Rhinocrisy

It takes a special kind of mind to devise a scheme in which energy-efficiency incentives reduce the nation’s energy efficiency. Fortunately, Washington is blessed with just such gifted craniums, as shown by the hybrid car incentives in the energy bill.

As Saurabh notes immediately below, there are some very expensive (for the government) tax credits for purchasers of hybrid cars. He rightly complains that they are designed to benefit American manufacturers at the expense of the Japanese innovators, but that’s par for the course. A bigger problem is that they move substantial cash from the Treasury — which is to say, duties on Chinese spark plugs and whatnot — to people rich enough to buy hybrids.

There is evidence that existing incentives for hybrids are working — that is, gas prices, social conscience, and social status. There’s already a waiting list for the Prius, the most fuel-efficient hybrid out there.

Meanwhile, I’ve seen no evidence that owning a Prius reduces household energy use — there are plenty of anecdotes about buyers suffering from moral hazard-itis. That is, buyers know they are using less gas per mile, so they drive more miles.

The bill also includes direct subsidies to American carmakers to build hybrids — as if the invisible hand weren’t already bitch-slapping them in that direction.

Compare this to some other places where a bit of federal money could make a real difference. How about if the feds subsidized low- and moderate-income households to help them purchase new homes in dense walkable urban areas by expanding the “location-efficient mortgage” program? Imagine that — offering money to people to help them lead lives scientifically proven to use less fuel? Or maybe paying for insulation and storm windows for low-income rental units? Yes, it subsidizes slumlords, but it also saves lots of energy while improving comfort and health for the poor.

But wait, there’s more. The energy bill requires states to consider “high-mileage” hybrids to be high-occupancy vehicles, allowing them in HOV lanes. Great idea if your goal is to clog up the HOV lanes with cars that get 33 person-miles a gallon, thereby slowing down the people who are actually sacrificing a bit of comfort by car-pooling. A Ford Explorer with 4 people in it gets 60 person-miles per gallon. It deserves the HOV lane. A 1989 Civic with the A/C off can get 45 miles a gallon. Maybe it should deserve some privileges. A 2005 Chevy Silverado hybrid with an automatic transmission gets 19 mpg highway — now that’s who I want to reward! (NOTE: I JUST TRIED TO FACT-CHECK THIS PARAGRAPH BY READING THE 1,700-PAGE ENERGY BILL. I DON’T SEE THE HOV-LANE STUFF IN THERE, SO MAYBE IT DISAPPEARED AT THE LAST MINUTE. SOMEONE SHOULD TELL THE LA TIMES.

In any case, the overall fleet fuel economy is now allowed to remain fixed at its current level until at least 2010. Which means that every hybrid sold allows Detroit to sell another Hummer.

All in all, we have a winner!

Via CT, this NY Times piece, which sadly points out that the apparent tax credit for hybrid vehicles actually caps out at 60,000 vehicles per manufacturer.

The energy bill sets up a complex formula that begins restricting eligibility for the tax credit once an automaker sells 60,000 gas-electric hybrids or cleaner burning diesels, known as advanced lean-burn vehicles.

Once an auto company hits the 60,000 mark, it has the remainder of that fiscal quarter plus one additional quarter in which buyers of its vehicles can receive the full credit. The credit ranges from $250 to $3,400 depending on the fuel efficiency of the vehicle.

During the two quarters immediately after the cars and trucks of the automakers become ineligible for the full credit, buyers would receive 50 percent of the credit. The next two quarters after that, the credit is 25 percent. The credit is phased out entirely at the end of the fifth full quarter after the automaker sells 60,000 hybrids or advanced diesels.

Note that Toyota plans to sell 140,000 hybrids this year, meaning it will probably hit the cap in the second quarter. Implication?

By capping the credit, Congress has limited the incentives available to companies that have been at the forefront of hybrid technology.

“Ironic isn’t it?” said Ed Cohen, Honda’s vice president for government and industry relations. “It really does create market mismatch.”

