Nothing slow about the news this August with USPS controversies and California blackouts
Remember when mid-August meant a stretch of slow news and a last gasp of summer vacation before charging into the excitement of a new school year and football season?
This year, not so much:
■ The recent passing of Northwest radio legend Pat O’Day wasn’t one of those “end of an era” moments because the moment O’Day not only exemplified but defined has, sad to report, been long gone. That could be said of the industries he worked in as well.
In the heyday of AM radio, disc jockeys were taste makers and local celebrities. The kids knew who they were and repeated their catch phrases to one another. More significantly, radio was how those kids were introduced to the latest records and performers. If they liked what they heard, they’d go buy the record at a department store or one of the chain music stores like Tower.
AM radio long ago evolved from a music medium to talk, and the booming-voiced DJ lives on only as a caricature in movies from the time. The record store and the department store both faded from the retail scene, other than for a few holdouts. Same deal for the record itself, although there’s been a movement lately to revive vinyl. Kids today hear about new music from YouTube and other social media channels, not radio. If they buy music, it’s in the form of a streaming service or a digital download, not a physical product.
O’Day built a second career in the concert promotion business. His book on both careers, “It Was All Just Rock ‘n’ Roll” is a great read, by the way, with rich detail of the region’s pop-culture history. Concerts were supposed to be the salvation of the music business. But in the coronavirus era, concerts are exactly what we’re not supposed to be attending.
O’Day’s voice lives on as a memory and in a wealth of sound recordings. The pandemic is proving to be a harsh test of what else in the music business will live on.
■ Beyond the political aspects of the current kerfuffle involving the U.S. Postal Service — and political grandstanding is a huge component of the story — the post office as a business faces three major challenges to its future, none of which might be solvable.
Problem No. 1: There isn’t as much mail to generate revenue as there used to be. People don’t write letters; they don’t pay their bills with paper checks they send through the mail; they don’t subscribe to print magazines; they receive far fewer print catalogs than in the pre-internet era; and FedEx and UPS have siphoned off big chunks of the package, parcel and document delivery business.
Problem No. 2: The postal service has thousands of external bosses and managers. Every member of Congress, every governor, every mayor, for starters, has a say in how the company should be run.
Problem No. 3: As a corollary to Problem No. 2, the point of having a postal service is not to deliver the mail, it’s to provide jobs and on occasion some pork-barrel spending for local political constituencies. The Postal Service shares this predicament with Amtrak, the Defense Department, in fact virtually every government entity down to the local school district. Significant change is almost impossible to achieve since it is likely to threaten some entrenched interest.
At this point perhaps all that can be done, given that the trends of Problem No. 1 are not likely to be reversed, is to give up the charade that the post office will ever make money and just keep tossing money at it as one more permanent sinkhole in the federal budget.
■ Have you been watching what’s been going on in California lately with the power grid? In addition to various calamities including wildfires and searing heat, Southern California has been enduring rolling electricity blackouts as utilities cope with a surge in demand resulting from those soaring temperatures.
In a normal, sensible world, the utilities would increase supply by ramping up generation, usually through natural gas-fired combustion turbines. But California has been for years on a course of ridding itself of any generating capacity not labeled renewable or “green.” Renewables by themselves are not reliable or dispatchable, and there’s limited capacity to store electricity generated by renewables when not needed for times of peak demand.
These problems were well-known long before the current supply-demand squeeze, but the consequences of relying on such a strategy are now getting a real-world, real-time demonstration. The utopia of an all-renewables future has always been based more on hope that “eh, the engineers and scientists will figure it all out” than on the current state of technology and the electric grid.
Maybe they will, but hope is not a useful solution for those sweltering in the dark right now.
The Northwest is not to the point of California’s predicament, although power planners have sounded warnings that a supply-demand crunch is coming. The arrival date of that crunch will be hastened by the continuing policies of extracting coal and natural gas from the generating mix, as well as hydro projects like the four Snake River dams, and snubbing next-generation small nuclear reactors. The ETA of that unhappy moment will be even sooner as more requirements are put on the electric grid, including vehicle charging and home heating (as natural gas is removed from that use as well).
Avoiding California’s fate isn’t impossible, but it will require some policy course corrections and getting to work now on new generating capacity that can backstop renewables. So we owe California a bit of gratitude for being so trendsetting and forward thinking that it got to the Green New Deal ahead of everyone else —and proved that it’s more than welcome to keep that future for itself.
This story was originally published August 22, 2020 at 7:00 AM.