Category: Politics and Government

On the climate

I liked the format of CNN’s climate town hall event. The successful way of allowing candidates to convey a lot of information was basically an accident of the DNC’s stubbornness — they didn’t want to host a debate on climate change (why?!?!), and they own any situation where more than one candidate appears on a stage and talks (or something like that). So the only option available was to provide each candidate a chunk of time — *not* a debate. Sucks that it wasn’t freely available like the debates were, but we signed up for a free trial of YouTube TV to watch it. And we’ll get a free trial of something else for MSNBC’s climate debate later this month (Weld is supposed to be on the schedule).

I’m glad CNN had large time blocks for each candidate — they could have given everyone ten minutes and not had time for follow-up. And it was interesting to see Buttigieg use another approach to the question of why environmentalism is important — because ‘existential threat’ is not likely to convert any minds. But couching it in terms of our stewardship of God’s creations — that actually has potential to appeal to people who don’t care about species going extinct, habitat loss, clean air, clean water, their kids future. What does God think of how you are treating his creations? I cannot imagine that sort of digression coming into a debate format. There were a few forays into a nuclear discussion too — Yang’s liquid fluoride thorium reactor investment, Sanders assertion that we’ve got enough radioactive waste already. I’d have liked to see someone offering to invest in reactors fueled with used rods — not as part of our overall energy strategy, but because *something* needs to be done with the existing waste.

Possibly due to the origin of the event, possibly just demographics … but they had some good questions too. I loved seeing food policy repeatedly brought up as a component of climate change mitigation. And some realization that it’s not as easy as picking up a guy from a Gulf oil rig, sending him to classes for a few weeks, and dropping him off at his job on the solar farm. People get their identities tied up in their job — “what they do” — and that’s just as important as addressing the training and logistics of training people for new jobs.

It was great to see Booker acknowledging that he doesn’t know much about geoengineering and would have to research it before having an opinion. That’s a reasonable order of things. And I liked that Yang brought up geoengineering as a component of the solution — geoengineering is something I’d researched from the ML / data modeling side, and it was good to see it put forth as something other than nuc’ing hurricanes. I’d have liked to see the problems with capitalist enterprise being the source of technological solutions (although Yang touches on the issue in ditching GDP as the sole measurement of economic success).

Biden’s whole performance was expectedly underwhelming. I’m not sure where he got his rep as a great people-person politician … because WTF is the point of arguing about whose state is getting it worse? Biden’s digression into base readiness is something I wish had follow-up. He started down a path, then drew back saying something like “I cannot get into that”. Which made me wonder what exactly *that* was. He might have been talking about the DoD Climate Report from Jan 2019 and not wanted to get into it as a digression wasting his free airtime. But my mind went down the path … a VP’s got high level clearance. Does he keep it after leaving office? Can he still request briefings from DNI? Can he *not* get into it?

Cooper had a card about Andrew Goldman because they knew the question was going to be asked — it was basically a “gotcha” setup. But the exchange highlighted how Biden is the embodiment of what people hate about politicians. The “depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is” legal technicality dodge. My takeaway is that Biden knew the guy had been a co-founder of a natural gas extraction company and runs a hedge fund with diversified investments. But the dude *isn’t* the CEO or active board member of a 100% fossil fuel company, so I’m following the letter of the agreement. How’d he make his first million? How’d he make his subsequent hundreds of millions? Not relevant. The alternative is that Biden’s campaign is inept, and they don’t do background research on people hosting high-dollar fundraising events. I believe that about as much as I believe a former model didn’t put any thought into the words on the back of the jacket she was wearing.

Other candidates did better jobs answering ‘gotcha’ questions. Sanders refused to pledge that no taxpayer will shoulder the 16 trillion dollar burden for his environmental plan (and I love the idea of TVA’ing renewable energy production, which I hadn’t heard before) because *some* taxpayers WILL pay more. Yang’s response about electric cars was great – it would have been a great place to talk about Porsche’s Taycan (another pure electric car with sub three-second 0-60 time) event earlier in the day. But telling people that they’re going to LOVE driving an electric car is spot on. Warren won’t take the light-bulb bait and wants to focus on the oil industry, the electric power industry and the building industry (although it would have been nice if *she* had enumerated them)

Some didn’t seem well prepared for obvious gotcha’s. Booker gets a bit cornered by the “taking away my burgers” question … because he’s a vegan and doesn’t want to seem like one of *those* vegans? Klobuchar doesn’t have a good response about the dairy or cattle industry because she may need to run again in Minnesota. But the Biden exchange seemed like an ambush in that it wasn’t an obvious question. Cooper returning to the Goldman topic for a closing clarification was bad for Biden too. The last impression you got of Biden was him being defensive about possibly taking money from an LNG guy. Which at least gives the appearance that Biden is losing his de facto choice status. Could you have seen CNN going after Clinton like that last time around?

