Safe Streets, William Barr

 

Safe Streets

Wm Barr

WSJ 102722

 

The violent crime surge was preventable. It was caused by progressive politicians reverting to the same reckless revolving-door policies that during the 1960s and ’70s produced the greatest tsunami of violent crime in American history. We reversed that earlier crime wave with the tough anticrime measures adopted during the Reagan-Bush era. We can stop this one as well.

Studies have repeatedly shown that most predatory crime is committed by a small, hard-core group of habitual offenders. They are a tiny fraction of the population—I estimate roughly 1%—but are responsible for between half and two-thirds of predatory violent crime. Each of these offenders can be expected to commit scores, even hundreds, of crimes a year, frequently while on bail, probation or parole. The only time they aren’t committing crimes is when they’re in prison. For this group, the likelihood of reoffending usually doesn’t recede until they reach their late 30s.

The only way to reduce violent crime appreciably is to keep this cohort off the streets. We know with certainty that for each of these criminals held in prison, there are hundreds of people who aren’t being victimized. This “incapacitation” strategy requires laws, like those in the federal system, that allow judges to detain repeat offenders before trial when they pose a danger to the community, and that impose tough sentences on repeat violent offenders.

History shows this strategy works. Before 1960, violent crime in the U.S. was modest and stable. In the early ’60s, however, liberal reformers pushed to turn state justice systems into revolving doors, with violent offenders quickly released on parole or probation. Predictably, violent crime exploded, going from 160 crimes per 100,000 population in 1960 to 758 per 100,000 in 1991.

In the 1980s, the Reagan administration and several large states started locking up violent offenders, and the nation’s prison population rose from about 300,000 to almost 700,000. This radically flattened the rate of violent crime, which rose only 11% during the ’80s. By 1991, when I first became attorney general, the revolving door was in overdrive in many states. Nationally, murderers served less than six years on average; the average time served for rape was three years. In Texas, offenders typically served only 15% of their sentences. Five of 8 felons released from prison were arrested for new crimes within three years.

The George H.W. Bush administration initiated the doubling of federal prison capacity, pushed states to do likewise, and launched a broad movement to toughen up state justice systems. It also greatly expanded joint federal, state and local task forces to target the worst violent criminals for stiff sentences under federal gun, gang and drug-trafficking laws.

The results of these policies were stunning. By 1992, as more violent offenders were incarcerated, the trajectory of violent crime started falling for the first time in decades. Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush continued these policies, and from 1991 to 2013, the total prison population in the U.S. doubled—from roughly 800,000 to 1.6 million. At the same time, violent crime plummeted, dropping for 23 years. By 2014 it had been cut in half—to a level not seen since 1970—and homicides of black victims were down by about 5,000 a year.

Nevertheless, progressives complained: Why were we imprisoning record numbers when crime was receding? They missed the point. Crime was dropping precisely because we were keeping violent criminals in prison. Progressives call this “mass incarceration,” but their rhetoric is deceptive. It implies people are being locked up indiscriminately. On the contrary, incapacitation is a precision strategy. It targets and uses prison space primarily for violent criminals who pose the greatest threat to public safety.

Unfortunately, 23 years of successful crime reduction came to an end with the resurgence of progressive policies in the Obama administration, which saw a return to the revolving door and the demonization of police. Incarceration rates started falling again, and by 2014 crime rates were headed back up. This reversal was temporarily halted by the Trump administration, which succeeded in driving violent crime down until the summer of 2020. It started to climb in the wake of the Covid pandemic and the Black Lives Matter riots. It continues to rise without any end in sight.

Progressives have no solution. As in the ’60s, they call for more social spending to address the supposed “root causes” of violent crime. But even if we knew how to address the root causes effectively, which we don’t, implementing the solution would take decades. People are entitled to protection now. Even the best-designed social programs have no chance of success in neighborhoods strangled by violence and fear. Law and order is a prerequisite for social progress.

