The Necropolitan Sentinel

Is Texas being . . . is it being punished for its “redness”? This story is very, very strange.

Bryan Preston, at PJM:

ERCOT: EPA Rule Threatens to Turn Out the Lights in Texas

Texas’ Electric Reliability Coalition of Texas — ERCOT — is firing up the warning flare that if the EPA’s new cross-state rules go into effect on January 1, 2012, parts of Texas may well go dark.

This is one of those cases where we believe it is our role to voice our concern that Texas could face a shortage of generation necessary to keep the lights on in Texas within a few years, if the EPA’s Cross-State Rule is implemented as written.

ERCOT’s May11 report to the Public Utility Commission on the impact of the proposed environmental regulations did not address the impact of SO2 restrictions on coal plants in ERCOT because these restrictions on Texas were not included as part of the EPA’s earlier rule proposal. We have not had time to fully analyze the entire 1,323-page Cross-State Rule released July 7 or to communicate with the generation owners regarding what their intentions will be. However, initial implications are that the SO2 requirements for Texas added at the last stage of the rule development will have a significant impact on coal generation, which provided 40 percent of the electricity consumed in ERCOT in 2010.

Our concern is that the timing of the new requirements – effective Jan. 1, 2012 – is unreasonable because it does not allow enough time to implement operational responses to ensure reliability. We fear that many of the coal plants in ERCOT will be forced to limit or shut down operations in order to maintain compliance with the new rule, possibly leading to inadequate operating reserve margins with insufficient time to reliably retrofit existing generation or build new, replacement generation.

The EPA set out this rule change in a way that guaranteed push back, and that is completely counter to the transparency that Obama promised. I know, that was a cynical lie, but nevertheless he promised it. The EPA has no idea just how much trouble this rule change may potentially cause. I strongly suggest that they re-think this and stand down. Never mind leaving businesses and families uncertain on their electricity in the winter at the turn of the year — an election year, no less. That’s just the beginning of the trouble the Obama gang is courting here.

Texas is not going to go dark, not for the EPA or anyone else. We just won’t. Having the EPA tell Texas to turn out the lights is among the quickest ways of creating a “Come and take it” moment I can think of.

Read the whole thing.

It would appear so if this is being interpreted properly:

The chief of the world’s leading physics lab at CERN in Geneva has prohibited scientists from drawing conclusions from a major experiment. The CLOUD (“Cosmics Leaving Outdoor Droplets”) experiment examines the role that energetic particles from deep space play in cloud formation. CLOUD uses CERN’s proton synchrotron to examine nucleation.

CERN Director General Rolf-Dieter Heuer told Welt Online that the scientists should refrain from drawing conclusions from the latest experiment.

“I have asked the colleagues to present the results clearly, but not to interpret them,” reports veteran science editor Nigel Calder on his blog. Why?

Because, Heuer says, “That would go immediately into the highly political arena of the climate change debate. One has to make clear that cosmic radiation is only one of many parameters.”

Oh … “only one of many parameters”, eh?  So nice to see him admit that.  Does he mean like that big yellow thing that hangs in the sky each day?

Imagine that – cosmic rays have a role in cloud formation and the sun is extraordinarily active in how many cosmic rays are able reach the atmosphere and carry out that function. And the effect?

The CLOUD experiment builds on earlier experiments by Danish physicist Henrik Svensmark, who demonstrated that cosmic rays provide a seed for clouds. Tiny changes in the earth’s cloud cover could account for variations in temperature of several degrees. The amount of Ultra Fine Condensation Nuclei (UFCN) material depends on the quantity of the background drizzle of rays, which varies depending on the strength of the sun’s magnetic field and the strength of the Earth’s magnetic field.

Emphasis mine. Back to that big yellow thing – what role does it have?:

Since clouds often cover 30 percent of the earth’s surface, a moderate change in cloud cover clearly could explain the warming/cooling cycle.

