Libertate Virtute (Virtue + Liberty)

I’ve written on this topic before, the subject of EV’s, and so has the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) and US New and World Report (USNWP).  Today, electric vehicles and the central planning of the Green New Deal are tied at the hip in the policy debate.  You can’t have one without the other.

But the error that is central planning will remain with us, not washed clean by the save-the-planet hot air.  The recurring problem with central planning – i.e., government running the economic show – lies in Hayek’s knowledge problem: humans are flawed and a small group of them can’t possess the requisite knowledge to make the zillions of decisions in an everyday economy.  But the situation gets worse when we realize that we aren’t producing the “best and brightest” to occupy the commanding heights of public service and culture.  Veritable dunces dominate both the policy and discussion.

I suspect that most of the blame for this sad state of affairs must be placed on our schools, with much of it belonging to our colleges.  Logic is thrown out the window.  Highly contentious propositions are taught as maxims, or ultimate truths, so much so that any possible debate in the classroom is cut off at the knees.  “Systemic” racism, the absolute determinism of self-proclaimed identity, all-pervasive group oppression, and the reduction of meteorology and climate science to ideological slogans are rampantly presented as truisms.   No wonder, upon graduation, these minions couldn’t argue their way out of paper cuffs.

If, heaven forbid, they should ever have to appear before a microphone, they are reduced to mumbling incoherencies.  As such, beware of politicians who preface their remarks with “all experts agree”.  Chances are, it isn’t true.  But it’s an easy rhetorical handle to push something that they don’t really understand.  It’s a favorite when they have to talk about economics, “climate change”, or Covid restrictions.

The push for electric vehicles is another one of those fad-thoughts that can’t withstand cross-examination.  Just think, your recent model Toyota Corolla in your garage – the one that is nearly paid off and gets 40 mpg – must be ushered to the junk pile for – what? – a cramped four-wheeled runabout of limited range or a near mortgage-priced Tesla – all of which will irreparably alter what it means to drive to grandma’s house for Thanksgiving.

Soviet-style apparatchiks – increasingly common in Democrat administrations – are famous for five-year plans.  Biden announced an eight-year one: half of all vehicles sold in the US will be “zero emissions” by 2030. It’s easy to announce, and a horror if implemented.

How so?  For one, we’ll become dependent on the ChiComs for either those “righteous” batteries or their manufacturing materials like nickel and lithium.  Mining the stuff in America is a difficult proposition since the same enviros who extol the virtues of zero emissions also hate mining.  We have restricted ourselves to one mine each for nickel and lithium (Silver Peak Mine, Nv.).  The internal contradiction of Biden’s proclamation alongside zealous nature-preservation translates into an unintelligible policy goulash.

Compound the above with the monumental difficulties in keeping the thing charged.  Where to charge?  At home and/or on the road?  If at home, it’ll take from 45 minutes for an 80% charge (fast charge) to 3-4 days (level 1 charge), depending on whether or not you want to do the equivalent of a home remodel to install the essential circuitry.

Charging is further impacted by how hot or cold the ambient temperature and the things are.  Colder takes longer.

If on the road, who knows what you’ll face.  One recent survey showed that 25% of the current charging stations were inoperable. And be prepared, if you find a functioning one, for a 45-minute wait (fast charge) or an overnight stay (10 hours) if sufficient terminals are available at a level 2 facility, which most are.  And bear in mind, California and a host of blue states are busy deconstructing their grids.  Unstable grids mean unstable charging, possibly ending up empty on the side of the road, and hopefully not in the dead of winter in a raging polar vortex.

Hypothermia from a dead battery is not as farfetched as you think.  Apparently, a byproduct of “sustainable” electricity grids is blackouts.  Someone could make quite a name for themselves by correlating an increased reliance on “renewables” and an uptick in blackouts.  Some numbers are trickling in to bolster the relationship.  In one study, outages went from 24 in 2000 to 180 in 2020.

Blackouts are one outcome in a system that is by nature erratic, as wind and solar are.  So, realistically, production can meet 100% of demand in one brief moment to chronically falling below it to everything going dark.  Once we begin to notice that the only lights are coming from vehicles, and the surrounding area is as dark as northern Chile’s remote Atacama Desert, it’s panic time in our Nissan Leaf on “empty”.

