Category: reason

When it was her turn to speak at Wednesday’s Senate Commerce Committee Hearing, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R–Tenn.) had a rather specific question fo Google CEO Sundar Pichai: “Is Blake Lemoine, one of your engineers, still working with you?”

Pichai responded that he did not know whether this particular individual was still employed by Google.

“Well, he has had very unkind things to say about me,” said Blackburn. “I was just wondering if you had kept him working there.”

Yes, she actually asked this.

Not every question posed to Pichai, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey hinged on whether an employee had personally insulted a member of the government, but a great many of them were of similarly dubious public value. As has been the case at previous Congressional hearings on tech issues, Democrats and Republicans assailed the CEOs for opposite problems, seeking openly contradictory solutions. In particular, the left wants to regulate Twitter and Facebook for allowing too much content, while the right wants to regulate these companies for allowing too little content. The only winner here is the regulatory state itself—certainly not the users of these tech platforms’ services.

Indeed, the government actually earned a concession from the CEOs—Zuckerberg in particular—that some reform of Section 230 (the federal law that allows the internet as we know it to function) might be amenable to Facebook. But as Zuckerberg rightly noted in one of his responses, changing the law and subjecting social media companies to increased liability could paradoxically help Big Tech by subjecting smaller competitors to un-survivable costs. Facebook, Twitter, and Google have armies of lawyers and can afford to spend money on compliance. If a new, smaller company comes along to challenge Facebook’s dominance, the regulatory barriers erected to control Big Tech would be too high for new competitors to surmount.

In holding this hearing, Senate Republicans—to their slight credit—had actually seized upon a legitimate grievance (albeit one the federal government is not at all positioned to solve): social media’s handling of the New York Post‘s Hunter Biden expose. A problem for the senators, however, quickly merged: Dorsey readily conceded that Twitter’s aggressive suppression of the link to the story was misguided, and had in fact admitted this—and vowed to change the policy—within hours of the initial controversy. He also said that the Post could easily recover its Twitter account.

“[Post editors] have to log in and delete the original tweet,” Dorsey explained. “They can tweet the exact same article today and it would go through.”

As is characteristic of these disputes, the concession actively displeased the other side. Sen. Brian Schatz (D–Hawaii) steadfastly maintained that the platforms had a duty not to circulate misinformation that “interferes in the election,” whether “foreign or domestic.” He complained that the Republicans were attempting to bully the CEOs into being nicer to conservatives—and then immediately began to bully them for being too nice to conservatives.

“You’ve hired Republican operatives, hosted private dinners with Republican leaders, and in contravention of your terms of service, given special dispensation to rightwing voices and throttled progressive journalism,” said Schatz.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t: That’s the only rule of these increasingly fraught tech hearings.

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In its annual World Energy Outlook report, the International Energy Agency (IEA) finds that, due to steeply declining costs, solar photovoltaic (PV) electric power generation “is consistently cheaper than new coal- or gas-fired power plants in most countries, and solar projects now offer some of the lowest-cost electricity ever seen.” Taking into account the declared energy policies of various countries, the IEA projects that renewables will meet 80 percent of the growth in global electricity demand to 2030. This makes solar “the new king of electricity.”

According to the IEA report, new utility-scale solar projects now cost $30 to $60 per megawatt-hour (MWh) in Europe and the U.S. and just $20 to $40 per MWh in China and India, where “revenue support mechanisms” such as guaranteed prices are in place (we’ll get to the issue of the guaranteed prices shortly). This analysis accords with the new levelized cost of energy report from the Lazard financial consultancy that finds that electricity from unsubsidized utility-scale solar PV costs between $29 and $42 per MWh. The levelized cost of energy analysis takes into account the capital costs, fuel costs, operations and maintenance costs, debt and equity costs, and plant utilization rates for each type of electric power generation.

The Lazard report further finds that “as the cost of renewable energy continues to decline, certain technologies (e.g., onshore wind and utility-scale solar), which became cost-competitive with conventional generation several years ago on a new-build basis, continue to maintain competitiveness with the marginal cost of selected existing conventional generation technologies.” As the Lazard analysis shows, when U.S. government subsidies are included, the cost of onshore wind and utility-scale solar is competitive with the marginal cost of fully depreciated coal, nuclear, and combined-cycle gas generation plants. “The former values average $31/MWh for utility-scale solar and $26/MWh for utility-scale wind, while the latter values average $41/MWh for coal, $29/MWh for nuclear, and $28/MWh for combined cycle gas generation,” notes the report.

