This is how most people feel, I think. Most people don't notice inflation when it's low and they think the natural order is stagnant prices. Even very smart people I've met have said that Biden is lying that inflation is coming down because "prices are still rising."
True, though it was a much bigger change. I wonder if the change in administration contributed to that as most people mis-attributed beating inflation to Reagan.
I just watched "Falling Down" and the scene where unhinged White Conservative Everyman psycho played by Michael Douglas destroys a Korean convenience store, ranting about prices returning back to 1965, comes to mind.
Prices for things like housing are NEVER going back down to what they were pre-inflation. Today's is the cheapest price for most things ever again. The only thing that will change (hopefully) is that the pace of increases slows. And that really sucks for people on a fixed-income or people whose wages haven't and won't keep up with inflation.
And it is perception - when inflation was running much higher in the late 70s, the drop in change was noticeable (remember inflation as 4% or more during Reagan's time even after the Fed crackdown). So, trend lines do matter, but can take a while.
"Of curse not, The Fed targets prices to rise at least 2% per year, more when bad things like Putin's invasion of Ukraine happen."
Seriously, Financial journalists and politician have not done enough to explain optimal inflation. Even the Fed target is often presented as the lowest rate the Fed can possibly achieve, leaving the implication that zero would be better.
If they aim to bring down a U.S. President by jacking up prices then its long past time we let them find out what their neighbourhood is like to live in without US weapons to defend themselves
Cut them off and let their wahabists run columns of suicide bombers at their enemies as a way to protect their border
With both SA and Israel doing everything they can to fuck over democrats, reducing oil sanctions on Iran to get them producing more seems like a reasonable move
A fairly cynical column for sure. Rather than suggestions to solve problems the focus is on ways to dress up the problems so that Biden who exacerbated them tremendously with his policies over the last 2.5 years can hide his involvement and get re-elected. It is that type of politics first thinking that is driving the country to ruin.
Donald Trump and its movement are *THE* problem. So trying to find ways to boost Biden to prevent a second Trump presidency is the most important problem to solve in America.
You don’t elect or reelect politicians that attempted a coup, that’s democracy 101. Most countries (all?) that make that mistake lose their democracies.
Interesting take. Not sure I agree with you that there was any more of an attempt to a coup by Trump than what the Left did for the first three years of the Trump presidency.
Personally, I'd rather they both had the grace to bow out. But I guess that's the point of a ballot box. Let's chat again in December 2024.
What a wide majority of Americans want is for him to Not run again. Let someone younger takeover. He was a life long mediocrity that some how became president only because the press war on Trump finally succeeded with Covid policies. Greasy Gavin can give you all the spending and taxes you crave, and he is young enough to even be interviewed without hadlers and script. You hate Trump so much? ok then run someone else. Under 60 would be nice.
My counterargument to the "He's too old" canard: We should aspire to be as productive and accomplished when we get to be Biden's age.
He's been in the Senate for much of his adult life, he's already served in the White House for eight years, and he knows how hard and emotionally draining politics is. And in his advanced age, he says, "Yeah, give me more of that."
Biden's great asset is that he has a long memory, knows the political process, and knows what the responsibility of being the chief executive is. He's also got a lot of substantive legislation passed (CHIPS, Inflation Reduction Act, COVID stimulus in the first days of his presidency) in the first half of his presidency.
I hearted this post because of Noah's opening paragraph. As a consequence of Duverger's law, the American political system is capable of outputting a maximum of two parties that can advance a maximum of two ideas. But even that is broken. The Red Tribe no longer offers any ideas negotiable with reality. Like, what expectations do magas have if Donald Trump is in the White House? None. They have no expectations. And what the Blue Tribe needs to understand is: No expectations Is. The. Point.
He's not suggesting it's ok for other countries to produce and export oil, he's just pointing out that Trump will be way worse for the environment than a bit of extra oil production now.
Where the oil is produces has zero environmental consequeses for CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere. Restricting us production and transportation of fossil fuels is McKribbenism.
It's burning the oil that harms the environment whether it's produced in the US or elsewhere. If we can produce at a profit, go for production while reducing demand!
The oil price thing is really tricky because we've probably peaked in *cheap* oil and there just isn't a whole lot that can be done by anyone to change that fact. In the last decade, the marginal producer for 90% of increased oil supply has been the United States, mostly via the extremely expensive and increasingly expensive-to-operate alternative supplies in the Permian Basin and the like. All that wondrous lateral drilling technology has increased production, but is also really costly, as is more conventional deep-water drilling. Already, after the 1970s, American oil exploration had expanded into increasingly-expensive-to-extract supply in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska, making up much-needed supply, but at a higher unit cost. Now our Energy Return on Investment (EROI) on marginal supplies of primary energy is worryingly low as the cheapest proven reserves of oil (e.g. in Saudi Arabia) are drying up.
This isn't always obvious in oil prices. We have some geopolitical variables affecting price in the shorter term (e.g. Russian invasion of Ukraine and OPEC+ coordination). There's also been recent and unprecedented demand-destruction from COVID and, to a lesser degree, from economic downturns. Also, above a certain price-point, oil is just too expensive, and there's demand destruction (with deleterious economic effects). But the secular trend is that supply is increasingly constrained relative to normal demand, *especially* cheap-to-extract supply.
Some future president is going to have to cry uncle on trying to every way possible to keep oil prices low and tell Americans the truth: that honeymoon period of cheap energy that we came to think of as normal is over. Especially the cheap liquid fossil fuels that underpin everything material in our lives, even as we make strides in Electrifying Everything. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve is already half-empty and seems unlikely to be re-filled any time soon at a decent price. Republicans keep talking about nixing the gasoline tax, but not only is that a small component of the price at the pump, it also funds the entire (subsidized) highway infrastructure that keeps transportation cheap. Unfortunately, that's a political hot potato that nobody wants to be stuck with. I'm sure the adults in the room understand this.
One of the first sci-fi books was Olaf Stapleton's "Last and First Men". One of the things I enjoyed about it was his discussion of how the "second men" had a much harder time developing because the "first men" (us) had already tapped out all the easily accessible fossil fuels. The book itself is a classic but I found it only so-so. That little detail always stuck with me though. Oil is transitory and its reign must be used to find a more long-term energy solution.
I followed the Peak Oil narrative closely for a couple years in the early 2000’s. The main reason it went away is because of enhanced recovery techniques in the US, as you say. And maybe huge discoveries in Guyana and who-know-where will continue to delay Peak Oil. But it has always seemed to me that the Energy Transition we’re hoping for--- some of us a bit skeptically--- is at least as important because of the steadily decreasing EROI of petroleum extraction as it is for climate change. The human population in the billions is the direct result of exploiting fossil fuel energy.