Let’s face it, the contraption can only appeal to those who plan to never leave the metropolis.  It’s an artifact of cities, like the Acela train or subways.  It’s easy to envision if your commute is ten miles or a few miles down the road to the soccer fields . . . except when you come back to reality trying to plan for the holidays or a family vacation to a national park.

And, so, we are expected to take the plunge for what, the delusion that American commuters are the principal cause of warming temperatures and not the rest of the world’s discovery of a life above grinding poverty and dirt floors?  Air conditioning, after all, is a godsend to the Third World and they want more of it.

Pardon me, broad electrification of transportation is lunacy.  Like most unhinged manias, it’ll have to be imposed or we’ll have to be bribed into the things with other people’s money.  Fact is, it won’t be other people’s money but magically pulled out of the ether, which means inflation, the hidden tax, and an erosion of personal wealth.  In the end, we’ll just be poorer and face enormously disrupted lives . . . for no good reason.

Welcome to the Biden edition of central planning’s nightmare.

RogerG

*Thanks to Andrew Stuttaford for important insights.

Central planning: A method of economic regulation in which investment, production, and resource allocation are coordinated according to a comprehensive national governmental plan. (lexico.com)

Democrats love the idea of central planning, not that they always and fully practice it.  When given the opportunity, any opportunity, they become giddy at the prospect of meddling in the most intimate economic decisions.  The Green New Deal is a classic in this control-freak genre of economics.  It’s understandable.  After all, let’s not forget that they are the defacto socialist party in America.

However, I must admit that the Trump-populist subspecies of Republican are intoxicated by it in their newfound affection for centrally planned tariffs in an attempt to resuscitate a 1950’s mythical ideal.

Still, the Democrats have essentially cornered the market in zeal for grand government plans to engineer a world that better suits their prejudices.  And like the now-deceased Soviet Union, they’ll fail as the unintended and disastrous consequences pile up.  We’ll live the disaster.  Regardless, Biden and fellow Democrat big cheeses are blissfully strolling down the path blazed by the USSR.

Indeed, the examples are piling up.  To address high gas prices, Biden and his people conjured the idea of increasing the supply by allowing more ethanol in the blend.  Watch for shortages and price jumps in corn meal, anything made with corn, its processed derivatives (sweeteners, etc.), all complimentary goods (meats, baking goods, machinery, ingredients, seeds, fertilizers, etc.), and substitutes (other grains such as wheat, rice, oats, soy beans, etc.).  And to think that the $6/gal. fuel was itself a result of Biden’s day-one executive orders to attack anything that would make more crude oil available in demanded volumes (XL pipeline, bans on federal leases, tax threats, an EPA run amok, etc.).  It’s a politically-engineered theater of the absurd.

And here’s another kicker: our refining capacity hasn’t changed much since 1977, the year of the construction of the last major refinery.  NIMBY’s, byzantine environmental reviews, and orchestrated hostility to fossil fuels has throttled the ability to turn the crude into affordable road trips and brimming supermarket shelves.  Instead, we get sermons to go electrical in a glorified golf cart or $60,000 Tesla.  Mind you, nothing is physically wrong with the conventional family sedan – it being made more fuel efficient and less polluting over the years – it’s just that these wunderkinds have a visceral hate for the lifestyles of soccer moms, the ‘burbs, and RV-vacations.  Under Biden, the bigotry gets a chance to be translated into policy.

Right now, the public’s focus is on shortages of everything from gasoline to baby formula, all of it trucked.  Think of the container ships piling up outside San Pedro, but don’t forget that the price of diesel is running a $1 more per-gallon than gasoline on an already inflated price base.  Today, it takes $700-$800 to fill up the required 150-gallon tanks on the big rig.  Some loads aren’t cost-effective and can’t be made outside bankruptcy proceedings.  Shortages!

So, Biden catered to eco-fantasies of his base and threw everyone else wild curve balls.  One of those batters in the box receiving the wild pitch is the oil industry.  The oil companies, like everyone else, have a survival instinct.  They have sensed over the recent years an infantile dislike for them among half-witted cultural elites.  As a result, they have increasingly tried to get on the “sustainable” bandwagon: biofuels like algae, etc.  You’ve seen the ads.  So, scarce refining capacity is devoted to them.  A Shell refinery (La.), a Tesoro refinery (Ca.), the HollyFrontier refinery (Wyo.), the Western Refining refinery (N.M.), and the Dakota Prairie refinery (N.D.) have responded to the political heat by restricting crude oil processing and a shift to the greenie will-o’-the-wisp.

Sending less gasoline from the refinery to the pumps is just one aspect of the problem.  Some refineries have simply called it quits.  The Philadelphia Energy Solutions, the largest refinery on the East Coast at 335,000 barrels per day, is slated to fall under the wrecking ball soon.  Lyondel Bassell’s refinery in Houston (263,000 barrels processed per day) is scheduled to close its gates by December 2023.

Some are being strangled in the crib.  The largest and newest proposed refinery, Hyperion Energy’s facility in South Dakota, is drowning in bureaucratic delays and an environmentalist insurgency.  Economic late-term abortions in the energy sector are becoming commonplace.

Tack on federal and state taxes – a dollar per gallon in California alone – and we have a pile-on for pump sticker shock and Walmarts with empty store shelves.  If you’re a climate-change hysteric, you must love misery.  Biden is proving that environmentalism is a sadistic religion.

*Read Jim Geraghty’s piece on the subject.

RogerG

Are you tired of corporate boards from Coca-Cola to Disney to BlackRock sounding more like a college sociology department?  These people are supposed to be wizened by the business bottom line, yet aren’t.  The reason might lie in their backgrounds.  These aren’t people who through grit and determination rose from hardscrabble to billionaire philanthropist showering libraries from one corner of America to another (think Carnegie).  Overwhelmingly, their world is the world of the suits and social remoteness.

Take for example Larry Fink, chairman and CEO of BlackRock investment management corporation.  The guy was born to an English professor mother and shoe store owner father in Van Nuys, Ca.  He went from high school right to UCLA, Kappa Beta Phi, to an MBA, on to managing other people’s money, and co-founder of the cash-cow behemoth investor BlackRock.  And he’s a Democrat and a lefty, all 5’ 7” of him.

His is a world alien to anyone who would find personal fulfillment in Mike Rowe’s Dirty Jobs.  It’s easy for a super-zip (zip code) groupie like Fink, isolated as he is, to be marinated in the cultural passions of his fellow insular grandees. Today, lefty groupthink is all the rage among the super-zips, and Fink is hip deep into ESG – environment, social, and governance.  What’s that?  It’s anti-capitalism for a capitalist, or a cover for how to maintain cred with the Che’ crowd in the faculty lounge.

ESG has it all for those peddling lefty bromides.  Beyond the usual race hustling, it is drowning in climate-change central planning.  One would think that central planning would be anathema to corporate suits.  Not so with this crowd, for they have bought into the lifestyle totalitarianism of the war on fossil fuels and the teenage rants of nincompoops like Greta Thunberg and AOC.  Besides, they’re rich enough to cushion any negative fallout to them personally.  So, for Fink’s BlackRock, no more money to companies on Greta’s hitlist, meaning oil companies.

Here’s Fink in a long-winded piece of nonsense: “As stewards of our clients’ capital, we ask businesses to demonstrate how they’re going to deliver on their responsibility to shareholders, including through sound environmental, social, and governance practices and policies.”  But he can’t speak for BlackRock’s shareholders since they were never polled for their views on their money being used to advance eco-totalitarianism.

Well, look out, Fink, because Sen. Dan Sullivan (R, Alaska) has written up the antidote for your high-handedness with other people’s money.  Sullivan’s “Investor Democracy Is Expected Act” wouldn’t allow money managers like Fink to act like Napoleon with BlackRock’s $10 trillion investors’ purse in order to blackmail targeted businesses into their woke political crusades.  The individual investor in BlackRock would have that power, not Fink.  Defanging Fink, and others like him in the super-zips and its soiree circuit, would be a step in the right direction of healthy free markets . . . and sane gas prices.

