There are a lot of ludicrously terrible government laws, regulations and policies across all the domains of life. My Covid posts have covered quite a lot of them.
Is there a clear action that an individual can take to help support efforts here? Or, if there's not yet, can I request that you keep us in-the-loop if such efforts arise in the future? I would happily volunteer my time/money if it could be well-used.
I'll definitely keep people in the loop. The obvious first steps for regular individuals are you can spread the word, and you can in particular write to your congressperson and senators and encourage others to do the same. That's standard 'help get it done.' In terms of more serious volunteer work, nothing on that level yet, and I'd want to respect your time and make sure it was well-used.
Zvi -- if you're not already familiar with Colin Grabow's work on the Dredge Act and the Jones Act over at Cato, beyond the "Welcome to New Critics" piece, you'd find an *extremely* dedicated ally in him, one who already knows a *lot* about why various political actors are or aren't willing to pull the levers on this issue. I briefly worked with him on the political aspect of these issues and he is always looking for more interesting, smart people with new angles on the topics. He's done a lot of thinking about alternatives, ways to signal appreciation of the existing values and priorities encoded in the laws, and ways to fix the worst aspects if straight repeal is off the table -- but he's also done a lot of work on who the critical actors are whose approval/disapproval could actually lead to things happening. (The third piece of legislation here in the unholy trifecta of Jones Act/Foreign Dredge Act, btw, is the law that prohibits cruise ships from stopping at multiple American ports in a row unless they're built in the U.S. -- which is even more ridiculous than either of the previous two since the U.S. hasn't build a cruise ship since the *1950s.*)
I think I had heard about the cruise ship one but I'd totally forgotten. And yes, that does seem like an even stupider rule, although obviously many orders of magnitude smaller in magnitude since all we're doing is missing out on cruises rather than crippling the whole economy. Every little bit always helps though.
And good note on Grabow. I reached out to a few people but not him yet.
Definitely much less bad. My favorite point Grabow makes about the Jones Act is its effect on I-95, which is a really horrifying highway primarily due to the presence of thousands of 18-wheelers -- which would vanish in a heartbeat, also having very salutory anti-pollution effects, if those goods could be sent down the East Coast by ship.
The section on current dredging ROI seems to somewhat refute the section on why we're not building more American dredges: building a ship costs 3-5x more against 7+x value returned.
You mentioned assuming that American dredging contracts cost 2x. If that's the case, the cost seems artificially depressed, possibly for interesting reasons? If that's not the case, the margins seem healthy enough for the dredging oligopoly to pump out ships as quickly as possible even in against the risk of Dredge Act repeal.
Your post implies some interesting questions about the supply side of the equation. Thanks for the run-down and call to action!
How do you square this claim: “If we presume … that the dredging market overseas is competitive (which by all reports it is)” with this statement “ 90% of global dredging contracts are currently won by one of four Belgian and Dutch dredging companies”? Seems like if 90% of the market is controlled by 4 companies, and there’s major barriers to entry (upfront costs) that this market is quite uncompetitive.
Oligopolies vary wildly - there are definitely places where there are 4 firms with 90% combined market share that are super competitive. There are others where it isn't. From what I have seen, this is one of the competitive ones, but I don't have extensive detailed knowledge so it's possible that is not true, and increased competition wouldn't have an in-context major impact on price. It would presumably have some, but in context even ~25% cut wouldn't change the calculus that much.
The capacity to engage in rent-collection doesn't always mean that the monopolist will chose to take the actions to collect those rents- it just means that they could if they tried. I could tell you how often you get one versus the other, but extracting monopoly rents usually pisses off your customers and makes you vulnerable to competition. But sitting on your monopoly, acting mostly like you would in a competative market, and keepig your customers happy with you is a great way to get small but long-term supernormal profits.
Think of the old 1st generation of the Mara/Rooney/Hunt families running an NFL that would go out of their way to do right by their fans, screw over their players, and collect a tidy extranormal profit. Most of their fans though pretty well of them. Now think of the modern NFL, where the average fan wouldn't piss on the leauge if it was on fire. They sure are collecting larger extranormal profits, but they are burning through a lot of goodwill and I don't think it can last.
I am kind of skeptical (unless maybe it's 'play a game with a lot of concussions') that the things that are pissing off NFL fans and burning long-term goodwill are the things that are enabling the extra profits?
Thursday night games and London games are my big gripe because they sacrifice complete balance but make a ton of money. My other gripes are like you say- own goals that don't make any money
I think before you jump down this rabbit hole you should investigate how incredibly difficult it is to get a permit to dredge from the Army Corps of Engineers. Once you do that you'll probably discover (A) the true barrier to dredging, and (B) the true reason why nobody's building super new awesome dredges in the USA. You're very likely not only barking up the wrong tree, the tree you're barking up is a bush under the bigger tree for a reason.
Certainly plausible this is another big problem, that would be unsurprising. I'll look closer. Even if true and the supply of permits is fixed this is still at least hundreds of millions a year directly and billions indirectly (through getting finished faster) at a bare minimum, but obviously it would be a lot less exciting. And then there are the emergencies, like what happened with the Mississippi, where I presume it's different.
Also, if you have multiple problems in logistics, you have to start somewhere. Otherwise everyone points at everyone else and nothing ever happens.
The last part of the Lee bill is most likely related to NEPA - in various situations courts have required alternatives considered to include things that an agency can’t do or that even might require legislative action and therefore vacated the “Record of Decision” that says “go ahead”.
I continue to be confused exactly what it means to 'consider' an action? E.g. if something has to be considered that couldn't be done without a law, I should still be about to 'consider' it without a law, right? But interested in more sources / detail I can read up on concerning exactly how the NEPA problems work (and also on everything else of course).
It gets convoluted,and I used shorthand which doesn't help since I conflated consider/analyze. But in short an agency must consider AND analyze various alternatives under the statute and regulations. Agencies will often consider and analyze a range of alternatives including a "no action alternative". There is often another category that they started adding to their documentation, generally because of court decisions, called "considered but not analyzed fully" where they briefly cover some alternative approach and why it didn't merit review to the level of everything else. At times, there have been lower court decisions where agencies have had their Record of Decision invalidated because the underlying EIS didn't either call out the consideration and/or include in depth analysis.
You can go down a major rabbit hole here, and depending on depth of interest different resources may be better or worse. Happy to have a conversation and point you in some directions if that helps. This CRS is a good basic primer though:https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/RL33152.html
You can safely disregard that it's older since not much has changed and newer documents can confuse matters by discussing the Trump regulatory changes... The confusion stems from regs being promulgated but they didn't take effect until very end of the Administration, so Biden's team put them on hold. However, if you look at the rules currently in the Code of Federal Regulations you'll see the "new" regs that aren't actually being used...
I sincerely wish I had no cause to know all of this.
Drop me an email, sounds like we should talk. I want a better understanding of exactly how these things work, as much as you quite reasonably wish you didn't have such an understanding.
I’ve not written it yet, but I believe a bigger but similar problem exists with regard to NEPA, that I’ve been meaning to try and summarize. There is a lot out there laying out the issues, but I think the unexplored space is looking at economic impacts of the process particularly as it would compare to somewhere like France, Australia, or Canada. The primary difference is lawsuits and private cause of action, and I imagine the GDP drag is quite large since it touches almost everything.
One other note, for context on this issue: related to the Jones Act and the Dredge Act - currently there are some exceptions to crewing and flagging requirements written into law for the offshore energy industries. Even right now, what would in effect be a repeal, has passed the House as part of a Coast Guard bill and the relevant Senate Committee is thinking about adding similar language.
This would be actually be going the other direction, have major economic disruption costs, and meaningfully impact emissions in a negative way - Gulf oil and gas is among the lowest emissions intensity in the world and even more relevant, it would delay offshore wind projects in the near term while increasing their costs permanently term, slowing deployment.
The extent to which left-wing objections to physical projects systematically lead to higher carbon emissions is astounding. At this point I'm just impressed. They seem to prioritize going after things that are helping - and the Moral Ambiguity framework explains why.
Agreed that NEPA is a huge issue, but that is not something that one does not seem tractable in the same way especially under the current administration. On my long-term radar? Near the top actually. But I don't see a short-term path.
I agree with you but have a slim hope that folks who want to lower emissions will eventually realize the path to do so includes legislative changes to NEPA. And, since the loudest climate folks ALSO tend to be the ones who are against touching NEPA, maybe some day that alliance cleaves apart enough to get something done?
Even if the probability of success is quite low, the expected value should be very very high.
Oh god, the Jones Act shit has essentially killed offshore wind in the US before it can begin. We’re using cranes on *barges* to transfer incredibly specialized, expensive equipment from shore to the installation ship, which they are not designed for and is very dangerous. Or we’re basing projects in MA and NJ out of *Halifax.* Don’t worry, though, we’ll have exactly one American-made installation vessel... in a year or three.
Wow, that... actually does not surprise me at all given everything else. I mean, at this point I'm saying this to everyone, basically, but - links! documentation! details! Or, even on the meta level (this goes out to everyone) help on how to gather such information efficiently. If one can demonstrate that this in particular is that bad it seems plausible one could at least press for a waiver for offshore wind projects.
I think that basing your count of the total dredge workers on the BLS data is causing a drastic undercount. I operate a tug boat company. We move dredge equipment around and otherwise support dredge operations. My rough guess of the total number of workers is an order of magnitude larger. They are probably just classified as some form of manual labor in BLS data. Dredge operators are not known for their paperwork skills.
Regardless, I think your points about the size of the workforce relative to the total workforce and potential benefits are correct even with a more accurate number.
The CPB could really use a division that produced a "consumer impact score" for proposed and existing legislation. An approach like that could unify both free marketers and those concerned about big corporate interests.
This strategy would resemble OMB/CBO roles that emerged originally as a tool by budget hawks, but became entrenched and bipartisan. The functions endured because it was indefensible to say we don't want to even know the impact of proposed policies (or more because both sides love a cudgel they can use to attack the other side's proposals).
There are lots of "total cost" studies for tariffs, this wouldn't require inventing new methodologies.
It wouldn't solve for the Jones Act or the Dredge Act directly, but it's a bit of a Nomic[1] strategy--it changes the moves in the game. The change would (somewhat) increase headwinds for a whole series of problems related to the concentrated benefits + distributed costs problem.
Since it addresses fundamental conditions at the meta level, it could probably avoid the unified opposition that emerges on individual policies at the object-level.
Is there a clear action that an individual can take to help support efforts here? Or, if there's not yet, can I request that you keep us in-the-loop if such efforts arise in the future? I would happily volunteer my time/money if it could be well-used.
I'll definitely keep people in the loop. The obvious first steps for regular individuals are you can spread the word, and you can in particular write to your congressperson and senators and encourage others to do the same. That's standard 'help get it done.' In terms of more serious volunteer work, nothing on that level yet, and I'd want to respect your time and make sure it was well-used.
Zvi -- if you're not already familiar with Colin Grabow's work on the Dredge Act and the Jones Act over at Cato, beyond the "Welcome to New Critics" piece, you'd find an *extremely* dedicated ally in him, one who already knows a *lot* about why various political actors are or aren't willing to pull the levers on this issue. I briefly worked with him on the political aspect of these issues and he is always looking for more interesting, smart people with new angles on the topics. He's done a lot of thinking about alternatives, ways to signal appreciation of the existing values and priorities encoded in the laws, and ways to fix the worst aspects if straight repeal is off the table -- but he's also done a lot of work on who the critical actors are whose approval/disapproval could actually lead to things happening. (The third piece of legislation here in the unholy trifecta of Jones Act/Foreign Dredge Act, btw, is the law that prohibits cruise ships from stopping at multiple American ports in a row unless they're built in the U.S. -- which is even more ridiculous than either of the previous two since the U.S. hasn't build a cruise ship since the *1950s.*)
I think I had heard about the cruise ship one but I'd totally forgotten. And yes, that does seem like an even stupider rule, although obviously many orders of magnitude smaller in magnitude since all we're doing is missing out on cruises rather than crippling the whole economy. Every little bit always helps though.
And good note on Grabow. I reached out to a few people but not him yet.
Definitely much less bad. My favorite point Grabow makes about the Jones Act is its effect on I-95, which is a really horrifying highway primarily due to the presence of thousands of 18-wheelers -- which would vanish in a heartbeat, also having very salutory anti-pollution effects, if those goods could be sent down the East Coast by ship.
Colin is very knowledgeable here and an excellent resource, so I’ll second that.
The section on current dredging ROI seems to somewhat refute the section on why we're not building more American dredges: building a ship costs 3-5x more against 7+x value returned.
You mentioned assuming that American dredging contracts cost 2x. If that's the case, the cost seems artificially depressed, possibly for interesting reasons? If that's not the case, the margins seem healthy enough for the dredging oligopoly to pump out ships as quickly as possible even in against the risk of Dredge Act repeal.
Your post implies some interesting questions about the supply side of the equation. Thanks for the run-down and call to action!
How do you square this claim: “If we presume … that the dredging market overseas is competitive (which by all reports it is)” with this statement “ 90% of global dredging contracts are currently won by one of four Belgian and Dutch dredging companies”? Seems like if 90% of the market is controlled by 4 companies, and there’s major barriers to entry (upfront costs) that this market is quite uncompetitive.
Oligopolies vary wildly - there are definitely places where there are 4 firms with 90% combined market share that are super competitive. There are others where it isn't. From what I have seen, this is one of the competitive ones, but I don't have extensive detailed knowledge so it's possible that is not true, and increased competition wouldn't have an in-context major impact on price. It would presumably have some, but in context even ~25% cut wouldn't change the calculus that much.
The capacity to engage in rent-collection doesn't always mean that the monopolist will chose to take the actions to collect those rents- it just means that they could if they tried. I could tell you how often you get one versus the other, but extracting monopoly rents usually pisses off your customers and makes you vulnerable to competition. But sitting on your monopoly, acting mostly like you would in a competative market, and keepig your customers happy with you is a great way to get small but long-term supernormal profits.
Think of the old 1st generation of the Mara/Rooney/Hunt families running an NFL that would go out of their way to do right by their fans, screw over their players, and collect a tidy extranormal profit. Most of their fans though pretty well of them. Now think of the modern NFL, where the average fan wouldn't piss on the leauge if it was on fire. They sure are collecting larger extranormal profits, but they are burning through a lot of goodwill and I don't think it can last.
I am kind of skeptical (unless maybe it's 'play a game with a lot of concussions') that the things that are pissing off NFL fans and burning long-term goodwill are the things that are enabling the extra profits?
Thursday night games and London games are my big gripe because they sacrifice complete balance but make a ton of money. My other gripes are like you say- own goals that don't make any money
London games are vainglory, I doubt they're getting much out of them given it's not catching on. Thursday night as a gambler I very much appreciated.
I think before you jump down this rabbit hole you should investigate how incredibly difficult it is to get a permit to dredge from the Army Corps of Engineers. Once you do that you'll probably discover (A) the true barrier to dredging, and (B) the true reason why nobody's building super new awesome dredges in the USA. You're very likely not only barking up the wrong tree, the tree you're barking up is a bush under the bigger tree for a reason.
Certainly plausible this is another big problem, that would be unsurprising. I'll look closer. Even if true and the supply of permits is fixed this is still at least hundreds of millions a year directly and billions indirectly (through getting finished faster) at a bare minimum, but obviously it would be a lot less exciting. And then there are the emergencies, like what happened with the Mississippi, where I presume it's different.
Also, if you have multiple problems in logistics, you have to start somewhere. Otherwise everyone points at everyone else and nothing ever happens.
But again, good note. I'll check it out.
The last part of the Lee bill is most likely related to NEPA - in various situations courts have required alternatives considered to include things that an agency can’t do or that even might require legislative action and therefore vacated the “Record of Decision” that says “go ahead”.
I continue to be confused exactly what it means to 'consider' an action? E.g. if something has to be considered that couldn't be done without a law, I should still be about to 'consider' it without a law, right? But interested in more sources / detail I can read up on concerning exactly how the NEPA problems work (and also on everything else of course).
It gets convoluted,and I used shorthand which doesn't help since I conflated consider/analyze. But in short an agency must consider AND analyze various alternatives under the statute and regulations. Agencies will often consider and analyze a range of alternatives including a "no action alternative". There is often another category that they started adding to their documentation, generally because of court decisions, called "considered but not analyzed fully" where they briefly cover some alternative approach and why it didn't merit review to the level of everything else. At times, there have been lower court decisions where agencies have had their Record of Decision invalidated because the underlying EIS didn't either call out the consideration and/or include in depth analysis.
You can go down a major rabbit hole here, and depending on depth of interest different resources may be better or worse. Happy to have a conversation and point you in some directions if that helps. This CRS is a good basic primer though:https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/RL33152.html
You can safely disregard that it's older since not much has changed and newer documents can confuse matters by discussing the Trump regulatory changes... The confusion stems from regs being promulgated but they didn't take effect until very end of the Administration, so Biden's team put them on hold. However, if you look at the rules currently in the Code of Federal Regulations you'll see the "new" regs that aren't actually being used...
I sincerely wish I had no cause to know all of this.
Drop me an email, sounds like we should talk. I want a better understanding of exactly how these things work, as much as you quite reasonably wish you didn't have such an understanding.
I’ve not written it yet, but I believe a bigger but similar problem exists with regard to NEPA, that I’ve been meaning to try and summarize. There is a lot out there laying out the issues, but I think the unexplored space is looking at economic impacts of the process particularly as it would compare to somewhere like France, Australia, or Canada. The primary difference is lawsuits and private cause of action, and I imagine the GDP drag is quite large since it touches almost everything.
One other note, for context on this issue: related to the Jones Act and the Dredge Act - currently there are some exceptions to crewing and flagging requirements written into law for the offshore energy industries. Even right now, what would in effect be a repeal, has passed the House as part of a Coast Guard bill and the relevant Senate Committee is thinking about adding similar language.
This would be actually be going the other direction, have major economic disruption costs, and meaningfully impact emissions in a negative way - Gulf oil and gas is among the lowest emissions intensity in the world and even more relevant, it would delay offshore wind projects in the near term while increasing their costs permanently term, slowing deployment.
Yay.
The extent to which left-wing objections to physical projects systematically lead to higher carbon emissions is astounding. At this point I'm just impressed. They seem to prioritize going after things that are helping - and the Moral Ambiguity framework explains why.
Agreed that NEPA is a huge issue, but that is not something that one does not seem tractable in the same way especially under the current administration. On my long-term radar? Near the top actually. But I don't see a short-term path.
I agree with you but have a slim hope that folks who want to lower emissions will eventually realize the path to do so includes legislative changes to NEPA. And, since the loudest climate folks ALSO tend to be the ones who are against touching NEPA, maybe some day that alliance cleaves apart enough to get something done?
Even if the probability of success is quite low, the expected value should be very very high.
Oh god, the Jones Act shit has essentially killed offshore wind in the US before it can begin. We’re using cranes on *barges* to transfer incredibly specialized, expensive equipment from shore to the installation ship, which they are not designed for and is very dangerous. Or we’re basing projects in MA and NJ out of *Halifax.* Don’t worry, though, we’ll have exactly one American-made installation vessel... in a year or three.
Wow, that... actually does not surprise me at all given everything else. I mean, at this point I'm saying this to everyone, basically, but - links! documentation! details! Or, even on the meta level (this goes out to everyone) help on how to gather such information efficiently. If one can demonstrate that this in particular is that bad it seems plausible one could at least press for a waiver for offshore wind projects.
That’s one of the things I was working on with Colin last year!
https://www.cato.org/blog/maritime-protectionism-raises-cost-offshore-wind
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/07/business/energy-environment/offshore-wind-biden-climate-change.html
https://www.cato.org/commentary/jones-act-inflicts-costly-burden-us-offshore-wind
https://www.powermag.com/how-the-offshore-wind-energy-industry-can-overcome-the-jones-act/
https://www.hatch.com/en/About-Us/Publications/Technical-Papers/2019/05/Jones-Act-Externalities-To-US-Offshore-Wind-Development
https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/jones-act-burden-america-can-no-longer-bear
What's best way to reach out to him? (You can always DM me on Twitter or LessWrong if you need to tell me privately)
DM’ed on Twitter.
I think that basing your count of the total dredge workers on the BLS data is causing a drastic undercount. I operate a tug boat company. We move dredge equipment around and otherwise support dredge operations. My rough guess of the total number of workers is an order of magnitude larger. They are probably just classified as some form of manual labor in BLS data. Dredge operators are not known for their paperwork skills.
Regardless, I think your points about the size of the workforce relative to the total workforce and potential benefits are correct even with a more accurate number.
Another possible strategy:
The CPB could really use a division that produced a "consumer impact score" for proposed and existing legislation. An approach like that could unify both free marketers and those concerned about big corporate interests.
This strategy would resemble OMB/CBO roles that emerged originally as a tool by budget hawks, but became entrenched and bipartisan. The functions endured because it was indefensible to say we don't want to even know the impact of proposed policies (or more because both sides love a cudgel they can use to attack the other side's proposals).
There are lots of "total cost" studies for tariffs, this wouldn't require inventing new methodologies.
It wouldn't solve for the Jones Act or the Dredge Act directly, but it's a bit of a Nomic[1] strategy--it changes the moves in the game. The change would (somewhat) increase headwinds for a whole series of problems related to the concentrated benefits + distributed costs problem.
Since it addresses fundamental conditions at the meta level, it could probably avoid the unified opposition that emerges on individual policies at the object-level.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic