Coyote Blog

The news came out the other day that Porsche will stop making diesel-engine cars.  This is the beginning of the end of significant diesel car production in Europe, and is the ultimate proof that the diesel engine is a dead-end technology choice for Europeans concerned with the environment.

The story is a long one and I will leave you with some links in a moment, but the basic story flow is:

• European governments are concerned about CO2 production, want to "do something"
• European car-makers have a lead over the rest of the world in diesel technology, urge governments to choose diesel as the technology of the future, since at the time it was more efficient than gasoline engines.
• European governments, hot to "do something" and also keen to do it in a way that seems to advantage domestic producers in the high profile automobile trade, promote diesel in a number of ways (including lowering taxes on diesel fuel and diesel car purchases).
• As Europeans adopt diesel, problems emerge as air quality degrades -- diesels may be more efficient, but have a number of harmful emissions that are far worse than with gasoline engines.  There are tests and standards for these emissions but it is discovered that most manufacturers are cheating on emissions tests.
• Too late, it is realized that other technologies (electric hybrids, all electric) are pushing well past diesel in terms of efficiency.  Diesel is a dead-end in terms of CO2 reduction, and increases harmful emissions.
• Emissions tests are tightened, but it is clear manufacturers cheated because they do not have the technology to produce cars people will buy that meet the standards.  Companies like Porsche start to exit the business.

One of the best articles I have found about this history is actually at Vox, that bastion of free market economics and government non-interventionism.

The failure here is entirely predictable and is subsumed in the general criticism of "government picking winners."  As with many such failures, they boil down to information and incentives.  In terms of information, folks in government have no idea of the range of technology choices now and in the future, and how these technology choices might or might not make sense in a broad range of applications.  In terms of incentives, government officials usually have very different true incentives from their publicly stated ones (in this case CO2 reduction).  In the US, the Feds continue to support insanely stupid ethanol subsidies and mandates in part because the first Presidential primary is in corn state Iowa.  In Europe, it may well have been that officials were more ready to support diesel, which Europeans were good at, over hybrids, which Asian companies were good at, no matter what the relative merits were.

If you think that is cynical, even the folks at Vox noticed:

At the time, there were lots of different paths Europe's automakers could have taken to green itself. They could've pursued direct injection technology for gasoline vehicles, making those engines more fuel-efficient. They could've ramped up development of hybrid-electric cars, as Toyota was doing in Japan. But European companies like Peugeot and Volkswagen and BMW had already been making big investments in diesel, and they wanted a climate policy that would help those bets to pay off.

Europe's policymakers obliged. The EU agreed to a voluntary CO2 target for vehicles that was largely in line with what diesel technology could meet. As researcher Sarah Keay-Bright later noted, these standards were crafted so as not to force Europe's automakers to develop hybrids, electric vehicles, or other advanced powertrains.

The result?

Although overall pollution in Europe has gone down over time, diesel vehicle emissions remain stubbornly high. Today, Paris sometimes has smoggy days comparable to those in Beijing. London is struggling with unhealthy levels of nitrogen dioxide. Germany, Austria, and Ireland have NOx pollution well above the legal limits, with vehicles accounting for roughly 40 percent of that output.

The health toll is likely considerable. One recent study estimated that diesel pollution from cars, buses, and trucks in Britain caused 9,400 premature deaths in 2010 alone. It's difficult to pinpoint what fraction of those deaths might have been avoided if emission rules on cars had been strictly enforced all along, but that gives a sense of the stakes.

Even Vox is willing to call for some technocratic humility:

Which brings us to the third takeaway. The future is hard to predict. Diesel cars seemed like a reasonable idea in the 1990s and a disaster today. That suggests that policymakers should have a lot more humility when crafting energy policy. Maybe battery-electric cars will win out, or maybe it'll be hydrogen, or maybe it'll be something else entirely. (Heck, perhaps diesel cars that are genuinely clean could play a role in reducing CO2 emissions.) No one knows for sure.

So one approach here might be to pursue technology-neutral policies focused on preferred outcomes — say, tightly enforced standards that require lower emissions — rather than favoring specific industries and technologies just because they happen to seem promising at that moment in time.

This conundrum is likely to come up again and again. For years, governments have been laying down big bets on emerging clean energy technologies. France did it with nuclear power in the 1970s and '80s. Germany did it with wind and solar power in the 2000s, through feed-in tariffs. The United States has done it with corn ethanol in the past decade.

Done right, this sort of government support can be valuable, helping useful new energy options break into the mainstream against entrenched competition. But there's also a huge risk that governments will end up gambling on badly flawed technologies that then becomethe entrenched competition — and prove impossible to get rid of. The US arguably made that mistake with ethanol, which has had unintended ripple effects on the food supply and deforestation that are proving politically difficult to untangle. The drive for diesel looks like it belongs in that category, too. It's not a story we'd like to keep repeating.

Thus we get to my plan, which eliminates all these political interventions in favor of a revenue-neutral carbon tax.

Back in November of 2015 I wrote:

I would be stunned if the Volkswagen emissions cheating is limited to Volkswagen.  Volkswagen is not unique -- Cat and I think Cummins were busted a while back for the same thing.  US automakers don't have a lot of exposure to diesels (except for pickup trucks) but my guess is that something similar was ubiquitous.

My thinking was that the Cat, Cummins, and VW cheating incidents all demonstrated that automakers had hit a wall on diesel emissions compliance -- the regulations had gone beyond what automakers could comply with and still provide consumers with an acceptable level of performance.

Since then Fiat-Chrysler has been accused of the same behavior, and GM has been accused as well, though only in  a civil suit.

Now, most recently, Daimler is being accused of the same behavior

Daimler has been under suspicion of cheating on US emissions tests for quite a while now -- in 2016, a number of customers even sued the automaker, claiming their cars had sneaky software made to trick testers similar to Volkswagen's. Now, according to German newspaper Bild am Sonntag, US authorities investigating the Mercedes maker have discovered that its vehicles are equipped with illegal software to help them pass United States' stringent emission tests. Citing confidential documents, the publication said Daimler's employees doubted their vehicles would be able meet US standards even before Volkswagen's diesel scandal blew up. Internal testing apparently revealed that some Mercedes models emit ten times the country's nitrogen oxide limit.

Daimler reportedly developed software with several functions to be able to trick US regulators. One called "Bit 15" was designed to switch off emissions cleaning after 16 miles of driving, while another called "Slipguard" can detect if the car is being tested based on speed and acceleration. Bild am Sonntag said it found emails from Daimler engineers questioning whether those functions were legal.

