Examiner:

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney explained that the number of people dropping out of the work force, which artificially depresses the unemployment rate, can be regarded as an “economic positive.” “A large percentage of that is due to younger people getting more education, which in the end is an economic positive,” Carney said. “This increase in the number of people leaving the work force has been a trend and a fact since 2000, because of an aging population”

This chart tells a different story:

An unemployment rate doesn’t drop two points in a month because kids are staying in school longer. And the amount of the “aging population” still in the workforce is near historic highs, since they can’t afford to retire. Once again we feel like we’re living in a world where it’s Opposite Day from the politicians and their captive media every single day. HT: GP

Following hard on the heels of the good “jobs” news from the mysterious disappearance of the American workforce, the Washington Post has another cheerleading story for the administration (“improved public confidence in his economic stewardship”) based on a “poll.” There’s just one little problem with the poll. It doesn’t disclose its sample. Cooked books, cooked polls. Ugh. What an ugly year 2012 is shaping up to be. Aren’t the “journalists” who “report” on “polls” and “jobs” like this embarrassed, even a little bit?

The Hill:

West wondered Friday. “Is this dramatic supposed decrease in black unemployment a result of job creation or is someone playing around with the census numbers?” Economists reached by The Hill for comment couldn’t fully explain the unemployment rate change for the black community. William Darity, a professor of public policy at Duke University specializing in African-American studies and economics, wrote in an email to The Hill that the decline could have been due to a smaller labor force. He called the drop an “unbelievably dramatic drop” but didn’t rule out the possibility of someone tampering with the numbers; he said there was no evidence one way or the other. “If a large proportion of the persons exiting from the labor force were black (and the exists [sic] presumably were due to people giving up on looking for work) that could drop the black rate without any significant new employment,” Darity wrote. “But a one month drop in the black unemployment rate from 15.8% to 13.6% strikes me as somewhat unprecedented.” President Obama hailed the January unemployment news as a sign that the economy is growing stronger.

As we said, confusing, and not in a good way.

Christopher Monckton at WUWT:

When I visited the House of Lords’ minister, Lord Marland, at the Climate Change Department a couple of years ago, I asked him and the Department’s chief number-cruncher, Professor David Mackay (neither a climate scientist nor an economist, of course) to show me the Department’s calculations detailing just how much “global warming” that might otherwise occur this century would be prevented by the $30 billion per year that the Department was committed to spend between 2011 and 2050 -– $1.2 trillion in all.

There was a horrified silence. The birds stopped singing. The Minister adjusted his tie. The Permanent Secretary looked at his watch. Professor Mackay looked as though he wished the plush sofa into which he was disappearing would swallow him up entirely.

Eventually, in a very small voice, the Professor said, “Er, ah, mphm, that is, oof, arghh, we’ve never done any such calculation.” The biggest tax increase in human history had been based not upon a mature scientific assessment followed by a careful economic appraisal, but solely upon blind faith. I said as much. “Well,” said the Professor, “maybe we’ll get around to doing the calculations next October.” They still haven’t done the calculations -– or, rather, I suspect they have done them but have kept the results very quiet

The environment minister of Northern Ireland weighed in on related matters a few years ago.

NY Post:

The Labor Department reported a loss of 2,689,000 jobs in January…In January 2010, as I said, there was an actual, unadjusted job loss of 2,858,000 jobs. To make it simple, the government computers were expecting a bigger unadjusted loss than the 2,689,000 jobs because last January’s decline was 2,858,000. Why weren’t there as many job losses this January? Very likely because the weather throughout the country is a lot milder this year than during the past two Januarys. A loss of jobs that isn’t as bad as expected turns into a job gain. Does that mean there really are 243,000 new jobs out there? Absolutely not.

Let’s say there are rumors in your company that 300 people are going to be laid off. Instead, management decides to fire just 200. Two hundred people, of course, have lost their jobs. But, adjusting it for expectations, 100 people didn’t get fired. Using this analogy, the government would say that, on an expectation-adjusted basis, 100 jobs were created. That’s sort of what happened in the January employment report because of seasonal adjustment.

Let’s get this straight. Jobs went down 2.7 million instead of 2.9 million in January and this is a job gain of 243,000 jobs? Okay. The labor force lost 1.7 million people, which trnslated into a seasonally adjusted 1.2 million people, so the labor force participation rate continued its drop to historic lows among prime age workers.

Meanwhile, the actual non-seasonally adjusted jobs number for December and January is a loss of 2.9 million jobs (which the BLS translated, using a methodology that we were unable to determine, into a job gain of 446,000 jobs). And these jobs losses and labor force losses are a cause for celebration? Huh? It’s all kind of confusing to us, and not in a good way.

Zero hedge claims that 1.2 million Americans somehow dropped out of the labor force in one month. If that’s true, it’s both interesting and very odd indeed. What could be going on?

We used to say that when the Catholic Church discarded the Latin Mass, they threw out the baby and kept the bathwater. But bathwater would be a major improvement over what passes for acceptable language today among the young. If you can believe it, we heard this song on the radio today, and to the best of our knowledge, no one has gone to jail.

We haven’t had much to say recently of a partisan nature, because really, it’s just awful out there, and boring too. Here’s a change of pace, however, with some cleverness added into the mix. The little sub-messages are a nice touch. HT: Ace

Yahoo:

Sugar and other sweeteners are, in fact, so toxic to the human body that they should be regulated as strictly as alcohol by governments worldwide, according to a commentary in the current issue of the journal Nature by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). The researchers propose regulations such as taxing all foods and drinks that include added sugar, banning sales in or near schools and placing age limits on purchases…

In the United States, more than two-thirds of the population is overweight, and half of them are obese. About 80 percent of those who are obese will have diabetes or metabolic disorders and will have shortened lives, according to the UCSF authors of the commentary, led by Robert Lustig. And about 75 percent of U.S. health-care dollars are spent on diet-related diseases, the authors said. Worldwide, the obese now greatly outnumber the undernourished…

Lustig, a medical doctor in UCSF’s Department of Pediatrics, compares added sugar to tobacco and alcohol (coincidentally made from sugar) in that it is addictive, toxic and has a negative impact on society, thus meeting established public health criteria for regulation. Lustig advocates a consumer tax on any product with added sugar…ban the sale of sugary drinks to children under age 17 and to tighten zoning laws for the sale of sugary beverages and snacks around schools and in low-income areas

In a country where the EPA has issued an endangerment finding about a gas that is necessary for life to exist on earth, it is possible to imagine the government requiring a photo ID and a prescription to buy a bag of sugar. How life has changed in the last half century, and in many ways not for the better.

The NYT has a story on Real Pollution:

Officials in southern China appear to have averted environmental calamity by halting the spread of a toxic metal that had threatened to foul drinking water for tens of millions of people, the state media reported Monday. Officials said they had successfully diluted the concentration of cadmium, a poisonous component of batteries, that has been coursing down the Longjiang River…

half the nation’s rivers and lakes are unfit for human contact, and news reports of chemical and oil spills are commonplace here. Although the central government has invested more than $3 billion to improve water quality in recent years, officials estimate that more than 300 million people still do not have access to clean drinking water…

10 percent of the nation’s rice crop contained excessive cadmium levels. In several southern provinces, 60 percent of rice samples were found to exceed the national standard for the heavy metal…“Only when fish started dying did they publicly acknowledge there was a problem,” Mr. Ma said.

In China they have Real Pollution. In the US we have not had serious pollution problems in decades; instead we now have pretend pollution, and Americans are so mal-educated that they don’t even know it. 16 of the 20 dirtiest cities in the world are in China. The country’s water is appalling. And how about the great taste of melamine?

Meanwhile, in the US, we have geniuses like this: “Think about the amount of money that China has spent on infrastructure. Their ports, their train systems, their airports are vastly the superior to us now.” The US has 20,000 airports, while China has fewer than 200 for civilian use. Some infrastructure! Some genius!

