ALEC: There Goes the Sun

In 1989, Dan Shugar, an engineer with Pacific Gas and Electric, demonstrated that distributed generation is a good deal both for electric power companies and their consumers. Distributed generation refers to an energy system consisting wholly or partly of small electricity-generating power plants located near the site of the end user. An example is solar photovoltaic cells on the rooftops of consumers who are connected to the power grid. Through an arrangement called net metering, consumers are credited by the power company with the retail rate for all the electricity the solar collector produces. If it produces as much electricity as the consumer uses—which seldom happens—the consumer pays nothing. Forty-three states have net metering policies, although the details vary from state to state.

Photo by grist.org

However, distributed generation is a pain in the ass to the utility companies. They have a different business model in mind. They would prefer to continue to use fossil fuels, or to build large, centralized wind farms or solar power plants and sell the electricity to their customers at the same rate they are now paying for power from fossil fuel plants, even though renewable energy will be cheaper to produce. So they and their allies at the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) have launched a campaign in the states to eliminate distributed generation. It involves labeling people with solar collectors as “free riders.”

This is their argument: When solar customers sell electricity to the power company, they use the existing energy grid, but they are not paying anything toward the cost of establishing and maintaining that grid. Therefore, they are indirectly increasing the rates of nonsolar customers. Sometimes they argue that poor customers (who can't afford solar) are subsidizing rich ones (who can). To recoup these fixed costs, the power companies want to penalize solar customers either by charging them a monthly fee or by reducing the amount they pay for the electricity solar collectors produce.

One document even claims that distributed generation is an “existential threat” to the power companies. They claim that if solar customers drive up the rates of nonsolar customers too far, everyone will be forced to go solar, thus driving the power companies out of business. While some of us may smile at this prospect, the sudden bankruptcy of large power companies would be disruptive.

The rebuttal from solar advocates is this: What Shugar said in 1989 is still true. Distributed generation reduces the power companies' costs by reducing the demand for power, especially during peak midday hours when solar collectors are producing energy. Therefore, the power companies have to spend less money building new generating plants and power lines. They can produce the energy they sell at a cheaper rate. If that's the case, there's no reason to pass along the “cost” of solar to nonsolar customers, since the cost is negative. Therefore, there is no existential threat.

Who is right? A study by energy consultant Tom Beach supported the solar advocates' argument. He found that distributed generation saves the power companies $92 million per year in Calfiornia and $34 million a year in Arizona. (Below is a political flyer based on the Beach study.) Of course, distributed generation does cost the power companies revenue, since every kilowatt hour produced by their solar customers is energy that they don't sell. Is it this competition that they object to?

Does it matter who is right? Probably not. Energy companies can lie about their costs, or they can use their superior spending power on campaign contributions and lobbying to render the science irrelevant.

Enter ALEC, an organization of corporations (including, of course, energy companies) and state politicians that produces model bills for conservative legislators to introduce at the state, and sometimes federal, level. It is ALEC that has given us such recent triumphs as stand-your-ground and voter ID laws. Legislators have introduced 77 ALEC energy bills in 34 states, intended to block the development of renewable energy at every stage. Bills have been introduced in Arizona, California, Colorado and Georgia to add a monthly surcharge to the electric bills of solar customers. Arizona has taken action. The original bill called for a monthly surcharge of $100 on solar collectors, which would have made them a huge money loser for consumers. They eventually settled on a fee that averages $4.90 per month. The solar companies are spinning this as a victory, but this added cost makes solar less attractive to homeowners.

Other energy initiatives pushed by ALEC include bills to eliminate state Renewable Portfolio Standards, which require utilities to produce a percentage of their power using renewable energy; and a federal bill to strip the Environmental Protection Agency of the power to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. The ALEC legislative agenda is not just about deny women access to abortions or denying black people the right to vote. It also strikes at the continuing ability of this planet to support human life.

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Sy Hersh's Bombshell

A lot of reporters write articles purporting to expose secrets of the American intelligence community, but this is different. The article is written by Seymour Hersh, the country's foremost investigative journalist. He began his career in 1969 by exposing the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and its coverup. Younger folks will know him for his reporting of American torture at the Abu Ghraib prison complex in Iraq.

