights that account for diminishing marginal utility uses a constant-elasticity specification to determine the weights for subgroups defined by […]
I saw the new Black Panther 2: Wakanda Forever last night, and it was ok. There is so much bad IR in this--usually, the politics of MCU movies has some kind of logic to it, even if faulty. By the way, check out the new Politics of the MCU for some analysis--it is being delivered to bookstores and maybe comic bookstores near you right now!! Spoilers will dwell beneath the break along.Before I get to the IR of it, I should say that I am a bit biased as I couldn't really enjoy Letitia Wright's performance given her anti-vax politics stuff. That and the movie was super-long. The movie was about grief, which is, um, not fun. So, it was a good memorial for Chadwick Boseman, but it was not that enjoyable of a movie. They did a good job with Namor being an asshole--keeping to his comic book roots. So, onto the IR of it:I get that France is one of the bad guys, looking to plunder Africa. Absolutely. The US seemed just a wee bit trigger happy about going to war over vibranium. That was never really well-explained--none of the US side of things made much sense. But the big IR thing here is Namor's view of alliances: he wanted Wakanda to join him in his war on the surface world. Or he would make Wakanda his first target. To be fair, the idea that you can threaten countries into submission is an old one, but it runs against the fundamental dynamics of international relations--that countries will balance against threats, not join them. One could cite Waltz or Walt for this. Who adopted this idea of threatening folks into submission? Kaiser Wilhelm thought that he could threaten the British into submission before WWII, and that did not work so well for him. More recently, Putin had hoped (and hope is not a plan) that he would keep NATO from supporting Ukraine via some nuclear sabre rattling. That hasn't worked out well for Vlad. As Waltz argued long ago, if you ally with the stronger (in Walt's theory--more threatening) side, you have to depend on the good will of the stronger side, and, in international relations, you should never be in a position to depend on the good will of anyone. In the movie, Wakanda resists. Namor tells Namora (really?) that it will work out in the end--that when countries attack Wakanda, Shurri will reach out to Namor and his people. Maybe. I guess BP3 would be the movie where the US attacks Wakanda? For Vibranium? One last thing: Namor is not the only bad planner. Shuri proposes to set a trap for Namor ... at sea. Not great when that is the other side's home turf surf. Her people were doomed except for the last minute peace deal. I won't even get into the UN stuff, which was just silly.So, not great IR. Nor any principal-agent stuff to make fun of. See the movie for the moving tribute to Chadwick. Don't think too hard about the bad international relations and alliance politics.
The sources of our future electricity are really quite simple but Whitehall, with the best of intentions, is doing their best to mess things up. Renewables, largely wind and solar, will provide the lion's share at best value – or something close to that. But what about the rest?In 2022, a record 41.5 per cent of electricity came from renewables. "Around 72 per cent of renewable fuels are used for electricity generation, a third of which is lost in the conversion process." This illustrates the care that must be taken in distinguishing renewables' capacity from contribution to demand. The former is the nameplate output from an energy source like wind, if the wind blew at an optimal level all year long and it could all be used for electricity generation with no wastage. Politicians, when discussing renewables, like to talk about capacity, which they can control by commissioning more windfarms, rather than share of demand which depends on weather and which they therefore cannot control.Even estimating 2020 needs care: UK electricity demand fell 4.7% in 2020 to 281 TWh due to Covid and "UK total electricity generation in 2020 was 312 TWh" but the former figure is demand and the latter is generation. In 2019 "primary electricity" was 11.6 per cent of UK energy consumption so if total energy consumption in 2050 remains about the same but has become 100 per cent electricity, the electricity market will need to have grown by eight times. To maintain its 40 per cent share, renewables would need to match that growth.An eightfold increase in the size of the 2050 electricity market may be too high. The Government estimates that the total electricity demand in 2050 could range from 370 TWh to 570 TWh, depending on the level of electrification and energy efficiency. This is clearly too low. McKinsey's predicts that the electricity demand could reach 800 TWh. Nearer the mark.National Grid ESO, in one of their future energy scenarios for 2050, think that the range of capacity required for electricity will be between 285 and 387 GW to deal with annual demand up to between 570 TWh and 726 TWh. They estimate that the wind and solar capacity will be between 149GW and 239GW which leaves between 135GW and 148GW to supplied by nuclear and fossil fuels with carbon capture.That compares with government expectation that the 2050 electricity capacity will total 96GW with nuclear supplying 25 per cent of that. About 6.4GW of that will be provided by Hinkley Point C, approved 2016, and its twin Sizewell C, frequently announced but still not approved. 24GW is too small a target for nuclear and would leave over 100GW to be supplied by fossil fuels, deeply unpopular even with carbon capture. Industry sources, that cannot be quoted, reckon that 48GW would be a far more realistic target. Hinkley was supposed to be built by 2020 at a cost of £12 billion; the latest estimates are completion in 2031 and a £44.3 billion bill. Apparently "there were 7,000 substantial design changes required by British regulations that needed to be made to the site, with 35% more steel and 25% more concrete needed than originally planned." Of course we fully understand that, seven years after approval, the designers could have had little idea how much steel or concrete was required or what the regulations would be.Sizewell C was touted as costing a mere £20 billion because of the savings from being the Hinkley Point C twin. Professor Thomas of Greenwich University thinks £40 billion is more likely with a 10 – 12 year construction time, i.e. 2036 if a decision is made this year.It is astonishing that the government is hell bent on continuing with these monsters. They are planning another six large reactors (albeit smaller at around 1 GW) after Hinkley and Sizewell. Assuming this plan for the larger reactors is implemented, then we would need about 120 SMRs @ £300 million each to be up and running by 2050. No sign of that in government plans.Large reactors take at least 10 years to build and will be providing electricity to the Grid at a price which is estimated to be at least 50% more expensive than the forecast price for electricity from Small Modular Reactors (SMRs). SMRs should take about 6 months to build in a factory or shipyards and about 2 years to install for the first unit of a multi-SMR facility with installation times falling to 12-18 months per subsequent unit. The reason Sizewell C took so long to gain approval was that no one but HM Treasury was stupid enough to invest in it. Even the French who own the EDF company responsible for Hinkley and Sizewell are trying to back out of paying for them.SMRs will typically cost in the range £2.1 million to £3 million per MW to build compared with the current estimate of £14.4 million per MW for Hinkley point C. Thorcon quotes £800 million per GW, i.e.£240 million for a 300 MW SMR. Rolls Royce leads the UK race for reasons good and bad and is offering SMRs here for rather more than Thorcon's offer. Poland has already ordered 30 SMRs. Yet this government plans not to make any decision on the first SMR until 2029, presumably to avoid having to undertake the required value for money comparison between SMRs and Sizewell C. It claims to be a world leader but actually it will be last in the queue. "To recover the UK's global leadership in civil nuclear" could be irony or could be evidence that some distant corner of HMT has a sense of humour after all.
The US Supreme Court's decision in Students for Fair Admission is a potential blessing. Diversity was always a problematic justification for race-based admissions programs. Diversity's origins are anti-Semitic. More likely, however, the decision will be a curse. The United States Supreme Court has made the pathway for disadvantaged minorities more difficult.
