My first love is philosophy; unfortunately, I got the "the talk" as I was finishing up my double major: basically, there is no way to make a living as a philosopher, unless you get a job teaching--and those jobs open up when a faculty member retires or dies. Isn't it interesting how other people whom majored or minored in philosophy, such as the late Tony Snow (God rest his soul) and Juan Williams, show an active interest in politics?
When I read a biographical piece on Tony Snow's large book collection, I had to laugh: because every philosophy major I know loves books. I'll never forget how my favorite philosophy professor, Mary Christine Morkovsky, was envious of my locating a copy of Rousseau's Emile for a nominal cost at a local book sale. Unfortunately, books are dead weight when you have to move to take a new job.
For those of us who love ideas, politics is a crucible of ideas. We aren't necessarily drawn to the vocation of being a politician; we aren't even necessarily attracted to the most popular ideas. Note that I said ideas, not empty rhetoric.
Influences in my thinking include an American philosophical tradition called pragmatism. A formal discussion of pragmatism is beyond the scope of this post. But in essence, the meaningfulness of some thesis is reflected in practical consequences or behavior. My behavioral research in MIS was guided by the scientific method. We seek to validate our nomological net--the relationships among constructs--via operationalizing the constructs and obtaining sufficient reliable data to support or question prior hypothesized relationships.
One of the important responsibilities in the world of academic research is peer review; we look at how a researcher has operationalized his or her constructs, the study design, and the power or extent of collected data and appropriateness of relevant statistical methods deployed.
One of the lessons I learned from my philosophy mentors is the necessity of studying original sources, questioning assumptions, and applying due diligence.
With that context in mind, let's examine the discussion of Barack Obama's alleged energy policy. There are salient issues to keep in mind when we discuss energy policy: infrastructure, including viable methods for alternative energy storage, any intermediary fuel/power depot/retailers, and the transmission between power/fuel source and target; capital investment and critical path to buildouts; organic growth of domestic energy consumption; global growth and competition for energy supplies. For example, let us simply look at wind power. It's not like we have investors' willing to put money in unsold turbines, collecting dust vs. interest in a equivalently funded bank account, or are going to build or expand plants, on the risk, say, that say we have enough business from Pickens to keep the plants running for 3 years and then--no more orders. All of these steps have their own resource constraints, e.g., do we have enough engineers to staff various facilities?
What we do know is that certain energy sources that Obama is hyping, e.g., geothermal, solar, wind, tidal, etc., currently account for roughly 5% of American consumption. We cannot overestimate enough the feasibility and cost issues in just trying to triple this percentage. And there are some intrinsic issues with some of these (e.g., wind and solar) to be without the availability of other plants to make up the difference when climate conditions are not favorable and/or energy stores are insufficient.
Ironically, John McCain has proposed an interesting proposal in this regard (although he's reluctant to mandate the practice). For example, the American software industry is attempting to convert from more of a perpetual license model to an information utility model to level income. The domestic oil industry, seeing their reserves eroding, might want to consider a way of trying to transition to cash flowd. For example, Exxon could offer contracts to, say, a neighborhood of homes, where they handle installation, operation and maintenance of solar panels and the households don't have to put up capital for the panels. It provides a good alternative for doing a solar power buildout among poor/lower middle-class families whom don't have the resources to panel for their own residence.
Now, I'm not suggesting that Obama needs to go into this depth of analysis in speaking at a political rally. But fundamentally what you say and how you say it is indicative of your due diligence on an issue. Obama has a higher threshold for demonstrating expertise; he is a trained lawyer without business experience. He has little or no knowledge and experience with the energy industry.
The statistics that Obama is citing (3-4% energy savings for tire inflation and tuneups) are questionable. For example, tuneups are not an issue for newer cars, and (for example) if you regularly have your car serviced (e.g., oil changes), checking tire pressure may be one of the activities. Let's say that "every expert" is Obama's name for http://www.fueleconomy.gov. But the EPA never said that ALL cars will achieve 3% savings. They are implying the 3% loss is occurring with the worst underinflated tires, and they do not give any inference of the distribution of drivers with tire inflation levels. Say, for instance, two-thirds of cars are properly inflated and the remaining 1/3 are roughly distributed at various levels. Under these assumptions, we probably end up with an aggregate figure of less than 1%. Is Obama deliberately misleading the American people about what the government says, or is he simply guilty of intellectual laziness and not doing due diligence?
For the sake of argument, let's suppose the Obama point is legitimate: there's really no way to enforce such conservation methods. The Republicans are tongue-in-check suggesting that Barack Obama wants to set up an expensive national car care bureaucracy to validate tire pressure and tuneups (if applicable): if you love what the TSA has done with security lines at the airport, just wait until you have a policeman stopping traffic in rush hour to check someone's tire pressure....
But in the big picture: let us generously suppose by proper car maintenance, we can bring down our consumption from (say) 20 to 19 million barrels a day. I guarantee the fast-growing Asia region where the percentage of people owning cars is escalating upwards with more than eating up that supply drop. That also doesn't help you get down to 18 or 17 million barrels per day. And let's not forget that Obama's favored corn ethanol solution not only has cost the taxpayers subsidies, not to mention protectionist tariffs on Brazilian sugarcane ethanol imports, which distort the true economics of ethanol, but also adversely affects soil fertility, requires increasing amounts of water (an increasingly scarce commodity), and has fueled regressive food cost increases that affect the poor and lower middle-class. The fact that Obama does not disclose these tradeoffs but reduces them to a stark Obama-yes on ethanol, McCain-no on ethanol is, in my view, questionable. (And as I mentioned in an earlier post he did vote for a rule in favor of an ethanol mixture safe for today's vehicles.)
That's why McCain's voting record seems somewhat ambivalent on alternative fuels; our progress is going to be slower than Obama is leading people to believe--and Obama is deliberately understating the costs in terms of ramping up alternative fuels. It's true some conservation groups think McCain's efforts are too little and in the pocket of the energy industry. It's really that McCain doesn't want to underestimate the timeframe and costs like Obama seems to be doing, which is more in line with John's "straight talk".
So it's in that context we get to this latest quote from Obama:"Let me make a point about efficiency, because my Republican opponents - they don't like to talk about efficiency...Now two points, one, they know they're lying about what my energy plan is, but the other thing is they're making fun of a step that every expert says would absolutely reduce our oil consumption by 3 to 4 percent. It's like these guys take pride in being ignorant..."
Oh, come on, Senator! I just showed your conservation claim is misleading. You are deliberately calling people like myself, whom find the gag funny, "ignorant"? Is this part of your post-partisan politics? To treat your political opponent with respect? You need to have a sense of humor. Are you running for President or store manager at Pep Boys?
Sooner or later some serious voter is going to wonder why Barack is letting a mockup of a tire gauge, with "Obama Energy Plan" stamped on it, get under his skin to the point he has to gripe about it in front of a campaign rally. Barack, I have a keyboard and a blog: it's what I call the "Obama Ego Pressure Gauge" . You know, if you let your ego get too inflated, it may result in your narcissism being exposed.
