Knitting for a storm

I was able to set up my old Singer "chunky" knitting machine in a different space where it can stay set up for a while, which meant I could do more knitting. Edana (age 6) has been helping. We now have a "line" of bobble hats made with Womerlippi Farm yarn. Edana likes to set up the needle bed and make bobbles. This is a good activity for the dead of winter.

Are RECs any good?

Adapted from a letter to a former student who asked whether RECs were any good.

Dear Susie:

You wanted advice on whether or not to purchase “green” electricity through one of the several companies allowed to sell it to you via your Versant delivery system. The specific example was Ambit.

These companies use “deregulated” electricity markets. Basically, deregulation meant that local electricity companies like Bangor Hydro (as Versant used to be known) has to disaggregate their electricity sales business from their electricity delivery business. They were now required by government to “deliver” electricity from other producers when previously they both produced and delivered their own electricity  This is a “free market" way of regulating "natural monopoly".

What this means is that Bangor Hydro no longer exclusively sells electricity from the many hydro dams it used to own on the Penobscot and other rivers. Good for salmon and alewives, bad for the atmosphere if that electricity is replaced by electricity from coal or gas. They now must sell you electricity from any producer on the national grid who wants to sell it to you.

The problem is the physics. You may remember from class that electricity finds the shortest path to ground. If you short out a 110V circuit with your finger, and don’t have proper PPE footwear, you’ll BE that shortest path, and get a “belt”. Usually this doesn’t kill you, unless you’re ready to drop dead anyway. But you’d notice.

So super clean wind turbine electricity produced in Minnesota and run into the grid there will find its way to ground through the nearest fridge or baseboard to the turbine. It’s not physically possible, unless every intervening draw is switched off along the transmission and distribution lines, for that electricity to arrive at your home in Maine.

So to account for this and allow for a “free” or freer market in power, we create a “free market” fiction. We let the wind power company feed that electricity into the grid in MN and get the two cents or so per kWh than MN is willing to pay for ordinary electricity  

But imagine that a “green” electricity customer in Maine is willing to buy that KWh for 18 cents, just over what Versant charges for Standard Offer.

The MN wind power company can sell the actual electricity to the MN grid for two cents and sell the green “attributes” of that power as a Renewable Energy Credit or REC to Ambit for say 5 cents. They get 7 cents instead of two so they’re happy. Accounting is used to make sure they don’t sell the attributes twice.

This is a bit like when you “sponsor” the education of a child in a developing country through a non-profit. You get pictures monthly of “your” kid. Except that the money you pay doesn’t go directly to your kid. It goes to the non-profit, who takes a cut to pay overhead, and then to an in-country umbrella corporation, possibly also a non-profit, who takes a cut, and then to the school. Sometimes bribes have to be paid. If you just found yourself some deserving kid somewhere and sent her a ten dollar USPS money order each month, you could cut out the middlemen and the whole business would be better for it. But that’s too much work for the average punter.

Back to the REC business. Ambit turns around and sells the seven cent kWh to Lilliana for 18 cents. Ambit pays Versant eight cents per kWH to "deliver” that power to Susie  Ambit is happy because they made three cents net revenue (18 minus 8 minus 7 cents equals three). And they did nothing very much too earn that money,. They just acted as a broker.

Susie is happy because she thinks she is buying green power instead of stinky old Versant power.

Only Versant is unhappy because they can’t sell Susie their standard offer of eight cents for the power and 8 cents for power delivery. They get eight instead of sixteen cents. But screw them. Filthy old power company.

But think again: If you look at Versants standard offer disclosure label, it actually isn’t so bad. A bit of coal and a bit of nukes, for sure, and some gas. But it’s over 20% renewable. (And would be more so if the grid hadn’t been deregulated in the first place, causing Versant to dismantle all those dams because they were no longer competitive with cheap fracked gas.)

Susie, in frustration, emails her grumpy old professor. He says it’s all very close to being a con. It’s sometimes better to spend the two cents differential between Versant Standard offer and Ambit on something that simply saves energy directly. So, if the power bill is $100/month, 2/18ths of $100 is $11.11. 

This is too much work for most punters. Just like the kid.

