It’s not easy to recover from jet lag. ~ Gael Monfils
I’ve been getting older ever
since my first breath, like every other human.[1]
Except for Benjamin Button. Our aging hopefully has involved numerous jovial,
opportune and exultant times.
Nevertheless, living often includes
a fair amount of lagging, even beyond jet lag. You know, waiting for buses,
trains and airplanes to arrive, waiting for the server to realize you’ve been
seated at one of her/his tables for more than 10 minutes, waiting for the
server to actually communicate with your computer, waiting to know if you got
that job you want. As ever-speedier technologies allow us to receive and
use information more swiftly, we still repeatedly wait for stuff. Even if lags
aren’t announced or you’re not flying on a jet, we live with them all the time.
Instantaneousness is a very rare occurrence.
Lags – intervals of time – happen all too frequently between what we expect or
hope for and what actually occurs. Some of these lags may cause losses of lives
as well. I’ll first talk about lags, and follow with how lives can be affected.
Lags. Some
lags are so pervasive that I don’t really think about them as delays. For
example, a sidereal day, the length of time it takes our Earth to complete one
rotation on its axis is 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4.09 seconds of solar time. It
takes Earth 365 days, 5 hours, 59 minutes and 16 seconds to revolve around the
sun, our yearly orbital period. These lags are simply immutable parts of our lives.
Do I wish I lived on Mercury whose “year” is a speedy 87.97 Earth days? Heaven
forbid, no.
Yet the length of lags that some
actions require to start and be completed usually goes unmentioned, perhaps
purposefully. Here are several examples of variously lengthy lags that can
affect many of us.
11 Month lag. The Dems deservedly touted the passage of
their Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) recently. For once, they cleverly named
this legislation as a solution for one of the public’s largest current worries:
mammoth inflationary price increases for fuel, food and other goods that people
regularly buy. President Biden signed the IRA into law on Aug. 16. That’s 11
months after it was first introduced in the House. That may be quick for Congressional
clocks, but it’s not for most folks.
Like much proposed legislation,
during these months the IRA had a long, roller-coaster ride through various
Congressional committees as well as innumerable transmutations after interactions
with the White House and affected parties like energy producers and consumers (for
the bill’s climate change regulations) and health care patients and the drug industry
(the IRA is also introducing a Drug Price Inflation Cap as well as limiting prices
on a few prescription drug 4 years from now).
Will the IRA soon reduce
inflation? No, the Congressional Budget Office and others have stated this Act
will not significantly affect inflation, despite its title and $777 billion (B)
overall price tag. Like all new legislation the IRA will take a fair amount of
time to actually have any effect on the citizenry. Bureaucracy’s wheels turn
very slowly when creating rules and regulations as I’ll now illustrate.
4 Years. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)
issued new rules on Sep. 6 that are designed to guarantee the independence of aviation
engineers tasked with performing safety oversight on the government’s behalf.
Congress called for the FAA take on this additional responsibility in 2018, when
the first of the 737 Max crashes occurred.
These safety engineers are employed
by Boeing and other aviation firms because the FAA does not have the resources
to place its own staff at airframe manufacturers like Boeing. Such lengthy
rules-setting lags, although never focused on, are always present for Federal,
State as well as local government operations.
10 Years. Another major focus of the IRA is providing $380B
in subsidies to change the nation’s energy investment and infrastructure to
help mitigate climate change. Infrastructure, like building new, much-needed EV
charging stations across the US is essential if EVs are ever to be bought and
operated by hordes of drivers.
Over the next decade, the IRA
will provide $1.7B of tax credits for building EV chargers or other equipment perhaps
in lower-income areas. New infrastructure like this never happens quickly. Let’s
hope the IRA is a bridge to a better place.
Such incentives will be needed; the
average price of an EV sold in the US in July was $66,000. But domestically building more
EVs and its key components (like batteries) to satisfy the IRA requirements will take considerable time.
It’s not yet clear how many more
EVs can actually be produced using the IRA’s incentives that begin next January
because EV demand currently outstrips production capacity. If you’re ordering a
Tesla, its order backlog in July was 504,000 vehicles. Hurray Elon! Tesla has
already abandoned its past practice of estimating specific delivery months for
its EVs. It also increased the price of its cars by up to $10,000 in March. Nasty
Elon!
In a big jump, last year 5.6% of new cars sold in the US were electric. This EV share of new car sales has never been higher. Yet despite EVs’ notable sales growth, they still represent less than 1% of the 250 million cars, SUVs and light-duty trucks on US roadways.
Because of this new demand, the average price of an EV in the US now is 37.4% higher than that of an internal combustion engine (ICE) car and the wait time for actually receiving your EV is measured in multiple months.
Efforts to ramp up domestic EV
production in record-quick time to save the environment will need to account
for challenging lags and realities. There are several causes for concern regarding
production lags for EVs due to potential constraints. First, as a sop to unions’
wishes, the IRA stipulates that federal subsidies will only be provided for EVs
and their components that are made in North America, only if the EV is priced
below specified caps (e.g., sedans’ cap is $55,000) and only if the individual
buyer’s taxable income is less than $150k.
These requirements will reduce
the EV subsidies’ applicability and the number of buyers who can qualify. The
buyers’ income ceiling is probably less of an issue but the domestic manufacturing
restrictions are significant, and troublesome. Such restrictions aim to promote
domestic EV production and more equitable EV ownership, at the cost of higher
EV MSRPs and fewer sales.
