California's zero emission rules will bankcrupt everybody

Both at the same time. Hmmm - not sure what that means. Thanks for
your wisdom.

Bill Putney
(To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my
address with the letter 'x')

 

Do you suppose 10% zero is like a partial erection?? ;>)

 

Frankly, Bill, I fail to see the analogy. Could you interject some actual
events that happened in California to support this rape analogy?

Seems to me that CARB mandated zero emissions back in the 90s
and GM spent a couple billion bucks on the EV-1 program, then used
the "evidence" that it was unprofitable to get CARB to rescind it's 0%
emissions rule. As soon as CARB recinded this, GM killed the EV-1
program, recalled all the EV's and crushed them.

Exactly how did this hurt the State of CA? GM lost a couple billion
but developed EV technology that they refused to use, 5 years later
Toyota is using this same technology to kick GM's ass on hybrids.
As far as I'm aware, CA didn't spend a dime on any of this.

As far as if the 2 domestic automakers left, Ford and GM, were to
pull out of CA as a result of this, I say good riddance. GM fought
tooth and nail against EV's even though there were 2 year waiting lists of
people who wanted to lease them, and thousands of drivers pleaded
with them to sell the EV's to them when GM decided to pull the lease.
Better to let Toyota take over the CA market. That might be the visible
kick in the pants of GM to get the managers that pulled the plug on the
EV program fired, and replaced with some more forward thinking
people.

There's plenty of demand for EV and fuel cell vehicles, even given all
the short range and recharge problems of them. A number of Cali
companies are retrofitting Priuses now to run 100% off the wall. It's
likely that within 5 years Toyota will cave in to consumer demand and make
100% off the wall power an option on the Prius.

If there was a tremendous increase in demand for electricity, the electrical
industry has the ability to increase generation. You can generate
electricity
a hell of a lot of ways other than burning fossil fuels and CA has some
nukes
already. But, if the same increase in demand happened to gasoline, the oil
industry simply couldn't meet it. It is rediculous that these auto
manufacturers
are so resistant to offering EV's and turbo diesels (which can be run off
biodiesel) in the US. You would almost think that the domestic auto makers
are heavily invested in the oil companies, for how they act.

Ted

 

OK so do tell - what happened to thise regulations?

Bill your attempt to generate sympathy for insurance companies is
a scream.

Name one single insurance company that went bankrupt, or
even declared a loss for that year, as a result of 911, and when the twin
towers
dropped that was probably the largest single hit in claims that
the insurance industry ever had in history.

Ted

 

Ken Lay and friends came to the California legislature and sold them on
deregulation. Then they, (Ken Lay and friends) raped them. Thus....,
by believing "Kenny Boy" and friends, California "set them selves up to
be raped" and are undeserving of "sympathy" or redress because they
are "idiots."

 

CA put restrictions on upgrading electrical generation capacity. That's
what gave the energy companies the leverage they needed to do what they did.

Now you're back to the question of if CA is going to simultaneously
limit increases in generation capacity. If they don't do that again,
then fine, but if they do that *and* increase the demand with the EV's,
then they are following their past suicidal patterns of behavior (back
to the rape analogy).

Bill Putney
(To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my
address with the letter 'x')

 

Generate sympathy for insurance companies? I fail to see where I did
that. You can't force a company to do business in your state, so you,
right or wrong, have to play ball with them to some degree - at least
make it conducive for them to do business in your state.

CA legislated some unreasonable requirements on the industry, and the
industry simply exercised its right to take their business elsewhere.
That's not sympathy for them - it's just life in a non-socialist world.

You'd have a tough time convincing many people that an insurance company
should be forced to do business where they are not allowed to adjust
rates based on a person's driving history, i.e., charge everyone the
same rates and be forced to insure the unsafe driver. And unless
someone is going to try to construe that to say that I'm saying that the
insurance companies ought to be able to cancel people or raise their
rates for arbitrary reasons, that's not what I'm saying.

It sounds like a cliché, but that truly is a non-sequitur. Regardless
of how slimy you may thing the insurance industry is, that doesn't mean
you can tell them that to do business in your state they have to do it
under unreasonable rules (which CA did) and then insist that they do
business with you.

I don't understand the apparent prevalent thinking that, on a given
issue, if you speak against one side, then by default that means you are
a supporter of the other side. You can see simultaneously see the
stupidity of CA and the greediness of the energy industry or the
insurance industry at the same time. My point has been that if you know
that a given industry will rape you if given half a chance, then don't
pass legislation that will give them excuses to do so, or in the case of
the insurance industry, don't make the rules under which they would have
to operate insane and then criticize them in that case when they tell
you "No thanks - we'll take our business elsewhere".

Just one more example of CA's stupidity: Pass laws in the name of
protecting "Mother Earth" that people can build houses in forrested
areas, but make it illegal to clear brush from around the property, and
then expect my sympathy when a small spark results in your houses
burning down in an entire neighborhood. Typical California.

Bill Putney
(To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my
address with the letter 'x')

 

You left out the part where CA then proceded to pass legislation
prohibiting increasing capacity. Throw that fact into your paragraph
and you have the whole date rape story and can remove the sarcastic
quote marks.

