# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Joe Rogan Experience #1259 - David Wallace-Wells

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Something went wrong, but don’t fret — let’s give it another shot.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Despair at Full Employment The Urgency of a Fairer Labor Market

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Reaganomics A Watershed Moment on the Road to Trumpism

# data[].attributes.body
Moseley Part 1

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Click here t here here to see a list of economics related videos.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The decline of worker power (with David Rolf and Larry Mishel) - Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Not so long ago, economic growth was shared widely among Americans thanks to a suite of policies that boosted the bargaining power of workers. In recent years, employer power has increased while worker powers have been significantly eroded-and as a result, income inequality has grown at record rates.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Dramatically reducing carbon dioxide emissions is the first step towards stopping catastrophic climate change - but it's not the last. If all emissions stop tomorrow, the atmosphere will still be clogged with 200 years' worth of human-produced CO2. The planet will continue to warm. The seas will continue to rise.

"The question is, what do we do with all this excess CO2 in the atmosphere," said Noah Deich, Executive Director and co-founder of the non-profit Center for Carbon Removal.

In 2014, the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported that preventing a 2°C increase in global temperatures above pre-industrial levels would likely require a global strategy to remove CO2 from the atmosphere.

The question is, what do we do with all this excess CO2 in the atmosphere?

Despite its outsized impact on climate, CO2 molecules represent only .04 percent of the air - that's one in 2,500 molecules. An industrial-scale machine that could remove meaningful amounts of CO2 would need to move huge amounts of air, requiring lots of energy, which means lots of money.It turns out that capturing airborne carbon is less of a scientific challenge - technology for removing CO2 from ambient air has been around since the 1940s - than an economic one.

For years, this strategy of CO2 removal, known as direct air capture, has been viewed as an exotic pipe dream, too expensive to be practical. A paper published in 2011 estimated the cost of direct air capture could be as much as $1,000 per metric ton of CO2.

But David Keith, the Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Physics at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, thinks it can be done for a lot less.

Keith and his colleagues estimate that their company, Carbon Engineering, could capture CO2 at a price between $94 to $232 per metric ton. In the journal Joule, the Carbon Engineering team outlined the material and engineering costs of their system - the first time the costs of a commercial direct air capture process have been published.

The paper could have major ramifications across the industry.

"Until now, basically no one in the industry has published an open book number that will give credibility that direct air capture costs less than the $500 to $1000 per metric ton that has been estimated," said Deich.

"We need enormous volumes of CO2 removal and to achieve that, we need accurate economic analysis and hard engineering data," said Julio Friedmann, CEO of Carbon Wrangler LLC and senior advisor at The Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute. "This paper provides that transparency."

Keith co-founded Carbon Engineering in 2009, when direct air capture was still on the fringes of industrial climate solutions. Carbon Engineering's goal is to use direct air capture to produce carbon-neutral fuels, enabling carbon-free energy to be converted into high-energy fuels for difficult-to-electrify vehicles such as planes and barges.

Keith and his team's approach is fundamentally different than their few competitors in the field.

"At Carbon Engineering, we're not developing a fundamentally new product or unit operation," said Keith. "That's the design choice we made. We're making something that's never been done before - commercial large-scale air capture - but we're doing it on a basis of technology that already exists."

Using existing technology in novel ways is the ultimate engineering challenge.

The Carbon Engineering system uses a remodeled industrial cooling tower which contains a liquid hydroxide solution that captures CO₂ and converts it into carbonate. Next, the carbonate is converted into pellets in equipment created to extract minerals in water treatment plants. Those carbon pellets are heated with a kiln originally designed for gold roasting and transformed into pure carbon dioxide gas, which can be turned into synthetic fuel.

The Carbon Engineering team worked directly with commercial suppliers of each of these pieces of repurposed equipment to design tests, engineer alterations, and develop cost estimates to adapt the hardware for a commercial direct air capture plant.

"In a post-Paris Accords world, everyone has been talking about carbon removal but most of the analysis is secondary literature or policy perspectives," said Keith. "This is the first paper to estimate the cost of direct air capture based on a detailed engineering design and cost analysis. While uncertainties, of course, remain, the fact that it can be build using established processes and suppliers gives us confidence to develop industrial-scale plants."

With that cost breakdown, direct air capture - especially direct air capture that can be used to make synthetic fuel - may look less exotic and more attractive to investors and policy makers.

In addition, direct air capture technology is location independent, which should make it even more attractive to investors, said Joe Lassiter, retired Senior Fellow and Senator John Heinz Professor of Management Practice in Environmental Management at the Harvard Business School.

"A commercial carbon capture facility could be located anywhere in the world where renewable or nuclear is inexpensive," said Lassiter. "This is an example of how engineering and human cleverness can find economically feasible and sustainable solutions to the problems that society faces."

Keith and the Carbon Engineering team have raised about $30 million to date, the next step is to raise funds for a plant that can deliver fuels to market, which depends on finding a renewable power supplier who wants to supply high capacity power at a low price and incentives for low carbon fuels.

"I hope this paper will launch 1,000 master's students to figure out how to create an even better future using this technology," said Friedmann.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Team provides first plan for commercially viable, industrial-scale

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Dramatically reducing carbon dioxide emissions is the first step towards stopping catastrophic climate change - but it's not the last. If all emissions stop tomorrow, the atmosphere will still be clogged with 200 years' worth of human-produced CO2. The planet will continue to warm. The seas will continue to rise.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Leer en español
The California coast grew and prospered during a remarkable moment in history when the sea was at its tamest.

But the mighty Pacific, unbeknownst to all, was nearing its final years of a calm but unusual cycle that had lulled dreaming settlers into a false sense of endless summer.

Elsewhere, Miami has been drowning, Louisiana shrinking, North Carolina's beaches disappearing like a time lapse with no ending. While other regions grappled with destructive waves and rising seas, the West Coast for decades was spared by a rare confluence of favorable winds and cooler water. This "sea level rise suppression," as scientists call it, went largely undetected. Blinded from the consequences of a warming planet, Californians kept building right to the water's edge.

But lines in the sand are meant to shift. In the last 100 years, the sea rose less than 9 inches in California. By the end of this century, the surge could be greater than 9 feet.

Wildfire and drought dominate the climate change debates in the state. Yet this less-talked-about reality has California cornered. The coastline is eroding with every tide and storm, but everything built before we knew better - Pacific Coast Highway, multimillion-dollar homes in Malibu, the rail line to San Diego - is fixed in place with nowhere to go.

But the world is getting hotter, the great ice sheets still melting, the rising ocean a slow-moving disaster that has already swept past California's front door. Seaside cliffs are crumbling in Pacifica, bringing down entire buildings. Balboa Island, barely above sea level, is spending $1.8 million to raise the wall that separates it from the ocean.

Winter storms pummeled a Capistrano Beach boardwalk, turning the idyllic shoreline into a construction zone as bulldozers rushed to stack boulders into a barricade. From San Diego to Humboldt counties, homeowners scramble to fend off increasing erosion and storm surges, pleading with officials for bigger seawalls that can hold back the even bigger ocean.

There are only so many ways to play against the rising sea. Seawalls are one option, but they come with a hidden cost - forcing the sand before them to wash away. For every new seawall protecting a home or a road, a beach for the people is sacrificed.

Adding sand to disappearing beaches is another tactic, but that race against nature lasts only so long as there's money and enough sand.

Then there's what scientists and economists and number-crunching consultants call "managed retreat": Move back, relocate, essentially cede the land to nature. These words alone have roiled the few cities bold enough to utter them. Mayors have been ousted, planning documents rewritten, campaigns waged over the very thought of turning prime real estate back into dunes and beaches.

Retreat is as un-American as it gets, neighborhood groups declared. To win, California must defend.

But at what cost? Should California become one long wall of concrete against the ocean? Will there still be sandy beaches or surf breaks to cherish in the future, oceanfront homes left to dream about? More than $150 billion in property could be at risk of flooding by 2100 - the economic damage far more devastating than the state's worst earthquakes and wildfires. Salt marshes, home to shorebirds and endangered species, face extinction. In Southern California alone, two-thirds of beaches could vanish.

The state has both no time and too much time to act, spiraling into paralyzing battles over the why, who, when and how. It's not too late for Californians to lead the way and plan ahead for sea level rise, experts say, if only there is the will to accept the bigger picture.

Returning after mudslides and wildfire. Rebuilding in flood zones. The human urge to outmatch nature is age-old. We scoff at the fabled frog that boiled to death in a pot of slowly warming water - but refuse to confront the reality of the sea as it pushes deeper into our cities.

We've all played by the shore and built castles in the sand, but seem to forget what happens next: The ocean always wins.

Pacifica

A town on the edge

On the bluffs and shores of Pacifica, a postcard stretch of coastal hamlets just south of San Francisco, residents fear that planning for sea level rise means condemning their own community to extinction.

Here, what other cities in California are only beginning to worry about in the abstract is already a much-lived reality. Powerful waves crest over the main pier and threaten roads with names such as Beach Boulevard and Shoreview Avenue. Blasts of sand batter walls and homes. Windows shatter. Cliffs collapse. Residents bear witness to entire chunks of hillside crumbling into the surf below.

In one part of town, the ocean chewed away more than 90 feet of bluff in less than a decade.

People were able to walk Pacifica as an entire stretch of beach in the 1970s, but the open shoreline shrank over the years as the city built seawalls, piled rocks, coated its fragile sandstone cliffs with special concrete to protect what nature was taking by force.

Today, most of Pacifica's coast is armored. But even with these defenses, the city still had to buy out a row of bluff-top homes, later converting the street into a trail. Down by the sand, more homes were removed and a public parking lot rebuilt 50 feet farther inland.

Along Beach Boulevard, signs caution dog walkers and joggers that waves may break over the seawall. The pavement is often wet from high surf. Cars are urged to keep moving. Locals are wise enough to not linger too long by the aging pier.

A woman who did was hit in 2006 by a wave that blew over. When she was finally able to breathe and open her eyes, she was stunned to find she had been swept to the back of someone's garage, her arm hooked through a barbecue pit.

The shocks continued. Years of drought followed by heavy storms in 2016 forced more than a dozen bluff-top residences to be tagged as unsafe. Three apartment buildings - suddenly dangling off the edge - could not be saved and were demolished.

"If we don't start managing retreat now, how much is it going to cost later?" - Charles Lester, director of UC Santa Barbara's Ocean and Coastal Policy Center

Responding to just this most recent El Niño season has cost Pacifica $16 million - no small change for a town whose $36-million operating budget relies mostly on property taxes. Officials are still seeking funds to cover damage from 2016 and remain mired in an eminent domain battle over two of the buildings.

Pacifica has become this story of unplanned, forced retreat, experts say, and the public got stuck with the bill.

"There's a public cost and a private cost in any choice that we make, and we need to start doing that cost-benefit analysis," said Charles Lester, director of UC Santa Barbara's Ocean and Coastal Policy Center, who has consulted for a number of towns, including Pacifica, on sea level rise planning. "If we don't start managing retreat now, how much is it going to cost later?"

In hundreds of pages of planning documents, officials concluded that moving inland in future decades might pencil out to be the most cost-effective option for a number of neighborhoods. Seawalls keep failing, they said, and the ocean is winning. Much of the shoreline protection could be overwhelmed with as little as 1 foot of sea level rise.

But many lambasted the proposal, fired up by a property rights campaign by the real estate industry. Homeowners flooded city meetings, knocked on neighbors' doors and plastered signs around town. The mayor became the town punching bag, and new leaders were voted in to help Pacifica stand its ground.

"'Managed retreat' is code word for give up - on our homes and the town itself," said Mark Stechbart, who worries that Pacifica, and in turn his own home's value, will be dismissed by future developers, insurers and buyers. "This is not just some intellectual exercise. These are real people and a real town at stake."

For Suzanne Drake, a historical-society volunteer who cobbled together enough money during the recession to buy "the ugliest house on the prettiest street in town," talk of managed retreat has kicked up an anger she didn't know she had.

The words are like a scarlet letter, she said. How could anyone get a 30-year-mortgage if city documents say the entire street might be condemned in the future and turned into a beach? How will she get insurance or permits to remodel her home?

"The public has rights to the beach, but I apparently don't have rights to my house," she said after one particularly heated meeting that pitted homeowners against conservationists. "I'm a left-of-left Democrat, but these environmental zealots are next level."

The issue has divided this close-knit town, whose residents open conversations by touting the number of years they've lived here and - in recent months - by how many feet they live above sea level. Outbursts at council meetings have become the norm, and depending on who's angriest that day, environmentalists, the real estate industry, the city or the California Coastal Commission is Enemy No. 1.

The specter of managed retreat has galvanized retired engineers, policy wonks - even the president of the local Democrats club - to speak alongside real estate groups, worried that Pacifica will become "an economic wasteland" if the long-term vision is retreat. They accuse the city's study of undervaluing homes, businesses, hiking trails and golf courses when calculating the public benefits of letting go. Preserving tourism, businesses and development opportunities, they said, should play into any future plan.

