“On its current trajectory,”  Craig Martin & Scott Moore write at Foreign Affairs, “the world is unlikely to meet the limits it set for itself in the 2015 Paris Agreement to halt global warming. … As this reality sets in, once fringe ideas about how to artificially cool the planet are gaining traction. One such idea is lowering global temperatures by effectively shading the planet, a process known as solar geoengineering.”

The premise of solar geoengineering is simple: If we reduce the amount of sunlight (and accompanying heat) that reaches the surface of the planet, we get lower temperatures.

The devil isn’t just in the details — do we seed the upper atmosphere with sulfates, spray seawater into clouds to lighten their color and make them reflect sunlight, maybe even park a gigantic Mylar (TM) mirror in orbit? — but in the fact that cooling the planet portends negative as well as positive consequences. Lower crop yields in some agricultural zones, for example. More violent/damaging weather in certain areas, too. Good things we can maybe predict, bad things we can’t necessarily foresee.

That makes the whole idea a political problem that, Martin and Moore write, “will require a new multilateral treaty with the primary purpose of prohibiting unauthorized deployment and establishing a collective decision-making process for approving and governing any potential future use.”

Count on a long wait and a great deal of acrimony before something, anything, might actually happen … unless rogue state or non-state actors take matters into their own hands. For a gripping fictional account of what that might look like, read Neal Stephenson’s Termination Shock. You’ll learn a lot, and enjoy the learning.

Let’s look at this from four highly debatable, but not implausible, premises:

First, the earth is warming, at least partly due to human action.

Second, the warming represents something at least approaching an existential crisis for humanity, making life — on balance — worse for humanity and maybe, MAYBE even portending our eventual extinction.

Third, most of humanity is NOT going to abandon the Industrial Revolution and its consequences — healthier, longer, more prosperous lives — to stop the warming.

Fourth, the that Revolution isn’t moving fast enough to get us to “net zero emissions” (with the supposed benefit of ending the warming) in a timely manner.

If those four things are true — and, like I said, they are all debatable — then the alternative seems to be “do some solar geoengineering” or “get used to living in an oven that’s still pre-heating with no top in sight.” The nature of politics probably sticks us with the latter.

As a libertarian, I’d naturally like to see matters resolved with minimal if any government involvement … but figuring out what level of “pollution” constitutes an actionable tort, or how to penalize those whose externalities warm up my house in ways that modify their behavior, may prove even more complicated than “a new multilateral treaty with the primary purpose of prohibiting unauthorized deployment and establishing a collective decision-making process for approving and governing any potential future use.”

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“What if our campaigns were much, much shorter?” Ben Smith asks at Semafor. “The presidential campaign is currently a two-year cycle, which begins just after the prior midterm elections. … [Kamala] Harris is accidentally demonstrating the alternative: She’s the hot new thing in August, riding on vibes and goodwill six months after the Super Tuesday peak of modern campaigns.”

Wouldn’t it be nice if we only had to suffer a few short months (maybe even WEEKS) of presidential campaigning every four years?

That’s how it used to be, even in the days before radio, television, and the Internet, when campaigning was limited to the speed of rail transportation and print newspaper coverage. Until the 1970s, candidates often didn’t even announce until well into election years, and it was frequently impossible to know whom political parties would even nominate until their summertime national conventions. Campaigns were autumnal affairs, not multi-year slug-fests.

My main disagreement with Smith’s take is on his idea that the modern American presidential campaign cycle only lasts two years.  In reality, we live (as his piece’s title mentions) in the age of the “permanent campaign.”

By the time a president delivers his (perhaps, and maybe as early as next January, her) first inaugural address, the re-election campaign is already underway, and the campaigns of future opponents or successors are at least gassing up for the long drive.

Barack Obama, for example, clearly launched his 2008 presidential campaign within days of delivering a well-received speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. His ascent from the Illinois State Senate to short tenure in the US Senate was more looping campaign ad than regular career move.

President George H.W. Bush’s two sons both stopped by the politics store to pick up governorships, both with obvious intent to generate presidential buzz.

Then there’s Harris, who barely got her US Senate seat warm before swerving into the presidential nomination lane for 2020.

Adoption of Smith’s “compressed schedule” proposal (presidential primaries in July, conventions shortly thereafter) wouldn’t shut down the “permanent campaign” nonsense in and of itself, but it might presage a cultural change in which perpectual “pick me” antics cost, rather than benefit, candidates.

Again, wouldn’t that be nice?

A cautionary note, however:

A shorter campaign season would merely provide a respite from the tiresome pageantry, not a solution to our bigger problems. It wouldn’t necessarily result in better government, even if we define “better” along the lines of Grover Norquist’s moderate prescription (“reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub”) rather than in terms of my own root and branch anarchist abolitionism.

As respites go, though, I’d joyously greet an end to the “permanent campaign.”

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Ah, the tempest teapot of vice-presidential campaigns: Republican veep nominee JD Vance, Senator from Ohio, accuses Democratic veep nominee apparent Tim Walz, governor of Minnesota, of engaging in “stolen valor garbage.”

Vance’s allegations seem to involve three components:

First, that Walz retired from the National Guard after 24 years in infantry and artillery jobs, instead of adding another hitch so as to deploy with his unit to Iraq (the unit received its orders two months after he submitted his retirement paperwork).

Second, that while Minnesota’s official government web site described Walz’s rank at retirement as Command Sergeant Major, he actually retired as a Master Sergeant because he hadn’t completed the Sergeants Major Academy while holding the job of (envelope, please) Command Sergeant Major.

And third, that Walz referred in passing to “weapons of war, that I carried in war” in an anti-gun-rights rant. Walz never carried a weapon in war, if for no other reason than that the US hasn’t been — legally/constitutionally speaking — at war since 1945, two decades before his birth. He almost certainly carried, at least, a side arm, during periods when the US military was engaged in combat, even though he didn’t see any himself.

Vance, on the other hand, served one enlistment in the US Marine Corps, deploying to Iraq as a “combat correspondent” who, by his own admission, saw no “combat.” I suspect he carried a weapon in that (pseudo-)war. So valor! Much rifle!

I seldom speak “as a veteran,” but “as a veteran” (and, by the way, a Marine who ran for vice-president 16 years before Vance, appearing on the ballot in Tennessee for the Boston Tea Party), I find this line of gotcha name-calling, and the whole concept of “stolen valor,” boring and silly.

A veteran is just a former government employee who may have held, but didn’t necessarily hold, a job with “kill people” in its description of usual duties. There’s nothing inherently more “valorous” about that than there is to any other government jobs/workfare program; “valor” is a rare individual occurrence, not an automatic attribute of “service.”

As for false or embellished claims as to the character of a veteran’s work, who cares?

Family-friendly version of an old saying: The difference between a fairy tale and a sea story is that a fairy tale begins “once upon a time …” while a sea story begins “no kidding, you’re not gonna believe this …”

Neither of these two politicians seems to have embellished his record to any wild degree — if I had a dollar for every “former US Navy SEAL” I’ve met, I’d have more dollars than the number of SEALs who’ve ever existed — and given Vance’s need to nitpick at this level of triviality, I doubt any new bombshells are wired for later detonation.

And if the idea of “stolen valor” bothers you, you’ve got too much time on your hands and probably a tendency toward unjustified grievance. Some idiot wearing an “unearned” Medal of Honor neither picks your pocket nor breaks your leg. Get over it.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY