Justice to End Role in Asset Seizures

It’s been a stunning practice of lawlessness that you thought could not happen in America yet no less than the U.S. Justice Department was behind it. A program meant to cripple drug traffickers (and mob syndicates before that) by encouraging local law enforcement to confiscate their houses, autos, boats and cash and then sharing in the proceeds has gone badly wrong, with local police departments preying on ordinary citizens and using stolen assets to fill holes in their depleted post-2008 budgets.

We told that story in full in “Law Enforcement’s License to Steal” last year, an account that will leave you with another reason to wonder whether those who speak of an emerging “police state” have reason for thinking so. The article recounts how police expand roadside stops for minor or imaginary infractions into auto searches and seizure of whatever was found. Motorists are forced either to sign a waiver that relinquishes ownership of their possessions or else be detained and charged with a felony. Most see no recourse but to move on down the road. If they do try to recover their possessions, they must overcome the reversed norm that they are guilty until they can prove their innocence.

Local police could then contact the Justice Department for “adoption” of a seizure by its Equitable Sharing program, making it a federal matter that trumped whatever state law there might be that prohibited seizures without due process. Equitable Sharing then allowed the cops to keep up to 80% of whatever cash or sold off assets they had grabbed.

It took investigative reports in The New Yorker magazine and The Washington Post as well as pressure from Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) to awaken Eric Holder’s Justice Department to the highway robbery their program had spawned. Justice says it will discontinue its participation in Equitable Sharing.

The question remains whether state and local police units around the country, now addicted to this new source of revenue, will continue on their own, preying on the civilian populace they are sworn to protect.

Abolish the Gas Tax, Says the Journal

Our article of two months ago — Congress Can’t Even Fix the Gas Tax” — made the obvious point that, with our roads and bridges falling into disrepair, the tax on gasoline and diesel should be increased. Not increased, actually — just adjusted for inflation.

Since that article, which treats the subject in greater detail, the price of oil has dropped below $50 a barrel and gasoline is under $2 a gallon in much of the nation. It is the perfect moment to adjust the tax. Senators Bob Corker (R-Tn) and Chris Murphy (D-Ct) have proposed a 6 cents a gallon increase each year for two years, yet the new Republican-controlled Congress, even though safely ensconced in their seats and protected by a full two years until the next election, is too timid to take any action. With next to nothing to be done other than to raise the rate of a tax already in place, we have John Boehner on “60 Minutes” answering Scott Pelli about a gas tax increase with, “we believe that through tax reform” — you know, that tax reform that never happens — “we can find the funds to fund a long-term highway bill”.

The Obama administration is silent on the issue as well. It prefers to get the money from the illusory elimination of “corporate tax loopholes” rather than alienate with a cost increase the middle class it has chosen to champion as its last hurrah.

In effect since 1956, the tax rate was last set at 18.4 cents per gallon of gasoline (24.4 cents for diesel) in 1993 and has not changed since, with the result that inflation has evaporated the buying power of the gas tax to about 11 cents a gallon and 14.5 for diesel. Other factors — Americans use more fuel efficient cars, some of them hybrids, to drive less — reduce the take still more. Anyone driving the interstates these days is likely to come upon long stretches of highway with shifted lanes and concrete barriers but no construction equipment or crews in sight — projects halted for lack of funds in keeping with the Highway Trust Fund (HTF) facing a deficit of an estimated $160 billion over the next decade. Some 70,000 bridges are considered to be “structurally deficient”.

Yet in a week when yet another bridge collapsed (photo), The Wall Street Journal published an editorial titled “Abolish the Gas Tax”, (and just two
One dead in Cincinnati bridge collapse
weeks after publishing an op-ed titled “Top 10 Reasons to Abolish the Corporate Income Tax”). Why not abolish all taxes and see what happens.

The American Society of Civil Engineers in 2013 gave the nation’s roads a near failing grade of “D”and bridges “C+” but the editorial writers call it a “myth” that U.S. roads and bridges are “crumbling”. The “solons” in Congress who would like to fix the tax are called “gougers” set upon ruining U.S. consumers’ “lucky break” of cheap gas. Leave the tax as is, says the WSJ’s own solons and “some projects would merely be delayed, or states and cities would fill the gaps”. Those mere delays are what have led to the nation’s collapsing infrastructure but we are cheered to learn that states and cities are awash in money.

