Beginning of the End

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Stephen Hayward, Powerline:

The Daily Chart: When Did the Reg Revolution Really Begin?

Conservatives like to point to the Progressive Era for the turn in constitutional philosophy that paved the way for the administrative state that then got into business during the New Deal. Though this is account is true, it is not complete. As the chart below of Federal Register pages—a rough measure of bureaucratic and regulatory activity—shows, the administrative state doesn’t really reach escape velocity until the 1970s, under Presidents Nixon and Ford unfortunately. And the kind of regulation that began in the 1970s was of a different and more ominous character than New Deal-era regulation, but that is a long story for another day.



I'm not a big fan of timid price cuts, but maybe this one will work, who knows?

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After 48 days on the market 26 Tomac Avenue has shaved 2.3% off its price and it is now looking for $4.275 million instead of $4.375. My working theory in these situations is that if house hasn’t sold in seven weeks, especially in a blistering market like the current one, there’s more wrong with its price than can be cured by a mere $100,000 reduction.

There will be nothing left after four more years of Democrat rule

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Lift off? Not if the government can stop it

Biden Admin to SpaceX: Drop Dead!

Stephen Green, PJ Media:

“It isn't a joke whenever I say that the new space race is Elon Musk versus the rest of the world, and I'm not joking now when I tell you that his company's biggest competitor isn't China — and it certainly isn't Russia — but the Biden-Harris FAA.

SpaceX's Starship promises to revolutionize spaceflight by reducing launch costs by two orders of magnitude — that's a 99% savings — and vastly expanding current limits on the size and mass of what can be lifted into orbit and deep space.

If SpaceX can get permission to perform the necessary flight tests, that is — and the FAA is dragging its feet.”

"Starships are meant to fly," the company reminded the Biden administration in a lengthy statement released on Tuesday. "We recently received a launch license date estimate of late November from the FAA, the government agency responsible for licensing Starship flight tests. This is a more than two-month delay to the previously communicated date of mid-September. This delay was not based on a new safety concern, but instead driven by superfluous environmental analysis."

The next Starship flight test is meant to demonstrate vital operations like landing both stages for reuse and the massive launch tower "chopsticks" designed to guide the first stage right back onto the launch pad instead of a landing barge out at sea. The Starship has been ready for weeks. The Biden-Harris administration keeps finding new excuses for delays. 

Every flight of Starship has made tremendous progress and accomplished increasingly difficult test objectives, making the entire system more capable and more reliable. Our approach of putting flight hardware in the flight environment as often as possible maximizes the pace at which we can learn recursively and operationalize the system. This is the same approach that unlocked reuse on our Falcon fleet of rockets and made SpaceX the leading launch provider in the world today.

To do this and do it rapidly enough to meet commitments to national priorities like NASA’s Artemis program, Starships need to fly. The more we fly safely, the faster we learn; the faster we learn, the sooner we realize full and rapid rocket reuse. Unfortunately, we continue to be stuck in a reality where it takes longer to do the government paperwork to license a rocket launch than it does to design and build the actual hardware. This should never happen and directly threatens America’s position as the leader in space.

Green:

“Biden-Harris would have us lose the New Space Race — putting our entire national security at risk — in a fit of partisan pique against the man whose other company, X, had the temerity to restore free speech to just one social media platform.”

FWIW:

You can read the full statement from Starlink detailing the environmental safeguards, monitoring, and reporting requirements already being fulfilled by the company here. Biden’s handlers have mobilized the full force of the government, from the DOJ, the EPA, the SEC, and now, the FAA, to crush all things Musk. If they can do that a dissident as powerful as Musk, they can certainly do it to us small fry.

Closing price reported

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808 North Street, which we’ve posted on before, sold yesterday for $8.8 million. The list was $9.995 million, but the seller grabbed this offer immediately — 19 days between initial listing and pending status — and why not? He paid just $5.3 million for the place in 2020.

The seller has fared far better than the preceding owner, who paid $11,368,500 for it in 2005 and then spent eleven years, 2009 to 2020, trying to unload it: began at $11.750 and ended, as noted, at $5.3.

Which simply shows that Bjorn Lomborg's been right all along: adjust to global warming, don't spend trillions on futile attempts to prevent it

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we're doomed — DOOMED, I tell you! We're all going to die!

Rising seas increasingly threaten coastal Maine wastewater plants

In the first of the back-to-back storms that rocked Maine’s coast early this year, employees of the Wiscasset wastewater treatment plant watched as the high tide lapped at the edges of its tanks, which sit on a small island in the Sheepscot River.

Fearing the next storm’s even higher tides would flood the facility and compromise its essential microorganisms, the town’s public works department built a berm around the wastewater treatment facility in a day. 

Though the plant avoided flooding in that case, the January storms were a wake-up call for the town, according to wastewater treatment plant superintendent Robert Lalli. More than 30 years after it was built, the facility has to move.

“The super tides, I think, emphasized in the citizens’ minds, ‘Hey, you guys really are on an island down there, and you really do have to move,’” Lalli said.

Rising tides and aging wastewater treatment facilities are not unique to Wiscasset. In fact, several facilities on Maine’s coast are facing a similar choice: move, upgrade or flood. 

Wastewater treatment plants around the state are vulnerable, including at least six that will be at risk of permanent flooding due to sea level rise by 2050, according to Maine’s 2020 climate action plan.

One of these facilities, in Saco, broke ground on its new wastewater treatment plant this summer, which will be elevated to escape sea level rise. Portland is installing four underground tanks that will keep its facility from backing up and sending untreated wastewater into the ocean. Bangor has made major improvements to its system over the last few years.

And the city of Bath is accounting for rising seas as it upgrades its pump stations and other infrastructure, said wastewater superintendent Bryan Levitt.

It’s not cheap. Maine’s climate action plan estimated the cost of replacing low-lying facilities could reach up to $93 million. Lalli estimated that moving Wiscasset’s wastewater treatment plant to another potential location in town — the current public works site — and related work such as demolishing the old plant could top $50 million. Wiscasset residents will vote in November on whether to use the new site.

Residents of Bath approved a $25 million bond last year to upgrade their own aging system, with work that will include separating the stormwater and sewer systems and upgrading the pump stations, some of which were also at risk of flooding during the January storms, Levitt said.

Municipalities continue to request state funding for wastewater facilities through the Clean Water State Revolving Fund, which was created as a part of the federal Clean Water Act. But as requests climb, the aid provided through the fund has decreased in recent years.

In 2021, 51 applicants requested a total of $235 million, and the state awarded $113 million. But this year, the state was only able to award $67 million, despite getting 66 applications requesting a total of $392 million.

A Maine Department of Environmental Protection official who oversees that fund did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

Wiscasset has put a hold on seeking funding for its project until voters approve the new site, Lalli said. If they vote it down, the town will have to search for a new location.

“A lot of things are in flux,” he said.

For now, though, the berm constructed in January stays in the case of another storm. 

Levitt said Bath has portable generators to keep its facilities and pump stations running during storms and is considering investigating whether sea level rise could back up its piping system. 

“You throw climate change on top of this, and that alone is this huge problem that, you know, it’s difficult to find a solution for,” Levitt said.

The cost of elevating sewer plants and other elements of Maine’s and the country’s infrastructure is nothing compared to what we’re spending on windmills, solar farms, new electrical grids, etc., etc. Billions vs trillions, and those trillions are all being needlessly wasted.

Here’s Lomborg, from Earth Day 2021:

This Earth Day let's replace alarmism with smarter policy

Today, almost every catastrophe is blamed on global warming, and we are being told that we must radically change the entire world until 2030 to avoid the apocalypse. Such irresponsible exaggerations are destroying our ability to make sensible decisions for the future. The evidence actually shows that climate-related disasters are killing far fewer people than ever before. Over the past century, the number of dead from floods, droughts, storms, wildfire and extreme temperatures has dropped by an incredible 98 per cent.

Climate change is real and human-caused, and it is a problem we should tackle smartly. But rabid hyperbole scares us witless and in our panic we make expensive but poor policy choices, leaving the world much worse off.

