Why nuclear power won't save us from climate change and oil addiction

http://www.oilcrisis.com/nuclear/WhyNuclearNotSustainable.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_new_nuclear_power_plants

Maybe you were like me and assumed that expanded nuclear fission power could help humanity wean itself off fossil fuel derived electricity, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. As of 2009, it supplied 20% of all US electricity, which is greater than all renewable sources combined. It seems like a perfectly "clean" technology: radioisotopes react in a controlled manner, creating heat that evaporates industrial water into steam that turns giant turbines, which powers our homes, businesses, and eventually cars too. The only major waste produced is heat and water. There are plenty of pro-nuclear "data" and persuasive marketing out there (http://www.world-nuclear.org/education/comparativeco2.html) to suggest that nuclear is the answer, but I'm not so sure.

Apart from the obvious and still legitimate concerns for plant accidents and waste disposal, nuclear power is a lot dirtier and inefficient than the industry and their political allies would admit, because we have to take the entire "nuclear fuel cycle" into account. First of all, as anyone following the Iranian uranium enrichment saga would know, fuel-grade material doesn't magically seep out of the ground like oil (and even oil must be refined before it is more useful). Uranium and plutonium isotopes have to be processed, concentrated, and separated from non-fissile material in a huge series of centrifuges, which of course requires lots of power to run and therefore have a big carbon footprint. Uranium mining and transportation is also energy-intensive, and any nuclear power plant must have adequate security in the post-9/11 world, which also adds to the cost of every KW produced. Also, high quality uranium is the least carbon-intensive, but quality ore mostly comes from Canada, and some of their major mines are nearing depletion. All other global uranium deposits in the US, Australia, and elsewhere have lower quality material and therefore higher pollution potential.

Obviously the up-front costs of plant construction are huge (maybe $10B, like the recent estimate for a new South Carolina project), also taking into account very generous government subsidies and tax breaks that the renewable energy industry doesn't even come close to enjoying. To be fair, nuclear's gross subsidies are huge vs. renewables, but appear much more reasonable on a per-MW basis ($24 for solar vs. $1.56 for nuclear), though this is partly due to the huge scale of nuclear plants vs. renewable projects. And let's remember that part of renewables' subsidies is a premium we're paying to avoid pollution. It's not meant to be the most economical energy source, though some renewables proponents would argue that it can be with proper government support, less superfluous aid to dirty energy, and consideration of the indirect costs of emissions (such as the BP spill, and health/productivity losses due to respiratory diseases).

With current technology, nuclear plants are built for a service life of 15-60 years, and must be decommissioned in a complex and even more costly process (maybe 2-10X construction cost, taking waste storage into account also). Therefore, many of the plants that were built by the G20 during the Cold War are aging, and half of the world's 443 large-scale reactors will be considered for retirement by 2012. So if the nuclear industry wants to boost their slice of the energy pie, they will need to invest in many new plants that they probably can't afford, and couldn't find the real estate for anyway, since they can't just build on top of a former plant site for 30-100 years, due to possible contamination from decommissioning. Also, an MIT study estimates that the Earth has enough uranium for 1,000 gigawatt-scale reactors for at least 50 years. Sounds great, but actually our ability to discover, mine, and produce fuel-grade material will not be able to keep up with the industry's hopes for growth. Each GW-size plant requires about 200 metric tons of uranium per year. Multiply that over all plants, and fuel production can't keep up: in 2004 plants needed 68,000 metric tons of fuel, but mines only produced 39,000, with the remainder coming from Cold War inventories, recycling, conversions of weapons-grade material. But our stockpiles are due to run out by 2020, possibly leading to a nuclear fuel shortage. That's why the IAEA expects nuclear power production to peak around 2015 and then taper off by 2030 to below-present levels. Nuclear currently supplies 6% of global energy, and may only peak at 10-14%, despite about $2T in total global investment since the technology became available. Just imagine if we spent that much on renewables.

The US hasn't built a new nuclear plant since 1978, and although (even more) new plant constructions subsidies are in Obama's energy plan, I don't know how it's going to pan out, because it's hard enough to get approval to build a much safer and smaller natural gas power plant. Plus with more nuclear plants comes more fuel waste to store in giant steel/concrete tanks at guarded facilities. Already 50% of Americans live within 75 miles of an above-ground nuclear spent-fuel site (whether they know it or not, according to the Federation of American Scientists), so probably the "not in my backyard" mentality will obstruct nuclear's growth (especially with the $50-100B Yucca Mountain waste repository project still in limbo and many logistical issues still unresolved).

All things considered, the DOE estimates that the economic and environmental costs of nuclear power (using current data) make it dirtier and less efficient than all other renewable energy sources but solar (due to very expensive photovoltaics), and in some cases, worse than traditional coal or natural gas power plants (8-13 cents/KWH for nuclear, vs. 6-12 cents/KWH natural gas, 6-23 cents/KWH coal, 3-9 cents/KWH wind/hydro). The DOE also estimates that nuclear's net energy (output divided by all energy inputs needed for the entire nuclear fuel cycle) is about 0.3 to heat a home, meaning we're actually taking an energy LOSS going nuclear (as in, 100 KW must be spent for every 30 KW of electric heating created). Compare this to passive solar home heating with a net energy of 5.8, or a natural gas furnace at 4.9 (which also creates CO2 unfortunately).

Then there's the old hope that technology will save us. New nuclear plant designs do have improved safety and economics, but probably won't make a big enough difference to make nuclear a more attractive energy source. New breeder plants actually produce plutonium while they consume uranium, supposedly making them nearly "renewable", but the technology is unproven, and fuel is not the major cost concern of nuclear power (though as I mentioned above, fuel supply shortage is a concern which breeder plants could potentially mitigate). Nuclear-friendly France experimented with a breeder plant that opened in 1986, but was closed just 12 years later due to operating cost overruns (in addition to the $13B to build it). Consequently, other nations have canceled breeder projects before breaking ground.

Humans will always tinker with clever ways to generate energy, but of course it takes energy to make energy. If you believe the climate scientists, we don't have a lot of time to counteract major climate change, if it's not already too late. The days of cheap oil are over, but drops in supply will be gradual, and maybe slow enough to prevent major public outcry forcing politicians to enact energy reform. We don't have the resources to invest in ridiculously expensive energy sources like nuclear that may not even provide much benefit over hydrocarbons. Obviously the best way to create new energy is to not waste what we already have, so improvements in CAFE standards, greening buildings, and more sustainable consumption habits will be like creating a new Saudi Arabia in the long run. And what do we have to lose by giving renewables a fair chance, and at least as much government support as dirty energy has enjoyed over the years? I know there are still socioeconomic and environmental costs associated with wind farms and dams, but at least failures there don't compare with Chernobyl or Valdez. Every venture has risk, but the upside of large-scale renewable power is much better than nuclear, "clean coal", or other alternatives.

