Climate News – July 2020

A review and commentary on topical matters concerning the science, economics, and governance associated with climate change developments.

Alan Moran

1 July 2020

Developments in science

Professor Ralph Alexander’s review of extreme weather finds there to be no trend in precipitation, hot and cold days, hurricanes.  He notes that the IPCC, though espousing global warming has so far adhered to the path of science by finding little to no evidence linking extreme weather to global warming.

Veteran activist Michael Shellenberger in his new book Apocalypse Never recants his previous alarmist views, and now argues, among other things:

• Climate change is not making natural disasters worse
• Wood fuel is far worse for people and wildlife than fossil fuels
• The build-up of wood fuel and more houses near forests, not climate change, explain why there are more, and more dangerous, fires in Australia and California

David Whitehouse reviews a comprehensive study, published in Science, that shows warming in West Antarctica, often cited as a precursor to a general global warming, is not seen in East Antarctica and has nothing to do with increased emissions. The evidence was insufficient for those with acute forms of confirmation bias like Michael Mann, the serial litigator who concocted the “hockey stick” that purports to prove modern warming is unique.

Roy Spencer tracks actual and modelled climate trends since 1979 and finds the models project temperatures 50 per cent greater than actual.

The warm May in England was paraded by the BBC as evidence that global warming was taking place.  Central England has remarkably good temperature records back to 1659 and Paul Homewood shows we have in fact had 47 hotter Mays than in 2020.

Developments in Economics

The collapse in demand has reduced electricity prices.  In Germany this has led to an increase in the green surcharge on consumer bills which in 2020 will be €26.2 billion, with the government paying €11billion of this.

Around 5,000 German wind turbines with a total output of 3.7 gigawatts (GW) will fall out of the 20-year “EEG” subsidy regime at the end of the year. The subsidy was €24 billion last year ($AUD 40 billion) where it contributed around €67 per MWh on top of the market price of €53 which, compounding the windfarms’ distress, has collapsed to €34.

In spite of subsidies having transformed Australian energy costs from the world’s lowest to among the highest, a new publication by Beyond Zero Emissions, bankrolled by Cannon-Brookes and other foundations, claims more such subsidies will create a million new jobs. The green activist, Fatih Birol, who heads the International Energy Agency, has a similar agenda. But the Guardian’s environmental alarmist Adam Morten reports that 11,000 Australian renewable energy jobs will disappear unless the government increases subsidies.

India and China, however are giving coal a more prominent place in energy production.  Indian PM Narendra Modi, has announced a privatisation program, saying “coal sector has finally been pulled out of decades in lockdown and liberated”.  In China, Greenpeace reports a massive new upsurge in new coal plant and Bloomberg expects the 2021-25 Five year Plan to feature further increases.

Developments in politics

GWPF’s YouGov survey finds COVID-19 has overtaken global warming as a concern in UK

What a difference a virus makes!  California’s Governor proposes to cancel January’s $12 billion “climate budget” of subsidies to low emission purchases, action against ocean rise, and support for technologies. However, California is not averse to imposing new costs on others and has passed laws requiring truckers to reduce their emissions.

The EU, notwithstanding the posturing of “President” Ursula von der Leyen, has agreed to abandon the $15 billion a year that airlines would have been obligated to spend to do their bit for climate change prevention.

But the European Commission wants to set up a €40 billion Just Transition Fund, allegedly for CO2 reduction but which will specifically ban nuclear investments

As part of its zero emissions by 2050, the UK is to have a stand-alone Emissions Trading System –  a carbon tax – at a £15 per tonne ceiling and covering plant that accounts about one third of emissions.  This is unlikely to be sufficient and, according to the Green Alliance, the government must spend an extra £14bn a year to meet its climate targets, while simultaneously reducing support for other initiatives. Greens are also angry that not enough is directed to their favoured schemes in the UK government £5 billion COVID-19 recovery spending.

