The Washington Post reports today on the Terraton Initiative from Indigo Ag, a supplier of seed treatments and agricultural logistics. The idea is simple and appealing: we need to do more than simply reduce carbon emissions if we want to avoid the worst effects of global warming. We need to remove carbon from the atmosphere. Indigo wants to do this not via some kind of dangerous geoengineering project, but by paying farmers to adopt practices that allow their soil to capture more carbon. Their goal is eventually to remove a teratonne (one trillion tonnes) of CO₂ from the atmosphere.

Do Indigo’s numbers add up? First off, here’s the cumulative amount of CO₂ that we’ve dumped into the atmosphere since the start of the Industrial Age:

So far we’ve put about 1.6 trillion tonnes of CO₂ into the atmosphere. Indigo says they’re starting off with 3,000 farmers who have a total of 1 million acres of land, and they expect the farmers to increase their carbon capture by 2-3 tonnes per acre. If we take the middle point of that, their project will capture an additional 2.5 million tonnes of carbon per year.

That’s a drop in the bucket, but Indigo says this is just their first-year projection. If it pans out, it will presumably be expanded. What would that look like?

Indigo says the world currently has about 3.6 billion acres of land under cultivation. Let’s be optimistic and suppose that we could adapt a third of that to better carbon capture techniques. At 2.5 tonnes of additional carbon capture per acre, that’s a total of 3 billion tonnes of CO₂. Currently, the world emits about 35 billion tonnes of CO₂ each year. Best case, then, Indigo could capture a little less than 10 percent of the world’s emissions each year. It’s a very far cry from a trillion tonnes.

But that doesn’t mean this isn’t worth doing. Pretty much everything is worth doing because, in the end, global warming will most likely be solved by putting together a whole bunch of things that each do 10 percent of the job. So best of luck to Indigo. I hope this isn’t just a marketing stunt.

UPDATE: This is not a pilot project, as I originally reported. The starting point of 3,000 farmers is just Indigo’s goal for the first year.

Kraft is providing parents with a new ploy to trick their kids into eating salads:

The food company is disguising its ranch dressing and relabeling it as salad “frosting,” packaging it in a slim white tube with flecks of vibrant color that resembles a confetti cake. The deception that parents can wield to get their kids to eat healthful foods is at the heart of the marketing initiative.

Healthful foods? Ranch dressing gets practically all of its calories from fat: aside from water, it’s made out of oil, eggs, sugar, salt, and buttermilk. It may be delicious, but healthy it’s not.

I’ve always been curious about something. Maybe one of you knows the answer. Which is healthier: (a) a salad topped with ranch dressing, or (b) nothing, along with some nutritional supplements? This whole thing reminds me of broccoli covered in cheese for folks who can’t get their hubby to eat vegetables. But it’s not as if the broccoli magically sucks all the bad stuff out of cheese. Once you combine the two, just how healthy is it, really?

If the economy is doing so well, why do so many Americans still think it’s doing badly? Ramesh Ponnuru suggests we look at polling data, which tells us that people have viewed the economy positively for only a few short periods over the past few decades:

It is perhaps not surprising that they are, even in a good economy, unsatisfied with an economic system that is delivering satisfactory results so rarely.

Quite so. And there’s an easy way to see this. Here is growth in wages among blue-collar workers:¹

The bare minimum wage growth that we could call “strong” is a growth rate of 1 percent. As you can see, we’ve hit that mark only three times in the past 30 years. We’ve hit 2 percent only once, and that was more than 20 years ago.

So, yes, the American economy produces satisfactory results for ordinary workers very rarely. The only thing missing from Ponnuru’s analysis is an acknowledgment that this is no accident.

¹That is, “production and nonsupervisory” workers.

This is a busy little bee doing his job and pollinating a Los Angeles Gilia, also know as Chaparral Gilia and Angel’s Gilia. It was growing along Santiago Canyon Road near Jamboree. According to my extensive research plus Google Translate, the Gilia family is named for Filippo Luigi Gilli, a Vatican astronomer and botanist who collected indigenous plants of North America and created a garden known as Orto Vaticano Indico at the foot of the Janiculum in Rome. He even wrote a book about it. Apparently there were a whole book’s worth of problems trying to get American plants to grow in Rome.

UPDATE: That’s no bee, it’s a hoverfly! Thanks, @Harry04945324.

PA Wire via ZUMA

One of the most common arguments against heavy government regulation is that it favors big incumbent companies that have armies of lawyers and compliance officers. Smaller companies can’t afford that, and therefore find it hard to break into regulated markets.