Progressives say we can’t afford to keep violent predators in prison. On the contrary, we can’t afford not to. A 1992 Justice Department report, “The Case for More Incarceration,” showed that the cost of keeping a chronic violent criminal in prison is small compared with the costs of letting him roam the streets.

In other contexts, we spend huge amounts to reduce the risk of premature death or injury to members of the public, including billions on highway safety or environmental quality. If we started using the same cost-benefit analysis for law enforcement, we would be spending many times more than we do today on police and corrections.

The very purpose of government is to secure a peaceful society—making life safe for law-abiding citizens by protecting them from violent predators. Progressive politicians are doing the opposite, blighting the lives of the law-abiding with their warped solicitude for the criminal few. We can stop the swelling crime wave only by rejecting these politicians and their destructive policies. It is time for a return to sanity.

Mr. Barr is a distinguished fellow at the Hudson Institute. He served as U.S. attorney general, 1991-93 and 2019-20.

FREUD EXPLAINS WOKENESS, A. Hartz, PhD

 

FREUD EXPLAINS WOKENESS

WSJ 080822

 

There sure is a lot of moralism going around. Censorship, condemnation, excommunication, demands for apologies. There are even spontaneous chants of “Shame! Shame! Shame!” directed at the villain of the moment. I recently saw an ad for a psychology workshop that argued outright that people from “privileged” groups should “hurt” and “feel shame.” People are guilt-tripped for using disposable straws, liking a canceled song or speaking “ableist” words.

How did we descend from the libertine culture of the 1960s—“if it feels good, do it”—into a pit of endless shame?

Ask Sigmund Freud. He divided the psyche into three parts: the id (unconscious drives), the ego (the conscious self) and the superego (the site of moral ideals, inhibitions and shame). Freud saw mental health as the result of balance—being aware of feelings as they come and go, but not letting any one part of the psyche become too dominant.

A large amount of mental illness is attributed to an overactive superego. Cycles of harsh self-criticism can induce depression or push people toward drugs or alcohol. Inhibitions around things like cleanliness or public speaking can underlie anxiety disorders. Rigid prohibitions can contribute to sexual dysfunctions and eating disorders. Judgments, righteous anger and control can lead to interpersonal problems.

Some psychoanalysts argue that the superego, in its purest form, is linked to a “death drive,” which seeks to regulate all thoughts and feelings down to zero. This is the suffocating aspect of Nurse Ratched in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Fully internalized, it’s the logic of suicide.

The superego isn’t always ethical. Someone could feel intense shame for having something stuck in his teeth during a date and no guilt at all about cheating on his taxes. The superego is often irrational, though its pronouncements can feel as if they come from on high.

The superego is often linked to father figures. In the Oedipal drama of early childhood, a son supposedly identifies with his father to internalize rules and ideals to live up to. Freud, like Plato, thought the parts of the psyche paralleled strata of society. The ego resembles a society’s leaders, the id is like the masses, and the superego is most like the police or other bodies that enforce rules—bureaucrats, censors, corporate HR. The leaders (the ego) have to manage the selfish desires (id) and the moral idealism (superego) that drive society. They do so by gratifying them somewhat and directing them toward productive goals, but not letting either entity seize control because both tend to be shortsighted.

How does all this fit into the transformation of the 1960s counterculture? In the 1960s, many figures on the left tried to abolish the superego (some consciously, others less deliberately), and this goal seeped into the entire counterculture. It wasn’t only the overthrow of “the patriarchy,” an anti-father ethos, or the shifting of sexual mores, but a deeper attempt to overthrow rules and gratify desire.

Obviously it didn’t work. Selfish desires are too destructive. Children need discipline; societies need laws. New rules emerged—rules that were somehow still opposed to the old rules but attempted to perform the same functions. The result is a patchwork morality that’s harsh in some places, absent in others and ultimately incoherent. If excessive sexuality is causing trauma and exploitation, rather than curtailing sexuality, activists demonize masculinity, deny the differences between the sexes, and eliminate due process.

