Forrest for the Trees

In 2010, in his anti-government screed Fed Up!, Rick Perry speculated that the planet was “experiencing a cooling trend.”

It was a ridiculous, nihilistically anti-scientific statement then—one that rested on an abstruse reading of temperature data—and has proved only more absurd since. Last year, 2012, we now know was the hottest year on record for the continental United States, Texas (technically, tied with 1921 due to rounding) and most of Texas’ cities. It was the second hottest year on record for the planet. For the U.S., 2012 was hotter than the previous record year (1998) by 1° Fahrenheit and hotter than average by 3.2°F. The heat was literally off the charts:

For Texans, it may come as some surprise that 2012 torched 2011, with its string of mercilessly dry 100-plus days. State Climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon explains on his blog, “Climate Abyss”:

Everyone remembers the record-setting heat of the summer of 2011.  Harder to remember is that January, February, and December of 2011 were all cooler than normal.  1921 had a near-normal summer, but the cooler half of the year was consistently warmer than normal.  In 2012, the warmth was spread out almost uniformly.  Eleven of twelve months recorded above-normal temperature, with October being the sole exception.

Here’s how Texas cities fared, according to NOAA.

WARMEST YEAR ON RECORD

• Abilene – 3.3F above average
• Amarillo – +4F
• Brownsville – +2.8F
• Corpus Christi – +3.7F
• Dallas – +2.8F
• Del Rio – +2.7F
• Houston – +2.4F
• Lubbock – +2.9F
• Midland – +3.2F

2nd WARMEST

• El Paso – +2.6F

3rd WARMEST

• Austin – +2.3F
• San Antonio – +2.2F

8th WARMEST

• Wichita Falls – +3.1F

How off the charts was 2012?

Just as one small graphic example, here’s a chart of Amarillo’s month-to-month average temperatures from 1948 to 2012. That red line at the top is 2012.

Given the unabated rise in global average temperatures and the lack of any meaningful action on reducing greenhouse gasses and tackling climate change, I think it’s fair to say that we ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

Think America isn’t blasé about gun violence?

Quick: Name the shooter in the movie theater massacre that left 12 dead and 58 wounded in Aurora, Colorado, this summer.

Stumped? It’s James Holmes, he of the orange hair and the Batman obsession.

Shooting rampages have become expected, routine, below the fold. The daily toll of gun-related suicides, homicides and accidental deaths is practically background noise. Only the almost unfathomable savagery—like the murder of 20 children in their Connecticut elementary school—can provoke genuine interest in revisiting gun control and buy the silence of the NRA. In his address at the Newtown interfaith service, President Obama asked, “Are we really prepared to say that we’re powerless in the face of such carnage, that the politics are too hard?” That question remains to be answered. The hideousness of what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary seems to have led to some sincere soul-searching. But our capacity for lamenting, and then tolerating, violence is not encouraging.

The mere suggestion that America has an unhealthy relationship with guns can whip up a storm that swamps the violent act itself. Sports commentator Bob Costas was nearly pilloried for suggesting, during hafltime of an NFL game, that easy access to guns leads to unnecessary deaths.

Quoting sportswriter Jason Whitlock on the murder-suicide of a Kansas City Chiefs linebacker, Costas said, “If Jovan Belcher didn’t possess a gun, he and [Belcher’s 22-year-old Texan girlfriend] Kasandra Perkins would both be alive today.”

Cue the backlash in 3 … 2 … 1. My favorite faux-outrage nugget came from Mark Davis, a Limbaugh wannabe who pens a column for The Dallas Morning News. Davis labeled Costas’ remarks “the usual reflexive scapegoating of an inanimate object, a dodge that always prevents the harder task of recognizing evil and holding people accountable in cases of gun violence.”

No matter that Jovan Belcher can’t be held criminally accountable because he’s dead, having taken his own life with a surprisingly lethal inanimate object. Davis prefers to blame the whole thing on “evil”—some immutable, ineffable force set loose in the world. Hell, he could’ve done it with a kitchen knife. What, are we going to ban Cutco now? The fact is much of the violence in this nation has two constants: men and guns. And I’m not prepared to talk about doing away with men. Yet.

Before Costas even got to his inevitable apology, we heard from another perennial contributor to the nation’s “discussion” about guns: a certain species of hand-wringing liberal, the kind who seems most concerned about inoculating liberalism from charges of being anti-gun. Their line after every mass shooting is that the “gun issue” is “settled.” The other side won (congratulations, NRA!), and there’s no reason to talk about it. Mourn the dead and move on. Thankfully, this group has been virtually silent post-Sandy Hook.

I grew up around guns. I feel comfortable around firearms. I enjoy shooting and view hunting as just a notch below fishing in the hierarchy of manly arts. What I don’t particularly care for is the dominant gun culture, by which I mean the hyper-politicized and anti-social reactionaries who interpret the Second Amendment as a license to kill. I don’t mean just people who own and use guns, but rather those whose social and political identity is centered around firearms. “Gun nuts” would be one term. These are the folks whose first impulse upon Barack Obama’s re-election was to buy more ammo.

But here’s the good news about our seemingly intractable gun problem. The gun culture, and dare I say the NRA, may not have much of a future in this increasingly urban, multiracial nation. Demographically, gun ownership in the United States is concentrated among white conservative rural males; according to a 2005 Gallup survey, one in three whites owns a gun, while only about one in six nonwhites do. Overall gun ownership is dropping too. New York University political scientist Patrick Egan persuasively argues, using long-term data, that “for all the attention given to America’s culture of guns, ownership of firearms is at or near all-time lows.”

But what about those stories about Walmart running out of ammo and Smith & Wesson raking it in? Recently, CNN crunched the numbers and found that fewer Americans own guns than any point in the past 30 years, but those who do are stockpiling more.

I don’t pretend to think this apparent trend solves the problem of a young man murdering young children in a classroom. It doesn’t obviate the need for gun-control legislation. But maybe the NRA’s real problem isn’t that Obama is going to take away all the guns, but that more and more Americans will unilaterally disarm.

Following the Observer‘s reporting on a Texas payday lender’s scheme to circumvent state and local rules meant to protect consumers, state regulators issued a stern warning last week.

My story centered on the Cash Store, an Irving-based payday chain owned by a major GOP donor. In October, I took out a $1,500, 612-percent-APR loan from a Cash Store location in Austin and discovered that the company had engineered a new mutant loan product—one that the company believes isn’t technically a payday loan and, therefore, doesn’t have to follow any of the city or state rules on such loans. The Cash Store is peddling this loan at the four stores we checked in Austin, Houston, Dallas and San Antonio.

Now, the Office of the Consumer Credit Commissioner is warning the payday and title loan industry in Texas away from such schemes.

“Continued use of the practice could result in the Texas Legislature taking adverse action in the upcoming legislative session and could also lead to civil liability on the part of the [business],” the agency wrote in a bulletin posted on its website last week.

The OCCC asserts that the practice “conflicts” with what the Legislature intended when passing two reform bills last session, and lawmakers could view a company’s actions (the bulletin doesn’t mention the Cash Store directly) as “a subterfuge intended to circumvent” the law.

Notably, the agency didn’t challenge the authority of Austin, San Antonio and Dallas to regulate payday lenders in the bulletin. The industry has been up in arms that local leaders have taken matters into their own hands by passing fairly stringent ordinances. Faith leaders, consumer advocates and others have successfully pressed many of the state’s big cities to do what the Legislature has not: Pass measures that attempt to reduce the predatory practices of the state’s booming, virtually unregulated payday and title loan industry. According to documents obtained by the Observer, payday and title companies have been aggressive in pushing OCCC to call off the cities.

Bill White, the chairman of the Texas Finance Commission, which oversees OCCC, instructed credit commissioner Leslie Pettijohn in August 2011 to push back against Austin’s proposed payday ordinance, according to an email. White is notably also a senior executive with Cash America, International, a Fort Worth-based company that operates pawn shops, check-cashing services and payday loans.

“Per Sunday’s Un-American Statesman [sic], the Austin City Council is following Dallas [sic] lead in proposing their own regulation of payday loans,” White wrote to Pettijohn. “Please have your troops inform them that even Austin doesn’t supersede State [sic] law.”

Pettijohn wrote back: “We have reached out to the City Attorney’s office trying to educate and inform.” (Austin passed an ordinance restricting how much payday and title lenders can loan consumers last year.)

Earlier that summer, White wrote to Pettijohn that the Dallas ordinance “overreached into OCCC territory.”

This echoed almost precisely the stance of the Consumer Service Alliance of Texas, the industry association representing the majority of payday and title businesses in Texas.

In a July 2011 email from Alex Vaughn, Cash America’s vice-president of governmental affairs, to Finance Commission Vice-Chair Paul Plunket, Vaughn wrote, “The industry believes the city [of Dallas] has over reached and intends to take the issue to court. We also believe it is under the preview [sic] of the OCCC…”

That email also includes a detailed run-down of the industry association’s media, legislative and legal strategies to attack the Dallas ordinance.

Pettijohn, the email stated, “is trying to decide what approach to take directly with the city concerning enforcement of the ordinance. In the past, depending on the ordinance, the Commissioner has taken a hard line with the respective city and informed them they had no authority to do what they planned to do and would receive no assistance from her office. In other instances, she has offered to cooperate on enforcement and data collection issues to alleviate possible duplication of effort. Obviously we we would prefer to do everything we can to assist her with her department’s independent legal analysis of the issues involved.”

Having failed to convince Austin, Dallas and San Antonio to drop their ordinances—all three city councils overwhelmingly approved measures to restrict payday and title lenders—the industry may be turning to the Legislature in 2013. The Legislature could, for example, decide to pass its own weaker reform package “pre-empting” what the cities have done. According to Pettijohn’s handwritten notes of a January meeting between her and CSAT head Rob Norcross, Pettijohn lists three “things we can work out.” The second one is an “agreement on preemption language for 2013.”

Austin City Councilman Bill Spelman says his best guess is that the industry will try to persuade the Legislature to pass weak legislation and then claim it preempts the more progressive efforts of the cities.

How’s the great free-market experiment into electricity deregulation going? Not all that great for the average Texan, according to a report released today that takes a year-by-year look at how deregulation has unfolded since its implementation in 2002.

The report, released by the Texas Coalition for Affordable Power, finds that Texans have paid an extra $10.4 billion for electricity under deregulation. That’s largely because of a huge run-up in electric rates between 2005 and 2008, when natural gas prices skyrocketed.

Of the states that have deregulated their electricity markets, Texas is about in the middle of the pack in terms of price increases, about 48 percent for residential ratepayers since 1999.

In the past two years, electric rates in Texas have dipped below the national average.

On its face that would seem to be a vindication of deregulation and the competitive forces it’s supposed to unleash. But, there’s a control in this experiment: city-owned utilities like Austin Energy and CPS Energy in San Antonio, and rural electric cooperatives and investor-owned utilities, are still regulated. Comparing prices among deregulated retail electric providers to regulated utilities yields the finding that prices rose faster in “competitive,” deregulated markets.

“Price increases for natural gas are not sufficient to completely explain jumps in electricity costs under deregulation,” the report claims.

 

You can also compare Texas to our neighbors. Here too we see that electricity prices here have outstripped adjacent states.

While natural gas continues to be the main driver of electric rates in Texas, recent decisions by the Texas Public Utility Commission may come to matter more in the years ahead. The report nicely captures a classic dynamic of corporations in a deregulated marketplace: They tend to cheerlead for “competition” until it affects the bottom line. And often regulators bow to the demands of the powerful.

“Major generation companies like NRG and Luminant combined to clamor for regulatory intervention, complaining that the market was not producing sufficiently high prices to support new investment,” the report states. “This was in contrast to the industry’s earlier warnings against market intervention, back when prices were sky high.”

One of the unforeseen consequences of deregulation is the lack of investment in new power plants. With little new generation coming online amid soaring demand, the PUC has been scrambling to avoid future blackouts, like happened in February 2011 and were narrowly avoided during the intense summer heat that year.

Earlier this year, the three PUC commissioners, all appointed by Rick Perry, voted to lift the cap on wholesale prices from $3,000 per megawatt-hour to $4,500. The cap is set to rise incrementally over the next few years, hitting $9,000 in 2015. Even before these increases, Texas allowed the highest wholesale prices of any state. “The Commission engaged in very title public deliberation of the potential bill impact on Texas consumers,” the report asserts, “despite very public concerns raised by the editorial boards of major newspapers and several state representatives.”

To date, the PUC has failed to do any substantial analysis of how much Texans’ light bills will go up.