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THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
Tuesday, November 5, 2013 | A15
OPINION
Does Environmentalism Cause Amnesia?
W
arming is becoming a
major
problem.
“A
change in our climate,”
writes one deservedly famous
American naturalist, “is taking
place very sensibly.” Snowfall, he
notes, has become “less frequent
and less deep.” Rivers that once
“seldom failed to freeze over in
the course of the winter, scarcely
ever do so now.”
And it’s having
an especially worrisome effect on
the food supply:
“This change has
produced an unGLOBAL
fortunate fluctuaVIEW
tion between heat
By Bret
and cold, in the
Stephens
spring of the year,
which is very fatal to fruits.”
That isn’t a leaked excerpt
from the latest report of the U.N.’s
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but it may as well
be. Last week, Canadian journalist
Donna Laframboise of the website
No Frakking Consensus posted a
draft of a forthcoming IPCC report on the alleged effects climate
change will have on food production. The New York Times then
splashed the news on its front
page Saturday. It’s another tale of
warming woe:
“With or without adaptation,”
the report warns, “climate change
will reduce median yields by 0 to
2% per decade for the rest of the
century, as compared to a baseline without climate change.
These projected impacts will
occur in the context of rising crop
demand, projected to increase by
14% per decade until 2050.”
If this has a familiar ring, it’s
because it harks back to the neoMalthusian forecasts of the 1960s
and ’70s, when we were supposed
to believe that population growth
would outstrip food production.
This gave us such titles as “Fam-
By Sohrab Ahmari
Two silly books, now being recycled by global warming alarmists.
ine 1975!”, a 1967 best seller by
the brothers William and Paul
Paddock, along with Paul Ehrlich’s
vastly influential “The Population
Bomb,” a book that began with the
words, “The battle to feed all of
humanity is over. In the 1970s and
1980s hundreds of millions of
people will starve to death in spite
of any crash programs embarked
upon now.”
In case you’re wondering what
happened with that battle to feed
humanity, the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization has some
useful figures on its website. In
1968, the year Mr. Ehrlich’s book
first appeared, Asia produced
46,321,114 tons of maize and
439,579,934 of cereals. By 2011,
the respective figures had risen
to 270,316,205, up 484%, and
1,289,633,254, up 193%.
It’s the same story nearly everywhere else one looks. In Africa,
maize production was up 247%
between 1968 and 2011, while
production of so-called primary
vegetables has risen 319%; in
South America, it’s 308% and
199%. Meanwhile, the world’s
population rose to just under
seven billion from about 3.7 billion, an increase of about 90%. It
is predicted to rise by another
33% by 2050.
But what about the supposedly
warming climate? According to
the EPA, “average temperatures
have risen more quickly since the
late 1970s,” with the contiguous
48 states warming “faster than
the global rate.” Yet U.S. food
production over the same time
has also risen by robust percentages even as the number of acres
under cultivation has been
steadily falling for decades.
In other words, even if you
believe the temperature records, a
warming climate seems to correlate positively with greater food
production. This has mainly to do
with better farming practices and
the widespread introduction of
genetically modified (GMO) crops,
and perhaps also the stimulative
effects that carbon dioxide has on
photosynthesis (though this is
debated). Warming also could
mean that northern latitudes now
not suited for farming might
become so in the future.
But whatever the reason, the
world isn’t likely to be getting
any hungrier. Quite the opposite:
Purely natural (as opposed to
man-made) famines are becoming
unknown. As the Irish economist
Cormac Ó Gráda noted in a 2010
paper, “in global terms, the margin over subsistence is now much
wider than it was a generation
ago. This also holds for former
famine zones such as India and
Bangladesh, whereas China, once
the ‘land of famine,’ nowadays
faces a growing problem of childhood obesity.” Only in Africa is
food scarcity still an issue, but
even there recent food crises in
Malawi and Niger did not result
in major loss of life.
