THE ENTERPRISE: INFORMATION YOU NEED, INSIGHTS YOU CAN USE

THE ENTERPRISE: INFORMATION YOU NEED, INSIGHTS YOU CAN USE 

NEWS FLASH: CHINA’S GROWTH RATE CONTINUES TO SLOW, NOW HEADING UNDER 6.5% AND LIKELY TO DROP FURTHER
Bad news for the global economy? Probably so. The real question is what it does to trade with the US and vice versa. When an economy this large has slow growth, it impacts every other trading partner—somehow.

THE US GOV’T SHUTDOWN IS COSTING AMERICA A TENTH OF A PERCENTAGE POINT IN GDP GROWTH EVERY MONTH
Will it throw American into recession? Probably not by itself, but with help from the meddling Fed—raising interest rates so they can then ride to the rescue, and lower them, hoping to prevent a recession they helped cause (too late?). Maybe.
"To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a computer." —Paul R. Ehrlich

TWO STEPS TO HELP YOURSELF AND OTHERS
1)Buy a copy (or two or more) of ROCKETSHIPS & PARACHUTES and READ SOME OF IT—It’s available on amazon.com. Here is a link to order: https://tinyurl.com/mariottiR-P —and please post a review if you like it. (If you have already read some of it and like it, please post a brief review too. Thanks. 

2) Read this edition of THE ENTERPRISE and share it with your contacts.

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This lead article is not mine.It appeared in the WSJ. The main point is that while we are arguing like schoolyard kids about whether Climate Change is real, and how bad it is, we are “fouling the planet.” Of course India, China and other less developed countries are doing it worse, but no matter. 

IT’S TIME TO TAKE ACTION, SHUT DOWN THE PANICKY ANTI-NUCLEAR CROWD, AND QUIT ARGUING ABOUT FOSSIL FUELS FOULING THE CLIMATE—SAVE THE ENVIRONMENT WHILE THERE IS STILL TIME

Only Nuclear Energy Can Save the Planet

Do the math on replacing fossil fuels: To move fast enough, the world needs to build lots of reactors

 

By Joshua S. Goldstein and Staffan A. Qvist

Jan. 11, 2019 11:57 a.m. ET

Climate scientists tell us that the world must drastically cut its fossil fuel use in the next 30 years to stave off a potentially catastrophic tipping point for the planet. Confronting this challenge is a moral issue, but it’s also a math problem—and a big part of the solution has to be nuclear power.

 

Today, more than 80% of the world’s energy comes from fossil fuels, which are used to generate electricity, to heat buildings and to power car and airplane engines. Worse for the planet, the consumption of fossil fuels is growing quickly as poorer countries climb out of poverty and increase their energy use. Improving energy efficiency can reduce some of the burden, but it’s not nearly enough to offset growing demand. 

 

Any serious effort to decarbonize the world economy will require, then, a great deal more clean energy, on the order of 100 trillion kilowatt-hours per year, by our calculations—roughly equivalent to today’s entire annual fossil-fuel usage. A key variable is speed. To reach the target within three decades, the world would have to add about 3.3 trillion more kilowatt-hours of clean energy every year.

 

Solar and wind power alone can’t scale up fast enough to generate the vast amounts of electricity that will be needed by midcentury, especially as we convert car engines and the like from fossil fuels to carbon-free energy sources. Even Germany’s concerted recent effort to add renewables—the most ambitious national effort so far—was nowhere near fast enough. A global increase in renewables at a rate matching Germany’s peak success would add about 0.7 trillion kilowatt-hours of clean electricity every year. That’s just over a fifth of the necessary 3.3 trillion annual target. 

 

To put it another way, even if the world were as enthusiastic and technically capable as Germany at the height of its renewables buildup—and neither of these is even close to true in the great majority of countries—decarbonizing the world at that rate would take nearly 150 years. 

