Mike Wolf

More on the President and his Secretary of State and the proposed five power agreement before the Senate.

 

The President appeared before the Senate and asked for ratification of the agreement. His message was couched in soothing terms as he urged the senators not to be swayed by narrow suspicions and fears. He assured them that the various agreements were open covenants which concealed no “alliance, entanglement or involvement” and had been constructed “in accordance with our constitutional methods.”  After giving such assurances he reminded them that as a former member of the senate he was well aware of the senatorial desire to exercise the Senate’s prerogatives. But he pointedly added: “since my senate experience I have come to know the viewpoint and inescapable responsibility of the Executive. To the Executive comes the closer view of world relationship and a more impressive realization of the menaces, the anxieties and the apprehensions to be met.”  Pass these agreements, he said, not merely because it is right to do so, but because the President feels that they are absolutely essential to the welfare of the United States.  He added: I am hopeful that we will establish the conviction in the minds of the world that it is possible for the American government to enter into international agreements and be able to secure the approval of the Senate. 

 

The Washington Post reflected on an almost universal sentiment when it cautioned the Senate that “rejection of these agreements would plunge the international situation into chaos.”

 

The foreign relations committee attaching a reservation to the agreement an amendment declared: “The United States understands that under this agreement there is no commitment to armed force, no alliance, no obligation to join in any defense.”

 

The opposing party relished the discomfort [of the administration] and sought to embarrass the administration by asking for the full record of all negations.

 

February 10, 1922:  Warren Harding and his Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes in their successful appeal for the Senate approval of the Five Power Navy Treaty limiting the future naval armaments of Japan by treaty between Japan, U.S., Great Britain, France and Italy.

From The Harding Era: Warren G. Harding and His Administration by Robert Murray. 1969.

Here’s an article I mentioned (From The Guardian)

Startups have figured out how to remove carbon from the air. Will anyone pay them to do it?

Don’t know anything about the companies mentioned.

I have been following CoolPlanet though. Here’s what they say they do:

“The process allows us to create green gasoline from non-food sources that capture carbon from the air, and a biocarbon product that sequesters the carbon left over – unlocking the capability for a carbon negative lifecycle”

Google is an investor, as are BP, Conoco, GE and others.

I’ve been following them since 2012 when I saw the  “Solve for X” talk sponsored by Google, here.  They seem real.

And here’s a TED talk by David Keith in 2007(!) about a different way to cool the planet. Keith is now at Harvard, and (I just discovered) he’s behind one of the companies mentioned in the Guardian article.

My favorite line from a transcript of his talk: “It’s conceivable that, say, using the sulfates method or this method I’ve come up with, you could create an ice age at a cost of .001 percent of GDP. It’s very cheap. We have a lot of leverage. It’s not a good idea, but it’s just important. (Laughter)I’ll tell you how big the lever is: the lever is that big. And that calculation isn’t much in dispute. You might argue about the sanity of it, but the leverage is real. “

A few odd bits that I found during our discussion.

Who works harder? The industrious, prosperous Germans, or the lazy, indebted Greeks.  According to this article in the Economist, the Greeks (at least those with jobs) worked nearly 50% more hours than their German counterparts in 2012. Similar results here, in the Washington Post. Source data here

And this article excerpts a longer interview with Thomas Pikkety in which he points out the hypocrisy of Germany’s insistence that Greece pay its debts.

When I hear the Germans say that they maintain a very moral stance about debt and strongly believe that debts must be repaid, then I think: what a huge joke! Germany is the country that has never repaid its debts.

As we know, Germany solved its post-WWI debt problem by starting World War II. Post-war Germany was burdened with debts of about 200% of GDP. Under the London Debt Agreement of 1953

…the repayable amount was reduced by 50% to about 15 billion marks and stretched out over 30 years, and compared to the fast-growing German economy were of minor impact.^[2]

An important term of the agreement was that repayments were only due while West Germany ran a trade surplus, and that repayments were limited to 3% of export earnings. This gave Germany’s creditors a powerful incentive to import German goods, assisting reconstruction

Ironically, Greece was among the nations that entered into the agreement forgiving German debts.