The Reality-Based Community

Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.

At What Point Mercy?

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Some people do truly horrible things that frighten and appall me as much as anyone. But their behavior should not be the moral guide for our behavior; that they failed to show mercy to their victims does not mean that we should sacrifice our own humanity by mimicking them. I think about this principle often, because it’s part of what undergirds my opposition to capital punishment (yes, in all cases) and also part of what sickens me about 75 year olds on dialysis spending their final years in prison.

I suggest a different way forward in Washington Post.

Nothing Raises Drug Prices Like Prohibition

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Prior to any state legalizing marijuana, economist Jeff Miron estimated that it would cause pot prices to fall by 50%. Legalized pot blew through that estimate in less than 24 months and is still dropping fast.

Illegal drug prices have generally fallen over time as industries become more efficient, and this fact has often been used to assert that prohibition doesn’t raise drug prices. That argument has been destroyed by the real time experiment of legalizing marijuana, as I explain in Washington Post Wonkblog.

Cannabis News Round-Up

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California gets into the weeds of pot marketing. Haze surrounding California marijuana regulations is starting to clear. When it comes to buying pot for pleasure, Fresno, California won’t be on the recreational map.

Ex-Bain consultant who opposed legalization named Massachusetts top marijuana regulator. Border patrol in Maine warns legalization won’t halt marijuana seizures. Pot shop clashes with tourism stores in eclectic Arkansas town.

How to get a job in the marijuana industry. Meet the 24-year-old entrepreneur who just launched a careers site for pot jobs. Big-name tech investors pour millions into marijuana. Buzz kill for pot farmers: Lower prices.

Sabet urges feds to “systematically shut down” cannabis industry. Legal pot in Trump’s America is part of “resistance culture.”

Quebec Marijuana czar stresses importance of reasonable prices for legal weed. Canadian provinces agree legal pot must be competitive with black market. Manitobans uncomfortable with certain aspects of pot legalization.

A week to remember

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Tomorrow morning, congress will be back at work, with a dozen working days to knock off a list of tasks that would be daunting even without an infantile, grievance-besotted, Russia-crazed president throwing sand in the works, and even if its own managers didn’t have a Freedom Caucus of know-nothing ideologues hanging on its ankles, and even if Trump hadn’t just tossed it the anvil of immigration reform.  Wow.

But that’s not all; this month only (but continuing for weeks and months of political hassle), you also get Harvey recovery, and wait, if you order now, and also if you don’t, you get two or even three additional exciting climate/weather events !  “Disturbance 1” is chugging west from near Cabo Verde at 10 mph with (at this writing) an 80% chance of getting organized within five days; “Disturbance 2” is brewing up exactly where Harvey started as a little baby orange X in the southern Gulf.

Irma is shaping up to be a very interesting event, as it is now drawing a bead on the east coast of Florida, likely to sail over warm water south of the Bahamas, turn right, and run north along the coast as a 3 or a 4. Of course these projections have a wide error band, but for now, let us reflect on what Neil Frank, the former director of the National Hurricane Center spent his career warning us of about just this storm.

(1) Evacuation routes in this region mostly run north and south; roads going inland (and you have to go a ways inland to be ahead of the storm surge) are basically narrow streets that peter out quickly among the alligators.  If the storm is following the shore north from about Miami, driving along the coast is not going to help you much.

(2) Almost no-one living on this coast has ever experienced a major hurricane and has no idea what to expect. Since the last one, there’s been significant sea level rise, increased paved area, land subsidence, and lot more people. There is no real high ground in  south Florida. Whole streets in Miami flood now just from a high tide.

(3) From Boca Raton south is a miles-long row of high-rise condominium towers lined up along the beach like dominoes, many taller than the space between them.  They are built on sand under (i) Florida building codes and (ii) Florida local government administration. The former are not as insouciant and optimistic as the rules that put Houston under water last week, but close; the latter is not as corrupt as Louisiana’s, but, um…my father had an expression “as crooked as a dog’s hind leg” …

Frank used to predict that the storm surge will wash the sand out from under some or many of these buildings and they will tip over, perhaps into the condo tower next door. If evacuation doesn’t work, there will still be people in them.

