Jack Lessenberry Essays and Interviews

Essay: Power Source - 5/16/2008

Here’s what the majority Democrats had to say when they passed this energy bill package last month.

“The Michigan House of Representatives today passed a comprehensive, long-term energy plan that will create thousands of jobs now for Michigan workers, keep electricity affordable for consumers and businesses, and ensure that our state has the safe, reliable power supply necessary to achieve major economic growth.”

Welcome to the wonderful world of doublespeak, Funny, but the House Democrats seem to have failed to mention that they also agreed to change the rate structure so that residential customers will pay a whole lot more and businesses a whole lot less.

True, this bill does set targets for renewable energy. But when I read the bills, I was unable to figure out just what penalty the utilities will have to pay if they don’t meet the renewable energy targets.

When I talked to the governor’s special energy advisor about this, I got a lot of doubletalk. And I came away utterly convinced that if any penalties are assessed, the utilities will cheerfully be able to pass them on to the consumers. They will also be allowed to propose rate increases that will automatically take effect if the state public service commission doesn’t stop them within a certain time period.

However, it gets worse.

These bills are now before the state senate, which, unlike the House, is still controlled by the Republicans. I have a hunch that they will fight to make any renewable energy targets strictly voluntary.

And you just know how fast these big utilities will move to spend money to make any change that they don’t have to make. Especially now that these bills also newly enshrine the CMS Energy and DTE Energy’s near-monopoly status.

What these bills are really designed to do is please the big two utilities, while maybe, at best, giving them a gentle nudge in the renewable energy direction. I’ll bet they drag their feet.

What is needed is a bill with teeth. Set a schedule for realistic renewal energy targets, and prescribe a system of rewards for making them and penalties for missing them. The penalties need to be real, and not something that can be passed on to consumers.

Something, say, requiring state government to open the field up to new competitors hungry enough to get it done. We also need to be honest. The governor has talked about renewable energy creating 19,000 jobs in the near future.

Skip Pruss, her energy advisor, talked as if most of these jobs would be created in tool-and-die shops. He sees an avalanche of orders for windmill parts from other states hot to get in on the renewable energy craze.

Call me a cynic, but I’m not convinced.

If we want renewable energy, we need to push for it. But not via a bunch of bills basically designed to create a safe monopoly for two energy companies who are still going to build coal-fired plants.

We can do better. Starting by insisting that our politicians be more honest.

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Interview: Skip Pruss - 5/16/2008

Governor Jennifer Granholm is a big proponent of renewable energy. A package of bills now before the state Senate would require that power producers obtain at least ten percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2015. Skip Pruss is the governor’s special advisor on alternative energy and the environment. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with him about the energy legislation.

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Interview: Ken Darga - 5/13/2008

Michigan has fewer young children than it did just eight years ago. The declining population could impact everything from schools to retail sales in the years to come. Ken Darga is chief demographer for the state. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with him.

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Essay: The Ethanol Craze - 5/12/2008

Depending on whom you talk to, corn-based ethanol is either the future, or the biggest con job since the perpetual motion machine. Nobody doubts any more that we need to do something different. The first time I ever saw a solar cell was in seventh-grade science class.

The teacher told us that by the time we grew up, our cars would be powered by these. I think the electric battery was supposed to get us through cloudy days. Sounded great to me. However, that was in the fall of ... 1963, and I have yet to see a solar-powered car.

As far as the solar powered future is concerned, I am running out of time to enjoy it.

The fact of the matter is that we still don’t have an agreed-upon replacement for gasoline. General Motors is once again working hard on an electric car. All the automakers are working on hybrids of some kind. Stan Ovshinsky, the now-retired founder of Energy Conversion Devices in Troy, is betting the future will be hydrogen. Others are betting on corn-based ethanol – at least as a transitional fuel. Then there is so-called cellulosic ethanol, which we first heard about when George W. Bush suggested making fuel out of switch grass.

In Illinois, a company called Coskata says it can make ethanol out of everything from table scraps to old tires. And their arguments were convincing enough to get General Motors to invest. The one thing all these people have in common is that they know the world’s fossil fuel reserves are running out.

Gas and oil are getting more and more costly, and nobody has a clear-cut solution as to what to do next. Actually, these are things we’ve known for decades, but never did anything about them.

Some say the oil and automotive industries did their best to make sure nobody did anything about them. Well, that’s changing now. We may not have one common fuel, at least not for awhile.

And we do need to experiment with as many alternatives as possible. But while I am no engineer, I have serious doubts as to whether corn-based ethanol makes sense.

Our sensible neighbors to the north get it. Monday, the Ottawa Citizen ran an editorial highly critical of the whole idea.

Noting that rising global prices and increasing food shortages have sparked recent riots in Haiti, the newspaper said “Food supply is a complex thing. But it is becoming clear biofuel production is playing a role in shrinking that supply.”

The image of peasants starving so we can fill up our Lincoln Navigators with ethanol-based fuel is not charming. The Ottawa paper suggests refocusing biofuel research towards algae. That sounds good. Making gasoline out of mosquitoes would sound good, too, But whatever we do has to pass two tests:

Will it work? And perhaps more importantly, what damage would it do to the environment and the ecosystem?

We are in a process of transition, and here’s something else they didn’t tell us back in seventh grade.

Whatever we do, it won’t be easy.

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Interview: Bruce Dale - 5/12/2008

As gas prices continue to rise, alternative fuels have become more popular. One of the more talked-about alternative fuels is corn-based ethanol. Bruce Dale is a distinguished professor of chemical engineering at Michigan State University. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with him about the future of alternative fuels.

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Essay: Doctor Shortage - 5/1/2008

I have a close friend who is a family care physician who is still practicing full-time at age 81. He goes to his office every day, and visits two nursing homes where he has been medical director.

His wife wishes he would at least slow down and take a little more time for himself. He has a beautiful home and perhaps the finest private library I’ve ever seen.  But he feels an obligation to his patients, some of whom have been with him for fifty years.

Naturally, he also loves what he does.  But he isn’t happy at all about what is happening to his profession.

“The corporations want to destroy the doctor-patient relationship,” he tells me.

“Places like the Detroit Medical Center don’t want you to have a relationship with a doctor, They just want you to have a relationship with the institution. They don’t want you to pick your own doctor, they just want to assign whatever one is next to see you.”

He thinks the managed care world wants to reduce physicians to something like the anonymous mechanics who will change your brakes at Sears.

He is a physician of the old school. He spends as much time with each patient as he thinks justified, which means that his waiting room resembles a backed-up airport terminal in a snowstorm.

For him, the assembly line model was meant for Plymouths, not physicians.  To be fair, medicine is changing, and his model of doctor-patient relationship may no longer work in today’s world.

Yet it isn’t clear that the corporate model is working very well either. After my friend moaned that “American kids don’t want to be doctors any more,” I introduced him to a young woman who planned to go to school to be a physician’s assistant. He snorted.

“So she wants to be a nine-to-five doctor,” he said. Medicine is a sacred calling to him, and real doctors are on call 24/7. 

That may be a bit extreme. Still, if you are a physician who is an employee of a  walk-in clinic, it is probably harder to see yourself as engaged in a long-term relationship with your patients.

Huge changes in health care are coming. All three remaining presidential candidates agree that far too many people are left uncovered. The tide of public sentiment and the aging of the baby boomers means health care will be a major topic soon.

What form health care reform will take is unclear, except that there will be some kind of movement towards universal coverage.

That means we need to train lots more doctors. Common sense indicates that the government should establish financial incentives aimed at making becoming a family care physician attractive.

If anyone objects, the bill’s sponsor should proclaim that this is a matter of national security.  Granted, funds are limited.

But if you had a clear choice between spending money on the war in Iraq, or spending to establish enough doctors for our future needs, where do you think our priorities should be?                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     

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Interview: Gregory Forzley - 5/1/2008

A new survey shows that more than forty percent of the state’s forty-thousand doctors plan to retire within the next decade. And, indications are that there aren’t enough new doctors in the pipeline to replace them. Doctor Gregory Forzley is a family physician and Chairman of the Michigan State Medical Society. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with him.

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Essay: Energy Blues - 4/30/2008

Everyone I know is for energy conservation. That is, they are firmly in favor of other people wearing more sweaters in winter and refraining from using the air conditioning in summer.

And I would be happy to do that too, but, well, it’s hard to keep sweating down on the farm after you’ve seen the wonders of climate control. Which is why efforts at conservation are always a hard sell, as long as we can easily afford to be comfortable.

However, the environmentalists have made progress, at least to this extent: Nowadays, many of us now think we should at least feel guilty about adding to that immense hole in the ozone layer.

We like to feel that we are doing our part for the environment, as long as it isn’t very painful. For example, virtuous little me carried a bin with all my cans and plastic bottles out to the curb this morning.

I’ll bet Al Gore would be proud.

Seriously, I am skeptical about the current package of energy bills, partly for that reason. Renewable energy sounds great. But as my research assistant Emmarie points out, other states that have set renewable energy targets are failing to meet them, because of a lack of technology, a lack of money to overhaul systems, or both.

And there are a lot of other things in this package that ought to raise a few eyebrows. For example, these bills would mean that residential electric rates would go up, while businesses would pay lower rates. My guess is that most voters wouldn’t like that idea.

That is, if they knew about it. Funny, I don’t recall the politicians telling us about this. These bills also would allow proposed rate increases to take effect automatically, if not acted on by the Michigan Public Service Commission. For people on fixed incomes, that may be scarier than living next to a nuclear power plant.

But what bothers me most of all is that it is designed to destroy competition, and give the state’s two dominant utilities a guaranteed customer base and near-monopoly status. That would be fine if we were in the business of promoting Soviet-style state socialism.

However, I thought what we wanted was good old capitalist competition. Giving the utilities a monopoly has been a particular passion of Speaker of the House Andy Dillon, an alleged Democrat.

He even suggested solving last year’s budget crisis by giving one utility guaranteed monopoly status in exchange for a lot of cash.

You may think all that is a great idea. But the fact is, these bills were rushed through the House without most voters knowing what was in them. Now, they are before the Senate. If you trust the utilities to have your best interests in mind, there’s nothing to worry about.

However, you might want to think about it, read the fine print first, and let your own state senator know how you feel. Especially because this just might be your last chance.

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Interview: Randy Richardville - 4/30/2008

Earlier this month, the Michigan House of Representatives passed a package of energy bills. They would promote renewable energy. But, they would also limit the amount of competition that the state’s big utilities have to face. State Senator Randy Richardville is a co-sponsor of the energy bills in the Senate. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with him.

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Essay: CAFE, anyone? - 4/23/2008

Back in the early seventies, my friend Crazy Ernie drove a souped-up late model T-Bird. Ford had long since stopped producing the original T-Bird, a jaunty little sports car with porthole windows.

Ernie’s car was a vast brown thing which handled somewhat like a power boat on choppy waters. It belched thick blue smoke, and consumed prodigious quantities of oil and gas. As far as fuel efficiency was concerned, I seem to remember that it got about eight miles to a gallon, though he now swears it was ten.

The thing was, nobody I knew really cared about gas mileage, even though none of us had much money. When I first started driving, I remember gasoline as being 29.9 cents a gallon.

Then came the Yom Kippur war, in October 1973, and the first oil shock. Gasoline rose to nearly fifty cents a gallon. “You’ll live to see gas cost more than a dollar a gallon,” an old man told me.

That sounded fantastic, though I dimly feared he was right. Now, you need to realize that when you take inflation into account, a dollar in November 1973 in today’s money would be … $3.59 cents.

Which is exactly what I paid for gas this morning. Now, that is still a strain on the pocketbook, especially since I normally drive more than a hundred miles a day. But the reason I can do this and still eat is that the car I drive now gets nearly thirty miles to a gallon. If I were driving the first car I ever owned, a 1968 Chevy Biscayne that got 12 mpg, I would be in debtor’s prison.

That is, if the world’s entire oil reserves hadn’t been exhausted by two hundred million “gas guzzling dinosaurs,” which is what old George Romney used to call the cars Detroit made.

Fuel economy standards may be resented by laissez-faire capitalists. But together with the pressure of Japanese competition, café standards have been responsible for most of the dramatic improvements in quality in American vehicles since 1973.

The new standards announced this week aren’t going to be wildly popular in Detroit. But I think there is a new spirit of realism in the automakers’ boardrooms. They know they have lost clout on Capitol Hill. Here’s what that aging lion John Dingell, their longtime protector, told the Big Three privately last year.

“Work with me on this and be grownups, and I may be able to get you a café bill you will hate – but which you can live with.

“Be unreasonable, and you may get a bill that will put you out of business.” The automakers know that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi isn’t sympathetic. Plus, the odds of getting a better deal from the next President are none too good.

Detroit is being eased, kicking and screaming, into the 21st century world of increasing fossil fuel scarcity.

The cars are getting better however, and the kicks and screams more muted. And that, you might say, is a sign of progress.

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