Meaning, when DaimlerChrysler and GM finally get in the game in a few years, they’re going to have an advantage.

Might be time to start reading the bill text to see what other goodies are buried in there.

A couple minutes into this interview, Condoleeza Rice says the Sept. 11 terrorists did it because they were “evil.”

“We weren’t in Iraq, we weren’t even in Afghanistan,” she says.

Strange — I coulda sworn we went into Iraq in 1991 and never stopped the overflights, bombings, and sanctions. But I guess my memories are flawed. Must be the Prozac. Oh wait, that’s an excuse. Must be my own inherent evil.

Sometimes too much badness happens at once. It challenges our ability to keep track. Yesterday in the U.S. Senate was a case in point. In one day, it:

• Passed the dreadful energy bill about which Saurabh previously wrote.
• Passed a law to exempt gun makers and dealers from lawsuits by people killed due to dealer or manufacturer negligence — such as letting guns get stolen, selling them to terrorists, and so on. (The District of Columbia and the City of Oakland each have such cases in process; the law even kills off cases already in the system.)
• Renewed or made permanent many of the most unpleasant parts of the martial law — I mean the USAPATRIOT act.
• Passed a transportation bill to build more roads, more highways, more highway bridges, more airports, and some more roads. I think the bicycles got a few bucks, too, but nothing major.

I write this from a sunny back yard deep in the exurbia of western Massachusetts. A cardinal nibbles from a birdfeeder. Wasps suckle on tiny blooms of queen anne’s lace. Bees peruse the tall pink asters, then stop to collect golden grains of pollen. The air is gently scented with leaking maple sap, drying grass, and the decomposing oak leaves of the nearby woods. Somewhere in the distance rises a placeless, unidentifiable rumbling.

Rhinocrisy recently cycled its Washington correspondent through Scott McClellan’s cesspool, the White House briefing room. I shouldn’t be so rude. Millions of people would love a chance to lay into the guy, so I should be gracious and accept my place at the table with an deep sense of responsibility and appreciation for those who put me there. But the heinousness of the Administration’s politics and policies are not something I crave to be near. I prefer the anonymous bureaucrats who toil in ignominy, their honest labor betrayed by hypocritical, self-serving bosses. That sense was only deepened at the White House.

Security was easy enough. Rhinocrisy has its ways.

Then I walked down a block-long paved path, past a platform full of TV cameras and umbrellas against impending rain. Then there was the west wing of the White House, anda little white awning, and I see guy smoking outside so I know I’m in the right place.

Entering the room from the bright daylight, the biggest surprise is its size. It is perhaps 15 feet across and twice that deep — at most a quarter the size I have sensed from watching it on TV. The room was obviously designed by someone with experience designing for TV; having the McClellan up a foot above the press — and the cameras another 2 feet up, though not far back — projects a sense of grandeur far beyond the room’s actual scale.

Entering through the brilliant white wall and its pleasant old wood door, one finds a shoddy high-pile grey carpet on the floor, a decade past its prime, and 35 Johnson-era movie theater seats so impressed by lemon-chicken-fattened reporter butts that the best and brightest of the press corps must practically squat at the knees of St. Scotty.

I got there just on time at 9:35 for the 9:45 gaggle. To stage left, unfiltered daylight reflected off the country-club brilliance of the White House lawn. Starlings chirped audibly, their flight still permitted below the anti-aircraft guns, their voices clear over the vast auto-free zone north of the presidential palace. Light entered through single-pane windows with arched tops, like palladians without the side panels. That exterior wall retains its signs of class (in both senses of the word), but the press chamber itself was squalid if not gloomy, reminiscent of the billiards room in a cinder-block dormitory.

The building appeared to have rotted from within. The deeper one peered, the more dismal it looked. Reporters — who all seemed to know each other in a cocktail-sipping, flirting sort of way — sat and waited for Scotty, waited and waited, the room filling with make-up pasted broadcast babes and fresh-faced interns, all arriving long after the grizzled, uniquely jovial cameramen. Yes, men.