Others say Pacifica has already outlived its time. There's a reason why an empty parcel by the water has failed for years to attract developers, they said, and why the Taco Bell can still afford prime oceanfront views.

How much Pacifica ultimately decides to retreat, both sides agree, could be the litmus test for what's going to happen to the rest of California.

One recent morning, Drake stood on her second-story deck and talked over the roar of sand dozers clearing roads. The area floods whenever waves top the seawall or there's a break in the berm. The city brings in a pump during the winter to push stormwater back into the ocean.

Without that seawall or berm, her neighborhood and the nearby golf course would easily flood. Without these kinds of defenses, sewage lines, wastewater treatment plants, schools and other public infrastructure would be at risk.

What officials need to do, Drake said, is build larger seawalls and commit to saving the town. She sees Pacifica on the cusp of becoming something special - a town that could finally have a nice library, perhaps, or a beautiful downtown with coffeehouses and places to shop.

The big white house next door sold not long ago for more than $1.5 million, she said. Pacifica is still worth something, so why would officials let it go?

City officials have heeded the backlash and rewritten their plan to address the rising sea. Key seawalls will be extended, and the words "managed retreat" have been replaced with references to environmental triggers for "adaptation strategies" in the coming decades.

Many still distrust where this document is headed. John Keener, who championed the issue as mayor before losing his bid for reelection, wonders how much will change under the new leaders in power.

Walking along Esplanade Avenue one recent afternoon, Keener points to the orange tape and bits of foundation still poking out from where apartment buildings once stood. Only the odd-numbered homes on this block remain, the even-numbered side making way for sweeping ocean views.

Keener, a retired biochemist, winces at the words "managed retreat" and said he didn't want to devalue anyone's home or give up on the town. He just looked at the data and tried to think ahead.

The city has little money to build bigger seawalls, no money for sand replenishment, no money to compensate homeowners for the loss of their property. So he reasoned that Pacifica had a better shot of getting outside funding by showing it had thought through every option and come up with a plan.

Worrying about what this planning document would do to home values is a privilege with an expiration date. He fears that by 2050, "this stuff will all become moot."

"We'll be in survival mode," he said. "The other aspects of climate change are going to simply just overwhelm us as a society."

He takes out his new business card, embossed with the words "Environmental Advocate." "What kind of world," he wondered, "are we leaving for our kids and grandkids?"

Seawalls

Protection at what cost?

Your home is your castle, the biggest investment most families make. So the impulse, of course, is to defend it.

The go-to tactic is the seawall. Made from piles of boulders, gunite-coated cliffs or concrete slabs as high as two stories, seawalls dissipate wave energy and fend off surging water. But these defenses aren't cheap. A single homeowner can spend as much as $200,000. A mile-long wall can cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars. Repairs sometimes cost as much as the wall itself.

Defending the entire state could cost homeowners and taxpayers more than $22 billion in the next 20 years if the sea rises even a moderate amount, according to a recent study by the Center for Climate Integrity.

And each seawall is a choice, conscious or not, to sacrifice the beach in front. The barriers disrupt the natural replenishment of sand, stripping away beaches until they narrow or vanish altogether. Some states have banned new seawalls: Oregon, North Carolina, Maine. Others have imposed significant restrictions.

The hidden cost of seawalls

Seawalls form a line of defense against the rising ocean. But a beach gets sacrificed in the process.

In California, environmentalists have called seawalls a coastal crisis. The Coastal Commission, in charge of regulating and shaping the state's 1,200-mile shoreline, has historically OKd them in emergencies - temporary solutions after a rough storm.

But temporary often becomes permanent. About 30% of Southern California's shoreline today is behind some form of seawall - locking in Navy bases, rail lines, harbors and multimillion-dollar homes at the expense of open space.

"Seawalls kill beaches," said Jennifer Savage, California policy manager for the Surfrider Foundation. "I feel like a broken record saying this, but there is still such a disconnect with the public on such a key, simple message: Sea level rise doesn't just impact homeowners; it impacts every person who wants to go to the beach."

And the beach, state law declares, belongs to everyone. So the Coastal Commission in recent years has gotten tougher on seawalls. It urged city leaders to do everything within their power to consider alternative options, including managed retreat.

But that position has not won the commission friends among homeowners and local planners. City leaders often blame the state and the commission when taking unpopular steps. But the commission, when confronted by the public, says it's just offering guidance.

More than 30 cities and counties are now left paralyzed, tugged left and right to do something - but not sure what that is. There's no clear set of directions, no one-size-fits-all solution.

For the homeowner, insurance policies, hazard grants and federal disaster relief are all set up in a way that encourages rebuilding rather than relocating. There's no incentive for owners to consider options beyond hunkering down with bigger and better walls. The way the state pushes down insurance prices also masks the true cost of living in a hazardous area.

But the more hazardous it gets, the more the public could pay: As rising seas and storms exacerbate property damage, experts worry that the inability of insurers to charge prices that reflect actual risk could lead them to stop offering coverage in California.

If insurers stop covering risky properties, the state becomes the last resort.

Subscriptions make in-depth reporting on climate change and the environment possible. Get full access to our journalism for just 99 cents for the first four weeks. Already a subscriber? Your contribution helped tell this story. Thank you.

That happened with earthquake insurance, when California stepped in to stabilize the market with insurance that companies could sell in lieu of their own. Officials are now confronting this in wildfire areas. Similar pressures are playing out in hurricane-prone states, according to a Stanford study led by a former coastal commissioner.

And so states, and ultimately taxpayers, are the ones subject to the biggest financial risks when a disaster hits.

Judy Taylor, a state director of the California Assn. of Realtors who has lived along the coast in the Half Moon Bay area for 45 years, said uncertainty over sea level rise planning has upended her world of clear rules and clean transactions.

Realtors are in a bind. Unlike other hazard zones in California, there are no mandatory disclosures for homes that might be subject to relocation or other sea level rise plans in the future. Clearly defined disclosures would help people better understand whether the home they're buying could actually be a long-term investment.

"Right now if we over-disclose, it's going to sabotage the seller's transaction," Taylor said. "If we under-disclose, then the buyer is going to have serious heartburn."

"... we have never before dealt with the fact that Mother Nature's going to do what she's going to do, and we can't do anything about it. " - Judy Taylor, California Assn. of Realtors

What's debated by her industry is not so much climate change, she said, but how much longer owners can extend the life and value of homes - and how they can do so while navigating the bureaucratic system of coastal permits.

"We have dealt with property being taken for bridges, for roads, for even shopping centers. But we have never before dealt with the fact that Mother Nature's going to do what she's going to do, and we can't do anything about it," Taylor said. "So how do we treat this issue sanely and fairly? Do these policies actually further the goal, do they create a better environmental outcome - and is your ox getting gored and mine left free?"

San Francisco

Choosing casualties

On one side of San Francisco, a century-old seawall keeps the city's iconic towers and skyscrapers firmly on land.

On the other side, a rock wall protects a road, a parking lot and a sewage treatment system - squeezing away one of the city's few beaches.

Something needs to give. But even in a city as climate-aware as San Francisco, making sacrifices is not easy.

What is now the city's commercial core was once mostly a marsh - the shoreline a muddy half-mile farther inland. Over the decades, settlers filled in these wetlands and created more than 500 acres of new land atop old coves and abandoned ships.

Holding back all the water is the Embarcadero, doubling as a tourist attraction and bustling today with visitors and schoolkids, markets and museums. Humming beneath their feet is a network of critical infrastructure - sewer and water systems, utility lines, public transportation, communication cables - that could cave to the ocean without this seawall.

There's no doubt defenses here must survive. This colossal feat of rock and concrete keeps San Francisco Bay from drowning the financial district and Market Street, safeguarding some $100 billion in business and buildings.

But the wall is crumbling and in desperate need of backup. High tides routinely spill over and flood sections of the boardwalk. With just 3 more feet of sea level rise, the iconic Ferry Building could flood every single day.

Updating this seawall will cost at least $2 billion, probably much more. Scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey recently found that the cost of building levees, seawalls and other measures to withstand 6 ½ feet of sea level rise and a 100-year storm could cost as much as $450 billion for San Francisco Bay.

Making people care has not been an overnight process. Lindy Lowe, the Port of San Francisco's resilience officer, reflected on all the neighborhood meetings, family nights and door-knocking to get taxpayers to understand the issue.

It was crucial, she learned, to actually work with the community from the beginning rather than doing all the research behind the scenes and then dropping a report full of government mumbo-jumbo declaring the city doomed.

"Never start a conversation with sea level rise is what we learned. Start the conversation with: 'What do you care about? What do you want your community to look like?' " Lowe said. "We're asking people to do some really big things, and we need to make sure we're not asking them to do it all at once."

So San Francisco started by asking voters for $425 million to lay the foundation for a bigger seawall. Last fall, 82% of them said yes - a huge feat in a world where shelling out this much money usually comes only after a big disaster.

Defense proved to be a feasible sell, but retreat on the other side of town took much more convincing.

At South Ocean Beach, a popular spot for big surf and bonfires, more than 275 feet could disappear by 2100. The waves once devoured more than 40 feet of bluff in one season. For years, city officials fought - even sued the state - to keep a protective rock wall.

There was Great Highway to defend, they argued, and also critical facilities underground. The city, in compliance with the Clean Water Act, had just spent close to $1 billion building infrastructure to prevent untreated sewage from overflowing into the ocean. Utility officials balked at the thought of retreat. But with each season, more beach disappeared.

It was a choice between two environmental imperatives: Preserve a popular beach or have clean water? SPUR, the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Assn., finally stepped in to referee all the city, state and federal agencies as they picked their casualties.

They had few examples to look to for guidance. Only a handful of managed retreat efforts were underway in California at that time - and each was a lesson in the cost and time it takes to give something up.

More than 200 miles south on the coastal highway, by Hearst Castle and the Piedras Blancas Light Station, Caltrans spent $57 million moving a 2.8-mile stretch of Highway 1 more than 400 feet inland. Coastal bluffs by then were eroding an average of almost 5 feet a year. Planning and approvals took almost 15 years.

Moving the roadway and three homes was a win for the public, adding 75 acres to Hearst San Simeon State Park and creating new coastal trails. The open area is now a popular stop for motorists, who marvel at the many elephant seals returning each year to mate and care for their pups.

Officials in Ventura County spent nearly two decades getting all the pieces in place to turn an eroding parking lot and collapsing bike path into a cobble beach backed by vegetated dunes. This has fended off storm surges, and the beach is now one of the most popular in the county.

And across the nation, buyout programs so far have occurred mostly after disasters and predominantly in less wealthy communities. These, too, have taken time. Two years after Hurricane Harvey, some residents in Texas are still waiting their turn. In New York, numerous neighborhoods begged for buyouts after Superstorm Sandy - but officials could afford only so many. And even with $120 million, which bought out 300 homes on Staten Island, that funding would probably amount to 10 or so homes in Malibu.

After years of deliberation, San Francisco finally agreed to take down the rock wall, remove two lanes of the coastal highway and turn the open space into a coastal trail.

Even this plan for retreat came with some compromises: A shorter, "low-profile wall" will protect the wastewater treatment facilities. Sand replenishment, on the order of 2 million cubic yards every few decades, will balance any beach loss from this wall.

Homes and personal fortunes weren't even at stake in this case, but choosing one public good versus another proved similarly fraught.

"Nobody was in charge of thinking about the big picture," said Benjamin Grant, who led SPUR's Ocean Beach Master Plan. "But if you start early, it can be considerably less painful ... than waiting for a crisis."

Officials have since convened a sea level rise task force, created an action plan, established new regional strategies. Finding the long-term answers, many now say, requires thinking beyond parcel by parcel and instead coordinating across city boundaries and looking at the entire shoreline.

"The whole region is going to need to see these trade-offs on a grand scale. It may well be that you wipe out beaches in one section of coast and preserve them on other sections of coast ... but we're ill-equipped for that," said Aaron Peskin, a San Francisco supervisor who serves on both the California Coastal Commission and San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission. "It's either planned retreat or unplanned retreat. One way or another, we'll have to give something up. ... So if we're going to do it right, shouldn't we have a sensible set of plans?"

Big-picture planning has proved possible elsewhere. In the state of Washington, leaders are pledging no overall net loss of the coast's remaining wetlands. A similar approach in California could help decide what to save and what to abandon: Destroy a beach here to protect critical infrastructure; move back elsewhere and restore a beach.

David Revell, a coastal geomorphologist who has consulted for a number of cities, said this kind of policy forces leaders to consider what sacrifices could be made versus where along the coast must be defended.

"Pick where," he said. "Just don't say everywhere."

Replenishing beaches

A race against nature

People often talk about the beach as a thing, a place, an area that doesn't move. In reality, a beach is more of a process.

Imagine a river of sand moving parallel to the shore, from Malibu to Santa Monica to Manhattan Beach, until the ocean pulls it offshore. This sand is always on the move, flowing down from mountain streams and waterways and stopping only temporarily on any specific beach.

