The Green New Deal vision of free water and electricity never made sense to me...
If you want people to conserve water and electricity, you make them pay based on their rate of consumption. If you want them to waste water and waste electricity, you give it to them for free.
It's pretty amazing that the Roman Empire lasted for as long as it did while the emperors were at the mercy of crowds that contributed very little to the empire's economy (agriculture) or military, but in the case of Constantinople the benefits of centering the government in an impregnable city outweighed the costs of having to put up with the rabble (and the rabble on net contributed luxury goods or services that made it easier to recruit able administrators into the government and made it easier to get the dangerous nobles to hang out where the emperors could keep an eye on them).
The history of Constantinople ran this experiment. The Arab conquest of Egypt in the 640s forced the emperor to end the grain dole, which substantially reduced the city's population in general and its population of unemployed layabouts in particular.
However, a few centuries later with the increase in Anatolian prosperity, crowds in Constantinople were again in a position to overthrow emperors they didn't like, as they showed in 1042 with Michael V (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_V_Kalaphates).
They certainly weren't on anything like the old Roman free bread dole or the early Constantinople free bread dole. Both of those required controlling North Africa and/or Egypt to have a large enough agricultural surplus to burn.
Some portion of the crowd was probably being supported by church charities, but it wasn't anything like the old Rome c.300 A.D. situation where half the city receives all its food for free and doesn't work.
ideally, we would figure out how to make electricity in a manner that is both clean and cheap. Hopefully it could even be done for such a low price that the dead weight losses from monitoring individual usage and collection of per-kilowatt hour monthly bills would would be larger than the efficiency gains of metering. One could even call this idealized state of energy abundance 'too cheap to meter'
This assumes people are rational consumers of their utility bills, which they aren’t if they can’t control their spending (don’t know where the electrical fault in their house is using all the power), don’t know they’re being charged (because they put everything on autopay and don’t read bills), and have mandatory spending (since you need water and power to live).
The problem with making everything free is that you still have to pay for it, and if it’s paid by “the government” then “the government” might just decide to stop paying for it. Having multiple funding sources is a good reason to charge customers, but it doesn’t mean recovering all costs from them and per-usage billing is the only way to go.
I really want an inside-the-house meter that shows me the current rate of usage, not the total usage this month. If there was just a display in the kitchen that I would occasionally glance at and see it's going at 137 when the washing machine is running, and 203 if both the washing machine and dishwasher are going, and that turning on the air conditioner just puts it to 207 (or whatever) then I'd have a much clearer sense of which appliances are the ones to conserve and which ones don't matter. (I have a sneaking suspicion that the tea kettle uses more than all the others combined.)
There are at least a dozen systems like that on the market. I have https://theenergydetective.com, but I wouldn't recommend it in 2022; there are more modern and better systems. Google "energy usage monitor" and do a little research to figure out what would work well for you. The best (IMO) systems put ammeter clamps on every circuit in the house and give you a pretty detailed view of what your usage is on a per-circuit basis. I'm a little skeptical of the ones that promise to use AI to deduce the identities and characteristics of specific devices by monitoring aggregate power usage, but I haven't read a lot of detailed reviews.
(After doing a little Googling myself, I like the looks of https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08CJGPHL9, but that's based on about two minutes of research.)
When I looked up those systems a while ago, they didn’t come with clamps for “every circuit”, instead just going on the main line and claiming they’d figure everything out with AI. Not sure why it was designed like that, but it was hard to believe it’d work.
I had an adjunct instructor in college that was working on a similar system. Most major appliances have a unique load and response cycle that makes them relatively easy to identify, and isolating the A/C wave functions associated with each device isn't particularly difficult if you have enough data.
I can't speak to the specific implementation of an in-house meter, but I have a fair amount of experience both personally (through acquaintances) and professionally with people in this space and, yes, reducing peak-rate power usage / use of smart meters and the adjustment of power provision to scheduling-tolerant appliance (e.g. washing machines) is very much a problem that capitalism puts a lot of effort into addressing.
Electricity markets are shockingly sophisticated (essentially instantaneous price changes) and very, very interesting in their own right.
But who ever looks anything like that up, and remembers it when they're actually using it? A dashboard you actually see on a regular basis would make it much clearer.
PG&E does have dashboards like that with hourly breakdowns, though I think the data is a day or two delayed.
There’s also various smart systems it hooks up to like OhmConnect that will turn off your lights randomly saying their power is dirty right now. Even though I’m on a “100% renewables” plan. And the times it does this aren’t related to the peak/off peak times either.
After the giant Texas freeze last year I wanted to see if we had any leaks in our water system before the family came back to the house.
So I turned on the water supply, made sure everything was off in the house and then watched the meter, and checked it again like 30 minutes to an hour later.
A water meter, electricity meter, gas meter that I could see real-time info for could all have uses for us.
And yet.... that's more work than I care to do and also my A/C isn't continuously on, depends on cooling.
Or my brother just installed a variable A/C that instead of going on/off goes gradually higher/lower (so it's "on" more of the time but for lower energy - supposedly a lot better). What's the usage of that?
I can't speak for everybody, but where I live (Montana), many people (like me, and all immediate family members) have flat rate billing for power, water, or both.
I have literally never heard of a flat fee for someone dealing directly with the utility company. You can run the A/C down to 58 degrees with the windows open and the utility charges you a flat fee? How do they deal with people trying to crypto-mine all day or something?
Where I live (Alabama) it is pay per usage, but I have levelized billing – so my bill is the same every month except for adjustments over time based on my average usage. But I still pay based on power used and always have.
In Sacramento we just upgraded meters to leave flat rate water billing. Used to be based on the number of bedrooms in the structure. It was obviously a model that made no sense in a state dealing with drought.
For a long time, Chicago only had flat-rate billing for water. Considering that it's next to one of the world's largest freshwater lakes, they didn't have much pressure to conserve. They're nudging people towards using meters now --- with some progress.
"If your home has a meter, you pay based on your actual use of water. But 52% of single-family homes and 42% of two-flats in Chicago do not have a meter. In those cases, the city charges a fee based on the building width and other building features—a rough estimate that may or may not be related to actual water usage."
Basically the same thing. A single monthly fee for 12 months. They check a few times a year to confirm I'm not running a grow operation or cryptomining. The next year's rate is based on past performance; I've had two rate increases and two decreases.
Electricity isn’t pay per use here, it’s pay per on peak use, less off peak - which is designed to be rational but hard to comply with now that we’re working from home. And then it goes up even if you don’t use more, because CPUC/PG&E have to pay for more line maintenance to stop forest fires; can’t do much about that.
As for water, it doesn’t matter how much you save because all the water in the state is being used by almond farms and nobody tells you that your almond milk bill is actually the water price signal and the water bill isn’t.
Basically what you're saying on energy is that they have two different prices based on whether it's during peak use hours or not. But you're still paying based on your consumption. I think people understand that if they run their AC on full blast with the windows open that they'll pay more than someone who doesn't.
For water, cities were able to bring consumption down by around a quarter during the last drought. And sure, agriculture water policy in California is bad and needs to be reformed. But that doesn't mean that there isn't capacity among people to decrease usage if the need be.
Electricity is still pay per use in Northern California, they've just layered on top of that peak/off-peak marginal pricing.
Even so, very few places do the peak/off-peak thing. Almost everywhere, it's pay per use with an increasing marginal price that tops out somewhere around $0.10 per kwh.
And realistically, all this rate design stuff is much more important to commercial and industrial uses of electricity who do pay attention and also show more flexibility on the consumption side.
>>>The punchline is that that presidential visit got vetoed because other factions in the White House warned that environmental groups wouldn’t like the president touting a facility that used natural gas as green.<<<
To echo Matt, I "like this president," too, but, if I have one gripe, it's that he doesn't have the killer instincts of some of his predecessors. He's too cautious. He should have been able to see the wisdom of visiting a steel mill (the dude's originally from NE Pennsylvania!). In word, he should be able to *triangulate* a bit more. What's the left going to do, support AOC in a 2024 primary challenge?
They're going to stay home and not vote anyway. If there is one thing I'm convinced of, its that chasing after the "youth vote" at the expense of any other votes is foolhardy.
they mostly do anyway, no matter what you promise them. Just ask Bernie Sanders circa the 2020 Primary... and yet, we still obsess over these narratives?
I appreciate Biden's low-key attitude. Slow and boring, just the way I like it. Tragically however I am not the only citizen who votes in presidential elections.
My wife and I can fairly be called Sanders Democrats, but we've talked repeatedly during the past 2 years about whether we're becoming more conservative, as progressive tactics have seemed repeatedly unwise. I like to say it's just that the left has gotten dumber, but not sure. I think MY is too generous to the climate left here. They're invested in a Howard Zinn picture of the progressive masses thwarted by Snidely Whiplash elites and often don't know or care what working-class people appear to think, and their view that sitting in at Nancy Pelosi's office, or whatever, produces change on the climate issue is unfalsifiable to them. (My local branch of 360.org last year decided the way to become relevant and win support for action on the climate was to jump on the Defund the Police bandwagon. How is that for smart?) Now the Green New Deal's strategic logic isn't hard to understand. Its framers are clear about it. They know w-c Americans aren't fired up about climate and are leery of a politics of limits. So the GND promises a huge suite of social benefits that will win the allegiance of those Americans. I don’t think that's about to work, but that's the idea.
The casual mention of "oral history projects" made me laugh out loud, especially when grouped with actually useful jobs in clean energy and climate mitigation.
I imagined a job seeker being offered a position as a Wind Farm Technician (Dirty Jobs featured that in an episode - it involves a lot of climbing and the acrophobic need not apply) and saying, “That’s not for me. How about something in oral history?”
That's fine by me, all those out of work coal plant operators will need jobs. Problem is most of those wind farm technician jobs don't pay half what the coal plant operators were making.
Yup, I came to make fun of the same thing. I want to do an oral history about people who do oral histories on the government dime. My qualification is that I have an unlimited ability to hide mirth, save it for later, laugh when I’m alone.
Also, the New Deal was implemented at a time of mass unemployment where people just needed a job, any job. In the "Green New Deal" scenario where the government is attempting to reorient the entire economy around zero-carbon infrastructure, promoting "oral history" jobs seems a little misplaced in terms of priorities.
Bold of you to offer even the most tepid of charitable interpretations in a community that is more obsessed with dunking on the humanities than honestly engaging with an argument.
I've been here long enough to know how much the majority of regular posters love to vent their frustrations by dumping on any jobs or interests that are coded as "progressive."
"They're invested in a Howard Zinn picture of the progressive masses thwarted by Snidely Whiplash elites"
I haven't read Zinn, but I've noticed that with all the talk about us living in a "Second Gilded Age" there is an investment among progressives in pretending that the same dynamics of wealth and political power of the original Gilded Age are still at play. This is, in part, due to the progressive movement being a victim of its own success. By giving average (middle-class) Americans a direct material stake in the status quo it has become politically more difficult to enact further progressive change. In this case, while wealthy executives disproportionately benefit and poor people are disproportionately harmed by continued carbon emissions, the real obstacle is the large middle class who are invested in a lifestyle that relies on heavy carbon emissions. Convincing them to change to lower-carbon lifestyle whether through social persuasion or (more likely) financial incentives is the ultimate goal.
This is a dynamic I've struggled with as an urbanist. Do average middle-class Americans genuinely prefer to live to live in large lot single-family-only neighborhoods, or have they been "conditioned"** by the government and car companies into believing this is the "correct" way to live? (Edit: The latter is a narrative I've seen pop up within urbanist circles. It is not something I seriously believe). Whatever the reason, you're certainly not going to convince anybody by telling them they've just been conditioned to accept their current lifestyle. Given that so many Americans are willing to spend 2+ hours a day in their car just so they can have a private backyard, I sometimes wonder if we're just genuinely insane as a culture.
** Edit: I originally used the word "brainwashed" here, but decided the use of that word was unnecessarily provocative.
I genuinely do like having a private yard to do activities in, like grilling food, having a fire, and hosting groups of friends outside. I also enjoy yardwork. I wouldn't be able to any of these things in an apartment.
There are plenty of urban single-family homes, and even townhomes and duplexes, that have decks, gardens and private yards for gathering. They are just much smaller than you would find in the typical suburb. When I wrote that I wasn't picturing any old outdoor space, but the common type of large suburban backyards intended as play space for children. IMO the expectation that every single-family home should have one of these comes from an outdated "stranger danger" and "helicopter parent" mentality that helps destroy any sense of community in suburban neighborhoods. I think every neighborhood should have a park where all the children can play together, and use the space saved from having smaller yards to build more houses.
