Is California Insane?

We are all familiar with the stories of the California governor ignoring his own Covid-19 rules to dine at an exclusive upscale restaurant with friends and supporters and of the LA County Supervisor who dined outdoors at her favorite restaurant hours after voting to ban such activity as too dangerous but before the ban took effect. They go out and party, then lock down the people who elected them.

 

That’s just simple hypocrisy. That happens across the nation, although California does seem to have a talent for electing some real nutcases to various levels of government. 

 

We almost expect that kind of hypocrisy from any politician, most of whom are elected on the basis of their charm, good looks or name recognition rather than their ethics and intelligence. But that’s not why California stands out. Here are just two of many examples.

 

The Glock Company manufactures and sells guns. On their site they list the GLOCK 19, a 9 mm Luger. It’s a handgun with a magazine capacity of 15 to 33 rounds. It’s not unlike side arms carried by police. The site carries a warning, only one warning, and it has nothing to do with gun safety. It reads: “This Product can expose you to chemicals including lead [in the bullets?], which is known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other productive harm.” 

The sun can also cause skin cancer. Will they soon require that all doors that lead outside carry a similar warning? The danger of catching cancer from a gun falls far behind other, more immediate dangers.

 

Last August an estimated 3.3 million in California were “Facing [the] Largest Power Outages In Its History … Amid Record Heatwave.” On October 23 the news came:  “Due to extreme fire risk the utility is shutting off 466,000 customers between Sunday and Tuesday.” Then on December 5 the news read: “As parts of California rev up for another round of potentially fire-fueling gusty winds, Pacific Gas and Electric is warning 130,000 customers across 15 counties that they could lose power starting early Monday morning.”

 

Disregard the fact that many experts believe California added to the wildfire problem with poor forestry management. Just think about those stories in light of this headline from last September, “California Governor Signs Order Banning Sales Of New Gasoline Cars By 2035.” 

Picture hundreds of thousands of citizens stuck at home on a regular basis without electricity to charge their cars (or their phones). It’s just one more good idea – unless you can see the unintended consequences. California citizens can sit at home in the dark and applaud their governor for saving the planet. 

 

The antics of California would be funny if they weren’t completely crazy, and if the rest of the country weren’t slowly drifting in the same direction.

Flashback – Coke and Pepsi Warnings

Much as the news media tries to upset us at every turn and on every subject, we don’t have time or the energy to be afraid of everything. That’s where perspective and critical thinking come in.

 

The following entry from 2012 gives a couple of examples of how the news media plays to our emotions, not only to enhance their profits, but often hoping we will take the bait and panic. It’s a power play, pure and simple, to push the public in a desired direction. If enough people back a belief, whether it's true or false, the government steps in with more regulations.

[One day I overheard discussion of a news item about using radiation to kill bacteria on vegetables. A colleague asked the rhetorical question, “Who would buy that?” I told her that I had done some reading on the subject recently and the irradiated vegetables were perfectly safe to eat. In fact, those vegetables had been exposed to radiation for at least half of the time they were growing and couldn’t have grown without it. It’s called sunlight. But people don’t think of sunlight as radiation. They don’t consider cellphone signals as radiation (except when falsely warned about cancer dangers). Radiation is thought to be always bad and dangerous – no distinction is made between harmless and dangerous. That would take some critical thinking.

People also fear carcinogens. If it might cause cancer, regardless of the conditions or dosage level, it’s bad. But so many things have been shown to cause cancer (including good-old sunlight, by the way) that comedians joke about it. There are even substances that were once considered dangerous but have earned a reprieve. It seems you can hardly move without bumping into something that at one time or another wasn’t considered deadly.

Now we get a recent news article about a substance in Coke and Pepsi coloring being banned in California because it caused cancer in lab animals. Later in the article it states that humans would have to drink over one thousand cans per day to reach the dosage level given to the rodents. Of course, if you tried to drink that much in a day the amount of water would kill you long before you reached the danger point for developing cancer. (Yes, you can overdose on water!) 

Perspective is about moderation, understanding that you can keep trying to make your food, your beverages and your environment purer but you reach a point where an extra dollar of effort yields pennies in benefit, and finally a point where an extra dollar of effort yields no benefit at all. Yet there are still those with so little perspective and no understanding of science who insist that the water and the air are never clean enough (and the soda never pure enough). Then it’s left to politicians and judges, not scientists, to sort it out.  And who pays any additional costs? – you guessed it!]

Pain Everywhere!

