Macro Roundup

Dartmouth economist adjust the death of despair numbers for comp-shift in educational attainment and find that mortality increases among whites have been driven almost entirely by changes in the bottom 10% of the education distribution.

"....Changing mortality rates among less educated Americans are difficult to interpret because the least educated groups (e.g. dropouts) become smaller and more negatively selected over time. New partial identification methods let us calculate mortality changes at constant education percentiles from 1992-2015. We find that middle-age mortality increases among non-Hispanic whites are driven almost entirely by changes in the bottom 10% of the education distribution. Drivers of mortality change differ substantially across groups......First, among middle-aged non-Hispanic white (hereafter referred to as white) men and women, the group most widely discussed in the recent literature, mortality increases are driven almost entirely by the bottom 10% of the education distribution (the part of the distribution represented by high school dropouts in 2015). From 1992 to 2015, age-adjusted mortality for whites in the least educated 10% has risen by 59-90% for women and 32-49% for men (respectively 2.2-3.1% and 1.3-1.9% per year).Mortality change in percentiles 10-45 (approximately high school completers in 2015) is considerably less dramatic, and is rising unambiguously only for white women below the age of 50 and white men under 35. The mortality increases described by Case and Deaton (2015, 2017) are thus both more severe and more focused in a narrow population subgroup than has previously been recognized. Second, non-Hispanic blacks have experienced large improvements in mortality in all education groups except for the least educated 10%. Blacks in the least educated 10% have close to zero mortality change from 1992-2015; age-adjusted middle-age mortality for blacks is marginally rising for women and marginally declining for men. This has led to a substantial convergence between black and white outcomes at the bottom of the education distribution. Conditional upon being in the least educated 10% of the national distribution, white men over the age of 50 now have higher mortality than similarly-aged black men.The same holds for white women relative to black women over the age of 40. Finally, a single proximate cause cannot expain these divergent death rates. The change in deaths from despair, which has been widely discussed in prior research and in the media, accounts for a large share of mortality increases for young whites, but a very small share of rising mortality among older whites and none of the divergent mortality rates of blacks. Further, deaths of despair have increased more uniformly across the education distribution than deaths from other causes. The least educated middle-aged white women, in particular, are now at higher risk of dying from cancer, heart diseases and respiratory diseases, among other causes, even as mortality from these causes has declined sharply for those outside of the bottom 10%. Note that earlier unadjusted estimates were particularly difficult to interpret for women, for whom education has risen considerably more than among men, creating a larger selection bias.....Deaths of despair explain a large share of mortality change among young non-Hispanic whites, but a small share among older whites and almost none among non-Hispanic blacks...."

Paul Novosad and Charlie Rafkin, "Mortality Change Among Less Educated Americans," Dartmouth College, April 2019, https://www.dartmouth.edu/~novosad/novosad-rafkin-mortality.pdf

interesting, new Guzman finds that state level R&D tax credits work, with a 5 year time lag.....