Any human disruption to this river of sand could reveal itself elsewhere. Pacifica may be eroding so quickly in part because of all the sand dredging farther up the coast in San Francisco Bay. Many Malibu beaches have lost significant amounts of sand after the building of Pacific Coast Highway. In Santa Monica, fresh sediment rarely reaches the coast now that humans have dammed up the creeks and turned the L.A. River into a concrete channel.

Los Angeles responded to these alterations of nature with more alterations. Adding sand to the beach began as early as the 1930s in Santa Monica Bay. Breakwaters, jetties and other retention structures have also been constructed to help hold in all the sand. As a result, these iconic beaches are 150 to 500 feet wider than normal.

Beach towns like Del Mar, a tiny affluent enclave north of San Diego, have all but declared this to be their survival tactic.

Tucked among sandstone bluffs, two lagoons and the rarest pine trees in America, the picturesque town bustles every summer when the fairgrounds and horse track come to life. Prime real estate clusters around where the San Dieguito River meets the Pacific.

Dry sand here was once abundant, the beach twice as wide today. Private seawalls now protect multimillion-dollar homes that early settlers had built right on the sand. On the southern end of town, train tracks run precariously close to the edge of rapidly crumbling cliffs.

But as word got out that those in charge were considering managed retreat, the town exploded. Relocating could mean allowing the ocean to claim as many as 600 homes.

If you start retreating, residents demanded, where do you stop?

"If you let the first row of homes go, the whole area behind it floods," said Jon Corn, a resident and attorney representing dozens of homeowners in the Del Mar Beach Preservation Coalition. "And then what about the next road? And the road after that? ... At some point, everyone is going to say: 'No, we're not just going to retreat away from the ocean.'"

City leaders finally agreed and said they would keep an open mind about relocating the rail line, the fire station and other city-owned infrastructure - but took out any mention of private property. The land here is too valuable, they reasoned, and the threat of lawsuits too high. Adding sand will be the solution for now.

Terry Gaasterland, a data scientist who led the sea level task force and ended up running for office over the issue, said she's confident more studies and more time will uncover ways to coexist with the ocean and save the town.

Del Mar can afford to both protect homes and save the beach, said Gaasterland, who's now on the City Council. "We're not going to be packing our bags."

But if past sand projects are any indicator, Del Mar and its neighbors might be in for a surprise. For every jetty and breakwater that has helped keep Santa Monica and Venice wide and sandy, Dockweiler and beaches farther down the coast in turn needed their own supply of sand, which then disappeared and flowed onto beaches farther south.

Sand, although it might seem limitless, is not free. It's the most exploited and consumed natural resource in the world after fresh water. Federal agencies, states, cities and private companies across the nation are all trying to stake their claim.

And because sand is always on the move, adding more of it is anything but permanent. Erosion runs its course all the same.

This makes "beach nourishment" difficult to sustain. Adding 240,000 cubic yards of sand - the amount, for example, to make a half-mile-long beach about 100 feet wide - requires 24,000 dump trucks full of sand. Even working seven days a week, it would take more than 16 months to bring in that much sand. Depending on how fast the sand washes away, a project of this scale would need to be repeated every few years, according to reports by Gary Griggs, who has studied coastal systems across California and taught at UC Santa Cruz's Institute of Marine Sciences for more than 50 years.

In 2001, officials in San Diego County pumped about 2 million cubic yards of sand from offshore onto 12 beaches - the first large-scale attempt by California officials to add sand to disappearing beaches. It cost city, state and federal taxpayers $17.5 million.

The effort was short-lived. Most of the beaches had narrowed significantly by the following year. The extra sand, Griggs found, "was removed within a day when the first large waves of the winter arrived." A second attempt by the county - with twice as much money - yielded similar results.

These costs have also paralyzed communities along Malibu's disappearing shoreline. Broad Beach, once so wide that dunes had room to grow along the sand, now hardly lives up to its name. Building mansions on the sand also took up about 200 feet of the beach and dunes, leaving only a narrow buffer against the rising sea.

Sand was disappearing so rapidly that a rock wall was built to protect the septic system and the homes. These days, there is little beach left during high tide. The public stairs drop straight down into water.

Owners years ago agreed to pay $19 million to add sand to the beach. The project has been delayed by disputes over the source of sand and legal challenges over the costs, which keep going up. The current price tag to save this stretch of beach: $65 million.

Imperial Beach

Grappling with retreat

At the very southernmost edge of California, a world away from Malibu, the border town of Imperial Beach seems to be living on borrowed time.

One-fifth of the residents here are lower-income. High tide soaks the road every winter. Sewage spilling from Tijuana regularly shuts down the beach. Those living below sea level recall floodwaters so high in the 1980s that they had to use canoes.

Today, they board up windows and brace for storms. Surrounded by the ocean, a bay and a river, Imperial Beach is looking at losing one-third of the town if nothing is done, one official said. Hazard maps show blocks and blocks of homes that could be flooded by 2100. A beach nourishment effort seven years ago went awry because the sand grains were too coarse. Sand berms and rock walls will last only so long. Moving back seems inevitable, even if the community isn't ready to say so.

The reptilian frenzy over managed retreat has overtaken Imperial Beach, as it has in other cities. Fear overwhelms reason. Conspiracy theories and misinformation abound. Some think the mayor, an environmentalist known for his history of preserving open space, just wants to turn the town into one giant lagoon.

With the city barely able to scrap together a $20-million budget every year, others say letting go of prime real estate means abandoning the whole town.

"If you get rid of the waterfront, the municipal tax base, how do you support the city?" said City Councilman Ed Spriggs, who lives along the water and questioned managed retreat as a strategy. He points to the city's first upscale hotel, which was built in 2013 with coastal defenses, as a sign that Imperial Beach has time to survive and thrive well into the future.

As chair of the coastal cities group for the League of California Cities, Spriggs sees what's been happening across the state and calls managed retreat an ideology being pushed by extreme environmentalists with no rules or standards.

"Nobody has explained how urbanized managed retreat works, what it would look like and how it would be paid for," he said. "We need time to build a consensus. We don't even have money for ... more detailed studies on what the actual costs will be."

But time is ticking. Earlier this year, a group of scientists from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography gathered on an apartment balcony and watched in awe as the ocean devoured more than 3 feet of sand in one morning.

"When that surge came over the seawall, it was just a blanket of water. There was so much force," said Mark Merrifield, director of Scripps' Center for Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation. "It was just crazy."

His team has been studying ways to forecast floods and were watching that morning because they knew the waves would be particularly powerful. Their data had projected that this would come just ahead of a king tide - when the sun, moon and Earth are aligned closest together, creating a higher-than-high tide. They had alerted Imperial Beach, which filled more than 500 sandbags just in time and warned residents to board up their homes.

These king tides are becoming a new normal, said Merrifield, whose team hopes to fill in data gaps that could help more communities better understand their risks. Imperial Beach doesn't even track the number of times the ocean tops the seawall - crews just clean the road before most residents wake up.

Tracking the frequency of flood events, and how much it's increasing, will make these truths harder to ignore. There's no debate, he said. "Sea level rise is the heart of climate change. That's ​where all the heat is going: into the ocean."

That rising ocean, for decades, had spared California. Much of the state's coastal development took place in the years after World War II, during the less stormy period of a climate cycle known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. Favorable winds pulled warmer water offshore and the West Coast had cool, denser water that took up less volume - suppressing the rate of sea rise below the global average.

But scientists in the last decade have seen a dramatic shift: The waters off the West Coast are now much warmer; the sea is now rising faster here than elsewhere in the world.

The morning after the worst of the surge, Imperial Beach Mayor Serge Dedina parked his Prius and hopped around puddles still pooling down Seacoast Drive. Waves, still breaking over the rock barriers, spewed sand across the road. A maintenance worker sprinted toward the nearest driveway, startled by yet another rush of water.

An avid surfer, Dedina has watched this ocean obsessively his whole life. But taming the water has been all-consuming. Cleaning up just from this king tide cost Imperial Beach $16,000 and left 350 hours of calls unanswered and other work unattended to around town.

Imperial Beach can't afford more seawalls, more sand, more meetings filled with 150 people yelling at him about managed retreat, he said. The town doesn't even have a Parks Department. It just got its first real grocery store.

The city and its consultants have come up with some big ideas - but lack the political support and capital to get started. Buy out these first few row of homes along the coast, for example, and rent them at market value. Three decades of rent should be enough to recoup the costs. The city or a land trust at that time could then decide what to do with the properties.

For now, Dedina is focused on relocating some public infrastructure and building more homes and businesses further inland. He's also suing a number of oil companies in hopes of funding, arguing that they should be held responsible for the costs of coastal flooding because their emissions contribute to sea level rise.

"Ultimately, the city can't protect private property owners. We need to be upfront about that," he said. "The insurance industry or the state needs to figure that one out."

The state has taken some action but is largely still confronting this 21st century problem with decades-old laws and thinking. The California Coastal Act - the defining road map to managing the state's shoreline - did not factor in sea level rise when it was written in 1976.

"Right now, managed retreat is just a slogan. It needs to become a reality where we actually talk about: How are we going to actually manage the retreat?" - Phil King, beach economist

Lawmakers are aware of the problem, and they have told cities they must start addressing climate adaptation in their planning. But Sacramento has otherwise shied away from issuing mandatory directions. The California Coastal Commission, through modest grants and some general guidance, has been encouraging local officials to consider "everything in the toolkit, including managed retreat," when updating city policies.

Phil King, an economist and professor at San Francisco State University who has consulted for a number of beach cities, said that what Californians need is a clear statewide plan. Managed retreat sounds scary, but it just means retreating with everyone knowing what the rules are, he said. Will there be a public subsidy, how is it going to be applied, who's going to get it, and does everyone think it's fair?

Bankruptcy law could be a model, he said, because it makes a messy process as orderly as possible. Managed retreat is similar: Dealing with a loss and making sure that everyone absorbs the loss in the most reasonable, equitable way.

"Right now, managed retreat is just a slogan. It needs to become a reality where we actually talk about: How are we going to actually manage the retreat?" said King, whose studies showed that retreat does end up penciling out for many communities as the most cost-effective solution in the long run. "If we start to think about managed retreat today, we can avoid the problems that people had with the fires in Paradise, where all of a sudden everything just disappears."

Imperial Beach's buyback-and-rent proposal is one idea, he said. And if a seawall has to exist in the short term to protect private property or infrastructure, perhaps a greater authority like the State Lands Commission could charge rent for it. These funds could then be used toward other efforts to manage and preserve the coastline.

Much of California's climate change efforts have centered on reducing carbon emissions and the rate of global warming, rather than dealing with how to live with these increasing hazards, said Heather Cooley, research director of the Pacific Institute, an Oakland think tank that has studied the economic impact of sea level rise.

"We need to do both," she said. "We're already locked into a certain amount of climate change, and we need to adapt to the effects that we know we're going to be experiencing."

A few bills under consideration now in Sacramento acknowledge these problems - appointing a chief climate resilience officer, calling for a plan to reuse dredged sand for coastal restoration projects, creating an inventory of the state's wetlands and a special fund for "coastal adaptation, access and resilience" - but none tackles managed retreat head-on.

"Living shorelines," which substitute seawalls with vegetation that could serve both as protection and public open space, has been gaining popularity as a less politically fraught approach. Some lawmakers see this as a way to buy more time as the backlash over relocation continues.

The fear of political suicide should not paralyze those in power from studying the how, where and why of managed retreat, said Katharine Mach, a senior research scientist at Stanford who has helped lead national and global climate change assessments.

In the same way state leaders paved the way on other environmental issues, what California does now on managed retreat could help set some standards for others across the country, she said.

Jack Ainsworth, executive director of the Coastal Commission, points to the work his agency has done within its legal power.

Commissioners are tough on any new construction that gets in the way of the rising sea. They passed a resolution last year pledging that seawalls would be permitted only if absolutely necessary. They're butting heads with homeowners and real estate groups, drafting a new guidance document for cities to use to balance preserving coastal resources and protecting homes.

"People have to understand that this is a crisis." - Jack Ainsworth, California Coastal Commission executive director

Beyond that, he said, the commission is stuck. Only lawmakers can establish new disclosure laws. Only state, city and federal leaders can determine how much money they are willing to spend to come up with a clear plan for the future, and ultimately, how to pay for the retreat where necessary.

Across the state, and the nation, many people know the sea is coming and exactly what's at risk - but no one seems ready to drop that first domino and rattle the status quo. "This conspiracy of silence," as one economist from the Union of Concerned Scientists publicly called it, can go on for only so long. Society as a whole saves $6 in avoided costs for every $1 spent to acquire or demolish flood-prone buildings before disaster hits, Ainsworth said.

When staff is short or pressure comes from those wealthy enough to fight back in perpetuity, the Coastal Commission has in the past pushed tough issues down the road. But Ainsworth said California cannot afford that with sea level rise.

"People have to understand," he said, "that this is a crisis."

Gleason Beach

A lost coast

A few winding turns past Bodega Bay, about an hour north of San Francisco, relentless waves pound against a stretch of coastline whose fate has been paralyzed by political inaction.