Spain is planning €90 billion in investment to enable renewables to supply 74 per cent of demand by 2030. In a triumph of hope over experience, the Spanish government claims its plan will create 107,000-135,000 jobs per year.

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison is thought to be a candidate for AG under President Biden.  He sued ExxonMobil Corp., Koch Industries and the American Petroleum Institute, saying they have long deceived consumers over the effects of climate change.  Ellison has links to Communist and Nation of Islam identities.

Former head of the Australian Greens Party, Bob Brown, has stepped up his opposition to windfarms in Tasmania due to their visual intrusion and bird killing.  He opposes the plan to have a second undersea electricity link with the mainland and considers lower usage of electricity to be the best strategy.

Whimsy

According to Joe Biden, “Climate change is linked to increased pregnancy risks — and heartbreakingly, Black mothers are being hit the hardest.”

“Come into my parlour, said the spider …” – a newly discovered variant of the huntsman spider has been named after Greta Thunberg.

In June, I published the following climate related articles:

• If we want to rebuild manufacturing post coronavirus, we need to cut the cost of energy
  The Spectator, 2 June 2020
• An Endlessly Renewable Source of Green Agitprop
  Quadrant Onine, 9 June 2020
• Coronavirus: We can’t spend our way to wealth
  The Australian, 11 June 2020
• Albo’s Claytons climate policy switch
  The Spectator, 24 June 2020
• Power companies must decide: are they about virtue signalling or cheap, reliable energy?
  The Spectator, 30 June 2020

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It is Time To Cancel The Democratic Party For Its Long History Of Racism

See much more at Manhattan Contrarian blog

June 18, 2020/ Francis Menton

Here in the United States, the environmental movement has been completely taken over by the campaign to ban use of fossil fuels, with the stated goal of slowing or preventing “climate change.” But at this point, is the “climate” campaign really about the climate in any meaningful way? The alternative hypothesis is that the principal goal of the anti-fossil-fuel movement in the United States is destruction of the American freedom-based economic system, commonly going by the name of “capitalism.”

So let’s consider whether the anti-fossil-fuel campaign in the U.S. could really be about its avowed goal of saving the planet from climate change caused by greenhouse gases. If that were the case, then the campaigners would be principally focused on the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions, mostly CO2, not only in the U.S. but in the world.

The campaigners are definitely focused on blocking any and all fossil fuel development in the United States. Environmental groups with what seem like infinite funding sources bring litigations on any and every possible theory to seek to block absolutely every proposed fossil fuel development in this country.

To illustrate the relentlessness of the litigation war, consider something called the Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP), a multi-billion dollar project intended to deliver natural gas from sources in West Virginia over to the Atlantic coast of Virginia. An environmental group called the Cowpasture River Preservation Association, represented by environmental lawyers from the Southern Environmental Law Center, brought a suit to stop the pipeline on the ground that its permit to cross the Appalachian Trail, which had been granted by the Forest Service, was not properly authorized. As you are likely aware, earlier this week the Supreme Court ruled in that case that the Forest Service had the power to issue the permit.

So is it now all clear sailing for the ACP? Not so fast. The SELC takes the position that the pipeline is “still lacking 8 permits.” As just a single example, one of those is a dredging permit from the Army Corps of Engineers. The pipeline developers thought they had that one because back in 2017 the Corps had issued a nationwide permit for all pipeline projects with impact on waterways below certain thresholds deemed de minimus. Just in May, that permit was vacated by an Obama-appointed federal judge in Montana, in a case involving the Keystone XL pipeline. A law firm here warns that the Montana ruling may well have nationwide impact on all pending natural gas pipeline construction. So everyone including ACP awaits hearing from the Ninth Circuit on that one, a year or more from now.

And then, of course, there are the other six permits, all of which will with certainty also be litigated all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. You can be sure that every other pipeline project seeking to move forward in the United States is facing a comparable barrage of litigation.

