A Rational Person’s Guide to Climate Change

The great Tom Wolfe astutely defined a cult as a religion with no political power. Wolfe’s observation resonates today when it comes to climate change. What was once a cult has now become the official religion of academia, government bureaucracy, rent-seeking corporations, and the Left. Just like Galileo who dared to challenge the Catholic Church’s official scientific consensus of the sun revolving around the Earth, those brave enough to question aspects of the climate change credo are immediately labeled as deniers, akin to heretics in the temple, risking banishment.

The primary challenge with rationally assessing the topic of climate change is that a very complex set of discrete issues has been boiled down to a neat, simple, universal, and erroneous view of political convenience. For a rational person to seriously reason through climate change issues, one must unpackage the singular, simple rhetoric into component pieces that, once properly assessed and sequenced, can build views anchored in science, data, and fact.

Query #1: Is climate change occurring?

Undoubtedly, the answer is ‘yes.’ Climate change has been a reality since Earth had a climate. Warming periods, cooling periods, Ice Ages, and widespread droughts have been occurring for millions of years and before humans appeared on the scene. Global climate change and trends in regional climates have been, and will remain, a reality.

Query #2: Can future climate change and its effects be accurately modeled?

Attempts to accurately predict climate have been abject failures. If the poor success rates of climate modelers were posted by a surgeon, attorney, or professional sports coach, all would be fired for incompetence. The failure is not from lack of effort or poor scientific acumen, although Climategate exposed how some in the racket of subsidy and government largesse are more than willing to play fast and loose with the scientific method.

The reason models have proven unreliable is they are attempting to simulate and predict the most complex fluid flow system ever: global climate.

The most advanced tools and techniques in meteorology struggle to accurately predict a hurricane path three days out, whether it is going to snow next week, and if the upcoming summer will be unusually hot or mild. What makes one think we would be able to accurately predict global temperatures fifty years out?

Anyone who states models can accurately predict future climate metrics (temperature, storm severity, etc.) is either uninformed or has a hidden agenda.

Query #3: Is human activity increasing the global carbon dioxide level?

Like our first question, the answer here is clearly, ‘yes.’ We know with certainty that since mankind harnessed the power of the carbon atom, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels increased from about 200 parts-per-million (ppm) to about 400 ppm. Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere will continue to grow as nations and economies further develop. Coincidentally, we should celebrate the rise in carbon dioxide levels because it brought higher life expectancies, lower infant mortality rates, and improved individual rights for billions of people. Carbon has driven, and continues to drive, quality of life on the third rock from the sun.

Query #4: Are increased carbon dioxide concentrations materially impacting the climate and global temperature?

This is the question that is least understood by the public and is most suspect to distortion and abuse by the leaders of the religion. The key phrase here is ‘parts per million,’ or ppm. People don’t understand the context of 200 ppm doubling to 400 ppm, because they have been instructed for decades to exclusively focus on the 200 and the 400, and to ignore the ‘ppm.’ A helpful analogy will illustrate the flaw in ignoring the ‘ppm’ part.

Imagine a Pennsylvania college football stadium that holds 100,000 fans on gameday when Penn State is playing Ohio State (sadly, it’s hard to picture that in the age of pandemic). A 200-ppm level of Ohio State fans (carbon dioxide) in the crowd of 100,000 (atmosphere) would be equivalent to 20 fans wearing Ohio State jerseys versus 99,980 wearing Penn State jerseys. If the concentration of Ohio State fans in the crowd doubled to 400 ppm, it would mean the number of fans wearing Ohio State gear went from 20 to 40, and the number of fans wearing Nittany Lion gear declined from 99,980 to 99,960. Clearly, the nature of that crowd did not change in any material sense, despite the concentration of Ohio State fans doubling.

A doubling of trace amounts of atmospheric carbon dioxide, measured in the parts per million and over hundreds of years since the Industrial Revolution, is not going to materially change climate or global temperature. Instead, it is going to have a very small, perhaps unmeasurable, impact on climate. Climate change is a reality. But simple math shows increases in trace levels of carbon dioxide, from 0.02% (200 ppm) to 0.04% (400 ppm) of the atmosphere, due to human industry and energy consumption are not the major, rate-setting driver.

