wrongologist – Page 29 – The Wrongologist

Saturday Soother – March 11, 2023

The Daily Escape:

Sunset, Santa Elena Canyon, Big Bend NP, TX – March 2023 photo by Rick A. Ludwig. Cliff on left is in Mexico, the one on the right is in US. The Rio Grande is in the middle.

Signs that we’re starting to think about the 2024 election are everywhere. Wrongo wants to connect a few dots regarding Biden’s recent efforts to move the Democratic Party more to the middle on crime and immigration while staying left on financing the country’s social and military needs.

Biden proposed a budget to reduce the deficit, protect Medicare and Social Security, and raise taxes on wealthy individuals and corporations. From the NYT:

“In a speech in Philadelphia on Thursday, Mr. Biden said that his budget was designed to ‘lift the burden on hard working Americans’ and drew sharp contrasts with the proposals that Republicans have offered, which the president argued would threaten the nation’s social safety net programs and benefit the rich.”

This contrasts with Biden’s right-leaning position on the recent DC crime bill. Since DC is controlled by the Congress, it’s legislation can be vetoed by the US Senate. Also from the NYT:

“The Senate…voted overwhelmingly to block a new District of Columbia criminal code that reduces mandatory minimum sentences for some violent offenses, with Democrats bowing to Republican pressure to take a hard line on crime in a move that underscored the rising political potency of the issue ahead of the 2024 elections.”

By an 81-to-14 vote, with 31 Democrats voting with the Republicans, the Senate passed the Republican-written measure to undo the District’s law. It now goes to Biden, who after initially opposing it abruptly changed course and said he would sign it.

So, Biden’s tacking left on spending but to the center-right on crime. He’s making a series of calculated moves to position his Party to compete successfully in 2024. Still, it’s disappointing that Biden and 31 Democrats joined with the Right to deny DC residents the right to govern their own city.

But this shouldn’t be surprising. Last year, Biden and the Democrats turned their backs on labor during their contract battle with the railroads.

Here’s Nick Catoggio in the Dispatch: (Brackets by Wrongo)

“[Biden has]…begun to tiptoe toward the center lately on another major Democratic liability, immigration…..Centrist analysts…have warned Biden and his Party that their political viability depends on escaping the…“cultural bubble” in which an unsecured border is treated as a civic good.”

And last week Biden changed his immigration policy. He’s requiring asylum seekers to seek refuge in nations they pass through rather than waiting to do so in the US.

These new policies bring Biden closer to public opinion. Among Democrats, a plurality want to see the number of asylum applicants increased rather than reduced. Among the overall public, it’s the opposite. Biden is tilting toward the latter.

Biden wants to be seen as strong on crime. Democrats walk a fine line of being against crime but not wanting to wholly support the police. Doing that would risk looking anti-Black in cities that are so important to their political success. Dems support compassionate justice and not retributive justice, so they get tied up in knots when violent crime increases, which is rising in America. The problem of course is that the descriptor “violent” isn’t consistently applied.

Biden’s idea is to try to win more votes from people who are not fanatic MAGA types. That means picking off White suburban voters, Asian voters and Hispanic and Black voters, all of whom are concerned about crime.

Tom Sullivan points out that while the moderate-to-conservative White population is in slow decline, their votes remain significant, and that Democrats shouldn’t ignore them over the next two years:

“Sadly, Democrats often do. Campaigning in concentrated urban areas that tend to vote your way is simply easier and more cost-effective. What it means for largely rural states like North Carolina is that while it remains possible to elect a Democrat like Roy Cooper as governor, Democrats’ urban focus bequeaths him a Republican-dominated legislature…”

Sullivan says the Democrats need to start acting like the big-tent party that they used to be.

And that’s what Biden is attempting to do.

Time to say “enough” to war-gaming the 2024 election. It’s time for our Saturday Soother. The daffodils have sprung through the snow, a sure sign of spring. We turn back the clocks tomorrow night, another win for those who hate dark days.

So, it’s time to take a few minutes to center yourself. Start by sitting in a comfy chair and watch and listen to Lili Boulanger’s “D’un matin de Printemps” (On a spring morning). She wrote this piece in 1917 when she was 23. Boulanger battled bronchial pneumonia throughout her short life, dying a year later at age 24. Here, it is played by the Seattle Symphony conducted by Cristian Măcelaru.

