Month: October 2021

Be Green: Buy a Coal Mine!

It’s time to reup the idea of buying coal mines and shuttering them. I wrote about this a few years ago based on Bard Harstad’s piece in the JPE and it came up again on twitter so I went looking for a coal mine to buy. Here’s a coal mine for sale in West Virginia for only $7.8 million! According to the ad, the mine produces 10,000 tons of coal monthly and has reserves of 8 million tons. Now here are some back of the envelope calculations.

(Warning: There may be errors since there are a lot of unit conversions. I invite someone with expertise in the industry to do a more serious analysis.)

Each ton of coal burned produces about 2.5 tons of carbon dioxide (you get more carbon dioxide since the carbon combines with oxygen). Sources: 2.86 short tons. 2.086 short tons.

It costs about $100 to sequester a ton of carbon dioxide for a long time.

Thus, 10,000 tons of coal burnt monthly produce 25,000 tons of carbon dioxide that it would cost $2.5 million a month to sequester. Or buying the mine pays for itself in reduced C02 emissions in about 3 months.

Ordinarily buying up the supply would increase supply elsewhere but coal mines are going out of business–thus no one is investing much in building new coal mines. The supply curve, therefore, is inelastic. In addition, you could buy up the right to mine in precisely those countries that are not committed to reducing coal mining. Indeed, you could buy the right to mine costly-to-exploit coal deposits–those deposits are cheap (since they are costly to exploit) and by taking them off the market you are making the supply curve even more inelastic so you aren’t encouraging much additional supply. Imagine, for example, that coal mining will be banned tomorrow. Thus, companies will be producing all-out today but that means you could reduce a lot of carbon emissions by buying the right to mine from the most expensive producers (who will sell cheap) and you won’t appreciably increase the incentive to mine. Indeed, on the margin, a higher price of energy might even do more to increase alternative sources of power like solar, especially if you buy thermal coal where there are lots of substitutes (there are fewer substitutes for coke coal.) See the Harstad paper and references in my earlier post.

Thus, buying a coal mine and leaving the coal in the ground looks like a cost-effective way of sequestering carbon dioxide.

Addendum: There are also some crazy “use it or lose it” laws that say that you can’t buy the right to extract a natural resource and not use it. When the high-bidder for an oil and gas lease near Arches National Park turned out to be an environmentalist the BLM cancelled the contract! That’s absurd. The high-bidder is the high-bidder and there should be no discrimination based on the reasons for the bid. See this Science piece.

H/t: Austin Vernon.

Jack Yeats, the greatest Irish artist

I am going to pick Jack Butler Yeats (1871-1957, Sligo) as Ireland’s greatest artist. And yes he was the brother of William Butler Yeats and son of the artist John Butler Yeats, notable in his own right.

(For background, here are my earlier posts on William Orpen, John Lavery, Mainie Jellett, and Harry Clarke.  Here are a few contenders whom I ruled out from the get-go.)

Wikipedia offers the following useful description of Jack Yeats:

His favourite subjects included the Irish landscape, horses, circus and travelling players. His early paintings and drawings are distinguished by an energetic simplicity of line and colour, his later paintings by an extremely vigorous and experimental treatment of often thickly applied paint. He frequently abandoned the brush altogether, applying paint in a variety of different ways, and was deeply interested in the expressive power of colour. Despite his position as the most important Irish artist of the 20th century (and the first to sell for over £1m), he took no pupils and allowed no one to watch him work, so he remains a unique figure.

I don’t think there are images I could show to convince you that Yeats should stand above the other contenders.  His signature expressionist works are thick with three-dimensional texture, and they look like crap on-line.  I am fortunate to have seen a large exhibit of them lately in Dublin.  When I first saw some many years ago, I thought they were a splotchy mess, a kind of second-rate Gaelic Kokoscha, but they hold up and improve remarkably well with time.  Everything is where it ought to be.