But I’m under no illusion that it’ll pass under the current Pelosi/Schumer/Biden regime.  However, the bill would bring to light a serious distortion in the relationship between investor and a business.  People like Fink would be properly limited to the fiduciary responsibility of enhancing shareholder value, not shills for the lefty chattering classes, if Sullivan’s bill ever survives the Democrats’ gauntlet.

*Read about Sullivan’s bill here.

RogerG

British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli was famous for saying, “There are three types of lies – lies, damn lies and statistics.”  The three are alive and well, and the stock and trade in the Democrats’ “will to power”.

Exploiting numbers are a favorite tactic in the pursuit of power, even if they are a product of an erroneous and deceptive calculation.  Right now, the Democrats’ frenzied lust for power puts the US Senate in their crosshairs.  The filibuster, a 50-50 split, and a couple of rogue Democrats stand in the way of their revolutionary blueprint.  The Constitution requires equal representation (2 Senators for each state) and they are popularly elected by a vote in each state. If it was really “fair” in their minds, the “fact” that their candidates received a sum total of more votes nationwide than Republicans should naturally mean that they should have more Senators, if something wasn’t wrong with the system . . . thus the drive for statehood for two more Democrat fiefdoms: Puerto Rico and DC, or 4 new Democrat solons.

The problem with the logic is that it is illogical.  The sum-total number is false.  Here’s how.  Some states, like the Democrats’ Wonderland of California have only one ruling party.  The state’s non-partisan primary puts all candidates – Democrats, Republican, independent, or whatever – on the same ballot with the top two vote-getters appearing on the general election ballot.  In a state like California, this can lead to two Democrats and no Republicans on the ballot, as what happened in 2016 in the Senate race between Kamala Harris and Loretta Sanchez. 12.2 million Democrat votes were registered, and zero Republican.  Add up California’s numbers with the others and, voilà, the hucksters have a talking point in their drive for power.

The same pernicious thinking is at work – i.e., something distorted in the calculation – in the war on fossil fuels, CRT, Covid hysteria, the love of the administrative state, class warfare, racialized education policies, and almost any other mania that’ll undermine the basis of our civilization.

Something to think about.  Eh?

*Thanks to Jim Geraghty for uncovering the statistical sleight of hand.

RogerG

Some facts are inescapable. California’s Department of Finance recently reported a population drop for the state for the second straight year.  The New York Times caught the story and immediately went into obfuscation mode.  The Times’s Tim Arango put the blame on Covid deaths, aging boomers, Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration, and the birth dearth.  Nonsense.  The pandemic’s toll, boomers reaching senescence, shrinking maternity wards, and the effects of enforcing immigration law were either felt across the country or in all border states, and yet, with the exception of California, they still grew, especially Texas.  Lies are comforting.  They make it easy to never admit that you were wrong.  Don’t expect a mea culpa from the state’s one-party mandarins.

The Times is right to mention the state’s previous periods of population decline, as in the 1990’s in the wake of the Cold War’s end.  Defense industries such as aerospace took a hit, but even back then, some in the media were reporting that the state’s bureaucratic, regulatory, and taxation nightmares would strangle any rebirth in the crib.  The state’s policy fetishes prove that one sure way to clean the air in the LA basin is to kill off manufacturing . . . and run many other businesses out of town.  They succeeded.

Where are they heading?  You guessed it: any place that likes the ideas of wealth-creation and jobs.  In contrast, the California attitude was encapsulated by assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez when informed of Elon Musk’s decision to move Tesla to Austin: “F*ck Elon Musk”.

It doesn’t end with Musk.  The state has been flashing the middle finger at businesses like Santa Ana-based Sovereign Flavors for their decision to flee to Kyle, Texas.  Likewise, the Twitter vitriol of fanatics like Gonzalez could be leveled at a host of businesses such as Oracle, CRBE (Coldwell Banker Richard Ellis), and McKesson for accessing the Texas escape hatch.

Businesses jump ship, and families run from unaffordable housing and the second-worst schools in the nation, and the prospect of nearly unchecked crime, filth, wildfires, blackouts, and collapsing infrastructure.  It’s enough to make any resident sick to their stomach.  The residents are plagued with nausea and the ruling clique and their base wallow in falsehoods.  Go figure.

RogerG