On Monday ("Pain at the Plug?") I explained that regardless of the good intentions, the EPA’s proposed cap on new power-plant emissions would likely translate into increased electric bills for everyone.  Coal is a dirty source of power, but economic understanding leads to the inevitable conclusion that any future costs related to cleaner emissions will be borne by the electric consumer.

Of course, this might not be the case, the electric industry may choose to build no new coal-fired plants, favoring the cleaner natural gas with a mix of solar and wind power.  These other sources however are not without their own problems and controversies.  Solar energy is not available on cloudy days or at night and, like wind, has a much bigger environmental footprint than traditional power plants.  Wind power also faces mounting bad press in that “almost 600,000 birds are killed by wind farms in America each year, including over 80,000 raptors such as hawks and falcons and eagles” (not to mention hundreds of thousands of bats).  The practice of fracking, used to increase the recovery of natural gas is bringing citizens out in opposition, signing petitions, and just this week, demonstrating in Washington to "demand that the government reopen investigations into fracking-related drinking water pollution in Pennsylvania, Texas and Wyoming.”  It seems good options are hard to find.

Diversification, the investment principle of spreading out money over a number of different instruments so that one bad stock or one bad sector (e.g., bonds) does not ruin future prospects, applies here as well.  Diversification of energy sources protects against unforeseen shortages or disruptions.  If the above three energy types have problems, one of the few remaining alternatives is nuclear, which has zero emissions, but scares people enough to make opposition an easy sell.  Taking all this into consideration, it is quite likely that more of those cleaner, but more expensive coal-powered plants will be built in the future.

Individuals and families are not the only ones who use electricity.  Stores, manufacturers and governments do too.  GM uses it to power their robots.  Wal-Mart uses electricity to light the parking lots and keep the ice cream frozen.  The town uses electricity to heat and cool public buildings and to light the streets at night.  How would airports, restaurants, and printers, even Internet companies, run without electricity?  If the price of electricity goes up, the cost will not be restricted to uses at home.  Everything we buy will be more expensive.

When the time comes to pay for cleaner air, eventually the bill comes to us.

Making Connections

Some people who are appalled at the NSA routinely reviewing phone records will sit glued to the TV as an undercover reporter tries to pin down a crooked businessman using a hidden camera.  Some people who start their day with a cup or two of coffee to wake up and end the day with a drink to calm down or have a beer on the weekends to relax are outraged at proposals to legalize marijuana or other recreational drugs.  These people are not being hypocritical.  They just don’t stop to make connections between one behavior and another.  Recognizing the similarities between seemingly unrelated behaviors, opinions or choices uncovers contradictions that often go unnoticed.

This brings us to examples of gasoline prices and student loans.

Early in June, the Midwest was surprised at having the highest gas prices in the country.  Prices jumped to $4.25 per gallon.  Local news stories featured the usual pain-at-the-pump stories.  The temporary price increase was attributed to problems at regional refineries, but not many people paid attention to this detail.  Naturally, the conspiracy theorists came out of the woodwork accusing the oil companies of price gouging.  A short time later the price had gradually dropped by more than a dollar a gallon with no mention in the media of our sudden good fortune.

During the same time period, this news appeared.  “An environmental group that helped push BP PLC to a multimillion-dollar settlement last year over air emissions at its northwestern Indiana oil refinery says the sprawling complex's revised wastewater permit falls short of what's needed to protect Lake Michigan's waters."  Do we recognize the connection between high gas prices attributed to refinery issues and the legal challenges of this environmental group making operation more difficult, risky and expensive for one of those regional refineries?  Clean air and clean water are important, but it’s so easy to forget that it’s not BP or any other corporation that ultimately pays the bill.  It’s you and me as we complain about our pain at the pump.  It’s simple economics.

Another news story getting attention is the failure of Washington to deal with student loans, allowing the interest rate to double.  Many students are struggling to get by and the additional interest will increase their burden.  To make matters worse, news broke that the federal government is making a profit on student loans.  As the story unfolded I noticed this article that tried to personalize the crisis with a real-life example.  It told of Kristy Currier, 26, of Detroit who owes $75,000 in loans.  When I expanded the photo, the caption said that she lives with her fiancé and two dogs and two cats.  One pet would be considered a luxury for someone owing $75,000, but it’s hard to feel sorry for someone who voluntarily takes on the extra costs of feeding, medical treatment and daily care of four!

When we miss the underlying connections and the contradictions they imply, it’s hard to come to a workable solution.  We bumble along and feel like victims of the system, but sometimes it’s not the system’s fault.