Category Archives: energy

The Power Under Our Feet

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If you think fossil fuels are the only way to power our lives, you need to go to Iceland. If Iceland doesn’t tickle your fancy (and don’t underestimate Iceland on this score; it’s surprising.), go to Texas.

If you think windmills should be forbidden because they kill birds, that nuclear power should be abolished because it leaves behind tons of dangerous waste, that electric-powered vehicles are actually uneconomical because it costs a lot of gas, oil, and coal for power plants to generate full  battery charges, that the use of oil, gas, and coal shorten lives, that water cannot turn enough turbines to light our cities—-you need to go to Iceland.  Or Texas.

Iceland first. We learned about this on a trip there just before the pandemic set in. We were attracted by the opportunity to see the northern lights.

And we did on a really cold night (we went in November).  Our guide—we called him “Fred” because we would have dislocated our jaws trying to pronounce name—took this one.

A 2020 study, the latest study we have seen, shows at least 90% of all homes in Iceland are NOT heated by nuclear, wind, or fossil fuel-generated power.  That study shows, in fact, that 99.94% of electricity generated in Iceland was geothermal or hydro-generated. Underground hot water and the water that powers the great waterfalls, in fact, provided 99.94% of all electricity generated in Iceland that year. And more than 70% of the total energy used in that country came from geothermal sources. The country wants to be carbon neutral by 2040.

Iceland has a lot of waterfalls—a lot!

Many of them are spectacular and they flow year-around. Why? Because glaciers melt from the bottom up in Iceland, even as winter puts down several feet of snow on top of them every year. The result is a lot of hydropower generation.

As far back as the Vikings, people have taken warm baths and washed their clothes in warm water even on the coldest days because of geothermal water-–water heated by the volcanic activity that created Iceland thousands of years ago and continues to alter its size today.

The number one use of geothermal heat in 2020 was space heating, then heating swimming pools, melting snow, fish farming, industry, and greenhouses (This is the Fridheimar     greenhouse that covers about 2.7 acres that uses pure  glacier water heated in a thermal pool to grow eighteen percent of the tomatoes used by the country—370 tons of them a year—on 20-foot high, or more, tomato vines throughout which about 1200 peaceful bumbleees maintain pollination, each of them capable of pollinating 2,000 flowers a day. The incredible tomato soup and bread for lunch are to die for.)

The Capital of Reykjavick, where about sixty percent of the country’s people live, has clear streets and sidewalks on snowy days because those streets and sidewalks are heated.  Water ranging from 100-300 degrees centigrade heats homes and is then diverted under the streets and sidewalks at 30 degrees centigrade (about 86 of our Fahrenheit degrees).

This issue has been highlighted by recent news coverage of some volcanoes that have become active in recent months. Some of the coverage has focused on the closure of the Blue Lagoon, the country’s most popular tourist attraction.  We were there.  And we floated in the geothermal waters.  The only way we could have drowned was by turning over and having somebody sit on us.

The lagoon’s water is a mixture of freshwater discharged from the Svartsengi Power Station and seawater.

Iceland didn’t officially recognize the power beneath national feet until about fifty years ago.  That’s when energy price inequities forced the national government to address the issue.   Orkustofnun, the National Energy Authority, recommended increased use of hydro and geothermal power to stabilize energy costs.  The Arab Oil Embargo that created an energy and economic crisis throughout the world led the Icelandic government to speed up its adoption of geothermal alternatives.

You might think that’s great for Iceland but the only significant place for geothermal activity here is Yellowstone National Park.  You are wrong. Take a look at this map of geothermal resources prepared by the Southern Methodist University  Geothermal Laboratory.

Texas might not look so hot in this map but it is a hotbed of geothermal energy development. The state well-known for its oil industry, says writer Saul Eblin for The Hill, is poised to dominate what boosters hope will be America’s next great energy boom: a push to tap the heat of the subterrnean earth for electricity and industry.”  He says Texas “is fueling a boom in startups that seek to take the issue nationally.

In March, he says, solar generation in Texas “eclipsed coal both in terms of power generation and market share.  Texas also has more utility-scale wind and solar capacity than any other state” although California still leads in rooftop solar power generation.

Last year, the Texas legislature passed four bills with only one “no” vote that will create new opportunities for geothermal drilling. Eblin says eleven of the nation’s 27 geothermal startups last year were in Texas and the momentum is building.

A few days ago, he reports, Bedrock Energy had a display at a commercial real estate company in Austin showing a new geothermal-powered heatng and cooling system. A few days earlier, Quaise, a drilling company, filed for a permit from state regulators to start field-testing drills that use high-powered radio waves to drill through dense rock. A company in Houston called Dervo, is building a 400-megawatt facility in Utah and the military is looking at geothermal source of electricity. Sage Geosystems soon will start using a fracked well to store renewable energy, a big step toward its goal of producing a reliable source of geothermal energy.

There are those who laugh at the electrification of America, particularly the growing emphasis on electric vehcles, claiming that the production fo electricity still requires fossil fuels and windmills and solar farms are nice but they limit use of land increasingly needed for food production.

But the heated water beneath our feet leapfrogs those arguments.  The SMU map indicates Missouri can produce 50-60 Milliwatts per square meter from underground water. One watt equals one millon milliwatts. Our calculation says Missouri has 180,540,000 square meters.  If we understand the math, that means 9,027,000,000-10,832,400,000 watts of geothermal power generation is beneath our feet.

If we do our math correctly, our largest utility, Ameren, generates 10,000 megawatts a year in Missouri, or about 10,000,000 watts per year.

Whether geothermal generation is an alternative for Ameren, we don’t know. But the company came under new federal pressure recently with the adoption of EPA new rules requiring coal-fired power plants to have new carbon pollution controls. The Post-Dispatch has reported more than half of Ameren’s power is generated by coal. Only Texas generates more power with coal. And Ameren’s Labadie plant in Franklin county is the number two power plant producer in the country.

So it appears we have enough thermal energy under our feet to generate as much as Ameren produces from all of its power plants, whether fossil or nuclear fueled in a year.  And Missouri isn’t even close to the geothermal potential other states who not only can serve their customers well but can export energy to other parts of the country, including to Missouri.

We have mentioned in earlier posts, one advantage to studying journalism in college was that no math courses were required.  If we have misunderstood these calculations, we welcome corrections.

Even if we are wrong, the experience of Iceland and elsewhere as well as the growing experience in Texas shows there is non-fossil energy enough beneath our feet to keep our lights on and to fuel our commerce indefinitely. But energy is politicized here. The fossil fuel industry slings a lot of money around in Washington and on campaign trails.  The Greenies, however, are making progress, incremental though it might be.

