I think Whitman has missed something here. She should offer to hire a lawyer to represent the worker in legal issued caused by Allred’s stunt, including deporation hearings, federal charges, and of course going after Allred. That would be the legal thing to do.

On the other hand we have the various governments trying to handle the clean-up. The leak itself seems to be far from the capabilities of anyone in the government so that rests with BP. Obama has put the Coast Guard in charge of the clean-up. It is safe to say that an operation of this size is a bit above their pay grade but they have done well to do what they know. The problem is that they have no way of thinking big or acting big. Had Obama established an office in the Navy to coordinate efforts perhaps things would be going better. Had he convened an emergency meeting of all U.S. oil companies, drilling companies, service companies, and foreign governments and oil companies perhaps something better could have come of things. But Obama is going by the book and that means the Coast Guard is in charge of the water, the EPA is in charge of the beach, and the Army Corp of Engineers is in charge in between. What does that really mean? Nobody is in charge.

Local governments, like Lousianas, have tried to push to do more themselves, but for the most part it seems that their efforts are thwarted by Federal agencies who don’t really understand what they are doing. The EPA, you would like from the name, was established specifically to protect the environment, but no. Like all government agencies their job is to protect themselves and enforce their rules. Sometimes you have to break a rule in order to enforce the intent of the rule. For example, if you build a machine to suck up oil contaminated water and remove most but not all of the oil, returning the partially cleaned up water back to the ocean, the EPA will see that as polluting the water. That is their rule.

So who should we blame for this leak? Some say our addiction to oil. That is like saying that our need for food is the cause of farm based water pollution. How about BP. Well, BP certainly did dig this hole ill prepared for the consequence of such a disaster. But then we rely on BP and their like to provide oil, cheap oil, not to keep us safe or clean. So that means the failure here should be blamed on those that stood up and said that they would protect the environment: the government and the environmental movement. These are the people to blame. Why blame environmentalists? Because most, if not all, environmental groups are run by lawyers, lawyers who advocate for one side and do not understand that just because they may win one in court doesn’t mean that they are protecting anything but their lifestyle. Sue to stop drilling in place A and the drillers move to place B, then C, until they find some place that nobody will sue and then they can do as they wish. The methods used by environmentalists are not conducive to good public policy, they are selfish and narrow-minded. The government on the other hand is pretty much always shown to be just plain incompetent. Would you trust your health care to the EPA?  I guess we will find out.

One last comment. What I would like to see here is for someone in the Gulf Coast to stand up and take back control of their land, of their livelihood, even if the Feds tell them they cannot. I would like to see a Governor say “We will protect our beaches this even if the Feds says we cannot. We will build the berms, the barriers, the filters we need to keep our waters safe and shores clean, even if some Federal bureaucrats say we cannot. We will not sit and wait for approval, we will act. If that means that we will be arrested then let it be, I will be first.” Unfortunately there are no heroes any more.

The Winners:

1. Health insurance companies. WTF? Evil insurance companies were the reason the bill passed. Why would they be the big winners? Let’s take the electric power industry as an example.  Are they still around? Do they have good profits? Do they suffer from being regulated? Yes. Yes. and No. The power industry was determined to be necessary for everyone by the federal government in the 1930′s. They became a regulated monopoly. Anything that is deemed necessary, or in the current vernacular “too big to fail”, will eventually be controlled by the government. But, those people in the government that control these utilities are basically too stupid to control them. We see time and again that government regulators are years, if not decades, behind the things they regulate. The utilities, on the other hand, will lead these regulators by the nose, keeping their profits stable and sucking dollars from their captive audience forever. Take your electric bill. Does it go down? I don’t think so.
2. Federal Bureaucracy. Nancy Pelosi claimed in her giggle laden speech before the vote that this bill would create 4 million jobs. I will assume that 90% of those are her plans for how the federal bureaucracy will grow. It might take a few years but I wouldn’t doubt that Obama will try starting tomorrow to hire as many of those 4 million as he can.

