The Weekly Screed (#629 & #630)

When Shangri-La decides 
to secede from China
by David Benjamin

PARIS — Somewhere in the Kunlun mountain range that roughly divides China proper from China’s puppet state of Tibet lies the imaginary paradise of Shangri-La, where life is a dream, everyone’s prosperous and people seem to live — smiling all the while — forever.

If you’re a devotee of the business media, this description often seems to describe China itself, a place where the central government caters slavishly to foreign investors while keeping its natives contented by steadily improving their standard of living, and managing the economy at a reliable and seemingly eternal growth rate of eight (that’s 8!) percent a year.

This rosy outlook on the Chinese miracle also prevailed recently at the University of Wisconsin, where the university’s leaders in reaching out to China had gathered an expert panel to discuss and explain the great awakening dragon of the Far East. Recently, UW opened an office in Shanghai and has appointed a Chinese woman, named Huang, to coordinate its Chinese outreach.

Ms. Huang was the only Chinese person on the China panel. Others included the school’s provost, the head of the College of Letters and Science, and an alumnus just back from a visit to China with his teenage granddaughter (who had a great time and bought a ton of souvenirs).

The panel lamented the lack of interest among UW students in Shangri-La — er, China — despite the wealth of opportunity to be had there, both educationally and commercially. An air of glowing optimism encompasses both academia and the business community, who perceive no end to the Chinese boom. China is as stable as the price of gold. China IS gold!

This air of certainty about China’s glorious inevitability always makes me a little nervous but, who knows? Maybe the Board of Directors at Pollyanna, LLC., is right. However, one expert conspicuous by his or her absence from the UW panel was the head of the political science department. Nor was there anyone from the history faculty familiar with the smooth, untroubled course of 20th-century Chinese history beginning with, say, the Boxer Rebellion and including the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty, the rise of the Kuomintang and the Chinese Republic under Sun Yat-sen, followed by 23 years of civil war interrupted by the bloody occupation of the Japanese, followed by Mao’s tyranny, the separation of Taiwan and ouster of Chiang Kai-shek, the Cultural Revolution and the massacre at Tiananmen Square.

Not a peep about that stuff — just a tranquil, happy, no-longer-Red China poised to become the world’s leading economy, without a hitch or a wrinkle, around 2023.

I was tempted to dim the sunny mood at the UW forum by mentioning that Tibetan monks keep setting themselves on fire in protest Chinese rule. But I demurred. Here was a group not susceptible to complexity or ambiguity. The mood was more like an old-time Praise-the-Lord camp meeting, or an Amway recruiting session, than an intellectual exchange.

Despite our presence in the bowels of an American university, and despite the fact that every American university fairly seethes with political controversy all the time, our evening of Chinese boosterism contained nary a whisper about Chinese politics. Nobody broached the vaguest suggestion that China, like the former Soviet Union, is a patchwork of disparate regions, cultures and religions covering 56 distinct ethnic groups, 24 languages and 3,700,000 square miles.

Nobody seemed to wonder if maybe, someday soon, this whole jury-rigged nitroglycerine truck might hit a pothole and go kaboom.

No one suggested that, if presented with a feasible pretext, one or more of China’s outlying districts — Tibet, say, or Inner Mongolia — might decide they’re more Tibetan or Mongolian than they are Chinese, and opt for self-determination, perhaps even violently. No one on the UW panel (or Chinese business expert I’ve talked with) seemed to recall that the chore of turning a few million openly hostile Croats, Serbs, Kosovars, Montenegrans, Herzegovinians, Bosnians and Slovenians into docile Yugoslavians only worked because everybody was too scared of Marshal Tito to start shelling the infidels across the street. And no one paused to count (15) the number of sovereign Balkan states that broke from the Soviet empire once Russia was no-longer-Red.

It’s hardly inconceivable that, with the right trigger — perhaps even before 2023 — politics in China could cease to be quite so tightly managed, businesslike and… well, Communist as they are today. The trigger could be another batch of flaming monks, another Beijing purge of Falun Gong religionists, the desecration of a Uighur Koran by a Han soldier, perhaps a famine among the earthquake victims of Sichuan, or maybe just one too many New York Times headlines praising the Dalai Lama as a swell guy.

China ain’t, after all, Shangri-La. And politics has a way of boiling to the surface, after which it tends to upset the best-laid economic programs of the sort of people — even at big, smart universities — who don’t like to bother their little heads with politics.
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Force of habit 
keeps the bullies in charge
by David Benjamin

PARIS — While I was hanging out last week at a Left Bank sidewalk café with visitors from Texas, the subject turned to America’s energy future. My friend Robert scoffed at reports that hydraulic fracturing, to extract natural gas and oil from shale deposits, might cause earthquakes.