NPR reports about a contract among Chinese farmers in 1978:

There was no incentive to work hard — to go out to the fields early, to put in extra effort, Yen Jingchang says. “Work hard, don’t work hard — everyone gets the same,” he says. “So people don’t want to work.” In Xiaogang there was never enough food, and the farmers often had to go to other villages to beg. Their children were going hungry. They were desperate. So, in the winter of 1978, after another terrible harvest, they came up with an idea: Rather than farm as a collective, each family would get to farm its own plot of land. If a family grew a lot of food, that family could keep some of the harvest…

Despite the risks, they decided they had to try this experiment — and to write it down as a formal contract, so everyone would be bound to it. By the light of an oil lamp, Yen Hongchang wrote out the contract. The farmers agreed to divide up the land among the families. Each family agreed to turn over some of what they grew to the government, and to the collective. And, crucially, the farmers agreed that families that grew enough food would get to keep some for themselves. The contract also recognized the risks the farmers were taking. If any of the farmers were sent to prison or executed, it said, the others in the group would care for their children until age 18…

by changing the economic rules — by saying, you get to keep some of what you grow — everything changed. At the end of the season, they had an enormous harvest: more, Yen Hongchang says, than in the previous five years combined. That huge harvest gave them away…

fortunately for Mr. Yen and the other farmers, at this moment in history, there were powerful people in the Communist Party who wanted to change China’s economy. Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese leader who would go on to create China’s modern economy, was just coming to power. So instead of executing the Xiaogang farmers, the Chinese leaders ultimately decided to hold them up as a model. Within a few years, farms all over China adopted the principles in that secret document. People could own what they grew. The government launched other economic reforms, and China’s economy started to grow like crazy. Since 1978, something like 500 million people have risen out of poverty in China.

In 1623 William Bradford figured out the same thing after the Pilgrims spent two years on their communal farms: “they began to think how they might raise as much corn as they could…so assigned to every family a parcel of land, according to the proportion of their number…and ranged all boys and youth under some family. This had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious…The women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn; which before would allege weakness and inability.”

It is of note that terrible hardships preceded the discovery of simple truths. In the case of China, tens of millions of people died over decades in service of Mao’s utopian fantasies. In Plymouth it took them three hard years to figure out how to deal with the freeloaders. Small wonder that in our world today, ideas that have lived off a lazy prosperity, like green energy and global warming, are having some problems of their own.

The WSJ has a piece signed by 16 scientists:

the number of scientific “heretics” is growing with each passing year. The reason is a collection of stubborn scientific facts. Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now. This is known to the warming establishment, as one can see from the 2009 “Climategate” email of climate scientist Kevin Trenberth: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.” But the warming is only missing if one believes computer models where so-called feedbacks involving water vapor and clouds greatly amplify the small effect of CO2.

The lack of warming for more than a decade — indeed, the smaller-than-predicted warming over the 22 years since the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing projections — suggests that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause. Faced with this embarrassment, those promoting alarm have shifted their drumbeat from warming to weather extremes, to enable anything unusual that happens in our chaotic climate to be ascribed to CO2.

The fact is that CO2 is not a pollutant. CO2 is a colorless and odorless gas, exhaled at high concentrations by each of us, and a key component of the biosphere’s life cycle. Plants do so much better with more CO2 that greenhouse operators often increase the CO2 concentrations by factors of three or four to get better growth. This is no surprise since plants and animals evolved when CO2 concentrations were about 10 times larger than they are today. Better plant varieties, chemical fertilizers and agricultural management contributed to the great increase in agricultural yields of the past century, but part of the increase almost certainly came from additional CO2 in the atmosphere.

Although the number of publicly dissenting scientists is growing, many young scientists furtively say that while they also have serious doubts about the global-warming message, they are afraid to speak up for fear of not being promoted — or worse. They have good reason to worry. In 2003, Dr. Chris de Freitas, the editor of the journal Climate Research, dared to publish a peer-reviewed article with the politically incorrect (but factually correct) conclusion that the recent warming is not unusual in the context of climate changes over the past thousand years. The international warming establishment quickly mounted a determined campaign to have Dr. de Freitas removed from his editorial job and fired from his university position. Fortunately, Dr. de Freitas was able to keep his university job.

This is not the way science is supposed to work, but we have seen it before — for example, in the frightening period when Trofim Lysenko hijacked biology in the Soviet Union. Soviet biologists who revealed that they believed in genes, which Lysenko maintained were a bourgeois fiction, were fired

The list of heretics is getting pretty long now.