Yeah, exactly right. The physical reality of how much hydrocarbon there is somewhere in the ground is very distinct from how much *affordably-extractable* volume there is left (even though adherents and critics of "Peak Oil," alike, can conflate the two). LOOOOONG before we literally run out of oil, it will just be ineffectual to extract anymore. Which, in essence, means we've "run out of oil," but will never actually use up the last drop of oil that exists.
In the same way, current battery technology today requires efficiently extractable lithium. Surprisingly, perhaps, lithium isn't rare. There's lithium in the ocean! But it would never make sense to extract lithium from the ocean, since it's so dilute. It would be like extracting the trace gold found in human bodies instead of mining it.
So it only becomes economic to exploit lithium in those few places in the world where it is both highly concentrated and accessible. Ditto with copper, iron ore, gold, and everything else material we use. Oil can be found in many places, but is only concentrated and easy to get to in a few.
What's the strike-point for oil where it becomes too expensive to produce be useful to use? That's an excellent question, but for many decades there's been demand-destruction once oil hits $100 and beyond. Arguably, we get WAY more value out of a barrel of oil than a $100 price captures. But oil is a bit of a free lunch, this way. We take for granted this geological subsidy, where we can immediately get 10,000 man-hours of work out of this barrel at a minuscule fraction of the cost. That's normal now. And our entire lifestyle requires it!
We also totally ignore the externalities that burning it creates. $100/barrel wouldn't even begin to cover it. Should we or could we pay $500/barrel? That would certainly open up a lot more economically extractable reserves of low-quality or hard-to-reach crude. Maybe, but it wouldn't be the world that we know today. The oil would be what it probably should be: a precious, niche miracle material that we should be reserving for the things that we absolutely can't do otherwise!
The strike-price for oil needs another relationship that would determine what the expense would be. One relationship would be fuel as cost-driver.
The higher the strike price of oil, the higher the price of fuel. When the fuel price grows, fuel cost grows as a larger proportion of a vehicle's operating cost, while the other portions of a vehicle's cost stay more or less constant. Fuel is also frequently replaced -- every few hundred miles of operation, vs. thousands of miles for routine maintenance or tens of thousands of miles for things like tires and engine and transmission components.
Most car owners don't think analytically like this. But, for anyone who has to manage a vehicle fleet, their job is to think analytically. They cannot influence the barrel price of oil, but they can run a keep-or-replace comparison and weigh the costs of paying for petroleum fuel or explore an alternative fuel. There might be some factor that nudges or compels paying a switching cost for an alternative fuel.
Because we habitually use money cost as a proxy for value, it doesn’t seem quite correct to say it, but yes, in a fundamental way the energy we extract from petroleum has been close to free.
What always comes to my mind in the discussions on Energy Transition is the idea of discontinuity. Or, the related idea of path dependency. We’ve come down this winding path of converting exquisitely high EROI fossil fuels into 8 billion humans at unprecedented material prosperity. Now that we want to switch to an energy source other that fossil fuels, we look at the trends in the money cost of making solar panels, windmills, batteries, grid enhancements, etc., and project a very plausible scenario that is well underway. But I wonder if the real predicament is that there is in our future a strike-point for oil EROI where things fall apart because the whole renewables build out is itself an illusory byproduct of the EROI of fossil fuels. Consider the cost of mining the materials to make renewables in a petroleum scarcity environment.
I have a hot take that, setting aside the political ramifications, illegal immigration is good actually. In my heart I'm an open borders guy, but I do have some concerns that opening the borders in the United States would lead to just a truly unmanageable number of people showing. Illegal immigration is kind of a middle ground where essentially everybody can come but there is still some level discouragement from coming.
I also think that the economy may benefit from having a class of workers or not entitled to exactly the same level of protections as everybody else. Minimum wage and other job protections are good, so I wouldn't want to throw them our entirely, but there are some jobs that just can't exist with them in place, and saying that even willing people cant take those jobs leads to dead weight loss. Illegal immigration fills that gap. I also don't feel like it is really exploiting the illegal immigrants, because they are usually going to be better off then if they hadn't come at all.
One change I would make is to set a statutes of limitations for illegal immigration - if you are here for X years illegally, you get legal status. Deporting people who've lived productive lives in the US for a while is kind of dumb. This would also reduce the extent to which illegal immigrants have to bear the brunt of lack of employment protections.
I'm not wedded to any of this, but for these reasons, I do kind of support illegal immigration as part of immigration policy.
WE could certainly use lots more immigration of high-skilled people. The flow of low skill people is probably too high, but legal immigration of lower/middle skilled people could be increased.
If it's not, the Democrats are coming full circle and re-embracing slavery -- that's what "a class of workers not entitled to protections" actually means.
I would suggest you read Camp of the Saints and let me know which side you believe to be in the right.
"Camp of the Saints" is fashoid copium. "The Turner Diaries" but for French consumption. It's like "Django Unchained" if Jamie Foxx and Leonardo DiCaprio were flipped as protagonist and antagonist.
Have you read it? I found it really hard to read because its descriptions of the ship occupants was so vile and racist and disgusting. But the response of the French establishment, and the complete disregard for their own people's culture and even continuity and safety is just as vile and disgusting. To me, that's why it's a good book -- you're forces to pick a side even though both are deeply flawed. You can't deny Raspail foresaw our current elite's response to massive waves of immigration.
Open borders is simply not a tenable proposition in a world of welfare states linked by cheap intercontinental travel.
I concede I didn't read Camp of the Saints. I didn't know of its existence until the Trump Administration, when an article noted that Stephen Miller was basing US immigration policy by reifying the book's plot. I've seen the plot synopsis on Wikipedia.
I won't engage with it because it seems to be the French equivalent of "The Turner Diaries," a genre of far-right gothic fantasy and vindication porn that defines its audience. Raspail was an acclaimed author in France, but Camp of the Saints was his most famous book and very much Raspail opening his true self and splashing all over the pages.
I learned about it from Rod Dreher about 8-10 years ago. Raspail may have been an overt racist. I have no idea. However, the book is so disgusting that it seems intentional. If Raspail was trying to slip his views into an otherwise anodyne novel, he clearly failed. Regardless of his personal views, the book makes a point of skewering the virtue of not only the Indian rabble but of the French intelligentsia and also the small, militant faction intent on repelling the invaders/immigrants/refugees. Raspail criticizes all of them.
If you can find a copy, I would urge you to slog through it. You won't "like" it, but it has something meaningful to say.
I don't have the digestive system for Camp of the Saints, to be honest.
I remember a similar cultural product, from my own backyard. The 2005 film "Crash." It won a best picture Oscar to boot. It's a bad movie, and an offensively bad one to boot. It's too bad that it took a decade for the hate for it to roll in.
It's a Hollywood liberal message movie, yet it's so anus-clenching in its repugnance because the film sets its moral bar so low. All you get to see in "Crash"'s universe are cliches and stereotypes, and that is the only way you get to be visible in this world. Exit the theater and look at real life, and in reality people are thankfully not this morally empty.
