climate-change

Why Should Immigrants ‘Respect Our Borders’? The West Never Respected Theirs

Immigration quotas should be based on how much the host country has ruined other countries.

There is a lot of debate these days about whether the United States owes its African-American citizens reparations for slavery. It does. But there is a far bigger bill that the United States and Europe have run up: what they owe to other countries

for their colonial adventures,

for the wars they imposed on them,

for the inequality they have built into the world order,

for the excess carbon they have dumped into the atmosphere.

The creditor countries aren’t seriously suggesting that the West send sacks of gold bullion every year to India or Nigeria. Their people are asking for fairness:

for the borders of the rich countries to be opened to goods and people, to Indian textiles as well as Nigerian doctors.

In seeking to move, they are asking for immigration as reparations.

Today, a quarter of a billion people are migrants. They are moving because the rich countries have stolen the future of the poor countries. Whether it is Iraqis and Syrians fleeing the effects of illegal American wars, or Africans seeking to work for their former European colonial masters, or Guatemalans and Hondurans trying to get into the country that peddles them guns and buys their drugs: They are coming here because we were there.

Before you ask them to respect our borders, ask yourself: Has the West ever respected anyone’s borders?

A vast majority of migrants move from a poor to a less poor country, not a rich one. Immigration quotas should be based on how much the host country has ruined other countries. Britain should have quotas for Indians and Nigerians; France for Malians and Tunisians; Belgium for very large numbers of Congolese.

And when they come, they should be allowed to bring their families and stay — unlike the “guest workers” who were enticed to build up the postwar labor force of the colonizers and then asked to leave when their masters were done exploiting them.

The Dominican Republic, where the United States propped up the dictator Rafael Trujillo for three decades, should be high on the American preference list. So should Iraq, upon which we imposed a war that resulted in 600,000 deaths. Justice now demands that we let in 600,000 Iraqis: for each death we caused there, someone should get a chance at a new life here.

Some 12 million Africans were enslaved and carried across the Atlantic by European powers. Should not 12 million people from Africa be allowed to live in the countries enriched by the toil of their ancestors? Both will be better off: the African still suffering from what slavery has done to his country, and the host country that will again benefit from African labor, but this time without enormous pain and for a fair wage.

Just as there is a carbon tax on polluting industries, there should be a “migration tax” on the nations who got rich while emitting greenhouse gases. The United States is responsible for one-third of the excess carbon in the atmosphere; Europe, another one-quarter. A hundred million refugees fleeing hurricanes and droughts will have to be resettled by the end of the century. The United States should take a third, and Europe another quarter.

A huge bill would come to the West, but it is one it should look forward to paying. Without immigration, America’s economic growth would have been 15 percent lower from 1990 to 2014; Britain’s would have been a full 20 percent lower. Immigrants are 14 percent of the American population, but

they started a quarter of all new businesses and since 2000

earned over a third of the American Nobel Prizes in chemistry, physics and medicine.

Migrants are 3 percent of the world’s population but contribute 9 percent of its gross domestic product. Their taxes prop up the pension systems of the wealthy nations, which are not making enough babies of their own.

If you want to help the poorest people in the world, the fastest way to do so is to ease barriers to migration. Migrants sent back $689 billion in remittances last year, which amounts to

three times more than the direct gains from abolishing all trade barriers,

four times more than all the foreign aid given by those governments and

100 times the amount of all debt relief.

Are the rich countries obligated to take in any and all comers from the countries they have despoiled? There are serious arguments against open borders: that the United States is a lifeboat in an ocean of poor nations, and letting too many people in will sink the boat; that even if we owe reparations to people we have dispossessed, those reparations can come in the form of cash payments or resettlement in another territory.

There are no serious arguments that demonstrate long-term economic damage to countries that accept immigrants, even in large numbers. During the age of mass migration, a quarter of Europe moved to the United States, which went on to replace Europe at the pinnacle of wealth and power.

A world with more open borders would have a brief spasm of mass movement, and then migration might actually decrease, because money and happiness would be more equitably spread around, and more people would stay home.

To avoid paying the “migration tax,” the rich countries would have to

stop propping up dictators,

stop starting savage and unnecessary wars,

restrain their multinational corporations from ripping off mineral wealth of poor countries and

make sure that global trade is more equitable.

Or else the migration bill from the devastated country would be prohibitive.

What is good immigration policy for the United States is separate from what is just and moral for the peoples whose destiny America, past and present, has affected. It might make economic sense for the United States to let in more skilled Indians and fewer unskilled Latinos, but America owes them more, and it should open its doors more to its southern neighbors.

History is what has happened and can never un-happen; history is happening right now. Attention needs to be paid. So does the bill.

To Make Headway on Climate Change, Let’s Change the Subject

States point to the economic advantages of cleaning up their electric grids.

DENVER — The morning two years ago that Jared Polis announced his run for governor of Colorado, he went to a coffee roaster operating on solar power and promised more renewable energy for the state. Campaigning on that alongside education and health care reform, Mr. Polis, a Democrat, blew away his Republican opponent last fall by 11 percentage points.