Hypermorality is now everywhere. “Implicit bias” training attempts to purify the unconscious of forbidden thoughts. There are the extreme inhibitions of safety culture and the use of ostracization to target heretics. Then, there are grandiose moral ideals. Zero carbon. Zero gun crime. Zero pedestrian deaths. Zero tolerance.

There’s also the misattunement of moralization. Criminals get compassion while police are vilified. There’s sometimes more judgment of people who don’t wear a mask than of people who rob stores. Insults directed at white people or men are seen as the epitome of justice and wisdom, while even unconscious bias against other groups is seen as unforgivable.

What happens to a society when the leadership is overpowered by a dysfunctional superego? Unachievable and grandiose ideals lead it astray. Narrow goals that hit moral notes override wise leadership. People lose sight of the big picture, of social cohesion and the need for humility, pragmatism and tolerance.

As the superego bears down too heavily, symptoms can emerge: paranoia, loss of reality, odd behaviors, despair. Eventually, as the over-pressurization of moralism intensifies, the desires of the masses erupt. A monstrous id emerges to topple the monstrous superego. This response is unlikely to be well-organized. More likely it will be impulsive, awkward and strange—a paroxysm of forbidden desires, gratifying but destructive.

The only hope is a new ego that can rein in the dysfunctional superego. This requires leadership that can speak directly about the costs of excessive morality and uneven standards and let people be people, with the diverse desires they have, under fair, pragmatic rules.

Hypermorality is seductive because it seems, well, virtuous. But in practice it dampens spontaneity, joy and ease, and it often has hateful overtones. It can make relationships cold, bitter and formal. It wastes enormous amounts of energy, and it makes society less fun. The id is the source of humor, creativity and inspiration. The superego is stiff and dull.

More to the point, hypermorality often worsens the problems it aims to address. Think of people who constantly criticize themselves for being socially awkward, making themselves more awkward. Or think of someone who tries a severe diet only to become more attached to junk food. Prolonged Covid lockdowns can increase excess deaths, aggressive “antiracism” can aggravate racial tension, and intrusive forms of social coercion, however well-meaning, can provoke hostile reactions.

One doesn’t have to agree with all Freud’s claims to see value in his perspective, but many of his points are shared by others in history. Lao Tzu wrote in the Tao Te Ching, “Try to make people happy and you make them miserable. Try to make people moral and you make them evil.” Societies require a light touch. They need a limited superego attuned to the most important wrongs, one that holistically considers costs and benefits of rules and is gentle enough to let us be human. It’s good advice for individuals too.

Mr. Hartz is a psychologist in private practice in New York City.

Lincoln’s Vision of Democracy by Allen C. Guelzo

 

Lincoln’s Vision of Democracy

 

At Gettysburg, he chose his words carefully—

especially the prepositions, ‘of,’ ‘by’ and ‘for’ the people.

 

By Allen C. Guelzo

Nov. 8, 2022 2:20 pm ET

 

The news of the great battle at Gettysburg came to Abraham Lincoln by fits and starts. But when it was finally confirmed on the morning of July 4, 1863, that Robert E. Lee’s Confederate army had been forced to retreat, the tidings couldn’t have been more welcome. To a crowd of well-wishers who gathered outside the White House, Lincoln exulted that “the cohorts of those who opposed the declaration that all men are created equal” had at that great battle “’turned tail’ and run.”

 

Before month’s end, plans were developing to create a majestic national cemetery in Gettysburg for the more than 3,300 Union dead, with dedication ceremonies to take place on Nov. 19. The featured orator would be the august Edward Everett. But for the actual dedication sentences—a “few, appropriate remarks,” as David Wills described them in his invitation letter—the organizers turned to Lincoln.

 

What they expected was probably perfunctory. But Lincoln gave them something far beyond their expectations. In 272 terse and simple words, the president laid out the story of the American republic in three stages: past (“four score and seven years ago”), present (“now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether this nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can endure”) and future (“we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain”).