What does hurt people is bad
public policy. Exhibit A is the U.S.
ethanol mandate—justified in part
as a response to global warming—
which diverted the corn crop to
fuel production and sent global
food prices soaring in 2008.
Exhibit B is the cult of organic
farming and knee-jerk opposition
to GMOs, which risk depriving
farmers in poor countries of highyield, nutrient-rich crops. Exhibit
C was the effort to ban DDT without adequate substitutes to stop
the spread of malaria, which kills
nearly 900,000 people, mostly
children, in sub-Saharan Africa
alone with each passing year. The
list goes on and on.
Environmentalists tend to have
conveniently short memories, especially when it comes to their
own mistakes. They would do better to learn from history. Just take
the quote about the warming climate with which this column began. It’s from “Notes on the State
of Virginia” by Thomas Jefferson,
published in 1785.
Write to [email protected]
Iran to America: Let’s Do Business
B
arack Obama’s renewed negotiations with the Islamic
Republic over Tehran’s nuclear-weapons program haven’t
yielded concrete progress. Yet
some congressional Democrats are
already proposing a pause in sanctions as a show of goodwill: A bill
circulated by Rep. Brad Schneider
of Illinois calls for a 120-day
period to study U.S. Iran policy.
Meanwhile, the White House has
been warning Congress away from
passing new sanctions lest lawmakers scuttle chances for a diplomatic breakthrough.
The mullahs have taken notice,
and they’re working to translate
U.S. policy concessions into gains
for Iran’s ailing economy. But how
to alleviate the concerns of U.S.
business about establishing commercial ties in one of the world’s
least-free societies?
That’s where Iranian-American
businessman E.J. Miller, born
Ekram Manafzadeh, comes in. He
is eager to play the middleman
between U.S. business and Iranian
officialdom, and he recently
founded the Iran America Chamber of Commerce Inc. to do just
that.
Mr. Manafzadeh—“82 years
young,” he says over the phone—
heads the Maryland-based Intercontinental Development Corp.,
which according to its website
finances development projects in
African and Central Asian markets
that can be risky for investors.
Risky certainly describes the
wobbling Iranian economy, which
is dominated by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Other
barriers to doing business in Iran
include the country’s opaque, labyrinthine governance and culture
of corruption. The Islamic Republic ranked 133rd in Transparency
International’s 2012 corruptionperceptions index.
The new Iran America
Chamber of Commerce
is ready to build on
Obama’s desire for a deal.
“As an American organization,
the chamber will try to lobby the
people who are considering relaxing the sanctions that are hurting
74 million Iranians,” Mr. Manafzadeh says. Trade between “the
United States and Iran would benefit those people and the United
States.”
Mr. Manafzadeh says the idea
for the chamber was hatched during a September meeting in New
York City with Iranian President
Hasan Rouhani and his chief of
staff, Mohammad Nahavandian,
who were visiting for the United
Nations General Assembly.
“During our meeting,” Mr.
Manafzadeh says, “I proposed to
Mr. Nahavandian that under his
auspices I should register such an
organization, in my office, at my
expense, to work together with
the Iranian-American business
network to . . . advance trading
with Iran.” Before becoming Mr.
Rouhani’s chief of staff, Mr. Nahavandian served as president of the
Iran Chamber of Commerce,
Industries and Mines, based in
Tehran.
Mr. Manafzadeh’s company
website shows a photo of him embracing Mr. Rouhani and “presenting a very special copy of the Holy
Quran to Mr. Rouhani which was
brought from the city of Mecca.”
Once the chamber is up and
running, Mr. Manafzadeh will target “several sectors,” he says. “We
know what Iran needs in the form
of technology and in the form of
industry. What Iran can export are
mineral deposits like iron ore and
other minerals.” He envisions
American mining companies operating in Iran.
