At the Wall Street Journal, "$53 billion plan, a mix of subsidies and conditions, will be a test of U.S. industrial policy: Companies receiving money to build domestic semiconductor facilities under the $53 billion Chips Act will have to meet a series of requirements imposed by the government."
The newspaper's editorial is here: "The Chips Act Becomes Industrial Social Policy: Gina Raimondo uses semiconductor subsidies to impose progressive priorities via corporations."
At the Wall Street Journal, "Flexibility among electric-vehicle owners in how and when they charge their cars is seen as key to avoiding stress on the electrical grid":
Our idiot governor, @GavinNewsom, is pushing the chimera of an all-electric future. Why buy an electric car if you can't charge it because you have to save electricity? The ridicule writes itself. "Global warming" "climate change" is a false religion resting on blind faith. #EVs
— Donald Douglas 📘 (@AmPowerBlog) September 25, 2022
California aims to add millions of new electric vehicles in the coming years. Charging them without impairing an aging grid will require more power generation and help from EV drivers. The state’s plan to ban the sale of new gasoline-powered cars and trucks by 2035 means more EVs will be using California’s power supplies to fuel up, adding pressure to the grid. This summer, the state faced the threat of rolling blackouts during an extended heat wave and asked people to avoid charging and using major appliances during critical hours, raising questions of whether its electrical grid can handle the added demand from charging EVs. The state’s success depends on a range of factors, which include influencing the behavior of many consumers who are used to accessing gasoline at any time and unaccustomed to thinking about curtailing electricity use outside of weather emergencies. “Are people going to top off every night? Are people going to wait every few days and then charge up all at once?” asked Dan Bowermaster, senior program manager for electric transportation at EPRI, a nonprofit research group. “There are a lot of questions about customer behavior.” To help manage the demand on the electrical grid, utilities and auto makers are offering incentives for owners to charge up at certain times and in different ways. Charging usually takes place at home over several hours, with similar kinds of chargers available at places like offices where people are parked for long periods. Ultimately, vehicle-to-grid technology that can use EV batteries to back up power to homes or send electricity back to the grid will be adopted, analysts say. In California, managing the stresses on the grid is important because of the expected demand added by charging. The state’s energy commission estimates that in 2030, California will have 5.4 million passenger EVs and 193,000 medium- and heavy-duty EVs, resulting in charging approaching 5% of the electric load during peak hours from less than 1% currently. California’s strategy includes adding renewable energy supplies and limiting power demand, such as asking people not to charge EVs during critical hours, as it did this month amid the heat wave, said Liane Randolph, chair of the California Air Resources Board, the agency that sets air quality and vehicle emissions standards. Ms. Randolph said EV charging isn’t going to break the grid because consumers can control when they charge and avoid busier times. “The reality is the grid is only stressed in a limited period, a few hours in the early evening on certain types of days. Most of the time it’s fine.” A Stanford University study published Thursday found daytime public or workplace EV charging, instead of the more common at-home charging, would be the least stressful for the grid in Western states. With current electricity rate designs, the study also found the grid could face problems late at night—when EV drivers typically charge in home garages—because too many cars could start charging at once and create a demand spike. “If everyone were doing that, it would cause really big problems,” said Siobhan Powell, the study’s lead author. California is rapidly overhauling its electricity supplies, retiring older fossil fuel plants and adding more renewable resources such as solar, wind and battery projects, but the addition of new power isn’t coming fast enough to avoid potential problems. Heat waves, drought and the slow pace to site and permit projects have made setting a target to decarbonize the power grid challenging. A crunchtime arrives on hot evenings when the West’s abundant solar power drops but demand for air conditioning remains high. California lawmakers voted in August to keep the state’s last nuclear plant online in a bid to ease anticipated electricity supply shortages. “There’s some energy challenges in how we’re bringing on new resources to meet this new growth of electricity demand,” said John Moura, director of reliability assessment and performance analysis at the North American Electric Reliability Corp., a nonprofit that develops standards for utilities and power producers. Mr. Moura said at-home charging sessions draw about the power of 2.5 air conditioners. He doesn’t expect the increased demand to create a problem with delivering reliable power to homes and businesses, mainly because utilities will manage the connection of new EV chargers. If they had to, utilities would delay charger connections until they could make grid reliability improvements to provide more power. It is an outcome to avoid, Mr. Moura said, because it would anger and inconvenience customers who would have EVs as their only new-car option. “The disaster kind of comes from the rally cries from the public that utilities aren’t connecting their EVs fast enough,” Mr. Moura said. “And now that bumps up against EV mandates. That’s the train-crash scenario.” EVs won’t arrive all at once, or even by 2035. Cars typically last more than 15 years, which means the fleet turnover in California will take place over many years, analysts say...
