Should the policymaking process be so rushed as to allow no time for thought? Price shocks from ozone nonattainment and cage free chickens. A better year for blueberries (I think).

Is this how we ought to be making policy?  Should it be so rushed that little if any analysis can be done?

 

Both of the articles linked below are somewhat dated by this point, but the exact details are not what I want to touch on here.  

What I want to focus on is probably best illuminated by the two quotes from the Center Square article below (note the Center Square article covers a report by the conservative-leaning Common Sense Institute and I left the link intact in the quote so you can find the report if you want):

"'Accordingly, with few exceptions, the bills listed in this report will add substantial costs to businesses – costs which will of course cascade to consumers – without a clear understanding of what those costs will be, or whether they are reasonable given the societal benefits of the legislation,' the report said."

And 

A majority of the bills included in the 2024 review haven’t had a full cost-benefit analysis, according to the organization.  'Midway through the 2024 legislative session, the quantity and pace of potential reform has continued unabated,' the 23-page report said, noting many bills could still be passed or tabled until the end of the session on May 8."

I've posted multiple times in the past about my frustration over the Democrats in the legislature running bills through the machinery so fast that everyday Coloradans cannot be a part of the process.  

This is related but not quite exactly the same.  The issue here is that the bills are running so fast that no one is able to do any sort of analysis, no one is looking at costs and benefits.  

Forget our participating in the process, is anyone even aware of what's going through the machine and what it will do?

Legislation around things like liability law, regulations of industries where the dollars come in the millions, and the like are by their nature complex and have the potential to have both a huge price tag and all kinds of unintended consequences.  Yet these bills will either fall off the map or get hurried through on party line votes and then, well, I guess we'll deal with the mess they might make later.

Just kidding!  We all know that the main function of new laws is to just add more regulation on top of existing mistakes.   

A quote from the Colorado politics article below puts some numbers to the problem:

"On day 105 of the 120-day legislative session, lawmakers have 374 bills out of 673 bills [according to the same article the 5th highest number of bills in 25 years] introduced that need action between now and midnight, May 8, when the session adjourns."

15 days to act on 56% of the bills.  

Is this how we ought to be making policy?  Those in charge here (the Democrats since 2019) are doing a real bang up job running things.  

https://www.thecentersquare.com/colorado/article_78680f82-fb5b-11ee-8b54-fb698500c85e.html

https://www.coloradopolitics.com/news/legislative-session-bills-2024/article_c683449a-018f-11ef-8434-6bf37d015ad0.html

Related:

I write frequently about the media citing sources and saying they're "nonpartisan" and thus trustworthy, capitalizing on the dual meaning of nonpartisan as both "not affiliated with any political party" and "unbiased" or "neutral".

I want to make a point via contrast.  In the post above, the Center Square relates a study by the Common Sense Institute (CSI), a group often labeled (including by me) as some version of conservative-leaning.  

I'm okay with this label as I think it's accurate and not pejorative.  You could say the same for any left-leaning group and I'd feel the same; I don't care about the politics so much as I do about truth in advertising.  

If you go to Common Sense Institute's About page, you'll see the following at the very top:

"Common Sense Institute is a non-partisan research organization dedicated to the protection and promotion of Colorado’s economy."

CSI is a nonpartisan group.  How often does their work appear in left-leaning papers as a source?  It's not zero, but it's not a lot.  When it does come in, it usually comes with the conservative-leaning label, something rarely appended to a left-leaning group as a source.

Nonpartisan doesn't mean neutral, and our media often characterize nonpartisan differently depending on the politics involved.  Remember both.

https://commonsenseinstituteco.org/about/

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Price shocks from ozone nonattainment and cage free chickens

From ozone nonattainment to free range chickens, the policy by Polis and his merry band of progressives makes our life more expensive and leaves us more vulnerable to price shocks.

What is the connection between Colorado's cage free chicken rule and ozone non-attainment?  More than tenuous, but perhaps not apparent at first blush.  