Bill Putney
(To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my
address with the letter 'x')

 

Funny you should ask. FERC investigated 55 electric service providers,
producers and "power brokers" (wholesalers) in regards to the runaway market
in California in 2000. http://thefederalregister.com/d.p/2003-07-03-03-16821
The paragraphs
\45\ 29 through \49\33 do a good job of explaining how the California
deregulated electric market was set up and how it was expected to operate.
Pay particular attention to the requirement that electricity was to be
bought no earlier than the day before use, which offered slightly lower
prices when there was a lot of excess capacity (and a form of gaming in
itself) but left California scrambling for the highest priced scraps of
capacity when load was highest.

The most serious allegations were against Enron, and (IIRC) in the end Enron
was the only company hit with sanctions, although two or three others were
ordered to refund significant amounts they had collected
http://www.epsa.org/Positions/Testimonies.cfm?what=746&keyID=746

There was never any evidence of collusion, which would have been very
serious indeed. As it was, the FERC determinations were a nail in Enron's
already sealed casket.

Mike

 

My current favorite example of California institutional stupidity was from
our vacation that included a day at Universal Studios. At one point I ducked
into a shop to escape the outrageous sound level of a band playing on the
central avenue of the theme park. I noticed a bright placard on a display of
mugs, and looking closer I saw it was for compliance with some initiative
that required them to identify the glaze on the outside of the mugs as
containing lead, which was known to the state of California to cause cancer
or something like that. I vowed not to gnaw on the outside of the mugs, but
remembered that outside the door were sound levels known to be damaging to
hearing. And now Universal Studios is reportedly to ban trans-fats. Sigh....

Mike

 

It's children that tend to "gnaw" on things. Odd that you would cite
"institutional stupidity" when you aren't sure ("cancer or something
like that") of the dangers. Much of the imported ceramics (drinking
utensils for example) contain high amounts of lead and there is a
connection between lead in the blood during pregnancy and impaired brain
development. California is not the only state with this particular type
of "initiative" (law).

 

Michael Pardee wrote:

Collusion would seem unlikely wouldn't it? No code of cooperation among
vultures. If memory serves FERC was pretty much staffed by friends
of the Bush Administration.

Speaking of Enron and Bush did you find it odd that Ken had a heart
attack just when he did, and are you familiar with the curious details
surrounding the death (officially suicide) of Cliff Baxter (former Vice
Chairman of Enron) who sold out and bailed after stumbling across
Enron's illegal activities in 2001? He was to be a government witness
before Congress and a federal grand jury investigating the Enron
collapse and was in a position to finger Ken Lay in the Enron Ponzi
scheme that largely funded Bush's 2000 election campaign.

All of Baxter's friends claimed that he wrote only in cursive letters.
Suicide note was in block. Including the signature.

Baxter was wearing his bedclothes, no shoes, no socks, no slippers. A
toxicology report disclosed the presence of large amounts of Ambien, a
powerful non-narcotic sedative. Also found was Norpropoxyphene, a
narcotic painkiller and Citalopram, an anti-depressant. This cocktail
of chemicals would have made it impossible for him to drive himself to
the spot where he supposedly shot himself, using untraceable ammunition
known as "rat shot" (a Teflon coated bullet containing small pellets).

 

Yes indeed, but California sees fit not to take any effective action, but
only to warn of a mysterious risk and to quantify it far more vaguely than I
did, leaving the public no better off than they were but merely more anxious
and confused. Would the lead be absorbed through the skin of the hand? What
action should the public take to deal with the supposed danger? Are people
in other states suffering from not knowing they are at risk unless they take
unspecified action? Simultaneously, a few yards away people were definitely
suffering progressive hearing damage en masse in the simple pursuit of
trying to get from one end of the facility to the other. Warn of vague
potential dangers but do nothing, then ignore well-understood injurious
conditions. Make sense to you?

Personally, I am rather well versed in the dangers of heavy metals -
particularly lead, mercury, and arsenic. I even knew of the toxicity of
polonium before it ever made the news. (Approximately as radio-toxic as
radium, it is roughly 100 billion times as toxic as cyanide.) I also know
that, despite the warning on the sign, cancer is not a major risk of lead
exposure... the neuro effects are much graver. And I know that lead glazes
are federally prohibited on the interior of food vessels because acidic
foods can leach the lead out, but the outside of food vessels may be lead
glazed because the risk was judged to be low by more knowledgable people
than I. California merely took the opposite approach, inviting the voting
public of uncertain education to weigh in on yet another technical issue.

 

No offense, but this struck me as the kind of primer I hear pitched to
try and hook me for the upcoming news. ("stay tuned, details next hour")

Pet peeve of mine.

Any thoughts on the Thimerosal in vaccines linked to autism?

LOL, you and Bill seem to have a distinct anti California bias. To your
defense, we *did* just re-elect Arnold. But its not only the voters
that are of "uncertain education." We have term limits because we
apparently believe that on the job "education" leads to *certain*
dishonesty.