Renaissance man Cory Doctorow warns that we’re about to make this mistake in the online world. If we heavily regulate Facebook and Google and YouTube, they’ll pay a short-term price but reap a huge long-term win in return. If they have to, YouTube and the others will be able to muster the resources to comply with difficult privacy and censorship rules. Smaller companies won’t, which means that the big guys are more likely to stay top dog in their parts of the social media world:

As a creator who derives the bulk of his living from giant media companies, it has been hard for me to watch those companies—and other creators who should really know better—act as cheerleaders for a situation in which the Big Tech firms are being handed a prize beyond measure: control over what is, in effect, a planetary, species-wide electronic nervous system.

The past 12 months have seen a blizzard of new internet regulations that, ironically, have done more to enshrine Big Tech’s dominance than the decades of lax antitrust enforcement that preceded them….It starts with the European Union’s privacy rules, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which came into force a year ago. This created stringent requirements for data-handling, breach notification and user consent. It also imposes a duty on firms to track how the data they collect are used, including by third parties with whom they are shared….etc.

I find this a persuasive argument. For what it’s worth, I also usually find myself more sympathetic than most of my fellow liberals to free speech claims on these platforms. Many of the regulations that are being bruited about would make big social media companies the gatekeepers for a lot of speech, and I’m not sure I really trust them to do that job. I’m not sure I trust anyone to do that job. In any case, although I find Doctorow’s argument a good one, I’m not so sure about his solution:

One exciting possibility is to create an absolute legal defence for companies that make “interoperable” products that plug into the dominant companies’ offerings, from third-party printer ink to unauthorised Facebook readers that slurp up all the messages waiting for you there and filter them to your specifications, not Mark Zuckerberg’s. This interoperability defence would have to shield digital toolsmiths from all manner of claims: tortious interference, bypassing copyright locks, patent infringement and, of course, violating terms of service.

Interoperability is a competitive lever that is crying to be used, hard. After all, the problem with YouTube isn’t that it makes a lot of interesting videos available—it is that it uses search and suggestion filters that lead viewers into hateful, extreme bubbles. The problem with Facebook isn’t that they have made a place where all your friends can be found—it is that it tries to “maximise engagement” by poisoning your interactions with inflammatory or hoax material.

In a monopolised market, sellers get to bargain by fiat. But interoperability—from ad-blocking to switching app stores—is a means by which customers can assay real counteroffers.

This strikes me as a solution with a lot of problems. Do all these third-parties get to piggyback for free? Could someone simply set up a mirror version of, say, YouTube, that would cost almost nothing to operate? What’s more, for interoperability to work, third-parties would need access to all the original data. This presents lots of privacy concerns since it would be hard to monitor everyone who sets up a site or creates a plug-in. Also, would this interoperability requirement be available only to Americans, or to anyone?

Maybe there are answers to all these questions, but I suspect not. Whatever the answer is, it probably lies elsewhere.

Panoramic via ZUMA

The Wall Street Journal reports that an FTC investigation has produced internal Facebook emails suggesting that—zut alors!—Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t really care about your privacy:

Within the company, the unearthing of the emails in the process of responding to a continuing federal privacy investigation has raised concerns that they would be harmful to Facebook—at least from a public-relations standpoint—if they were to become public, one of the people said. The potential impact of the internal emails has been a factor in the tech giant’s desire to reach a speedy settlement of the investigation by the Federal Trade Commission, one of the people said.

It’s not clear when these email exchanges took place, but the Journal does describe one that took place seven years ago:

In one email exchange from April 2012 that has caught regulators’ attention, according to a person familiar with the matter, Mr. Zuckerberg asked employees about an app that claimed to have built a database stocked with information about tens of millions of Facebook users. The developer had the ability to display that user information to others on its own site, regardless of those users’ privacy settings on Facebook, the person said.

Mr. Zuckerberg wanted to know if such extensive data collection was possible and if Facebook should do anything to stop developers from displaying that data, the person said. Another employee responded to Mr. Zuckerberg’s question, saying it was possible and many developers do the same thing but adding it was a complicated issue, the person said. The discussion continued without Mr. Zuckerberg or anyone else suggesting by email that the company investigate how many other apps were stockpiling user data.

….That email exchange occurred after the FTC’s consent decree had been announced but before it went into effect. The decree says Facebook must honor a user’s privacy settings and not share data without a user’s explicit permission. If it had been in effect at the time, the stockpiling of such user data would potentially have violated it. Mr. Zuckerberg’s message seemed to indicate he was aware of that, according to the person who was familiar with the exchange.

Three years later, we learned that Cambridge Analytica had been harvesting Facebook data. After that became public, Facebook asked Cambridge to remove the data, but never bothered to check if they had done so. They hadn’t. Three years after that, the whole thing blew up when a whistleblower came forward to tell the whole story. The FTC’s emails seem to suggest that Zuckerberg and others were well aware of what was going on and just didn’t bother doing anything about it.