In an article appearing today in the London Review of Books, Hersh accuses the Obama administration of “cherry picking” intelligence to support the conclusion that the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the chemical weapons attack in Eastern Ghouta last August, said to have killed somewhere between 280 and 1400 people. This conclusion was used to justify the threat of US bombing of Syria. His article begins this way:

Barack Obama did not tell the whole story this autumn when he tried to make the case that Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the chemical weapons attack near Damascus on 21 August. In some instances, he omitted important intelligence, and in others he presented assumptions as facts. Most significant, he failed to acknowledge something known to the US intelligence community: that the Syrian army is not the only party in the country's civil war with access to sarin, the nerve agent that a UN study concluded—without assessing responsibility—had been used in the rocket attack.

That other party is al-Nusra, a group affiliated with al-Qaeda, that is part of the coalition of rebel groups trying to overthrow Assad that the US government supports.

Hersh doesn't say Assad was not responsible for the attack, just that the US doesn't have enough evidence to threaten to start a Middle Eastern war. In effect, he is saying the Obama administration was as foolish and/or dishonest as the George W. Bush administration was during the buildup to the American invasion of Iraq. You might say it's deja vu all over again.

You should read the article, but I'll try to summarize: The US had wiretaps intended to monitor coversations of the Syrian high command, and sensors in the ground near chemical weapons facilities designed to detect any movement of these weapons. The wiretaps, and possibly the sensors, were discovered and neutralized sometime earlier in the year, so if the Syrians carried out the attack, the US was taken by surprise. Two days after the attack, the US used computer keywords to analyze several thousand radio communications from the Syrian army, looking for evidence of the attack. In other words, they started with the assumption that the Syrian government was responsible and look for confirming evidence—a clear example of confirmatory bias. They then assembled a scenario of what the Syrian army would have done if they had carried out the attack, based in part on a training exercise that the Syrians carried out the year before. This scenario was presented as if the US had monitored it in real time, which of course they did not. Hersh says the US also ignored evidence that the shells said to have been used to deliver the sarin had a shorter range than they claimed.

At the same time, another suspect, al-Nusra, has emerged. Hersh cites US intelligence sources claiming to be certain that al-Nusra has sarin, and others stating that the evidence is inconclusive. Those who claim al-Nusra does have sarin refer to the presence in their ranks of Ziyaad Tariq Ahmed, a chemical weapons expert from Iraq—a bit of possible  “blowback” from the Iraq War. Needless to say, the US didn't try to construct a case implicating al-Nusra. They probably didn't have the necessary data.

As journalist Marcy Wheeler points out, Hersh's story helps to answer such questions as why our European allies did not support our threat to attack Syria, and why Obama surprisingly backed off from the threat, agreeing to take the question to Congress, where he faced almost certain defeat, and eventually accepting the Russian plan for dismantling Syria's chemical weapons that is now being carried out. As Hersh puts it:

Do we have the whole story of Obama's willingness to walk away from his 'red line' threat to bomb Syria? He claimed to have an iron-clad case but suddenly agreed to take the issue to Congress, and later to accept Assad's offer to relinquish his chemical weapons. It appears possible that at some point he was directly confronted with contradictory information: evidence strong enough to persuade him to cancel his attack plan, and take the criticism sure to come from Republicans.

Hersh's article appears in a journal unlikely to be encountered by many Americans. (Why was it not published by The New Yorker, his usual outlet?) It will be interesting to see how many American media cover this article, and how it is covered. The corporate media usually jump on any story likely to embarrass the President. But in this case, the story conflicts with their usual unquestioning loyalty to the American security state. We'll probably hear a lot of anonymous denials coming from Washington in the next few days.

Update (12/10):

The corporate media have been largely silent about Hersh's article.  The exceptions are interviews he did on Democracy Now (see the interview below, in two parts) and CNN. As expected, a national intelligence spokesperson denied everything.

The most interesting facts to emerge so far are that the piece was turned down by both The New Yorker and The Washington Post.  The Post told Hersh the sourcing of the article did not meet their standards.

