Our own speed trap; arrogant SUV'ers

The stories about the Ferguson, Mo., police using big fines from trivial traffic violations, especially against African-American drivers (who are, it is true, a majority in that city), as a major municipal revenue source sounds like a variant of some communities in New England. East Providence, R.I., is one of those "speed traps'' that works very hard to get as much revenue as it can from hapless drivers who find themselves into that confusing labyrinth, with its notoriously bad signage. Some  forward-looking drivers might want to avoid that burg entirely.

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What is it about the arrogance of SUV drivers that makes them speed through streets narrowed by snow banks and push everyone else  aside -- people in normal cars as well as pedestrians?

Is it because they're sitting so high above the street and that they think they can use the sheer size of their hideous gas-guzzlers to force everyone else off the road? Or do they think they're better than other drivers because they have been able to afford one of these disgusting vehicles?

And they're even worse at night because SUV's have blinding lights. Where is the National Transportation Safety Administration when we need them?  But wait a minute. A lot of lobbyists have these things.

--- Robert Whitcomb

Selfish people in fat cars

As a libertarian about many things, I used to oppose laws against using cell phones while driving even in states  -- Rhode Island is the worst I have seen -- noteworthy for having very  incompetent, lazy and inconsiderate drivers. No more. The relentless snows have  dramatized just how bad many drivers in the Ocean State are. The people in SUV's are the worst -- perhaps because the owners tend to be affluent and spoiled. They barrel down streets many of which are  now less than a lane wide, at 20 miles an hour over the speed limit, with walls of snow and ice squeezing from both sides while yakking about their trivial lives on their phones.

I'll be pleased when the price of gasoline goes to $5 a gallon and even some of these slobs might get rid of their fat cars. They'll still be  self-absorbed, spoiled people but less able to make life miserable for others on the road, be they other drivers or hapless pedestrians looking for a sidewalk behind six-foot-high walls of dirty snow.

-- Robert Whitcomb

Robert Whitcomb: Another trap in the energy cycles

A few years ago I co-wrote a book, with Wendy Williams, about a controversy centered on Nantucket Sound. The quasi-social comedy, called Cape Wind: Money, Celebrity, Energy, Class, Politics and the Battle for Our Energy Future, told of how, since 2001, a company led by entrepreneur James Gordon has struggled to put up a wind farm in the sound in the face of opposition from the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound — a long name for fossil-fuel billionaire Bill Koch, a member of the famous right-wing Republican family.  An amusing movie, Cape Spin,  directed by John Kirby and produced by Libby Handros, came out of this saga, too. Mr. Koch's houses include a summer mansion in Osterville, Mass., from which he doesn’t want to see wind turbines on his southern horizon on clear days.

Mr. Koch may now have won the battle, as very rich people usually do. Two big utilities, National Grid and Northeast Utilities, are trying to bail out of a politicized plan, which they never liked, forcing them to buy Cape Wind electricity. They cite the fact that the company missed the Dec. 31, 2014, deadline in contracts signed in 2012 to obtain financing and start construction. Cape Wind said it doesn’t “regard these terminations as valid” since, it asserts, the contracts let the utilities’ contracts be extended because of the alliance’s “unprecedented and relentless litigation.” Bill Koch has virtually unlimited funds to pay lawyers to litigate unto the Second Coming, aided by imaginative rhetoric supplied by his  very smart and well paid pit-bull  anti-Cape Wind spokeswoman, Audra Parker,  even though the project has won all regulatory approvals.

It's no secret that it has gotten harder and harder to do big projects in the United States because of endless litigation and ever more layers of regulation. Thus our physical infrastructure --- electrical grid, transportation and so on -- continues to fall behind our friendly competitors, say in the European Union and Japan, and our not-so-friendly competitors, especially in China. Read my friend Philip K. Howard's latest book, The Rule of Nobody, on this.

With the death of Cape Wind, New Englanders would lose what could have helped diversify the region’s energy mix — and smooth out price and supply swings — with home-grown, renewable electricity. Cape Wind is far from a panacea for the region’s dependence on natural gas, oil and nuclear, but it would add a tad more security.

Some of Cape Wind’s foes will say that the natural gas from fracking will take care of everything. But New England lacks adequate natural-gas pipeline capacity, to no small extent because affluent people along the routes hold up their construction. And NIMBYs (not in my backyard) have also blocked efforts to bring in more Canadian hydro-electric power. So our electricity rates are soaring, even as many of those who complain about the rates also fight any attempt to put new energy infrastructure near them. As for nuclear, it seems too politically incorrect for it to be expanded again in New England.

Meanwhile, the drawbacks to fracking, including water pollution and earthquakes in fracked countryside, are becoming more obvious. And the gas reserves may well be exaggerated. I support fracking anyway, since it means less use of oil and coal and because much of the gas is nearby, in Pennsylvania. (New York, however, recently banned fracking.)

Get ready for brownouts and higher electricity bills. As for oil prices, they are low now, but I have seen many, many energy price cycles over the last 45 years of watching the sector. And they often come with little warning. But meanwhile, many Americans, with ever-worsening amnesia, flock to buy SUV's again.

Robert Whitcomb oversees New England Diary.