The whole thing got me thinking that the next president has a chance of making some progress in spite of Moscow Mitch. Piece-meal some of it through budget reconciliation. There’s SCOTUS precedent that the Executive branch can take money from one place and allocate it elsewhere for something that has been intentionally not funded by Congress (yet another point where Trump probably doesn’t even understand the ramifications of his short-term ‘win’). Withhold subsidies from one place (fossil fuels, meat, dairy) and use that money toward other initiatives (increased solar/wind rebates, increased veggie subsidies, electric car rebates). Adjust dietary guidelines and national school lunch requirements (it’s be a huge uproar, but imagine the impact of schools doing meatless Monday). Sue the companies that have internal documents from *decades* ago indicating that they knew burning fossil fuels was environmentally destructive. It’s no different than the tobacco companies — well, it’s worse because even if you lived on a remote island for your entire life and never encountered anyone who bought anything from ExxonMobile … you’re impacted by their products — so why *don’t* we have trillion dollar settlements from them funding the public solar/wind power company?

On Greenland

Trump wants to buy Greenland … which, yeah, it’s been suggested before. Way before, like 1946. And it wasn’t well received by the Danes at the time, so not exactly a stellar argument there. But Greenland isn’t a colony in the 1800’s style. A decade ago, the Act on Greenland Self-Government was granted. Which made Greenland’s parliament on par with the Danish parliament. Now, foreign policy and international agreements are still under Danish control, and there have been some power struggles in the intervening decade. But I don’t think anyone could buy Greenland from Denmark.

Followup – Straws as a Marketing Stunt

Well, I wasn’t wrong 🙂 Plastic straws + free media attention were a great combination for the Trump campaign. 140k straws at 15$ a pack is over 2 million dollars. They cleared 200k on that, which isn’t bad for a week or two of fundraising. And half of the purchasers were new donors — which means a lot of new contact information to solicit future donations and to target “get out the vote” efforts. And it’s pretty easy to figure out what message will entice this demographic.

Straws as a Marketing Stunt

As a campaign/marketing stunt, the Trump campaign’s plastic straws are brilliant. It is a solid component of the “troll the liberals” campaign plank. Garnered a lot of attention (not *good* attention, but that seemingly doesn’t matter). Sure, major news outlet aren’t exactly saying “go shop the Trump reelection store!!!”, but media outlets are still providing free advertising for Trump.

The Federal Budget (aka there’s no such thing as a fiscal conservative)

The federal budget numbers for 2019 and 2020 are, of course, estimates … but it perplexes me how persistent the myth of the “tax and spend” Democrat and the “reduce government spending” Republican is. There’s no party shrinking the federal budget. Having a huge increase and then dropping back down to where you started isn’t much of a “decrease”. And outright increasing certainly isn’t a decrease.

If the difference is “tax and spend” and “just spend” … the fiscally conservative position should always be “don’t spend money you don’t have”.

Ohio House Bill 62

Letter sent to my Ohio State Representative and Senator:

I’m writing in reference to House Bill 62.

Pertaining to the definition of “Plug-in electric motor vehicle” and “Hybrid motor vehicle” (Sect 4501.01 DDD and EEE) and their additional respective registration fees, the wording in the bill as I read it leaves some ambiguity to a third segment: the “Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle” or PHEV. These are vehicles that will both plug into an external source to charge for a modest electric range AND use the gasoline engine in a typical hybrid configuration when the charge is depleted. These vehicles are NOT designed to run indefinitely on electricity alone. My concern is that the current wording classifies certain PHEV’s as Plug-in electric motor vehicles. PHEV’s will still pay the gasoline tax, similar to hybrids, when they fill up at the pump *and* be charged a 200$ registration fee. Examples of vehicles in this category are the Chevy Volt, Toyota Prius Prime, Chrysler Pacifica PHEV, Kia Niro PHEV, Honda Clarity, and the Ford Fusion Energi. I would like to see the law amended to ensure PHEV owners, who generally pay some gasoline tax just like “Hybrid motor vehicle” owners, are not subject to the higher registration fee.