That's the same thing I imagine with Camp of the Saints. The author harbors a bitter vision of humanity, the soft totalitarianism of false dichotomy. Because the French failed to maintain a static, dead idea of culture, they get devoured by the brown multitudes. Read between the lines, and Raspail is saying that "Do this to Them before They do it to Us."
Yet France is better than Raspail. You can experience more culture, being produced and reproduced, at any random Paris Metro stop during a lunch hour than the cultural output of the entirety of France during the 18th century before the revolution.
Your opening paragraph isn’t helping with the growing partisanship issue you alluded to later in the blog. Just the fact that you felt a need to include that paragraph goes to show how divided we are.
He repeated use of the marketing phrase "bidenomics" makes me throw up a little in my mouth. Neither Biden nor Trump should be president again. That's what most Americans want
Nor is calling "right wingers" (whatever the that means) racists. I expected more from this substack. Just another insular left winger (see what I did there) web site
Both these issues aren't about specific policies. They are an underlying worldview of Biden and most Democrats. They really believe that oil is evil and continued production will destroy the Earth. They really believe that borders are racist and probably nation states themselves are. These are religious convictions, not academic policy debates. As such: 1) they can not be changed easily, and 2) even if Biden were to do a 180, no one (in his own party or the other) would believe him.
Look at how the sudden U-turn on COVID policies and the lab leak theory undercut trust in our public health folks. The kind of yo-yo'ing you suggest from the President on 2 of his highest profile positions would have the same effect on a larger scale.
The solution for Biden isn't to try and "evolve his views" 1 year before the election. The solution is to convince others that his views are correct. He may fail at that, but that's his only path forward.
Sorry, the trust in public health folks was mostly undercut by misinformation and other BS that was aimed specifically at doing that and feeding conspiracy theories... Most folks have no clue about the lab leak theory or what the issues are - the reason why it had an impact was purely political (China virus..) and long before there was even good info (which there still isn't thanks to China). And yes, the CDC made mistakes (and as a former scientist, I am still pissed off at them and the FDA) - but most of the "mistrust" was due to nonsense that had nothing at all to due to stupid CDC mistakes.
Gary, read the Great Barrington Declaration. It was deplatformed and labelled unscientific misinformation in 2020. It's obvious today that it was essentially spot on. Similarly for the lab leak. It was a racist conspiracy theory in 2020 only believed by QAnon people... until it suddenly wasn't and our CIA and FBI essentially confirmed it as the most likely origin. This kind of stuff adds up.
I have been a microcosm of tis myself. I was one of the first people to mask. I watch NHK (Japanese) News on PBS so I had about 3 more days notice than most of the country. I stocked up on masks and flour and oil and peanut butter. And everyone looked at me weird because I was wearing a mask when I was shopping. My family was sewing masks for our local hospitals for the first month. I say this to illustrate that I was 100% trusting of our public health establishment in March of 2020.
All that changed in the wake of George Floyd for me. The same public health establishment that had told everyone they had to stay in their homes at all costs... now had no criticism of thousands of people maskless and screaming in the streets. They even promoted it: "racism is a bigger public health threat than COVID!"
That was my red-pill moment. I didn't turn away quickly, but the seeds were planted. I started reading other sources. I found the Great Barrington Declaration. And I gradually realized that I had been (and was being) lied to. It was very much an echo of my Iraq War transformation in the late 2000's.
So maybe that's why I'm untrusting now. In my adult lifetime, the ruling class of my country has lied to me about a war and about a public health pandemic. Whether it's simple incompetence or outright malice, the erosion of trust is real.
First, if anyone had implemented Barrington, the death toll would have been awful I spent many years as a molecular biologist and I could rip that to pieces (and have done in other forums), but I don't really feel like doing it again. Sweden did a very limited version and had far more deaths than its immediate neighbors - and they didn't come close to full Barrington...
Second, the CIA and FBI haven't confirmed anything as far as the origin - all they really said was that they couldn't rule it out - BFD - scientists knew that from the beginning. Without a lot more info from the Chinese on early cases (which ain't going to happen), we won't know the answer. Of course, a lab leak was possible and so was animal spread. The level of data we actually have sucks. Lab leaks are dangerous and need more watching (see Tufecki generally)
And as far as masking outside, almost certainly a fairly low risk step early on - as opposed to inside buildings with crappy ventilation. Did the CDC screw this up ?? Yep, CDC and FDA did a horrible job - not lying, just flat out incompetent.
Yes, governments lie, so does pharma, so do many large companies. The actual science in all the Covid related areas was out there and there were good aggressive scientific discussions in a situation with limited info that required quick decisions to save lives... For anyone capable of reading those papers and discussions, this was pretty consistent all the way through but with lots of uncertainties. However, the way that was portrayed in the media and with intentional misinformation was horrible (ex. the ivermection and hyrdroxychloroquine which never had Any science behind them).
So, yep, the Iraq War was a lie from the beginning and Vietnam was just as bad (for those of us who lived through that). Covid was much more about a situation with limited information and limited pandemic experience that turned from a public health problem into a political football at the cost of a lot of lives.
I'm not worried about the mistakes. Mistakes in the first few weeks of something this unusual are to be expected. The problem is the systemic inability (or lack of desire) to correct those mistakes when they become obvious. The first few months of COVID were undestanbly chaotic and I supported them despite that. After that though, it felt like Lysenkoism -- keep saying the same things despite those things being obviously useless, since changing course now would be too embarrassing.
You do not know what would have happened had the Barrington Declaration been followed. No one does! All you have is models, and let's be honest, the models weren't very accurate in this case. Remember that COVID model out of England that predicted 2.5 millions deaths and caused caused the UK govt to change course and start locking everyone down? It's clear it was catastrophically flawed, but if you said that at the time it was "misinformation" that must be suppressed. (Some UK scientists tried.) No one knows what would have happened on a different course (although Sweden does provide a hint as does Africa). Just as no one knows how many people "died with COVID" vs "died of COVID" since hospitals were incentivized to list COVID as the cause of death.
Sweden has been a Rorschach test for the "trust the experts" class. Objectively, Sweden's COVID death rate is right in the middle of Western Europe (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1111779/coronavirus-death-rate-europe-by-country/ ) above Norway and Finland but below France and Belgium -- dead center. And yet the "trust the experts" class consistently points to Sweden as a data point of how terrible not locking everyone in their houses for a year would have been. There's no science behind the "Sweden did terribly" belief; it's a religious conviction without evidence. Sweden screwed stuff up like everyone else. The difference is that their health minister was honest when he screwed things up. They adjusted several times during the pandemic instead of blinding following the same first-few-weeks game plan. And hindsight has confirmed that that they did reasonably well without destroying their economy, their population's mental health, or their kids' education.
