Month: April 2021

Someone on Twitter—sorry, I don't remember who—complained that Joe Biden's speech tonight was a laundry list, the least effective type of speech there is. I'm not so sure about that. I remember all those years of Bill Clinton giving long, laundry-list SOTUs and getting panned by the national press. But the public loved them. I'll bet Biden's version gets pretty good marks too.

In any case, the speech was a laundry list, which is hardly surprising since Biden has a ton of stuff he's proposing these days. And it was fine. Biden ad libbed a few lines here and there to good effect, and there were no miscues or—God forbid—gaffes. It was a workmanlike speech and he delivered it efficiently.

Anyway, that's about it. Biden outlined all the stuff he's been talking about for the past couple of months and he did it without insulting anyone or becoming the face that launched a thousand fact checkers. He stayed focused on jobs, jobs, and more jobs, and promised to build stuff in America instead of China, which I'm sure went over well.

It was, I suppose, a fairly boring speech, but that seems to be Biden's brand these days. After four years of Donald Trump, boring is good. Right?

This is a Sally Holmes rose blooming in our backyard right now. The delicate colors don't last for long, but they're lovely while they're around.

This is not really new news, but it's good to see that Elon Musk is following through on it:

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is putting up $100 million for a new XPrize competition aimed at spurring the creation of new carbon removal technologies and helping to ease the climate crisis.

The prize will be the largest cash incentive in history, according to XPrize....About $15 million will be distributed across the teams that choose to participate in the competition as "seed money" to help get their development programs off the ground. Another $5 million will be reserved specifically for student teams.

A grand prize of $50 million will go to whichever team can prove its technology can extract at least 1000 metric tons, or about 2 million pounds, of carbon dioxide per year with the potential to scale up to extracting millions of metric tons of CO2 later down the road. The winner will also have to prove the CO2 can be "durably and sustainably" sequestered — or kept out of the atmosphere — for years into the future.

Carbon capture is something that gets too little attention in the climate debate. Every previous attempt at CCS has been a failure, and at this point most climate activists consider it little more than a scam meant to take attention away from things that are more feasible.

And there's something to that. Nevertheless, one of the dirty little secrets of climate change is that even if, by some miracle, we did did everything we needed to do in order to get to zero carbon emissions by 2050, it still wouldn't be enough. There's just too much carbon in the atmosphere already. To truly address rising temperatures, we need to reduce atmospheric carbon, not merely stabilize it. And planting more trees won't do it.

The big problem with CCS—aside from the basic one of getting it to work—is that a successful system would have to be enormous. Roughly speaking, the infrastructure for removing carbon would need to be similar in size to the infrastructure for adding carbon. In other words, about the size of the entire fossil fuel extraction industry. Big.

But maybe someone can figure out a better way. Good on Musk for identifying this as a place where a billionaire's money just might be able to make a difference.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through April 27. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Over at Vox, James Carville takes a shot at identity politics:

Wokeness is a problem and everyone knows it. It’s hard to talk to anybody today — and I talk to lots of people in the Democratic Party — who doesn’t say this. But they don’t want to say it out loud.

This is what you'd expect Carville to say, and I'm not going to take sides on it at the moment. But one thing that's clear is that Republicans sure think that attacking wokeness is a winning strategy. Off the top of my head, the past few weeks have produced the following three-day wonders from the conservative noise machine:

• Liberals are banning Dr. Seuss!
• John Kerry is giving away our secrets!
• Joe Biden is going to ban red meat!
• You should call the police if you see a child wearing a mask!
• Kamala Harris's book is being passed out to illegal immigrants!
• Woke capital is ruining our country!
• Vaccine passports are the beginning of a liberal police state!
• Baseball is un-American for objecting to voter suppression in Georgia!

If I could be bothered to hit up Google I'm sure I could double this list in a minute or two. And I'm not even counting the big, sustained jihads about the election being stolen or the COVID-19 vaccine being a hoax of some kind. Even for Republicans, this is a helluva list.

For whatever it's worth, this means that Republicans are putting their money on Carville. That doesn't mean they're right, but it's worth thinking about.

Here's a silhouette of a guy checking out his phone in front of one of the fountains in our lake. You may use your collective imaginations to guess what he's looking for.

The environmental credit trading company known as Tesla announced financial results for the first quarter on Monday. They sold twice as many cars as they did a year ago, which is great, but their profit per car declined by about $2,000 per car. That's probably due to the mix of models they sold, but it's still not great news.

Net operating profit clocked in at $594 million, but $518 million of that was from selling environmental credits to other companies plus a one-time sale of Bitcoin. Taking that into account, their actual net profit from selling cars and batteries came in at $76 million, or 0.7% of revenue. That's not great, and it hasn't changed a lot over the past year despite selling a lot more cars. It's especially not great since the next year or two are going to bring a ton of competitors into the electric vehicle market.

None of this is to say that Tesla is headed for failure. They have loads of cash and are well aware that they can't count on environmental credits to sustain them for a lot longer. No, the part I don't get is this:

What is it about Tesla's performance that has caused their stock price to skyrocket by about 10-15x since the end of 2019? There are so many things I fail to understand these days.

It's about damn time:

White House officials plan to make a massive increase in enforcement at the Internal Revenue Service a central component of the tax proposal they will unveil this week alongside a $1.8 trillion spending package, according to four people briefed on the matter.

....Probably the single biggest source of new revenue in the plan comes from dramatically expanding the clout of the nation’s tax agency. It seeks to beef up the number of agents and give the IRS new tools and technology to execute collections and crack down on avoidance, the people said. White House officials have eyed raising as much as $700 billion from toughening IRS enforcement and auditing over 10 years, two of the people said, although the precise amount in the plan remained unclear. Enforcement will be focused on the wealthy, the people said.

Here's an updated version of a chart I published a couple of years ago:

As you can see, my trendline turned out to predict the 2018 audit rate perfectly. At the pace we were going, rich people wouldn't have gotten audited at all by 2021.

And make no mistake: this was not just a matter of neglect. It was a very explicit policy of the Republican Party in order to reward their rich donors. President Obama tried to fight back, but he didn't try very hard and congressional Republicans were able to continue gutting the IRS every year. Needless to say, once Trump was in office there was no longer any pushback at all.

A trio of economists estimated last year that an aggressive push to audit the rich more rigorously would raise about $1.4 trillion over ten years. The Biden folks are more cautious, estimating $700 billion. Whatever the number, there's no good excuse for ignoring the massive drop in audits of high-wealth individuals between 2011 and 2018. Good on Biden for recognizing this as not just a way to fund his spending priorities, but a simple matter of justice as well.

Here's an interesting question: Which state's population turned out to be the most mistaken when the 2020 census results were tabulated? Here's a candidate:

Until yesterday, Arizona was assumed to have a population of 7.4 million in 2020. But the actual census results put their population at 7.1 million. That's an error of about 4%, which might not seem like a lot until you start thinking about federal dollars that are allocated by population. Then it seems a little more serious.

There are other states that had larger missed estimates, but Arizona had by far the biggest overestimate. That is, its estimate was way over its actual count when the results of the census were tabulated. Here are the top 20 missed estimates:

New Jersey and New York both turned out to have more residents than they thought. Arizona and Washington DC are in a class by themselves when it comes to having fewer residents than they thought.

What accounts for large missed estimates like this? Is it really the estimates at fault or did the census itself fail? Perhaps the Census Bureau's statisticians will weigh in on this someday.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through April 26. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.