#68 Humanity as Assailant, Earth as Avenger? By ANDREW C. REVKIN

TomDispatch, Grist and many other blogs are carrying an essay by Michael T. Klare, a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College, that offers a counterpoint to Bill McKibben’s account of a planet so marred by human affairs that it requires a distorted name, “Eaarth.” (The video above reflects this notion because it is less “natural” than it appears.)

Klare’s view — strongly echoing the ideas of James Lovelock (who explored climate, nuclear power and other issues with me in a 2006 video interview) — is that the environmental challenges confronting humans these days, particularly the aftermath of the great quake and tsunami in Japan, are somewhat akin to the immune response of an invaded organism. Our home planet, he writes, is “an avenger, rather than simply victim”:

It’s not enough to think of Eaarth as an impotent casualty of humanity’s predations.  It is also a complex organic system with many potent defenses against alien intervention — defenses it is already wielding to devastating effect when it comes to human societies. And keep this in mind: we are only at the beginning of this process.

Humans, the assailant, Earth the avenger?

There’s nice imagery and allegory there, but that’s more the realm of Stan Lee, to my mind.

I see another explanation of this turbulent moment.

We are a young species with a short memory and only slowly-dawning awareness of three vital pieces of the challenge of meshing our aspirations with life on Earth: the planet’s dynamics, our capacity to jog the system and — perhaps most importantly — the distorting mix of rational, emotional and instinctual processes in our brains that shape our perceptions and actions.

So far, as I’ve written before, we’ve been in a full-tilt teen-style binge. But now we face the tough question: What do we want to be when we grow up?

Addendum | Vaclav Smil, an essential touchstone on risk, resources and technology, has weighed in afresh in American Scientist with an overview of Japan’s challenges in the wake of its multifaceted, and still unfolding, calamity and a must-read critique of “the latest infatuations” related to the global energy challenge.

Just in case you missed it a while back, I was lucky enough to be able to spend an hour with Smil on a stage at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Canada, in 2009, exploring the simple question, “9 Billion People + 1 Planet = ?” Here’s the video (seat belts required!):

#67 New York’s Green Grid By ALEC APPELBAUM

MANHATTAN’S street grid, which turned 200 years old last month, has long been an easy target for urban romantics. They love to point out how its relentless logic — most blocks are a precise 200 feet by 600 feet — imposed a soulless Cartesian order on a once-lush coastal island, trampling nature and leading to two centuries of real-estate mania.

But the Commissioners’ Plan, as the grid is formally called, in fact made prescient and wise use of the city’s natural environment — a fact that was lost on later generations of city planners. As the Bloomberg administration looks for cost-effective ways to make New York more resilient to the effects of climate change, it should look back to the grid’s genius and find new ways to help, rather than stifle, the constructive role nature can play in shaping the city.

Manhattan’s natural resources were a major reason that Native Americans, and then the Dutch, settled here: the soil is easy to dig, the drinking water is excellent and the soft ocean breezes and startling vistas make it a pleasant place to live.

The early 19th-century planners who created the grid knew how to make the most of these attributes. They laid out the grid so that the sun sets precisely in line with east-west streets several times a year. The short north-south blocks mean more streets lead to the rivers, allowing floodwaters to recede easily and drawing people to the waterfront. The plan guided raucous commerce along the route of an old canal and enticed future developers with the promise of sites on hills with enviable views north.

Within the grid they placed an engineering marvel, the Croton Aqueduct and Reservoir; the latter is gone, but the aqueduct still delivers clean and tasty drinking water from upstate. Perhaps their wisest move was to conserve 843 prime acres as a Central Park to provide “the lungs of the city.”

But rather than continue working with nature as a template, subsequent generations fought against the city’s environment. Planners wrangled natural streams into (eventually) rusty pipe systems. The city dredged so many swamps and poured so much asphalt that the ground has become unable to handle heavy downpours. When it rains a lot — as it increasingly has in recent years — rainwater flows into the same pipes that carry sewage. When those pipes overflow, the combined liquid dumps into the rivers. That’s not how nature would manage things.

Of course, nature hasn’t gone away. In fact, it is steadily wearing away at our efforts to control and repress it. Eight million gallons of water a day accumulate in the subway system’s underground network, and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority has to spend a small fortune pumping it out.