We might not be able to operate our cars on water but they can operate on the electricity generated by water, steaming hot water.  A 500-mile affordable electric car is growing closer.  But if we want to see the reality of a society powered by non-fossil fuels, Iceland is a flight of only five hours from Chicago O’Hare Airport. Take a coat, even in summer. It’s pretty far north.

Iceland as a country is one big ground source heat pump, north to south, east to west.

Super hot water beneath OUR feet is something to think about even here in relatively cool Missouri.

(Photo Credit: Bob Priddy)

 

Bye, Bye, Bulbs 

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If you have them, use them. They’re still legal.  But once they’re gone from the store shelves, they’re gone, period.

The incandescent light bulb, perfected by Thomas Edison almost 150 years ago, is being turned off.

There are likely to be some nut cases who will say the federal government will be sending agents around to your house to confiscate all of your light bulbs.

That’s a crock.

Sixteen years ago, President George W. Bush—a Republican—signed a law that set new efficiency requirements for lightbulbs and started a timeline to phase out incandescent light bulbs.

But through the years there have been individuals and groups who have decided it is highly-profitable to convince people they are victims of government (as opposed to being thinking partners in it), and the humble lightbulb has become part of a broader conspiracy theory.

President Trump bought into that and rolled back the Obama administration’s rules phasing out the Edison bulbs in favor of more energy efficient lights. Vanity might have played a role in his decision because he once complained to Congressional Republicans, “I always look orange” under LED lights.

There has been a lot of speculation about that and lights have nothing to do with his orangeness.  Mother Jones has suggested Trump’s close friendship with Steve Hillbert might be a reason. Hilbert is the CEO of a company that makes tanning products. The magazine says they became friends about the time people began noticing Trump’s hue. (Melania reportedly got a one-million dollar contract to promote the Hillbert company’s line of caviar-based skin products).

Trump’s longtime personal doctor has suggested the coloration might come from Rosacea, a skin condition that produces redness of the skin.

Informally, we might suggest that his constant rage against those who suggest he seriously disregarded the statutory rules of public behavior might contribute to his coloration.

We have wandered afield from our intended topic.

The Biden administration’s Department of Energy reinstated the policy in April of ‘22 with a new rule that says light bulbs have to have a minimum of 45 lumens per watt. Light bulb maker Phillips says traditional light bulbs that have come down from Edison’s time produce one-third of that amount.

Lumens are ways to measure brightness. And, actually, modern LED bulbs produce 75 lumens per watt.

The rule does NOT mean you and I must immediately throw out our incandescent light bulbs—or the government will force us to do so. It DOES outlaw the manufacture and sale of them, though.

And there are several kinds of incandescent bulbs that can still be made and sold in our stores.  The Department of Energy says they are:

  • Appliance lamps, including fridge and oven lights
  • Black lights
  • Bug lamps
  • Colored lamps
  • Infrared lamps
  • Left-handed thread lamps
  • Plant lights
  • Flood lights
  • Reflector lamps
  • Showcase lamps
  • Traffic signals
  • Some other specialty lights, including marine lamps and some odd-sized bulbs

Why is the government making this switch?  Because these lights are more energy efficient and because they will lessen the human impact on climate change.  The DOE thinks these bulbs eventually will save consumers about three-billion dollars in utility bills.  The department also estimates they will reduce carbon emissions (a factor in global warming) by 222 million metric tons in the next three decades, the equivalent the carbon dioxide emissions of 28-million homes.

A metric ton is about 205 American pounds more than an American ton.

We have several of the old-fashioned bulbs in our fixtures at our house. It is legal for us to use them until they burn out.

The United States Energy Information Administration’s 2020 Residential Energy Consumption Survey says about half of all American households are using LED bulbs already.

The changeover to higher-tech lighting isn’t done. Compact fluorescent bulbs are next on the ban list.  Last December the DOE proposed a rule saying the minimum lumen level would have to be more than 120, a move that would, in effect, ban CFL bulbs. That rule is to go into effect at the end of next year.

All of this conveniently fits into the right-wing conspiracy theory that federal agents will soon be confiscating our gas stoves.

Everything is a big conspiracy these days. It helps gin up a too-sizeable segment of the population willing to immediately believe almost anything that can be manipulated into a profitable anti-government movement.

Your light bulbs are safe, folks.  Your stoves are, too, but that’s another story for another day.

Electing Time Travelers

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Some of the people we elected yesterday will decide how we travel through time.

This weekend we fell back from daylight savings time to standard time. Officially the change comes at 2 a.m. yesterday. There always are some folks who don’t get the message or forget the message and find themselves arriving at the end of church services instead of at the beginning, or an hour late for tee time if they worship the putter instead.

There are a lot of folks who think we should have daylight savings time year-around.  Going back to standard time will give us more daylight in the mornings but we’ll be in the dark an hour earlier in the evening. The Hill reported last week about the efforts in Congress to keep daylight time year around. It cites a poll that says, “Most Americans want to abandon the time change we endure twice a year, with polls showing as much as 63 to 75 percent of Americans supporting an end to the practice. But, even if the country does do away with the time change, the question still remains whether the U.S. should permanently adapt to Daylight Saving Time (DST) or Standard Time (ST).”

Most of the country is on daylight time eight months of the year and switches to standard time for four months. There are always some contrarians, of course. Hawaii and Arizona stay on standard time all year.  Hawaii decided the Uniform Time Act of 1967 meant nothing to a state that is so close to the equator that sunrise and sunset are about the same time all year.

Arizona has a different reason.  It doesn’t want to lose an hour of morning time when it’s cool enough for people to go outdoors in the summer.

Residents of or visitors to Puerto Rico, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, the Virgin Islands and American Somoa don’t tinker with their clocks twice a year either.

And there’s the rub, as Hamlet says in his soliloquy.  Some folks like permanent standard time because it’s more in line with our circadian rhythms and hels stave off disease. But in March, the U.S. Senate passed a bill that would make DST permanent—the Sunshine Protection Act (who thinks up these insipid names for bills?)—because of its economic benefits because more Americans would go shopping if it remains lighter in the early evening hours.

The movement to protect the sunshine has been led by Senator Marco Rubio of the Sunshine State of Florida. He says the change would reduce the risk of seasonal depression.  That strikes us as a little silly and reminds us of the time when Missouri decided to adopt DST in 1970 when some of the ladies who were regular listeners of “Missouri Party Line” on the local radio station where I worked were vitally concerned that their flowers would not get enough sunlight if we tried to “save” daylight.

The Senate has passed the bill, as we have noted. Final approval is iffy because the Lame Duck Congress has only seventeen working days left before it becomes history.  But if the House approves it, permanent DST would go into effect a year from now.