Query #5: Are wind and solar renewable forms of energy?

It’s an article of faith in the climate change religion that renewable energy exists, it is the global savior from climate change, and it is best exemplified by windmills and solar panels. Such beliefs defy science and reality. Laws of thermodynamics instruct us that there is no form of truly renewable energy. Worse yet, windmills and solar panels as forms of electricity generation at scale represent massive carbon footprints that likely exceed the carbon footprint of natural gas-derived electricity. Life-cycle visualization of what it takes for renewables to provide electricity at scale helps illustrate the reality.

If, say, western Pennsylvania needed to add 650 MW of baseload electricity generation, doing so with windmills would have a massive life-cycle carbon footprint.

Nearly 300 large turbines/towers would be needed for a capacity of 650 MW (compared to a compact combined cycle array for natural gas).
The materials needed to construct the wind turbines must be mined and processed, likely in places like Mongolia where the resources are located, using carbon to do so while massively scarring the surface where the deposits are.
The components must be constructed, likely in places like China, in factories powered by carbon. The components then need shipped here, using carbon to power the trains, vessels, trucks, and planes.
Windmills in places like Pennsylvania only work on ridge lines, meaning wide swaths of trees must be felled to clear pads and right of ways for transmission lines, resulting in visible scars on scenic areas and another big contribution to carbon footprint.
Concrete must be poured for pads and miles of new transmission lines must be run to link the hundreds of turbines to the grid, consuming yet more carbon.

Finally, you need backup generation for when the wind is not blowing, which is most likely going to be carbon-based natural gas or coal. To top it off, much of this cycle needs repeated in about seven years when the turbines need replaced due to age (turbine disposal has its own carbon footprint).

A legitimate scoring of the life-cycle carbon ledger for wind shows it can suffer a much larger carbon footprint than natural gas-fired generation. The same conclusion would hold for solar, perhaps worse in places like Pennsylvania since the sun doesn’t shine as much as the wind blows.

Be wary of those who tout renewable energy and how the carbon footprints of wind and solar are zero, or close to it. Most likely they are angling for subsidies or political favor. They are not speaking from a position of scientific authority.

Query #6: Is climate change the biggest threat facing us today?

Climate change, whether caused by rising carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere or not, is always going to pose a risk to human health. Hurricanes destroy and drought kills. Mother Nature for millennia has proven to be a force to be reckoned with. But climate change is not even close to the top threats to our quality of life today.

Disease, as the past year of pandemic has demonstrated, is a much bigger threat to humans. Violent crime, particularly in large cities, is a bigger risk to urbanites than what the polar ice caps are doing. Corrupt government, the rise of socialism, and a broken public education system should worry Americans more than rising sea levels. Young adults in the developed world face a bigger safety risk from driving than climate change while young adults in the developing world are more at risk from contaminated water than carbon dioxide. Whatever twists and turns the climate may take over the years, have confidence that technology will allow humans to adapt to it.

Final query: What to think?

There are discrete issues that converge into the climate change discussion. The unpackaging of the cult/religion credo reveals logic and truth. Climate change has always and will always occur. Models forecasting the complexity of future climate have proven to be inaccurate.

Human activity since the Industrial Revolution has doubled carbon dioxide atmospheric concentration and may continue to increase it. However, the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a trace amount, and its doubling over the past couple hundred years has not materially altered the climate.

There is no such thing as truly renewable energy. Wind and solar power are incredibly carbon intensive forms of electricity generation when an honest life-cycle assessment is performed. Although climate always will have the potential to harm or kill, there are much larger and more looming threats to the human condition at our doorstep today.

The Latin origin of the word ‘science’ derives from ‘knowledge.’ History’s greatest scientists did not trust other scientists; the scientific method and human progress rely on healthy skepticism of the scientific consensus. Don’t fear being labeled a denier, called a skeptic, or challenging the scientific/political consensus. Think of Galileo, Einstein, and Curie.