 

[/QUOTE]

Now where will that hydrogen be produced?
-Leaving the pollution there.

 

No - just anti-stupidity bias.

Yep - people in CA are wising up some (finally got enough pissed off is
more like it). It took a while for them to dig themselves into a hole,
and it will take a while to dig themselves out - remarkable progress has
been made thanks to Arnold. But he can't stop all the stupid legislation
- but he can - and has - vetoed some of it. So yeah - you're right -
things are looking up.

Bill Putney
(To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my
address with the letter 'x')

 

Getting ever more OT... ;-)

I am opposed to mercury compounds for ingestion, in any quantity. Mercury
has been known as a cumulative poison for longer than I've been alive and
the effects are too well known.

That said, we do know the effects of mercury poisoning at all sorts of
levels. Mostly we know the effects of compounds that introduce mercury into
the body - nasty things like methyl mercury. Those effects have never been
linked with autism. Is that to say that a specific mercury compound can't
have unique effects? Not at all. But... it has been around as the external
antiseptic Merthiolate and I used it a few times when I was a kid. (Explains
a lot, maybe?) WHO finds no evidence yet that it is toxic in the doses used
in vaccines.

Bottom line - still worth watching, but not my responsibility.

 

I am a former Californian; moved to Arizona in 1974. I have about the same
view of the place as I did then - there is probably the same ratio of
intelligent people to screwy people there as anywhere else, but in
California the screwy people are more cohesive and form a significant voting
block. Here they tend to fight among themselves while reasoned points of
view remain cohesive. Also, corruption is more open here in Arizona, so
actually getting things done in order that they might generate wealth to be
skimmed is a priority <8^P

Mike

 

LOL! I vote that the most intelligent post in this thread.

Bill Putney
(To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my
address with the letter 'x')

 

Emotional words like:

"rediculous regulations...forced several major...companies to pull out"

Companies aren't forced out, they are choosing to leave. Unless it was
a situation were no drivers at all could buy insurance, because there
were absolutely no insurance companies writing new policies, I cannot
see how it is anything more than CA wrote some regs that cut into their
profits, so some of the insurance companies tried some ham-handed
attempts at blackmail that obviously didn't work.

Why? As long as there's some companies out there willing to do business
in your state according to whatever cockamamie regulations you put
in place, then why do you have to do anything at all to help other companies
that don't what to do business in your state?

So how did this suddenly change from "several major companies"
into "the insurance industry"

As I said, do tell? What was the story?

If your speaking out against one side but you know the alternatives are
equally bad, then your doing a disservice today by not at least mentioning
that.

You mentioned prevalent thinking. So, I guess that there was a time 30
years ago
when people would say things like "I think we ought to
try instituting a 55Mph speed limit to see if we can save energy although
I know that it is probably going to waste money on extra time spent on the
freeways
so the total economic benefit may end up being nil - but we won't
know unless we trial it"

Funny how I can't remember any of the pro-double-nickel people saying
that. Instead I remember quite a lot of irrational FUD.

When exactly did this time in history exist?

Bill I know you are old enough to have some political sense and you
know perfectly well that if you want to drag the center right you have
to argue from the ultra right, and if you want to drag the center left you
have
to argue from the ultra left. You cannot argue from the center. That is
why there are ultra conservatives and ultra liberals.

The usual argument I hear people that make your complaint making is
that the problem today is that the issues are so much more complex, which is
understandable in
a highly technological and mechanized civilization, that it requires the
average
person to put more effort and time into understanding the issues. Yet
at the same time due to this very same complexity of civilization, there
are many more distractions to people's time. So, people don't spend the
time and as a result they are easy prey for the 5-minute-soundbite.

This is the old "people were more reasonable in the 'olden days'" argument.
You will pardon me if I'm sick to death of it, I have got a crawful this
week reading all the drippy tributes to dead President Ford.

What all these folks seem to forget is that back in these more reasonable
olden days they were lynching blacks.

And older than that we had people like Laura Ingalls Wilder who
went around writing lots and lots of articles castigating Roosevelt
and the New Deal (as if the Hooverites had any better idea how to get
out of the Depression)

And further back than that we had all the pro slavery arguments to the
point that the country was split into a civil war.

So once again I have to ask, when did this more reasonable time
period in history exist?

Please relate this to the zero emissions thing. You never really explained
who is raping who, here.

Didja know - the people can always opt to NOT buy forested property
and opt to NOT build on it. Why is it necessary for CA to make sensible
regulations for people to build in forested areas? Maybe they should
just tell the people "we are going to make senseless regulations for
building in forested areas so if your not an idiot, then don't build there"

It's like New Orleans. They rebuilt the dikes. But they don't allow you
to build a house on 30 foot stilts. Maybe what they are really telling the
smart people who can read between the lines is "if your not an idiot, don't
build a house here"

I don't regard either of these solutions as stupid solutions. Actually I
regard
them as rather clever solutions since it increases the chances that the
stupid
people will build in those places, so when the floods and fires come
through,
it might even help increase intelligence in the gene pool by killing off the
stupider
ones.

Ted