(The governor overseeing this mess will be the deeply odious, reactionary, willfully ignorant, climate denier Rick Scott, who’s idea of Christian charity is drug tests for welfare recipients, and of responsive government is allowing Floridians to be sure their children don’t learn anything they don’t know, like evolution.)

Irma is due (according to current model runs) about next weekend; the other two, too early to tell. Oh yeah, Russiagate continues to slowly fulminate, and North Korea…oy.

The writer Saki, back at the beginning of the last century, said “the Balkans create more history than can be consumed locally.” I think current times create more news than society, or anyone in it, has the bandwidth to cope with. Or that the remaining adults in government can react to usefully.

Enforcing laws against interstate tobacco smuggling

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Cigarette taxes protect health by reducing smoking.

But tax disparities across states create a multi-billion-dollar annual market in smuggled tobacco products. Current enforcement efforts are inadequate and ill-organized.

As a result, the illicit trade in tobacco products (ITTP) is growing, and the larger the market grows, the harder the problem of controlling it. (That’s the usual positive feedback problem in violation rates due to enforcement swamping.) So inaction now has long-lasting costs.

Tax equalization would solve the problem, but isn’t likely to happen. Feasible changes in enforcement strategy could protect health and revenue while reducing crime.

Further thoughts on this from Mike DeFeo and me now up on SSRN.

Actually, Don’t Follow Your Dreams

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I often listen to books on tape. The ones you pay for generally have excellent readers, like the magnificent George Guidall. But the free ones (e.g., through LibriVox) are of uneven quality. I am in the midst of listening to a famous Victorian Era novel through LibriVox, and some of the chapters are read by a woman with such a thick accent and poor command of English words and cadence that I keep laughing because her rendition reminds me of this Monty Python sketch.

But it’s no big deal. People can certainly read the book on their own if they don’t like someone else’s reading, and she’s not harming herself. She’s a volunteer doing something she finds intrinsically enjoyable in what I suspect is her retirement. Indeed I get the sense she really admires the author of the words she is mangling.

But it makes me think of a situation I and many other professors encounter where the stakes are much higher, namely when someone is at the beginning of their adulthood, and just not that good at what they want to do in their career. What is my or any other faculty member’s responsibility to the pre-med student who dreams of being a surgeon but is better suited to being a barber? What onus is on the high school basketball coach to tell his star player that he’s never going to be an NBA player, so he should focus instead on doing well in math, science and language class?

This is a very un-American topic to raise. “Gotta have a dream” American movies are a dime a dozen, and virtually all of them feature a scowling older person who tells our young hero/ine that s/he’s never gonna be a movie star/top athlete/brilliant scientist/successful musician etc. Most professors don’t want to be that scowling figure; it’s easier to tell everyone to go confidently in the direction of their dreams, even when we suspect it’s going to be a train wreck (Food for thought here: I never should have followed my dream).

A couple years ago I was talking to a high-ranking professional staffer at one of the country’s leading universities. I asked him how he chose his career, and he said he owed it all to the mentor who told him in graduate school that he was never going to achieve his ambition of becoming a chemistry professor at a great university. His mentor told him, compassionately, that he didn’t have the scientific chops or drive it took to make independent research breakthroughs, and that he would probably end up at a community college or low-tier 4 year college where he would be required to teach all the time (and he didn’t like teaching). He dropped out and is now in a very different but well paid and meaningful line of work. His tribute to his beloved mentor stayed with me: “Thank God he didn’t believe in me”.

I don’t claim certainty about how faculty can know in advance for which mentees unwavering support is the right medicine and for which it is cruel. But I do feel pretty confident that American academic institutions tend to worry less than they should about leading on optimistic, unrealistic, dream-chasing students.

Cannabis News Round-Up

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11-year-old girl sues Sessions over marijuana legalization. The reaction to Sen. Booker’s marijuana bill that he doesn’t want to see. Jeff Sessions, pot prohibition is so 2011. Marijuana tech firm MassRoots to buy CannaRegs for $12 million. Support for cannabis law reform remains high in 2017. The great pot monopoly mystery. A record number of Americans have tried marijuana, new survey shows.

