THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 11 , 2021. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A25
P
eak oil production has been
postponed, again. Peak hysteria
about climate change, however,
might have been passed.
In 1914, the government said U.S. oil
reserves would be exhausted by 1924.
In 1939, it said the world’s reserves
would last 13 years. Then oil fueled a
global war and the post-war economic
boom, and in 1951 the government said
the world had 13 years of remaining
reserves. In 1970, the world’s proven
reserves were estimated to be 612 bil-
lion barrels. More than 767 billion were
pumped by 2006, when proven re-
serves were 1.2 trillion. In 1977, Presi-
dent Jimmy Carter predicted the ex-
haustion of the world’s proven reserves
“by the end of the next decade.” By
2009, the world had consumed three
times more than 1977’s proven 1.2 tril-
lion barrels, and today’s proven re-
serves are above 1.5 trillion.
All this disappointed those who de-
sire scarcity of everything but govern-
ment, which they think can engineer
comprehensive social change by be-
coming the allocator of scarce resourc-
es. Such people filled the Glasgow,
Scotland, streets outside the climate
summit chanting “System change not
climate change.”
The 33-year-old student who told
the New York Times “We need a whole
system change” was correct: The “sys-
tem” — industrialism, enterprise, mar-
kets, economic development that ex-
pands the global middle class, eco-
nomic growth that funds the social
safety nets of developed nations with
aging populations — is i ncompatible
with “keep 1.5 alive.” Meaning the goal
of limiting global warming to 1.5 de-
grees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).
This limitation will not happen. This
nonoccurrence will be tolerable.
Since 2010, the New York Times
reports, the great majority of the
$1.1 trillion of private equity energy
sector investments have been in fossil
fuels, just 12 percent in renewables.
The stock prices of major U.S. coal-
mining companies rose at least 145 per-
cent in the past 12 months. The amount
of coal used this year to generate
U.S. electricity will be more than
20 percent above last year’s amount.
This might be a short-term phenom-
enon, produced by declining oil prices
that cut shale operations and natural
gas production. But nothing is more
expectable than the regular occurrence
of unexpected things, such as the awk-
ward decline of Northern Europe’s
power-generating winds as Glasgow
drew near. (Fossil fuel-generated elec-
tricity kept the lights on for the
e nlightened.)
The Energy Information Adminis-
tration projects that fossil fuels, which
were 84.2 percent of global energy
consumption in 2010, will decline only
to 70 percent in 2050. India, which no
later than six years hence will have the
world’s largest population, and which
already is the world’s third-largest
source of greenhouse gases, said at
Glasgow it will try to achieve net zero
carbon emissions — by 2070.
India, with one-thirtieth the U.S per
capita gross domestic product, cannot
be faulted for barely disguising its
Scarlett O’Hara stance regarding cli-
mate change: “I’ll think about that
tomorrow.” Consider all that was un-
imaginable about 2021 in 1972: the
transformation to a service economy,
air conditioning — an adaptation to
difficult climate — that enabled the
Sun Belt to boom, etc. Now, imagine
how remote 2021 will seem in 2070,
when the world certainly will have
unimagined worries of currently un-
knowable natures.
The Hoover Institution’s John H. Co-
chrane, a.k.a. the Grumpy Economist,
notes that even with extreme assump-
tions about increased global tempera-
ture and negligible adaptation mea-
sures, it is difficult to postulate a cost
larger than 5 percent of global GDP by- Even assuming meager 2 percent
growth, U.S. GDP in 2100 will be
400 percent larger than now. At 3 per-
cent compounded growth, there will be
1,000 percent more GDP than now.
From 1940 to 2000, Cochrane reminds,
there was 3.8 percent compound an-
nual growth, and GDP increased
1 0-fold.
Cochrane says: Suppose, implausi-
bly, that Miami might be six feet below
sea level in 2100. Amsterdam has been
such for centuries. It built dikes. By
hand. There is, he notes, “great disdain
for adaptation.” Of course: The disdain-
ers worry that adaptation might obvi-
ate the need for radical government
micromanagement of life.
Cost-benefit analyses illuminate
choices and budget constraints. “With-
out numbers,” Cochrane warns, “we
will follow fashion. Today it’s wind-
mills, solar panels, and electric cars.
Yesterday it was high-speed trains. The
day before it was corn ethanol and
switchgrass.”
Tomorrow? There will be other pro-
spective salvations. But, says Co-
chrane: “Notice how our policy-makers
never tell us how much they think each
new policy will reduce year 2100 global
temperature or raise year 2100 GDP.