Over at NRO, Douglas Murray calls our attention to a recent bombing in Malmö, Sweden, which was presumably the work of immigrant criminal gangs. Murray says that although Donald Trump was technically wrong when he suddenly blathered about “what’s happening last night in Sweden” back in 2017—as it turned out, nothing had happened—the press has been culpable in pretending that nothing is happening in Sweden:

In their desire to lampoon Trump they ended up colluding in a falsehood. Just how false can once again be seen from the most recent work from Paulina Neuding, one of the most indispensable journalists not just in Europe but anywhere else….As Neuding reports, in just 24 hours, there were three explosions in the city of Malmo, in southern Sweden. This included a bomb which ripped through two apartment buildings on Friday evening. The scale of this assault (which is mostly the result of violence between foreign-born gangs) is such that Neuding says that it is time for Swedes to admit that they have a national emergency on their hands.

That got me curious, so I decided to check out the official Swedish crime statistics. The Swedes, it turns out, keep track of crime at a remarkably granular level. For example, not only is “crimes against creditors” a category by itself, but it’s then broken up into five separate subcategories: dishonesty to creditors, hindering the seizure of property, careless disregard of creditors, favoritism to creditors, and bookkeeping crimes. What this means is that not only do they track “crimes against the public,” but one of the subcategories is specifically destruction causing public endangerment by means of explosion. Impressive! Anyway, here it is for 2018:

Sadly, I couldn’t find the 2017 statistics for comparison, but the key thing to notice is the scale of the vertical axis. That’s not in thousands or hundreds. That’s the total number. Here is Neuding’s chart of hand grenade explosions:

Neuding’s number for 2018 suggests about one or two detonated hand grenades per month. If the entire chart is right, there’s clearly been a long-term increase in hand-grenade explosions, but it peaked in 2016 and has been declining ever since. In particular, Malmö, which is supposed to be ground zero for this stuff, had zero explosions in 2018.

The explosions are mostly the work of immigrant gangs fighting turf wars over their smuggling operations, but that doesn’t seem to have increased much either. Here are the stats for smuggling by organized crime groups:

Add to this the fact that overall crime levels have been flat for the past decade, and it doesn’t especially look like immigrant gang crime is skyrocketing. It’s a problem, obviously, and there’s no reason Sweden should put up with criminal explosions from immigrant gangs or anyone else, but it doesn’t appear to be a sudden crisis. Maybe there’s more to it, but whatever it is, it’s not obvious from the Swedish crime statistics.

UPDATE: Some of the text originally misstated the numbers in the charts. It’s been corrected.

Brian Cahn/ZUMA

Donald Trump is obviously terrified that anyone might find out why he really wants a citizenship question on the 2020 census:

President Trump on Wednesday asserted executive privilege to shield documents about the administration’s decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census….Attorney General William P. Barr had a day earlier warned the House Oversight Committee that if it moved toward holding him in contempt, he would ask Trump to assert privilege to protect the materials….In the Justice Department’s view, the privilege assertion undercuts the contempt finding, because it prevents the attorney general from turning over materials lawmakers had subpoenaed.

This again? Surely this would fail in court, wouldn’t it? Documents are either protected by executive privilege or they aren’t. It’s not a weapon to be used simply to avoid a contempt charge. What am I missing here?

Every year, Bond Capital’s Mary Meeker produces an immense slide deck of internet trends. You can see the whole thing here. I’ve chosen two slides to highlight. First, there’s this one. Before you look, see if you can figure out what I find interesting about it.

Granted, this is only two years of data, but what I found interesting was how static it is. YouTube and Instagram have grown, but the other platforms are all basically flat. There’s nothing new making much of an impact in the social media space, and Facebook, for all the flak it gets, continues to putter along in first place.

Then there’s this, just because:

The worst aspect of social media is that . . . it wrecks your sleep. It’s pretty astonishing that so many people recognize this, but go on being addicted to social media anyway. It’s no wonder so many people complain about sleep these days.

The other thing I find interesting is that, apparently, all of the good and bad averages out almost perfectly to zero. This doesn’t necessarily mean that social media actually has a null effect on your health, since some of these things might count more than others. Still, it’s intriguing to think that the net impact of this enormous industry might be precisely nothing.

A few years ago, a team of researchers published a paper documenting a decline in college completion rates between 1970 and 1990. A few days ago, a different team of researchers published a paper documenting a subsequent increase from 1990 to 2010. Neither team had a very persuasive explanation for this phenomenon, which prompted a reader to wonder if the culprit could be lead poisoning. I figured I was game to take a look, and it turns out the answer might be yes:

As usual, the lead levels are lagged 20 years. For example, kids who were born in 1950 went to college in 1970, so we want to compare lead levels in 1950 with college dropout rates in 1970.

This chart doesn’t prove anything, but it’s a surprisingly close fit. And lead is a perfectly plausible candidate since it’s known to reduce both academic performance and the ability to focus for extended periods. So in addition to all the other stuff lead is responsible for, it might also be responsible for an increase in college dropout rates among Gen Xers.