Policy

Republican Foreign Policy Melt-Down

13 May
by John, posted in leadership, Liberty, Middle East, Policy, President   |  No Comments

For me George Schultz summed up Ronald Reagan. I have seen Schultz repeat it in various formulations many times.  Some people run for President to be President.  Ronald Reagan ran for President to do things.

It was a time of big ideas – 1980.  Reagan had decided that containment of the Soviet Union had reached its limits and that detente was just as limited a doctrine.  The time had come to call evil, evil.  To rearm and assert that the binding glue of civilization was not collective dehumanization, but liberty.

Today we have the Republican Party, the party that gave us 4,000+ dead in Iraq based on ideological misjudgment, determined to prove that President Obama conspired in Benghazi to do …  I have no idea what it is the President’s administration is covering up.  But this blog has associated itself for a long time with the view that President Obama is a smart and intelligent fellow with a wonderful family who is by  temperament and skills incompetent as President.

What we know about Benghazi is that the President’s administration through incompetence and bureaucratic in-fighting got four guys killed.  Then through incompetence it bungled every non-political aspect of reporting on the facts.  Given the President’s inability to pass any material legislation since 2010 that he is incompetent is hardly news.

When I was in Budapest in 2004, I was amazed at how many Hungarian business people, waiters, artists, and people across the capital stopped to thank me as an American for freeing them from communism.  When I took a cab ride out to the airport, the driver refused to charge me and drove me around the city to see memorials, tank shell holes, and the other visible signs of the Hungarian struggle for liberty.   In Warsaw that year it was the same experience.

There was a long bipartisan effort to contain communism.  But it was Reagan’s decisive abandonment of Carter’s bumbling “human rights” agenda, in favor of a foreign policy based on liberty that changed the game.  Reagan’s aides were concerned he was a neophyte unable to carry his own weight in foreign policy.

Instead he, almost alone,  had the central analysis correct.  The CIA’s estimates that the Soviets were outgrowing the US were wrong.  The US could simply out muscle the Soviet economy in any arms race.  It was a dangerous theory for a nuclear war strategy, but it forced the Soviets  to the table.  And for all the foreign policy elites scoffing, let me state the following unequivocally.

This blog values the opinion of that Hungarian cab driver more than the views of any “expert”.   Under the policies of those elites I crawled in fear under my school desk.  Because of Ronald Reagan my children never have.

This is what I know about Republican foreign policy today.  There are two wings.  One believes we should intervene militarily in every Arab or Persian crisis, while not advocating intervention in any black African, Asian, or Latin American country suffering war induced famine, rape, and genocide.  It does not care that every US kinetic intervention in the Middle East with the exception of the Gulf War in 1992 has cost more lives than anticipated.  Every such intervention has yielded unintended results worse than the initial problem.

The other wing believes the United Nations is a global conspiracy.

We are witnessing the passing of the baton on foreign policy competency to the Democrats.  Since 1968 the Republican Party has owned national defense and foreign policy.  It was the party of limited decisive intervention.  This began to collapse with the 2003 Iraq invasion and the rise of Neo-Con “invade every culture we do not really understand” policies.

Now, rather than articulating a vision for how to engage in Asia on a broad economic, cultural, humanitarian, and lastly military basis, we have the Benghazi investigation.   Even as a Democrat I would venture to guess that would not be President Reagan’s foreign policy agenda for 2013.

The Known Natural Gas Problem

06 May
by John, posted in environment, leadership, Policy, President   |  No Comments

Right before I departed on my spring time tour of rural Nebraska and Colorado, I attended FrackingSense’s “Atmospheric Perspective on Oil & Gas Operations” from CU’s Jana Milford, a professor with expertise in airborne pollutants, and NOAA’s Gabrielle Petron, who is busily measuring field levels of airborne pollutants in oil & gas fields. It was very hard to get either of them to use the word fracking. They just do not accept it as scientifically relevant to the pollution issue.

It reminds me frankly of listening to someone who is an expert on firearms pointing out why “assault weapons” is an irrelevant term in gun violence.

For two years while at CU Law I interned for the National Wildlife Federation, the Environmental Defense Fund, and a coalition of water groups in Summit County, Colorado.  It was hardly a pro-extraction group.  But whether it was whooping cranes on the Platte, pronghorn antelope in Wyoming, or air pollution from uranium mining it was all about science.  In those days and in heavily rural Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, and Nebraska the emotion was all on the side of the farmers and ranchers.

After several months of attending the FrackingSense forum at the Center for the American West I have had everyone of my preconceived views confirmed, but one.  Water pollution, traffic, noise, pipeline construction and maintenance are all solvable problems under assault from people who act as if hydrocarbon production is a new untested industrial process.  These problems deserve much more study and innovation, but they are not the problems to focus upon. The air pollution impact is much worse than I thought.