—Except in states that now operate on Standard Time. They won’t have to switch.  We recall the days before DST became more common when we had to change our watches when we crossed certain state lines.  Our annual trips from Central DST Missouri to Eastern ST Indiana in May always left us uncertain about whether to change our watches until we stopped some place with a clock and learned that CDST was the same as EST.

At least, I think that’s how it went.

Polling has found no consensus on which time should be the permanent time.

If we eliminate switching back and forth, we could be endangering our safety.  Various safety officials tell us that we should replace the batteries in our smoke and carbon monoxide detectors when we change our clocks.  To keep some battery life from being wasted, it is suggested that they be changed either when clocks are adjusted for DST or when they’re adjusted for plain ST.  That assumes the battery-changer remembers which time is the time to switch. We know of no one who marks their calendars for such events.

The article in The Hill’s series “Changing America” delves into the pros and the cons:

Sleep experts say the health benefits that could come from a permanent ST are crucial for a chronically sleep-deprived nation. In response to darkness, the body naturally produces melatonin, a hormone that helps promote sleep but is suppressed by light. Thus, having too much sunlight in the evening can actually work against a good night’s sleep. 

The status quo leads to circadian misalignment, or “social jetlag,” says Beth Malow, a professor of neurology and pediatrics and director of the Vanderbilt sleep division. Malow also authored the Sleep Research Society’s position statement advocating for a permanent ST. 

Under DST, our work and school schedules dictate our actions; while in an ideal scenario, environmental changes like lighter mornings and darker evenings would regulate sleep patterns, Malow explained in an interview with Changing America. 

“There’s a disconnect when we have to wake up early for work or school and it’s still dark outside and we want to sleep,” she said.

Light in the morning wakes humans up, provides us with energy, and sets our mood for the day. “It actually aligns us so that our body clocks are in sync with what’s going on in our environment,” Malow said.

Having more energy in the morning can also make it easier to fall asleep at night when it’s darker outside. 

Overall, ST “maximizes our morning light and minimizes light too late at night,” Malow said. 

When the body doesn’t get enough sleep, risks of developing heart disease, diabetes, and weight gain all increase.  Insufficient sleep is also linked to some forms of cancer.

Polls show younger individuals are less likely to support abolishing the clock change, largely because they’re more flexible than their older counterparts who support nixing the practice. 

But teenagers and young adults are at a higher risk of negative impacts from permanent DST, partially because they’re already primed for sleep deprivation.

“What happens when you go through puberty and you become a teenager is…your natural melatonin levels shift by about two hours, so it takes you longer to fall asleep,” said Malow. “[Teenagers] end up going to bed or being tired at 11 o’clock at night, even midnight sometimes, but they have to wake up early for school.” 

Students who wake up in darker mornings and drive to school could be at a greater risk of car accidents. The same is true for workers with early commutes and individuals in the north or on western edges of time zones who tend to experience more darkness overall.

“Sleep is really, really important to our health. And right now, what we’re doing is imposing mandatory social jetlag for eight months out of the year,” Malow said. “And we’d like to—rather than going to mandatory social jetlag for 12 months out of the year—to stop the clock and go back to Standard Time which is much more natural.” 

Despite the myriad of health benefits that come from adopting ST year-round, having more sunlight in the evenings if DST were permanently adopted is a tempting prospect for many Americans, especially those who work or attend school indoors all day.

Who got us into this mess?  The Washington Post says we can blame two guys. George Hudson, from New Zealand, wanted more daylight time in the late afternoon to collect bugs.  Britisher William Willett wanted more time to play golf late in the day.

Their idea didn’t catch on until World War I when Germany, bogged down in trench warfare with the French and the British, adopted it to save coal. England soon followed suit. It didn’t catch on in this country until 1917 when stockbrokers and industries lobbied for it. The Post says they overcame opposition from railroads that feared the time change would confuse people and led to some bad crashes.  And farmers opposed it because their day already was regulated by the sun and they saw no reasons to fiddle with the clocks.  David Prerau, who wrote Seize the Daylight: The Curious and Contentious Story of Daylight Savings Time, told the Post dairy farmers didn’t want it because they’d have to start their milking in the dark if they wanted to ship their product out on the trains. “Plus, the sun, besides giving light, gives heat, and it drives off the dew on a lot of things that have to be harvested. And you can’t harvest things when they’re wet.”  Getting up an hour early didn’t solve that problem.

This country adopted DST in 1918 with the Standard Time Act. DST was repealed the next year and wasn’t seen again until FDR reinstated it during WWII for the same reason it was instituted in The Great War—to save fuel.

In 1966, Congress passed the Uniform Time Law. In the 1970s we got permanent DST for a while, also an energy-saving issue because we were in the midst of an energy crisis caused by the Middle East Oil Embargo. That situation caused major inflation issues including in energy prices—at the gasoline pumps and in home heating and electric bills—to skyrocket. The great minds in Congress decided we needed permanent DST to reduce excess utility costs.  But the public didn’t like it and the experiment ended after ten months.

Then George W. Bush got the Uniform Time Act amended to change the sates when clocks were to spring ahead from April to March and we’ve had our present system since then.

Does it really work or is it just something to politicians to fiddle around with from time to time?

A 2008 Department of Energy report said the Bush change cut the national use of electricity by one-half of one percent a day.  Ten years or so later, someone analyzed more than forty papers assessing the impact of the change found that electricity use declined by about one-third of a percent because of the 2007 change.

More contemporary studies show similar small changes in behavior when DST kicks in.

One study supporting the economic advantage of permanent DST was done by JP Moran Chase six years ago.  The study looked at credit card purchases in the month after the start of DST in Los Angeles and found it increased by 9/10th of a percent.  It dropped 3.5% when DST ended.  That was good enough to recommend fulltime DST.

Another report showed robberies dropped by 7% during DST daytimes. And in the hour that gained additional sunlight, there was a 27% drop in that extra evening hour. That’s in Los Angeles.

Rubio maintains that having more daylight in the evening could mean kids would be more inclined to get their noses out of their cell phones, tablets, and computers and go outside and run around playing sports.

Maybe they could take up golf.  Or looking for bugs that proliferate in the twilight. Imagine a parent suggesting those ideas for their nimble-thumbed children.

So what’s better—having kids standing in the dark waiting for the morning school bus or riding the school bus into the darkening evening and arriving at home where the lights are all on?

The people we elected yesterday are likely to make this decision sooner or later. Let us hope they’re up to it.

 

Notes from a Quiet Street (Fall Colors edition)

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(Being a compendium of random thoughts that don’t merit full bloggiation.)

