At TriplePundit Leon Kaye asks have we reached peak gasoline?

While many fret over whether Donald Trump will or will not shred the United States’ commitment to the global climate deal, market forces may very well help mitigate climate change risks in the long run. We will certainly see the global transportation energy mix shift over the next few decades.

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), the sun is already setting on gasoline. In its 2016 World Energy Outlook, the Paris-based intergovernmental agency projects an eventual decline in demand for gasoline over the next 25 years. The IEA says global demand for oil will remain steady until at least 2040, due to the lack of alternatives for truck and aviation fuel. But the agency expects electric vehicles to increasingly displace gasoline cars that run on gasoline.

I think that the answer to his question, at least in the United States, is “No”. And if present trends continue we never will.

Hybrids and electric vehicles comprise about 2% of total light vehicle sales in the United States. That’s a 50:1 advantage for internal combustion and in the U. S. most of those burn gasoline.

In other words despite a decade’s worth of hype, hybrids and EVs are still a niche market. And that’s not even getting into Jevon’s paradox. Also, keep in mind that in the U. S. it takes 20 years for the total fleet to turn over.

You know that fake news you’ve been hearing so much about lately? Ironically, much of the whining has come from purveyors of fake news.

At any rate at RealClearWorld Derek Scissors points out that there are good reasons to believe that the reports of China’s coming ascendancy are more fake news:

There are data, grounded in real-world calculations, that show China’s economic importance falling — not rising slowly, nor staying stable, but falling. The most important indicator is net private wealth, which is the single best measure of a country’s economic size and of the pool of resources available to its public sector for military or social spending.

In work dating back to 2000 and carried out with no geo-economic agenda, Credit Suisse has estimated private wealth. The new estimates, through the middle of 2016, show American private wealth at $84.8 trillion and Chinese private wealth at $23.4 trillion. Moreover, the gap is widening. With $60 trillion less in private wealth than the United States, China’s global economic leadership is a fable.

It’s an interesting article.

I don’t know whether China’s power is growing, declining, or what. Honestly, I don’t much care as long as the lives of Americans get better. I think there are legitimate concerns about that and not much is being done about it.

Raymond Hogler is such a tease. His New Republic piece is titled “What’s Behind the Decline of American Unions?”:

In 1980, union membership density stood at 23 percent of the work force; some 40 years later, just over 11 percent of American workers belong to unions. During the same period, wealth inequality in the U.S. continued to accelerate largely on a social class basis.

but you’ll search the piece in vain for that. Even his antecedent piece doesn’t really offer an explanation. Maybe you need to read his book for an answer but, given his lack of explanations in two posts, I can’t hold out much hope for that.

Let me offer some potential explanations: deindustrialization, low margins and a slack labor market in service industries, bad union strategies, and an adverse regulatory environment for manufacturing.

Deindustrialization is the simplest, easiest explanation. That 23% of the work force in 1980? A lot of those were employed in heavy industry: auto manufacturing, steel mills, and the like. We don’t have nearly as much heavy industry as we used to through a combination of competition from overseas suppliers, self-destructive trade policy on our part, predatory monetary policies and domestic subsidies on the part of our foreign competitors, preference, and regulatory factors I’ll get to later.

Since the 1980s the emphasis in the labor movement has been on organizing service industries. The problem there is that they are not good prospects for unionization. There is a slack labor market for unskilled workers, largely but not solely a product of our failure to enforce our own immigration laws. In the hospitality and food service sectors, major employers of unskilled workers, margins are extremely low. That means they’d rather fire their workers and hire new ones than pay their workers more. I know of companies that’ve gone out of business in response to unionization of its work force.

The “commanding heights of the economy”, healthcare and finance, are not particularly good prospects for organization.

The predatory monetary policies and domestic subsidies on the part of Japan, South Korea, and China practically go without explanation. In essence by manipulating their currencies they’ve exported inexpensive goods to us and imported employment.

For the last 30 years the labor movement has been fighting a delaying action. It’s been trying to preserve existing jobs, wages, and benefits at the expense of future jobs, wages, and benefits. The apogee of that was in the deal that GM’s workers cut for a tiered wage system.

Finally, environmental, energy, health and safety regulations, reporting requirements, and so on discourage American companies from employing workers in heavy industry. The United States used to produce most of the rare earth elements produced anywhere in the world. Now we produce very little, importing most of what we use from China. It’s not because we ran out; we’ve stopped producing them because of environmental regulations.

Note that I’m not arguing that the regulations are bad. I’m just pointing out that they have secondary effects.

If you read Mr. Hogler’s articles, you’ll be left with the impression that the labor movement needed life support in the form of supportive legislation in order to prosper. Is that really prospering? I think there’s a lot more to it than that.

The irony of organized labor’s decline is that the Democrats, notionally the patrons and beneficiaries of organized labor, have supported all of the ill-considered and self-destructive policies that have brought it to its present circumstances. That’s the reason for the title of this post.

I keep reading opinion pieces from people on the Democratic side of the aisle and they convince me that Democrats are living in a fool’s paradise. This recent column from E. J. Dionne in the Washington Post is no exception:

Democrats are in danger of moving from complacency to panic. Neither is particularly helpful.

The complacency part is obvious: Until about 9 p.m. Eastern time on Nov. 8, supporters of Hillary Clinton (myself included) were certain that Donald Trump’s weaknesses among women, nonwhite voters and younger Americans would prevent him from becoming president.

Here’s another example of complacency: re-electing the same leadership who put you in the fix you’re in.

These responses are predicated on the notion that Democrats’ strategy has been right all along and all they need to do is stay the course and their ultimate victory is assured. Poppycock. That strategy has been losing them votes for eight years.

Now Democrats’ emphasis is on the popular vote for president, an irrelevancy. Their claims are entirely based on the notion that if the rules were different Hillary Clinton would have won, ignoring that she knew what the rules were and lost.

You’ve got to start with this. Trump accomplished his objective. Hillary Clinton did not. From that do you conclude that if a different objective had been required that Hillary Clinton would have won? Or that Trump would have changed his tactics accordingly?

To my mind this is what we’ve seen over the last year. First, Trump trounced the national Republican Party. Its ruins are still smoking. Then he beat the national Democratic Party, doing what was needed to win the presidency. That’s economy of effort not fundamental weakness.

Now the Democrats are busy telling us it’s just a flesh wound (see video above).

Republicans still hold power at the state level with most states having legislatures dominated by Republicans and Republican governors. Democrats are depending too strongly on California and New York. They’re also pointing proudly to an additional 500,000 votes in Texas. That would seem to support my hypothesis that Democratic voters in the upper Midwest have moved south.

The next decennial census will be conducted under the tender mercies of the Trump Administration. Don’t be surprised if the rules under which it’s conducted change to favor his re-election and reduced appointment in Democratic strongholds.

What I think Trump’s victory tells us is that political parties, while important at the state and local levels, are just not enough to win the presidency any more. A candidate must pretend to be a good party member because that’s how our system works. It’s stacked in favor of the two major political parties. But that’s about where it ends, too.

You might be interested in Uri Friedman’s Atlantic piece in which he speculates about the incoming Trump Administration’s approach to terrorism. He first summarizes President Obama’s views:

Barack Obama has downgraded Bush’s War to a fight, and the enemy from Terror to specific terrorist groups. He rejects the notion of a clash of civilizations, both because he thinks it overestimates the threat of terrorism to the United States and because he doesn’t want to affirm the jihadists’ narrative of a struggle between Islam and infidels in the West. When a U.S. president uses “loose language that appears to pose a civilizational conflict between the West and Islam, or the modern world and Islam, then we make it harder, not easier, for our friends and allies and ordinary people to resist and push back against the worst impulses inside the Muslim world,” Obama told The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg.

What will President Trump’s alternative be? I don’t think there’s any way to tell. If he turns his attention to foreign policy early in his first term, it will be a significant departure from previous incoming presidents.

But with this guy anything can happen.

The chart above is from Chris Cilizza’s Washington Post post. It illustrates the change in fortunes of the Democratic Party during the Obama Era. Mr. Cilizza notes:

Placed in the context of the last eight years of elections, 2016 looks more like the rule than the exception. The rise of President Obama obscured the fact that the Democratic Party he represented was struggling in virtually every other way in which a party’s health is judged. Clinton’s loss should make that fact plain to Democrats: The country, judging by down-ballot election results nationwide, is center-right — and holding. And the Democratic bench is woefully devoid of major rising stars, itself a function of the party’s down-ballot struggles over the last eight years.

