D E B I L I T A T I N G M I S C O N C E P T I O N S
That, because there are only two major political parties, there are only two
distinctive – but extremely divergent – options, and we are required by some invisible
law to strictly adhere to one of their outdated, one-size-fits-all bullet point platforms.
The second misconception is that, because there are only two major political parties, there are only two distinctive — but extremely divergent — options, and we are required by some invisible law to strictly adhere to one of their outdated, one-size-fits-all bullet point platforms.
No. Just no. There is no way to craft intelligent policy when your solutions are confined to these ridiculously constricting labels.
Leo Tolstoy said, “The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.”
It’s wildly irresponsible to address dynamic policy issues with boilerplate solutions. Take regulation, for example. As hard as people try, this is an issue that can’t be wrapped up in a nice, tidy bow.
When speaking on this topic, people — mainly those leaning to the conservative side of things — often ask, “Are you for more regulation or less?” They seem to want a one-word answer, but it’s way more complicated than that.
In reality, the only reply to that question should be, “Are we for or against regulation for what?” Are we speaking about small businesses or Wall Street? Or social media, food safety, environmental protection, or the oil and gas industry? Or condo buildings in Florida?
One of the most irresponsible ideas the Trump administration had — enacted by executive order naturally — was the “one in, two out” regulation requirement. This meant that, whenever a federal agency issued one regulation, it was required to take at least two regulations away.
This approach is ridiculous. And, quite frankly, more than a little lazy. Without question, there are outdated and burdensome regulations, but these should be dealt with specifically, not as part of some big monolithic exorcism.
Besides, this strategy didn’t work in the first place. The Penn Program on Regulation (PPR) is located at the University of Pennsylvania — incidentally, Donald Trump’s alma mater — and conducts balanced analysis on regulatory policy. In an analysis titled Deregulatory Deceptions: Reviewing the Trump Administration’s Claims About Regulatory Reform, they conclude that,
“Deregulation has been celebrated as one of the Trump Administration’s most important economic accomplishments. The Administration suggested both that the magnitude of its deregulatory efforts far outpaced those of prior years and that the economic gains from these efforts were drivers of historic economic and jobs growth, delivering an increase in real income of over $3,000 to each American household.
This report investigates these claims in turn. We find that they are a mix of exaggerated, cherry-picked, and indefensible. Stated simply, the Administration did not roll back regulations at anything close to the rates it has claimed, and households have not gained thousands of dollars annually from these efforts.
Overall, we find that every claim we examine about the Trump Administration’s deregulatory efforts is either wrong or exaggerated. The reality is that the Trump Administration has done less deregulating than regulating, and its deregulatory actions have not achieved any demonstrable boost to the economy.
The positive economic trends that the Administration likes to give deregulation credit for — such as increases in the gross domestic product and decreases in unemployment — had their roots in policies predating the Administration. If anything, the pace of overall growth in GDP has actually slowed somewhat during the pre-Covid years of the Trump Administration relative to the last three years of the Obama Administration.
The Trump Administration has not only exaggerated the positive effects of deregulation, it too often has ignored or downplayed its negative consequences. These adverse effects could be substantial. Although it is too early to assess the overall impact of the Trump Administration’s deregulatory efforts, our research suggests that the Administration may be more effective at deceiving the public about its achievements than in actually using deregulation to boost the economy.”
In our minds, there is a different level of acceptable regulation for almost everything.
For example, some state and local governments create onerous barriers to upward mobility by making occupational licenses ridiculously difficult to obtain. On the other hand, large corporations, banks and financial institutions could use a little more regulation.
Let’s look closer at two more examples. An excellent one is the electricity fiasco that transpired during the ice storm in Texas in February 2021. Texas Governor Greg Abbott — who desperately needs to be voted out of office for his horrible pandemic response alone — said on The Sean Hannity Show: “This shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America,” while the Fox News scroll at the bottom of the screen declared “Green Energy Failure.” Another Fox News host, Tucker Carlson, chimed in on his show: “The windmills froze so the power grid failed.” What? These statements are just laughable.
Tucker also told his audience that “global warming is no longer a pressing concern here,” suggesting that, because it was so cold outside, the earth is obviously not warming — yet another idiotic theme on Facebook feeds during that week.
< Allow us to let Tucker in on a little secret: Global warming refers to earth’s overall temperature, which is rising. That’s just a fact. Global warming, in turn, causes the climate to change. Climate change causes extreme weather patterns, rising sea levels, shifting jet streams, and plenty of other things that are really bad. As a result of climate change, floods, droughts, ice storms and heat waves become more frequent and way more intense. Essentially, the extremes become even more extreme. So, when Tucker uses the fact that Texas had historic cold and icy weather this year as proof that there is no global warming, he is inadvertently proving the exact opposite. >
Back to Texas. Yes, non-winterized wind turbines froze. But because they were also not properly winterized, so did power plants, oil and gas wells, gas pipelines, oil rigs, piles of coal, and even a nuclear reactor water pump.
People trying to blame this on windmills is just nonsensical. Two-thirds of the winter electricity demand in Texas is generated by natural gas. One of the main culprits in the Great Texas Blackout of 2021 was the interruption of natural gas getting to power plants…and no amount of spin on Fox News is going to change that fact.
The truth is this. The energy catastrophe in Texas was caused by two things and two things only: Texas hubris and energy deregulation.
First up, Texas hubris. Never has a state loathed regulation or government intervention as has Texas. In the midst of the crisis, former Texas governor (and former Secretary of Energy) Rick Perry actually said that “Texans would be without electricity for longer than three days to keep the federal government out of their business.”
Texas Republicans hate federal government intervention so much (or we should say, they hate federal government intervention until they happily take $11.24 billion from the CARES Act and God only knows how much more after this massive leadership failure) that 90 percent of Texas’ electric grid is not connected to interstate grids. This means that Texas can largely avoid any oversight by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). But is also means that Texas can’t rely on other states to help when its electric grid fails.
Second up, deregulation. In 1996, FERC passed Order 888, which promoted wholesale electricity competition through open access, non-discriminatory transmission services. In simple terms, companies could now “rent” electric transmission lines and move electricity through them, regardless of who owned the lines.
Unsurprisingly, Texas went all in! The state embraced this new opportunity and shifted a great deal of control over the state’s electric delivery system to the private sector.
At the same time, electric generation entities were given permission to do pretty much whatever they want in terms of reserve margins for backup power and generation planning, which was another major culprit in the February 2021 disaster. Want to take your power plant offline for maintenance in the middle of February? No problem! Go for it!
In the beginning, and maybe even still today, Texas leadership naïvely believed that market forces would correct for just about anything, making energy shortages and service disruptions virtually impossible in their minds.
But here’s the inevitable problem: Although competition has kept Texas energy prices low through the years, smaller profit margins and practically no regulation and/or oversight also tempted energy companies to cut corners on necessary capital investments…like say, WINTERIZATION PROTECTIONS THAT INCLUDE PROPER INSULATION, HEATERS AND DE-ICING MACHINES.
What happened in February is all the more irritating because it has happened before. In 2011, Texas experienced a very similar winter blackout that affected over 4 million people. In the aftermath, the Texas Public Utility Commission demanded that Texas power generators submit annual winterization plans, but that doesn’t seem to have worked out that well.
Thad Hill, the chief executive of Calpine Corporation, admitted that during the 2021 freeze “two of [Calpine’s] power plants failed because of winterization…That’s my fault.” Yep, it sure is Thad, because you knew full well what could happen. After all, two of Calpine’s plants also failed during the 2011 freeze. NRG, another generation company, experienced power failures at its coal-fired plant in Limestone County and another at Greens Bayou, the same exact two plants that failed in 2011.
At the end of the day, Texas Republicans chose ideology over reliability. Then, naturally, blamed everyone else when the price of electricity skyrocketed during the crisis. When we say skyrocketed, we're not exaggerating. Some consumer electric bills reached well over $16,000.
Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick — who desperately needs to be voted out of office just for consistently saying stupid things — said, “the people who are getting those big bills are people who gambled on a very, very low rate…going forward, people need to read the fine print in those kinds of bills.”
Another regulation example is attorney Rob Bilott’s courageous fight to regulate polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in American drinking water. < FYI, Mark Ruffalo plays Rob in the movie Dark Waters. >
It all started when an angry farmer noticed bubbling green water in his creek and blood running out of the noses of his cattle not long after DuPont, the chemical company, began operating a waste landfill near his property. Rob Bilott watched a video the farmer provided, where he “saw cows with stringy tails, malformed hooves, giant lesions protruding from their hides and red, receded eyes; cows suffering constant diarrhea, slobbering white slime the consistency of toothpaste, staggering bowlegged like drunks.”
In a study funded by DuPont (lest you think they were acting responsibly, they were pretty much forced to conduct one thanks to the lawsuit Bilott filed), scientists discovered there was a “probable link’” between PFOA and kidney cancer, testicular cancer, thyroid disease, high cholesterol, pre-eclampsia and ulcerative colitis.
According to the Congressional Research Service, “PFAS include thousands of diverse chemicals, some of which have been used for decades in an array of industrial, commercial, and U.S. military applications. The chemical characteristics of PFAS have led to the use of various PFAS for an array of purposes such as fighting fuel-based fires and for processing and manufacturing numerous commercial products (e.g., stain-resistant and waterproof fabrics, nonstick cookware, and food containers).”
In 2016, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reported that “PFOA and/or PFOS were detected in at least one public water system in 24 states. Four other PFAS were also detected in some systems.”
Rob Bilott started his fight in 1999. On February 20, 2020, the EPA announced preliminary decisions to develop Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) regulations for the two most frequently detected PFAS, perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) — TWENTY-ONE YEARS after Bilott filed his first federal suit against DuPont chemical company.
Now, we have a question for the people who ask, “are you for more regulation or less?” Are you cool with this poison in your drinking water? Because we are most certainly not.