Would someone, preferably one of the people Missourians have sent to the U. S. Senate or the U.S. House, enlighten us about why we have a federal debt limit if it can be increased at congressional will?

And, members of our Washington delegation, don’t get all puffy about how you oppose raising it when you and your colleagues previous DID raise it.

Please write a 500-word theme about how you will pay back this debt. If you expect to pass this course, do not give me the tiresome argument that if government reduces its ability to pay for its programs, the public will create more economic growth that will reduce the debt.

There will be no grading on the curve. This is strictly pass/fail.

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When it was announced a few days ago that the nation was averaging 1900 COVID deaths a day for the first time since last March and that 90% of COVID patients in hospitals are unvaccinated, an ugly stroke of capitalist brilliance overwhelmed me.

Monogrammed body bags.  There’s a big constituency for this product—the thousands of people who refuse to get vaccinated.  Take your personal bag to the hospital with you so you can go out in style.

It would be the last status statement, a last chance to be SOMEBODY instead of just some body.

It will be a wonderful memento for your survivors and an inspirational symbol of your stalwart independence.  Could become a family heirloom.

And there would be a good market for used ones.  Run an ad on the internet, or maybe in the newspaper, or offer it on EBay: “Body bag, reasonably priced. Great savings if your initials are _____ (fill in appropriate letters).”

If ya don’t got it, flaunt it.

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The University of Missouri football team, a few days ago, held a charitable event for the athletic department of Southeast Missouri State University. The Tigers gave the Red Hawks $550,000 and all the team from Cape Girardeau had to do was get the snot beaten out of it again at Faurot Field.

Early in the season we see a lot of these games, usually routs.  We’re not sure they should really count on the season’s record of either team but they do—-because they are two college football teams and they do play and somebody keeps score.

Smaller schools are willing to take on these challenges because—in this case $550,000—they get a relative ton of money for athletic programs that come nowhere near having the resources bigger schools have.  If being a punching bag one Saturday afternoon makes sure there are volleyball and soccer and other minor games available for student-athletes in Cape Girardeau, the price is worth it.

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We are sure we are not the only ones to think, or to say when buying a new car, “This is probably the last gas-powered car I’ll ever own.” We’ve said it for the last two cars we’ve bought and the second one is coming up on eight years old. Will there be a third?  Two developments in the past few days make it clear the future is silently roaring (if such thing is possible) our way.

New York’s new governor, Kathy Hochul, has signed a new law saying every new passenger car or truck sold in the state must be zero-emission vehicles by 2035.   Medium and heavy-duty trucks have a 2045 goal. This is a huge goal—electric vehicles constituted only two percent of sales last year. The new law is similar to an executive order issued by the governor of California earlier.  Big difference: executive orders are not laws.

That’s plenty of time to develop EVS that don’t need to recharged on round trips to St. Louis or Kansas City.

In fact, one such car is coming over the horizon.

We’ve said that we’ll start to seriously look at an electric vehicle has a 500-mile battery.  There is such a vehicle and the EPA says its range is 520 miles, topping Tesla’s best by more than 100 miles.  The company is called Lucid and it plans to start deliveries of its cars before the end of the year. Lucid is a Silicon Valley-founded company that recently picked Casa Grande, Arizona as the site for its first purpose-built EV factory in North America. It will start by making 10,000 cars a year and plans expansion to produce more than 300,000 a year.

Prices are believed to start at about $77,000. They’re going to have to come down a few tens to be affordable to people such as I am.

Still…….

The future is coming.

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The big inaugural/bicentennial parade in Jefferson City on Saturday, September 18t, was a week premature.   True, Missouri was admitted to the Union on August 10, 1821.  But people living out here in central Missouri didn’t know about it until September 25 when the proclamation was published by The Missouri intelligencer¸ in Franklin—Missouri’s first newspaper outside of St. Louis.   Folks in St. Louis celebrated twenty days earlier when Missouri’s first newspaper, The Missouri Gazette and Public Advertiser, published the proclamation.  No big stories or headlines Just the proclamation.  That’s the primitive reporting style of the day.

 

A good man, a statesman

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We usually are silent in this space on Tuesdays but today we must note the passing of former state legislator Wayne Goode.  His kind has been missing from our General Assembly far too long.  Wayne was from St. Louis and St. Louis County. He and John T. Russell (who died several years ago) served 42 years in the House and the Senate. Only Senator Michael Kinney, who represented St. Louis for 56 years served longer.

He died Saturday of leukemia. He was 83. He was one of the finest people I knew in four decades as a reporter at the Capitol.

Wayne is a prime exhibit in discussing the evils of term limits.  Last year, the Missouri Historical Society in St. Louis presented him with its highest honor, The Thomas Jefferson Award.  I was asked to talk about him.

Some people, it seems, are born for public service and if there ever was one of those people it is Wayne Goode. I will not even try to list all of the boards and commissions on which Wayne has served. 

Wayne always was one of the “white hats” in the general assembly.  In today’s sometimes irrational political world there would be critics who would say he was just a darling of the left wing fake news media, I suppose.  But they’d be wrong.

Wayne wasn’t very good at political rhetoric.  But he was great at common sense, sound reasoning, and persuasive credibility.  People listened when he talked. 

I remember him especially from his work in shaping state budgets.  Until he came along, the state budget was pretty much written by the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee.  But Wayne got the job and decided that if there was a committee, the committee should do the work and state officials as well as common citizens should participate.  There were some folks in the Capitol who didn’t know what to make of that process at first, but the process is still used today. 

He co-sponsored a resolution to have Missouri ratify the Equal Rights Amendment….only to see the Speaker of the House and the Majority Floor leader introduce one, too…..The leadership resolution went to a committee where the chairman refused to hold a hearing and the Speaker refused to put the hammer down and get one…and the issue died that year.  After that, Phyllis Schlafly was in the way and the best chance of Missouri to ratify the ERA was lost.

His love of the outdoors led him to observe great damage was being done to it in the post-war industrial age…which led him to sponsor a hazardous waste bill that was the first major environmental cleanup legislation to pass.  We are grateful for that in our household because my wife, Nancy, worked for many years in the Department of Natural Resources Hazardous waste section.  I think she still has her big green boots in which she clomped around hazardous waste sites.  There is no truth to the rumor that the boots were black before she started clomping around.  

He got a bill passed that ended the legal dumping of hazardous wastes down wells. 