Discovering Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience

Americans who desire order, stability, and civility in life find themselves having endured a painful string of recent months. Order, stability, and civility seem to be in scarce supply of late, no matter where you live, what politics you subscribe to, or how old you are.

In trying times like these, thought-provoking reading helps place the current environment in better perspective. I recently read Henry David Thoreau’s essay, Civil Disobedience. Thoreau and the subject of civil disobedience would not normally be on top of my reading list for two reasons.

First, I am not the civil disobedience type; never have been and probably never will be. In fact, I am one of the least likely individuals to engage in breaking a law to prove a point, let alone someone who would look to do harm to property or my fellow man.

Second, I’ve always been inspired by the more overtly provocative writers: Rand, Orwell, Paine, Didion, and T. Wolfe to name a few. Thought leaders who jolt you into an awareness. Henry David Thoreau never struck me as that type of writer. My impression of him was a guy up in the New England sticks, sitting on his porch, and looking out over a pond as he contemplates nature. The Kenny G of literature (not that there is anything wrong with some alto sax from time to time).

I was wrong, big time. Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience is an impactful gem that has proved its relevance over 170 years and across the globe. Yet most Americans never read the essay and equate Thoreau’s legacy exclusively to his famous work, Walden. That’s too bad, because Civil Disobedience changed the world and history.

Thoreau was jailed for a night in the 1840s because he refused to pay a poll tax to the government. Afterward, he discussed the experience and his reasoning with a Concord newspaper and then expanded on the interview with an essay he published in a journal. Not much came of it, and it looked like Civil Disobedience would be quietly forgotten.

But decades later, Mahatma Gandhi gave it a read and become inspired. Gandhi tailored his version of civil disobedience to catalyze a movement that redrew the geopolitical map. Gandhi and Thoreau, in turn, served as motivators for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s as he utilized civil disobedience to combat racial segregation policies.

That’s one heck of a coaching tree, Thoreau-to-Gandhi-to-King, distanced by decades yet connected by the power of the written word. We should visit Civil Disobedience in our schools, homes, and professions. The themes captured and articulated by Thoreau sound more relevant today than ever.

A foundational belief in the essay is that government has the potential to be dangerous to the individual, and that the individual must be continually vigilant of the threat of government usurping his conscience. The essay implores an ethical duty to be skeptical of government.

Thoreau makes no apology for adherence to the principle that government is best which governs least. He recognized that progression from monarchy to democracy correlates to increased individual rights. Today, we should recognize a regression from democracy to socialism correlates to reduced individual rights. Thoreau would be horrified to see the extent government permeates American life and tramples the individual in 2021.

He also indirectly argues in support of the Electoral College, another of our Republic’s institutions that is under attack these days, by pointing out a danger of democracy without refining safeguards is that the majority can bully the minority. The majority rules, not because the majority is right or noble, but because it is simply the strongest. Conscience, justice, and what is right may get bulldozed over. Thoreau and the Framers knew we are individuals first, and subjects afterward. The Electoral College was designed to safeguard that view.

I wish I would’ve read Civil Disobedience in college, because it speaks to an issue I am particularly passionate about: the vital role businesses and corporations play in a free society. Corporations are vilified as soulless predators in the media, academia, and by the left on a consistent basis. Thoreau pointed out that although a corporation has no conscience, a corporation of conscientious individuals is a corporation with a conscience. Better late than never for me; I am going to trumpet this theme through 2021 and beyond.

I get the strong sense Thoreau would not be a fan of modern-day subsidy-seeking corporations, government lobbyists, environmental policy, or leftists/socialists. He points out we should be free to pursue our self-interests and beliefs, but not if we do so to the detriment of another. Think about how much government policy and regulation today is designed to take from one to subsidize another, with the schemers being the influential elite manufacturing a mathematical majority. All of it under the banners of the public good and socially just.

Put Civil Disobedience on your reading list. An inspiring work that reminds us of our duty of public discourse during challenging times.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of ESG

Today businesses, markets, and investors are increasingly obsessed with the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) arena.