Some Democrats may take solace in Hillary Clinton’s apparently having received more votes albeit concentrated in fewer districts than Donald Trump did. They shouldn’t. Democratic candidates received three million fewer votes than Republicans did in House races.

I think that Democrats are on the horns of a dilemma. They can maintain their focus on social issues which underpins their present coalition of ethnic and racial minorities and young people. Or they can turn to the economy and security which runs the risk of alienating their present coalition.

Now they’re on the brink of re-electing the leadership that has brought them to their present diminished circumstances, their worst in 80 years. Does that sound like they’ve come to terms with their problems to you?

The “active slasher” attack that took place yesterday at Ohio State University appears to fall into what is becoming a sad pattern. It is the second stabbing rampage on the part of a Somali refugee in just three months.

I found the quote from the alleged perpetrator, from an interview conducted earlier by the campus paper, telling:

“I wanted to pray in the open,” he was quoted as saying, “but i was kind of scared with everything going on in the media…if people look at me, a Muslim praying, I don’t know what they’re going to think, what’s going to happen.”

Note that this man, who had previously lived in Somalia and then as a refugee in Pakistan, had never experienced living in a country in which Muslims were in a minority before coming here. Suddenly finding yourself in the minority while accustomed to being in the majority imposes serious stresses.

Some people just can’t handle those circumstances. And some resort to violence.

Although this Washington Post article opens as being about the differences a Finnish schoolteacher experiences when practicing her profession in the United States:

Chartouni, who is a Canadian citizen through marriage, moved from Finland to Florida with her family in 2014, due in part to her husband’s employment situation. After struggling to maintain an income and ultimately dropping out of an ESL teacher-training program, a school in Tennessee contacted her this past spring about a job opening. Shortly thereafter, Chartouni had the equivalent of a full-time teaching load as a foreign-language teacher at two public high schools in the Volunteer State, and her Finnish-Canadian family moved again. (Chartouni holds a master’s degree in foreign-language teaching from Finland’s University of Jyväskylä.)

it quickly turns to an issue that’s much broader than the differences between Finland and the United States and of much more general interest—the role of autonomy in job satisfaction:

According to a National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) report, teacher autonomy is positively associated with teachers’ job satisfaction and retention. And while most U.S. public-school teachers report a moderate amount of control in the classroom, many say they have little autonomy. In fact, the percentage of U.S. public-school teachers who perceive low autonomy in the classroom grew from 18 percent in the 2003-04 school year to 26 percent in the 2011-12 school year. In general, U.S. public-school teachers report that they have the least amount of control over two particular areas of teaching: “selecting textbooks and other classroom materials” and “selecting content, topics, and skills to be taught.”

My mom, who spent much of her career that spanned the years from the 1940s to the 1980s as a classroom teacher, used to call the classroom “the last kingdom”. No more. Standardization and oversight are increasing rather than decreasing and as they increase teachers’ job satisfaction declines.

That’s no limited to teaching. It extends to the other professions as well. Physicians, for example, report that they have experienced declines in their own autonomy and job satisfaction.

That should come as no surprise. As more money comes from far away the pressures to ensure that the money is being spent appropriately mount. The farther away the source of the money and mandates, the greater the indifference to the job satisfaction of individual professionals.

Don’t nuclear waste? Here’s a report from Inhabitat about getting electricity from batteries powered by dirt:

Harvard scientists believe in the power of the good earth — literally. A team at the Boston-based college have created microbial fuel cell (MFC) batteries that derive energy from naturally occurring bacteria in soil. If the product takes off, the eco-friendly batteries could provide power for some of the 500 million people in sub-Saharan Africa who lack access to electricity.

The MFC batteries, which were recently honored as one of Popular Mechanics‘ 10 Most Brilliant Innovations of 2009, were first tested in Tanzania in 2008. The MFC came in the form of a five-pound bucket, and was made up of a graphite- cloth anode, chicken-wire cathode, mud with manure, a layer of sand which acted as an ion barrier and salt water which acted as an electrolyte. All components were hooked up to an electronic power-management board. The charge coming out of the device is strong enough to charge a cell phone or power LED lights.

I actually like the idea of the nuclear waste-powered batteries better but there’s undoubtedly a niche for batteries powered by dirt.