As people read newspapers and chatted, they absently glanced down the hall to where the press crew was unhurriedly finishing their preparations. It was fluorescent lit and low-ceilinged. Worn industrial matting on the floor, like the entry to a chicken-processing plant.

At length, out came a team of 5: Scotty and four aides. I didn’t recognize their faces but I’m pretty sure that they included “senior White House source,” “people briefed on the case,” and “people close to the situation.” (The latter “people” are, of course, each just one person.)

McClellan spoke very fast. Questioners were patient and indifferent to his bullshit. After 15 minutes, he abruptly said, “OK then,” closed his leather trapper-keeper, and led his crew from the room, though questions could have kept going all day.

The time has come for me to attempt to answer what is arguably the most profound issue of the day: how would religious kooks react if they were to encounter alien civilizations?

I’m not really well-placed to answer this question, so I asked someone who is. I spoke with Claudio Pasqua, a janitor at Harvard’s Divinity School, who has acquired an impressive knowledge of theology over the years, mostly gleaned from tracts discarded in Divinity School waist-bins. Unfortunately he took this interview a lot more seriously than I was expecting. Here it is anyway:

RHINOCRISY: First of all, do you believe extraterrestrial life exists?

CLAUDIO PASQUA: To be honest, I don’t know that much about it. But, our government gives the SETI project several million dollars a year, so obviously THEY believe extraterrestrial life exists. And I think most scientifically-minded people would admit that in a universe so large, it seems very improbable that ours is the only planet to develop life.

R: What about UFOs?

CP: Well. I mean, I think it’s of course possible that some form of alien life form could visit us, but I tend to favor the notion of Jung, that UFO reports are a sort of modern mythology. Throughout our history we’ve always wanted some sort of authority figure watching over us - Mithra, Jehovah, Ahura Mazda, what have you - I tend to think that UFOs fill that role for us in the rationalist, more atheist modern era. Sort of, you know, elder brothers who’ve already explored and understood this vast, cold universe and can guide us through it. So this is a kind of modern myth-making, supplanting the importance of older myths. Sometimes quite literally, in fact, if you look at the “alien astronaut” theories which suggest that some extraterrestrials visited ancient Sumeria or Babylon and gave humans the skills and technologies that allowed us to become civilized. That in fact parallels some of the early Mesopotamian myths, which had the gods Enki and Enlil giving these same tools - irrigation, farming implements - to humanity. So we’re seeing a literal re-imagining of these old myths in a way that’s more palatable to the modern mind.

R: Erm… that was very… thorough.

CP: (laughs)

R: What sort of positions do religions take on aliens?

CP: Most religions are more or less silent on the subject. Of course, there are some that are actually constructed around the existence of aliens, for example the Raelians or the Heaven’s Gate cult. Or Scientology. But these are really on the fringes, they could be wrapped up in the general fabric of this broader tendency to believe in UFOs. I think most major religions are wary of making pronouncements on the subject, because they’re afraid of being at odds with science. The Catholic church actually had tremendous entanglements over this very subject in the past, in fact. A philosopher named Giordano Bruno was executed because he preached what was then considered a very heretical doctrine, that the universe was not geocentric and there was extraterrestrial life. Remember that according to the cosmology of the time, heaven was actually a physical place - it was above the firmament, the vault of the sky that held the stars, and God actually, literally, lived directly above us. So when people came along and said, no, the earth isn’t the center of the universe, they were contradicting this conception of the firmament and were in a way actually destroying heaven. And also, geocentrism suggested that human beings were important, we were special - but heliocentrism and later the idea that there were other suns, other stars out there really destroys that notion. And it leaves open a lot of thorny theological questions that I think most religions really aren’t ready to touch.

R: Like are aliens Christian.

CP: Exactly. Or, was Jesus crucified on other planets? But also questions like, what is the nature of the Catholic Church, and is it still privileged in some special way if other Churches exist that have the same relationship with God? I think this would be more problematic for Christianity than for, say, Islam, which emphasizes the subordination of man to God, or eastern religions that are more abstracted, more about elementary concepts like consciousness rather. But Christians really emphasize the special privilege of human beings.