Here is a “more normal” picture by Yeats:

His scenes are more animated, more impudent, more multi-faceted, and fresher than those of any other Irish painter.  It is easy to imagine him still inspiring painters today, Irish or otherwise, and I don’t think the same is quite true for the other names surveyed.  There is something “whole greater than the sum of the parts” that makes Yeats a clear, easy, and I think (mostly) consensus choice for Ireland’s greatest artist.  And he certainly was “Irish enough” to count.

Here is a good Christie’s short essay, mixed in with six high-quality images of works recently up for sale.  Oh, and here is one of the expressionist horse paintings after all:

The best places to see Yeats works are in Dublin and Sligo, but London and even the Walters in Baltimore have some.  Catch the Dublin exhibit while you can!

*Let It Be*, the new release

So what did I get for my $117, other than six discs that could have been three or dare I say two?

“I Dig a Pony” was a good composition that never saw an effective release; the Glyn Johns mix rehabilitates the song, though it remains far from perfect in execution.  You can listen to some of McCartney’s even better than usual vocal leaps on the outtakes of “Oh, Darling.”  It is fun to hear outtakes of segments of “Gimme’ Some Truth” and “All Things Must Pass,” done by “The Beatles,” though once probably is enough.  That is pretty much it, I am sorry to report.

The Giles Martin remix of the Let It Be album is a step backwards.  He botches “The Long and Winding Road” by keeping the strings orchestration, and “Across the Universe” is worse too.  The good version of “Road,” as approved by its creator, is on the “Naked” Let It Be release from about twenty years ago.  That one is the real contribution, and this release is not nearly as revelatory as the Esher demo tapes from the White Album.  Here is a good Pitchfork review.

I am looking forward to the six-hour movie nonetheless.  And I will (again) recommend the Laibach cover of Let It Be, one of the most underrated albums ever.  In the meantime, the price discrimination shall continue.

Sunday assorted links

1. “Nearly 40% of California state workers are unvaccinated against COVID despite Newsom order.”

2. “Part of the Catholic church in Sicily has imposed a three-year prohibition on naming godparents, arguing that the tradition has become merely a way to fortify family ties — and mob ties, too.”  Jonathan Schulz, telephone!  (NYT)

3. Carmen Mola is three men.

4. The immigrant health advantage, for blacks.

5. Carbon tax making a Biden comeback? (NYT)  And profile of Juliette Binoche (NYT).

6. Claims about Chinese hypersonics.

The continuing case for nuclear energy

Climate mitigation scenarios envision considerable growth of wind and solar power, but scholars disagree on how this growth compares with historical trends. Here we fit growth models to wind and solar trajectories to identify countries in which growth has already stabilized after the initial acceleration. National growth has followed S-curves to reach maximum annual rates of 0.8% (interquartile range of 0.6–1.1%) of the total electricity supply for onshore wind and 0.6% (0.4–0.9%) for solar. In comparison, one-half of 1.5 °C-compatible scenarios envision global growth of wind power above 1.3% and of solar power above 1.4%, while one-quarter of these scenarios envision global growth of solar above 3.3% per year. Replicating or exceeding the fastest national growth globally may be challenging because, so far, countries that introduced wind and solar power later have not achieved higher maximum growth rates, despite their generally speedier progression through the technology adoption cycle.

That is a new paper from Nature Energy, by Aleh Cherp, et.al., via the excellent Kevin Lewis.  Yes, yes, Moore’s Law for solar cost and all that, but we need to think about the problem more deeply and that still implies a significant role for nuclear energy.  And here is some good news:

Finland has joined France, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic in lobbying the European Union to categorize nuclear power as sustainable. According to the Finnish Broadcasting Company, Finland’s pro-nuclear lobbying marks a U-turn within the Green Party.

Link here.

Is this the uh-oh moment for renewable energy?

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:

American elites like to argue for a carbon tax and other means of raising the price of carbon emissions, and I fall into that camp myself. Yet higher energy prices are extremely unpopular with many voters. A recent study found that most Americans would vote against a mere $24 annual climate tax on their energy bills. Many countries now have to ask themselves if they really are ready to start paying the bills for a transition away from carbon.

And:

…the Biden administration has been playing a two-sided game. Policies strongly discourage domestic producers from adding fossil-fuel capacity, and indeed those investments remain depressed. Perhaps that is how it should be. Yet when it comes to global capacity, America is talking and playing a very different hand.

For instance, the Biden administration has criticized OPEC for insufficient production of crude oil. National security adviser Jake Sullivan said bluntly: “At a critical moment in the global recovery, this is simply not enough.” That kind of policy talk is hard to square coming from the same government that has revoked permits for the Keystone XL pipeline, limited oil and gas leases on federal land and in Alaska, and used the Endangered Species Act to limit energy development on private lands in the West.

The federal government’s strategy seems clear. It is discouraging fossil-fuel capacity in the U.S. and Canada, but to keep energy prices low it will tolerate and indeed encourage high fossil-fuel spending in other, more distant nations. That would give the U.S. some domestic “trophies” in the fight to limit fossil fuels, yet without higher energy prices for the world at large.

The problem is that the same mix of policies won’t do much to limit overall carbon emissions. It will hurt American industry, by penalizing domestic energy production, and also damage U.S. energy independence.

So far I am not seeing a lot of evidence that the world really is willing to tolerate higher energy prices.  Countries all over are rushing back to coal — what are we supposed to conclude from that?

Fasten your seat belts…

New Stablecoin Charter Could Hinge on National Bank Act Rewrite

A special-purpose banking charter for stablecoin issuers – one of the potential options for federal regulators to rein in the risks posed by the digital asset – may require a revamp of the National Bank Act, the statute that defines the “business of banking,” analysts said in an American Banker piece this week. The prospect of the Biden Administration urging Congress to authorize such a charter was recently reported by the Wall Street Journal. The National Bank Act stipulates that the core activities for national banks are taking deposits, making loans and facilitating payments. The same statute is at the center of legal disputes over the OCC’s FinTech charter that would allow firms engaging in only one of those activities to receive a banking charter and essentially act as a bank.

That is from an email I received from BPInsights.

Will this revolution be televised?

More than a century after the artists of the Vienna Secession declared “to every age its art; to art its freedom”, the Austrian capital has found a new site for artistic expression free from censorship: the adults-only platform OnlyFans.

Vienna’s tourism board has started an account on OnlyFans – the only social network that permits depictions of nudity – in protest against platforms’ ongoing censorship of its art museums and galleries.

In July, the Albertina Museum’s new TikTok account was suspended and then blocked for showing works by the Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki that showed an obscured female breast, forcing the museum to start a new account. This followed a similar incident in 2019, when Instagram ruled that a painting by Peter Paul Rubens violated the platform’s community standards which prohibit any depictions of nudity – even those that are “artistic or creative in nature”.

In 2018, the Natural History Museum’s photograph of the 25,000-year-old Venus of Willendorf figurine was deemed pornographic by Facebook and removed from the platform.

The Leopold Museum has likewise struggled to promote its collection of nudes by the expressionist Egon Schiele, with advertising regulators in Germany, the UK and US refusing to show them in a city tourism campaign in 2018. (The tourist board successfully resubmitted the posters with banners obscuring the bare bodies reading: “Sorry – 100 years old but still too daring today.”)

Here is more from The Guardian, via Jason D.

What I’ve been reading

1. Carole Angier, Speak, Silence: In Search of W.G. Sebald.  Might Sebald be the only semi-recent writer who can hold a candle to Ferrante, Knausgaard, and Houllebecq?  This book is sprawling, and suffers somewhat from lack of access to the author’s family, but it is a true labor of love.  And Angier has a deep understanding of Sebald, and also brings out the Jewish-related themes in his work (though he was not Jewish himself).  It attempts to be a Sebaldian work itself, and even if it does not always succeed it is the kind of passionate book we need more of.  Recommended, but you have to read Sebald first, if need be start with Die Ausgewanderten [The Emigrants].