To this day, I wonder how much European officials knew about all this as it was happening.  European officials really went all-in on promoting diesel years ago as an approach to combating climate change.  This has, by the way, turned out to be a great example of the danger of government picking winners, as diesel has really turned out to be one of the worst approaches for reducing emissions in transportation vehicles, both economically and environmentally.  Never-the-less, given the big commitment by European regulators in promoting diesel as a key part of their climate change plans, I wonder how much they were looking the other way through all of this -- such that their current "shock" at all this cheating might be equivalent to Reynault's shock that there was gambling going on in Rick's Cafe in Casablanca.

I thought this letter from Dan Hanson to Tyler Cowen was really thought provoking:

I wonder how many of the people making predictions about the future of truck drivers have ever ridden with one to see what they do?

One of the big failings of high-level analyses of future trends is that in general they either ignore or seriously underestimate the complexity of the job at a detailed level. Lots of jobs look simple or rote from a think tank or government office, but turn out to be quite complex when you dive into the details.

For example, truck drivers don’t just drive trucks. They also secure loads, including determining what to load first and last and how to tie it all down securely. They act as agents for the trunking company. They verify that what they are picking up is what is on the manifest. They are the early warning system for vehicle maintenance. They deal with the government and others at weighing stations. When sleeping in the cab, they act as security for the load. If the vehicle breaks down, they set up road flares and contact authorities. If the vehicle doesn’t handle correctly, the driver has to stop and analyze what’s wrong – blown tire, shifting load, whatever.

In addition, many truckers are sole proprietors who own their own trucks. This means they also do all the bookwork, preventative maintenance, taxes, etc. These people have local knowledge that is not easily transferable. They know the quirks of the routes, they have relationships with customers, they learn how best to navigate through certain areas, they understand how to optimize by splitting loads or arranging for return loads at their destination, etc. They also learn which customers pay promptly, which ones provide their loads in a way that’s easy to get on the truck, which ones generally have their paperwork in order, etc. Loading docks are not all equal. Some are very ad-hoc and require serious judgement to be able to manoever large trucks around them. Never underestimate the importance of local knowledge.

I’ve been working in automation for 20 years. When you see how hard it is to simply digitize a paper process inside a single plant (often a multi-year project), you start to roll your eyes at ivory tower claims of entire industries being totally transformed by automation in a few years. One thing I’ve learned is a fundamentally Hayekian insight: When it comes to large scale activities, nothing about change is easy, and top-down change generally fails. Just figuring out the requirements for computerizing a job is a laborious process full of potential errors. Many automation projects fail because the people at the high levels who plan them simply do not understand the needs of the people who have to live with the results.

Take factory automation. This is the simplest environment to automate, because factories are local, closed environments that can be modified to make things simpler. A lot of the activities that go on in a factory are extremely well defined and repetitive. Factory robots are readily available that can be trained to do just about anything physically a person can do. And yet, many factories have not automated simply because there are little details about how they work that are hard to define and automate, or because they aren’t organized enough in terms of information flow, paperwork, processes, etc. It can take a team of engineers many man years to just figure out exactly what a factory needs to do to make itself ready to be automated. Often that requires changes to the physical plant, digitization of manual processes, Statistical analysis of variance in output to determine where the process is not being defined correctly, etc.

A lot of pundits have a sense that automation is accelerating in replacing jobs. In fact, I predict it will slow down, because we have been picking the low hanging fruit first. That has given us an unrealistic idea of how hard it is to fully automate a job.

Based on this I can still think of some labor-saving, but not labor-eliminating, automation roles in trucking.

• Convoying, allowing one driver to lead multiple additional automated trucks
• Reduction in team driving.  Currently Federal rules (e.g. for rest breaks and maximum driving times) have created incentives for teams of two drivers to move priority freight that needs to be moving constantly and not parked while the driver sleeps.  Automation might allow one person plus the automated driver to keep trucks moving continuously and safely.

One thing not mentioned by Mr. Hanson is the role of regulation.  Safe automated trucks will likely exist LONG before Federal regulatory changes will occur to allow them much use.  This is not just because there is some delay with regulators getting comfortable with the safety aspects, but because affected groups with political pull who wish to keep the status quo will use safety concerns, real or imagined, to hold up the regulatory process.

If you think I am being too pessimistic, here is a story.  The typical steam engine of the 1930's needed a driver and a fireman -- the latter's job was to make sure the furnace was correctly fueled and operating well.  When diesel locomotives came along, one benefit among many was that the fireman was no longer needed.  Seeing this on the horizon, the fireman's union was ready to dig in their heals.  They actually, boldly, took the position NOT that a diesel locomotive needed a fireman, but that it should be required to have 2 firemen!  This was partially a subject for union negotiation, but in the dysfunctional world of railroad labor regulation, it also required some regulatory changes  (as the first industry with large workforces, the government took its first shot at labor regulation in a railroad-specific manner and the result was largely dysfunctional; fortunately for the rest of industry it did a better job with labor regulation later for everyone else).  It took years to totally eliminated fireman from diesel engines.  In fact, nearly every railroad labor saving technology like this (e.g. automatic brakes rather than men on roofs turning break wheels) led to regulatory foot-dagging that allowed the new technology but resisted the reduction in personnel.

Back in November of 2015 I wrote:

I would be stunned if the Volkswagen emissions cheating is limited to Volkswagen.  Volkswagen is not unique -- Cat and I think Cummins were busted a while back for the same thing.  US automakers don't have a lot of exposure to diesels (except for pickup trucks) but my guess is that something similar was ubiquitous.

My thinking was that the Cat, Cummins, and VW cheating incidents all demonstrated that automakers had hit a wall on diesel emissions compliance -- the regulations had gone beyond what automakers could comply with and still provide consumers with an acceptable level of performance.

Since then Fiat-Chrysler has been accused of the same behavior, and now GM is accused as well, though only in  a civil suit.

A class-action lawsuit accuses General Motors of rigging emission-control systems on 2011–2016 Chevrolet Silverado HD and GMC Sierra HD pickups with GM’s Duramax turbo-diesel 6.6-liter V-8 engine. If the allegations are proved true, the environmental damage from these 705,000 trucks, which the lawsuit said emit two to five times the legal limit of nitrogen oxides (NOx) in typical driving conditions, could easily exceed that of Volkswagen’s emission-test-cheating TDI engines.

Of course, people can say any thing they want in a civil suit, so this needs to be proved, but I think it probably is true.