"....The acceleration of start-up activity is often cited as a rationale for the R&D tax credit, a key innovation policy instrument adopted increasingly by US states over the past quarter century. While there is a strong empirical base linking the R&D tax credit to increased R&D expenditures and innovation, prior work has not provided causal evidence that this policy effects the rate of formation and growth potential of new businesses. This paper combines data from the US Startup Cartography Project with the Panel Database on Incentives and Taxes to implement a difference-in-differences estimate of the impact of the R&D tax credit on the quantity and quality-adjusted quantity of entrepreneurship. Our key finding is that the R&D tax credit is associated with a significant long-term impact on both the overall quantity and quality-adjusted quantity of entrepreneurship, with the bulk of the effect materializing more than five years after the policy is enacted........Accounting for county and year fixed effects, as well as lagged state GDP,we find that the introduction of state R&D tax credits is associated with around 7% increase in the rate of net new business formation (both in terms of raw quantity and accounting for the heterogeneous firm potential for growth). Moreover, this effect may underestimate the incentive’s actual long-term impact. While state-level R&D tax credits have little to no effect on the rate or composition of new firm formation in the first few years following their introduction, these incentives lead to a 20% increase in the quantity and quality-adjusted quantity of entrepreneurship over a ten year period (in the absence of any meaningful pre-adoption trend).Notably, these impacts stand in sharp contrast to the effects of other contemporaneous state fiscal incentives supporting established firms - state-level investment tax credits.2 For the investment tax credit, we see at best a neutral impact in terms of the overall quantity of entrepreneurship, and a longer-term decline in the quality-adjusted quantity of new firms founded, suggesting that, by enhancing the competitiveness of established businesses, the investment tax credit might serve to deter growthoriented entrepreneurship over time..... These findings stand in contrast to an analysis of the adoption of state-level investment tax credits. There, we observe no long-term impact on the quantity of entrepreneurship but a marked decline in the rate of formation of growth-oriented startups over time. Combined with other evidence regarding the efficacy of R&D tax credits in spurring innovative investment, our results shed light on the potential for this fiscal policy to also stimulate the formation of growth-oriented start-ups....."
Catherine Fazio, Jorge Guzman and Scott Stern, "The Impact of State-Level R&D Tax Credits on the Quantity and Quality of Entrepreneurship," National Bureau of Economic Research, July 2019, https://www.nber.org/papers/w26099

Ernie Tedeschi updated his charts last friday after the jobs report, he sees the labor market decelerating,

"...Big move down in part-time for economic reasons -- -24bp of employment -- and slight rise in EPOP and LFPR. Household survey very good. But there's little doubt now that the labor market, which was a source of comfort for the Fed & policymakers for so long, is decelerating. Deceleration in jobs growth could in principle just be a sign that we've hit full employment, but the deceleration in wages isn't consistent with that hypothesis. Interestingly -- this doesn't happen often -- while prime-age EPOP and LFPR declined slightly, my demographically-adjusted series, which covers all ages, rose, because we've seen sharp increases in EPOP and LFPR for the 55+ population over the last 2 months..."

Ernie Tedeschi, "Jobs Day, July 2019," August 2, 2019, https://twitter.com/ernietedeschi/status/1157274423508000769

Warren really doesn't like PE. This reads to me as effectively taking limited liability away from the PE industry, ".... My plan would transform the private equity industry and end this looting with a comprehensive set of legal changes,including: Putting private equity firms on the hook for the debts of companies they buy, making them responsible for the downside of their investments so that they only make money if the companies they control flourish. Holding private equity firms responsible for certain pension obligations of the companies they buy, so that workers have a better shot of getting the retirement funds they earned...."

Elizabeth Warren, "End Wall Street’s Stranglehold On Our Economy," Medium, July 18, 2019, https://medium.com/@teamwarren/end-wall-streets-stranglehold-on-our-economy-70cf038bac76

"...This response emerges from an insight that I like to callthe working hypothesis: that a labor market in which workers can support strong families and communities is the central determinant of long-term prosperity and should be the central focus of public policy.Genuine prosperity depends upon people working as productive contributors to their society, through which they can achieve self-sufficiency, support their families, participate in their communities, and raise children prepared to do the same. And it is the labor market that determines where, how, by whom and at what price most work gets done...."

Oren Cass, "The Communal Power of a Real Job," New York Times, August 3, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/03/opinion/sunday/workers-conservatives.html

The Communal Power of a Real Job

The conservative blueprint envisions a flourishing society built upon a foundation of strong families and communities, buttressed by a free market. But cracks in that foundation are widening, the structure is swaying, and market forces are providing little support. In response, conservatives are turning their focus to workers.

This response emerges from an insight that I like to call the working hypothesis: that a labor market in which workers can support strong families and communities is the central determinant of long-term prosperity and should be the central focus of public policy. Genuine prosperity depends upon people working as productive contributors to their society, through which they can achieve self-sufficiency, support their families, participate in their communities, and raise children prepared to do the same. And it is the labor market that determines where, how, by whom and at what price most work gets done.