“The 47,714 miles of the interstate highway…system was officially finished in 1992”, so “it is less rational for drivers nationwide to send so many dollars to Washington”. If you can make sense of their apparent beliefe that roads do not need maintenance, then why their other gripe that the HTF has diverted funds to mass transit, light rail, ferries, bike lanes and other modes of transport. Perhaps it’s the word “highway” in the HTF name, but it is not made clear why it is improper to spend on other ways consumers use to get to work.

Such diversions have “increased 38% since 2008” but no data is given about how much of the total fund goes to other transportation purposes. Better to leave the reader fuming that diversions also include “sidewalks, hiking trails, urban planning and even landscaping” than to point out whatever tiny amounts are involved, if at all. It is a confused presentation. “Today, the costs of transportation can be reasonably borne by the people who enjoy the benefits”, the editorial says. Well, yes, that’s what the gas tax is for. Possibly they mean people within states paying for their own roads. To really assure that the nation’s infrastructure falls to pieces, the more doctrinaire Republicans want the entire burden of maintaining roads and bridges to be borne by the states as part of their unending campaign to Balkanize the United States into 50 economically disparate zones. It is a particularly inept application of that doctrine inasmuch as roads do not end at state lines. (“Caution: sudden change in road conditions as you are entering a poorer state”).

The gas and diesel tax may not perfectly correlate to road use but it has the advantage of being in place, and the money is needed right now. Better schemes such as a fee based on vehicle mileage, which would have to be collected directly from vehicle owners, will take years to implement. If Republicans can’t summon the gumption to accomplish something as simple and necessary as marking up the tax to account for inflation, what should we expect when they confront difficult issues over the next two years?

The Climate Deniers: What Are They Saying Now?

“A human role in climate change is acknowledged by every single prominent climate skeptic” admits an article in the conservative Weekly Standard magazine. An op-ed in The Wall Street Journal acknowledges “that carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere have increased due to the burning of fossil fuels, and carbon dioxide in
the atmosphere is a greenhouse gas”. The featured article in the Wall Street Journal‘s weekly “Review” section said climate change is a “settled matter” and that “humans are influencing the climate… due largely to carbon-dioxide emissions from the conventional use of fossil fuels… is no hoax”.

So what’s happening? Are the global warming deniers (who prefer to be thought of as skeptics) throwing in the towel? The answer to that is ‘no’, witness that the titles of those articles were “Climate Cultists”, “…Flat Wrong on Climate Change” and “Climate Science Is Not Settled”.

Nevertheless, the skeptics seemed to have evolved from earlier absolutist positions. But their decades-long campaign to paint global warming, climate change and human involvement in both as a fraud has been so successful that they have left behind broad swaths of the population — and the politicians who pander to them — still believing original doctrine. As recently as this past June the Pew Research Center found that 26% of the public think there is no “solid evidence that the average temperature on Earth has been getting warmer over the past few decades”. Those beliefs hew to partisan lines: 46% of Republicans agreed with that statement compared to 11% of Democrats. Newly crowned Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says, “For everybody who thinks it’s warming, I can find somebody who thinks it isn’t”. Likely seeker of the presidency Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, rejects outright that climate change is caused to a significant degree by human activity. And James Inhofe, the new chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee, which (of all things) oversees the Environmental Protection Agency, famously called global warming “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people”.

He said that back in 2003, however. How about now? In 2012 he published a book with “The Greatest Hoax” in the title and scolded us with, “God is still up there. The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous”.

looking for something else

To combat climate activists, the dissidents devote their energies to finding fault in the research of others. The earnest work by scientists worldwide is met with derision from naysayers who call it a “climate industry” seeking to perpetuate research grants and paychecks.

A recent Journal op-ed was devoted entirely to tracking down and debunking the (multiple, as it turns out) sources of the claim that 97% of scientists believe that climate change is man-made. The notion that warming is caused by variations in the Sun’s energy was another attempt to decouple Man as cause. That claim still crops up despite findings that the variations were not strong enough to account for heat rise.

Or maybe it’s the Earth’s wobble. Texas Representative Steve Stockman was incredulous to learn when questioning a White House official that the Earth’s wobble, which is credited with ending ice ages, was left out of climate computer models. That had to be put to rest in another op-ed, this one in The New York Times, by a NASA scientist who wrote, “The time scales involved are on the order of tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years… we don’t normally include these factors in 100-year climate projections”.

upgrade

Not so easily dismissed by the climate-concerned is the gift that Inhofe’s God gave the skeptics by keeping the temperature comparatively stable over the last dozen-or-so years, a plateau that has put climate scientists
on their back foot, unable to explain it except to theorize that warming has shifted from the atmosphere to ocean depths. This has caused some gloating, as from Journal columnist Holman Jenkins noting how “thoroughly the bottom has fallen out of such efforts directly to link human greenhouse-gas emissions and global average temperature”. The hiatus has even caused some notable skeptics, such as Richard Lindzen and Pat Michaels, to conclude that we’ve already seen most of the temperature rise that is likely, never mind a future of ever-increasing greenhouse gas emissions.

Climate activists are quick to point out that while there may be a plateau, it is a high one. The 2007 report from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had already said that the 1990s was the warmest decade on record. Then came the 21st century, with its first 13 years among the 14 hottest on record. And now the Japanese Meteorological Agency, the first of the four major global temperature recorders to announce,
has said 2014 was the warmest year on record.

finding fault

Conservative media regularly greet with sarcasm the assessments issued every five or six years by the “self-selected scientists” and “self-appointed experts” of the IPCC. The “plateau in global average temperature is the biggest embarrassment for a supposed scientific ‘consensus’ since Piltdown Man”, exults The Weekly Standard. About the “jargon-filled” report the magazine summoned Churchill’s quip that “by its very length, it defends itself against the risk of being read”. Having it both ways, it then chides other media for “generating predictable headlines” based only on the summary rather than those 2,000 pages, which anyway are unimpressive for not being an “original scientific inquiry but a wide-ranging literature review”. The IPCC doesn’t pretend otherwise. The assessments are a peer review of the research of hundreds of scientists over the preceding years.

In May, soon after the final release of the IPCC report, the Obama administration issued its own quadrennial National Climate Assessment which the Journal‘s editorial and opinion page dismissed as

“the only political project grandiose enough for President Obama…playing the old classics of unscientific panic…We have now reached the junkie’s-craving phase of the climate-change story, where bigger and more frequent fixes are necessary to keep alive the euphoria of saving the world” from “droughts, floods, heat waves, torrential rains, wildfires, polar-vortex winters and other indicia of the end of day. Good thing we’ve been building that ark in the backyard”.

models not so super?

As outright denial of a warming planet has become a losing proposition, the dissent has focused on the unreliability of the computer models that project the future rising temperatures. Bias is assumed going in, because, while the models are built by different clusters of climate scientists around the world, all are assumed to be united by a common belief in catastrophic global warming. As proof, the deniers feasted on a trove of e-mails leaked from the University of East Anglia in England a few years ago and found what appeared to be the scandalous cover-up of scientists substituting data that better fit what they hoped to prove.

matching the past

More significantly, the skeptics cite how inaccurate the computer models have been. When actual past data is plugged in, the models have had difficulty replicating what actually happened to the climate in those years. Past models missed the rapid warming of the Arctic in recent decades, for example, but when the models were tweaked to match that rise, the rest of the modeled planet grew too hot compared to what actually happened. “Almost anyone would say the temperature rise seen over the last 35 years is less than the latest round of models suggests should have happened”, according to Carl Mears, the senior research scientist at Remote Sensing Systems, a California firm that analyzes satellite climate readings, quoted in The New York Times.

The climate models depend on how a plethora of data streams from the physical world interact and influence temperature and climate. Reworking the weighting of these influences is derisively called “computer knob-twisting” by the denialists — except that is exactly how one arrives at whether a model has things right. The naysayers at The Weekly Standard warn us that the ability to match the past is no guarantee that a model will correctly foresee the future and they come up with what they call “this startling sentence” in the IPCC report: “The ability of a climate model to make future climate projections cannot be directly evaluated.” Well of curse not; the future hasn’t happened yet. It’s an example of how the obvious is played to sow doubt.

cloud cultists

Those contesting the validity of predictions have hit upon the deficiency of one such input to argue that the models can’t be trusted: their failure to account for clouds. “There remain significant errors in the model simulation of clouds”, the IPCC admits in its most recent report. “It is very likely that these errors contribute significantly to the uncertainties in estimates of cloud feedbacks and consequently in the climate change projections”.

Clouds matter because their brightness — their water vapor — reflects sunlight away from Earth. Indeed, our article on geo-engineering recounted the belief that spraying clouds with salt would make them brighter still, the moisture condensing around the salt to make shiny droplets.

Computer models divide the Earth into a grid with a “virtual weather station” at each corner at which atmospheric variables must be calculated. A typical resolution is a grid with each cell 62 miles to a side (100 kilometers). And the models are 3D — they then divide each cell into layers of atmosphere. Once 10 layers deep, more recent models run to 30 layers.

Tighter resolution than 62-mile squares require much higher computational power for models, which already need plenty of juice. The general rule is that halving the dimension of the cell sides, thus quadrupling the number of cells, increases the computer power needed by a factor of 10.

At any level of resolution, clouds are intermittent and constantly on the move and the weather stations in a model must compute across time how the average temperature and humidity produce a cloud canopy.

Much like atmospheric layers are the oceans, for which the climate models also use 30 layers to try to assess what is happening at different ocean depths.

Together, clouds and oceans make for easy targets for deniers to snipe at and use as proof that their complexity means climate models can never be accurate. Cells 60 miles to a side give a distance such as New York City to Washington, D.C., only four cells, yet weather is not uniform in areas that wide, they can assert. And if the models are not accurate, if they can’t be trusted, they should have no influence on policy.

sensitivity

Climate dissidents have excitedly trumpeted some recent scientific papers that factor in the “plateau” and make the case that the temperature rise could be more gradual than earlier predicted. Whereas we added another 25% to our historic contribution of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere over those 16 years, the temperature rise has been minimal compared to the swift 0.9 degree Fahrenheit climb in Earth’s average surface temperature during the final quarter of the last century. Skeptics have used that anomaly to promote the lowest sensitivity estimates in their debate with whom they deem the “alarmists”, estimates that run to as little as a 2 degree Fahrenheit increase from a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere. What we should therefore focus on, they say, is the climate’s “sensitivity” to carbon dioxide. Emphasis should be to lock down just how much temperature rise occurs per unit of added CO2 and not do anything rash until that is known. It is rather like having been told you have three months to live but then, upon hearing your doctor say it now looks more like six months, deciding the problem’s over, so why not quit taking your meds?

sowing doubt

The climate contrarians do not deal in empirical research. What white papers and studies they do produce are instead critiques and attempts to refute the work of others. That forecasts of more rapid temperature rises did not pan out was an opportunity for condescension in a Journal op-ed that said the doubters might “forgive these modelers if their forecasts had not been so consistently and spectacularly wrong”.

That posture is because their purpose is entirely political; it is to head off any legislation or policy actions that would disrupt the status quo of the hydrocarbon economy and all the wealth it brings. It is notable that the deniers’ new found belief that warming is real but will take longer doesn’t lead them to celebrate the gift of perhaps enough time to head it off. It is a strange phenomenon to watch humans so absorbed in retaining power in government or storing up money in this temporal moment that they seek debating points to ridicule what is so widely thought to be a looming planetary disaster.

After the fault-finding of the Journal article mentioned above, the authors tell us “the science is urgent” but then sagely advise that we “take steps to make climate projections more useful over time” such as a “global climate observation system” that would “generate an ever-lengthening record of more precise observations” with “increasingly powerful computers” to yield “a better understanding of the uncertainties in our models”. That is a political prescription to do nothing while we wait and see — a continuation of the policy of President Bush who for eight wasted years said we needed ever more research.