This week, the clean-energy voters who helped put him into office will get their first reward. Mr. Polis is expected to sign a remarkable package of 13 environmental and energy bills that will propel Colorado to the top rank of states tackling the climate crisis.

Colorado stands out, but it does not stand alone. A wave of fresh ambition to confront climate change is sweeping through state governments as lawmakers point to the benefits: green jobs, lower electric rates and new tax revenues.
Six states have adopted policies that will effectively require the elimination of carbon dioxide emissions from their electric grids by midcentury, most of them in the past year. So many other states are considering it that the number could double in the next year or two.

This is happening mostly in states like Colorado where Democrats have taken full control of state government, and I think the trend holds important lessons for the Democratic Party. At the national level, the Democrats need to start running hard on climate and energy, instead of paying the issue lip service.

Signs abound that the American public is ready for a serious discussion about our energy options. But how to discuss the subject? For that we should look not just to states like Colorado but, interestingly enough, also to a state under complete Republican control: South Carolina.

This received little national attention, but the South Carolina legislature just adopted a bold policy meant to open the state to more solar power. Utilities like Duke Energy may yet torpedo the plan, but if they are beaten back, South Carolina in a few years could match North Carolina in getting 5 percent of its electrical power from the sun, compared with less than 1 percent last year.

The solar bill is part of the ongoing recuperation in South Carolina from an attempt to build a new nuclear power plant. That turned into a debacle, with repeated cost overruns and construction problems finally leading to the cancellation of the plant. South Carolinians will be paying for their $9 billion hole in the ground for many years to come.

In the aftermath of that mess, the solar industry swooped in and offered to put a lot of clean power onto the grid. The industry was careful with words, though. Tyler Norris, who helped craft the bill on behalf of South Carolina’s solar industry association, told me that the focus was on the direct benefits to the people of the state.

“I don’t know that the terms ‘climate change’ or ‘global warming’ were ever uttered in the entire year and a half of advocacy and debate around this,” Mr. Norris said.

The final vote in the South Carolina Senate was 46-0, and in the House, 103-0. You read that right.

The champion of the Energy Freedom Act, a Republican state senator named Tom Davis, explained his thinking last week, writing in an op-ed that the bill was a step toward “real competition that will provide downward pressure on the cost of producing energy.”

He is right: We are entering an era when clean electricity is going to be the cheapest electricity. That means monopolies like Duke Energy are about to get stuck with a bunch of dirty, coal-burning power plants that are becoming uneconomical.

Some utilities, it must be said, are turning into clean-energy champions. The leading one in the country is Xcel Energy, which happens to supply much of urban Colorado with power and operates in seven other states. The company has been ramping up its clean-energy commitments for years; after Mr. Polis was elected but before he took office, it committed to going 100 percent clean by 2050.

Mr. Polis, working with a legislature controlled by Democrats, wrote into law a mandatory 80 percent reduction in emissions for Xcel by 2030, along with a broader target of reducing emissions from the entire Colorado economy 90 percent by 2050. The legislative package includes a big push for electric cars, as well as measures to ensure fair treatment for workers laid off from dirty power plants.

“Colorado prides itself on being an innovative, forward-looking state,” Mr. Polis told me. “We want to lead as a state to make sure Colorado is well positioned for the renewable-energy future.”

The clean-energy picture has evolved so rapidly in the past few years that I think the situation calls for a strategic shift on the part of the Democrats. Wagging fingers in the Republicans’ faces about their climate denial has not worked. Demanding that they pass punitive fuel taxes has not worked. What seems to be working is to emphasize the local and statewide benefits of clean energy.

Senator Chuck Grassley, Republican of Iowa, likes wind energy because it is good for the farmers who get paid to host turbines. School boards in Kansas and Oklahoma love it because the taxes on wind parks are filling their coffers. In the South, people are figuring out that solar panels can put out cheap power just about the time they are cranking up their air-conditioners.

As the economic case for renewables grows more compelling, the issue becomes how much faster we can go in cleaning up the grid. The tactical goal for Democrats is not to get Republicans to admit they have been wrong about climate science; the only thing that matters is to pass measures to speed the energy transition.

Understanding all this, Democrats can still run hard on climate change in party primaries. But in general elections and upon taking office, they need to make the subtle shift from talking about the climate crisis to talking about the benefits of clean energy — something that Mr. Polis, for one, is skilled at doing.

The polls have told us, over and over, that right below the surface in this country lurks a powerful consensus to go all out on the energy transition. The falling costs offer a fresh opportunity to talk about competition and freedom of choice in the market for electricity, a language that many Republicans understand.

That unanimous measure in South Carolina tells you that for the right policies advocated in the right language, the votes are there.

The New Right Is Beating the New Left. Everywhere.

From Australia to Europe, the signs are multiplying that conservative populism is on the rise.

Sometimes political revolutions occur right before our eyes without us quite realizing it. I think that’s what’s been happening over the last few weeks around the world, and the message is clear: The populist “New Right” isn’t going away anytime soon, and the rise of the “New Left” is exaggerated.