 

Even if we could develop renewables much faster, huge problems would remain. Although costs have dropped dramatically for solar and wind energy, they are not a direct, reliable replacement for coal and gas. When the sun doesn’t shine or the wind doesn’t blow, little or no energy is collected. And when nature does cooperate, the energy is sometimes wasted because it can’t be stored affordably. Bill Gates, who has invested $1 billion in renewables, notes that “there’s no battery technology that’s even close to allowing us to take all of our energy from renewables.” If substantially expanded, wind, solar and hydropower also would destroy vast tracts of farmland and forest.

 

What the world needs is a carbon-free source of electricity that can be ramped up to massive scale very quickly and provide power reliably around the clock, regardless of weather conditions—all without expanding the total acreage devoted to electric generation. Nuclear power meets all of those requirements. 

 

When Sweden and France built nuclear reactors to replace fossil fuel in the 1970s and 1980s, they were able to add new electricity production relative to their GDPs at five times Germany’s speed for renewables. Sweden’s carbon emissions dropped in half even as its electricity production doubled. Electricity prices in nuclear-powered France today are 55% of those in Germany.

 

So why isn’t everyone who is concerned about climate change getting behind nuclear power? Why isn’t the nuclear power industry in the U.S. and the world expanding to meet the rising demand for clean electricity? The key reason is that most countries’ policies are shaped not by hard facts but by long-standing and widely shared phobias about radiation.

 

Nuclear power is the safest form of energy by far, especially compared with coal, which continues to cause hundreds of thousands of premature deaths a year from air pollution in addition to contributing to climate change. 

 

Over six decades, nuclear power has experienced only one fatal accident, Chernobyl in 1986, which directly caused about 60 deaths and is blamed for thousands more over time from low-level radiation. That’s a serious accident, but other nonnuclear industrial accidents have been worse. A hydroelectric dam failure in China in 1975 killed tens of thousands, and the 1984 Bhopal gas leak at a Union Carbide plant in India killed 4,000 initially and an estimated 15,000 more over time. We don’t stigmatize those entire industries as a result. 

 

The 1979 accident at Three Mile Island killed no one. In Japan in 2011, the fourth largest earthquake in recorded history and a 50-foot tsunami together took almost 20,000 lives—and damaged the Fukushima nuclear facility, which leaked radiation. Exposure during the incident contributed to one worker’s 2016 death, according to the Japanese government; the badly handled evacuation of the area, by contrast, is blamed for much hardship and many deaths. 

 

Nuclear power is regulated as though any amount of radiation is extremely dangerous. Yet we all walk around in a soup of background radiation, giving us an average of about 3 millisieverts (mSv) per year but ranging up to 200 in some places, with no demonstrated harm. The occupational and medical recommendations are to stay below 50 per year. At Fukushima, only 12 individuals at the plant received more than 200 mSv, and nobody outside the plant exceeded 50. It’s possible to measure and track very low levels of radiation, but those levels are harmless. 

 

Nor is nuclear waste the insurmountable problem that the public has been led to believe. The volumes are tiny, unlike the vast quantities of equally toxic waste from coal and other fuels. An American’s entire lifetime of electricity use powered by nuclear energy would produce an amount of long-term waste that fits in a soda can. All spent fuel from U.S. reactors over the past 60 years would fit on a football field, stacked 20 feet high. Today we store spent fuel at reactor sites in concrete casks (radiation does not escape the concrete) that will be safe for a hundred years. After that, the waste can be burned in reactors that are currently being designed, or it can be buried permanently.

 

All the reasons put forward to oppose nuclear power amount to over-hyped fears that in no way stack up to the real dangers facing humanity from climate change.

 

Nuclear power, if scaled up in a way that has already been shown possible, would easily compete on price with fuels that pollute far more. South Korea, which has built 10 of its reactors based on the same design, already produces nuclear power at or below fossil-fuel prices. Recent American and European efforts to build first-of-a-kind reactor designs in a hyper-regulated environment have led to large cost overruns and delays. But in the coming years, the world can build reactors centrally, at factories or shipyards, using standardized designs, and achieve costs below other fuels. We can create hundreds of reactors per year world-wide and meet the world’s enormous need for clean energy. 

