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BAKER CITY
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Tuesday, September 6, 2022 • Baker City, Oregon
EDITORIAL
Is Oregon ready
for growth in
electricity use?
A
question we hear in state meetings about
climate, power and even discussions we have
overheard at Bend’s Midtown Yacht Club:
Does Oregon have enough electricity if everybody
moves to using electricity for pretty much everything?
The short-term answer is: No, not right at this
moment.
The long-term answer is: Yes, with the right action.
We can’t predict the future. We aren’t experts on en-
ergy in Oregon. We know there is also a very important
question: Should Oregon do it? But today we are looking
at the is-there-enough question. (And we should thank
the help the folks at Oregon’s Public Utility Commission
gave us to try to track down answers.)
The easiest to digest the answer comes from the Ore-
gon Department of Energy. It looked at how ready Ore-
gon’s grid is for electric vehicles. In the next few years, it’s
not expected to be a big deal.
“But as more Oregonians make the switch to EVs,
utilities are already working on potential solutions to
meet the increased demand,” the department said in a
blog post. “To handle peak demands, the electricity sec-
tor has long engaged in multi-year capacity planning to
forecast future peak demands on the grid and to identify
whether new resources (like new energy-generating fa-
cilities) are required to meet those demands.”
Electric vehicle loads are not unusually large. But they
do come bundled with complications.
Charge up a Nissan Leaf in a home and that is only
about twice the energy of a typical refrigerator. But mul-
tiple EVs charging together on a Level 2 fast charger
could gobble up the capacity of a local distribution trans-
former. So utilities will need to plan for those upgrades.
They will need to have an understanding of where and
importantly when EVs charge. Moving the demand for
EV charging to the late evenings and night would help
reduce the need for peak electrical capacity.
Capacity for electric vehicles are one slice of the an-
swer. There are a lot of discussions in Oregon about the
future of natural gas for heating and cooking. There’s
even been talk in Bend of prohibiting new natural gas
hookups for residences.
For the bigger picture, we talked to Bob Jenks. Jenks
is executive director of Oregon’s Citizen Utility Board.
It’s basically Jenks’ job and CUB’s job to look out for the
interests of consumers when utilities ask for changes in
rates and submit their capacity plans to the state.
Jenks says: No. Right now, there is not enough electri-
cal capacity in Oregon if everybody switched to electric
cars and electric heating and cooling.
“I think we can get to about 90% to 95% clean (to
about 2035) on the electric system even with electrifi-
cation of transportation and buildings,” he told us in an
email. “That last 5 to 10% is what will be difficult. Off-
shore wind might be the answer. New advanced nukes
might be. But there is time to figure this out.”
Electrical capacity is not just an Oregon question. The
grid is regional. The scenario everyone is trying to avoid
are energy shortages. They call it loss of load probability.
The goal, at least in the Northwest Power Plan, is to have
an adequate power supply so the likelihood of having
one or more shortfalls in a year is 5% or less.
Just a couple years ago in 2019 the Northwest Power
Council was worried that with the retirement of coal-
fired power plants the loss of load probability would rise
to 8.2% in 2024 and 17% in 2026.
Not good.
But the Northwest Power Council’s new report pub-
lished a few months ago in the Federal Register doesn’t
sound alarmist. It talks about the need for planning.
And it talks about the need for preparation.
Oregon’s utilities do look at these challenges in their
plans filed with the state’s Public Utility Commission. For
instance, Pacific Power did an independent study of how
the electric vehicle market would impact its systems.
We may have actually tried to take on this question
a little early. A key document that will look at the state’s
energy future is actually scheduled to come out on Nov.
1. It’s the 2022 Biennial Energy Report from the Oregon
Department of Energy.
If there is a hint of loss of load probability in that re-
port, if there is hint that Oregon is not ready for the en-
ergy future, legislators will need to act.
Unsigned editorials are the opinion of the Baker City
Herald. Columns, letters and cartoons on this page express
the opinions of the authors and not necessarily that of the
Baker City Herald.
COLUMN
Enough with the ‘anti-democratic’ insults
BY TYLER COWEN
O
ne of the most disturbing trends in
current discourse is the misuse of
the term “anti-democratic.” It has
become a kind of all-purpose insult, used
as a cudgel to criticize political and intel-
lectual opponents. Not only is this practice
intellectually lazy, but it threatens to dis-
tort the meaning and obscure the value of
democracy.