And, as we’ve seen, without marshlands or big patches of soil into which it can seep, snow hangs around on side streets for weeks and then converts to pothole-making muck.

Fortunately, it’s not too late to go back to the spirit of 1811. The Bloomberg administration recently created a $1.5 billion “green infrastructure” plan to replace aging public works with nature-centered projects, like distributing free barrels to collect rainwater for outer-borough gardens. It is helping to finance a 774-apartment project near the Gowanus Canal that works with the site’s natural slope by clustering buildings where ground is highest and creating a park to sop up stormwater near the shore. And it has issued a grant for “bioswales” — natural clusters of plants — in strategic places around the city to handle rainwater on the side streets.

But the city must do a lot more. To rekindle the progressive spark of the Commissioners’ Plan, the government can show the real estate value of following nature’s cues. It can tap into the Welikia Project, an effort by Eric Sanderson, a biologist, to map the whole city as it existed in 1609, to provide data about how much solar power and water absorption a site would have if you left it alone, and then offer financial incentives to developers who take advantage of those assets.

Moreover, the city should extend development at the waterfronts into the water, for example by incorporating marshland into riverside parks (Brooklyn Bridge Park already has plans to include such a feature). The city could also reopen long-buried streams — several of which still flow beneath downtown streets — that now present regular flooding hazards, a step already being tested in San Francisco.

It can require new projects to use green roofs and plantings rather than pipes to absorb stormwater, and it can give bonuses to owners who use microbes to handle wastewater.

Finally, the administration should rezone the city into “eco-districts,” areas that share topography, microclimates, soil and species rather than census data. Such local attention is critical to steps like switching to renewable energy — after all, relying on tidal power makes more sense on eastern Staten Island than in central Brooklyn, where wind power might be a better option.

Sound wild? No wilder than laying out 155th Street in 1811, a time when Union Square, nearly seven miles south, was still a hill full of oak trees. The street grid made real estate speculation seem as natural to Manhattan as bedrock. With pressing needs for better housing and public health, and an imperative to provide it in an ecologically intelligent way, we should let nature once again teach us where and how to grow.

Alec Appelbaum is writing a book about urban planning and climate change.

#66 Whitman the Scrivener

Kenneth Price is one of many Walt Whitman scholars dedicated to tracking every jot and tittle left by the definitive poet of America. Three years ago, Mr. Price came upon a startling discovery, buried in the National Archives: Whitman’s handwriting and his signature initials on documents he copied during his Washington day job as a government clerk.

“A prodigious amount of material,” said Mr. Price, who is at about 3,000 documents and searching for more. They give the lie to tales of Whitman’s being a slacker of a bureaucrat when he hand-duplicated the letters and memos of government officials.

For some, the material may be frustrating for offering no new tropes and stanzas from Whitman the poet. Still, his clean penmanship, so easily read in the here and now, is something fresh to wonder about — Whitman working to keep food on the table while he wrote his great Civil War poems. In his free time, he wrote letters home for wounded and illiterate Civil War soldiers. Twelve in one day “inhabiting the voice of another,” notes Mr. Price, a literature professor at the University of Nebraska and co-director of the Walt Whitman Archive.

Whitman clearly was no passive observer who could compartmentalize his life, which makes it interesting to see what biographers will make of this emerging clerk’s tale. The papers he copied dealt with the bureaucratic mundane but also issues like the Ku Klux Klan; the trial of Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president; and westward railroad expansion. He worked at the Army paymaster’s office, the attorney general’s office and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, where the poet was famously fired after his boss pronounced “Leaves of Grass” immoral writing.

#65 A Shot at a Sane Budget By ALAN B. KRUEGER

Princeton, N.J.

PRESIDENT OBAMA has been criticized as too slow to engage in major debates and too timid to make difficult decisions.

Some have argued that his budget speech last week fit that narrative. He waited to deliver his speech until five months after his own fiscal commission proposed steep cuts to spending and tax deductions to bring the deficit under control, and a week after Representative Paul D. Ryan, the Wisconsin Republican who leads the House Budget Committee, proposed to replace Medicare with a voucher-like program for those now under age 55.

In one important respect, however, Mr. Obama’s deficit speech disproves the caricature, and contains a bold, serious and timely proposal.