Recent raids on Mendocino, California grows elicit response from local government. Marijuana becomes a player in California politics and it’s putting its money on Gavin Newsom. California is hiring extensively as recreational marijuana approaches. Pot prices rise 200% in Nevada as product flies off the shelves. Nevada regulators reaffirm wall between casinos, marijuana.

Colorado, Alaska, Washington, Oregon respond to Sessions’ missives. Oregon Gov. Brown mounts vigorous defense of legal pot. Colorado towns to receive new mental health clinics. Colorado town disputes recall petition. Traffic fatalities linked to marijuana are up sharply in Colorado. Is legalization to blame? At least eleven Colorado pot-related homicides since legalization. Fairbanks, Alaska referendum pits pot retailers against neighborhood groups.

First member of Massachusetts pot commission didn’t support legalization. Pennsylvania law firms bullish on cannabis despite grave legal risks. Is this the last hurdle to legalizing pot in New Jersey if Murphy wins?

Canadian liquor stores lobby to sell legal marijuana. MP says pot legalization should factor in discrimination against black Canadians. Quebec wants to hear from you on legal marijuana. Pot was flying off the shelves in Uruguay; then US banks weighed in. UK Liberal Democrats still want to legalize cannabis.

The end of fossil-fuelled cars

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1919 Rauch & Lang electric car

We all love a David-and-Goliath story. Elon Musk is a great showman and has played this narrative for all it’s worth in the spectacular rise of his electric car company Tesla. A few weeks ago Tesla launched the Model 3, hyped as the first mass-market full-range all-electric car. But what we really want to know is not whether Tesla will beat Ford and GM and VW, and whose shareholders will make or lose money. It is the answers to two questions:

  • Is the electric vehicle revolution is on track to take over from fossil-fuel vehicles in the coming decades?
  • If yes, will the revolution happen fast enough to be consistent with the Paris 2 degree C warming cap and net zero emissions not too long after 2050?

Here is a growth chart for global sales of plug-in electric vehicles (EVs).
Another one from me, using IEA data – copied into a spreadsheet here. The growth rate for pure battery cars is higher than for hybrids, a complex transitional technology that is fated to fade out.

The rate bounces around and hasn’t settled down, so it would be hazardous to pick a CAGR as a prediction. You can pick a rate and find an expert who predicts it. A nice chart from BNEF shows the scatter.

BNEF leaves out the outlier, Stanford professor Tony Seba, who predicts EVs will be 100% of new sales by 2030. His growth rate is not particularly high – 33% CAGR by my calculations. He does expect self-driving plus rideshare to slash the size of the market by two-thirds.

I see no reason not to join the party with my own blunderbuss. The growth rate looks to be higher than the 42% that gives a doubling time of 2 years. The global light vehicle market is currently 93.5 million a year, growing at 1.5%. Project the 42% CAGR, and EV sales take all the market in 2031, in line with Seba (my spreadsheet, and footnote). That’s without his rideshare revolution.

In all the professional scenarios, the answer to the first question is yes. Electric cars will take over. So will buses and light commercial vehicles (sooner), and eventually heavy ones.

But the answer to the second question is still very doubtful. The problem is that the stock of ICEVs is huge, over one billion, and they last a long time, about 20 years for cars. Even if no new ICEVs are sold after 2030, emissions from the fleet don’t hit zero until 2050. Rideshare does not affect this problem unless it accelerates scrapping of the legacy stock. Net zero by 2050 requires extremely high growth rates to hold up; follow anybody else’s forecasts than Seba’s and mine, and the deadline is put off. The govrnments of the UK and France have announced ICE cutoffs for cars in 2040: this is not too bad, as cars over 10 years old tend to have low annual mileage. Net zero by 2050 also calls for extension of the technology to trucks. This is all possible, but not at all certain.

It’s easier to argue that this can happen than that it will. I can at least offer you a qualitative list of downside and upside risk factors, over the jump. Continue Reading…