Monthly Archives: July 2023

What’s in the renewable energy you’re buying?

Posted by on 2023-07-29 No comments

If you’re a health-conscious consumer, you want to know how much cholesterol, saturated and trans fats, sodium, potassium, or sugar is in the yogurt you’re buying, and whether there’s anything unhealthy (like aspartame or additives) in it. Similarly, if you’re an environmentally-conscious energy consumer, you want to know how much solar, wind, biogas, or hydro is in the energy mix you’re buying, and if there’s anything bad (like diesel, gas, coal, or nuclear) in there.

There ought to be a straightforward way to find out, but despite the many conversations I’ve had and emails I’ve exchanged with the energy people who provided much of the information in this post, no one can give me a clear answer to the simple question — what exactly is in the energy mix I’m buying and where does it come from?

Part of the problem is that reporting is not geared toward addressing consumer or environmental concerns — but instead on reporting compliance with energy certificate tracking mandated by a series of laws following the 1998 deregulation of the energy industry. Here is the type of information typically shared with energy consumers:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GcoKiggT99cU11Q7wU-0MWx-4DWT0hCE/view

Rather than telling you what’s in the yogurt container, instead you get numbers that represent a theoretical mix of energy types under Class I RPS Requirements, “Other” RPS Requirements, “Additional” Class I power requirements, and “System Power” requirement (“RPS” stands for “Renewable Energy Portfolio Standard” and “APS” is “Alternative Energy Portfolio Standard”). It all looks like so much word salad for the average consumer.

What these reports tell you is that when you buy “renewable” energy you are buying a mix that can be satisfied from a variable number of generators providing all sorts of energy. Because you don’t know what you’re getting or where it came from, it’s impossible for anyone to describe with any degree of precision the difference in energy mix between Dartmouth’s default 50% “renewable” plan and its opt-in 100% “renewable” plan. And that’s a problem if the state is trying to woo consumers to buy greater percentages of renewable energy.

https://www.mass.gov/service-details/program-summaries

According to the program summary above, “NEPOOL GIS tracks all electricity generated within the ISO New England (ISO-NE) control area and fed onto the New England grid, as well as electricity exchanged between ISO-NE and adjacent control areas.” The NEPOOL GIS website is:

https://nepoolgis.com/public-reports/

It sounds like a promising information source, but when you visit the site this stands out: “Due to the confidentiality reasons, the identity of the generator is masked.” This means that a consumer has no ability to learn who is generating the energy being purchased, or how much they produce. You’d hope that some of this information might be published by the state in its annual compliance reports, but (for starters) mass.gov’s RPS and APS most recent reports are 3 years old:

https://www.mass.gov/service-details/annual-compliance-reports-and-other-publications

None of the data tables in the referenced spreadsheets can answer my consumer question. The 2020 Executive Summary’s accompanying spreadsheet does list suppliers (in table 13), but not what or how much each supplier generates. Dartmouth’s supplier, Constellation New Energy, is listed only as a “Competitive Retail Supplier.” And only the value of energy credits for the three energy suppliers who failed to live up to their contracts are shown in table 14.

https://www.mass.gov/doc/2020-rps-aps-annual-compliance-report-final-draft/download

https://www.mass.gov/doc/2020-rps-aps-annual-compliance-report-executive-summary/download

So the state isn’t telling the consumer much, and with a goal of 100% renewables by 2037 (if the planet hasn’t already burned up by then), the state’s energy goals don’t reflect much of a sense of urgency.

If we want to know what we’re actually buying — as well as having information to advocate for more and faster adoption of renewables — Massachusetts needs to start requiring energy resellers to put their own “Nutrition Facts” on each consumer’s energy bills.

Because there’s so little that displays energy data in a consumer-friendly format, one suggestion I received was to download an app called “ISO to GO” to track what the state’s energy grid is currently powered by.

https://www.iso-ne.com/about/news-media/iso-to-go

It’s entertaining, and may give you a sense of what’s in the New England, Mid-Atlantic, and Canadian grids, but it still won’t answer the question of what you’re actually buying and who’s generating it.

Massachusetts needs to do better.