But how about in other countries, including countries with four and more times the population of the U.S.? Today’s email from the Global Warming Policy Foundation has yet another roundup of accelerating fossil fuel development, mostly coal, from some of the largest countries around the world:

• In India just today, Prime Minister Modi has announced that the government is auctioning off a large group of formerly publicly-owned coal mines in order to spur faster commercial development.  From IANS News Service: “Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday said that the coal sector has finally been pulled out of decades in lockdown and liberated. . . . ‘Today, we are not just launching the auction of commercial coal mining but are also pulling out the coal sector out of years in lockdown,’ Modi said during the video address during the launch programme.”

• China continues to accelerate the pace of construction of new coal power plants. From Bloomberg, June 10: “A wave of new coal power plants are under construction or in development after the country lifted curbs on new builds. . . . About 46 gigawatts worth of new plants were under construction as of May, the study said. Another 48 gigawatts were under various stages of development. . . . About 29.9 gigawatts of new coal power capacity was added last year, making a total of about 1,040 gigawatts, according to China Electricity Council data.” (The U.S. has a total of about 220 gigawatts of coal-fired electricity generation capacity, per EIA data.).

• Pakistan, a country of over 200 million people, is also moving to rapidly increase power production from coal. The International News on June 18 reports that Pakistan is planning to increase the share of coal in its energy mix by up to 30%, and a Thar coal project was commissioned in July 2019 as a “priority national project.”

So can anything meaningful in terms of world greenhouse gas emissions be accomplished by the endless climate campaign and litigation barrage in the United States? The answer is no. Damage to the U.S. economy for no discernible purpose is another question.

Next Up In The Stupidest Litigation In The Country: The Science?

June 11, 2020/ Francis Menton

For some reason I haven’t seen much about this even on climate-focused websites; but in late May one of the litigations that I have named as being among the stupidest in the country, and which had been dismissed by the trial court, got reversed and reinstated by the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.

What next? The defendants — who are five major oil companies — had managed to get the two related cases dismissed at the trial court level on purely procedural grounds, without ever having occasion to address the merits of whether the so-called “settled science” of greenhouse-gas induced catastrophic climate change is complete baloney. Now they are running out of such procedural defenses. If they are not going to just concede the cases and fork over billions of dollars, it now looks like they will likely need to attack the fake science. I don’t know that they will. But I do know that they soon may not have much choice.

I’ll begin with a relatively thorough history of these cases so far. Back in 2017, the Cities of San Francisco and Oakland in California, at the urging and with the assistance of environmental activist outside lawyers, filed cases in the California state courts alleging common law tort claims for “nuisance” against five major oil companies (Exxon, Chevron, BP, Conoco and Shell). A “nuisance” claim is the kind of thing you can bring against your neighbor for, for example, having a smoke stack that dumps large amounts of toxic ash on your house. In the Oakland and San Francisco cases, the theory is that all burning of fossil fuels constitutes a “nuisance” because of contribution to global warming. In their complaints, the plaintiffs paint horrible scenarios of impending environmental doom from the burning of fossil fuels produced by the defendants, including sea level rise that supposedly would soon swamp these coastal cities.

The oil companies could have chosen at that point to defend on the ground that the so-called “science” behind these scenarios of doom was fake. But these defendants have shown time and again that they are scared to death of the media pushback (CLIMATE DENIERS!!!) that they will face should they make any effort to go after the fake science. So instead of that tack, the defendants embarked on a series of procedural maneuvers. First, they “removed” the cases to federal court. If you get sued in state court, you can “remove” the case into federal court if you can meet certain criteria, one of which is that the claims against you arise under federal rather than state law. The plaintiff cities in these cases had carefully crafted their claims to arise under state law rather than federal; but the defendants argued that the federal environmental laws and the federal Clean Air Act pre-empted the field, and that any claim against them in this area was of necessity federal, whether it said so or not. On removal, the cases landed in the federal Northern District of California before a Judge Alsup. The plaintiffs moved to send the case back to state court because the claims were state claims; and the defendants moved to dismiss the cases on the ground that the “nuisance” theory did not stand up under the federal environmental law.