Public companies trumpet ESG credibility, investment firms are unveiling ESG products at dizzying rates, and investors are constantly being told it is a moral imperative to invest in ESG products. Human nature attracts us to embrace ESG as a virtue. Yet media, environmental groups, academia, and Wall Street firms adore ESG, which is a sure tip-off to its potential hazards.

ESG presents a conundrum: is it “doing well by doing good” or instead does it stand for “enabling stakeholder graft”? With trillions of dollars at stake, the conundrum warrants an honest and fair assessment. Cue the Ennio Morricone soundtrack, because the ESG craze has components that are good (Blondie), bad (Angel Eyes), and outright ugly (Tuco).

The Good (Blondies)

Let’s be unequivocally clear: ESG focus for individual companies, particularly ones that operate in environments with risk, can be an effective tool to garner market recognition, reduce risk, and create value.

The key to ESG effectiveness is transparently laying out performance and targets for tangible and measurable metrics that correlate to the E, S, or G. This sounds obvious, but is unfortunately a rare thing in the world of public companies.

To illustrate, take a natural gas company operating in Appalachia. Effective ESG management would include:

a percent reduction in annual fresh water usage that can be measured year-on-year (falling under E);
a defined portion of annual spend or employee hires that hail from economically disadvantaged communities within the stated geographic operational footprint of the firm that can be itemized year-on-year (covering the S); and,
straightforward reporting of how stock ownership has grown in magnitude and tenure for directors and executives over time (addressing the G).

Add to these three examples similar metrics and you start to see how ESG can be utilized by companies across a range of industries to clearly express performance in risk management, long term value creation, and across stakeholder groups. By the way, a key to effective ESG management is that companies don’t just report how they performed for the prior year across these metrics, but also their near-term targets (as in the next few years, not twenty years out). State a standard that can be tracked, and then deliver actions and performance that back it up.

The Bad (Angel Eyes)

Although it may be politically incorrect to say so, the truth is much of the ESG complex has become a racket. Investors are being duped on a grand scale while certain corporations and investment firms obfuscate and make a killing, respectively.

Let’s start with ESG shenanigans in corporate America.

Beware whenever you hear a company making a big splash about an unmeasurable and opaque target well into the distant future. Take the multi-billion-dollar industrial or energy firm committing to “net zero carbon” in some far-in-the-distant year when much of the current executive team and board will likely not be alive. No one knows how such a metric is calculated and if the path to zero carbon is even scientifically viable (it’s not). Plus, the target date is set so no one running their mouths today are accountable for seeing it through.

Companies that engage is this type of PR stunt increasingly risk violation of SEC regulations dealing with false and misleading statements. If these executives said something similarly baseless about future cash flow or net income aspirations, they would need a criminal defense attorney. But if it falls in the squishy world of ESG, it not only receives a pass but is applauded, even when such ESG talk is becoming more and more material to capital markets.

Worst of all, corporate titans waxing poetic at Davos about how their companies are going to be net carbon zero by 2050 often corelates to poor ESG performance today.

Undefined, non-measurable targets decades in the future provide cover to shift attention from the troubling, tangible, and harsh realities of right now. You see it everywhere.

Amazon talks about its fleet going electric by 2035 while today it imposes harsh labor practices on its employees and contributes to deforestation with ubiquitous use of cardboard. Apple harps how it will be net carbon zero in coming years while its supply chain relies on an oppressive Chinese state that squashes human rights and its FoxConn contractor installs nets around its facilities to prevent exhausted workers from committing suicide. Patagonia brags about its refusal to sell its apparel to financial institutions that invest in the fossil fuel industry, yet its products are carbon-derived and its murky supply chain is traced to third world epicenters known for sweat shops.

Then there is the investment firm looking to use ESG as a convenient vehicle to shove high-fee products down the throats of everyone, from mom-and-pop investors to multi-billion-dollar pension funds.

Wall Street is creating new ESG funds and products at the rate of trillions of dollars each year. Investment firms seeking to lure well-intentioned investors can mislead by touting how their high-fee ESG-focused funds beat traditional portfolios. However, reality shows many ESG funds struggle to match the performance of simple, low-fee index funds on a consistent basis. Be wary of firms rolling out ESG-friendly titled funds with no meaningful difference in their holdings compared to non-ESG funds, conning guilt-ridden investors in a multi-billion-dollar charade of wordsmithing and subpar returns.

Finally, there are the massive institutional investors, such as index funds and pensions, demanding that public companies they invest in meet ESG criteria. The demanding institutions hold shares in hundreds, perhaps thousands, of public companies all over the map and in every imaginable industry. Such institutions realize the influence they hold over public companies and want to do the right thing by using their influence to promote the worthy aspects of ESG.

Not surprisingly, many of these large institutional investors desire an easy and efficient way to screen ESG performance across their huge portfolios. They rely heavily on global frameworks and reporting mechanisms that claim to universally define good ESG behavior—therein lies the flaw.

Delivering and assessing effective ESG performance requires sweating numerous details unique to individual companies and industries. It is not a one-size-fits-all approach set by a static spreadsheet, designed by people who never worked in the trenches of the industries they judge; instead it is hard work requiring specialized knowledge of an industry or company.

The mammoth institutional investor may have the benefit of a glossy and sleek report touting its ESG veneer, but it won’t have the substantive ESG wisdom that reduces investment risk and boosts returns for their clients and beneficiaries. Often the application of these blunt tools for assessing ESG performance frustrates the worthy aspirations of the institutional investor.

The Ugly (Tucos)

Prolonged immersion in the bad of ESG leads to the ugly, as exemplified by the demise of Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) and WeWork.

For years, PG&E racked up ESG accolades from self-proclaimed ESG experts. Sustainalytics.com deemed the California utility an ESG outperformer, Corporate Responsibility magazine’s 100 Best Corporate Citizens ranked PG&E as the top utility in the nation, and Newsweek’s Green Rankings also placed PG&E at the top of the utility heap. The company boasted that over a third of its power came from renewables, which helped deliver a string of best-possible governance ratings from Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS). PG&E was the belle of the ESG ball, yet also severely dysfunctional.

The utility’s rap sheet over the past twenty years includes convictions for over 700 misdemeanors and felony convictions stemming from misleading regulators and the public about the state of a gas pipeline that ruptured and killed eight people. PG&E made attorney Erin Brockovich a Hollywood movie sensation when she represented clients who were eventually awarded over $600 million from PG&E stemming from contaminated drinking water. From 2012 to 2016 PG&E supervisors looked the other way as employees fabricated thousands of on-time results to hit internal targets for responding to excavation work around buried power and gas lines, accumulating over 170,000 violations of state law. Clearly, this was not a best-in-class track record for E, S, or G.

Then, in 2017 and 2018, wildfires raged across California and it was determined that over 1,500 fires, several of them catastrophic, were caused by PG&E’s poor maintenance practices, deferred safety upgrades, slow responsiveness, and obsolete equipment. More than a hundred lives were lost. Twenty-two thousand buildings were destroyed across 350,000 scorched acres. A company audit months after the fires found nearly 10,000 problems with power lines throughout its system. Before you knew it, the utility was facing tens of billions of dollars in liability. PG&E’s system is now subject to frequent rolling blackouts, delivering a third-world power grid to ratepayers. PG&E filed for bankruptcy, bringing home the reality of wiped-out investors despite all those shiny yet hollow ESG credentials.

The case of WeWork offers another cautionary lesson. The office space tech darling (at least for a period of time) boasted a $47 billion valuation in early 2019 and possessed one of the savviest investment firms on the planet as a major owner: SoftBank. WeWork was as ESG friendly as it gets, at least on the surface. The company’s founder and initial CEO, Adam Neumann, constantly spouted a potpourri of ESG missives including how WeWork “advances inclusion and equity in the global economy,” wanted “to build a world where no one feels alone,” and existed “to elevate the world’s consciousness.”