The brevity of Lincoln’s remarks also left the Gettysburg Address dark with hidden lights. Why the oddly biblical opening? Why the invocation of 1776 and the Declaration of Independence rather than 1787 and the Constitution? What would have happened if, in the ensuing two years of the Civil War, we had failed the “testing”?

 

The least well-examined words of the address, however, are its expansive triplet: “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” This wasn’t merely a rhetorical flourish. In that triplet, Lincoln lays out the three fundamental elements of democracy. The first is consent—government of the people. “According to our ancient faith,” Lincoln said in his 1854 speech objecting to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which compromised on slavery, “the just powers of governments are derived from the consent of the governed.” That meant plainly “that no man is good enough to govern another man, without that other’s consent. I say this is the leading principle—the sheet anchor of American republicanism.”

 

A second distinctive feature of democracy is the people’s voice in the affairs of governing—government by the people. It matters little whether that active voice is the direct participation of individuals, as in ancient Athens, or through their representatives, as in the American Constitution. From his earliest moments in politics, Lincoln argued that government by the people—through their laws and through elections, and not by mobs with nooses and shotguns—was the only legitimate expression of democracy. “I do not deny the possibility that the people may err in an election,” he conceded in 1861. “But if they do, the true cure is in the next election.”

 

The third basic element of democracy is a government that serves the interests of the people—government for the people—not those of a monarch, an aristocracy or an angry and contemptuous elite. For that reason, Lincoln wrote, government served to do only those things that need “to be done, but which they cannot, by individual effort, do at all, or do so well, for themselves,” such as roads and bridges, schools and asylums, the enforcement of the laws and the defense of the nation. While government isn’t “charged with the duty of redressing, or preventing, all the wrongs in the world,” he said in 1859, it does have the responsibility to keep from “planting and cultivating too many thorns in the bosom of society.”

 

Lincoln’s address at Gettysburg wasn’t an explosion of rhetorical fireworks. That kind of speaking was reserved for Everett’s 13,000-word oration, teeming with classical allusions to Thucydides and Pericles but without a single sentence anyone could remember afterward. Lincoln’s was an essay on why American democracy had been founded, why it was worth the sacrifice to preserve, and what the country could anticipate if it emerged whole from the conflict. The example of that sacrifice would stimulate “a new birth of freedom,” like the new birth revival preachers had exhorted people to embrace—a revitalization of the original purpose of the American Founding that would, as Lincoln said in 1858, “turn this government back into the channel in which the framers of the Constitution originally placed it.”

 

That new birth is the task that lies before every succeeding generation of Americans. In it, we find our way not only back to Lincoln but to democracy itself. We return to the dignity of a human form that can stand upright before its Creator, with no autocrat or prince casting an intervening shadow, with hands outstretched to nature and its God, and to each other. When we do, the shades of those Lincoln honored at Gettysburg will embrace us, as the sun shines again on government of the people, by the people, for the people.

 

Mr. Guelzo is director of the Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship at Princeton University’s James Madison Program.

Are We Heading for a Civil War? Article in The Week, 21 Jan. 2022

 

Clara Barton and the Red Cross

Little hard to read the text, but the images are interesting.

 

A World War I truce on Christmas Day, soccer on the Western Front.

 

German, British soldiers found peace on pitch

During a World War I truce on Christmas Day, the two sides put away their weapons and played soccer on the Western Front.

By Kevin Baxter

The first Christmas of World War I was a hellish time for Alfred Dougan Chater, a second lieutenant in the 2nd Battalion Gordon Highlanders, who woke that morning in a freezing, muddy trench less than 100 yards from the German lines in West Flanders, Belgium.

It was 1914 and the bloodiest fighting of the still-young conflict had ended in a stalemate. Corpses littered the deadly “No Man’s Land” separating the two sides along the Western Front, where hope had long since given way to despair and disillusionment.

So what Chater saw next, he wrote his mother, was “one of the most extraordinary sights that anyone has ever seen.”