The reason is that the numbers are
tiny.” The gigantic numbers concern
the resources we will squander until we
follow numbers rather than f ashions.
GEORGE F. WILLPeak climate
hysteria
at COP26
E
verything is a grift nowadays.
There are individual scam-
mers, sure, and there always
have been: the Billy McFar-
land’s of the see-and-be-seen party cir-
cuit, or the Bernie Madoffs of the world
of wealth management (or mismanage-
ment). Yet increasingly the headline-
making cons of the moment seem like
full-fledged cosmologies — personal,
professional and political belief sys-
tems. And the adherents are trying to
fool others even as they fool themselves.
Recent weeks are rife with examples.
Start with the so-called University of
Austin, or UATX, co-founded by former
New York Times writer, editor and
warrior for free speech — or is it speech
free from criticism? — Bari Weiss. This
school boasts a professorial roster of
right-leaning scholars, many of whom
made their names by being canceled
and complaining about it. The coun-
try’s venerated houses of higher learn-
ing, this group alleges, are plagued by
“illiberalism and censoriousness.”
Their venture, in contrast, will be dedi-
cated to the "pursuit of truth.”
Truth? Sounds good. Except that
however much of the “deepest wisdom
of civilization” students manage to ex-
tract from UATX, there is one thing
they’ll never get: a degree. “DO YOU
OFFER DEGREES?” reads a frequently
asked question on the dedicated page.
The answer: “We do not confer degrees
at this moment.” Nor is UATX accredit-
ed (yet!). Oh, and its nonprofit “fiscal
sponsor” listed no assets when it last
filed in 2020.
Certainly, college campuses could do
with a measure more tolerance for
ideas that are out-of-step with the pre-
vailing mood of modern academia. But
why not work within schools to squeeze
every educational drop out of this clash
of cultures? Why build your own bubble
where you can indoctrinate kids with
your own ideology instead?
Bubbles are in, though. Consider
another libertarian pet project promis-
ing to haunt our fragile nation: the
wacky realm of cryptocurrency, even
wackier now that non-fungible tokens
have turned into the fad of the year.
The crypto rip-off known as a “rug
pull” is practically a rite of passage for
the wide-eyed investor who hopes to
challenge the predominance of the
mighty dollar. See for an example the
currency inspired by the Netflix surviv-
al series “Squid Game,” which traded at
$2,856.65 and then $0.0007 within five
minutes this month. Suddenly, millions
of dollars had disappeared: The cre-
ators had abandoned their project after
cashing out en masse, leaving other
investors holding a bag full of absolute-
ly meaningless “money.”
This may seem about as dumb as can
be, but don’t worry — there’s even
dumber. The “Evolved Apes” project
enticed participants to purchase NFTs
of, uh, cartoon monkeys wearing hu-
man clothes. The monkeys were sup-
posed to “fight for survival,” but the
game necessary for the realization of
this vision never materialized, and the
anonymous developer overseeing the
promised kingdom vanished after si-
phoning off nearly $3 million of the
enterprise’s funds. Now a bunch of
people are left with, well, JPEGs of apes
certified on the blockchain as unique
originals. Or, really, they are left with
links to JPEGs of apes certified on the
blockchain as unique originals.
Which is to say, they are left with
nothing of value, unless enough of these
ape-holding chumps continue to be-
lieve the apes are valuable. That’s the
key to the whole show of cryptocurren-
cy, whether you’re hanging on to a
bearded orangutan wearing aviators or
a bitcoin: The participants in these
markets buy and sell and buy and sell
again to juice up their own holdings.
Enough people lose interest, and here
comes the crash.
Of course, you might say the same
thing about the value of a non-degree
from a non-accredited non-university.
The host of little lies that organize us
may seem to have nothing to do with
the “big lie” — the evidence-free con-
spiracy theory that Donald Trump won
the 2020 presidential race. Yet look
closer.
Everyone is living their truth, not the
truth. Reality is kaput, shared neither
in theory nor in practice. So, many have
discarded what faith they had in insti-
tutions, and they’ve also discarded the
idea that institutions can be improved
at all. Small victories don’t exist. Only
total victory exists, zero-sum.
Where this thinking leads is obvious.
No point in trying to reform politics —
better to rebel for your own regime. No
point in trying to root the ugly out of
Wall Street — better to invent your own
kind of money. No point in trying to
improve higher education — better to
design your own insular network of
alt-academia.