Off the record some of the top regulators in Colorado had warned me that this was the main issue.  There are two grave distortions fostered by the environmental community diverting our attention from the methane, and more importantly, volatile organics currently flooding our new hydrocarbon fields.  First, is that the unscientific video in Gasland and elsewhere points to a water table crisis.  Second, is that the Clean Air Act does not apply to oil & gas production through the so called “Halliburton loophole”.

Both of these are false.

There are water use issues in some watersheds in Colorado, but in no watershed does oil and gas production require the kind of permanent substantial use that agriculture (80% of CO water useage mostly for cattle production) and municipal usage require.   There is a ready and functioning water market with increasing use of industry recycling.  You have a 100% recycling of the fracking fluid and a reasonable near term chance of 100% recycling of produced (ancient underground) water.

The issue is that there is substantial leakage of methane, and worse, volatile organics at the surface in the oil & gas fields.  The leaks can come from drilling, particularly completion of the well processes.  The leaks come from tanks, pipelines, dryers/evaporators, and other equipment.  All of those leaks are regulated at the federal level under the Clean Air Act.

It is the exact opposite of Gasland.

We need the EPA to act within its existing authority to tighten the amount of leakage through the use of technology, enhanced monitoring, and inspections.  The Clean Air Act is one of the most successful US regulatory efforts in history.  Go back and watch video from the 1960s of any major US city before the Clean Air Act .  You will cough in sympathy.

So much of the FrackingSense presentations have been about what we do not know. But it was clear already from Ms. Petron’s previous work and published measurements in Utah and Colorado that a field can be a “sea of methane” from leaks. More importantly accompanying that methane are volatile organics that in the presence of sunlight convert into ozone (O3), one of the original air pollutants regulated under the Clean Air Act.

Regardless of your view of the science on methane and climate change, nobody debates that ground based ozone kills people.

Instead of wasting all this effort on unknown water pollution and temporary disruptions to the surface, the environmental community should be focused like a laser on what we already know.  We have a bad ozone pollution problem, regulated under the Clean Air Act, which we can abate right now.  All it requires is the President to stop campaigning and start acting under existing law.

FrackingSense Update March 19, 2012

20 Mar
by John, posted in competitiveness, environment, leadership, Policy, Rural, West   |  No Comments

Last night’s FrackingSense at CU and the Center for the American West was less inspiring.  An engaging Colorado political scientist at Colorado State University, Charles Davis, described the national and Colorado debate on fracking.  Once again Patty Limerick from the Center for the American West did a fantastic job of moderating a crowd that clearly wanted to argue politics not understand the various goals and strategies of industry, environmentalists, government, and localities.

Whether it was because I already understood 90% of the material presented or the politics of fracking at this point is only arguing as opposed to data, this was a less satisfying night.

There is one early take it to the bank takeaway already from the outreach effort.  You cannot discuss fracking data or policy without a strong moderating voice focused on science and civility.   With that moderating voice and focus anything is possible.

Fracking Sense – Science Before Policy

18 Mar
by John, posted in environment, Policy, Rural, West   |  No Comments

One of the bizarre developments of modern politics is the tendency of the two political parties charged with developing and implementing policy to abandon science.  The most reported story in the United States is on global warming and the Republican party.  But the uncovered story is the Democratic party’s denial of the overwhelming existing scientific consensus on oil and gas production including fracking.

It is always possible for the Republican party to find a dwindling number of dissident scientists to testify that climate change is not tied to man made activities.  The same phenomenon is ongoing now with fracking.  You can site to Gasland, or some of the preliminary EPA or Cornell University studies, but what you cannot do is present the scientific case against fracking as a majority consensus.  In fact it is not even as advanced  as the climate change denier’s case.

And into this breach of politics masking as science has stepped the Center for American West with a 5 year long National Science Foundation study on the effects of natural gas development. The study is staffed and overseen with a wide variety of researchers across engineering, science, social science, and environmental disciplines.  Most importantly it has represenatives from the environmental movement, academia, Native Americans, government, and industry.

It is beginning with a typical Center for the American West outreach to the community through a lengthy lecture series called Fracking Sense. I attended last Tuesday’s presentation on water quantity, which is a big issue in Colorado.  We have a limited water supply which we almost fully consume.  It is surely a legitimate question to ask if hydraulic fracking with its pressurized streams of water and sand will cause disruption or even disaster to Colorado’s water volumes.

I learned that Colorado consumes about six million acre feet per year of water.  Eighty percent of that use is for agriculture that is mostly used to feed livestock.  Projected fracking consumption assuming the most optimistic price, regulatory, and production assumptions would consume 20,000 acre feet per year.  Production companies in Colorado buy water on the open market from agriculture and cities with excess water.

If you happen to be pro-industry it is easy to say six million acre feet versus 20,000 with an operating free market and no disruption equals no problem.

