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Poli Sci Profs Say Poli Sci Wizardry Didn’t Help Obama In 2012 After All

by KrystalMckenney Posted on February 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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Ryan Enos and Anthony Fowler have a new paper out that tries to figure out if the Obama campaign’s widely reported techno-wizardry in the 2012 election really produced a big get-out-the-vote advantage over Mitt Romney. Apparently not:

The Obama campaign of 2012 has been championed as the most technologically-sophisticated, evidence-based campaign in history while the Romney campaign was more traditional. Does this difference manifest itself in the data? Did the technological sophistication of the Obama campaign lead their GOTV efforts to be significantly more effective than Romney’s?

…. Our analysis, while admittedly crude, allows us to roughly compare the effectiveness of the Obama and Romney campaigns in mobilizing their respective supporters. Despite the technological sophistication of the Obama campaign and its devotion to a data-driven, evidence-based campaign, we see similar mobilization effects on both sides of Figure 2. It appears that the two campaigns were roughly comparable in their ability to turn out supporters.

Logic and conventional wisdom suggest that you should concentrate your GOTV effort on strong partisans, since these are the people most likely to vote for you. These are the voters Enos and Fowler analyze, and they conclude that both campaigns mobilized strong partisans about as well. Strongly organized precincts showed a 7 percent improvement in turnout on both sides.

Now, it could well be that the Obama campaign spent more money on GOTV and was thus able to influence more voters. It’s also possible that Obama was able to perform sophisticated targeting that went beyond just the most rabid partisans. So take this with a grain of salt. But if Enos and Fowler are right, the poli-sci-driven rocket science of the Obama campaign didn’t actually make much difference. The core GOTV efforts of both campaigns were about equally effective.

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Poli Sci Profs Say Poli Sci Wizardry Didn’t Help Obama In 2012 After All

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New Study Says Poverty Rate Hasn’t Budged For 40 Years

by JohannaG58 Posted on December 10, 2013

Mother Jones

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The Washington Post reports some good news:

Government programs such as food stamps and unemployment insurance have made significant progress in easing the plight of the poor in the half-century since the launch of the war on poverty, according to a major new study….The findings also contradict the official poverty rate, which suggests there has been no decline in the percentage of Americans experiencing poverty since then.

According to the new research, the safety net helped reduce the percentage of Americans in poverty from 26 percent in 1967 to 16 percent in 2012.

There are certain things you always need to be aware of in different fields of study. If it’s test scores among school kids, you need to disaggregate by race and ethnic background. If it’s life expectancy and Social Security, you need to make sure to use life expectancy at age 65, not life expectancy at birth. And if it’s poverty measurements, you need to distinguish between elderly poverty and working-age poverty.

Social Security has dramatically reduced elderly poverty, so if you simply look at overall poverty rates they’re always pulled down by the success of Social Security. But what about the working-age poor? How have government programs helped them? This was the first thing I looked for in this new study, and I found it in the red line in Figure 4:

This is a lot less cheery. Poverty has still declined, but not by much, and only between 1967 and 1973. Since 1973, the poverty rate hasn’t budged. It was 15 percent forty years ago and it’s 15 percent today.

Now, there’s still some good news in this study. Using their new measurement, the researchers find that child poverty has dropped from from 31 percent to 18 percent over the past three decades. They also find that safety net programs have reduced poverty rates and dramatically reduced “deep poverty” rates. It’s also heartening that poverty rates increased only slightly during the Great Recession. Safety net programs have significantly ameliorated a human catastrophe over the past five years.

But the headline result, I think, is simple: among the working-age poor, poverty has been stuck for the past four decades. We’ve made virtually no progress at all.

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New Study Says Poverty Rate Hasn’t Budged For 40 Years

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Clean energy law reducing electricity costs in Ohio

by DenaeTina858 Posted on September 6, 2013

Clean energy law reducing electricity costs in Ohio

By

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Ohio is getting greener, and that’s reducing the cost of power.

More than 1,000 renewable energy projects have been built in Ohio during the past five years — part of a scramble by utilities to comply with the state’s renewable energy standard. The biggest project, a wind farm, cost $600 million.

So how much are the state’s electricity customers being forced to fork out for this flurry of climate-friendly construction activity?

Nada. Not even nada — less than nada. An analysis [PDF] by the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio concludes that all those green energy projects have actually reduced the price of wholesale power in the state, albeit just a little bit.

It’s true that such projects cost money to build. But, unlike fossil fuel–powered plants, their fuels — solar radiation and wind — are free. The lower long-term energy costs of all those clean power facilities has “suppressed” the market rate for dirtier forms of electricity in Ohio, the study found.

“[C]onsistent with theoretical expectations, Ohioans are already benefiting from renewable resource additions through downward pressure on wholesale market prices and reduced emissions,” says the report, written by PUC economist Tim Benedict. Midwest Energy News fleshes out the findings:

According to Benedict’s calculations, the renewable generators now producing power have reduced the cost of wholesale power by about 0.15 percent. When his study looked at the projected power from all renewable projects that the state has approved, including those not yet operational, the figure is closer to 0.5 percent.

“This confirms what other studies have found,” said Rebecca Stanfield, a deputy director for policy for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “As we add renewables, the wholesale price of electricity goes down.”