I’m not talking about the president’s plan to curb the growth rate of Medicare expenditures beyond what is already included in health care reform, or his renewed pledge to allow the Bush tax cuts on top income earners to expire — both of which will be difficult to achieve. (An earlier version of the Medicare proposal was projected by the Congressional Budget Office to produce only modest savings, and we all know what happened the last time the top tax rates were held hostage to middle-class tax cuts.)

What I have in mind is his endorsement of a trigger that would automatically kick in to reduce spending and tax expenditures if Congress and the administration fail to bring the debt under control.

Mr. Obama described what he called a “debt fail-safe”: “If, by 2014, our debt is not projected to fall as a share of the economy — if we haven’t hit our targets, if Congress has failed to act — then my plan will require us to come together and make up the additional savings with more spending cuts and more spending reductions in the tax code.”

In essence, Mr. Obama proposed a rule that will enable us to get ahead of the long-run budget problem, and provide predictability and certainty to the federal budget.

Economists prefer rules over discretion when parties can choose to reverse themselves as tough decisions arise. Think of an overweight person intending to lose weight. He could use his judgment every time he is confronted with dessert. But that one extra slice of cake would not really matter much, so there is a tendency to indulge today and push restraint off until later. If, however, he buys all his meals in advance and commits to eat only those meals, he builds restraint into his diet. Rules can commit individuals or groups to a predetermined path.

If the political process always led to time-consistent, optimal decisions, rules would not be necessary. But that is not the world we inhabit.

Although rules are often flouted, they have helped trim budgets in the past.

The so-called pay-go rule in the Budget Enforcement Act of 1990 — which required increases in spending or decreases in revenue to be offset by other spending cuts or revenue increases — helped lead to the surpluses that arose in the late 1990s. We’ve also run the experiment in reverse: After the pay-go rules expired in 2002, increased spending on programs like Medicare prescription drugs and two rounds of tax cuts caused the deficit to soar.

While pay-go rules are helpful in the current environment, they are not sufficient given the burden the approaching retirement of the baby boom generation and rising health care costs will place on the debt. We need a supercharged pay-go rule, and that is what the president proposed. Because politicians prefer discretion, it took courage to propose an automatic trigger.

The proposal goes beyond the trigger proposed in December by Mr. Obama’s fiscal commission, which affected only tax revenue and kicked in only if tax reform was not enacted. Mr. Obama’s plan would automatically reduce direct spending and spending through the tax code.

Of course, the devil in any trigger is in the details. A key issue involves exceptions: What categories of spending or taxing would be exempted from the trigger, and how large a majority would be required to override the trigger?

Another important issue concerns the ratio of spending cuts to tax revenue. The president proposed a ratio of $2 of direct spending cuts (excluding interest on the debt) to every additional dollar of tax revenue in his speech. The House speaker, John A. Boehner, and many other Republicans have objected to raising additional tax revenue. But the two sides may be closer to some type of agreement than is commonly believed; they seem to agree that around $4 trillion needs to be trimmed from the budget over the next 10 to 12 years, but not on how to do it.

Discretion is hard for politicians to give up — and briefly satisfying, as dieters know when they dig out those hidden chocolate bars. What will help over time to lessen our appetite for more debt is to remove the temptation, and expectation, that when it comes to the budget we can always spend more than we have.

Alan B. Krueger, a professor of economics at Princeton, was the assistant secretary of the Treasury for economic policy from 2009 to 2010.

#64 RETROSPECTIVE ON CUBA

You Say Bay of Pigs, I Say ...

By LIZABEL MÓNICA

Havana

FOR weeks, Cuba has been preparing for this weekend’s huge military parade, the first of its kind in many years.

Fidel Castro has been musing in his regular column about the disaster in Japan and comparing NATO’s intervention in Libya to the Nazi involvement in the Spanish Civil War. Although he says nothing about the parade, everyone knows it’s coming.

Children have been practicing for a performance that will take place on the stage that is the Plaza de la Revolución. Yadira, the daughter of a friend of mine, has had to stay up late for several nights now to hone her marching skills. She will hold a cardboard pencil twice as tall as she is, and will be dressed up as one of the militia members who fought off the invaders during what Americans and Cuban émigrés call the Battle of the Bay of Pigs, which began 50 years ago Sunday.

Thousands of workers have been mobilized by the government to take part in the parade. Semi-retired soldiers have been called back up and outdated Russian armaments dusted off so they can be dragged through the streets. Airplanes are supposed to fly above.

I am sitting in my kitchen with my friend Adrian and my mother when we hear them whirring in the sky. “That’s a familiar sound,” says my mother. A half-century ago, she bore witness to the chain of events that the Cuban government is now trying to relive by retelling the story of a victory and the fulfillment of a national dream.

In Cuba, we do not call it the Bay of Pigs. Instead we call it the Battle of Playa Girón, after the beach where the main battle was fought. As always, there are two ways of talking about what happened: Mercenaries (or patriots), under orders from (with the support of) the C.I.A., attacked (tried to liberate) Cuba, at a place called Playa Girón (Bay of Pigs).

“We can’t even agree on the name of the place,” says Adrian, who is a historian. Or its geography. For some people, it’s a beach. For others, a bay. While people here celebrate the defeat of an imperialist’s mercenaries, in Miami the survivors of the 2506 Brigade reconvene to commemorate the day Cuban patriots fought against a tyrant in the name of democracy and freedom.

Between sips of hot coffee mixed with ground split peas, which is the cheapest drink you can buy on the streets here, Adrian talks about the contradictions of Cuban history, beginning with the revolutionaries who came with Fidel Castro on a yacht from Mexico in 1956 through the civil war that followed the departure of the dictator Fulgencio Batista. “Many people died during those 10 years,” he says. “We don’t know the real history of that period, because everyone wants to push their version of the story, hoping that theirs is the only one that gets told.”

We hear another plane and for a minute the three of us say nothing.

“What we call Playa Girón is just one area within the Bay of Pigs,” Adrian points out, smiling, as if it’s that simple. “See? It doesn’t seem so difficult. But we love to contaminate words, fill them with extraverbal connotations. We even do it with people’s names. Calling him Fidel is not the same as calling him Castro.” Fidel is a close friend and Castro is a distant enemy. “Ideologically those are two irreconcilable terms.”

“And of course” — I am thinking out loud — “nobody is willing to compromise. The creation of a Bay of Girón is, for the moment, highly unlikely.”

My mother turns on the television. On every channel, there are announcements for the official event:

“The second secretary of the Central Committee and president of the Councils of State and Ministers, Raúl Castro Ruz, during his closing speech at the sessions of the National Assembly of People’s Power, announced that the Communist Party of Cuba would soon be holding its Sixth Congress ... to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the proclamation of the socialist nature of the Cuban Revolution and the Playa Girón victory.”

There will be many speeches in the Plaza de la Revolución this weekend, and I imagine in America as well. But when I look outside, the streets are quiet. Most Cubans are standing in the shade of front doors and building entrances, escaping the tropical sun and dehydration. They are selling toothpicks and homemade costume jewelry. They are taking advantage of the more liberal economic measures announced by Raúl Castro last year, which are intended to let more Cubans open small businesses.

When the pageantry is over, everyone knows that these liberal economic policies are what Congress, and the Cuban people, will really be talking about.

Lizabel Mónica runs the online magazine Desliz. This essay was translated by Kristina Cordero from the Spanish.

#63 Wrongful Foreclosures

We were worried recently when we saw an advance draft of legal agreements between federal regulators and the nation’s big banks to address and correct foreclosure abuses. The actual deals were as bad as we feared.

It turns out that the inquiry that preceded the agreements was limited to reviews of “foreclosure-processing functions” — things like paperwork handling and work-force supervision. The reviews found big processing problems — no surprise there — and the agreements call for more staff and better management.

What was not looked for is far more significant. Because so few files were examined, the regulators’ report says, “the reviews could not provide a reliable estimate of the number of foreclosures that should not have proceeded.” So much for the burning question of the extent of wrongful foreclosures. The reviews also did not look at potential abuses outside the foreclosure process, including unreasonable loan fees and misapplied loan payments. Such faulty charges can precipitate default by making it impossible for borrowers to catch up on late payments.