 

It is a win-win strategy, giving humanity its only viable path to stop a climate catastrophe while providing poorer countries with the energy they need to grow. It’s the only strategy that adds up.

 

—This essay is adapted from the authors’ new book, “A Bright Future: How Some Countries Have Solved Climate Change and the Rest Can Follow,” published by PublicAffairs. Mr. Goldstein is a professor emeritus of international relations at American University; Mr. Qvist is an energy engineer and consultant.

 

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APPLE HAS TROUBLE SELLING THE iPhone XR. 

IT’S THE IDEAL COMBINATION OF FEATURES AND TECHNOLOGY

And its the cheapest of the new iPhone releases. It’s battery lasts longer.It’s functionality is all there. And did I say, it’s cheaper? Why is it not selling best of all. Nobody seems to know. It’s a no-brainer best buy of current models. Apparently, Apple users who blindly follow and buy the latest and most expensive model don’t care.

 

NEW, INDEFENSIBLE ADDON FEES TO EVERYTHING YOU BUY

Caveat Emptor—Latin for “buyer beware” applies when you look at your cable TV bill, your phone bill, your airline ticket price detail, your rental car contract, your hotel bill, and almost anything else you are buying. Hotels may have taken the award with their “Destination Fee.” a $25-50 feel because you got to your destination—What? Find these bogus fees. Challenge them. Maybe even make a scene. Some are negotiable. Some are not. You won’t know until you complain.

 

A SECOND WSJ PIECE—AN EDITORIAL—SHOULD FRIGHTEN ALL AMERICANS

Stealing votes is a long standing tradition in America dating back to the old days in Chicago where the motto was “vote early and vote often,” as the Richard Daley the elder Democratic party would flood ballot boxes with votes for people long deceased, and name found in many other places.

 

SHOULD WOMEN SERVE IN COMBAT UNITS? NO MATTER HOW TOUGH OR WELL TRAINED CAN A 130 LB. WOMEN RESCUE A 220 LB. FELLOW SOLDIER WHO IS INJURED OR INCAPACITATED?

 

A WSJ OpEd piece written by a woman, says NO. The response has been immediate. Here’s a link to the counterpoint to this statement about women not serving in combat units. I guess it depends on what they are asked to do. Genetically, men are stronger, have stronger more dense bones (other than in their heads!), men are more muscular, designed by nature to hunt and fight and protect families. So if women (know as the weaker sex for years) want to be part of Army combat units—shouldn’t they have to pass all the same tests? Even those that “discriminate against them” because of their gender.

 

https://taskandpurpose.com/veterans-women-combat-units

 

Here’s a link to the original article. Read it and form your own opinions.

 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/women-dont-belong-in-combat-units-11547411638

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THIS IS SCARY, AND CAN CHANGE THE ENTIRE DEMOCRATIC VOTING PROCESS IN THE USA

 

Harvesting Democratic Votes

Liberals want to impose the California voting model on all 50 states.

 

By The WSJ Editorial Board Jan. 18, 2019 7:09 p.m. ET

 

Democrats in Congress are making election reform their top legislative priority, and we’ve criticized it as a majority protection act. To understand why, consider that Democrats are trying to do for the country what they’ve done with election laws in California. 

 

The Golden State is where Republican candidates went to bed on election night in November with leads in most of their competitive House races, only to lose in the ensuing weeks of vote counting. In Orange County, Young Kim was poised to become the first Korean-American woman in Congress, with a sizable lead on Election Day over her Democratic opponent. She lost by three percentage points. Republican Rep. Mimi Walters’s 6,074-vote lead on Nov. 6 turned into an 11,866-vote loss to Democrat Katie Porter.

 

 

The GOP wipeout came after the Democrats who dominate Sacramento passed laws aimed at greasing their voting machine. The project started in 2015 when California became the second state after Oregon to move to automatic voter registration. 

 

Can’t be bothered to register? California does it for you, automatically adding to its rolls any person who has any interaction with its Department of Motor Vehicles. The system is already a threat to ballot integrity, with the DMV acknowledging in September it had incorrectly registered 23,000 voters.