But Nature has its own timetable and pays us no attention. Whatever it chooses to do, there’s no undo and “no insurance policy in the event we guess wrong” as one Journal letter writer put it.

A Movie Studio? What If It Had Been the National Grid?

A little over a year ago, an unseen enemy bombed transformers and substations, knocked out power lines and injected viruses into computer control systems in an
attempt to take down the entire U.S. power grid. They were disturbingly successful, but the attack didn’t even make the front pages.

That’s because it was a simulation, a war game called Grid Exercise II, successor to a smaller simulation that took place a year earlier, in which close to 10,000 electrical engineers, cyber-security experts and FBI agents took part across the country in a two day battle to ward off everything the red team attackers could think of to throw at them and keep America’s lights on. They came thick and fast. “They were trying to drive their people to saturation,” one participant said. In all, 210 companies participated, including those in Mexico and Canada that are linked into our grid.

The outcome? Tens of millions of notional Americans lost power and were shrouded in darkness; hundreds of transmission lines were destroyed or damaged; seven police, fire and utility workers were figuratively killed when they went to investigate equipment failures and were confronted by simulated attackers still at the sites.

back to reality

Americans are mostly oblivious to the hundreds of daily cyber probes by foreign governments and militaries into our corporations to steal industrial secrets and probe for weaknesses. It is telling that it took hacking into a movie company and exposure of gossipy insider e-mail to spark the public’s interest.

But apart from Sony Pictures’ spineless cave-in to North Korean threats and a willingness to throw free speech into the trash bin, this was just an embarrassing incident compared to what a successful cyber attack against an essential industry could bring.

The most essential of all industries is the national electrical grid of 3,200 utilities that deliver
power over 2.7 million miles of power lines, what Bloomberg/BusinessWeek called “the largest machine in the world”. The interconnections between the nation’s three separate electric systems are such that saboteurs could bring about a coast-to-coast blackout by knocking out just nine of the country’s 55,000 electric-transmission substations — four in the East, three in the West and two in Texas. That was the conclusion of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) last March in an analytical report that when announced was completely ignored by the evening and morning news programs on ABC, CBS, and NBC in favor of the usual trivial fare (a new revelation about Princess Diana, an obituary for a movie-trailer voiceover artist, the latest winter storm, e.g.).

The U.S. has experienced a number of regional outages, most recently from Hurricane Sandy, which left 20 million people without electricity, some for longer than a week. In August 2003 power failed from Detroit to New York, affecting 50 million (not taken all that seriously: there was a festive mood in New York City that night as people left their darkened apartments and crowded the streets and outdoor restaurants).

porous defenses

But compared to an outage caused by a temporary equipment failure, Americans have no conception of the consequences of an attack should it succeed in destroying key components of the grid. Transformers at substations boost the voltage of electricity so it can cover distance. They then reduce the voltage to a level that homes and businesses can use. Many are in remote locations, with cameras and chain-link fences their only protection. If key units among the 2,000 transformers in the U.S. were destroyed, there are only a few U.S. factories that build them — seven, says the Wall Street Journal.

A cyber attack might take the form of Stuxnet, the successful sabotage of Iranian centrifuges assumed to have been by the U.S. and Israel that made them spin out of control. The worm that found its way into the centrifuges manipulated the industrial control devices of the sort that open and close valves, govern speed and temperature, etc. — equipment that is in use throughout industry around the world.

A physical attack might take the form of bombing or the incident — still unsolved it seems — where in April of 2013 shooters opened fire on a California substation and took out 17 large transformers that supplied power to Silicon Valley. It took 27 days to make repairs.

Replacement is another matter. Transformers are custom made, weigh up to 500,000 pounds, and can cost millions. “I can only build 10 units a month,” the general manager of one plant told the Journal reporter.

That means, according to an after-action report from the FERC war game, that if an enemy knew which nine substations to take out, “the entire United States grid would be down for at least 18 months, probably longer”.

worst case

“A cyber Pearl harbor”, said Leon Panetta when still defense secretary, trying to goad the government into preventive action. Actually, it would be far worse.

Darkness would be the least of it. A coordinated strike on the grid would devastate the country. Air traffic control would immediately go blind, with planes aloft having to coordinate with other aircraft on their own in attempting to land. Collisions would be almost inevitable.

Train traffic controls would go blank as well. Energy pipelines would shut down, as would the pumps on which the water supply depends. Cell phone towers would fall silent. We’d lose connection to the Internet and fall into a near total information void with little other than landline phones working.

Bank systems would go dark. Cash would be unavailable at ATMs or at bank counters, where clerks would be unable to see accounts and balances. Credit and debit cards would no longer work. In other words, with few now carrying paper money, people would have no money — for months — and need to barter for food.

Gas and diesel pumps would not work. Trucking would therefore screech to a halt, as would deliveries of that food. People would be unable to commute to work, or would not be of much use once they got there. The economy would collapse.

And very quickly, fear and panic would lead to violence. Imagine this being the condition for 18 months.

That worst case scenario is far-fetched when considered as a physical attack. How unlikely is it that some domestic organization could divine which are the nine substations and launch a coordinated attack across the United States with no prior detection? It is nevertheless important to awaken the public to just how severe any level of disruption would be so that we force action from our so-called leadership.

The cyber threat is another matter, an attack from outside the country. Of Russia, North Korea and China, the most likely transgressor would be China, which already employs software engineers in the thousands to infiltrate American corporations and steal their technology — thefts that are believed to have cost hundreds of billions of dollars in stolen R&D.

That same technological ability to worm into a corporation’s innards could be redirected to sabotage. In February 2013, The New York Times broke the story that American intelligence has known for years that “an overwhelming percentage of the attacks on American corporations, organizations and government agencies originate” from a single building in a non-descript neighborhood of Shanghai and that all indications are that the operation is run by the Chinese army.

ultimate zaps

If hostilities between advanced nations are allowed to intensify in this fractious world, a far worse possibility is a nuclear-tipped missile designed to detonate at high altitude. Interacting with Earth’s magnetic field, it would generate an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) of high amplitude that would play havoc with electrical equipment on the ground.
Major solar flare (lower right)
on Oct. 24, 2014 erupting from the
largest sunspot in 24 years.
Solar flares, too, produce EMPs on Earth from 93 million miles away, and we are in a period of high solar activity. A solar flare took down the electric system in Labrador in the middle 1990’s. A flare with an aurora one “could read a newspaper by” took out most of the telegraph system in the United States in 1859. Experts say if such a flare hit the U.S. today it would take down the grid for about 10 years. In an area struck by an EMP, power lines are turned into generators that overload and burn up high voltage transformers.

So what are we doing about it?

Not much. It might seem that nothing could be done about a solar or nuclear EMP, but in fact transformers can be hardened to withstand such an event. We saw that the utilities are at least imagining what could happen, but we found little to indicate they are taking it upon themselves to install cyber shields and physical fortifications. In America, money and profit are all, and making and keeping are worth courting disaster.

For a disinterested public, it’s a mundane industry taken for granted. Movies and books paint the horror pictures just described, but Americans compartmentalize that as fantasy. So while the populace should be marching on Congress to demand laws, we are silent.

In 2009, President Obama had already called the cyber threat “one of the most serious economic and national security challenges we face as a nation…the very technologies that empower us to create and to build also empower those who would disrupt and destroy”. He would later, in the wake of congressional inaction, only ask industry to set standards for securing their computer networks, offering help from the Department of Homeland Security to better protect critical infrastructure.

That inaction took place in 2012, with nothing done since. Senate bill S 3414 sought to give water facilities and electric utilities incentives to meet cyber-security goals. But this was met with adamant resistance from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — a business lobby that influences campaign contributions — and that led to a Republican filibuster that blocked the bill from becoming law even though compliance would be only voluntary, even though it would be left to businesses to decide for themselves what defensive measures to take, even though taking such measures would indemnify them by law from suits by customers arising from damages of cyber attacks. The chamber warned its corporate sponsors that what is voluntary now would become mandatory — which of course the protection of critical infrastructure should be. Yet Republican senators were persuaded that such requirements impose too great a regulatory burden. So we are witness to the harm of money in politics extending so far as to leave the country existentially vulnerable.