I explained that early fracking operations have been implicated in a series of tremors that struck a seismologically stable area in Pennsylvania, a point of information that Robert had not encountered. But afterwards, the conversation left me pondering the difficulty of getting even liberal people like him to look seriously beyond fossil-fuel extraction to new (renewable, green, earth-friendly) energy sources like wind, solar, biofuel, etc.

Unnecessarily, green energy has become a political football, with conservatives — allied to the oil, coal and extraction industries — dismissing a non-fossil fuel future as too costly and technologically difficult to achieve (at least until we’ve sucked every last drop of sweet crude from Mother Earth).

I’m not sure why anyone — for political, or any reasons — would disdain a non-polluting inexhaustible energy source (wind, sun, vegetation) in favor of a filthy and destructive finite resource (coal, oil). But this is one of the mysteries of capitalism.

Whenever renewables come up, conservatives instantly invoke the word “Solyndra,” citing the failure of a solar-panel manufacturer that went belly-up after a $535 million infusion from President Obama’s 2009 stimulus package.

I looked into Solyndra’s share of a U.S.-government green energy program that has, since 2009, totaled around $150 billion. Besides Solyndra, these funds have paid to weatherize some 770,000 homes, double the share of energy derived from wind and solar, and clean up 668,000 square miles of land formerly used for Cold War-era nuclear testing. Some of the money has also gone to infrastructure projects like smart grid development, high-speed rail and nuclear power.

Of all this money, the $535 Solyndra loss (actually about $400 million) accounts for — at most — .0036 percent. If you were to offer to a venture capitalist the prospect of losing just one-third of a penny per dollar on one dice-roll among $150 billion in diversified bets, he’d take the deal in a New York minute.

In the end, Solyndra’s bankruptcy was the exception that proved the rule. Overall, the green energy share of the stimulus was money prudently directed toward America’s future.

Indeed, in reporting these figures last year, CNN had difficulty finding an expert willing to put a negative spin on Uncle Sam’s investment in wind power, green homes, electric cars, etc. However, they finally got a few discouraging words from Diana Furchtgott-Roth, senior fellow at the right-wing Manhattan Institute and formerly one of President George W. Bush’s house economists. She argued that people don’t weatherize their homes, build electric cars or put up their own windmills because they know such harebrained enterprises will never be worth the investment. Drill, baby, Ms. Furchgott-Roth cries. Drill!

Typically, Ms. F-Roth overlooked the fact that every big energy and infrastructure project in U.S. history, from the telegraph to the laying of the transcontintental railroad to the proliferation of the oil industry and the pipeline networks and interstate highways that helped it to keep on drilling, came with massive government assistance, underwritten by taxpayers. Indeed, Big Oil is the only corporate interest ever to have placed its own handpicked president, Warren G. Harding, in the White House. Even today, every year, the petrochemical industry receives $10-52 billion (depending on who’s estimating) in corporate welfare from you, me and Uncle Sam.

Fifty-two billion bucks! That’s 4,685 (used — like new!) copies of To Kill a Mockingbird for every high school student in the United States.

The $535 million Solyndra boondoggle, so deplored by supporters of subsidies to the oil industry, equals .01 percent of one annual government gift to BP, ExxonMobile, Shell, ConocoPhillips, Chevron and the rest of the gimme-more Big Oil gang.

One point in Diana Furchgott-Roth’s green-energy critique that rings true is that people are, in fact, genuinely loath to experiment with new-fangled devices like Chevy Volts and solar roofs, even if in the long run they might save a fortune.

The fly in the ointment of progress is force of habit. People instinctively cling to patterns, institutions and tools that are fixed and familiar. We change — even for our own good — reluctantly, even stubbornly. And when rich, powerful political factions, like the scorched-earth extraction industries with their legion of bought-and-paid-for puppets in Congress (Senator Inhofe, Senator Landrieu, Senator Manchin) spends their vast treasure (a lot of which comes from us) to bolster the mighty forces of habit, the course of sensible change is strewn with boulders and bogged with horse manure.

Most of us suspect that Big Oil’s lobbyists and mouthpieces (Senator Cruz, Senator McConnell, Senator Vitter) might not be telling the truth. But we’re accustomed to holding our tongues, avoiding controversy and letting the bullies have their way.

Force of habit.