The labor market’s outcomes, like any market’s, depend on the conditions in which it operates. Crucially, while a labor market left alone will seek an efficient equilibrium, economic theory never promises that the equilibrium will be a socially desirable, inclusive one. A genuine conservatism values markets as powerful mechanisms that foster choice, promote competition and deliver growth, but always in service to the larger end of a cohesive society in which people can thrive. Observing that deficiencies in the labor market’s outcomes have become acute, conservatives are beginning to ask which conditions are leading to those outcomes and how to change those conditions.

The Republican senators Marco Rubio and Josh Hawley are in the vanguard of that effort. Read Mr. Rubio’s report from May, “American Investment in the 21st Century,” which interrogates the business sector’s failure to make long-term investments in the nation’s economic future. Or watch Mr. Hawley’s maiden speech on the Senate floor, also from May, in which he excoriated the “new aristocrats” who “seek to remake society in their own image: to engineer an economy that works for the elite but few else.” Instead, Mr. Hawley said, “we need a society that offers rewarding work for every worker who wants it, wherever she is from, whatever degree he might have, whether their ambition is to start a business or to start a family.”

Intuitively, progressives might seem the likely vindicators of workers’ interests. But the serious structural changes that the labor market needs will entail real trade-offs with other priorities that progressives see as more important.

Consider the constellation of issues emphasized thus far in the Democratic Party’s presidential primary: free college and health care, relaxed or nonexistent immigration enforcement, and various “Green New Deals” whose explicit goal is suppression of the energy-producing and -consuming sectors that form the backbone of the blue-collar economy. Such policies are more likely to harm than benefit workers, in their capacity as workers. Offers to help come typically as redistribution to compensate for what people can no longer accomplish themselves.

The appeal of redistribution is its promise of painless progress. Yes, the winners have to compensate the losers. But so long as they pay their taxes, they can structure society however they like. Actually changing the conditions that weaken the labor market and harm those left behind, by contrast, requires real concessions from the people commanding society’s cultural, economic and political heights.

Conservatives will be the advocates for such concessions because theirs is the perspective that sees no alternative, while progressives will more likely be attracted to the possibility that some novel configuration of society could work just as well. Conservatives will tend to view human nature and abilities as a constant to which policy must adapt, while progressives will see greater potential for transformation. Progressives will trust social and economic progress to provide the foundation for a healthy society, while conservatives will argue that a healthy society must instead provide the foundation for any progress.

In some cases, this will lead conservatives in directions they might already lean. The United States has cleaned its air to the point that Brussels, headquarters of the European Union, would be our dirtiest city. Recognition of the enormous social value of well-paying jobs for less-educated workers in manufacturing, construction and resource extraction argues for tolerating more of the pollution that comes with them.

In other cases, conservatives will head in new directions or even reverse course. Our society’s intensive commitment to the college pathway might make sense if we plan to have the one-fifth of students who move smoothly from high school to college to career take care of everyone else. But an insistence that workers throughout the labor market share in productivity growth will shift the education system focus from college completion to alternative pathways from high school to productive careers.

Conservatives’ longstanding hostility toward organized labor will give way to an emphasis on reform. The 1930s-style unions mandated by the National Labor Relations Act have passed their expiration date, but new forms of organizing through which workers can support one another, engage with management and contribute to civil society should be a conservative priority.

Rather than focus safety-net debates on budget savings, conservatives will ask how to use existing budgets better — for instance, by transforming at least some portion of the safety net into a wage subsidy delivered directly into each low-wage paycheck, encouraging less skilled workers to enter the labor force and businesses to employ them. Mr. Hawley proposed such a work credit in his successful campaign to unseat Claire McCaskill.

And yes, conservatives will bring a skepticism of unfettered international trade and immigration to the discussion as well. If the emphasis is on a healthy labor market, rather than merely rising consumption, then borders matter. Few things could benefit American workers more than forcing companies to rely on them — something progressives always acknowledged in their calls for greater worker power, until it began conflicting with other priorities.