But eleven bucks isn’t nothing. That would be enough to switch out the five most heavily used light bulbs in the house for new LEDs in just the first month. Or pay via credit for a new fridge that uses 100w/hour instead of 500w/h. It might even buy a small share in a local solar cooperative, among the many getting set up locally. These have the advantage of being capital investments and so bring in more savings (AKA income. Savings is the same as income in the long run).

Moral of the tale? It’s perhaps better not to buy the REC if other better local options are available. But if you don’t have the brain-space to find out about these options, buy the REC. just research the company that sells it to you.

Best,

Grumpy old Mick

Gunning for who?

Some of my gun-nut former students, the ones' I'm pretty sure are not die-hard Trumpers or white supremacists or I wouldn't bother with them, are making jokes and bragging about ammunition stocks and guns. Really dude? The whole country just experienced the worst attack on democracy since the war of 1812, led by Trumper gun-nuts and violent extremists. Great timing, bro. How do you think the women and children that see your FB feed feel about this? How might they feel about you? What about the possibility that they mis-read you and decide you are one of the insurrectionists? Maybe report you to the FBI? And in general, isn't it time to fucking grow up? I was in the military. I helped save lives and win wars, mostly by doing what I was told. Then I got over it and had a whole other life doing other cool stuff. I don't need to play GI Joe in my head. (My real and far more manly job is to make things safe for my kid to play fairies in her head.) So why do you? What is it that's missing here? I'm asking for your sake.

(BTW, I should have said the worst attack on democracy since the Civil War. It was the worst attack on the Capitol since 1814.)

Irreducible complexity

Credit: Maine: An Encyclopedia

It's not amusing watching some former students and other people I know struggle to accept that a) what happened was an attempted coup, b), terribly wrong, and c), going to result in legal punishment for those who took part. These are, for the most part, decent people. But they can't mentally get to grips with the problem because of various kinds of implicit bias. Some were outright pro-Trumpers, but most were single-issue conservative voters, especially second-amendment types from the former law enforcement program at Unity College. 

Here's some help: First up, admit you've been in a bubble. You don't read the serious news. You admitted this to me in class. I tried but often couldn't get you to read it, even though I explained that not reading it made you a poor candidate for participation in a democracy. Many of you don't read well at all. Remember when I made you read out loud in class? I'm not trying to demean you. I just want you to understand that a lot of information you need just goes right by you because you don't read the unbiased news, for one or the other reason.

Second up, try to understand that a politician can be for something you like, ie, gun rights, but also for something you don't like, ie, violent insurrection. At the same time. Just because you often only have one thing, whatever it is (Jesus, hunting, guns, abortion, fill-in-the-blank) doesn't mean to say that others don't have many more, some of which you won't like. You have to begin to consider more than one issue and weigh things in the balance more carefully, one thing against the other. Otherwise you'll keep your gun rights, for instance, but lose your free speech rights, or the right to equal treatment under the law. (I would pick those over guns any day.) 

Finally, it is complex. It's called irreducible complexity because you can't reduce it. There are no shortcuts to understanding it. The extremists themselves used a variety of failed mental shortcuts (Q-Anon, Trump worship, racism) so they wouldn't have to deal with the complexity. This hurts. It truly hurts to not understand what is going on, I know. But you going to have to learn to either live with this feeling or try harder to understand. Finally, remember when I showed you that the KKK came to Maine to organize against Franco-American immigrants in the 1920s? Many of you  have those tell-tale French last names. If you think that you are immune from fascists, well, you just don't know or understand that they came for your grandparents or great-grandparents (even though they were white). They tried to come for mine too. The Luftwaffe bombed my town, bombed my six-year old dad out of his house, and forced multiple members of my family into the British armed forces for six years before the war against fascism was finally won. 

Fascists will always come for you eventually. That's what fascists do. It's inherent to their system, which is based on hate. The in-group has to get purer and purer over time to keep up a steady supply of out-groupers to hate. You have to stop fascists before they they come for you. Because they will. But it has to start with you. You have to stop hating too.

For students and former students who need help with Public Service Loan Forgiveeness

This is likely to be a popular topic. Full disclosure: I was "around" the political process at the start of the PSLF scheme. It was a recommendation in a 2003 paper I wrote for Philosophy and Public Policy Quarterly. 

Here's the question: How can you succeed with student loan forgiveness? 

Especially given the basket-case that is the DoE under DeVos? 