Gallup asked an open-ended question in a poll:

As you can see, almost no one — a mere 2% of those polled — thinks income inequality is a priority compared to the economy generally. Here’s why:

Want to be a leveler? Good luck with that.

Robert Samuelson discusses why the Fed failed to see the housing bust coming:

Hardly anyone asked whether lax mortgage lending would trigger a broad financial crisis, because America had not experienced a broad financial crisis since the Great Depression. A true financial crisis differs from falling stock prices, which are common. A financial crisis involves the failure of banks or other institutions, panic in many markets and a pervasive loss of wealth and confidence. Such a crisis was not within the personal experience of members of the FOMC — or anyone. Nor was it part of mainstream economic thinking. Because it hadn’t happened in decades, it was assumed that it couldn’t happen. There had been previous real estate busts. From 1964 to 1966, new housing starts fell 24 percent; from 1972 to 1975, 51 percent; from 1979 to 1982, 39 percent; from 1988 to 1991, 32 percent. Declining home construction had fed economic slowdowns or recessions. So the natural question seemed: Would this happen now? The answer seemed “no”…

There’s a paradox to economic policy. The more it succeeds at prolonging short-term prosperity, the more it inspires long-run destabilizing behavior by businesses, banks, consumers, investors and government. If they think basic stability is assured, they will assume greater risks — loosen credit standards, borrow more, engage in more speculation, relax wage and price behavior — that ultimately make the economy less stable. Long booms threaten deep busts. Since World War II, this has happened twice. In the 1960s, the so-called “new economics” promised that, by manipulating the budget and interest rates, it could stifle business cycles. The ensuing boom spanned the 1960s; the bust extended to the early 1980s and included inflation of 13 percent, four recessions and peak monthly unemployment of 10.8 percent. The latest episode was the so-called Great Moderation, largely paralleling Greenspan’s Fed tenure (1987-2006), when there were only two mild recessions (1990-91 and 2001). We are now in the bust. The Fed slept mainly because it overlooked the possibility of boom-bust.

(We certainly did not understand what was happening when we first noticed the sub-prime mortgage market in early 2007. Nor did we understand it well when the Bear Stearns conference call tanked the market in August of that year.) We think there’s another factor that was in play as well: computer models. Recall that the largest investment banks were allowed to write their own capital rules at this time by the government, because they were so smart and had very sophisticated computer models showing that they had excess capital even at ratios as low as 4-5%. GIGO as it turned out.

Since at least the time of Rick Santelli’s Tea Party rant, we have been witnessing some seismic changes in American politics. Independents flipped by 33 points in 2010 after all. But to many of the powers that be, it’s as though that never happened. Flash forward to the extraordinary GOP primary season. Candidate after candidate has surged and they have been characterized in their turn by the punditry and the media as the latest anti-Romney. That characterization misses the point. In our view the Republican primary voters have been sending a clear message that has has not varied all that much, though the vessels for the message have come and gone.

The latest vessel is Newt Gingrich, obviously flawed in many ways. But take a moment to read what he’s saying. It’s less the messenger than the message that has the power. We think that GOP primary voters believe that a minimally acceptable candidate articulating that message clearly and unapologetically is electable by a sizeable majority of voters. After all, in the wake of the ridiculous Keystone decision, even staunch liberals are shaking their heads about the disastrous course the administration has set for the country. We don’t recall a recent analogy to this bubbling up of opinion from the grass roots. (Eugene McCarthy’s strong losing performance in the 1968 New Hampshire primary comes to mind.) If the insiders don’t quite get what is going on, it wouldn’t be the first time.

Charles Murray in the WSJ:

To illustrate just how wide the gap has grown between the new upper class and the new lower class, let me start with the broader upper-middle and working classes from which they are drawn, using two fictional neighborhoods that I hereby label Belmont (after an archetypal upper-middle-class suburb near Boston) and Fishtown (after a neighborhood in Philadelphia that has been home to the white working class since the Revolution).

