Goodman Speaks

I couldn’t watch the last Democratic debate. I was busy talking politics with two friends, which was more enlightening than what the Dems offered. The debate format is just not for serious debate. It’s mostly for probing your opposing candidates’ weaknesses, establishing your own bona fides, and coming up with a quotable crumb for the press.

The Democrats seem pulled between two opposing forces—what the polls show to be the dominant issues for voters and what are in fact the most pressing issues. That is to say, they haven’t yet found the right political formula to move the voters left. Climate change, the world’s most urgent and least fixable problem, got less than 10 minutes’ consideration in the debate. And so the pattern of denial continues.

. . . Climate experts also worry that a lack of specific policy with price tags and the limitations of a debate format relegate the topic to low priority, even as Wall Street and Corporate America step up their own attention on the issue.

Wednesday’s question lineup was also reflective of current headlines. The Trump impeachment hearings, taxes and foreign policy dominated the debate.

And the outrageous amount of time devoted to health care in earlier debates is just pandering to what the Dems perceive to be voters’ concerns. As some of you know, I worked on the Clinton heath care reform in ’93-’94 and understand how deep the problem is. It’s the most immediate and pressing issue for most voters.

But other big challenges loom, not just with climate but with the parlous state of American democracy, as David Leonhardt mentioned. Consider: voting rights, the collapse of the GOP, the rank inequality in our country, energy, the middle class erosion. Yet, in a sense they are all tied in to climate change.

People like Bill McKibben have been ringing the alarm bells for a long time. Maybe the noise (along with increasingly strong and numerous protests) has finally penetrated a few brains.

McKibben says the climate crisis doesn’t work anything like the health care crisis. The math is against us and the scenario for reducing emissions to nothing in twenty years is an “ungodly steep slope.”

Here’s another way of saying it: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported last autumn that if we hadn’t managed a fundamental transformation of the planet’s energy systems by 2030, our chance of meeting the Paris temperature targets is slim to none. And anyone who has ever had anything to do with governments knows: if you want something big done by 2030, you better give yourself a lot of lead time. In fact, it’s possible we’ve waited too long: the world’s greenhouse gas emissions spiked last year, and—given Trump, Bolsonaro and Putin—it’s hard to imagine we won’t see the same depressing thing this year.

2030: that’s only ten years, Democrats. Are Sanders and Warren the only ones talking candidly about climate? If Booker, Klobuchar and Harris want to revive their faltering campaigns, getting serious about climate might be a way to start.

November 16, 2019

Let the Big Banks Pay

Why Central Banks Need to Step Up on Global Warming

Climate Finance

Why We Need Finance to Fight Climate Change

“That’s where the money is” was Willie Sutton’s reply when someone asked why he robbed banks. I’ve used his cool rejoinder before, but it’s especially apt when you think about the overwhelming problems coming: mitigating and adapting to what the world faces in global warming.

Bill McKibben talked about getting the big banks to just quit lending to the oil industry—which they fund to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars a year. This seems about as likely as getting a junkie off fentanyl but, as he said, it’s kind of a Hail Mary pass.

Bernie Sanders’ grandiose climate proposals ($16.3 trillion) are just unrealistic when it comes to funding. Elizabeth Warren’s are only a bit more practical. The amounts for underwriting any kind of comprehensive Green New Deal are staggering. Great bags of money will be required to have any hope of success.

But it does seem right and proper, as Columbia’s Adam Tooze proposes, that “a decade after the world bailed out finance, it’s time for finance to bail out the world.” That is, it’s time for the world’s largest financial institutions to step up on climate change, which a few of them have already committed to do, the IMF being one. But the grand scale that will be required is something else again.

How would you get the central banks—like the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England—to cough up, or backstop, long-term loans? Tooze put it in terms of moral obligation and the threat of financial crisis:

Acting as a backstop to the issuance of a massive volume of publicly issued green bonds is certainly a novel role for the central banks. But after their exertions in the 2008 financial crisis, central bankers, of all public officials, can’t plausibly retreat into an insistence on the limits of their mandate. . . .