Nor did the reviews focus on faulty loan-modification processes, like instances in which bank employees wrongly told borrowers they needed to be delinquent to qualify for new loan terms. Delinquency subjects borrowers to late fees, damaged credit and an increased risk of falling hopelessly behind. It also harms mortgage investors who are stuck with the loan losses. But it can be profitable for banks that service loans; they can extract late fees from the borrower or upon the foreclosed home’s sale.

To add insult to injury, the agreements leave it largely up to the banks to investigate themselves on those issues. They require banks to choose, hire and pay independent consultants to check a sample of pending foreclosures; banks are then supposed to reimburse wronged borrowers. The regulators pledge to ensure that the reviews are comprehensive and reliable. We’re not holding our breath.

The agreements do not include monetary penalties, though regulators say fines are coming. Regulators appear divided over whether the agreements should preclude efforts by the states to correct and punish foreclosure abuses. The Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation have stated clearly that the agreements do not stop other enforcement actions. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has not ruled out such interference. Over all, an important opportunity has been missed for real reform, redress and accountability.

#62 REFLECTIONS ON THE COSTS OF AMERICAN JUSTICE

Justice, Too Much and Too Expensive

By JOSEPH L. HOFFMANN and NANCY J. KING

HABEAS corpus: it is, as Alexander Hamilton suggested, the “bulwark” of a Constitution. A habeas petition gives a single federal judge the authority to decide if a prisoner is being held unlawfully and order his release. At Guantánamo, habeas plays a crucial role: it provides the essential means by which the federal judiciary can ensure that innocent people are not mistakenly held, indefinitely, as enemy combatants. This is an example of habeas at its best.

But habeas is also subject to abuse. State prisoners convicted of non-capital offenses file more than 17,000 habeas corpus petitions in federal court each year. Each petition challenges the constitutionality of some aspect of the prisoner’s conviction or sentence, even though that conviction and sentence already have been affirmed by at least one state court, and sometimes several.

Only a tiny fraction of these habeas petitioners — estimated at less than four-tenths of one percent — obtain any kind of relief, which is usually a new trial, sentencing or appeal, after which they may be sent back to prison.

Each petition consumes the scarce resources of both the federal and state governments. Indeed, the never-ending stream of futile petitions suggests that habeas corpus is a wasteful nuisance. By almost any measure, the use, and abuse, of habeas by convicted state prisoners is a failure, one that could corrode one of the most revered pillars of our legal system.  

We need a new approach — one that ensures a more prudent use of habeas in state criminal cases.

Congress should limit habeas review of state criminal cases to two categories in which it actually can do some serious good: capital cases and cases in which the prisoner can produce persuasive new evidence of his innocence. Limiting habeas to these cases will help protect the long-term future of the writ in all of its varied forms.

Throughout our history habeas has served two core functions: during periods of social and political crisis, it ensures that detainees have not been deprived of their liberty in violation of federal law, and it encourages the creation of alternative mechanisms of judicial review that can be used to enforce federal law without the need for case-by-case habeas review. It was used to free those illegally interned during World War II and those unlawfully confined for deportation during the Red Scare.

Habeas was also pressed into service to remedy gross abuses of power in state criminal justice. After the Civil War, habeas helped enforce the new 13th and 14th Amendments by preventing the states from imprisoning freed slaves and Reconstruction officials on trumped-up criminal charges. And in the 1960s, habeas helped ensure that state defendants received the benefit of new and often unpopular federal constitutional rights, including Miranda warnings and the right to appointed counsel. In both eras, habeas often was the only way state criminal defendants could assert their new federal rights in any court.

But today state judges no longer resist the idea that they are required to enforce federal constitutional rights in state criminal cases. Now prisoners in every state can file both an appeal and a post-conviction petition in state court, where alleged violations of federal rights can be reviewed and, if necessary, corrected. Habeas has thus fulfilled its mission: it helped facilitate the move to a criminal justice system in which the supremacy of federal law is unchallenged.

As a result, we no longer need habeas review of routine state criminal cases. One reason the writ is so rarely granted in these cases is that state courts long ago took over the role of reviewing constitutional claims that federal habeas courts once performed.

But the federal courts remain in a 1960s-style habeas rut. They continue to receive tens of thousands of habeas petitions from convicted state prisoners, almost all of which will be denied. Still, the habeas machinery runs on, wasting resources and dissipating respect for the Great Writ, while benefiting almost nobody.