We constantly hear that electric cars are the future—cleaner, cheaper and better. But if they’re so good, why does California need to ban gasoline-powered cars? Why does the world spend $30 billion a year subsidizing electric ones? In reality, electric cars are only sometimes and somewhat better than the alternatives, they’re often much costlier, and they aren’t necessarily all that much cleaner. Over its lifetime, an electric car does emit less CO2 than a gasoline car, but the difference can range considerably depending on how the electricity is generated. Making batteries for electric cars also requires a massive amount of energy, mostly from burning coal in China. Add it all up and the International Energy Agency estimates that an electric car emits a little less than half as much CO2 as a gasoline-powered one. The climate effect of our electric-car efforts in the 2020s will be trivial. If every country achieved its stated ambitious electric-vehicle targets by 2030, the world would save 231 million tons of CO2 emissions. Plugging these savings into the standard United Nations Climate Panel model, that comes to a reduction of 0.0002 degree Fahrenheit by the end of the century. Electric cars’ impact on air pollution isn’t as straightforward as you might think. The vehicles themselves pollute only slightly less than a gasoline car because their massive batteries and consequent weight leads to more particulate pollution from greater wear on brakes, tires and roads. On top of that, the additional electricity they require can throw up large amounts of air pollution depending on how it’s generated. One recent study found that electric cars put out more of the most dangerous particulate air pollution than gasoline-powered cars in 70% of U.S. states. An American Economic Association study found that rather than lowering air pollution, on average each additional electric car in the U.S. causes additional air-pollution damage worth $1,100 over its lifetime. The minerals required for those batteries also present an ethical problem, as many are mined in areas with dismal human-rights records. Most cobalt, for instance, is dug out in Congo, where child labor is not uncommon, specifically in mining. There are security risks too, given that mineral processing is concentrated in China. Increased demand for already-prized minerals is likely to drive up the price of electric cars significantly. The International Energy Agency projects that if electric cars became as prevalent as they would have to be for the world to reach net zero by 2050, the annual total demand for lithium for automobile batteries alone that year would be almost 28 times as much as current annual global lithium production. The material prices for batteries this year are more than three times what they were in 2021, and electricity isn’t getting cheaper either. Even if rising costs weren’t an issue, electric cars wouldn’t be much of a bargain. Proponents argue that though they’re more expensive to purchase, electric cars are cheaper to drive. But a new report from a U.S. Energy Department laboratory found that even in 2025 the agency’s default electric car’s total lifetime cost will be 9% higher than a gasoline car’s, and the study relied on the very generous assumption that electric cars are driven as much as regular ones. In reality, electric cars are driven less than half as much, which means they’re much costlier per mile.... Electric vehicles will take over the market only if innovation makes them actually better and cheaper than gasoline-powered cars. Politicians are spending hundreds of billions of dollars and keeping consumers from the cars they want for virtually no climate benefit.
Take Liz's advice:
Read every word of this thread to understand exactly how the leftist politicians like Newsom are lying to you about the CA heat wave & electric vehicles. https://t.co/ncw0xZizbk
— Liz Wheeler (@Liz_Wheeler) September 7, 2022
As readers have noted, I've not been defending Texas state officials, neither Governor Abbott nor Senator Cruz.
That said, perhaps the governor and senator can redeem themselves by vacating the high energy bills Texas residents are facing due to the failed power grid, which, once more, was no fault of their own.
At NYT, "His Lights Stayed on During Texas’ Storm. Now He Owes $16,752":
After a public outcry from people like Scott Willoughby, whose exorbitant electric bill is soon due, Gov. Greg Abbott said lawmakers should ensure Texans “do not get stuck with skyrocketing energy bills” caused by the storm.SAN ANTONIO — As millions of Texans shivered in dark, cold homes over the past week while a winter storm devastated the state’s power grid and froze natural gas production, those who could still summon lights with the flick of a switch felt lucky. Now, many of them are paying a severe price for it. “My savings is gone,” said Scott Willoughby, a 63-year-old Army veteran who lives on Social Security payments in a Dallas suburb. He said he had nearly emptied his savings account so that he would be able to pay the $16,752 electric bill charged to his credit card — 70 times what he usually pays for all of his utilities combined. “There’s nothing I can do about it, but it’s broken me.” Mr. Willoughby is among scores of Texans who have reported skyrocketing electric bills as the price of keeping lights on and refrigerators humming shot upward. For customers whose electricity prices are not fixed and are instead tied to the fluctuating wholesale price, the spikes have been astronomical. The outcry elicited angry calls for action from lawmakers from both parties and prompted Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, to hold an emergency meeting with legislators on Saturday to discuss the enormous bills. “We have a responsibility to protect Texans from spikes in their energy bills that are a result of the severe winter weather and power outages,” Mr. Abbott, who has been reeling after the state’s infrastructure failure, said in a statement after the meeting. He added that Democrats and Republicans would work together to make sure people “do not get stuck with skyrocketing energy bills.” The electric bills are coming due at the end of a week in which Texans have faced a combination of crises caused by the frigid weather, beginning on Monday, when power grid failures and surging demand led to millions being left without electricity. Natural gas producers were not prepared for the freeze either, and many people’s homes were cut off from heat. Now, millions of people are discovering that they have no safe water because of burst pipes, frozen wells or water treatment plants that have been knocked offline. Power has returned in recent days for all but about 60,000 Texans as the storm moved east, where it has also caused power outages in Mississippi, Louisiana, West Virginia and Ohio. The steep electric bills in Texas are in part a result of the state’s uniquely unregulated energy market, which allows customers to pick their electricity providers among about 220 retailers in an entirely market-driven system...
No state, especially nominally "Republican" states like Texas, should be in need of MORE federal regulation of their energy markets, but I'll be damned if I said that Texas should benefit from some kind of exceptions. I mean, the screwballs in Austin (and Houston, Sen. Cruz's residence) messed up, and bad. Frankly, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is doing a better job helping Texans than any of the elected officials in the Lone Star State, which must be embarrassing, frankly.
More at the link, FWIW.
On March 16, coronavirus brought the financial system to the brink. Few realized how close it came to going over the edge entirely. https://t.co/kGg568pU1D— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) May 20, 2020
An urgent call reached Ronald O’Hanley, State Street Corp.’s chief executive, as he sat in his office in downtown Boston. It was 8 a.m. on Monday, March 16.Still more.