Beyond the classification of PHEVs, the gasoline tax is consumption and usage based. Heavier vehicles tend to have lower mpg ratings, thus their drivers accrue more tax. Individuals who drive a lot accrue more tax. The new registration fee is a fixed amount that has no bearing on an individual’s actual vehicle usage. I will be assessed the 200$ fee, and I drive maybe 2,500 miles a year. Someone with a pure electric Tesla who drives 300 miles a day pays the same 200$ fee but drives 75,000 miles in a year. If I convert an F-350 to a plug-in electric motor vehicle, that 7,000 pound truck is going to be assessed the same 200$ fee as my 3,800 pound PHEV.

I don’t have a problem being asked to pay for *my* usage of the roads. I wouldn’t complain about per-mile fee for electric and hybrid vehicles or an additional tax on electrical consumption to fund road repairs. I’d be less upset if the petrol tax were scrapped and everyone charge a registration fee based on the vehicle’s weight so infrequent drivers universally subsidize frequent drivers. But I vehemently object to being uniquely, financially penalized for low-milage usage of a PHEV.

GA133 HB 62 – Electric Vehicle Registration Fees

As the new transportation bill moves into the Senate, I wanted to calculate exactly how badly electric vehicle drivers are getting screwed. It depends, of course, on the MPG rating for the comparison vehicle. The best case for their assessment would be a vehicle with very bad mileage — say a big truck that gets 8 mpg. That truck has to drive 7,619 miles a year to pay the same amount of gas tax as the 100$ hybrid vehicle registration fee. It’s got to drive 15,238 miles in a year to achieve parity with the 200$ electric vehicle registration fee.

But how many vehicles get eight miles per gallon? The CAFE 2016 fleet average is 34.0 mpg. Comparing the electric vehicle registration fee to the fleet average, you’d have to drive 32,380 miles a year to hit parity on the 100$ registration fee. 64,761 miles to hit parity on the 200$ registration fee. There are plenty of cars that get better than 34 mpg — for a driver whose car gets 40 mpg to pay 200$ in gasoline tax, they’d be driving 76,190 miles a year!

According to the 2000 information from the Office of Highway Policy Information, Americans drive an average of 13,476 miles per year. An average driver needs to own a vehicle that gets worse than 8 mpg — 7.0749 mpg — to pay the same amount of gas tax as a driver who registers a Chevy Volt.

 

0.105 tax / gallon 0.105 tax / gallon 0.105 tax / gallon 0.105 tax / gallon 0.105 tax / gallon
8 mpg 15 mpg 25 mpg 34 mpg 40 mpg
0.013125 tax per mile 0.007 tax per mile 0.0042 tax per mile 0.003088 tax per mile 0.002625 tax per mile
fee Miles to pay same tax fee Miles to pay same tax fee Miles to pay same tax fee Miles to pay same tax fee Miles to pay same tax
200                          15,238.10 200                          28,571.43 200                          47,619.05 200                          64,761.90 200                          76,190.48
100                             7,619.05 100                          14,285.71 100                          23,809.52 100                          32,380.95 100                          38,095.24

In an emergency … build a wall??

Efficacy and waste of money aside, the best thing would have been to give him the cash. If Congress can pass one-off legislation on end of life care for a single individual, they could have one-off’d letting the GoFundMe buy a wall. And then the dude could have absolutely failed at building a wall because, well, he runs the government *just like* he runs his awful businesses. Hell, he *builds* the wall and we still have people overstaying visas, meth cooks out in Illinois, murders, and traffic accidents — bad PR for the wall, that.

This is the martyr path — no wall means no stats to show how ineffective it was, he can keep crowing about how amazing he is at building all sorts of things, we’ll be treated to endless bitching about how no other president has had to deal with this judicial intrusion into their agenda, the case becomes a rallying point for the base and yet another justification for activist judges. I was shocked he didn’t go national emergency before the shutdown — strategically, it really seems like the best solution (a priori assumption: everyone from the administration knows the wall is a heap of theater thus knows theater with no tangible artifacts is an improvement)

I’ve seen the future …

This will go totally meta — he’s going to deny having denied that he denied denying collusion. At some point, dude is going to deny having been Trump’s attorney / spokesperson / lacky. Then we’ll meander our way into a whole “je pense, donc je suis” discussion because maybe we don’t even exist at all. Bad debate tactic, but I’m coming to see Trump’s approach to public discourse like the guerilla warfare American Revolution approach to European combat tactics. Considered terrible form at the time, but effective as anything. Which, sadly, dictates that we’ll *all* be debating substantive topics by throwing baseless attacks, making shit up, and derailing the conversation with a heap of crazy.