The Losers:

1. Low-paid workers. Expect unemployment to increase to 12% reported and 17% actual. Eventually if things keep going this way we will match European unemployment rates because we will have the same economic system as Europe. Why low-paid workers? Because those workers will cost more to employers so they will be …  fired.
2. Real taxpayers. By real taxpayers I’m talking about people who pay the majority of the taxes, or as the Democrats call them, the wealthy.
3. The U.S. Economy. The taxes imposed by this system will not be an incentive to economic growth. This will contribute to unemployment and general economic malaise.
4. Anyone who currently has insurance but gets sick. This is a close call. There are some benefits to these people in that insurance companies will have to treat some of their ailments. But on the down side we all will suffer from the coming stagnation of medical technology.

The future of health insurance is predictable. Eventually everyone in the country will have the same health plan, there is no real insurance involved, and profits will be fixed, no doubt at a level higher than current profits. Health insurance premiums will rise and care will decline. Wealthy people will pay out of pocket and a new type of health insurance will start. This will be the health insurance you want to have to keep you from dying waiting for your healthcare.

The press report on the ban, which I’m sure was just copied straight from CEC propaganda, gave a few actual facts: 6515 billion watt-hours per year of electric energy savings at a benefit of $8.1B/year in reduced electric bills. Doing simple division that says that electricity saving are taken at $1.25/KW-hr, which is 7 times the average rate for electricity and 3 times the marginal rate for residential customers (7 times for business customers). CAN”T ANYONE IN THE PRESS DO DIVISION??? Obviously this doesn’t make any sense. Going further, 6515 billion watt-hours/year requires a 750 MW power plant which the CEC claims will cost 8.7 billion dollars. The current cost for such a coal burning power plant (which are built in Wyoming and Montana for California consumption) is about $2B, about 1/4 the costs they claim. Again, this computation requires a little division and knowing what a gigawatt and a kilowatt are, so maybe it is asking too much for the press to actually figure out when someone is blowing smoke up their butts.

Some of the comments of yahoo readers are much more interesting than the story. All the readers are against the ban and see it as an overreach by an ever increasing fascist/socialist government. [For those who think there is a difference between fascism and socialism, there isn't.]  One reader wrote:

78 Posted by brenda25252 on Wed Nov 18, 2009 9:59PM EST

How long before they regulate how many TVs, computers, appliances, etc.? You’ll hear a knock at the door in the middle of the night…its the energy police operating an energy sting in your neighborhood. Can you say “big brother”?

Brenda: this has happened already. The California Air Resources Board has instituted a winter spare the air program in which fireplace police drive around neighborhoods sniffing for people who are using their fireplaces to heat their home. They will knock on your door and if you don’t answer or don’t let them in they will give you a ticket for using that fireplace. You must show up to court to defend yourself – you are guilty unless you can prove your innocence. Repeat offenders can be sent to jail.  Also, PG&E is now installing new “smart” meters that will, soon, be able to measure things like your using of appliances and computers and most air conditioning, so they won’t even have to knock on your door to figure out what you’re doing late at night.

Now the most ironic but uncovered point of this whole story is that while the CEC wants to save a few watts by banning TVs, they are promoting ELECTRIC CARS!!  A typical electric car requires 0.25 KW-hr/mile. Assuming by banning TVs you save 100 Watts/household for 8 hours a day, that corresponds to 0.8 KW-hr/day or 3.2 miles of electric vehicle travel. If their dreams of an electric car come to fruition, the only TV we will be able to buy will be the ones built into our cars.

My guess is that the first bill in Congress to make wind farms illegal will come from Democratic sponsors in the name of conservation.

Well looks like I was half right. The first opposition to a big ($1.5B) wind farm in Texas is by a Democrat, Chuck Schumer, who was ironically also the topic of that same post. Chuck didn’t, however, poo-poo the power plant because of conservation. He doesn’t like the fact that the turbines are going to be made in China. Believe it or not, I agree.

Buying toasters, toys, TVs, and telephones made in China is bad enough, but contracting major industrial projects to Chinese products and labor shows us only that we have lost leadership in almost all  things critical to a successful country. The useless “stimulus” spending the Feds are undertaking should at least help us build back our own industries, our own capabilities, our own future, not those of China.