But one thing he could not stop was the construction of the Callaway Nuclear Plant.  I remember hearing Wayne and some other legislative colleagues protesting the plant’s construction.  Wayne and three other House colleagues proposed legislation that would have put some strict controls on nuclear plants. The issue made it to a statewide ballot. Union Electric outspent Wayne and Kay Drey and the legislators behind the bill by 3-million dollars to 100-thousand dollars; voters said no, big time, to the anti-plant proposal in 1984 and Callaway was built.  I saw an article a few years ago where Wayne admitted the plant was being operated about as well as a nuclear plant can be operated….although the industry still lacks a final solution to its nuclear waste problem.

It was his legislation, of course, that led to the creation of the University of Missouri at St. Louis, for which there is a statue of him on the campus. It’s a good statue. It captures Wayne fully engaged in straightening out a colleague on the bill Wayne holds in his hand. 

(Wayne, on the right, poses with sculptor Jay Hall Carpenter and Carpenter’s statue of Goode on the UMSL Campus. UMSL)

There is nothing angry about the debate that is portrayed in this statue. In fact, Wayne is enjoying himself.  There is a joy of earnest discussion. There is no animosity. No posturing. This is the Wayne Goode I remember.  It is an example of what collegial lawmaking should be. Unfortunately it also is a contrast to what too much of our lawmaking has become. 

University students will benefit for years to come because of the Senator Wayne Goode Scholars Program.  Goode Scholars, they’re called.  The recognitions are handled though the University’s Scholars and Fellowship program.  It’s a shame that the Wayne Good Scholars Program isn’t considered a fellowship…..because students happy to win one of those could be called Jolly Goode Fellows.

I saw Wayne in the pose frozen by that statue many times, never outwardly angry, never flustered, always knowing legislation better, sometimes, than the sponsors.  I never saw him try to slip something into a bill secretly.  I also never saw him stand still as long as he has since being cast in bronze. Wayne likes to be in motion—whether it’s hiking or riding a bike or going about doing—good(e).          

I was curious the other day and looked back at some of the people Wayne served with in the House and Senate. I dug out the Blue Book—the official state manual that has not always been blue. The list gives an idea of the eras that he spanned in his 42 years in the Missouri legislature.

When Wayne began serving in the House, Theodore McNeal was a State Senator from St. Louis, the first African-American state senator. The first African-American to serve in the House, Walthall Moore of St. Louis, served in the 1920s, BG (Before Goode)

Senator Michael Kinney was still there, the man who served 56 years in the Senate, the only man in the history of Missouri who served more years than Wayne in the legislature. Kinney had succeeded his brother who had died in 1912, toward the end of his second term.  So that part of St. Louis was represented by these two brothers for 64 years. Thomas was serving in the Senate when the Capitol burned in 1911 and Mike served in the temporary capitol while the present building was going up. 

The Kinney family, incidentally, apparently believed in naming children after Biblical figures…Michael and Thomas.  Thomas’ nickname also was Biblical—Snake. 

Here are some of the other people Wayne served with during his time in the House:

William C. Phelps, Melvin Carnahan, James Spainhower, James Conway, Harold Volkmer, John Buechner, Wendell Bailey, E. Thomas Coleman, Karen McCarthy, Alan Wheat, Betty Hearnes, Claire McCaskill, William Webster, Todd Akin, and Robert Holden.

In the Senate, he served alongside Patsy Danner, Roger Wilson, Jeremiah Nixon, William L. Clay Junior, Sam Graves, Joe Maxwell, Peter Kinder, and Steve Ehlmann. 

There were hundreds of others but the ones I’ve just mentioned have special distinctions.

Ten of these folks became members of the United States House of Representatives—Harold Volkmer,  Tom Coleman, Jack Buechner, Wendell Bailey, Karen McCarthy, Todd Akin, Alan Wheat, Pat Danner, William Lacy Clay, and Sam Graves. 

One, Claire McCaskill, became a U. S. Senator—after she had been state auditor.

There were four who became governors: Mel Carnahan, Jay Nixon, Roger Wilson, and Bob Holden.

Betty Hearnes was a first lady when Wayne showed up in Jefferson City and later became the only former First Lady to serve in the legislature.

Five of these names were Lieutenant Governor—Mel Carnahan, Fulltime Bill Phelps, Peter Kinder, Roger Wilson, and Joe Maxwell.

Three were state treasurers: Carnahan, Bob Holden, and Jim Spainhower.

Two served as Attorney General—Jay Nixon and Bill Webster.

James F. Conway became Mayor of St. Louis.

And Steve Ehlmann runs St. Charles County government. 

What I can’t figure out is why we are here tonight.

We’re honoring the guy who went nowhere—except to Jefferson City and back…and to Jefferson City and back….and to Jefferson and back…for 42 years.  

Wayne, you coulda been somebody!  

But for some reason, it’s you, a man of low ambition, that we’re honoring tonight..   

However, this stay-at-home, low-ambition guy is, I think, the only one of the 24 people I have just mentioned who has a statue of himself. That’s pretty special.  Not even James S. Rollins, who is considered the “father” of the whole University system has a statue.  A bust, but not a statue. 

Wayne served in a far different Senate and a far different House during his 42 years.  There were filibusters every now and then but they weren’t the self-serving filibusters that we see so much today.  Filibusters in Wayne’s time, were often funny, and often had a purpose of forcing two sides to find some middle ground that would let the Senate move ahead.  Today, in the days of supermajorities, filibusters aren’t funny; they’re often futile efforts by a weak minority; and quite often are not just ways to force two sides to work out a troublesome issue.  They’re unfunny and they’re boring. I know.  I was there for many of them and found laughter helped stay awake. 

A few weeks ago I asked some capitol staffers who remain from the Goode Old Days to share some thoughts about Wayne.  Most talked about how hard he worked—and in the process how hard he sometimes worked THEM.   One comment that I enjoyed was that Wayne was always careful with what he ate during legislative sessions.  I was told that he didn’t like potatoes…and often had rice with his meals.  

You might have noticed potatoes were not on our plates tonight.

I planned to bring Wayne a gift from Jefferson City tonight.  I suspect, Wayne, you’re not a fan of bumper stickers and it wouldn’t fit on your bicycle anyway. But I wanted you to have this bumper sticker that says “Eat More Rice. Potatoes Make Your Butt Big.”  But the one I have that I was going to give you is in a box that I have filed too far away.  Be watching for it in the mail, though.   

In his closing years in the General Assembly, Wayne was increasingly concerned about term limits and the loss of institutional memory that they would cause—among other concerns.  In the years since their adoption we have seen his fears of term limits—and similar fears voiced by many others who have served in the legislature—come true. 

I watched it happen from the House Press Gallery and from the press table on the Senate floor. I can tell you from personal experience all of the negatives we were warned about have come true…and there are darned few positives. 