A while back a reader with some inside knowledge explained what was going on.

One of my favorite correspondents, also the proprietor of the Finem Respice blog, sent me a note today about my article the other day about cheating on diesel emissions regulations.   The note covers a lot of ground but is well worth reading to understand the crony-regulatory state.  They begin by quoting me (yes, as I repeat so often, I understand that "they" is not grammatically correct here but we don't have a gender-neutral third person pronoun and so I use "they" and "their" as substitutes, until the SJW's start making me use ze or whatever.)

"My thinking was that the Cat, Cummins, and VW cheating incidents all demonstrated that automakers had hit a wall on diesel emissions compliance -- the regulations had gone beyond what automakers could comply with and still provide consumers with an acceptable level of performance."

Exactly. More importantly, the regulators KNEW it. I was researching energy shorts and had a ton of discussions with former regulatory types in the U.S. I was stunned to discover that there was widespread acknowledgement on the regulatory side that many regulations were impossible to comply with and so "compliance trump cards" were built into the system.

For instance, in Illinois you get favorable treatment as a potential government contractor if you "comply" with all sorts of insane progressive policy strictures. "Woman or minority owned business" or "small business owner", as an example. Even a small advantage in the contracting process for (for example) the State of Illinois puts you over the edge. Competitors without (for instance) the Woman or Minority Owned Business certification would have to underbid a certified applicant by 10-15% (it's all a complex points system) to just break even. It got so bad so quickly that the regs were revised to permit a de minimis ownership (1%). Of course, several regulatory lawyers quickly made a business out of offering minority or women equity "owners" who would take 1% for a fee (just absorb how backwards it is to be paying a fee to have a 1% equity partner) with very restrictive shareholder agreements. Then it became obvious that you'd get points for the "women" and "minority" categories BOTH if you had a black woman as a proxy 1% "owner." There was one woman who was a 1% owner of 320 firms.

Some of my favorites include environmental building requirements tied to government contract approval. The LEED certification is such a joke. There are a ton of "real" categories, like motion detecting lights, solar / thermal filtering windows, CO2 neutral engineering. But if you can't get enough of that, you can also squeeze in with points for "environmental education". For instance, a display in the lobby discussing the three solar panels on the roof, or with a pretty diagram of the building's heat pump system. You can end up getting a platinum LEED certification and still have the highest energy consumption density in the city of Chicago, as it turns out.

U.S. automakers have been just as bad. There's been a fuel computer "test mode" for emissions testing in every GM car since... whenever. Also, often the makers have gotten away with "fleet standards" where the MPG / emissions criteria are spread across the "fleet." Guess how powerful / "efficient" the cars that get sent to Hertz or Avis are.

Like so many other things in the crony capitalist / crudely protectionist United States, (e.g. banking prosecutions) foreign firms will get crucified for industry-wide practices.

Gee, I wonder if state-ownership of GM has been a factor in sudden acceleration / emissions prosecutions?

BTW, I wrote about the silliness of LEED certification here, among other places, after my local Bank of America branch got LEED certified, scoring many of their points by putting EV-only spaces (without a charger) in the fron of the building.  In a different post, I made this comparison:

I am not religious but am fascinated by the comparisons at times between religion and environmentalism.  Here is the LEED process applied to religion:

• 1 point:  Buy indulgence for $25
• 1 point:  Say 10 Our Fathers
• 1 point:  Light candle in church
• 3 points:  Behave well all the time, act charitably, never lie, etc.

It takes 3 points to get to heaven.  Which path do you chose?

Back in November of 2015 I wrote:

I would be stunned if the Volkswagen emissions cheating is limited to Volkswagen.  Volkswagen is not unique -- Cat and I think Cummins were busted a while back for the same thing.  US automakers don't have a lot of exposure to diesels (except for pickup trucks) but my guess is that something similar was ubiquitous.

My thinking was that the Cat, Cummins, and VW cheating incidents all demonstrated that automakers had hit a wall on diesel emissions compliance -- the regulations had gone beyond what automakers could comply with and still provide consumers with an acceptable level of performance.

So we have this:

U.S. environmental regulators accused Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV of using software that allowed illegal emissions in diesel-powered vehicles, the latest broadside in an unprecedented government crackdown on auto makers for alleged pollution transgressions.

The Environmental Protection Agency, days before the end of the Obama administration, delivered a violation notice to Fiat Chrysler accusing the auto maker of using illegal software that allowed 104,000 recent diesel-powered Jeep Grand Cherokee sport utilities and Ram pickup trucks to spew toxic emissions beyond legal limits. The affected vehicles have model years ranging between 2014 and 2016.

Regulatory compliance can be a royal pain in the *ss, but I comply with everything I know about and can figure out in my own business.  There just is no percentage in cheating.  Where regulation has made my business untenable, such as in certain parts of California, I have closed the affected parts of the business.

So if I see no good reason to cheat in my own business when the rents for doing so would flow directly into my own pocket, how in the hell do middle managers on a salary with little or no share in the marginal profitability gains of the company convince themselves to take these risks?

I have mentioned a number of times my chicken or the egg arguments with Progressives on the solution to cronyism.  Is the problem that government power exists to influence markets, and as long as it exists people will bid to control it?  Or is it possible to wield massive make-or-break government power over industry rationally, and only the rank immorality and corrupt speech of corporations stands in the way.  The former argues for a reduction in government power, the latter for more regulation of corporations and their ability to participate in the political process.

I believe this is an example in favor of the "power is inherently corrupting" argument.  No corporation lobbied for NOx rules on diesel engines.  They all fought it tooth and nail.  But once these regulations existed, engine makers are all trying to use the laws to gut their competition:

In 1991, the EPA ignored complaints from several makers of non-road engines that rivals were cheating, in order to save fuel, on emissions rules for oxides of nitrous (NOx). Then environmental groups took up the same complaint, whereupon the agency demanded face-saving consent decrees with numerous engine makers, including two Volvo affiliates.

In essence, the engine makers apologized by agreeing in 1999 to accelerate by a single year compliance with a new emissions standard scheduled to take effect in 2006.

Meanwhile, with another NOx standard looming in 2010, Navistar sued the EPA claiming rival engine-makers were seeking to meet the rule with a defective technology. In turn, Navistar’s competitors sued claiming the EPA was unfairly favoring a defective technology pursued by Navistar (these are only the barest highlights of what became a truck-makers’ legal holy war).