To be assigned to Belmont, the people in the statistical nationwide databases on which I am drawing must have at least a bachelor’s degree and work as a manager, physician, attorney, engineer, architect, scientist, college professor or content producer in the media. To be assigned to Fishtown, they must have no academic degree higher than a high-school diploma. If they work, it must be in a blue-collar job, a low-skill service job such as cashier, or a low-skill white-collar job such as mail clerk or receptionist.

People who qualify for my Belmont constitute about 20% of the white population of the U.S., ages 30 to 49. People who qualify for my Fishtown constitute about 30% of the white population of the U.S., ages 30 to 49. I specify white, meaning non-Latino white, as a way of clarifying how broad and deep the cultural divisions in the U.S. have become. Cultural inequality is not grounded in race or ethnicity. I specify ages 30 to 49 — what I call prime-age adults — to make it clear that these trends are not explained by changes in the ages of marriage or retirement. In Belmont and Fishtown, here’s what happened to America’s common culture between 1960 and 2010.

Marriage: In 1960, extremely high proportions of whites in both Belmont and Fishtown were married — 94% in Belmont and 84% in Fishtown. In the 1970s, those percentages declined about equally in both places. Then came the great divergence. In Belmont, marriage stabilized during the mid-1980s, standing at 83% in 2010. In Fishtown, however, marriage continued to slide; as of 2010, a minority (just 48%) were married. The gap in marriage between Belmont and Fishtown grew to 35 percentage points, from just 10.

Single parenthood: Another aspect of marriage — the percentage of children born to unmarried women — showed just as great a divergence. Though politicians and media eminences are too frightened to say so, nonmarital births are problematic. On just about any measure of development you can think of, children who are born to unmarried women fare worse than the children of divorce and far worse than children raised in intact families. This unwelcome reality persists even after controlling for the income and education of the parents. In 1960, just 2% of all white births were nonmarital. When we first started recording the education level of mothers in 1970, 6% of births to white women with no more than a high-school education — women, that is, with a Fishtown education — were out of wedlock. By 2008, 44% were nonmarital. Among the college-educated women of Belmont, less than 6% of all births were out of wedlock as of 2008, up from 1% in 1970.

Industriousness: The norms for work and women were revolutionized after 1960, but the norm for men putatively has remained the same: Healthy men are supposed to work. In practice, though, that norm has eroded everywhere. In Fishtown, the change has been drastic. (To avoid conflating this phenomenon with the latest recession, I use data collected in March 2008 as the end point for the trends.) The primary indicator of the erosion of industriousness in the working class is the increase of prime-age males with no more than a high school education who say they are not available for work — they are “out of the labor force.” That percentage went from a low of 3% in 1968 to 12% in 2008. Twelve percent may not sound like much until you think about the men we’re talking about: in the prime of their working lives, their 30s and 40s, when, according to hallowed American tradition, every American man is working or looking for work. Almost one out of eight now aren’t. Meanwhile, not much has changed among males with college educations. Only 3% were out of the labor force in 2008…

“The more opulent citizens take great care not to stand aloof from the people,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville, the great chronicler of American democracy, in the 1830s. “On the contrary, they constantly keep on easy terms with the lower classes: They listen to them, they speak to them every day.” Americans love to see themselves this way. But there’s a problem: It’s not true anymore, and it has been progressively less true since the 1960s.

From the WSJ a couple of years ago: “the CDC reported that about 40% of American children were born out of wedlock in 2007, more than triple the 11% who were in 1970.” It seems clear enough to us that the government has to stop subsidizing this sort of behavior or fairly soon the country will be in an even bigger mess than it is now.

A few days ago, Mitt Romney was ahead in SC, and it was all about Saul Alinsky versus Gordon Gekko, but it turned out that Newt Gingrich won handily. Here’s some of what he had to say (we could not find a transcript of Gingrich’s victory speech in South Carolina, so we essentially created one below):

So many people who are so concerned about jobs, about medical costs, about the everyday parts of life, and who feel that the elites in Washington and New York have no understanding, no care, no concern, no reliability, and in fact do not represent them at all.

In the last two debates we had…where people reacted so strongly to the news media, I think it was something very fundamental that I wish that the powers that be in the news media would take seriously. The American people feel that they have elites who have been trying for a half century to force us to quit being American and to become some kind of other system, and the reaction…People completely misunderstand what’s going on. It’s not that I am a good debater, it’s that I articulate the deepest held views of the American people…

If Barack Obama can get reelected after this disaster, just think how radical he would be in a second term…there are a number of key issues we have to talk about with the President. I believe this campaign comes down to economics, including jobs, economic growth, balancing the budget, the value of money, comes down to national security, what threatens us and what to do about it, but the centerpiece of this campaign is about American exceptionalism versus the radicalism of Saul Alinsky…

What we are going to argue is that American exceptionalism, the Declaration of Independence, the American Constitution, the American Federalist Papers, the Founding Fathers of America are the source from which we draw our understanding of America. He draws his from the Saul Alinsky, the radical left-wingers, and people who don’t like the classical America…

One of the keys issues, and I’m prepared to take this straight to the President and frankly, straight to the elite media…is the growing anti-religious bigotry of the elites…The second big theme that every South Carolinian understands is jobs, economic growth…I want to go into every neighborhood of every ethnic background in the country and say to the people very simply, if you want your children to have a life of dependency and food stamps, you have a candidate and that’s Barack Obama. If you want your children to have a life of indepedency and paychecks, you have a candidate and that’s Newt Gingrich…

Part of our long-term security interests is having an American energy policy. I want America to become so energy independent that no American President ever again bows to a Saudi King. Let me give you an example of a common sense conservatism that solves problems. You have well over $29 billion of natural gas offshore. As President I will authorize on the very first day the development of it. That natural gas will create jobs that, in Louisiana, average $80,000 apiece. In addition, it generates royalties. Part of the royalties should be used to modernize the port of Charleston, which affects 1 out of every 5 jobs in South Carolina.

But it’s not enough just to find the money. The Corps of Engineers bureaucracy is so long and so stupid that they currently take 8 years to study, not to do the project but to study the project. We fought the entire Second World War in 3 years and 8 months. Now if you can beat Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and Imperial Japan in 3 years and 8 months, it is almost unimaginable that it now takes 8 years to study the project…

The President’s decision to veto the Keystone pipeline…you have to wonder how out-of-touch with reality this administration is…The President says, no, we don’t want you to build a pipeline from central Canada straight down, with no mountains intervening, to the largest petrochemical center in the world, Houston, so that we would make money on the pipeline, we would make money on managing the pipeline, we would make money on refining the oil, and we would make money in the ports of Galveston and Houston shipping the oil.

Oh no, we don’t want to do that because Barack Obama is taking care of his extremist left-wing friends in San Francisco. They think that will really stop the oil from getting out. No. Prime Minister Harper…is going to cut a deal with the Chinese, and they will build a pipeline straight across the Rockies to Vancouver. We will get none of the jobs, none of the energy, none of the opportunity. An American President who can create a Chinese-Canadian partnership is truly a danger to this country.

Gingrich certainly owes a great deal to the much-reviled media, and possibly to Romney’s mishandling of his tax issue. More surprises ahead no doubt, but even Romney partisans know that important changes are needed, and quick.

A Yahoo report from the UK, where there are so many fascinating stories:

Beck Laxton, 46, and partner Kieran Cooper, 44, have spent half the decade concealing the gender of their son, Sasha. “I wanted to avoid all that stereotyping,” Laxton said in an interview with the Cambridge News. “Stereotypes seem fundamentally stupid. Why would you want to slot people into boxes?…Sasha dresses in clothes he likes — be it a hand-me-downs from his sister or his brother. The big no-no’s are hyper-masculine outfits like skull-print shirts and cargo pants.

In one photo, sent to friends and family, Sasha’s dressed in a shiny pink girl’s swimsuit. “Children like sparkly things,” says Beck. “And if someone thought Sasha was a girl because he was wearing a pink swimming costume, then what effect would that have?”…

When Sasha turned five and headed to school, Laxton was forced to make her son’s sex public. That meant Sasha would have to get used to being a boy in the eyes of his peers. Still, his mom is intervening. While the school requires different uniforms for boys and girls, Sasha wears a girl’s blouse with his pants.