But the legitimacy of a home-brewed
belief system depends exclusively on
the continued belief of those within
that system. While to the rest of society,
it might as well all be an illusion:
non-degree degrees, non-money mon-
ey, nonwinning winners. The believers
might wonder who’s really getting
scammed.MOLLY ROBERTSWelcome to
the golden
age of
scammers
V
eterans of the Civil War, World
War I, World War II and the
Gulf War got victory parades.
What do the 800,000 veterans
of the Afghanistan war get?
They fought with awe-inspiring ded-
ication and great sacrifice across near-
ly two decades, but in the end could not
establish a sustainable status quo. The
government of Afghanistan disinte-
grated in just a matter of days in
August. The Taliban — the violent
extremists that U.S. troops had been
fighting for nearly 20 years — are now
in control of the entire country. Tens of
thousands of Afghans who worked
with U.S. forces have been evacuated,
but the majority of those who applied
for “Special Immigrant Visas” have
been left behind.
The acting interior minister, Sira-
juddin Haqqani, is a “specially desig-
nated global terrorist” with a $10 mil-
lion U.S. bounty on his head. The Kabul
province’s governor, known as Qari
Baryal, is an associate of al-Qaeda who
used to carry out deadly attacks
against U.S. soldiers and civilians in
the capital. There is no way to sugar-
coat it: This is what defeat looks like.
It is perfectly understandable for
those who served in Afghanistan to
wonder on this Veterans Day: Was it
worth the lives of 2,352 U.S. service
members and the wounding of nearly
21,000 more — to say nothing of the
psychological traumas that afflict so
many of those who serve in any war?
There is no good answer to that ques-
tion. If it offers any solace to those who
served, however, this is not a new
dilemma.
Some version of these same agoniz-
ing questions was asked by veterans of
the Korean War, which ended in an
unsatisfying stalemate, and the Viet-
nam War, the only previous war thatthe United States lost.
Even veterans of the Great War,
despite their ostensible victory in 1918,
came to question their sacrifice after it
became clear that U.S. involvement
had neither made the world safe for
democracy nor ended all wars. Instead,
World War I sowed the seeds of an-
other, even larger conflict just 21 years
later. Adding insult to injury, destitute
veterans who marched on Washington
in 1932, demanding early payment of a
bonus they had been promised, were
rebuffed by Congress and violently
routed by Army troops.
We like to imagine that when
U.S. troops go into battle, the inevitable
result is total victory, but reality has
always been messier. Yes, federal forces
won the Civil War, but they lost the
peace. After the end of Reconstruction,
Southern Whites were able to subju-
gate African Americans with Jim Crow
laws. Yes, U.S. forces won World War II,
but they could not prevent all of East-
ern Europe from falling under the iron
grip of Joseph Stalin, a tyrant whose
evil arguably rivaled Adolf Hitler’s, and
the outbreak of a Cold War that threat-
ened nuclear annihilation.
No defeat was as traumatizing as the
one in Vietnam. I wrote a book about
Edward Lansdale, the legendary covert
operative who helped to create the
state of South Vietnam — and who was
anguished to see its collapse in 1975. He
expressed “a deep-seated feeling of
grief over my failure to accomplish
enough in my 1965-1968 service in
Vietnam to have helped the people
there prevent the tragedy which even-
tually overcame them.”
No doubt, many veterans who
fought in Afghanistan feel the same
way today.
There are many failures in Afghani-
stan that need to be judged before thecourt of history. These include Presi-
dent George W. Bush’s decision to shift
resources to an unnecessary war in
Iraq; President Barack Obama’s deci-
sion to mount an ill-fated, time-limited
troop surge; President Donald Trump’s
decision to conclude a terrible, one-sid-
ed deal with the Taliban; and, finally,
President Biden’s decision to pull all
U.S. forces out despite widespread pre-
dictions of the disaster that would
follow.
America’s generals also need to be
held to account for their Pollyanna-ish
assessments of the war effort and the
state of the Afghan security forces, the
many offensives they ordered that in-
curred great costs for only transitory
gains, and all of the corrosive effects of
too much U.S. money (which fueled
corruption) and too much U.S. fire-
power (which caused needless deaths
and created new enemies).
But none of those failures should
detract from the heroism and dedica-
tion of the ordinary Americans who
served on the front lines. On numerous
visits to Afghanistan from 2008 to 2017,
I often came away uncertain whether
we were winning but certain that the
U.S. troops I met were a credit to their
country. They were, in fact, the best of
us. The same was true of the diplomats,
aid workers, intelligence officers and
other unsung heroes who served along-
side the men and women in uniform.
There were no battles in Afghani-
stan as decisive as Gettysburg, Midway
or D-Day, but those who fought dis-
played just as much valor and commit-
ment. Even though the war was lost,
those who served should forever re-
main proud of their service — and
those of us who did not serve should
spend this Veterans Day, and every day,
honoring those who did. Maybe they
should get a parade after all.MAX BOOTVeterans of the Afghanistan war
deserve their own parade
RAHMAT GUL/ASSOCIATED PRESS
U.S. troops in Logar province, Afghanistan, in November 2017.group is a kind of beachhead. “There is a
certain amount of civility and decorum
and respect afforded to somebody who has
also worn the uniform,” she said.
Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.) agreed:
“You’ll never find us calling each other
unpatriotic or questioning... what the
other person is trying to achieve.” Crow,
who served in the Army in both Iraq and
Afghanistan, noted: “Because once you do
that, there is no going back and you can’t
have a discussion with somebody — you
just can’t.”
One of the reasons he ran for Congress,
Rep. Michael Waltz (R-Fla.) told me, was
as a response to its declining share of
former service members. “We’re at a rec-
ord low in terms of veterans in Congress,”
he said. “I think that is a big part of
explaining the record amount of dysfunc-
tion. I really do.” When 70 to 80 percent of
members had been in the military, he said,
“you just had that commonality of service.”
Crow is passionate about the health
care, education benefits and other basic
support owed to veterans and their fami-
lies. But he is most animated about
something larger and harder to execute: a
“radical change in our society in the way
that we distribute the burdens of conflict.”
It begins, Crow said, with facing up to
what it means to “ask a very small number
of people to bear that burden for every-
body else.” The nation requires “a more
honest running conversation about the
costs of asking these young men and
women to go off and do very, very chal-
lenging, sometimes very troubling things,
on our behalf.”
“People that are going into our militaryW
e rely on fewer and fewer of our
fellow Americans to bear the
burdens of war.
Nowhere is this narrowing
of the responsibilities of military service
more obvious than in the halls of Con-
gress. Half a century ago, roughly three-
quarters of the members of the House and
Senate had served in the military. Today,
veterans account for less than a fifth of
Congress.
This is, in part, a natural outcome of the
end of the draft. But that does not reduce
our national obligation to make Veterans
Day more than a one-off occasion for
gratitude.
We need to take stock of the burdens
that 20 years of war have imposed on a
remarkably limited share of American
families.
And we need to consider what it means
that a large proportion of our nation’s
leadership has never known what it is like
to face combat. Its members have never
had to risk their lives carrying out deci-
sions made far away. They do not have to
bear the physical and emotional scars of
battle long after the wars end.
Perhaps because they are a self-chosen
few, military veterans in Congress feel a
special responsibility — to other vets, to
the nation and to each other. Twenty-five
veterans from both parties formed the For
Country Caucus, with the goal of “a less
polarized Congress.”
In these divided times, the caucus’s
statement of purpose feels more aspira-
tional than realistic, but Rep. Chrissy
Houlahan (D-Pa.), an Air Force veteran
who grew up in a military family, said theare coming from a smaller and smaller
subset of the country,” he added. “You have
fewer counties contributing a larger per-
centage of our military. That’s not good for
our country. That’s not good for our
military, either.”
Rep. Anthony G. Brown (D-Md.), a
30-year veteran of the Army and Army
Reserve, insisted that his non-veteran
colleagues are “no less patriotic” than
those who have served. But having fewer
members with military experience makes
debates on war and national security
“more conceptual and abstract.”
Debates over the “numbers of lives lost,
trillions of dollars spent” often “don’t have
a whole lot of stories behind” them, Brown
said.
His love for the military, Brown added,
is what pushed him to engage on issues
related to “diversity, equity and inclusion
initiatives on promotions, fighting ex-
tremism in the military ranks,” and re-
forming how the military deals with sex-
ual assault.
Houlahan sees the shortage of veterans
in Congress as owing in part to “how we
elect people.” Most veterans, she said,
“don’t have a very deep bank of people that
they know who might have the resources
that they need to be able to communicate.”
This is part of the larger question
looming over us this Veterans Day. Yes, we
should thank vets for their service. Yes, we
should, as Houlahan, Crow and others
argue, create a far more robust system of
national civilian service. But we should
also recognize the costs to a democracy of
asking so much of such a small share of
our people.E.J. DIONNE JR.Asking military service of so few
takes a toll on our democracy