Svensmark noted the gigantic “solar wind” that expands when the sun is active—and thus blocks many of the cosmic rays that would otherwise hit the earth’s atmosphere. When the sun weakens, the solar wind shrinks. Recently, the U.S. Solar Observatory reported a very long period of “quiet sun” and predicted 30 years of cooling.

Got it? So … we’re in a solar minimum and the temp hasn’t risen in the 10 years since it has begun. Go figure.

Where does this leave us given the CERN gag order? What can you infer from that? Nigel Calder does a good job of rounding the inferrences up:

Four quick inferences:

1) The results must be favourable for Svensmark or there would be no such anxiety about them.

2) CERN has joined a long line of lesser institutions obliged to remain politically correct about the man-made global warming hypothesis. It’s OK to enter “the highly political arena of the climate change debate” provided your results endorse man-made warming, but not if they support Svensmark’s heresy that the Sun alters the climate by influencing the cosmic ray influx and cloud formation.

3) The once illustrious CERN laboratory ceases to be a truly scientific institute when its Director General forbids its physicists and visiting experimenters to draw the obvious scientific conclusions from their results.

4) The resulting publication may be rather boring.

Indeed … boring only in the sense of reading dense scientific material. Not boring in its impact.

The CERN experiment is supposed to be the big test of the Svensmark theory. It’s a tipoff, then, that CERN’s boss, Rolf-Dieter Heuer, has just told the German magazine Die Welt that he has forbidden his researchers to “interpret” the forthcoming test results. In other words, the CERN report will be a stark “just the facts” listing of the findings. Those findings must support Svensmark, or Heuer would never have issued such a stifling order on a major experiment.

Can’t wait to watch this one unfold. But the gag order is very suspicious and certainly infers that the results don’t support the warmist theory … or should I say “assertion” now?

~McQ

Twitter: @McQandO

A month ago, Dan Collins, Enoch Root and I started up a site with a web address and a dream . . . a dream that we could provide a gathering place for people who want to follow the news of the day: Brainy, high-powered folk who want to know what’s going on with the economy, U.S. energy policy, the upcoming election, gun rights, and–yes–the occasional and regrettable complete banishment of faith issues from the public square.

We dreamed . . . well, we dreamed that Dan and I could avoid being slaughtered by our respective spouses, if only we started bringing grocery money into our homes.

And this has been a blast. I mean, I realize that there are moments that I got a bit whiny during Dan’s working vacation with his family, but one has to keep in mind that I still have a lot of unfulfilled ambitions regarding this website. Once we get to a new level, I’m hoping to integrate more magazine-style features of the type we used to run at The Website That Must Not Be Named . . . but we can’t very well dip our body parts in pudding until we finish our Pink Floydish meat, served up with garbled, nonsensical metaphors.

We did want to thank you all for participating in this venture, and remind you that just by hanging out here, you’re part of something that’s really exciting . . . and it is cool; we’re only two ads away from paying the biggest of our startup costs! And we are pulling down more traffic than our quirky little personal blogs do, combined. Some weeks, it’s a lot more.

If you do have a small business, feel free to advertise in our Directory of Dreadful Capitalists. If you’re trying to sell something, hit our Classifieds section. And if you have a medium-size or large business, consider getting a display ad.

If you’re just enjoying the company here and want to help us with our startup costs, that’s do-able too: use the PayPal button below, and you might add a note that labels it a Conservatory contribution, since right now we’re using the Little Miss Attila PayPal account. (Yes: we expect this site to have its own account by the time we turn two months old. That may not excite you people, but there’s nothing that warms the heart of an Operations Manager/Co-Editor/Corporate Advertising Manager/Partner from Hell like seeing the new venture take a baby step such as that.)

Seriously, thanks for coming along; this will continue to be quite a ride.

Maybe. Maybe not . . .

I think I’m starting to resolve a puzzle that’s been bugging me for awhile.

Pop economists (or, at least, pop micro-economists) are often making one of two arguments:

1. People are rational and respond to incentives. Behavior that looks irrational is actually completely rational once you think like an economist.