Way back in 2014, Lazard reported that the levelized unsubsidized cost of utility-scale solar PV was then between $72 and $86 per megawatt-hour. How much lower could solar PV power generation costs go? Ramez Naam, technologist and author of the excellent book, The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet (2013), projected earlier this year, assuming current trends continue, that in sunny parts of the world the cost of generating a kilowatt-hour of electricity through solar PV would fall to just a penny or two by 2030 or 2035. As result, he added, “Building new solar would routinely be cheaper than operating already built fossil fuel plants, even in the world of ultra-cheap natural gas we live in now.”

Generating electricity is, however, not the only cost associated with getting power to the people. The intermittency of solar (and wind) power requires, among other things, the buildup of a more nimble digitized transmission grid so that power can be relayed rapidly between regions to account for shifts in power generation. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, power generation accounts for about 58 percent of the cost of power to retail consumers; the rest is transmission and distribution. Given current trends in renewable power adoption, the IEA projects that $460 billion will need to be spent by 2030 to modernize electrical grids around the world.

In addition, renewable power sources need backup generation or massive storage to make up for generation shortfalls when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing. How to pay for electricity generation and storage that are idle much of the time has to be addressed as well.

As a brief report from Resources for the Future think tank explains:

Renewable energy sources do not require fuel inputs to run since they use energy from the sun, wind, and other natural sources. Consequently, they are able to offer bids of $0 into the energy and capacity markets. As these sources make up a larger portion of the grid over time, these $0 bids can significantly reduce wholesale prices for energy and capacity and could discourage long-term investment for all resources. As a result, wholesale markets may need to adapt in the future to better accommodate different types of resources.

In other words, solar power that is eventually too cheap to meter creates the problem of how to pay for the infrastructure required to make and transmit.

“If private capital is to fuel the renewables wave, it seems likely the sector will need to move from a more commoditized market where revenues are determined by a price per kilowatt hour to one in which revenue is generated by providing guaranteed delivery of electricity when it is needed from sources either desired by the customer or required by regulation,” suggests Brian Murray, the director of the Duke University Energy Initiative in his Forbes article, “The Paradox of Declining Renewable Costs and Rising Electricity Prices.” He likens the solution to the way phone and internet service is delivered today in which different customers pay different prices to purchase different service delivery plans.

A 2019 article in The Electricity Journal outlined just such an approach for how wholesale power markets might be restructured to accommodate zero marginal cost electricity. In a nutshell, power consumers would be offered a portfolio of service contracts that allow them to choose plans that align with what they desire, value, and can afford. This range of portfolios would compensate utilities for their generation and transmission infrastructures while enabling them to more cost-effectively balance power demand and supply.

For example, a budget plan setting upper limits on customers’ peak loads could be coupled with automation technology that helps them minimize the impact of power restrictions on their most critical uses. A premium plan would charge customers more for their higher capacity and for the amount of power they consume per month. Or customers could choose an intermediate capacity plan with a wide range of home automation services that enable them to stay within limit of the amount of power for which they wish to contract.

All signs are that cheap solar power is coming and that’s really good news.

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Philadelphia saw a second night of protests and looting yesterday following Monday’s police shooting of Walter Wallace Jr., a 27-year-old aspiring rapper who was wielding a knife while experiencing what his family described as a “mental crisis.” Wallace’s relatives say police could have defused the situation without using lethal force.

Last night about 500 people staged a peaceful march in West Philadelphia to protest Wallace’s death, while others of a more avaricious bent took advantage of the situation several miles away. “After looting Monday night into Tuesday morning in West Philadelphia, hundreds of people were back out ransacking businesses 24 hours later,” WPVI, the local ABC station, reports. “Hundreds of people could be seen running in and out of businesses along Aramingo Avenue in the city’s Port Richmond section, including a Foot Locker, Burlington, Target and Dollar General. Some could be seen with their hands full of merchandise, jumping in cars before police arrived.”

A bystander’s cellphone video of the shooting shows two officers repeatedly ordering Wallace to put down the knife as he approaches them and they back away. The Philadelphia Police Department says the officers each fired seven rounds, although it is not clear at this point how many struck Wallace.

Wallace’s mother, Catherine Wallace, says police should have known her son was having a mental breakdown because they had been called to the family’s house three times that day. Shaka Johnson, a lawyer representing Wallace’s family, noted that the officers were not carrying tasers, which might have provided a less lethal way to subdue him. “When you come to a scene where somebody is in a mental crisis, and the only tool you have to deal with it is a gun…where are the proper tools for the job?” he asked.

Wallace was the father of nine children, and Johnson said his wife was about to give birth to a 10th. In 2013, WPVI reports, Wallace “pled guilty to assault and resisting arrest after punching a police officer in the face.” Around the same time, “a judge ordered Wallace to undergo a psychiatric evaluation and treatment.”

The officers were wearing body cameras, but the footage has not been released yet. The police department is investigating the shooting. “We’re confident that investigators will conduct an exhaustive and transparent review of all the facts related to this tragic incident,” said Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 5 President John McNesby.

“The public deserves a transparent and honest accounting of what happened,” City Council Member Jamie Gauthier writes in a Philadelphia Inquirer op-ed piece published today. “Officers need more intensive training on de-escalation techniques and use of nonlethal weapons….We must immediately ramp up investments in mental health supports for first responders and the communities they serve.”

More on that from Sally Satel in Reason‘s October issue.

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Very little will likely be decided on Election Day, says Stanford and Hoover Institution political scientist Morris P. Fiorina, and that’s not simply because a historically high percentage of mail-in ballots means the final tally might not be known for weeks or even months.

Fiorina says we are in an extended age of what he calls “unstable majorities” because neither the Republican Party nor the Democratic Party is popular enough to get and hold enduring legislative power. The result is a historically rare period in which control of the White House and each house of Congress regularly flips back and forth between the two parties.

Fiorina says the main cause of such “electoral chaos” is the way that parties select candidates and platforms. Party activists are more ideological and less representative not simply of most Americans but even of the other members of their own parties. When they take control, the parties push extreme agendas at odds with popular opinion, resulting in regular turnover the next time there’s an election. In 2008, for instance, Barack Obama and the Democrats won in a landslide before losing control of Congress two years later. Similarly, Donald Trump won the White House in 2016 and had a Republican Congress, only to lose the House two years later.

Fiorina, who describes himself as a “soft libertarian,” expects Joe Biden to win next week and figures it’s likely that the Democrats will win a majority in the Senate while keeping the House. But he also expects “electoral chaos” to characterize the 2022 midterms and the 2024 presidential election because the underlying conditions that produce such unstable majorities haven’t changed.

Despite deep discord stoked by COVID-19 lockdowns, economic collapse, and racial tensions, Fiorina is guardedly optimistic about the future. His work in books such as Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America shows that citizens actually agree overwhelmingly on many issues (including abortion, marijuana legalization, gay rights, and free trade) despite divisive political rhetoric. “There are big problems and no one seems to have a good idea of how to get a handle on them,” he grants. But comparing the current moment to the late 1960s and early ’70s, though, he says “we’re not on the verge of civil war” and that today’s violence is far less intense or extensive. “We somehow muddled through [the ’60s],” he says, “and so I think we will probably as a country do that again, although it won’t be pretty and it won’t be quick.”

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Yesterday the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy issued a press release that lists “ENDING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC” as one of the Trump administration’s “accomplishments.” The reaction from anti-Trump news outlets was predictable.

“White House lists ending Covid-19 pandemic as an accomplishment despite cases spiking to record levels,” CNN said. “U.S. reports more than 500,000 cases in a week, a record, as the Trump administration says it ended the pandemic,” The New York Times reported.

Gotcha headlines like these strike me as overly literal readings of routine political puffery. That “ending the COVID-19 pandemic” was meant to be aspirational rather than a statement of current reality is clear from the press release’s single sentence of elaboration: “From the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Administration has taken decisive actions to engage scientists and health professionals in academia, industry, and government to understand, treat, and defeat the disease.”

If Joe Biden is elected president and fails to “lift every voice,” restore “the soul of the nation,” “secure environmental justice,” “revitalize Main Street,” “end violence against women,” “end our gun violence epidemic,” “end the opioid crisis,” “ensure the future is ‘Made in America,'” and “restore trust, transparency, common purpose, and accountability to our government,” will CNN and the Times count those as broken promises? Probably not.

Still, there is no denying that Donald Trump is all over the place when it comes to describing the COVID-19 pandemic and his strategy for dealing with it. The president has embraced blatantly contradictory messages unified only by his desire to make himself look good.

A White House “fact sheet” posted yesterday asserts that “President Trump’s Coronavirus Response Has Saved Over 2 Million Lives”—a claim that relies on an utterly unrealistic worst-case scenario that the administration promoted last spring. Six months later, Trump was retweeting outlandish claims that COVID-19 had killed a “minuscule” number of Americans: about 9,000, compared to the official death toll of about 187,000 at the time. Although Trump may have thought slashing the number of deaths by 95 percent reflected well on his policies, the implication was that he could not possibly take credit for saving millions of lives, because COVID-19 never posed much of a threat to begin with.

During his debate with Biden last week, Trump reverted to the position he took in late March. “As you know, 2.2 million people, modeled out, were expected to die,” he said. “We closed up the greatest economy in the world in order to fight this horrible disease.” That we was suspect, since it was governors, not the president, who decided to fight COVID-19 with sweeping social and economic restrictions. Nevertheless, Trump was clearly suggesting that lockdowns had reduced the death toll.

Nonsense, the White House “fact sheet” says: “Lockdowns fail to eliminate the virus and are causing irreparable harm to families and children, especially the working class and people with limited resources. Lockdowns have seen cancer cases and other serious illnesses not being diagnosed on time and an increase in drug overdoses and suicides. Due to school shutdowns, children are falling behind in math, reading and other subjects, and have lost access to important support services.”

While all of that is true, the White House, unlike Trump during last week’s debate, is clearly not crediting lockdowns with saving those 2 million imaginary lives. What is its current explanation? The “fact sheet” cites these examples of Trump’s “decisive action”:

President Trump has deployed point of care testing equipment, millions of rapid tests, and critical PPE to nursing homes to help protect our seniors.

The Administration also put in place safety measures like visitation restrictions, mandated staff testing, and required reporting of cases at certain senior facilities.

The Trump Administration mobilized extra beds and personnel to help prevent hospital overcrowding and has deployed medical supplies to aid healthcare workers on the frontlines.

The administration’s rollout of virus tests was a complete disaster, depriving policy makers of the information they needed to weigh the costs and benefits of proposed interventions (including lockdowns) and making it impossible to curtail the epidemic through isolation, quarantine, and contact tracing. The rest of the items on the White House list seem like pretty weak tea, as does Trump’s frequent boast that he restricted travel from China. That happened on February 2, four days before the first known COVID-19 death in the United States, which involved a middle-aged woman in Santa Clara County, California, who seems to have caught the virus through local transmission, which may have happened weeks earlier.

The “fact sheet” does include some actual facts. According to the “best estimates” from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it notes, COVID-19’s infection fatality rate (deaths as a share of all infections) is very low among relatively young Americans: 0.003 percent among people 19 or younger, 0.02 percent for 20-to-49-year-olds, and 0.5 percent for 50-to-69-year-olds, compared to 5.4 percent among people in their 70s. I’m not sure Trump can take credit for that.

The White House also notes that “the United States has among the lowest case fatality rates of any major country.” Depending on how you define major, that is more or less true: The U.S. CFR (deaths as a share of confirmed cases), which has fallen dramatically since mid-May, is currently about 2.6 percent, compared to 6.9 percent in Italy, 5.2 percent in China, 5 percent in the U.K., 3.2 percent in Spain, 3 percent in France, 2.2 percent in Germany, and 1.8 percent in Japan.

Since the case fatality rate is based on confirmed infections, expanding virus tests to include younger, healthier people with mild-to-nonexistent symptoms—as the U.S. has been doing in recent months—brings the rate down. But with the exception of Germany and the partial exception of Japan (which initially had a higher CFR than the U.S.), the U.S. CFR has always been lower than the rates in those other countries, which may partly reflect differences in age demographics or health care. It is not clear to what extent differences in polices—let alone policies championed by the Trump administration—explain international variations in the case fatality rate, which also varies widely across the United States.

Wider testing tends to reduce the CFR, which makes the president look better. But Trump has frequently complained that wider testing, which the White House touts as one of his administration’s major accomplishments, makes him look worse. The White House “fact sheet” likewise bemoans “the media’s fixation on case numbers,” which it says obscures progress in reducing daily deaths.

The White House has a point. Since mid-September, the seven-day average of newly confirmed cases has risen sharply in the United States (and in Europe). Yesterday, according to Worldometer’s numbers, that average was nearly 73,000, more than double the number on September 12 and a new record. Yet the weekly average of daily deaths so far has risen only modestly (from 704 on October 17 to 842 yesterday) and is still 63 percent lower than the peak on April 21.

Given the lag between laboratory confirmation and death, daily fatalities probably will continue to rise during the next few weeks. But judging from the experience with this summer’s COVID-19 spike, the increase in deaths won’t be nearly as big as the increase in cases, let alone as big as Biden predicts (a fivefold rise by late November). COVID-19 looks less lethal now for the same reasons the CFR is falling: a younger, healthier mix of patients, possibly combined with better treatments. But again, the Trump administration has not made a very plausible case that the president is responsible for that development.

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