A senior deputy told him corporate treasurers and pension managers, panicked by the growing economic damage from the Covid-19 pandemic, were pulling billions of dollars from certain money-market funds. This was forcing the funds to try to sell some of the bonds they held.
But there were almost no buyers. Everybody was suddenly desperate for cash.
He and the deputy, asset-management executive Cyrus Taraporevala, had spoken the night before, wrestling with how investors would respond to an emergency interest-rate cut from the Federal Reserve.
Now, they had their answer. In his 34 years in finance, Mr. O’Hanley had weathered plenty of meltdowns, but never one like this.
“The market is fearing the worst,” Mr. O’Hanley told him.
March 16 was the day a microscopic virus brought the financial system to the brink. Few realized how close it came to going over the edge entirely.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged nearly 13% that day, the second-biggest one-day fall in history. Stock-market volatility spiked to a record high. Investors struggled to unload even safe bonds, like Treasurys. Companies and government officials were losing access to the lending markets on which they rely to make payroll and build schools.
Prime money-market funds that are owned by big institutional investors and buy a lot of short-term corporate debt—normally safe and boring—had outflows of $60 billion in the week ending that Wednesday, financial-data firm Refinitiv said, among the worst ever. Some $56 billion in client money fled bond funds.
Interest rates on short-term corporate debt surged, peaking on March 25 at 2.43 percentage points above the federal-funds rate—the highest it has been since October 2008, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
The financial system has endured numerous credit crunches and market crashes, and memories of the 1987 and 2008 crises set a high bar for market dysfunction. But longtime investors and those who make a living on Wall Street say mid-March of this year was far more severe in a short period. Moreover, the stresses to the financial system were broader than many had seen.
“The 2008 financial crisis was a car crash in slow motion,” said Adam Lollos, head of short-term credit at Citigroup Inc. “This was like, ‘Boom!’ ”
A barrage of government programs has since pulled the system back from collapse. This account of what happened on one of the worst days the financial markets have ever seen, from many of the executives, money managers and Wall Street veterans who lived it, shows why the rescue effort was so urgent.
The Federal Reserve set the stage for the downturn on Sunday, March 15. Most investors were expecting the central bank to announce its latest response to the crisis the following Wednesday. Instead, it announced at 5 p.m. that evening that it was slashing interest rates and planning to buy $700 billion in bonds to help unclog the markets.
Rather than take comfort in the Fed’s actions, many companies, governments, bankers and investors viewed the decision as reason to prepare for the worst possible outcome from the coronavirus pandemic.
A downdraft in bonds was now a rout.
Mr. O’Hanley was in a good position to see the crisis unfold. His bank provides vital, if unheralded, administrative and bookkeeping services for most of the world’s biggest investors, and runs its own trillion-dollar money manager.
Companies and pension managers have long relied on money-market funds that invest in short-term corporate and municipal-debt holdings considered safe and liquid enough to be classified as “cash equivalents.” They function almost like checking accounts—helping firms manage payroll, pay office leases and move cash around to finance their daily operations.
But that Monday, investors no longer believed certain money funds were cash-like at all. As they pulled their money out, managers struggled to sell bonds to meet redemptions.
In theory, there should have been some give in the system. U.S. regulators had rewritten the rules on money funds in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, replacing their fixed, $1 price with a floating one that moved with the value of their holdings. The changes headed off the panic that could ensue when a fund’s price “breaks the buck,” as one prominent fund had in 2008.
But the rules couldn’t stop a panicked assault like this one. Rumors circulated that some of State Street’s rivals would be forced to prop up their funds. Within days, both Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Bank of New York Mellon Corp. stepped in to buy assets from their money funds. Both firms declined to comment.
This was bad news for not only those funds and their investors, but also for the thousands of companies and communities dependent on short-term loan markets to pay their employees. “If junk bonds back up, people can rationalize that away,” Mr. O’Hanley said. “There’s very little ability to rationalize trouble in cash.”
A debt-investing unit of Prudential Financial Inc., one of the largest insurance companies in the world, was also struggling with normally safe securities.
When traders at PGIM Fixed Income tried that Monday to sell a batch of short-term bonds issued by highly rated companies, they found few takers. And banks were reluctant to step in as intermediaries.
“The broker-dealer community was frozen,” said Michael Collins, a senior fixed-income manager at PGIM. “It was as bad as at any point during the great financial crisis.”
Across the country in Southern California, the head of the debt-trading desk at investment firm Capital Group Cos., Vikram Rao, tried to make sense of the dysfunction.
Mr. Rao, who was working remotely that Monday, walked down the 20 steps to his home office at 4:30 a.m. to discover the debt markets were already in disarray. He started calling the senior Wall Street executives he knew at many of the big banks.
Executives told him that Sunday’s emergency Fed rate cut had swung a swath of interest-rate swap contracts in banks’ favor. Companies had locked in superlow interest rates on future debt sales over the past year. But when rates fell even further, the companies suddenly owed additional collateral.
On that Monday, banks had to account for all that new collateral as assets on their books.
So when Mr. Rao called senior executives for an explanation on why they wouldn’t trade, they had the same refrain: There was no room to buy bonds and other assets and still remain in compliance with tougher guidelines imposed by regulators after the previous financial crisis. In other words, capital rules intended to make the financial system safer were, at least in this instance, draining liquidity from the markets.
One senior bank executive leveled with him: “We can’t bid on anything that adds to the balance sheet right now.”
At the same time, the surge in stock-market volatility, along with falling prices on mortgage bonds, had forced margin calls on many investment funds. The additional collateral they owed banks was also booked as assets, adding billions more.
The slump in mortgage bonds was so vast it crushed a group of investors that had borrowed from banks to juice their returns: real-estate investment funds.
The Fed’s bond-buying program, unveiled that Sunday, had earmarked some $200 billion for mortgage-bond purchases. But by Monday bond managers discovered the Fed purchases, while well-intentioned, weren’t nearly enough.
“On that first day, the Fed got completely run over by the market,” said Dan Ivascyn, who manages one of the world’s biggest bond funds and serves as investment chief at Pacific Investment Management Co. “That’s where REITs and other leveraged-mortgage products started getting into serious trouble.”
That Tuesday, UBS Group AG closed two exchange-traded notes tied to mortgage real-estate investment trusts. By Friday, a mortgage trust run by hedge-fund firm Angelo Gordon & Co. had warned its lenders it wouldn’t be able to meet its obligations on future margin calls...
'Bikini barista' coffee shop in #California has license revoked after city council deems outfits too revealing. 🙄 https://t.co/aMVw9i5dVb
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) March 9, 2019
BREAKING: Trump admin plan would revoke California's authority to set fuel economy rules, and freeze 2020 mileage targets in place nationwide for six years. https://t.co/Qc2l9dvaXE
— Evan Halper (@evanhalper) April 27, 2018
The Trump administration is speeding toward all-out war with California over fuel economy rules for cars and SUVs, proposing to revoke the state's long-standing authority to enforce its own, tough rules on tailpipe emissions.
The move forms a key part of a proposal by Trump's environmental and transportation agencies to roll back the nation's fuel economy standards. The agencies plan to submit the proposal to the White House for review within days.
The plan would freeze fuel economy targets at the levels required for vehicles sold in 2020, and leave those in place through 2026, according to federal officials who have reviewed it. That would mark a dramatic retreat from existing law, which aimed to get the nation's fleet of cars and light trucks to an average fuel economy of 55 miles per gallon by 2025. Instead of average vehicle fuel economy ratcheting up to that level, it would stall out at 42 miles per gallon.
That would constitute the single biggest step the administration has taken to undermine efforts to combat climate change.
Cars and trucks recently surpassed electricity plants as America's biggest sources of the greenhouse gases that drive global warming. And unlike the electricity industry, in which market forces have pushed utilities toward cleaner energy, including natural gas and renewable sources, relatively low gasoline prices in recent years have led consumers to pay less attention to fuel economy when they buy new cars.
As a result, the steady increase in fuel mileage standards championed by the Obama administration in partnership with California represented the most powerful action the U.S. has taken to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. The biggest gains have been projected to happen in the years that the Trump administration's plan would target.
The plan from the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration remains a draft, and White House officials could decide to back away from a direct fight with California and like-minded states.
Within the administration, officials have disagreed about how far and how quickly to push changes in fuel economy rules, according to officials familiar with the discussions. Some officials attuned to the concerns of the auto industry have warned against a proposal that over-reaches and could lead to years of litigation and uncertainty. Others, aligned with EPA chief Scott Pruitt, have argued for a more aggressive push.
EPA spokesperson Liz Bowman declined to comment on the details of the draft plan.
"The Agency is continuing to work with NHTSA to develop a joint proposed rule and is looking forward to the interagency process," she wrote in an email.
Environmental groups and California officials already have vowed to fight the administration in court. But if the EPA plan prevails, it would be a crippling blow to efforts in California and other states to meet aggressive goals for climate action as well as for cleaning their air.
"I find this to be an outrageous intrusion," Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said in an email.
More liberal NYT cancellations coming after this headline, no doubt— AlexaShrugged (@AlexaShrugged) January 2, 2018
- The Trump Effect: Business, Anticipating Less Regulation, Loosens Purse Strings
https://t.co/3s1uHuUD9x
WASHINGTON — A wave of optimism has swept over American business leaders, and it is beginning to translate into the sort of investment in new plants, equipment and factory upgrades that bolsters economic growth, spurs job creation — and may finally raise wages significantly.That part above concerning the "little historical evidence" on how regulations kill economic growth is pure baloney. If anything, perhaps the authors are alluding to how the historical legal-institutional framework of the American economy has contributed to the consolidation of markets and secure property rights. No one argues against such a regulatory framework. Nope. Business leaders and entrepreneurs are now responding to the Trump administration's incentives and market signals for an expansionary business environment. Think of the opposite in the previous administration: Obama, "So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it's just that it will bankrupt them, because they're going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that's being emitted..." Hillary, "We're going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business..."
While business leaders are eager for the tax cuts that take effect this year, the newfound confidence was initially inspired by the Trump administration’s regulatory pullback, not so much because deregulation is saving companies money but because the administration has instilled a faith in business executives that new regulations are not coming.
“It’s an overall sense that you’re not going to face any new regulatory fights,” said Granger MacDonald, a home builder in Kerrville, Tex. “We’re not spending more, which is the main thing. We’re not seeing any savings, but we’re not seeing any increases.”
The applause from top executives has been largely reserved for the administration’s economic policy agenda. Many chief executives have been publicly critical of President Trump’s approach to social and cultural issues, including his response to a white nationalist march over the summer in Charlottesville, Va., that turned deadly and his decision to withdraw from the Paris climate accord. Two of the business advisory councils that Mr. Trump assembled in the nascent days of his presidency disbanded after executives grew concerned about his public remarks on the violence in Charlottesville.
There is little historical evidence tying regulation levels to growth. Regulatory proponents say, in fact, that those rules can have positive economic effects in the long run, saving companies from violations that could cost them both financially and reputationally. Cost-benefit analyses generally do not look just at the impact of a regulation on a particular business’s bottom line in the coming months, but at the broader impact on consumers, the environment, public health and other factors that can show up over years or decades.
But in the administration and across the business community, there is a perception that years of increased environmental, financial and other regulatory oversight by the Obama administration dampened investment and job creation — and that Mr. Trump’s more hands-off approach has unleashed the “animal spirits” of companies that had hoarded cash after the recession of 2008.
Some businesses will essentially be able to get away with shortcuts that they could not have under a continuation of Obama-era policies. The coal industry, for instance, will not have to worry about a regulation, overturned by Congress and Mr. Trump, that would have protected streams from mining runoff.
Brett Hartl, the government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said the Trump administration might avoid big-splash regulatory rollbacks this year and instead would make it harder for federal agencies to block business expansion.
“It’s not going to be sexy things like ‘We’re killing the Clean Power Plan,’” Mr. Hartl said, referring to the Obama-era rule aimed at curbing greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants. “But you can make it systematically harder for an agency to do the right thing.”
Only a handful of the federal government’s reams of rules have actually been killed or slated for elimination since Mr. Trump took office. But the president has declared that rolling back regulations will be a defining theme of his presidency. On his 11th day in office, Mr. Trump signed an executive order “on reducing regulation and controlling regulatory costs,” including the stipulation that any new regulation must be offset by two regulations rolled back.
That intention and its rhetorical and regulatory follow-ons have executives at large and small companies celebrating. And with tax cuts coming and a generally improving economic outlook, both domestically and internationally, economists are revising growth forecasts upward for last year and this year.
Even before it became clear that Republicans would pass a major tax cut, capital spending had risen significantly, climbing at an annualized rate of 6.2 percent during the first three quarters of last year. Surveys of planned spending also show increases...
California's goal: an electricity grid moving only clean energy https://t.co/WJaunnRfdw pic.twitter.com/xjEK7rUBlZ
— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) August 31, 2017
California lawmakers are considering a future without the use of fossil fuels to generate electricity, a step that would boost the renewable energy industry and expand the scope of the state’s battle against global warming.See that?
If approved at the end of the legislative session next month, the proposal would eventually ensure only clean energy moves through the state’s electricity grid, a goal nearly unmatched anywhere in the world.
It would accelerate the adoption of renewable energy by requiring utilities and other electricity providers to obtain 60% of their power from resources such as the sun and wind by 2030. Then it would task regulators with phasing out fossil fuels for the remaining 40% by 2045.
The goal: Less than three decades from now, no coal or natural gas would be burned when Californians charge their electric cars, run their air conditioners or flip on their lights.
The lofty ambition of the legislation, Senate Bill 100, could come with similarly steep challenges.
New solar plants and wind turbines would need to be built in addition to massive batteries connected to the grid to store energy for when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing.
The state would no longer be able to rely on natural gas — which can be turned on and off to match demand — to help balance a complex electricity grid that stretches across deserts, snow-capped mountain ranges, urban sprawl and rural farmland.
“It’s doable,” said Mike O’Boyle, who studies the power sector at Energy Innovation, a think tank in San Francisco. “But because we don’t really have a working example for a 100% renewable system, it’s going to be an ongoing experiment.”
Hawaii became the first state to set such a target two years ago, but California would be trying to achieve the goal at a much larger scale. Germany and France, countries with economies closer in size to California’s, are also working to phase out fossil fuels for electricity.
Compared with the political firestorm over extending the state’s cap-and-trade program earlier this year, the electricity proposal has flown under the radar. It was passed by the state Senate in May and requires approval from the Assembly before it can be sent to Gov. Jerry Brown’s desk.
Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de León (D-Los Angeles), who authored the legislation, said he’s confident the state can pull it off. He compared the speed of renewable energy innovation to the rapid spread of the Internet.
“That’s the type of opportunity we have today, right here in California, with clean energy,” he said.
But utilities and some business groups have concerns.
“We want to help California achieve its bold clean energy goals in a way that is affordable for our customers,” said Lynsey Paulo, a spokeswoman for Pacific Gas & Electric Co., the state’s largest utility. “If it’s not affordable, it’s not sustainable.”
An estimate from nonpartisan legislative analysts shows renewable energy regulations are a relatively costly way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
“It’s a more expensive, less flexible approach to reducing emissions,” said Loren Kaye, president of the California Foundation for Commerce and Education, a think tank affiliated with the California Chamber of Commerce.
He said ratepayers will end up covering the cost in their utility bills...
Business leaders are predicting a dramatic unraveling of regulations on everything from overtime pay to power-plant emission rules as Donald Trump seeks to fill his cabinet with determined adversaries of the agencies they will lead.More.
The president-elect’s pick Thursday to head the Labor Department, fast-food executive Andrew Puzder, is an outspoken critic of the worker-pay policies advanced by the Obama administration. Mr. Trump’s choice for the next administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, is a primary architect of legal challenges on President Barack Obama’s environmental regulations.
Other cabinet nominees critical of regulations advanced under Mr. Obama include Rep. Tom Price to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, financier Wilbur Ross Jr. at the Commerce Department and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. All will require Senate confirmation.
Those picks suggest the Trump administration, backed by a Republican Congress, is determined to advance labor, environmental and financial regulatory policies more favorable to many American corporations, though not all will back his proposals.
Appearing in Des Moines, Iowa, on Thursday as part of his postelection “thank you” tour, Mr. Trump said he will push to do away with regulations that are crimping job growth. “On regulations, we’re going to eliminate every single regulation that hurts our farms, our workers and our small businesses,” he said.
Business leaders say all Americans stand to benefit from a lighter regulatory touch that would boost profits, growth and hiring, particularly for small and midsize businesses.
“If government can stimulate business to hire more, rather than vilify us, that’s going to be a better milieu,” said Andrew Berlin, CEO of Chicago-based Berlin Packaging LLC, which makes glass and plastic bottles for consumer products.
“The continual onslaught of regulation over the last eight years—that probably has been pretty much our No. 1, overall concern as manufacturers,” said Jason Andringa, CEO of the Vermeer Corp., a Pella, Iowa-based maker of construction and farm machinery. “That there may be some relief from that is very appealing to us.”
Mr. Andringa said mounting Obama-era regulations have drained the time of several employees dedicated to complying with them. That has eaten into profits, despite overall rising sales in recent years. But the company has’t resorted to layoffs in more than a decade, he added.
Mr. Andringa said he does have reservations about Mr. Trump’s trade policies because Vermeer exports around one-fifth of the equipment it makes in Iowa. “We certainly hope not to see tariffs that are implemented here that then cause corresponding tariffs overseas,” he said.
While a push to freeze and rollback new regulations could cheer some CEOs, Mr. Trump’s relationship with the business community has had plenty of rough spots. Throughout the campaign he threatened to impose taxes on companies that moved jobs overseas. He lambasted big banks and multinational corporations in a campaign video that ascribed dark motives to the forces of globalism.
Mr. Trump also has taken to Twitter since the election to confront individual businesses and labor leaders by name over specific disputes, a tactic some economists warn could amplify corporate uncertainty around his policies...
One of California’s largest energy utilities took a bold step in the 21st century electricity revolution with an agreement to close its last operating nuclear plant and develop more solar, wind and other clean power technologies.More.
The decision announced Tuesday by Pacific Gas & Electric Co. to close its beleaguered Diablo Canyon nuclear plant within the next decade runs counter to the nuclear industry’s arguments that curbing carbon emissions and combating climate change require use of nuclear power, which generates the most electricity without harmful emissions.
Instead, PG&E joined with longtime adversaries such as the Friends of the Earth environmental group to craft a deal that will bring the company closer to the mandate that 50% of California’s electricity generation come from renewable energy sources by 2030.
PG&E’s agreement will close the book on the state’s history as a nuclear pioneer, but adds to its clean energy reputation. California already leads the nation by far in use of solar energy generated by rooftop panels and by sprawling power arrays in the desert.
“California is already a leader in curtailing greenhouse gases,” said Peter Bradford, a former member of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. “Now they’re saying they can go even further. That’s potentially a model for other situations.”
Under the proposal, the Diablo Canyon Power Plant in San Luis Obispo County would be retired by PG&E after its current U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission operating licenses expire in November 2024 and August 2025.
The power produced by Diablo Canyon’s two nuclear reactors would be replaced with investment in a greenhouse-gas-free portfolio of energy efficiency, renewables and energy storage, PG&E said. The proposal is contingent on a number of regulatory actions, including approvals from the California Public Utilities Commission.
The Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, built against a seaside cliff near Avila Beach, provides 2,160 megawatts of electricity for Central and Northern California — enough to power more than 1.7 million homes.
Tuesday’s announcement comes after a long debate over the fate of the plant, which sits near several earthquake fault lines. The Hosgri Fault, located three miles from Diablo Canyon, was discovered in 1971, three years after construction of the plant began...
Less than a year ago, climate scientists were heralding the “Godzilla El Niño,” which would generate historic rainfalls that could help alleviate California’s mega-drought.More.
Climate reality has failed to confirm climate theory, as the term “dud” is now being used to describe the weather pattern.
Is this El Niño a dud?At this point, it looks as if California is going to have to continue implementing a wide array of water-saving measures, which include “cash-for-grass” and drought-shaming neighbors...
Sacramento is in the peak of its rainy season, but there is no substantial rain in the forecast for the next two weeks. The Sierra snowpack has fallen below normal levels for this time of year. The state’s three largest reservoirs remain far below capacity.
Whither El Niño?
Throughout the summer and fall of 2015, California residents waited in anticipation as they heard about the strong El Niño weather pattern brewing in the Pacific Ocean. We remembered the winters of 1997-98 and 1982-83, when such strong El Niños corresponded with deluges. And we hoped for relief from our long, brutal drought.
But through Feb. 20, Sacramento has seen half the precipitation that occurred by this point in 1997-98 and 1982-83.
Billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer and Democratic Sen. Richard Pan spoke about the evils of cigarettes and vaporizers Tuesday at C.K. McClatchy High School as they joined a coalition of medical and labor groups to launch a petition for a ballot measure that would levy a $2 tax on tobacco sales.Still more.
“My mother smoked three packs a day of non-filtered cigarettes and died of lung cancer, so I have a personal interest in preventing smoking and preventing young people from starting smoking,” Steyer said to a room of teenagers. Steyer is a former hedge-fund manager turned advocate for legislation to fight climate change.
