Mihir Sharma: The world’s climate leaders need better data

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It isn’t hard to understand that global warming is already changing how we live. In India’s capital, New Delhi, this summer has been so hot — above 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) even at night — that people are gasping, the tap water is scalding, and the walls of their homes emit heat like radiators.

The Saudi Arabian authorities said that 1,300 pilgrims have already died on this year’s Hajj. Players at the European soccer championships are collapsing due to exhaustion.

And yet economists — clearly able to keep cool heads when everybody else is losing theirs — are in the middle of a fresh debate about the real costs of climate change. A new working paper from two academics at Harvard and Northwestern, and published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, argues that the macroeconomic damage from climate change might be as much as six times higher than previously estimated.

Their model predicts that a single degree increase “in global mean temperatures leads to a gradual decline in world GDP that peaks at 12% after six years and does not fully mean-revert even 10 years after the shock.” They point out that this makes unilateral climate action worth it for countries like the U.S.; that argument must surely also hold countries that are poorer but far more exposed to climate change, such as India. Is it possible to add a couple more countries here?

The paper has set off a storm of furious criticism, and not just from economists. The climate scientist John Kennedy argues that its methodology may be flawed. He isn’t sure, for example, that we can easily extrapolate from the historical record of 0.3-degree shocks to global temperature to the larger, one-degree changes associated with climate change.

It’s clear that global warming is already having a malign effect on human health and livelihoods. We just need more clarity on how much.

Discussion of the real costs of climate change, to human welfare and to national economies, have been going on for decades. But we no longer need such estimates to make the case that it is real, and a problem. Instead, we need them as inputs into policymaking — similar to employment or price data.

Policymakers are still short of objective, sector-specific and precise estimates of current and possible future costs. That shortage is a growing problem — because climate policy is beginning to bite. Billions of taxpayer dollars are being directed to sectors that promise to curb emissions; consumers are paying more for carbon-intensive goods and services; and pressure to follow a net zero strategy has complicated decisions for companies and institutional investors.

These should all count as successes in the fight against climate change. When money moves, however, people begin to ask pointed questions. It isn’t just various Republican politicians attacking “woke capital” to get in the headlines. Serious macroeconomic decision-makers, accustomed to evidence-based policy, are beginning to ask exactly what global warming’s costs and benefits are for their particular countries.

India’s chief economic adviser, for example, asked earlier this year if we were irrationally scared of the health effects of global warming. It is true that we in India are more exposed to heat stress than most. But, he pointed out, large-scale studies suggest that far more people die in India as a consequence of “moderate cold” than from extreme heat.

Delhi’s temperature might stay above 40 degrees for weeks on end, with all the negative effects on public health and economic activity that entails; but would other Indians actually live longer if average temperatures rose? Do we have real evidence for the aggregate effect of higher temperatures on mortality in India and the rest of the developing world?

These are real questions that deserve real answers. But the data we currently have is insufficient. And that lack of data might lead to erroneous conclusions. Some scholars in India have noted that those most exposed to heat stress are manual laborers, construction workers and farmers — marginalized groups whose illnesses and deaths the country’s public health system might not properly record.

It’s vital that we put more resources into identifying and analyzing the effects of warmer temperatures. Some efforts have already begun: Last year, the World Health Organization released a framework to quantify the economic value of the health outcomes of climate-related investments.

Countries like India must also begin to quantify the many indirect effects of climate change on their macroeconomic fundamentals: from greater variability in farm output to less productive physical investments. We can’t make evidence-based policy for the greatest global problem of our time without more high-quality data.

Mihir Sharma is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A senior fellow at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi, he is author of “Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy.”

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Trudy Rubin: Zelenskyy lays out how Ukraine can win, if the West loses its fear of Putin

Zelenskyy challenges Trump to reveal plans for quick end to war

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Annmarie Hordern and Daryna Krasnolutska | Bloomberg News (TNS)

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Donald Trump should come forward with his plan to quickly end the war with Russia, warning that any proposal must avoid violating the nation’s sovereignty.

“If Trump knows how to finish this war, he should tell us today,” Zelenskyy said in a Bloomberg Television interview in Kyiv on Wednesday. “If there are risks to Ukrainian independence, if we lose statehood – we want to be ready for this, we want to know.”

The former U.S. president, who leads in polls over President Joe Biden ahead of the November election, has boasted that he’ll end the war by the time he’s inaugurated in January. In the televised debate last week, Trump decried the billions of dollars spent on Ukraine’s defense, saying that Kyiv is “not winning the war.”

