Month: September 2023

Pretty soon, everybody in the world is going to be suing oil companies:

The state of California has sued five of the largest oil and gas companies in the world, alleging that they engaged in a “decades-long campaign of deception” about climate change and the risks posed by fossil fuels that has forced the state to spend tens of billions of dollars to address environmental-related damages.

There's not much question that oil companies have been aware of climate change for a very long time. Here's a set of findings from Exxon Mobil going back nearly 50 years:

The Exxon scientists did good work! The red lines show actual levels through 2015 (temperature and CO₂ concentrations), and they match the Exxon projections very closely. Exxon has known for a long time what the burning of fossil fuels was doing to the planet—and other industry groups have known even longer.

But I'm still uneasy about these lawsuits. Oil companies are obviously no heroes, but the real defenders of climate change denialism are much easier to find: us. All of us. Even now, when the evidence of climate change is unquestionable, we keep burning oil and gas and coal in prodigious quantities. And we aren't doing it because of oil company propaganda. We're doing it because we don't want to give up our cars and air conditioners and plastic bottles:

It's true that solar power has finally started to inch onto this chart, though it's still so small you can barely see it. And keep in mind that solar didn't start to take off until 2015. We were flatly not willing to use it if it meant any increase whatsoever in electricity prices. We only started to use it when the price of solar fell to a point that absolutely no sacrifice was necessary.

So sure, sue the oil companies. Why not. But don't think of them as the big villains in the climate change story. We're the villains. All the oil companies did was make a lot of money giving us what we desperately demanded from them.

It's all over, and only two Republicans in the Texas Senate voted to convict Ken Paxton on any of the charges against him. The other 17 Republicans all voted to acquit on every charge.

The evidence against Paxton was open-and-shut, and the charges were clearly serious enough to be impeachable. But tribal loyalty and intense pressure from conservatives carried the day. What an embarrassment.

Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, is almost comically corrupt. He's so corrupt that even though the legislature is controlled by his fellow Republicans, he's being impeached.

The Texas Senate is voting on impeachment as I type this, and so far Paxton has survived on eight out of 16 counts. Only a couple of Republicans have joined Democrats to convict him.

But there are still eight counts to go! Maybe Texas Republicans will do the right thing in the end.

Maybe someone can finally get Donald Trump to shut up:

Special counsel Jack Smith is asking a judge to issue a gag order against former President Donald Trump, prohibiting him from attacking prosecutors, the judge or potential witnesses who may testify in his federal criminal trial stemming from his effort to subvert the 2020 election.

I'm basically in favor of anything that pisses off Trump, so I'm rooting for the gag order. Nobody deserves one more.

Here is the average hourly wage for auto workers over the past 30 years:

The view of the auto workers is that back when the industry was in trouble they made a lot of concessions on pay to keep the companies in business. Adjusted for inflation, auto workers today make about $12 per hour less than they did in 2005.¹

Now that auto companies are doing well, the unions want them to make concessions on pay that will get workers back on the rising trendline they were on before. This is where the initial demand for a 40% raise over four years came from. That still wouldn't get them back to the old trend, but it would at least get them back to about where they were in 2005.

¹I'm using PCE inflation here instead of CPI because this is a long-term series where it makes a difference. Using CPI, auto workers make $15 per hour less than they did in 2005.

Last week we got a closeup of Hilbert, so this week it's Charlie's turn. He was walking back and forth on the fence when I took this.

The UAW—my former union!—isn't happy with Joe "Mr. Union" Biden:

Shawn Fain, the head of the United Auto Workers, has privately expressed his frustration with Joe Biden, wanting the president and other Democratic lawmakers to come out more aggressively in support of his union, which launched a strike Friday against the so-called Big Three automakers.

Fain’s frustration was conveyed by five people familiar with his thinking, who were granted anonymity to describe his position. One of those five described him as “not happy” with the situation. And Fain’s not the only person in Michigan who isn’t thrilled with the way Biden and his team have handled the labor dispute.