Less robust donor response to the Pakistan flood disaster

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38687569/ns/world_news-south_and_central_asia/
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129293203

Some news sources were observing that the global response to the Pakistan flood is weaker than with the Haiti quake or Indian Ocean tsunami of recent past, even though the current Pakistan disaster is larger and affecting more people in a more strategically important nation. Over 10M have become displaced, and thousands have died (1,500 documented deaths, but the actual number is probably over 10X higher). Within 2 weeks, international donors pledged over $1B for tiny Haiti, but so far Pakistan has only received a $460M pledge from the UN (that hasn't amassed the funds yet), with $50-150M or so coming from the US. Of course the US gives a lot of aid to Pakistan in many forms, and the Obama/Bush admins have tried to boost social and humanitarian aid in order to improve relations and combat extremism (currently to the tune of $7.5B over 5 years). Maybe Washington sees this "opportunity" as a way to score goodwill points with Pakistanis and Muslims after years of bad relations (as was the case with tsunami relief). Plus the more gratitude ordinary Pakistanis have for the US, and the more our aid helps boost their quality of life, the more stable Pakistan and Afghanistan will be, and the safer we will be from Islamic terrorism and loose nukes. So really it's a win-win for all nations, but if the perception among Pakistanis is that the West doesn't care, or is withholding aid as "punishment" for their lack of cooperation in the war on terror (even though Pakistan has suffered greatly from our war), they may come to support us even less.

Some possible explanations for the less robust response to the tragedy:

1) Donor fatigue: more miserable dark-skinned people needing Western assistance is always a bummer.
2) Timing: Haiti and the tsunami both occurred during winter holidays, so maybe there was more good will in our hearts? Pakistan is in August, when Westerners are on holiday, not paying attention to hard news, or getting ready for back-to-school.
3) Location: apparently the flooding (the size of Lebanon) was so bad that it wiped out access to the worst-hit areas, and more may be coming. Only helicopters can get in, which makes it hard for government officials and journalists to document the tragedy and broadcast powerful images to our screens.
4) Politics: Pakistan is associated with terrorism and corruption, especially after the Wikileaks documents release. Maybe this causes us to feel less compassion, even though the victims of the flooding have never harmed and do not want to harm America and our efforts in Afghanistan. They may not love us, but they are not all Taliban sympathizers. However, if the international community and Pakistani government fail to provide even minimal aid to the desperate victims, Islamic groups will step in and fill the void (whether out of charity or for political gains), like in Palestine. Or maybe foreign donors feel like their aid would be wasted on graft or seized by militants, as was the case in Somalia.
5) Global warming denial: like Katrina, African droughts, and Southwest wildfires in the last decade, the Pakistan flood's unprecedented size may lead one to implicate climate change in the disaster. If so, it's damning for Westerners, because the least polluting poor people in equatorial nations tend to suffer the most from global warming, while the human component is mostly due to G20 economies and lifestyles. So the least responsible suffer most. If we don't give generously, to address a problem that may be of our creation, then that is pretty heartless. So maybe it's better to ignore it and be in denial than accept the guilt.
5) Islamophobia: no media sources are willing to acknowledge it, and it's somewhat related to point 4. But look at the Ground Zero mosque debate. Many European nations and the US have a negative impression of Pakistani Muslims, especially after the recent Times Square terror attempt. Yes it's true that we helped Muslim Indonesia a lot after the tsunami, but US-Muslim relations may have been a little warmer then, and Indonesians are the "good Muslims" in our book. Maybe we blame our struggles in Afghanistan on Pakistan (deserved or not), so we feel less about their current plight. This is ridiculous of course, because as I've said Pakistan has sacrificed and suffered for the war on terror much more than most Americans. It's not the people's fault that the ISI is working with the Afghan Taliban.

The dysfunctional US Senate

“Sit and watch us for seven days,” one senator says of the deadlocked chamber. “You know what you’ll see happening? Nothing.”

And if something does happen, it's bad:

Richard Shelby, an Alabama Republican, was secretly blocking the confirmation of seventy Obama appointees over a dispute involving defense earmarks for his state. (His tactics exposed, Shelby—whose office maintains that he was responsible for fewer than fifty holds—lifted all but three.) Later that month, [KY GOP Senator] Bunning spent several days and a late night on the Senate floor, filibustering to prevent benefits from being paid to millions of unemployed Americans. When [OR Dem Senator] Merkley tried to reason with him, Bunning responded, “Tough shit.” (Eventually, Republicans persuaded Bunning to stop.)

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/09/100809fa_fact_packer
http://www.kqed.org/a/forum/R201008170931

Of course this story is an outsider's take on the modern Senate, and he leans left. Maybe the author can't or won't capture all the less publicized, complex good work that the Senate does for us every day, but the problems he describes are obvious to most Americans who aren't committed to a political agenda of making sure Obama accomplishes nothing.

Unlike previous generations, the Senate is not a debate forum among intellectuals for the good of the country. No one even discusses anymore; Senators just talk past each other, read canned statements written by their staffers (often inexperienced, ideological go-getters), and then go home without hearing other views. Maybe they would even prefer to stroke their egos and talk on the press rounds instead. Modern political pressures and 24-7 mass media have turned the Senate into a joke. Of course our founding fathers designed the Senate to be inefficient, unparliamentary, and act as a brake against populism and knee-jerk legislation. But it wasn't meant to be a brick wall, which is what the GOP minority has resembled since Obama took office. So what is the future of government? When a Dem is president, nothing gets done, except for urgent crises like wars and recessions? And when the GOP is in power, maybe the Dems would do the same, or they would blink and cowardly give a rubber stamp, as they did with Dubya? So basically the country can only hold course or swing right, which doesn't represent the interests of at least 40% of voters. Sometimes you hold the line and fight, and sometimes you have to make deals, but you can't be a brick wall all the time.

We already know that lobbying and special interest money contaminate the Congress, and the use of filibuster has changed in purpose and drastically increased since Reagan's time (especially when the GOP is in the minority). Pointless "secret holds" delay uncontroversial, qualified presidential nominees from doing their jobs for months (again, the GOP has taken this to another level with Obama). Many junior senators are pumped up to do good and get bills passed, so they hate the loopholes and philosophically would like to change some rules, but what if their party is in the minority next session? They don't want to lose out on that leverage, just in case (like the problematic super-majority to pass a budget in CA: everyone hates it but fears that they may need it one day). For the minority party, it's become like a degenerate game of curling (and just as exciting) rather than legislation. Don't worry about winning, just find sneaky ways to frustrate and block your opponent from scoring. Then eventually the public will get fed up and kick that party out, and you will get your chance. Who cares about the precious legislative calendar you've wasted? Your term is 6 years, you will most likely be re-elected even if you sucked on the job, and you enjoy fat compensation. And even if you lose your office, just wait the 2-year "cooling off period" and become a big time lobbyist on the Hill instead, which has even higher pay. But that job security and privileged status breeds an attitude of arrogance, apathy, and exclusivity I think.