In a nearly hour-long interview, the Ukrainian leader lamented the delays in weapons deliveries from Western allies and said he was “potentially ready” to meet with Trump to hear his team’s proposals.

“They can’t plan my life and life of our people and our children,” he said. “We want to understand whether in November we will have the powerful support of the U.S., or will be all alone.”

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Zelenskyy pushed back on the notion that Ukrainian and Russian forces are in a deadlock on the battlefield, saying that the military is better positioned in terms of manpower than it was months ago and a new offensive is a matter of arming its brigades.

And while he lauded the $61 billion assistance package approved by the U.S. Congress this year — after a six-month long delay — he said the military equipment was taking too long to make it to the front.

“This is the biggest tragedy of this war, that between the decision and real fact, we have real long, long, long wait,” Zelenskyy said.

The Ukrainian leader also said China could play a “tremendous role” in resolving the conflict, since Moscow is so dependent on its market for exports. He suggested that the U.S. and China, should they put aside differences, could act together to end the war.

(With assistance from Volodymyr Verbianyi and Olesia Safronova.)

©2024 Bloomberg L.P. Visit bloomberg.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

In blockbuster term, Supreme Court boosts its own sway

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Michael Macagnone | CQ-Roll Call (TNS)

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court closed out a term Monday full of blockbuster decisions on gun control, abortion and criminal charges against former presidents, but legal experts say the most impactful rulings may be those where the conservative majority flexed its influence over federal government actions and policies.

The justices extended their own power over other branches of government and the lower courts, even as they declined to go as far as some Republican-backed litigants and conservative lower courts, those experts say.

Aziz Huq a law professor at the University of Chicago, said the Supreme Court decided most issues in a way that gives them more sway over policies.

“What is distinctive here is that the consequence, the aftereffect, of these decisions is to dramatically increase the discretionary authority of courts, and in particular, the Supreme Court, at the cost of other constitutional actors’ authority,” Huq said.

In four decisions, the justices gave judges more power to review administrative agency decisions, forced certain Securities and Exchange Commission actions to be filed in federal court, allowed challenges to agency rules years after they are finalized and stepped in to pause a nationwide plan to reduce cross-state air pollution.

Clare Pastore, a law professor at the USC Gould School of Law, said the changes from those decisions will reverberate for years to come, encouraging constant lawsuits over both new and existing federal rules, with litigants shopping around for the friendliest judges.

“I think anyone who’s paying attention, can see that the court is engaged in a project of — some would say rolling back, some would say dismantling — the administrative state as much as possible, and the rulings that the court has just issued take us a kind of a stunning distance in that direction,” Pastore said.

Those cases emerged as part of a term filled with major decisions on the structure of federal agencies, abortion, Congress’ taxation power, gun regulation and former President Donald Trump.

In the cases where the court did not rule in favor of conservatives, they did so in a way that avoided a major decision on abortion or other contentious issues in an election year, or avoided a “calamity” such as a ruling that avoided sweeping changes to congressional power to tax, Huq said.

That includes decisions where the justices upheld regulations about the abortion drug mifepristone and chose not to rule on whether Idaho could ban abortions in emergency health care situations.

“The court saved the Republican Party from having, you know, particularly contentious abortion decisions being handed down before an election, but left it open for the court to come back to them a year or so later if a Democratic president wins. So it’s a bit of heads, I win, tails, you lose in those cases,” Huq said.

Administrative law

The court’s conservative majority, ruling 6-3 in three of the four cases, couched its decisions as a necessary step to reassert the judiciary’s responsibility to check the executive branch on Congress’ behalf.

In a decision overturning a 40-year-old precedent for courts to defer to agency interpretations of ambiguous laws, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote that federal law bars the justices from “disregarding” their responsibility to decide what the laws mean.

“Courts must exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority,” Roberts wrote.

The decision means an uncertain and more difficult path for Congress to shape how the federal government carries out laws on major issues such as the environment, health, immigration and more, lawmakers and legal experts said.

The court’s Democrat-appointed justices have accused the conservative majority of a power grab. Justice Elena Kagan, dissenting in the administrative deference case, accused the majority of “judicial hubris.”

“In one fell swoop, the majority today gives itself exclusive power over every open issue—no matter how expertise-driven or policy-laden—involving the meaning of regulatory law,” Kagan said.

Overall, the decisions will likely mean more court fights over the past and future of administrative rules, according to University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School professor Kermit Roosevelt.

“These decisions work to take power away from the federal administrative agencies and shift power to judges,” Roosevelt said.

Kevin King, a partner at Covington & Burling, said those cases will combine to let judges decide more issues surrounding administrative law and could move many of those court cases out of Washington, D.C.

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Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in her dissent in a decision that allowed challenges to agency rules years after they are finalized, wrote the that court’s decisions would combine to unleash a “tsunami” of lawsuits objecting to long-standing federal rules.

“Doctrines that were once settled are now unsettled and claims that lacked merit a year ago are suddenly up for grabs,” Jackson said.

Still, the justices declined to go as far as the conservative-leaning U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit had in several major issues.

The justices reversed decisions from that court that would have invalidated a federal law banning certain domestic abusers from possessing guns, restricted access to medication abortion, invalidated a part of the 2017 tax law and rendered unconstitutional the funding structure for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Those were some of the court’s most contentious cases, and Roosevelt said they showed the court’s intended focus.

“There are some things the Supreme Court is not willing to do, at least not yet, and maybe not ever,” Roosevelt said. “It is a question of how far they are willing to push it.”

Trump and election

The Supreme Court’s most prominent case this term dealt a serious blow to the criminal case brought by special counsel John L. “Jack” Smith alleging Trump attempted to overturn his loss in the 2020 election.

Monday’s decision almost ensured that Trump will not face trial in that case before the 2024 election, as it sent the issue back to the trial court to decide whether the indictment covers Trump’s “official” acts as president.

Even in the Trump case, where the justices said presidents have a broad immunity to federal charges, Jackson pointed out in her dissent that the justices had given themselves the role of “gatekeeper” to decide whether a president could face trial over official acts outside the “core” of his presidential duties.

Huq said the decision may have done long-term damage to the country and it is difficult to see how it would be rolled back. He pointed out that even in its decision, the justices did not engage with the consequences of presidential immunity, such as the implied ability to order political assassinations.

“It’s really striking how the majority, in that case, you know, an openly or a self-evidently partisan majority, responds to those concerns with essentially nothing,” Huq said.

For next term, the justices have already started taking controversial cases, including fights over access to gender-affirming care for minors, the Food and Drug Administration’s ability to regulate e-cigarettes, and access to pornography websites in Texas.

The justices could take up more contentious issues, such as gun regulation, the viability of Georgia’s state case against Trump and more in the coming months.

©2024 CQ-Roll Call, Inc., All Rights Reserved. Visit cqrollcall.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Other voices: A middle ground on presidential immunity

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The U.S. Supreme Court ended its term Monday with a highly anticipated decision that provides American presidents with a modicum of immunity from criminal charges. The case was ostensibly about Donald Trump, but in fact the ruling sets guidelines intended to ensure the nation — regardless of which man, woman or party holds the Oval Office — doesn’t become mired in a series of retaliatory and vindictive prosecutions.

Progressives, fixated on Trump, argue that the 6-3 decision “creates a law-free zone around the president,” as Justice Sonia Sotomayor described it in her dissent. But it does nothing of the sort.

“The president enjoys no immunity for his unofficial acts,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority,” and not everything the president does is official. The president is not above the law. But Congress may not criminalize the president’s conduct in carrying out the responsibilities of the executive branch under the Constitution.”

Note that the court explicitly rejected Trump’s claim of absolute immunity. “Trump asserts a far broader immunity,” the majority opinion holds, “than the limited one we have recognized.” But the idea, put forth by special prosecutor Jack Smith and the government that a president has no special protection is equally pernicious. Would it be good for the country to allow a former president to face politically motivated prosecutions involving a policy dispute?

In the current political climate, such concerns are not theoretical.

“Virtually every president is criticized for insufficiently enforcing some aspect of federal law (such as drug, gun, immigration or environmental laws),” Roberts wrote. “An enterprising prosecutor in a new administration may assert that a previous president violated that broad statute. Without immunity, such types of prosecutions of ex-presidents could quickly become routine.”

The decision will require federal courts to hold evidentiary hearings to determine which actions charged by Smith amount to “official” and “unofficial” acts. But it in no way stops the government from prosecuting Trump for actions he took that were unrelated to his duties as president. Trump’s attorney conceded during oral arguments that some of the conduct that caught Smith’s attention was related to unofficial actions.

Despite the apocalyptic protestations of the dissenting liberal justices, the majority has carved out a middle ground that rejects the extreme arguments made by both the former president and the special prosecutor who pursues him. Trump — or any other president — is not above the law. But neither should they be victims of politically motivated criminal prosecutions.

— The Las Vegas Review Journal

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