Open Thread August 15, 2023 The Inflation Reduction Act – real climate change policy?
Briefly, Josh Bivens: “Put simply, the IRA puts the U.S. on a path where meeting its global climate change commitments is within reach. The commitments which would provide a genuine chance at securing a livable planet for future generations if they are kept. At the beginning of August 2022, there was no such path to secure this livable future, but there is now and it is a mammoth victory.
The IRA was essentially a climate change bill. Included in it were extraordinarily important health and tax changes as ride-alongs.
The Inflation Reduction Act finally gave the U.S. a real climate change policy, Economic Policy Institute, Josh Bivens
Open Thread August 8, 2023-Are Electric Vehicles Green? – Angry Bear, NYT
Good grief:
https://www.propublica.org/article/the-hidden-fee-costing-doctors-millions-every-year
August 14, 2023
The Hidden Fee Costing Doctors Millions Every Year
By Cezary Podkul
A powerful lobbyist convinced a federal agency that doctors can be forced to pay fees on money that health insurers owe them. Big companies rake in profits while doctors are saddled with yet another cost in a burdensome health care system.
Having read carefully through the reports of the calamity on Maui, I am struck above all by the lack of preparation for a climate-change induced weather emergency. Even the recording of short term weather change showed an absence of capability and response. This has happened recently, though less dramatically, several times from coast to coast and tells me that American progress on climate change needs is much less advanced than suggested.
downed power lines possible cause of deadly Maui wildfires
AP – August 16
The cause of the tragedy is deeper rooted and more profound than just the location of the immediate spark. Please notice the date of this article:
https://www.sfgate.com/hawaii/article/hawaii-resorts-worsen-maui-water-problems-18210790.php
July 25, 2023
‘Hurting for water’: Hawaii resorts worsen Maui’s water shortage
By Christine Hitt
Popular among visitors to Hawaii, the hotels and resorts lining the South Maui beaches in Kihei and Wailea are lush and green, with many pools, water slides and fountains. But this is all a facade.
The coastline is actually dry, receiving less than 10 inches of water per year. It gets the majority of its water from Central Maui — the area of Kahului and around Wailuku — where residents are sometimes urged to conserve….
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/10/climate/hawaii-fires-climate-change.html
August 10, 2023
How Climate Change Turned Lush Hawaii Into a Tinderbox
Declining rainfall, rising temperatures and invasive species have left the islands more susceptible to wildfires.
By Christopher Flavelle and Manuela Andreoni
It is not unusual for sparking high-tension power lines to cause brush fires, which are all too likely to go ‘out of control’ when arid conditions exist.
What sparks US wildfires: Power lines, burning trash and lightning
Bloomberg – August 15
https://cepr.net/press-release/progress-undone-new-report-examines-ecuadors-economy-since-2017/
August 15, 2023
“Progress Undone”: New Report Examines Ecuador’s Economy Since 2017
Gains of 2007–2017 Period Have Been Erased as Poverty, Inequality, and Crime Have Spiked
Washington, DC — A new report * from the Center for Economic and Policy Research examines key indicators for Ecuador’s economy and finds that significant gains of the 2007–2017 period have been erased by subsequent governments that returned to the International Monetary Fund and slashed spending. As a result, poverty and economic inequality have increased, as have crime, insecurity, and worsened health outcomes.
“The data make it clear: things have gotten much worse in Ecuador since 2017, with the return to the IMF and to destructive austerity,” CEPR Co-Director Mark Weisbrot said. “But in the 2007–2017 period, Ecuador experienced remarkable economic and social progress, which were all the more impressive considering that there were major external economic shocks to the Ecuadorian economy, including the world recession of 2009 and two oil price collapses.”
The report, “Ecuador: A Decade of Progress, Undone,” by Jake Johnston and Ivana Vasic-Lalovic compares the 2007–2017 period, when Rafael Correa was president, to the post-Correa era of Lenín Moreno and then current president Guillermo Lasso. It finds that from 2007 to 2017:
a) social spending, as a percentage of the economy, doubled;
b) poverty fell by over 41 percent;
c) inequality, as measured by the Gini coefficient, declined by 16.7 percent;
d) average annual per capita GDP grew by 1.6 percent, more than double the rate of the previous 25 years; and
e) Ecuador undertook significant institutional reforms that reduced debt and allowed the government to weather two large external shocks.
But since 2017:
a) government-imposed austerity measures pushed the economy into recession prior to the onset of the COVID pandemic;
b) in just two years, poverty increased by 17 percent, and inequality worsened, with both reaching the highest levels in more than a decade;
c) the country has had the worst-performing economy in South America, with per capita GDP still 5 percent below 2019 levels;
d) the economy is currently on the edge of recession after negative growth in the first quarter of 2023; and
e) Ecuador will be paying hundreds of millions of dollars each year to service IMF debt.
While the data include the negative impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Ecuadorian government was poorly equipped to handle the pandemic after laying off 3,680 public health workers and dismantling many institutional reforms from the prior administration. In early 2020, Ecuador became a global hotspot for the outbreak, with one of the highest per capita death rates in the world.
The paper notes that the successes of the 2007–2017 period were not driven simply by a “commodities boom,” but from deliberate policy choices and reforms that the Correa government enacted, including ending central bank independence, defaulting on illegitimate debt, taxing capital leaving the country, countercyclical fiscal policy, and — in response to an oil price crash — tariffs implemented under the WTO’s provision for emergency balance of payments safeguards.