R: God created us in his image.

CP: Exactly. And gave us dominion over all his creatures, etc. So if there are other races, even if they are Christians, even if they do show up bearing Bibles, you know, where does that leave us with respect to them? I think these are uncomfortable ideas, so the easiest way to respond is with a sort of agnosticism towards the entire question.

R: Okay, this is a bit more loopy, but: how do you think that Christians would react if aliens DID come and visit us?

CP: (laughs) Well, that’s really hard for me to answer, I mean I have no idea what the aliens would be like. But I think it’s a fair guess they’re not going to be Christians.

R: That’s a pretty safe bet.

CP: (laughs) I’d put money on that one. But I think most Christians will react to that by being rather threatened by it, you know, because of all the questions it would raise, the doubts it would raise. So a lot of them would be pretty hostile, maybe even decide that these are demons or agents of Satan. And then consider the possibility that aliens might proselytize us.

R: We’d try and convert them, for sure.

CP: Definitely. Which could be a pretty sticky interaction, that might cause some friction. But in general I think… Religion has proved remarkably robust, adapting to new ideas, somehow managing to survive. The Copernican revolution should have destroyed Christianity - it literally shattered the sky, this notion of the firmament. But it survived. And I think if we ever do meet aliens religion will end up proving to be pretty tenacious.

R: Thanks for your time.

CP: My pleasure.

Two follow-ups on the energy bill (which just got through the House):

1. Henry Waxman (D-CA) has been circulating a letter he wrote to Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert complaining about a provision that snuck its way into the bill after debate was closed. It’s ostensibly a $1.5 billion fund for offshore deep water drilling, but Waxman says language in the bill implies it’s pork stuck in there by Tom DeLay, directed at the Research Partnership to Secure Energy for America consortium, which is in his district. As evidence he cites the bill text: The subtitle, however, directs the Department to “contract with a corporation that is constructed as a consortium.” Pretty gross, but really not as bad as the bill itself. This is just theft of public resources and massive, criminal abuse of public trust. That’s fucking over the entire country and possibly the world.

2. The EPA decided to hold back on releasing its report on fuel efficiency trends at the last minute, probably to allow passage of this energy bill. The report shows that various loopholes (i.e., SUVs, basically) have allowed fuel efficiency to DROP since 1987 - the fleet average is down from 22.1 mpg then to 21.0 now. Igniting a debate about CAFE standards would have done poorly for a bill that does nothing to improve vehicle efficiency (probably the easiest way to cut back on oil consumption).

McClellan dodges:

Q Did the White House ask the EPA to hold it back as a way to ensure that it didn’t get in the way of passage –

MR. McCLELLAN: I don’t think it really has any relation to the energy bill, but you might want to talk to the EPA about it.

…but there’s really no question on what happened. The executive summary of the report says:

Fuel economy continues to be a major area of public and policy interest for several reasons, including:
1. Fuel economy is directly related to energy security because light-duty vehicles account for approximately 40 percent of all U.S. oil consumption, and much of this oil is imported.
2. Fuel economy is directly related to the cost of fueling a vehicle and is of great interest when crude oil and gasoline prices rise.
3. Fuel economy is directly related to emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide. Light-duty vehicles contribute about 20 percent of all U.S. carbon dioxide emissions.

Doesn’t get more explicit than that.

You’ll note that a Bush energy bill is squeezing its way through the House and Senate this week. Easily done, since it’s especially lubricious, being absolutely permated with oil. This Reuters bit has the salient details.

The broad strokes are, basically, tons of credits for oil and gas production and moving in the direction of new exploration, including, especially, offshore drilling. This is significant because it implies a recognition of a need to move to more difficult oil sources as easily-available sources run dry. To paraphrase Colin Campbell, when people start looking for oil under 10,000 feet of water, you know they’re having problems.