Once referred to as Malibu North, Gleason Beach now feels more like the edge of the world - a window into the future if California does not change course. Nine homes perch on crumbling cliffs that drop 30 some feet onto a beach that appears only during low tide. A pile of seawalls, smashed into pieces, clutters the shore.

Rebar and bits of concrete poke out here and there - a graveyard of more than 10 other homes that once also faced the sea. Highway 1, hanging inches from the edge, had to shut one traffic lane this year.

"Behold your highway tax dollars falling into the ocean," locals say. But efforts to move 0.6 miles of this critical road about 400 feet inland have taken more than a decade. Residents, environmentalists, and state, county and transportation officials are still arguing over the details.

Mary Cook remembers moving into a seaside cottage from the 1930s. Photos back then showed the house with a 20-foot yard. Stairs led down to the beach.

Her husband, an architect, made a few additions to their home as the bluff continued to erode about a foot a year. They put up a seawall. But then in the winter of 1997, one big storm took out the entire cliffside. Officials came in and declared an emergency.

When Cook opened her sliding door, "there was nothing," she said. "You looked straight down into the ocean."

Life for her neighbors eventually carried on. The storm ebbed from memory. The sun re-emerged. The Cooks, however, were tired of buying time.

They jacked their home up from its foundation, called in a truck and moved to higher ground.

Credits: Production by Vanessa Martínez and Priya Krishnakumar.

More from the Los Angeles Times

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The California coast is disappearing under the rising sea. Our choices are grim

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Leer en español The California coast grew and prospered during a remarkable moment in history when the sea was at its tamest. But the mighty Pacific, unbeknownst to all, was nearing its final years of a calm but unusual cycle that had lulled dreaming settlers into a false sense of endless summer.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Government surveys collect a wide range of information about the population of the United States that contain useful insights about Americans' economic status. Three examples are the American Community Survey (ACS), the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement (ASEC), and the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF). The ACS and the ASEC are conducted annually by the Census Bureau, while the SCF is conducted once every three years by the Federal Reserve. Below are some examples of measures of income and wealth from those surveys.

Income Levels Vary Across Geography, Race, and Gender

The ASEC is the primary source for income data at the national level. According to the ASEC, median household income for 2017 was $61,372 - an increase of 1.8 percent from the previous year, after adjusting for inflation. Looking at data for national averages, however, may mask important differences by region, race, level of education, or other categories.

The table below shows that median income varies by region - for example, it is higher for households in the Northeast and West than it is for those in the Midwest and South.

The Northeast and West have higher median household incomes than the Midwest and South

SOURCE: United States Census Bureau, Income and Poverty in the United States: 2017, September 2018. Compiled by PGPF.

The table below shows median household income data for selected states. According to the ACS, in 2016, the District of Columbia, Maryland, and New Jersey had the highest median household incomes. West Virginia, Mississippi, and Arkansas had the lowest median household incomes. Such figures do not reflect differences in the cost of living between regions.

Median household incomes vary widely by state

SOURCE: United States Census Bureau, Household Income: 2017, September 2018. Compiled by PGPF.

NOTE: The states are ranked by point estimate in 2017. In some cases, the differences between point estimates are not statistically significant.

Income also varies by race and ethnicity. The ASEC data below shows median household income grouped by the race and ethnicity of the head of household. In 2017, households whose head was classified as Asian or White had median incomes that were higher than the national median, while households headed by people classified as Black or Hispanic had median incomes that were lower than the national median.

In 2017, median household income varied considerably by race and ethnicity

SOURCE: United States Census Bureau, Income and Poverty in the United States: 2017, September 2018. Compiled by PGPF.

The table below shows median household income, grouped by educational attainment of the household head. Households led by an individual with a bachelor's degree or above have incomes that are considerably higher than the national median. Households led by an individual with less than a high school diploma earn less than half of the national median.

Median household income varies based on the educational attainment of the household head

SOURCE: United States Census Bureau, Income and Poverty in the United States: 2017, September 2018 and Current Population Survey: Annual Social and Economic Supplement, September 2018. Compiled by PGPF.

It is possible to analyze income data based on a combination of demographics. For example, the table below compares the median earnings for male and female full-time, year-round workers at different levels of education. In 2017, the median earnings for full-time, year-round male workers was higher than the median earnings for full-time, year-round female workers, given the same level of educational attainment.

Full-time male workers earn more than full-time female workers at all levels of educational attainment

SOURCE: United States Census Bureau, Current Population Survey: Annual Social and Economic Supplement, September 2018. Compiled by PGPF.

Wealth is an Important Component of Americans' Economic Status

When it comes to describing the financial status of Americans, income doesn't tell the whole story. Income measures the flow of money and assets during a given period of time. Wealth measures the stock of money and assets accumulated as of a certain point in time. A household with an income of $100,000 that saves $5,000 each year would have $25,000 of additional wealth at the end of five years.

The SCF measures wealth by using a concept called net worth. Net worth is the difference between a household's assets and its debt. For example, if a household has $10,000 in its checking account, $40,000 of student debt, and $5,000 of credit card debt, then it has a net worth of -$35,000.

The table below shows median net worth in 2016 by race and education. (This data is updated once every three years; the next update will contain data for 2019, therefore no 2017 update was possible.) It illustrates how net worth varies by race, even when controlling for education level.

Household net worth varies by race

SOURCE: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, 2016 Survey of Consumer Finances, September 2017. Compiled by PGPF.

The ASEC, ACS, and SCF contain data for many more demographic categories, such as occupation, family structure, marital status, and number of children. Such data highlight variations among populations in the United States and can help lawmakers evaluate policies to address such differences.
Related: CBO: Income Inequality Continues to Rise
Want analysis to help you understand the latest fiscal news? Sign up for our bimonthly email newsletter.

Image credit: IP Galanternik D.U.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Income and Wealth in the United States: An Overview of the Latest Data

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Government surveys collect a wide range of information about the population of the United States that contain useful insights about Americans' economic status. Three examples are the American Community Survey (ACS), the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement (ASEC), and the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Tesla makes a battery-powered product called a Powerwall that pairs with solar panels to meet your home energy needs. This "must-have item for any truly green home" goes for over five thousand dollars. Most people can't afford that up front, so even though solar may save money and help the planet in the long run, use of the Powerwall is restricted to people with cash to burn.

If your understanding of sustainable consumption were limited to just this example, you'd come away thinking that rich people must be a much more eco-friendly bunch than poor people. But you'd be missing the forest for the trees. While the wealthy have an ever more dazzling array of green consumer products at their fingertips, the impact of those gadgets is nothing compared to the overall ecological destruction wrought by luxury consumption habits.

A new paper called "Measuring the Ecological Impact of the Wealthy: Excessive Consumption, Ecological Disorganization, Green Crime, and Justice," published by researchers Michael J. Lynch, Michael A. Long, Paul B. Stretesky, and Kimberly L. Barrett, takes a long hard look at the role of the rich's consumption habits in destabilizing the climate.

The researchers contend that when a person has vastly more money than they need to live, "acquiring property and consuming excessively become marks of distinction, and to earn those marks, the leisure class must consume." This leads the rich to buy, build, and operate things like superyachts, super homes, luxury cars, and private jets. It would take an awful lot of Powerwalls to offset the damage done by the proliferation of these luxury consumables.

The researchers estimate that there are about three hundred superyachts in operation around the world. A person has to have individual wealth upward of $30 million in order to afford even the smallest one; the upper price is close to $1 billion. These things guzzle oil and spew pollution. Tally it up, and the world's superyacht fleet uses over thirty-two million gallons of oil and produces 627 million pounds of carbon dioxide emissions a year - all of it for the personal enjoyment of the extremely rich. The world's superyachts consume and pollute more than entire nations.

Super homes, which the researchers define as homes greater than twenty-five thousand square feet, are similarly devastating for the environment. The average square footage of these homes is closer to forty thousand, and their average price is just under $28 million. The researchers couldn't calculate the entire ecological footprint of these homes, so they just stuck with the impacts of wood sourcing, assuming it was all of standard wood stock (of course, many luxury homes use hard-to-source exotic materials, too).

The average home, they concluded, requires harvesting twenty trees, while a super home requires 380 trees. An average home results in 74,880 pounds of carbon sequestration loss, while a super home results in a loss of 1,422,720 pounds. The carbon footprint of super homes is astronomical - all so the rich can have some extra space to roam around in. The fact that a few of them now boast Powerwalls hardly puts the mind at ease.

Tesla doesn't just make the Powerwall; it also, of course, makes luxury electric cars. But rich people have been buying expensive cars since long before Tesla's rollout, and while a pricey electric car is becoming something of a status symbol in select circles, so far the vast majority of the wealthy are sticking with gasoline cars: as long as it costs a fortune and looks like it, sustainability is of little importance. These cars come with all sorts of gadgets and features, far beyond what is necessary for driving, and they tend to be larger than average cars. Their size and their frequent use of uncommon materials makes them far less sustainable to build, and their carbon footprints are larger, too.

The researchers focused solely on the efficiency of luxury cars, comparing them to popular cars that sell for a fraction of the price. They found that the latter category were over 60 percent more fuel efficient than luxury vehicles. "Compared to top 10 selling vehicles," the researchers concluded, "a luxury vehicle produces, on average, 373.98 more pounds of CO2 emissions per 1,000 miles traveled."

High-income groups also drive twice as many miles annually as low-income groups. The rich could certainly get by with a Hyundai Sonata or a Nissan Altima, but their desire to be seen driving a Jaguar or a Bentley means more pollution for everyone.

And, finally, there are private jets. There are only about fifteen thousand of them registered in the United States. The entire fleet is in operation a total of 17 million hours per year, burning roughly 345 gallons an hour. Jet fuel produces twenty-one pounds of carbon emissions per gallon. That means that the carbon footprint of the United States' private jet fleet is about fifty-six tons per year. The entire nation of Burundi produces less than half the carbon emissions than the US elite does with its private jets alone - to say nothing of their luxury cars, their super homes, and their superyachts.

These rich people belong to the capitalist class, which means that together they own the vast majority of the world's productive assets. Their luxury consumption habits constitute only a fraction of their contribution to the destabilization of the planet. They own mines and factories and fossil fuel companies, and banks that invest in harmful extractive practices, and shipping operations that guzzle more fuel than they could ever dream as individuals. Their consumption habits are only the tip of the iceberg.

Still, it's astonishing that they can get away with all this conspicuous consumption without anyone batting an eyelash. As the seas rise, the temperatures soar, and the weather becomes more erratic and violent, these same elites will migrate to safe places - or, if worse comes to worst, retreat to doomsday bunkers - and be spared the worst effects of the chaos they've sown.

At the very least, the researchers conclude, society should develop policies to curb the conspicuous consumption of the rich. Perhaps building a home so big it requires the razing of a small forest should be considered a form of "green crime."

In the end, however, there will be no true resolution to the climate crisis without a fundamental alteration in the economy. As long as we produce for profit - not for public well-being and the common good - the earth will be a casualty in the pursuit of money, and the poor will suffer.

"As a result of the inherent contradiction between capitalism and nature," observed the researchers in a prior publication, "the capitalist system must be seen as a crime against nature." And for this crime, the only real justice is socialism.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Rich Are Committing Crimes Against Nature

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Tesla makes a battery-powered product called a Powerwall that pairs with solar panels to meet your home energy needs. This "must-have item for any truly green home" goes for over five thousand dollars. Most people can't afford that up front, so even though solar may save money and help the planet in the long run, use of the Powerwall is restricted to people with cash to burn.

# data[].attributes.body
Moseley Part 2

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
There are three fundamental issues that lie at the heart of our current economic malaise: the first is unearned income and wealth from land rent, the second is the creation of money by privately owned banks, and the third is rent-seeking that is used to juice profits out of intellectual property through copyright and patents.

But the political class, supported by lobbying, continues to avoid addressing these issues. So monopolies grow larger and larger, and as they do, more and more people are excluded from the economy.

To really address the root causes, why don't we start by calling out the rentier economy as a structural issue that no progressive society can actually afford?

Host Ross Ashcroft is joined by economist, author and co-founder of Basic Income Earth Network, Professor Guy Standing to discuss rentier capitalism and reclaiming the commons.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Renegade Inc: Guy Standing - Rentier Britain, All the rent goes to the 1% | Brave New Europe

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
There are three fundamental issues that lie at the heart of our current economic malaise: the first is unearned income and wealth from land rent, the second is the creation of money by privately owned banks, and the third is rent-seeking that is used to juice profits out of intellectual property through copyright and patents.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
President Trump has claimed his Democratic 2020 rivals are socialists, despite the fact that Bernie Sanders is the only self-described democratic socialist. As the leftist political theory continues to come up in the presidential race, voters' views of socialism could play a significant role in determining who occupies the White House. But college students' opinions greatly differ depending on their major.

A new survey of 10,590 undergraduates found that 4 in 10 (39%) have a favorable view of socialism, an equal number (39%) have an unfavorable impression of the economic system, and 18% report that they are unsure of their opinion. A recent Gallup poll found that an increasing number of Americans have a positive view of socialism. More than 4 in 10 Americans (43%) believe socialism would be a good thing for the country, while only 25% said this in 1942.