“Ecuador’s experience from 2007 to 2017 showed that even a relatively small, lower-middle income developing country is less restricted in its policy choices by ‘globalization’ than is commonly believed, and can achieve remarkable gains in living standards, with sound, independent economic policy-making,” Weisbrot said. “But Ecuador’s return to the IMF and self-defeating economic policies showed how quickly these gains can be eroded, to the point where poverty has increased substantially, Ecuadorians have lost confidence in their leaders, and people are fed up with out-of-control crime and insecurity.”
* https://cepr.net/report/ecuador-a-decade-of-progress-undone/
This is a big, big deal:
https://english.news.cn/20230816/951e8432cec64042b9161d0df9f5a318/c.html
August 16, 2023
Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., Ltd. reveals new LFP battery
Chinese battery manufacturer Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., Ltd. (CATL) revealed on Wednesday a new LFP battery * that achieves 4C superfast charging. The battery provides electric vehicles with a driving range of over 400 kilometers on a 10-minute charge. In addition, it can also deliver a range of over 700 kilometers on a single charge.
* Lithium iron phosphate
I expect a lot of such news over the next few years. There’s enough money in improving automotive battery storage to make it worth investing in even long shots. The whole intercalation battery story goes back a long ways and spans a few continents. It started with a breakthrough at Ford in the 1960s. They even built an electric car using a sulfur ion based battery that had a 450F operating temperature. Then, the technology developed slowly until the Japanese need it for their camcorders. It was a while before serious work on using the technology to power automobiles resumed.
Just BTW, Goodenough, a major lithium ion battery pioneer died back in June at 100.
What evidently happened was that even with the development of an electric vehicle by Tesla, the major world vehicle makers did not understand that they could lose a 100 and more year edge in oil-powered vehicle making. German vehicle makers mentioned this, but along with Tesla only the Chinese began to competitively build new energy vehicles and the Chinese have now been working on lithium batteries for vehicles for years.
Chinese vehicles which have a huge home market passed the US, then Germany in 2022, and have passed Japan in 2023 in vehicle exports.
Interesting:
Here is an extract of the Penn Sate Mechanical Engineering Dept paper concerning ‘fast charge’ LPR.
Penn State team develops thermally modulated LFP battery; fast-charging, inexpensive, long-life for mass-market EVs – Green Car Congress
I do not own an EV but I understand that current batteries achieve 80% potential mileage in around 35 minutes at a ciommercial rapid charge station.
I wonder how it charges on a 240V home station?
The Penn State paper is Jan 2021, which means the concept is coming to production quite rapidly.
The new CATL battery has a 700 km with a full charge and charging and running are not effected by low temperature. The 400 km 10 minute charge though is enough to drive from Boston to New York City.
i have to disagree with Josh Bivens….apparently he didn’t read the clause in the Manchin IRA that opened 80 million acres – an area of the Gulf of Mexico as large as Florida and Georgia combined – to gas & oil drilling … and they also gave away Alaska to get Manchin to sign on….Big Oil was positively giddy..
via CNN:
Biden administration moves ahead with massive Gulf of Mexico drilling auction, weeks after approving Willow Project
—
A few weeks after allowing the controversial Willow oil drilling project in Alaska to go forward, the Biden administration is auctioning off more than 73 million acres of waters in the Gulf of Mexico to offshore oil and gas drilling.
It could be the first Gulf of Mexico lease sale under the Biden administration that actually results in new drilling, after previous auctions were embroiled in legal challenges and delays.
On Wednesday, the Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management will hold a lease sale for an area that’s more than double the size of the Willow Project in acreage. The administration was forced to hold the sale after Joe Manchin added it to the Inflation Reduction Act, the major climate and energy bill that President Joe Biden signed last year.
I have to disagree with Josh Bivens…apparently he didn’t read the clause in the Manchin IRA that opened 80 million acres – an area of the Gulf of Mexico as large as Florida and Georgia combined – to gas & oil drilling…
[ Surely so; important comments. ]
Not feeling this is much of a negative development. Fossil fuels will be replaced as cleaner energy becomes more available at good pricing. IRA should drive that ahead. My sense is this is “sleeves from the vest” trade-off…..a bunch of IRA stuff that otherwise might not happen for many years. Not sensing a nuclear energy resurgence; fossil fuels will balance the energy demand for the duration of the transition and IRA makes that shorter than otherwise.
There’s still such an abundance of oil & gas resources out there, there is clearly an irresistable tendency in the wealth-centered portion of humanity to take advantage of it, continue to rake it in. They are going to do so, inevitably. If god doesn’t want this to happen, he will intervene. Sad to say…
If god doesn’t, Gaia will have to handle it.
Wikipedia: In Greek mythology, Gaia meaning ‘land’ or ‘earth’), also spelled Gaea is the personification of the Earth and one of the Greek primordial deities. Gaia is the ancestral mother—sometimes parthenogenic—of all life. …
rjs
thanks for the information
eric 377
thanks for the disinformation
Why Wall Street is Gung-ho on the Housing Market
NY Times – August 17
Despite mortgage rates hitting multidecade highs and jitters in the bond market, demand for new homes is strong and prices are rising.
it seems likely to me that the “next recession” will be caused by corporate greed (aka “capitalism” especially in the takeover of the housing market. people can’t buy much if their whole paycheck is taken up by paying rent. and, of course, if the rich price the poor out of the housing market entirely.
and thanks to ltr and rjs for noticing that the “climate friendly” Biden plan is no such thing.
maybe we need the gas to fight the russians, but if that is the case and we can’t find an answer we may need to brush up on our mad max skills. maybe a novel use for nuclear power, including fusion, to solve the climate change problem.
To paraphrase Pogo Possum, “We have met the climate crisis and it are us.”
Ron
good ol’ Pogo. I wouldn’t expect anyone not eligible for Social Security to remember him.
Never thought I’d miss the Loan Arranger.