In June 2018 Judge Alsup ruled for the defendants on both of those issues, and dismissed the cases.

Since then the wheels of justice have been grinding at their typical glacial pace. The plaintiffs appealed to the relevant Court of Appeals, which in this circumstance is the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco. Nearly two years on, the Ninth Circuit has now rendered its decision. Here is a copy. The bottom line: the Court of Appeals ruled for the plaintiffs on both issues. The federal environmental law is held not to fully pre-empt these claims; the claims are therefore state law claims; the cases therefore have no basis to be in federal court; and they get sent back to state court.

The defendants still have procedural steps they can take, but at this point they are mostly playing for time. First, they can ask for an en banc rehearing in the Ninth Circuit, but that is very unlikely because the panel decision was unanimous. And then they can try a run at the U.S. Supreme Court, but that is also a long shot, if perhaps somewhat less so. Even if those options come up completely dry, as is more likely than not, it will take well more than a year for that process to play out.

Suppose that all falls flat. Somewhere a year or two from now these oil majors are going to find themselves in California state court with no real defense other than that global warming caused by emissions from their products poses no serious risk to the plaintiffs. In other words, the science.

Multiple commenters out there have suggested that this will now be the end of the oil business, or at least of the major oil companies. If the Ninth Circuit decision stands up, the activist environmental lawyers are ready with complaints in hand to be filed by essentially every jurisdiction in the country seeking a cut of the vast lucre of the oil business. It will be like the tobacco litigation, they say. The defendants will inevitably be swamped by the tide of litigation. Your city is not next to the rising seas? No problem — you can claim prospective damage from tornadoes or hailstorms or something.

Two principal options for going forward present themselves. A former colleague of mine sends along a client alert memo from the Wachtell Lipton law firm, advising of the Ninth Circuit’s decision, and suggesting the outlines of a strategy that Wachtell would recommend for clients to follow. You may recognize the Wachtell firm as among the premier law firms in the country for strategic advice to major corporations. Wachtell is also the law firm representing Conoco in the two cases in question. Here is their advice from the memo:

Corporations and directors can . . . manage their exposure by actively evaluating climate-related risk, considering sustainability initiatives, implementing appropriate operational and board monitoring procedures, and documenting all these efforts.

This borders on the idiotic. Is any oil company actually going to keep the crocodiles away by trying to paper over their main activities with a bunch of so-called “sustainability initiatives”? The fact is that they are fundamentally in the oil business. Nobody with a brain is going to be fooled. But of course, Conoco has actually hired Wachtell. And you’ve probably seen all those ads from Exxon about algae research and other such diversionary tactics. Good luck with that guys.

Another approach is outlined by Christopher Monckton in a post on June 8 at Watts Up With That, with the headline “Climate litigation: big oil must fight on the science or die.” Monckton argues that the science of catastrophic global warming is completely fake, and further that courts that have been confronted with fake scientific claims are much better than you might think at figuring that out and putting the charlatans in their place.

As a first example, Monckton cites the litigation back in the 1990s between tobacco companies and the EPA over the alleged dangers of indoor second-hand tobacco smoke. As with the oil companies in the Oakland and SF suits, the tobacco companies exhausted all their procedural defenses and motions without success, and then were forced to present the science — which, in the case of second hand smoke, was extremely strong for their side, and weak for the EPA. In 1998, a federal judge in North Carolina named William Osteen wrote a 100 page opinion excoriating the EPA and vindicating the tobacco companies on this issue. (Of course, the tobacco companies had other problems in the case of actual smokers.). Monckton:

If anyone doubts the competence of the courts to decide upon disputed questions of science – a doubt frequently and nervously expressed by climate lobbyists desperate to avoid thorough judicial scrutiny of their preposterous position on global warming – that doubt is dispelled by Judge Osteen’s masterly consideration of the substantive scientific merits of EPA’s case.