The ballot measure calls for the state to largely funnel the revenue from a tobacco tax to Medi-Cal, with some money set aside for anti-smoking programs and research on tobacco-related illnesses and diseases. The tax would apply to cigarettes, e-cigarettes and any other products containing or derived from tobacco or nicotine.
Pan, a practicing pediatrician from Sacramento, warned students that despite misconceptions, e-cigarettes are also addictive and contain nicotine...
BERLIN— Volkswagen AG raced Wednesday to contain the widening scandal threatening Germany’s most important company, ousting its chief executive and pledging to prosecute those involved in a scheme to cheat U.S. auto-pollution tests.Continue reading.
CEO Martin Winterkorn’s resignation follows a calamitous few days after Friday’s disclosure by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that Europe’s biggest auto maker employed software on some VW and Audi diesel-powered cars to manipulate the results of routine emissions tests.
The crisis threatens to spill beyond the auto maker to the broader German economy. Wolfsburg-based Volkswagen is as much institution as corporation at home, with nearly 300,000 employees, 29 plants across the country and deep ties to the government—Lower Saxony owns 20% of VW.
The company’s next CEO faces a daunting task of cleaning up the scandal—the scope of which remains unclear—and keeping its sales expansion on track. Volkswagen hasn’t yet said it knows who was responsible or how many employees were involved.
On Tuesday, Volkswagen disclosed that as many as 11 million cars contained software alleged to have duped emissions tests and were possibly subject to a global recall. The company issued a profit warning and disclosed a €6.5 billion ($7.27 billion) charge to earnings to cover the costs of addressing the matter.
In a statement following Wednesday’s meeting of the company’s top shareholders and labor representatives, Mr. Winterkorn said he would “accept responsibility” for the “irregularities that have been found in diesel engines” and tendered his resignation to the supervisory board.
“I am shocked by the events of the past few days,” he said. “Above all, I am stunned that misconduct on such a scale was possible in the Volkswagen Group.”
The executive committee of the supervisory board thanked Mr. Winterkorn for his contributions to the company and said the CEO had “no knowledge of manipulation of the emissions data.”
The committee said it would seek prosecution of any Volkswagen employees involved in the affair, and it would establish a special investigative committee to uncover what had happened and who was responsible.
The board subcommittee said it would present by Friday’s scheduled supervisory board meeting names of candidates to succeed Mr. Winterkorn, but didn’t disclose any...
What puzzled a business columnist five years ago remains puzzling today. Martin Winterkorn, the now-embattled Volkswagen chief, grandly pronounced a goal to make VW the world’s biggest car maker by sales. Shouldn’t a business manager care about whether capital is productively deployed to maximize returns, not about generating sales volume for its own sake?Keep reading, and remember, leftism is built on a lie. And the dues for doing the devil's work keep coming due.
Mr. Winterkorn might have noticed, for one thing, that the sales crown had been associated with catastrophe for its two most recent wearers, Toyota and GM. Mr. Winterkorn would need to find a bigger place for VW in the U.S. market—and bowdlerized a car that had earned a small but devoted fandom in the U.S., the Jetta, cheapening it into a Corolla wannabe. His U.S.-tailored Passat landed with a thud just as fuel prices were falling and American families were turning to small SUVs instead.
VW at least had learned something from a previous foray in the U.S. market. In the late 1970s, the company tried to recover its plummeting market share by opening a UAW-staffed factory in New Stanton, Pa. That plant was a disaster from day one and closed a few years later. This time, VW built its plant in Tennessee in pursuit of well-behaved, nonunion labor. Yet there followed an attempt at self-sabotage of the sort that inspires feature stories in women’s magazines: To appease labor back in Germany, VW tried to slip the UAW into the factory through the backdoor anyway, only to be prevented by its own U.S. workers.
All this now becomes preamble to the scandal that completes the disaster of Mr. Winterkorn’s tenure: His admission that VW used a software trick to fool U.S. emissions tests even while its diesel-engined Volkswagens on U.S. roads put out many times the allowable limit of nitrogen oxides.
Any chief executive can have bad luck, but these were poor decisions: To alienate the company’s residual U.S. fans by downgrading the Jetta with a cheap rear axle. To blithely insert the company in the partisan fault-line that divides the union-dominated northern U.S. auto industry and the nonunion south, and to do so directly in the wake of the inflammatory GM and Chrysler bailouts.
But beggaring belief is the latest scandal, committed in the service of a dubious marketing strategy from the get-go. This was VW’s bet that it could cure Americans of their aversion to diesel by flogging the car’s supposed “green” credentials. Unpropitiously, the company launched its bet as gasoline engines were catching up with diesel engines in efficiency, and when diesel fuel is pricier than gasoline and harder to find.
Yet Mr. Winterkorn was reconfirmed in his control as recently as April, when a board fight prompted the exit of VW’s eminence grise, Chairman Ferdinand Piëch, who built the modern company and had begun to criticize Mr. Winterkorn’s American endeavors. Mr. Winterkorn’s key ally in ejecting Mr. Piëch was labor representative Bernd Osterloh, also his partner in the UAW fiasco. That should tell you something.
Mr. Winterkorn may be on his way out but not before he all but pleaded guilty on the company’s behalf to the emissions-cheating charges, which, coming from the EPA, might normally deserve skepticism...
The expanding Volkswagen diesel emissions scandal now includes 11 million vehicles worldwide, and threatens to destroy the credibility and market value of a global behemoth that was already showing signs of instability.Still more.