All along a 20-mile stretch of the Western Front, unarmed German troops began climbing over the parapets and walking toward the British side simply to shake hands and exchange greetings, the first tentative steps toward what is likely the largest spontaneous Christmas truce in modern history, one in which the warring armies shared cigars, good cheer, chocolate and, in more than one place, a game of soccer.

“It absolutely did happen,” said Terri Blom Crocker, author of “The Christmas Truce,” among the most authoritative books on the subject. Some of the men, she said, came out “the night before, some the morning of, some the afternoon of Christmas. Nobody pre-arranged anything.”

The truce, Crocker said, ranged from soldiers shouting across the pockmarked battlefield pledging not to shoot if the other side promised the same to “full-fledged let’s go out and fraternize and maybe even play a little football.”

More than a century later the truce and its spontaneous example of humanity and decency in the darkest of times continue to inspire, which is why the incident remains a subject of both study and curiosity. Failed, cowardly leadership had brought the world to war, but a simple child’s game brought the two sides to peace — for a few hours at least.

In one of a series of interviews the Imperial War Museum conducted with veterans long after the conflict, Ernie Williams, a 19-year-old private with the 6th Battalion Cheshire Regiment, said he was near Ypres, on the northern end of the front, when “from somewhere, somehow, this football appeared.”

He continued the story with Peter Hart for his book “Fire and Movement: The British Expeditionary Force and the Campaign of 1914.”

“They took their coats off, some of them, and put them down as goalposts,” he said of the Germans. “There would be at least a couple of hundred taking part.

“No referee; we didn’t need a referee for that kind of game. It was like playing as a kid in the streets, kicking the ball about and the referee being the policeman and chasing you off. There was no score, no tally at all — it was simply a melee.”

Hours before, men on both sides had been trying to kill one another. But when the football came out, Williams said, “everybody seemed to be enjoying themselves. There was no sort of ill will.”

At another spot along the front, a group of Scottish soldiers marked a goal with their hats and played against the Germans with “huge enthusiasm,” until a German officer found out about the game and put a stop to it with the Germans leading 3-2.

Temporary ceasefires have been a part of war dating to the Roman Empire. They are frequently arranged to allow each side to collect the dead and wounded littering the battlefield or to allow the exhausted armies to rest and recover.

The impromptu truce of 1914 — truces, actually, since they involved thousands of soldiers up and down the line with no coordination — that briefly halted the fighting five months into World War I had all of that.

“For many men the truce was, in the moment, nothing more than a welcome break from the grind and abject misery of trench life and constantly living under mortal threat,” Mike Hill, author of recently released “Christmas Truce by the Men Who Took Part: Letters From the 1914 Ceasefire on the Western Front,” wrote in an email interview. “The truce was a much-desired chance to gather in the dead bodies of their friends, which had been just out of reach, in some cases for months, and must have been a pretty grim sight to live with.”

The 1914 truces were also unique in that many took place without the knowledge or permission of commanding officers. Also because they featured soccer.

“The football games are really what attracted everyone’s attention,” Crocker said. “There’s really a big thing made out of them.”

So much so that the English supermarket chain Sainsbury’s aired a smartly made and emotional 3-minute 20-second holiday commercial timed to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the truce.

Officers on both sides opposed the fraternization, which is why some contemporary histories of the war downplayed or ignored the magnitude of the event. British commanders threatened to discipline some who participated, fearing it would rob soldiers of their will to fight. On the German side, Crocker said, an Austrian-born corporal refused to leave his spot in the trenches, believing the truce to be disgraceful. His name was Adolf Hitler.

But letters the men wrote home, many of which were published in local newspapers and later collected in museum archives, speak in glowing terms about the truce. However, there were far fewer references to soccer.

“There is very little first-hand evidence of organized games taking place in the form we would recognize as a match, i.e. even sides, referee, rules, laid-out goals, etc.,” said Hill, whose book claims to be the largest collection of letters from the front during World War I. “There are a lot of references to more impromptu kickabouts. There is also a lot of discussion about the possibility of having games, conversation between enemies about professional football back in Britain — a significant number of Germans had lived in the UK prior to the war — and also reports of games taking place on Christmas Day between British regiments behind the lines.”