Listen and think about her writing this during the darkest days of her life:

New Legal “Doctrines” Help Supreme Court Push Farther Right

The Daily Escape:

Sunset, midtown Manhattan viewed from the Williamsburg Bridge – March 2023 photo by Mike Davis

Plenty of ink has been scrawled or printed describing how the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) has navigated its way into being the supreme executive branch of our government. The SCOTUS has long been a bastion of Conservative thought in America, but since gaining its 6-person supermajority, we’re seeing them bring forward novel legal concepts to help move decisions towards the Right’s agenda.

The best example is the Court’s majority creating new “doctrines” to help deliver rulings that their clients on the Right argue for. Prior to embracing “the major questions” doctrine and the “Independent state legislature” doctrine, Conservative members of the court used to insist on “textualism” to achieve their goals. Textualism says that when interpreting the Constitution, judges should confine themselves only to the words of the Constitution. Originalism says that if the words are unclear, then judges need to consult historical sources to determine their meaning at the time of ratification.

But we’re now seeing cases where a statute’s words aren’t delivering a decision that the Supremes are aiming for, so using these new doctrines give them a pretext for breaking their own rules.

That’s how they blew up the EPA’s Clean Power Rule. Eight months ago, SCOTUS first invoked the “major questions doctrine” in a majority opinion, using it to limit the Environmental Protection Agency’s power to address climate change.

Last week, the court seemed ready to use it again, to kill Biden’s proposed student loan relief. More on the new “doctrines” from the NYT’s Adam Liptak: (brackets by Wrongo)

“On the last day of the 2021-22 Term, the Supreme Court handed down a decision on “the major questions doctrine” and [agreed] to hear a case presenting “the independent state legislature doctrine” – neither of which had been called “doctrines” there before.”

The rationale behind the major questions doctrine is the contention by the Justices that the agencies must receive explicit direction from Congress to address a particular issue if action by the agency is of political or economic significance. Conveniently, this “doctrine” gives the Court’s Conservative supermajority a tool to achieve their preferred outcomes when textualism doesn’t get them there.

Liptak quotes Allison Larsen, a law professor at William & Mary:

“The phrase was used just once by any federal judge before 2017, and in only five federal decisions — at any level of court — before 2020,”

But you guessed it, the turning point in 2017 was when Justice Brett Kavanaugh, then a judge on the US Court of Appeals, used the term in a dissent. More from Professor Larsen: (brackets by Wrongo)

“[Using] the word ‘doctrine’ to describe the major questions concept was first used by law professors and then bandied about on blogs…and used as a rallying cry in opinion pieces and programming by those seeking to challenge the administrative state….In 2016 — long before it was anointed a ‘doctrine’ by the Supreme Court — the ‘major questions doctrine’ was featured by name in the annual Federalist Society conference,”

Interestingly, at Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) asked him about the doctrine, calling it “something else that you (Kavanaugh) came up with.” Liptak reports that Kavanaugh responded vaguely that the “major questions doctrine is rooted in Supreme Court precedent.”

In his 2017 dissent, Kavanaugh conceded that “determining whether a rule constitutes a major rule sometimes has a bit of a ‘know it when you see it’ quality.” That’s some real Wavy Gravy right there.

Back to the EPA case: Chief Justice Roberts wrote that the Court’s use of the term was unexceptional:

“It took hold….because it refers to an identifiable body of law that has developed over a series of significant cases all addressing a particular and recurring problem: agencies asserting highly consequential power beyond what Congress could reasonably be understood to have granted.”

Turning to the student loan debt relief case, in the oral arguments, Roberts argued that since loan relief is expensive, it must be authorized by Congress. But as Justice Elena Kagan said in the same oral argument, “Congress could not have made this much more clear, adding, “We deal with congressional statutes every day that are really confusing. This one is not.”

Welcome to 2023, where when cases come out the way the Conservative justices want, it’s just fine. But if the legal text gets in the way, the “major questions doctrine” allows them to make the explicit text disappear because they’re willing to engage in bad faith readings of statutes to get the job done.

So much for the rule of law.

If under a Republican president, when the Supremes need to find a sweeping executive branch authority to justify a Conservative wet dream policy, they’d find it without even a whiff of self-reflection.

Will we ever make up the ground now being lost to the decisions by these ideologues?

The Looming Russia-China Alliance

The Daily Escape:

Peach trees in bloom, Low Gap, NC – March 2023 photo by Donna Johnson

Springtime brings hope after a dark, cold winter. The clocks leap forward this Sunday. It’s also a time to take stock of the old assumptions that our recent geopolitical strategies are built on. The US is trending in what may be an unsustainable direction in our global politics.

