Cali's Green Jim Crow, Pamela Ronald, GM's EVs are on fire, Scissortails

Aug 27, 2021

California's "Green Jim Crow," Pamela Ronald talks rice on the podcast, GM's EVs really are on fire, and a Scissortail on Lady Bird Lake

It’s been a busy, and frankly, rather depressing, week. Afghanistan is a long way from Austin but the news from and about Kabul – including yesterday’s suicide bombings, the bungled withdrawal, and the vapid leadership in the White House – has been deeply discouraging. Add in the news from General Motors, America’s biggest carmaker, about its recall of all of the EVs it has sold, the recall election of Gavin Newsom in California (a state where nearly everything, and in particular its energy policy) appears to be going wrong, and it seems that we are facing a crisis of basic competence in America’s top leaders and institutions.

I have a lot to say about GM and California this week. But there’s also an antidote to some of the bad news: amazing things are happening in plant genetics and agriculture, which are the focus of this week’s Power Hungry Podcast. So let me get to it. Four items this week:

Jennifer Hernandez calls out California’s “Green Jim Crow”
Plant geneticist Pamela Ronald on the Power Hungry Podcast
GM's embarrassing and costly costly EV recall
Scissortails in town

Note: The photo at the top of this email is of a Scissortail Flycatcher. It’s from South Dakota Birds and Birding. The photo credit belongs to Terry Sohl, who, according to the notes, took this photo, and several other great shots of a Scissortail Flycatcher in 2008, near Brookings, SD.

As I noted in this “news” letter a few weeks ago, I was pleased to meet Jennifer Hernandez at the Breakthrough Dialogue in California. Her essay in the Breakthrough Journal spurred me to publish this piece in Real Clear Energy. I began:

For decades, California has been viewed as a vanguard state, a province that leads America on things like entertainment, fashion, and politics. No longer. Instead, it has become a state to be rebuked, a place where a small group of regulators and politicians -- with the full backing of the state’s powerful environmental groups -- have created “a new Green Jim Crow era,” where “racist climate housing policies are strongly linked to its racist climate transportation policies.” That’s the gist of a scathing essay by Jennifer Hernandez that appears in the latest edition of the Breakthrough Journal, a periodical published by the Oakland-based Breakthrough Institute. It’s no coincidence that Hernandez’s essay reads like an indictment. Hernandez is a lawyer. She’s a partner at Holland & Knight and the lead lawyer for The 200, a group of Latino leaders who have sued the state of California over its climate, housing, and transportation policies.

In her essay, Hernandez included a 1937 map that shows where redlining was occurring in the Bay Area. That map (shown above) also neatly aligns with California's plans to implement taxes on the number of vehicle miles traveled, or VMT. Those taxes are a pernicious tax on personal mobility.

I concluded my article thusly:

Hernandez concludes her essay by saying that California must “stop pretending” that it can meet its energy needs with solar, wind, and batteries “while the state closes its last nuclear plant and continues to grant license extensions to its dirtiest gas plants.” She goes on, “we are long overdue to reconsider California’s racist, inequitable and ineffectual climate agenda.” In a telephone interview on Wednesday, Hernandez told me she is proud of the essay and the reaction it is getting. She added that while she loves California, the notion that the state’s climate policies “are being exported to Washington, D.C., is terrifying. California regulators want the rest of the country to buy these policies. But look at what they have done to us.” She added, California has “betrayed its people. It’s a broken society.”

Please read my piece and Jennifer's essay. Hers is a powerful indictment of California's regulatory regime and its regressive impact on low- and middle-income Californians.

Pamela Ronald on plant genetics, flood-resistant rice, "bulking up," & the future of food

Pamela Ronald is one of the world’s leading scientists on plant genetics and co-author (with her husband, Raoul Adamchuk) of Tomorrow’s Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food. She has won a slew of awards and fellowships. In 2020 she was named a World Agricultural Prize Laureate by the Global Confederation of Higher Education Associations for Agricultural and Life Sciences. She becomes the first woman whose work is recognized by the award.

In this episode, she and I talked about the evolution of pathogens, why nearly everything we eat has been genetically modified, and in particular about her work on developing flood-resistant strains of rice. If you haven’t seen her TED talk, which has been viewed almost 2 million times and been translated into 26 languages, have a look at it. The time-lapse video showing the growth of the flood-resistant rice next to the conventional strain, is remarkable. Indeed, for me, it borders on magic. We also talked about “bulking up” seed supplies, CRISPR, and why geneticist Barbara McClintock, the winner of the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, is one of her personal heroes.

I learned a lot in this episode. Please give it a listen and share it.

On Sunday, I published a piece in Forbes about GM’s embarrassing -- and insanely expensive -- recall of all of the Chevy Bolt EVs it has produced. Of course, I’ve been writing critically about EVs for a long time. I have a full chapter in Power Hungry, which was published in 2010, about EVs. The title of the chapter: “Electric Cars Are the Next Big Thing.” In November, I published a piece in Real Clear Energy on why internal combustion engines are here to stay, which noted the high price of the Chevy Bolt. On June 30, I testified before Congress about the myriad problems with EVs and attempting to electrify transportation. Last month, I took the photo above of a Chevy Bolt that was out in front of the Costco here in Austin. Sticker price: $46,250.

