Letter 174 - Just do it!

It's shocking

This crowtoon sets the tone today:

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Is there anyone who considers politicians to be outstanding repositories of intelligence and wit? Lawyers might be the butts of jokes that highlight various versions of venality but lawyers aren’t typically shown as being dumb. Politicians, on the other hand, set the bar for ignorance, venality and a good helping of corruption just to complete the recipe. And America suffers even more greatly than many other countries in one particular way - a political corps with shockingly poor academic preparation.

Our world is unique in the annals of history in being a heavily technologically driven one. For thousands of years all one needed to understand was the current state of weaponry (bronze swords, blunderbusses, what have you) and the means for their delivery (on food, on horse, by ship).

But now our world is, quite literally, a virtual world. It runs by means of invisible electrons being chopped and assembled at trillions of times a second. We now have to deal not with the merely small, but with the “can’t actually get any smaller”. Individual tweaks to chromosomes, new spins imposed on a quark, and a new Apple app a day to plague us. The days of a human-sized and human-comprehended world are long gone.

And yet those in charge are doing well if they realize that a dozen represents an amount that’s more than a handful. And that the internet isn’t really a collection of “tubes”. Which leads inevitably to problems. Asking our current cadre to make good decisions is something akin to asking Jed Clampett to lay down his shooting iron and pilot a fighter jet. Not something destined for a happy landing.

Case in point. Cars. Back in the 60’s, when air pollution finally became impossible to ignore, (witness this pic of high quality LA smog)

the officials in charge decided that the answer would be to reduce harmful automotive emissions, the two primary ones being nitrous oxides and carbon monoxide. Turns out that it’s easy peasy to reduce nitrous oxides. But doing so increases the amount of carbon monoxide. And likewise, it’s easy to reduce the carbon monoxide if you allow the nitrous oxides to balloon. But reducing both at the same time? Like pushing down both ends of a teeter totter at the same time. Ain’t gonna happen. Yet the goofs in charge at the capital decided, with zero understanding of the physics involved, that both HAD to come down. Or else!

The automotive industry tried to explain but it was like trying to explain laparoscopic surgery to a duck. You could talk the talk but the duck was just going to go quack.

HOWEVER, in a twist that’s stranger than fiction, the industry actually managed to accomplish the impossible task because of absolute serendipity. Two separate fields of study that had never impacted the auto industry before, when combined, led to the invention of the catalytic converter. A new avenue for pollution control that came with a price. Namely the platinum that provided the catalyst and thereby incentivized lots of thieves to snip off a car’s catalytic converters in order to sell the platinum. A huge problem for the owners of the vehicles, to this day. Consider it collateral damage in the search for clean combustion.

Buoyed by this absolutely unpredicted and likely non-repeatable success, politicians embraced the concept of “if we say it must be - it must perforce be”. Order it done, set a time limit, and magic will happen.

California was the next to try that approach. ZERO EMISSIONS! That was the ticket. And so they told the automakers that they wouldn’t be selling their cars in California unless they emitted zip a dee doo dah of pollutants. Again the automakers said “Ummm, that’s not really possible”. Again the politician held firm to their non-understanding of physics and economics.

And … the politicians blinked first. When it became obvious that the choice was hold firm or have no cars sold in the golden state, they back pedaled. Whew! Lesson learned, right?

Of course not.

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And this next time it wasn’t just the US, it was the US and Europe! All the politicos decided, yup, electric cars are the way to go and EVERYONE WILL BUY ONE! Don’t want one? Tough - production of gas powered cars was going to be banned by 2030. It’ll be an electric nirvana.

Did these ding dongs consider that the infrastructure for a fully electrified transportation fleet didn’t exist and that such an infrastructure was absolutely crucial? Of course not. I actually posted about some of those challenges some time ago:

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