A year ago with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, America sought to make Ukraine a proxy for the fight between authoritarianism and democratic forms of government. The Ukraine war caused several major changes within Europe and NATO:

Germany moved away from its strategic energy supplier, Russia.
NATO became more clearly unified than at any time since its founding.
The Eastern European members of NATO became the drivers of military engagement on the side of Ukraine.
The US and NATO have found they do not have the production capability to continue providing military weapons and ammunition at the rate Ukraine is using them.
This has made it clear that the US and NATO aren’t prepared for a major confrontation with a great power such as China or Russia.

The Ukraine war has precipitated other global consequences. While Russia has become a pariah to Europe, China has become one of Russia’s most important allies.

Many readers won’t remember that 60 years ago, there was a fundamental split between the Soviet Union and China, largely over differences in communist ideology. Over the years, they have slowly moved closer together, driven in part by US policy and by their shared quest for a global reset of geopolitical power.

Now they are willing to work together to dismantle or blunt the US-led world order.

This “alliance of autocracies,” is built on China’s and Russia’s belief that the US’s supremacy is waning. And they are entitled to rule within their own spheres of influence. And to use force if necessary to control those spheres. An alliance between China and Russia brings advantages to both countries. Recent US intelligence says that China may supply Russia with weapons to aid in its war against Ukraine. There is talk of China building a drone factory in Russia to supply its war in Ukraine.

Russia also desperately needs China to stabilize its economy by importing more below-market cost oil, a boon to China’s economy. In June 2022, Russia became the PRC’s largest oil supplier, eclipsing Saudi Arabia. While Russia is betting that Western fatigue will hand them a victory in Ukraine, China is sizing up America’s ability to engage in a faraway battle should China decide to invade Taiwan.

The US is attempting to isolate both China and Russia. With Russia, we’re using ever-tightening economic sanctions. With China, we’re building a geographic containment strategy among our allies in Asia. Containment has been helped by North Korea’s bellicosity against South Korea and Japan, who recently decided to partner militarily, much to China’s distress. The Pentagon has also expanded its bases in the Philippines while shrinking our military footprint in the Middle East.

With US/Russian relations basically clinging to life, prudence should have indicated that the US adopt a more friendly stance toward Beijing. However, we’ve prioritized support for Taiwan over better relations with China. Both the Trump and Biden administrations embraced high tariffs on Chinese imports.

In 2022, Biden added sweeping tech restrictions on China, including a provision barring the PRC from using semiconductor chips made with US tools anywhere in the world. That’s the harshest economic measure leveled against China since the normalization of diplomatic relations in 1979. This hasn’t gone unnoticed by China. China’s new foreign minister said:

“The more unstable the world becomes, the more imperative it is for China and Russia to steadily advance their relations.”

It’s clear that the Russia‐PRC relationship isn’t yet a full‐fledged military alliance, but it’s moving in that direction. And both are friendly with Iran and North Korea, which have also supplied weapons for Russia’s war in Ukraine. It isn’t a great stretch that these four could create a new “axis of evil” that could lead to the West needing to plan to fight two faraway wars simultaneously.

This is at a time when we cannot find enough munitions and weapons to fight one proxy war in Europe.

The odious Henry Kissinger once cautioned that it must be a high priority for the US to make certain that our relations with both Moscow and Beijing were closer than their relations are with each other. But our policy makers have done just the opposite.

While the argument for not continuing a proxy war in Ukraine has merit, Wrongo has argued that Ukraine is a war of necessity because democracy in Europe is what’s really on the line. And, with the 2024 presidential campaign about to start, Republican opposition to the war is growing.

Biden needs to keep what political capital he has, but he also needs to improve our ability to sustain our military support for Ukraine. That may be difficult because America hasn’t developed a solid military strategy for tomorrow’s battles which may well be with one or more of the great powers.

It is more difficult because we’ve spent the last 20+ years using $80 million-dollar planes to drop $400,000 bombs on $25 tents, while still wondering why we didn’t win any of our wars in the Middle East.

Ironically, our geopolitical strategy and the supporting military strategies may have the US in the position of being the midwife bringing a newborn Russia‐PRC military alliance into the world.