It’s impossible to quantify the burden habeas litigation imposes because no one collects such data and because habeas caseloads vary widely from place to place.

In most cases, a state attorney must respond to the petition and any related motions. Either a federal district judge or magistrate must closely read the petition, consider the governing legal rules and precedents, and draft a formal judicial opinion disposing of the case.

Because more than 90 percent of all non-capital habeas petitions are filed by prisoners acting as their own lawyers, the petitions are often difficult to decipher in the first place. Some federal courts employ clerks or staff lawyers to work almost full-time on habeas cases. Whenever a prisoner tries to appeal the district court’s decision to deny relief, even more judicial review is required.

These costs would be justified if we still relied primarily on habeas to enforce federal constitutional rights in state criminal cases. Liberty often does not come cheap. The problem is that habeas litigation in non-capital state criminal cases is useless and potentially harmful.

Justice William J. Brennan predicted that once state post-conviction remedies became “the rule and not the exception,” federal judicial review of alleged constitutional violations would become unnecessary.

His prediction has long since come true. Federal habeas review of noncapital state criminal cases is unnecessary, because state courts now do the vast majority of that work.

Worse, the misuse of habeas as one more round of appeal in routine state criminal cases will eventually cheapen habeas’s currency. If habeas is chiefly seen as a way for convicted state prisoners to get federal courts to review countless meritless claims, this will diminish public respect for the writ and leave it vulnerable to broader attacks.

We can safely limit the abuse of habeas without eliminating judicial control over the writ and its scope. Should the urgent need for extensive federal oversight of state criminal justice arise again, as it did during the 1960s, the Supreme Court retains the power — underthe suspension clause of the Constitution — to overturn any Congressional restrictions and expand the scope of the writ.

So long as reasonable judicial review measures like state post-conviction remain in place, habeas should recede and the burden of ensuring day-to-day Constitutional compliance can rest on these alternatives. In routine state criminal cases, this means allowing state courts, supplemented by Supreme Court certiori review, to ensure compliance. These courts won’t catch every constitutional error, but no judicial review, including habeas, is 100 percent perfect.

EXCEPT in capital cases and in cases in which prisoners can produce persuasive evidence of their innocence, the need for finality must trump our pursuit of perfection. If habeas review were truly costless we could review all criminal cases ad infinitum.  But,  in the real world, judicial review eventually must stop. 

The question is not how much review it might take to achieve perfect compliance with constitutional rules governing criminal cases, because that’s a goal we can’t reach. The question, instead, is how much review makes sense before it becomes a wasteful, possibly harmful, endeavor.

If the federal government wants to take meaningful steps to protect the constitutional rights of criminal defendants and improve the quality of state criminal justice, there is a better way.

Instead of wasting time and money on repetitive habeas review, we might devote our resources to a new Federal Center for Defense Services that would support improved defense representation through grants, research and “best practices” standards.

Improving defense services in the state courts would help prevent constitutional errors, and would do far more good for far more criminal defendants than habeas does or could ever do.

The statistics speak for themselves: habeas review of routine state criminal cases is no longer needed to enforce federal constitutional rights. If the federal courts can’t figure out how to extricate themselves from a situation in which they constantly spin their wheels, Congress should help them out. The future of the Great Writ of habeas corpus may depend on it.

Joseph L. Hoffmann, a law professor at Indiana University, and Nancy J. King, a law professor at Vanderbilt University, are the authors of the forthcoming “Habeas for the 21st Century: Uses, Abuses and the Future of the Great Writ.”

#61 NYT EDITORIAL - MOSCOS'S DRINKING PROBLEM

Moscow’s Drinking Problem

By MARK LAWRENCE SCHRAD

Villanova, Pa.

IN an effort to reduce both its sky-high alcoholism rate and its budget gap, Russia recently announced plans to quadruple the tax on the country’s eternal vice, vodka, over the next three years.

But while the move might be well intentioned, the long history of liquor taxation in Russia exposes a critical obstacle in the path of any anti-drinking campaign: the Kremlin’s own addiction to liquor revenues, which has derailed every previous effort to wean Russians from their tipple.