And then there was the litigation in England where a truck driver, seeking to protect his kid from the propaganda of Al Gore’s climate movie “An Inconvenient Truth,” brought suit to get that film excluded from the English schools. Monckton again:

The moment the Government received the scientific testimony, it folded and agreed to pay half a million dollars’ costs to the truck-driver, and to circulate the movie only if it was accompanied by 77 pages of corrective guidance.

I would say that I am not quite as sanguine as Monckton. The global warming issue is highly politicized, and a very progressive judge could very likely not be subject to convincing even by the most completely definitive demonstration. On the other hand, the oil companies are coming to the point when they can’t duck this issue. So far, the alarmist side has had a huge advantage of funding even with no real science to back it up. That could soon be changing, maybe after the string gets played out for another year or two.

Reality Is Gradually Catching Up To Green Energy

June 08, 2020/ Francis Menton

If you dutifully read your U.S. mainstream media, you undoubtedly have the impression that “clean” and “green” energy is rapidly sweeping all before it, and soon will supplant fossil fuels in powering our economy. After all, many major states, including California and New York, have mandated some form of “net zero” carbon emissions by 2050, or in some cases even earlier. That’s only 30 years away. And reports are everywhere that investment in “renewables,” particularly wind and solar energy, continues to soar. For example, from Reuters in January we have “U.S. clean energy investment hits new record despite Trump administration views.” In the New York Times on May 13 it’s “In a First, Renewable Energy Is Poised to Eclipse Coal in U.S.” The final victory of wind and solar over the evil fossil fuels must then be right around the corner.

Actually, that’s all a myth. The inherent high cost and unreliability of wind and solar energy mean that they are highly unlikely ever to be more than niche players in the overall energy picture. Politicians claim progressive virtue by commissioning vast farms of wind turbines and solar panels, at taxpayer or ratepayer expense, without anyone ever figuring out — or even addressing — how these things can run a fully functioning electrical grid without complete fossil fuel backup. And the electrical grid is the easy part. How about airplanes? How about steel mills? I’m looking for someone to demonstrate that this “net zero” thing is something more than a ridiculous fantasy, but I can’t find it.

To stay grounded in reality, there is no better source than the multiple-times-weekly email from the Global Warming Policy Foundation. If you do not already receive these emails, you can go here to subscribe. As is typical, today’s email searches out back pages and specialized sources to bring us multiple pieces showing green energy running into its inevitable wall, with no known way to get past. (Full disclosure: I am on the Board of the GWPF’s American affiliate.)

We go first to green energy champion Germany, where Bloomberg reports on June 5 that “Germany’s Green Power Finance Is Becoming Unaffordable.” Excerpt:

The German program that’s spurred the nation’s switch to green power is buckling under the weight of surging costs and needs an urgent fix. That’s the assessment of one of the scheme’s chief designers, Hans Josef Fell. . . . Yet the system’s increasing costs have become glaring in the during the coronavirus pandemic, the veteran Green Party lawmaker said. High and guaranteed payments made to investors in clean power plants are the problem Fell said in an interview.

It seems that to get its wind and solar facilities built, Germany put in place guaranteed payments to producers that would kick in if market prices for power were insufficient. The guaranteed payments are divvied up and added to consumer electricity bills. This year, with prices for alternative fossil fuels plummeting, the guaranteed payments are projected to come in at some 26 billion euros — which is around $100 per month for every German household, on top of electricity prices that were already about triple the U.S. average. Of course, Chancellor Merkel is proposing a “fix,” which is a government bailout as part of a supposed coronavirus relief package. That may work for a little while. Then what?

Also from Germany, we have a piece from the Financial Times of June 8 with the headline “Environmentalists on back foot as Germany’s newest coal plant opens.” What?? — Opening a new coal power plant right in the midst of a transition away from fossil fuels?? What happened here is that they are closing all their nuclear plants, and they need something that works all the time, unlike the wind and the solar. Just in January, Germany enacted legislation to completely phase out coal power generation by 2038; and then in May, they went right ahead and opened this new Dateln 4 coal plant. The Financial Times piece quotes Greenpeace activist Lisa Göldner as calling the new plant a “climate crime.” Meanwhile, the crew members of a barge bringing coal to the plant are described as “whooping and whistling in mockery” at environmental protesters seeking to block the opening of the plant.