Monday Wake Up Call, North Carolina Edition – March 6, 2023

The Daily Escape:

Early blooming Bradford Pear trees, near Cana, VA – March 2023 photo by Lee Ogle

North Carolina is in today’s news for two reasons: First, North Carolina Republicans, who control the state legislature, announced a deal to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. North Carolina would be the 40th state to expand Medicaid after a decade of Republican resistance.

From the WaPo:

“The deal marks a stark turnaround for Republican leaders that played out over years in North Carolina and in states across the country, as more and more governors and legislatures expanded Medicaid to low-income residents.”

NC’s governor, Democrat Roy Moore will sign the bill if it gets to his desk. Passage would extend Medicaid coverage to 600,000 of the state’s poor citizens. Dozens of rural hospitals in NC closed during Covid, so maybe it dawned on NC’s Republican Party that dead constituents have a difficult time voting for them.

As with other states, this will allow North Carolina, at no cost to the state government, to give health insurance to the state’s working poor. The federal government will pay for 90% of the cost, and the rest will be covered by a new tax on hospitals and insurance companies.

Wrongo wrote about how the Medicaid expansion was a great source of revenue to state governments here. The NC House Speaker, Republican Tim Moore said that since the federal government will pay North Carolina a $1.8 billion bonus if expansion passes, the GOP was motivated to sign on.

The extra money is part of the 2021 stimulus package signed into law by Biden, that offered signing bonuses to states that expanded Medicaid. In NC’s case, $1.8 billion. Biden reacted:

“This is what I’m talking about….That’ll be 40 states who’ve expanded. 10 more to go.”

It’s doubtful that any other states will sign on this year.

Shouldn’t Red states be taking care of their residents? Instead of wasting time with anti-trans bills and anti-woke bullshit? But that’s too much to expect.

A second North Carolina story involves a case in front of the US Supreme Court, Moore vs. Harper. Last fall the Supremes heard this case about the “Independent State Legislature Theory“. The case started out as a challenge to a Republican-gerrymandered voting map that the NC Supreme Court ruled was unconstitutionally partisan.

NC’s GOP then appealed to the US Supreme Court, arguing that the Constitution’s election clause gives state legislatures freedom to do whatever they decide about their own elections, and that no court can intervene in that. A decision was expected in June, 2023.

But the Supremes may not get a chance to weigh in, since the case is back before the NC high court. Why you ask? Well the NC Supreme Court is elected. And in November, the Republicans won a majority of the seats on the court.

Unsurprisingly, the court decided to review two cases that were decided against Republicans. What’s remarkable is the extent to which NC Republicans are willing to go in order to take control over the outcome of elections away from voters. And they’re not even trying to be covert about it.

On February 3, the NC Supreme Court granted a petition to rehear the case. That means the state supreme court may reconsider a case that is already in front of the US Supreme Court.

On March 2, the US Supreme Court asked for a supplemental briefing. They’re asking the NC Republicans, (the plaintiffs that originally challenged the maps), and the Biden administration to submit supplemental briefings about what effects the state court’s reconsideration might have on the Supreme Court’s ultimate decision.

So the legal jousting about voting rights in North Carolina continues. Maybe the state’s decision to embrace Medicare expansion after a decade means that we simply have to wait for the GOP to come around to an idea that most Americans favor. In the case of voting rights, Wrongo suggests continuing the fight, not waiting.

Time to wake up America! The Biden administration won’t be sending free money to the states to get them to embrace universal voting rights. That may have worked with Medicare, but not with voting rights.

To help you wake up, watch, and listen to Roy Rogers play “Walkin Blues” from his video “Slide Guitar For Rock & Blues” on a 12 string resonator guitar. Rogers makes it his own, and the playing and vocals are terrific:

This is dedicated to our friend Rene S, who also plays a mean guitar. “Walkin Blues” is a blues standard that’s been recorded countless times, often with different lyrics. Son House, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Eric Clapton and the Grateful Dead all have their own versions.

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – March 5, 2023

Not sure who buys their drugs at Walgreen’s but this seems like a bad management decision:

“The nation’s second-largest pharmacy chain confirmed Thursday that it will not dispense abortion pills in several states where they remain legal — acting out of an abundance of caution amid a shifting policy landscape, threats from state officials and pressure from anti-abortion activists.”

It seems that Republican state attorneys general in about 24 states wrote to Walgreens in February, threatening legal action if the company continued distributing the drugs in their states.

These abortion pills are the nation’s most frequently used method for ending a pregnancy.

The company subsequently told the states that it will not dispense abortion pills either by mail or at their brick-and-mortar locations in those states.