But of course what it really does is set up one aspect of the study.  That 20,000 acre feet does not come out of the entire Colorado six million acre feet, but out of the watersheds that serve the relatively small number of counties that have oil and gas.  The question is not how will 20,000 acre feet affect the state, but those small number of counties, their watersheds, and the downstream interests.

But there is certainly no existing science to demonstrate a catastrophic disruption to the quantity of Colorado water supplies warranting a ban on fracking.  That is a metaphor repeated over and over in the science around fracking.  There is a rich field for research not an emotional reaction.

Another example is recycling of fracking fluids.  I learned that almost all fracking fluids are captured and recycled as part of the well flow back.  Even more interesting the produced water, ancient seawater trapped in the shale beds, is only partially recycled due to the high energy cost of desalination. With the right kind of technological and policy innovation even produced water recycling may be possible.

Again, not a reason for a ban, but plenty of fertile ground for research and innovation.

This study and in particular the Tuesday lectures is occurring in a charged political environment in Colorado.  Here in Boulder a vote on lifting a temporary ban will occur in the spring.  Longmont and Ft. Collins have passed bans and are facing poor prospects in resulting lawsuits.  In rural Colorado, even Weld County outside Ft. Collins, fracking has strong support.

But the Center for the American West’s focus on science kept the audience in check.  And that is really our problem with both political parties.  They cherry pick science when it is convenient to support their ideologies, instead of developing policy based on science regardless of ideology.

Join me at Fracking Sense to learn about science and hear the alternative to bans, ideologies, and bad policy from either party.

Lean Whatever – Professional Women’s Equality

13 Mar
by John, posted in competitiveness, innovation, leadership, Life, Policy   |  No Comments

Watching for months, threatening to become years, professional women debate equality of opportunity vs. equality has culminated in a rather obvious point. In America professionals cannot trust anyone else to give them balance.  Professionals have to make hard choices.  How you make those choices dictate in large measure your wealth or your willingness to live without it, therefore your flexibility in child-rearing and career.

I thought that was the whole point?  Men and society would no longer make decisions for women.  Women, individually, would be free to chose their own paths in life.

But instead an element of the conversation really seems to be less equality of opportunity, but equality in the French sense.  The idea that society’s collective sense of equality (fraternity) outweighs individual equality of opportunity.  It is as if one sliver of professional women are asking for égalité expressed in various forms of government policy imposing mandatory change and another is making the traditional American point that you are better to seize control of your life and live it your way.

What I was struck by in Anne-Marie Slaughter’s Atlantic piece was how uncomfortable she was with her decision to leave the White House.

My family moved with me to the DC area.  They hated it.  From that move huge opportunity arose that made my career.  Now we have balance in our lives.

It was only after  that I realized I did not want a grinding career marked by 10, 20, or even 30 year stints in an organization.  I realized that by year three I was bored even in the most dynamic of environments.  It was not so much the constant pounding of 80 hour work weeks, but the prospect of only doing that.

In other words, why not make public policy on my life experience versus Anne-Marie Slaughter’s, or anyone of the other three hundred million Americans regardless of gender?

At its core I think Sheryl Sandberg’s approach focusing on empowerment of women to succeed in the world  matches my experience. It is only when you succeed in your career that you can extract balance from it.  Waiting on the government to pass the right mix of subsidies and laws to empower your success is riskier than striking out.

And Sandberg is completely right about having to reach out for the baton.  I am a turnaround guy.  Nobody takes care of you, but you.

Now this can come across as critical of Anne-Marie Slaughter and traditional policy solutions such as flexible hours and workspace. I believe in all of those tools.  It makes good business sense in productivity, efficiency, and cost structure.

It is also a great way as a manager to motivate not just female employees, but any employee with a challenge.  A few hundred dollars of technology can enable any employee to work more hours from more places.  You have to manage employees to data driven metrics, but flexible work hours breed incredibly loyal, grateful, and hard working employees.

But there is no one size fits all.  Yahoo’s CEO, Marissa Mayer, has gone just the other way in banning telecommuting in some circumstances.  Remember she is in a long-shot turnaround at Yahoo that most likely will fail. If you have worked in a desperate turnaround where the customer rejects your product, the workforce is wracked with the results of multiple RIFs (reductions in force), your biggest daily challenge is shocking the culture.  It is literally a defibrillator to a prostrate body on the way to being a carcass.

It has nothing to do with égalité vs. equality of opportunity. It has to do with a turnaround.  Gender has nothing to do with it.

We should do everything possible to encourage young women to succeed on their terms. We should pursue public policy, continuing to focus on all forms of discrimination, that emulates that cultural encouragement.  But in the end not every man or woman wants the same thing, will sacrifice the same,  and the society is too complex to relegate women’s future to a binary “balance” discussion.

You can have it all, or part of it, or none it.  It comes with degrees of cost.  The choice is what makes us American.

 

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