More trade is good, if that trade is balanced. But huge trade deficits represent supplies of foreign workers entering the United States market from afar with no commensurate rise in foreign demand for what American workers produce. Immigration, likewise, can be constructive — if those immigrants enter segments of the labor market where native workers are doing well. But if a lack of economic opportunity for less-educated Americans is seen as one of society’s great challenges, allowing yet more less-educated workers to enter the labor market won’t make sense.

Mr. Rubio has co-sponsored legislation with Senator Tammy Baldwin, a Wisconsin Democrat, to confront China’s unfair trade practices and held hearings and published research on its industrial policy. This past week, Mr. Hawley and Ms. Baldwin co-sponsored legislation that would require the Federal Reserve to close the trade deficit by taxing foreign purchases of American assets.

Political realignments occur when core values collide with changed conditions, creating rifts that both divide longstanding alliances and bring new sets of constituencies and concerns into contact. The one underway in America is frequently mischaracterized as pitting an “open” progressive side that favors desirable things like trade, immigration, the environment and college against a “closed” conservative side that finds them scary. But the actual divide is between a progressive enthusiasm for pushing ahead and a conservative concern about restoring fractured foundations.

Most conservatives see value in all those “open” priorities too, but their nonnegotiable starting point is a cohesive society built on work, family and community. Their task is to persuade enough Americans that building higher should be contingent on first establishing the strength of a sturdy base.

"...Academics debate why American workers are in many ways worse off than their counterparts elsewhere, but there is overriding agreement on one reason: Labor unions are weaker in the United States than in other industrial nations. Just one in 16 private-sector American workers is in a union, largely because corporations are so adept and aggressive at beating back unionization. In no other industrial nation do corporations fight so hard to keep out unions...."

Steven Greenhouse, "Yes, America Is Rigged Against Workers,"New York Times, August 3, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/03/opinion/sunday/labor-unions.html

Yes, America Is Rigged Against Workers

The United States is the only advanced industrial nation that doesn’t have national laws guaranteeing paid maternity leave. It is also the only advanced economy that doesn’t guarantee workers any vacation, paid or unpaid, and the only highly developed country (other than South Korea) that doesn’t guarantee paid sick days. In contrast, the European Union’s 28 nations guarantee workers at least four weeks’ paid vacation.

Among the three dozen industrial countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States has the lowest minimum wage as a percentage of the median wage — just 34 percent of the typical wage, compared with 62 percent in France and 54 percent in Britain. It also has the second-highest percentage of low-wage workers among that group, exceeded only by Latvia.

All this means the United States suffers from what I call “anti-worker exceptionalism.”

Academics debate why American workers are in many ways worse off than their counterparts elsewhere, but there is overriding agreement on one reason: Labor unions are weaker in the United States than in other industrial nations. Just one in 16 private-sector American workers is in a union, largely because corporations are so adept and aggressive at beating back unionization. In no other industrial nation do corporations fight so hard to keep out unions.

The consequences are enormous, not only for wages and income inequality, but also for our politics and policymaking and for the many Americans who are mistreated at work.

To be sure, unions have their flaws, from corruption to their history of racial and sex discrimination. Still, Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson write of an important, unappreciated feature of unions in “Winner-Take-All Politics”: “While there are many ‘progressive’ groups in the American universe of organized interests, labor is the only major one focused on the broad economic concerns of those with modest incomes.”

As workers’ power has waned, many corporations have adopted practices that were far rarer — if not unheard-of — decades ago: hiring hordes of unpaid interns, expecting workers to toil 60 or 70 hours a week, prohibiting employees from suing and instead forcing them into arbitration (which usually favors employers), and hamstringing employees’ mobility by making them sign noncompete clauses.

America’s workers have for decades been losing out: year after year of wage stagnation, increased insecurity on the job, waves of downsizing and offshoring, and labor’s share of national income declining to its lowest level in seven decades.

Numerous studies have found that an important cause of America’s soaring income inequality is the decline of labor unions — and the concomitant decline in workers’ ability to extract more of the profit and prosperity from the corporations they work for. The only time during the past century when income inequality narrowed substantially was the 1940s through 1970s, when unions were at their peak of power and prominence.

Many Americans are understandably frustrated. That’s one reason the percentage who say they want to join a union has risen markedly. According to a 2018 M.I.T. study, 46 percent of nonunion workers say they would like to be in a union, up from 32 percent in 1995. Nonetheless, just 10.5 percent of all American workers, and only 6.4 percent of private-sector workers, are in unions.

But this desire to unionize faces some daunting challenges. In many corporations, the mentality is that any supervisor, whether a factory manager or retail manager, who fails to keep out a union is an utter failure. That means managers fight hard to quash unions. One study found that 57 percent of employers threatened to close operations when workers sought to unionize, while 47 percent threatened to cut wages or benefits and 34 percent fired union supporters during unionization drives.

Corporate executives’ frequent failure to listen to workers’ concerns — along with the intimidation of employees — can have deadly results. On April 5, 2010, a coal dust explosion killed 29 miners at Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch coal mine in West Virginia. A federal investigation found that the mine’s ventilation system was inadequate and that explosive gases were allowed to build up. Workers at the nonunion mine knew about these dangers. “No one felt they could go to management and express their fears,” Stanley Stewart, an Upper Big Branch miner, told a congressional committee. “We knew we’d be marked men and the management would look for ways to fire us.”

The diminished power of unions and workers has skewed American politics, helping give billionaires and corporations inordinate sway over America’s politics and policymaking. In the 2015-16 election cycle, business outspent labor $3.4 billion to $213 million, a ratio of 16 to 1, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. All of the nation’s unions, taken together, spend about $48 million a year for lobbying in Washington, while corporate America spends $3 billion. Little wonder that many lawmakers seem vastly more interested in cutting taxes on corporations than in raising the minimum wage.

There were undoubtedly many reasons for Donald Trump’s 2016 victory, but a key one was that many Americans seemed to view him as a protest candidate, promising to shake up “the system” and “drain the swamp.” Many voters embraced Mr. Trump because they believed his statements that the system is rigged — and in many ways it is. When it comes to workers’ power in the workplace and in politics, the pendulum has swung far toward corporations.

Reversing that won’t be easy, but it is vital we do so. There are myriad proposals to restore some balance, from having workers elect representatives to corporate boards to making it easier for workers to unionize to expanding public financing of political campaigns to prevent wealthy and corporate donors from often dominating.

America’s workers won’t stop thinking the system is rigged until they feel they have an effective voice in the workplace and in policymaking so that they can share in more of the economy’s prosperity to help improve their — and their loved ones’ — lives.

“…Yet in industrialized Western countries, where bravado is often mistaken for strength, a slower, humbler, more deliberative approach to decision-making tends to garner little respect. Our schools still prize innate abilities over other skills, and most students are encouraged to believe that speed (in answering questions and processing information) is an essential and even fateful sign of superiority. We also prefer “strong” leaders who stick to their convictions, even though closed-mindedness typically leads to more aggressive tactics and occasionally calamitous misunderstandings….”

Emily Bobrow, "‘The Intelligence Trap’ Review: How Smart Is Too Smart?"Wall Street Journal, August 5, 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-intelligence-trap-review-how-smart-is-too-smart-11565045370

‘The Intelligence Trap’ Review: How Smart Is Too Smart?

Every year brings more books about how stupid we are. Apparently humans are impulsive, gullible and prone to making all sorts of bad decisions. We are also fascinated by our shortcomings, if the shelves at airport bookstores are anything to go by. The latest contribution to the pile is from David Robson, a London-based science journalist, who offers an intriguing angle on our flawed habits of mind. In “The Intelligence Trap,” he argues not only that we are walking, talking, error-making machines, but also that the cleverest among us may make the biggest mistakes.

Anyone who has spent time on a college campus has probably intuited that innate intelligence and common sense don’t necessarily go hand in hand. But Mr. Robson bolsters his case with a raft of studies that show all the ways in which a fine mind can trip up. People with high SAT scores, for example, are less likely to either take advice or learn from their blunders. Folks with multiple degrees and professional expertise are often blind to their own biases. The consequences of these gaffes are often merely personal and embarrassing, but sometimes they are catastrophic. In American hospitals, one in 10 patient deaths appear to be the result of diagnostic mistakes.

To help distinguish between smarts and wisdom, Mr. Robson offers the analogy of a car. A fast engine can get you around quickly, but horsepower alone doesn’t guarantee you’ll arrive at your destination safely. Without a proper understanding of the rules of the road, a speedy driver is, in fact, a menace. Philosophers have perceived the shortcomings of sharp minds for millennia, but the pursuit of “evidence-based wisdom” really gained steam after the financial crash of 2008, when nearly everyone suffered from the costly mistakes of “experts.” New institutions such as Chicago’s Center for Practical Wisdom now apply scientific techniques, including randomized control trials, to explore and understand human reason. “The study of wisdom now seems to have reached a kind of tipping point,” Mr. Robson tells us.

In keeping with the driving comparison, this book is most entertaining when it allows readers to rubberneck at the collisions. The author’s anecdotes about the missteps of masterminds offer plenty of opportunities for schadenfreude—although the assumption that these problems only afflict other people is a perfect illustration of the blind spots intelligent people often have about themselves. Arthur Conan Doyle, for example, was easily hoodwinked by photographs of some fairies frolicking in Cottingley, England. In reality these sprites were cardboard cut-outs, but Conan Doyle, a devoted spiritualist in addition to being a doctor of medicine and the creator of Sherlock Holmes (the “perfect reasoning and observing machine”), claimed that they offered evidence of a supernatural world, and used his superior analytical reasoning to dismiss the skeptics and rationalize his beliefs. When the girls behind the photos finally confessed to the hoax, one of them admitted her surprise that adults would be so easily fooled—“they wanted to be taken in,” she observed.

Beliefs often arise from emotional needs, which we intellectually rationalize post hoc. Clever people are as prone to irrationality as everyone else—a phenomenon called “dysrationalia”—yet they are often even more skilled at justifying their superstitions. College graduates are more likely than those with less education to believe in extrasensory perception and “psychic healing.” High-IQ types are just as likely to have financial problems, even though they often have better jobs with higher salaries. Because many “brainiacs” expect to outsmart others, they are often more heedless of risks and less aware of their own flaws in thinking. As the 19th-century psychologist William James once said, “a great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.”

Mr. Robson offers some proven tricks for dodging these intellectual pratfalls. Many are familiar enough to be cliché: Be humble and keep an open mind; weigh opposing views with less emotion by taking a step back. These ideas may sound like common sense, but Mr. Robson convincingly shows us that they are not quite common enough. He cites the research of Eli Finkel at Northwestern University, who found that simply encouraging couples to view their conflicts from a more detached, dispassionate perspective helped them achieve greater intimacy and trust. Doctors who are pushed to analyze their gut responses and consider alternative hypotheses improve their diagnostic accuracy by up to 40%.

The good news is that wisdom, unlike intelligence, can be taught, and these lessons bear real fruit. People with superior reasoning skills are more content and generally happier with their relationships. Yet in industrialized Western countries, where bravado is often mistaken for strength, a slower, humbler, more deliberative approach to decision-making tends to garner little respect. Our schools still prize innate abilities over other skills, and most students are encouraged to believe that speed (in answering questions and processing information) is an essential and even fateful sign of superiority. We also prefer “strong” leaders who stick to their convictions, even though closed-mindedness typically leads to more aggressive tactics and occasionally calamitous misunderstandings.

What is fascinating is that IQ scores in industrialized countries have never been so high, rising the equivalent of 30 points in 80 years. Access to factual information has also never been so widespread. Yet we are no less susceptible to the allure of fake news and pseudoscience. We are as likely as ever to opportunistically prop up our own positions and take down those of our rivals. Clearly, we need to find new and better ways to teach critical thinking and measure good judgment. Reading David Robson’s book would be a good place to start.

