Category: President Trump

Adieu to the felon Trump

A last chance for commenters to let off steam.

The loyal remnant of RBC readers deserve one last chance to let off steam about Donald Trump.

Your budget foreign soothsayer predicts:

1. Based on current polls: Joe Biden will be elected President in November, quite comfortably (high probability, strong evidence, as the IPCC would say). Democrats will get a thin majority in the Senate (medium probability, weak evidence) and hold their 2018 gains in the House.

2. “In one year many things can happen. I may die. The king may die. And perchance the horse will learn to sing.”  Biden, Trump and Murdoch are all old men, living like me through a dangerous pandemic. Life insurance salesmen are not queuing at our doors. There is a significant chance the election will not be between Biden and Trump. Suppose it’s a contest between Abrams and Hawley? The best you can say is that Ms Generic Democrat beats Mr Generic Republican. Fox News either stays the same or implodes; the upside is all for the Democrats.

3. Current polls do not reflect the full impact of the coronavirus disaster. Trump’s increasingly unhinged behaviour (injecting disinfectant? WTF?) suggests his lizard brain fears the worst, and it’s right to do so.

Cumulative US deaths today are 50,000, about at the peak daily rate. The total death toll will therefore be at least 100,000. Check: Spain today, well past the peak, is at 22,000. Say ultimate toll of 25,000. Scale up to the USA by population (x 7.6) and you get 190,000. Spain, after a poor start, now has a well-enforced national lockdown, credible plans for a phased exit, and a decent income support safety net. The poor US safety net is leading to a chaotic and premature lockdown exit, giving the pandemic a long tail and ensuring an anaemic economic recovery. These predictions are pretty safe. Together they could easily lead to a wave election defeat for Trump and his party, on a par with 1932.

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On behalf of all us bloggers, a heartfelt thank you to all our readers and commenters over the years.

Hokusai’s solution for Covid-19

Row together or drown.

I posted this famous image six years ago, and you all know it, but like all good icons it bears endless repetition:

Hokusai, Great Wave off Kanagawa, ca. 1830

Hokusai’s Great Wave has a moral. It’s to do with the almost invisible boats, and the faceless oarsmen in them. They are responding to a threat from nature in the only practical way: rowing together as hard as they can. Their survival is not guaranteed, but decisive cooperation raises the chances of each of them.

The lesson applies straightforwardly to epidemics such as the coronavirus one we are living through ( I hope). The public health experts may not always be right, but doing what they say is far and away your best chance. Most people in the street recognize this: the draconian quarantines in China and Italy have been well supported, in spite of initial screw-ups.

The odd man out is the United States. Clownish lack of leadership and media irresponsibility has left the field open to quarrelling individual opinions. Even the highly regarded CDC mismanaged the testing rollout. This was quite unnecessary. Chinese researchers released the sequenced genome on 11 February, and German ones at the great Charité in Berlin released a reliable test on January 13 (pdf) (using a partial sequence?).  The timing is confusing to me, and multiple teams are at work on both the genome and tests, but basically the enemy has been identified for a month now.  Countries like South Korea have been able to institute mass testing. The episode shows just how deep the Trumpian rot has gone in the public service.

Hokusai does not spell out the alternative, but it’s obvious. If the fishermen do not row together, the boats will be swamped and they are like to drown. A comparable  fate now looks inevitable for the United States.  Without effective and systematic federal leadership (targeted restrictions on movement, public education on social distancing, emergency paid leave and guaranteed care, food distribution, measures against hoarding …) the epidemic will spread out of control and swamp the available critical resources (isolation beds, respirators, nurses, antiviral drugs). Thousands will die, perhaps more than in China.

I hope I’m wrong. The silver lining, if it’s as bad I as I think, is that Trump cannot escape responsibility for the disaster, any more than Bush could for the botched aftermath of Katrina.  The virus could have been designed as a WMD against his supporters: older, poorly educated, individualistic, careless, and trusting in his dangerous lies. You can’t spin gravestones. Some of the mourners will wake up.

 

Impeachment open thread

I don’t have anything interesting to say about this, but commenters might like a space for a discussion, so here it is.