Thus, my new Forbes piece is just the latest in my decade-long skepticism about EVs, which still only command about 2% of the US new-car market. I began:

The puns about the recall of the Chevrolet Bolt EV almost write themselves. Last week’s announcement by General Motors that it was recalling some 73,000 Bolts at a cost of some $1 billion due to the possibility that the vehicles could catch on fire, is both embarrassing for the iconic automaker, and a warning that its plans to electrify all of the cars it sells by 2035 could, ahem, be going up in flames. The recall announced last Friday, comes about a month after an earlier recall of some 70,000 Bolts that were made between 2017 and 2019. GM put the cost of that recall at about $800 million. Thus, fixing all of the Bolts being recalled could, as Morningstar analyst David Whiston told the Detroit Free Press, cost GM some $1.8 billion. That’s a staggering amount for any company, but particularly for one that went bankrupt in 2009, and has said it will be spending $27 billion on EVs and autonomous vehicles over the next few years. But the significance of the recall by GM, the biggest U.S. automaker, goes far beyond Detroit. The costs of the EV push now underway are likely to be borne by all American taxpayers and ratepayers, not just EV buyers.

I also noted GM’s failed history with EVs and the enormous expenses it will incur trying to fix all the Bolts:

For decades, automakers have been claiming that an all-electric car was just around the corner. Some of that hype came from GM. As I pointed out in my fourth book, Power Hungry, (published in 2010) GM was claiming back in 1979 that it had found “a breakthrough in batteries” that “now makes electric cars commercially practical.” That boast was included in a September 26, 1979 article in the Washington Post, headlined “GM Unveils Electric Car, New Battery,” which said the new zinc-nickel oxide batteries will provide the “100-mile range that General Motors executives believe is necessary to successfully sell electric vehicles to the public.” And yet here we are, 42 years later, and GM is announcing it will “replace defective battery modules in Chevrolet Bolt EVs and EUVs with new modules.” In that same press release, the company said the replacement process for the 73,000 cars being recalled will result in an “additional cost of approximately $1 billion.” Thus, some elementary division shows that GM’s cost to fix each Bolt will be about $13,700.

I concluded it, writing:

This spate of recent EV fires, along with the high cost of buying an EV, and the enormous cost of attempting to upgrade our electric grid to accommodate them, are prime examples of why attempting to “electrify everything,” and in particular, our transportation sector, is fraught with risk. The Bolt recall shows why policymakers should slow down the headlong rush toward EVs lest we burn tens of billions of dollars on a technology that could, in fact, simply go up in smoke.

A "Texas Bird-of-Paradise" on the shore of Lady Bird Lake

Long before I was an active birdwatcher, I was enthralled with the Scissortail Flycatcher (Tyrannus forficatus). The main reason for that, of course, is that it is such a striking bird. Its long tail is unmistakable and as a kid growing up in Tulsa, I saw them frequently whenever we traveled around the state. I loved watching them fly and the way they use their long tails to make acrobatic turns in the air. Plus, as a kid, I knew the Scissortail is the Oklahoma state bird. It got that designation in 1951. The illustration above is from the Oklahoma Historical Society’s website which doesn’t provide any details on the artwork. After a bit of searching, I learned that’s an illustration by wildlife artist Richard Sloan (1935 to 2007) who worked as a staff artist for Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo.

I am writing about the Scissortail Flycatcher today because Lorin and I saw one a few weeks ago right in the center of Austin, near the pedestrian bridge over Lady Bird Lake. It was the only time I can recall seeing a Scissortail in the middle of town. As I wrote above, we ordinarily only see them on power lines or poles in areas far from town. But this bird was happily perched on a wire that was just a few blocks from downtown.

Wikipedia says the Scissortail is also known as the “Texas bird-of-paradise and swallow-tailed flycatcher” and it is “a long-tailed bird of the genus Tyrannus, whose members are collectively referred to as kingbirds. The kingbirds are a group of large insectivorous (insect-eating) birds in the tyrant flycatcher (Tyrannidae) family. The scissor-tailed flycatcher is found in North and Central America.”

The Scissortail also has had a name change. Again, from Wikipedia:

Its former Latin name was Muscivora forficata. The former genus name Muscivora derives from the Latin words for 'fly' (musca) and 'to devour' (vorare), while the species name forficata derives from the Latin word for 'scissors' (forfex). The scissortail is now considered to be a member of the Tyrannus, or 'tyrant-like' genus. This genus earned its name because several of its species are extremely aggressive on their breeding territories, where they will attack larger birds such as crows, hawks and owls.

The Oklahoma Historical Society has this description:

The Latin name, forficatus, derives from its most notable physical trait, the fact that its tail is "forked like a pair of scissors." Although it can reach up to one foot in length, the striking, black-and-white tail is usually eight to ten inches long, with a fork that splits it six inches deep. The scissortail's body is soft gray with a white underbelly; the only bright colorings are splashes of red or pink under the wings where they join the body. The species' nesting range is confined to a relatively narrow belt running from southern Texas to southern Nebraska. During the summer months, Oklahoma's official bird can be seen throughout the state.

Have a great weekend.

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