When the company was deciding which stock exchange to list its shares on before its planned IPO, Neumann sat the CEOs of NYSE and NASDAQ down to ask which one would ban meat and plastic in the exchanges’ cafeterias. Such a ban would curry favor with WeWork and land the exchange the coveted stock listing. NASDAQ practiced one-upmanship by committing to create a We50 index of companies practicing sustainability and won the listing.

Not before long, NASDAQ and SoftBank looked foolish as WeWork’s substantial financial woes and its CEO’s problematic public behavior peeled away the thin ESG veneer to expose a stark reality. Valuation plummeted from $47 billion to less than $8 billion, Neumann was ousted as CEO, the IPO was canceled, the company had to be bailed out by SoftBank to avoid ruin, and a reorganization to cut costs could not be effectuated because the company was in such dire financial straits it could not afford to pay severance. That’s what happens when public company governance behind the ESG posing is a nightmare of reality.

Finding the Blondies While Avoiding the Angel Eyes and Tucos of the Capital Markets

Effective ESG performance and assessment can help companies and investors competitively pursue profit in a capitalistic society. But beware the unscrupulous looking to lure capital or the naïve looking to ride moral high horses who abuse and misapply ESG for counterproductive designs. The quick and easy approach to ESG is a tempting mirage of sugary nothingness. Real ESG takes grueling work and endless effort; an infinite pursuit of perfection where the lucky capture it for only brief periods yet prevail over the long haul.

Requiem for the Pro Sports Fan

I am a free market and capitalism advocate; the more society has of these two, the better. I was also a dedicated sports fan for many years, starting at childhood. I use the past tense to describe my sports dedication because I lost my passion for pro sports years ago.

What bled my love for pro sports? The quick answers are free agency creating continual player turnover, organizations constantly moving teams from city to city for more lucrative arrangements, and player branding superseding team performance. In short, profit motive and self-interest.

How can I be an advocate of capitalism and the free market and then lament professional sports being driven by money and individualism? This question confounded me every time I was frustrated to hear about a team abandoning its city for a more lucrative zip code. I felt for the betrayed fans of the team, yet I knew a business’ duty is to pursue a profitable path. Same mixed feelings when a star player hopped from one team to another chasing a bigger contract.

Teams and Leagues Break the Social Contract

But then it dawned on me that professional sports are different than other industries and businesses. Pro sports have a social contract with society.

Leagues are granted a near monopoly, the ability to control wages ala the salary cap, public subsidy for venues, and various exemptions from a host of regulations that the rest of us are subject to. In exchange, the leagues are supposed to agree to take a stakeholder long view, with each team in the league developing roots in the cities and regions where they are situated. Moving and short-termism would only be applied in dire situations where the team was facing insolvency. Pro sports under this compact were a more lucrative, sexier version of a public utility. Sort-of private and at the same time sort-of public works.

The social contract between leagues/teams and their traditional cities/regions has transitioned into a new arrangement between pro sports and big money pools.

The money pools are television/media and booming cities looking to lure teams away from their traditional homes. The transition allowed professional sports to retain all the benefits of the original social contract while being released to commit to the highest bidder.

That isn’t capitalism or a free market. Instead, it’s a public-works model that was commandeered into an oligopoly colluding to maximize its economic rent at the expense of the towns, regions, and fans who paid up front and held up their end of the deal for years. Traditional fans, legacy cities, and taxpayers are getting hosed. The market does not function as a free one but instead functions as a controlled one through the collusion of the few.

Athlete Morphs to Brand

While leagues and teams learned how to break the social contract with legacy cities while keeping its benefits and pursuing more lucrative opportunities, the professional athlete was not sitting idle.

Today’s professional athlete has become a discrete media brand. Performance in the game is now just a means to the end of the star’s ‘platform.’ Touchdowns, three-pointers, home runs, and goals only matter today if they convert into internet clicks and social media followers.

This startling transformation was completed within three generations. Baby boomers grew up idolizing sports when teams and star players didn’t move. Clemente is always a Pirate, Rocket Richard is a perpetual Canadien, Russell is the eternal Celtic, and Jim Brown is forever a Brown. The stability of great players built the brand, image, and culture of players, teams, divisions, and leagues.