This is where America is at: Large corporations are doing more to obstruct access to abortion than the law requires. On to cartoons.

Women’s history month at the Supreme Court:

Wrongo and Ms. Right watched the Oscar-nominated movie “Women Talking” last night. It’s message is that women should no longer accept things they cannot change; that it’s time to change the things they can’t accept. Like the Dobbs decision.

Tennessee outlaws drag. And they’re so pro-life that they want to execute any woman who gets an abortion.:

Make facts your weapon:

Disney today:

Dilbert exits:

Jimmy’s with us for a little while longer:

Saturday Soother – March 4, 2023

The Daily Escape:

Superstition Mountain area, AZ – March 2, 2023 photo by Teresa Arbisi

What does freedom mean to you? Lexington, a columnist who writes about America in the Economist, says that American politicians on the right and left are groping for a new definition of what it means:

“Democrats and Republicans are competing over which party is the true defender of freedom in American life, but the claims of both have become muddy. What the debate really illuminates is how far the parties have drifted from decades of consensus about liberty in American economic and social life, without yet articulating where they are headed, if they know.”

Lexington says that as evidence of the Republicans’ commitment to freedom, they are for gun rights. The Democrats usually point to abortion rights or voting rights. But the crux of today’s battles are about how history should be taught, what pronouns people should use, and whether governments should coax investment managers to include corporate behaviors in their analysis of investments.

We see that there’s a new willingness on the part of Republicans to inject the state into what freedom means.

Lexington says that Harvard’s Michael Sandel, in his 1996 book “Democracy’s Discontent”, traced in the wake of the New Deal how Americans made peace with centralized governmental power by embracing a concept of liberty that maximized the individual citizens’ freedom to pursue their own ends, with an economy that encouraged consumption. The implicit agreement was that:

“The government would deliver economic growth and Americans would debate how to distribute it, but politicians would stay out of questions about individuals’ values or notions of the good life. In one sign of this shift the Supreme Court in 1943 blocked local governments from compelling schoolchildren to salute the flag.”

This idea of government staying out of the way of individual freedom used to be a core assumption of American politics, but not so much today. Two examples: Florida’s governor DeSantis has trouble squaring his agenda that includes enhancing the state’s control over local schools and substituting its judgment for that of corporations over how to serve their customers.

DeSantis signed a law tightening restrictions on what materials teachers can use, prevented cruise-ship companies from requiring passengers to be vaccinated and sought new government control over Disney because he disapproved of its exercise of speech.

This week, a Florida state senator introduced a bill that would make bloggers who write about DeSantis, and other members of the Florida executive cabinet or legislature register with the state or face fines.

Whatever you make of these policies, what’s happening in Florida is miles away from any definition of freedom.

Second, Lexington points to Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the governor of Arkansas. In her rebuttal to Biden’s State of the Union speech, she said she was a defender of free speech, while boasting she had banned the “derogatory term LatinX in our government”. Wrongo never uses the term either, but did Huckabee Sanders understand the contradiction between her actions and what freedom of speech means?

The Republicans are saying words about freedom that no longer square with the concept, while groping for definitions that they can’t articulate without losing much of America. Take for example, this quote from DeSantis’s new book, “The Courage to Be Free”:

“At the end of the day, the re-mooring of the constitutional ship of state will provide the needed foundation for the reinvigoration of a society rooted in freedom, justice, and the rule of law.”

What exactly does THAT mean?

This is a great time to introduce you to Anat Shenker-Osorio. She’s the founder of ASO Communications, and an expert on political messaging. Shenker-Osorio says we need to be thinking about freedom as freedoms, plural. And to see it as a concept that the Left needs to reclaim from the Right, who use it as a tribal signifier.

She says the Left focuses too much on what they are against. Thus, what the Left stands for gets lost in the noise. She thinks that freedom must be a contested value between the Parties.

If you think about it, the Right have fought against every major effort to extend freedom to more people. Isn’t it funny how deeply anti-communist Florida along with the deeply anti-communist Republican Party keep doing things to constrain freedom? Aren’t these the hallmarks of state socialist regimes?

On to the weekend and our Saturday Soother. It’s our time to forget about ideas that make our heads hurt; like what freedom means. Let’s try to center ourselves after another week of terrible news. Here on the Fields of Wrong, the first robins have arrived. They’re searching among the patches of snow for those early bugs that will soon be everywhere. We’re also getting our latest late winter snowfall, so good luck finding bugs for the next day or so.

