Nothing is ever as it seems
Nothing is ever as it seems; especially when you think it's obvious.
From last week's op-ed in the WSJ:
From 27 April 2016
Wall Street Journal:
"OPINION
The Auto Emissions Crackup
One more example of what an analyst calls ‘sophisticated state failure.’
By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. | 762 words
As expected, Volkswagen’s scandal over emissions cheating is spreading to other car makers. Porsche, Audi, Mercedes and GM’s Opel division in Germany are recalling cars for failing emissions tests.
In France, Renault and Peugeot have been raided by police. Japan’s Mitsubishi admitted on Tuesday that it had been fudging mileage data for 25 years, putting the company’s survival in doubt.
In an honest world the scandal would now spread to the agencies and politicians that conspire to set implausible rules and then help create ways around them for industries that employ millions of their voters and whose products are of vital daily purpose to virtually everyone in their societies.
The crackup here is bigger than the crackup of a single regulatory initiative. The problem only begins with agencies maniacally hoeing their row because it’s theirs, beyond reason, with science reduced to their useful idiot.
Take the Environmental Protection Agency standard that Volkswagen, in its still-unexplained obsession with reconquering the U.S. market with diesel cars, is guilty of flouting.
EPA’s latest target of 0.07 grams of nitrogen oxide per mile represents a 90% reduction from NOx output of the average car on the road today.
It represents a 97% reduction compared to the 100 million pickup trucks on the road. The law of diminishing returns, if agencies behaved rationally, would have caused EPA to declare victory on nitrogen oxide and turn to other matters.
But acting rationally is not an agency interest. The Clean Air Act gave EPA the atmosphere as its regulatory bailiwick, and it won’t let go.
And since racking up of continued costs for small gains must be justified somehow, an unsupported scientific orthodoxy is rolled out—the theory, which permeates federal regulatory endeavors, that anything toxic in large amounts is toxic in small amounts.
Even the chair of the EPA’s Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee testified in 1997: “I do not believe we are sufficiently well-informed to make the judgment that regulating [fine particulates] to near background levels is an appropriate national commitment.”
The agency since then, of course, has made an even bolder leap to claim that the Clean Air Act entitles it to regulate virtually all activities in the atmosphere in the name of climate change, though 85% of the relevant activities take place outside the U.S. beyond EPA’s reach.
It might seem easy to blame the politicians who superintend this machine, but politicians come and go, while the machine endures.
The Bush administration started out criticizing fuel-mileage standards as perverse and ineffective, yet when the Iraq war went bad, President Bush seized on tighter rules to suggest he was making war on America’s “oil addiction.”
The fuel-economy regime was created in 1975 when gasoline price controls were still extant. If politicians wouldn’t let price ration usage, they needed another way to temper demand—that was the idea behind fuel-economy mandates.
Those price controls are long gone but the mileage mandates survive because so many interests have sprung into being around them, though the cited purpose has become “emissions,”not “energy security.”
In setting his own mileage goals, President Obama selected 54.5 miles-per-gallon because the White House wanted an impressive “headline number.”
The actual target is closer to 40 mpg when various allowances, gimmes, favors to U.S. auto makers at the expense of their foreign counterparts, subsidies to pet technologies, etc., are counted.
And of course, “your mileage may vary,”because the EPA and auto makers silently agreed on a testing procedure that has nothing to do with real-world driving.
The ne plus ultra is Tesla, a company massively propped up by indirect and direct official handouts. Electricity is the most important source of global greenhouse emissions, so the U.S. pays Tesla to make a car that runs on electricity.
Multiply the emissions scandal by many thousands and you have the crackup of the Western model of governance.
Their retirement systems were premised on workforces growing faster than retired populations, yet now are helpless to adjust when the opposite is true. Their tax and welfare systems suppress work, entrepreneurship and eventually childbearing, and now need to be kept ambulatory by direct lending from their central banks.
One thing that can’t be changed, though, is the programs themselves no matter how maladaptive they prove. Jan Techau, of Carnegie Europe, coined the phrase “sophisticated state failure”for the impasse afflicting the advanced industrial nations.
If you think the U.S. is somehow immune to rigid elites and dysfunctional priorities, somehow specially blessed, think again. If you suppose Donald Trump is the solution, an even ruder awakening may be coming.■