Aimee and I have some experience with this because in February 2020 we managed to get our loans forgiven, all $110,000 of them. This sounds like a lot, but remember it was the cost of a BA and a BS, two MS's, and two PhD's. This was without counting the tuition remission and research assistant stipends we also had. 

We also got nearly $10,000 of payments that we had already made refunded. Without this event, losing our jobs at Unity College would have been a much bigger family financial disaster than it was.

First up, what is PSLF?

PLSF is federal student loan forgiveness for all government and non-profit employees. Your loans have to be federal subsidized or unsubsidized loans, not private for-profit loans. If you don't know the difference you need extra help and had better email us separately. And you must be employed by the government, (federal, state, or local), or a "qualifying" IRS 501 (c) (3) not-for-profit charitable institution. Again, if you don't know the difference between government, non-profit, and for-profit organizations, a) you should have taken economics in college!, and b) you need extra help and should email us separately. 

But many students that won jobs after taking degrees at the old, "real" Unity College will qualify. 

(If you are reading this and are a student at the new, purely online Unity College, you need a different kind of help. There are pedagogical reasons why so many of the old students are employed in their target jobs.)

How long does it take? Ten years qualifying payments or 120 payments on time and the rest of your loans are forgiven. There's no limit to how much, at least not right now. But, and this is a timely warning, Congress is very likely to overhaul the system completely after the Biden inauguration, so you should stay tuned. I'll add updates to the bottom of the page as necessary.

How do I start? You have to be enrolled in an income-driven repayment scheme (IDR) and your loans must be consolidated under Pennsylvania's FedLoan program. Fedloan is the federal contractor for all ordinary PLSF loan forgiveness processes. FedLoan has a seven-step start page here. Scroll down a little to expand the seven steps: 

https://myfedloan.org/borrowers/special-programs/pslf

What if I haven't been in an IDR? Congress realized that a lot of former students had been counseled by loan providers, including state and federal government ones like FedLoan, out of IDR schemes, so they approved Temporary Expanded PSLF (TEPSLF) to give these folks a window of opportunity for forgiveness (section 3 of the Act). The amount authorized is limited, but hasn't all been used yet because of how crap FedLoan is. (More on dealing with this below.) DoE has a start page for TEPSLF here:

https://studentaid.gov/manage-loans/forgiveness-cancellation/public-service/temporary-expanded-public-service-loan-forgiveness?utm_content=&utm_medium=email&utm_name=&utm_source=govdelivery&utm_term=

PSLF or TEPSLF?  If you work for government or qualifying non-profit and are in an IDR scheme and make 120 on-time payments, you qualify for PSLF. If you work for government or a non-profit, and have made payments under a different scheme, you may still qualify for TEPSLF. 

What if I've already made 120 payments? If you made 120 on-time payments that qualify as IDR for PSLF, you'll get forgiveness under that program. If you made 120 payments under a different repayment program, you may qualify for TEPSLF if there's enough of the tranche of money that Congress authorized left. or if they allocate more money. Both PSLF and TEPSLF allow for backdating of payments, so approval can happen in less than ten (further) years with that program if you have kept up. And even if you missed a payment, or were in forbearance for a month, that will only be one extra month of payments. (When we first started work at Unity College the pay wasn't very good, and so there were a couple times we asked for forbearance so we could pay an auto repair bill or buy a necessary household item. Or get married! We asked for and got forbearance to have more money to pay for our wedding. Not that it was a particularly "big" wedding. But that's how tight things were. There's a reason we had to build our own house!)

First step: You have to reconsolidate your loans under an IDR with FedLoan to begin PSLF or TEPSLF. It's advisable to do this in any case, because consolidation saves money and time, and, to be honest, none of the loan servicers are much better than FedLoan. Beware for-profit consolidation schemes. These vultures will charge high interest and drive you bankrupt. And there's no forgiveness if you are foolish enough to consolidate with a private student loan company. 

