Category: Analysis

Part of the problem with getting old is that sometimes you can’t tell if the world has changed (and nobody sent you the memo), or if you merely mis-remember history.

A case in point is our current extended bout of economic protectionism (or industrial policy, or trade wars, or whatever you want to call it.)

Most recently, we had the CHIPs act to subsidize domestic production of computer chips.  The Inflation Reduction Act provided significant subsidies for electric vehicles via the tax code, but unlike the legislation that replaces, those subsidies are now for domestically-assembled cars only.  The Biden infrastructure bill has a pretty strong “buy American” clause.

(I know that last one because I recall all the right-wingers from Fox on down pissing all over those buy-America clauses.  Which just … seemed odd, to say the least.  Because we need to hate China, but we have to buy Chinese steel?  Beats me.  I don’t think internal consistency is necessarily their strong point in the best of times.)

And then, of course, the prior President appeared to impose new tariffs almost at random, or based on whoever spoke to him last.  With some obviously made-up national security pretext.  So we had ourselves a mini trade war with Canada?  Yeah, Canada.  Because they were a threat to U.S. national security?

Let me put aside whether I’m for or against such things.  Put aside the knee-jerk reaction of a classically trained economist.  Or even whether you think the best of these constitute good economic policy.

My only question is:  Didn’t that used to be illegal? 

For example, didn’t the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) forbid that sort of non-level-playing-field behavior?  Is GATT still in force?  If not, what replaced it?

I’m sure I can recall the U.S. claiming that (e.g.) Canadian subsidies for softwood lumber were illegal.   And having anti-dumping penalties imposed on Japanese chips.  And so on and so forth.  I’m pretty sure I didn’t make those up.  Pretty sure they actually occurred.

What changed?

GATT and the WTO.  There is no legal or illegal. There is only power, and those too weak to use it.

The answer to my question is that international trade law is just one great big game of “So, sue me”.

First, I appear to be a touch out of date.  GATT was a set of treaties in force between 1947 and 1995.  GATT was effectively replaced by the World Trade Organization (WTO) at that point.

But, in theory, the guiding principles of the WTO are the same as GATT.  In a nutshell, they are for removing tariffs and other barriers to trade.

So, what’s legal and what’s not legal, under the WTO?

Despite several attempts to figure out just what, exactly, the WTO is and does, I have decided that all documents pertaining to the WTO are required to be written in impenetrable bafflegab.  Half an hour of reading, from multiple sources, and I still have no idea what’s legal and what’s not.  I have no idea whether the concept of “legal” even applies to policies affecting international trade.

I’m clearly going to have to have an expert dumb it down for me.

OK, to be concrete.  The Biden infrastructure bill has some fairly strong “Buy American” clauses in it.   And yet, the U.S. is party to a WTO agreement requiring that government purchases operate on a level playing field, that is, without preference for domestic over foreign manufacturers.  How can those two things both be true?

The law firm of Aiken, Gump offers this explanation.

Below, the GPA is the WTO agreement, of which we are part, which “… prohibits the U.S. from discriminating against the goods, services and suppliers of parties to those agreements for procurement.”

The article closes with a review of the implications of the GPA on the IIJA’s Buy America requirement. The authors note that many state agencies implementing IIJA-funded projects may be unaware of the implications of the U.S.’s GPA commitments on their procurement because previous federal funding similarly subject to Buy America requirements was “generally covered by exceptions to these commitments,” as they discuss in the article.

They conclude by noting, among other benefits and risks, that “[T]he Buy America expansion in the IIJA could significantly complicate the administration of procurements for infrastructure projects for covered states. Unlike with previous federal funding, states agencies will now have to consider whether the procurement for each infrastructure project is subject to U.S. GPA commitments via consideration of the factors listed above.”

Source:  The law firm of Aiken, Gump 

Clear as mud.  As I read it:

• The U.S. government cannot discriminate against foreign suppliers.
• But the U.S. government is handing the money to the states.
• The states can discriminate against foreign suppliers, even if that’s at the explicit direction of the Federal government.
• Except maybe they can’t.

Well, OK, then how about the CHIPS act?  Here’s a reasonably intelligible writeup of that, from somebody I don’t recognize.  A key paragraph, emphasis mine:

"Under WTO law, the Chips Act is a “domestic subsidy” because it is targeted at a particular industry and makes financial contributions to that industry through direct payments and tax subsidies. Such subsidies are not prohibited but are potentially “actionable” at the WTO if they cause injury to foreign producers of semiconductors seeking to sell into the U.S. market or some third country market in competition with subsidized products. In addition, if chips produced by subsidized facilities or firms are exported, they are potentially subject to “countervailing duties” imposed by the importing country if their presence in the export market causes “material injury” to producers in that market.

Source:  Stanford University Law School

Aha.  The penny drops.

There is no clear-cut legal and illegal under WTO agreements.  There are some vague general principles that we’ve agreed to.  And then, they way these things are settled is that if some country or industry doesn’t like what you’ve done, they sue you over it.   And … I guess the WTO kind of functions like an international court of law.

So, for example, the domestic subsidy is only one of several controversial parts of the CHIPs act.  The most controversial is that it bars U.S. producers from expanding production of certain types of chips in China.  And it appears that China is getting ready to sue us, via the WTO, over that (per this reference).

When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child.

I think I finally get it.

As a young man, I naively thought that there were, you know, laws and stuff, governing international trade.

Now, as an old man, I’m pretty sure that’s wrong.  There are agreements, but these aren’t laws they way (e.g.) criminal laws are laws.  They kind of outline the things that you can sue somebody else for, if they do them.  I think.

So, international trade is governed by some general principles — with numerous exceptions.  Each country and industry is free to do whatever it wants to.  And if somebody else doesn’t like it, they can take them to court.  With, I guess, the WTO being the court, that is, supervising the dispute.

And that’s why the U.S. can sign a treaty that bars discrimination against foreign-made goods in government procurement.  And then sign laws requiring discrimination against foreign-made goods in government procurement.

It’s up to foreign governments and industries to sue us if they don’t like it.  Given how swiftly the law moves in general, I cannot even imagine how long that takes under international law.

Maybe a decade from now, we’ll be found to be in violation of our WTO treaty.  But by then, that big chunk of infrastructure money will have been spent.

In any case, I think I get it now.  When it comes to tariffs, domestic subsidies, and Buy American legislation, there are no laws.  It’s all just a game of whatever you can get away with.

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Source:  American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers.  This is from the 2016 ASHRAE Handbook—HVAC Systems and Equipment (SI), Chapter 22:  Humidifiers.

I’m a big believer in running a humidifier or two during the coldest part of the winter.  I harped on that point just recently, in Post #1640.  I do it as much for the health benefits (illustrated above) as for the comfort.

That said, I realize that I pay a considerable energy penalty for doing that.

Interestingly, a lot of people do not seem to understand just how large that energy cost is.  Here’s the trick:  You can’t measure it by the amount of electricity the humidifier itself uses.  If you have anything other than a boiling-water humidifier, by far, the majority of energy used to run your humidifier comes from your home furnace.

Which I shall now demonstrate, and briefly calculate.

Humidifier as a house-cooling device.

First, this ain’t rocket science.  Everybody knows that evaporating water cools things off.   For this next part, you just have to get your mind around what, exactly, is being cooled off by the evaporation from your humidifier.  And then, what you have to do about that, in the wintertime.

In the case of an evaporative humidifier, what is being cooled is the air inside your house.  The humidifier literally absorbs heat from room air.  You can easily prove that to yourself, as I did above.  My Vornado humidifier cools down the room air by about 5 degrees when used on its medium setting.

That’s just physics, and there’s no getting around it. No matter how you do it, converting liquid water into water vapor takes a lot of energy input.   Boil it, evaporate it from a humidifier pad, mist it into the air and let those tiny drops evaporate.  Or just hang your damp laundry inside.  If you start with liquid water, and end with water vapor, somewhere along the way, that water absorbed a lot of heat energy.  From somewhere.

At room temperature, it takes just about 700 watt-hours of energy to evaporate a kilogram of water (reference).  Which means that evaporating a U.S. gallon of water, at room temperature, requires somewhere around 2.5 kilowatt-hours of energy (or about 8500 BTUs).

And so, per the illustration above, if I want keep the room at 68F, I’m going to have to run my furnace to make up for the 5-degree difference between room temperature and the cool air coming out of the humidifier.  How much energy will my furnace have to supply?  Just about exactly 8500 BTUs for every gallon of water I evaporate.  Or, if I do a typical 2-gallon day, roughly 17000 BTUs or 5 KWH of energy, per day, will have to be added into the room air, that would otherwise not have to be supplied.

That works out to a rate of power consumption of (5000 W-H/24 H =) about 200 watts, averaged over the course of a 24-hour, 2-gallon day.  By contrast, the humidifier itself uses just 32 watts, run on medium speed.  The upshot is that the furnace supplies roughly 85% of the energy required to run that humidifier, in a room with constant temperature.

The actual electricity use isn’t quite that bad, because my “furnace” is a heat pump with a coefficient-of-performance (COP) of roughly 3.  That is, it releases about 3 watts of heat energy inside my home, for every watt of electricity consumed.  So it only uses electricity at a rate of about 70 watts, on average, to offset the cooling produced by the evaporative humidifier.

What’s the difference between a humidifier and a clothes dryer?

Answer:  Not much.

To drive this home, let me now compare the humidifier to a known household energy hog, the clothes dryer.  A typical home dryer uses about 3.5 KWH per load.  Here, if I ignore the COP advantage of the heat pump, my humidifier requires about 5.7 KWH of energy input per two gallons, including both the device itself (32 watts on medium), and the heat required to re-heat the air after it’s been cooled by evaporating water.

At which point, I’m hoping that a little light bulb goes off.  Because those energy use figures are pretty close.  Let me adjust them for the amount of water being evaporated.

