The illusion of action and competence is what politics is about.

Offering a tangible plan that promises this tax incentive, that fact-finding commission, this reinvestment project, this funding for retraining doesn’t reach people who perceive the present as a slum left behind by a low-rent version of Benjamin’s angel of history. In fact, all it does is convince them that the candidate with the plans is one of those folks with his hands on the levers, one of them who always seems to come out on top. . .

There isn’t a policy package that can straightforwardly address some of the underlying structural changes in the global political economy that affect Peoria as surely as they affect Shenzen. Your wonkish arms are too short to box with that god. I don’t think anyone is the master of these changes, even though some people and social classes and systems have way more power to direct what is happening than others. Even corporations and governments, bankers and businessmen, technologists and artisans, are sometimes adrift on a swiftly floating river, bound to follow it to its coursing ends. . .

Competency is something I value. I believe in it, I vote for it. It is what makes a leader (institutional, national, local) both legitimate and charismatic in my eyes. But that’s significantly because I inhabit social and economic worlds where competency has a very immediate and obvious impact on whether those worlds function well or not. . .

That sight is partly a function of knowledge, which I still believe can have a universal value to everyone, at all levels. But it’s also self-interest. I am drawn to procedural liberalism because I live in worlds that are highly procedural and my skills and training are adapted to manipulating procedural outcomes.

Most if not all of the issues that national and international politicians and advocates talk about are beyond them. They are all incompetent as measured by those problems. The tax diddles and fact-finding junkets and such are the spoils of political victory that often make things worse for most people, while rewarding special interests, and don't often even pretend to deal with major issues.

The bit that I find amazing is that the advocates seem unaware of just how silly they sound to anyone who isn't a cultist.

The current issue is pretty much a bunch of policy prescriptions to be implemented starting about, say, January 21, 2009. These proposals struck me as an almost-perfect illustration of the kind of hubris that has infected the American political class since the end of the Cold War. This is not limited to one party or faction – the whole governing elite seems to me to be drunk with power. . .

Mooney proposes: an ever-tightening cap on US emissions that will reduce emissions by 80% by 2050; spending $150 billion on a clean energy research “Manhattan Project” over 10 years; erecting large-scale public works preparedness projects, such as building seawalls around New York; and leading the rest of the world, notably India and China, into a global version of an emissions reduction regime.

He is casually calling for radically restructuring the entire energy sector of the US economy, and further assuming that just by passing a law that says we are going to reduce emissions by X amount that we have done something.

Sure, just like the EU and Kyotoites have reduced emissions.

Finally, consider the idea that the US will lead China and India to agree to reduce emissions substantially (without which, the AGW-related benefits of US reductions would be pretty hard to justify). Together, these two countries have more than 2,400,000,000 people and are rapidly-rising world powers. What makes us think that we will have the power to “lead” either one of these countries to do something that is not in its own interests? . . .

Where is the humility about the complexity of society, the inherent difficulty in predicting the future of anything, and the limits to our capabilities? Put differently, where is the sense of how much harder it is to do a thing than to talk about doing it?

While political poseurs loot the treasury, the truly competent get on with things.

[E]ven the best system converts only about 30 percent of received solar energy into electricity—making solar more expensive than burning coal or oil. That will change if Lonnie Johnson’s invention works. [It] can achieve a conversion efficiency rate that tops 60 percent with a new solid-state heat engine. It represents a breakthrough new way to turn heat into power.

Johnson, a nuclear engineer who holds more than 100 patents, calls his invention the Johnson Thermoelectric Energy Conversion System, or JTEC for short. This is not PV technology, in which semiconducting silicon converts light into electricity. And unlike a Stirling engine, in which pistons are powered by the expansion and compression of a contained gas, there are no moving parts in the JTEC.

Johnson left JPL and is using some NSF funding as well as his own money resulting from his invention of the Super Soaker squirt gun to develop JTEC.

“It’s like a conventional heat engine,” explains Paul Werbos, program director at the National Science Foundation, which has provided funding for JTEC. “It still uses temperature differences to create pressure gradients. Only instead of using those pressure gradients to move an axle or wheel, he’s using them to force ions through a membrane. It’s a totally new way of generating electricity from heat.” . . .

This engine, Johnson says, can operate on tiny scales, or generate megawatts of power. If it proves feasible, drastically reducing the cost of solar power would only be a start. JTEC could potentially harvest waste heat from internal combustion engines and combustion turbines, perhaps even the human body. And no moving parts means no friction and fewer mechanical failures.

As an engineer, Johnson says he has always been interested in energy conversion. In fact, it was while working on an idea for an environmentally friendly heat pump (one that would not require Freon) that he came up with the Super Soaker, which earned him millions of dollars in royalties.

Competent governance is not a bunch of policy prescriptions. It's about reality, and that's messy and uncertain. The worst thing we could do would be a clean energy research “Manhattan Project”. Increased funds for research should not be shackled to some wonkish idea about targets. We have many problems which all need innovative solutions, but they don't all have a political constituency. The social mind works best when it is not distracted and impeded, when it is not diverted from its natural course by the threats and promises of brutes in power. This matters because we do have many problems, any one of which can bring us low. It's bad management to pursue any one while neglecting others, yet that is precisely the result of political machinations. Competence is apolitical, even anti-political. When you hear a politician asking for your vote by claiming competence, or hear an advocate demanding your vote based on such claims, then stand back and walk away slowly. This is not a reasoned argument and won't result in good governance.

I'd like to hear some politican promote these types of ideas, one who seeks power to remove impediments rather than create new ones that favor some constituency, even if I am part of that constituency. I'll haul my own water, thank you. It's a difficult argument to make and has little mob appeal. It probably won't result in power. But it might improve the conversation and perhaps, in some distant future, result in better governance through influence on more appealing power seekers who can't sell their ridiculous promises the way they do now.

Update:

Speaking of mindless poseurs . . .

[W]hatever the shortcomings of their rhetoric, environmentalists have a very good reason to push for some limits, however much of a downer that message might be. Global warming is caused by carbon emissions and can be contained only by reducing them. Nordhaus and Shellenberger’s preferred alternative — huge investment in alternative energy — doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny. For one thing, without mandatory curbs on emissions, it might not work. For another thing, emissions caps would effectively provide a subsidy to less polluting alternatives, one that would be harder for lobbyists to manipulate and that wouldn’t require lawmakers to pick winners among various possible technologies. Finally, even as a matter of crass politics, Nordhaus and Shellenberger neglect a basic point: the hard part about gaining support for a new initiative isn’t convincing people of its value but finding the money to pay for it. The conventional solutions to global warming posed by the “politics of limits” — taxing carbon emissions, or issuing tradeable emissions to carbon-producing firms — conveniently raises revenue that could be used to pay for the very projects the authors wish to see.

Investment in alternative energy might not work? And this dork thinks that a national tax on carbon emissions will work? News flash: It's global warming, not local warming. No policy matters at all that does not apply to the whole world.

Taxing carbon or some such wheeze will raise money, but it won't affect the climate one bit. And as a way to raise revenue for whatever reason it has fatal flaws in that it puts so much of the burden on those who can least bear it. There have been proposals to redistribute the loot to ease the burden on the poor, but when the smoke clears it ends up that whatever justifications this silly idea once claimed are long gone.

So much of politics is like this. Some real or imagined problem is adopted by political poseurs who then proceed to debate non-solutions to the non-problems. This is what they do for a living and it's a mystery to me why we endure them. They just aren't that entertaining. In fact, why am I posting about this dim wit? Memo to self . . .