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This Will Not Surprise You

This should have been an important year for news about climate change. In September, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released part one of its fifth assessment, raising their level of certainty than global warming is human-caused from 90% to 95%, increasing their estimate of sea-level rise, and discussing climate change's irreversability. 2013 was also an active weather year, including the Typhoon Haiyan, the strongest storm ever to make landfall in recorded history. But, as usual, the corporate media are still ignoring or confusing the issue.

The release of the IPCC report fell victim to false balancing when an article in The Economist suggested that there had been a “pause” in global warming during the last 15 years. Because of natural climate variability, whether there appears to be a “pause” is largely a function of which years you choose as your start and end points. 1998 was a year of record high temperatures, so most “pause” advocates start there. Below are the exact same climate data. The top chart shows in red the long term trend that best fits the data. The bottom chart marks in blue several places where global warming might appear to have “paused.”

The IPCC may have made a tactical error by addressing and refuting the “pause” claim, which increased its familiarity and allowed the media to suggest there was a “controversy” over whether climate change was really happening. (“The global atmosphere hasn't been warming lately,” CBS reported.)

Media Matters did a study of coverage of the IPCC report from August 1 through October 1 on six TV and eight print outlets. The majority of them mentioned the “pause.”

Although climate change coverage had been improving in recent years, the “pause” story brought about an increase in false balancing, with more attention given to climate skeptics. As usual, Fox News and The Wall Street Journal were the worst, but doubters were 20% of those quoted by CBS and 17% by The Washington Post. USA Today published side-by-side op-eds giving equal weight to the IPCC and its skeptics.

Another depressing feature of news coverage is their failure to mention climate change when reporting extreme weather events consistent with climate predictions. Scientists, being a cautious lot, have often said that no single weather event can be definitely attributed to climate change. The media seem to have interpreted these statements to mean that it would be irresponsible to even mention climate change when reporting on hurricanes, tornados, wildfires, droughts, etc.

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) did an analysis of reports on extreme weather on ABC, CBS and NBC TV news from January through September—ending before Typhoon Haiyan. The results could hardly have been more conclusive.

As Jim Naureckas has pointed out, every weather event is caused by the climate. While it's theoretically possible to imagine that Typhoon Haiyan might have occurred in a parallel universe in which we had not heated up the global temperature, defining “cause” that narrowly makes it impossible to ever attribute a weather event to the climate. This is not helpful when planning public policy. It's time for climate scientists to demand a new norm for reporting extreme weather. Current weather events should be compared to the historical record and changing trends should be reported every time the media do a weather story to which climate change is relevant.

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Nelson Mandela (1918-2013)

Photo by Jurgen Schadeberg

Herding Cats

You've all heard that trying to get liberals united behind a common goal is like herding cats, or that when liberals go into battle, they form a circular firing squad. A new study appears to support these clichés, and attributes the problem to a liberal personality trait, the need for uniqueness.

The false consensus effect is a cognitive error in which we believe that more people agree with our attitudes than is actually the case. For example, both those who favor and those who oppose the legalization of marijuana might think that theirs is the majority view. One explanation for false consensus is that we tend to associate with others who share our views and are therefore exposed to a biased sample of opinions. The opposite of false consensus is a false uniqueness effect in which people incorrectly believe that most others disagree with them. However, most studies of the general population find false consensus rather than false uniqueness.

In the study by Chadly Stern and others, 292 participants recruited over the internet were asked their opinions on 41 topics, 22 non-political and 19 political. They were asked to classify themselves as liberal, moderate or conservative. Then they were asked to estimate the percentage of people participating in the study “who share your political beliefs” who agreed with them on each item. A true measure of false consensus or uniqueness was obtained by comparing the participants' estimates to the actual beliefs of the study participants in their political in-group.

It was found that all three groups were inaccurate. Both moderates and conservatives showed the usual false consensus effect, but liberals showed false uniqueness. They underestimated the percentage of fellow liberals who agreed with them. In a second study, 287 participants were this time asked to estimate the percentage of people who shared their political beliefs in the American population who agreed with them on each item. The same results were obtained.

The authors proposed an explanation for the false uniqueness effect among liberals: That they are higher on a personality trait called need for uniqueness, defined as a strong dispositional desire to feel unique. The authors used 11 items from this 34-item Need for Uniqueness Scale, but I'm not sure which ones. Liberals are indeed higher than moderates and conservatives in need for uniqueness. An analysis showed that the relationship between political ideology and overestimation of consensus was mediated by need for uniqueness, meaning that the correlation between ideology and overestimation was significantly reduced when the effect of their common relationship to need for uniqueness was statistically removed.

I have some concerns about this study. For example, I'm not sure how participants interpreted the phrase “people who share your political beliefs.” It would have been better if the instructions had specifically referred to fellow liberals, moderates or conservatives. There are good reasons to expect liberals to underestimate the percentage of people in the general population who agree with them. As Justin Lewis has demonstrated, the corporate media tend to exclude progressive opinions from public debate, leading liberals to feel outside the political mainstream. For example, the media continually identify support for modest cuts in Social Security and Medicare as the centrist political position when their own polls show that the public is overwhelmingly opposed to such cuts. If the participants in the Stern study were confused about the group whose attitudes they were estimating, this could partially explain the results. Liberals have been marginalized by the corporate media.

I am also unimpressed with the attempt to explain liberals' behavior as resulting from a need for uniqueness. In my opinion, the words “need” and “uniqueness” are both overstatements. The items in the scale largely reflect the respondent's willingness to engage in nonconforming behavior. All the data in this study are correlational, not causal. The apparent "need" for uniqueness could be as much a result of the illusion of uniqueness as its cause. In any case, the relationship between ideology and overestimation of consensus appears to still be statistically significant after the effect of need for uniqueness is removed, so it's not a complete explanation for the phenomenon.

In the article, the authors contrast the Occupy Movement to the Tea Party. They note that the Tea Party became a potent political force, while they claim the Occupy Movement broke down due to internal bickering, presumably a result of their individual needs to feel unique. This ignores a far more important reason for the Tea Party's greater success. They received behind-the-scenes financial and logistical support from wealthy conservatives and were welcomed into the Republican Party. The Occupy Movement, on the other hand, received almost no outside support, and was shunned by the Democrats, who chose to side instead with their wealthy political donors, mostly members of the 1%.  To attribute the failure of the Occupy Movement to the personalities of its members is politically naive. One of my pet peeves is the tendency for psychologists—even social psychologists, who should know better—to attribute behavior primarily to personal motives and overlook situational forces that are much more likely explanations for the behavior.

Regardless of why liberals underestimate their political strength, it is important that they examine public opinion polls directly, rather than trusting the corporate media to interpret them. (See, for example, my recent post on the public's “surprising” views on climate change.)

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Merry Christmas

It's hard to believe that this greatest of all R&B Christmas records, "White Christmas" by the Drifters, is 59 years old. It was recorded on February 4, 1954, and released in November of that year. It reached #2 on the R&B charts the following month.

The Drifters are (from left to right) Clyde McPhatter, Jimmy Oliver, Andrew Thrasher, Gerhart Thrasher and Bill Pinkney. I'll always be grateful to deejay Alan Freed, who came to New York in September, 1954, for getting me interested in rhythm and blues, which led me to a lifelong obsession with jazz and blues.

This article is cross-posted from my music blog, The Blues and the Abstract Truth.  

"We Are America"

Jazz/R&B singer and bassist Esperanza Spalding has produced a music video entitled "We Are America," calling for the either the prosecution or the release of the detainees who have been held without trial at Guantanamo Bay for more than a decade.

In a statement accompanying the release of the video, Ms. Spalding reports that she became embarrassed about Gitmo while touring in Europe. When she returned home, she contacted several Congresspersons. She received an answer from one Senator who said she had no intention of doing anything about Guantanamo, but would "keep [her] comments in mind." Her recommendation? The people who see the video should write or call their Congresspersons.

It's difficult to abandon the cliches we've been taught as children, or to think of alternative ways of influencing the political system, even when it's clear that the old ways are completely ineffective.

This article is cross-posted from my music blog, The Blues and the Abstract Truth.