This last week a piece of the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge broke and fell onto traffic. The piece was a fix to a broken eye-span, critical to keeping the bridge from falling into the bay. This span of the old bridge is being replaced with a brand new bridge span that is supposed to look spiffy. I listened on the radio to a civil engineering professor from U.C. Berkeley who has been studying the bridge in detail since the earthquake of 1989 that shook lose a non-critical but still lethal section of the bridge deck. He said that the current fix to the bridge is not safe, it is just a C-clamp to keep the the eye-span from further deterioration. It is a race now, will they get the new bridge done before the old one collapses? Will Caltrans fix the old bridge properly? What does this have to do with China?

Turns out most of the steel in the new bridge is made in, you guessed it, China. I guess they were the low bidder. I hope this new bridge is going to hold up better than the current one.  According to the professor, chinese steel is known for being defective, subject to cracking, and he said that they have already found a couple of cracks in critical decking before it made it out of the factory, some 12,000 miles from California.

The professor mentioned another interesting characteristic of the new bridge design: the bridge deck is a critical element keeping the entire bridge structure together (unlike all the other bridges where the bridge deck is held up by the bridge structure). While the structure is built to withstand a really big earthquake (assuming the steel infrastructure doesn’t crack), it is not built to withstand a simple bomb. One bomb causing one big hole in the new bridge deck and the whole thing will collapse. The old bridge doesn’t suffer that problem. Caltrans answer to why this flaw exists? Terrorism was not an issue when the bridge was designed.

I hope Caltrans hires some good engineers from California to fix the old bridge properly so that it can be used just in case the new one gets hit.

A couple days ago I read a magazine, Design News, that had been sitting on my desk for a few weeks. There was an interesting article about the 230 mpg Volt. One line in the article confused me: the EPA uses an energy density for gasoline of 82 kwhr/gallon. Strange. I used 34.5. Maybe I was wrong….  I looked at many sources including the DOE and NIST and sure enough, the energy density of gasoline is around 34 kwhr/gallon depending on the exact formulation (in California it is lower, for example).

Next I looked up the EPA conversion factor of 82 (about 2.5 times the actual energy density) to see where they came up with that. I found it in the Electronic Code of Federal Regulation, Title 10, Section 474.3: “If the electric vehicle does not have any petroleum-powered accessories installed, the value of the petroleum equivalency factor is 82,049 Watt-hours per gallon.” So the EPA has decided that the laws of physics are not good enough for them, they need to favor electric vehicle hype by a factor of 2.5. What a fraud.

I then read the “Purpose and Scope” of this distorted computation: “The petroleum-equivalent fuel economy value is intended to be used by the Environmental Protection Agency in calculating corporate average fuel economy values pursuant to regulations at 40 CFR Part 600—Fuel Economy of Motor Vehicles.” Translation: if you sell one electric car then you can sell 20 20mpg cars and claim an average of 30 mpg for your fleet. No wonder GM wants to sell electric cars.

But why would the EPA want electric cars?  They pollute more than hybrid cars because they essentially burn coal, which is known to be the dirtiest source of electric power. I will check and see if I can find the answer to this question on the Internet.

Update

I found the original DOE memo detailing how the electric vehicle equivalency was computed, Petroleum-Equivalent Fuel Economy Calculation dated June 12, 2000. The analysis, by the DOE, starts off in a very reasonable way. The relative efficiency of burning fuel in an engine versus burning it in a power plant is computed yielding a net efficiency for electric power production of 35%, which is exactly what I used in my analysis in an earlier blog Energy Facts. So far so good. Next they multiply this number by 6.67. What? They call it they “Fuel Content” (the quotes are theirs). Here is the reason from the document:

The fuel content factor has a value of 1/0.15 and is included in
the PEF for the reasons described in the notice of proposed rulemaking
and the responses to comments section of this notice. Briefly, these
reasons are:
    (i) Consistency with existing regulatory and statutory procedures;
    (ii) Provision of similar treatment to manufacturers of all types
of alternative fuel vehicles; and
    (iii) Simplicity and ease of use.
The fuel content factor value of 1/0.15 is equivalent to a multiple
of 6.67.

Translation: we lie about electric cars to be consistent with the lies we tell about other politically correct vehicles. One interesting note about this lie: in the comment sections some of the electric power companies want to be a bit more honest about the factor of 6.67, but the California Air Resources Board wants be lie even more:

Comment 6: Assigning one fuel content factor (1/0.15) to all
alternative fuel vehicles is inappropriate since ``the fuel efficiency
benefits of electric vehicles far exceed those of other alternative
fuel vehicles.'' DOE should use a fuel content factor that more
accurately represents electric vehicle benefits in comparison to other
alternative fuels. (CARB)

Everyone (well everyone who hates Republicans) is in a huff that someone had the gall to speak up during a speech in Congress. They should watch the Prime Minister of England talk every week before his Parliament. Anyways I was interested to listen to what the so called FACT CHECK article had so say. “Fact Check” is what modern journalists call it when they actually do research on an issue and don’t just print propaganda. Unfortunately the term has been twisted into just the newest form of propaganda. What I was left with is listening to a clip of the actual speech.

Obama: “The reforms I’m proposing will not apply to those who are here illegally.”

Wilson: “You lie”

So I guess the question is, do the reforms that Obama is proposing apply to those who are here illegally? Well first, what reforms is Obama proposing? Obama hasn’t proposed any specific reforms so in that sense Wilson is wrong. Case closed.

Well, let’s assume, as the “FACT CHECK” guys do, that Obama is talking about the bills propose by his fellow Democrats in the House and the Senate. The fact check guys say the house bill says: “Nothing in this subtitle shall allow federal payments for affordability credits on behalf of individuals who are not lawfully in the United States.” They conclude that Joe Wilson is wrong. Unfortunately for them Obama didn’t say: “The reforms I’m proposing will not provide any federal insurance health subsidies for those who are here illegally.” Then Wilson would be wrong.

Perhaps Wilson was referring to the other 1,000 pages of the bill. How about the part that says that insurance companies cannot discriminate based on preexisting conditions, or the part about employers getting fined for employees that do not have health insurance or the part that allows people to join the “public option.” How about all of the other provisions that are in these bills or may be in these bills in the future? Californians passed a constitutional amendment prohibiting state funds to be used to give state run health care (i.e. publicly funded hospitals) or education to illegals and it was determined to be unconstitutional. So who was more right this time, the President or Mr. Wilson?

BTW, just as an informal poll.  Since I didn’t listen to his speech, did President Obama say his plan includes the “public option” or not?

The problem with the current health bill is that everyone who is pushing it really wants a single payer system. Single payer won’t sell now, so they came up with a 1200 page bill that nobody understands and claim it is nothing like a single payer system. Would you believe them? These proponents are being disingenuous, and most people understand that Obama will implement the bill as though it is a single payer system, eventually. In a single payer system all of your health decisions are controlled by a single payer, and guess what, YOU are not that payer.

Whether Congress passes a health bill with death panels or rationed care or free care for illegals or value based decision making really makes no difference. Whatever bill is passed now is just a another step down the path of thinking that the our government knows better than we do. The national health insurance system currently assumes that our employer makes better decisions than we do. Our employer decides our benefits, our deductibles, our drug plans, our co-pay our medical groups, and in many cases our employer even has to approve specific medical procedures. For most people it is not a stretch to change employer to government, in both cases someone else is making our most basic decisions for us.

To say that there is no choice in medical insurance plans is just wrong. There are lots of choices, it is just you aren’t allowed to make them. When my company wanted to offer medical insurance we asked a broker to come up with a list of possible plans. I expected a handful of plans and got literally hundreds, more than we wanted to read or understand. I’m an engineer, not a insurance specialist. We ended up offering our 5 employees a choice of just two plans, one HMO one PPO. Four years later we have more than 40 employess and have added a third choice: Kaiser. This is the way medical insurance is decided for 80% or more of Americans. By the way, employers make the same decisions for 401K retirement plans. I had to pick one of those too.