"Capitalism is a failure of a system," an Appalachian State student says. "If you weren't born rich, you [aren't] gonna be rich, so we should be focusing on helping our neighbors." They added that students in favor of capitalism were defending "a system designed to keep them poor and exhausted."

Students with certain majors are far more likely than their peers to approve of socialism. Philosophy majors, in particular, have a positive view of socialism. Nearly 8 in 10 (78%) say they view the economic system favorably, followed by 64% of anthropology majors, and 58% of both English and international relations majors. Accounting and finance majors are least likely to view socialism positively (20% and 22% respectively).

The Majors Most and Least Likely to Favor Socialism

Do you have a favorable or unfavorable opinion of socialism?

When it comes to voting for a candidate who supports socialism, only 12% of students say they would be enthusiastic about a candidate describing themselves as socialist. Three in 10 (30%) say they would be comfortable with a socialist candidate, 32% say they would have some reservations, and 22% say they would be very uncomfortable supporting such a candidate.

To receive regular updates about this study, as well as other key college student insights, sign up here.

__________________________

Methodology: This survey was designed and conducted by College Pulse. Interviews were conducted among a sample of 10,590 full-time and part-time students attending four-year colleges or universities in the U.S. who are part of College Pulse's American College Student Panel.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
8 in 10 Philosophy Majors Favor Socialism | College Pulse

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
President Trump has claimed his Democratic 2020 rivals are socialists, despite the fact that Bernie Sanders is the only self-described democratic socialist. As the leftist political theory continues to come up in the presidential race, voters' views of socialism could play a significant role in determining who occupies the White House.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Who receives high status in society? Cultures can vary. We may assign high status to the brave warrior, to the gifted athlete, to the talented artist, to the holy priest, to the martyr, to the politician, to the craftsman, or to the intellectual. Because relative status is a zero-sum game, the more status points we assign to merchants, bankers, and entrepreneurs, the less status points are available for other categories.

There is much more. This essay was stimulated by one of the questions Erik Torenberg sent me to prepare for our podcast.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Who receives high status in society? Cultures can vary. We may assign high status to the brave warrior, to the gifted athlete, to the talented artist, to the holy priest, to the martyr, to the politician, to the craftsman, or to the intellectual.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In ever more areas of life, algorithms are coming to substitute for judgment exercised by identifiable human beings who can be held to account. The rationale offered is that automated decision-making will be more reliable. But a further attraction is that it serves to insulate various forms of power from popular pressures.

Our readiness to acquiesce in the conceit of authorless control is surely due in part to our ideal of procedural fairness, which demands that individual discretion exercised by those in power should be replaced with rules whenever possible, because authority will inevitably be abused. This is the original core of liberalism, dating from the English Revolution.

Mechanized judgment resembles liberal proceduralism. It relies on our habit of deference to rules, and our suspicion of visible, personified authority. But its effect is to erode precisely those procedural liberties that are the great accomplishment of the liberal tradition, and to place authority beyond scrutiny. I mean "authority" in the broadest sense, including our interactions with outsized commercial entities that play a quasi-governmental role in our lives. That is the first problem. A second problem is that decisions made by algorithm are often not explainable, even by those who wrote the algorithm, and for that reason cannot win rational assent. This is the more fundamental problem posed by mechanized decision-making, as it touches on the basis of political legitimacy in any liberal regime.

I hope that what follows can help explain why so many people feel angry, put-upon, and powerless. And why so many, in expressing their anger, refer to something called "the establishment," that shadowy and pervasive entity. In this essay I will be critiquing both algorithmic governance and (more controversially) the tenets of progressive governance that make these digital innovations attractive to managers, bureaucrats, and visionaries. What is at stake is the qualitative character of institutional authority-how we experience it.

In The Black Box Society: The Hidden Algorithms That Control Money and Information, University of Maryland law professor Frank Pasquale elaborates in great detail what others have called "platform capitalism," emphasizing its one-way mirror quality. Increasingly, every aspect of our lives-our movements through space, our patterns of consumption, our affiliations, our intellectual habits and political leanings, our linguistic patterns, our susceptibility to various kinds of pitches, our readiness to cave in minor disputes, our sexual predilections and ready inferences about the state of our marriage-are laid bare as data to be collected by companies who, for their own part, guard with military-grade secrecy the algorithms by which they use this information to determine our standing in the reputational economy. The classic stories that have been with us for decades, of someone trying to correct an error made by one of the credit rating agencies and finding that the process is utterly opaque and the agencies unaccountable, give us some indication of the kind of world that is being constructed for us.

What Was Self-Government?

"Children in their games are wont to submit to rules which they have themselves established, and to punish misdemeanors which they have themselves defined." Thus did Tocqueville marvel at Americans' habit of self-government, and the temperament it both required and encouraged from a young age. "The same spirit," he said, "pervades every act of social life."

Writing recently in the Atlantic, Yoni Appelbaum notes the sheer bulk of voluntary associations that once took up the hours and days of Americans, from labor unions and trade associations to mutual insurers, fraternal organizations, and volunteer fire departments. Many of these "mirrored the federal government in form: Local chapters elected representatives to state-level gatherings, which sent delegates to national assemblies. . . . Executive officers were accountable to legislative assemblies; independent judiciaries ensured that both complied with rules." Toward the end of the twentieth century, however, this way of life more or less collapsed, as Robert Putnam documented in Bowling Alone. We still have voluntary associations, but they are now typically run by salaried professionals, not the members themselves, Appelbaum points out. This is part of the broader shift toward what has been called "managerialism."

I believe these developments have prepared us to accept a further abstraction of institutional decision-making-as something having little to do with ourselves, and with human judgment as we know it firsthand. Another development that paved the way for our acceptance of algorithmic governance was the transfer of power out of representative bodies into administrative agencies. Let us take a glance at this before turning to things digital.

Administration versus Politics

We often hear about a growing "administrative state" (usually from conservative commentators) and are given to understand that it is something we ought to worry about. But why? Doesn't it consist simply of the stuff all those agencies of the government must do in order to discharge their duties? And speaking of government agencies, what are they-part of the executive branch? Yes they are, but a bit of confusion is natural, as this is a hazy area of governance.

In The Administrative Threat, Columbia law professor Philip Hamburger writes that, in contrast to executive power proper, "administrative power involves not just force but legal obligation." This is an important distinction, and in the blurring of it lies great mischief against the Constitution, which invested "the power to bind-that is, to create legal obligation" not in the executive branch but in Congress and in the courts. Administrative power "thereby sidesteps most of the Constitution's procedural freedoms." It is fundamentally an "evasion of governance through law."

Provocatively, Hamburger draws a close parallel with the mechanisms of prerogative (such as the notorious Star Chamber) by which King James I of England consolidated "absolute" power-not infinite power, but power exercised through extralegal means:

Ever tempted to exert more power with less effort, rulers are rarely content to govern merely through the law, and in their restless desire to escape its pathways, many of them try to work through other mechanisms. These other modes of binding subjects are modes of absolute power, and once one understands this, it is not altogether surprising that absolute power is a recurring problem and that American administrative power revives it.

The "less effort" bit is just as important for understanding this formula as the "more power" bit. The relevant effort is that of persuading others, the stuff of democratic politics. The "restless desire to escape" the inconvenience of law is one that progressives are especially prone to, in their aspiration to transform society: merely extant majorities of opinion, and the legislative possibilities that are circumscribed by them, typically inspire not deference but impatience. Conservatives have their own vanguardist enthusiasms that rely on centralized and largely unaccountable power, but in their case this power is generally not located in executive agencies.

I am not competent to say if Hamburger is right in his characterization of administrative power as extralegal (Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule says no), but in any case he raises questions that are within the realm of conventional political dispute and within the competence of constitutional scholars to grapple with. By contrast, the rush to install forms of extralegal power not in executive agencies, but in the algorithms that increasingly govern wide swaths of life, pushes the issue of political legitimacy into entirely new territory.

More Power with Less Effort

"Technology" is a slippery term. We don't use it to name a toothbrush or a screwdriver, or even things like capacitors and diodes. Rather, use of the word usually indicates that a speaker is referring to a tool or an underlying operation that he does not understand (or does not wish to explain). Essentially, we use it to mean "magic." In this obscurity lies great opportunity to "exert more power with less effort," to use Hamburger's formula.

To grasp the affinities between administrative governance and algorithmic governance, one must first get over that intellectually debilitating article of libertarian faith, namely that "the government" poses the only real threat to liberty. For what does Silicon Valley represent, if not a locus of quasi-governmental power untouched by either the democratic process or by those hard-won procedural liberties that are meant to secure us against abuses by the (actual, elected) government? If the governmental quality of rule by algorithms remains obscure to us, that is because we actively welcome it into our own lives under the rubric of convenience, the myth of free services, and ersatz forms of human connection-the new opiates of the masses.

To characterize this as the operation of "the free market" (as its spokespersons do) requires a display of intellectual agility that might be admirable if otherwise employed. The reality is that what has emerged is a new form of monopoly power made possible by the "network effect" of those platforms through which everyone must pass to conduct the business of life. These firms sit at informational bottlenecks, collecting data and then renting it out, whether for the purpose of targeted ads or for modeling the electoral success of a political platform. Mark Zuckerberg has said frankly that "In a lot of ways Facebook is more like a government than a traditional company. . . . We have this large community of people, and more than other technology companies we're really setting policies."

It was early innovations that allowed the platform firms to take up their positions. But it is this positioning, and control of the data it allows them to gather, that accounts for the unprecedented rents they are able to collect. If those profits measure anything at all, it is the reach of a metastasizing grid of surveillance and social control. As Pasquale emphasizes, it is this grid's basic lack of intelligibility that renders it politically unaccountable. Yet political accountability is the very essence of representative government. Whatever this new form of governance might be called, it is certainly not that.

Explainability and Legitimacy

This intelligibility deficit cannot be overcome simply through goodwill, as the logic by which an algorithm reaches its conclusions is usually opaque even to those who wrote the algorithm, due to its sheer complexity. In "machine learning," an array of variables are fed into deeply layered "neural nets" that simulate the fire/don't fire synaptic connections of an animal brain. Vast amounts of data are used in a massively iterated (and, in some versions, unsupervised) training regimen. Because the strength of connections between logical nodes within layers and between layers is highly plastic, just like neural pathways, the machine gets trained by trial and error and is able to arrive at something resembling knowledge of the world. That is, it forms associations that correspond to regularities in the world.

As with humans, these correspondences are imperfect. The difference is that human beings are able to give an account of their reasoning. Now, we need to be careful here. Our cognition emerges from lower-level biological processes that are utterly inaccessible to us. Further, human beings confabulate, reach for rationalizations that obscure more than they reveal, are subject to self-deception, etc. All this we know. But giving an account is an indispensable element of democratic politics. Further, it is not only legislative bodies that observe this scruple.

When a court issues a decision, the judge writes an opinion, typically running to many pages, in which he explains his reasoning. He grounds the decision in law, precedent, common sense, and principles that he feels obliged to articulate and defend. This is what transforms the decision from mere fiat into something that is politically legitimate, capable of securing the assent of a free people. It constitutes the difference between simple power and authority. One distinguishing feature of a modern, liberal society is that authority is supposed to have this rational quality to it-rather than appealing to, say, a special talent for priestly divination. This is our Enlightenment inheritance.

You see the problem, then. Institutional power that fails to secure its own legitimacy becomes untenable. If that legitimacy cannot be grounded in our shared rationality, based on reasons that can be articulated, interrogated, and defended, it will surely be claimed on some other basis. What this will be is already coming into view, and it bears a striking resemblance to priestly divination: the inscrutable arcana of data science, by which a new clerisy peers into a hidden layer of reality that is revealed only by a self-taught AI program-the logic of which is beyond human knowing.

For the past several years it has been common to hear establishmentarian intellectuals lament "populism" as a rejection of Enlightenment ideals. But we could just as well say that populism is a re-assertion of democracy, and of the Enlightenment principles that underlie it, against priestly authority. Our politics have become at bottom an epistemic quarrel, and it is not all clear to me that the well‑capitalized, institutional voices in this quarrel have the firmer ground to stand on in claiming the mantle of legitimacy- if we want to continue to insist that legitimacy rests on reasonableness and argument.

Alternatively, we may accept technocratic competence as a legitimate claim to rule, even if it is inscrutable. But then we are in a position of trust. This would be to move away from the originating insight of liberalism: power corrupts. Such a move toward trust seems unlikely, however, given that people are waking up to the business logic that often stands behind the promise of technocratic competence and good will.