Fain is famously aggressive, so it's no surprise to hear this even though Biden has offered stronger support for the union than any other president in memory. But I have a question: Is there any evidence from recent history that presidential support has any impact on union negotiations? I hear this same kind of thing at all levels—the mayor should get involved, the governor should get involved, the president should get involved—but none of those people have any actual authority to do anything, and thus no real leverage. President Biden could offer mediation assistance in the auto strike, but only if both sides want it. As far as I know, neither side wants it.

In any case, my understanding is that wages aren't the only sticking point here. There's also the UAW's desire to make sure that new plants making electric vehicles are unionized. But for some reason this never gets mentioned.

Nick Kristof wrote yesterday about the huge rise in single-parent households over the past 60 years, especially among Black families. This has been a subject of public discussion ever since the famous Moynihan Report was issued in 1965, which detailed the "pathology" of Black family life in the wake of hundreds of years of brutal treatment. Here's the basic data:

Moynihan was concerned about the rise of single-parent households at a time when "illegitimate" births (the usual name back then) had risen only from 18% to 25% among Black families. The real explosion was in the years after that. Between 1965 and 1990 the number rose to 70%.

But why? Kristof offers up the following:

I think the big driver for the rise in single-parent households is bad decisions by policymakers that led to mass incarceration and a collapse of earnings for working-class men.

There's no question that incarceration skyrocketed during the 1965-90 period, though it didn't get underway until the mid-70s. But was there a collapse in earnings for working-class men? Here's the data:

None of these is a perfect indicator, but taken together they suggest that working-class men, and Black men in particular, never suffered a collapse in employment or a collapse in earnings. Black men had higher unemployment and lower wages compared to white men, but the gap was steady over time.

Whatever happened, the timing doesn't fit mass incarceration as an answer, and there was never a big change in employment or earnings. Something else has been at work.

As expected, the DOJ special counsel indicted Hunter Biden today on charges of lying about his drug use when he purchased a handgun in 2018:

I was a fed'l l prosecutor for 20+ yrs. & did quite a few ATF cases, esp early on. I was also a supervisor for about 5 yrs, so I knew of all cases in our office. Not only have I never seen this statute charged, I never even HEARD of it until recently relative to Hunter Biden. ???? https://t.co/3tmyRUKgD5

— Elizabeth de la Vega (@Delavegalaw) September 14, 2023

Republicans have been complaining forever that the Hunter Biden investigation is politically biased. They're right. Hunter is being treated unusually harshly because the special counsel is afraid of Republican backlash. In a world with no fear of Republican retribution Hunter would, at most, be ordered into the diversion program that he was offered before the plea deal fell apart.

The redoubtable Wall Street Journal opinion page says that Bidenomics is a crock. The Census Bureau just released its estimate of annual income for 2022, and after adjusting for inflation it's fallen from the previous year:

The Census Exposes Bidenomics
Its annual report shows how inflation has gutted real household incomes.

....Middle-class Americans who think they’re losing ground are right. The reason is that inflation has outpaced the earnings growth from work.

As usual, they're distorting the story. The main reason real wages have fallen is that they spiked upward in 2020 thanks mostly to statistical artifacts. As those artifacts faded away, the official numbers reverted to their old values.

That said, here are all the different measures of income that I could round up. All of them are measured from the final quarter of 2019 to the most recent quarter of 2023 using the usual CPI index. The exceptions are the Census Bureau numbers, which are annual and use the C-CPI chained index.

The Journal, naturally, is focusing on the worst number because it fits the point they wish to make. The reality is that, adjusted for inflation, almost every measure shows that average incomes are about flat.

That's nothing to write home about, but it's a far cry from the middle class being gutted during the Biden era.

POSTSCRIPT: It's worth noting that the CPI inflation index diverged considerably from the PCE index during the pandemic. Here's the same chart as above, but using the PCE inflation numbers consistently for everything:

The PCE index treats housing differently than CPI and was likely more accurate during the housing boom of 2021-22. However, I normally use CPI and I don't like to cherry pick based on what's convenient. That's why the main chart uses CPI.