Devashree Saha and Sifan Liu for the Brookings Institution: The “war on coal” is a false narrative that oversimplifies what is happening in the energy economy. In blaming environmental regulations under the Obama administration as the sole reason for the recent turmoil in the coal industry, President-elect Trump and Environmental Protection Agency administrator nominee Scott Pruitt are ignoring fundamental market realities that are buffeting the industry.
A December 2016 Brookings paper shows how the ongoing large-scale switch in the power sector from coal to cheaper and abundant natural gas, a trend driven more by investors and market forces than by environmental regulations, is playing a huge role in states’ increased ability to “decouple” their economic growth from growth in carbon emissions. The natural gas glut has reshaped how we get electricity across the board, with natural gas-fired generation expected to surpass coal generation in the United States for the first time in 2016.
At the same time, renewable energy is continuing to increase its market share aided by declining costs, increasing efficiency and economies of scale. Renewables, including hydro, wind, solar, biomass and geothermal, provided 16.9 percent of electricity generated in the first half of 2016. That compares with 13.7 percent in all of 2015.
The wave of coal plant retirements in recent years, therefore, is not surprising as utilities move away from coal to burn cheaper natural gas and increase their renewable capacity.
Weight gain doesn’t end with the holidays
Lisa Sodders for the RAND Corporation: People are more likely to choose unhealthy foods from November to December, and the subsequent holiday pounds they gain account for 60 percent to 70 percent of the weight they gain per year, according to a RAND Corporation study.
Roland Sturm, RAND senior economist, and his colleagues examined supermarket scanner data of food purchases and individual surveys from about 400,000 enrolled households who were members of a South African health promotion program from 2009 to 2013.
Overall, participants spent 16.7 percent of total food expenses on “nutritionally undesirable foods” such as sugar-sweetened beverages, chocolates, cookies, candy and ice cream — and 24.7 percent on healthy foods such as fruits, vegetables, whole grains and nonfat dairy foods. (Neutral foods accounted for the remaining percentage of purchases.)
But there were pronounced seasonal variations in their spending: December was the peak month for unhealthy food purchases, which were 40 percent higher than in January.
This holiday peak was associated with short-term weight gain. However, despite some weight loss after January, average body mass did not revert to pre-holiday levels and the holiday weight gain accounted for 60 percent to 70 percent of the annual weight gain.
The good side of identity politics
Jacob Levy for the Niskanen Center: Black Lives Matter has provided the first truly large-scale political mobilization against police violence and mass incarceration since the War on Drugs began.
It’s perfectly true that many liberal — very much including libertarian — scholars and analysts have been calling for reform of police practices, an end to police militarization and civil forfeiture abuse, respect for civil liberties and drug decriminalization or legalization for a long time. It’s true that it’s possible to offer those analyses in a race-neutral way. But given that the policies aren’t race-neutral, it shouldn’t surprise us that opposition to them isn’t either, and that the real political energy for mobilizing against them would be race-conscious energy.
If Black Lives Matter is “identity politics,” then identity politics has provided one of the most significant political mobilizations in defense of freedom in the United States in my lifetime. That doesn’t belong on the “to be sure” exception side of a rule that is driven by the politics of gender pronouns. It’s precisely the other way around.
If there is any feature of identity politics that has triggered a political backlash, I think it is far less likely to be gendered pronouns or the more exotic extremes of campus politics … and far more likely to be the high-profile Black Lives Matter. But on any plausible account of political action and political change — something liberals have sometimes lacked — the political energy provided by BLM is sure to be vital to any effective long-term solutions to the policing and incarceration crises. …
Identity politics at its best, in other words, isn’t just a matter of being on some group’s side. It’s about fighting for political justice by drawing on the commitment that arises out of targeted injustice, and about having the intellectual resources to let us diagnose that targeted injustice. It lets us spot the majority group’s identity politics rather than treating it as the normal background state of affairs, and to recognize the oppression and injustice that it generates.
Compiled by Joseph Lawler from reports published by the various think tanks.
