Obama’s War on the American Economy; Supreme Court decisions; A ray of hope?

View 779 Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Roberta’s computer has decided to funk out and Eric is over to replace it with a new one. We’ll have a performance report on it when it’s done. There are some innovations.

Obama’s War on the American People

That’s a harsh title, but after a careful read of his new Environmental Policy, to be implemented by Administrative Fiat without consent of Congress, relying on the Environmental Protection Act of 1990 which does not mention carbon as a pollutant but now the EPA has declared carbon to be a pollutant – it appears that Obama is out to damage the American economy just as it is struggling to recover.

None of this was in his 2012 campaign. Indeed, he went to coal country and accused Mit Romney of being anti-coal.

The major factors in the US economy are the complexities of regulations and the price of energy. Cheap energy and freedom will produce an economic boom including the recovery of manufacturing. Obama’s new program will multiply the regulations, raise the price of energy, and subsidize uneconomical energy sources like windmills. Next he cracks down on fracking since that produces natural gas which also “pollutes” with CO2. And of course adds to the safety regulations and the administrative processes for actually stating up nuclear power plants.

The price of energy rises.

The economic recovery staggers.

Salve Sclave.

A Federal trial judge in California decided that the California Proposition 8 forbidding same sex marriage was contrary to the Federal Constitution. When Governor Brown and the California state government refused to appeal that decision, the backers of Proposition 8 did. They lost in the 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals, and appealed that to the US Supreme Court.

The US Supreme Court has ruled that the sponsors of Proposition 8 do not have standing to sue in challenging the 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that the Proposition 8 Amendment to the California Constitution is federally unconstitutional. Thus gay marriage is to be restored to California without an actual US Supreme Court ruling on the federal constitution and its rights to marriage.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2013/06/26/supreme-court-makes-its-doma-prop-8-rulings/

This is less confusing than it seems at first sight. The Court has in some sense deferred to the political authorities of the State of California, who have chosen not to join the suit to enforce Proposition 8. It is a dance, of course: the Supreme Court long ago (1912) decided that incorporation of the Initiative and Referendum into a state constitution did not violate the federal guarantee of “a republican form of government” to the states. What this present ruling implies is that if the people of a state recall their governor and he refuses to leave office, the citizens cannot go to the US Supreme Court to get him thrown out. They don’t have standing. Only the political authorities of the state have standing. But of course they don’t mean that. What the USSC is trying to do is avoid deciding on whether there is a constitutional right to gay marriage.

Meanwhile the USSC ruled that the Defense of Marriage Act is an infringement on the state’s rights; which means that if the State of California had joined in the suit to overturn Proposition 8 then under the same logic that overturned DOMA would have required that Proposition 8 be upheld and gay marriage would be banned in California.

There is dancing in the streets in West Hollywood.

Imagine now if a California governor decides that he doesn’t like Proposition 13 which protects property owners from confiscatory tax rates, and has the legislature raise property taxes by a factor of ten. Property owners sue in Federal Court, but the State pleads that Proposition 13 is unconstitutional on the grounds that it favors property owners and discriminates against the homeless. It is not impossible to imagine that a federal judge, and 2 judges of the 9^th Circuit Court of appeals would agree to that. The state rejoices. Who can appeal to the USSC? Who has standing to sue?

Meanwhile the US fertility rate is below replacement rate, and marriage is no longer the expected way for a couple to beget and raise children. We live in interesting times.

A later reflection: if the proponents of Prop 8 had not the standing to sue on the matter then they had not the standing to take the case to the Circuit Court of Appeals, which means this this has not been decided by a federal court of appeals: I am not enough of a lawyer to know what that means, but since the Governor is sworn to uphold the State Constitution and this has not been decided by an appeals court, can the order county clerks to disobey? It’s pretty well moot now of course.

 

A Ray of Hope?

There has been a lot of attention on the CO2 rising over 400 ppm recently. Some are advocating political action to halt the rise. That’s not likely to happen because uprooting the world’s energy economy would do more damage (kill more people faster) than the climate changes expected due to the high CO2 levels.

However, something might have changed in the last couple of months.

Solar power satellites are the only energy source known that scales to humanity’s needs and well beyond. To get them adopted on a huge scale, all that’s needed is for the cost of energy from them to undercut fossil fuels, first coal for electric power and then synthetic oil. The first happens at 5 cents declining to 2 cents per kWh. Synthetic hydrocarbon fuels would cost a dollar a gallon if the cost of power went down to 1 cent per kWh.

It’s not hard to get the cost for 5kg/kW power sats down in this range if the cost of lifting parts to GEO can be reduced to $100/kg. Solar power on earth ties up in the range of 500 kg/kW(avg). If you can build them in space, they are not subject to wind and gravity, allowing a hundred to one materials reduction. However, $100/kg is a hundred to one reduction over the current cost of around $10,000 per kg paid to put communication satellites in orbit.

A two-orders-of-magnitude reduction seems to be possible, but not using chemical energy (other than the first step where a Skylon type vehicle burns hydrogen with air for about 1/4 of the velocity to orbit). Beyond that it takes a 3 GW laser located in GEO to accelerate the last 6 km/s to orbit using a simple sheet of tubes to heat hydrogen to 2700 K. That gives an exhaust velocity of 7500 m/s.

A second stage also uses laser-heated hydrogen to transport 20 tons three times per hour to GEO. The second stages are scrapped at GEO for material, making the entire dry weight payload.

The problem is powering the first laser in GEO. Last year I worked out how to do it in a paper that was recently approved after peer review. It took an elaborate multi-step bootstrap process that built a 25,000 tons power satellite in GEO to power the first propulsion laser. The cost came in just short of $140 B. Early April this year it became obsolete because Steve Nixon (otherwise known for advocating Mega-Chimney) made a suggestion that cut the cost model by $80 B. At $60 B (and 500% ROI in ten years), it may be within the capacity of western finance. If not the Chinese asked the Indians to join them in building power satellites last Nov. (Google China India power satellite to find it.)

Steve’s idea was inspired; power the propulsion laser for a few months from a huge (10 km) transmitter on the ground. Reciprocity (look it up) says that the path loss will be the same if you swap the transmitter and receiver antennas. The target in space would be a 1 km rectenna, with a mass under 1000 tons.

Further, the laser, tracking optics and heat sink can all be built and tested in LEO, much cheaper to access, then the propulsion laser can be sent to GEO using electric thrusters powered from the same rectenna that powers the laser. Takes 21 hours of thrust to get it there; powered ten percent of the time, it could make the trip in 10 days.

Then use it for 3 months or less to bring up a first power satellite to replace the power from the ground.

The 3 GW laser is scaled to bring up 500,000 tons per year, enough for

100 GW of power satellites. While that’s not enough to get humanity off coal, it is a good start and (if the financial models are correct) it makes a 500% ROI by the end of ten years, selling power satellites for 5 cents per kWh declining over ten years to 2 cents per kWh.

Re-investing 10% of transport capacity to bring up more lasers doubles production every year and that _will_ get humanity off fossil fuels.

(The energy payback time is under two months.)

Keith Henson

It is a far ray of hope. It would be a large step, and getting the energy and power to put up the first solar power satellites would require a lot of sacrifices in entitlements. The American people no longer seem to be inclined to deprive themselves of immediate gratification to invest in the future. I would like to be optimistic. I was when I wrote about these things in A Step Farther Out. It could still happen.

Of course the Keystone pipeline is a shovel ready jobs project that would substantially lower the cost of energy in the United States – which is likely to mean that it will be refused by this president.

RAND study on Algebra 1 blended instruction

Dear Jerry,

Article today in Education Week on RAND study of hybrid instruction (blend of online plus in-class) of Algebra 1 “Study: Hybrid Algebra Program ‘Nearly Doubled’ Math Learning”

http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/inside-school-research/2013/06/government_study_finds_gains_f.html <http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/inside-school-research/2013/06/government_study_finds_gains_f.html>

I have not read the RAND study yet. Valerie teaches Algebra 1 and Algebra 2, so I will forward her comments and mine later this month.

http://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WR984.html

Jim Ransom

The amount of on line instruction in all subjects grows weekly. What is needed is a way to certify that a person has learned the material without requiring payments to The Blob.