This is all too difficult. What do I do? It is way too freakin' difficult. The paperwork is unnecessarily difficult, even before FedLoan loses your papers and miscounts your payments! We have PhDs and are good readers, writers, and critical thinkers, but it still took us four solid months to figure it all out and qualify. The reading level for the documentation is way too high, probably around grade fourteen or fifteen (sophomore/junior in college) and it's very disorganized. And this is even before you get deeper into it and start reading the actual laws or the results of the various court cases, which we found ourselves doing before we won forgiveness. (As we tried to explain to you when we were your teachers, reading and writing are very important college skills -- more important than knowing how to dart monkeys or electroshock fish! Here's a great example!) But they could have made it easier. The DoE under Betsy DeVos is/was a terrible basket case. FedLoan lost our paperwork several times and gave us several different counts of qualifying payments. Congress really needs to fix this, but a new Secretary of Education will help, one that is actually an educator.

Be patient, be "Zen" and plug away at it. "Keep calm and carry on." Take a break if you need to, and get some rest, then come back to it. There are also counselors and lawyers who are beginning to specialize in PSLF and TEPSLF, but, of course, this "high priced help" comes with a cost.

But email us with any specific questions you may have and we'll try to help. 

If all else fails? If you run into trouble with FedLoan, and almost everyone does because they lose paperwork all the time, you can then go to something called the Federal Student Aid Ombudsman and appeal. 

It's this last step that worked for us: The Ombudsman will still send you back to FedLoan almost immediately, but you'll be in a different department that works much faster. They'll get back to you very quickly and if you have a good case it will take a month or two more and you'll be done. 

This is primarily because of the various lawsuits that have been brought against DeVos, the DoE, and FedLoan. There's a little-known federal law called the Administrative Procedure Act. The APA requires all government procedures to be consistent and rational. In particular, a federal agency or contractor (DoE or FedLoan) cannot treat people differently under the law. If one person gets forgiveness, all other people with the same relevant characteristics must also get the same consideration, or they can sue. The Trump Administration fell afoul of this law many, many times during its four years' reign, and DeVos was the very worst offender. They just couldn't get it together to treat people fairly and consistently under just about any law they tinkered with. (Especially if you were poor, of color, or Muslim. But "deplorables," from Mar-a-Largo members to Proud Boys got lots of help and support!)

Keep your bill stubs! I'm a packrat. I have all our paid bills filed for the last twenty years, since I moved to Maine in 2000. It helped enormously that we had nearly a full set of payment stubs for all our loan payments. Each previous payment date and amount, the loan provider, and in most cases the payment plan was documented on the stub. This meant that we could prove if necessary, and in in court if needed, that we had made the payments, putting FedLoan and DoE at risk of an APA lawsuit if they didn't follow the law. This record helped focus the ombudsman on FedLoan's deficiencies, not any of ours. They obviously couldn't pin any deficiency on us because we had such a good paper trail. As the ombudsman process got going, I went through all our saved bills (which are filed chronologically by biweekly pay periods), pulled out the loan payment stubs, made a spreadsheet of each amount, loan provider, and payment plan (when recorded), and also an electronic photocopy of the whole stack. I sent both electronically to the ombudsman. We had changed student loan providers as the government changed the system over the years, and so there were some stubs that didn't give the payment plan, and we had lost four or five monthly stubs, but we had enough to make the Ombudsman force FedLoan to check the records more carefully. So keep your payment stubs. This is usually the top two thirds of each bill, after you rip off the payment slip and send it in with your check. If you pay online, save similar records electronically.

Of course, now Aimee doesn't get to complain about my packrat habits, at least with regard to bill-filing! Car parts, hardware, and nuts and bolts are a different category, though (apparently).

Bottom line: It's a major pain to jump through all the hoops, took us hours of work and frustration, but considering the pay-off ($110K for both of our PhDs), they were well-paid hours in the end!

Russian long range climate strategy finally breaks the surface

The Times is telling us all about Putin's climate strategy:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/12/16/magazine/russia-climate-migration-crisis.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

You heard it here first, folks.

https://taskandpurpose.com/thelongmarch/endgame-key-putins-long-range-grand-strategy-climate-change/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8UyUpM3l10

The truest word I'll ever say...

"Let’s start with the force field. No-one tells you about this when you start teaching, but it’s as true as the live-long day, the truest word I’ll ever say. The average developed world teenager comes with a supernatural force-field around them that inhibits communication from any person older than them, but especially teachers. Learning to identify and penetrate this force field at will, on a regular basis, is an a priori requirement to be successful in teaching liberal arts classes."

(I wrote this as part of a critical essay for the CHE this spring. They turned it down. But I still like it. You can read the whole thing here for free.)