An industry spokesperson said no
vehicles will qualify for IRA’s $7,500 EV incentive over the next
few years because of the production restrictions. This statement may be exaggerated,
but these restrictions will certainly reduce EV sales over the next several
years. It’s another case of politics trumping consumer and environmental
interests.
Why? Because inconveniently China
currently controls over 70% of the world’s component supply chain for EVs,
including production of lithium-ion batteries. There is only one lithium mine
operating currently in the US. It produced 1,000 tons of lithium content last
year, representing an inadequate 1% of world production.
New American mines are being
discussed, but it can take over 16 years to initiate actual mine production. These mines require huge amounts of water and space to operate. Water is
already a very scarce commodity, especially in the Western US. Indigenous
peoples, where several of these potential US lithium mines may be located, are
understandably opposed to such development.
In addition, mineral experts say
there may not be enough lithium, a vital ingredient for making EV and other batteries,
to satisfy the increased consumer EV demand, let alone the expected orders of
magnitude surge involved with satisfying California’s new mandate to sell no
ICE cars after 2035. Another 14 states and Washington, DC may also adopt
California’s EV mandate that requires a specified minimum percentage of ZEVs
(zero-emission vehicles) for certain future years that will increase EV demand
big time.
EV battery demand is forecast to
increase at least 25% per year that will require more than 100 additional giga-sized
battery and vehicle factories to be built to keep up with demand during the
next 8 years. This will be a giant challenge. EV battery factories can be erected
in 5 to 7 years, with consistent support and little litigation. Because a lack
of litigation mostly never materializes, construction lags will almost
certainly lengthen.
The IRA’s more than $200B of consumer
subsidies will hopefully benefit the US and its residents in becoming more
productive, greener and thus eventually may check inflation. These federal EV subsidies,
like virtually all others, are expected to be periodically renewed and will
need to last for more than the IRA’s decade of funding, assuming the Dems are
in control. Nevertheless, due to inherent lags for dramatically increasing EV
production, and for consumers to step up and buy them, it will take many years for
them to be broadly provided.
2 months. The second coming of (Charlie) Crist may not
take nearly as long as producing more EV-bound lithium. In Florida’s primary, Crist
recently defeated a progressive Florida Democratic rival. He’ll now be engaged through
November 8 in yet another quest to become Florida’s governor by surmounting
substantial challenges to de-throne Trumpian Gov. Ron DeSantis. Goooo Charlie.
One week. Gasoline prices change rapidly. Fuel prices escalated 47.9% during this past year, which is a big deal except for you EV drivers.
The US nominal retail gasoline
price in July was $5.032/gal., the highest since 2008 when it was “only”
$4.114/gal. In the SF Bay Area, we can’t count that low. The Bay Area gas price
was $6.056/gal. on July 1st, partially due to California’s recently-increased
$0.539/gal. gas tax, the nation’s highest.
Overall, the US local prices
of gasoline are closely tied to the West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude price which varies
daily, as well as the costs of production and distribution. During the last
month the price of WTI crude dropped 11.5%.
Neighborhood gas stations usually
buy their wholesale gasoline once every 3 to 5 days. Many consumers of gasoline
are quite aware of local price differences between stations, helped by the giant
signs displaying the station’s prices, shown below, and by apps like GasBuddy that
has more than 60 million users.
Gasoline pricing thus is
relatively efficient – local retailers quickly modify their prices based on everchanging
wholesale crude petroleum prices. But it’s not symmetric. Falling WTI prices
offer local stations more business profit possibilities than when the WTI is
rising.
Lives. The
Ukrainian War started on Feb. 20, 2022. This war has been turning into a war of
attrition for a while.
The US has provided more than
$13.5B in security assistance to Ukraine for fighting against Putin’s
unprovoked, insidious attack. In addition to this giant financial support, a
key element for ensuring Ukraine’s hopeful victory is finding and training
available Ukrainians into combat-ready troops.
Military losses have been heavy for
both Ukraine and Russia. Rough guestimates for combat deaths are about 9,000
Ukrainians and as many as 25,000 Russians. These deaths require new replacement
troops. Training raw recruits to become capable troops takes time.
Dealing with troop training lags is
thus an essential component for winning wars and saving fighter’s lives. Winning
requires at least adequate basic training as well as additional tactical support.
For Ukrainian solders, they need know how to use new, sophisticated military equipment
provided by the US and allies. Ukrainian soldiers’ training is being conducted
in England and other locations inside and outside Ukraine.
US Army basic training takes about
10 weeks. The Army’s subsequent Advanced Individual Training (AIT) courses can
last an additional 4 weeks to 7 months. AIT courses provide skills needed to
perform a specific Army job, such as field artillery, engineering or medical proficiencies.
US Army Special Forces training for Green Berets and Rangers, its most elite
and capable special operations units, can take up to 63 weeks.
Several weeks. Unsurprisingly, Ukraine and Russia have both shortened
their new troop training time. Conscript standards for both nations have also eased
considerably. New Ukrainian recruits are on average in their 20s and getting
only several weeks of basic training. According to one observer, Russian recruits
are “old, broke and out of shape.” Having only a few weeks of training before
combat is far shorter than US standards mentioned above. Will such obligatory
reductions cause added lost lives for Ukraine’s troops? Here's hoping they keep on breathing through the thick and thin of this war.
[1]
Folks at Dartmouth College estimate that an average human at rest takes
slightly more than 8.4 million breaths each year.