(1) There's a big difference between "this yard is shared between several apartments" and "this yard is mine"
(2) Even when "this yard is mine" there are often noise / fire limits on what you can do with it in downtown areas that are more binding than what you can do in a suburb
I get why the suburban lifestyle would be preferable in those regards. My point was that if the tradeoff is sitting inside a metal box for two hours each day, is it really worth it? (I know work from home changes this dynamic)
But some people do pick this. Assuming we are holding $ spent on housing+transit+car ownership+car parking constant, they are probably (on average) going from getting:
A 1BR 1 bath apartment in the city with an average size of 600 sq. ft. + expensive parking spot
to
A 4 BR 3 bath 2,500 sq. ft. house in the exurbs with a full 1 acre lot, covered garage, room for an on-property work-shop, garden, vegetable garden, and fence.
So that commute is buying you a lot of extra housing (room for a family), not just less noise and more external space.
Alternatively, if you hold housing size constant (say you only need 2BR 1 bath but you need it in both places since you have 1 kid), the housing unit costs 2x as much in the downtown as it does in an inner-ring suburb, so spending 60 (not 120) extra minutes commuting each day is a pretty easy sell to go from spending 40% of family income on housing to 20%.
To summarize:
(1) Commuting times are much shorter than you think
(2) Commuting buys much more space, much more cheaply than living in the downtown
(3) Therefore, people's preferences for "the suburban lifestyle" are much easier to explain than you think
You seem to be arguing that people who live in single family homes on large lots in suburban developments are making their lives worse and have chosen to do so because of brainwashing/conditioning and false fears of stranger danger. You muse that we must collectively be insane to make the choice to live this way. It seems a little condescending, not to say hostile to me.
Isn't it more likely that we've found a way to live that works reasonably well for us, all facts and irrational preferences considered, just as inner city urbanists have found what works for them.
My point was that I have been prone to the same ideological blindspots as the Green New Deal advocates are. I was actually not making a direct argument for that line of thinking. I guess I could've made that more clear.
Your ideological blindspot on this is very large, as evidenced by the fact that (1) you are massively over-estimating average commute times and (2) you are assuming people are paying those commute times just to have a yard, when those yards are attached to housing units that are much less expensive per interior-sq.-ft., per-BR, and per-bath than downtown core housing units.
why do you think suburbs equates "stranger danger" mentality? From my experience this mentality is far more common in cities than in (rich) suburbs. It is in the latter that people don't lock their doors and say hello to you in the streets even if they don't know you, and often people don't even fence their yards and lawns. In the city you're taught to ignore strangers in the street and don't know your next door neighbor. There are pros and cons to both styles of living but let's not idealize or demonize either, or delude ourselves to thinking either is "natural". Both are equally modern and living in either style is equally something we are socially "conditioned" to do.
I'm 100% with you on parks >> yards, btw. Agglomerate 100 yards into one decent-sized park and that's a very clear win for kids, who really like having room to run / play catch / soccer / hide & seek
Among the reasons I love my neighborhood is that I have a reasonably private 1/8th of an acre because I'm on the end of a row, but also have one of the largest urban parks in the country right down the street in one direction and a well-equipped playground right down the street in the other. Not to mention bus access to downtown, ample parking, supermarket down the street, and easy highway access...
I think a lot of people genuinely prefer this (I'm not one of them, I'm also an urbanist and don't want to drive or do yard work). But I wouldn't say "brainwashed," I think it's more a combination of what people have grown up with/become accustomed to, and the (unsustainable) subsidization of outward growth (see, eg, Strong Towns).
Over time, I think the "suburban retrofit" approach will convert more people to the "walkability is good, actually" side. The aging of the population will also probably move the needle: it's bad to be isolated in a huge house when you're old and shouldn't be driving. But change on the ground will take time.
FTR, I would not ordinarily be inclined to use the word "brainwashed", I was simply using it here as a point of rhetorical contrast. Thinking about it now I should've used the word "conditioned" instead.
I would just call the widespread preference for suburban SFHs small-c conservatism. Most people already live that way, are comfortable with their circumstances, don't want them to change, and if they move will opt for the same type of home they already like. Redlining, auto advertising, white flight, unsustainable subsidization of outward growth and other unsavory things may have helped create the current situation. But people now are mostly just sticking with what they know, which seems like what you should expect in an affluent society where most people are content with their lives.
The other dynamic you see is young people who move into urban areas then leave for the suburbs after starting families. I don't think that choice is generally made on the basis of believing children can only be properly raised in certain types of houses, but just the reality that kids take up space and the same amount of money can get you more of it in the suburbs than in desirable urban neighborhoods. Also the public schools are generally considered better. But these are policy problems, not the result of people being conditioned to think they must live in the suburbs.
I agree with all of these points, but I can't help but think that given houses have only been getting bigger even as average family sizes have been getting smaller, that parents have been oversold on the amount of space that is necessary to raise a family. Maybe they're just following the general American "bigger is better" instinct instead of the wishes of any particular interest group, but that instinct is still culturally conditioned to an extent.
I hear you. One of the most stimulating perspectives MY has offered is his contrarian (for liberals) take on energy -- pushing energy abundance rather than lesser energy consumption. The latter idea is of course ingrained in environmentalism and it appeals to me personally, but I think the majority of Americans see real problems in trying to do that, far beyond the ranks of those who simply scorn conservation a la Dick Cheney or who envision a lavish lifestyle for themselves. Clearly much of America isn't built right now for less energy consumption, and the political barriers to addressing this are formidable. However, when Democrats have unified control of state governments they are doing meaningful things. But this is hard for climate activists to wrap their heads around. They're used to seeing the political elites as their enemies, whereas I think MY is right that Democratic elites are way ahead of the public in general on this, so the logical course for climate activists is to be loyal Democrats and try to get as many of them as possible elected. That's not how climate activists are built. This is part of a more general failure by progressives to recognize how far they've won the ideological war in the Democratic Party since the turn of the century and how their strategy and tactics ought to evolve accordingly, but that's a bigger story, and the dynamics are most acute on the climate issue.
It's overwhelmingly a genuine preference driven by the needs and wants of the family. It's nothing like brainwashing/conditioning in my view. Also, it's increasingly attactive to add rooftop solar and fully electrify a suburban family home -- much easier than the collective action needed to get to near-zero GHG in an urban condo. The key issue / question is abundance of low-GHG or zero GHG electricity.
The bold techno-futuristic vision of America's cities in 2100 involve building multiple layers of suburbs directly on top of eachother in the downtown core, with artificial skies of LED panels and UV lights so you get the benefits of real sunlight at every layer.
The other X factor besides "you became more conservative" and "the left become dumber" might be "we became way way way more supply constrained."
The "you get a car and you get a car and you get a car" aspect of GND eco-socialism sounds _just absolutely dumb_ right now. But we're living in a world where there's supply chain constraints on everything, everything's more expensive, and spending to increase demand feels like kicking over a gas can while the house is on fire.
Wind back the clock a few years - you might still say tying climate change action to socialism is losing politics - but the conventional wisdom was still "shoulda done more stimulus in 2009."
Remember just one short year ago everyone was still trying to make Stephanie Kelton a star and force Modern Monetary Policy down our throats like it was some cryptocurrency...
I've listened to Kelton on podcasts at length and...I think her actual take on government spending and inflation takes inflation pretty seriously. When asked "what wold happen if the government just printed up a ton of money and spent it", her take was "it would create inflation because the real economy wouldn't be able to produce enough stuff to meet the demand created by all of that created and spent fiat currency, so prices would rise." Which...seems exactly right to me and a good description of now - the government gave people a bunch of fiat currency while the economy's productive capacity was reduced and misallocated for demand and here we are.
(But if your meta point is that taking inflation seriously wasn't a thing on the left until very recently, I think you're spot on.)
(I think her ideas on how we'd ever _target_ spending are a little bit "no true Scotsman" - like, if an economist can start by postulating that we'll manage the economy via fiscal policy from congress, then the theory isn't going to be applicable in practice and will never be falsified by real world events.)
My point was MMT proponents continually suggest (when serious critics aren't looking, otherwise they obfuscate) that the way to rein in inflation is not to utilize the Fed to raise interest rates on all...but instead just to raise taxes significantly...and mostly on rich people...which...is unfeasible politically in economic durress and just seems like it would delay actual monetary policy that would actually help (raising rates) such that durress would last much longer....
Right - I think the sleight of hand is going "raise taxes is anti-inflationary" (which _could_ be true) and then adding in "on the rich", which screws it up. Ironically you could give the rich tons of money and not see consumer price inflation because they won't spend it on consumption. MY has argued in these posts that the missing link in European socialism is the broad and heavy taxes on the middle class that stop consumption and make resources for state spending.
But also the meta-problem here is a lot of economists would prefer we use fiscal and not monetary policy to deal with inflation, it's not realistic politically, but the MMT people are more adamant about it because they don't like the interest rates lever.
In general, i view MMT as a Calvin v. Hobbs esque intellectual bullshit exercise to just push Progressive to care less about debt....and I think Kelton is in on the rouse. But personally, the fact that she would go so far in that rouse frightens me....because too many folks bought into it without seeing the wink or the nod...and that's Modern Leftism in a nutshell for me
Which was wrong then, too. Fed shoulda done NGDPL targeting or even PL targeting. And the fiscal "relief" should have been more generous per unit of time but tied to economic conditions, not dollar amounts or the calendar
And yet it's people like Josh Gottheimer and Kyrsten Sinema that may be threatening to take this excellent bill down.
In other words, these activists make lots of noise but at the end of the day, they either go along or just don't get their way. They may not be the dangerous ones.
In the world of radicals, these lefty climate types are clearly the most reasonable. They are still radicals, but a radical that will negotiate isn't that bad. They really need to highlight the difference between that and the radical right.
In general, these tactics are just more salient within the Party as more and more people in places of power insist they can repurpose the Tea Party handbook and wield it from the Moral High Ground and do so without collateral damage.
"Matt's really an extremely underrated (and ultra-dry) humorist."
Agreed! He's a funny dude, and a good writer. This column really benefitted from revision and expansion -- the first draft said simply, "I told you so."
I'm so confused. Maybe it's too early in the morning for me or something, but where is the comedy in this post? I liked the article, but at no time did I do any laughing out loud.
I really do not get the sense from the "Climate Left" that they believe there is a desire among the mass public for sweeping climate legislation. While they will often cite issue polls showing their legislation's supposed popularity, that seems more of a supporting justification for why climate legislation should be first on the agenda than the central reasoning. The central reasoning is that the government should have a "moral" commitment to addressing climate change, and in particularly has a moral commitment to younger and future Americans to ensure they will have a hospitable planet in the future (notice how central children are to their campaign). I happen to agree with this reasoning, but the progressives often treat this line of reasoning as self-evident and not based on a series of assumptions baked into their specific worldview, so they neglect the need to convince the mass public to share their worldview. Also, as someone who learned about the greenhouse effect at a young age, I have developed an intuitive understanding on the connections between carbon emissions and climate change, but it is actually quite complex and not very intuitive, and I think educated elites who have been steeped in this world for a long time just have lost a sense of how much all of this just does not register with the average person.
A general problem that plagues the left is that they all believe that the government has a "moral" responsibility to address various ills that plague society (climate change, poverty, racism, lack of healthcare coverage, gun violence, income inequality, etc.), so when it comes time to try and prioritize campaign and legislative issues, they fight over whose issue deserves the highest "moral" priority, which essentially becomes a religious debate divorced from political realities. This view of the government's "moral" obligations is treated as self-evident in progressive circles, as if you are an inherently shitty person if you don't subscribe to it, but I would like to see some writing outlining where precisely this view of "morality" comes from, especially in a left that is increasingly secular.
Two words: cancel culture. When you live in an ideological bubble and silence out any possibility for debate even within your own camp the most basic doubts, indeed not even doubts, just pointing out of factual errors, will inevitably be missed. People seem to forget that the strongest case for free speech was based on a very simple and, I should think, self-evident premise: no one is infallible.
I think the thing that most Bernie folks never truly got about Sanders (though MY clearly gets) is that Bernie Sanders is clearly bullshitting when he says he "believes" that Medicare For All or the Green New Deal can pass...
It's clear that others, like AOC, get this (remember she basically said the quiet part out loud before Nevada?) but there are some folks who just completely miss the wink AND the nod that Sanders is doing...and ultimately...that's what ends up sinking so many of these movements in the long term. A lack of expectation management just burns people out very quickly....as you perpetually seem like you are losing BIG time if you compare gains to asks....
If you confronted them about how unpopular many of their proposals are I think many will admit that this is true, but that's different from acting as if it's true. What MY is trying to help them realize is that many of their actions don't match reality. Yelling at Manchin over his beliefs that are politically popular is counter productive in that framing.
But I agree that they see this in a moral framework and you can't dissuade people about a good vs evil subject by using practicality arguments.
I think it’s also compounded by the fact that there is alignment in the “feels good” and “is financially beneficial / clout increasing” for them to indulge and there is quite a lot of money / funding at stake these days….
Having a moral commitment to a livable planet in the future is great so long as you advocate for policies that will actually do that at least cost: a tax on net CO2 and methane emissions.
>>This struck me as such an unbelievably weird bank-shot theory of change that I mostly believed the guy was just BSing to get me to stop complaining. But the fact is, that’s almost exactly what happened, so it’s possible this guy is the Kwisatz Haderach and everything went according to plan.<<
I actually just finished the first Dune book. I had many folks recommend it to me, but I counted MY’s Dune references as among my recommendation points. I’ll definitely continue the series.
Mild and highly subjective warning: Messiah is, IMO, the least engaging of the bunch (other than Chapterhouse, which was not my cup of tea). There's some cool stuff in it and it sets up the later books but I found the ratio of cool stuff to quality of writing to book length to make it a (relative) slog compared to the original, Children, God Emperor or Heretics (although admittedly by the standards of the Dune novels Heretics is practically a pulp adventure).
Dune Messiah is also a great book. Children of Dune is definitely worth reading. The others are all pretty terrible. I read them because Dune was so great and I kept hoping that some of that greatness would appear again, but by the last book I was only reading because I had already invested in the first 5. Nothing remotely redeeming about them. Don't torture yourself, stop after Children of Dune. Then go read Rendezvous with Rama or Foundation or Starship Troopers or Ringworld.
>>In this case, I think Democrats may actually benefit politically from passing the bill because it would give the party license to stop talking about climate change for a year or three. <<
This this this. I hadn't thought about this before, but this would be so welcome. Climate is both the most important political challenge we face and the one most needing depoliticizing. It needs investment and subsidies -- which the people will never rise against -- as well as NRC reform, easier transmission line permitting, lots of actions on the state and local level, and the like. But if we could keep it out of the national political arena? Awesome! Let the Secret Congress do its occasional thing and otherwise let's move on to the next great existential debate.
On the other hand . . . I read this: "Politically, now that they’ve done a Big Important Substantive Thing on climate" and I scream in anguish. It hasn't come close to passing yet! It's not law! I imagine my Jewish mother turning her head, spitting and going "Tfoo tfoo tfoo." Matt, you are just begging for the kinehora; please stop.
I’m glad that Matt finally came out of the closet and said Dems should talk less about climate. His timing is curious. The IRA has yet to pass and there are still more points of friction (SALT, Sinema’s affinity for big pharma) than spare Democratic votes. Matt was looking for an excuse to embrace a stance that dare not speak its name in liberal bubbles. He is a mix of populist pragmatism and elite caution.
Accordingly Matt has yet to go full populist. Us folk in suburban Georgia don’t give a flying fuck about transit. It will never get me from Peachtree City to McDonough. The BIP may have passed, but state route 20 still has an at grade crossing of the Norfolk Southern mainline and there are no plans to fix this. There are still too few ways to cross I-75 and this crap costs me an hour or more every week. My wife loses 5 or 10 minutes a day because there is no overpass at the junction of State Routes 54 and 74. I hope the coastal elites who run the Democratic party will delude themselves into thinking we’ll all drive EVs in ten years and actually build first class roads. Transit is a niche issue for urbanites and should get no more than 15% of the infrastructure pie.
If you think the US doesn't have first class roads, by and large, you've literally never been anywhere else.
Germany and Japan look decent only because they make the alternatives so functional that most people don't even have to drive daily, not because the road infrastructure is better or more comprehensive.
It's just not possible to build enough roads for everyone to drive everywhere all the time with no delays in any reasonably populated metropolitan region.
Now, specific projects to improve real bottlenecks, fine. The two you mention are probably sensible in a location with rapidly growing population.
But to think that I could, for instance, double-deck I-76 in Philadelphia (a perennial favorite) is just ludicrous. I-476 was widened to 6 lanes between the main northwestern suburban interchange and I-76 in 2017; traffic delays at peak hours are now up to nearly what they were when that project was started, and the region is still growing rapidly.
Twenty billion, well spent, without these stupid environmental impact studies and other bullshit, would greatly enhance Philly’s infrastructure for generations.
On the roadway side, I could conduct a systemic review of all the major thoroughfares and force the counties to remove a bunch of traffic lights, turning side streets back into side streets and improving flow on major arterials, for a few hundred million at most. Residential communities do not need signals and speed bumps, they need no signals so people don't short-cut.
The major needed improvements to I-95 are done or in progress, but a 1-2 billion investment in US-1 would let me push the existing at-grade segments, which are deathtraps, mostly below or above grade, at least as far north as PA-73. I could probably improve design on PA-611/Broad Street and reallocate signal priority to allow it to accommodate much more commuter traffic for a relative pittance.
There are at least 20 major bridge spans in need of replacement, that I could get done for less than a billion if the bullshit were cut and the state or county had the staffing and capacity to do good design in-house.
I could conduct a complete lead survey of all public water supplies in the city and replace all the offending lines for less than a billion as well, with money left over to conduct proper surveillance testing in private residences too.
On the transit side, a fraction of that money, and the right to gut SEPTA's makework programs and legacy labor costs, would allow me to run the Regional Rail system at higher frequency, improve signaling at several chokepoints, and expand parking at all suburban Regional Rail stations. If you couple that with better Center City and University City bus service, rail commuting to and from the city becomes a compelling alternative to roads. Unlike Atlanta we're an old, northeastern city with miserable roadway infrastructure and major space constraints. I actually can run a commuter rail service good enough to suck folks off of I-95 and I-76.
That same bit of signaling and some automation on the trainsets would allow me to run an S-Bahn service within city limits on the same rail rights of way, improving intra-city transport markedly.
That allows us to shuffle bus service around feeding those high-frequency rail corridors instead of long, slow, meandering cross-city routes. The existing couple trolley lines can be given dedicated right of way and priority signaling to avoid those roads being deathtraps and improve service.
OR...
I could blow it all double-decking the length of I-76 between I-476 and the Walt Whitman Bridge. I'm not kidding; at globally competitive prices for urban viaduct systems, it would cost most of that $20 billion just to do that, alone.
I don’t know what building a viaduct costs. I do know that the Victorians built huge tunnels for sums that, even adjusting for inflation, are bargains. Technology should make moving earth cheaper.
In 1845, the Brits completed a three mile, trans pennine tunnel for £200k, which equates to around $27M today. They didn’t have power tools! I’m not an expert on building, but nothing should cost more in real terms today than 177 years ago.
The one reality that underpins my industry is that absolutely *everything* costs vastly more in real terms than it did 177 years ago. Or 77. Or 27.
No one can fix it, because the technology doesn't seem to exist to allow site-based construction to stay ahead of Baumol's Cost Disease. The cost of construction workers is driven by what folks could make working in a factory instead. The cost of civil engineering consultancy is driven by what people would make in technology or as manufacturing engineers. But none of the productivity gains of those sectors have filtered down to construction or project delivery.
Don't get me wrong, we've made that much worse by wrapping everything in a layer of red tape six inches think, but don't make the mistake of thinking things will suddenly get cheap if you somehow unwind it, not compared to the shit we did back in 1900.
I've got my opinions on how to break the worst of the abysmal construction productivity trends, but they go far, far beyond "environmental review bad".
That's just the low-hanging fruit, the barbed wire we erected around the hill ourselves. There's still the whole hill left to climb after we tear it back down.
There is one thing which makes everything Christ only knows how much more expensive: all this stuff is in use and the costs of shutting it down for even a day are obscene, so we spend lots of money on doing shit like prefabricating a whole bridge deck adjacent to a toll road, jacking the existing one, rebuilding foundations and supporting piers, then moving the old deck off and dropping the new one in place, with only 4 hours of shutdown permitted.
In that context, direct costs make sense, because opportunity costs are higher.
Philly's whole budget is under 6 billion! The US federal budget is 6 trillion. Guessing that if we just spent 20 trillion well it might enhance the country's infrastructure for generations. Just one slight problem for both of those...
Spending $20 billion to improve an area with a GDP of $431 billion is equivalent to spending $1.16 trillion to improve an area with a GDP of $25 trillion. Coincidentally, the BIF price tag was $1.2 trillion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrastructure_Investment_and_Jobs_Act).
So, David's proposed investment could be fully paid for if the Philly region received a share of the BIF equal to its fraction of national GDP.
If David meant just the city of Philadelphia should get $20 billion in revenue, then he's being (slightly) unreasonable, but still more reasonable than your comparison suggests.
I presumed in my answer that he was referring to the region.
The thing is, the region has generally good infrastructure. The stuff that everyone, including the suburban residents, complains about is mostly really old shit located in the city that everyone uses just to pass by or through, so a disproportionate amount of the money would be spent within the county limits... but for the benefit of everyone, not just the locals.
The BIF was an additional 550 billion on top of regularly scheduled spending. So cut the 20 billion down to 10. Then when you break out the actual categories, only 20% went to roads. 13% to power infrastructure, 12% to passenger & freight rail, 12% to broadband, 10% to drinking water, 9% to western water storage, 7% to public transit, etc.
He's welcome to correct me if I'm wrong, but given his focus on roads, I took him to mean 20 billion should be spent on transit. That's a massive jump in spending!
Transit would be 20%+12%+7% = 39%, so $3.9 billion
$3.9 billion to $20 billion is a large difference (although what fraction of "status quo" spending over a decade would it be? That's harder to calculate because that spending it split between feds/state/city/county and not broken down by metro region cleanly), but $20 billion is still much closer to $3.9 billion than it is to $344.8 billion, which is what your comparison was suggesting*
*$20 trillion / $25 trillion GDP = 0.8 * $431 billion Philly metro GDP = $344.8 billion
The US does have first-class roads, all told, but IME the roads in Spain and Sweden are better. Spain and Sweden have better public transit, too - these things are not mutually exclusive!
The problem is that continued road investment just encourages further development along those road corridors and bakes in unsustainable urban growth patterns. It encourages more people like you to try to live in Peachtree City and work in McDonough, instead of making an effort to live closer to your job. Continued road expansion creates the illusion that people can live and work wherever they want with no tradeoffs, when those tradeoffs will just show up further down the line. I get that the average American wants to live and work wherever they want with no lifestyle or social tradeoffs, but we can't keep pretending that those tradeoffs don't exist.
We have been building suburbs now for over 70 years, I'm pretty sure we've demonstrated that the model is economically sustainable by now.
As for environmental sustainability, if we get abundant clean energy, who cares if we use slightly more of it living in suburbs? And if we don't get abundant clean energy, there is no plan B (because geo-engineering is still outside the Overton window).
I really wish Matt would have taken my question last week on Chuck Marohn and this frankly stupid idea that infrastructure is a ticking time bomb that is going financially ruin suburban and rural communities. I feel like there has been at least one person parroting this talking point in the comments everyday for weeks and it's driving me nuts.
I'm very curious where the gap is between Strong Towns rhetoric and the reality on the ground. The Strong Towns argument of "moar taxable $ per acre, less $ of feet of pipes per person" is pretty solid, but it doesn't seem to matter IRL. My guess is that big cities in the US get their physical-$ savings gobbled up by higher police budgets and/or general public sector bloat and/or unions, but I haven't seen anyone run the real numbers to explain it.
This is a common claim in urbanist circles, and I can never get to the bottom of it.
When I hear "massively", I assume this means we are dealing with large amounts of money as a % of housing costs (at least 20%, say). And when I hear "subsidized", I assume this refers to governmental action that transfers money *to* the suburbs *from* elsewhere (presumably city-cores, since rural areas don't have the GDP to subsidize the much more populous & richer suburbs.
So, adding that together, we'd be talking about:
52% of the American population that is suburban receiving 20% of their housing cost in the form of government transfers from cities.
Speaking as an Alabaman, the traffic situation for like 100 miles surrounding Atlanta is just hellish, and I avoid the vast majority of Georgia entirely, just due to that blight.
It’s amazing what having 2 senators, 5 million people and a large stratum of folks who are too poor to drive much can do for congestion. But yes, Alabama roads rock. Interstate 22 is one of the few ways our infrastructure has actually improved in recent years, it takes 30 minutes off the drive to Memphis. If only y’all would have an 80mph speed limit.
You don't care about transit, because transit is not useful to you, personally. I didn't know where Peachtree City and McDonough are in relation to Atlanta, so I just looked it up. And...yeah, transit is probably never going to reliably get you between those two places. Fair enough.
But if the Atlanta area had a reliable regional rail network maybe it could get you to Atlanta. Or to (picking some random-places on a line between Peachtree City and Atlanta) the airport or College Park or Riverdale or East Point. And there are many, many people who live somewhat closer to Atlanta who may find it useful even if you don't. Probably there would be even more of them if they built TOD near the train stations (Matt has written very persuasively about how good urban living is under-supplied relative to demand in the US, even if most people don't want to live that way, and I think he's correct).
My point is, transit is only a "nice issue for urbanites" because the US has decided that it is rather than actually try to make it work. There are millions upon millions of Americans in cities and older suburbs who would use transit regularly if it was useful to them. You might not be one of them, and that's fine, but that doesn't mean they're insignificant. The US needs to invest in transit *and* learn how to build it effectively and run it efficiently (far as I can tell, the climate left is utterly uninterested in the last two; I suppose cost-effectiveness and efficiency just reek of evil capitalism).
You don't have to be interested in this, and I'm not one of those liberals who thinks suburbs and cars are evil, but the US would be a better place is more of it had actually-useful public transit. And it's perfectly doable, if we wanted to get serious about doing it.
I actually did ride MARTA when i lived in midtown Atlanta and worked for the US Court of Appeals, which is downtown. But the second I moved to East Atlanta, where I was only 4 miles from
work, transit wasn’t viable. I would have had to walk 0.4 miles to a bus stop, take a bus that runs every 20 minutes and connect to a train that runs every 15 minutes. Then I would have had to walk three more blocks. It would have taken almost an hour. I could have gotten to work faster on a bike if it weren’t dangerous
There is alot of low hanging transit fruit. It wouldn’t cost much to run trains more often on marta tracks. It wouldn’t cost much to increase bus frequency. Making buses nice enough that middle class people will ride them is worthwhile. But most transit fans want to build shiny new things despite the fact that constructing new lines is massively expensive.
The issue is that there isn't some great suburban or exurban constituency crying out for more mass transit.
So it is largely restricted to the urban/urbanite populations.
And even if there were such a constituency in a given area, they can vote and raise funds and implement it at the state and local level. The federal govt only needs to be involved for interstate connections.
That being said, I think that more transit in more densely populated areas would definitely be nice.
Not really - any space that opens up on congested roads is immediately filled with drivers who had been staying in-neighborhood for discretionary trips because of traffic.
Transit improves the choices of people who want to go places but don't like being stuck in traffic. But it doesn't really reduce traffic to any significant degree.
The strong form of the induced demand argument posits an infinite propensity to drive places if only the roads exist. However, I don’t want to spend all my waking hours driving nor do any of my friends. There is certainly some induced demand when you build new roads, but also some reduction of congestion. Calculating the relative proportions would take hard, empirical work
Yeah, I think that's right. I definitely object to the kind of self-serving induced demand argument that transit advocates use to say that roads and lanes are never worthwhile. And I especially object to their idea that if it doesn't reduce congestion then it's not valuable - increasing people's ability to do things they want is valuable whether or not they're experiencing congestion while doing it!
But I think the claim I am comfortable making is that if a roadway is congested enough that the congestion is a significant impact on travel time, then for precisely the reason that you mention (i.e., that people want to limit the amount of time they spend driving), a decrease in the difficulty of driving will lead to an increase in the distance people are driving.
A further refinement is possible without difficult empirical work. Errand and leisure driving is responsive to congestion in the short term. If traffic sucks, but amazon and recreate l near home. Commuting is extremely inelastic in the short term (only alternative is quitting your job) and fairly inelastic in the medium term— getting a new job or living closer to downtown can involve wrenching lifestyle changes. Some people will choose to make ridiculously long commutes if there isn’t traffic, I wonder how large that population is.
“That said, the investment and justice parts of the three-legged stool basically died on the vine. What we ended up with in the IRA is closer to a pure investment-driven approach”
Is the first sentence supposed to say “standards and justice”?
“If passed the IRA would provide major incentives to produce clean energy and reduce pollution in low-income and disadvantaged communities. The act would provide tax breaks for up to 3.6 gigawatts of solar and wind generating capacity, enough to power millions of homes, in low-income communities. IRA § 13103. The act also allocates $4.75 billion to states to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, with a focus on disadvantaged communities. IRA § 60114. The act would also allocate hundreds of millions of dollars specifically to tribal communities across the U.S. IRA §§ 80001–04.
“Disadvantaged communities would also benefit from over $3 billion in funding for the Federal Highway Administration for programs to improve transportation access, reconnect low-income areas to their neighbors, and reduce the negative impacts of transportation hubs. IRA § 60501. The IRA would also provide $3 billion to community non-profit organizations to reduce pollution, address toxic contamination, monitor local pollution levels, and invest in climate resiliency projects. IRA § 60201. The Department of Housing and Urban Development would also receive $1 billion to improve the climate resilience and electrification projects in public housing.”
It’s unclear to me what the point is of prioritizing placement of wind and solar projects in low-income and tribal communities rather than in windy and sunny locations. Maybe one of the experts here can explain how that maximizes GHG reduction.
The Federal Highway Administration part seems not to be closely connected to climate change.
I guess none of that is surprising. Despite the lofty goals the reality is that it’s likely to be a big subsidy to non-profits and consultants more than anything else.
This is a good bill and I am a big fan of the Manchin congress’s work in the past year.
One interesting angle to all of these bills is that the ‘process’ Politico-style stories never mention the White House or POTUS being involved in negotiations. Is Biden just really good at keeping his name out of the press? Is he trying to give Congress the flexibility to compromise without getting in the way? Is he just busy? Feels like a big departure from Obama & Trump.
Manchin says Biden wasn't involved. I think if there's one thing Biden knows, it's how negotiations in the Senate are supposed to take place, and how that shapes the President's role. Sometimes the best way to do something is to do nothing.
What specifically did Summers say? According to WaPo,
“The two men spoke this week, and Manchin listened as Summers talked in detail about why Democrats’ proposed economic package — including its energy provisions — would not lead to higher prices.”
That’s not different from what the Wharton economists said.
I think something that is very deeply ingrained in the Democratic political psyche is that tangible marketing of the things the government is doing for you is very critical to political success in the future.
This is evident across the entire issue space... a hugely popular theory about the problems with the Obama stimulus is the Social Security tax cut was a bad idea because it was not broadly marketed. Student loan stuff is very popular under the perception that "doing something" for young people (something with a visible and financial impact) is key to retaining their support. The desire for something very visible was also key with how prominent the various relief checks were in the discussion of pandemic aid.
It isn't exactly "checks" but the Green New Deal is a similar theory that you can essentially buy off a huge array of interest groups and voters with various targeted programs (re-training/aid funds for affected fossil fuel workers, various programs targeted at underprivileged folks, and a huge expansion of the social safety net/possible jobs guarantee for everyone).
Ultimately though I think the last two years of polling/politics doesn't really support this theory of the case... people did not really care that much about the relief checks. And frankly the general populace was more skeptical of the Child Tax Credits, etc. than wonks were. The checks/letters were super visible with Trump or Biden's name on them but did not move the needle (as a side note I remember people saying putting Trump's name on the first relief check was somewhere between Machiavellian genius and dirty politics, but it really didn't do anything).
I think it really debunks the theory that directly targeted programs at particular constituencies will create any political impact with those constituencies...
Basically I think the thing is any policy action you do will create a political backlash. You should try to do the best you can while you are in power, but it is unrealistic to think that a great/popular policy will create NEW popularity that you can use for a snowballing "GREEN NEW DEAL" type agenda.
>> Do Democrats want to emphasize the (true) idea that the IRA should moderately reduce inflationary pressures in the economy, or do they want to emphasize the (also true) idea that it’s the most important climate legislation in history? <<
Surely the correct answer is (c), emphasize the bipartisan infrastructure bill.
Matt during the Obama administration: "The Obama administration is making a huge mistake by preemptively compromising because it makes their compromise look like the left wing position."
Matt in 2021: "Biden should preemptively compromise because that's moderate and polls well."
*Biden does not preemptively compromise. Instead he starts with strong left positions, eventually takes the best compromise he can get, and passes several pieces of massively important legislation that Matt and most people like.*
Matt in 2022: "Biden got lucky. He should have gotten here by preemptively compromising and waiting for conservatives to be reasonable."
It's basically the Charles Barkley argument about the Golden State Warriors shooting 3s.
What Dsep said. At the end of the day under Biden we’re getting a staggering number of laws passed in congress, both partisan and especially bipartisan. It’s especially impressive considering his paper thin margins. He deserves credit for that and how he achieves it is a secondary question. If being humbler than previous presidents and letting. congress sort itself out is what works then all for the better it just proves he is wiser than his predecessors.
I'm not sure if this is meant to be ironic or not, but feel free to substitute "The Biden Administration" or "the Biden legislative strategy" in place of "Biden."
The Green New Deal vision of free water and electricity never made sense to me...
If you want people to conserve water and electricity, you make them pay based on their rate of consumption. If you want them to waste water and waste electricity, you give it to them for free.
Poor people want free stuff. Bread and circuses are as old as political history.
It's pretty amazing that the Roman Empire lasted for as long as it did while the emperors were at the mercy of crowds that contributed very little to the empire's economy (agriculture) or military, but in the case of Constantinople the benefits of centering the government in an impregnable city outweighed the costs of having to put up with the rabble (and the rabble on net contributed luxury goods or services that made it easier to recruit able administrators into the government and made it easier to get the dangerous nobles to hang out where the emperors could keep an eye on them).
But surely in the medium term, rabble is endogenous. No free food => less rabble.
The history of Constantinople ran this experiment. The Arab conquest of Egypt in the 640s forced the emperor to end the grain dole, which substantially reduced the city's population in general and its population of unemployed layabouts in particular.
However, a few centuries later with the increase in Anatolian prosperity, crowds in Constantinople were again in a position to overthrow emperors they didn't like, as they showed in 1042 with Michael V (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_V_Kalaphates).
Thanks. Nice point. Were the 1042 crowds on the dole?
They certainly weren't on anything like the old Roman free bread dole or the early Constantinople free bread dole. Both of those required controlling North Africa and/or Egypt to have a large enough agricultural surplus to burn.
Some portion of the crowd was probably being supported by church charities, but it wasn't anything like the old Rome c.300 A.D. situation where half the city receives all its food for free and doesn't work.
In this country it's the rich that get free stuff
Free electricity is a recipe for millions of crypto miners.
ideally, we would figure out how to make electricity in a manner that is both clean and cheap. Hopefully it could even be done for such a low price that the dead weight losses from monitoring individual usage and collection of per-kilowatt hour monthly bills would would be larger than the efficiency gains of metering. One could even call this idealized state of energy abundance 'too cheap to meter'
This assumes people are rational consumers of their utility bills, which they aren’t if they can’t control their spending (don’t know where the electrical fault in their house is using all the power), don’t know they’re being charged (because they put everything on autopay and don’t read bills), and have mandatory spending (since you need water and power to live).
The problem with making everything free is that you still have to pay for it, and if it’s paid by “the government” then “the government” might just decide to stop paying for it. Having multiple funding sources is a good reason to charge customers, but it doesn’t mean recovering all costs from them and per-usage billing is the only way to go.
I really want an inside-the-house meter that shows me the current rate of usage, not the total usage this month. If there was just a display in the kitchen that I would occasionally glance at and see it's going at 137 when the washing machine is running, and 203 if both the washing machine and dishwasher are going, and that turning on the air conditioner just puts it to 207 (or whatever) then I'd have a much clearer sense of which appliances are the ones to conserve and which ones don't matter. (I have a sneaking suspicion that the tea kettle uses more than all the others combined.)
There are at least a dozen systems like that on the market. I have https://theenergydetective.com, but I wouldn't recommend it in 2022; there are more modern and better systems. Google "energy usage monitor" and do a little research to figure out what would work well for you. The best (IMO) systems put ammeter clamps on every circuit in the house and give you a pretty detailed view of what your usage is on a per-circuit basis. I'm a little skeptical of the ones that promise to use AI to deduce the identities and characteristics of specific devices by monitoring aggregate power usage, but I haven't read a lot of detailed reviews.
(After doing a little Googling myself, I like the looks of https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08CJGPHL9, but that's based on about two minutes of research.)
When I looked up those systems a while ago, they didn’t come with clamps for “every circuit”, instead just going on the main line and claiming they’d figure everything out with AI. Not sure why it was designed like that, but it was hard to believe it’d work.
I had an adjunct instructor in college that was working on a similar system. Most major appliances have a unique load and response cycle that makes them relatively easy to identify, and isolating the A/C wave functions associated with each device isn't particularly difficult if you have enough data.
There’s a business opportunity in your idea but, knowing me, someone thunk it up 20 years ago
I can't speak to the specific implementation of an in-house meter, but I have a fair amount of experience both personally (through acquaintances) and professionally with people in this space and, yes, reducing peak-rate power usage / use of smart meters and the adjustment of power provision to scheduling-tolerant appliance (e.g. washing machines) is very much a problem that capitalism puts a lot of effort into addressing.
Electricity markets are shockingly sophisticated (essentially instantaneous price changes) and very, very interesting in their own right.
Sense.com does all that.
https://www.amazon.com/Emporia-Monitor-Circuit-Electricity-Metering/dp/B08CJGPHL9/ref=dp_prsubs_1
it’s not hard to look up the wattage of different appliances and calculate the number of kilowatt hours they generate
But who ever looks anything like that up, and remembers it when they're actually using it? A dashboard you actually see on a regular basis would make it much clearer.
PG&E does have dashboards like that with hourly breakdowns, though I think the data is a day or two delayed.
There’s also various smart systems it hooks up to like OhmConnect that will turn off your lights randomly saying their power is dirty right now. Even though I’m on a “100% renewables” plan. And the times it does this aren’t related to the peak/off peak times either.
I like the dashboard... randomly turning off my lights sounds less good.
That's my concern about some of the "smart meter" stuff.
After the giant Texas freeze last year I wanted to see if we had any leaks in our water system before the family came back to the house.
So I turned on the water supply, made sure everything was off in the house and then watched the meter, and checked it again like 30 minutes to an hour later.
A water meter, electricity meter, gas meter that I could see real-time info for could all have uses for us.
And yet.... that's more work than I care to do and also my A/C isn't continuously on, depends on cooling.
Or my brother just installed a variable A/C that instead of going on/off goes gradually higher/lower (so it's "on" more of the time but for lower energy - supposedly a lot better). What's the usage of that?
I can't speak for everybody, but where I live (Montana), many people (like me, and all immediate family members) have flat rate billing for power, water, or both.
I have literally never heard of a flat fee for someone dealing directly with the utility company. You can run the A/C down to 58 degrees with the windows open and the utility charges you a flat fee? How do they deal with people trying to crypto-mine all day or something?
Where I live (Alabama) it is pay per usage, but I have levelized billing – so my bill is the same every month except for adjustments over time based on my average usage. But I still pay based on power used and always have.
In Sacramento we just upgraded meters to leave flat rate water billing. Used to be based on the number of bedrooms in the structure. It was obviously a model that made no sense in a state dealing with drought.
Hi fellow Sacramentan! I don’t live there anymore, but grew up there…
For a long time, Chicago only had flat-rate billing for water. Considering that it's next to one of the world's largest freshwater lakes, they didn't have much pressure to conserve. They're nudging people towards using meters now --- with some progress.
"If your home has a meter, you pay based on your actual use of water. But 52% of single-family homes and 42% of two-flats in Chicago do not have a meter. In those cases, the city charges a fee based on the building width and other building features—a rough estimate that may or may not be related to actual water usage."
https://www.chicagobusiness.com/equity/inequity-built-chicagos-inefficient-and-unfair-water-bills
Basically the same thing. A single monthly fee for 12 months. They check a few times a year to confirm I'm not running a grow operation or cryptomining. The next year's rate is based on past performance; I've had two rate increases and two decreases.
I've never heard of such a thing. But either way your rate is based on past performance (so you still have incentives to reduce consumption).
Really? Wow. I’ve never heard of that. I suppose it comes from a vast surplus of those things. Don’t count on it lasting.
Really? Wow. I’ve never heard of that. I suppose it comes from a vast surplus of those things. Don’t count on it lasting.
Electricity isn’t pay per use here, it’s pay per on peak use, less off peak - which is designed to be rational but hard to comply with now that we’re working from home. And then it goes up even if you don’t use more, because CPUC/PG&E have to pay for more line maintenance to stop forest fires; can’t do much about that.
As for water, it doesn’t matter how much you save because all the water in the state is being used by almond farms and nobody tells you that your almond milk bill is actually the water price signal and the water bill isn’t.
Basically what you're saying on energy is that they have two different prices based on whether it's during peak use hours or not. But you're still paying based on your consumption. I think people understand that if they run their AC on full blast with the windows open that they'll pay more than someone who doesn't.
For water, cities were able to bring consumption down by around a quarter during the last drought. And sure, agriculture water policy in California is bad and needs to be reformed. But that doesn't mean that there isn't capacity among people to decrease usage if the need be.
If farmer pay the same as urban consumers per cubic food, le them raise almonds. IF
Electricity is still pay per use in Northern California, they've just layered on top of that peak/off-peak marginal pricing.
Even so, very few places do the peak/off-peak thing. Almost everywhere, it's pay per use with an increasing marginal price that tops out somewhere around $0.10 per kwh.
And realistically, all this rate design stuff is much more important to commercial and industrial uses of electricity who do pay attention and also show more flexibility on the consumption side.
>>>The punchline is that that presidential visit got vetoed because other factions in the White House warned that environmental groups wouldn’t like the president touting a facility that used natural gas as green.<<<
To echo Matt, I "like this president," too, but, if I have one gripe, it's that he doesn't have the killer instincts of some of his predecessors. He's too cautious. He should have been able to see the wisdom of visiting a steel mill (the dude's originally from NE Pennsylvania!). In word, he should be able to *triangulate* a bit more. What's the left going to do, support AOC in a 2024 primary challenge?
Young ppl could choose to stay home and not vote.
They're going to stay home and not vote anyway. If there is one thing I'm convinced of, its that chasing after the "youth vote" at the expense of any other votes is foolhardy.
they mostly do anyway, no matter what you promise them. Just ask Bernie Sanders circa the 2020 Primary... and yet, we still obsess over these narratives?
they’ll be too afraid of Trump and/or becoming handmaids.
Have you met many teenagers?
Rise, Dark Brandon. Crush all opposition and do centrist stuff! 🙏
I appreciate Biden's low-key attitude. Slow and boring, just the way I like it. Tragically however I am not the only citizen who votes in presidential elections.
My wife and I can fairly be called Sanders Democrats, but we've talked repeatedly during the past 2 years about whether we're becoming more conservative, as progressive tactics have seemed repeatedly unwise. I like to say it's just that the left has gotten dumber, but not sure. I think MY is too generous to the climate left here. They're invested in a Howard Zinn picture of the progressive masses thwarted by Snidely Whiplash elites and often don't know or care what working-class people appear to think, and their view that sitting in at Nancy Pelosi's office, or whatever, produces change on the climate issue is unfalsifiable to them. (My local branch of 360.org last year decided the way to become relevant and win support for action on the climate was to jump on the Defund the Police bandwagon. How is that for smart?) Now the Green New Deal's strategic logic isn't hard to understand. Its framers are clear about it. They know w-c Americans aren't fired up about climate and are leery of a politics of limits. So the GND promises a huge suite of social benefits that will win the allegiance of those Americans. I don’t think that's about to work, but that's the idea.
The choice to portray an average American as a young, childless humanities graduate was so revealing, and not in the way its author hoped.
The casual mention of "oral history projects" made me laugh out loud, especially when grouped with actually useful jobs in clean energy and climate mitigation.
I imagined a job seeker being offered a position as a Wind Farm Technician (Dirty Jobs featured that in an episode - it involves a lot of climbing and the acrophobic need not apply) and saying, “That’s not for me. How about something in oral history?”
That's fine by me, all those out of work coal plant operators will need jobs. Problem is most of those wind farm technician jobs don't pay half what the coal plant operators were making.
Yup, I came to make fun of the same thing. I want to do an oral history about people who do oral histories on the government dime. My qualification is that I have an unlimited ability to hide mirth, save it for later, laugh when I’m alone.
The WPA had a lot of oral history projects, so I imagine that's what it was intended to hearken back to.
The WPA also was set against a backdrop of an elderly population who had lived through things like the Civil War and 20-30% of whom were illiterate.
To say that we should spend money on a similar program now is... odd. Facebook has us covered, mostly moreso than we would really prefer, lol.
Also, the New Deal was implemented at a time of mass unemployment where people just needed a job, any job. In the "Green New Deal" scenario where the government is attempting to reorient the entire economy around zero-carbon infrastructure, promoting "oral history" jobs seems a little misplaced in terms of priorities.
Bold of you to offer even the most tepid of charitable interpretations in a community that is more obsessed with dunking on the humanities than honestly engaging with an argument.
I wouldn’t characterize it as “the community”
I've been here long enough to know how much the majority of regular posters love to vent their frustrations by dumping on any jobs or interests that are coded as "progressive."
oh man it killed me
"They're invested in a Howard Zinn picture of the progressive masses thwarted by Snidely Whiplash elites"
I haven't read Zinn, but I've noticed that with all the talk about us living in a "Second Gilded Age" there is an investment among progressives in pretending that the same dynamics of wealth and political power of the original Gilded Age are still at play. This is, in part, due to the progressive movement being a victim of its own success. By giving average (middle-class) Americans a direct material stake in the status quo it has become politically more difficult to enact further progressive change. In this case, while wealthy executives disproportionately benefit and poor people are disproportionately harmed by continued carbon emissions, the real obstacle is the large middle class who are invested in a lifestyle that relies on heavy carbon emissions. Convincing them to change to lower-carbon lifestyle whether through social persuasion or (more likely) financial incentives is the ultimate goal.
This is a dynamic I've struggled with as an urbanist. Do average middle-class Americans genuinely prefer to live to live in large lot single-family-only neighborhoods, or have they been "conditioned"** by the government and car companies into believing this is the "correct" way to live? (Edit: The latter is a narrative I've seen pop up within urbanist circles. It is not something I seriously believe). Whatever the reason, you're certainly not going to convince anybody by telling them they've just been conditioned to accept their current lifestyle. Given that so many Americans are willing to spend 2+ hours a day in their car just so they can have a private backyard, I sometimes wonder if we're just genuinely insane as a culture.
** Edit: I originally used the word "brainwashed" here, but decided the use of that word was unnecessarily provocative.
I genuinely do like having a private yard to do activities in, like grilling food, having a fire, and hosting groups of friends outside. I also enjoy yardwork. I wouldn't be able to any of these things in an apartment.
There are plenty of urban single-family homes, and even townhomes and duplexes, that have decks, gardens and private yards for gathering. They are just much smaller than you would find in the typical suburb. When I wrote that I wasn't picturing any old outdoor space, but the common type of large suburban backyards intended as play space for children. IMO the expectation that every single-family home should have one of these comes from an outdated "stranger danger" and "helicopter parent" mentality that helps destroy any sense of community in suburban neighborhoods. I think every neighborhood should have a park where all the children can play together, and use the space saved from having smaller yards to build more houses.
(1) There's a big difference between "this yard is shared between several apartments" and "this yard is mine"
(2) Even when "this yard is mine" there are often noise / fire limits on what you can do with it in downtown areas that are more binding than what you can do in a suburb
(3) City noise
I get why the suburban lifestyle would be preferable in those regards. My point was that if the tradeoff is sitting inside a metal box for two hours each day, is it really worth it? (I know work from home changes this dynamic)
You're strawmanning the alternate position here, probably unintentionally.
If you compare housing options available in a city core to ones available +60 minutes (one-way) of commuting further away, you're comparing:
City core commute time ?15 minutes? one way
Suburban commute ?15?+60 = 75 minutes one way
Right off the bat, that's much, much higher than the average commute time in the US (26.4 minutes: https://www.bestplaces.net/transportation/city/texas/houston).
But some people do pick this. Assuming we are holding $ spent on housing+transit+car ownership+car parking constant, they are probably (on average) going from getting:
A 1BR 1 bath apartment in the city with an average size of 600 sq. ft. + expensive parking spot
to
A 4 BR 3 bath 2,500 sq. ft. house in the exurbs with a full 1 acre lot, covered garage, room for an on-property work-shop, garden, vegetable garden, and fence.
So that commute is buying you a lot of extra housing (room for a family), not just less noise and more external space.
Alternatively, if you hold housing size constant (say you only need 2BR 1 bath but you need it in both places since you have 1 kid), the housing unit costs 2x as much in the downtown as it does in an inner-ring suburb, so spending 60 (not 120) extra minutes commuting each day is a pretty easy sell to go from spending 40% of family income on housing to 20%.
To summarize:
(1) Commuting times are much shorter than you think
(2) Commuting buys much more space, much more cheaply than living in the downtown
(3) Therefore, people's preferences for "the suburban lifestyle" are much easier to explain than you think
You seem to be arguing that people who live in single family homes on large lots in suburban developments are making their lives worse and have chosen to do so because of brainwashing/conditioning and false fears of stranger danger. You muse that we must collectively be insane to make the choice to live this way. It seems a little condescending, not to say hostile to me.
Isn't it more likely that we've found a way to live that works reasonably well for us, all facts and irrational preferences considered, just as inner city urbanists have found what works for them.
My point was that I have been prone to the same ideological blindspots as the Green New Deal advocates are. I was actually not making a direct argument for that line of thinking. I guess I could've made that more clear.
Your ideological blindspot on this is very large, as evidenced by the fact that (1) you are massively over-estimating average commute times and (2) you are assuming people are paying those commute times just to have a yard, when those yards are attached to housing units that are much less expensive per interior-sq.-ft., per-BR, and per-bath than downtown core housing units.
Choices GIVEN a) restriction on urban housing supply and b) no congestion tax/road user charges.
why do you think suburbs equates "stranger danger" mentality? From my experience this mentality is far more common in cities than in (rich) suburbs. It is in the latter that people don't lock their doors and say hello to you in the streets even if they don't know you, and often people don't even fence their yards and lawns. In the city you're taught to ignore strangers in the street and don't know your next door neighbor. There are pros and cons to both styles of living but let's not idealize or demonize either, or delude ourselves to thinking either is "natural". Both are equally modern and living in either style is equally something we are socially "conditioned" to do.
I'm 100% with you on parks >> yards, btw. Agglomerate 100 yards into one decent-sized park and that's a very clear win for kids, who really like having room to run / play catch / soccer / hide & seek
Among the reasons I love my neighborhood is that I have a reasonably private 1/8th of an acre because I'm on the end of a row, but also have one of the largest urban parks in the country right down the street in one direction and a well-equipped playground right down the street in the other. Not to mention bus access to downtown, ample parking, supermarket down the street, and easy highway access...
I think a lot of people genuinely prefer this (I'm not one of them, I'm also an urbanist and don't want to drive or do yard work). But I wouldn't say "brainwashed," I think it's more a combination of what people have grown up with/become accustomed to, and the (unsustainable) subsidization of outward growth (see, eg, Strong Towns).
Over time, I think the "suburban retrofit" approach will convert more people to the "walkability is good, actually" side. The aging of the population will also probably move the needle: it's bad to be isolated in a huge house when you're old and shouldn't be driving. But change on the ground will take time.
FTR, I would not ordinarily be inclined to use the word "brainwashed", I was simply using it here as a point of rhetorical contrast. Thinking about it now I should've used the word "conditioned" instead.
I would just call the widespread preference for suburban SFHs small-c conservatism. Most people already live that way, are comfortable with their circumstances, don't want them to change, and if they move will opt for the same type of home they already like. Redlining, auto advertising, white flight, unsustainable subsidization of outward growth and other unsavory things may have helped create the current situation. But people now are mostly just sticking with what they know, which seems like what you should expect in an affluent society where most people are content with their lives.
The other dynamic you see is young people who move into urban areas then leave for the suburbs after starting families. I don't think that choice is generally made on the basis of believing children can only be properly raised in certain types of houses, but just the reality that kids take up space and the same amount of money can get you more of it in the suburbs than in desirable urban neighborhoods. Also the public schools are generally considered better. But these are policy problems, not the result of people being conditioned to think they must live in the suburbs.
I agree with all of these points, but I can't help but think that given houses have only been getting bigger even as average family sizes have been getting smaller, that parents have been oversold on the amount of space that is necessary to raise a family. Maybe they're just following the general American "bigger is better" instinct instead of the wishes of any particular interest group, but that instinct is still culturally conditioned to an extent.
I hear you. One of the most stimulating perspectives MY has offered is his contrarian (for liberals) take on energy -- pushing energy abundance rather than lesser energy consumption. The latter idea is of course ingrained in environmentalism and it appeals to me personally, but I think the majority of Americans see real problems in trying to do that, far beyond the ranks of those who simply scorn conservation a la Dick Cheney or who envision a lavish lifestyle for themselves. Clearly much of America isn't built right now for less energy consumption, and the political barriers to addressing this are formidable. However, when Democrats have unified control of state governments they are doing meaningful things. But this is hard for climate activists to wrap their heads around. They're used to seeing the political elites as their enemies, whereas I think MY is right that Democratic elites are way ahead of the public in general on this, so the logical course for climate activists is to be loyal Democrats and try to get as many of them as possible elected. That's not how climate activists are built. This is part of a more general failure by progressives to recognize how far they've won the ideological war in the Democratic Party since the turn of the century and how their strategy and tactics ought to evolve accordingly, but that's a bigger story, and the dynamics are most acute on the climate issue.
It's overwhelmingly a genuine preference driven by the needs and wants of the family. It's nothing like brainwashing/conditioning in my view. Also, it's increasingly attactive to add rooftop solar and fully electrify a suburban family home -- much easier than the collective action needed to get to near-zero GHG in an urban condo. The key issue / question is abundance of low-GHG or zero GHG electricity.
Yeah, I kinda think the modal American actually wants to live in a streetcar suburb, more or less.
(Or maybe I'm just projecting my preferences onto others. I live in a streetcar suburb and quite like it.)
This.
"Location, Location, Location."
The bold techno-futuristic vision of America's cities in 2100 involve building multiple layers of suburbs directly on top of eachother in the downtown core, with artificial skies of LED panels and UV lights so you get the benefits of real sunlight at every layer.
The other X factor besides "you became more conservative" and "the left become dumber" might be "we became way way way more supply constrained."
The "you get a car and you get a car and you get a car" aspect of GND eco-socialism sounds _just absolutely dumb_ right now. But we're living in a world where there's supply chain constraints on everything, everything's more expensive, and spending to increase demand feels like kicking over a gas can while the house is on fire.
Wind back the clock a few years - you might still say tying climate change action to socialism is losing politics - but the conventional wisdom was still "shoulda done more stimulus in 2009."
The whole world is what changed.
Remember just one short year ago everyone was still trying to make Stephanie Kelton a star and force Modern Monetary Policy down our throats like it was some cryptocurrency...
I've listened to Kelton on podcasts at length and...I think her actual take on government spending and inflation takes inflation pretty seriously. When asked "what wold happen if the government just printed up a ton of money and spent it", her take was "it would create inflation because the real economy wouldn't be able to produce enough stuff to meet the demand created by all of that created and spent fiat currency, so prices would rise." Which...seems exactly right to me and a good description of now - the government gave people a bunch of fiat currency while the economy's productive capacity was reduced and misallocated for demand and here we are.
(But if your meta point is that taking inflation seriously wasn't a thing on the left until very recently, I think you're spot on.)
(I think her ideas on how we'd ever _target_ spending are a little bit "no true Scotsman" - like, if an economist can start by postulating that we'll manage the economy via fiscal policy from congress, then the theory isn't going to be applicable in practice and will never be falsified by real world events.)
My point was MMT proponents continually suggest (when serious critics aren't looking, otherwise they obfuscate) that the way to rein in inflation is not to utilize the Fed to raise interest rates on all...but instead just to raise taxes significantly...and mostly on rich people...which...is unfeasible politically in economic durress and just seems like it would delay actual monetary policy that would actually help (raising rates) such that durress would last much longer....
Right - I think the sleight of hand is going "raise taxes is anti-inflationary" (which _could_ be true) and then adding in "on the rich", which screws it up. Ironically you could give the rich tons of money and not see consumer price inflation because they won't spend it on consumption. MY has argued in these posts that the missing link in European socialism is the broad and heavy taxes on the middle class that stop consumption and make resources for state spending.
But also the meta-problem here is a lot of economists would prefer we use fiscal and not monetary policy to deal with inflation, it's not realistic politically, but the MMT people are more adamant about it because they don't like the interest rates lever.
In general, i view MMT as a Calvin v. Hobbs esque intellectual bullshit exercise to just push Progressive to care less about debt....and I think Kelton is in on the rouse. But personally, the fact that she would go so far in that rouse frightens me....because too many folks bought into it without seeing the wink or the nod...and that's Modern Leftism in a nutshell for me
"'shoulda done more stimulus in 2009.'"
Which was wrong then, too. Fed shoulda done NGDPL targeting or even PL targeting. And the fiscal "relief" should have been more generous per unit of time but tied to economic conditions, not dollar amounts or the calendar
And yet it's people like Josh Gottheimer and Kyrsten Sinema that may be threatening to take this excellent bill down.
In other words, these activists make lots of noise but at the end of the day, they either go along or just don't get their way. They may not be the dangerous ones.
In the world of radicals, these lefty climate types are clearly the most reasonable. They are still radicals, but a radical that will negotiate isn't that bad. They really need to highlight the difference between that and the radical right.
In general, these tactics are just more salient within the Party as more and more people in places of power insist they can repurpose the Tea Party handbook and wield it from the Moral High Ground and do so without collateral damage.
>>Now obviously this all goes quite a bit further than anything Joe Biden ever proposed.<<
Well, don't blame Gina when she votes for Yang's Forward Party. You've been hereby warned.
This column, which is excellent, by the way, had me in stitches. Matt's really an extremely underrated (and ultra-dry) humorist.
"Matt's really an extremely underrated (and ultra-dry) humorist."
Agreed! He's a funny dude, and a good writer. This column really benefitted from revision and expansion -- the first draft said simply, "I told you so."
I'm so confused. Maybe it's too early in the morning for me or something, but where is the comedy in this post? I liked the article, but at no time did I do any laughing out loud.
I really do not get the sense from the "Climate Left" that they believe there is a desire among the mass public for sweeping climate legislation. While they will often cite issue polls showing their legislation's supposed popularity, that seems more of a supporting justification for why climate legislation should be first on the agenda than the central reasoning. The central reasoning is that the government should have a "moral" commitment to addressing climate change, and in particularly has a moral commitment to younger and future Americans to ensure they will have a hospitable planet in the future (notice how central children are to their campaign). I happen to agree with this reasoning, but the progressives often treat this line of reasoning as self-evident and not based on a series of assumptions baked into their specific worldview, so they neglect the need to convince the mass public to share their worldview. Also, as someone who learned about the greenhouse effect at a young age, I have developed an intuitive understanding on the connections between carbon emissions and climate change, but it is actually quite complex and not very intuitive, and I think educated elites who have been steeped in this world for a long time just have lost a sense of how much all of this just does not register with the average person.
A general problem that plagues the left is that they all believe that the government has a "moral" responsibility to address various ills that plague society (climate change, poverty, racism, lack of healthcare coverage, gun violence, income inequality, etc.), so when it comes time to try and prioritize campaign and legislative issues, they fight over whose issue deserves the highest "moral" priority, which essentially becomes a religious debate divorced from political realities. This view of the government's "moral" obligations is treated as self-evident in progressive circles, as if you are an inherently shitty person if you don't subscribe to it, but I would like to see some writing outlining where precisely this view of "morality" comes from, especially in a left that is increasingly secular.
Two words: cancel culture. When you live in an ideological bubble and silence out any possibility for debate even within your own camp the most basic doubts, indeed not even doubts, just pointing out of factual errors, will inevitably be missed. People seem to forget that the strongest case for free speech was based on a very simple and, I should think, self-evident premise: no one is infallible.
I think the thing that most Bernie folks never truly got about Sanders (though MY clearly gets) is that Bernie Sanders is clearly bullshitting when he says he "believes" that Medicare For All or the Green New Deal can pass...
It's clear that others, like AOC, get this (remember she basically said the quiet part out loud before Nevada?) but there are some folks who just completely miss the wink AND the nod that Sanders is doing...and ultimately...that's what ends up sinking so many of these movements in the long term. A lack of expectation management just burns people out very quickly....as you perpetually seem like you are losing BIG time if you compare gains to asks....
If you confronted them about how unpopular many of their proposals are I think many will admit that this is true, but that's different from acting as if it's true. What MY is trying to help them realize is that many of their actions don't match reality. Yelling at Manchin over his beliefs that are politically popular is counter productive in that framing.
But I agree that they see this in a moral framework and you can't dissuade people about a good vs evil subject by using practicality arguments.
I think it’s also compounded by the fact that there is alignment in the “feels good” and “is financially beneficial / clout increasing” for them to indulge and there is quite a lot of money / funding at stake these days….
Having a moral commitment to a livable planet in the future is great so long as you advocate for policies that will actually do that at least cost: a tax on net CO2 and methane emissions.
>>This struck me as such an unbelievably weird bank-shot theory of change that I mostly believed the guy was just BSing to get me to stop complaining. But the fact is, that’s almost exactly what happened, so it’s possible this guy is the Kwisatz Haderach and everything went according to plan.<<
:-D
I love how MattY knows he can use literary references to stuff he’s discussed in previous posts. He’s clearly writing to the SB community.
I actually just finished the first Dune book. I had many folks recommend it to me, but I counted MY’s Dune references as among my recommendation points. I’ll definitely continue the series.
Mild and highly subjective warning: Messiah is, IMO, the least engaging of the bunch (other than Chapterhouse, which was not my cup of tea). There's some cool stuff in it and it sets up the later books but I found the ratio of cool stuff to quality of writing to book length to make it a (relative) slog compared to the original, Children, God Emperor or Heretics (although admittedly by the standards of the Dune novels Heretics is practically a pulp adventure).
Dune Messiah is also a great book. Children of Dune is definitely worth reading. The others are all pretty terrible. I read them because Dune was so great and I kept hoping that some of that greatness would appear again, but by the last book I was only reading because I had already invested in the first 5. Nothing remotely redeeming about them. Don't torture yourself, stop after Children of Dune. Then go read Rendezvous with Rama or Foundation or Starship Troopers or Ringworld.
I also loved this reference to SB cannon.
>>In this case, I think Democrats may actually benefit politically from passing the bill because it would give the party license to stop talking about climate change for a year or three. <<
This this this. I hadn't thought about this before, but this would be so welcome. Climate is both the most important political challenge we face and the one most needing depoliticizing. It needs investment and subsidies -- which the people will never rise against -- as well as NRC reform, easier transmission line permitting, lots of actions on the state and local level, and the like. But if we could keep it out of the national political arena? Awesome! Let the Secret Congress do its occasional thing and otherwise let's move on to the next great existential debate.
On the other hand . . . I read this: "Politically, now that they’ve done a Big Important Substantive Thing on climate" and I scream in anguish. It hasn't come close to passing yet! It's not law! I imagine my Jewish mother turning her head, spitting and going "Tfoo tfoo tfoo." Matt, you are just begging for the kinehora; please stop.
I was just asking myself this… “wait, did this even pass yet??”
I’m glad that Matt finally came out of the closet and said Dems should talk less about climate. His timing is curious. The IRA has yet to pass and there are still more points of friction (SALT, Sinema’s affinity for big pharma) than spare Democratic votes. Matt was looking for an excuse to embrace a stance that dare not speak its name in liberal bubbles. He is a mix of populist pragmatism and elite caution.
Accordingly Matt has yet to go full populist. Us folk in suburban Georgia don’t give a flying fuck about transit. It will never get me from Peachtree City to McDonough. The BIP may have passed, but state route 20 still has an at grade crossing of the Norfolk Southern mainline and there are no plans to fix this. There are still too few ways to cross I-75 and this crap costs me an hour or more every week. My wife loses 5 or 10 minutes a day because there is no overpass at the junction of State Routes 54 and 74. I hope the coastal elites who run the Democratic party will delude themselves into thinking we’ll all drive EVs in ten years and actually build first class roads. Transit is a niche issue for urbanites and should get no more than 15% of the infrastructure pie.
If you think the US doesn't have first class roads, by and large, you've literally never been anywhere else.
Germany and Japan look decent only because they make the alternatives so functional that most people don't even have to drive daily, not because the road infrastructure is better or more comprehensive.
It's just not possible to build enough roads for everyone to drive everywhere all the time with no delays in any reasonably populated metropolitan region.
Now, specific projects to improve real bottlenecks, fine. The two you mention are probably sensible in a location with rapidly growing population.
But to think that I could, for instance, double-deck I-76 in Philadelphia (a perennial favorite) is just ludicrous. I-476 was widened to 6 lanes between the main northwestern suburban interchange and I-76 in 2017; traffic delays at peak hours are now up to nearly what they were when that project was started, and the region is still growing rapidly.
It just doesn't work.
Twenty billion, well spent, without these stupid environmental impact studies and other bullshit, would greatly enhance Philly’s infrastructure for generations.
Sure.
On the roadway side, I could conduct a systemic review of all the major thoroughfares and force the counties to remove a bunch of traffic lights, turning side streets back into side streets and improving flow on major arterials, for a few hundred million at most. Residential communities do not need signals and speed bumps, they need no signals so people don't short-cut.
The major needed improvements to I-95 are done or in progress, but a 1-2 billion investment in US-1 would let me push the existing at-grade segments, which are deathtraps, mostly below or above grade, at least as far north as PA-73. I could probably improve design on PA-611/Broad Street and reallocate signal priority to allow it to accommodate much more commuter traffic for a relative pittance.
There are at least 20 major bridge spans in need of replacement, that I could get done for less than a billion if the bullshit were cut and the state or county had the staffing and capacity to do good design in-house.
I could conduct a complete lead survey of all public water supplies in the city and replace all the offending lines for less than a billion as well, with money left over to conduct proper surveillance testing in private residences too.
On the transit side, a fraction of that money, and the right to gut SEPTA's makework programs and legacy labor costs, would allow me to run the Regional Rail system at higher frequency, improve signaling at several chokepoints, and expand parking at all suburban Regional Rail stations. If you couple that with better Center City and University City bus service, rail commuting to and from the city becomes a compelling alternative to roads. Unlike Atlanta we're an old, northeastern city with miserable roadway infrastructure and major space constraints. I actually can run a commuter rail service good enough to suck folks off of I-95 and I-76.
That same bit of signaling and some automation on the trainsets would allow me to run an S-Bahn service within city limits on the same rail rights of way, improving intra-city transport markedly.
That allows us to shuffle bus service around feeding those high-frequency rail corridors instead of long, slow, meandering cross-city routes. The existing couple trolley lines can be given dedicated right of way and priority signaling to avoid those roads being deathtraps and improve service.
OR...
I could blow it all double-decking the length of I-76 between I-476 and the Walt Whitman Bridge. I'm not kidding; at globally competitive prices for urban viaduct systems, it would cost most of that $20 billion just to do that, alone.
I don’t know what building a viaduct costs. I do know that the Victorians built huge tunnels for sums that, even adjusting for inflation, are bargains. Technology should make moving earth cheaper.
In 1845, the Brits completed a three mile, trans pennine tunnel for £200k, which equates to around $27M today. They didn’t have power tools! I’m not an expert on building, but nothing should cost more in real terms today than 177 years ago.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodhead_Tunnel
"nothing should cost more in real terms today than 177 years ago."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease
"Should" is doing a hell of a lot of work there.
The one reality that underpins my industry is that absolutely *everything* costs vastly more in real terms than it did 177 years ago. Or 77. Or 27.
No one can fix it, because the technology doesn't seem to exist to allow site-based construction to stay ahead of Baumol's Cost Disease. The cost of construction workers is driven by what folks could make working in a factory instead. The cost of civil engineering consultancy is driven by what people would make in technology or as manufacturing engineers. But none of the productivity gains of those sectors have filtered down to construction or project delivery.
Don't get me wrong, we've made that much worse by wrapping everything in a layer of red tape six inches think, but don't make the mistake of thinking things will suddenly get cheap if you somehow unwind it, not compared to the shit we did back in 1900.
I've got my opinions on how to break the worst of the abysmal construction productivity trends, but they go far, far beyond "environmental review bad".
That's just the low-hanging fruit, the barbed wire we erected around the hill ourselves. There's still the whole hill left to climb after we tear it back down.
There is one thing which makes everything Christ only knows how much more expensive: all this stuff is in use and the costs of shutting it down for even a day are obscene, so we spend lots of money on doing shit like prefabricating a whole bridge deck adjacent to a toll road, jacking the existing one, rebuilding foundations and supporting piers, then moving the old deck off and dropping the new one in place, with only 4 hours of shutdown permitted.
In that context, direct costs make sense, because opportunity costs are higher.
Philly's whole budget is under 6 billion! The US federal budget is 6 trillion. Guessing that if we just spent 20 trillion well it might enhance the country's infrastructure for generations. Just one slight problem for both of those...
(1) The city of Philadelphia =/= economic region of Philadelphia
(2) Cities raise a tiny fraction of their GDP in tax revenue whereas the federal government collects ~20% of US GDP as tax revenue
"According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington MSA had a gross domestic product of $431 billion"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delaware_Valley
The US has a national GDP of $25 trillion
Spending $20 billion to improve an area with a GDP of $431 billion is equivalent to spending $1.16 trillion to improve an area with a GDP of $25 trillion. Coincidentally, the BIF price tag was $1.2 trillion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrastructure_Investment_and_Jobs_Act).
So, David's proposed investment could be fully paid for if the Philly region received a share of the BIF equal to its fraction of national GDP.
If David meant just the city of Philadelphia should get $20 billion in revenue, then he's being (slightly) unreasonable, but still more reasonable than your comparison suggests.
I presumed in my answer that he was referring to the region.
The thing is, the region has generally good infrastructure. The stuff that everyone, including the suburban residents, complains about is mostly really old shit located in the city that everyone uses just to pass by or through, so a disproportionate amount of the money would be spent within the county limits... but for the benefit of everyone, not just the locals.
The BIF was an additional 550 billion on top of regularly scheduled spending. So cut the 20 billion down to 10. Then when you break out the actual categories, only 20% went to roads. 13% to power infrastructure, 12% to passenger & freight rail, 12% to broadband, 10% to drinking water, 9% to western water storage, 7% to public transit, etc.
He's welcome to correct me if I'm wrong, but given his focus on roads, I took him to mean 20 billion should be spent on transit. That's a massive jump in spending!
Transit would be 20%+12%+7% = 39%, so $3.9 billion
$3.9 billion to $20 billion is a large difference (although what fraction of "status quo" spending over a decade would it be? That's harder to calculate because that spending it split between feds/state/city/county and not broken down by metro region cleanly), but $20 billion is still much closer to $3.9 billion than it is to $344.8 billion, which is what your comparison was suggesting*
*$20 trillion / $25 trillion GDP = 0.8 * $431 billion Philly metro GDP = $344.8 billion
The US does have first-class roads, all told, but IME the roads in Spain and Sweden are better. Spain and Sweden have better public transit, too - these things are not mutually exclusive!
The problem is that continued road investment just encourages further development along those road corridors and bakes in unsustainable urban growth patterns. It encourages more people like you to try to live in Peachtree City and work in McDonough, instead of making an effort to live closer to your job. Continued road expansion creates the illusion that people can live and work wherever they want with no tradeoffs, when those tradeoffs will just show up further down the line. I get that the average American wants to live and work wherever they want with no lifestyle or social tradeoffs, but we can't keep pretending that those tradeoffs don't exist.
"bakes in unsustainable urban growth patterns"
We have been building suburbs now for over 70 years, I'm pretty sure we've demonstrated that the model is economically sustainable by now.
As for environmental sustainability, if we get abundant clean energy, who cares if we use slightly more of it living in suburbs? And if we don't get abundant clean energy, there is no plan B (because geo-engineering is still outside the Overton window).
I really wish Matt would have taken my question last week on Chuck Marohn and this frankly stupid idea that infrastructure is a ticking time bomb that is going financially ruin suburban and rural communities. I feel like there has been at least one person parroting this talking point in the comments everyday for weeks and it's driving me nuts.
Agreed. I'm starting to think it's an actual cult. Every online discussion ever- "well akshually as Strong Towns sez...."
I'm very curious where the gap is between Strong Towns rhetoric and the reality on the ground. The Strong Towns argument of "moar taxable $ per acre, less $ of feet of pipes per person" is pretty solid, but it doesn't seem to matter IRL. My guess is that big cities in the US get their physical-$ savings gobbled up by higher police budgets and/or general public sector bloat and/or unions, but I haven't seen anyone run the real numbers to explain it.
The suburbs are, in the main, new enough not to have gotten into the intensive maintenance cycles that NE and Rust Belt cities have to do.
The probability of a water main break goes wildly up after 80 years or so, roadbeds can sometimes require complete replacement over a century.
Time will tell one way or another.
EDIT: If you want to see some early evidence here, look at NE state DOT budgets and how behind they are on maintenance, vs Sun Belt state DOTs.
We’re starting to slide down that curve.
They are right below/above you in responding to my comment, with zero details as usual.
As I mentioned elsewhere, 70 years is really not enough time to make this judgment. Give it another 70, lol.
Only because the burbs are massively subsidized.
This is a common claim in urbanist circles, and I can never get to the bottom of it.
When I hear "massively", I assume this means we are dealing with large amounts of money as a % of housing costs (at least 20%, say). And when I hear "subsidized", I assume this refers to governmental action that transfers money *to* the suburbs *from* elsewhere (presumably city-cores, since rural areas don't have the GDP to subsidize the much more populous & richer suburbs.
So, adding that together, we'd be talking about:
52% of the American population that is suburban receiving 20% of their housing cost in the form of government transfers from cities.
52%*20%*(15%) = 1.6% of GDP.
https://www.nahb.org/news-and-economics/housing-economics/housings-economic-impact/housings-contribution-to-gross-domestic-product
What federal or state programs are transferring 1.6% of GDP or more per year to the suburbs from cities?
Speaking as an Alabaman, the traffic situation for like 100 miles surrounding Atlanta is just hellish, and I avoid the vast majority of Georgia entirely, just due to that blight.
It’s amazing what having 2 senators, 5 million people and a large stratum of folks who are too poor to drive much can do for congestion. But yes, Alabama roads rock. Interstate 22 is one of the few ways our infrastructure has actually improved in recent years, it takes 30 minutes off the drive to Memphis. If only y’all would have an 80mph speed limit.
Small stretches of Alabama roads rock. Overall, I'm not much of a fan.
Especially compared to the roads in Tennessee that actually have decent shoulders.
You don't care about transit, because transit is not useful to you, personally. I didn't know where Peachtree City and McDonough are in relation to Atlanta, so I just looked it up. And...yeah, transit is probably never going to reliably get you between those two places. Fair enough.
But if the Atlanta area had a reliable regional rail network maybe it could get you to Atlanta. Or to (picking some random-places on a line between Peachtree City and Atlanta) the airport or College Park or Riverdale or East Point. And there are many, many people who live somewhat closer to Atlanta who may find it useful even if you don't. Probably there would be even more of them if they built TOD near the train stations (Matt has written very persuasively about how good urban living is under-supplied relative to demand in the US, even if most people don't want to live that way, and I think he's correct).
My point is, transit is only a "nice issue for urbanites" because the US has decided that it is rather than actually try to make it work. There are millions upon millions of Americans in cities and older suburbs who would use transit regularly if it was useful to them. You might not be one of them, and that's fine, but that doesn't mean they're insignificant. The US needs to invest in transit *and* learn how to build it effectively and run it efficiently (far as I can tell, the climate left is utterly uninterested in the last two; I suppose cost-effectiveness and efficiency just reek of evil capitalism).
You don't have to be interested in this, and I'm not one of those liberals who thinks suburbs and cars are evil, but the US would be a better place is more of it had actually-useful public transit. And it's perfectly doable, if we wanted to get serious about doing it.
I actually did ride MARTA when i lived in midtown Atlanta and worked for the US Court of Appeals, which is downtown. But the second I moved to East Atlanta, where I was only 4 miles from
work, transit wasn’t viable. I would have had to walk 0.4 miles to a bus stop, take a bus that runs every 20 minutes and connect to a train that runs every 15 minutes. Then I would have had to walk three more blocks. It would have taken almost an hour. I could have gotten to work faster on a bike if it weren’t dangerous
There is alot of low hanging transit fruit. It wouldn’t cost much to run trains more often on marta tracks. It wouldn’t cost much to increase bus frequency. Making buses nice enough that middle class people will ride them is worthwhile. But most transit fans want to build shiny new things despite the fact that constructing new lines is massively expensive.
Lol, note that my grand plan to blow $20B in the Philly area contained zero new train lines.
The damned infrastructure is all here, we just use it like shit.
The issue is that there isn't some great suburban or exurban constituency crying out for more mass transit.
So it is largely restricted to the urban/urbanite populations.
And even if there were such a constituency in a given area, they can vote and raise funds and implement it at the state and local level. The federal govt only needs to be involved for interstate connections.
That being said, I think that more transit in more densely populated areas would definitely be nice.
What's Brian Kemp's proposed solution for these problems? (Probably no worse than Stacy Abrams's but I'm still curious.)
Not really - any space that opens up on congested roads is immediately filled with drivers who had been staying in-neighborhood for discretionary trips because of traffic.
Transit improves the choices of people who want to go places but don't like being stuck in traffic. But it doesn't really reduce traffic to any significant degree.
The strong form of the induced demand argument posits an infinite propensity to drive places if only the roads exist. However, I don’t want to spend all my waking hours driving nor do any of my friends. There is certainly some induced demand when you build new roads, but also some reduction of congestion. Calculating the relative proportions would take hard, empirical work
Yeah, I think that's right. I definitely object to the kind of self-serving induced demand argument that transit advocates use to say that roads and lanes are never worthwhile. And I especially object to their idea that if it doesn't reduce congestion then it's not valuable - increasing people's ability to do things they want is valuable whether or not they're experiencing congestion while doing it!
But I think the claim I am comfortable making is that if a roadway is congested enough that the congestion is a significant impact on travel time, then for precisely the reason that you mention (i.e., that people want to limit the amount of time they spend driving), a decrease in the difficulty of driving will lead to an increase in the distance people are driving.
A further refinement is possible without difficult empirical work. Errand and leisure driving is responsive to congestion in the short term. If traffic sucks, but amazon and recreate l near home. Commuting is extremely inelastic in the short term (only alternative is quitting your job) and fairly inelastic in the medium term— getting a new job or living closer to downtown can involve wrenching lifestyle changes. Some people will choose to make ridiculously long commutes if there isn’t traffic, I wonder how large that population is.
The benefit to auto commuters of building roads is far greater than the Effect of transit taking a handful of cars off of them.
“That said, the investment and justice parts of the three-legged stool basically died on the vine. What we ended up with in the IRA is closer to a pure investment-driven approach”
Is the first sentence supposed to say “standards and justice”?
I'll ask and fix it if necessary.
And the IRA does allocate $60 billion (of the total $369 billion) for environmental justice so that’s not insignificant.
What federally fundable projects fit into that rubric?
For instance:
“If passed the IRA would provide major incentives to produce clean energy and reduce pollution in low-income and disadvantaged communities. The act would provide tax breaks for up to 3.6 gigawatts of solar and wind generating capacity, enough to power millions of homes, in low-income communities. IRA § 13103. The act also allocates $4.75 billion to states to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, with a focus on disadvantaged communities. IRA § 60114. The act would also allocate hundreds of millions of dollars specifically to tribal communities across the U.S. IRA §§ 80001–04.
“Disadvantaged communities would also benefit from over $3 billion in funding for the Federal Highway Administration for programs to improve transportation access, reconnect low-income areas to their neighbors, and reduce the negative impacts of transportation hubs. IRA § 60501. The IRA would also provide $3 billion to community non-profit organizations to reduce pollution, address toxic contamination, monitor local pollution levels, and invest in climate resiliency projects. IRA § 60201. The Department of Housing and Urban Development would also receive $1 billion to improve the climate resilience and electrification projects in public housing.”
It’s unclear to me what the point is of prioritizing placement of wind and solar projects in low-income and tribal communities rather than in windy and sunny locations. Maybe one of the experts here can explain how that maximizes GHG reduction.
The Federal Highway Administration part seems not to be closely connected to climate change.
https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=eb753da3-dbfa-4344-a4c6-d1ccfe07dff2
I guess none of that is surprising. Despite the lofty goals the reality is that it’s likely to be a big subsidy to non-profits and consultants more than anything else.
I have seen no good reason to think this bill is anything more than a boondoggle.
I think the idea is “we want to vote on some thing called environmental justice. The details don’t really matter.”
Yes. Same as with GHG reductions: Good intentions are everything.
This is a good bill and I am a big fan of the Manchin congress’s work in the past year.
One interesting angle to all of these bills is that the ‘process’ Politico-style stories never mention the White House or POTUS being involved in negotiations. Is Biden just really good at keeping his name out of the press? Is he trying to give Congress the flexibility to compromise without getting in the way? Is he just busy? Feels like a big departure from Obama & Trump.
Manchin says Biden wasn't involved. I think if there's one thing Biden knows, it's how negotiations in the Senate are supposed to take place, and how that shapes the President's role. Sometimes the best way to do something is to do nothing.
This makes me feel much better about reading SB comments at work, thank you.
Whatever it is, it’s working, and he deserves credit for it!
Speaking of bill names that don’t translate well across the Atlantic, I can’t imagine there will be many pro-IRA politicians running around the UK.
Well other than a plurality of the Northern Ireland assembly and those MPs with the sweet gig of never having to show up for work.
That’s true, SF did take a plurality didn’t they?
I'm conservative/libertarian but also an economist. Thus I love the idea of a net zero carbon tax.
Better to tax carbon that labor.
Also I wish we saw more of a focus on regenerative farming to sequester all that carbon while building soil health, and healthy foods
“Do Democrats want to emphasize the (true) idea that the IRA should moderately reduce inflationary pressures in the economy”
Who says so? Because the eggheads at Wharton say otherwise:
“The impact on inflation is statistically indistinguishable from zero.”
https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2022/7/29/inflation-reduction-act-preliminary-estimates
Larry Summers says otherwise, and, like him or loathe him, he's A) not an intellectual lightweight, and, B) he's been more right than wrong recently.
What specifically did Summers say? According to WaPo,
“The two men spoke this week, and Manchin listened as Summers talked in detail about why Democrats’ proposed economic package — including its energy provisions — would not lead to higher prices.”
That’s not different from what the Wharton economists said.
https://twitter.com/LHSummers/status/1552445404637466624?s=20&t=RNtqSOIejxsS8JsJSVVnHg
Nothing fiscal affects inflation without a link through monetary policy.
I think something that is very deeply ingrained in the Democratic political psyche is that tangible marketing of the things the government is doing for you is very critical to political success in the future.
This is evident across the entire issue space... a hugely popular theory about the problems with the Obama stimulus is the Social Security tax cut was a bad idea because it was not broadly marketed. Student loan stuff is very popular under the perception that "doing something" for young people (something with a visible and financial impact) is key to retaining their support. The desire for something very visible was also key with how prominent the various relief checks were in the discussion of pandemic aid.
It isn't exactly "checks" but the Green New Deal is a similar theory that you can essentially buy off a huge array of interest groups and voters with various targeted programs (re-training/aid funds for affected fossil fuel workers, various programs targeted at underprivileged folks, and a huge expansion of the social safety net/possible jobs guarantee for everyone).
Ultimately though I think the last two years of polling/politics doesn't really support this theory of the case... people did not really care that much about the relief checks. And frankly the general populace was more skeptical of the Child Tax Credits, etc. than wonks were. The checks/letters were super visible with Trump or Biden's name on them but did not move the needle (as a side note I remember people saying putting Trump's name on the first relief check was somewhere between Machiavellian genius and dirty politics, but it really didn't do anything).
I think it really debunks the theory that directly targeted programs at particular constituencies will create any political impact with those constituencies...
Basically I think the thing is any policy action you do will create a political backlash. You should try to do the best you can while you are in power, but it is unrealistic to think that a great/popular policy will create NEW popularity that you can use for a snowballing "GREEN NEW DEAL" type agenda.
>> Do Democrats want to emphasize the (true) idea that the IRA should moderately reduce inflationary pressures in the economy, or do they want to emphasize the (also true) idea that it’s the most important climate legislation in history? <<
Surely the correct answer is (c), emphasize the bipartisan infrastructure bill.
Matt during the Obama administration: "The Obama administration is making a huge mistake by preemptively compromising because it makes their compromise look like the left wing position."
Matt in 2021: "Biden should preemptively compromise because that's moderate and polls well."
*Biden does not preemptively compromise. Instead he starts with strong left positions, eventually takes the best compromise he can get, and passes several pieces of massively important legislation that Matt and most people like.*
Matt in 2022: "Biden got lucky. He should have gotten here by preemptively compromising and waiting for conservatives to be reasonable."
It's basically the Charles Barkley argument about the Golden State Warriors shooting 3s.
except Sir Charles is knighted. ill admit both Charles and Matty have great hair though
What has Biden really done for the IRA?
I've not heard about him being very involved with the negotiations with Manchin.
What Dsep said. At the end of the day under Biden we’re getting a staggering number of laws passed in congress, both partisan and especially bipartisan. It’s especially impressive considering his paper thin margins. He deserves credit for that and how he achieves it is a secondary question. If being humbler than previous presidents and letting. congress sort itself out is what works then all for the better it just proves he is wiser than his predecessors.
I'm not sure if this is meant to be ironic or not, but feel free to substitute "The Biden Administration" or "the Biden legislative strategy" in place of "Biden."
No one like foolish consistency.