The increasing economic ties
between the countries would also
benefit U.S. exporters, he says. For
example, he notes that airliners
sitting in U.S. desert storage facilities are ripe for sale: Iran would
be “a major buyer of aircrafts as
soon as sanctions are lifted.”
But investors curious about the
Iran America Chamber of Commerce may also want to know
something about Mr. Manafzadeh’s history. He immigrated to
the U.S. in 1974. Early in 1980, as
the new revolutionary regime in
Tehran took power, he served as
chairman of the Intercontinental
Development and Management
Co. The business operated a complicated enterprise whereby
wealthy Iranian expats in America,
fearing that they would be forced
to return to Khomeini’s Iran once
their U.S. visas expired, could
obtain Dominican passports by
“donating” $10,000 to the island.
The scheme rankled the U.S.
State Department, since Mr.
Manafzadeh’s company was issuing Dominican passports out of its
own premises in Los Angeles.
Under U.S. pressure, the Dominican government stopped issuing
passports under the arrangement
by May 1980.
Although it was widely reported in the international press
at the time, Mr. Manafzadeh now
denies that his company distributed Dominican passports: “It had
nothing to do with us. I’ve denied
this vigorously.”
The story of Mr. Manafzadeh
and his Iran America Chamber of
Commerce, however, is less about
one businessman’s past than it is
about current U.S. policy and its
consequences. A regime long comfortable with operating in the gray
zones of the global economy is
already positioning itself to profit
from Washington’s softening
approach. Let’s hope the bargain
is worth it.
Mr. Ahmari is an assistant
books editor at the Journal.
The ObamaCare Website Failure Was Inevitable
Federal information
systems are rife with
dysfunction, costing
taxpayers billions.
issued a scathing report showing
that years after the agency began
generously subsidizing Medicare
providers to digitize their medical
records, its own inputs to those
systems were still encouraging
fraudulent billing by making it so
easy for billers to check boxes
that conceal crucial details.
In July, Health and Human
Services essentially gave up on
verifying applicants’ eligibility for
ObamaCare’s insurance subsidies.
When HHS’s databases could not
swiftly and reliably verify applicants’ income and employment
histories, the administration decided to grant the subsidies
quickly based on little more than
the applicants’ personal say-so—
an open invitation to fraud.
Consider gun control laws. Although Congress began requiring
background checks for gun buyers
Composite
W
hile the ObamaCare
website fiasco is disturbing, it is no isolated
event. Dysfunctional information
systems are endemic in the federal government. Officials’ incessant talk about living in a 21stcentury information society that
can generate “big data” to help
solve our problems diverts attention from the stubborn truth:
Many government agencies and
programs operate in an informational stone age.
Immigration is a classic example. For decades, Congress has
chastised the immigration enforcement agency (now called
Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE) for failing to computerize its paper-based case files,
and then often losing them. The
agency’s reputation for poor record-keeping fuels the widespread
skepticism about its ability to effectively police the borders, which
in turn impedes comprehensive
immigration reform.
Government procurement regulations lead to another form of
information incompetence. As a
top procurement official in the
Clinton administration, Steven
Kelman found that rules about
competitive bidding made it difficult for officials to interact with
potential bidders about the design of the computer systems the
government was considering. The
absence of back-and-forth at the
crucial design stage led to poorly
specified contracts and performance problems down the road.
The government not only fails
in designing and running its own
information systems; it also
pushes unworkable systems on
the private sector. Last November,
for example, the inspector general
monitoring the Medicare program
two decades ago, the FBI’s spotty
database of state criminal and
mental-health records has allowed thousands of unauthorized
people to buy (and use) firearms
every year. Since 2005, the New
York Times found that 22,162 firearms—including nearly 3,000 in
2012 alone—were bought after
the required waiting period by
people who were ineligible because of their criminal and mental
histories. Meanwhile, Congress
has effectively barred the Bureau
of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and
Explosives from maintaining an
effective database of gun ownership records.