Surveillance Capitalism

In her landmark 2019 book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff parses what is really a new form of political economy, bearing little resemblance to capitalism as we have known it. The cynic's dictum for explaining internet economics-"if you don't know what the product is, you're the product"-turns out to be incorrect. What we are, Zuboff shows, is a source of raw material that she calls "behavioral surplus." Our behavior becomes the basis for a product-predictions about our future behavior-which are then offered on a behavioral futures market. The customers of the platform firms are those who purchase these prediction products, as a means to influence our behavior. The more you know of some-one's predilections, the more highly elaborated, fine-grained, and successful your efforts to manipulate him will be. The raw material on which the whole apparatus runs is knowledge acquired through surveillance. Competition for behavioral surplus is such that this surveillance must reach ever deeper, and bring every hidden place into the light.

At this point, it becomes instructive to bring in a theory of the state, and see if it can illuminate what is going on. For this purpose, James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State, published in 1998, is useful. He traces the development of the modern state as a process of rendering the lives of its inhabitants more "legible." The premodern state was in many respects blind; it "knew precious little about its subjects, their wealth, their landholdings and yields, their location, their very identity. It lacked anything like a detailed 'map' of its terrain and its people." This lack of a synoptic view put real limits on the aspiration for centralized control; the state's "interventions were often crude and self-defeating." And contrariwise, the rise of a more synoptic administrative apparatus made possible various utopian schemes for the wholesale remaking of society.

Google is taking its project for legibility to the streets, quite literally, in its project to build a model city within Toronto in which everything will be surveilled. Sensors will be embedded throughout the physical plant to capture the resident's activities, then to be massaged by cutting-edge data science. The hope, clearly, is to build a deep, proprietary social science. Such a science could lead to real improvements in urban planning, for example, by being able to predict demand for heat and electricity, manage the allocation of traffic capacity, and automate waste disposal. But note that intellectual property rights over the data collected are key to the whole concept; without them there is no business rationale. With those rights secure, "smart cities" are the next trillion-dollar frontier for big tech.

Writing in Tablet, Jacob Siegel points out that "democratic governments think they can hire out for the basic service they're supposed to provide, effectively subcontracting the day to day functions of running a city and providing municipal services. Well, they're right, they can, but of course they'll be advertising why they're not really necessary and in the long run putting themselves out of a job." There is real attraction to having the optimizers of Silicon Valley take things over, given the frequent dysfunction of democratic government. Quite reasonably, many of us would be willing to give up "some democracy for a bit of benign authoritarianism, if it only made the damn trains run on time. The tradeoff comes in the loss of power over the institutions we have to live inside." The issue, then, is sovereignty.

As Scott points out in Seeing Like a State, the models of society that can be constructed out of data, however synoptic, are necessarily radical simplifications. There is no quantitative model that can capture the multivalent richness of neighborhood life as described by Jane Jacobs, for example, in her classic urban ethnography of New York. The mischief of grand schemes for progress lies in the fact that, even in the absence of totalitarian aspirations, the logic of metrics and rationalization carries with it an imperative to remake the world, in such a way as to make its thin, formal descriptions true. The gap between the model and reality has to be narrowed. This effort may need to reach quite deep, beyond the arrangement of infrastructure to touch on considerations of political anthropology. The model demands, and helps bring into being, a certain kind of subject. And sure enough, in our nascent era of Big Data social engineering, we see a craze for self-quantification, the voluntary pursuit of a kind of self-legibility that is expressed in the same idiom as technocratic social control and demands the same sort of thin, schematic self-objectifications.

If we take a long historical view, we have to concede that a regime can be viewed by its citizens as legitimate without being based on democratic representation. Europe's absolutist monarchies of the seventeenth century managed it, for a spell. The regime that is being imagined for us now by venture capital would not be democratic. But it emphatically would be "woke," if we can extrapolate from the current constellation of forces.

And this brings us to the issue of political correctness. It is a topic we are all fatigued with, I know. But I suggest we try to understand the rise of algorithmic governance in tandem with the rise of woke capital, as there appears to be some symbiotic affinity between them. The least one can say is that, taken together, they provide a good diagnostic lens that can help bring into focus the authoritarian turn of American society, and the increasingly shaky claim of our institutions to democratic legitimacy.

The Bureaucratic Logic of Political Correctness

One reason why algorithms have become attractive to elites is that they can be used to install the automated enforcement of cutting‑edge social norms. In the last few months there have been some news items along these lines: Zuckerberg assured Congress that Facebook is developing AI that will detect and delete what progressives like to call "hate speech." You don't have to be a free speech absolutist to recognize how tendentiously that label often gets applied, and be concerned accordingly. The New York Times ran a story about new software being pitched in Hollywood that will determine if a script has "equitable gender roles." The author of a forthcoming French book on artificial intelligence, herself an AI researcher, told me that she got a pitch recently from a start-up "whose aim was 'to report workplace harassment and discrimination without talking to a human.' They claim to be able to 'use scientific memory and interview techniques to capture secure records of highly emotional events.'"

Presumably a scientifically "secure record" here means a description of some emotionally charged event that is shorn of ambiguity, and thereby tailored to the need of the system for clean inputs. A schematic description of inherently messy experience saves us the difficult, humanizing effort of interpretation and introspection, so we may be relieved to take up the flattened understanding that is offered us by the legibility-mongers.

Locating the authority of evolving social norms in a computer will serve to provide a sheen of objectivity, such that any reluctance to embrace newly announced norms appears, not as dissent, but as something irrational-as a psychological defect that requires some kind of therapeutic intervention. So the effect will be to gather yet more power to what Michel Foucault called "the minor civil servants of moral orthopedics." (Note that Harvard University has over fifty Title IX administrators on staff.) And there will be no satisfying this beast, because it isn't in fact "social norms" that will be enforced (that term suggests something settled and agreed-upon); rather it will be a state of permanent revolution in social norms. Whatever else it is, wokeness is a competitive status game played in the institutions that serve as gatekeepers of the meritocracy. The flanking maneuvers of institutional actors against one another, and the competition among victim groups for relative standing on the intersectional totem pole, make the bounds of acceptable opinion highly unstable. This very unsettledness, quite apart from the specific content of the norm of the month, makes for pliable subjects of power: one is not allowed to develop confidence in the rightness of one's own judgments.

To be always off-balance in this way is to be more administratable. A world-renowned historian, a real intellectual giant of the "old Left," told me that once a year he is required to take an online, multiple-choice test administered by his university's HR department, which looks for the proper responses to various office situations. It seems clear that there is a symbiotic relationship between administration and political correctness, yet it is difficult to say which is the senior partner in the alliance. The bloated and ever-growing layer of administrators-the deans of inclusion, providers of workshops for student orientation, diversity officers, and whatnot-feeds on conflict, using episodes of trouble to start new initiatives.

But what does any of this have to do with the appeal of algorithms to managers and administrators? If we follow through on the suspicion that, in its black-box quality, "technology" is simply administration by other means, a few observations can be made.

First, in the spirit of Václav Havel we might entertain the idea that the institutional workings of political correctness need to be shrouded in peremptory and opaque administrative mechanisms because its power lies precisely in the gap between what people actually think and what one is expected to say. It is in this gap that one has the experience of humiliation, of staying silent, and that is how power is exercised.

But if we put it this way, what we are really saying is not that PC needs administrative enforcement but rather the reverse: the expanding empire of bureaucrats needs PC. The conflicts created by identity politics become occasions to extend administrative authority into previously autonomous domains of activity. This would be to take a more Marxian line, treating PC as "superstructure" that serves mainly to grease the wheels for the interests of a distinct class-not of capitalists, but of managers.

The incentive to technologize the whole drama enters thus: managers are answerable (sometimes legally) for the conflict that they also feed on. In a corporate setting, especially, some kind of ass‑covering becomes necessary. Judgments made by an algorithm (ideally one supplied by a third-party vendor) are ones that nobody has to take responsibility for. The more contentious the social and political landscape, the bigger the institutional taste for automated decision-making is likely to be.

Political correctness is a regime of institutionalized insecurity, both moral and material. Seemingly solid careers are subject to sudden reversal, along with one's status as a decent person. Contrast such a feeling of being precarious with the educative effect of voluntary associations and collaborative rule-making, as marveled at by Tocqueville. Americans' practice of self-government once gave rise to a legitimate pride-the pride of being a grown-up in a free society. One thing it means to be a grown-up is that you are willing to subordinate your own interests to the common good at crucial junctures. The embrace of artificial intelligence by institutions, as a way of managing social conflict, is likely to further erode that adult spirit of self-government, and contribute to the festering sense that our institutions are illegitimate.

Of all the platform firms, Google is singular. Its near-monopoly on search (around 90 percent) puts it in a position to steer thought. And increasingly, it avows the steering of thought as its unique responsibility. Famously founded on the principle "Don't be evil" (a sort of libertarian moral minimalism), it has since taken up the mission of actively doing good, according to its own lights.

In an important article titled "Google.gov," law professor Adam J. White details both the personnel flows and deep intellectual affinities between Google and the Obama White House. Hundreds of people switched jobs back and forth between this one firm and the administration over eight years. It was a uniquely close relationship, based on a common ethos, that began with Obama's visit to Google's headquarters in 2004 and deepened during his presidential campaign in 2007. White writes:

Both view society's challenges today as social-engineering problems, whose resolutions depend mainly on facts and objective reasoning. Both view information as being at once ruthlessly value-free and yet, when properly grasped, a powerful force for ideological and social reform. And so both aspire to reshape Americans' informational context, ensuring that we make choices based only upon what they consider the right kind of facts-while denying that there could be any values or politics embedded in the effort.

One of the central tenets of progressives' self-understanding is that they are pro-fact and pro-science, while their opponents (often the majority) are said to have an unaccountable aversion to these good things: they cling to fond illusions and irrational anxieties. It follows that good governance means giving people informed choices. This is not the same as giving people what they think they want, according to their untutored preferences. Informed choices are the ones that make sense within a well-curated informational setting or context.

When I was a doctoral student in political theory at the University of Chicago in the 1990s, there was worry about a fissure opening up between liberalism and democracy. The hot career track for my cohort was to tackle this problem under the rubric of an intellectual oeuvre called "deliberative democracy." It wasn't my thing, but as near as I could tell, the idea (which was taken from the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas) was that if you could just establish the right framing conditions for deliberation, the demos would arrive at acceptably liberal positions. We should be able to formalize these conditions, it was thought. And conversely, wherever the opinions of the demos depart from an axis running roughly from the editorial page of the New York Times to that of the Wall Street Journal, it was taken to be prima facie evidence that there was some distorting influence in the conditions under which people were conducting their thought processes, or their conversations among themselves. The result was opinion that was not authentically democratic (i.e., not liberal). These distortions too needed to be ferreted out and formalized. Then you would have yourself a proper theory.

Of course, the goal was not just to have a theory, but to get rid of the distortions. Less tendentiously: protecting the alliance "liberal democracy" required denying that it is an alliance, and propping it up as a conceptual unity. This would require a cadre of subtle dialecticians working at a meta-level on the formal conditions of thought, nudging the populace through a cognitive framing operation to be conducted beneath the threshold of explicit argument.

At the time, all this struck me as an exercise in self-delusion by aspiring apparatchiks for whom a frankly elitist posture would have been psychologically untenable. But the theory has proved immensely successful. By that I mean the basic assumptions and aspirations it expressed have been institutionalized in elite culture, perhaps nowhere more than at Google, in its capacity as directorate of information. The firm sees itself as "definer and defender of the public interest," as White says.

One further bit of recent intellectual history is important for understanding the mental universe in which Google arose, and in which progressivism took on the character that it did during the Obama years. The last two decades saw the rise of new currents in the social sciences that emphasize the cognitive incompetence of human beings. The "rational actor" model of human behavior-a simplistic premise that had underwritten the party of the market for the previous half century-was deposed by the more psychologically informed school of behavioral economics, which teaches that we need all the help we can get in the form of external "nudges" and cognitive scaffolding if we are to do the rational thing. But the glee and sheer repetition with which this (needed) revision to our understanding of the human person has been trumpeted by journalists and popularizers indicates that it has some moral appeal, quite apart from its intellectual merits. Perhaps it is the old Enlightenment thrill at disabusing human beings of their pretensions to specialness, whether as made in the image of God or as "the rational animal." The effect of this anti-humanism is to make us more receptive to the work of the nudgers.

The whole problem of "liberal democracy"-that unstable hybrid-is visible in microcosm at Google; it manifests as schizophrenia in how the founders characterize the firm's mission. Their difficulty is understandable, as the trust people place in Google is based on its original mission of simply answering queries that reflect the extant priorities of a user, when in fact the mission has crept toward a more tutelary role in shaping thought.

Google achieved its dominance in search because of the superior salience of the results it returned compared to its late-1990s rivals. The mathematical insights of its founders played a large role in this. The other key to their success was that they rigorously excluded commercial considerations from influencing the search results. Reading accounts of the firm's early days, one cannot help being struck by the sincere high-mindedness of the founders. The internet was something pure and beautiful, and would remain so only if guarded against the corrupting influence of advertising.

In other words, there was some truth in the founding myth of the company, namely, the claim that there are no human biases (whether value judgments or commercial interests) at work in the search results it presents to users. Everything is in the hands of neutral algorithms. The neutrality of these algorithms is something the rest of us have to take on trust, because they are secret (as indeed they need to be to protect their integrity against the cat-and-mouse game of "search engine optimization," by which interested parties can manipulate their rank in the results).