Soccer also was used as a morale-booster and recruitment tool on both sides, so the sport was hardly a stranger to the troops. Moreover, FIFA, the world governing body for international soccer, had been created just a decade earlier and the German and English national teams had played one another four times in the six years preceding the war, with England winning three times and the other match ending in a draw.

As a result, the idea of soccer as a vessel for nationalist expression already had been established, so it’s not hard to imagine the game serving the same role during a tentative truce.

“Football was very popular at the time in both countries and then, as now, would have been a default conversation between strangers, so it is no surprise it should have come up as something to talk about, and the next logical step is having a game,” Hill said. “If nothing else, it would underline their new-found camaraderie.”

One firsthand account of a game, from Cpl. Albert Wyatt of the Norfolk Regiment, is featured in Hill’s book.

“Everybody on each side walked out to the middle of the two firing lines and shaking hands wished each other a Merry Christmas,” Wyatt writes in a letter home. “To our surprise we found we were fighting men old enough to be our fathers, and they told us they had had enough of the war, as they were nearly all married men.

“We finished up in the same old way, kicking a football about between the two firing lines. So football in the firing line between the British and Germans is the truth, as I was one that played.”

British officer Peter Jackson, in an interview with the Imperial War Museum nearly a half-century after the conflict, also clearly remembered a Christmas Eve game.

“Somebody from the trench punted across a short football [that] landed amongst the Germans and they immediately kicked it back amongst our men,” he said. “I spoke to the German officer and suggested that we ha[ve] a football match. After a while he relented, and the football match began. ...

“They were kicking the ball backwards and forwards to the trenches, to the barbed wire, for quite half an hour, until unfortunately the ball got impaled on one of the stakes of the barbed wire and was deflated.”

That sports could become a substitute for war shouldn’t be surprising since generals rely on many of the same attributes coaches do, among them teamwork, camaraderie and discipline.

During the Contra War in Nicaragua in the 1980s, a Sandinista patrol reportedly came across a small group of anti-government rebels, and with neither side willing to violate the delicate ceasefire then in place, they decided to settle their differences with a baseball game in a nearby pasture.

That the story is almost certainly apocryphal does little to diminish its message: play ball, not war. It’s also why Crocker finds the lessons of the Christmas Truce still relevant 107 years later, in a country riven not by war but by political and social divisions.

“We’re so divided by everything. We can’t talk to each other. We have these two very disparate sides of America,” she said. “Imagine they were fighting and they’re still able to say, ‘You guys are people and we’re going to go out and hang with you for the afternoon.’

“That’s what’s wonderful about the truce. It’s not because they were rejecting the war. Everybody out there in the trenches still thought the war was worth fighting. They were out there because they recognized their enemies as people.”

 

Batteries, A Discussion About the Costs of EV

 

Batteries
Some amusing lagniappe [small gift] with some
good information on the subject.
Anonymous (couldn’t locate the author)

When I saw the title of this lecture, especially with the picture of the scantily clad model, I couldn’t resist attending.  The packed auditorium was abuzz with questions about the address; nobody seemed to know what to expect. The only hint was a large aluminum block sitting on a sturdy table on the stage.

When the crowd settled down, a scholarly-looking man walked out and put his hand on the shiny block, “Good evening,” he said, “I am here to introduce NMC532-X,” and he patted the block, “we call him NM for short,” and the man smiled proudly. “NM is a typical electric vehicle (EV) car battery in every way except one; we programmed him to send signals of the internal movements of his electrons when charging, discharging, and in several other conditions. We wanted to know what it feels like to be a battery. We don’t know how it happened, but NM began to talk after we downloaded the program.

Despite this ability, we put him in a car for a year and then asked him if he’d like to do presentations about batteries. He readily agreed on the condition he could say whatever he wanted. We thought that was fine, and so, without further ado, I’ll turn the floor over to NM,” the man turned and walked off the stage.