And while a wholesale price cut of half a percent may not sound like much, it’s important to keep in mind that only about 1 percent of Ohio’s power currently comes from renewable sources. The renewable standard passed in 2008 requires that that proportion gradually increase to 12.5 percent in 2025. And as the contribution from renewable power grows, so, presumably, will the savings from a falling wholesale price of fuel.

The report was published as state Sen. Bill Steitz (R) pushes, yet again, to roll back elements of Ohio’s renewable energy mandate, which he has compared to “Joseph Stalin’s five-year plan.” Fortunately for consumers and the climate, similar efforts backed by the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to kill renewable energy mandates in states across the nation have been flopping.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Business & Technology

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Clean energy law reducing electricity costs in Ohio

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Why the fracking boom may actually be an economic bubble

by wqds234der Posted on February 19, 2013

Why the fracking boom may actually be an economic bubble

By Philip Bump

Fracking proponents like to use an evocative economic metaphor in talking about their industry: boom. The natural gas boom. Drilling is exploding in North Dakota and Texas and Pennsylvania. Only figuratively so far, but who knows what the future holds.

The Post Carbon Institute, however, suggests in a new report [PDF] that another metaphor would be more apt: a bubble, like the bubbles of methane that seep into water wells and then burst.

PCI presents the argument in its most basic form at ShaleBubble.org:

[T]he so-called shale revolution is nothing more than a bubble, driven by record levels of drilling, speculative lease & flip practices on the part of shale energy companies, fee-driven promotion by the same investment banks that fomented the housing bubble, and by unsustainably low natural gas prices. Geological and economic constraints — not to mention the very serious environmental and health impacts of drilling — mean that shale gas and shale oil (tight oil) are far from the solution to our energy woes.

PCI’s strongest argument may be on the rapid depletion of drill sites. The case is made using the data in this graph, showing the amount of oil extracted over time from wells in the Bakken formation in Montana and North Dakota.

PCI

Bakken wells exhibit steep production declines over time. Figure 63 illustrates a type decline curve compiled from the most recent 66 months of production data. The first year decline is 69 percent and overall decline in the first five years is 94%. This puts average Bakken well production at slightly above the category of “stripper” wells in a mere six years, although the longer term production declines are uncertain owing to the short lifespan of most wells.

If five years after a well is drilled it’s only returning 6 percent of its peak production, it becomes harder to justify spending money to operate the well. With less production, more wells need to be drilled.

This steep rate of depletion requires a frenetic pace of drilling, just to offset declines. Roughly 7,200 new shale gas wells need to be drilled each year at a cost of over $42 billion simply to maintain current levels of production. And as the most productive well locations are drilled first, it’s likely that drilling rates and costs will only increase as time goes on.

This is another version of the production problem in the coal industry, but on a much shorter timeline. Wells run out, requiring more wells, fast.

PCI also argues that the low price of fracked fuels, usually attributed to the abundance of supply, is unsustainable too. Taking issue with claims that shale production is a job creator and economy builder, the organization wrote a separate report [PDF] outlining how it believes the marketplace has been manipulated.

Wall Street promoted the shale gas drilling frenzy, which resulted in prices lower than the cost of production and thereby profited [enormously] from mergers & acquisitions and other transactional fees.
U.S. shale gas and shale oil reserves have been overestimated by a minimum of 100% and by as much as 400-500% by operators according to actual well production data filed in various states.

The timing of this report is important. As we noted last week, natural gas prices (particularly for electricity producers) are again increasing. Natural gas has been touted as a bridge fuel from carbon-heavy coal to renewables. If the price of natural gas is being kept artificially low and if production is necessarily going to taper off, that clung-to promise looks remarkably shaky.

Or, to use PCI’s original analogy: The bubble may be about to burst.

Fracking well in Scott Township, Penn.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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New Yorkers create three pounds of garbage per person per day

by biglermyrta910 Posted on December 13, 2012

New Yorkers create three pounds of garbage per person per day

By Philip Bump

Twelve years ago, New York City residents created nearly four pounds of garbage per person per day. It was broken down as follows:

27 percent thin pizza crusts
20 percent tourists
18 percent surliness
14 percent unused Mets tickets
11 percent lox
6 percent rejected New York Post headline ideas
4 percent ticker tape

Today, good news: The figure has declined to less than three pounds a day, about 12 ounces of which is recycled material. That’s an estimated drop from 32 million pounds of garbage a day to 25 million pounds.

Not that the city is all that happy about it. From The New York Times:

While that’s the lowest amount since at least 2000, the cost of collecting and disposing of the garbage has remained relatively constant, ranging from a low of about 70 cents [per person per day] in 2002 to a high of more than 80 cents in 2008. In 2012, the average cost per person daily was about 75 cents. The cost figures are all in 2012 dollars.

Refuse accounts for most of the garbage, but recycling, which is more expensive per pound, makes up nearly half the daily expenditure.

Independent Budget Office

Click to embiggen.

Not only has the amount of garbage dropped, so has its number of components. According to an expert whose name we will make up if pressed, this is what comprises the city’s garbage now:

83 percent artisanal things of various kinds
17 percent rubble from Sandy

Some progress, anyway.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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