While all this was going on, a Navistar joint-venture partner, Caterpillar, complained that 7,262 Volvo stationary engines made in Sweden before 2006 had violated the 1999 consent decree. Now let’s credit Caterpillar with a certain paperwork ingenuity: The Volvo engines were not imported to the U.S. and were made by a Volvo affiliate that wasn’t a party to the consent decree. EPA itself happily certified the engines under its then-current NOx standard, only changing its mind four years later, prodded by a competitor with a clear interest in damaging Volvo’s business.

To complete the parody, a federal district court would later agree that the 1999 consent terms “do not clearly apply” to the engines in question, but upheld an EPA penalty anyway because Volvo otherwise might enjoy a “competitive advantage” against engines to which the consent decree applied.

As a side note, this is from the "oops, nevermind" Emily Litella School of Regulation:

Let it be said that the EPA’s NOx regulation must have done some good for the American people, though how much good is hard to know. The EPA relies on dubious extrapolations to estimate the benefits to public health. What’s more, the agency appears to have stopped publishing estimates of NOx pollution after 2005. Maybe that’s because the EPA’s focus has shifted to climate change, and its NOx regulations actually increase greenhouse emissions by increasing fuel burn.

I got an email today from some random Gmail account asking me to write about HyrdoInfra.  OK.  The email begins: "HydroInfra Technologies (HIT) is a Stockholm based clean tech company that has developed an innovative approach to neutralizing carbon fuel emissions from power plants and other polluting industries that burn fossil fuels."

Does it eliminate CO2?  NOx?  Particulates?  SOx?  I actually was at the bottom of my inbox for once so I went to the site.  I went to this applications page.  Apparently, it eliminates the "toxic cocktail" of pollutants that include all the ones I mentioned plus mercury and heavy metals.  Wow!  That is some stuff.

Their key product is a process for making something they call "HyrdroAtomic Nano Gas" or HNG.  It sounds like their PR guys got Michael Crichton and JJ Abrams drunk in a brainstorming session for pseudo-scientific names.

But hold on, this is the best part.  :

Splitting water (H20) is a known science. But the energy costs to perform splitting outweigh the energy created from hydrogen when the Hydrogen is split from the water molecule H2O.

This is where mainstream science usually closes the book on the subject.

We took a different approach by postulating that we could split water in an energy efficient way to extract a high yield of Hydrogen at very low cost.

A specific low energy pulse is put into water. The water molecules line up in a certain structure and are split from the Hydrogen molecules.

The result is HNG.

HNG is packed with ‘Exotic Hydrogen’

Exotic Hydrogen is a recent scientific discovery.

HNG carries an abundance of Exotic Hydrogen and Oxygen.

On a Molecular level, HNG is a specific ratio mix of Hydrogen and Oxygen.

The unique qualities of HNG show that the placement of its’ charged electrons turns HNG into an abundant source of exotic Hydrogen.

HNG displays some very different properties from normal hydrogen.

Some basic facts:

• HNG instantly neutralizes carbon fuel pollution emissions
• HNG can be pressurized up to 2 bars.
• HNG combusts at a rate of 9000 meters per second while normal Hydrogen combusts at a rate 600 meters per second.
• Oxygen values actually increase when HNG is inserted into a diesel flame.
• HNG acts like a vortex on fossil fuel emissions causing the flame to be pulled into the center thus concentrating the heat and combustion properties.
• HNG is stored in canisters, arrayed around the emission outlet channels. HNG is injected into the outlets to safely & effectively clean up the burning of fossil fuels.
• The pollution emissions are neutralized instantly & safely with no residual toxic cocktail or chemicals to manage after the HNG burning process is initiated.

Exotic Hyrdrogen!  I love it.  This is probably a component of the "red matter" in the Abrams Star Trek reboot.  Honestly, someone please tell me this a joke, a honeypot for mindless environmental activist drones.    What are the chemical reactions going on here?  If CO2 is captured, what form does it take?  How does a mixture of Hydrogen and Oxygen molecules in whatever state they are in do anything with heavy metals?  None of this is on the website.   On their "validation" page, they have big labels like "Horiba" that look like organizations thave somehow put their impremature on the study.  In fact, they are just names of analytical equipment makers.  It's like putting "IBM" in big print on your climate study because you ran your model on an IBM computer.

SCAM!  Honestly, when you see an article written to attract investment that sounds sort of impressive to laymen but makes absolutely no sense to anyone who knows the smallest about of Chemistry or Physics, it is an investment scam.

But they seem to get a lot of positive press.  In my search of Google, everything in the first ten pages or so are just uncritical republication of their press releases in environmental and business blogs.   You actually have to go into the comments sections of these articles to find anyone willing to observe this is all total BS.   If you want to totally understand why the global warming debate gets nowhere, watch commenter Michael at this link desperately try to hold onto his faith in HydroInfra while people who actually know things try to explain why this makes no sense.

Update:  If you want an actual nano-material that absorbs various pollutants, this may be one.

This is the most helpful article I have found yet on the problems at earthquake-damaged nuclear plants.  As one can imagine, it is a lot more sensible than some of the garbage in the general media.

It cleared up one point of confusion I had - I was not sure why there was still heat generation after the control rods slammed down, killing the fission process.  But apparently there are a number of intermediate fission products created that continue to decay for several days, producing about 3% of the heat of the full fission process.  This heat is what boiled away the water in the reactor vessel once flow of cooling water stopped.  It is this boiling that led to the necessity to release steam (to reduce pressure in the reactor vessel).  It was this steam that was partially disassociated into hydrogen and oxygen, which led to the explosion.

One fact that has been lost in all the hype, and may continue to be lost, is that the earthquake alone (which was 7 times larger than the plant was designed for) was necessary but not sufficient to lead to the current problems.  Everything probably would have been fine had it not been for the tsunami knocking off all the diesel generators the plant used in an emergency to keep the colling pumps running.  Apparently the generators they rushed to the site later could not be used due to various incompatibilities, the type of real-world frustrating problem that will be immediately recognizable to any engineer who has a troubleshooting background.

Update: Unfortunately, the author may have been overly optimistic.  The author implied the pile would stop producing new heat after a few days, but that does not seem to be the case, particularly since spent fuel rods apparently have to be kept in water to keep them cool months or years after they were in service.  With the apparent rupture of the main presure vessel around the core, all bets would seem to be off in terms of containing the most harmful radioactive elements.

I did troubleshooting at a refinery for years, and almost every time the worst disasters were from improbable event and/or screwup after improbable event.   The human mind seems to be unable to really grasp just how screwed up things can get.  The novel Jurassic Park was as much about this problem as it was about dinosaurs.

Update #2: This is the piece that was missing from the earlier linked report:

The sharp deterioration came after a frantic day and night of rescue efforts focused largely on the No. 2 reactor. There, a malfunctioning valve prevented workers from manually venting the containment vessel to release pressure and allow fresh seawater to be injected into it. That meant that the extraordinary remedy emergency workers had jury-rigged to keep the nuclear fuel from overheating no longer worked.

As a result, the nuclear fuel in that reactor was exposed for many hours, increasing the risk of a breach of the container vessel and more dangerous emissions of radioactive particles.

By Tuesday morning, Tokyo Electric Power said that it had fixed the valve and resumed seawater injections, but that it had detected possible leaks in the containment vessel that prevented water from fully covering the fuel rods.

Update #3:  Things are slightly better.

For years, my observation has been that the perfect has been the enemy of the good in energy policy.   Now, I don't support the feds making energy policy at all, but given that they do, too often the government has ignored the 80/20 solution that would get most of the desired benefits for a fraction of the cost of alternatives being considered.

For example, in California, the state could have made a ton more progress reducing vehicle emissions had they  accepted a low emissions standard decades ago that allowed for things like compressed natural gas (CNG) as a vehicle fuel.  However, environmentalists insisted on zero emissions, and thus only electric vehicles passed muster, and the technology simply has not been there  (not to mention that at the margin, new electric vehicles in the state would at best be powered by natural gas and at worst by Arizona and Nevada coal plants, making the very concept of "zero-emissions" crazy).

I am thinking of this by looking at this chart from the EIA of CO2 emissions per BTU for various fuels (pounds per million BTU):

Coal (anthracite)	227
Coal (bituminous)	205
Coal (lignite)	215
Coal (subbituminous)	213
Diesel fuel & heating oil	161
Gasoline	156
Propane	139
Natural gas	117

Looking at this, and given the huge amounts of natural gas in this country, one might reasonably expect that a logical policy suggestion would be to try to provide incentives to substitute natural gas for coal and diesel fuel.  The technology exists right now, today, to produce electricity with gas and to power large vehicles with CNG  (and focusing on truck fleets eases the distribution issues with CNG).

But of course absolutely no one in the global warming movement is suggesting this (except for T. Boone Pickens, and he is involved in climate bills as a rent-seeker, not as an advocate).  You see, we want "renewable" energy, and natural gas does not fit.  Though for some reason ethanol does, despite the fact that ethanol probably creates more CO2 than it reduces.

No point here really, since I am not advocating any sort of energy policy.  But it reinforced to me why no one should claim as a justification for energy policy that somehow the system will be more efficient if a few smart people design it top-down, when one of the most obvious 80/20 solutions to Co2 reduction is not even considered.

I have written a lot about state licensing typically being more about protecting incumbents from competition than consumer protection.  This is a story in a similar vein, where plumbers worked to stop the approval of waterless urinals because they required, well, fewer plumbers to install.  In the end, there was a compromise -- the plumbers would support waterless urinals in the code, BUT the code would also say that water still had to be piped to the urinals that don't need water.  I kid you not.

This reminds me of when railroads were switching from steam locomotives to diesel.  The switch basically obsoleted the job of the fireman, who shoveled coal and kept the fire optimized in the boiler.  Faced with extinction, the fireman's union followed a gutsy strategy -- they demanded that diesel locomotives have two firemen instead of one!  You see where this is going.  Eventually, they compromised at one, so for years, decades even, useless firemen were paid to ride around on locomotives.

Of course this was going to happen.

An audit of solar-power generation from November 2009 to January 2010 found that some panel operators were paid for doing the "impossible" -- producing electricity from sunlight during the night, El Mundo reported today, citing a letter from Secretary of State for Energy Pedro Marin....

Preliminary evidence shows some solar stations may have run diesel-burning generators and sold the output as solar power, which earns several times more than electricity from fossil fuels, El Mundo said, citing unidentified people from the energy industry. The power grid received 4,500 megawatt-hours of power from midnight to 7 a.m. in the months audited, El Mundo said.

Electric current is electric current.  However, in a country like Germany, the price that utilities are required to pay for electric current varies based on its source.  While electricity from, say, a diesel generator gets 4-5 Euro cents per KwH, ground-based solar gets about 48 Euro cents per KwH.  This is a 10x greater price paid solely for absolutely identical power manufactured in a different way.  So of course there is going to be fraud as to the current's source.

I was having a back and forth with a reader about wind power and how much fossil fuel capacity must be kept on standby to support grid reliability with wind.  Here are some excerpts of what I wrote:

Forget all of the studies for a moment.  I used to operate power plants.  Any traditional capacity (fossil fuel, nuclear) except perhaps gas turbines takes on the order of a day or more to start up - if you don't take that long, the thermal stresses alone will blow the whole place up.  During the whole startup and shutdown, and through any "standby" time, the plant is burning fuel.   Since we don't have a good wind energy storage system, some percentage of wind capacity must be backed up with hot standby, because it can disappear in an instant. We are learning now, contrary to earlier assumptions, that wind speeds can be correlated pretty highly over wide geographies, meaning that spreading the wind turbines out does not necessarily do a lot to reduce the standby needs.  And since plant startups take time, even gas turbines take some time to get running, the percentage of wind power that required hot backup is pretty high -- I would love to find this percentage.

I found at least one source for such a percentage, which posits that for England, the percentage of hot backup needed is as high as 80%:  http://www.ref.org.uk/Files/ref.for.decc.28.10.09.i.pdf

I quote from page 6-7:

On any view, including the square root rule of thumb referred to above, the result, imposed for purposes of maintaining adequate response and reserve requirements, implies that a high degree of conventional (dispatchable) plant capacity is retained in the system to support wind generation. Thus, for 25 GW of installed wind capacity only 5 GW of conventional plant can be replaced leaving 20 GW in the role of standby capacity (also known as "Spare" or "Shadow Capacity").3

So 80% of the expected production from wind has to be backed up with hot spares burning fossil fuels.  They go on to say that the percentage of required spare capacity may be lower if the grid area is substantially larger, but not a lot lower.  I had not considered hydro power, but apparently that can be used to provide some quick response to wind production changes.  The report also talks about diesel generators for standby since they can be started up quickly, but these are seriously inefficient devices.  Despite the report's conclusion that the situation might be a bit better on the continent with a larger and more diverse grid, a report of the largest German utility seems to argue that German experience may actually be worse:

As wind power capacity rises, the lower availability of the wind farms determines the reliability of the system as a whole to an ever increasing extent. Consequently the greater reliability of traditional power stations becomes increasingly eclipsed.

As a result, the relative contribution of wind power to the guaranteed capacity of our supply system up to the year 2020 will fall continuously to around 4% (FIGURE 7). In concrete terms, this means that in 2020, with a forecast wind power capacity of over 48,000MW (Source: dena grid study), 2,000MW of traditional power production can be replaced by these wind farms.

It is hard to tell, because 48,000 MW is the nameplate capacity which is virtually meaningless, but my guess is that they are not doing better than 80%.

I have to tell one of my favorite stories of chutzpah.  In the 1940's and 1950's, railroads were making the transition from steam engines to diesel engines.  One of the changes was that a diesel engine only needed a driver, it did not need a fireman as steam engines did to shovel coal and keep the boiler running well.   The unions of course saw this coming.  So what did they do?  They preemptively made the demand that diesel engines should have to have TWO fireman.  Railroads spent so much time fighting this insane proposal that it took them years to get the firemen per locomotive to the correct number (ie zero).

I am reminded of this story when I think of how the Obama administration has handled the issue of CO2 abatement.  Reasonable people understand that CO2 abatement will be horrifically expensive - it just will not be cheap in terms of cost or lost economic output and lost personal liberties to take the country back to a CO2 per capita it last had in the 19th century.     But rather than taking this on, the Obama administration preemtively attacked, saying that in fact Co2 abatement would lead to economic growth and job creation.  This was the broken windows fallacy on steroids, but the usual progressive illiterates and consumers of party talking points have run with it.

We are finally getting folks to start to address the true costs of CO2 abatement, and they are enormous.  People who push the precautionary principle try to say that even a small risk of climate catastrophe outweighs some minor abatement costs.  But does a small change of manmade warming outweigh a near certainty of enormous economic costs?

I have said for years that to really get to an 80% reduction target, gas prices would have to rise over $20 a gallon  (they are at $10 already in Europe and they are no where near the targets).  Some researchers looked at the gas price implications of more modest CO2 targets:

To meet the Obama administration's targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions, some researchers say, Americans may have to experience a sobering reality: gas at $7 a gallon.

To reduce carbon dioxide emissions in the transportation sector 14 percent from 2005 levels by 2020, the cost of driving must simply increase, according to a forthcoming report by researchers at Harvard's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

And this is with a straight tax, probably the most efficient way to hit the targets.  The study agreed that other intervenist approaches didn't seem to work as well as a straight tax:

In the modeling, it turned out that issuing tax credits could backfire, while taxes on fuel proved beneficial.

The Thin Green Line passes on an editorial from today's SF Chronicle:

California should continue to lead the way in the fight against climate change by requiring cleaner-burning fuels in this state.

The state Air Resources Board is scheduled to vote today on whether to force refiners and distributors to reduce the "carbon intensity" of the transportation fuels they sell, starting in 2011. The so-called Low Carbon Fuel Standard represents a critical step toward this state's commitment to reduce overall emissions of heat-trapping gases by a third by 2020.
Passage of a California cleaner-fuels standard would intensify the pressure on Congress to make a national commitment to promote lower-carbon options to gasoline and diesel.

Holy moly, I never thought of this?  It's brilliant!  Let's just legislate that hydrocarbons should have less carbon!  And tell the refiners to figure it out.

In all seriousness, assuming this is not just insane (which may be a poor assumption in CA) I presume they have something in mind here.  Does anyone know what opportunity they see, because I sure don't.  Here is why I am confused:

Basically transportation fuels are made up various hydrocarbon chains.  The shortest is methane, CH4, then C2H6, then C3H8, etc.  As the chains get longer, the molecule gets heavier  (for example, CH4 is a gas at room temperatures; C3H8 is propane, which is a gas but a liquid under pressure in our BBQ tanks; C8H18 is octane and liquid at normal car operating temperatures.)

Motor fuel is a careful blend of many different molecules, and is actually frighteningly complex (the above just discusses straight chain forms, there are also rings and other shaped hydrocarbon molecules).  There are literally hundreds of specs it has to meet, and several present difficult tradeoffs that must be carefully balanced.  Trying to make one spec can easily put one out of another spec.  So this is an optimization equation with a lot of constraints.

All things being equal, decreasing the carbon intensity of fuel basically means making it lighter, with shorter molecules.  Why?  Well, look at the molecular equations.  Basically a straight chain hydrocarbon is C(x)H(2x+2).  Shorter molecules get a higher ratio of their BTU's from combustion of hydrogen vs. larger molecules get a higher ratio of their BTU's from carbon.

So, it is correct that burning propane in a car vs. currently formulated gasoline will be less carbon intensive, with only the teeny tiny problem that most cars today cannot burn propane.  Modern engines are carefully built to run most efficiently (valve design, cylinder pressure and size, air mixtures, fuel injection)  on a certain range of gasoline, and that range is moderately narrow.  And, besides the pure physics of engine design, lightening up motor fuels will create a variety of secondary problems -- for example, lighter fuels tend to have higher vapor pressures and volatility that can cause vapor lock in engines on warm days.  Another way to reduce carbon intensity is to go from ring molecules (e.g. benzine) to straight chains of the same size, but this creates other problems, for example in maintaining octane numbers.

And speaking of unintended consequences, my understanding is that environmentalists like diesel engines, because the best diesel technologies today are far more efficient than gasoline engines.  But diesel is a heavier, more "carbon intensive" fuel than gasoline.  So is the carbon dioxide emissions from a heavier fuel in an engine that is more efficient less or more than a typical gasoline engine?  Who knows, and the answer is probably "it depends" anyway.

Update: I think I have figured it out.  The California legislature is going to mandate changing the size of the 2p valance shell, allowing more hydrogen molecules per given carbon molecule.

Here-to-fore, I had generally accepted the meme that where Wal-mart moves in to small towns, smaller stores tend to fail due to the competition.  Unlike most who spread this meme, however, my response has generally been, "so?"  The number of people shoveling coal into steam boilers has decreased with the rise of diesel locomotives.  The number of people employed physically connecting phone calls with patch cords has fallen with the rise of automatic switching.  Technology and distribution systems change and morph over time. 

But I have to admit I appear to have been wrong -- the meme itself may not be true.  Via Mark Perry, who discusses this study in more depth.

Everyone wants to blame their industry's poor economics on banks or the oil companies: (via a reader)

Truckers angry about the high price of fuel staged a rolling protest on
Tuesday, using their big rigs to slow traffic to a crawl on the New
Jersey Turnpike.

The protest was part of a loosely organized
nationwide effort by independent truckers to draw attention to the high
prices they face....

"The gas prices are too high," said one of them, Lamont Newberne, a
34-year-old trucker from Wilmington, N.C. "We don't make enough money
to pay our bills and take care of our family."

Newberne said a
typical run carrying produce from Lakeland, Fla., to the Hunt's Point
Market in The Bronx, N.Y., had cost $600 to $700 a year ago. It now
runs him $1,000...

"The oil company is the boss, what are we going to be able to do about
it?" said Rotenbarger, who was at a truck stop at Baldwin, Fla., about
20 miles west of Jacksonville. "The whole world economy is going to be
controlled by the oil companies. There's nothing we can do about it."

Well, we talked the other day about how oil industry profits, even at this historic high, amount to twenty cents of current gas and diesel prices.  But lets take a more direct comparison.  I looked at Google finance for ExxonMobil and Knight Transportation (a large trucker based here in Phoenix).  If you sum up sales and net income for 2006 and 2007, ExxonMobil earned 10.2% of sales.  During the same period, the trucker earned 9.9% of sales.  This is a statistical dead heat.  So it is kind of hard to say that trucking companies are suffering at the hand of oil companies when they earn the same profit margins.

So what might be the problem?  The article gives a big fat hint that it might not actually be an oil company problem:

Jimmy Lowry, 51, of St. Petersburg, Fla., and others said it costs
about $1 a mile to drive one of the big rigs, although some companies
are offering as little as 87 cents a mile. Diesel cost $4.03 a gallon
at the Jacksonville-area truck stop.

I would certainly be willing to believe that trucking companies are paying independent drivers a price per mile that hasn't kept up with fuel costs.   In particular, it may be that the independent truckers have the same problem that Bear Stearns had, ie their revenues are tied into long term contracts while their costs float short term.  I'd certainly be bargaining for either higher mileage rates or a new rate structure with a fuel surcharge.

If the word "environmentalist" wasn't so corrupted, I would consider myself to be one.  For years, the main charity I have supported with my money and my advocacy has been private land trusts like The Nature Conservancy.  Just because I don't think that governments should quash individual rights to force people not to develop their own land does not mean that I don't think certain pieces of land are worth protecting from development.  But I do it the old-fashioned way -- I and others spend money to buy that land.  Here is more on why I (mostly) like  groups like the Nature Conservancy and here is a post wherein I lament the shift in charity from spending your money to achieve goals to spending money to lobby the government to force other people to achieve your goals.

Of course, my claim to be an environmentalist just because I, you know, spend my money and time on private conservation efforts would be laughed off because I take the wrong stand on certain litmus test environmental issues (e.g. global warming, of course).  In this world, someone who buys a silly and environmentally worthless $19.99 carbon offset has more environmental street-cred than I do.

So I guess it is nice, at least for once, to be in agreement with those "real" environmentalists:

The government's bid to make fuel consumption more environmentally
friendly will involve petrol and diesel being mandatory blended with
2.5pc biofuel from this April and the country's leading supermarket
chain is aiming to use twice this amount at over 300 of its petrol
stations.

But campaigners believe this is not the green alternative people think they are getting.

Jenn
Parkhouse from Norwich Friends of the Earth said: "From April, people
will have no choice but to contribute to the destruction of forests,
the eviction of small farmers and rising food prices which will mean
more hunger.

"More and more people now realise the need for a
strong movement to stop the destruction caused by the biofuel industry
and the legislation which encourages it."

Via the New York Times:

Prime Minister Wen Jiabao
responded Wednesday to growing public anxiety about inflation by
announcing that China would freeze energy prices in the near term, even
as international crude oil futures have continued to surge....

Last November, China raised gasoline and diesel prices by almost 10
percent, partly to appease officials at state-owned refineries.
Refiners had complained that price controls were forcing them to
swallow the difference between higher prices for crude oil on the world
market and regulated consumer prices at home for refined products. So
refineries cut back production of gasoline and particularly diesel,
causing long lines at fuel stations around the country.

More on past Chinese problems from gas price caps.  Here is a picture of one such past gas line in China. 

    I got my driver's license in 1978, just in time to spend the first few months of my driving life sitting in gas lines with the family car, a result of a series of market distorting actions by the US government.

Meanwhile, I presume the French and Germans will see no problem with this approach:

The Economist says,
of the state of economics education in France and Germany, "I
desperately hope it's not really this bad." Unfortunately, I think it's
really that bad. When the 35 hour work week was proposed, I was talking
to someone in the French consulate who did economics and trade. "Aren't
you worried that this will raise employer's costs and lead to business
failures or higher unemployment?" I asked.

"That's just Anglo-saxon economics" was his rather stunning reply.  Apparently, in France, demand curves do not slope downwards.

While we can argue about the projected impacts of man-made global warming (my skeptics site here), it is almost certain than any solution that puts a real dent in CO2 production will bar from the middle class about a billion people who are just climbing out of subsistence poverty.  TJIC notes a particularly odious proposal by environmental groups to encourage human power over industrialization in the third world:

See, first world Volvo-driving environmentalists!  We can help
the Third World! All we need to do is build them human hamster wheels,
so that they can set their children to work pumping water, instead of
using nasty diesel pumps (like we do here in the First World, while our
children attend soccer practice or piano lessons).

Don't miss the really awful animation from the environmentalist's site.

My previous post joking about potential union opposition to unmanned military aircraft reminded me of one of my favorite labor relations stories.   Until just the last few years, most railroads continued to pay a "fireman" to ride in the cab of their diesel locomotives, despite the fact that the role of the fireman to shovel coal into a steam boiler was totally obviated fifty years ago by diesel technology.  How this came about is an interesting story.

Railroads were the first heavy or large industry in this country.  For years, if you were to talk about "big business", you were really talking about railroads.  So it is not surprising that when the government succumbed to the pressure of interfering legislatively into the relationship between employer and employee, their first target was the railroad industry.  In a sense, the US has two bodies of labor law.  The first body of law is railroad labor law, and the second is the law that applies to every other industry. 

As much as we can complain about the labor law most of us operate under, it is nothing compared to the hash that the government made of railroad labor law.  From an early stage, details about work days and work rules that would normally be part of a private labor contract between a company and their union or employees were actually embodied in the law.  For example, back in the steam-engine era when trains moved fairly slowly, a full "day" for a train crew was defined by statute as 100 miles (about the distance a steam engine could go without taking on more water).  Once a train crew had traveled that distance, they were owed a days pay.  Other portions of the law gave the unions incredible power, such that the bargaining table at every negotiation with management was always tilted, by statute, in their favor.

Beginning in the late 1930's, but really gaining momentum in the late 1940's, railroads began to replace steam locomotives with diesel engines.  Diesel locomotives were more reliable, easier to maintain, easier to operate (no coal to shovel) and could go much longer distances without service (steam engines stopped frequently for more water).  As this transition occurred, railroad companies very reasonably sought to eliminate the position of "fireman" on diesel trains.  After all, without a boiler and coal to shovel, the fireman role was totally redundant on a diesel engine.  Railroad unions were nothing if not gutsy, and in response they argued that not only would they not accept elimination of the fireman position, but they campaigned for an addition of a second fireman on diesel engines.  Railroads found themselves in the position of actually having to fight a nearly successful effort to increase the number of firemen on crews.  As a result, they ended up accepting the fireman role, and generations of railroad men cruised about the country on engines for the next 40 years, doing virtually nothing for their pay.  Railroads were still fighting to eliminate the fireman in the 1990's.  In some cases, railroads were actually forced to pay "lonesome pay" to some engineers when the firemen were removed from their crew.  LOL.

Other labor statutes and work rules prevented full use of the diesel's capabilities.  For example, the 100 mile rule was now absurd - an inter-modal or other long-distance freight train could cover this in less than two hours.  But US law still insisted that railroad workers be paid a full days pay for 100 miles.  By 1990, after four decades of lobbying and negotiation, the 100 miles had been increased all the way to ... 108 miles.

This article from Regulation is a bit dated, but it still gives a good overview of some of the historical insanities in railroad labor.  An excerpt:

The rail unions deserve the labor equivalent of an Oscar for best sustained performance in reducing industrial efficiency. Restrictive work practices are legendary from firemen on diesel locomotives to train-limit laws. During the 1980s the railroads made minor progress against these practices, but they still have a long way to go. Some crews receive an extra day's pay every time they turn a locomotive around (yard and line haul crews have rigid separations of duties despite identical skills). Carriers are forced to employ three- to five-person crews, while nonunion carriers (Florida East Coast Railway and regional and short-line carriers) use two people. Crew members receive a full day's pay after a train moves 108 miles, even if the trip requires only a few hours. (The current three-member board appointed by Congress may impose a 130-mile rule by 1995.) Some union members have guaranteed lifetime incomes and must only work a few days per month. Some engineers receive "lonesome pay" for giving up the full-time company of a fireman. Until 1987, some Burlington Northern crews received "hazardous pay" for traveling through Indian territory in Montana. Management studies show that work forces could be cut in half, and according to some estimates, labor restrictions cost the industry some $4 billion a year. Despite union concessions on work rules, shippers continue to complain about the carriers' inability to achieve efficient and economical labor contracts. Overall, the RLA and its government-backed unions combine to double labor costs and therefore drive up freight rates from 20 to 25 percent, a very serious handicap in the competition with trucks and barges.

One railroad stood up to the union, and eventually won, but had to withstand a violent 11-year strike, all the while the taking continuous grief in the union-friendly press:

The Florida East Coast Railways, a line long known as "America's most efficient railroad," highlights the woeful labor inefficiencies of the major carriers. Its primary operation is transporting freight from Jacksonville to Miami. When Edward Ball took over the operation in 1961, the unions required the use of three five-man crews-each receiving a day's pay for each 100 miles traveled on the 366-mile trip. Ball failed to see the sense of this scheme and decided to try th change it. Union officials could not see the sense in any change and called a strike in 1963. The violence and vandalism that continued for eleven years demonstrated to other carriers the cost of defying the unions. The railway won, however. The company used two-man crews who were "cross-trained" and paid them a day's pay for eight hours' work rather than for 100 miles traveled. During the 1970s, the railroad's labor costs were 40 percent of total costs compared with 64 percent for all class I railroads, and Florida East Coast Railway earned the highest return of any class I railroad. In addition, the railway consistently won safety awards that fended off another pretext for government control and continues to retain customers while other railroads lose out to trucks.

Read the whole article.  If you have ever read Atlas Shrugged, you will find that a lot of the outrageous legislation in that story that seemed too stupid to be true actually have a basis in the history of US railroad law.  Even the "railroad unification act" that seems totally over-the-top toward the end of the book is based on actual railroad law after WWI:

The Transportation Act of 1920 gave the Interstate Commerce Commission complete control over pricing, issuance of securities, expenditure of proceeds, consolidations, and the construction, use, and abandonment of facilities. The act set up a Railway Labor Board to mediate disputes. Its "recapture" provision required a portion of a company's earnings in excess of an allowable "fair return" to be diverted to railroads with relatively low earnings. Except for the most routine administration, almost everything owners might do was subject to federal regulation or dictation.

More on the transition of steam to diesel here.  I am not very well versed on the subject, but apparently this specialized railroad labor law was later applied to airline pilots, with predictable results.  It is interesting that the two industries covered by the RLA (railroads and airlines) have both seen every major carrier in their industry bankrupted over the last 50 years.

Update:  I have been a fan of railroads for years.  One of my frustrations with my current house is a don't have room for a model railroad layout.  I had one back in St. Louis, where I had a basement, but there are not very many basements in Phoenix.  Here are some photos of that old layout, which was still under construction when I had to tear it down and move.

This post in The Commons raises an issue that has concerned me for years.  Increasingly, activists are using the courts to achieve regulatory goals that legislatures and/or voters have rejected.  While I am still not sure there is constitutional justification for the degree of legislated regulation that exists in this country, there certainly is no basis for individual courts running whole industries (e.g. telecom, tobacco). 

State attorneys general and private plaintiffs lawyers are increasingly turning to the nation's courts to adopt regulatory measures that legislatures reject. Such "regulation by litigation" has been used against numerous unpopular industries in suits by government and private attorneys. The first set of cases sought to regulate and extract rents from the tobacco companies, but subsequent cases have been brought by both private lawyers and government agencies against gun makers, lead-paint producers, coal-burning utilities, diesel engine manufacturers, and many other industries. In each case, the aim is to extract rents and impose regulatory controls that could not be adopted through the legislative or administrative process.

Read the whole thing.