Senators and their families used to live and socialize with each other (even with the other party) in Washington, so it's easier to talk and be cordial with friends. But now they mainly don't know each other, so it's easier to hate (especially when the rest of your caucus pressures you to). In order to save money, and due to the fact that they're only in DC half the week, some senators even eat and LIVE in their offices. So they're isolated from their peers (and the real world), even for lunch, since they're probably busy courting donors or hearing out special interest pitches downtown. The "old lions" of the Senate, who knew it when it was actually bipartisan and orderly under LBJ, are now dead or dying/retiring, and new senators came up in a more nasty, ideological climate. Unlike the past, more younger senators are coming from the House, which is an even more short-sighted, partisan institution. Also senators have to fly to their home states, maybe several times a week, in order to attend to local business or engage in the endless re-election campaign (Senator Harkin estimates that he and his colleagues spend 50% of their free time on fund-raising activities, instead of better serving the public interest). They are scheduled on the Senate floor literally for 15-minute blocks, and then they're whisked away by their staff punching away on their smart phones. In fact, most Senators aren't even on the floor, even during major business and votes.

[OR Senator] Merkley could remember witnessing only one moment of floor debate between a Republican and a Democrat. “The memory I took with me was: ‘Wow, that’s unusual—there’s a conversation occurring in which they’re making point and counterpoint and challenging each other.’ And yet nobody else was in the chamber.”

So if no one gives an honest effort at outreach or even basic participation, there can be no debate and compromise. Would we survive at our jobs by being absent most of the time and saying "no" to everything? And if Senators are too over-scheduled with other matters to really think about public policy and governance, how can they do their jobs and represent the people? But our government is a reflection of us and our culture, so we deserve our leaders and their broken system. It's just a shame that it's so difficult to change. But if things got this bad so quickly, they can also improve quickly with the right people, conditions, and motivation.

-----

Some highlights of a typically long New Yorker piece:

The Republicans had turned this old rule [requiring unanimous consent for debate to extend past 2PM] into a new means of obstruction. There would be no hearings that afternoon... Like investment bankers on Wall Street, senators these days direct much of their creative energy toward the manipulation of arcane rules and loopholes, scoring short-term successes while magnifying their institution’s broader dysfunction.

.........

The Republican goal in [blocking Obamacare with endless, pointless amendments] Vote-O-Rama was to embarrass the Democrats while appearing to suggest useful changes; the Democratic goal was to prevent any change to the bill, so that it wouldn’t have to return to the House, where it might be voted down. Several of the Republican amendments had been designed to make Democrats look hypocritical, by forcing them to vote against policies that the Party typically supports.

.........

Each senator sits on three or four committees and even more subcommittees, most of which meet during the same morning hours, which helps explain why committee tables are often nearly empty, and why senators drifting into a hearing can barely sustain a coherent line of questioning. All this activity is crammed into a three-day week, for it’s an unwritten rule of the modern Senate that votes are almost never scheduled for Mondays or Fridays, which allows senators to spend four days away from the capital. Senators now, unlike those of several decades ago, often keep their families in their home states, where they return most weekends, even if it’s to Alaska or Idaho—a concession to endless fund-raising, and to the populist anti-Washington mood of recent years. (When Newt Gingrich became Speaker of the House, in 1995, he told new Republican members not to move their families to the capital.) Tom Daschle, the former Democratic leader, said, “When we scheduled votes, the only day where we could be absolutely certain we had all one hundred senators there was Wednesday afternoon.”

......

[Former Dem leader] Daschle sketched a portrait of the contemporary senator who is too busy to think: “Sometimes, you’re dialling for dollars, you get the call, you’ve got to get over to vote, you’ve got fifteen minutes. You don’t have a clue what’s on the floor, your staff is whispering in your ears, you’re running onto the floor, then you check with your leader—you double check—but, just to make triple sure, there’s a little sheet of paper on the clerk’s table: The leader recommends an aye vote, or a no vote. So you’ve got all these checks just to make sure you don’t screw up, but even then you screw up sometimes. But, if you’re ever pressed, ‘Why did you vote that way?’—you just walk out thinking, Oh, my God, I hope nobody asks, because I don’t have a clue.”

........

For some Federalists, [the Senate] also had an aristocratic purpose: to collect knowledge and experience, and to guard against a levelling spirit that might overtake the majority. When Alexis de Tocqueville visited the Senate, in 1832, he was deeply impressed by the quality of its members: “They represent only the lofty thoughts [of the nation] and the generous instincts animating it, not the petty passions.” But he also recognized that “a minority of the nation dominating the Senate could completely paralyze the will of the majority represented in the other house, and that is contrary to the spirit of constitutional government.” As long as the Senate continued to be composed of America’s most talented statesmen, Tocqueville implied, it would restrain its own anti-democratic potential.

..........

But the Senate's history was not always intellectual and lofty:

After the Civil War the Senate was captured by wealthy and sectional interests, ending a more high-minded age when Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and John C. Calhoun engaged in brilliant debate. Aside from spasms of legislation at the start of the Presidencies of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, Caro writes, the Senate remained controlled by an alliance of Southern racists and Republican corporate shills, and was “the dam against which the waves of social reform dashed themselves in vain—the chief obstructive force in the federal government.” By the fifties, the Senate had become far more conservative than the public. And not just conservative: William S. White, in his 1956 book “Citadel,” called the Senate “to a most peculiar degree, a Southern Institution . . . growing at the heart of this ostensibly national assembly” and “the only place in the country where the South did not lose the war.”

.........

The Senate’s modern decline began in 1978, with the election of a new wave of anti-government conservatives, and accelerated as Republicans became the majority in 1981. “The Quayle generation came in, and there were a number of people just like Dan—same generation, same hair style, same beliefs,” Gary Hart, the Colorado Democrat, recalled. “They were harder-line. They weren’t there to get along with Democrats. But they look accommodationist compared to Republicans in the Senate today.”

.........

The weakened institution could no longer withstand pressures from outside its walls; as money and cameras rushed in, independent minds fell more and more in line with the partisans. Rough parity between the two parties meant that every election had the potential to make or break a majority, crushing the incentive to coöperate across the aisle. The Senate, no longer a fount of ideas, became a backwater of the U.S. government. During the Clinton years, the main action was between the White House and the Gingrich House of Representatives; during the Bush years, the Republican Senate majority abdicated the oversight role that could have placed a vital check on executive power.