Then came the advent of wider-spread free agency and the big money of television in the 1980s and 1990s.

Beloved teams moved from city to city to chase public subsidy and generous handouts. Free agency went from exception to rule, and the star spending an entire career with one team started to become something special. Fan trepidation loomed when a big-name player had a contract expiring and coming up for extension. The stars increasingly engaged in musical chairs: Gretzky left Edmonton for L.A., Montana went from 49er to Chief, Shaq switched the Magic for the Lakers, and so on.

Jerry Seinfeld nailed this era when he quipped that sports fans started rooting for laundry, because players and teams were moving from city to city. Should Nolan Ryan’s plaque show him wearing a Mets, Angels, Astros, or Rangers cap? The 1980s and 1990s saw player and team movement starting to shift fan loyalty from team to player.

There was once a reliable, sequential formula for pro athlete success: the expression of individual talent via the highlight reel and stat sheet, then the championship title, followed by endorsements and bigger contracts. The formula worked for decades, with the exemplar being the career trajectory of Michael Jordan.

That formula no longer applies.

Today’s stars are focused on how many followers they have on social media, not whether their team wins a title. Players and advisors manage playing time and career decisions to maximize brand beyond the field-court-rink. If a player creates tension between individual brand and team when posting something on social media that will attract followers of the player but also draw team critics, today’s athlete looks after #1 and worries about the team later.

The concept of continuity of a team has been undone, so that the modern fan doesn’t associate with teams. Fans now follow an individual athlete, and more so the player’s social media posts than his stats (gambling and fantasy leagues aside). Why be concerned with what laundry the player is wearing this season? The laundry’s logo will surely change before you know it. This is what athletes pursuing their self-interests looks like in 2021.

What’s a Fan to Do?

Feeling unease with the current state of pro sports does not conflict with advocating for free enterprise and capitalism. With the social contract between pro sports and their traditional homes breached, fans are free to pursue enjoyment guilt-free.

Fans have two paths to choose from. One path is to get with the times: stop rooting for team laundry, download the popular social media apps to follow favorite brands (what we used to call players), and replace televised games with internet clips of player highlights, fashion, and skits. The other path is to stop following current sports and instead revisit prior teams, games, and players immortalized in the YouTube time vault. Outside of the Super Bowl or Final Four, sign me up for the latter.

Assessing Trump’s Four Years

With President Biden now in the White House, let’s objectively assess President Trump’s four years in office.

An objective evaluation is neither construed from the Left’s Resist Movement (there are plenty of those views out there to read) nor part of the MAGA-hat-wearing, Trump-Rambo-flag-waving crowd (with its own small but vocal minority that breaks laws and assaults).

No, objectively here means from the lens of middle-class Americans in fly-over country. Places like my corner of the world, western Pennsylvania. You know, the people and regions the government and its elected leaders are supposed to work for.

So, how would one grade Trump looking back on the past four years?

Although assessing the leader of the most powerful nation on Earth in the complex modern era can be a daunting task, Trump’s legacy comes down to performance in three crucial categories: domestic/foreign policy, fiscal/monetary policy, and the intangibles/leadership. Trump’s performance across these three categories has been quite the mixed bag.

Domestic/Foreign Policy Grade: A

Trump clearly excelled in the category of domestic/foreign policy.
Countless Americans benefitted from deregulation across numerous industries and activities; working families along with free enterprise doers had the shackles of the administrative state loosened for the first time in a decade.

Those that carry society’s water as taxpayers were able to retain more of their hard-earned value with tax reform. Parents and their children benefitted from policies that favored school choice. Criminal justice reform became a reality. A record number of federal judges, including over 50 appellate judges, were confirmed to the bench. America maintained its global energy leadership, keeping domestic energy costs affordable while sharing cleaner-burning natural gas with others abroad.