The health bill I would propose would be very short and contain just two key and simple elements: employers or other groups are not allowed to offer insurance, only individuals and families can purchase insurance; insurance rates or availability may not depend on individual or family genetics or health history but may depend on the number of years they are uninsured (this would have to be phased in) and other general characteristics. This would provided a basis for universal coverage in that all people could be covered if they could pay an average rate. If someone decided not to have insurance, that is OK, but if they get sick they would have to pay up, maybe 2 times, maybe 100 times the going rate before they get coverage. The value of having insurance would be amplified, and the cost would be controlled by the individual. People wanting only catastrophic insurance to reduce their health insurance costs could. If you want complete coverage it is your choice, not your employer’s and not your President’s.

If Congress wants to pass a law to pay for the insurance of people who do not want to, or cannot pay for insurance Congress can, but that would be a different bill with its own issues. Any such law would have to define a minimum acceptable insurance plan (MAP) which would be a source of great debate. It is the same question that each of us would have to answer ourselves, which plan is best, only this time it would have to be a plan that would fit everyone. Let’s face it, there is no such plan. I’m sure they can write another 1000 page bill that describes a minimum plan. 1000 pages may be too few though, I mean the tax code is a lot bigger and that.

While we are at it, we should eliminate the 401K retirement program and replace it with personal retirement accounts too. I like giving people their own choices in life, but I guess that is a perverted idea in Democracy today. I learned in high school that Democracy was about letting people vote for the things that make a difference in their lives. I didn’t realize that meant that my neighbors could vote if I qualify to live. Seventy years ago my father left a country that voted on whether he would live or die. They picked die. Each of us deserves to make our own health insurance decisions, to be the one and only member of our own personal death panel.

So instead of discussing the facts, let me discuss the claims.

First, Obama says that the bill will allow one to keep their own doctor. What does that mean? Right now my insurance, as is almost everybody’s, is decided by my employer, not by me. My employer today might decide to get insurance that has one set of doctors, but tomorrow (actually they can only change annually), they might decide to choose a different plan that only supports other doctors. Is Obama saying that they cannot make this decision? He has said that employer’s are still going to provide insurance so I am confused. I think he means that your employer will continue to decide your health insurance, not the government. Obama is trying to personalize healthcare today without understanding the basic reality, heath insurance is decided by employers, not by individuals.

The second statement from Obama is that private insurance will be more competitive if there is a “public” insurance plan. Who is going to fund this “public” insurance? The public or the government? All insurance companies are “public” today, they trade on public exchanges, they provide insurance to the public, the raise money from the public, their profits are distributed to the public. I think he means a government insurance plan, not a public plan. So who would put up the capital for a government plan? who would get the profits? who would run the plan? who would be on the board of directors? who would manage the company?

When I first heard him promote a public plan equal to private plans my  thought was “will private insurance companies be allowed to raise my taxes?” I know it is a strange question, but I assume that the government plan would have such a right, so if the government can do it and they are equal to the private companies then the private companies must have the right to do it. You probably are thinking that I am crazy, or as someone said to me recently, that I engage in hyperbole. Well it turns out that I was right. Regular  insurance companies will, under the Obama plan, be able to raise my taxes, at least indirectly, by skewing the cost curve. The government, i.e. my taxes, will under the laws of economics have to match the private plans, so basically my taxes will be paying for other people’s premiums which means that my taxes will be controlled by insurance companies while my employer will pay for my insurance.

The result will be a system whereby the only insurance that I will NOT be deciding or paying is my own!!

I think this is the ultimate goal of the Democratic plan: create a system so confusing, so open to abuse, so out of control that in a few years we will all be screaming for someone to step in and fix it. Then, enter single payer health, where it will be illegal to get health insurance, and illegal to pay for ones own health care and ultimately illegal to get any health care unless you can convince that “single payer” that you are worthy to be treated. I think this is called a slippery slope. Let’s hope we don’t slip, that might not be covered.