Decarbonization is a vastly more complex technical, economic, and social problem. But to embark on solving it we need to mobilize all the resources we can muster. The essential responsibility of the central banks is to ensure that money does not stand in the way.

The World Resources Institute projects the scale (for the short term, it seems) of public/private investment needed to remediate and adapt to what’s coming:

- The World Economic Forum projects that by 2020, about $5.7 trillion will need to be invested annually in green infrastructure, much of which will be in today’s developing world.
- This will require shifting the world’s $5 trillion in business-as-usual investments into green investments, as well as mobilizing an additional $700 billion to ensure this shift actually happens.

How is it possible to persuade the mercantile banking industry to get in on the action—and indeed make money doing it? A National Climate Bank has been proposed to sidestep the big banks and foster greenhouse gas reductions. Read more about that here. I’m not sure that will do the job; it’s mostly for smaller-scale projects.

What’s required is a Congress dedicated to transforming banking regulations to demand that a certain percentage of big commercial bank investments be made in wide-ranging, large green projects with commercial potential. Once again, like so much involving climate change, it’s a political problem. We are talking about trillions of dollars, folks, and Willie Sutton knew where that money was hiding.

November 9, 2019

The Conservatives’ Addiction to No!

Don’t bother waiting for conservatives to come around on climate change

What Motivates Voters More Than Loyalty? Loathing

The GOP’s Opposition to Impeachment Is (Terrifyingly) Principled

They say no to everything: no to impeachment, immigration, voter registration, Merrick Garland, anything Obama tried to do, anything the liberals advocate. However, it’s increasingly hard to say no to climate change.

Their negativism is owing not just to mutual antagonism and the partisanship everyone complains of; it’s built in to the conservative mindset. What liberals understand as democracy and justice is implicitly rejected by conservatives as threat to their programme. Their constituencies are not just the fossil fuel complex but the major power groups in society, the interests that basically run things. For many conservatives, I think, it boils down to fears of a “socialist” takeover that will marginalize them forever.

Their tactics, if you can call them that, have included: increased lawlessness, voter suppression, total politicizing of judgeships, foreign policy fiascos, flagrant giveaways to the private sector, and rampant corruption.

Climate change, if it’s acknowledged at all, is a liberal plot, a hoax, an act of God, a natural series of events not due to human activity. Take your pick. In the face of that intransigence, the persistent liberal argument that the climate crisis is man-made is just futile, says David Roberts of Vox.

Those who fear change, prize order, and pine for an imagined past without all the troubling present-day changes—i.e., conservatives—will be more open to messages emphasizing the maintenance of purity and glories of the past.

. . . The tragic but inescapable fact at the core of climate change is that we are in an era of loss. The stable weather patterns, fertile soil, and biodiversity enjoyed by our ancestors—the biophysical status quo—is going away, whether we like it or not. It’s too late to save it.

Sooner or later, with more climate disasters, this notion of loss, one imagines, will have to penetrate to the conservative naysayers. Who can say how they will respond? Those so imbued with the power of No! and the status quo ante may never come to accept the ultimate change that is climate change. Eric Levitz put it in more strictly political terms:

To acknowledge anthropogenic climate change is to empower liberals, open the door to additional taxes and regulations, and threaten the power of the fossil fuel industry. The Republican Party as currently constituted will simply never do those things. Ever. The arguments are secondary.

November 2, 2019

Big Oil and Big Tobacco Long in Cahoots

New Documents Reveal Denial Playbook Originated with Big Oil, Not Big Tobacco

Did Exxon Deceive Its Investors on Climate Change?

Exxon Climate Plan Wasn’t Fake, Tillerson Says In N.Y. Trial

We are just discovering how long and how deeply the tobacco and oil industries joined together to deceive the public about their toxic products. Their connections go back to the 1950s, studying and funding deceptions about smog science and cancer science.

The Center for International and Environmental Law wrote about this over three years ago, and like most other important news it got swamped by the furor over Trumpism. The Center used documents unearthed from the tobacco industry to establish the connections. Tobacco, they reveal,

used the same playbook of misinformation, obfuscation, and research laundered through front groups to attack science and sow uncertainty on lead, on smog, and in the early debates on climate change. Big Tobacco used and refined that playbook for decades in its fight to keep us smoking—just as Big Oil is using it now, again, to keep us burning fossil fuels.

The New York state attorney general is now bringing suit against Exxon Mobil, charging that the world’s biggest publicly traded energy company “misled its shareholders and the public by misrepresenting the risks that climate change poses to the value of its oil and gas assets.” The company took in $290 billion in revenue last year, and the suit argues not that it helped create climate change but that for years it has schemed (basically by keeping two sets of books) to defraud its investors, analysts and underwriters about the risks of climate change to its business.

That rather seems like begging the real question, though it will finally expose what many have suspected about Exxon’s business practices—assuming the state wins the suit. Ex-CEO Rex Tillerson, Mr. Trump’s one-time secretary of state, knew about this for years. Lee Wasserman, who directs the Rockefeller Family Fund (interesting, isn’t it, that the Rockefeller fortune came from Standard Oil?) wants to hold fossil fuel companies liable for reparations for the massive damages their products and practices have caused.

The company of course denies any attempt to mislead and professes to be proud of its many years of (accurate) research into climate change. The other day Tillerson testified under oath that the company knew long ago that global warming was very real, “a serious issue and we knew it was one that’s going to be with us now, forevermore.”

Tillerson didn’t deny Exxon’s role in creating the problem—which isn’t what the trial was about. But in his nuanced view, the company did its best to address the issue once it became apparent. He also said there may be plenty of blame to share, given that Exxon was providing products demanded by society.

But don’t hold your breath until Exxon becomes accountable for the huge sums that some states and cities are now suing for.

October 26, 2019

Gloom but not Doom?

What If We Stopped Pretending?

Climate Change Will Cost Us Even More Than We Think

Scientists Have Been Underestimating the Pace of Climate Change

Climate change is like diarrhea. You never know when or where it’s going to hit. Climate change is like getting old. You know what’s coming but are powerless to prevent it. Climate change is like believing in God. As Pascal said, play it safe and believe.

Jonathan Franzen, the novelist, social commenter and birdwatcher, took the fatalistic stance a couple of months ago in the New Yorker (What If We Stopped Pretending?) and got a lot of flak for it. He told us: “The struggle to rein in global carbon emissions and keep the planet from melting down has the feel of Kafka’s fiction. . . . You can keep on hoping that catastrophe is preventable, and feel ever more frustrated or enraged by the world’s inaction. Or you can accept that disaster is coming, and begin to rethink what it means to have hope.”

Denial seems to be part of our human makeup, or maybe it’s simply an inability to confront anything as far out in time as climate change. Bryan Walsh shows how the present dominates our minds and yet we often consider the welfare of future generations, as in working to cure cancer or trying to avert a catastrophic climate crisis.

Franzen talks about dystopian political denial and how to keep a democratic focus:

any movement toward a more just and civil society can now be considered a meaningful climate action. Securing fair elections is a climate action. Combatting extreme wealth inequality is a climate action. Shutting down the hate machines on social media is a climate action. Instituting humane immigration policy, advocating for racial and gender equality, promoting respect for laws and their enforcement, supporting a free and independent press, ridding the country of assault weapons — these are all meaningful climate actions. To survive rising temperatures, every system, whether of the natural world or of the human world, will need to be as strong and healthy as we can make it.

And yet his essay seems premised on prophetic doom and rather less on how we can face that impossible music. Facing such facts means taking climate science at something more than face value. Naomi Oreskes, who teaches environmental science at Harvard, has written (with others) two recent pieces that shed some harsh light that has been missing on climate science.

In Scientists Have Been Underestimating the Pace of Climate Change she explains why climate change has been “occurring far faster than predicted by theory” and why and how scientists have underestimated its severity and pace. In Climate Change Will Cost Us Even More Than We Think, she reflects on how world political leaders “understand neither the magnitude of the risks to lives and livelihoods, nor the urgency of action.” A major reason is that economists have underestimated the impact of climate risks. Worse, they don’t factor in the cascading effects of even small changes. Worse still, what they don’t know or can’t account for, they dismiss or set the effect at zero.

In the face of all this, Franzen is not wrong in saying

a false hope of salvation can be actively harmful. If you persist in believing that catastrophe can be averted, you commit yourself to tackling a problem so immense that it needs to be everyone’s overriding priority forever. One result, weirdly, is a kind of complacency: by voting for green candidates, riding a bicycle to work, avoiding air travel, you might feel that you’ve done everything you can for the only thing worth doing. Whereas, if you accept the reality that the planet will soon overheat to the point of threatening civilization, there’s a whole lot more you should be doing.

October 19, 2019

The Big Heat

Facing unbearable heat, Qatar has begun to air-condition the outdoors

Days of 100-Degree Heat Will Become Weeks as Climate Warms, U.S. Study Warns

Heat waves and climate change: Is there a connection?

Air conditioning the outdoors? insanity reigns everywhere and it’s not just over Trump. Three days ago the Washington Post published this lengthy and frightening account of what’s happening in one of the world’s hottest regions. It may be the scenario of our future.

Here are some of the takeaways, but you need to read the full piece to understand their implications. And the photos are most revealing.

- Preparing for the 2022 World Cup, Qatar is air conditioning its eight open-air soccer stadiums.
- “Yet outdoor air conditioning is part of a vicious cycle. Carbon emissions create global warming, which creates the desire for air conditioning, which creates the need for burning fuels that emit more carbon dioxide,” this in a country that is the world’s largest per capita emitter of greenhouse gases.
- The region expects temperatures to increase about 4 to 6 degrees Celsius by the time the rest of the world hits 2⁰ C.
- The country relies more than ever on fossil fuels, including natural gas.
- Doha, the major city, is progressively roasting, having warmed “by an astonishing 2.8 degrees Celsius since 1962.”

Water temperatures in the Persian Gulf are rising much faster than in the world’s other seas, and the “urban heat island effect” of heating asphalt and concrete makes cities the other focus of this increase. The prospect of growing heat and humidity may “one day exceed the capacity of humans to tolerate the outdoors. In such conditions, air conditioning would no longer be a convenience; it would be essential to survival.”

With its vast resources of fossil-fuel money Qatar can afford to do something as crazy and yet necessary as air conditioning the outdoors. It can’t, of course, do this forever. Some two-thirds of its electricity goes toward air conditioning. So there is planning and engineering to change building and construction requirements—but mostly now for the World Cup sites. Recently and hopefully, however, “Qatar Petroleum announced that it would construct a facility to capture and store 5 million tons of carbon from the company’s liquefied natural gas operations by 2025.”

Meanwhile, heat waves everywhere are going to get much more frequent and hotter. It’s not just athletes and outdoor workers who will be affected, though they have the highest exposure. How will human beings begin to endure such extreme heat? By mid-century many areas of the U.S. will face many more days of 105-degree heat, more than triple those of the previous fifty years. It will be worse elsewhere.

Qatar is one of earth’s richest countries, yet some are predicting that cities throughout the Middle East could well become uninhabitable. You can imagine the scenario for the poorer parts of the world.

October 12, 2019

It’s not All Gloom and Doom

Five Radical Climate Policies That Most Americans Actually Like

To Fight Global Warming, Think More About Systems Than About What You Consume

Climate denial is reported more than science

“Don’t we deserve a little good news on the climate front, at least once in a while?”

That’s a bit like asking, “Didn’t Rudy Giuliani do some good as mayor of New York?” We keep trying to nullify the present by invoking the past, trying to find our way out of a difficult dilemma. And it’s the negative, immediate stories that always get the headlines.

Climate is invariably presented in the press as a contentious issue: “That is, according to a massive study by Californian scientists, the people who say climate change is not happening, or not a problem, get 49% more coverage than the scientists who have the evidence that it represents a serious and accelerating crisis.” The assumption is we’d rather hear about conflict than science.

Some new and reputable polling shows, however, that the public is getting behind the very ambitious programs proposed by Sanders and Warren.

At least five aggressive and left-wing climate policies are supported by most registered voters in the United States. Americans seem particularly fond of large spending packages, as Sanders has advanced, and climate policies with a populist bent, such as Senator Elizabeth Warren’s proposed climate import fee and her “economic patriotism” plan.

Some of this approval reflects opposition to Trump, yet even conservative-leaning surveys report a liking for something as radical as the Green New Deal.

Shockingly, the idea was more popular than not, with 48 percent of respondents in support and 7 percent undecided. Only when pollsters told people that a Green New Deal could cost $93 trillion did support for the idea collapse. But according to the GOP group’s own math, a Green New Deal that focused only on climate change could cost only $13 trillion.

The five programs that garnered most support are:

1. A national recycling program for commodities
2. $1.3 trillion to weatherize every home and office building in the United States
3. $1.5 trillion for a massive federal build-out of renewable energy
4. A climate adjustment fee on environmentally destructive imports
5. “Economic Nationalism for Climate Change” (meaning “aggressively encourage large American manufacturing firms to specialize in solar panels, wind turbines, and other climate-friendly technologies”).

Now, none of these projects tackle perhaps the thorniest aspect of the climate crisis: how to deal with the overwhelming effects of consumer choice and consumer demand around the world. Bill McKibben tries to confront this one in a recent book review. He does a commendable job of showing how collective action is the only effective response: “We aren’t going to solve our problems one consumer at a time. We’re going to need to do it as societies and civilizations, or not at all.” That is, we aren’t going to get there by simply renouncing plastic straws.

October 5, 2019

The Lure of Travel, the Shame of Flying

If you care about your impact on the planet, you should stop flying

Air travel is a huge contributor to climate change. A new global movement wants you to be ashamed to fly.

When it comes to the environmental costs of flights ‘we need to figure out how to turn that shame into action’

Most of the friends I have in Oaxaca are Americans, most have money, and most love to travel—usually by air. And they tend to take several long-distance trips a year. These are smart people who understand (at least I think they understand) that aviation produces enormous amounts of carbon pollution.

Yet these folks are expats who have family in the U.S. or elsewhere. They are retired and yearn finally to indulge the urge to see the world. They have personal connections abroad or would create them. Flying seems to activate this kind of personal globalization in all its ambiguous consequences, and there are millions of travelers like them.

What are the costs of this sort of indulgence?

Air traffic currently accounts for about 3% of global emissions, which is three times more than the total emissions of a country like France. Traffic is growing by 4% per year and is projected to double by 2030. This is in complete contradiction with the objectives of the Paris agreement, which will require halving current greenhouse gas emissions by around 2030. With the growth projected, by 2050 the aviation sector alone could consume a quarter of the carbon budget for the 1.5°C target, i.e., the cumulative emissions from all sources that cannot be exceeded to limit global warming to this target.

Technical progress toward more efficient planes and better organised airports will have only marginal impact at best. Real change can only be achieved by a massive transition toward biofuels or a dramatic reduction in demand.

And neither biofuels nor reduced demand are likely to happen soon. Putting it another way: a one-way flight from London to New York for each traveler in economy class will “put an extra 1.6 metric tons of carbon dioxide in the air—about as much as taking a round-trip 15-mile commute every day for a year in a fuel-efficient car.”

So the question of whether or not to give up or restrict one’s flying typically becomes an ethical and very personal one. For me and my friends in Mexico, Oaxaca has recently improved its air service options, and with more airlines and more flights operating, we’re more tempted to use them. Bus travel within the country is much less polluting, and the buses are good. But if they have the money, most will choose to fly.

I fly to the U.S. maybe once a year to see family. I don’t like what air travel has become and I don’t want to contribute to climate pollution. Others will have different needs and convictions. Americans fly more than most anyone else in the world (and contribute the second-most pollution of any country). They are not going to quit flying but they should think long and hard before making any trip. They should also think long and hard about the systemic and political changes that the climate crisis demands. Shame and personal guilt are not enough.

September 28, 2019

For Greta, the Timing Was Problematic

It’s Greta’s World

The World’s Oceans Are in Danger, Major Climate Change Report Warns

Why the right’s usual smears don’t work on Greta Thunberg

Well, she got upstaged by impeachment. Some stories will always capture the media, but that’s not to deny the reality and power of what Greta told the UN leaders last week. She got a ton of pushback and some nastiness from the right-wing, e.g.,

“She’s ignorant, maniacal and is being mercilessly manipulated by adult climate bedwetters funded by Putin,” ranted C-list climate denier Steve Milloy, somehow fitting all the mutually contradictory stereotypes about powerful women into his pea brain at once.

Australian prime minister Scott Morrison found her remarks would cause “needless anxiety” in his country’s children. Oh dear. How will those youngsters respond to his building more coal-fired plants and the country’s dismal record on climate change?

By putting her faith in science, Greta managed to slough off most of this stuff. She has achieved some kind of political miracle and gotten 4 million-plus people to go along with her. Maybe it’s her Asperger’s that gave her this power. Or the unassailable facts of climate change.

The bad news keeps coming. One of our most respected sources on climate study, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently reports that the oceans are rapidly becoming hotter, more acidic, losing oxygen, dramatically affecting fish stocks, coastal flooding, marine heat waves, and more.

While the report recommends that nations sharply reduce greenhouse gas emissions to lessen the severity of most of these threats, it also points out that countries will need to adapt to many changes that have now become unavoidable.

Only when the politicians and “world leaders” accept the fact that time is running out, will the possibilities for real change emerge. Most are still phumphing around the emergency and that’s what got Greta so angry.

On Twitter she wrote: “When haters go after your looks and differences, it means they have nowhere left to go. And then you know you’re winning!”

September 21, 2019September 22, 2019

Your Money or Your Life

For the Sake of Life on Earth, We Must Put a Limit on Wealth

Money Is the Oxygen on Which the Fire of Global Warming Burns

Citigroup Yields to Pressure from Environmentalists

You elders may remember the famous radio sketch by Jack Benny: the mugger says, “This is a stick-up! Your money or your life!” A long pause ensues. “Look, bud, I said, Your money or your life!” Jack: “I’m thinking it over!”

The ultra-rich could understand Jack’s quandary. Their lives are circumscribed by money and all its attendant privileges. Writer George Monbiot has cataloged some of their more outrageous excesses, behavior that inevitably attacks the environment. He says these people are committing ecocide, the impunity to get away with destroying the natural world on which we all depend.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised to learn that when Google convened a meeting of the rich and famous at the Verdura resort in Sicily in July to discuss climate breakdown, its delegates arrived in 114 private jets and a fleet of mega-yachts, and drove around the island in supercars. Even when they mean well, the ultrarich cannot help trashing the living world. . . .

Surplus money allows some people to exercise inordinate power over others: in the workplace; in politics; and above all in the capture, use and destruction of the planet’s natural wealth. If everyone is to flourish, we cannot afford the rich. Nor can we afford our own aspirations, which the culture of wealth maximisation encourages.

People of less wealth and the best intentions are still captive to the consumption culture which drives so much of the world economy. The president is our prime exemplar, a man of less wealth than the ultras and certainly without good intentions. When questioned last Monday about his fondness for arms sales to Saudi Arabia, Trump said, “Saudi Arabia pays cash.” The cash nexus seems to motivate everything he does.

An interviewer asked Willie Sutton why he robbed banks. “Because that’s where the money is,” he said. Bill McKibben would agree. He has an interesting piece in the New Yorker claiming that the big banks like JPMorgan Chase, the biggest of them all, are the true sources of capital for the fossil fuel industry, to the tune of $196 billion over the past three years. Much of that money goes to “fund extreme new ventures: ultra-deep-sea drilling, Arctic oil extraction, and so on.”

It’s kind of a Hail-Mary pass, says McKibben, but what if that flow of money could be disrupted, just as some of the largest corporations and pension funds through pressure have divested themselves of “socially undesirable” organizations? Almost twenty years ago the Rainforest Action Network (RAN) took successful action against Citigroup to slow down the deforestation in the Amazon—showing celebrities cutting up their Citi credit cards. Lately it has publicized and ranked the investments of the largest banks in terms of their damage to the climate.