 

In 2016 California passed the Voter’s Choice Act, which allows counties to mail every voter a ballot. Lots of Californians use mail voting, though previously they had to request it. Now ballots arrive automatically, whether voters want one or not. Thirteen million California voters received ballots in the mail last year, compared to about nine million in 2014.

 

The biggest score for Democrats is a separate 2016 law pushed heavily by unions that legalized what’s known as ballot harvesting. This allows any person—union activists, canvassers, community organizers, campaign staff—to show up at homes and collect mail ballots on behalf of voters. 

 

California law also allows counting mail ballots postmarked or delivered on Election Day, as well as same-day registration and liberal use of provisional ballots. This year the Democratic vote totals piled up long after the polls closed. Fred Whitaker, chairman of the Orange County GOP, has estimated that an extraordinary 250,000 mail-votes were dropped off on Election Day thanks to harvesting.

 

All of this is carefully designed to enhance Democratic turnout. Media stories have detailed a sophisticated operation that pinpointed Democratic voters and deployed volunteers to harvest door-to-door. Republicans struggled to get conservatives to hand ballots over to strangers, and Democrats can’t be blamed for better organization.

 

But California law also creates opportunity for fraud and coercion. Voters in a 2017 special election for an open seat in the California state Assembly reported activists harassed them at their doors to fill out ballots for specific candidates and hand them over. 

 

This creates opportunities for harvesters to “help” voters complete their ballots, or even pay to finish them, and it’s easy for the unscrupulous to lose ballots they think may go for the wrong candidate. This is why ballot harvesting is illegal in many states, or at least limited to drop-offs by family members.

 

House Democrats are now moving to impose much of this on the other 49 states. Their For the People Act, or H.R.1, would require all states to adopt automatic voter registration based on names in state and federal agency databases. This means anyone receiving federal food stamps in, say, Ohio, would be automatically registered to vote. 

 

The bill also requires states to allow same-day and online voter registration. It mandates looser rules on provisional ballots, requires every state to provide two weeks of early voting, prohibits restrictions on mail voting, and limits states’ ability to remove voters from rolls. Oh, and it will require that the United States Postal Service deliver ballots for free. Vote harvesting isn’t in H.R.1 but give Democrats time.

 

All this is an affront to the American tradition of letting states set their own election rules. Few states have automatic registration, on the principle that voting is voluntary. Even liberal Slate magazine, in suggesting that the House bill would “Save American Democracy,” acknowledged that some of the bill might not survive Supreme Court scrutiny.

 

California has become a one-party state, and Democrats have used their dominance to make it even harder for Republicans to compete. Now they want to use their new House majority to do the same for the rest of America. The Senate can stop them for now, but look out in 2021.

 

Appeared in the January 19, 2019, print edition

TO ROBOT OR NOT TO ROBOT?

What country has the most robots power 10,000 manufacturing workers? USA? NO WAY…it is 7th. South Korea with 710, followed by Singapore with 658, Germany with 322, Japan with 308 and after Sweden and Denmark, the USA with 200. This from the International Federation of Robotics. Do robots cost people jobs? At first YES, while the displace workers. Later, NO, as they improve quality and lower costs. Replacing workers with robots and automation in general is a good idea when people costs (wages and benefits) are high. Watch for more robots in the future—some where you least expect them—in your grocery stores—checking for safety hazards (slip, trip and stumble) and checking stock to see that the right things are in the right places with the right prices on them. Coming soon to a store near you.

 

LONELINESS—THE NEXT EPIDEMIC?

People don’t join clubs like they used to. Then don’t congregate and talk to each other as much either. Now their noses are in their cell phone or tablet or streaming TV set. Loneliness causes many sed effects. it gets worse with older folks too—but it isn’t limited to the elderly. Young people are getting lonelier too. Loneliness and shorten a person’s life by as much as 15 years!So get out there and join a club, meet some people, do some good, gather and interact. You’ll be happy you did.

 

All the best

JOHN