2. People are irrational and they need economists, with their open minds, to show them how to be rational and efficient.

Argument 1 is associated with “why do they do that?” sorts of puzzles. Why do they charge so much for candy at the movie theater, why are airline ticket prices such a mess, why are people drug addicts, etc. The usual answer is that there’s some rational reason for what seems like silly or self-destructive behavior.

Argument 2 is associated with “we can do better” claims such as why we should fire 80% of public-schools teachers or Moneyball-style stories about how some clever entrepreneur has made a zillion dollars by exploiting some inefficiency in the market.

The trick is knowing whether you’re gonna get 1 or 2 above. They’re complete opposites!

. . . Here’s a quote from Steven Levitt:

One of the easiest ways to differentiate an economist from almost anyone else in society is to test them with repugnant ideas. Because economists, either by birth or by training, have their mind open, or skewed in just such a way that instead of thinking about whether something is right or wrong, they think about it in terms of whether it’s efficient, whether it makes sense. And many of the things that are most repugnant are the things which are indeed quite efficient, but for other reasons — subtle reasons, sometimes, reasons that are hard for people to understand — are completely and utterly unacceptable.

As statistician Mark Palko points out, Levitt is making an all-too-convenient assumption that people who disagree with him are disagreeing because of closed-mindedness. Here’s Palko:

There are few thoughts more comforting than the idea that the people who disagree with you are overly emotional and are not thinking things through. We’ve all told ourselves something along these lines from time to time.

I could add a few more irrational reasons to disagree with Levitt: political disagreement (on issues ranging from abortion to pollution) and simple envy at Levitt’s success. (It must make the haters even more irritated that Levitt is, by all accounts, amiable, humble, and a genuinely nice guy.) In any case, I’m a big fan of Freakonomics.

But my reaction to reading the above Levitt quote was to think of the puzzle described at the top of this entry. Isn’t it interesting, I thought, that Levitt is identifying economists as rational and ordinary people as irrational. That’s argument 2 above. In other settings, I think we’d hear him saying how everyone responds to incentives and that what seems like “efficiency” to do-gooding outsiders is actually not efficient at all. The two different arguments get pulled out as necessary.

The set of all sets that don’t contain themselves

Which in turn reminds me of this self-negating quote from Levitt protoge Emily Oster:

anthropologists, sociologists, and public-health officials . . . believe that cultural differences–differences in how entire groups of people think and act–account for broader social and regional trends. AIDS became a disaster in Africa, the thinking goes, because Africans didn’t know how to deal with it.

Economists like me [Oster] don’t trust that argument. We assume everyone is fundamentally alike; we believe circumstances, not culture, drive people’s decisions, including decisions about sex and disease.

I love this quote for its twisted logic. It’s Russell’s paradox all over again. Economists are different from everybody else, because . . . economists “assume everyone is fundamentally alike”! But if everyone is fundamentally alike, how is it that economists are different “from almost anyone else in society”? All we can say for sure is that it’s “circumstances, not culture.” It’s certainly not “differences in how entire groups of people think and act”–er, unless these groups are economists, anthropologists, etc. . . .

Good is entrepreneurs, bad is bureaucrats. At some point this breaks down. For example, if Levitt is hired by a city government to help reform its school system, is he a rational, taboo-busting entrepreneur (a good thing) or a culture-loving bureaucrat who thinks he knows better than everybody else (a bad thing)? As a logical structure, the division into Good and Bad has holes. But as emotionally-laden categories (“fuzzy sets,” if you will), I think it works pretty well. . . .

Statisticians are special because, deep in our bones, we know about uncertainty. Economists know about incentives, physicists know about reality, movers can fit big things in the elevator on the first try, evolutionary psychologists know how to get their names in the newspaper, lawyers know you should never never never talk to the cops, and statisticians know about uncertainty. Of that, I’m sure.

Trying to one-up Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL), she asks him if he has a degree in economics. Which he does.

Ed Morrissey:

Brooks actually has three degrees: [in] political science, economics, and law. . . . Brewer was being flat-out rude as well as foolish; MSNBC invited Brooks to appear to get his perspective on the issues. If their hosts respond by belittling them (whether it backfires or not), what does that say about MSNBC, its management, and the kind of invitations they make?