Some envision campaigns to pressure the banks to disinvest. “Chase’s retail business is a huge part of its enterprise, as is the case with Citi, Wells Fargo, and the others.” The new generation of consumers cares a lot about climate and may well have the clout to demand action. Their protests will finally learn to address the distribution of wealth and power.

September 14, 2019September 14, 2019

Joe’s Gibberish

Would You Leave Joe Biden Alone With Trump?

A Joe Biden presidency would be a climate catastrophe

In Second Democratic Debate, Candidates Criticize Biden’s Climate Plans

Excuse me, but after listening to and watching Joe Biden doddering through his responses at the third Democratic debate Thursday night, you have to wonder how he is still the front-runner. His climate change plan is better than nothing but goes less than halfway to get the job done.

“Middle-ground solutions, like the vice president has proposed . . . are not going to save us,” James Inslee has said. “Literally the survival of humanity on this planet and civilization as we know it is in the hands of the next president,” and God save us if that’s Joe Biden.

It’s not just his climate plan, folks. It’s him. And how his mind works—or produces the bloviations that expose it.

The Democratic front-runner cannot speak in complete sentences when he is feeling tired or defensive. And 90 minutes of debate is enough to make him tired. And a reference to something that he said about race in the 1970s is enough to make him defensive.

These were my three main takeaways from the Democratic Party’s third presidential primary debate in Houston on Thursday. And they’ve left me rather apprehensive about the prospect of the Democrats sending Joe Biden into battle against Donald Trump next year. . . . If Biden can’t keep his talking points straight for an entire evening, what shape will he be in after running the gauntlet between today and his televised showdowns with the president next fall? And if a pointed question from an ABC News anchor can reduce him to spasms of anxious blather, how well will he hold up when Trump comes after his family?

And just how seriously does he take the threat of climate change? When he got caught out taking big funds from a fossil fuel guy, the NY Daily News ran this headline: “Biden claims he doesn’t take fossil fuel cash at NYC fundraiser co-hosted by fossil fuel company co-founder.” He called that a misrepresentation.

Linguistic giveaways from two of the front-runners repeatedly bother me. Biden’s fillers are “the fact of the matter” and “look”; Bernie’s is “let me be clear.” The other candidates in Thursday’s debate thankfully avoided most thought padding like this.

At the debate ABC News’ Linsey Davis asked him what responsibility Americans should take to repair the damage of slavery. Joe answered:

Well, they have to deal with the . . . Look, there is institutional segregation in this country. And from the time I got involved, I started dealing with that. Redlining, banks, making sure that we are in a position where — Look, we talk about education. I propose that what we take is those very poor schools, the Title 1 schools, triple the amount of money we spend from $15 to $45 billion a year. Give every single teacher a raise to the equal of . . . A raise of getting out of the $60,000 level.

Number two, make sure that we bring in to the help with the stud — the teachers deal with the problems that come from home. The problems that come from home, we need . . . We have one school psychologist for every 1,500 kids in America today. It’s crazy. The teachers are required — I’m married to a teacher. My deceased wife is a teacher. They have every problem coming to them.

Make sure that every single child does, in fact, have three, four, and five-year-olds go to school. School! Not daycare, school. We bring social workers into homes of parents to help them deal with how to raise their children. It’s not want they don’t want to help. They don’t know want— They don’t know what quite what to do. Play the radio. Make sure the television — excuse me, make sure you have the record player on at night. The phone — make sure the kids hear words. A kid coming from a very poor school — er, a very poor background will hear 4 million words fewer spoken by the time they get there.

Davis: Thank you, Mr. Vice-President.

Biden: No, I’m going to go like the rest of them do, twice over, okay? Because here’s the deal. The deal is that we’ve got this a little backwards. And by the way, in Venezuela, we should be allowing people to come here from Venezuela. I know Maduro. I’ve confronted Maduro. Number two, you talk about the need to do something in Latin America. I’m the guy that came up with $740 million to see to it those three countries, in fact, change their system so people don’t have to chance to leave. You’re all acting like we just discovered this yesterday! Thank you very much.

No, thank you very much, Joe.

P.S. More evidence from the debate of Biden’s mental stumbles.