“Good evening,” NM said. He had a slightly affected accent, and when he spoke, he lit up in different colors. “That cheeky woman on the marquee was my idea,” he said. “Were she not there, along with ‘naked’ in the title, I’d likely be speaking to an empty auditorium! I also had them add ‘shocking’ because it’s a favorite word amongst us batteries.” He flashed a light blue color as he laughed.

“Sorry,” NM chuckled, then continued, “Three days ago, at the start of my last lecture, three people walked out. I suppose they were disappointed there would be no dancing girls. But here is what I noticed about them. One was wearing a battery-powered hearing aid, one tapped on his battery-powered cell phone as he left, and a third got into his car, which would not start without a battery. So, I’d like you to think about your day for a moment; how many batteries do you rely on?”

He paused for a full minute which gave us time to count our batteries.  Then he went on, “Now, it is not elementary to ask, ‘what is a battery?’ I think Tesla said it best when they called us Energy Storage Systems. That’s important. We do not make electricity – we store electricity produced elsewhere, primarily by coal, uranium, natural gas-powered plants, or diesel-fueled generators, [and solar panels]. So to say an EV is a zero-emission vehicle is not at all valid. Also, since forty percent of the electricity generated in the U.S. is from coal-fired plants, it follows that forty percent of the EVs on the road are coal-powered, do you see?”

He flashed blue again. “Einstein’s formula, E=MC², tells us it takes the same amount of energy to move a five-thousand-pound gasoline-driven automobile a mile as it does an electric one. The only question again is what produces the power? To reiterate, it does not come from the battery; the battery is only the storage device, like a gas tank in a car.”

He lit up red when he said that, and I sensed he was smiling. Then he continued in blue and orange. “Mr. Elkay introduced me as NMC532. If I were the battery from your computer mouse, Elkay would introduce me as double-A, if from your cell phone as CR2032, and so on. We batteries all have the same name depending on our design. By the way, the ‘X’ in my name stands for ‘experimental.’ 

There are two orders of batteries, rechargeable, and single-use. The most common single-use batteries are A, AA, AAA, C, D. 9V, and lantern types. Those dry-cell species use zinc, manganese, lithium, silver oxide, or zinc and carbon to store electricity chemically. Please note they all contain toxic, heavy metals.

Rechargeable batteries only differ in their internal materials, usually lithium-ion, nickel-metal oxide, and nickel-cadmium.

The United States uses three billion of these two battery types a year, and most are not recycled; they end up in landfills. California is the only state which requires all batteries be recycled. If you throw your small, used batteries in the trash, here is what happens to them.

All batteries are self-discharging.  That means even when not in use, they leak tiny amounts of energy. You have likely ruined a flashlight or two from an old ruptured battery. When a battery runs down and can no longer power a toy or light, you think of it as dead; well, it is not. It continues to leak small amounts of electricity. As the chemicals inside it run out, pressure builds inside the battery’s metal casing, and eventually, it cracks. The metals left inside then ooze out. The ooze in your ruined flashlight is toxic, and so is the ooze that will inevitably leak from every battery in a landfill. All batteries eventually rupture; it just takes rechargeable batteries longer to end up in the landfill.

In addition to dry cell batteries, there are also wet cell ones used in automobiles, boats, and motorcycles. The good thing about those is, ninety percent of them are recycled. Unfortunately, we do not yet know how to recycle batteries like me or care to dispose of single-use ones properly.

But that is not half of it.  For those of you excited about electric cars and a green revolution, I want you to take a closer look at batteries and also windmills and solar panels. These three technologies share what we call environmentally destructive embedded costs.”

NM got redder as he spoke. “Everything manufactured has two costs associated with it, embedded costs and operating costs. I will explain embedded costs using a can of baked beans as my subject.