"...Building one wind turbine requires 900 tons of steel, 2,500 tons of concrete and 45 tons of nonrecyclable plastic. Solar power requires even more cement, steel and glass—not to mention other metals. Global silver and indium mining will jump 250% and 1,200% respectively over the next couple of decades to provide the materials necessary to build the number of solar panels, the International Energy Agency forecasts. World demand for rare-earth elements—which aren’t rare but are rarely mined in America—will rise 300% to 1,000% by 2050 to meet the Paris green goals. If electric vehicles replace conventional cars, demand for cobalt and lithium, will rise more than 20-fold. That doesn’t count batteries to back up wind and solar grids...."

Mark P. Mills, "If You Want ‘Renewable Energy,’ Get Ready to Dig,"Wall Street Journal, August 5, 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/if-you-want-renewable-energy-get-ready-to-dig-11565045328

If You Want ‘Renewable Energy,’ Get Ready to Dig

Democrats dream of powering society entirely with wind and solar farms combined with massive batteries. Realizing this dream would require the biggest expansion in mining the world has seen and would produce huge quantities of waste.

“Renewable energy” is a misnomer. Wind and solar machines and batteries are built from nonrenewable materials. And they wear out. Old equipment must be decommissioned, generating millions of tons of waste. The International Renewable Energy Agency calculates that solar goals for 2050 consistent with the Paris Accords will result in old-panel disposal constituting more than double the tonnage of all today’s global plastic waste. Consider some other sobering numbers:

A single electric-car battery weighs about 1,000 pounds. Fabricating one requires digging up, moving and processing more than 500,000 pounds of raw materials somewhere on the planet. The alternative? Use gasoline and extract one-tenth as much total tonnage to deliver the same number of vehicle-miles over the battery’s seven-year life.

When electricity comes from wind or solar machines, every unit of energy produced, or mile traveled, requires far more materials and land than fossil fuels. That physical reality is literally visible: A wind or solar farm stretching to the horizon can be replaced by a handful of gas-fired turbines, each no bigger than a tractor-trailer.

Building one wind turbine requires 900 tons of steel, 2,500 tons of concrete and 45 tons of nonrecyclable plastic. Solar power requires even more cement, steel and glass—not to mention other metals. Global silver and indium mining will jump 250% and 1,200% respectively over the next couple of decades to provide the materials necessary to build the number of solar panels, the International Energy Agency forecasts. World demand for rare-earth elements—which aren’t rare but are rarely mined in America—will rise 300% to 1,000% by 2050 to meet the Paris green goals. If electric vehicles replace conventional cars, demand for cobalt and lithium, will rise more than 20-fold. That doesn’t count batteries to back up wind and solar grids.

Last year a Dutch government-sponsored study concluded that the Netherlands’ green ambitions alone would consume a major share of global minerals. “Exponential growth in renewable energy production capacity is not possible with present-day technologies and annual metal production,” it concluded.

The demand for minerals likely won’t be met by mines in Europe or the U.S. Instead, much of the mining will take place in nations with oppressive labor practices. The Democratic Republic of the Congo produces 70% of the world’s raw cobalt, and China controls 90% of cobalt refining. The Sydney-based Institute for a Sustainable Future cautions that a global “gold” rush for minerals could take miners into “some remote wilderness areas have maintained high biodiversity because they haven’t yet been disturbed.”

What’s more, mining and fabrication require the consumption of hydrocarbons. Building enough wind turbines to supply half the world’s electricity would require nearly two billion tons of coal to produce the concrete and steel, along with two billion barrels of oil to make the composite blades. More than 90% of the world’s solar panels are built in Asia on coal-heavy electric grids.

Engineers joke about discovering “unobtanium,” a magical energy-producing element that appears out of nowhere, requires no land, weighs nothing, and emits nothing. Absent the realization of that impossible dream, hydrocarbons remain a far better alternative than today’s green dreams.