Aspirations

When I started this blog, I planned on leaving politics out of it, but it turned out that politics doesn't plan on leaving me alone, and is having serious effects on my household's finances.  In today's example, Minnesota is working hard to transform itself into the California of the Midwest.

It's all kind of intertwined, but at the foundation are a solid belief in climate change*, and a steadfast faith in the power of collective, government-led effort to get things done.  There is a law on Minnesota's books, the 2007 Next Generation Energy Act, which mandates a 30% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from 2005 levels, and a 80% reduction by 2050.  The state is not on track to meet those goals, but by golly, they're trying.

The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency is considering adopting California's ZEV and LEV standards, as several other states have already done. The initial public comment period on this effort closed yesterday; fortunately I was working on some of these things yesterday morning, and I noticed the deadline in time to get my comments prepared and submitted.

The LEV (Low Emissions Vehicle) standard would require that most new vehicles sold in Minnesota meet California emission standards. Apparently, federal law requires that states wanting to set more stringent emissions standards must either use the California standards, or do nothing.  The MPCA may take Colorado's LEV standard (which basically incorporates the California standard by reference) as a model for Minnesota's version.

I don't see how letting another state write your state's laws can end well.  Population of Los Angeles metro area:  4 million.  Population of the entire state of Minnesota:  5.7 million.

The ZEV (Zero Emissions Vehicle) standard would set delivery quotas for electric, hybrid, and hydrogen-fueled vehicles for car manufacturers wishing to sell new cars in Minnesota. From a news report, it appears that people wanting to buy ZEV vehicles in Minnesota at present are having a bit of a hard time finding them, though most of them manage to purchase one in the end.

It turns out that this slight shortage in ZEV supply is because California and several others states have adopted ZEV standards, so the manufacturers are delivering these vehicles first to the states where they are required to deliver them.  In my comments, I pointed out that the economic forces at play will sort this situation out over time, without any government intervention at all. And that if government intervention sets the ZEV quotas above demand, then the manufacturers and dealers may start having to subsidize ZEV sales by charging more for higher-emissions vehicles.

This is another of those "unintended consequences" that keep popping up. They're never in my favor, either.

The MPCA claims that the LEV and ZEV standards would only affect manufacturers and dealers.  That is baloney; new car buyers would also be affected, as well as used car buyers in a few years as these vehicles trickle into the used car market.

Colorado's LEV standard exempts passenger vehicles over twelve passengers; I see a fifteen-passenger high-emissions van in my future.  Our family is large, but not that large. It's not a gain on the climate change front, either.

On the utility front, our utility is proposing to reduce carbon emissions by 80% by 2030, and to get to zero-carbon electric generation by 2050; not only meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement**, but exceeding them. They are asking for permission from the Public Utilities Commission to retire all of their coal-powered plants ten years early, and to build a lot more wind and solar power generation capacity.

The problems, of course, are that wind and solar electricity generation often don't track with electricity demand, and that it is very hard and expensive to store excess electricity in large quantities for the times when the wind isn't blowing or the sun isn't shining--which could be for days or even weeks.

Their solution is *waving the magic Technology wand* to use the power of technology to manage demand rather than supply. That looks to me like it is going to involve some kind of real-time pricing:  very cheap electricity when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, and very expensive electricity when they aren't.

Minnesota does have a nuclear power plant, but from what I've read, it sounds like they are working only on keeping it open, and not on building another one. The environment lobby Force is very strong in Minnesota, and it does not always act coherently.

Buried deep within the bowels of the utility's Carbon Report, I have found an implied wish list:  1.  Substantial tax subsidies for their "de-carbonization".  2.  That Minnesota be converted to a "high-electrification state, requiring that electricity be used for cooking, water heating, space heating, and passenger vehicles.  3.  That private generation of electricity (at least at the level of large businesses, etc.) be banned.

So, their brilliant plan to stop climate change and save the world is to use my tax money to force me to use electricity for everything, and then, when their zero-carbon-emissions electricity proves unreliable, to bar me from making my own electricity.

I just finished reading Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, which makes a strong case that socialism always requires some sort of a common cause, and always ends up using coercion by force. I am also in the middle of a book about the history of the Baptist church in Russia.  Under the Soviet Union the Communists found it politically convenient to set the Church up as the internal enemy of all good Communists--as opposed to creating an external enemy that they might end up having to fight a war with, if passions ran too high.

More and more, I am starting to see climate change as the modern unifying cause of the socialists, the justification that they are using to take over control over more and more of the world's physical economic activity. Climate change cannot be separated from economic activity, because in their view economic activity causes climate change. The climate modelers are having to incorporate manufacturing and land use and so on into their models, and they already are showing a distinct tendency to want to control those activities in order to control climate change. This will not end well; it doesn't even end well when the economists are in charge.


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*The short version of my opinion of climate change is that we are working very hard to solve a problem that may not even exist.

**I read the Paris Agreement. It's only sixteen pages, but it has already spawned a complex of committees busily generating large quantities of documents written in bureaucrat-ese.  The character of the Paris Agreement can be seen clearly in its practice of calling a regular international assessment of progress toward reducing carbon emissions a "global stocktake"--overt Newspeak, in an Orwellian global program. The U.S. is withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, but the process will take some time.