Let’s start off by grabbing a chair by a south-facing window. Now watch and listen to Yo Yo Ma perform “Song of the Birds“. It’s a traditional Catalan tune and was a favorite of Pablo Casals, but the composer is unknown. Ma plays this piece often.

Casals often played it to protest war and oppression, particularly after he fled Franco’s Spain. He played it in 1961 at the White House for John F. Kennedy. Here Ma performs it live at KCRW in Los Angeles:

What To Do About Social Security and Medicare

The Daily Escape:

Lupine and poppies, near Glendale, AZ – March 2023 photo by Marion Cart

From Joe Perticone:

“Social Security and Medicare are headed for insolvency—that’s just a mathematical, demographic fact. But when it comes to addressing the problem, there’s virtually nothing the two parties actually agree on. For years, Republicans have waffled between proposing cuts and kicking the can down the road.”

Republicans are correct that Social Security (SS) and Medicare (M) are marching toward insolvency. But they trip over their own feet with their proposals to save them. Republicans are wrong to think they can solve the solvency questions without raising taxes. Once the Republicans take taxes off the table, they’re left without any real solutions to propose.

The Biden administration has done a good job in pre-emptively going after Republican’s ideas about cuts in Social Security and Medicare benefits. The result is that the GOP is squabbling between themselves and scrambling to come up with a plan they could take to the public.

It’s not just the federal debt that should be discussed. Dr. Donald Berwick head of Medicare and Medicaid during the Obama administration wrote in JAMA: (emphasis by Wrongo):

“A total of 41% of US adults, 100 million people, bear medical debts. One of every 8 individuals owes more than $10,000. In Massachusetts, 46% of adults say they skip needed care because of costs. As of 2021, 58% of all debt collections in the US are for medical bills.”

The WaPo explains why people who live in the American South have bad credit scores. It turns out that neither race nor poverty were the deciding factors. It was medical debt:

“Of the 100 counties with the highest share of adults struggling to pay their medical debt, 92 are in the South, and the other eight are in neighboring Oklahoma and Missouri…”

But why the South? Yes, as a region, it’s unhealthy. But there are several Northeastern states where residents struggle with chronic health conditions but have good credit. One thing that stands out is the lack of Medicaid:

“…a recent analysis in the Journal of the American Medical Association…found that medical debt became more concentrated in lower-income communities in states that did not expand Medicaid after key provisions of the Affordable Care Act took effect in 2014.”

So bad health and bad credit are because of Republican governors’ refusal to expand Medicaid to cover more poor people. Leave it to the south to show a MAGA future for all of us: undereducated, unhealthy, and neck-deep in debt.

Nuclear Power vs. Solar And Wind

The Daily Escape:

Bright Angel Trail, Grand Canyon NP – February 26, 2023 photo by Adam Schallau Photography. The Grand Canyon NP was created on 2/26/1919.

There’s lots of talk about America’s need to move away from traditional sources of energy to renewable energy. Wolf Richter gives us some perspective: (brackets by Wrongo)

“Electricity generation, as measured in gigawatt-hours, [faced] near-stagnation in demand since 2007, as efforts to make everything more efficient…produced results…[but]…These upfront costs by electricity users…reduced electricity consumption. For electric utilities, it meant that they were stuck in a demand quagmire….But…in 2022…electricity generation rose by 3.5% from 2021, to a new record of 4,297,000 gigawatt-hours…”

Wolf helpfully provides a chart of electricity generated by type:

The decline in coal and the remarkable increases in natural gas and renewables are easy to see. The renewables category includes wind, hydro, solar, geothermal, and biomass.

The green line above is for nuclear power, which very few people think of as a “green” source of power generation. Wrongo believes we need to reconsider nuclear power if we are to hit our ambitious targets for lowering greenhouse gas emissions in the next few decades.

Jonathan Rauch in The Atlantic has a long and well-reasoned article about how, after a decade of regulatory and financial uncertainty, small modular light-water nuclear reactors are getting closer than ever to commercialization. Rauch describes the vision is for small nuclear reactors:

“Forget about those airport-scale compounds…and 40-story cooling towers belching steam. This reactor will sit in an ordinary building the size of…a suburban self-storage facility. It will be mass-produced in factories for easy shipping and rapid assembly. Customers will be able to buy just one, to power a chemical or steel plant, or a few, linked like batteries, to power a city.”