As a peg, let me suggest the very practical question whether House Democrats should pursue a broad or a narrow investigation, within the bounds of “high crimes and misdemeanours” not bad policies as on immigration and trade.

For narrow: the record of the Ukraine phone call conclusively proves abuse of office; no serious defence possible; gets it over with quickly.

For broad: impeachment will in any case not lead to removal; the object is to educate the electorate about the unfitness of not only Trump but most of his Cabinet and his enablers in the Senate, so lay out all the dirt; the open-and-shut Ukraine count will help shake loose evidence on other offences like money laundering for Russian mobsters.

There are nuances within the broad approach. Take violation of the oath of office to “faithfully execute the laws.” Trump and his minions have instead done their worst to sabotage both ACA and the Clean Air Act. Very dirty pool, but I suspect most voters will treat these as policy choices (maybe very bad ones) not potential abuses of power. There is quite enough to go on without taking this risk.

PS: “Perhaps the horse will learn to sing”. McConnell is a thug, but his own thug not Trump’s. There are circumstances - very unlikely but not impossible - in which Mitch would conclude that Trump is a net liability to the Congressional GOP. We may reasonably question if VP Pence has the cojones to stick the knife in if necessary. There is no such doubt about McConnell.

PS2: If any of my fellow-bloggers chimes in with something more substantial, commenters please shift the discussion to that thread.

Trump’s War on Coal IV

In the second of this series of posts, I reported on data from the SEIA and consultants WoodMac that cast doubt on FERC’s forecasts of “highly probable” new solar installation in the USA. I went so far as to characterize these as “politicised rubbish”.

At the time I did not have comparable data for wind. Now I do. In a press release, the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) reports:

Of the total wind pipeline, 17,213 MW were under construction across 21 states at the end of first quarter. [….] Project developers also reported 21,949 MW of wind capacity in the advanced development stage, which also reached a record level. Projects in advanced development have not yet begun construction but are likely to come online in the near term because they have either signed a long-term contract, placed turbine orders, or are proceeding under utility ownership.

My italics.

The AWEA definition corresponds very closely to the SEIA/WoodMac criterion for solar and to any common-sense interpretation of the term “highly probable”. So FERC have got this badly wrong too.

Putting the data together for your convenience, I get this:

The implied coal retirements in the last line - implied by the AWEA and SEIA/WoodMac data - are based on the assumptions of static demand for electricity, one-for-one substitution of renewables for coal, and no change in the latter’s break-even capacity factor (CF). The continuous-equivalent number for the announced retirements is just reached by applying the fleet average and is probably inaccurate, but it plays no part in the rest of the calculation. Note that old coal plants are inflexible, unlike gas, and don’t contribute much to the needed firming backup for cheap intermittent renewables.

The table also assumes that all the utility projects listed by SEIA/WoodMac and the AWEA will be completed in the three-year horizon used by FERC. This is very likely, though recently solar developers have started signing PPAs with delivery as late as 2023. The CFs for wind and solar are conservative, as technical advances are still raising them.

The estimate therefore has a fair margin of error. But it does strongly suggest that coal retirements of well over twice those already notified to FERC are already baked into the cake, with more on the way.

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Politically, the key factor is how many more coal jobs are lost in the next 15 months, before the 2020 elections. Here the picture is much less clear, but qualitatively similar.

It’s a fairly safe assumption that all the wind and solar farms currently under construction will be working by the election and cutting demand for coal. Since solar is very quick to build once ground is broken, this may imply a large underestimate. Using the same simple methods as in my table, that translates to 11.5 GW of redundant coal generation. The actual coal plant closures may be delayed or anticipated; the impact on mining jobs will be immediate.

The number is in the same ballpark as recent experience. 15 GW of American coal plants closed in 2018, displaced by gas as much as renewables. ( I don’t attempt to take account of gas here, but it’s more bad news for coal.) The acceleration I predicted, and still do, looks as if it will come after the election. However, the now certain job losses, and the equally certain prospect of many more to come, will already be on a sufficient scale to show up Trump’s promises in 2016 to American coal-miners as a cynical fraud.

It looks as if Appalachians generally are slowly getting the message. Trump’s approval ratings in selected states, Morning Consult, for now and at the start of his term:

Update 3 September

To do the FERC staff justice, they have changed the concept again and now less subjectively list new generating plants “under construction”. In the “energy infrastructure” report for June, the numbers I am interested in are:

  • coal plant retirements to July 2022 16.3 GW (+3.0 GW from May)
  • wind under construction 27.1 GW (+1.6 GW)
  • solar under construction 17.1 GW (+2.3 GW)
  • gas under construction less retirements 21.7 GW (+3.5 GW)

The small victory for professionalism should be praised. Note however that since wind and solar plants take at most 2 years to put up, FERC’s table is no longer very useful as a three-year projection. What we can say is that at least 44 GW of new wind and solar will be up and running before next November, and cutting coal sales. I make that 22 GW of coal generation replaced, plus up to another 13 GW from gas.

Unpublished Op-Ed

Mark Kleiman and I wrote this in February 2017, but never had it published. I thought that it might be worth posting at this time.

Some Words of Advice for Federal Employees

Receiving directives inconsistent with good government – if not worse – creates one of the most difficult situations a civil servant can face. As former Justice Department staffers, we have some advice to offer Federal employees when such situations arise, as they seem likely to do often under the current regime.

1.       When told to implement a policy that is counter to statute, regulation, or the stated and authorized goals of the agency, take good notes; such directives rarely come in writing. Then go back to your office and write down your understanding of the recommended policy, making sure you have correctly described what you were told. Then send that account as a memo to your superior.

2.       Whether or not you receive a reply, follow up with a detailed list of issues and concerns, both pro and con, involved with proposed policy or action. Describe them in full context and cite the relevant legislation, executive orders, and constitutional issues. Send that, too, up the chain of command.

3.       You may also be at the receiving end of threats or other problematic situations that are meant to intimidate you. Write a memo to yourself and share it with a trusted friend as soon as possible, to establish a time line.

4.       Do not use your office phone or computer (or cell phone while in the office) for personal reasons, least of all to complain about these situations, as this may open you up to attack. If your agency expects you to be available for phone calls and text messages around the clock, get a cell phone that you use only for official business. You might want to use a text messaging app that encrypts the message, and ask your recipients to do the same.

5. Maintain a contemporaneous, written log on a ruled ledger with a sewn binding, so removal of any page will show. Enter every meeting, call, and significant email on successive lines in ink, leaving no spaces. Fill in any space on the right with a slash, so nothing can be added. Note the date, time, attendees, subject, and conclusions. Absent minutes, no one else will remember what happened a day later, so your record will become dispositive. This approach, laborious though it is, can provide valuable protection for anyone from a GS-1 to a cabinet officer.

6. If you decide to talk to a reporter, get the ground rules clear first. “On background” means you can’t be identified, but your agency can; “deep background” means that even your agency isn’t mentioned.  Any communication to the press about official business not previously cleared by your agency’s public information office will probably put you out of bounds; consider whether you’re willing to take the consequences. If you’re later asked about whether you were the source of a story, either tell the truth (and be prepared to find a new job) or refuse to answer.

There are already reports that White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon has taken steps to erase the paper trail behind various Executive Orders. All the more reason for career civil servants and the political appointees more loyal to the country than to the ruling cabal to make as much of a record as possible.

Michael Maltz is Emeritus Professor of Criminal Justice and of Information & Decision Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He was a research analyst with the National Institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice during the Nixon administration and had to deal with some questionable directives.

Mark Kleiman was Professor of Public Policy at the New York University Marron Institute of Urban Management. He served as Director of Policy and Management Analysis for the Criminal Division in the Carter and Reagan Administrations, never receiving an improper order.

Trump’s War on Coal III

The US coal collapse is speeding up as predicted.


Previous posts in this series: Donald Trump’s War on Coal , Trump’s War on Coal II

In January I looked at the state of US coal and concluded:


It is highly probable that demand for coal will fall by the order of magnitude implied by the FERC data. My prediction is that the pace of closures, and the loss of mining jobs, will roughly triple.

I did not predict that it would happen so fast.

FERC regularly updates a table including planned retirements of coal generating plants up to three years ahead. The April table gave 13,992 MW. In May this rose to 17,054 MW: an increase of 3 GW in one month, just over 1% of the remaining capacity.

It’s technically possible, given the rolling horizon, that these 3 GW were already in the spreadsheet for May 2022 and the forecast has just caught up. This is very unlikely, and makes little difference even if it were true.

The obvious interpretation is that utility executives across the United States have concluded:

1. Their coal plants are increasingly uneconomic compared for gas, renewables, and storage, and carry growing reputational and policy risks at federal (>2020) and state level.

2. The Trump Administration’s policy to save coal is a sham. Even rhetorically, it is disappearing: Trump did not mention coal in his lastest set-pieces on energy (July 8 remarks, fact sheet).

3. They might as well bite the bullet now. Nothing will get better for coal.

The information the utilities supply on closures to FERC, the federal agency responsible for the reliability of the national electricity supply, must be hard. These aren’t predictions but decisions. There is more of the same they are still mulling over. And once they have decided to close a plant, there are pressures to bring the date forward. The collapse will go on speeding up.

With oversight from Washington in the hands of feckless, inept and amoral ex-lobbyists, the end of coal mining in America is coming at an appalling social cost. David Roberts at Vox documents one example, the Eagle Butte and Belle Ayr mines in Wyoming. The short version:

1. The mines were run by Alpha Natural Resources. Alpha made a very bad bet on Appalachian coal and declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2015.

2. Te restructuring involved abandoning critical health benefits to 4,580 non-union miners and spouses, slashing the cleanup liabilities, multi-million dollar bonuses to executives, and spinning off the mines.

3. The buyer of the two mines was Blackjewel, run by an Appalachian grifter called Jeff Hoops. Hoops had apparently no plan to nurse the mines back to viability. Instead he milked the cash flow for more insider bonuses while not paying taxes and other creditors. IANAL but it looks to me like a classic long-firm fraud.

4. Blackjewel suddenly collapsed two weeks ago in a cloud of bouncing cheques, some for wages. It is heading for Chapter 7 bankruptcy and a full liquidation. The state will be left with the uncovered cleanup liabilities, and support for the abandoned miners, assuming they are nor just left to cough their lungs out untreated in the rugged Western way.

5. Roberts does not go into this, but I assume that the political influence of Philip Anschutz, the wind baron of Wyoming, has been strengthened by the fiasco. Wyoming will be less helpful in future to his coal rivals. The state may even go after Mr. Hoops. Good hunting.

PS: let me advertise an old proposal I made here in 2010: nationalize coal. It really is the most humane way to manage the rundown of an entire sector in the public interest. US coal companies are to a first approximation worthless, once you include the cleanup, pension and health liabilities they are trying to evade. So the fair price to shareholders is $0 a share. Bondholders and unsecured creditors? How about their taking the same haircut they are getting anyway under Chapter 11 bankruptcy? The taxpayer will be on the hook for the shortfall in the funds for cleanup, pensions and health, but that’s inevitable in any scenario. What nationalization saves is the looting by the likes of Mr. Hoop, and it allows for proper planning of the reconversion measures.

Socialism? Sure. That’s what makes my proposal sadly unrealistic. Do you have a better one?

Trump’s War on Coal II

The collapse of US coal continues.

In January I posted a piece on coal under Trump, concluding

My prediction is that the pace of closures, and the loss of mining jobs, will roughly triple.

How’s it going? The coal plant closures continue, but it’s far too early to test my prediction. I do however have some new evidence on my side.

I’m not talking about the long-awaited announcement by Trump’s EPA of its replacement for Obama’s Clean Power Plan regulation in the form of the Affordable Clean Energy rule (ACE). The CPP was moribund once SCOTUS loyally suspended it, on the laughable pretext that the Trump Administration would shortly produce a workable alternative form of regulation of greenhouse gas emissions. ACE will be immediately caught up in litigation so it won’t have any effect either: it’s no longer regulations killing coal but economics. For instance, Republican Florida and Texas are both in the middle of a solar boom.

ACE is a stunt to retain the fraying support of Rust Belt voters along the lines of “At least we tried, but we had no answer to AOC’s superhero powers and superior Chinese and Danish technology, backed by the machinations of the Deep State”. Less an ace than a desperate lob from behind the baseline, inviting an easy smash. Fake news.

No, it’s something else.

Continue reading “Trump’s War on Coal II”

The sleep of reason brings nightmares

Nothing combines Trump’s ignorance, cruelty, fecklessness and desperation like [what I suppose is] Stephen Miller’s idea of sending refugees into sanctuary cities.  It’s nature imitating art, Brers Fox and Bear throwing Brer Rabbit into the briar patch.

The way this scheme is supposed to work is that we (I live in one of those places) will be terrified at the prospect and crime will soar when it happens, so we will vote against all our Democratic officials and, I guess, form vigilante gangs and go after the refugees violently. Boy, that’ll show those luftmensch liberals and the refugees both, right?

But every assumption behind this is completely wrong. These are people who don’t want to be raped and killed, and have the courage to trek two thousand miles to protect their kids, and who trust US decency and law, and being immigrants will have lower crime rates than the native population. The idea that they are going to scare the pants off us is completely and obviously nuts. Sanctuary cities declared themselves such having lots of experience with immigrants; we know exactly what to expect, and it’s OK with us.

Aside from its viciousness and illegality, it’s hard to think of a Trump initiative that is so completely disconnected from facts and reality; not just slightly off, but totally mad.  The White House continues to plumb new depths of sick and stupid; are there any more wheels that can come off this thing?

Why you can skip the SOTU

The word considerable does not mean what most people think it does. It means “needing or deserving of consideration” , not “big”  or “a lot” .  It means what everything Donald Trump says is not, and tonight’s speech (and the post-speech tweets and flailing about by flacks and shills that will follow) will be more proof: Trump’s discourse is not considerable and should just be ignored as such. 

One significance of the Jewish ceremony of Bar Mitzvah is that the principal is now responsible for what he says: when an adult says he will do something, the odds that he will should go up, and in general people can depend on that and make corresponding commitments. What Trump says he will do has no such significance: his statements of intent are vacuous and ephemeral, as Mitch McConnell and the dozens people he has stiffed in business can attest.

When grownups assert facts about the world, the assertion has some bearing on what you should believe, though of course some are better informed than others or smarter.  When Trump says practically anything, his relentless, terrier-like, purposeful ignorance means it has no informative value whatever, whether he’s noodling about climate, Iran, the border, or trade data.

A third kind of discourse enlightens us about the speaker’s values: “I’m a Christian” is shorthand for a bunch of actions in the world one can expect the speaker to try to perform or not.  Trump’s value statements are as vacuous, and as labile—whether odious or decent-as his fact discourse. 

It’s not just a matter of mendacity, though his endless, insouciant lying about big things and small have a lot to do with this. He doesn’t misrepresent his values; he just doesn’t have any (except his own ego). If there were money to made from it, and he had permission from Laura Ingraham and Putin, he would as readily get on a climate alarm jag as he does about immigrants.

All of which has been a paralyzing problem for all of us and especially for the press.  Deference to his office, and long journalistic tradition, seems to require that when the president says “A is B”, the fact that he said it requires reporting, perhaps with a quote from another source who says “no, it’s not!” But when this president says absolutely anything, the event is not like any other president, or any other important public official saying something.  It has no bearing on anyone’s belief, on what he will do in the future, or on our views of him: it’s not considerable. It’s like a horserace prediction based on a dice roll. We’ve had two years of our press trying to treat Trump’s discourse as the utterances of a responsible, more-or-less-informed, responsible adult: it’s time to stop. The word lie is, thankfully, starting to be used to characterize his mendacities, but why tell us about something that will be inoperative or a passing fancy by the next news cycle?  We need a completely new convention, recognizing that the presidential utterance process has been replaced with an inconsequential-not considerable—model, and treating it like the “speech” of a parrot or random artificial speech generator.

Not considerable: how to listen to tonight’s speech, or why you can just ignore it.