Whenever there is a poll question about something stupid, you can depend upon a fair number of Americans holding the ridiculous position. For example, there was a recent poll that found that 29% of Americans think Obama is a Muslim. I’m generally sympathetic to the argument that these people don’t really believe this. They are rather signalling in whatever way the questions allow that they really, really, really don’t like Obama. But I’m not certain. I don’t really know what is going on in these people’s minds. Indeed, a recent article made me question the basic brain functioning of my fellow Americans. But when I dug down into it, I found it was more complicated than is being reported.

Samuel Osborne reported in The Independent, US Town Rejects Solar Panels Amid Fears They “Suck Up All the Energy From the Sun.” The town in question is Woodland, North Carolina. Strata Solar Company wanted to build a solar farm north of the town. This required that the land be re-zoned from manufacturing to agricultural. The town council rejected the plan, despite the fact that the planning board was in favor of it. But it’s worse than that. The council had previous accepted plans for three other solar farms. But at the same meeting, the council voted for a moratorium on solar farms.

What could be the cause of this reversal? Well, the people have risen up. Some of the complaints at least seem reasonable. Mary Hobbs said that the existing solar farms have killed the local economy. I don’t really see that. Woodland isn’t exactly a tourist destination. It’s probably dying for the same economic reasons that lots of other small towns are dying. But it is true that the solar farm is not like a factory; it would create few jobs. At the same time, the Strata farm would probably have been very lucrative because its location was close to an electrical substation. This kind of local investment is not likely to revitalize the community.

Other concerns were less debatable. Jane Mann argued that the vegetation near solar panels is brown because of lack of sunlight. Her husband Bobby concurred, saying that the solar farms suck up all the energy from the sun. They are also concerned about cancer deaths, which the solar farms are supposedly responsible for. But mixed in with all the crazy, there is some sense. The Manns are still primarily concerned with what is going to happen to the town because of the solar farm. As Jane Mann said, “I don’t see the profit for the town.”

That’s a good point. The site for the Strata solar farm is outside the town limits and so the town will get no tax benefit from it, “The only funding the town would get is approximately $7,000 per year for specialized training for the Woodland Fire Department in the event of an electrical malfunction at the solar plant.” Get that: the company is only going to pay to make sure that the publicly funded fire department is properly educated on how to serve the company’s interests. So regardless of how silly the concerns may be, there really is nothing to counterbalance it.

Now, I’m in favor of solar farms. This is exactly the kind of thing we should be doing. But we come back to the same problem as ever: inequality. The rich want to place their solar farms out where they don’t have to see them. They can just siphon off the profits to wherever they decide the view is nicest. And the people of Woodland get nothing very clear in exchange. It’s not surprising that they start talking about solar farms sucking.

I guess I should say something about the debate. Despite my best efforts, I did manage to listen to the whole thing. But as soon as I found out that it was focused on “national security,” I wanted to run away. This strikes me as journalistic malpractice on the part of CNN. Do we really need a forum to listen to all these candidates talk about how terrible non-Americans are and how we need to close down our borders? This is most of what we get from the candidates regardless. This is the easiest issue to demagogue and so they stick with it.

What’s more, when it comes to the situation in Syria and Iraq, they all push how “strong” and “hard” they will be. But when you get down to it, they aren’t proposing to do anything more than Obama. So they are going to continue to bomb but with more intent? Ben Carson implied that he wanted boots on the ground. Marco Rubio wants boots on the ground — Arab boots on the ground. John Kasich wants boots on the ground — some kind of Persian Gulf coalition. But I get it: the Republican Party is working itself up for war.

The reason I know this is because my father told me that he thought we needed to send ground troops into the conflict. Charles Krauthammer must think this. I know because my father also has no clue why we should send ground troops in. I questioned him about it. Does he think that ISIS is an existential threat? No. Does he think fighting ISIS over there is going to make terrorist attacks here less common? No. Does he realize that ISIS has been so successful because of our starting the Iraq War? Yes. So why do we need ground troops? At that point he folded, but this is fast becoming the new Republican orthodoxy.

But watching the debate, it was hard to escape the conclusion that Republicans think the greatest threat to the United States is Barack Obama. It’s also hard to understand why they all haven’t emigrated from the country. I mean, as Trump put it, “Our country doesn’t win anymore.” The United States does have a lot of problems, but listening to these bozos, you would think we were Zimbabwe. No one respects us; everyone gets over on us; we’re weak. And the only thing that will save us from this sorry state is a Republican president. That is, interestingly, also the one and only thing. Just elect one of them and America will be great again because it will be “strong” and “hard.”

The phrase “Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton” was repeated so often that I began to think it was a single person. And almost all of the attacks were facile. Take Ted Cruz’s opening, “The men and women on this stage, every one of us, is better prepared to keep this nation safe than is Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton.” And why is this? Based upon the discussion, there seem to be two ways that every one of them is better:

1. They won’t be politically correct.
2. They will use the magic words “radical Islamic terrorism” more often.

That seems like snark, right? But it isn’t. It all comes down to their contention that there is something ineffable about fighting terrorism. It isn’t about intelligence and bombs and troops and so on. None of that matters if you don’t really want to fight the terrorists. And the one thing that Republican voters know, it is that Obama loves the terrorists just as much as he hates America. What they want is not any particular policy. They want more belligerent rhetoric. That will make them feel safer. And they are very much willing to give up essential liberty to purchase not temporary safety but the illusion of safety. It’s worse than Benjamin Franklin said.

Under normal circumstances, few people should care about the Paris climate deal. This kind of stuff is mostly just technocratic. There is a problem and they are just working out how to solve it. Indeed, 20 years ago, it would have been just that. But when one of the major political parties in the most powerful country on earth refuses to acknowledge that the problem is real, things are different. Then, getting anything done at all is a big deal. And that’s why this agreement is a big deal.

What’s different about this agreement is that it is not legally binding. But the question is: does that really matter? Brad Plumer wrote a really interesting article that provides a brief history of the failure of previous climate deals, Past Climate Treaties Failed. So the Paris Deal Will Try Something Radically Different. But the real takeaway here was this, “No treaty is truly binding.” That’s right. Countries mostly abide by their treaties because they want to be part of the civilized world. Even at that level, humans are still social. But more than that, there is the economic issue.

I’m all too aware of the conservative response to this. We have already heard people claiming that this will just allow Russia (which has set insignificant goals) to get ahead of us. But I think this is a total misunderstanding of the way that economics works. Listening to the Republican debates, I’ve been really annoyed hearing about how doing something about climate change will hurt our economy. This is taken as a given. But it is actually rather the opposite that ought to be given. We aren’t going to grow our economy in the long-term by making it ever more dependent on the new energy technology of a century and a half ago.

What we are getting from the Republicans — and what we always get from them — is not an argument for economic growth. It is an argument for the status quo. They care about securing the profits of those who are already rich. Look at who is the biggest funder of the Republican Party: the Koch brothers. Their wealth comes from oil. They don’t see clean energy as a way to help our shared economy; they see it as a threat to their short term profits. And the Republicans rush to defend their interests, using the specious argument that they are looking out for all of us.

So Russia looks like it is going to do what Russia has traditionally done: look backwards. As it is, the Russian economy is highly dependent upon selling oil. So this makes some sense. But it is shortsighted. I think that’s especially true because we have been going through a period of revolution regarding green energy. I fully expect countries like Costa Rica (which put forward an ambitious program) to look back in ten or twenty years and see that they have not only been able to do a lot more, but that their economy is much better as a result.

We really have two choices here. We can look backward and continue to harm the earth. This will lead to more economic stagnation. Or we can look forward and mitigate the damage we are doing. This will lead to a more vibrant economy. That’s it. This really is what it’s all about. The only upside for continuing on as we have been is that it allows installed interests to continue to make money. The economies that are going to be strong in the future are the ones that embrace green energy today. And I think that alone will cause this climate deal to be a success.

Over at Mark Thoma’s indispensable Economist’s View is a sub-blog by Tim Duy, Fed Watch. Generally, it is too technical for me. But the other day, I was really struck by an article, Makes You Wonder What The Fed Is Thinking. Of course, I always wonder what the Fed is thinking. But when someone like Duy says that, it makes me take note.

He started by noting that one of the reasons that the Federal Reserve is set to raise interest rates is because it believes that the inflation rate will “approach” its 2% target in 2016. Now before we get to Duy’s point, think about that for a moment. According to the Fed, it is supposed to target 2%. Now it’s looking like the Fed is saying that really the 2% target is a ceiling. They are not willing to let it get above that point. If that’s the case, I wish the Fed could tell us so that we could fire them all and restructure the organization. As it is, the Fed doesn’t seem to be much concerned with employment, which is the other thing that it is supposed to do.

But as Josh Zumbrun noted in The Wall Street Journal, while the Fed may think that inflation will “approach” 2% next year, “The trouble is they have made the same prediction for the past four years.” It seems that in Fedlandia, we are always and forever on the verge of inflation. The Fed isn’t any better than the Ron Pauls of the world who tell us we must buy gold because hyperinflation is coming. The Fed types scoff that such idiocy. But they don’t seem to be able to learn from their own failed predictions.

What Duy highlighted is the asymmetric nature of the Fed interest rate increases. If the economy starts to heat up, causing inflation — the Fed can just raise interest rates as high and for as long as necessary. But if economy goes into recession, the Fed can only lower interest rates to zero. So if they raise interest rates too soon, there is little the Fed can do to fight the resulting recession. There are other asymmetries in all of this. And they all point in the same direction. So why raise rates now?

Duy mentioned the “financial stability” argument. According to this argument, low interest rates will “encourage excessive risk-taking.” Really?! Because I remember the Fed watching the tech bubble and the housing bubble inflate over years without doing anything about it. I think this argument is just more apologetics. The situation is this: the Fed wants to raise interest rates; but there is no real reason to raise interest rates; so the Fed goes looking for reasons to justify things it wants to do regardless.

I’m sorry to be constantly harping on the Federal Reserve. But it really is ridiculously important. The truth is that with the current philosophy of the Fed, the working class will never get ahead. As soon as the economy is starting to do well enough that workers can share in productivity growth, the Fed puts on the brakes. This is not good. In general, the Fed has not been a major tool of the power elite. But it looks more and more like that. And imagine what it would be doing if it had been filled with people by Donald Trump or Ted Cruz? It’s too frightening to contemplate.