Russians consume about 18 liters of pure alcohol per person a year, more than twice the internationally recommended limit, a rate that President Dmitri A. Medvedev has called a “natural disaster.” Thanks in part to lifelong heavy drinking, the life expectancy for the average Russian man is now about 60 years, just below that of Haiti. Alcohol poisoning alone kills 40,000 Russians a year (compared with about 300 in the United States), and alcohol plays a role in more than half of all premature deaths.

Rampant alcoholism is nothing new, and Russian governments since the Middle Ages have introduced liquor taxes to reduce drinking rates.

But in almost every case, the public-health goal has been undermined by the state’s efforts to increase tax revenue. In Russia, the demand for vodka persists even when prices go up, so the state has an ever-present temptation to raise taxes and fill the treasury under the political cloak of making vodka more dear. Yet government after government has taken the following step of then promoting drinking to produce more revenue.

In 1591, for example, the English ambassador Giles Fletcher lamented that Ivan the Terrible encouraged his subjects to drink their last kopecks away in state-owned taverns where “none may call them forth whatsoever cause there be, because he hindereth the emperor’s revenue.”

Later, the ideological godfather of the Russian Revolution, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, denounced the state’s abdication of its responsibilities of “promoting national honor, the moral welfare of the nation, justice and fairness,” all of which he argued had been sacrificed to a system of hefty vodka taxes. “The only reason for its existence is monetary,” he complained. “Its sole purpose and concern is money, money, money.”

Though he was exiled to Siberia for this sort of criticism, Chernyshevsky’s argument was sustained by his revolutionary disciple, Lenin, who banned vodka during the early years of the Soviet Union.

But the siren song of liquor-tax revenue proved too tempting for Stalin, who lifted the ban to support the communist autocracy. “What is better, the yoke of foreign capitalism, or the sale of vodka?” he said. “Naturally, we will opt for vodka.”

Vodka revenues even played a role in the collapse of the Soviet state. In 1985, Mikhail S. Gorbachev restricted vodka sales to get Russian workers back to the assembly line; because vodka taxes provided a full quarter of the entire Soviet budget, the result was a substantial drop in government revenues. The Kremlin tried to patch the budget hole by printing more money, which worsened the hyperinflation that hastened the downfall of the communist state.

To his credit, Mr. Medvedev seems to grasp the pitfalls of trying to tax an entrenched culture of drinking out of existence, and he favors incremental, realistic policies like public-service messages and advertising restrictions rather than the bombastic and often hollow policy pronouncements of his predecessors.

Yet the proposed quadrupling of vodka taxes now threatens to undo this gradual progress, and return to not only the autocratic timbre of policymaking, but also the traditional harnessing of state finances to the vodka bottle. It will be hard to avoid the allure of maintaining, or even increasing, the estimated $11.2 billion in extra revenue that the proposed taxes will bring in.

Is the Kremlin poised to again stumble into this eternal liquor trap? It definitely seems so: in the fall of 2010 Russia’s finance minister, Aleksei L. Kudrin, told reporters that the best thing that his fellow citizens could do to help the country’s flaccid national economy was to smoke and drink more, thereby paying more in taxes.

“Those who drink,” Mr. Kudrin said, “are giving more to help solve social problems such as boosting demographics, developing other social services and upholding birth rates.”

Not only will the government be tempted to dial back its anti-drinking campaigns to preserve its liquor tax revenues, but the higher prices for legal alcohol — from about $3.50 for a half-liter bottle today to $14 — will, if experience holds true, drive Russians to drink dangerous and unregulated homebrews, as well as poisonous surrogates like eau de cologne, shoe polish and even jet fuel. Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin recently based his opposition to the tax increase on precisely these past lessons.

Yet if Mr. Putin and Mr. Medvedev are to invoke the lessons of the past in dealing with Russia’s alcohol epidemic, they need to look more broadly at the dubious historical role of alcohol as a pillar of state finance. The only real solutions entail significant increases in public-health spending, rehabilitation programs, youth awareness campaigns and stricter advertising limits, as well as incremental rather than radical changes to pricing and availability.

Even then, the problem will take decades to solve. Most important, the Kremlin should take the first step to its own recovery and admit that it too has an alcohol problem, and not make the health of Russian finances dependent on the misery of its people.

Mark Lawrence Schrad, an assistant professor of political science at Villanova University, is the author of “The Political Power of Bad Ideas: Networks, Institutions and the Global Prohibition Wave.”