Of course, from the very beginning, the algorithms in question have been written and are constantly adjusted by particular human beings, who assess the aptness of the results they generate according to their own standards of judgment. So the God's-eye perspective, view-from-nowhere conceit is more ideal than reality. But that ideal plays a legitimating role that has grown in importance as the company has become a commercial behemoth, and developed a powerful interest in steering users of its search engine toward its own services. More importantly, the ideal of neutral objectivity underlies Google's self-understanding as definer and defender of the public interest.

This is the same conceit of epistemic/moral hauteur that Obama adopted as the lynchpin of his candidacy. The distinctive feature of this rhetoric is that the idea of neutrality or objectivity is deployed for a specific purpose: to assert an identity of interest between liberals and the demos. This identity reveals itself once distortions of objective reality are cleared away. Speaking at Google's headquarters in 2007 (as characterized by White), Obama said that "as president he wouldn't allow 'special interests' to dominate public discourse, for instance in debates about health care reform, because his administration would respond with 'data and facts.'" During the Q&A, Obama offered the following:

You know, one of the things that you learn when you're traveling and running for president is, the American people at their core are a decent people. There's . . . common sense there, but it's not tapped. And mainly people-they're just misinformed, or they're too busy, they're trying to get their kids to school, they're working, they just don't have enough information, or they're not professionals at sorting out the information that's out there, and so our political process gets skewed. But if you give them good information, their instincts are good and they will make good decisions. And the president has the bully pulpit to give them good information.

. . . I am a big believer in reason and facts and evidence and feedback-everything that allows you to do what you do, that's what we should be doing in our government. [ Applause.]

I want people in technology, I want innovators and engineers and scientists like yourselves, I want you helping us make policy-based on facts! Based on reason!

Lest my point be misunderstood, it is perhaps appropriate to say that I voted for the man in 2008. And since the example he gives above is that of health care, I should say that I am open to the idea that socialized medicine is a good idea, in principle. Further, the debate about health care really was distorted by special interests. The point I wish to make is not about substantive policy positions, but rather to consider the cognitive style of progressive politics as exemplified by the mutual infatuation of Google and Obama.

Why engage in such an effort now, in the Trump era, when we are faced with such a different set of problems? It is because I believe the appeal of Trump, to fully half the country, was due in significant part to reaction against this peremptory and condescending turn of progressivism.

It is telling that Obama said he would use the president's bully pulpit not to persuade (the opportunity that "the bully pulpit" has generally been taken to offer), but to "give good information." We are a people of sound instincts, but "not professionals at sorting out the information that's out there." What we need, then, is a professional.

Persuasion is what you try to do if you are engaged in politics. Curating information is what you do if you believe your outlook is one from which dissent can only be due to a failure to properly process the relevant information. This is an anti-political form of politics. If politics is essentially fighting (toward compromise or stalemate, if all goes well, but fighting nonetheless), technocratic rule is essentially helping, as in "the helping professions." It extends compassion to human beings, based on an awareness of their cognitive limitations and their tendency to act out.

In the technocratic dream of early twentieth-century Progressives such as Woodrow Wilson, politics was to be overcome through facts and science, clearing the way for rule by experts. Daniel Bell famously named this hoped-for denouement "the end of ideology." It was a project that acquired a moral mandate as recoil from the ideologically driven cataclysm of World War II. From today's perspective, it is striking that twentieth-century Progressives seemed not very conflicted about their cognitive elitism. Wilson's project to transfer power from the legislature to administrative bodies entailed a deliberate transfer of power to "the knowledge class," as Hamburger writes, or "those persons whose identity or sense of self-worth centers on their knowledge." This includes "all who are more attached to the authority of knowledge than to the authority of local political communities. . . . [T]heir sense of affinity with cosmopolitan knowledge, rather than local connectedness, has been the foundation of their influence and their identity."

Today's progressives have a more complex relationship to their own elitism, surely due in part to the legacy of the civil rights movement. It takes a certain amount of narrative finesse to maintain a suitably democratic self-understanding while also affirming the role of expertise. This is the predicament of the tech firms, and it is the same one Obama had to manage for himself. In his 2007 remarks at Google, Obama referred to the firm's origins in a college dorm room, and drew parallels with his own trajectory and aspirations. "What we shared is a belief in changing the world from the bottom up, not the top down; that a bunch of ordinary people can do extraordinary things." This is the language of a former community organizer. But it is a peculiar sort of "bottom up" that is meant here.

In the Founders Letter that accompanied Google's 2004 initial public offering, Larry Page and Sergey Brin said their goal is "getting you exactly what you want, even when you aren't sure what you need." The perfect search engine would do this "with almost no effort" on the part of the user. In a 2013 update to the Founders Letter, Page said that "the search engine of my dreams provides information without you even having to ask." Adam J. White glosses these statements: "To say that the perfect search engine is one that minimizes the user's effort is effectively to say that it minimizes the user's active input. Google's aim is to provide perfect search results for what users 'truly' want-even if the users themselves don't yet realize what that is. Put another way, the ultimate aspiration is not to answer the user's questions but the question Google believes she should have asked." As Eric Schmidt told the Wall Street Journal, "[O]ne idea is that more and more searches are done on your behalf without you having to type. . . . I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next."

The ideal being articulated in Mountain View is that we will integrate Google's services into our lives so effortlessly, and the guiding presence of this beneficent entity in our lives will be so pervasive and unobtrusive, that the boundary between self and Google will blur. The firm will provide a kind of mental scaffold for us, guiding our intentions by shaping our informational context. This is to take the idea of trusteeship and install it in the infrastructure of thought.

Populism is the rejection of this.

The American founders were well acquainted with the pathetic trajectories of the ancient democracies, which reliably devolved into faction, oligarchic revolution, and tyranny. They designed our constitutional regime to mitigate the worst tendencies of direct democracy by filtering popular passions through political representation, and through nonrepresentative checks on popular will. The more you know of political history, the more impressive the American founding appears.

Any would-be populist needs to keep this accomplishment in view, as a check on his own attraction to playing the tribune. How much deference is due the demos? I think the decisive question to ask is, what is the intellectual temper of today's elites? Is it marked by the political sobriety of the founding generation, or an articulated vision of the common good of the nation such as the twentieth-century Progressives offered? Not so much? One can be wary of the demos and still prefer, like William F. Buckley, to be ruled by the first fifty names in the Boston phone book than by one's fellow intellectuals.

When the internal culture at Google spills out into the headlines, we are offered a glimpse of the moral universe that stands behind the "objective" algorithms. Recall the Googlers' reaction, which can only be called hysterical, to the internal memo by James Damore. He offered rival explanations, other than sexism, for the relative scarcity of women programmers at the firm (and in tech generally). The memo was written in the language of rational argumentation, and adduced plenty of facts, but the wrong kind. For this to occur within the firm was deeply threatening to its self-understanding as being at once a mere conduit for information and a force for progress. Damore had to be quarantined in the most decisive manner possible. His dissent was viewed not as presenting arguments that must be met, but rather facts that must be morally disqualified.

On one hand, facilitating the free flow of information was Silicon Valley's original ideal. But on the other hand, the control of information has become indispensable to prosecuting the forward march of history. This, in a nutshell, would seem to be the predicament that the platform firms of Silicon Valley find themselves in. The incoherence of their double mandate accounts for their stumbling, incoherent moves to suppress the kinds of speech that cultural progressives find threatening.

This conflict is most acute in the United States, where the legal and political tradition protecting free speech is most robust. In Europe, the alliance between social media companies and state actors to root out and punish whatever they deem "hate" (some of which others deem dissent) is currently being formalized. This has become especially urgent ahead of the European Parliament elections scheduled for May 2019, which various EU figures have characterized as the last chance to quarantine the populist threat. Mounir Mahjoubi, France's secretary of state for digital affairs, explained in February 2019 that, by the time of the election, "it will be possible to formally file a complaint online for hateful content." In particular, Twitter and Facebook have agreed to immediately transmit the IP addresses of those denounced for such behavior to a special cell of the French police "so that the individual may be rapidly identified, rapidly prosecuted and sentenced." He did not explain how "hateful content" is to be defined, or who gets to do it. But it is reported that Facebook has a private army of fifteen to twenty thousand for this task.

Speaking at MIT six months after the Damore memo episode, in February 2018, former president Obama addressed head-on the problem of deliberative democracy in an internet culture. He made the familiar point about a "balkanization of our public conversation" and an attendant fragmenting of the nation, accelerated by the internet. "Essentially we now have entirely different realities that are being created, with not just different opinions but now different facts- different sources, different people who are considered authoritative." As Obama noted, "it is very difficult to figure out how democracy works over the long term in those circumstances." We need "a common baseline of facts and information." He urged his tech audience to consider "what are the . . . algorithms, the mechanisms whereby we can create more of a common conversation."

Obama's description of the problem seems to me apt. Our political strife has become thoroughly epistemic in nature. But the fix he recommends- using algorithms to "create more of a common conversation"-is guaranteed to further inflame the sense any dissident-minded person has that the information ecosystem is "rigged," to use one of President Trump's favorite words. If we are going to disqualify voices in a way that is not explainable, and instead demand trust in the priestly tenders of the algorithms, what we will get is a politics of anticlericalism, as in the French Revolution. That was not a happy time.

Among those ensconced in powerful institutions, the view seems to be that the breakdown of trust in establishment voices is caused by the proliferation of unauthorized voices on the internet. But the causal arrow surely goes the other way as well: our highly fragmented casting-about for alternative narratives that can make better sense of the world as we experience it is a response to the felt lack of fit between experience and what we are offered by the official organs, and a corollary lack of trust in them. For progressives to now seek to police discourse from behind an algorithm is to double down on the political epistemology that has gotten us to this point. The algorithm's role is to preserve the appearance of liberal proceduralism, that austerely fair-minded ideal, the spirit of which is long dead.

Such a project reveals a lack of confidence in one's arguments-or a conviction about the impotence of argument in politics, due to the irrationality of one's opponents. In that case we have a simple contest for power, to be won and held onto by whatever means necessary.

This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume III, Number 2 (Summer 2019): 73-94.

¹ I am thinking of the project to transform society in the image of an imagined "free market" that would finally bring to fruition what nature prescribes (often destroying customary practices and allegiances along the way), or stories of a novus ordo seclorum that will blossom if only we are courageous enough to sweep away the impediments to "freedom" (man's natural estate)-by aerial bombardment, if necessary. Both enthusiasms tend toward lawlessness. Both seek a world that is easily conjured in the idiom of freedom-talk, but in practice require more thorough submission to mega-bureaucracies, whether of corporations or of an occupation force.

² In his 2018 book The Revolt of the Public, Martin Gurri diagnoses the eruption of protest movements around the world in 2011-Occupy Wall Street, the indignados in Spain, and the violent street protests in London, to name a few-as a politics of pure negation, driven more by the romance of denunciation than by any positive program. These protests expressed distrust of institutional voices, and a wholesale collapse of social authority. On left and right alike, people feel the system is rigged, and indeed political leaders themselves have stoked this conviction, insisting that elections lost by their side were illegitimate, whether because of "voter suppression" or a phantom epidemic of voting by illegal immigrants. This is dangerous stuff.

³ It is therefore perhaps appropriate to consider Europe's experiment in transferring political sovereignty to a technocratic, democratically unaccountable governing body (the European Union) for clues as to what sort of political reactions such a project might engender.

⁴ Richard Rorty celebrated the power of "redescription" to alter our moral outlook. He had in mind the genuinely liberal effect that literature sometimes has in shifting our gaze, for example the effect that reading Dickens or Uncle Tom's Cabin had in enlarging the sympathies of people in the nineteenth century. But redescriptions can just as easily have an impoverishing effect on how we view ourselves and the world. As Iris Murdoch wrote, man is the animal who makes pictures of himself, and then comes to resemble the pictures.

⁵ On campus, something like this is evident in the reduction of the entire miasma of teenage sexual incompetence, with its misplaced hopes and callow cruelties, to the legal concept of consent. Under the influence of this reduction, a young person is left with no other vocabulary for articulating her unhappiness and confusion over a sexual encounter. She must not have really consented.

⁶ In a related materialist vein, Reihan Salam ties "wokeness" to the political economy of precarity. Wokeness is a competitive status game played by aspirants to cultural capital. As one friend put it to me, "my PC status advancement seems to depend on my having a Perry Mason moment, in which I reveal that the defendant's superficially unobjectionable speech actually hides a subtext of oppression only apparent to me."

⁷ Whenever there is a whiff of regulatory concern about possible self-dealing by Google as it expands into services far afield from search, it asserts that if its search results presented anything but the disinterested, best possible match to what "customers" were looking for, they would go elsewhere. This incantation of the free market syllogism works like a magic spell in arresting criticism. But how does the logic of the market apply to a near-monopoly? Or to a firm that provides a free service? The reality, of course, is that the users of Google are not the customers. Customers are those who pay for a product. Advertisers gave Google $95 billion in 2017 for access to the product. The product consists of predictions about users' susceptibility to a specific pitch.

