ObamaCare will be no more effective than it was, for exactly the same reasons.
Category Archives: Business
The Green EU
It took an economic disaster for them to reduce their carbon output:
But the data shows that even though EU economic weakness and US natural gas are responsible for significant drops in emissions in the developed world, developing countries, led by China, continue to drive the global total higher.
This underscores the disconnect between green policies and green results. The US hasn’t checked off many items on the green wish list for domestic legislation; Europe has. But it turns out that the introduction of the euro and the subsequent economic disaster had more to do with European emissions drops than Kyoto or the shambolic carbon-trading program.
The usual suspects are headed to Bonn next week for another forlorn attempt to carve out a meaningful global climate treaty. Meanwhile in the real world, the challenge is to find a way for developing countries to continue rapid growth without driving greenhouse gasses and other pollutants to potentially dangerous levels.
That’s assuming that the high levels of the “other” “pollutants” is more dangerous than slow economic growth, of course. And meanwhile, it turns out that the US has twice as much oil, and three times as much gas as we thought. And “peak oil” continues to recede into the future, to the tears of the Malthusians. Which are delicious.
[Update a while later]
Gazprom (and the Russian economy) are in trouble, too:
The US has begun exporting gas to Europe, and has also ramped up coal exports by more than 250 percent since 2005. The net result has been to knock Gazprom back on its heels. The WSJ reports that the negotiations with Bulgaria were heated, with Gazprom’s negotiators shouting in frustration on several occasions.
In public statements, however, the Russian company remains defiant (and perhaps in a state of denial) about the implications of the shale gas boom…
Well, that’s one tactic, I guess. Not one I’d recommend, though.
The Stupid Party
It is understandable that Tennessee senators Corker and Alexander would oppose the idea for the usual home team reasons, but why aren’t other Republicans jumping on board and upping the ante? (Probably for the usual deference/log-rolling reasons; they’ll want Corker and Alexander to support their home state pet projects down the line.) I recommend that Republicans suggest adding the Bonneville Power Administration in the Pacific Northwest, and watch the Democratic senators from Oregon and Washington object. That’s probably why Obama didn’t include Bonneville along with TVA. Memo to GOP: Go big with this idea.
But they won’t because…see post title.
Falcon 9 First Stage
Considering the recovery options.
The Democrats Lost The Sequester
Plus, it’s long past time to privatize air-traffic control. My long-time associate and friend Bob Poole at Reason has been promoting this for years.
A Conservative LA Times
I don’t see why not. In fact, a very useful first step would be that threatened mass resignation by the staff. That by itself would instantly improve the quality of the rag.
The Border Fence
Rubio has already caved:
If you want to write a bill that won’t result in a fence being built, you will give discretion to the DHS as to “where” it should be built, in what form–and, implicitly, where it shouldn’t be built. You will require only a ”plan.”
If you want to write a bill that won’t result in a fence being built but that might con conservatives into thinking it will be, you will throw in lots of meaningless references to possible ”double layer fencing” even though DHS might not decide to build even a foot of that kind of fencing (and none is mandated).
That’s what Rubio and his gang have written. Does Krauthammer–who despairs of getting any actual “enforcement first” bill through Congress, given Dem opposition–think Rubio is now going to pull a 180 and decide to really mandate an actual fence, and that Schumer and the Democrats will go along?
This won’t help Rubio get the nomination in 2016, if he decides to run.
SpaceShipTwo’s First Powered Flight?
A lot of rumors that it will be happening today. Jeff Foust has the story, with some broader context:
While Virgin may make a flight test of a crewed suborbital vehicle as soon as Monday, another company isn’t far behind. Just down the flightline from Virgin and Scaled at the Mojave airport, XCOR Aerospace is continuing work on its Lynx suborbital spaceplane, with plans to begin an incremental series of tests later this year.
“The concept design is done. I know what the approach is, I can put the numbers together,” Greason said of XCOR’s orbital vehicle plans.“We’re not done yet,” said Jeff Greason, CEO of XCOR, said of Lynx in a presentation at the Space Access ’13 conference in Phoenix earlier this month. “It’s not because of any particular roadblock, but it’s just the usual 90-90 rule of project management: the first 90 percent takes the first 90 percent of the time, and the last 10 percent takes the other 90 percent of the time.”
While development of SpaceShipTwo’s hybrid rocket motor is widely believed to have been the major cause of that vehicle’s delays, Greason said propulsion is not an issue for Lynx. “Propulsion-wise, we’re in great shape,” he said, saying that the four engines, powered by liquid oxygen and kerosene, are now integrated into the fuselage of the Lynx Mark I prototype.
Instead, Greason said, XCOR has been working on a variety of other issues with the Lynx, including tweaks to the vehicle’s aerodynamics, avionics, and landing gear, as well as the production of the vehicle’s wings and a second fuselage. Flight tests are slated to begin in the second half of this year.
It just occurs to me that while the biggest difference is that XCOR was funding-constrained while (as far as I know) Virgin Galactic was not, both have also been delayed for symmetrical problems. XCOR is a propulsion company trying to build an airplane, while Scaled was an aircraft company trying to develop a rocket engine. So it’s natural that both companies have their core competency well in hand, but are being held up by the problem that’s not so much in their wheelhouse.
[Update a while later]
The implication, of course, is that if they’d teamed up, there might have been a suborbital vehicle flying years ago. That they didn’t certainly wasn’t XCOR’s fault.
[Update a few minutes later]
Apparently it was a successful test, and they went supersonic.
This may be the first prediction that Sir Richard has ever made that met schedule.
[Afternoon update]
Clark Lindsey has a roundup of links, including the congratulatory press release from XCOR.
Climate Hearings On The Hill
Judith Curry’s prepared testimony:
My written testimony summarizes the evidence for, and against, the hypothesis that humans are playing a dominant role in global warming. I’ll make no attempt to summarize this evidence in my brief comments this morning. I will state that there are major uncertainties in many of the key observational data sets, particularly before 1980. There are also major uncertainties in climate models, particularly with regards to the treatments of clouds and the multidecadal ocean oscillations.
The prospect of increased frequency or severity of extreme weather in a warmer climate is potentially the most serious near term impact of climate change. A recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found limited observational evidence for worsening of most types of extreme weather events. Attempts to determine the role of global warming in extreme weather events is complicated by the rarity of these events and also by their dependence on natural weather and climate regimes that are simulated poorly by climate models.
Given these uncertainties, there would seem to be plenty of scope for disagreement among scientists. Nevertheless, the consensus about dangerous anthropogenic climate change is portrayed as nearly total among climate scientists. Further, the consensus has been endorsed by all of the relevant national and international science academies and scientific societies.
I have been trying to understand how there can be such a strong consensus given these uncertainties. How to reason about uncertainties in the complex climate system is neither simple nor obvious. Scientific debates involve controversies over the value and importance of particular classes of evidence, failure to account for indeterminacy and ignorance, as well as disagreement about the appropriate logical framework for assessing the evidence.
For the past three years, I’ve been working towards understanding the dynamics of uncertainty at the climate science-policy interface. This research has led me to question whether these dynamics are operating in a manner that is healthy for either the science or the policy process.
No kidding. And emphasis mine. I’ve been trying to understand that, too. It increasingly appears to be driven by politics.
[Update a few minutes later]
This comment, from a post earlier today, seems apropos:
When I was young, I was taught history as a narrative of mistakes, errors of judgment, and closed minded attitudes which were subsequently found to be irrational. The motivations of those benighted souls who believed these things were effectively random ignorance and bias, with no logical basis or external impetus.
The implication to a naive, young mind was that, that was all in the past, and we had now monotonically converged upon an era of unprecedented enlightenment, and humans now were effectively immune from the foibles of the past. Adults knew everything that was needed to know, and only a small minority of troglodytes, who were invariably the butt of derision on evening sit-coms, had failed to keep up.
The “science” of the past was full of leeches, geocentricism, and arbitrary religious conviction. Today’s scientists were immune to bias, their conclusions based on objective, reproducible evidence, and infused with 20/20 foresight. Knowledge was the key. The more knowledge you had, the less vulnerable you were to irrationalism. But, knowledge and wisdom are not, in fact, synonymous.
Eventually, as I grew and gained knowledge, I realized that the people of the past were no different than those of today. That they made erroneous inferences based on pat answers which seemed “obvious” based on the knowledge base of the day, and that we were no more immune to mistakes of that sort than they were. But, today, a large portion of the average population remains in the arrested stage of my youth, in which “scientists” are authorities whose word is inviolable holy writ, and anyone who questions “science” is a troglodyte worthy of being made the butt of derision on evening TV.
It is not just bizarre and surreal, but utterly teeth gnashing to see these fools strut their faith and ignorance in smug certitude that they stand on unshifting, bedrock solid ground. They have no inkling that they are the believers in leechcraft and other folderal of today. And, they will carry us all into the abyss with unblinking faith that they are the righteous heirs of the enlightenment, whose ends justify whatever means necessary to rescue we troglodytes from ourselves.
Indeed. This isn’t about science — it is about the false faith of scientism.
Our Long-Term Unemployment Problem
Is it caused by the government?
Yes. Next question?
I think that she underestimates the effects of regulatory uncertainty and the war on business that started rhetorically in 2008, and for real in 2009. I also think that she’s missing another problem — the huge mismatch between skills and employers’ needs, which are themselves a result of terrible government education policies.
[Update early afternoon]
One other point. We also have a labor mobility problem, due to the housing crisis, in which many are still unable to sell their homes and move to where the jobs are. That too was caused by government policies.