Start with Australia, where Prime Minister Scott Morrison won a surprising victory last week. Before the election, polls had almost uniformly indicated that his Liberal-National Coalition would have to step down, but voters were of another mind. With their support of Morrison, an evangelical Christian who has expressed support for President Donald Trump, Australians also showed a relative lack of interest in doing more about climate change. And this result is no fluke of low turnout: Due to compulsory voting, most Australians do turn out for elections.

Or how about the U.K.? The evidence is mounting that the Brexit Party will do very well in this week’s European Parliament elections. Right now that party, which did not exist until recently, is in the lead in national polls with an estimated 34% support. The Tories, the current ruling party, are at only 12%. So the hard Brexit option does not seem to be going away, and the right wing of British politics seems to be moving away from the center.

As for the European Parliament as a whole, by some estimates after this week’s election 35% of the chamber will be filled by anti-establishment parties, albeit of a diverse nature. You have to wonder at what margins the EU will become unworkable or lose legitimacy altogether.

Meanwhile in the U.S., polls show Joe Biden as the presumptive front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination. He is one of the party’s more conservative candidates, and maybe some primary voters value his electability and familiarity over the more left-wing ideas of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. That’s one sign the “hard left” is not in ascendancy in the U.S. Biden’s strategy of running against Trump is another. It’s hard to say how effective that will prove, but it is likely to result in an election about the ideas and policies of Trump, not those of Democratic intellectuals.

Meanwhile, the U.S. economy has remained strong, and Trump’s chances of re-election have been rising in the prediction markets.

One scarcely noticed factor in all of this has been the rising perception of China as a threat to Western interests. The American public is very aware that the U.S. is now in a trade war with China, a conflict that is likely to provoke an increase in nationalism. That is a sentiment that has not historically been very helpful to left-wing movements. China has been one of Trump’s signature causes for years, and he seems to be delighting in having it on center stage.

The Democratic Party is not well-positioned to make China a core issue. Democrats have been criticizing Trump’s tariffs for a while now, and it may be hard for them to adjust their message from “Tariffs Are Bad” to “Tariffs Are Bad But China Tariffs Are OK.” Their lukewarm support for free trade agreements — especially the Trans Pacific Partnership, which could have served as a kind of alternative China trade policy — also complicates matters. The net result is that Republicans will probably be able to use the China issue to their advantage for years to come.

Elsewhere, the world’s largest democracy just wrapped up a lengthy election. The results in India aren’t yet known, but exit polls show that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling coalition — and his philosophy of Hindu nationalism — will continue to be a major influence.

In all of this ferment, I am myself rooting for a resurgence of centrist cosmopolitanism. But I try to be honest about how my ideas are doing in the world. And in the last few weeks, I’ve seen a lot of evidence that a new political era truly is upon us.

Jay Inslee’s Climate Plan Is Keeping It 100

The agenda mirrors many of the policies that Inslee has piloted in Washington. Next week, the governor will sign a bill committing the Evergreen State to a carbon-neutral grid by 2030, and a zero-emissions grid by 2045. It will represent a long-awaited victory for Inslee: After years of trying, and several failed attempts to put a statewide price on carbon pollution, Inslee will succeed in passing an ambitious climate policy in Washington. And he has found this success not by trying to tax carbon pollution, but by going sector by sector, coaxing and prodding individual parts of the economy to change their ways. It is a strategy he now hopes to bring to the White House.

The Inslee campaign considers the bill “the most comprehensive path to 100 percent clean energy,” Jared Leopold, a spokesman, told me. “It sets down real teeth and standards. It’s reflective of what the modern discussion is at the state level.” Inslee has also launched a green-buildings code as governor.

The new plan earned mostly good reviews from a slate of climate-policy experts, who said it built on preexisting state-level policies while pushing a faster timeline. “It is already aligning with a lot of the ambition of the Green New Deal,” says Greg Carlock, a policy researcher at the leftist advocacy group Data for Progress. “They’re picking something ambitious.”

But climate ambition has often flubbed on a federal level. Leah Stokes, a political scientist at UC Santa Barbara, noted that even though Inslee’s policies have found success in Washington State, the same policies have not had the same record in D.C. “There have been many efforts to pass a federal [renewable electricity standard], in the ’90s, and under [the 2009 climate bill] Waxman-Markey, and it’s always resisted by utilities and ultimately defeated.”

She also advised considering the practical challenges of the plan. Carbon-free sources—such as wind, solar, and nuclear—now generate 37 percent of U.S. grid electricity. Under the Inslee plan, they must take over the last 63 percent of the grid over the next 16 years, Stokes said.

To meet that target, clean energy must add about four percentage points every year between now and 2035. This would be unprecedented: Even over the past few years of record-setting expansion for renewables, clean energy has grown by only 0.6 percentage points a year.

And that may actually understate the challenge. “It’s not just an eightfold increase—it’s probably closer to a tenfold increase, because if you’re going to electrify everything, you have to grow the grid,” Stokes said. The Inslee plan would add tens of millions of new electric cars to the road, all of which would need to draw their energy from the power grid. A literature review last year found that U.S. electricity use could more than double by 2050.