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National Grid as Learning Opportunity for the Governor
One begins to get the sense that National Grid energy prices are becoming a bit of a representation of Rhode Island’s business climate generally, which makes this sort of rhetoric from the Raimondo administration a bit hard to take, from Alex Kuffner’s article on rate increase requests for the Providence Journal:
Rhode Island families and small business owners — especially manufacturing businesses — are already challenged by high energy costs,” Gov. Gina Raimondo said in a statement. “The Public Utilities Commission needs to open up National Grid’s books and stand up for Rhode Island ratepayers.”
Macky McCleary, administrator of the state Division of Public Utilities and Carriers — sister agency to the PUC — said Rhode Islanders deserve better value in their utility services.
“What we received today appears to be a proposal that continues business as usual and presumes the willingness of Rhode Islanders to bear an ever‐increasing burden of higher costs,” he said.
Read through the article and what you’ll find is a list of complaints that touch on government mandates on energy and on business in general:
- Labor costs, including health care
- New hires to connect green energy sources to the grid
- Wealth redistribution through a low-income discount
- Electric vehicle charging stations
How can the governor play defender of the people when it comes to these expenses and then allow things like mandatory paid sick time, new health care mandates, and expanded green energy programs? Whether these costs filter through the energy company or not, they ultimately all come from the same household incomes.
The Fruitlessness of Plastic Bag Bans
As we hear rumors that the municipal fad of plastic bag bans may move up to the state level, Glenn Reynolds points to a Daily Mail article reporting that up to 95% of all plastic waste in the world’s oceans comes from eight rivers in Asia and two in Africa:
Up to 95 per cent of plastic polluting the world’s oceans pours in from just ten rivers, according to new research.
The top 10 rivers – eight of which are in Asia – accounted for so much plastic because of the mismanagement of waste.
About five trillion pounds is floating in the sea, and targeting the major sources – such as the Yangtze and the Ganges – could almost halve it, scientists claim.
When your neighbors attempt to impose these sorts of environmentalist restrictions on you, what they’re really doing is imposing useless drags on our lives and economy in order to feel good about themselves. Naturally, the most vulnerable in our community will ultimately feel the effects most acutely, but that’s of little concern when you’re saving the world from a phantom non-Asian bag menace.
That statement may seem a little harsh, but in all the articles I’ve read about these bans, I don’t think I’ve ever seen mention of the actual source of plastic in the oceans or a discussion of the economics. I have, however, seen stories about people getting sick from reusable grocery bags.
The Rules Seem Different for Government Agencies
Portsmouth good government activist John Vit released these drone photos of new @RIDOTNews facility in Portsmouth (notice proximity to wetlands) violating RIDEM Rules by not protecting salt piles. @TedNesi @kathyprojo pic.twitter.com/pcHUcHdPmr
— John Pagliarini, Jr. (@SenJPag) November 21, 2017
Does Regunberg See the Charges but Miss the Fees
.@AaronRegunberg Q for you: do you support all the legislatively mandated fees/surcharges that ramp up RIers electric bills each month? https://t.co/JXpqaOCtjy
— OSTPA (@OSTPA1) November 5, 2017
An Administration with No Credibility to Chastise
To be fair, this is the sort of thing one expects a governor to say when an institution, particularly a public utility, falls short of expectations at a time during which people are relying on it, as Shaun Towne reports for WPRI:
[Democrat Governor Gina] Raimondo’s office on Wednesday said the governor has directed the Division of Public Utilities and Carriers (DPUC) Administrator Macky McCleary to assess National Grid’s storm preparedness and restoration efforts.
To ensure National Grid’s attention is focused on the ongoing restoration, Raimondo’s office said the review will begin once all homes and businesses are back online.
“Rhode Islanders should expect the lights to come on when the switch is flipped. National Grid owes Rhode Island families and businesses a swift response when power goes out and thoughtful planning to prevent outages when storms are forecasted,” Raimondo said in a statement Wednesday.
Unfortunately, it’s not so easy for a politician to position herself in opposition to inadequate services when this is also news, as reported by Susan Campbell, also on WPRI:
On the first day of open enrollment for health insurance, a glitch prevented hundreds of customers from reaching HealthSource RI.
About 300 calls were routed incorrectly, due to a change that was made to the agency’s phone menu Tuesday night, according to Brenna McCabe, a spokesperson for the agency.
Add the following to the list of reasons government should remain small enough that it’s actually possible for politicians to run it well: It doesn’t help when the people’s elected representatives have less than zero credibility for complaining about the disappointing performance of other organizations.
The Real Animosity to Constitutional Order
Yet I'm suddenly supposed to believe that disdain for democracy is concentrated in the White House & military. cc: @tomricks1 @RadioFreeTom https://t.co/GVWQYr6hF1
— Andrew Morse (@CAndrewMorse) October 24, 2017
Arctic Ice on the Rise
Exact opposite of expert forecasts and claims about warming, there has been a huge increase in Arctic ice since 2007https://t.co/oyDzgaoWRZ pic.twitter.com/LCc57TYc4N
— Steve Goddard (@SteveSGoddard) October 23, 2017
For Some, Driving Out Producers Is a Feature, Not a Bug
A father-and-son op-ed in the Wall Street Journal notes that California’s cap-and-trade energy scheme (like Rhode Island’s) misses the reality that companies can simply leave and, moreover, have incentive to do so:
Yet the law’s designers still have not confronted the central conundrum of trying to impose a state or regional climate policy: As firms compete for a limited supply of carbon permits, they are put at a disadvantage to out-of-state rivals. Production flees the state, taking jobs and tax revenues with it. Emissions “leak” outside California’s cap to other jurisdictions.
Of course, as we can readily observe in Rhode Island, this works out just fine for people who have jobs (often because they’re politically connected) and the wealth to tolerate higher energy prices. They’re happy to pay more for energy… for everything… if they get to feel good about “being green” and never coming across any energy-production plants that don’t give them a thrill of self virtue, like wind turbines might. Those to whom that doesn’t apply, however, find that they have incentive to leave the state, as well.
Preparing for the Future Without Experience of the Present
If we’re really under threat of cataclysmic climate change, why do the activists have to go back so far for examples and use on-paper predictions to suggest acceleration?
Spinning Evidence of Climate Change Alarmism
A curious thing happens by the end of Harry Cockburn’s Independent article about scientists’ admission that they overshot the mark with their warnings of global warming a decade ago. We start with this acknowledgment that those of us who were sneered at as “deniers” were actually right to be skeptical:
The study, published this week in the journal Nature Geoscience, does not play down the threat which climate change has to the environment, and maintains that major reductions in emissions must be attained.
But the findings indicate the danger may not be as acute as was previously thought.
But we end with the new spin, from University College London Professor Michael Grubb, who suggests that keeping the global increase in temperature to 1.5° Celsius “is simply incompatible with democracy.”
New calculations suggest that humanity can emit more than three times the amount of carbon than scientists had previously prescribed (as a pretense for imposing economy-changing regulations on the planet), which is great news, according to Grubb, because:
“That’s about 20 years of emissions before temperatures are likely to cross 1.5C,” Professor Allen said.
“It’s the difference between being not doable and being just doable.”
Catch the trick? Under the previous assessments, it would already be too late to do anything about catastrophic climate change, so we might as well keep our democracy (and prosperity, I might add) through to the bitter end. If we acknowledge that the models have been alarmist, on the other hand, there’s a chance that we just might be able to save the world. So, there’s still a reason to hand over our freedoms to an international bureaucracy of elites.
Whether the models might still be too alarmist, we cannot yet tell, but why risk it for the petty sake of our inalienable rights as individual human beings?
A Century of Global Climate… Easier to Predict than a Hurricane’s Path?
I make a point of directing news and commentary from ideologically conflicting sources across my desk, and so it isn’t unusual for me to see a headline like, “Harvey should be a warning to Trump that climate change is a global threat,” immediately following one like, “The Trouble With Connecting Harvey to Climate Change.”
My own view on that contrast is much like Datechguy’s (via Instapundit):
Now as a person familiar with both mathematics and computer science, this [huge] variation [in predictions of the incoming hurricane’s likely path] is not odd, in fact it’s completely understandable. After all a computer model is based on the best possible guesses from the available data and hurricanes are “complex natural phenomena that involve multiple interacting processes” so there is nothing at all odd about there being a 850 mile variation as to where it will it. As we get closer to Sunday and we have true data to input the variation in the models will correspondingly decrease.Now apply this to climate change models telling us we face disaster in 100 years.You aren’t dealing with a single “complex natural phenomena that involve multiple interacting processes” you are dealing with EVERY complex natural phenomena that involve multiple interacting processes that exists on the earth. Every single additional item you add increases the variation of the data models. Furthermore you are also dealing with variations in the sun, variations in the orbits of the earth, its moon and more.
Furthermore, as the post points out, those advocating alarmism on climate change have financial incentive to do so in a coordinated “consensus” kind of way, whereas the incentive for those predicting hurricanes that will play out over the following week is mainly to be as accurate as they can be. The hurricane trackers aren’t asking us to hand over vast quantities of our resources, not to mention our rights, to them. They’re just trying to do a job, and because they’ll have liability for their predictions in the near future, they’re much more controlled about their claims.
Observe, Americans, and respond to activists accordingly.
The Path To Lower Electric Prices Is Clear
Already ranking a dismal 45th on the overall Family Prosperity Index, Rhode Islanders will soon suffer from a 16-21% increase on their electricity bills, making matters even worse.
Greenpeace Objects to Others’ Using Leftist Tactics
The news is interesting enough, as Christopher Matthews reports it in the Wall Street Journal, that Energy Transfer Partners, which is the Dakota Access Pipeline company, is suing Greenpeace under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). Greenpeace’s response, however, is nothing if not revealing:
Greenpeace USA General Counsel Tom Wetterer said in a statement that the suit was “not designed to seek justice, but to silence free speech through expensive, time-consuming litigation. This has now become a pattern of harassment by corporate bullies.”
Once could certainly dispute the characterization that Greenpeace is entirely, or even mostly, about “free speech,” but even if it were, the complaint is essentially that the company is stealing one of the Left’s signature moves. How many projects have been delayed or canceled because environmentalist groups have sued to impose costs on those behind them? How many people on the right have battled through the investigations and lawsuits that inspired the coining of the phrase “the process is the punishment”?
No doubt, we’re in dangerous territory if organizing against projects can be litigated as if it were a criminal enterprise, but this is the world that progressives have brought about, and the rules can’t only cut in one direction.
While Politicians Demagogue Energy, They Ensure Higher Rates
Although it’s not entirely unique in this respect, energy policy is incredibly complex, which makes tracing the effects of policy very difficult. But how could this, as reported by Ted Nesi on WPRI, not drive up the cost of energy and (therefore) everything else in the Northeast?
Rhode Island and the eight other states that are part of a decade-old compact to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions announced Wednesday they have reached an agreement for further cuts through 2030.
The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) said the governors have agreed to an emissions cap of 75.15 million tons of carbon dioxide in 2021 and a 30% cut from that level over the subsequent decade. If successful, by 2030 the initiative will have reduced carbon emissions in the Northeast by more than 65% since it began in 2009, officials said.
Our governments (which one might reasonably hesitate to characterize as “representative”) continue to set policies that close down nearby energy production and hinder the importation of energy from elsewhere. Then they turn around and blame greedy private corporations when they have to raise prices.
Of course, the politicians are aided in this endeavor by activists. This is from another WPRI article, by Ian Opaluch and Shiina LoSciuto:
“They want to build a biomass plant [in Somerset],” Connie Brodeur of Coalition for Clean Air South Coast said. “Bio sounds very green, but it’s not.”
“We’d like to see Somerset go into a different direction, away from burning things,” she added.
Here’s a thought: If that’s what you’d like to see, then get some money together and start a business. Compete for a share of the energy market, rather than interposing yourself between people trying to supply energy and the people who rely on it.
Regunberg Meddling with a Model Beyond His Ken
Providence Representative Aaron Regunberg tramples economics to demagogue against National Grid.
Will Voters Turn Back the Progressive Tide in Special Senate Election?
Rhode Island progressives’ extremist agenda can no longer be denied.
When the “Affordable” Fashion Needs a Subsidy
Here’s a telling story, from Susan Cambell of WPRI:
Piette said the [electric] car was an affordable option because of rebates and tax credits. One of them he was banking on? A $2,500 rebate from Rhode Island’s DRIVE program. (DRIVE is short for Driving Rhode Island to Vehicle Electrification.)
“That $2,500 was going to help me put in a charging station at the house here,” Piette explained. “The car takes about 18 hours to charge on 110 [volts], but it takes four to five hours on the system I’d be putting in.”
Unfortunately, when Mr. Piette bought the car, he wasn’t aware that the funds for the subsidy had just dried up. Now the car requires more than just an overnight-charge, and he apparently won’t spend his own money on what he was willing to force taxpayers to cover.
One wonders how pervasive this phenomenon will prove if ever our government finds it can’t continue to subsidize (by tax or by rate-payer mandate) everything from electric cars to home rooftop solar to offshore wind farms. It may not seem like much in the grand scheme of the economy, but the $575,000 that went toward the program in which Piette missed his chance to participate would have gone to something else — something that the economy considered to be more important.
Last Impressions Podcast Episode 25: We Have to Up Our Game as Citizens
The danger of the political fashion flip and a loss of perspective.
Who Can Solve the Mysterious Energy Cost Increases?
Ian Opaluch, of WPRI, provides the latest forum for local politicians to go after National Grid for seeking a 53% increase in its energy rates. Says Democrat Lieutenant Governor Daniel McKee: “National Grid’s proposed 53-percent standard offer rate increase is unacceptable. Another rate hike is a step in the wrong direction when it comes to making Rhode Island a better place to live, work and own a business.” Republican Senator Elaine Morgan calls the request “unconscionable.”
But there’s a mystery:
… Laws in Rhode Island prohibit National Grid from making a profit on the energy supply itself, and the company said the price hike is necessary to deal with rising energy costs.
In addition, the price increase would not affect delivery fees, so the average bill would go up by about 19% if the rate hike is approved, according to the Public Utilities Commission (PUC).
In short, National Grid won’t profit from this increase, but rather is just passing increased costs along. What could be driving the request, then?
Rhode Islanders should wonder how any reporters could cover this issue without noting the culpability of state governments. Even with fracking holding down the price of energy worldwide, New England politicians are happy to cave to activists on actions like shutting down the Brayton Point energy plant, delaying and maybe stopping a new energy facility in Burrillville, forcing us all pay for expensive renewable energy mandates, imposing additional taxes on fossil fuels, and on and on.
Morgan is right; it is unconscionable for Rhode Islanders to be saddled with skyrocketing energy costs when our country is becoming a world leader in energy production. But the people taking the unconscionable actions are those who work in the same building as Morgan and McKee. Every year, they take many steps in the wrong direction, across a variety of issues.
A More-Scientific Approach to Dealing with Climate Change
The suspicious assumption of climate-change hysteria is that if the proclaimed science is accurate, then the policies of the hysterics obviously follow. We should question whether an economic system that restricts rights and consolidates power would be the solution at a time when the world especially needs ingenuity and progress if we rightly avoid such a system when we aren’t in desperate need of innovation. (The inference of alarmists’ attitude, of course, is that freedom and inalienable rights are luxuries with which we must dispense once they’ve proven their science.)
In an op-ed in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, David Henderson and John Cochrane of the Hoover Institution suggest a different attitude:
… spread over a century, the costs of moving and adapting are not as imposing as they seem. Rotterdam’s dikes are expensive, but not prohibitively so. Most buildings are rebuilt about every 50 years. If we simply stopped building in flood-prone areas and started building on higher ground, even the costs of moving cities would be bearable. Migration is costly. But much of the world’s population moved from farms to cities in the 20th century. Allowing people to move to better climates in the 21st will be equally possible. Such investments in climate adaptation are small compared with the investments we will regularly make in houses, businesses, infrastructure and education.
And economics is the central question—unlike with other environmental problems such as chemical pollution. Carbon dioxide hurts nobody’s health. It’s good for plants. Climate change need not endanger anyone. If it did—and you do hear such claims—then living in hot Arizona rather than cool Maine, or living with Louisiana’s frequent floods, would be considered a health catastrophe today.
Some methods of conning people involve a manufactured sense of urgency to whisk the victim past the opportunity for reflection. Henderson and Cochrane have it right: “Strategic waiting is a rational response to a slow-moving, uncertain peril with fast-changing technology.”
Especially in sluggard Rhode Island, if time really is of the essence, we should stop binding our people with ideologically derived restrictions and allow dynamism to get us to a surer economic footing.
Faith Versus Reason in Technological Progress
Progressives promise that subsidizing green energy will produce fruits of savings in the future, but that seems more like faith than analysis.
“Collusion” Among Newspapers, Researchers, and “the Resistance”
This is perhaps a minor thing, and it’s certainly a little outside of my usual scope, here, but being a language guy, I found it to encapsulate the bias that many of us see in the news media. This is from text by the Washington Post’s Ashley Parker that appears as a brief sidebar in today’s Providence Journal. The Projo gave it the online headline, “White House blames Obama for failing to stop Russia collusion“:
The White House blamed the Obama administration Sunday for failing to tackle possible Russian collusion in the 2016 presidential election, sticking with a new strategy to fault President Donald Trump’s predecessor for an issue currently facing the president himself as part of a widening FBI probe.
Either Parker and the Projo’s online headline writer are attempting to deceive readers or they don’t know what “collusion” means. They use the word to mean, broadly, Russian interference or meddling in the election, but it actually requires some sort of agreement, in this case between somebody in the Trump campaign and the Russian government. Even with all of the illegal leaks newspapers have published in the last however-many months, we’ve seen no evidence of collusion, and yet journalists are using that mere allegation as the characterization of the whole “widening FBI probe.”
This sort of peep-hole into the thinking and decisions of people who claim to be objective investigators gives an example of why so many of us are suspicious of all such claims. Consider the legislation that looks likely to become law this year to shield researchers in state institutions of higher education from public records requests.
Maybe there’s an argument to be made for the transparency exception on more procedural grounds — if serious scientists are avoiding employment in state institutions because having to divulge “preliminary drafts, notes and working papers” hobbles them in professional competition with other researchers, but that’s not how it’s being presented. It’s being presented as a mechanism for hiding the work on the hotly contested issue of climate change on behalf of a governing elite that has given the people no justification for trust.
Energy Legislation Not as Advertised
Lieutenant Governor Dan McKee’s op-ed overstates the significance of his “legislative package,” not the least because it leaves out three of five bills.
A Useless, Self-Promoting Executive Order
Governor Raimondo’s executive order “reaffirming” progressives’ environmentalist agenda will have a net-negative effect on the environment.
Competing to Impose Expensive Energy on Residents
The whole notion of states’ competing to lead the nation in offshore wind, as reported in an AP article by Providence Journal alum Philip Marcelo, is strange. This isn’t an attempt to woo companies to the state, whether through a mere personal touch or millions in taxpayer subsidies; it’s explicitly an effort to force electrical customers (i.e., everybody) to fund the industry:
A state law passed last year to boost Massachusetts’ use of renewable energy outlines the process for developing offshore wind power.
The law calls for generating at least 1,600 megawatts of power, roughly enough electricity to power 750,000 homes annually, from offshore wind by 2027.
To accomplish this, the utilities are required to secure long-term contracts with wind farm developers in at least two phases: a bid request this June and another in 2019.
Treating this as some sort of positive competition reveals a certain tint of ideological glasses.
We Won’t Always Have Paris, Thank Goodness
In light of Dan Yorke’s surprising incredulity that Mike Stenhouse would be satisfied with President Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris climate accords, I was happy to come across Roger Kimball’s shared glee over the withdrawal and the ensuing lunacy from the Left:
Hysteria on the Left was universal. But as many cooler-headed commentators observed, one of the really amusing things is that the Paris Accord means exactly nothing. Since it requires nothing of its signatories, it will yield nothing from them. As an editorial in The Wall Street Journal pointed out, “amid the outrage, the aggrieved still haven’t gotten around to resolving the central Paris contradiction, which is that it promises to be Earth-saving but fails on its own terms. It is a pledge of phony progress.”
Kimball offers two things that Paris does do, though. First is offering people an opportunity for cheap-to-them virtue signaling.
The second reason for the hysteria follows from the one serious effect of the climate accord. It has nothing to do with saving the environment. Every candid observer understands that the real end of the accord is not helping “the environment” but handicapping the developed countries. At its core, the accord is intended as a mechanism to redistribute wealth by hampering countries like the United States from exploiting its energy resources and growing its economy. Hamstring the United States, but let countries like China and India—industrial strength polluters, both—do whatever they want.
Like many international agreements, the unspoken subtext of the Paris Climate Accord is “hamper America. Grab as much of its wealth as you can. Say it’s in the name of ‘fairness.’”
The irony is that the Left is throwing around terms like “traitorous” and “betrayal,” which makes me think of Indiana Jones. Kimball quotes left-wing billionaire political activist Tom Steyer on the first term; I’ve noted our own Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s using the second, conspicuously just a few days after the mega-donor’s statement. And yet, they’re using those words to describe an action that, from the perspective of many conservatives, puts working Americans’ interests first.
That’s a strange sort of betrayal, if your loyalty is to Americans.