⁸ Another difference stands out. The early Progressive program had avowedly nationalist elements (consider William James's famous essay "The Moral Equivalent of War" promoting a program of universal national service and an ethic of hardness, to be achieved through manual labor). It sought to forge an American identity based on solidarity, whereas for today's progressives the idea of a common good, defined as American, is more problematic. A version of it underlies the economic populism of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, but the idea of a specifically American common good is also subject to constant challenge on the left, both by immigration maximalists and by intersectional entrepreneurs who must direct their claims against what is common. Relatedly, the perspective of today's progressivism is global rather than national, and this sits easier with the "shareholder cosmopolitanism" of capital.

⁹ Woodrow Wilson complained that "the bulk of mankind is rigidly unphilosophical, and nowadays the bulk of mankind votes." The reformer is bewildered by the need to influence "the mind, not of Americans of the older stocks only, but also of Irishmen, of Germans, of Negroes." Hamburger argues that it was the expansion of voting rights early in the twentieth century that prompted Wilson to want to shift power from representative bodies to executive agencies.

¹⁰ Barbara Tuchman wrote, "Not before or since has so much careful and reasonable thinking been invested in the formation of a government system. . . . [T]he Founders remain a phenomenon to keep in mind to encourage our estimate of human possibilities, even if their example is too rare to be a basis of normal expectations" ( The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, 1984).

¹¹ Silicon Valley's original intellectual affiliations lie deep in the California counterculture: the Human Potential Movement, Esalen, the Whole Earth Catalog, and all that. Like the generation of '68 in its long march through the institutions, the Valley staked its early identity on an emancipatory mission, and it has had a hard time adjusting its self-image to reflect its sheer power. In the same vein, recall Obama striking the pose of community organizer in his second term, speaking truth to power from Air Force One.

¹² BFMTV, Twitter post, February 20, 2019, 4:29 p.m.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Algorithmic Governance and Political Legitimacy - American Affairs Journal

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In ever more areas of life, algorithms are coming to substitute for judgment exercised by identifiable human beings who can be held to account. The rationale offered is that automated decision-making will be more reliable. But a further attraction is that it serves to insulate various forms of power from popular pressures.

# data[].attributes.body
Both of these stories are illustrative of capitalistic failure. The second story (private firefighters) is a harbinger of a dismal future.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
#927: The Indicator In The House - Planet Money

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
One state, two very different stories: Why Huntington Beach won't build new homes during a housing shortage, and what private firefighters say about their industry and inequality.

# data[].attributes.body
Bernanke video

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
For two centuries the left was understandably relaxed about time. The arrow of time, which in nature produces complex systems out of simple ones, had replaced feudalism with capitalism, the proletariat and technological progress. In the process it produced Marxism, a secular philosophy that claimed the ultimate outcome might be communism. Revolutionaries wanted the process to be faster, even at the cost of forcing the pace of history; reformists were content with a more natural timetable; revisionists such as Eduard Bernstein were happier simply being en route than achieving the goal itself. Each faction shared the assumption that time is on the side of progress.

Now, unfortunately, it is clear that time is something we do not have.

For 200 years, the left's assumptions about capitalism were made without full knowledge of the human contribution to global warming, or its potentially catastrophic effects. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)'s Special Report, issued in October 2018, warns that unless we halve net carbon emissions by 2030, and end them by 2050, we face a global catastrophe.

Yet even now the left, along with most parts of civil society, seems barely to have understood the implications for its previous assumptions. Like the New Yorkers observed by WH Auden in 1939, on the day the Second World War broke out, we "cling to our average day".

The Keynesians who were trying to promote state intervention as the cure for the 2008 financial crisis now advocate it as a cure for the climate crisis. In the US, a left that has always despaired at its failure to achieve a universal health-care system, now aspires to deliver that ambition as part of a wider Green New Deal.

Few people are yet prepared to accept that, to save the planet, we have to end capitalism - and on a timescale that even an ardent Leninist might find optimistic. One reason is that the world of climate science does not possess anything resembling a theory of capitalism. It has a theory of sustainable development - which allows it to design theoretical "pathways" towards a zero-carbon economy involving different speeds of social change. But the possibility that we live in an economic system with a beginning, a middle and an end, and with internal dynamics just as measurable as the climate, is a thought too far.

Before we ask what the left should do, it is worth considering at the most abstract level how the new conclusions of climate science should change our view of capitalism as an economic system.

The left always understood that rampant commercialism destroyed the natural environment and depleted its productivity. But from Marx onwards, we assumed that problem could be overcome through technological change. The contradiction that would kill capitalism was between a system of private property and essentially social technologies, from the 19th-century factory to Wikipedia and Linux (the open source computer operating system) today.

Based on any scientific reading, we are obliged to bracket that proposition within a deeper contradiction: capitalism has run out of time. It took off by using the planet as a source of free, carbon-based energy and as a wastepipe for gases that warm the atmosphere. But that process has now reached its limits. It is, of course, easy to imagine a non-carbon form of capitalism - as long as you admit that it's like imagining a non-racist form of Nazism: theoretically possible but unlikely, given the historic patterns already set.

The most radical scenarios of the IPCC would entail net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 through "rapid and far-reaching transitions in energy, land, urban and infrastructure (including transport and buildings), and industrial systems". These changes will have to be "unprecedented in terms of scale... and imply deep emissions reductions in all sectors".

****

The problem is, we are not dealing with a theoretical capitalist system but one that's been in crisis since 2008 and in which inequalities of wealth and power are growing. In the real capitalism of now, elites are detaching themselves from democracy, the rule of law and from multilateral obligations and treaties, switching instead to a form of "Thatcherism in one country", combined with Great Power diplomacy.

America under Donald Trump, Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro and Australia under Scott Morrison are harbingers of what's to come. Where they accept the science, the most likely response of real-world elites will be, at first, to restrict decarbonisation to what the interests of corporations and the limits of orthodox fiscal and monetary policy will allow.

But as climate effects intensify, and social struggles erupt, elites are likely to switch to an overt strategy of "adapting" to climate change, rather than halting it, and they will do so on a nation-centric basis. The enlightened rich will create zoos and data banks to preserve otherwise dying species; the unenlightened will go on building pipelines across tundra, flying in executive jets and shooting elephants for sport.

Though central banks and treasuries now recognise the danger, we should not assume that will spur them into decisive action. Having saved the banks from the subprime crash in 2008 using state insurance and money printing, they will deploy the same tools to save Gazprom, Petrobras, ExxonMobil and Total. This assumption is what underpinned Chancellor Philip Hammond's call for a "review" of the UK government's commitment to net-zero emissions by 2050: the subtext is that we should only abide by it if others do.

Andreas Malm, a left-wing Swedish climate writer, argues that, at a minimum, we should: stop building carbon-burning power plants; shut the existing ones down; end the expansion of air, sea and road travel and introduce a rationing system for transport; expand mass transit systems; switch urgently to locally grown food; dismantle the meat industry and switch to plant-based proteins; and pour money into carbon removal technologies.

That would, says Malm, amount to the equivalent of Marx's ten-point reform programme in The Communist Manifesto. But each measure raises a question: who will pay, whose interests will suffer, who will mandate the change, and are the ambitions consistent with democracy? These are dilemmas that, despite the flurry of rhetoric around a "Green New Deal", the left keeps trying to avoid.

In the face of opposition from the GMB trade union, Labour committed to a ban on fracking in 2016. But at a local level, the party's councillors in Cumbria have just led the approval of the first new coal mine in Britain for decades. The party's strategy includes plans to boost renewable energy production - but there is no urgent commitment to close the gas-fired power stations that form the core of UK energy. The dilemma is even greater for left parties in Germany and Canada, where coal is still a major industry.

The answer to "who will pay" cannot be simply "the rich". Labour pushed redistributive tax policy to its limits during the 2017 general election, when it pledged to raise £50bn a year to fund free university tuition and to reverse spending cuts to policing, health care and schools. To fund infrastructure spending, the party pledged to borrow an extra £250bn over the next ten years. Hammond estimates that the UK government would need to spend a trillion pounds to meet the net-zero target - around £30bn-£50bn of extra public spending over a period of 30 years.

The left's answer must be that if the rich can't pay, the future must. The state has to borrow money now, and on a vast scale, if necessary through central bank money creation programmes. But unlike in every previous Keynesian episode, we must borrow in the full knowledge that "growth", as measured by GDP, will never be strong enough to erode the debt.

This is because the inner dynamics of capitalism do not change. In its classic form, capitalism created a surplus out of free carbon-based energy, plus human labour. Capitalism's tragedy is that, just as it discovered the need to stop burning carbon, it also discovered the means to dispense with work. As I argued in my 2015 book PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future, information technology has already begun to short-circuit the adaptation mechanisms of the market economy - creating the possibility of a low-work future, in which useful goods and services are increasingly provided outside the market and GDP ceases to be a measure of societal well-being.

We are faced with the prospect of two transitions - beyond work and beyond carbon. That the climate crisis must take precedence is unarguable: the task is to formulate a new left politics in which the post-work and post-carbon projects are fused.

Let's be honest: centralised government action will be required to forcibly alter or shut down some key business models in the private sector and to enforce behavioural change. Energy-intensive industries such as steel will either have to be shut down or receive large state subsidies. Meat farming will end. Major airports such as Heathrow will probably end up being rewilded.

****

It is obvious that the market system cannot deliver these outcomes on the required scale or timetable. Global capital is geared to financial speculation, cheap money and deregulated economic space. For a form of capitalism to emerge that enables centralised state ownership of energy, transport and housing - and that is committed to extensive borrowing - there would need to be some capitalists in favour of it: I can't find any.

The left should turn a crisis into an opportunity by reframing its programme and methodologies around defeating climate change through huge modal changes and automation. But it's here that we hit an existential problem.

The left that's emerged since 2008 is, in reality, an alliance of two projects: a rearguard action by the old working class of the carbon era, against austerity, atomisation and a falling wage share; and an offensive by the diverse, educated workforce of the information era to advance individual rights and social liberalisation. One project is about setting right the injustices of the carbon era; the other is about moving beyond both work and carbon.

That is why all current Green New Deal proposals contain a promise to the existing industrial workforce that, whatever the scale of change, there will be enough decent high-paid jobs created. The same assurance underpins the US Democrat proposal to replace diesel and petrol cars with electric vehicles.

Yet the future-oriented left knows, both theoretically and in its heart, that the recreation of the Keynesian-era workforce is impossible, and that perpetuating a system based on family-owned automobiles by adopting electric vehicles is pointless. From the energy grid to the factory to the road network, capitalism looks like it does because, for 250 years, burning carbon and exploiting human labour were its twin sources of dynamism. An honest left would have to tell people that neither of these things can continue.

But the left, globally, is avoiding such brutal honesty for an understandable reason. In every country parts of its electoral base among older, former industrial workers are falling prey to past-oriented ideologies. The central plank of all reactionary plebeian politics is that climate change does not matter. Either the science is deemed suspect or, if accepted, used by the new right to argue that rising oceans and burning prairies are grounds for ending immigration and raising military spending.

Though I want Cumbria - which is Labour-run, in coalition with the Liberal Democrats - to cancel its absurd coal mine, it may be that, if it did, the council would simply lose power to the Tory party or the populist right. This fear of "abandoning" traditional communities to right-wing politics has underpinned the response to Brexit in parts of the Labour and trade union movement. The same fear haunts the climate discussion.

The "just transition" concept, originally pioneered by the International Trade Union Confederation, has crept into the left's vocabulary largely unexamined. It calls for the involvement of working-class communities in the rapid shutdown of coal and always promises "decent jobs". But it avoids the question: what if the transition has to be unjust? And who defines justice? What if it has to feel less like Franklin D Roosevelt's New Deal and more like the compulsory relocation of Soviet industry to the Urals?

From the Green New Deal to the just transition, my fear is that the left has armed itself with platitudinous phrases to avoid hard choices. It is likely that, given the scale of the endeavour, we will need decisive, centralised state action and ownership. The place for creativity, localism, entrepreneurship and consultation will be in the implementation, not the decision.

It has taken immense energy over the past four years to transform Labour from a party of austerity and privatisation into a party of state ownership and public investment. But the bigger transformation lies ahead. The eradication of carbon emissions needs to become the lode star and the animating spirit of the left. The alliances we need to achieve this are not those of classic socialism.

If we get it right, with a transition programme that is both technologically and economically sophisticated, the anti-capitalist left can become hegemonic. Get it wrong and we will become a re-enactment society for the class struggle in a carbon-centric world.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
For two centuries the left was understandably relaxed about time. The arrow of time, which in nature produces complex systems out of simple ones, had replaced feudalism with capitalism, the proletariat and technological progress. In the process it produced Marxism, a secular philosophy that claimed the ultimate outcome might be communism.

# data[].attributes.body
Joe Rogan Experience #1325 - Dr. Cornel West - YouTube

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Joe Rogan Experience #1325 - Dr. Cornel West