When the FBI director goes on the BBC and says a lab leak was the most likely cause of COVID, I'm not sure how you can say it "hasn't been confirmed". Is it deductively confirmed in a scientific journal? No. But that was never going to happen. It's fair to say it's inductively confirmed at this point. And the head of the FBI feels the same way.
Look, neither of us is going to convince the other. I suspect this largely comes down to whether you trust "experts" or "people" more. At the start of the pandemic, I was very much in the "trust the expert" class. This is not surprising, as I am highly educated and worked for many years in the technology field before teaching. COVID forced me to pick a side though, and at precisely the time when so many experts were saying and doing things that were not only obviously wrong but outright absurd. So I picked the other side. Perhaps something may yet happen to force you into that position.
TJ, you misunderstand. I'm not arguing about the severity of global warming (or climate change or whatever the latest incarnation is). I'm saying that for Democrats, the belief in global warming has transcended any scientific reality.
For major Democrats, the premises: 1) the earth is warming, 2) caused by human burning fossil fuels, 3) which is significantly and detrimentally altering the planet, and 4) that drastic steps must be taken now to stop this... are all holy writ. They can not be questioned let alone reversed.
Science can confirm some of those premises (all of 1 and part of 2). But whether the current warming is actually detrimental is very uncertain (most people die of cold than heat) and using this as a justification to effectively end the age of fossil fuels as way outside of the realm of climate science.
I think that's a very valid debate to have, as an interdisciplinary conversation between between climatology and economics. I'd love to see that. It's not happening today though, precisely because the dominant establishment is committed to global warming as theology not as science.
A basic test for whether you have a religious belief in something: is there any evidence that would convince you it wasn't true? Richard Dawkins once said that even if an 800 foot tall Jesus appeared in front of his house, he still wouldn't believe. It feels like the Democratic Party has entered that realm of belief in global warming.
Now that Biden is building a border wall, he should make a deal with Republicans to do a comprehensive immigration reform: 1. Build an effective wall against illegal immigration. 2. Let the Dreamers be US citizens. 3. Let in more talented legal immigrants.
That ship sailed 3 years ago. Why would they make that deal today? Biden is being forced by events to build the border wall (or at least put on a very public show of starting to). He has nothing to offer.
And very hard to believe that the border walls will make any difference in any time frame that could matter (they don't work very well now in the first place)...
The overall tone of the article is good - and a lot really has to do with how Biden "appears" to be doing something - most people have no actual clue what is going on with oil prices or immigration or the current state of the economy - just whatever "bleeds it leads" nonsense that they get from the media.... As Noah implies, it is the perception that matters politically.
you didn't mention tapping into the SPR as a way to reduce oil prices (in the short term), which would also have the benefit of not necessitating additional oil production (in the short term). Is the SPR just too small to make a noticeable difference in oil/gas prices, even over the relatively short period between now and Nov 2024?
They should probably be actively filling the SPR right now, even if that increases prices a bit, so that if there's a Saudi/Russian oil price hike next summer, they're in good position to fight it through November.
Quick aside on the reality of Federal action re: increasing oil production(and importantly dowstream products like gasoline/etc). Most of this is global & not directly admin controlled obviously, but there certainly are marginal short & intermediate production impacts based on admin actions.
However, to the extent there was a chance to increase domestic production of various sorts to counter inflation, & you think that is helpful from either a policy or political standpoint, here is the bad news -
1) Production - If it is actual production impacts you are looking for, it is too late now. The window to do those actions was mostly back in the 2021-2022 range due to the lag (for example, onshore drilling permits, EPA refinery actions, or even if they would've implemented SPR re-purchase agreements, generally would take anywhere from a year to three to have impacts we'd see in the numbers).
2) Politics/Signaling - The federal oil/gas leasing cake is more or less baked at this point, especially with the release of the 5 year plan for offshore leasing only showing 3 sales, as you alluded to. So the signal has been sent, and even if they changed direction today with a nod to the election: nobody in industry would subscribe to a thesis that said "I should increase investment to juice production over the short term, because it is now safe to presume that a 2nd Biden administration would moderate based on these signals."
3) SPR - between the politics of it and the reality of SPR levels after all the releases of the last few years... there just isn't capacity here to do anything meaningful.
Polls are unreliable. Their like mood rings. But, for the sake of argument: there will be as many as 20 million first-time register voters in 2024. They come from Gen Z, the most-liberal of the generations succeeding Baby Boomers. Polls indicate that only 7% of these new voters favor Republican policies. Trump lost by 7 million votes. If political parties focus their time and resources on new voters, Trump loses by an even wider margin. But polls are mood rings, not ballot boxes.
Rick Wilson, the Lincoln Project co-founder and conservative never Trumper, pours water on the youth vote boom. He drew upon his experience working on Florida and national campaigns, and he's told this to a receptive audience.
The youth vote, or voters ages 18-30, is usually in the 20% range of the total electoral vote. However, voters 50 and older make up 50% of the total electoral vote. The next 30% are voters ages 30-50, and this is the age where most swing voters are.
The problem among young voters is that non-participation is always high, and it's really difficult to convert a non-voter into a voter. Also, parties run the risk of devoting resources to youth votes and alienating older, incumbent voters to swing elections more conservatively.
I think Gen Z is markedly different because they came of age when they and their parents worried about mass shootings at schools, to say nothing of a pandemic. Gen Z is more secular and tolerant of racial diversity and gender identity. No other generation was raised in these circumstances, circumstances that give them incentive to vote. In a sense, they’re voting with guns pointed at their heads. Boomers are dying off, which is parallel to the death of linear TV. Legacy media has lost this demographic, if it ever had them. As with all things, time is the ultimate critic.
But just like every other generation, it takes time for them to develop a voting habit, and they don't seem to be developing it any faster than any previous generation did.
A conversation with the very liberal old lady at the coffee stand: “What do you think about inflation?”
Me: “I think it’s come way down and is look good going forward all while unemployment stayed low. Pretty great.”
Her: “So when will prices come back down to where they were?”
Me: ...
This is how most people feel, I think. Most people don't notice inflation when it's low and they think the natural order is stagnant prices. Even very smart people I've met have said that Biden is lying that inflation is coming down because "prices are still rising."
Well, prices never came back down after the 70s inflation, and people seemed pretty satisfied with how we had beaten that one.
True, though it was a much bigger change. I wonder if the change in administration contributed to that as most people mis-attributed beating inflation to Reagan.
I just watched "Falling Down" and the scene where unhinged White Conservative Everyman psycho played by Michael Douglas destroys a Korean convenience store, ranting about prices returning back to 1965, comes to mind.