The fact is that Germany has nowhere further to go by building more wind and solar facilities. When the wind blows on a sunny day, they already have more power than they can use, and they are forced to give it away to Poland (or even pay the Poles to take it). On a calm night, no matter how much wind and solar they build, it all produces nothing. Without the coal plant, the lights go out. Talk about climate virtue all they want, but no one has yet even begun to work on a solution to get past this hurdle.

Which brings me to the most important piece in the GWPF email, from Cambridge Professor Michael Kelly, appearing in something called CapX on June 8, with the headline “Until we get a proper roadmap, Net Zero is a goal without a plan.” Kelly makes the point that seems to me obvious, but that somehow has slipped past the New York Times and all the rest of the MSM, which is that if wind and solar energy are ever going to surpass niche status, there is a gigantic engineering problem to solve. Somebody has to engineer an electrical system based on the intermittent sources that works 24/7/365. But in fact, even as major states and countries have piously proclaimed commitment to “net zero” energy, nobody has even started the engineering project. And as soon as you start to consider the question, you quickly realize that the whole endeavor is almost certainly impossible. As an example, Kelly addresses batteries:

Take batteries. It is estimated that current battery manufacturing capabilities will need to be in the order of 500-700 times bigger than now to support an all-electric global transport system. The materials needed just to allow the UK to transition to all electric transport involve amounts of materials equal to 200% the annual global production of cobalt, 75% of lithium carbonate, 100% of neodymium and 50% of copper. Scaling by a factor of 50 for the world transport, and you see what is now a showstopper. The materials demands just for batteries are beyond known reserves. Would one be prepared to dredge the ocean floor at very large scale for some of the material? Should securing the reserves not be a first priority?

And that’s just one of the issues. Others include vast costs constituting a multiple of current energy costs; the environmental impact of mining and transporting huge amounts of materials; need for vast amounts of rare elements, far beyond known world reserves; incredibly huge amounts of material to recycle when facilities wear out; and on and on.

Read enough of this stuff and you gradually realize that almost everything you read about supposed solutions to climate change is completely delusional.

More Progressive Bad Ideas To Make Things Worse For Black Americans

By Francis Menton, Manhattan Contrarian

The last week plus has been filled with demonstrations, as well as many violent riots, the purpose of which is said to be seeking an end to racist or oppressive treatment of black Americans. Oddly, the demonstrations (and riots) have been largely concentrated in the major cities, almost all of which have been under the political control of the Democratic Party, and generally its left-most wing, for multiple generations. (Exceptions: New York had Mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg from 1994 to 2013; and Los Angeles had Mayor Riordan from 1993 to 2001.)

Could the generations of progressive control have somehow failed to end the racism and oppression? Yes; but of course, it goes far beyond just that. The very most progressive cities, with the very most progressive policies in place for decades, are known for the worst possible outcomes on any metric you can think of. For example:

• The highest rates of measured income inequality. According to a 2014 study by Bloomberg of all Congressional districts, the district with the very highest income inequality was my own NY-10 (covering the West Side of Manhattan), while other spots in the top 25 for income inequality went to one progressive icon after another — all four other districts covering parts of Manhattan, Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco district (# 14), and districts in Chicago, Cambridge, Los Angeles, Santa Monica, and Berkeley.

• The largest amounts of homelessness. In just the last few years, progressive icons Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle have seen explosions in their homeless populations. New York’s homelessness explosion has been going on for a couple of decades. Here is a piece I wrote in October 2019 with full statistics on the San Francisco situation, and how they spend more and more money and yet have more and more homelessness.

• The most expensive housing. San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York are the champions of expensive housing, despite decades of progressive policies supposedly designed to fix that.