The Paris Agreement has been marketed as the solution to climate, yet, by the United Nation’s own reckoning, it will accomplish almost nothing. In a best-case scenario, it will achieve just one per cent of what political leaders have promised. And no major nation is on-track to actually deliver on its promises.

The Paris agreement is phenomenally expensive, costing US$1-2 trillion every year by 2030. But even if all nations actually kept their promises, including Barack Obama’s for the U.S., and also stuck to them through the rest of the century, the impact would be an almost immeasurable 0.19°C reduction in temperatures by the end of the century. The cost would vastly outweigh the benefit: each dollar spent would avoid just 11 cents worth of global climate damage.

But there is another cost to excessively focusing on climate in a world that is full of problems. COVID-19 showed us how worrying mostly about climate leaves us poorly prepared for all the other global challenges. The World Health Organization itself fell prey, which is perhaps one of the reasons it seemed to be blindsided by coronavirus.

When U.S. National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy warns us that climate is the “most significant public health challenge of our time” she effectively ignores much bigger health problems. A third of all U.S. deaths are caused by cardiovascular disease and more than a quarter by cancer. In comparison, just a third of one per cent are caused by heat deaths — compared to the almost seven per cent who die from cold each year. Extreme weather kills just 0.015 per cent.

The world’s poor battle with much greater challenges: starvation, poverty, dying from easily curable diseases and lack of education. And these challenges have solutions where each dollar spent can help much more. Spending just a thousandth of the cost of the Paris agreement could save more than a million people from dying of tuberculosis. Each dollar would do more than a thousand times more good than when spent poorly on climate.

Similarly, we could do phenomenally much better at much lower cost helping children out of malnutrition or improving learning in schools. We could address most of the world’s top issues with just a fraction of what we’re spending on climate.

Earth Day reaffirms that we should care about the planet and its inhabitants and reminds us that we should tackle climate. But we need to do so smarter and more effectively. We shouldn’t continue, and we certainly shouldn’t ramp up, our massive subsidies to inefficient electric cars and solar and wind power. Instead, we need to spend much more on green innovation. If we can innovate the price of future green energy down to below the cost of fossil fuels, then not just rich Canadians, but everyone — in China, India and Africa — will switch to green energy.

Let’s re-focus Earth Day away from exaggerated climate alarmism toward straightforward effective solutions.

I turned it off when he brought up cats for a third time

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And that was early into the debate. It’s hard to believe that anyone could look sillier, more fatuous than Kampallawalla, but Trump pulled it off, and made Harris look almost, dare I say it, presidential in comparison. Our open border, and the disastrous effect of the resulting flood of uneducated criminal immigrants, is one of Trump’s strongest issues, but he undercut his argument by returning, again and again, to the missing cats of Springfield; a great source for funny memes, but a stupid diversion from last night’s opportunity to impress undecided voters. Just as a for instance, he could have pointed out that the 20,000 Haitians in that town of 38,000 were there legally, shipped in by Biden/Harris under the very refugee parole system Harris was boasting about last night. He failed to do so, and focused on the trivial, instead.

Just dumb, and very disappointing.

After death, life

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A couple named Jeffrey and Kate Lazarus are building a spec house at 21 Innis Lane, Old Greenwich, and have priced it at $4.199 million. This past May they paid $1.695 million for the 1967, 1,915 sq.ft. slab-built house on the property, razed it, and are replacing it with a 4,000 sq.ft. one. Innis Lane used to be a little dead end with (very) modest homes, but so were a lot of Old Greenwich streets.

I do wonder at the decision to include six bedrooms in the planned building; how many Greenwich yuppies are procreating like old fashioned Irish families these days? Not many.

And I don’t like the one-car garage with no place to park a second except on the street. Wait til the new owners, doubtless from New York, move in and discover that there’s no room to lock away their six kids’ bicycles or the Merceds G Class station car? The Stamford housing project juveniles must already be donning their masks in anticipation.

Hmm: right after I slammed the Democrats' media outlets, this clip surfaces to dispute that (a little)

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no wonder he still loves her