.........

Between 1998 and 2004, half the senators who left office became lobbyists. In 2007, Trent Lott, a Republican leader in the Senate less than a year into his fourth term, abruptly resigned and formed a lobbying firm with former Senator John Breaux, just a few weeks before a new law took effect requiring a two-year waiting period between serving and lobbying.

.........

Under McConnell, Republicans have consistently consumed as much of the Senate’s calendar as possible with legislative maneuvering. The strategy is not to extend deliberation of the Senate’s agenda but to prevent it. Tom Harkin, who first proposed reform of the filibuster in 1995, called his Republican colleagues “nihilists,” who want to create chaos because it serves their ideology. “If there’s chaos, things will tend toward simple solutions,” Harkin said. “In chaos people don’t listen to reason.”

.........

“If you can engage public opinion in a way politicians can understand, public opinion can still blow away money and interest groups,” he said. “But over the past few decades the reflex has grown in the Senate that, all things considered, it’s better to avoid than to take on big issues. This is the kind of thing that drives [CO Dem Senator] Michael Bennet nutty: here you’ve arrived in the United States Senate and you can’t do fuck-all about the destruction of the planet.”

Problems with US exceptionalism

From a retired Army colonel and now professor at Boston Univ.

http://www.kqed.org/a/forum/R201008121000

After WWII, the US was the only industrial power that wasn't decimated by the conflict, so it made sense for us to exert global leadership in rebuilding the world (in our image) and establishing the UN to enforce justice and resolve conflicts peacefully. But maybe that privileged victor status went to our heads, and 60 years later we and some allies now act in defiance of the UN, and routinely engage in wars of choice, not "just wars" of last resort. Although we are a big, omnipresent target, the 50 states of America have not really been threatened militarily since Pearl Harbor, apart from four suicide airliners. Why do we still feel the duty/destiny/entitlement to "make the world a better place" through projection of military and economic might, especially when most of our efforts have caused more harm than good for the majority of those affected? Hindsight is 20/20, but some signs at the time indicated that unchecked communist domination and their nuclear destruction of Western society was not really likely. Yet we designed and executed an aggressive Cold War foreign policy assuming that all the world's reds were unified and committed to our demise. It wasn't just about peace-loving Americans reluctantly forced to contain dangerous commies, it was about us actively defeating our rivals to achieve global superiority ourselves. But of course we couldn't go overboard, or the Soviets would launch their nukes, so we conducted limited or proxy wars. Then came the Vietnam wake-up call, but unfortunately America's post-Vietnam leaders were the very people who didn't suffer from the war, didn't understand the war, and instead re-wrote its narrative in order to continue a flawed US interventionist strategy endorsed by the military-industrial complex. So that led us to the Iranian Revolution, Israel-Palestine impasse, Latin American civil wars, Afghanistan (2X), and Iraq (3X). We weren't 100% to blame for those situations, but we didn't really play a helpful role either.

What is worrisome is that "constant war" now seems to be the price we pay for trying to free the world. If it's not the Soviets, it's the Latin drug cartels, the Eastern European gangsters, African warlords, the few remaining commies, or "Islamo-fascists." We are rehashing the exact same insincere rhetoric, and forcing our "professional volunteer military" to work overtime (to the point of exhaustion and suicide for some) because we can't allow a bunch of turban-heads to undermine our global standing. We have more soldiers and bases overseas than protecting our shores. But our Middle East failures have demonstrated that even we cannot always bend others to our will, we don't have all the solutions worked out, and the world is really complex and maybe impervious to sudden external improvement, even with our huge resources. And we've paid an even bigger price, since beyond our military casualties and expenditures, we've made the price of crude quadruple, poisoned international diplomacy for years, and our massive debt has compromised progress on most other national priorities. Those factors have only served to strengthen our rivals too. Plus our military actions have created new enemies and dispersed formerly more concentrated, conspicuous threats. The Times Square and underpants bombers probably would be living normal, lawful lives now if we made different war decisions.

I know that we can't just bury our heads in the sand and ignore global problems/injustices, but there are less expensive and destructive ways to approach them. If we really want to make the world a better place, half of war is rooted in poverty, economic injustice, and lack of law/education. We can easily invest in development projects that alleviate those global problems and reduce the likelihood of conflict, which will also create economic opportunities for Americans and score us diplomatic/humanitarian points. And for the hardcore violent people out there who are bent on hurting us and others out of twisted hateful ideology, surveillance, defensive measures, and surgical anti-terror missions may be more effective than occupying entire nations. Cheap, easy cyber-monitoring of communications and money wires have prevented more terrorism than our entire war in Iraq, and no one had to die. Lastly, if we improve our own ethics and conduct, and eliminate some of our offensive, unjust practices, that will go far to advance our supposed goals of global peace and freedom.

Bottom line, we have to learn to let go. Humanity and the world have gotten on just fine without America for 99.99999% of history. There's no natural law dictating that humans must shape the world in our image, that a benevolent superpower must maintain order in the world, and that the power must be us. We are barely in control of our own checkbooks; how can we expect to control the world and its 6B diverse inhabitants? US exceptionalism is a hard ideology to wean off; we all were indoctrinated in grade school and every election cycle. We feel noble and proud to be the vanguards of global freedom, white knights standing up for everything that's good. While others cower and capitulate, we confront the dark forces of the world. Mass media really exploits this, and I'll admit that I wanted to join the military as a kid, and more recently was a little moved by Bush's "Mission Accomplished" speech at the time. We beat King George, the Apaches, the slave masters, the fascists, and the Soviets. We made the world safe for democracy and capitalism, and we can do anything we set our minds to. Yes we have done some good along the way, but did we have the right to drastically alter the lives of so many, and was it worth the steep price some had to pay for our ambitions?

Even our educated, perceptive, 21st Century President Obama is not immune. In his famous, jubilant election victory speech in Chicago, he asked Americans to help him "put our hands on the arc of history, and bend it once more towards the hopes of a better day." What hubris, even if we really have all the best intentions. It is true that the US has the power to write, or end, history any time we want. But will it be for the good of the few people in power, or the greater good? Sometimes the best thing we can do is nothing, and our world will never be free of evil and violence. That doesn't mean we shouldn't stop trying to be good global citizens, and we do have the serious responsibility to use our vast power and wealth for good. So let's think very hard about the ways to do that properly and successfully, instead of rushing to assert ourselves in every single conflict that threatens our prestige, and masking it with some noble crusade rhetoric.

Feedback to NPR's story on parenting temperamental teens

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129150658

To Morning Edition,

As I contemplate starting my own family soon, I was fairly disgusted with this story on parenting strategies for dealing with temperamental teens. While I think your guest, Dr. Kastner, had good general advice for conflict mitigation among familial ADULTS, I don't think kids deserve to be reasoned with that way. Kids are already too spoiled and coddled today, even versus Gen X's youth. Parenting is not about bargaining and compromising to make everyone happy; parents are the authority because they provide food, education, shelter, and many luxuries that you and I didn't have as children. The least modern kids can do to show their respect and appreciation is to behave properly and not talk back. They are not the bosses of the household. I understand the desire to cultivate self-esteem, and plenty of strict, angry parents unfortunately turn abusive, but would parents rather have their kid grow up to feel good about him or herself, but become an egotistical, undisciplined jerk in the process? America already has too many of those.

That hypothetical academic exercise of the teen writing a statement reflecting on the consequences of vandalizing a neighbor's house is ridiculous. Pediatrics and behavioral science can help us understand the tumultuous process of growing up, but can't be simply used to condone and explain away bad behavior. Kids are not wild animals. Even in the heat of the moment and under peer pressure, a 13-year-old should still be able to practice good decision making and do the right thing. If not, then the parents and society have truly failed. If kids really were that out of control, they shouldn't be allowed to go out unsupervised and put themselves and others in danger. If I was caught spraying shaving cream on a neighbor's home, my fairly liberal immigrant parents would paddle the lesson into me, prohibit me from hanging out with those "bad influence friends," and I would never do it again. In fact, the shame of bringing that trouble on my family would be motivation enough. I wouldn't have needed to reflect and share about it like a support group.

We may owe Toyota an apology

http://www.insideline.com/toyota/driver-error-is-culprit-in-most-toyota-crashes-says-nhtsa.html

It's easy to bag on a strong foreign company dominating a very American industry (especially for politicians during a recession), but it looks like the real culprits for the acceleration safety problems were dumb-ass American drivers. Initial findings from the NHTSA investigation of 58 sudden-acceleration-associated Toyota crashes across the country showed ZERO evidence of electronics causing acceleration from vehicle data logs. In fact, in over 30 cases the vehicle log shows that the driver did not apply the brake, so in all likelihood their acceleration was due to a panic slam on the wrong pedal. With apparently no definitive evidence, Toyota was accused of sudden acceleration from electronics, floor mats, and sticky pedals. The company initially denied the claims, then acknowledged some design flaws, and issued big recalls to rectify the 3 risks. But in the government analysis, zero of the 58 crash cases were due to sticky pedals or electronics, and only one was due to the floor mat. Out of the millions of Toyotas being happily driven each day in the US and worldwide, there were only a small number of crashes, and funny how the acceleration accusations were only in our country, huh? NASA is currently helping to see if electromagnetic interference could have still caused electronic acceleration. Of course lawyers for greedy and blame-shifting plaintiffs suing Toyota are challenging these findings, but 58 is a pretty big sample size to me. What I'm ashamed of is how quickly the media took up the accusations as Biblical truth, and how I and most of the public believed them without proof.

What the JetBlue employee meltdown says about the US workplace and society

http://news.yahoo.com/s/theweek/20100811/cm_theweek/205934_1
http://www.kqed.org/a/forum/R201008110900

By now you've probably heard the buzz surrounding Steven Slater, the
veteran JetBlue flight attendant who was harassed by a passenger on a
flight and decided to say "F this job!" and illegally exited the plane
down an emergency chute, with beers in hand. Maybe he was living out
all our closet fantasies (and paid the price by going to jail, but
he'll get the book deal and TV circuit). I'm sure he would have
preferred to do his job (of 28 years) happily with others treating him
respectfully. Though what does that say about the state of the US
workplace and society if Slater is now celebrated as a folk hero for
breaking the law, possibly putting people in danger, and acting
against everything in his professional training? That customer must
have been an astronomical bitch because JetBlue FAs are some of the
best in the industry, and probably have very thick skins after years
of abuse and training. But honestly, I'm sure we all have a list of
people we'd like to curse out on the PA system, and many
jobs/customers that we'd like to stick it to.

I'll try to refrain from a cliched anti-society diatribe, but humor me
with this set-up. I know we tend to remember the "good ol' days" with
rose-colored lenses, but we probably weren't always this stressed out,
this nasty to each other, and work wasn't this horrible, was it? Some
things have changed since the last generation was young. We usually
don't have pensions anymore (and don't stay with 1-2 firms our whole
career), nor just one car/TV per household. Standard of living and
life expectancy have risen, but so have costs, while real wages
haven't kept up (unless you're a CEO, and in that case your wages have
ballooned). For many of us, the finer things in life are still
unaffordable without taking on dangerous debt, but we still try: total
US consumer debt is now in the trillions, our pre-recession savings
rate was negative, and savings is currently still worse than postwar
America. We have also segregated ourselves into many racially and
economically homogeneous suburban enclaves, and may not need to have
"real interactions" with strangers for days at a time (automate
everything, drive-thru everything, hurry up and be on your way).
Culturally, it's also strange now that it's accepted and almost
desirable to act like a spoiled good-for-nothing like Paris Hilton, a
cocksure idiot like Sarah Palin, or a pathologically ambitious a-hole
like The Donald. What happened to doing right by people and making an
honest buck? Sorry, I'm 30 and I sound 70.

When IBM envisioned the first computers, the designers hoped that they
would help humans by saving us time on repetitive, grunt work
calculations. But since the PC revolution, computers and mobile
electronics have only served to take time from us. Yes computers allow
us to be more productive, but now employers demand more of us (and
practically expect some workers to be on-call 24-7, plus some tech or
work-addicts even do it to themselves, checking their BlackBerries at
completely inappropriate times). An average, not even an excellent,
worker is now doing the jobs of 2-3 workers from 1960, and many
traditional US industries have vanished or relocated overseas. Gadgets
and the internet have allowed us to share ideas and access resources
like never before (for better or worse: tolerance of diversity has
increased, but so have all sorts of cyber-crimes), but also bleed us
of our precious free time (and money) with semi-pointless,
quasi-social distractions like Facebook. Families spend less time
together (maybe a good thing depending on the family), and even less
quality time. We may spend more time exhausted in front of a screen
than raising our kids.

Competition for quality education, jobs, government services, and
other basic living essentials has risen drastically. Workers are
spending more time in commute, more time in travel-heavy jobs, and
more time at work in general vs. the 1960s. The rich-poor gap has
increased, and more Americans are employed by corporations than ever
before. Executives and managers are under more pressure from
shareholders and others to cut costs, innovate, and find new ways to
boost productivity/efficiency, even at the cost of worker morale and
the law. Forget the work-life balance; for many people work is life,
which makes the personal pain of an unsatisfying job or losing a job
even harder to handle. The recession has only exacerbated these
tensions and problems.