The world's largest automobile manufacturer, Volkswagen Group was experiencing weakening sales in the U.S. and China, its two most promising areas of growth. As of the Friday before the emissions story broke, the company's stock had already fallen to $162 a share, from a March 2015 high of $255. Midday Tuesday, the stock traded at $106.
Volkswagen has confirmed Environmental Protection Agency charges that it installed software "defeat devices" in versions of its 2009-2015 Jetta, Beetle, Golf, Passat and Audi A3 passenger cars fitted with 2.0-liter, 4-cylinder engines.
The company on Tuesday said the same software was present in as many as 11 million vehicles sold worldwide. The company said in a statement it was working "at full speed" to come into regulatory compliance.
Facing up to as much as $18 billion in U.S. fines alone -- and liable for fines and punishments in other countries -- Volkswagen said it would also set aside $7.2 billion to cover the cost of recalls and “other efforts to win back the trust of our customers.”
That broken trust may prove equally problematic for Volkswagen's bottom line. Many buyers feel duped into having bought a polluting car with a green marketing campaign for the "clean diesels."
In California, which has the nation's toughest emissions standards, outraged consumers used social media to air their anger at the company. Many said they were angry enough at the company to turn away from the brand permanently.
Owner Bob Merlis, an independent music industry publicist, said he was looking to add a second Volkswagen diesel last week.
"I went shopping for a new one, the Golf Sportwagen, but that's so off the table now," Merlis said. "I don't want to do business with those criminals."
Here in my adopted home state of Colorado, orange is the new Animas River thanks to the blithering idiots working under President Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency.More.
It’s just the latest man-caused disaster from an out-of-control bureaucracy whose primary mission is not the Earth’s preservation, but self-preservation.
As always, the government cover-up compounds the crime — which is why the agency’s promise this week to investigate itself has residents across the Rocky Mountains in stitches. Or tears.
After the EPA and officials and their contract workers accidentally spilled three million gallons of pent-up toxic sludge on August 5 from a defunct mine in San Juan County that hadn’t operated since 1923, EPA apparatchiks delayed notifying residents for more than 24 hours. They vastly underestimated the volume and spill rate of gunk. Then, while refusing to release data, EPA head Gina McCarthy flew to the glowing river to fecklessly declare that the water “seems to be restoring itself.”
The cleanup costs for the Colorado spill alone are estimated at $30 billion. Small farmers, ranchers and tourist-related businesses will be reeling for years to come — yet the EPA is simultaneously pushing forward with Draconian ozone regulations (based on cherry-picked junk science) that will punish the state’s residents with no discernible health benefits.
If only Mother Nature could help wash away the institutionalized corruption that has been leaching from Obama’s EPA headquarters since Day One:
–BP oil spill data doctoring. Former White House Director of the Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy Carol Browner and the EPA suffered no consequences after they repeatedly lied and cooked the books in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon spill in 2010. Browner, who pulled the puppet strings of then-EPA head Lisa Jackson, misled the public about the scope of the disaster by falsely claiming that 75 percent of the spill was “completely gone from the system.” Then she falsely claimed that the administration’s initial report on the disaster was “peer-reviewed.”
The Interior Department inspector general also singled out Browner for misrepresenting the White House’s blue-ribbon science panel, which opposed a six-month drilling moratorium, and exposed how she butchered their conclusions to justify the administration’s preordained policy agenda.
Browner, an inveterate left-wing crony lobbyist/activist, left office without so much as a wrist slap. Brazen data doctoring and destruction are her fortes. As EPA head during the Clinton administration in the 1990s, she was held in contempt by a federal judge after ordering a staffer to purge and delete her computer files. Browner had sought to evade a public disclosure lawsuit by conservative lawyer and author Mark Levin’s Landmark Legal Foundation.
–Email evasion and transparency trouncing. While Browner was doing her dirty work as Obama’s unaccountable eco-czar, Jackson busied herself creating sock-puppet email personalities to circumvent public disclosure rules as the agency crafted radical climate-change policies in secret. She learned the tricks of the trade from Browner. Jackson admitted to using the pseudonym “Richard Windsor” on one of at least two separate secret government accounts. Competitive Enterprise Institute fellow Christopher Horner discovered the elaborate ruses in 2012. The agency had stonewalled Horner’s FOIA requests on the use of alias accounts at the agency; CEI sued to force the administration to comply.
In December 2012, Jackson resigned amid multiple investigations. Not a wrist slap. Not a scratch. In March of this year, a federal judge blasted the agency for avoiding a separate FOIA request by Levin’s Landmark Legal Foundation related to sock-puppet email accounts created by Jackson and others “who may have delayed the release dates for hot-button environmental regulations until after the Nov. 6, 2012, presidential election.”
Apple Computer hired Jackson in 2013 (and all of her multiple personalities). Two months ago, the company proudly announced that it was promoting Jackson to “vice president of Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives” and head of the company’s “global government affairs and public policy teams.”
–Enabling sex predators and porn addicts. Last month, the EPA inspector general finally testified on Capitol Hill about the agency’s chronic mismanagement of alleged sexual perverts on the payroll. One employee “engaged in offensive and inappropriate behavior toward at least 16 women, most of whom were EPA co-workers,” the IG reported. Supervisors “were made aware of many of these actions and yet did nothing.”
Well, not exactly “nothing.” The employee was actually promoted to assistant administrator for the EPA’s Office of Homeland Security — a position he used to harass six more women...