Also, there’s some bones thrown to the nuclear industry, including tax credits of up to 1.8 cents per kilowatt-hour. This might be something like 30% of the cost to the consumer (depending on time of year, etc.), so it’s no small boost.

Finally, don’t pay ANY ATTENTION to the suggestion that this bill does anything positive for renewables. The most charitable thing that could be said about it is that it glances in their general direction - but only so that it can more accurately spit upon them. There’s meager bits about tax credits for purchasing hybrids, and a rather paltry home-efficiency refurbishing credit. Then $800 million worth of credits for utilities that invest in renewables - while simultaneously cutting the old requirement that all utilities must generate at least 10% of energy via renewables by 2020. No money for research.

This outlines the strategy for the future pretty clearly: bail out the oil and gas industry for the next ten years, spend like mad to exploit oil resources as much as possible while they last, and meanwhile encourage the growth of the nuclear industry. If this strategy is to succeed, note that nukes must replace both electricity generation AND liquid fuel, meaning the construction of something on the order of thousands of plants. Since the U.S. hasn’t commissioned a new plant since 1978, this is a somewhat daunting task. But I look forward to the sight of a cooling tower’s graceful curves peeking up over my neighbor’s rooftop.

Some things never change. Specifically, the font on the International Socialist Organization’s fliers. Civilization could end, and you can rest assured the ISO would issue a flier about it in 18-point bold Helvetica (”Fight back! Stop the oppression of fuel and gas shortages!“).

I ran into some ISO-types busking in Central Square yesterday. I made the mistake of insulting their flier as I walked past, which resulted in a protracted tirade about the inefficacy of the ISO and left politics in general. It started as a general commentary on the robotic nature of ISO product, and how brainless they seem with their shoddy sloganeering. I believe my first salvo was something along the lines of, “I’ve lived in Boston for eight years, and you guys have had the exact same slogans the whole time.” You know the ones: Stop this! End that! Fight back! Now! Now! Now! Simple imperative statements are appealing, for about ten seconds, until you realize that their political insight doesn’t extend much further than that.

Eventually this conversation proceeded into the matter at hand, namely the “anti-war” movement. I’m glad to see that nothing new is happening on that front. Apparently there’s a big rally scheduled for late September, which is presently split between the UFPJ^* and ANSWER^†. The former obsequiously refuses to divest itself from the Democrats and mouth words in support of the Palestinians; the latter dogmatically insists on thrusting the issue of Palestine into a march about the Iraq occupation. “They’re connected!” insisted the ISO type I was harranguing. True. True. This, I guess, is the leftist version of the “Kevin Bacon Game”.

She also insisted it was necessary to support the Iraqi resistance if we are really opposed to ending the occupation, because those who do NOT support the Iraqi resistance think we have to “finish the job” in Iraq. This seemed to be a false dichotomy to me (I certainly don’t get sorted correctly by it), and when I pointed out that it wasn’t necessary to support the NVA or the NLF in order to want to end the Vietnam War, and many of the people opposing it were not so inclined, she demurred.

This makes hiding in the Internet seem like a much more comfortable notion, since the world out there is dominated by people acting out some bizarre Marxist fantasy, shining their alien light on the rest of us leftists and insisting that anyone who wishes to march in support of some particular cause (e.g. ending the occupation of Iraq) should be happy to wear that glow. Either I must wear ugly Marxist clothes or dress like a Democrat - not much of a choice.

WSJ:

In a report published last week, Merrill Lynch & Co. said the aggregate net income of the 70 largest companies in the [oil] sector is expected to rise 26% this year to $230 billion, on sales of $2.57 trillion, up nearly 10%.

$2.57 trillion is about 1/4 the GDP of the United States. It is the GDP of the biggest companies in the oil sector. Those of us who eat locally, don’t use cars, and avoid using air conditioners — we don’t get to take part in the single greatest social project undertaken in human history. The extraction and combustion of as much fossil carbon as possible.

I think I’ll take another cross-country road trip! After all, look at the charts: the poor oil companies are about to see their profits start to drop. Poor things, I have to help out — it’s like tsunami relief, only different.