Corruption of the Bureaucracy Watch

The Washington Post had a great story which reported that:

Neil Jacobs, the acting head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, sent an all-staff email Friday afternoon in an apparent effort to repair damage from an unusual Sept. 6 statement that sided with President Trump rather than agency weather forecasters.

I have obtained a copy of the email and have posted it here. It states that:

Scientific integrity is at the heart of NOAA’s mission and culture, and is essential for maintaining the public’s trust.

Of course, for the government to function properly, all of its component parts must act with integrity. Thus, the NOAA story is but a subpart of the much larger story of a broad-based attempt by the Trump Administration to undermine the integrity of the federal bureaucracy by the Trump Administration.

Going forward, I will attempt to focus on similar examples of this corruption. One question that I would pose to those contributors to the RBC who are from the UK: Is the bureaucracy there under a similar attack? If it either is or were presented with similar pressures, is it institutionally more resistant?

Financing hydrogen iron

A wonkish plan for problem industries in the energy transition.

We know how to make the electricity supply renewable. We know how to make land transport electric. Both are on track. But there are four problem industries where things are not so clear.

These estimates are not all for the same year and not strictly comparable, but they are good enough to make the point that to reach net zero emissions, the four sectors (together 20% of global fossil emissions) cannot be ignored.

The challenges are distinct but they have common features.

  1. Very plausible technological pathways exist to decarbonise. But these are not mature, and for the moment they are far more expensive than BAU.
  2. There is no guarantee or strong expectation that technical progress will ever eliminate the cost barrier, in contrast to electricity and land vehicles.
  3. The industries are typical of modern capitalism: they are international and oligopolistic, with a lot of trade, a handful of large companies, and a myriad of small ones.
  4. Their products and services rarely have plausible substitutes. (We shall see later on why this matters).

Points 1 and 2 mean that the issue for public policy is not R&D (pace all the Democratic presidential hopefuls) but early deployment.

Recall how we got to cheap wind, solar and batteries. It wasn’t a carbon tax, since that does not exist anywhere in the pure form. Partial cap-and-trade exists in the EU, but it has only just started to bite, after giveaway initial allocations. It was done by subsidies for early deployment to create economies of learning and scale:

  • In the USA, tax breaks for wind, solar, and electric cars; renewable obligations at state level.
  • In Europe and China, tax breaks, subsidies, and regulatory privileges for electric cars.
  • FITs and ringfenced auctions for wind and solar generation in Germany, other European countries, China and India.

The costs of FITs have been large in the past, though the cumulative liability (in Germany for instance) has now almost stopped growing as the few surviving FITs are near market rates. Well worth it of course, especially if you aren’t a German consumer.

The same principle holds for our four problem industries. Carbon taxes are politically toxic, and a coordination nightmare in globalised industries. So what’s the workable second-best kludge?

I’d like to float a possible solution. I’ll take steel as the example. The principle extends to the others ceteris paribus.

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Weekend Book Recommendation: Tales from the Society for the Preservation of Preposterous Absurdity

If we cannot help, we may at least hinder

I have written here before of my love for books that employ a bonkers narrator to deliver absurdist humor, and I have another gem of that cut to recommend this week. A perfectly ludicrous set of adventures are related in this collection by the is-he-a-genius-or-has-he-just-gone-spare Dr. Martin Smotheringdale, President of the Society for the Preservation of Preposterous Absurdity. Smotheringdale introduces the reader to a strange society via a series of investigations into mysterious problems, which through diligent effort he usually manages to make worse.

The hilarious stories in this book are reminiscent of Douglas Adams in being suffused with high-end scientific nonsense, from quantum kittens to a clowder of Schrodinger cats to black hole spaghetti makers. This reflects the day job of the author, Professor Shane Darke, an eminent addiction researcher whose work I have cited on many occasions (including in this interview by my fellow RBCer, Harold Pollack).

Each tale include many drolleries line by line that made me laugh out loud, and the collection is greater than the sum of those parts because the comic inventions build on each other: the poor chap who has his ears reversed in the first tale, the Perpetual Irritation Machine, and the Hypercube, among other off-the-wall concoctions, return for well-timed bows in the tales that follow after the stories that introduce them to the reader. And the best story in the book — The Ghosts of Gridley Gorge — is a joke within a meta-joke that is as brilliantly constructed as anything Evelyn Waugh, Lewis Carroll, or Punch magazine, ever pulled off.

On top of all that, it’s a good buy, just five bucks on a Kindle or 10 to 15 dollars in paperback depending where you look. You can find it at many on line booksellers including Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Annals of weird infographics

A Norwegian consultancy comes up with a bafflingly cute one.

This chart, or whatever you want to call it, is from a report on the global energy transition by the big Norwegian consultancy DNV-GL. It’s not wrong or misleading so much as baffling. A new type of Tufte failure, perhaps. For their next effort, I suggest adding animated Teletubbies skiing down the mountaintops.

U.S. Prescription Opioid Consumption Still Leads the World

I frequently hear the claim that “doctors have just stopped prescribing opioids”. The truth is that U.S. doctors prescribe fewer opioids than they did 5 years ago, but the U.S. still dwarfs the world in its per capita prescribing even among the heaviest prescribing nations. For details, see my latest piece at The Washington Monthly.

Cannabis news round-up

Washington teens used less marijuana following legalization. Counterfeit cannabis products stoke black market for California weed.

Posh pot boutiques? Budtenders? Illinois police worry what’s down the road. Your weed dealer will be ok even after Illinois marijuana becomes legal. Lake in the Hills, Illinois village board weighs options for marijuana legalization. Niles, Illinois proposes plan to allow marijuana sales but restrict locations. Illinois suburban school administrators bracing for legal marijuana’s impacts. Naperville, Illinois residents rally against sale of recreational marijuana  Tennessee, whose governor opposes legalizing marijuana, pulls out of Illinois weed business.

Marijuana faces second phase of legalization in small-town Michigan. FBI warns of public corruption threat in Michigan legal marijuana industry. Weedmaps may stop advertising illicit marijuana businesses in Michigan.

Governor Walz wants Minnesota to be ready to roll on legal marijuana. Florida overwhelmingly supports legalizing recreational marijuana. Don’t count on tax revenues from Pennsylvania legal marijuana sales, study says. Locals say balderdash.

Pro-legalization primary challenger slams Rep. Steny Hoyer’s marijuana opposition.  Pot industry underestimates old-school dealers. Trump reiterates his administration will let states legalize marijuana. White House drug officials say legal marijuana is up to states. Nine questions about marijuana legalization you were too embarrassed to ask. Do we really want a Microsoft of marijuana?

Mexico cannabis users eagerly await legal marijuana.  Canadians continues to buy cannabis illegally.