All this creates an environment for people to treat each other badly,
and we have many pressures and incentives to do so. Our egos fall
victim to our competitive free-market culture, and we may equate
differences in wealth/achievement with differences in personal worth.
"I'm a big-shot doctor, so I can talk down to you, lowly flight
attendant! I paid my ticket and I can do whatever I want!" Worries and
threats are everywhere. Bad news on the 24-7 channels, bills coming
due, and everyone seems to try to take advantage of us, make us part
with our hard-earned money, or otherwise short-change us somehow.
Politicians are always in scandals, there is less public trust, and
therefore less trust and courtesy for each other. When anxiety is
high, we are not ourselves, or is that our true nature? We have less
time and more stress, so we're living on the edge with a shorter fuse,
and minor annoyances or injustices could cause us to blow up. And as
the many life annoyances wear us down each day, we have less patience
and energy to handle the big problems and confrontations with poise.
And it doesn't seem that this trend is going to reverse any time soon.
But no one wants to acknowledge the insanity of our predicament for
fear of appearing weak and unable to cope.

Maybe an airplane is a microcosm of our social condition. A bunch of
impatient, tense strangers, who would rather be somewhere else doing
something else, packed in an uncomfortable, artificial enclosure with
bad air. There are turbulence, crying kids, and terrorist threats, and
of course weather and technical delays. The only things keeping us all
from descending into chaos are watered-down cocktails, an LCD screen
in front of us, and Sully Sullenberger.

"Why parents hate parenting"

An interesting discussion and lengthy article about why many American couples may not want kids, or aren't happy because of them:

http://nymag.com/news/features/67024/
http://www.kqed.org/epArchive/R201007301000

As a rule, most studies show that mothers are less happy than fathers, that single parents are less happy still, that babies and toddlers are the hardest, and that each successive child produces diminishing returns. ...Robin Simon, a sociologist at Wake Forest University, says parents are more depressed than nonparents no matter what their circumstances—whether they’re single or married, whether they have one child or four.

...all parents spend more time today with their children than they did in 1975, including mothers, in spite of the great rush of women into the American workforce. Today’s married mothers also have less leisure time (5.4 fewer hours per week); 71 percent say they crave more time for themselves (as do 57 percent of married fathers). Yet 85 percent of all parents still—still!—think they don’t spend enough time with their children.

...Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize–winning behavioral economist, who surveyed 909 working Texas women and found that child care ranked sixteenth in pleasurability out of nineteen activities. (Among the endeavors they preferred: preparing food, watching TV, exercising, talking on the phone, napping, shopping, housework.) This result also shows up regularly in relationship research, with children invariably reducing marital satisfaction.

Well that's a bit of a loaded question, since what kind of masochist enjoys child care? They enjoy playing with their kids, showing off their kids, and watching them do cute things, succeed, and grow up. But who would like the maintenance? You may love driving your sports car, but that doesn't mean you like getting dirty to change the brake pads. But personally, I will always prefer napping to anything involving a kid. Also, I'm sure many single or child-less people also wish they had more personal time (I surely do).

LOL:

It was big news last year when the Journal of Happiness Studies published a Scottish paper declaring the opposite was true. “Contrary to much of the literature,” said the introduction, “our results are consistent with an effect of children on life satisfaction that is positive, large and increasing in the number of children.” Alas, the euphoria was short-lived. A few months later, the poor author discovered a coding error in his data, and the publication ran an erratum. “After correcting the problem,”it read,“the main results of the paper no longer hold. The effect of children on the life satisfaction of married individuals is small, often negative, and never statistically significant.”

Any why is this happening?

Before urbanization, children were viewed as economic assets to their parents. If you had a farm, they toiled alongside you to maintain its upkeep; if you had a family business, the kids helped mind the store. But all of this dramatically changed with the moral and technological revolutions of modernity. As we gained in prosperity, childhood came increasingly to be viewed as a protected, privileged time, and once college degrees became essential to getting ahead, children became not only a great expense but subjects to be sculpted, stimulated, instructed, groomed. (Princeton sociologist Viviana Zelizer describes this transformation of a child’s value: “Economically worthless but emotionally priceless.”) [me: raising a kid in the US from age 0 to 18 now costs $250,000 on average] Kids, in short, went from being our staffs to being our bosses. [me: this of course affects parental discipline]

This is especially true in middle- and upper-income families, which are far more apt than their working-class counterparts to see their children as projects to be perfected. (Children of women with bachelor degrees spend almost five hours on “organized activities” per week, as opposed to children of high-school dropouts, who spend two.) Annette Lareau, the sociologist who coined the term “concerted cultivation” to describe the aggressive nurturing of economically advantaged children, puts it this way: “Middle-class parents spend much more time talking to children ...and treating each child’s thought as a special contribution. And this is very tiring work.” Yet it’s work few parents feel that they can in good conscience neglect, says Lareau, “lest they put their children at risk by not giving them every advantage.” [me: isn't that a sad reflection of our competitive, me-first, never-enough society?]

Even more surprisingly, they found that parents’ dissatisfaction only grew the more money they had, even though they had the purchasing power to buy more child care. “And my hypothesis about why this is, in both cases, is the same,” says Twenge. “They become parents later in life. There’s a loss of freedom, a loss of autonomy. It’s totally different from going from your parents’ house to immediately having a baby. Now you know what you’re giving up.” (Or, as a fellow psychologist told Gilbert when he finally got around to having a child: “They’re a huge source of joy, but they turn every other source of joy to shit.”) [me: if only it wasn't so true]
It wouldn’t be a particularly bold inference to say that the longer we put off having kids, the greater our expectations. When people wait to have children, they’re also bringing different sensibilities to the enterprise. They’ve spent their adult lives as professionals, believing there’s a right way and a wrong way of doing things; now they’re applying the same logic to the family-expansion business, and they’re surrounded by a marketplace that only affirms and reinforces this idea. “And what’s confusing about that,” says Alex Barzvi, a professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at NYU medical school, “is that there are a lot of things that parents can do to nurture social and cognitive development. There are right and wrong ways to discipline a child. But you can’t fall into the trap of comparing yourself to others and constantly concluding you’re doing the wrong thing.” 

The only peer-reviewed study that uncontroversially concluded that kids improve parents' happiness was conducted in - you guessed it - Northern Europe.

The researcher, Hans-Peter Kohler, a sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, says he originally studied this question because he was intrigued by the declining fertility rates in Europe. One of the things he noticed is that countries with stronger welfare systems produce more children—and happier parents.

Of course, this should not be a surprise. If you are no longer fretting about spending too little time with your children after they’re born (because you have a year of paid maternity leave), if you’re no longer anxious about finding affordable child care once you go back to work (because the state subsidizes it), if you’re no longer wondering how to pay for your children’s education and health care (because they’re free)—well, it stands to reason that your own mental health would improve. When Kahneman and his colleagues did another version of his survey of working women, this time comparing those in Columbus, Ohio, to those in Rennes, France, the French sample enjoyed child care a good deal more than its American counterpart. “We’ve put all this energy into being perfect parents,” says Judith Warner, author of Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, “instead of political change that would make family life better.”

I'm not so sure about the strong welfare-more children link, because some data suggest the reverse. Birth rates are still quite low in strong social welfare states like Japan and Germany, but also low in poor welfare nations like Russia and Bulgaria. Sometimes people in rich nations decline to have kids not for the stress reasons, but because they're interested in other stuff, especially in their "prime years". They go to graduate school, have busy jobs, travel, buy things, volunteer, and maintain hobbies/friendships/online life. And before they know it, they're 40 and can't conceive even if they wanted to (except for Palin). When teens basically "need" smartphones and laptops to manage their relatively simple lives, us adults have even more chores/distractions, so there's no void/need to fill with a baby. So I suppose the self-centered Western lifestyle can motivate some couples to have kids and others to not. Third World families are bigger partially due to lack of education and access to family planning tools. But they also willingly birth a lot of kids as insurance against infant mortality, but also as a labor source and for material support in old age. A strong pension system precludes the need for many kids to support you.

But it's very true that strong social support makes parenting so much easier, as a previous email described (http://worldaffairs-manwnoname.blogspot.com/2010/01/american-work-family-conflict.html). When European parents don't have to fret about affordable childcare, accessible medical care, maternity leave, and even getting enough time off for a summer vacation, family life is better. Much has been said about the anachronistic US summer vacation for school kids. This was originally meant to free up kids to help their farming and ranching parents with the busy summer season. But of course less than 10% of Yanks currently live on farms, so there is no reason for our summer break to be the longest in the G20, apart from giving underpaid and overstressed public school teachers a break so they don't blow their brains out (but we just end up transferring the stress to parents and day care). So our kids learn less, and are a bigger time burden on their parents, who also work longer hours, spend more time in commute, and have less vacation days than others in the G20. Recipe for problems.

What about a couple's romantic life? You guessed it.

This is another brutal reality about children: They expose the gulf between our fantasies about family and its spikier realities. They also mean parting with an old way of life, one with more freewheeling rhythms and richer opportunities for romance... Healthy relationships definitely make people happier. But children adversely affect relationships. ...Psychologists Lauren Papp and E. Mark Cummings asked 100 long-married couples to spend two weeks meticulously documenting their disagreements. Nearly 40 percent of them were about their kids. “And that 40 percent is merely the number that was explicitly about kids, I’m guessing, right?” This is a former patient of Nachamie’s, an entrepreneur and father of two. “How many other arguments were those couples having because everyone was on a short fuse, or tired, or stressed out?” This man is very frank about the strain his children put on his marriage, especially his firstborn. “I already felt neglected,” he says. “In my mind, anyway. And once we had the kid, it became so pronounced; it went from zero to negative 50. And I was like, I can deal with zero. But not negative 50.”
... The amount of time married parents spend alone together each week: Nine hours today versus twelve in 1975. Bradbury, who was involved in the UCLA study of those 32 families, says the husbands and wives spent less than 10 percent of their home time alone together. “And do you think they were saying, ‘Gee honey, you look lovely. I just wanted to pick up on that fascinating conversation we were having earlier about the Obama administration’? ” he asks. “Nope. They were exhausted and staring at the television.”

A possible silver lining and what it all means for your decision for children:

We know that having kids increases stress/fatigue and reduces happiness/freedom. On the other hand, the married women were less depressed after they’d had kids than their childless peers. And perhaps this is because the study sought to understand not just the moment-to-moment moods of its participants, but more existential matters, like how connected they felt, and how motivated, and how much despair they were in. ...Parents, who live in a clamorous, perpetual-forward-motion machine almost all of the time, seemed to have different answers than their childless cohorts. ...Technically, if parenting makes you unhappy, you should feel better if you’re spared the task of doing it. But if happiness is measured by our own sense of agency and meaning, then noncustodial parents lose. They’re robbed of something that gives purpose and reward.
“When you pause to think what children mean to you, of course they make you feel good,” [Gilbert] says. “The problem is, 95 percent of the time, you’re not thinking about what they mean to you. You’re thinking that you have to take them to piano lessons. So you have to think about which kind of happiness you’ll be consuming most often. Do you want to maximize the one you experience almost all the time”—moment-to-moment happiness—“or the one you experience rarely?”
“I think this boils down to a philosophical question, rather than a psychological one,” says [Cornell psychologist] Gilovich. “Should you value moment-to-moment happiness more than retrospective evaluations of your life?” He says he has no answer for this, but the example he offers suggests a bias. He recalls watching TV with his children at three in the morning when they were sick. “I wouldn’t have said it was too fun at the time,” he says. “But now I look back on it and say, ‘Ah, remember the time we used to wake up and watch cartoons?’ ” The very things that in the moment dampen our moods can later be sources of intense gratification, nostalgia, delight. 

Dan Ariely, who wrote those behavioral economics books on irrationality, studied how people tend to value the exact same item more if they possess it than if they don't and others do. Part of that is egotism, and no one wants to regret what we've already committed to as a good idea at the time. We're so glad that we didn't buy that blue house that turned out to have termites, but we love our beige house even though it has wiring problems. No one wants to admit that having their kid was a mistake, especially to his/her face. But humans err. Maybe having kids was a mistake for many couples out there (post-children divorce rates may suggest that, even though the couples may cite other excuses for their split). But they're trying to make the best of it and derive as much purpose as they can (forget pleasure). They may know deep down it was a mistake, and maybe wish for another crack at life, but in the meantime they want to make something good out of their "mistake", so the sacrifice was not in vain. Like how some families of soldiers needlessly killed in wars of choice still force themselves to believe that their child died a hero to "protect freedom".

No one is saying that people should only engage in activities that are guaranteed to produce 100% satisfaction and zero regret. That's impossible, and makes life boring frankly. But at least for kids, we have to be realistic. For many middle-class Americans, having a kid means decades of stress, fatigue, zero to uninspiring sex, unhappiness, and maybe divorce/poverty. But is that "sacrifice" worth it to gain the special pride, "joy", and nostalgia at the beginning and in the end - if you survive it - that child-less people can never know? For some people, it's a resounding "yes". For others, they have kids without contemplating it, or have kids unplanned. Though to be fair, it's not like we get to have a preview of what our future parental life will be when we're deciding. At best, we can just examine the case studies of our friends and relatives, and see if that type of life would be appealing.

But we also need to temper expectations. We can get some of the benefits of parenthood for a smaller blood sacrifice. So what if we don't dote on our kid 24-7, and he/she doesn't go to Space Camp and Harvard? Even if everyone on our block is doing it, and looks down on us as "bad parents", who cares? The kid probably won't become homeless or Charlie Manson if you skip ballet lessons. As long as there's love, morals, and common sense, no one else needs to "approve" of your parenting methods and limitations. And there's no need to kill yourselves trying to give your kid stuff that he/she may not even need or want. You have a life to live too, and a worn-out parent may be worse for kids than a "less committed" one. Forget about the Joneses, do less, buy less, don't take the promotion if you can't handle the extra workload, and maybe you'll have time to actually enjoy family life. Quality, not quantity. On the other hand, people with kids should realize that they can't perfectly maintain the single or couple life anymore. There's another term in the equation, and each spouse will get less attention now. Yes couples can and should spend time and money on themselves, but obviously if the choice is piano recital or poker game, you have to do the grown-up thing. And loving spouses can't be so demanding and expect their partners to keep off the love handles and do all the little romantic things they did during dating, while also performing well on the job and as a parent. It doesn't mean he loves you less, but now the relationship is different. We give up some stuff to get other stuff. Flexible, realistic, and understanding spouses and parents have a better chance in the minefield of child rearing. Those who "want it all" and won't take no for an answer are setting themselves up for a life of misery and disappointment, which will reflect on their kids as well.

The Chevy Volt: GM's "electric lemon"

"In truth, the first-generation Volt was as good as written off inside G.M., which decided to cut its 2011 production volume to a mere 10,000 units rather than the initial plan for 60,000."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/30/opinion/30neidermeyer.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=G.M.%27s%20electric%20lemon&st=cse

A dismal assessment of the car that is going to "save GM". The author brought up a good point about the Volt's ridiculous cost vs. all the huge government subsidies GM got to develop it. So probably the real cost of a Volt is $24K higher to the consumer/taxpayer (10,000 initial orders for vehicles vs. a 2009 $240M DOE grant to help fund the project, and that doesn't even include the billions of bailout funds given to GM). Plus GM decided to sell the Volt at cost, rather than take a loss as Toyota initially did with the Prius (even a whopping 40% loss in 1997), but are now reaping the rewards, recent safety concerns aside. They wanted to give consumers access and build up a loyal following for its 21st Century flagship vehicle (3rd most popular Toyota model in the US, and most popular in Japan), which GM won't be able to do for its "flagship". Another confounding factor is the government's involvement, since Uncle Sam and the UAW are majority owners of GM. Obama's task force has already concluded that the Volt won't be profitable, but maybe decided to not cut the price in order to make the company look financially healthier in preparation for its upcoming stock offering. Regardless, the first generation Volt is not the answer for America's green transportation needs, or Detroit's Renaissance. And since innovation comes so slowly for Big US Auto (if at all), even a good future Volt will have probably missed the boat vs. better EVs from foreign companies that hit the market faster.

--------

The author makes some good points, but he's also a well-known hater of domestic manufactures (sometimes deservedly, sometimes not). Whether the Volt was worth the government investment in the first place is a good question, but now that the investment is made, criticizing the pricing is a little ridiculous. There have been reports that dealers have been offered $10,000-$20,000 over list from eager buyers, suggesting that it's possible that GM has set the price too *low*. Toyota set the price low for the first generation of Prius because they weren't even sure that there was a market for green cars to begin with. Now that it's been well-established that having the latest, greatest green car gives you the largest car-peen in the neighborhood, there isn't as much need for that. What Chevrolet will need to do to make the Volt and follow-ons successful is not fiddling with the launch model price, but fundamentally making a car that doesn't suck. It's a tall order for GM, for sure, but I really don't think the car will be made or broken based on the pricing of the first 10,000 guinea-pig launch units.

And while the first iteration of the Volt has clearly been overhyped (it won't be the game-changer for GM that it's been touted, nor will likely the second generation be), the technology of the Volt will have to be the game changer if we ever hope to get off of our dependence on oil. For better or worse, electronic cars will probably always be a niche market until somebody deals with the fear auto owners (legitimately or not) have that they will be stranded if the battery ever runs down in the middle of nowhere. The fact that the Volt deals with this fear means it is the first serious attempt at making a true mass-market electronic car, with all the energy and climate impacts that entails. If the Volt fails, I really hope the technological effort expended on it survives on in future models, both at GM and elsewhere.

---------

The Volt was absolute not worth the government investment, especially
when you consider all the other assistance GM has received from
Washington over the years. If Tesla or Toyota got the same support, we
would have gotten much more bang for the buck. Criticizing the price
is not ridiculous. It is one of the most important factors that car
buyers consider (#3 according to Consumer Reports). Just because rich
morons are willing to overpay for Volts in order to be the first on
the block to have one (same thing happened with Tickle-Me Elmos and
Wiis) doesn't mean that car is a bargain or even fairly priced. After
all, many Americans terribly overpaid for real estate during the
housing bubble.

http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/cars/new-cars/news/2010/01/2010-car-brand-perceptions-survey/most-important-factors/brand-perceptions-most-important-factors.htm?EXTKEY=AYAHFP01

Toyota took a loss on the 2nd generation Prius as well, and the
current cost of a new Prius is about the same as a gen. 1 Prius with
inflation adjusted. So they have really gone out of their way to make
the vehicle accessible and generously priced for people. Plus the
Prius is a quality vehicle, and most owners love them. When do you
think the first Volt mass recall will take place? What's the
over-under for May 2011? What tech gains have we enjoyed from the Volt
anyway? Briggs and Stratton have been making portable gas-electric
generators for decades. GM is still waiting on the DOE to invent a
better battery so they can lower the price and increase range for
drivers. And the whole EV market is still struggling with
infrastructure. Plugging in a fast-charging EV to your home may blow
out your local transformer. You will need to call your power company
for a retrofit. There aren't enough public charging stations. Yes
government hasn't been serious about making EVs possible, partly due
to resistance from Detroit, Big Oil, and affiliated
industries/politicians. But there are better solutions out there to
the EV range concern than the Volt's, such as Better Place, already in
a contract with Nissan-Renault in Israel:

http://www.betterplace.com/

Most urban drivers commute less than 40 miles one way, and plenty of
combustion vehicle drivers forget and run out of gas too. People think
SUVs are "safer", but they pollute 40% more (which leads to
respiratory problems) and they have a higher rollover risk. A lot of
the public's fears are unfounded or ignorant, but unfortunately EV
makers still must persuade them if they want their businesses to
succeed.