Since Brewer made an issue out of having an economics degree before engaging in economics debates, she must have a doctorate in the subject herself, right? Not exactly. According to her Wikipedia entry, Brewer has a baccalaureate in broadcast journalism (magna cum laude). Apparently they didn’t teach interviewing skills at Syracuse, or logic either, as a requisite for the degree.

The MSM continues to try to skew public opinion nationwide on the Debt Ceiling crisis with skewed polls. (How bad? Try three Obama voters in 2008 for every two McCain voters that were polled.) Meanwhile, in Minnesota their budget crisis has finally ended.

Minnesota’s legislature approved a budget deal in the early hours of Wednesday morning that will end the state’s 20-day government shutdown – the longest ever in a state – once Gov. Mark Dayton signs it later in the day.

In a special session that began Tuesday afternoon and continued on until 3:30 a.m., the state’s House and Senate approved a series of budget bills that Dayton, a Democrat, has promised to ink to restart government operations and have 22,000 state employees back at work by Thursday.

Democrats in the legislature are incensed:

House Minority Leader Paul Thissen, DFL-Minneapolis, called it “the most irresponsible budget in state history. Their budget forces the state to beg from seniors and the disabled with draconian budget cuts, borrow money to temporarily fill the deficit with one-time funds and steal from our children’s future by expanding the K-12 school shift.”

Listen to this language; if you were following the Wisconsin budget fight, you may get a sense of deja vu. Let’s remember how they got there:

Hot Air, July 5th:

The Republican-led legislature passed the required nine budget bills in mid-May; Dayton vetoed them last week without ever bothering to negotiate on any of them individually. Dayton’s vetoes came on the last day of the legislative session, which meant that Republicans had no time at all to redraft the bills for Dayton’s signature anyway. Now they can’t meet without Dayton calling a special session, which Dayton has refused to do, even though there are no special rules for such a session that give an advantage to either side.

Here is The New York Times the same day:

How far will Republican lawmakers go to protect millionaires? Those who think a default on the federal government’s credit seems implausible should take a sobering look at the “closed” signs dotting Minnesota. The Republican Party there readily shut down the state’s government on Friday by refusing to raise taxes on the 7,700 Minnesotans who make more than $1 million a year.

Turn on CBSABCNBCCNNMSNBC’s coverage of the Debt crisis and see if that paragraph seems familiar.

Power Line, July 14th:

As I read Governor Dayton’s letter to the Republican leadership in the legislature, the most notable fact is that Dayton has given up on imposing tax increases as a condition of ending his shutdown of state government. Why did Dayton agree to end his shutdown now? This is pure speculation, but my guess is that he is looking at poll data that are not supportive of his position.

Ed Morrissey suggested that the tour he took, trying to sell his plan, went less than positively. And they probably had the real data, somewhere: I suspect poll numbers for the left are a lot like bookkeeping at a dishonest business: there’s one set that is disseminated to influence the public, and another private set that tracks what people actually think.

That brings us to today: the crisis in Minnesota is over, and the budget is balanced. This is yet another fiscal catastrophe averted by applying the GOP’s solutions.

In the space of three weeks we have :

• Wisconsin county budgets going from deficit to surpluses in a matter of days.
• Multiple states run by Republicans (unexpectedly?) in surplus.
• A confrontation in Minnesota between a Democratic Governor, supported by the media versus a newly elected GOP house. When the GOP house wins, the Democrats cave–and their fiscal house is put in order.

Am I the only one detecting a pattern here? Because the Beltway/NY/LA media axis sure isn’t.

The bottom line: when the Democratic “leaders” won’t lead, it’s up to the Repubicans to bring them along, even when they are outranked. Meanwhile, we should ignore the obviously biased polls data coming from the MSM and remind the fiscal conservatives that the New Media have their backs.

The long game is definitely to get the White House back in 2012, but in the meantime, Boehner et al. may have a stronger hand to play than many people suppose.