Some time back, I figured that a typical load of laundry retained about 10 pounds of water (Post #910).  So that’s about 3.5 KWH of electricity, to evaporate 10 pounds of water, in a dryer.  But two gallons of water per day, out of an humidifier, is about 16.5 pounds of water.  So, at the rate my dryer uses energy, that ought to take about (16.5/10 x 3.5 KWH =) 5.8 KWH of energy.

In other words, per pound of water, your home humidifier uses just about exactly as much energy as your home clothes dryer.

Because, of course it does.  It has to.  Plus or minus a bit of wasted heat, your home clothes dryer does exactly the same thing as your humidifier.  It’s taking water and converting it to water vapor.  It just does it at a different temperature.

The only energy advantage my humidifier has over my clothes dryer is that the humidifier uses a more efficient heat source.  The COP 3 heat pump uses less electricity, per unit of heat, than the resistance heating elements in the dryer.  So the actual electricity use is lower, due to the magic of heat pumps.  (Plausibly, if you had one of the new heat-pump clothes dryers, there wouldn’t be much difference at all.)

Finally, if you have achieved enlightenment in this area, you now realize that hanging your laundry to dry, inside, in the winter, does not save anywhere nearly as much energy as you probably thought it did. Sure, you don’t run the dryer.  But you run your furnace instead.  That’s to make up for the cooling effect all that wet laundry has on your room temperature.  Which is exactly the same cooling effect that the humidifier has.

There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.

Sensible heat, latent heat, and conservation of energy.

Hang on, Mr. Conservation-of-Energy.  You’re saying that the humidifier is, in effect, withdrawing heat out of the room air?  Where does that heat go?

These devices:

• Humidifiers (both evaporative and ultrasonic),
• Personal air conditioners
• Swamp coolers
• Mist fans
• Patio misting systems
• Street-fair mist-cooling stations

all work by converting “sensible” heat — that is, air temperature –– into “latent” heat — that is, the energy embodied in water vapor as opposed to liquid water.

The energy is still there.  It was neither created nor destroyed.  It’s simply in a different form.  In this case, it’s in the form of the energy that’s in the water vapor, as opposed to liquid water.  If you could condense that water vapor back into water, it would release exactly the amount of energy it absorbed in making the transition from liquid water to water vapor.

And, as night follows day, any time you convert liquid water into water vapor, that’s going to absorb heat energy.  In all of the above, the heat comes out of the air, and the air cools down. For most of these devices, that’s the entire point.  For humidifiers, by contrast, that’s a regrettable downside.

My point being, physics doesn’t care about your opinion.  If you like street-fair cooling stations, or patio misters, because they cool you off — up to a claimed 30 F in ideal conditions (reference) — then, logically, you have to realize that your home humidifier is also cooling you off.  In the dead of winter, when that’s the last thing you need.

And that’s why running your humidifier, in the winter, takes just about as much energy as running your clothes dryer.  Per pound of water, that is.  From a physics standpoint, there’s not much difference between the two appliances.  One of them heats up air, and converts water to water vapor.  The other one converts water to water vapor, which then requires you to heat up the air.   The only difference is the timing, and the efficiency of your home heating system compared to the simple resistance heaters (hot wires) used in a typical clothes dryer.

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With all the coverage of the big winter storm sweeping the country, you’d think that the coming cold temperatures were unprecedented.  And, for sure, it’s a big storm. And temperatures are going to drop a lot.  Might even set some records, somewhere.

But we tend to lose sight of the modern context.   Winter nights are much warmer now, on average, than they were just a few decades ago.  In the Washington DC area, what we perceive as an outrageously cold night in the 2020s was merely a cold night in 1980s.

In fact, the main temperature impact of global warming is exactly that — warmer nights.  And while you can’t infer global warming by looking at temperatures at a single point on the planet, you can remind residents of the DC area that winter low temperatures used to be much lower, on average, than they are today.

Here’s the official temperature data from Dulles International Airport, via NOAA.  I’ve simply taken the lowest recorded temperature for each calendar year, and plotted that.   (The 9 degrees for 2022 (so far) occurred back in January 2022).

Source:  Analysis of weather data via NOAA.

Every year in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s had a lower minimum temperature than we are expecting from this super-storm. Almost every year in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s, ditto.

Similarly, we can check how common a low of 8F or lower was, back in the day.  And the answer is, relatively common.  For Dulles Airport, in the 1960s to 1980s, an average year had between seven and eight nights when the temperatures dipped to 8F or colder.

Source:  Analysis of weather data via NOAA.

What was once a commonplace wintertime occurrence in this area —   nighttime low of 8 or lower — is now a rare event.

When I was a kid, if it only got down to 8F around here, and only did that for a single night?  That would have been reckoned as an exceptionally mild winter.   But now, that single 8F night is the remarked-upon cold weather event of the year.  Such is the slow and subtle impact of global warming.

The sheer area of this storm is unusual.  It will be packing some strong winds.

But around here, the “Siberian” temperatures it brings, with all the associated news hype, would not have been at all unusual half-a-century ago.  They only stand out in the context of the much warmer average nighttime temperatures that we currently experience.  The chill from this storm hardly registers as a blip in the overall trend of rising temperatures.

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