• The highest murder rates. In this post from January 2017 I collected statistics for murder rates for the U.S. as a whole (about 5 per 100,000), and for many of the large progressive-run cities ( St. Louis 60/100K, Detroit 44, Baltimore 50, New Orleans 42, Chicago 30). New York’s rate was about 25/100K in 1993, before 20 years of Republican mayors and pro-active policing brought the rate all the way down to about 4/100K when current Mayor de Blasio took over in 2014.

• High measured poverty rates far above the national norm. What state has the highest poverty rate? Of course, it’s California. The poverty rate in New York City was about equal to the U.S. average in the late 60s when the War on Poverty was beginning, but over the intervening decades, as New York has gone for more and more progressive programs, its poverty rate has soared well above national norms. By 1999 New York City’s rate was about 10 points above the national norm (22% versus 12%); the gap has since narrowed somewhat.

• High energy costs well above the national norm. Average electricity prices per kWh for 2019: U.S. 10.48 cents, California 19.17 cents, New York 17.97 cents, Connecticut 22.17 cents, Massachusetts 21.99 cents.

• And on and on.

But this time they think they are finally going to get it right. Here is a small collection of some of the current proposals:

De-fund the police. This is the big proposal of the moment, coming from all over the progressive internet. As an example, here is a piece by Annie Lowrey at MSN today making the case. “[T]he United States has an extreme budget commitment to prisons, guns, warplanes, armored vehicles, detention facilities, courts, jails, drones, and patrols—to law and order, meted out discriminately. . . .  A thin safety net, an expansive security state: This is the American way.”

Or from the Guardian, June 4, “Movement to defund police gains ‘unprecedented’ support across US.” To spend the money on what? “[A] coalition convened by Black Lives Matter LA pushed for what it called a “people’s budget”, which encouraged the city to spend only 5.7% of its general fund on law enforcement, and 44% on universal aid and crisis management.”

I for one am not a fan of the drug war, nor of increasing militarization of the police that we have seen in recent decades. On the other hand, it is very hard to argue with the huge decline in crime, most notably murders, in New York and some other places, that accompanied increased and more pro-active policing in the 90s and 00s. Close to half the victims of murders in the U.S. are black males. The decline in murders in New York City from about 2200 per year in the early 90s to only 300 or so today means almost 1000 black males who don’t get murdered each year.

Take money from the police and “invest” it into the black community. From FoxNews, June 4: “Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said Wednesday that he tasked the city to ‘identify $250 million in cuts’ [to police funding] to invest more money into the black community, communities of color,  women and ‘people who have been left behind.’” And what exactly would qualify as such an “investment” in the community? That’s anybody’s guess, and the progressives always seem to have an infinite wish list. But in summary, we’re not talking about private investment by businesses to create real jobs. Instead, it’s more and yet more government “programs.” Here are some ideas from Lowrey’s piece: “[De-funding the police would] mean funding housing-first programs, creating subsidized jobs for the formerly incarcerated, and expanding initiatives to have mental-health professionals and social workers respond to emergency calls.” In the Guardian, from BLM, it’s “universal aid and crisis management.” All experience teaches that money for such government programs ends up in the hands of bureaucrats and crony capitalists, and the social problems sought to be solved only get worse.

Hold black people to lower standards to “accommodate” them. An example reported at Campus Reform on June 3 comes from the University of Washington: “Students at the University of Washington are demanding that black students be given leniency on finals because they are too ‘busy fighting for [their] rights to sit down and study.’ The university is advising professors to do just that.  An online petition calls for laxed grading and accommodations, specifically for Black students. So far, the petition has amassed more than 26,000 signatures.” George W. Bush called it the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” For myself, I don’t see anything “soft” about it. The whole point behind attending college is to learn self-discipline and how to meet standards. How does giving the black students a pass on that help them in life?

These proposals would appear destined to fail, just as the previous forty rounds of progressive “programs” have all failed and made things worse. When they fail, of course, the result will be another round of guilt over the failure, and then yet another round of new but equally destructive proposals.