There are three portraits that hang in the Senate Lounge at the state capitol.  One is Senator Kinney.  Another is Senator A. Clifford Jones who was from Ladue and was known for his humor, his tight-fistedness (he didn’t like spending money to redecorate his office, for example), and for not suffering fools gladly during debate.  The third is Senator Richard Webster, who was the last Republican Speaker of the House before Catherine Hanaway arrived, and who became one of the most powerful men in state government as the minority leader in the Senate.

I have suggested, always to deaf ears, that two more portraits should be in that Lounge—two men who served in the legislature together for 42 years.  One is a strong-conservative Republican from the city of Lebanon, in southwest Missouri, John T. Russell, and the other is Wayne Goode, a strong-liberal Democrat.   I don’t recall, as I mentioned earlier, ever hearing Wayne raise his voice. I heard him speak firmly at times, but I don’t remember that he ever showed a temper.  Russell was different.  He had a resonant voice and there were times—brief ones—when he could thunder.

The legislative session in the year that Republicans took control of the Senate, began with some vacancies, leaving Republicans and Democrat with the same numbers.   For a few weeks there were co-presidents pro tem, for example.  And for a short time, Wayne Goode—the dedicate liberal—was the co-chairman of the Senate appropriations committee with John T. Russell, the dedicated conservative.  

When Republicans won enough of the special elections to take the majority in the Senate, Russell became the stand-alone chairman.  But he and Wayne, as the ranking minority member, worked together on the state budget, respecting the experience and the knowledge and the shared legislative history that each brought to the process. 

To those of us who watched them, they represented the best that government can be.  Two men of widely-different political loyalties showed what statesmanship means.  We lost both of them at the same time because of term limits.  Both served the people in Jefferson City for 42 years—not just THEIR people, but THE people.  

In 1892, Maine Congressman Thomas B. Reed, who also served three terms as Speaker of the House, received a letter from a citizen who asked him, “What is a Statesman?”  Reed wrote back, “A statesman is a successful politician who is dead.”

Harry Truman embroidered that comment in 1958, after he’d been promoted back to private citizenship, as he liked to say, by saying, “A statesman is a politician who’s been dead ten or fifteen years.”  

But both Thomas B. Reed and Harry S Truman were wrong.  Politicians can be statesmen in their lifetimes….and we have living proof with us tonight of the goodness that comes from that living statesmanship. 

Term limits robbed the legislature of the influence of people such as Wayne Goode.  Time now has robbed all of us of this good man.

A Ground-Source Heat Pump Nation

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It’s early afternoon on top of the Langjokull glacier (Langjokull means “long glacier” so I’m being a little redundant here perhaps) in the Highlands of Iceland. The ice is about 1,900 feet thick below us as we stand on the second largest ice cap on an island named for ice. We are about five hundred feet short of being a mile high.

And we are standing on top of two volcanic systems. But we’re relatively safe. There have only been thirty-two eruptions in the past ten-thousand years. We do not think when there might be a thirty-third.

This is a land of fire and ice, of long dark nights and long bright days, of heat and snow, of Northern Lights in the winter and whales and Puffins in the summer. It is a country the size of New York with a population equaling that of Anaheim, California. About 266,000 of the country’s 360,000 people live in one town, Reykjavik.

Iceland has about 130 volcanoes, about thirty of which are considered active. Glaciers melt from the bottom here because of the warmth of the ground. The water is pure and cold and it spills over dozens of waterfalls and careens through canyons carved through the volcanic rock laid down through thousands of years of eruptions.

In some places it’s boiling hot and there are geysers. Visitors are cautioned to stay on walkways lest they break through the thin crust and encounter boiling water. More than ninety percent of the homes in Iceland are heated with geothermal water heated by the underground magma that is part of the ecosystem of this fascinating country, an entire country that is, in effect, a ground source heat pump.

In other places, steam from geothermal sources generates electricity that provides lights to much of the island.

Heat and cold. Light and dark. The darkness of winter is setting in fast in Iceland. During our visit, we could make out outlines of mountains on the horizon about 9:15 a.m. and it was fully light by ten.   But by three o’clock we were headed back to our hotel because darkness was coming on fast.

Christmas lights go up early in November and they stay until February, not because Iceland celebrates Christmas for four months but because the people NEED THE LIGHT.

Actually, Iceland celebrates Christmas for about two weeks, beginning December 23 and running through Epiphany on January 6 with traditional events linked back to ancient Norse customs and figures such as the thirteen Yule Lads.

The lads are trolls, children of Gryla, a part-troll and part animal who lives in the mountains with her husband and the black Christmas Cat. At Christmas time she and her family come down out of the mountains looking for children who’ve been more naughty than nice. She likes to boil them in her cauldron while the boys go around visiting the homes of children.

Icelandic Christmas custom has children putting a shoe in their bedroom windows each evening for the thirteen days before Christmas. Each night, one of the lads comes by and leave small gifts—candy is always popular—for the good little girls and boys. But the child who has been a pain in the neck that day can wake up the next morning and find a rotten potato in the shoe.

The Yule Cat prowls the countryside and eats people who haven’t received any new clothing before Christmas Eve.

Those of us who live in the less harsh but soft and more temperate and light world of Missouri have a fat old man in a red suit who flies around with the help of reindeer.

The country has an officially established church, a state church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church.

Some folks will attend holiday services at Hallgrimskirkja, the church of Hallgrimur Petursson, a seventeenth-century poet and clergyman (although that’s a statue of Leif Ericson in front of the church instead of Pastor Petursson). This modern church is the largest church in the country and at 244 feet is one of the tallest buildings in all of Iceland.

 

 

 

 

 

Simplicity is its beauty. Workers started building it in 1946 and did not complete it until 1986. The original design was for a building not as tall as this one. But it grew in design when the Church of Iceland insisted on a spire that would be higher than the cathedral of Iceland’s Catholic Church.

Yes, we saw the Northern Lights.

Our cameras saw them better than our eyes did. To our eyes, the lights were barely visible. But our digital cameras with slow shutter speeds captured the lights and (if you look closely) the Big Dipper. We had gone out on a Northern Lights tour in a boat the previous night but they didn’t materialize. The second night, we took a bus an hour into the dark interior of the island. We were on the verge of giving up when the first slight glitter caught our attention.

But on our boat trip we did see a light—Yoko Ono’s Imagine Peace Light that is turned on during the winter for various periods.

This year, she went to Reykjavik to turn it on in honor of husband John Lennon’s 79th birthday, October 9. It will be turned off for the season on March 27. “Remember, each one of us has the power to change the world,” she wrote in a message in October. “Power works in mysterious ways. We don’t have to do much. Visualize the domino effect and just start thinking PEACE…

It’s Time of Action.

The Action is PEACE.

Think PEACE, act PEACE, Spread PEACE.

PEACE is power!”

It was late at night when I took that picture and I’m surprised it turned out as well as it did. It looks lighter than it was because of the slow shutter speed. And we were riding on a boat. Actually there are fifteen searchlights that form the column. The stone monument housing the lights features “Imagine Peace” in two-dozen languages.

Now—back to the glacier, back to where we started. Standing on a glacier is one thing. Going inside one is something else. But we did.

With sixty feet of ice over hour heads and hundreds of feet of ice and volcanoes beneath our feet we explored the interior. The tunnel was designed by a geophysicist and snakes through the glacier far enough that the trip through takes about an hour. We were given spikes that we stretched over our boots; some of our group had toe-warmers that they inserted inside their boots but it wasn’t all that bad (we thought), especially as long as we kept moving. In fact, it was warmer inside the glacier than it was outside.

There are some rooms carved into the ice, including a chapel where weddings are held from time to time, not something we could ever anticipate doing because of the hassle, if nothing else. Plus, we observed, who wants to start a marriage with a frigid spouse?

In the middle of our tour, one of our group was startled by the ringing of his cell phone. Somebody from Jefferson City was calling.   We’re sixty feet underneath the top of a glacier in Iceland, for goodness sakes, and a cell phone still found him.

The geology that shapes the island and the people who live there and the environment in which they choose to live produces some amazing lifestyle developments (at least amazing to us).

This is the biggest greenhouse we have ever seen, at Freoheimar. And it’s only one in a complex that covers about 1.25 acres that grows tomatoes and cucumbers and has restaurant facilities scattered throughout the vine-growing area. A computerized climate-control system takes care of temperature, humidity, lighting and carbon dioxide. Geothermal water heats the greenhouses. Pure cold water irrigates the plants. Plants are protected from pests by biological controls and bumblebees that care nothing about humans help pollinate the plants.

We’re not sure how tall the plants are—more than fifteen feet, we suspect. Visitors can have tomato soup and home-made bread for lunch. And, oh, is it good soup! And the bread is to die for. Each of us tasted a little tomato and this consumer who tolerates tomatoes on hamburgers tried one. Very low acidic content. It was almost sweet.

And the plastic container that these folks market their small tomatoes in: After the purchaser has eaten all the tomatoes, the container can be held under hot water and it disappears.

Iceland, where people live on volcanic lava rather than good rich (or not so rich) dirt could teach us Americans a lot about efficient, low-waste, natural living.

Two or three final things: Remember we mentioned the Christmas lights going up early and staying up late because people in long winter-dark time need light? How about this gas station/car wash?

Gas was costing about nine dollars (US) a gallon there. But people don’t drive little bitty cars. In fact, Iceland has an amazing variety of cars available from Skodas made in Czechoslovakia to Volkswagens from Germany and Jaguars from England, Subarus from Japan, and Fords from the United States, among others.

The Icelandic language is very old. It has no dialects. Old Icelandic is a derivation of Old Norse. The oldest written documents in Iceland date to about 1100 CE. Most modern Icelanders can read those documents because their language has been so unchanged. The Icelandic alphabet is based on the 12th Century First Grammatical. It also has six letters our alphabet doesn’t have.

Reykjavik also is the home of the only museum of its kind in the world. You’ll have to go to Google Images to see more about it. I cannot imagine the public reaction in most of this country if somebody opened a museum like it here. I did take some pictures of it (although I didn’t have time to get any farther inside than the gift shop—and some of the gifts would have made interesting objects on the airport luggage security cameras). Actually, it’s called The Iceland Phallological Museum but it’s best known by its sign.

Almost all of the land and sea mammals found in Iceland are represented. Including, uh, Homo Sapiens. In all, there are 282 specimens from 93 different species of animal. Should anyone want to create one of these museums in this country, we suggest locating it in Olean, the Miller County town of about 125 or so souls who have held an  annual Testicle Festival, which we understand has moved to another town.

So, we went to Iceland a couple of weeks ago. And we found it intriguing for several reasons. It’s about six hours from Chicago if you are so unfortunate as to want to leave from O’Hare International.

It was kind of an anniversary celebration for us. A week after Nancy and I got back and got the unpacking and the laundry mostly done, we celebrated our 52nd wedding anniversary.

Would we go back?  We have other places on our list but a maybe a summer visit when the whales and the Puffins are there…..

 

 

 

King Canute, Charles Wilson, and the dangers of rejecting change

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We have a lot of misquotes that we like to quote to prove our points in arguments and discussions.

One arose when Charles E. Wilson was appointed by President Eisenhower as Secretary of Defense. Wilson was the President of General Motors and his position triggered intense questioning during his confirmation hearing.  When he was asked if he could, as Secretary of Defense, make a decision that would be bad for GM, he said he could although he could not think of such a situation happening because “for years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors and vice versa.”

Through the years his statement has been turned into the rather arrogant and erroneous quote that “What’s good for General Motors is good for the U.S.” It came to mind recently when GM announced layoffs and plant closures affecting thousands of workers in the United States and Canada.

The President has threatened GM with various penalties if it doesn’t reverse course and keep running factories and keep employing people making vehicles that consumers aren’t buying in enough quantity to justify their continued production.

It’s the equivalent of President Woodrow Wilson in 1915 ordering the thirteen-thousand manufacturers of wagons and buggies and their supporting industries (horseshoes, harnesses, buggy whips) to maintain production while people drove by their factories in Model T’s.

Paul Turner has recalled in his Adaptive Insights Blog that there were 4,600 carriage manufacturers in 1914, the year after Henry Ford fired up his first production line.  About a decade later there were only 150 of those companies and just 88 in 1929.  “Companies that tried to hang on to the past, or simply apply old world skills and technology to the new world simply failed to exist,” he wrote. One company that recognized the future and embraced the idea that it was not in the business of making wagons and buggies, but was in the transportation business was Studebaker. But changing economics, market demands, and public taste eventually drove Studebaker out of business, along with its late partner, Packard.

Think of the badges that have disappeared in recent years—Plymouth, Oldsmobile, Saturn, Mercury.  We let them slip away with some minor mourning, not paying as much attention as we might have to what their disappearance meant.  But now Ford has announced it’s getting out of the passenger car business because of changing public demand. And General Motors has ignited public awareness dramatically with its announcement that the products it makes, while good products, are not what the public wants in enough numbers to justify continued production and before GM becomes another Studebaker-Packard, it has to reprogram itself for what tomorrow’s consumer wants.  And tomorrow’s consumer appears to be leaning more toward being a rider than a driver and increasingly turning attention to electricity rather than gasoline.