Makes us want to play matchmaker. Look, almost anything’s better to comment on than the drip, drip, drip of the primary season, or the appalling situation in Washington.

The Washington Post’s editorial board discusses Keystone:

Obama’s Jobs Council reminded the nation that it is still hooked on fossil fuels, and will be for a long time. “Continuing to deliver inexpensive and reliable energy,” the council reported, “is going to require the United States to optimize all of its natural resources and construct pathways (pipelines, transmission and distribution) to deliver electricity and fuel.” It added that regulatory “and permitting obstacles that could threaten the development of some energy projects, negatively impact jobs and weaken our energy infrastructure need to be addressed.” Mr. Obama’s Jobs Council could start by calling out…the Obama administration…

We almost hope this was a political call because, on the substance, there should be no question. Without the pipeline, Canada would still export its bitumen — with long-term trends in the global market, it’s far too valuable to keep in the ground — but it would go to China. And, as a State Department report found, U.S. refineries would still import low-quality crude — just from the Middle East. Stopping the pipeline, then, wouldn’t do anything to reduce global warming, but it would almost certainly require more oil to be transported across oceans in tankers.

WaPo columnist Robert Samuelson is a little less diplomatic:

rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico is an act of national insanity. It isn’t often that a president makes a decision that has no redeeming virtues and — beyond the symbolism — won’t even advance the goals of the groups that demanded it…environmentalists won’t get much. Stopping the pipeline won’t halt the development of tar sands, to which the Canadian government is committed; therefore, there will be little effect on global warming emissions. Indeed, Obama’s decision might add to them. If Canada builds a pipeline from Alberta to the Pacific for export to Asia, moving all that oil across the ocean by tanker will create extra emissions. There will also be the risk of added spills…

consider how Obama’s decision hurts the United States. For starters, it insults and antagonizes a strong ally; getting future Canadian cooperation on other issues will be harder. Next, it threatens a large source of relatively secure oil that, combined with new discoveries in the United States, could reduce (though not eliminate) our dependence on insecure foreign oil.

Finally, Obama’s decision forgoes all the project’s jobs. There’s some dispute over the magnitude. Project sponsor TransCanada claims 20,000, split between construction (13,000) and manufacturing (7,000) of everything from pumps to control equipment. Apparently, this refers to “job years,” meaning one job for one year. If so, the actual number of jobs would be about half that spread over two years. Whatever the figure, it’s in the thousands and important in a country hungering for work. And Keystone XL is precisely the sort of infrastructure project that Obama claims to favor.

The big winners are the Chinese. They must be celebrating their good fortune and wondering how the crazy Americans could repudiate such a huge supply of nearby energy.

Speaking of China, Chairman Mao wanted people to put steel mills in their back yards. Very practical. In the new fantasy America we have now, everyone should put a Solyndra in their back yards, and there should be personalized high-speed rail service connecting every home in the country,

Henry Adams reflected on changes in America in about 1904: “The American boy of 1854 stood closer to the year 1 than to the year 1900.” Charles Eliot commented on the range of knowledge among some Americans in 1854: “We are accustomed to seeing men leap from farm or shop to court-room or pulpit, and we half believe that common men can safely use the seven-league boots of genius.” Those days are long gone.

As VDH says, and as we have written as well, Americans don’t know much about the world that existed in the days of Adams and Eliot. The world seems magic now, because of technology; it hardly was magic back then.

The ignorance is not just sad, it’s actually perilous. To take a mundane example, technology has permitted the elimination of inventory everywhere in the global supply chain. How large are the buffer inventories of gasoline, fruits and vegetables, meat, canned goods, and so forth, in case some serious disruptions should occur? A month or two, like the SPR? What happens when the gas and the cheeseburgers run out after that?

Charles Eliot advocated a new curriculum in higher education that focused on specialization. This time in our view would benefit by more respect for the generalist of 1854. It is colossally arrogant to think that there will not be a breakdown in the supply chain at some point. And the consequences of arrogance are not pretty. If there’s a Plan B for the US in such a crisis, we haven’t heard of it. And offshoring so much of America’s needs to foreign lands heightens the risks in our perilous present.