If the government’s poor information systems often invite fraud
and evasion, they also often fail
to detect it when it occurs. For
example, ICE found (long after
the fact) that 21.7% of the H-1B
visa petitions it grants for temporary high-skill foreign workers
contained fraud or technical violations. The Railroad Retirement
Board waited for years to terminate disability benefits to 600
Long Island Rail Road retirees
based on fraudulent medical
evidence—and did so only after
adverse publicity.
Earlier this year the Government Accountability Office reported that the Agriculture Department paid $22 million to more
than 3,400 crop-insurance policyholders who had been dead for at
least two years, and that the $9
billion program’s fraud rate is 5%.
In a burst of good news, GAO
recently found that the $75 billion
food stamp program’s fraud rate
has declined to “only” 1%.
Years after the mortgage crisis,
the Federal Housing Administration is still making irresponsible
loans based on poor models and
databases, enlarging its enormous
deficits. The new Consumer
Financial Protection Bureau finds
that federal regulators are using
fundamentally flawed models to
assess risks of default.
Social Security and Veterans
Administration disability programs are rife with fraud. The
Treasury Department’s inspector
general recently reported that
Treasury overpayments under the
Earned Income Tax Program—exacerbated by the program’s complexity for innocent filers without
expert assistance—total billions
of dollars every year.
If there is any good news in
these failures, it is that there is
vast room for improvement. Data
systems should be field-tested so
that they are ready for prime
time, as the health exchanges
were not. And the GAO’s valuable
watchdog efforts should be vastly
expanded. We must see information for what it is: vital to effective government but harmful
when inaccurate.
Mr. Schuck is a professor at
Yale Law School and the author
of “Why Government Fails So Often, and How It Can Do Better,”
which will be published in March
by Princeton University Press.
War by Other
Means
Double Down
By Mark Halperin and John Heilemann
(The Penguin Press, 499 pages, $29.95)
A
s sequels go, Election 2012 was more “Hangover III”
than “Godfather II.”
Campaign 2008 featured more plotlines than a
Coppola screenplay. It had a nail-biting Democratic primary
knife fight between the first family of Democratic politics—
pushing the putative first woman president—and a fresh
young senator aiming to be the first African-American in
the Oval Office. An initially rather colorless GOP subplot
was vividly enlivened late in the second reel with the unexpected entrance of the Wonder Woman from Wasilla and
the weird unspooling of John McCain’s presidential bid that
followed. Events conspired to produce a dramatic denouement to the general election as the biggest financial crisis
in 75 years crashed over the closing stages of the race.
Campaign 2012 was, by contrast, a dispiriting shadow of
its predecessor. The Democratic candidate who four years
earlier had won on a platform of hope and change, chose
essentially to seek re-election by accentuating the negative,
demonizing his opponent in a campaign marked largely by
crude anti-rich populism and predictable base-baiting.
A flawed Republican
nominee emerged out
of a field from which
all the apparently more
plausible candidates—
Chris Christie, Mitch
Daniels, Jeb Bush, Haley
Barbour—had absented
themselves. They left in
their place an odd field of
unlikely contenders—
Herman Cain, Michele
Bachmann, Rick Perry,
Newt Gingrich and Rick
Santorum—each of whom
auditioned briefly for the
part of Not Mitt before disappearing under the Romney campaign bus.
Not for the first time, Republicans wound up picking a
man whose principal appeal was his apparent electability
and who promptly lost a very winnable election by a mile.
Mark Halperin and John Heilemann authored a megaselling account of the 2008 drama, “Game Change.” Their
sequel, “Double Down,” struggles to achieve the melodramatic heights of four years earlier, yet there’s no shortage of the conversational anecdotes that made “Game
Change” such a hit. Joe Biden and Bill Daley both recall
how Rahm Emanuel had nicknamed Valerie Jarrett, President Obama’s closest counselor, and Peter Rouse, another
senior adviser, Uday and Qusay, after Saddam Hussein’s
psychotic sons. Less amusingly for the veep presumably,
Mr. Daley was a key participant in secret Obamaworld
discussions about replacing the vice president on the
ticket with Hillary Clinton.