We have lived through numerous non-weather climate changes and that is happening with the auto industry—worldwide—might just be the most eye-catching example.  The sprouting of big windmills and wind farms is an unmistakable indication that the way we get our energy in ten years will be much different from the way we get it today.  A former Sierra Club CEO, Carl Pope is quoted by Theenergymix.com saying “Real markets are poised to savagely strand assets, upset expectations, overturn long-established livelihoods, and leave a trail of wreckage behind them.”

Some will see the words “Sierra Club” and immediately dismiss Pope’s observations as drivel. But remember how quickly the wagon makers and their extensive support industries that employed thousands of people disappeared.  Pope wrote in 2015, just three years ago of, “fossil fuels, with coal companies declaring bankruptcy at the rate of one per month, stock exchanges delisting their stocks, and oil and gas beginning to lose market value.”

Woodrow Wilson probably could have gotten a lot of votes in some places if he promised to revitalize the horse-drawn wagon industry. But by then, Lydston Hornsted had driven his 200 hp Benz faster than 124 mph, pretty well proving one horsepower was not the future of transportation.

Change is not coming in transportation and energy alone, it is here and it is gaining momentum.

Paul Turner set forth three lessons from the transition to the car:

  1. “Only those who embrace creative destruction will make the shift…The carriage makers that didn’t invest in retooling their production failed. Most were too busy protecting their existing, dying, revenue streams. The same holds true today….”
  2. “The transition is much faster than anyone expects.” He cites the death of the wagon industry 1914-1929 and remarks, “That’s akin to a staple of the year 2000 sliding into the dust today—or perhaps today’s cars essentially being replaced by self-driving cars by the mid-2020’s. The pace of change can be disconcerting. Those that have spent their entire careers in a single industry invariably underestimate the breadth, depth, and speed of change. The speed of disruption and the unwillingness to put aside antiquated technology is a potent combination capable of bringing organizations to their knees much faster than thought possible. Innovators like Google with a self-driving vehicle, and Tesla Motors with an electric vehicle designed from the ground up understand this, while the old automakers do not.”
  3. “New innovators emerge out of nowhere, faster than the old world leaders expect.” Forty-six hundred carriage makers were in business in 1914. A dozen years later there were 3.7-million cars and trucks on the roads, some of them driving past a lot of shuttered carriage factories.

He concludes, “Holding on to the past is more risky than embracing the future.”

The Twelfth Century English Historian Henry of Huntingdon told of King Canute setting his throne by the seashore and commanding the tide to stop before it wet his chair and his robes.  Moments later the wet king rose and turned to his followers and told them, “Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings, for there is none worthy of the name, but He whom heaven, earth, and sea obey by eternal laws.”

The tide is here and it is going to keep coming and General Motors is the latest “king” to realize sitting still is to become submerged by the future.  There is pain in change but history tells us that ignoring change or ordering us to ignore that change is asking for a mouth of salt water at best, drowning at worst.

It’s only a band-aid but I’ll wear it

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A new product came on the market in 1920.  The Band-Aid (registered trademark symbol is supposed to be here) became so popular that its name has become a generic term for anything that temporarily solves a problem.

Missourians will vote on a gas tax increase in a few days and I’m going to vote for it because I am part of the problem the proposed tax increase seeks to temporarily solve.

My car’s dash tells me all kinds of stuff including the cumulative fuel mileage since I bought the car in 2014.  This is the way it looked yesterday.

Another “screen” told me that I have driven this car about 63,000 miles.  In all of that driving, town and highway, summer and winter, short trips to the grocery store or longer trips to, say, Nashville or Indianapolis, this car has averaged 25.4 miles per gallon, pretty good for a 300 hp car that can hit 60 in a little over five seconds.

This car replaced one that got 26 mpg, tops, on a long trip.  Obviously I don’t burn as much gas in this newer car as I did in the older one making me one of those who doesn’t contribute as much in gas taxes with the present car as I did with my previous one. But I drive the same roads most of the time and cross the same bridges most of the time as I did with the previous car.

I am, therefore, one of hundreds of thousands of the people on our roads who are the collective cause of our Transportation Department’s long decline in financial ability to operate our highways.

As a good and responsible citizen who prefers not to replace his shock absorbers anytime soon or fall through a bridge floor, I’m going to vote to increase the tax on the gas I burn.

Frankly, it’s kind of a chicken way to go about it—a ten-cent increase that’s phased in during four years so the percentage increase is small enough that it won’t be too painful to the parsimonious Missourians who have been told for a couple of decades now that it’s okay to think state services and programs can get by on less and less and less and less because the people know better how to spend their money than the government does.

But the potholes and the patches have become such an inconvenience to motorists that maybe they’ll decide the government really can make better use of 2.5 cents than they can.

But this is only a band-aid.   Only a temporary solution.  A good friend is a reason the gas tax isn’t a long-term solution to the problems with our transportation system.

My friend recently bought a Tesla 3.   He likes it a lot.   He’s had it for about a month and has not put a single gallon of gas in it.  (Anybody who buys gas for their Tesla might be planning on setting the thing on fire.) Tesla claims drivers can get 310 miles out of a full battery charge but battery technology is moving quickly and when a 500-mile battery car hits the market at a reasonable price, watch out.

Even 310 miles isn’t bad.  We’ve been told Teslas come with a directory that can be called up on the big cockpit screen and shows where there are chargers—such as these we saw the other day at a fast foot place in Limon, Colorado. It’s like of like the printed directories that came out in the 1970s when a lot of people started driving diesels, showing them where there were gas stations with diesel pumps for cars.

You’ll notice there’s a Tesla like the one my friend has that is getting a re-charge while the driver is inside the Limon restaurant enjoying a casual cheeseburger or something.  Tesla says it has 1,359 Supercharger stations with 11, 234 superchargers like those in Limon. Plug in for thirty minutes and you’re good for another 170 miles.  That gets you to 480 miles with a lunch stop on the way.

Tesla is quickly getting competitors and that means prices will become more reasonable and that means more of us will be paying zero gas taxes before long.  I have thought that each of the last two cars I have bought would be the last completely gas-powered vehicles I would own.  A Tesla, by the way, will get to 60 in about half the time my current car does.

So a ten-cent gas tax increase (spread through four years) is only a band-aid.  It’s going to take more than a Band-Aid to permanently assure our road system doesn’t go back to gravel.  We hope those who formulated the ten cent (after four years) gas tax increase are thinking about what comes when tens of thousands of motorists don’t use gasoline or diesel fuel at all.

I’m going to vote for the band-aid.  The four-year phase-in means it’s flesh-colored so it’s not so noticeable.