A few days ago, in advance of last Monday's announcement by the Obama Administration of proposed new Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) emissions rules for the nation's coal-fired power plants, I was getting myself mentally lathered-up to write about the inevitable poorly-founded Republican and special-interest opposition to such a worthy ground-breaking initiative.
As it turns out, I was wasting my time. Here's why: These proposed new regulations are, unfortunately, not very challenging; in fact, it's hard to call them ground-breaking. The 30% reduction in carbon emissions called for by the proposed new EPA regulations can be achieved by the power generation industry if they just simply keep on doing what they have already been doing.
Accomplishing a 30% emissions reduction in the next 15 years--the proposed regulations are not immediately effective, as the process requires a one-year period of commentary and revisions first--doesn't seem very challenging to me; when you do the math, it probably doesn't seem that challenging to you, either.
But, it's even easier than it would seem after doing the math. Why? you might ask. Because, I would answer, the baseline year is not 2014 or 2015, but instead it is 2005, and in the last nine years these emissions have already been reduced by about half of the target of 30%! So, according to the regulations as they are currently proposed, the power generation industry must accomplish over the next fifteen years about the same as they have accomplished during the last nine years. In other words, they need to accomplish a 15% reduction over a period of 15 years, when they've already done the same in 9 years.
If America's taipans of power can't do that by just getting out of bed in the morning and going to work, then we need new taipans.
Yes, I realize there are lots of moving pieces that affect power generation. For example, it's been relatively easy over the last few years to replace thermal coal with natural gas because of the emergence of relatively inexpensive natural gas as an alternative fuel, which offsets the costs of plant conversion. And then there's the argument that plays so well in all of those coal-mining states: Coal means jobs!
The economic reality, of course, is brutally in favor of continuing to reduce the use of thermal coal for a couple of reasons. First, natural gas is abundant; even the most conservative estimates of America's natural gas resources speak in terms of supplies that can last for centuries. Second, the labor part of the business of extracting and delivering coal is dirty, dangerous and undesirable; over the next decade-and-a-half, most of the people involved in that labor will either die, retire or engage in more agreeable employment.
Bear in mind the fact that coal miners have been passing away, retiring or moving to better jobs for the last nine years as the power industry has been reducing its reliance on coal. If the numerical impact on that labor force is proportional to the change in need for its product--seems like a reasonable assumption to me--then changes that have happened over nine years will now be spread out over fifteen years, thus making for more manageable changes in the overall employment environment.
I think these things by themselves close the case in an economic sense, even without adding in the economic, emotional, mental and human benefits of a population that will enjoy better health.
We need the proposed new EPA regulations; without them, there's nothing to nudge the power industry to make further improvements in their operations that will mean cleaner air for us to look through and breath into our lungs. If it were up to me, we would be doing more. . .but that's a conversation for another time.
The effort I first spent on this wasn't entirely wasted; I'm still using the same title, because I think it's a good one.
For those who are interested, what follows is the original, lathered-up version.
****************************************************************************
You would think that it would be relatively easy for Americans to agree that breathing polluted air is bad, and acting to remove pollution is good. We decided this decades ago, with bipartisan agreement from both major political parties--Democratic and Republican--as well as most of the minor parties.
It seems that some people have forgotten this and so they want to waste good air--presumably they wouldn't want to suck up bad air since that would send them into fits of coughing or worse--by objecting to the next expected step in further reducing airborne pollution, which is to begin the process of putting a stake through the heart of King Coal.
The squeamish among America's political class--admittedly and shamefully, this includes some Democrats, but mostly it's Republicans--feverishly chant that this is "Obama's war on coal!" They understate the reality. It's a war on a power-generating substance which has reigned supreme with disguised malevolence for two centuries. The combustion of which corrupts our air, land and water with chemicals which are inimical to all higher forms of life on Earth, including--and especially--the bipedal life forms known as homo sapiens sapiens; that's us. Don't call it simply coal; call it King Coal, because it has powered the furnaces and generators and engines needed by a developing and growing civilization for generations. Yes, we needed it, and so we willingly gave our fealty while basking in the protective warmth of those furnaces. But King Coal has always deceived us about the costs of our feudal relationship. The price of living under King Coal's protection is more than what we could see we were paying for discovery, extraction, transportation and combustion. Much more.
We've already had the debate about the not so obvious costs of a dirty environment, and the importance and values of a cleaner living environment, starting in the 1950s, gaining clarity in the '60s--remember Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring?"--and then the decision being decisively awarded in the early '70s with the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the federal government by the Republican Administration of Richard Nixon and the Democratic-majority House and Senate. The Clean Air Act legislation was a companion product to the formation of the EPA. Seems like a pretty solid piece of bipartisan commitment to me.
Which brings us to the here-and-now, with the Obama Administration set to announce soon a set of reduction actions, under the authority of the Clean Air Act, that must be taken over the next several years by coal-fired electricity plants. Already, the Chamber of Commerce and other similar special-interest groups, and their bought-and-paid-for anti-environmental politicians, have objected to these actions by saying that they are too expensive--they peg the cost at $50 billion annually, which they somehow figured out before the program has been announced--and that jobs will be lost if the actions are taken.
If these people who oppose the next steps needed to clean the environment know what they are talking about, then they sure are doing a good job of hiding that fact.
First of all, let's assume that the $50 billion figure is accurate, which is just an assumption. In a $17 trillion economy, $50 billion is hardly even a rounding error. But the whole discussion is pointless, because it will take time to figure out these numbers. The fact that these people are throwing figures like this around even before the program is announced is just evidence that they don't want to engage in a fact-based discussion.
The same holds true for any commentary on job losses. I don't doubt that reducing the use of coal will cause some coal mining jobs to go away. That's not necessarily a bad thing, nor is it even an event that will have an adverse effect on the people who currently hold those jobs. Coal mining is dangerous, dirty and unhealthy work; that's the kind of employment that ought to decrease over time.
In fact, many of today's jobs related to the finding, extraction and transportation of coal are going to be around for a good amount of time yet. Reducing coal usage will not take place overnight, and normal employment attrition might well balance the books as coal-related job opportunities fade away.
I wish we could do without the use of coal entirely, because I believe we would all be better off for doing so. That's not going to happen soon, certainly not in the next few decades. But the new EPA regulations point us in the right direction.
Friday, June 6, 2014
Friday, May 16, 2014
U.S.A -- Making do with an old Constitution
Is __________________ (fill in the blank) constitutional or unconstitutional? Here in the United States we seem to ask that question often.
If you were asked to render an opinion on the constitutionality of a law or an action--in other words, deciding if something is constitutional or unconstitutional--how would you go about doing that? For example, might you read the text of the Constitution, looking for a reference to the matter under consideration, and then make your decision based on the wording that is found, with the feeling that if no such reference exists in the Constitution then the presumed law or action might well be unconstitutional?
With that approach, you would have to read all the way through the main body of the Constitution, and continue reading past the first twelve Amendments, to arrive at the conclusion that slavery is unconstitutional. If you were to stop reading at the end of the Constitution--as originally written--you would have to conclude that slavery was perfectly legal in this country, which was the original intent of the framers of the Constitution.
You might read that far and then beyond, all the way to the last Amendment--#27, or Amendment XXVII, adopted in 1992--and reasonably conclude that the Air Force is unconstitutional, since it is nowhere described within the Constitution or those Amendments, even though the Army and the Navy are specifically mentioned.
In a few months--on September 17--the Constitution of the United States of America will be two hundred twenty seven years old. The world, and the nation, are a whole lot different now than they were when the Constitution was written in the 1780s. Nothing lasts forever.
It's time to start thinking about writing a new Constitution.
We've done it before. The United States did not start with the Constitution that we have now. Instead, the nation was born with a different supreme governing law of the land; it was called the Articles of Confederation. Those Articles acted as a national constitution for the duration of the Revolution and the subsequent time of peace during the early to mid-1780s.
The Articles of Confederation never worked very well. The national government was small, dysfunctional and weak. It was just barely able to establish working relations with the governments of other nations, it depended for its success on the voluntary cooperation of the thirteen individual state governments, and it had little ability to raise national revenues. As a result, it took years longer than should have been needed to convince European governments of the sincerity and eventual success of the American Revolution, and the Continental Army--and embryonic Navy--were constantly underfunded. In fact, by the time that the Revolution was successfully concluded with the Treaty of Paris, there was so little that the national government was able to do for the individual states that a common thought in Great Britain was that those states, within a few years, would start drifting back to the Mother Country, seeking the protection and stability of Crown and Parliament.
So, we already know that we can write a new governing law for the land and use it to replace an old one that has become out-of-date. Why should it be done now? And, even if there are good reasons to write a new constitution, is there another, less disruptive solution that could work just as well?
This practice did not originate in America; it probably started with the British monarchy during the mid-1300s. French was the language commonly spoken by British royalty and nobility at that time, hence the Gallic appearance of the terminology. Sir Francis Drake was probably the most famous holder of a letter of marque, which was granted to him by Queen Elizabeth I.
Issuing letters of marque might have made some sense for the United States when the country had an insignificant Navy, but it makes no sense at all at a time when the U.S. Navy wields more firepower than all of the other navies of the world combined. Nor is it a sensible tool to hold when the nations of the world are united in condemning and combating piracy in all its forms.
Another example: the Constitution retains its original wording regarding the difference between "free persons" and "all other Persons." It also still has the statement that Senators are to be chosen by the state legislatures. Both of these, of course, have been corrected and superseded by Amendments, but the original wording remains.
There are flaws of omission, too. The Constitution, even with the addition of the Bill of Rights of the first ten Amendments, is weak on provisions for the protection of personal privacy, whether from intrusion by law enforcement and our own government, by other individuals, or by businesses and organizations of any size and type. Regarding impeachment, the Constitution fails to define what could be a reason for impeachment, other than to describe it as "treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors." Treason and bribery are probably fairly straight-forward, but the rest is vague at best, and a springboard for political cupidity at worst.
There are plenty of good reasons to create a new constitution, but it's not likely to happen any time soon. The inertia of human apathy, and the current political disagreements over the responsibilities of a national government, probably prohibit any meaningful attempt at achieving something that can be expected to last for another one or two hundred years.
So, instead we content ourselves with a judicial system that is expected to render Olympian judgments on matters of constitutionality that are increasingly distant from the realities of the day when the Constitution of the United States was written. From the standpoint of liberal progressives such as myself, that's not such a bad thing, as long as the judiciary making those decisions is largely composed of people who believe that which seems to be obvious for the long-term viability of the nation: the U.S. Constitution must be increasingly interpreted to accommodate contemporary realities, rather than judging by trying to make contemporary realities fit into the more than two century old box of original intent.
As time goes by, it becomes more and more important to ask the questions "Why do we care about the original intent of the framers of the Constitution? How should the original intent be updated to take into account today's lifestyle and social contexts, instead of the contexts of the late 18th century?"
Fortunately for America, the ambiguities inherent in the Constitution, along with the general acceptance of the practice of judicial interpretation, have combined to enable gradual legal adaptations over time so that the Constitution is still effective, even if it isn't perfect.
But, in the absence of a new and more current constitution, we are going to have to prepare ourselves for an increasing tug-of-war over the how far the nation's laws should stray from the original intent of the Constitution. Times change and people change, and laws of the time will have to change to keep abreast of the needs of the people. Consider this: the U.S. Constitution was written from a predominantly Anglo-Saxon perspective by a predominantly Anglo-Saxon population; by mid-century, the United States will no longer have a predominantly Anglo-Saxon population. In some ways, even now the population is no longer predominantly Anglo-Saxon. As for perspective, that which reflects an Anglo-Saxon type of outlook will continue to be hugely influential for the foreseeable future, but other types of outlook are emerging (and have emerged) and will expect to be adopted into the legal system, too.
There's a much-quoted, but largely under-appreciated, part of the Constitution that provides the best indication of anticipation on the part of the members of the Constitutional Convention that their final production would, in fact, be liberally interpreted over time. It's the Preamble, which sets huge national goals for things that naturally have evolving definitions: justice, domestic tranquility, defense, welfare, and blessings of liberty. Everything else that comes after the Preamble builds the apparatus that we use to achieve these goals.
This is a design for a powerful national government. A limited and shackled national government cannot accomplish nor can it maintain these things. I say this with all due respect to today's limited-government denizens of the tea party cliques. American government is far from perfect, but a small and wimpy government cannot accomplish the lofty goals of the Preamble to the Constitution. We already know that because we tried such a government first, and it failed.
A new American Constitution, properly crafted, would serve the country better than an old one that has had to be amended for improvement, and which is based in human experiences that are more than two centuries in the past. Can we muddle along with what we already have without replacing it? Probably, but that means continually charting and re-charting a course between original intent and contemporary interpretation, and that will be a ride that's likely to be something similar to charting a course between two black holes.
If you were asked to render an opinion on the constitutionality of a law or an action--in other words, deciding if something is constitutional or unconstitutional--how would you go about doing that? For example, might you read the text of the Constitution, looking for a reference to the matter under consideration, and then make your decision based on the wording that is found, with the feeling that if no such reference exists in the Constitution then the presumed law or action might well be unconstitutional?
With that approach, you would have to read all the way through the main body of the Constitution, and continue reading past the first twelve Amendments, to arrive at the conclusion that slavery is unconstitutional. If you were to stop reading at the end of the Constitution--as originally written--you would have to conclude that slavery was perfectly legal in this country, which was the original intent of the framers of the Constitution.
You might read that far and then beyond, all the way to the last Amendment--#27, or Amendment XXVII, adopted in 1992--and reasonably conclude that the Air Force is unconstitutional, since it is nowhere described within the Constitution or those Amendments, even though the Army and the Navy are specifically mentioned.
In a few months--on September 17--the Constitution of the United States of America will be two hundred twenty seven years old. The world, and the nation, are a whole lot different now than they were when the Constitution was written in the 1780s. Nothing lasts forever.
It's time to start thinking about writing a new Constitution.
Pre-Constitution: Articles of Confederation
Most people will read that last statement and react with a hearty response of something along the lines of "That's the craziest idea I've heard in a long time!" Well, maybe so, but not because it cannot, or should not, be done. It can be done--people are just as able to write laws today as they were in the 18th century (maybe more so). It should be done--our Constitution is creaking under the weight of more than two centuries of change.We've done it before. The United States did not start with the Constitution that we have now. Instead, the nation was born with a different supreme governing law of the land; it was called the Articles of Confederation. Those Articles acted as a national constitution for the duration of the Revolution and the subsequent time of peace during the early to mid-1780s.
The Articles of Confederation never worked very well. The national government was small, dysfunctional and weak. It was just barely able to establish working relations with the governments of other nations, it depended for its success on the voluntary cooperation of the thirteen individual state governments, and it had little ability to raise national revenues. As a result, it took years longer than should have been needed to convince European governments of the sincerity and eventual success of the American Revolution, and the Continental Army--and embryonic Navy--were constantly underfunded. In fact, by the time that the Revolution was successfully concluded with the Treaty of Paris, there was so little that the national government was able to do for the individual states that a common thought in Great Britain was that those states, within a few years, would start drifting back to the Mother Country, seeking the protection and stability of Crown and Parliament.
A national government that was given a fighting chance
The world of the mid-1780s looked a whole lot different from the world of the early and mid-1770s. Those differences are what motivated the leading American citizens of the time to write a new constitution for the country. They dropped the reference to a loosely-organized confederation of states by naming the document the Constitution of the United States. That was a clear statement of legal principle and national intent that was meant to cure one of the major ailments of the time: the states were to be firmly bound together, with no drifting back towards Great Britain.So, we already know that we can write a new governing law for the land and use it to replace an old one that has become out-of-date. Why should it be done now? And, even if there are good reasons to write a new constitution, is there another, less disruptive solution that could work just as well?
Our constitution includes some really old and odd ideas
There are good reasons to write a new constitution. As it stands now our constitution has content that was relevant in the 18th century, but no longer has any meaning in the 21st century. For example, did you know that it gives Congress the authority to issue letters of marque? Most people today don't have the faintest idea of what a letter of marque is, or what it means. (I'm going to guess that most Members of Congress have no idea what a letter of marque is, or even that they have the authority to issue one.) A letter of marque is a governmental authorization given to a private shipowner to arm that ship--at the owner's expense--and then sail the high seas with the goal of capturing, and then selling for profit, the shipping of another country. Basically, this was legalized piracy.This practice did not originate in America; it probably started with the British monarchy during the mid-1300s. French was the language commonly spoken by British royalty and nobility at that time, hence the Gallic appearance of the terminology. Sir Francis Drake was probably the most famous holder of a letter of marque, which was granted to him by Queen Elizabeth I.
Issuing letters of marque might have made some sense for the United States when the country had an insignificant Navy, but it makes no sense at all at a time when the U.S. Navy wields more firepower than all of the other navies of the world combined. Nor is it a sensible tool to hold when the nations of the world are united in condemning and combating piracy in all its forms.
Another example: the Constitution retains its original wording regarding the difference between "free persons" and "all other Persons." It also still has the statement that Senators are to be chosen by the state legislatures. Both of these, of course, have been corrected and superseded by Amendments, but the original wording remains.
There are flaws of omission, too. The Constitution, even with the addition of the Bill of Rights of the first ten Amendments, is weak on provisions for the protection of personal privacy, whether from intrusion by law enforcement and our own government, by other individuals, or by businesses and organizations of any size and type. Regarding impeachment, the Constitution fails to define what could be a reason for impeachment, other than to describe it as "treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors." Treason and bribery are probably fairly straight-forward, but the rest is vague at best, and a springboard for political cupidity at worst.
It's a different world now
The constitution that we are living with was written when the United States was a primarily rural, agricultural nation of less than four million total population. Today, the U.S. is populated by over 318 million people who live mostly in metropolitan areas--each of which is composed of millions of residents whose occupation is anything but an agricultural endeavor. It's probably obvious to most that the United States of the 1780s had no Internet and television, but here are other things that it did not have: paved roads, railroads, pipelines, massive coal mines, No. 2 pencils, oil wells, electricity, steamships, guns that could shoot more than once without reloading, bicycles, tennis balls and racquets, barbed wire, telegraph lines, ballpoint pens, police forces, observable theory of evolution, pharmaceuticals, telephones, quantum mechanics, space travel, airplanes, hospital emergency rooms, public education, black holes (they were around, of course, but we didn't know about them), medical records, stop signs on the roads, canals with barges, mega-huge corporations, a stock market. . .the list could go on and on. Some things arrived after the Constitution was written, changed the world, and then became obsolete by something else that arrived later and changed the world again.There are plenty of good reasons to create a new constitution, but it's not likely to happen any time soon. The inertia of human apathy, and the current political disagreements over the responsibilities of a national government, probably prohibit any meaningful attempt at achieving something that can be expected to last for another one or two hundred years.
So, instead we content ourselves with a judicial system that is expected to render Olympian judgments on matters of constitutionality that are increasingly distant from the realities of the day when the Constitution of the United States was written. From the standpoint of liberal progressives such as myself, that's not such a bad thing, as long as the judiciary making those decisions is largely composed of people who believe that which seems to be obvious for the long-term viability of the nation: the U.S. Constitution must be increasingly interpreted to accommodate contemporary realities, rather than judging by trying to make contemporary realities fit into the more than two century old box of original intent.
As time goes by, it becomes more and more important to ask the questions "Why do we care about the original intent of the framers of the Constitution? How should the original intent be updated to take into account today's lifestyle and social contexts, instead of the contexts of the late 18th century?"
Maybe it can be interpreted in endless ways
As each year goes by, it becomes more and more absurd to try to make constitutional judgments that are substantiated by the idea of original intent, simply because we change and our world changes. This makes life harder for the political and judicial conservatives in the country, because they put themselves in the position of defending something that is less relevant to a modern society. "Less relevant" doesn't mean irrelevant, it just means that there are more and more chinks in the armor plating of original intent.Fortunately for America, the ambiguities inherent in the Constitution, along with the general acceptance of the practice of judicial interpretation, have combined to enable gradual legal adaptations over time so that the Constitution is still effective, even if it isn't perfect.
But, in the absence of a new and more current constitution, we are going to have to prepare ourselves for an increasing tug-of-war over the how far the nation's laws should stray from the original intent of the Constitution. Times change and people change, and laws of the time will have to change to keep abreast of the needs of the people. Consider this: the U.S. Constitution was written from a predominantly Anglo-Saxon perspective by a predominantly Anglo-Saxon population; by mid-century, the United States will no longer have a predominantly Anglo-Saxon population. In some ways, even now the population is no longer predominantly Anglo-Saxon. As for perspective, that which reflects an Anglo-Saxon type of outlook will continue to be hugely influential for the foreseeable future, but other types of outlook are emerging (and have emerged) and will expect to be adopted into the legal system, too.
There's a much-quoted, but largely under-appreciated, part of the Constitution that provides the best indication of anticipation on the part of the members of the Constitutional Convention that their final production would, in fact, be liberally interpreted over time. It's the Preamble, which sets huge national goals for things that naturally have evolving definitions: justice, domestic tranquility, defense, welfare, and blessings of liberty. Everything else that comes after the Preamble builds the apparatus that we use to achieve these goals.
This is a design for a powerful national government. A limited and shackled national government cannot accomplish nor can it maintain these things. I say this with all due respect to today's limited-government denizens of the tea party cliques. American government is far from perfect, but a small and wimpy government cannot accomplish the lofty goals of the Preamble to the Constitution. We already know that because we tried such a government first, and it failed.
A new American Constitution, properly crafted, would serve the country better than an old one that has had to be amended for improvement, and which is based in human experiences that are more than two centuries in the past. Can we muddle along with what we already have without replacing it? Probably, but that means continually charting and re-charting a course between original intent and contemporary interpretation, and that will be a ride that's likely to be something similar to charting a course between two black holes.
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