The dynamic at play here is artificially restricted supply.  This in and of itself raises prices, but more than that, it means that problems intensify price increases beyond what they would otherwise be.

Illustrating the dynamics will show you the connection.  

In 2020, then State Representative (now senator) Dylan Roberts and Senator Kerry Donovan sponsored a bill which passed and was signed by Gov Polis.  This law mandated that only eggs from egg facilities which met certain standards on cages for the hens could be sold in Colorado.  That bill is linked first below.

In early 2023, an avian flu outbreak meant that chicken flocks needed to be culled to prevent the disease's spread.  This meant lots of dead chickens, none of whom lay eggs, and thus price increases and difficulty even getting eggs.

But this isn't the whole story.  Eggs were sitting unsold in other states.  Eggs which we could have brought here to increase the supply and/or lower prices.  Thing is, that 2020 law meant we couldn't bring them here.  Those eggs didn't meet Colorado's standards.  Right next door, but they might as well not have existed.

A quote from the 9News story linked second below fleshes it out.

"The new law, requiring all eggs sold in Colorado to come from hens held by the new law’s standards, makes that a bit more challenging.  'That means we need to start finding eggs to supply the Colorado market from the same type of environments,' he [Bill Scebbi, executive director of Colorado Egg Producers and the expert quoted in this article] said. 'Not every state has the cage free or enhanced environment to bring into Colorado while they’re serving their populations in their own states.'"

Fast forward to now and the third link below (a Sum and Substance article).  Governor Polis has written to the EPA decrying a mandate on the price reformulated gasoline the Front Range will likely soon have to buy since it is in an ozone nonattainment area. 

This specially gasoline could cause huge price jumps, jumps which Polis characterized to the EPA as "onerous and counterproductive".

Uh, yeah.  60 cents a gallon possibly jumping to between $1.17 and $1.41 a gallon are indeed onerous and counterproductive there guv.

Why so high?  Just like with eggs it comes to supply.  There isone refinery in Denver.  They can, of course, produce this special gasoline, after reconfiguring and retooling.  The effort put into that will mean other endeavors (like refining other fuels) are put on hold or minimized.  So anyone buying fuel from this refinery would likely see a jump in prices, reformulated or no.    

We could maybe try to convince other refineries in other states to make it, but then we'd face the problem of getting it here cheaply; you see, there aren't that many pipelines coming in and they're already moving things of their own.  Like the eggs, there is capacity in other states.  Unlike the eggs, we can bring it in, albeit at a higher cost.  

Both of these are alluded to in the governor's letter.  Quoting his letter via the article linked below:

"Because that one area refinery — the Suncor Energy plant in Commerce City — produces only 38% of gas used in the Denver market, the rest of the RFG [reformulated gasoline--the special gas for the Front Range] must come in via five major pipelines, which historically are constrained during the summer months, Polis wrote.  Understanding that, the EAI study estimated the RFG available to the Denver area would fall 15% to 45% short of peak July demands and would have to be trucked in, which likely would boost emissions from increased truck traffic."

"Polis’ administration is getting permit applications to expand fuel terminals to ensure adequate RFG storage and transportation — applications that would impact already emissions-burdened 'environmental justice communities,' he wrote. To meet this challenge, his administration would have to refocus its efforts away from its clean-energy strategy toward more pipeline construction and swift approval of air permits for refiners, seemingly defeating the EPA mandate’s purpose, he added."

Imagine if this state hadn't been so hostile to this sort of infrastructure to begin with.  Imagine what would happen if we have more pipelines and/or more refineries.**  

Policy in this state has already made it harder for oil and gas operators and has kept new investment out.  Then, when we have an emergency like this proposed EPA enforcement action, we have a spike in prices beyond what it would have been otherwise.  None of this, either, touching on the fact that Polis left us vulnerable to an EPA action YEARS ago by foregoing a waiver as his predecessor did (see the fourth link below for an excellent thread on Twitter by Jake Fogleman breaking down all of our esteemed governor's previous comments on the issue).   

I think the quote by Dan Haley (Oil and Gas Association President quoted in the article) says it well, so I'll end with that.  

“'Governor Polis had ample time to formally request a waiver on RFG,' Haley said. 'Choosing to wait until the last minute is irresponsible and looks like political opportunism, and consumers will bear the brunt of this policy inaction.'”

**Worth pointing out here, and I couldn't tell by the bits I read, but I hope Polis understands that refineries and pipe don't happen overnight.  They time time and money.  Fair bit of both.  Even starting today to build some, they wouldn't be online for a bit.  Guess we'd just have high prices til they're done?  Maybe this is simply a threat to the EPA, a la, if you don't give us a waiver we'll have no choice but to pollute some other way?

https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/hb20-1343

https://www.9news.com/article/news/local/next/egg-price-increase-avian-flu-cage-free-law/73-11ee5489-58f3-44f6-bfcd-684dc65b27e1

https://tsscolorado.com/polis-seeks-epa-waiver-for-gas-mandate-that-he-says-would-hurt-economy-and-environment/

https://twitter.com/Jake_Fogleman/status/1783616890595672392

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A better year for blueberries (I think) ...

That time of the week again.  Last post til Sunday, and so something for fun and not related to politics.

The winter before this last one (22/23) was such a tough one that my blueberry plants didn't produce fruit.  They survived the winter and leafed out and grew just fine.  It's just that blueberries make their buds in Fall.  These buds are dormant and overwinter, opening in spring and flowering.  This means that they're vulnerable to damage over winter, particularly damage by freezing and drying out.  

There are things to do to mitigate this damage, but despite my precautions that tough winter killed the buds and any hope of fruit.**

This year's (23/24) relatively milder winter (along with perhaps a new addition to my winter prep regimen -- a "varnish" made from pine sap which seals the buds and  prevents dehydration) had me hopeful for a crop.

So far things are looking good.  Photos 1 and 2 show the abundance of white bell-shaped flowers on my three plants.  Fingers crossed:  if things go well I'll be eating and freezing plenty!

I also tried some grafting this Spring.  Anything that is a stone fruit is (in theory) compatible to graft onto another stone fruit, so I got my hands on some plum scions to graft onto my apricot tree.  I got three scions in total.  So far I'm pretty sure one of them has taken and another is a definite "maybe".  Having never grafted anything before, I'm pretty proud at my results and excited to have the ability to have another kind of fruit without a whole new tree.

Photos 3 and 4 show the "definite" and "maybe" grafts respectively.  The graft joint is boxed in blue for each and I highlight the buds on the scions in red.  I know #3 is going to take because the buds have greened up and started to open.  #4 I'm less certain of.  The buds haven't swelled or opened, but the scion itself has a gloss to it, a gloss that makes it look alive. 

In the process of grafting, I had to cut off some apricot branches.  Rather than throw the cutoffs away, I decided to use them for practice; I tried grafting them onto my sour cherry tree.

That's screenshot 5.  It's harder to see in the picture, but I don't think any of these apricot-to-cherry grafts will take.  The scions look dead and there's no bud swelling.  Can't win them all. 

 

Next year will bring more plum scions and some peach too.  Going to try for a whole orchard's variety of stone fruit on two trees.  

Photo 6 is just for fun.  It's my sour cherry and I circled one of the chamomile tea bags I put in it (3 total).  As I wrote about earlier with the chamomile for the bee water, these tea bags are to get those bees to take notice and start pollinating.  

Hard to say if it's working.  I've seen some bees as well as some little butterflies/moths, but I don't know if that's the tea bags or what.  High hopes for a good harvest regardless:  as with the blueberries, I'll be dreaming of cobblers and pies as they grow, keeping my fingers crossed the whole time.

That's it on the garden notes so far.  I don't want to oversell, but I think I have a trick to share with you regarding a substitute root cellar and keeping last year's sweet potatoes.  More in the future.

In the meantime, it's time to wrap for the day.  See you on Sunday!

**Well, one of the bushes I have is a variety that can fruit in Fall and it did produce a little handful of berries in August/Sept.