Whitcomb: Power Failures; Test How Far Behind They Are; Imploding Employment; Rush Job

Sunday, February 21, 2021

Robert Whitcomb, Columnist

 

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Robert Whitcomb, columnist

“Dear Uncle stranger, Cousin known too late,

sweet wife unkissed, come, we will celebrate

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in this thronged mirror the uncelebrated dead,

good men and women gone too soon to bed.’’

-- From “Dear Uncle Stranger,’’ by Conrad Aiken (1889-1973)

 

 

 

“The ‘control of nature’ is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man.’’

 -- Rachel Carson (1907-1964), American marine biologist and author. Her most famous book is Silent Spring, about the damage done by pesticides.

 

 

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Energy meltdown in Texas

Last week’s electricity woes, mostly in Texas, reflect not only changing weather patterns caused by global warming but also America’s decayed and fragmented electricity infrastructure. The Texas mess provides lessons for the rest of the country.

 

Contrary to the assertions of the usual fossil-fuel fans, Texas’s use of a lot of wind power (especially in the summer) was not an important culprit in the disaster. Indeed, the wind turbines along Texas’s Gulf Coast that didn’t have ice gumming their works helped ensure that the crisis wasn’t even worse.  And for that matter wind turbines in Iowa and Canada and a lot of other usually chilly places do fine. So, do solar panels, even if you have to push snow and ice off them from time to time.

 

The biggest Texas problem was that the natural-gas pipeline system couldn’t deliver enough gas to meet the suddenly much higher demand for home heating and electric power. Natural gas is the largest power source in Texas. Pipelines froze and there were cold-related breakdowns at the gas-powered utility plants themselves, some due to poor maintenance and some because the equipment just couldn’t handle very low temperatures. And there’s obviously not enough backup – or as the engineers call it, redundancy. That’s because of utilities’ drive for maximum profitability.

 

Consider that back in the 1990s Texas decided against paying power producers to hold gas reserves, even though the common practice in the U.S. and Canada has been to require a buffer of at least 15 percent beyond a typical day’s need. That also made things worse.

 

But then, a cursory look at, for example, America’s transportation infrastructure, as well as its electric utilities, shows that we’re not very enthusiastic about spending money to prepare for emergencies or maintaining public as well as private infrastructure.

 

Further, the Lone Star State is the only state in the continental United States that runs a stand-alone electricity grid, designed to keep its energy system independent and isolated from other electricity markets.

 

That means that during storms and extreme heat and cold, most of Texas can’t draw from other grids. That raises the question as to whether the entire continental U.S. electrical system should be connected to alleviate regional crises when the occur. Or would that make the whole country’s electricity too vulnerable to cyberattacks by Russians, Chinese, North Koreans, Iranians and other enemies?

 

At least some of the crisis could have been forecast last month, when the stratospheric air above the Arctic suddenly warmed up. That caused a slow-moving atmospheric chain reaction that weakened the high-level air current circling the Arctic that traps frigid air there.  This let frigid air pour into temperate regions of Asia, Europe and North America.

 

As global warming continues, expect more extreme weather, with more severe storms, worse heat waves and, yes, deep freezes in unlikely places. Our electrical infrastructure must be adapted to these extremes even as we move away from  the fossil-fuel burning that’s causing global warming.

 

Here’s a good overview of the problem, Click HERE

 

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Meanwhile, Florida and Alaska have been much warmer than normal this winter….

 

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U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX)

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, detested by many of his Democratic and Republican colleagues in that august body for his arrogance and hypocrisy, got a lot of heat for jetting off to Cancun for a vacation during the worst of the Texas energy crisis. He was discovered and quickly flew back.

 

But so what?! All he’d do back home is posture and get in the way. If only he’d move to Cancun permanently.

 

 

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Dr. Nicole Alexander-Scott and Governor Gina Raimondo

If West Virginia Can Do It….

Why, oh why was Rhode Island so late in creating a truly centralized, reliable and easy-to-understand vaccination-registration system instead of the chaotic, confusing hodge-podge that we saw for weeks? It’s a tiny, densely populated jurisdiction that would seem well-positioned for such a system. But what we’ve had is a mess, though it’s been getting better the last week or so. Massachusetts (“Medical Capital of the World”!) has had similar vaccination-rollout problems, though they’re being addressed faster now.

 

The mixed messages in the Ocean State have been something. Consider that people officially too young to get shots in the first cohorts have been able to jump the lines and get them.  Apparently, it’s easy to lie about your age amidst the confusion.

 

I think a big, if well-intentioned, problem has been efforts to almost micro-target high-risk groups, which has tangled up the wider anti-COVID effort.

 

Even West Virginia, which, like many Red States, has many impoverished residents, along with bad health indices because of poorly funded health systems, has done much better than us managing the COVID crisis so far. It rapidly created a registry system that assigns everyone seeking a vaccination a place in line and notifies them when and where they can be vaccinated.

 

Let’s hope that Rhode Island’s shot-sign-up site, vaccinateri.org, can handle the crush of people seeking shots. Massachusetts’s vaccine appointment site, vaxfinder.mass.gov, crashed Thursday morning as about 1 million residents became newly eligible to book their appointments! Any techno lessons there for the Ocean State, even taking into consideration that its population is much smaller? Spend (and tax) whatever it takes to make these sites work.

 

Post-Pandemic Learning Catch Up

How much learning has been lost because of COVID-19 rules and closings in our schools for the past year? All states should use the results of coming standardized tests and other indices to determine how far behind COVID has left them.  Don’t cancel the standardized tests. Use them to help figure out how to structure catch-up programs.

 

Kids in lower socio-economic groups who lack the help (including computer equipment) that kids from more comfortable backgrounds have gotten to try to weather the crisis have fallen the most behind.  We need to figure out what sort of remedial programs could help narrow the gap. This will cost tax money, but it’s absolutely necessary for the future of the country.

 

Assuming that the vaccination process moves fast enough, this summer ought to see many schools open for catch-up work.

 

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Expectations for massive job loss due to AI

The Future of Work, if You Can Find It

Last November, Bill Gates predicted that half of business travel and 30 percent of “days in the office” would disappear forever. Meanwhile, the McKinsey Global Institute says that a mere 20 percent of business travel won’t return and about 20 percent of workers might be working from home indefinitely. Whomever you believe, all this means far fewer jobs at hotels, restaurants and downtown shops, even as the pandemic has speeded the automation of (i.e., killing of)  many office jobs  (including home office jobs) and  more factory jobs.

 

So what can government do to train people for new, post-pandemic jobs, assuming that there will be many? How can vocational and other schools be brought into this project? The trades – electricians, plumbers, carpenters, roofers, plasterers, etc., will probably have the most secure, and generally well compensated, jobs going forward, along with physicians, dentists and nurses as well as engineers of all sorts and computer-software and other techies.

 

Another part of the jobs package should be a WPA-style program to rebuild America’s infrastructure, which the drive for lower taxes and higher short-term profits has dangerously eroded. (See Texas again.) This has undermined the nation’s long-term economic health. Such a program could also serve to train many people in new, post-pandemic skills that would be useful even as automation accelerates.

 

Of course, there will always be jobs available for very low-paid personal-help people, such as home health-care workers. Indeed, the aging of the population means that we’ll need a lot more of them

 

Andrew Yang, an entrepreneur who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, made  addressing the looming threat of automation-caused job losses a key part of his campaign, which he suspended before the pandemic. He has proposed giving Americans a $12,000-a-year “basic income’’ to help get them through the developing employment implosion. It may come to that….
 

Meanwhile, “meds and eds’’ – Greater Boston’s (of which Rhode Island is on the edge) dense medical, technological and higher-education complexes – will help save it at least from the worst of the long-term economic disruption caused by the pandemic. Much research must be done by teams in labs; technological breakthroughs require a lot of in-person collaboration, and most college students will continue to want and need in-person teaching. Further, Greater Boston is an international venture-capital and company start-up center. These high-risk activities also require a lot of in-person, look-‘em-in-the-eye work.

 

On the other hand, Boston’s banks and its famed retirement-investment companies, such as Fidelity, will never have as many employees working in its offices as before COVID-19; nor will its innumerable law firms. Many offices in high rises in downtown Boston (and Providence)  will remain empty for a long  time while architects, engineers and interior designers  try to figure out what to do with them.

 

But No Room Service
Some of those COVID-closed hotels and motels may never reopen. Can some be converted into housing -- rental apartments or condos – to mitigate our housing-affordability crisis? I would think so.

 


Ready, Aim, Raise Money

It says something about the current state of the gun-obsessed Republican/QAnon Party that Rhode Island’s Republican Conservative Caucus is raffling off firearms, including an AR-15 assault rifle, to raise money to elect more alleged “conservatives’’  (translation: far-right “populists’’) to the state’s General Assembly.

 

The quote below is from the then-retired U.S. Chief Justice Warren Burger (1907-1995) in 1990.  The Second Amendment interpretation by this true conservative judge was generally the one held by the Supreme Court until far-right appointees of Republican presidents, in league with the gun lobby, began to take over the court. He was chief justice in 1969-1986.

 

“The Gun Lobby’s interpretation of the Second Amendment is one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American People by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime. The real purpose of the Second Amendment was to ensure that state armies – the militia – would be maintained for the defense of the state. The very language of the Second Amendment refutes any argument that it was intended to guarantee every citizen an unfettered right to any kind of weapon he or she desires.’’

 

The Second Amendment:

 

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.’’

 

Note that the Founders wrote not only “Militia” but also “well regulated,” in those days before assault rifles….

 

Growing Hearts at the “Despot’’

At that soulless, depressing place called Home Depot (aka Despot), I came across a spectacular plant called an anthurium, whose blood-red flowers very closely resemble human hearts. The directions suggest watering them with six ice cubes a week.

 

I bought one as a modest Valentine’s Day present for my wife, but so striking are these plants, I might have bought one even without that occasion. Perfect for this unusually gray, dreary month.

 

But bring back Benny’s!

 

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Death of a Mendacious Showman

I mostly listened to Rush Limbaugh’s far-right yak shows on my car radio, especially while driving through Red States. The long-time cigar smoker died last week at 70, of lung cancer.

 

He was  a charlatan through and through, making many millions  of dollars (which paid for a lifestyle of Trumpian extravagance) by gleefully peddling lies as a  vaudevillian showman. I often enjoyed listening to him in those long, boring highway stretches as he reveled in misogynistic and racist tales, interspersed with song parodies, while discussing (and making up some of) the day’s news. He was an unusual mix of jolly and vicious.

 

I especially liked his over-the-top sarcastic assaults on,  and sometimes clever mimicry of, figures he called, for example,  “compassion fascists,” “feminazis” and “tree-hugging wackos” or just “dumb Democrats.’’ (He must have sorely missed Sen. Edward Kennedy after the latter’s death, in 2009. Kennedy’s sometimes troubled private life and “far-left-wing” policies were perfect targets for Limbaugh, even though the entertainer’s own private life was often an utter mess.) And Limbaugh did his daily act without a prepared script or sidekicks. He had a kind of feral intelligence.

 

But like his late-in-life hero and fellow con man Donald Trump, his often fun but toxic act did considerable damage to our democratic civic culture because millions of his devoted (and aging) fans believed his lies and acted accordingly. Consider that he said early on that COVID-19 was no worse than the common cold, that the Affordable Care Act had “death panels,’’ that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and that a “Deep State” of liberals was conniving behind the scenes to keep power from “patriotic Americans’’.  And of course, global warming was a “fraud.’’ He helped lay the foundation for QAnon-style  conspiracy theories.

 

He was a highly successful promoter of hate and discord and helped pull along the national Republican Party to its current neo-fascist-infected condition.

 

Still, while America is better off without Limbaugh, I confess I’ll sometimes miss him on long drives.

 

 

Hentoff on Free Speech

The First Amendment has been in the news a lot lately. So, you might want to read The Nat Hentoff Reader, by that New York-based journalist, essayist, historian and jazz expert. Hentoff (1925-2017) was a near-absolutist (I’m not) when it came to free speech, but his essays vividly present the range of positions and emotions in American free-expression controversies.

 

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