Prices for things like housing are NEVER going back down to what they were pre-inflation. Today's is the cheapest price for most things ever again. The only thing that will change (hopefully) is that the pace of increases slows. And that really sucks for people on a fixed-income or people whose wages haven't and won't keep up with inflation.
And it is perception - when inflation was running much higher in the late 70s, the drop in change was noticeable (remember inflation as 4% or more during Reagan's time even after the Fed crackdown). So, trend lines do matter, but can take a while.
A great debating moment in that scene:
Crazy Douglas: "You're Koren. Do you have any idea how much money my country has given your country?"
Worried Shopkeeper: "How much?"
CD: "I don't know either but its got to be a lot, you can bet on that."
Roll the tape!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2YRMixW9u8
"Of curse not, The Fed targets prices to rise at least 2% per year, more when bad things like Putin's invasion of Ukraine happen."
Seriously, Financial journalists and politician have not done enough to explain optimal inflation. Even the Fed target is often presented as the lowest rate the Fed can possibly achieve, leaving the implication that zero would be better.
In 1984, inflation had fallen a lot but prices were way above where they had been (duh).
Reagan still won 49 states.
If inflation stays low for the next year, people will get over their fear that it's going to spike again and may even give Biden credit.
There's a long lag effect and it takes a while for people to deal with their fears.
Just enough with Saudi Arabia already
If they aim to bring down a U.S. President by jacking up prices then its long past time we let them find out what their neighbourhood is like to live in without US weapons to defend themselves
Cut them off and let their wahabists run columns of suicide bombers at their enemies as a way to protect their border
The problem with the alliance with Saudi Arabia (Israel, Egypt, et al) is that we are their ally but they are not ours.
As a wise man once said (me): "The Saudis can get fucked."
With both SA and Israel doing everything they can to fuck over democrats, reducing oil sanctions on Iran to get them producing more seems like a reasonable move
The short version is Biden should stop pandering to his base and start pandering to the voters who will decide the election in 2024.
Crazy idea I know
A fairly cynical column for sure. Rather than suggestions to solve problems the focus is on ways to dress up the problems so that Biden who exacerbated them tremendously with his policies over the last 2.5 years can hide his involvement and get re-elected. It is that type of politics first thinking that is driving the country to ruin.
Donald Trump and its movement are *THE* problem. So trying to find ways to boost Biden to prevent a second Trump presidency is the most important problem to solve in America.
You don’t elect or reelect politicians that attempted a coup, that’s democracy 101. Most countries (all?) that make that mistake lose their democracies.
Interesting take. Not sure I agree with you that there was any more of an attempt to a coup by Trump than what the Left did for the first three years of the Trump presidency.
Personally, I'd rather they both had the grace to bow out. But I guess that's the point of a ballot box. Let's chat again in December 2024.
What a wide majority of Americans want is for him to Not run again. Let someone younger takeover. He was a life long mediocrity that some how became president only because the press war on Trump finally succeeded with Covid policies. Greasy Gavin can give you all the spending and taxes you crave, and he is young enough to even be interviewed without hadlers and script. You hate Trump so much? ok then run someone else. Under 60 would be nice.
My counterargument to the "He's too old" canard: We should aspire to be as productive and accomplished when we get to be Biden's age.
He's been in the Senate for much of his adult life, he's already served in the White House for eight years, and he knows how hard and emotionally draining politics is. And in his advanced age, he says, "Yeah, give me more of that."
Biden's great asset is that he has a long memory, knows the political process, and knows what the responsibility of being the chief executive is. He's also got a lot of substantive legislation passed (CHIPS, Inflation Reduction Act, COVID stimulus in the first days of his presidency) in the first half of his presidency.
I hearted this post because of Noah's opening paragraph. As a consequence of Duverger's law, the American political system is capable of outputting a maximum of two parties that can advance a maximum of two ideas. But even that is broken. The Red Tribe no longer offers any ideas negotiable with reality. Like, what expectations do magas have if Donald Trump is in the White House? None. They have no expectations. And what the Blue Tribe needs to understand is: No expectations Is. The. Point.
My point is not that Trump is a good choice. But it's time to take gramps car keys away before he kills someone
Hi Noah. Am I missing something?
You say drilling for oil is bad for the environment, but then suggest it’s ok for other countries to produce and export fuel.
How does this work if climate change is a global problem?
He's not suggesting it's ok for other countries to produce and export oil, he's just pointing out that Trump will be way worse for the environment than a bit of extra oil production now.
Where the oil is produces has zero environmental consequeses for CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere. Restricting us production and transportation of fossil fuels is McKribbenism.
It's burning the oil that harms the environment whether it's produced in the US or elsewhere. If we can produce at a profit, go for production while reducing demand!
He's letting ideology trump honesty.
He explicitly states that it's bad and the alternative is worse lol, how is that dishonest?
The oil price thing is really tricky because we've probably peaked in *cheap* oil and there just isn't a whole lot that can be done by anyone to change that fact. In the last decade, the marginal producer for 90% of increased oil supply has been the United States, mostly via the extremely expensive and increasingly expensive-to-operate alternative supplies in the Permian Basin and the like. All that wondrous lateral drilling technology has increased production, but is also really costly, as is more conventional deep-water drilling. Already, after the 1970s, American oil exploration had expanded into increasingly-expensive-to-extract supply in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska, making up much-needed supply, but at a higher unit cost. Now our Energy Return on Investment (EROI) on marginal supplies of primary energy is worryingly low as the cheapest proven reserves of oil (e.g. in Saudi Arabia) are drying up.
This isn't always obvious in oil prices. We have some geopolitical variables affecting price in the shorter term (e.g. Russian invasion of Ukraine and OPEC+ coordination). There's also been recent and unprecedented demand-destruction from COVID and, to a lesser degree, from economic downturns. Also, above a certain price-point, oil is just too expensive, and there's demand destruction (with deleterious economic effects). But the secular trend is that supply is increasingly constrained relative to normal demand, *especially* cheap-to-extract supply.
Some future president is going to have to cry uncle on trying to every way possible to keep oil prices low and tell Americans the truth: that honeymoon period of cheap energy that we came to think of as normal is over. Especially the cheap liquid fossil fuels that underpin everything material in our lives, even as we make strides in Electrifying Everything. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve is already half-empty and seems unlikely to be re-filled any time soon at a decent price. Republicans keep talking about nixing the gasoline tax, but not only is that a small component of the price at the pump, it also funds the entire (subsidized) highway infrastructure that keeps transportation cheap. Unfortunately, that's a political hot potato that nobody wants to be stuck with. I'm sure the adults in the room understand this.
One of the first sci-fi books was Olaf Stapleton's "Last and First Men". One of the things I enjoyed about it was his discussion of how the "second men" had a much harder time developing because the "first men" (us) had already tapped out all the easily accessible fossil fuels. The book itself is a classic but I found it only so-so. That little detail always stuck with me though. Oil is transitory and its reign must be used to find a more long-term energy solution.
