Jack Lessenberry Essays and Interviews

Essay: Seaway Anniversary - 7.8.09

Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry is thinking about the birthday of the Saint Lawrence Seaway…

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You probably haven’t heard much about this, since Michael Jackson is still dead. But this summer is the 50th anniversary of something that has been both a great benefit and an environmental nightmare: The St. Lawrence Seaway. We don’t often think about it, but we should, because a couple of major decisions need to be made that will strongly affect our future, and that of the Seaway.

The bottom line is that the Seaway never lived up to its promise of being a passageway to economic growth. That’s not to say that it didn’t add something; it did, but never as much as promised.

However, the St. Lawrence Seaway also did something terrible that wasn’t foreseen at all. It led to the introduction of at least 57 invasive species into the Great Lakes, which have done horrible damage and changed the lakes ecology forever.

The most famous of these are the now-ubiquitous zebra mussels, which have clogged and choked water pipes and drains throughout the Great Lakes. There are also junk fish like the round goby, which drive out native fish species, and many other parasites, like the virus that causes fish to bleed to death.

In a way, it is unfair to blame the Seaway for invasive species; we have only ourselves to blame. We discovered early on that these things were coming over in the ballast water of ocean-going ships. Pretty much all we needed to do was insist they meticulously flush their ballast tanks before entering the seaway. Former State Senate Majority Leader Ken Sikkema had an even better idea: Make the ships add chlorine to their ballast water.

But environmentalists opposed Sikkema’s idea, and lobbyists didn’t want to make commerce any more expensive. Ships‘ ballast water was exempted from regulation by the Clean Water Act of 1972. Later, when Congress passed laws requiring ships to flush their ballast tanks, those laws weren‘t enforced by the Coast Guard.

The result was an ecological nightmare.

Ironically, the St. Lawrence Seaway never lived up to its economic potential either. When it was formally opened, it was heralded as one of the wonders of the world. It was expected to carry 50 million tons of cargo each year. But that never happened.

Thirty years ago, traffic on the seaway peaked at 23 million tons -- less than half that. Since then, traffic has dwindled. Nowadays, less than 10 million tons a year pass through the locks. True, the seaway did help the Midwest join the global economy.

But it could be carrying a lot more cargo. Marcy Kaptur, the longtime congresswoman from Toledo, thinks she has an answer. Modern oceangoing ships are bigger than in 1959 -- many just too big for the Seaway. She’d like to see our government and Canada’s spend billions to widen and deepen the locks.

That’s a proposal worth examining, but only if there is ample evidence it would pay off. And nobody should support any Seaway bill that doesn’t add strong new measures against invasive species. The Great Lakes are the most important source of fresh water this nation has. If we ruin them, we will be finished.

Let’s try not to forget that.

Essay: Emissions Standards - 5.20.09

Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry shares his thoughts on the new fuel efficiency and emissions standards that were announced by President Obama yesterday...

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President Obama has made it official: The government is going to require fuel efficiency and emissions standards for cars that are far higher than anyone could have imagined only a few years ago.

Current standards require new cars to average 27.5 miles per gallon; trucks have to get 23 miles a gallon. But here’s what those figures will be just seven years from now: Cars will have to average 39 miles per gallon. Trucks will have to get 30 miles per gallon.

I have never even driven a car, other than a hybrid, which got that kind of mileage. But that is going to be the required standard, less than seven years from now. For years, the automakers have fought savagely against increased mileage standards.

Their bulldog on Capitol Hill was Congressman John Dingell, Detroit’s human truck, as they called him. He’s been in Washington and on guard for the automobile industry since 1955.

Yesterday, here’s what he had to say about the agreement: “This is a remarkable environmental and national security accomplishment in an era that requires aggressive action to combat global warming and free our nation from foreign oil.”

Six months ago, if you showed me those words, I would have thought they came from Ralph Nader, or Greenpeace.

So - why does everyone all of a sudden think these drastically heightened fuel economy standards are a good idea? For a number of reasons, perhaps the biggest of which is that it doesn’t make any sense to have different state standards for emissions.

There are plenty of areas where the states should have broad leeway to make their own laws. But we all share the same atmosphere. California cannot prevent Nevada air from blowing across the state line. From the automakers’ point of view, having different standards for fuel economy doesn’t make sense either.

They are barely staying alive. They can’t afford, as Congressman Dingell said yesterday, “to be concerned about meeting a patchwork of different state standards.”

For years, California has had far tougher fuel standards than the rest of America. What Detroit wanted was for California to be forced to back off. But that isn’t happening. The nation’s biggest state is immensely rich, and immensely powerful, politically and otherwise.

Plus, for all intents and purposes, Chrysler and General Motors are wards of the government. They are depending on federal financing to keep them going, and help them through bankruptcy.

They are in no position to rock the boat. We are facing a new world here, and Detroit is going to have to be brave. What nobody knows, however, is whether the automakers can possibly achieve these fuel efficiency targets in less than seven years.

In past years, targets have been set, but then amended, pushed back, watered down. It’s possible that the mentality in the boardrooms is, as Free Press columnist Tom Walsh said yesterday, to say anything about 2016 that you need to say in order to survive.

Possibly. Yet things aren’t what they used to be. Every day, Michigan sees a little more clearly just how true that is.

Essay: Powering On - 5.12.09

Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry has been thinking about our state’s energy needs...

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If you are worried about the Michigan economy’s ability to rebound, you’ll be happy to know that someone does have faith.

Someone believes firmly that we are going to be growing again, and not only that, they are willing to put up the money to prove it.

I’m talking about the energy companies. They’ll admit that consumption is down, but they don’t expect it to stay that way. And since it takes a little longer to build a power plant than it does to order a hamburger, they have filed a bunch of requests to build new coal-fired plants, plus at least one new nuclear reactor.

Now it is an article of faith among environmentalists, liberals and other like-minded people that so-called old school energy projects are bad. Think air pollution, hydrocarbons, Three Mile Island. What we should be doing, they say, is renewable energy. Wind, and solar. And of course they are basically right. We should make better use of wind power than we do. If solar power can be harnessed in an effective way, I am all for that. Governor Jennifer Granholm is a tremendous advocate for wind power.

So much so that she has ordered the approval process for conventional plants slowed down, if not entirely stopped. That may sound like a good idea, but in fact I think it’s very risky.

Preventing new conventional plants from being built now could actually cause an environmental hazard in the future. And here’s why. Wind power is wonderful, but experts doubt that it can ever generate more than a small fraction of our energy needs.

Nor has Michigan poured massive resources into developing wind power, in large part perhaps because the state is broke.

Eventually, when the economy revives, we are going to need more power. Where do you suppose the electricity is going to come from for all those plug-in hybrids we hope to be buying?

Americans are a spoiled lot who like their creature comforts. Thirty years ago, we had a President who appeared on television wearing a sweater and suggested we turn the thermostat down and get used to being colder. When he ran for reelection, he lost 44 out of 50 states. Politicians learned from that.

What I fear is that when our state’s energy demands start outstripping supply, we’ll suddenly authorize crash programs to build them, which will be far more worrisome from a safety standpoint.

Without any doubt, Bill Milliken was the most environmentally friendly governor we’ve ever had. Last month, he and two other former governors, Jim Blanchard and John Engler, co-authored a article strongly urging Michigan to expand its nuclear energy capacity, starting right now. They pointed out that despite all the fears, that nuclear has been a remarkably clean and safe form of energy. Yes, we need to find a permanent storage site for the spent fuel rods.

But they make a good case that, in their words, “nuclear energy can help power Michigan’s economic turnaround.” We are being forced these days to reexamine a lot of old assumptions.

Maybe this is another taboo we should reexamine as well.

Essay: Bring Back Pork - 5.8.09

President Obama’s point-man for helping Michigan communities that have been hit hard by the auto crisis is in the state today. Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry has been thinking about what Ed Montgomery can do to help our state...

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Ed Montgomery, who the media insist on calling the “auto czar,” is in Michigan today. I would know this if I never turned on the radio, because I have been deluged with press releases from politicians rushing to be in the great one’s presence.

Gary Peters, a highly ambitious, newly elected congressman from a swing district in Oakland County, sent me one with the headline, CONGRESSMAN TO JOIN DR.ED MONTGOMERY AT MEETING IN WARREN. Be still, my beating heart.

When he gets there, the freshman Democrat plans to take part in a mass panel which will advise the czar, quote, “on ways the federal government can alleviate the impact auto industry restructuring will have on workers, business and communities.”

I’ll bet this will all come as a great revelation to Dr. Montgomery. After all, he is only a brilliant scholar who has been a Deputy Secretary of Labor, and an economics professor at Michigan State. If you think I am being a trifle sarcastic, you are right. He knows a great deal about what’s happening in the industry, and to Michigan.

Naturally, this didn’t stop every single member of our congressional delegation from signing a mass letter, telling Dr. Ed they “wanted to share with you those areas we feel are of immediate importance to our state,” and then suggesting he get the government to launch close to twenty massive federal spending programs.

Here’s a sample: “Please call Transportation Secretary (Ray) LaHood to urge him that Michigan gets its maximum allowed ($300 million) in discretionary spending.” I am sure he’ll tell them, “Hey, no problem. I’m on it. The feds have lots of dough. No deficit here.”

Meanwhile, the state’s remaining newspapers gave him a further round of orders and requests. If this were India, I think we’d all show up wearing dhotis and holding begging bowls.

Here’s something to keep in mind. Montgomery is NOT an auto czar. His actual title is, Director of Recovery for Auto Communities and Workers. Think of that scene in Gone With the Wind where one weary old doctor without enough medicine is trying to cope with thousands of wounded and sick soldiers.

Montgomery is bringing us a little something: $10.3 million dollars in Brownfield Grants designed to create jobs and, he says, revitalize communities. The Small Business Administration is also expanding its loan program, which could help some dealerships, repair shops and parts suppliers.

But there is no magic bullet. Here’s an idea, however: Pork.

Carl Levin is now chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and one of the most powerful men in Congress. So, why can’t we get some more Pentagon spending in Michigan? I was down in South Carolina a few years ago and Strom Thurmond had directed billions there. So -- why can’t we use some of our excess factory capacity to make tanks and trucks and airplanes? Revive the old Arsenal of Democracy. Worked quite well during World War II, which, come to think of it, was the last war we really won.

So the ball’s in your court, Senator:

Tell us why that’s a bad idea.

Essay: Chrysler - 4.30.09

Michigan Radio's Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry is rooting for Chrysler...

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I have a confession to make. I’ve tried to remain neutral as I have assessed the battles for the future of the auto industry. I’ve never owned a Chrysler, and have seldom driven one.

But I have to say I have an emotional soft spot for Chrysler, and want them to make it. That wasn’t always the case.

Back in 1979, when I was a young reporter on the fringes of Chrysler’s first near-death experience, I thought they ought to be allowed to fail. The company had been so poorly mismanaged for so long, and its cars were such clunkers, that I thought it didn’t deserve to survive. I knew something of its history.

Chrysler had a meteoric rise throughout the 1920s, and shot past Ford to become the nation’s number two car maker.

After that, it drifted into decline. I am sitting here looking at a excellent book, “Riding the Roller Coaster: A History of the Chrysler Corporation,“ by Wayne State University history professor Charles Hyde. The cover has a photograph of an extremely ugly car, a 1937 Chrysler rolling off the assembly line with a beaming Walter P. Chrysler himself at the wheel, the millionth car Chrysler had built that year. Lined up next to the car are Chrysler’s top executives.

Every one of them is a pasty-faced, fat, unlovely old man in a drab and ill-fitting suit. That’s how Chrysler was seen when I was young. It was a car for the old, the poor, the unstylish and usually undereducated. Chrysler’s luxury car, the New Yorker, was a joke compared to a Cadillac or a Lincoln Continental.

Hundreds of thousands of Chryslers came trundling off the assembly lines at cavernous old factories like Dodge Main in Hamtramck. The company then stacked them up in parking lots till they could pressure dealers into taking them.

That nutty system almost did the company in. But they were saved, not so much by the government loan guarantee, but by Lee Iacocca, who reinvented Chrysler as a manufacturer of minivans, trucks and sport utility vehicles. For my money, two of the sexiest cars on the road today are the Satellite Sebring and the Crossfire.

They also have had a hit with the fun and highly functional PT Cruiser. Exactly ten years ago, this week, however, Chrysler took the fateful step of selling itself to the Germans. Daimler, that is. Though it was billed as a marriage of equals, it was anything but.

Daimler chewed Chrysler up and spat it out two years ago, palmed off to a venture capital firm. Then came last year’s financial hurricane, and the collapse of the car market.

Give Chrysler management credit for this. They went out and found Fiat, and worked hard at putting together this new alliance, to give themselves a chance to survive.

But ... will it work?

Will being a captive of the Italians prove better than being a captive of the Germans? We won’t know for awhile, but we do know that Chrysler has been left for dead before.

And then somehow, it has always sputtered back to life.

Essay: Earth Day - 4.22.09

Today is Earth Day… which has Michigan’s Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry thinking about, what else, our environment…

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The first Earth Day was thirty-nine years ago today, when I was a college freshman at Michigan State. One of my science professors shrugged it off as a hippie fad, soon to be forgotten with all those be-ins and teach-ins and love-ins.

Well, guess what. The good news is that it Earth Day is still here. The better news is that we are still here too, which wasn’t necessarily a sure thing back during the cold war.

Today, twelve thousand trees will be planted throughout the Upper Peninsula by dozens of religious congregations. Tree-planting seems to be a theme of this Earth Day; yesterday, the Student Conservation Association planted trees in a muddy marsh along Maryland’s Anacostia River. They had some help.

Among the volunteers was a guy whose wife grabbed the biggest sapling. “Look how big our tree is, honey,“ she crowed. Her husband, the President of the United States, was happy to let her have it. He planted a smaller tree with purple flowers.

For the last eight years, it often seemed like Earth Day itself was an act of defiance against a government that seemed frozen in the ice of its own ideological indifference, if not outright hostility, to the environment. That’s clearly not the case any more.

The Environmental Protection Agency has reversed a Bush-era decision and has issued the common-sense ruling that greenhouse gases are in fact hazardous to human health. That isn’t the same as regulating them, but it lays the groundwork.

The burden of proof seems to be shifting from the environmentalists to the polluters. There was a little-noticed but very welcome decision in Michigan the other day. One of the state’s most notorious polluters is the vast Vreba-Hoff factory dairy farms in Lenawee and Hillsdale counties in Southern Michigan.

They have been cited over and over again for the amount of liquid manure they produce and pump into nearby fields. They now owe $223,500 in fines for this. Yet Vreba-Hoff had the chutzpah to say they couldn’t pay unless they were allowed to expand their operation and add more cows! This week, Ingham County circuit judge told Vreba-Hoff to pay up within a month.

Yet though there’s a welcome shift in the climate, we face some new problems when it comes to protecting the earth.

President Obama is thought of as being pro-environment, and he is. But that has its downside. Some will be tempted to say, ‘well, since our government is now on the right side, I don’t have to worry so much.“ That couldn’t be more wrong. All Washington can do is give us the ability to be better stewards of this earth.

What may be a bigger problem is money. Michigan Is broke, and the governor is trying to turn over responsibility for wetlands protection to the feds, who aren’t set up to do that.

You’ll see more of that sort of thing as the budget battles continue. We are a much more environmentally conscious state than on that first Earth Day long ago. So let’s make sure we don’t slip back into the primordial and political ooze.

Essay: Electric Energy - 3.26.09

Michigan Radio's Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry has been thinking about the current situation of the domestic automakers.

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We are waiting for the other shoe to drop next week. General Motors and Chrysler have until Tuesday to convince the government they are making progress at restructuring themselves, and moving toward a future that is profitable again.

If they fail to do that, the government can immediately call in the $17.4 billion in loans they've given those automakers.

That would cause both car companies to immediately declare bankruptcy. Of course, the taxpayers would never get that money back, because the automakers have already spent it all.

What Chrysler and GM really want is for the government to decide they have made enough progress to get more money. How much more? At least $20 billion, most of that for GM, once the world's biggest and richest corporation.

What the government will do is anyone's guess. General Motors laid off hundreds of white-collar workers this week. That's a time-honored move for an automaker in trouble.

But everyone knows you can't just cut your way to success. You need a new exciting car, or cars, that everyone wants to buy. When Chrysler was on the rocks thirty years ago, lee Iacocca kept them alive by telling everybody to wait till the new K cars arrived.

Now, people are pinning their hopes on the Chevy Volt, the new electric car scheduled to go into production next year. Last week, I talked to the man who may be most responsible for making electric and hybrid cars happen, the legendary Stanford Ovshinsky.

He was the principal inventor of the nickel-metal-hydride battery that powers your cell phone. He worked for years on an earlier GM attempt to build an electric car, the EV-1, until GM got cold feet.

If you want to know more about that, go rent the movie "Who Killed the Electric Car," in which Stan and his late wife Iris play starring roles. Stan, by the way, recently launched a new company, got remarried, and is working as hard as ever. And why not? He is only 86. I asked him about the Volt. "Well, it is a start," he said. "They will probably sell a few thousand, but... they are fourteen years behind the Japanese." Back in the 1990s, he went to Japan and saw that the hybrids were coming. He tried to tell GM, "and they laughed at us. They said they would never work, or sell."

Ovshinsky hopes the Volt is a success. But, as he noted, the company still hasn't decided on the battery to run it. The car will also cost more than $40,000, out of many people's reach.

The history of technology shows that in time, better electric cars are certain to be developed, and the price will fall.

Yet it is hard to see the Volt bailing out a corporation that is losing millions of dollars every hour. The new technology may do that in time. But the auto companies are running on empty right now. Next week we may find out if Washington will again refuel their tanks -- or decide it's time to stop being taken for a ride.

Essay: Smoking Ban - 3.20.09

A possible ban on smoking is being talked about, again, in the state legislature. Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry gives us a rundown of what’s really going on.

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Secondhand smoke kills people. It killed the lovely and brilliant Alice Trillin, wife of the brilliant humor writer Calvin Trillin. It has killed people I’ve known, and kills, by various medical community estimates, between 54,000 and 75,000 Americans a year.

That alone should be more than enough reason for Michigan to outlaw smoking in bars and restaurants. Additionally, polls have consistently shown that large majorities of the population are in favor of a total smoking ban. But the legislature has failed to pass one.

And here’s why. There are two main culprits. One Republican, Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop, and one Democrat, State Rep. Bert Johnson of Detroit.

Bishop doesn’t want a smoking ban at all, because he fears it would be bad for some businesses. In fact, for a long time he simply prevented the state senate from voting on any bill to ban smoking.

But last year, he faced a revolt in his own caucus, led by State Senator Tom George of Kalamazoo, who, as a physician, knows just how terrible second-hand smoke can be. So finally, Bishop agreed to allow a vote, but on one condition. He would only agree to a total ban. No exemptions whatsoever. This was shrewd.

Remember, Bishop doesn’t want any smoking ban at all. Now, he knows he can’t stop a total ban from being passed by the Senate, but figures -- so far correctly -- that a total ban won’t pass the heavily Democratic State House of Representatives.

Why? Well, originally some blue-collar representatives feared the wrath of their constituents, who like to smoke in bars. But the real problem is the casinos. Canada is a civilized country which is generally ahead of us, and Windsor enacted a total smoking ban some years ago. That immediately boosted Detroit casino business by 30 percent, from smokers coming across the river.

Detroit casino operators reason that if Michigan bans smoking everywhere as well, these folks will have no reason to leave Canada, especially since their casino is somewhat nicer than any of ours.

So Democrats, led by Bert Johnson, the chair of the House Regulatory Committee, wanted a bill banning smoking in restaurants that had an exception for the casinos. They also wanted to exempt those trendy “cigar bars,” the kind of places arrogant young stockbrokers hung out before they helped destroy the economy.

But Senator Bishop said all or nothing. So we got nothing and no smoking ban, which is what he wanted all along.

And innocent people continue to die. You can argue that if smokers want to kill themselves, so what? Well, we all pay for it in terms of higher health care costs. And there are non-smokers who work in these places because these are the only jobs they can find, and it is hard to turn down any work now.

We owe it to ourselves to push our lawmakers to resolve this and get the most comprehensive ban possible, as soon as possible.

For if they can’t solve something this simple and important, than just what is a legislature for?

Essay: Coal Power - 3.4.09

Governor Granholm’s push to accelerate the development of wind power and to delay new coal-fired plants is exactly the right move to help Michigan towards a sustainable energy future.

However, what is essential is that this be part of a consistent, long-term energy policy that survives her administration. Otherwise, it may turn out to look like nothing more than a faddish waste of time.

Wind power, the experts say, does have the potential to provide an important part of the energy mix. No, it won’t fulfill all our energy needs, but it probably can eventually supply perhaps as much as a quarter of them. It is cheap and non-polluting.

Fossil fuels, such as coal, are expensive to burn, foul the air, damage the environment, and eventually will be all used up. However, we are going to have to use them in some degree for the foreseeable future - and probably nuclear power too.

What we need is a long-term, non-partisan energy policy aimed at eventually weaning ourselves off the bad stuff while staying relatively comfortable. Otherwise, it is no exaggeration to say that in the long run, we will all be doomed.

Eventually, the governor, or her successor, is going to have to issue permits for at least some new coal-fired plants, and she should do so. Otherwise, it could lead to the undoing of her own clean energy policy. We aren’t going to get to the green energy future all at once. There are two mistakes we have to avoid making.

One is the one we have been making, which is just to keep blithely burning fossil fuel and saying, “oh, well, maybe our children will come up with a way to get cheap power from the sun.”

The other mistake is the one the folks in the Green Party would have us make, which is to try and go cold turkey. Wind and solar power or nothing. Imagine trying to huddle in your bark hut, or even your split-level house in East Lansing this winter with inadequate heat. We are spoiled and we wouldn’t stand for it.

I talked to scientists when the two great nuclear disasters of our age occurred at Three Mile Island in 1979 and Chernobyl in 1986. Like the rest of us, they were all over the place on what this meant, but I heard one very interesting theory.

Both times, some scientists told they thought that was exactly the right moment to begin building new nuclear power plants. Why?

They were bound to eventually be needed, and if they were built then, they reasoned, they were bound to be the safest plants ever constructed. They had a point, and if we had a way of sending the spent fuel rods to the moon, I’d be all for nuclear power.

What I do know is that we aren’t willing to freeze, and we need to avoid drowning in our own pollution. Call me an optimist, but I think if we could just move this discussion out of the realm of partisan politics, the human race might have a fighting chance.

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Interview: James Clift - 3.4.09

In her state of the state address a month ago, Governor Granholm said she was ordering regulators to delay the approval process for five new coal-fired plants in the state. That prompted Attorney General Mike Cox to overturn the governor’s decision… saying she had no authority to tell environmental regulators how to assess the applications. James Clift is policy director for the Michigan Environmental Council. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with him about where things stand.

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