Support S.174 / H.377

Posted by on 2023-07-23 No comments

As many are aware, anti-abortion organizations have begun setting up fake abortion clinics, such as the Crossroads Pregnancy Center in Georgia, a state with over 90 such “clinics,” in an attempt to prevent women from receiving actual health care.

These “crisis centers” or “fake clinics,” as reproductive rights advocates call them, deceptively advertise medical services but offer none, use strong-arm tactics including releasing or threatening to release personal information to third parties, and frequently engage clients in counseling and religious proselytization well into late stage pregnancy in order to make the abortion impossible. National organizations like SPARK, ReproAction, and Abortion Access Front have exposed these clinics for what they are and Massachusetts bills S.174 and H.377 thankfully put legal protections for women into law.

The Massachusetts Joint Committee on Consumer Protection and Professional Licensure will hold hearings tomorrow that will include testimony on Senate Bill S.174 (also filed as House Bill H.377), An Act to protect patient privacy and prevent unfair and deceptive advertising of pregnancy-related services. The legislation is accompanied by an appropriations component found in House Bill H.57, An Act making appropriations for the Fiscal Year 2023 to provide for supplementing certain existing appropriations and for certain other activities and projects.

Besides legal protections for women, the appropriations bill specifies that “not less than $1,000,000 shall be expended for a public awareness campaign to educate providers and the public about so-called crisis pregnancy centers and pregnancy resource centers and their lack of medical services; provided further, that said campaign shall include information on the availability of providers across the commonwealth that provide legitimate medical and family planning services.”

Naturally, right-wing groups are up in arms. The Massachusetts Family Institute is rallying supporters to show up at tomorrow’s hearings. MFI takes great offense at the appropriations bill and has framed the legislation as an attack on Christian Nationalists’ First Amendment rights [to deceive women], calling it a “gag order.”

But this is first and foremost a health and consumer protection issue. These fake abortion clinics are as much a menace to public health as the guy who does liposuctions in his garage.

Please write to your legislator and to the Joint Committee to express your support for An Act to protect patient privacy and prevent unfair and deceptive advertising of pregnancy-related services.

Social Networks

Posted by on 2023-07-09 No comments

Social Networks

Aside from blogging I was never much of a social networking person, mainly because for the most part these platforms are angry places run by sociopathic billionaires who want to steal your personal data. However, I have recently begun to use a few social networks and for the most part they are civilized places that respect my privacy. Recently, several people have asked me about alternatives to Twitter. And Facebook’s founder just announced a social network called Threads. I decided to do a roundup of social networks I’ve tested. The list below focuses on social media for communicating short messages; consequently I didn’t mention Facebook, VKontakt, Telegram, Hive, LinkedIn, Reddit, TikTok, or other social media.

Twitter

Facebook was launched in 2004, and Twitter followed up two years later as a minimalist social network for posting 140-character messages. By 2023 Twitter had between 250 and 550 million users, while Facebook had nearly 3 billion users and its media-centric network, Instagram, had 2 billion.

In 2022 Elon Musk bought Twitter and set about almost immediately making it inhospitable for 3rd-party developers, anonymous readers, and even his own users whom he tried to gouge with monthly charges and verification fees. Adding injury to insult, Musk welcomed back Nazis, gay-bashers, and racists who had been banned, and Twitter quickly went from already-bad to worse.

As a result, Musks’s users have been defecting in droves to alternate social media sites like Mastodon, BlueSky, Post, Substack Notes, Spoutible, and Spill. And now Threads.

Threads

By now everyone knows that Meta (Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp) just launched a Twitter competitor called Threads. Threads leverages Meta’s Instagram platform (and its two billion users) and within 48 hours Threads had attracted 70 million users.

Because of its rapid adoption, as well as the realization that Elon Musk is rapidly destroying his own vanity project, some are calling Threads a Twitter-killer. While that remains to be seen, Threads has enormous potential because Threads is literally built on top of Instagram and leverages Instagram’s 2 billion users.

I have been experimenting with Threads. It’s still pretty primitive. Since you can’t use Threads without an instagram account, you also can’t cancel your Threads account without deleting your Instagram account. Unlike Instagram, there is also no way to use Threads in a web browser. What you see in your feed is (rather annoyingly) determined by a Meta algorithm, not by you, and it seems half-finished in comparison to three other apps (Mastodon, Post, and Spoutible) I have been testing.

Commercial social media networks embody the adage: “if you’re not the customer, then you’re the product.” In other words, your data is the source of their profits. And the Threads app (like all Meta products) wants pretty much all your data. You can find a comparison of data collection practices of top social networks here.

Julia Angwin, who is both a keen observer of social media as well as an online privacy fanatic, wrote (on Mastodon), “Joined Threads but immediately regretting it. [Wired link].” A light-hearted faux advertisement poked fun at Thread’s privacy issues, which are serious enough that they will prevent Threads from being rolled out in the EU until it finally complies with European privacy laws.

Since I had never used Instagram before, I set up a new account, providing them with my email address and cell phone address. I used my real name and added a current photo of myself to my profile. I made one test post:

The next day I added some more contacts and received a surprising message:

I appealed their algorithm’s “decision” in the Zuckerberg Court of Appeals, and I prevailed:

I don’t have these sort of problems on other social networks. Overall, between the privacy risks, the lack of features, and the aggravations of dealing with an evil monopoly, I simply can’t recommend Threads.

But I’m sure people are going to love it because all their friends will be there.

Mastodon

Mastodon is a federated (clustered) network, distributed over thousands of privately-owned instances (servers). It has between 4 and 5 million users. Mastodon distinguishes between a local and a federated (global) feed. Another feed consists of all the people you follow, regardless of which instance they’re on. On Mastodon a Tweet is called a Toot. I have not found any reason to care which instance I’m on because I can follow people anywhere. And because Mastodon has been around since 2016 there are a surprising number of writers, journalists, and political commentators on the platform. But it’s not a place to follow your favorite actress or hockey player.

Besides Mastodon’s web interface, you can also choose between a large number of apps to use with it. On iOS alone you will find: the official client, Mastodon; Ivory, Ice Cubes; Mammoth; Metatext; Tooot; Tootle; Mona; Radiant; Toot!; Mastoot; Wooly; Trunks; Tusker; Mast; Manny; and Feather.

Mastodon, silly name notwithstanding, is still the most democratic and privacy-conscious platform today. However, at the moment it lacks encrypted DM’s (direct messages), a feature supposedly in development.

BlueSky

BlueSky is the brainchild of Jack Dorsey, who created Twitter and has much the same political views as Elon Musk. I can’t tell you much about it because I am still waiting for an invitation to join. BlueSky is still in very early stages, although mobile apps are available. Users who have experienced the site say it’s less toxic than Twitter. However, given Dorsey’s politics and his reticence to moderate right-wingers, it probably won’t be long before BlueSky follows Twitter’s path. Let’s not forget that Twitter under Dorsey was a MAGA paradise even before he sold it to Elon Musk.

Post

Post has a nice design and has focused on recruiting journalists and writers to its platform. Post’s monetization scheme is based on selling journalistic content for points, although you don’t have to use points for most interactions. Post offers an app, although at present it is very basic. Post has fewer privacy risks than Twitter or any of Meta’s products. Post is a great place to have informed and civilized discussions since there is a notable absence of unhinged haters on the platform.

Substack Notes

Substack is a great blogging platform and there are many excellent blogs on the platform. By the same token, since Substack is politically neutral, there are also many you might not care to read, depending on your taste and politics. Substack makes its money by sharing profits with authors of monetized content. However, many blogs do not enable the monetization feature. While Substack has always offered commenting on individual posts, it now offers the ability for Substack subscribers to post messages for all Substack content creators using a new feature called Notes. I have posted a few Notes but have not found the feature to be all that useful. Bloggers would actually find it more useful for Substack to provide hooks to re-post content to other social media.

Spoutible

Like Elon Musk, Spoutible’s founder Christopher Bouzy is a cantankerous guy who picks fights with his critics. Spoutible is in early stages of development, but has a beautiful design and its community is friendly. And Bouzy has promised to keep it that way, as well as moderating any kind of content of a remotely sexual nature. There is presently no app, so I don’t know what its privacy risks are, but I commend Spoutible for their encrypted DM’s (direct messaging). Mobile apps for Android and iOS are reported to be coming out this month.

Spill

Another interesting alternative that has popped up is Spill, sometimes described as Black Twitter. Spill is the creation of Alphonzo “Phonz” Terrell and DeVaris Brown, two young Twitter veterans. Spill’s user interface is unlike any other, and its terminology is different as well. The app uses spill for post, sipping for following, and serving for being followed. Fresh Tea is a live feed from everywhere, while My Brew is a feed of everyone you’re sipping. Because the app’s conventions are unique, I initially had difficulties getting around but ultimately I got the hang of it.

Spill is still a work in progress. For example, it’s impossible to paste text plus a URL into Spill, which many people do when commenting on an online article. I found I could only enter the text and URL separately, which is rather cumbersome. Perhaps this is by design, but the result is that most spills are short thoughts or observations. There is also no web app at the moment, which the developers promise to rectify shortly.

The vibe on Spill is quite different from other social networks. Black vernacular is the lingua franca on Spill. Many of the users are well-known Black journalists, authors, professors, and social activists, but you might not even know it because frequently these self-aggrandizing details are not mentioned in the profiles (although it’s possible). Rather than exploiting the opportunity to network professionally, Spill is clearly a more personal, safe, Black space where folks are just sharing their thoughts and feelings in ways that are most comfortable and fun.

Expand the Court

Posted by on 2023-07-05 No comments

Donald Trump did tremendous damage to the Supreme Court by appointing two Christian Nationalist zealots during his single term. Trump, a sexual predator in his own right, appointed accused sexual predator Brett Kavanaugh to join accused sexual predator Clarence Thomas in a court already swimming with misogyny.

In a nation where only 23% of all citizens regard themselves as Catholic, 7 of 9 — 78% — of current Supreme Court justices are Catholic (Kagan is Jewish, Jackson is Protestant). Several of the Catholic justices reject the liberal Catholicism that came out of the Second Vatican Council, a papal nod to modernity, equality, and justice. Amy Coney Barrett, Trump’s last appointment, actually belongs to a Catholic cult replete with handmaids (not precisely what you think). There is not a single gay justice on the Court, although at least 7.2% of all Americans are gay. This is a court that knows little and cares even less about the diverse lives of ordinary Americans.

The Court’s recent, explosive rulings both snub their nose at stare decisis and dishonestly select cases based on fraudulent standing before the court. Where once it took a panel of legal experts to discern the legal principles behind a decision, now it only requires asking the question: what would Donald Trump want?

Worse, the Court is now encroaching upon the functions of the other branches of government. In her dissent to the Court’s ruling on student debt cancellation, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that “the result here is that the court substitutes itself for Congress and the Executive Branch in making national policy about student-loan forgiveness”.

“Congress authorised the forgiveness plan… the [education secretary] put it in place; and the president would have been accountable for its success or failure,” she wrote. “But this court today decides that some 40 million Americans will not receive the benefits of the plan (so says the court) that assistance is too ‘significant'”.

Most dishonestly, the Court violated a basic legal principle of standing (as it also did in the website case) by conjuring up an aggrieved party with no standing to actually bring its complaint before the Court. The Court claimed the Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority (MOHELA), a student loan servicer that conducts day-to-day operations on federal student loans, would lose revenue as a consequence of debt cancellation. The only problem is that MOHELA did not bring the suit and said in its own financial documents that it didn’t plan to make any payments in the future.

Furthermore, an analysis from the Roosevelt Institute and the Debt Collective shows that MOHELA stood to gain revenue if debt cancellation had gone forward. In selecting this case and faking the plaintiff, the Court was not settling a dispute; it was going out of its way to preempt both the Executive and Legislative branches of government.

For the past year following the Dobbs decision, the Court has drawn intense criticism, with critics eager to revisit the lies and ethical violations of its black-robed sexual predators, as well as those who took cash and gratuities from billionaires and then ruled on cases affecting these sugar daddies.

But the last straw has been the Court’s outrageous violations of judicial precedent and dishonesty in picking and choosing cases as well as manufacturing aggrieved parties. We have finally reached the point where many are calling for impeachment, reforms and court expansion.

The Constitution’s Article III, Section 1 says that federal judges can hold their offices “during good behavior.” With a corrupt Supreme Court, it’s sobering to consider that the Supreme Court itself may have the last word in deciding if conspiring with your wife on an insurrection, letting billionaires buy your decisions, or violating basic legal principles that would disbar lesser judges constitutes grounds for impeachment. One hopes it is entirely in Congress’s hands.

Reforms can be accomplished by the Court itself, others only by Congress, and others (term limits or court diversity) only by Constitutional amendment. The reform group Fix the Court does not advocate the expansion of the Court but does advocate: term limits, tighter ethics and disclosure rules, public access to court proceedings, divestiture of individual stocks by justices, more rigorous recusal rules, comprehensive financial disclosures, and public disclosures of the many media appearances most of us didn’t even know that justices make.

Expanding the court, however, does not require altering the Constitution. It could theoretically be done today. This is a position that an increasing number of legislators, including both Massachusetts senators, advocate. The group Demand Justice advocates for court expansion. Democrats have already filed legislation to expand the court, though it is unclear why they think it would survive a Constitutional sniff test. Expansion is something the President can do with Senate approval. The only problem is: the current president refuses to expand the court.

But adding justices is hardly a new idea. Donald Trump’s next favorite president (after himself, of course) was Andrew Jackson, who added two justices to the Court in 1836. In 1937 the very threat of expanding the Court to 15 justices by Franklin Delano Roosevelt was enough to return several obstructionist justices to less ideologically-motivated positions.

Which is not to say the court does not also need major reform. There is nothing sacred about nine justices or lifetime presidential appointments. The way justices are appointed in other Western nations puts our poorly-defined scheme to shame.

The Supreme Court of Canada is appointed by the Governor in Council and consists of nine justices. The number started out as six, was bumped up to seven, and ultimately became nine. On the surface Canada’s looks like ours, but Canada’s Supreme Court Act requires that three judges come from Ontario, three from Quebec, two from the Western provinces or Northern Canada and one from the Atlantic provinces. And judges must also retire before their 75th birthdays.

The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom has twelve justices (shown above) and they must have already served on the bench for 15 years, or two on a “federal” bench. The UK convenes a selection commission chosen from judiciaries in Britain, Scotland, Northern Island and Wales, and it strives for at least regional balance. After selection, a justice is formally appointed by the Queen. Even with 12 justices that number can still be increased. Justices must retire at 70 or 75, depending on when they joined the bench.

The German Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht, or BVerfG), has sixteen justices divided a couple of ways into two senates and three chambers. Judges are elected by both the Bundestag and the Bundesrat, each of which selects eight justices. A Justice must have previously held a position on the bench and be at least 40 years of age. Justices serve for 12 years or until the age of 68, whichever comes first.

The French Court of Cassation is the highest appeal court in France and has an elaborate system of chambers and sitting and administrative judges, but 15 justices head up the court. These 15 judges serve a 9 year term and 3 each are appointed by the President of the Republic and Senate and National Assembly presidents. To become a judge a lawyer must be admitted to the Supreme Court Bar after passing an exam from the National School of the Magistracy. Typically, candidates are already judges in lower courts.

Our Supreme Court selection process is a mess. Not only is it highly politicized, but it lacks regional and demographic representation, professionalism, and justices typically serve well past normal retirement. More importantly, the selection process is simply undemocratic. And timidity, inertia, and a vague Constitution seem to prevent Congress from using its powers to rein in abuses by the Judicial branch.

We need a serious re-do of the selection process as well as term limits for the Supreme Court. And there are many places to look for good ideas, starting with those of our closest allies. Add Supreme Court reform to a long list of Constitutional changes necessary to update American democracy rather than overturn it — now that we’ve seen how fragile ours really is.

But in the interim, let’s expand the Supreme Court.