One of my favorite parts about this SubStack and the Comments is the excellent reading recommendations. Thank you!
I followed the Peak Oil narrative closely for a couple years in the early 2000’s. The main reason it went away is because of enhanced recovery techniques in the US, as you say. And maybe huge discoveries in Guyana and who-know-where will continue to delay Peak Oil. But it has always seemed to me that the Energy Transition we’re hoping for--- some of us a bit skeptically--- is at least as important because of the steadily decreasing EROI of petroleum extraction as it is for climate change. The human population in the billions is the direct result of exploiting fossil fuel energy.
Yeah, exactly right. The physical reality of how much hydrocarbon there is somewhere in the ground is very distinct from how much *affordably-extractable* volume there is left (even though adherents and critics of "Peak Oil," alike, can conflate the two). LOOOOONG before we literally run out of oil, it will just be ineffectual to extract anymore. Which, in essence, means we've "run out of oil," but will never actually use up the last drop of oil that exists.
In the same way, current battery technology today requires efficiently extractable lithium. Surprisingly, perhaps, lithium isn't rare. There's lithium in the ocean! But it would never make sense to extract lithium from the ocean, since it's so dilute. It would be like extracting the trace gold found in human bodies instead of mining it.
So it only becomes economic to exploit lithium in those few places in the world where it is both highly concentrated and accessible. Ditto with copper, iron ore, gold, and everything else material we use. Oil can be found in many places, but is only concentrated and easy to get to in a few.
What's the strike-point for oil where it becomes too expensive to produce be useful to use? That's an excellent question, but for many decades there's been demand-destruction once oil hits $100 and beyond. Arguably, we get WAY more value out of a barrel of oil than a $100 price captures. But oil is a bit of a free lunch, this way. We take for granted this geological subsidy, where we can immediately get 10,000 man-hours of work out of this barrel at a minuscule fraction of the cost. That's normal now. And our entire lifestyle requires it!
We also totally ignore the externalities that burning it creates. $100/barrel wouldn't even begin to cover it. Should we or could we pay $500/barrel? That would certainly open up a lot more economically extractable reserves of low-quality or hard-to-reach crude. Maybe, but it wouldn't be the world that we know today. The oil would be what it probably should be: a precious, niche miracle material that we should be reserving for the things that we absolutely can't do otherwise!
The strike-price for oil needs another relationship that would determine what the expense would be. One relationship would be fuel as cost-driver.
The higher the strike price of oil, the higher the price of fuel. When the fuel price grows, fuel cost grows as a larger proportion of a vehicle's operating cost, while the other portions of a vehicle's cost stay more or less constant. Fuel is also frequently replaced -- every few hundred miles of operation, vs. thousands of miles for routine maintenance or tens of thousands of miles for things like tires and engine and transmission components.
Most car owners don't think analytically like this. But, for anyone who has to manage a vehicle fleet, their job is to think analytically. They cannot influence the barrel price of oil, but they can run a keep-or-replace comparison and weigh the costs of paying for petroleum fuel or explore an alternative fuel. There might be some factor that nudges or compels paying a switching cost for an alternative fuel.
Because we habitually use money cost as a proxy for value, it doesn’t seem quite correct to say it, but yes, in a fundamental way the energy we extract from petroleum has been close to free.
What always comes to my mind in the discussions on Energy Transition is the idea of discontinuity. Or, the related idea of path dependency. We’ve come down this winding path of converting exquisitely high EROI fossil fuels into 8 billion humans at unprecedented material prosperity. Now that we want to switch to an energy source other that fossil fuels, we look at the trends in the money cost of making solar panels, windmills, batteries, grid enhancements, etc., and project a very plausible scenario that is well underway. But I wonder if the real predicament is that there is in our future a strike-point for oil EROI where things fall apart because the whole renewables build out is itself an illusory byproduct of the EROI of fossil fuels. Consider the cost of mining the materials to make renewables in a petroleum scarcity environment.
I have a hot take that, setting aside the political ramifications, illegal immigration is good actually. In my heart I'm an open borders guy, but I do have some concerns that opening the borders in the United States would lead to just a truly unmanageable number of people showing. Illegal immigration is kind of a middle ground where essentially everybody can come but there is still some level discouragement from coming.
I also think that the economy may benefit from having a class of workers or not entitled to exactly the same level of protections as everybody else. Minimum wage and other job protections are good, so I wouldn't want to throw them our entirely, but there are some jobs that just can't exist with them in place, and saying that even willing people cant take those jobs leads to dead weight loss. Illegal immigration fills that gap. I also don't feel like it is really exploiting the illegal immigrants, because they are usually going to be better off then if they hadn't come at all.
One change I would make is to set a statutes of limitations for illegal immigration - if you are here for X years illegally, you get legal status. Deporting people who've lived productive lives in the US for a while is kind of dumb. This would also reduce the extent to which illegal immigrants have to bear the brunt of lack of employment protections.
I'm not wedded to any of this, but for these reasons, I do kind of support illegal immigration as part of immigration policy.
WE could certainly use lots more immigration of high-skilled people. The flow of low skill people is probably too high, but legal immigration of lower/middle skilled people could be increased.
Wow. I honestly can't tell if this is a parody.
If it's not, the Democrats are coming full circle and re-embracing slavery -- that's what "a class of workers not entitled to protections" actually means.
I would suggest you read Camp of the Saints and let me know which side you believe to be in the right.
"Camp of the Saints" is fashoid copium. "The Turner Diaries" but for French consumption. It's like "Django Unchained" if Jamie Foxx and Leonardo DiCaprio were flipped as protagonist and antagonist.
Have you read it? I found it really hard to read because its descriptions of the ship occupants was so vile and racist and disgusting. But the response of the French establishment, and the complete disregard for their own people's culture and even continuity and safety is just as vile and disgusting. To me, that's why it's a good book -- you're forces to pick a side even though both are deeply flawed. You can't deny Raspail foresaw our current elite's response to massive waves of immigration.
Open borders is simply not a tenable proposition in a world of welfare states linked by cheap intercontinental travel.
I concede I didn't read Camp of the Saints. I didn't know of its existence until the Trump Administration, when an article noted that Stephen Miller was basing US immigration policy by reifying the book's plot. I've seen the plot synopsis on Wikipedia.
I won't engage with it because it seems to be the French equivalent of "The Turner Diaries," a genre of far-right gothic fantasy and vindication porn that defines its audience. Raspail was an acclaimed author in France, but Camp of the Saints was his most famous book and very much Raspail opening his true self and splashing all over the pages.
I learned about it from Rod Dreher about 8-10 years ago. Raspail may have been an overt racist. I have no idea. However, the book is so disgusting that it seems intentional. If Raspail was trying to slip his views into an otherwise anodyne novel, he clearly failed. Regardless of his personal views, the book makes a point of skewering the virtue of not only the Indian rabble but of the French intelligentsia and also the small, militant faction intent on repelling the invaders/immigrants/refugees. Raspail criticizes all of them.
If you can find a copy, I would urge you to slog through it. You won't "like" it, but it has something meaningful to say.
I don't have the digestive system for Camp of the Saints, to be honest.
I remember a similar cultural product, from my own backyard. The 2005 film "Crash." It won a best picture Oscar to boot. It's a bad movie, and an offensively bad one to boot. It's too bad that it took a decade for the hate for it to roll in.
It's a Hollywood liberal message movie, yet it's so anus-clenching in its repugnance because the film sets its moral bar so low. All you get to see in "Crash"'s universe are cliches and stereotypes, and that is the only way you get to be visible in this world. Exit the theater and look at real life, and in reality people are thankfully not this morally empty.
That's the same thing I imagine with Camp of the Saints. The author harbors a bitter vision of humanity, the soft totalitarianism of false dichotomy. Because the French failed to maintain a static, dead idea of culture, they get devoured by the brown multitudes. Read between the lines, and Raspail is saying that "Do this to Them before They do it to Us."
Yet France is better than Raspail. You can experience more culture, being produced and reproduced, at any random Paris Metro stop during a lunch hour than the cultural output of the entirety of France during the 18th century before the revolution.
That's why we don't have open borders. :)
Your opening paragraph isn’t helping with the growing partisanship issue you alluded to later in the blog. Just the fact that you felt a need to include that paragraph goes to show how divided we are.
He repeated use of the marketing phrase "bidenomics" makes me throw up a little in my mouth. Neither Biden nor Trump should be president again. That's what most Americans want
Nor is calling "right wingers" (whatever the that means) racists. I expected more from this substack. Just another insular left winger (see what I did there) web site
Both these issues aren't about specific policies. They are an underlying worldview of Biden and most Democrats. They really believe that oil is evil and continued production will destroy the Earth. They really believe that borders are racist and probably nation states themselves are. These are religious convictions, not academic policy debates. As such: 1) they can not be changed easily, and 2) even if Biden were to do a 180, no one (in his own party or the other) would believe him.
Look at how the sudden U-turn on COVID policies and the lab leak theory undercut trust in our public health folks. The kind of yo-yo'ing you suggest from the President on 2 of his highest profile positions would have the same effect on a larger scale.
The solution for Biden isn't to try and "evolve his views" 1 year before the election. The solution is to convince others that his views are correct. He may fail at that, but that's his only path forward.
Sorry, the trust in public health folks was mostly undercut by misinformation and other BS that was aimed specifically at doing that and feeding conspiracy theories... Most folks have no clue about the lab leak theory or what the issues are - the reason why it had an impact was purely political (China virus..) and long before there was even good info (which there still isn't thanks to China). And yes, the CDC made mistakes (and as a former scientist, I am still pissed off at them and the FDA) - but most of the "mistrust" was due to nonsense that had nothing at all to due to stupid CDC mistakes.
Gary, read the Great Barrington Declaration. It was deplatformed and labelled unscientific misinformation in 2020. It's obvious today that it was essentially spot on. Similarly for the lab leak. It was a racist conspiracy theory in 2020 only believed by QAnon people... until it suddenly wasn't and our CIA and FBI essentially confirmed it as the most likely origin. This kind of stuff adds up.
I have been a microcosm of tis myself. I was one of the first people to mask. I watch NHK (Japanese) News on PBS so I had about 3 more days notice than most of the country. I stocked up on masks and flour and oil and peanut butter. And everyone looked at me weird because I was wearing a mask when I was shopping. My family was sewing masks for our local hospitals for the first month. I say this to illustrate that I was 100% trusting of our public health establishment in March of 2020.
All that changed in the wake of George Floyd for me. The same public health establishment that had told everyone they had to stay in their homes at all costs... now had no criticism of thousands of people maskless and screaming in the streets. They even promoted it: "racism is a bigger public health threat than COVID!"
That was my red-pill moment. I didn't turn away quickly, but the seeds were planted. I started reading other sources. I found the Great Barrington Declaration. And I gradually realized that I had been (and was being) lied to. It was very much an echo of my Iraq War transformation in the late 2000's.
So maybe that's why I'm untrusting now. In my adult lifetime, the ruling class of my country has lied to me about a war and about a public health pandemic. Whether it's simple incompetence or outright malice, the erosion of trust is real.
First, if anyone had implemented Barrington, the death toll would have been awful I spent many years as a molecular biologist and I could rip that to pieces (and have done in other forums), but I don't really feel like doing it again. Sweden did a very limited version and had far more deaths than its immediate neighbors - and they didn't come close to full Barrington...
Second, the CIA and FBI haven't confirmed anything as far as the origin - all they really said was that they couldn't rule it out - BFD - scientists knew that from the beginning. Without a lot more info from the Chinese on early cases (which ain't going to happen), we won't know the answer. Of course, a lab leak was possible and so was animal spread. The level of data we actually have sucks. Lab leaks are dangerous and need more watching (see Tufecki generally)
And as far as masking outside, almost certainly a fairly low risk step early on - as opposed to inside buildings with crappy ventilation. Did the CDC screw this up ?? Yep, CDC and FDA did a horrible job - not lying, just flat out incompetent.
Yes, governments lie, so does pharma, so do many large companies. The actual science in all the Covid related areas was out there and there were good aggressive scientific discussions in a situation with limited info that required quick decisions to save lives... For anyone capable of reading those papers and discussions, this was pretty consistent all the way through but with lots of uncertainties. However, the way that was portrayed in the media and with intentional misinformation was horrible (ex. the ivermection and hyrdroxychloroquine which never had Any science behind them).
So, yep, the Iraq War was a lie from the beginning and Vietnam was just as bad (for those of us who lived through that). Covid was much more about a situation with limited information and limited pandemic experience that turned from a public health problem into a political football at the cost of a lot of lives.
I'm not worried about the mistakes. Mistakes in the first few weeks of something this unusual are to be expected. The problem is the systemic inability (or lack of desire) to correct those mistakes when they become obvious. The first few months of COVID were undestanbly chaotic and I supported them despite that. After that though, it felt like Lysenkoism -- keep saying the same things despite those things being obviously useless, since changing course now would be too embarrassing.
You do not know what would have happened had the Barrington Declaration been followed. No one does! All you have is models, and let's be honest, the models weren't very accurate in this case. Remember that COVID model out of England that predicted 2.5 millions deaths and caused caused the UK govt to change course and start locking everyone down? It's clear it was catastrophically flawed, but if you said that at the time it was "misinformation" that must be suppressed. (Some UK scientists tried.) No one knows what would have happened on a different course (although Sweden does provide a hint as does Africa). Just as no one knows how many people "died with COVID" vs "died of COVID" since hospitals were incentivized to list COVID as the cause of death.