2. Arthur Herman, The Viking Heart: How Scandinavians Conquered the World.  Ignore the subtitle!  There have been a number of good books on the Vikings lately, and this is perhaps the most “popular” and big picture of the lot.  The early Vikings swept through Europe in a matter of decades, mixing conquest and trade.  King Canute was pretty impressive it seems.  Specialists may pick nits, but it is very readable and seems to me to give a good overview of the role of the Vikings in European history.  This would be the one to start with.

3. Lawrence Rothfield, The Measure of Man: Liberty, Virtue, and Beauty in the Florentine Republic.  An excellent introduction to Florence, with some focus on issues of liberty and also civic leaderhip.  One should never tire of reading about this particular topic.

4. Howard W. French, Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World 1471 to the Second World War.  Think of this book as a retelling of some standard historical episodes, but with Africa at the center rather than as a recipient of European advances.  This is a useful reframing, and I enjoyed the read.  But perhaps by the end it was the New World that in my mind was upgraded as a more central spot for the rise of modernity?  Too frequently the relevance of Africa has to be rescued by invoking Portugal, as Sweden, Russia, and Turkey simply will not do the trick there.

New out is Diane Coyle, Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be; she is typically wise.

I am happy to see the publication of Calvin Duke’s Entrepreneurial Communities: An Alternative to the State, The Theories of Spencer Heath and Spencer MacCallum.

There is also Kyle Harper, Plagues Upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History, long and comprehensive.

Tyrone, your local Straussian, comments on “Trap House”

I took it to refer to a place where drugs are sold, but you might be trapped either by the police or by the attendant lifestyle and its appeals.  The Yale Federalist Society was proclaming itself comparable to such a trap house, and thus at the same time broadcasting both its appeal and its potential danger.

By calling itself such a trap house, in a funny self-referring way it became one.  A kind of opposite to the Liar’s Paradox.  How many other claims become true by the mere act of making them?  “I am making a claim now” would be one of them.

Tyler: So says Tyrone.  But he is very consistently wrong.  And if you don’t know what Tyrone is talking about in this incoherent, philosophically naive missive, it is not worth trying to find out.

Now-defunct publicity markets in everything

The official Wizard of New Zealand, perhaps the only state-appointed wizard in the world, has been cast from the public payroll, spelling the end to a 23-year legacy.

The Wizard, whose real name is Ian Brackenbury Channell, 88, had been contracted to Christchurch city council for the past two decades to promote the city through “acts of wizardry and other wizard-like services”, at a cost of $16,000 a year. He has been paid a total of $368,000.

Here is the full story, and for the pointer I thank P.  And speaking of marketing, here is vaccine markets in everything.

Friday assorted links

1. Are strong interventions overrated?: “I find that the interventions reduce completion rates of the opposite behavior by 19-29%.”

2. Colby College bans caste-based discrimination.

3. The most overstudied places in development economics?

4. My sister wins another bird photography award.

5. Do Americans want smaller government once again?

6. A deeper look at the vaccine-hesitant (Zeynep, NYT).

7. UFOs and the import of Blink 182.

8. Tribute to Ronald Findlay, RIP.

Hunting the Satanists

Michael Flynn, the former Trump National Security Advisor and QAnon promoter, is now being accused by QAnon of being a Satanist.

…Flynn’s trouble started on Sept. 17, when he led a congregation at Nebraska pastor Hank Kunneman’s Lord of Hosts Church in prayer. Flynn’s prayer included invocations to “sevenfold rays” and “legions,” two phrases that struck some of Flynn’s followers as strange.

…As video of the prayer circulated in online conspiracy theorist groups, the references to “legions” and “rays” soon sparked speculation among Flynn’s right-wing supporters that their hero had been lured to the dark side. Always on the lookout for the Satanic influence they imagine lurks at the heart of the world, they claimed that Flynn had secretly been worshiping the devil. Worse, since the congregation was repeating the prayer after Flynn, the rumor went, he had duped hundreds of Christians into joining the ritual.

…Flynn isn’t the first right-wing figure tied to QAnon to see its acolytes turn on him. Oklahoma Senate candidate Jackson Lahmeyer, whose challenge to Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) has been endorsed by Flynn, appeared at an April pro-QAnon conference with Flynn in Tulsa.

A few months later, however, Lahmeyer posted a seemingly innocent picture of his daughter wearing red shoes—apparently unaware that QAnon followers consider red shoes to be yet another sign of their imagined Satanic sex-trafficking cabal. Lahmeyer was soon caught up in a QAnon controversy of his own.

“Unfortunately, I have to say it because people are asking me,” Lahmeyer wrote in a Facebook post. “I’m in no way involved in Child Sex Trafficking, pedophilia or devil worship.”

Now, here’s another story–this one about an email sent by a Yale law student from the Native American Law Students Association (NALSA) to fellow classmates. The email in question reads:

SUP NALSA,

Hope you’re all still feeling social! This Friday at 7:30 we will be christening our very own (soon to be) world=renowned NALSA Trap House….by throwing a Constitution Day Bash in collaboration with FedSoc. Planned abstractions include Popeye’s chicken, basic-bitch-American-themed snacks (like apple pie, etc.), a cocktail station, assorted hard and soft beverages, and (most importantly) the opportunity to attend the NALSA Trap House’s inaugural mixer!

Hope to see you all there!

The email seems to me like a light-hearted invitation to a party but, of course, not being one-of-the-elect I can’t read the secret, esoteric meaning. According to Yale’s Diversity office the email was actually a coded message to celebrate white supremacy with a blackface party.

Just 12 hours after the email went out, the student was summoned to the law school’s Office of Student Affairs, which administrators said had received nine discrimination and harassment complaints about his message.

At a Sept. 16 meeting, which the student recorded and shared with the Washington Free Beacon, associate dean Ellen Cosgrove and diversity director Yaseen Eldik told the student that the word “trap” connotes crack use, hip hop, and blackface. Those “triggering associations,” Eldik said, were “compounded by the fried chicken reference,” which “is often used to undermine arguments that structural and systemic racism has contributed to racial health disparities in the U.S.”

Eldik, a former Obama White House official, went on to say that the student’s membership in the Federalist Society had “triggered” his peers.

…Throughout the Sept. 16 meeting and a subsequent conversation the next day, Eldik and Cosgrove hinted repeatedly that the student might face consequences if he didn’t apologize—including trouble with the bar exam’s “character and fitness” investigations, which Cosgrove could weigh in on as associate dean.

…When the student hadn’t apologized by the evening of Sept. 16, Eldik and Cosgrove emailed the entire second-year class about the incident. “[A]n invitation was recently circulated containing pejorative and racist language,” the email read. “We condemn this in the strongest possible terms” and “are working on addressing this.”

The two cases illustrate that the worldview of QAnon and Yale’s diversity office are surprisingly similar. Both see a world in which Satan, literal or metaphorical, is an active force in the world corrupting individuals and institutions. Satan is powerful but hidden. He only reveals his influence when the corrupted slip-up and by the incorrect use of a word, phrase, or gesture reveal their true natures.

Since Satan is powerful and hidden the good people must constantly monitor everyone. The moment a slip-up is spotted, no matter how small, the corrupted must be denounced because anyone who even unwittingly associates with the corrupted will themselves become corrupted. “Legions”and “rays”? Satanist! “Trap House.” Satanist! “Red shoes.” Sex-trafficker! “Federalist Society.” Satanist society! Repeating the prayer? Duping hundreds of Christians into joining the ritual! Attending a party? We condemn this in the strongest possible terms! Condemn the non-believers to HELL! It’s all the same.

The other similarity, of course, is that both views are disturbingly common and completely bonkers.

Photo Credit: Wikipedia.