The advantages of democracy are ob-
vious, at least to me, and deserve greater
emphasis:
• Democracy helps produce higher rates
of prosperity and economic growth.
• Democratic governments are more
likely to protect human rights and basic
civil liberties.
• As philosopher Karl Popper stressed,
democracy helps societies escape the very
worst rulers, by voting them out of office
and in the meantime constraining them
with checks and balances.
Of course democracy is not perfect.
First, a lot of individual democratic deci-
sions are not very good. (In fact, relative
to scientific or technocratic ideals, most
democratic decisions are not very good,
though I would argue that technocrats
cannot be completely trusted, either.) Sec-
ond, there are periods when some coun-
tries might do better as non-democracies,
even though democracy is better on av-
erage.
Too much commentary ignores these
nuances. For example, the New York
Times recently published an opinion
piece with the headline, “Modi’s India Is
Where Global Democracy Dies.” Many of
its criticisms of Prime Minister Narendra
Modi are valid — but the regime is not
anti-democratic. Modi has been elected
twice by comfortable margins, and he is
favored to win another term. It is instead
a case of a democracy making the wrong
choices, as they often do.
Or consider the criticisms of Poland
when that regime limited the powers of
its independent judiciary several years
ago. That was a mistake, as it under-
mines the system of checks and balances
that help strengthen democracy. Yet the
move was not part of an “anti-demo-
cratic” agenda, as some commentators
said at the time. Limiting the judiciary
typically makes a government more
democratic, as it did in Poland. (By the
way, there are Polish elections scheduled
for 2023; I see no signs they will be can-
celed.)
The danger is that “stuff I agree with”
will increasingly be labeled as “demo-
cratic,” while anything someone opposes
will be called “anti-democratic.” Democ-
racy thus comes to be seen as a way to en-
act a series of personal preferences rather
than a (mostly) beneficial impersonal
mechanism for making collective deci-
sions.
Closer to home and more controver-
sially, many on the political left in the U.S.
have made the charge that the Supreme
Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade
was “anti-democratic.” It is fine to call
Dobbs a bad decision, but in fact the rul-
ing puts abortion law into the hands of
state legislatures. If aliens were visiting
from Mars, they simply would not see that
move as anti-democratic.
Yes, the American system of govern-
ment has many non-democratic (or im-
perfectly democratic) elements at its heart
— the Supreme Court itself, for example,
or the Senate, which gives less populous
states outsized influence. Yet those same
descriptions would apply to the court that
decided Roe v. Wade as well as the court
that overturned it.
(An aside: My qualms about the term
“non-democratic,” as opposed to “an-
ti-democratic,” are separate but related.
Not every aspect of a democracy can or
should be democratic; there is a strong
case for appointing sheriffs and dog-
catchers. But if “non-democratic” is used
as a normative insult, people may begin
to wonder if their loyalties should be to
small-d democracy after all.)
It is also harmful to call the Dobbs de-
cision anti-democratic when what you’re
really arguing for is greater involvement by
the federal government in abortion policy
— a defensible view. No one says the Swiss
government is “anti-democratic” because
it puts so many decisions (for better or
worse) into the hands of the cantons. And
pointing out that many U.S. state govern-
ments are not as democratic as you might
prefer does not overturn this logic.
It would be more honest, and more ac-
curate, simply to note that court put the
decision into the hands of (imperfectly)
democratic state governments, and that
you disagree with the decisions of those
governments.
By conflating “what’s right” with “what’s
democratic,” you may end up fooling
yourself about the popularity of your own
views. If you attribute the failure of your
views to prevail to “non-democratic” or
“anti-democratic” forces, you might con-
clude the world simply needs more major-
itarianism, more referenda, more voting.
Those may or may not be correct con-
clusions. But they should be judged empir-
ically, rather than following from people’s
idiosyncratic terminology about what they
mean by “democracy” — and, by exten-
sion, “anti-democratic.”
Tyler Cowen is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist.
He is a professor of economics at George Mason
University and writes for the blog Marginal
Revolution. He is coauthor of “Talent: How to
Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around
the World.”
COLUMN
Could workers’ return avert a recession?
BY RACHEL GRESZLER
T
here’s not much good to say about
the U.S. economy today, with out-
of-control inflation eroding house-
hold incomes and Americans bracing for
a recession after gross domestic output
shrunk in the first half of 2022.
But the labor market is the wildcard.
There are nearly two job openings
for every unemployed worker, and half
of businesses have job openings they’re
unable to fill. Since the start of the pan-
demic, the working-age population (16+
years) has increased by 4.4 million, yet
there are 576,000 fewer people employed
today.
If the employment-to-population ratio
were the same today as it was in Febru-
ary 2020, more than 3 million additional
people would have jobs. With that many
more people producing goods and ser-
vices, would it be enough to turn negative
GDP growth positive? The relationship
between employment and economic out-
put suggests yes.
A popular rule-of-thumb called
Okun’s law (named after economist Ar-
thur Okun) says that each one-percent-
age-point decrease in the unemployment
rate corresponds to a roughly two-per-
centage-point increase in the growth rate
of real GDP.
Right now, unemployment is low, and
GDP growth is negative. Those two don’t
usually go hand in hand, but we’re in un-
usual times where demand for goods and
services is high, but there aren’t enough
workers to meet those demands. That
suggests that the disappearance of more
than 3 million active workers has contrib-
uted to the decline in GDP in the first half
of 2022 and their re-entry into employ-
ment might have prevented that decline.
Suppose all those “missing” workers
had never left the labor force but were
classified as unemployed. (The official
unemployment designation is based on
whether a jobless person is looking for
work, but the fact remains that they are
not contributing to output.) The unem-
ployment rate would have been about 1.9
percentage points higher in the first half
of this year. But if those workers found
employment among the 11.4 million job
openings that existed in the first half of
2022, the unemployment rate would have
subsequently declined by about 1.9 per-
centage points.
That increase in employment (or de-
crease in the potential unemployment
rate) would have meant more output,
which gets to the crux of Okun’s law re-
lating economic output to the difference
between people being productively em-
ployed or unproductively unemployed.
Applying a 2-to-1 ratio between out-
put and unemployment, the productive
employment of 3.2 million missing work-
ers might have shifted the pace of GDP
growth from -1.6% to 2.4% in the first
quarter and from -0.9% to 2.9% in the
second quarter.
That seems like a big jump, but the re-
covery from COVID-19 was supposed
to be strong and longer-lasting. In Janu-
ary 2021, Moody’s estimated that GDP
growth would be 8% in 2021 and 4% in
2022. Instead, it was 5.7% in 2021 and
negative so far in 2022.
And it’s not for a lack of demand. Can-
celed flights, delayed deliveries, unopened
community pools, over-crowded emer-
gency rooms, missing bus drivers and
teachers, reduced public safety, shortages
of goods and services, rising prices, and
all the extra human resources needed to
find and retrain new workers (instead of
directly producing goods and services)
demonstrate how missing workers have
meant less output.
Could a reversal of the decline in work
spare the U.S. a recession?
Theoretically, yes. But it’s not possi-
ble for millions of people to immediately
jump back into the workforce and into
productive jobs. A gradual reentry could
absolutely minimize economic decline,
but the necessary ingredients for a strong
workforce have drastically deteriorated.
For starters, welfare-without-work ben-
efits and school lockdowns were a major
setback for young peoples’ work and in-
come prospects. Individuals between the
ages of 20 and 24 have experienced larger
employment declines than any other age
group besides those 65 and older. And at
the same time, their college enrollment
plummeted over 9%.
Policymakers could help increase em-
ployment among young workers by ex-
panding alternative education options—
including reviving Industry Recognized
Apprenticeship Programs—and by mak-
ing welfare work-oriented.
And to help increase employment
among older workers, policymakers
should protect flexible, independent work
opportunities that allow people to be their
own bosses. They also should eliminate
Social Security’s retirement earnings test,
which discourages older Americans from
working.
Current policies to spend more, tax
more, regulate more, and produce less
will only make labor shortages and infla-
tion worse. But it’s not too late for poli-
cymakers to minimize the severity of the
current economic downturn by removing
government-imposed barriers to work
and by getting the federal government’s
fiscal house in order.
Rachel Greszler is a senior research fellow
specializing in retirement and labor policy at The
Heritage Foundation’s Hermann Center for the
Federal Budget.