Sweden has been a Rorschach test for the "trust the experts" class. Objectively, Sweden's COVID death rate is right in the middle of Western Europe (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1111779/coronavirus-death-rate-europe-by-country/ ) above Norway and Finland but below France and Belgium -- dead center. And yet the "trust the experts" class consistently points to Sweden as a data point of how terrible not locking everyone in their houses for a year would have been. There's no science behind the "Sweden did terribly" belief; it's a religious conviction without evidence. Sweden screwed stuff up like everyone else. The difference is that their health minister was honest when he screwed things up. They adjusted several times during the pandemic instead of blinding following the same first-few-weeks game plan. And hindsight has confirmed that that they did reasonably well without destroying their economy, their population's mental health, or their kids' education.
As for the lab leak: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64806903
When the FBI director goes on the BBC and says a lab leak was the most likely cause of COVID, I'm not sure how you can say it "hasn't been confirmed". Is it deductively confirmed in a scientific journal? No. But that was never going to happen. It's fair to say it's inductively confirmed at this point. And the head of the FBI feels the same way.
Look, neither of us is going to convince the other. I suspect this largely comes down to whether you trust "experts" or "people" more. At the start of the pandemic, I was very much in the "trust the expert" class. This is not surprising, as I am highly educated and worked for many years in the technology field before teaching. COVID forced me to pick a side though, and at precisely the time when so many experts were saying and doing things that were not only obviously wrong but outright absurd. So I picked the other side. Perhaps something may yet happen to force you into that position.
TJ, you misunderstand. I'm not arguing about the severity of global warming (or climate change or whatever the latest incarnation is). I'm saying that for Democrats, the belief in global warming has transcended any scientific reality.
For major Democrats, the premises: 1) the earth is warming, 2) caused by human burning fossil fuels, 3) which is significantly and detrimentally altering the planet, and 4) that drastic steps must be taken now to stop this... are all holy writ. They can not be questioned let alone reversed.
Science can confirm some of those premises (all of 1 and part of 2). But whether the current warming is actually detrimental is very uncertain (most people die of cold than heat) and using this as a justification to effectively end the age of fossil fuels as way outside of the realm of climate science.
I think that's a very valid debate to have, as an interdisciplinary conversation between between climatology and economics. I'd love to see that. It's not happening today though, precisely because the dominant establishment is committed to global warming as theology not as science.
A basic test for whether you have a religious belief in something: is there any evidence that would convince you it wasn't true? Richard Dawkins once said that even if an 800 foot tall Jesus appeared in front of his house, he still wouldn't believe. It feels like the Democratic Party has entered that realm of belief in global warming.
A secure border. You cannot have a nation without borders.
Now that Biden is building a border wall, he should make a deal with Republicans to do a comprehensive immigration reform: 1. Build an effective wall against illegal immigration. 2. Let the Dreamers be US citizens. 3. Let in more talented legal immigrants.
That ship sailed 3 years ago. Why would they make that deal today? Biden is being forced by events to build the border wall (or at least put on a very public show of starting to). He has nothing to offer.
Republican would never take that. They'd rather whine about immigration and call it "open borders" however great or small it is.
And very hard to believe that the border walls will make any difference in any time frame that could matter (they don't work very well now in the first place)...
The overall tone of the article is good - and a lot really has to do with how Biden "appears" to be doing something - most people have no actual clue what is going on with oil prices or immigration or the current state of the economy - just whatever "bleeds it leads" nonsense that they get from the media.... As Noah implies, it is the perception that matters politically.
you didn't mention tapping into the SPR as a way to reduce oil prices (in the short term), which would also have the benefit of not necessitating additional oil production (in the short term). Is the SPR just too small to make a noticeable difference in oil/gas prices, even over the relatively short period between now and Nov 2024?
They should probably be actively filling the SPR right now, even if that increases prices a bit, so that if there's a Saudi/Russian oil price hike next summer, they're in good position to fight it through November.
Quick aside on the reality of Federal action re: increasing oil production(and importantly dowstream products like gasoline/etc). Most of this is global & not directly admin controlled obviously, but there certainly are marginal short & intermediate production impacts based on admin actions.
However, to the extent there was a chance to increase domestic production of various sorts to counter inflation, & you think that is helpful from either a policy or political standpoint, here is the bad news -
1) Production - If it is actual production impacts you are looking for, it is too late now. The window to do those actions was mostly back in the 2021-2022 range due to the lag (for example, onshore drilling permits, EPA refinery actions, or even if they would've implemented SPR re-purchase agreements, generally would take anywhere from a year to three to have impacts we'd see in the numbers).
2) Politics/Signaling - The federal oil/gas leasing cake is more or less baked at this point, especially with the release of the 5 year plan for offshore leasing only showing 3 sales, as you alluded to. So the signal has been sent, and even if they changed direction today with a nod to the election: nobody in industry would subscribe to a thesis that said "I should increase investment to juice production over the short term, because it is now safe to presume that a 2nd Biden administration would moderate based on these signals."
3) SPR - between the politics of it and the reality of SPR levels after all the releases of the last few years... there just isn't capacity here to do anything meaningful.
Polls are unreliable. Their like mood rings. But, for the sake of argument: there will be as many as 20 million first-time register voters in 2024. They come from Gen Z, the most-liberal of the generations succeeding Baby Boomers. Polls indicate that only 7% of these new voters favor Republican policies. Trump lost by 7 million votes. If political parties focus their time and resources on new voters, Trump loses by an even wider margin. But polls are mood rings, not ballot boxes.
Rick Wilson, the Lincoln Project co-founder and conservative never Trumper, pours water on the youth vote boom. He drew upon his experience working on Florida and national campaigns, and he's told this to a receptive audience.
The youth vote, or voters ages 18-30, is usually in the 20% range of the total electoral vote. However, voters 50 and older make up 50% of the total electoral vote. The next 30% are voters ages 30-50, and this is the age where most swing voters are.
The problem among young voters is that non-participation is always high, and it's really difficult to convert a non-voter into a voter. Also, parties run the risk of devoting resources to youth votes and alienating older, incumbent voters to swing elections more conservatively.
I think Gen Z is markedly different because they came of age when they and their parents worried about mass shootings at schools, to say nothing of a pandemic. Gen Z is more secular and tolerant of racial diversity and gender identity. No other generation was raised in these circumstances, circumstances that give them incentive to vote. In a sense, they’re voting with guns pointed at their heads. Boomers are dying off, which is parallel to the death of linear TV. Legacy media has lost this demographic, if it ever had them. As with all things, time is the ultimate critic.
But just like every other generation, it takes time for them to develop a voting habit, and they don't seem to be developing it any faster than any previous generation did.