Author: Moe_Lane

Mercury fallout from the Cash-for-Clunkers program.

Let’s walk through the mercury problem (H/T: Instapundit).

  • Automakers used mercury as a component for various auto systems until 2004.
  • They stopped because mercury is toxic, and it gets into stuff that we eat (the actual level of risk is in fact not relevant for this discussion).
  • People get very touchy about toxic elements being thrown out with the rest of the garbage, so there’s an industry designed around collecting the mercury at the end of a car’s life.  The big (only?) one of these is ELV Solutions.
  • Here’s a list of the car companies that work with ELV Solutions.  Notice which car company isn’t on the list?
  • That’s right: GM isn’t on the list.  They exited the program at the beginning of August.
  • Autoblog Green calls the reason why “convoluted,” but it’s not.  There are now two GMs.  Good GM is the one with good assets and a chance of actually making money; Bad GM is the one with all the garbage assets, bad debts, and onerous obligations.
  • Good GM does not make cars using mercury, and technically never has (its predecessor Old GM did, not it), so it sees no particular reason why it should fund mercury recovery.
  • Bad GM… doesn’t make anything, or indeed do much of anything except sit there and slowly decompose; but Bad GM is the one that ELV Solutions needs to talk to about funding mercury recovery.
  • No, Bad GM doesn’t have any money.  Money is a good asset, which is why Bad GM doesn’t have any of it.
  • No, ELV Solutions is not able to break even on mercury reclamation.  If you could do that, ELV Solutions wouldn’t exist: the car companies would have done the job themselves and directly.
  • So now we come to the Cash-for-Clunkers program, which has suddenly put a large number of pre-2004 cars up for immediate destruction (and mercury reclamation).  A lot of those cars were built by the Old GM.
  • ELV Solutions is thus stuck for reclaiming the mercury of a major car company’s old vehicles, without getting funded by that car company.
  • And, given that there’s no GM ‘flavor’ of mercury, or GM-only junkyards, ELV Solutions is really stuck for reclaiming the mercury a major car company’s old vehicles, without getting funded by that car company.

One last thing, and please note this carefully: none of this is a bug.  The intent all along was to shunt money-hemorrhaging expenses like mercury reclamation to a zombie company that could go belly-up without also killing General Motors.  So don’t expect the administration to do anything about this.  Although I suspect that the hand of the government that was establishing the GM reorganization [did not know] what the hand that was putting together Cash-for-Clunkers was doing… which may mean that (depending on how this all turns out) a seafood diet may be contraindicated again for a couple of years.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

[Updated for clarity.]

Funny: I’ll believe that Bruce Bartlett is serious about helping the GOP recover…

…when it takes me less than ten minutes to track down his Congressional District (VA-10, Frank Wolf) or his local party apparatus (Fairfax County GOP).  Neither of which is particularly mentioned in his bio page, although a link to his book slamming President Bush is.  Prominently.  Where it’s the first thing that you can see, really.

This is fronted (via Instapundit) because this is the problem: we have lists and lists of people who want some nebulous Little Red Hen to fix their pet problem with the GOP.  Fixing the problems themselves?  Not so much.

Moe Lane

PS: Sure, you can join the Tea Parties next year, Bartlett. Just don’t expect to be given a task more involved than “make a sign to bring”…wow.  Can you even imagine Bruce Bartlett standing on a street corner, waving a homemade sign around and encouraging people to honk if they’re tired of the government spending too much of their money?  No, neither can I.

Which is more or less my point.

Crossposted to RedState.

I don’t think that this video *has* a context.

It’s just a broom. That made CNN.

Via Breitbart TV.

I actually like video shorts like this: while they are admittedly taking up resources that CNN might use to report on real news, I’m not precisely impressed with the way that CNN reports on real news. At least this way the Alabama lady maybe gets a few more customers for her shop…

Moe Lane

Bill Bradley wants to trade tort reform for the public option.

Good luck with that.

The best that I can say about the former Senator’s plan is that he means well:

Whenever Congress undertakes large-scale reform, there are times when disaster appears certain — only to be averted at the last minute by the good sense of its sometimes unfairly maligned members. What now appears in Washington as a special-interest scrum could well become a triumph for the general interest. But for that to happen, the two parties must strike a grand bargain on universal coverage and malpractice tort reform.

It’s also unfortunately the worst that I can say, too. Democrats in Congress had their opportunity to seek a bargain, and they deliberately spurned it. Since then, they have libeled, slandered, lied, and schemed against not only Republican legislators (which is part of the game), but the American people (which is not). And now they are poised to try to pervert the rules of the Senate itself in order to pass corrupt legislation that ignores the concerns of… pretty much everybody in the country who isn’t a major contributor for the Democratic party, really.

So no deal.  If this distresses former Senator Bradley, then he should have spoken up before this: say, at the beginning, when Madame Speaker and Reid decided to freeze out the GOP.  But it’s so easy to go along to get along when things are coming along well for your party…

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Boston Globe: Well, he ain’t getting any deader*.

So now’s a great time to bring up the Cape Wind wind farm project again (some background on the topic here). As near as I can tell, the Globe got this one in before the first spadeful of Virginia earth got put on former Senator Kennedy’s coffin:

The proposed offshore wind project has sustained more than seven years of heated debate; political maneuvering, including some by the late Senator Edward Kennedy, a project opponent; and environmental review. It now awaits a decision from the Department of the Interior — the last major regulatory hurdle its developers must clear for the project to move forward. As the country’s first proposed commercial offshore wind farm, and the only project of its kind this far along in the approval process, Cape Wind could open the door for developers to harness the vast wind energy resource along the nation’s eastern seaboard. The approval could make Massachusetts the trailblazer of a power source that is an essential part of the country’s strategy to address global warming and to achieve energy security.

(Via Newsbusters, via Instapundit**) That’s the thing about defending things until your dying breath: if you’re good enough at it, people eventually settle down to wait until you have one. Continue reading Boston Globe: Well, he ain’t getting any deader*.

Book of the Week: A Song for Arbonne.

It being Sunday, we replace Terry Pratchett’s Unseen Academicals with Guy Gavriel Kay’s A Song for Arbonne – a older book, but a fine one, and an excellent introduction to Kay’s work.  Given that he’s finally given out information about his next book (Under Heaven, drawing from Tang Dynasty China, due in Spring of 2010), this gives some of you plenty of time to get up to speed on the author, and why you’ll want this one in hardback.

Pandas ‘too fat to mate?’

Well, according to this Twitter entry, they are – so Chinese zoo workers are trying to get them to exercise more.  The only confirmation of this that I have had so far is this, which is a year old.

I know that even writing this may violate an unstated taboo, but at some point we may have to ask if giant pandas actually want to avoid extinction.  It’s like they keep coming up with ways to provoke natural selection into deselecting them; if they looked like opossums – or even squirrels, which aren’t actually ugly-looking – the panda would have long since left the Circle of Life.  So… are we just encouraging more and more self-destructive evolutionary behaviors with our misguided altruism?  Have we trapped ourselves in a codependent relationship with a bamboo-chewing species of lazy nihilists?  Are we enablers?

Moe Lane

PS: That being said, Suicidal Pandas would be a good name for a band.