In this scenario, baked beans are on sale, so you jump in your car and head for the grocery store. Sure enough, there they are on the shelf for $1.75 a can. As you head to the checkout, you begin to think about the embedded costs in the can of beans.
The first cost is the diesel fuel the farmer used to plow the field, till the ground, harvest the beans, and transport them to the food processor. Not only is his diesel fuel an embedded cost, so are the costs to build the tractors, combines, and trucks. In addition, the farmer might use a nitrogen fertilizer made from natural gas.

Next is the energy costs of cooking the beans, heating the building, transporting the workers, and paying for the vast amounts of electricity used to run the plant. The steel can holding the beans is also an embedded cost. Making the steel can requires mining taconite, shipping it by boat, extracting the iron, placing it in a coal-fired blast furnace, and adding carbon. Then it’s back on another truck to take the beans to the grocery store. Finally, add in the cost of the gasoline for your car.

But wait - can you guess one of the highest but rarely acknowledged embedded costs?” NM said, then gave us about thirty seconds to make our guesses. Then he flashed his lights and said, “It’s the depreciation on the 5000 pound car you used to transport one pound of canned beans!”

NM took on a golden glow, and I thought he might have winked. He said, “But that can of beans is nothing compared to me! I am hundreds of times more complicated. My embedded costs not only come in the form of energy use; they come as environmental destruction, pollution, disease, child labor, and the inability to be recycled.”

He paused, “I weigh one thousand pounds, and as you see, I am about the size of a travel trunk.” NM’s lights showed he was serious. “I contain twenty-five pounds of lithium, sixty pounds of nickel, 44 pounds of manganese, 30 pounds cobalt, 200 pounds of copper, and 400 pounds of aluminum, steel, and plastic. Inside me are 6,831 individual lithium-ion cells.
It should concern you that all those toxic components come from mining. For instance, to manufacture each auto battery like me, you must process 25,000 pounds of brine for the lithium, 30,000 pounds of ore for the cobalt, 5,000 pounds of ore for the nickel, and 25,000 pounds of ore for copper. All told, you dig up 500,000 pounds of the earth’s crust for just - one - battery.”

He let that one sink in, then added, “I mentioned disease and child labor a moment ago. Here’s why. Sixty-eight percent of the world’s cobalt, a significant part of a battery, comes from the Congo. Their mines have no pollution controls and they employ children who die from handling this toxic material. Should we factor in these diseased kids as part of the cost of driving an electric car?”

NM’s red and orange light made it look like he was on fire. “Finally,” he said, “I’d like to leave you with these thoughts. California is building the largest battery in the world near San Francisco, and they intend to power it from solar panels and windmills. They claim this is the ultimate in being ‘green,’ but it is not! This construction project is creating an environmental disaster. Let me tell you why.

The main problem with solar arrays is the chemicals needed to process silicate into the silicon used in the panels. To make pure enough silicon requires processing it with hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, nitric acid, hydrogen fluoride, trichloroethane, and acetone. In addition, they also need gallium, arsenide, copper-indium-gallium- diselenide, and cadmium-telluride, which also are highly toxic. Silicon dust is a hazard to the workers, and the panels cannot be recycled.

Windmills are the ultimate in embedded costs and environmental destruction. Each weighs 1688 tons (the equivalent of 23 houses) and contains 1300 tons of concrete, 295 tons of steel, 48 tons of iron, 24 tons of fiberglass, and the hard to extract rare earths neodymium, praseodymium, and dysprosium. Each blade weighs 81,000 pounds and will last 15 to 20 years, at which time it must be replaced. We cannot recycle used blades. Sadly, both solar arrays and windmills kill birds, bats, sea life, and migratory insects.

NM lights dimmed, and he quietly said, “There may be a place for these technologies, but you must look beyond the myth of zero emissions. I predict EVs and windmills will be abandoned once the embedded environmental costs of making and replacing them become apparent.

I’m trying to do my part with these lectures.  As you can see, if I had entitled this talk “The Embedded Costs of Going Green,” who would have come?  But thank you for your attention, good night, and good luck.”

NM’s lights went out, and he was quiet, like a regular battery.