The Coming War with Texas

The recent announcement that Toyota is moving its American sales and marketing headquarters from California to Texas has spurred some of the usual commentary about an economic competition between California and Texas. And this is supposedly a competition that California is losing! But I don't think there's much to that story; I don't really think we have anything serious to worry about from Texas poaching our businesses. I will probably do a post about that soon.

However, California does have a serious problem with Texas that may well come to resemble a political and economic war in the years to come. And that war will be about oil.

A recent (and excellent) article about the Texas economy is in the current issue of Washington Monthy magazine. Among many interesting points, author Phillip Longman points out that a critical part of the economic growth spurt in Texas is simply the growth of the Texas oil and gas industry. The growth of the oil and natural gas industries is a critical foundation of the Texas "miracle" that conservatives crow about.

But California has declared war on oil and gas (and coal). From our renewable energy mandate for 2020, to our efforts to build a network of hydrogen fuel cell refill stations across the state, from our opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline to our mandate for electrical utilities to develop energy storage capacity,  to our cap and trade greenhouse gas market, California is working to reduce our use of oil and gas. In so doing, we have taken up arms against an industry that Texas is going all in on.

It's not personal. It's not that anyone over here has a grudge against Texas or is upset by the fact that their economy is growing. But Californians live in the real world, where global warming is a clearly recognized danger to the Mediterranean Climate that we know and love. And because global warming threatens our climate and lifestyle, global warming has to go, and therefore the oil and gas industries pretty much have to go too.

But Texas lives in Fox News Land, and they don't see things the same way. They think oil is great. So our effort to gut their foundation industry is going to cause some really hard feelings at some point.

Something like this

This is kind of cool, as so much renewable energy news out of Germany is lately. But I don't think that California has a lot of old mines that we could use.

Germany uses a coal mine to increase clean energy

Saving Net neutrality, Again

Every couple of years now, we have to rally the troops to fight for Net Neutrality. Comcast and its fellows want to be able to run the Internet as private business where you pay more in order to get better service. The only problem is that Comcast and its fellow Internet providers are monopolies that don't have enough competition for us to expect good service from them. If we let them start giving special treatment to anyone on the Internet, they will be able to decide what you get to see on the Internet. We have to stop them. Again.

Free Press Message to the FCC

The other way to fix global warming

If we actually have an economically feasible way to do this, it would totally be the way to go. It would fix our existing warming problem while allowing us to keep using coal and oil until they actually get used up. Why don't the Kochs and the coal industry throw some money at this?

Direct air carbon capture technology must be developed to help fight climate change. - Slate Magazine

Carbon price working? Coal slumps, clean energy soars

Carbon price working? Coal slumps, clean energy soars

InfoWorld Says Linux has Already Won on the Desktop

This is an interesting perspective, but I'm still keeping my linux distro desktop.

The Linux desktop is already the new normal | Open Source Software - InfoWorld

The Uses and Misuses of a Carbon Tax

Thomas Friedman writes in the New York Times about how a carbon tax could be used to help balance the Federal budget. Part of what attracts him is the idea that the revenues from a carbon tax could be used, partly, to reduce income tax rates and thereby gain Republican support. But I suspect Friedman is wrong about both the politics and the tax policy of this issue.

He's wrong about the politics because the Republican base, enraged and inspired by various institutes and organizations controlled by the Kochs and their running dogs, will never accept a carbon tax. The Tea Party believes that global warming is a liberal conspiracy, intended to cripple the American economy and thus somehow usher in Shariah Law, and the Tea Party will never accept any Republican motion in this direction. The ideological rigidity that makes it impossible for the Republicans to contemplate a tax increase of any size will double down to prevent a carbon tax from being passed. A carbon tax is not the ticket to a grand unified budget bargain for the exact same reason that we have a budget impasse in the first place: fanatical Republican intransigence.