Trump and the California clean air waiver

James Sallee has a nice analysis here. Galling as it is to see Trump trying to revoke California's waiver, which allows the state to impose more stringent gas mileage standards than the national, Sallee suggests that the damage was really done when Trump rolled back the national standards imposed by Obama. The reason has to do with the way the federal CAFE standards interact with California's:

The federal greenhouse gas rule for automobiles, called Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards, require automakers to sell vehicles that, on average, have fuel economy above a certain threshold. If California has its own, stricter greenhouse gas rule, the cars sold in California still count as part of the federal fleet under CAFE. This means that every Leaf, Prius and Tesla sold in California improves the industry’s federal average. That enables automakers to sell more Mustangs and Suburbans in the rest of the country, which means that much, if not all, of the greenhouse gas mitigation that takes place in California will be offset by increased emissions throughout the nation. 

The application of this so called “waterbed effect” to California fuel economy standards was described elegantly in a paper by Larry Goulder, Mark Jacobsen and Arthur van Benthem back in 2012. They studied the implementation of a California-specific fuel economy rule and concluded that between two-thirds and three-quarters of emissions reductions in California would be offset by increases in other states. In the meantime, the burden of complying with strong regulations would fall on Golden State consumers.

At any rate, the issue is now in the courts– of law and of public opinion. The best rule change would follow regime change in the White House.

Anne B

I recently re-read Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. Are these now my two favorite books? I think so. And not just because they have added great words like umbles and gralloched to my vocabulary, should I have occasion to use them (though granted that seems unlikely). I could happily turn around and read both books straight through again. Hilary, where is volume 3?

Anne was wearing, that day, rose pink and dove grey. The colours should have had a fresh maidenly charm; but all he could think of were stretched innards, umbles and tripes, grey-pink intestines looped out of a living body; he had a second batch of recalcitrant friars to be dispatched to Tyburn, to be slit up and gralloched by the hangman. They were traitors and deserved the death, but it is a death exceeding most in cruelty. The pearls around her long neck looked to him like little beads of fat, and as she argued she would reach up and tug them; he kept his eyes on her fingertips, nails flashing like tiny knives."

– Bring Up the Bodies, p. 38

Game of Fleabags

I watched a bit of the Emmys tonight. I had watched some of the shows that were big winners. Regarding which: I'd give up about two or three seasons of Game of Thrones for an episode or two of Fleabag.

Robert Frank, RIP

Gosh, so many obit blog posts lately. Anyway, I own a reprint edition of Frank's The Americans, and I have had the privilege of seeing the actual prints, in book order, in a museum setting. I love his approach to photography, and I love his take on America: critical, leftist, but open-minded and big-hearted, and with a real sense of humor: Why not obscure the faces of your subjects with jingoistic iconography? But when he wanted to capture faces, he didn't mess around...

Jimmy Johnson, RIP

Even if you've never heard of him, you've heard him. The Swampers... Art and commerce vs. racism? Sometimes it even worked...

“We didn’t know we were making history,” he said of this interracial affinity in an interview with Southern Rambler magazine. “Black or white, we had the same goal: to cut a hit record.” 

After the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, the all-white Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section’s work on soul music sessions for Atlantic and Stax, two of the era’s most influential record companies, was suspended. To Mr. Johnson’s relief, the suspension was temporary. 

“We were an integral part of Atlantic and Stax and thought that might be it,” he recalled in that interview. “We were told we wouldn’t be cutting any more black records, and those were our favorite records.”

Pedro Bell, RIP

Not always PC, but always visually funky.

Tuxedo Junction

Dr. Lenzy Wallace, who directed our high school jazz band, must have had his moments of frustration and doubt. We weren't very good, through no fault of his. I'm no racial essentialist no-how, so I don't for a moment think that white folk are less capable of swinging than black folk, but the suburban white kids in Storrs CT did NOT swing, for whatever reason. Perhaps Lenzy should have forced us to listen to recordings of the tunes he selected for us to play, such as "Tuxedo Junction." Erskine Hawkins, who co-wrote it and made this 1939 recording with his once-college dance band, knew how to swing and chicken-scratch his way to perfection. Who knows, a little bit of the humor and easy elegance might have sunk in with us.

Across the divide

One of my favorite day hikes follows the Pacific Crest Trail from Carson Pass up to Meiss Col and down into beautiful Meiss Meadow, from which you can proceed to lovely little Showers Lake and/or elsewhere. An interesting feature of Meiss Col, which had not occurred to me until this visit, is that it lies along the divide between the Pacific and the Great Basin watersheds. So at the point where the first picture below was taken, looking roughly southward toward Round Top, any rain or snow melt in front of me would run downhill into various creeks and eventually into the American River, the Sacramento River, and the Bay, before emptying into the Pacific; whereas behind me, the water drains into the Upper Truckee River (e.g. from the snowfield in the second picture), into Lake Tahoe and then out of it into the Truckee proper, which finally drains into Pyramid Lake, an endorheic lake within the Great Basin. Endorheic is a new word for me: water checks in but it doesn't check out. Well, evaporation notwithstanding. Two raindrops or snowflakes that fall quite near one another on Meiss Col could end up thousands of miles apart. Of course there may be some hapless little raindrop that falls at the very divide and languishes there, like Buridan's ass, unable to decide which great watershed to join. Such a drop may happily end up nourishing one of the many western blue flag irises that flourish in the col. (The map below thanks to Wikipedia... don't forget to send them money.)