On the Republican side, we learn that it was campaign
operatives associated with the holier-than-thou Jon
Huntsman who leaked to the press not only the story
about Herman Cain’s alleged multiple marital infidelities,
but also the cellphone number of the ex-wife of the man
Mitch Daniels’s wife married, and then divorced, before remarrying Mr. Daniels (yes, you read that correctly)—helping to ensure the governor of Indiana would never run.
Republicans picked a man whose principal
appeal was his apparent electability and who
promptly lost a winnable election by a mile.
And there are revelations that cast new light on some
of the most striking and puzzling moments of the
election. We are told, for instance, that Gov. Rick Perry’s
awful debate performance—remember his “oops”—was
evidently the result of a serious back malady that left
him drugged and sleepless before he went onstage
against his Republican primary rivals.
There’s a fascinating inside account of the Romney campaign’s vice-presidential selection process. Led by a team
of young operatives who fueled themselves with large
quantities of Cheddar crackers, the process was named
“Operation Goldfish,” and the selectors gave appropriately
cheesy code names to the final candidates—Marco Rubio
(Pescado), Tim Pawlenty (Lakefish), Rob Portman (Filet-OFish) and the eventual winner, Paul Ryan (Fishconsin). In
the authors’ account, the vetting process for Pufferfish—
Chris Christie, of course—turned up a swirl of unanswered
ethics questions about some of his political and family ties.
“Double Down” is far better on the gossipy vignettes—
Mr. Christie thought Newt Gingrich “the worst human being he had ever met in politics”—than it is on grand narrative. The central conceit of the book is that Mr. Obama
saw his re-election as an opportunity to run as the progressive he had always wanted to be. Early on in the book,
he walks into the Roosevelt Room with a stack of notes
handwritten on yellow legal pages and proceeds to startle
his embryonic campaign team by telling them he wants his
second-term agenda to be a list of liberal ideals: action on
climate change, gay marriage, antipoverty programs, immigration reform, closing Guantanamo Bay and so on. During his first term, he said, “his progressive impulses had
too often been trumped by the demands of pragmatism.”
Clearly, for whatever reason, we didn’t much hear of
that personal manifesto out on the campaign trail and in
any case the president’s base seems to have been satisfied enough with his performance in the first term to
turn out in numbers just as large to re-elect him.
“Double Down” would read better without the
repeated linguistic homages from the authors. The
Romney campaign, for example, needed a “game change”
and so “doubled down” on the conservative message by
picking Paul Ryan. The first presidential debate was, of
course, another “game changer,” as Mr. Romney trounced
the president who, we learn, then had a kind of existential long dark night of the political soul afterward about
the very nature of modern politics.
The book also breaks no analytical ground in explaining a result that seemed in doubt for much of the
campaign. The simplest explanation still seems the right
one. Mr. Obama had the advantage of incumbency and his
formidable political machine, propelled by the campaign’s
populist message, succeeded in nearly replicating the
massive turnout by blacks, Hispanics and young people
that carried him to victory in 2008.
And then there was Mr. Romney himself. In “Double
Down,” it is Bill Clinton who captures better than anyone
the mismatch at the heart of the election. After the
release of the infamous, secretly recorded video in which
the Republican nominee appeared to dismiss 47% of the
electorate as government-dependent and not his concern,
Mr. Clinton “remarked to a friend, that, while Mitt was a
decent man, he was in the wrong line of work. ‘He really
shouldn’t be speaking to people in public.’ ”
Mr. Baker is editor in chief of Dow Jones and
managing editor of The Wall Street Journal.
P2JW309000-0-A01500-1--------XA
By Peter Schuck
BOOKSHELF | By Gerard Baker
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