Historic accords were inked between Israel and wide swaths of Arab and Muslim nations. An oppressive, aggressive, and menacing China was finally taken head on. NAFTA was replaced with the superior USMCA. The nice sounding but flawed concept of free trade was replaced with the practical reality of fair trade between the US and trade partners.

Trump wasn’t perfect on the policy front. Not getting major immigration reform across the finish line was a missed opportunity. Operation Warp Speed successfully rolled out vaccines in less than a year, but the pandemic still claimed a heavy toll in lost lives.

Love him or despise him, but Trump posted a policy record that bested his predecessors all the way back to Reagan. The scoreboard of pre-pandemic GDP growth, unemployment, and market valuations proves it. All of it achieved while reducing our involvements in endless wars in faraway lands.

Fiscal/Monetary Policy Grade: F

This category is the biggest failure of Trump and no one across the political spectrum seems interested in talking about it. The US national debt sits at nearly $28 trillion dollars, which is roughly $7 trillion more than our annual GDP. The US government now posts a debt level that is over eight-times its revenue. To put that egregious metric in perspective, consider the S&P index of public corporations posts an average debt-to-revenue ratio of less than 0.5.

Multi-trillion-dollar annual federal deficits are now the accepted and welcomed norm. The Trump era only solidified the comfort with these egregious fiscal levels. Entitlement reform never materialized, and the past four years only stoked the dumpster fire that consists of the federal budget, deficit, and debt. Trump and the Fed had a love-hate relationship over four years. Unfortunately for us, the love part of that relationship was their joint rapture in zero interest rates and a Fed balance sheet that only knows one direction.

Trump, Congress, and the Fed collaborated to have government drive capital allocation to the point where massive bubbles have inflated over equities, debt, real estate, and a host of exotic assets (art, wine, rare coins, etc.).

Saving went from a virtue in our culture (frugality was one of Ben Franklin’s 13 Virtues) to a punished behavior. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Our nation is about to experience that axiom the hard way as it relates to free money and continual outspend.

Intangibles/Leadership: C (the average of an A and F, as explained below)

Presidents should be judged not just on their policies and the numbers, but also on leadership qualities and intangibles. When it comes to that last component, this country has not seen a president like Trump since FDR. And there is massive positive and massive negative that goes along with that statement.

First, the positive. Trump was a trailblazer and disruptor when it came to communication methods.

Trump single-handedly rendered the mainstream media obsolete with his use of social media, much like FDR did with his fireside chats via radio. Worse yet for the media, he exposed for all to see blatant bias on a range of issues lying underneath the faux veneer of objectivity. And he accomplished all that without the support of (one might argue despite) traditional political party infrastructure. Politicians for generations will be looking to mimic his strategy when it comes to communication.

But there were negatives, some of them massive.

The content of his tweets represents a cumulative failure of leadership. Often it was not what he said, but how he said it. And sometimes it was what he said. But the best way to summarize his body of work on social media and at press conferences over four years is: good grief! Regardless of the fanatical views and violent tendencies of segments of both the Right and Left, as president, equivocating and rationalizing such behavior with a “the other side does it, too” mentality falls woefully short of the obligations of the office. A little discipline or a measure of rising above the fray would’ve done wonders. Alas, neither were apparent.

The other big negative in this category was how Trump acted after the election. High achieving individuals with track records of success don’t suffer loss well. And objective observers understand Trump had a lot working against him, including the Washington establishment and proponents of the status quo in both political parties, the media, a global public health crisis, untested mail-in voting, and so on. But when you’re the leader of the free world, there will be times where the nation comes first. Trump’s lame duck period was one of those times. He did not rise to the occasion, no matter what his role was with the lawlessness that ensued at the U.S. Capitol.

Trump was a force that burned down and rewrote the political playbook on communication and leadership. But he blew it with a poorly executed game plan, lack of judgement, and dangerous penchant for stoking the flames of discontent.

Overall Final Grade: C

We enjoyed better and suffered worse presidents than Trump. What is frustrating with Trump’s performance is that he did so many things right. But stoking fiscal and monetary flames higher and unbecoming behavior that covered up the substance with the form leaves many wondering what might have been.