Given new technologies currently in advanced testing, even if a local disaster cuts the power to the reactor cooling system, this new type of reactor will not melt down, spew radioactive material, or become too hot and dangerous to approach. It will remain stable until normal conditions are restored.

But for decades, nuclear has flopped as a commercial proposition. It has broken its promises to deliver new plants on budget and on time. And despite an enviable safety record, the public still fears catastrophic accidents. The Three Mile Island plant’s partial meltdown in 1979 was the US nuclear industry’s worst accident. Although no one died or was injured, it hardened the public and environmentalists against increasing the use of nuclear power in the US. In fact, the plant’s second reactor operated without problems until 2019 when it was decommissioned. Today legacy nuclear power supplies about 18% of American electricity, and the US has fired up only one new nuclear power reactor since 1996.

It seems perverse to avoid nuclear, since it’s carbon-free, and as few realize, very safe. Only the 1986 accident at Chernobyl has caused mass fatalities from radioactivity. Remember, that plant was subpar and mismanaged by Western standards.

Excluding Chernobyl, the total number of deaths attributed to a radiation accident at a commercial nuclear power plant is zero or one, depending on your interpretation of Japan’s 2011 Fukushima accident. Yes, more than 2,000 people may have died in Fukushima, but most of that happened during the evacuation.

Solar and wind have huge problems because of how much land they require. According to Armond Cohen of the Clean Air Task Force, meeting all of the eastern US’s energy needs requires 100,000 square miles of solar panels, an area larger than New England. Wind is worse: It requires more than 800,000 square miles of onshore windmills to meet the eastern US power needs, an area the size of Alaska plus California. NIMBY opposition will prevent the building of sufficient power generation from wind and solar.

Contrast this with the space required by small nuclear reactors: They would take up about 500 square miles of nuclear plants, equal to the size of Phoenix, Arizona to power the eastern US.

Dozens of companies and labs in the US and abroad are pursuing small nuclear plants. GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy has a signed agreement to build the first grid-connected small modular reactor (SMR) for Ontario Power Generation. It will be a 300-megawatt light-water SMR in Ontario, Canada.

NuScale Power, a pioneer in small reactors, cleared the ultimate US regulatory hurdle when the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission certified the design of NuScale’s 50-megawatt power module. It’s the first design ever approved for use in the US. The US Department of Energy is helping to fund NuScale’s project at the Idaho National Laboratory, including $1.35 billion in funding. The first of six clustered SMRs at the site is expected to go online in 2029, with the rest expected to follow in 2030.

Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act also provides a tax credit for advanced nuclear reactors and microreactors.

Ultimately, choice of energy generation will come down to cost. Solar is widely deployed today because it’s the lowest-cost generation source. But how can it scale?

If SMRs can demonstrate a cost advantage in real-life operation, orders will follow. And the long-promised nuclear renaissance might actually arrive.

Along with a better shot at a low carbon future.

Monday Wake Up Call – February 27, 2023

The Daily Escape:

Sunset, Blue Ridge Mountains, near Asheville, NC – February 2023 photo by Andre Daugherty

Yesterday, Wrongo posted the Gallup Poll’s recent survey showing that 65% of Americans support continuing with the war in Ukraine, even if it’s a prolonged conflict. Staying the course in Ukraine requires us to think carefully about both the means of continuing to arm Ukraine, and also about the ends we hope to achieve once the fight is over.

The New Yorker’s David Remnick interviewed Russian historian Stephen Kotkin about how the war in Ukraine ends. Kotkin points out that the war is far from over, but we can look at how it might end:

“The Biden Administration has effectively defined victory from the American point of view as: Ukraine can’t lose this war. Russia can’t take all of Ukraine and occupy Ukraine, and disappear Ukraine as a state, as a nation.”

Kotkin thinks that from the Ukrainian viewpoint, victory has mostly to do with getting into the European Union:

“…that has to be the definition of victory: Ukraine gets into the European Union. If Ukraine regains all of its territory and doesn’t get into the EU, is that a victory? As opposed to: If Ukraine regains as much of its territory as it physically can on the battlefield, not all of it…but does get EU accession—would that be a definition of victory? Of course, it would be.”

Currently, we’re experiencing a war of attrition between Ukraine and Russia. In order to win this type of war, you have to out-produce your enemy’s weapons production.

But is that realistic? The US is the major supplier of arms to Ukraine, but we haven’t ramped up our production of the weapons we’re sending to Ukraine. Instead, we’re drawing down our supplies of armaments. More from Kotkin: (brackets by Wrongo)

“We haven’t ramped up industrial production at all. At peak, the Ukrainians were firing…upward of ninety thousand artillery shells a month. US monthly production of artillery shells is fifteen thousand. With all our allies thrown in, everybody in the mix who supports Ukraine, you get another fifteen thousand….So you can [produce] thirty thousand…artillery shells while expending ninety thousand a month. We haven’t ramped up…..We’re running out.”

So, can we actually provide the means to get to the ends Biden wants, or the ends that Ukraine wants? Not without doing something radically different than we’re doing now.

Politically, from here to the 2024 election we’ll see a debate about whether we should be in Ukraine at all. This debate will form a key element in who the Republicans select as their presidential nominee.

Mike Pence isn’t a first-level presidential candidate, but on Friday he rebuked fellow Republicans who have given less-than-robust support for America’s defense of Ukraine. On NBC, he lays out the classic Republican position clearly:

“…I would say anyone that thinks that Vladimir Putin will stop at Ukraine is wrong…”

NBC also quoted DeSantis: (brackets by Wrongo)

“An open-ended blank check [in Ukraine]…is…not acceptable…..Russia has been really, really wounded here and I don’t think that they are the same threat to our country, even though they’re hostile. I don’t think they’re on the same level as a China.”

The WSJ’s Kimberley Strassel writes that Trump intends to make limiting or ending the war in Ukraine a central element in his campaign. She quotes Trump:

“This thing has to stop, and it’s got to stop now…the US should negotiate peace between these two countries, and I don’t think they should be sending very much.”

Strassel thinks that Trump sees an opening to rally the part of his base that’s skeptical of military commitments abroad. So he, like Congressional Republicans are floating a false choice: A strong America globally or a strong America domestically:

“The GOP for more than 70 years has been the party of strong defense….Trump and a small group (at least for now) of congressional Republicans risk throwing all that hard-earned credibility away, neutralizing one of the party’s greatest strengths…”

Clearly there’s a developing split in the GOP over whether America should be backing the war or seeking immediate peace in Ukraine.

Regardless of Republican Party politics, don’t Ukrainians deserve the chance to try to win on the battlefield? Whether America is willing to ramp up its weapons production will partially answer that question. And whether we’re able to keep our eyes on the prize of a reunited NATO, a reunited EU, and a free Ukraine.

Time to wake up America! It seems possible that the Republican Party might shift to preferring a strong America domestically rather than a strong America globally.

That would be a political earthquake in our politics.

And how would the Democrats adjust? Their political brand is already pretty damaged among the White non-college educated in heartland America. Would the Dems become America’s military spending Party?

To help you wake up, listen to 1973’s “Live and Let Die” written by Paul and Linda McCartney, and performed live by McCartney:

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – February 26, 2023

From Gallup: (brackets by Wrongo)

“Nearly one year into the war between Russia and Ukraine, Americans’ support for Ukraine holds steady. A stable 65% of US adults prefer that the United States support Ukraine in reclaiming its territory, even if that results in a prolonged conflict. Meanwhile, 31% continue to say they would rather see the US work to end the war quickly, even if this allows Russia to keep its [Ukraine’s] territory.”

Here’s Gallup’s chart:

Shortly after the poll was conducted, Biden announced that the US would send 31 Abrams tanks to Ukraine.

There are significant partisan differences in how the war is viewed. Democrats are far more supportive than Republicans and independents, even though majorities of all three Party groups favor Ukraine’s continuing to fight to reclaim its former territory:

The Bulwark’s Will Saletan writes about the current disarray in the GOP over Ukraine. He’s saying that war fatigue and unease in the Republican base are being channeled and fueled by FOX, whose primetime anchors are working to undermine America’s support for Ukraine. He also mentions a few GOP officials who are fighting back by supporting Ukraine when they go on the FOX network.

This isn’t shocking, since back in the 1990s the warmonger right were literally saying “give peace a chance” over NATOs involvement in the Balkans. Mostly because the commander in chief at the time was a Democrat. This is what they do.

Wrongo thinks that, just like in the 90s, there are enough Republicans tied to the military and national security to ensure that the US won’t abandon Ukraine.

But from here to the 2024 election we’ll see a large contingent of Republican hypocrites who will turn themselves inside out trying to be peaceniks, complaining that the money spent in Ukraine should be going to Real Americans. It’s just a game to them. And It has been for a very long time. On to cartoons.

The Tucker effect: