Twitter, Musk and Rule by Tweet

I’ve never had a Twitter account and never will.

Why? I’ve had four careers: scientist, lawyer, law professor, and now (in my dotage) blogger. In none of them did I ever dream I could write more than a wisecrack in 280 characters. That’s too short for even abstracts of most serious papers.

You might think, with Shakespeare, that “brevity is the soul of wit.” Maybe so. But “wit” is not far from “wisecrack.” And for all his verbal brilliance, Shakespeare was neither a government leader nor a scientist. He was smart enough to see that 280 characters are too few to discuss the kinds of vexing, interdisciplinary practical problems that people in high places routinely debate on Twitter today.

Perhaps the problem is not the bare concept of Twitter, but its overuse and misuse. It might be fine for stand-up comics testing one-liners. For serious discussion of complex practical problems in the public sphere, it falls short. At least it consistently oversimplifies and misleads. In operation, it’s like reporting on a twenty-minute, nuanced, multi-topic speech with a thirty-second sound bite.

It doesn’t take many words to say “Stop the Steal!” So Twitter is perfect for lies, misinformation, innuendo and conspiracy theories. There the bare claim is all; nuance, contrary evidence, thinking and sound judgment are not encouraged.

Readers’ online comments on news articles are similar. Though the Washington Post allows up to 2,000 characters, the vast majority of the comments I have read—I would say well over 95%—are wisecracks. They contain no facts, no reasoning, no nuance, no subtlety, and no complexity. They often contain no information about anything other than the writer. Many are verbal selfies less than 100 pixels wide.

Tweets are like that. They remind me of the “chops” that we kids used to hurl at each other as just-post-pubertal adolescents on my junior-high-school playground. Yet now supposedly serious people are using them to discuss serious public issues and even to govern us. No wonder our polity is beginning to resemble Lord of the Flies! (That’s a novel that leaves children to govern themselves. Spoiler alert: the outcome is not pretty.)

Elon Musk’s current trial in San Francisco illustrates the problem. There are reasons why our securities laws are longer than a Tweet. There are reasons why investment materials are, too. Investing is a serious and multifaceted business. The risks and rewards to be considered are many. And as the rote warning tells us, “past performance is no guarantee of future success.”

But Elon Musk sought to short-circuit all this with his now-famous Tweet. It implied (some would say boldly stated) that his taking Tesla private with big Middle Eastern money was in the bag. But the private purchase never happened. Investors who bought on his Tweet lost money. Some of them, apparently, were professionals, and they were not amused. They sued.

A big civil judgment against Musk for securities-law violations might teach us all a lesson. The convenience of Tweeting doesn’t justify ignoring the laws and customs of an industry developed over decades to protect ordinary people, in this case investors. (I think Musk himself is too far gone and too rich ever to learn a lesson from a mere rap on his knuckles. But the rap might inform others vicariously.)

Musk’s best legal defense may be to claim that his internal teenager got the best of him. He just wanted to broadcast a verbal selfie and have all the world admire him. He never expected anyone to act on it. Whether any sane juror would believe that defense remains to be seen.

Musk is not alone in seeming to Tweet before engaging his brain or his moral compass (if any), or consulting a lawyer. Our über-Narcissist ex-president used Tweets the way Roman emperors used to post edicts in the Forum. He made public pronouncements. He tried to make law, bypassing all the machinery of Congress, our regulatory agencies and our Constitution. He skirted rules and customs for making and publishing executive orders. He even fired high officials by Tweet, as if on his fictional TV show, “The Apprentice.” Sometimes he had to backtrack because his Tweets violated or skirted the law.

The public (or a huge minority of it) ate this up with a spoon. But unfortunately, there’s a little thing about human psychology. It’s called “delayed gratification.” This term denotes an individual’s ability and inclination to delay getting an immediate reward in order to serve a more distant or more important goal.

Psychologists test it in kids with the “two-piece-of-candy” test. They put a three-year old with basic understanding of language alone in a room, in front of a small table. An adult tester comes in and puts a piece of candy on the table, then says, “I’m going out for a while. If you haven’t eaten that piece of candy when I get back, I’ll give you another, and then you’ll have two.” It’s a simple, practical test of a kid’s ability to delay gratification for a large goal.

Researchers have followed the education, careers and family histories of kids in these tests for forty years. They found that, on average, the kids who delayed gratification (by waiting for the second reward) did better on every measure of human success: education, marriage, family, career, lifetime earnings, health, even basic stuff like staying off drugs and out of jail. The researchers concluded that the ability to delay gratification helps people succeed in virtually every measure of achievement and the good life.

So now comes Twitter. By design, it discourages delayed gratification. It beckons an industrialist like Musk with a way to circumvent the securities laws. It bids presidents, governors and senators to circumvent the Constitution and rule by Tweet. It seduces journalists to forget sourcing and nuance and blurt out whatever first comes to mind, just to get the “scoop,” or to bet their careers on that thirty-second sound bite.

Twitter goads everyone from teenagers to Musk and the President of the United States to Tweet first and think later—circumspection, laws and even entrenched customs be damned. We all feel the dopamine-rush of seeing our names in print and our “thoughts” on line, right away, without second thoughts or delayed gratification. What could possibly go wrong?

So in Musk’s San Francisco courtroom, it’s not he on trial so much as Twitter and its exploding misuse. I hope the court makes him pay big time. Otherwise, the disease of grown men and women acting like teenagers, abandoning thought and caution and ignoring rules and customs, will continue to metastasize with the Internet’s “Warp Speed.”

One of humanity's greatest achievements in communication could yet infect our best and brightest—and our most powerful—with a habit of shooting from the hip. If that habit ever makes its way to the nuclear button, we as a species are done.

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What Would a Rational Species Do? We Need a New Paradigm

We humans stand on the precipice. We now face five existential threats, each unique in our short recorded history.

First, we are running out of planet to plunder. So we are destroying the climate in which we evolved, likely irrevocably.

Second, we are fighting a global pandemic that’s evolving as we watch, beating our best genetic-engineering tools to an uneasy stalemate. Third, our population—already too big for our small planet—continues to explode, as our economists tell us we need yet more babies to support our living geezers.

Fourth, our food sources are starting to fail, principally as a result of climate change and overuse. Last fall, there was a drought-caused partial crop failure in Southern China. The breadbaskets of Australia, Argentina and California have been beset by drought and wildfires. Ukraine’s is under siege, blockaded, and pock-marked by bomb craters. Food prices are rising globally, and famine is growing in the world’s poorer parts.

Last but not least, we humans are gradually extinguishing the other species (both flora and fauna) with which we co-evolved. The consequences are unclear but likely horrendous: a duller, less beautiful, less resourceful and more sterile Earth. We even have fancy scientific names for this catastrophe—the “Sixth Extinction,” or a new “Anthropocene” Age in Earth’s history. Named after us, that new Age portends a sterile near-monoculture of ourselves, our crops and our cattle. So what, pray tell, happens to us when a new plague wipes out a key crop or food species on this near-sterile Earth?

Any one of these problems could maim our global civilization. Together, their threat is nothing short of catastrophic. So how are we addressing them? We are preparing for war among ourselves.

The West and Russia are re-arming conventionally, with nukes ever in the background. The West is arming to fight Russia’s gratuitous atrocity in Ukraine, which already threatens Eurasia’s greatest breadbasket. Germany and Japan have two of the most orderly, rational and productive cultures in human history. Both learned the hard lessons of unprovoked aggression in history’s greatest war. Yet what are both doing today? Turning their rational productivity toward armaments to address the threats of Russia and China, respectively.

Don’t get me wrong. The foes that Russia conquered in our most-horrible war are all lining up against it. The two that we helped beat—Germany and Japan—are aligned and allied firmly with us. They are even (reluctantly) giving up their hard-earned pacifism to face the growing martial threats of Russia and China.

All this testifies to a general human preference for basic rights and democracy, however imperfect they may be. All this proves that our American system is better than complete despotism or plutocracy, or at least more human.

But still. Neither war nor preparing for it is going to solve any of the five existential problems that our species faces now. Instead, it’s going to make all of them worse. At least war or re-arming will draw down resources and distract attention needed elsewhere. As India’s PM Narendra Modi reportedly told Warmonger Putin, “Now is not a time of war.”

So what would a really intelligent species do, all together? I can think of four things off the top.

First and foremost, we would treat the Covid pandemic now raging in China like the global four-alarm fire that it is. It’s shutting down the “world’s factory” in the middle of a lingering economic crisis. Worse yet, it’s turning the world’s most populous nation—with virtually no innate and little acquired immunity—into the biggest-ever petri dish for growing new variants of the plague.

So simple self-interest, let alone common humanity, demands an all-hands-on-deck crash project to flood China with vaccines that work. That means our existing mRNA vaccines, plus new versions for new variants as they evolve. A rational species would use China’s immense manpower and efficient organization, along with the best Western scientific expertise, to build the biggest and best vaccine factories in human history, in China, and to do so quickly. Then it would vaccinate all of China and the world, while keeping new vaccines coming as long as new variants arise.

A rational species would spare no expense or effort in this task. After all, what’s the price of species decimation? And the value of avoiding it? Priceless.

Second, and equally important, China would devote its huge stores of lithium and rare-earth metals, plus its vast solar-panel and windmill factories, to electrifying the worst climate offenders ASAP. That means Brazil and India. I can’t think of any quicker way to reduce global CO₂ emissions than swapping out the massive, dirty coal-fired power plants in these two countries for solar and wind farms. The construction work in Brazil would also slow the present destruction of the Amazon rainforest, the “Earth’s Lungs,” by offering Brazil’s people climate-saving jobs to replace climate-destroying ones. After Brazil and India, the same approach could apply to the rest of South America’s and Africa’s coal plants, as well as China’s own.

Conceptually, these two projects are low-hanging fruit. They are obvious things to do. They would benefit every human being, not to mention the other surviving species that share our planet. They are not even especially hard to organize, at least if we don’t let politics get in the way.

Other projects, while clear in principle, will be harder to plan and organize. A third is “terraforming” our own planet Earth to make it more resilient to ongoing climate change.

The principal focus would be fresh-water management. California is a prime example, and it could be a demonstration project. After years of punishing drought and wildfires, it has faced devastating floods in just the last two weeks, with more apparently to come. To preserve and enhance its immense breadbasket, we must “terraform” its Central Valley to save all that rain (and ameliorate its flood damage) for another dry day.

In the bad, old days, we used to do things like that with lots of cement, damming rivers and changing their courses. Now we have much more sophisticated civil engineering, which takes natural geology and ecology into account. It preserves wetlands to spare species and buffer storms. It takes natural river flows and water-based ecology into account.

For California specifically, scientists talk about exploiting “paleo valleys” to store floodwater. These are underground valleys, formed by ancient floods, filled with gravel and silt but permeable to water. We can use or modify them to store modern floods for agriculture and/or to gradually replenish underground water tables after droughts.

We must build many massive infrastructure projects like these to make our geography more resilient, using recently discovered natural features and phenomena. To do so, we can create a modern civil engineering informed by scientific discoveries of how our world really works. We can adapt our planet not by paving it over, but by mimicking and improving how our natural world has adapted to change in past ages. If we are clever enough, we might even find ways to divert floods like the one that inundated Pakistan last year to replace some of the fresh water from the rapidly disappearing glaciers that now keep much of Asia alive.

The fourth and final hurdle may be the hardest. We are going to have to cut our global population, or at least level if off. However good the glib reasons may seem—having more youngsters to support the old, growing the economy, or out-populating our political rivals—we cannot continue to grow our global population indefinitely. Our planet and its resources are finite. Our Earth is not going to get any bigger.

In my view, the greatest political blunder, worldwide, in my adult life has not been our own disastrous War in Vietnam, Bolsonaro’s despoliation of the Amazon, or even Putin’s bloody atrocity in Ukraine. It has been Xi’s abolition of China’s one-child policy. Coming from the world’s most populous and arguably most disciplined nation, that bad example has set the stage for making all our existential problems worse, and sooner.

Even in the medium term, a global race to grow in population is a recipe for species-wide suffering and partial self-extinction. The iron laws of biology are clear. We have studied them intensely in many other species. When a species outgrows its habitat, the Four Horsemen of the biological apocalypse inevitably cut it back: famine, conflict, predation, and disease. Often the decline is precipitous: a population “crash.” In our own case, an even more horrible global war, or a pandemic far more deadly than Covid, could do the trick. A rational species would not court that outcome by pretending it lives on an infinitely expandable planet.

So how do we get from where we are to a rational plan for sustainable living? Ay, there’s the rub! It does no good to preach or plan when most of us, and most of our leaders, act like kids on a playground grabbing toys and territory and screaming, “Mine!” It does no good when Xi reaches for Taiwan, or Putin reaches for Ukraine, not with promises of advancement or better treatment, but with saber-rattling, unnecessary arming, threats, an invasion, atrocities, and devastation. And it does no good when we in the West respond only with threats and force, however necessary they may seem in the moment.

We in the West are only slightly less flawed in our thinking. Individual profit will never cure, or even spark the cure of, all that ails us. Profit may motivate the development of mRNA vaccines, but it won’t bring their massive production and rollout worldwide before the next viral mutation arises. Profit also can help proliferate cell phones around the globe, the better to spread lies, misinformation and propaganda. Indeed, cell phones may be the new “opiate of the masses,” distracting us all relentlessly while our planet burns, our fertile valleys run dry (or are flooded), our crops fail, and new pandemic variants take us.

At the end of the day, the West’s apotheosis of profit as the ultimate good will destroy us. We need a new paradigm.

Unfortunately, it can’t be religion. That simply hasn’t worked. For two millennia, Jesus and his disciples have been telling us “Love they neighbor as thyself” and “Love thy enemy.” Both are superb advice. Both implicate our species’ chief evolutionary advantage: our ability to communicate and cooperate in detail.

But we can’t seem to heed either. Russia, the EU and America are all predominantly Christian nations. Yet, right now, they are engaged (partly by proxy) in the vilest major-power war in 78 years. Somehow, despite the best efforts of innumerable priests and popes, Jesus’ good messages just haven’t gotten through. The noise of people, their supreme leaders, patricians and even popes crying “Mine!” has drowned out the signal.

Not only are today’s religions mostly unhelpful. Some are actively counterproductive. Why? They seem to teach that “God” wants people to have and raise as many children as possible, regardless of whether or not their parents can feed them or our overburdened Earth can support them. The more “orthodox” or “fundamentalist” believers are, the more they seem to subscribe to this philosophy. Like Xi Jinping with his abrogation of China’s one-child policy, they are pushing our species relentlessly toward population crash, while their adherents take more than their fair share of the Earth’s dwindling resources for their own families.

What our species needs, in principle, is really simple. We need to grow up and wise up, or start dying prematurely by the millions. We need to understand that we are all alone on our little blue planet at the end of a small spiral arm of a medium-sized galaxy in an impossibly large and complex Universe. We need to see that no one and nothing are going to save us from our own shortsighted selfishness and stupidity.

If we can’t work together wisely and conserve what’s left of our planet for our own survival and happiness, we are going to start suffering, being displaced, and dying in large numbers, in this very century. And if you think that migration at our southern border is too great now, wait and see what happens when large parts of the tropics become literally uninhabitable!

It really is that simple. If we want to justify our self-awarded title of “Homo sapiens,” we are going to have to change our thinking and our ways, and soon. We are going to have to learn to work together, hard and fast, for the good of all.


For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

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The FTC’s Proposed Rule Banning Worker Noncompetes

With Republican Kevin McCarthy just installed as House Speaker after a raucous fifteen ballots, it looks as if our new 118th Congress is broken on arrival. We can look forward to fruitless partisan investigations, pointless angry “debates,” and attempts to extort the Dems by playing “chicken” with government funding and the debt ceiling. In short, we can expect from Congress a steady stream of performative politics—anything but solid governing and sensible legislation.

But does this mean our entire government is dead in the water for two years? I think not. Action by the President, the Senate and federal agencies is still possible, even likely. One of the most important actions will be finalizing the FTC’s proposed rule outlawing forced, routine noncompete agreements for workers.

The FTC has proposed such a ban in the press. But it has not yet proposed the Rule formally, for comment, in the Federal Register, the official US government repository of all pending and final Federal Rules. If the Rule becomes final, it will go a long way toward reversing a dismal trend in private employment contracting, under which many workers have become more like serfs than free agents.

Anyone can submit comments within sixty days after the proposed Rule is published in the Federal Register. What follows is a draft of my own proposed comment. I invite readers to comment on and improve it (but please be brief!). I intend to submit it formally soon after the proposed Rule is formally published for comment.

If adopted in final form as reported, the proposed Rule might be one of the most consequential products of the Biden Administration during what looks to be a dismal next two years. At least it will visibly shift the balance of power between management and labor. And it does look likely to make it to the finish line after our Democratic Senate exercises its new majority to appoint a key Democrat to the FTC.

THE DRAFT COMMENT FOLLOWS:
This is an unusual comment. No one is paying me to write it, and I’m not an aggrieved or interested party, except philosophically. I’m a retired lawyer, once licensed in California, Hawaii and Ohio, and a retired law professor of some twenty-four years. I have a Ph.D. in physics, and I spent most of my law practice and teaching career specializing in intellectual property and so-called “high-tech law.” I used to teach entire courses on antitrust and trade secrets.

The best years of my legal practice were 1982 to 1986, when I worked in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley. There Section 16600 of the California Business & Professions Code outlawed noncompete agreements except (with limitations) in the sale of a business. So no Silicon-Valley employee, as such, had to sign one.

There was never a doubt in my or my colleagues’ minds that this ban was a vital source of Silicon Valley’s creativity, “high-tech” progress, and successful entrepreneurship. It let workers—from security guards, through skilled technicians, to the most advanced Ph.D.-level “knowledge workers”—secure their best futures. They could seek better pay, better on-the-job education, improved career prospects, new-business start ups, a chance to explore their own ideas and dreams, and better and more nurturing bosses.

As otherwise powerless workers moved up their individual career ladders and sought their highest and best uses, they made the Valley an industrial legend for decades. They embodied Thomas Jefferson’s tradition of a “yeomanry” of free and independent workers. That tradition, which had begun with free farmers, culminated (during my law career) with Andy Grove, Gordon Moore, and Robert Noyce, the founders of Intel Corp. and the principal authors of our uniquely American late-twentieth-century industrial revolution, the one involving personal computers.

This is not my view alone. A well-entrenched view in California’s Silicon Valley, consistent with technological history, holds that it was able to create the personal-computer revolution, and to wrest dominance of the computer industry from the minicomputer companies then thriving along Boston’s Route 128, largely by virtue of Massachusetts’ self-defeating enforcement of noncompetes in employment agreements. See https://www.vox.com/new-money/2017/2/13/14580874/google-self-driving-noncompetes.

In a leading antitrust case, Justice Thurgood Marshall condemned horizontal restraints on competition among members of a trade association. Along the way, he penned one of the most poignant (and accurate) descriptions of the human and economic significance of our antitrust laws:

“Antitrust laws in general, and the Sherman Act in particular, are the Magna Carta of free enterprise. They are as important to the preservation of economic freedom and our free enterprise system as the Bill of Rights is to the protection of our fundamental personal freedoms. And the freedom guaranteed each and every business, no matter how small, is the freedom to compete—to assert with vigor, imagination, devotion, and ingenuity whatever economic muscle it can muster.”

United States v. Topco Assocs., Inc., 405 U.S. 596, 610 (1972) (Marshall, J.)

Like all great Justices, Marshall was addressing the case before him. But he could just as well have been writing about individual workers, rather than the trade-association member businesses that had been colluding not to compete.

After all, a “business” or a “corporation” is just an abstraction: it can only operate, only do actual work, through its live employees. What is at stake in this regulation is a horizontal restraint on competition among businesses for employees, imposed on the workers themselves, as a routine matter, at the very moment they begin their employment, and sometimes their careers. That’s a far broader and more damaging horizontal restraint on competition and our economic system than the unusual anti-competitive collusion among members of a trade association at issue in Topco. So this regulation has justification bedrock-deep in the history and purpose of our antitrust laws.

Unfortunately, like tech workers, the well-paid corporate lawyers who advance the interests of corporate bosses seldom sleep. During my near-half-century career of law practice and teaching (I joined the California State Bar in 1978), they have undercut and undermined workers’ freedom in several vital ways, mostly involving boilerplate clauses in employment contracts of adhesion.

Not only have routine, boilerplate noncompete clauses—in states unlike California that don’t outlaw them—curtailed workers’ freedom of movement and advancement. Routine “nondisparagement” clauses have curtailed their freedom of speech, far more than does the law of defamation, which restricts only public speech that is false. Routine arbitration and no-class-action clauses have curtailed, if not abolished, workers’ access to the courts of law and equity—institutions of justice that have evolved at common law, in England and America, since Magna Carta. And routine no-class-action clauses have virtually abolished a brilliant late-twentieth-century legal innovation by which workers and customers once secured collective justice for wrongs and swindles that are too small to prosecute individually but that collectively net bosses millions (and therefore enjoy a strong monetary incentive to perpetrate and perpetuate).

It’s so easy to insert yet another oppressive boilerplate clause in a contract of employment or purchase and ask a man or woman to sign it, without the expectation or opportunity for negotiation, on that very first exciting day on the job, or on the day of purchase. Yet that’s precisely what American business has done. Step by step, it has sought to deprive the supposedly free citizens who work for it (and its customers!) of the freedom to manage their own careers, to seek another job that best uses their skills, to speak freely about their work and harm done them and the public (in non-defamatory ways, while protecting trade secrets), to resort to the Anglo-American legal system when they’ve been harmed, and to resort to class actions to redress small wrongs and swindles collectively.

No wonder many workers today seem on the verge of revolution! With simple, boilerplate clauses in contracts of adhesion, corporate lawyers and the law have squeezed out of them much the freedom, agency, self-determination, and consequent personal liberty that they once enjoyed. Justice Marshall, who so well understood the analogy between our antitrust laws and Magna Carta from which we derive all our liberties, would have been appalled.

So yes, by all means, outlaw the routine use of noncompete clauses in employment agreements nationwide, while still protecting the rights of businesses to secure their trade secrets. If departing employees divulge their erstwhile employer’s trade secrets unlawfully—whether to the next employer or to any other unauthorized person—the aggrieved employer already has ample recourse under the Uniform Trade Secrets Act in force in at least 47 states, as well as to criminal sanctions under the Economic Espionage Act of 1996, as amended, 18 U.S.C. Chapter 90. With such powerful sanctions available to deter and punish improper disclosure of real trade secrets, and with the universal custom of “exit interviews” to advise departing employees what not to disclose after departure, it makes little sense to drastically restrict workers’ freedom of employment, including their ability to start new businesses. It makes more sense to trust their discretion and the strong civil and criminal disincentives and remedies of existing trade-secret law.

As for employers’ mistakes and wrongs, including medical errors in hospitals, there is good reason not to treat them as trade secrets at all. See Part III of Jay Dratler, Jr., “IP and Health Care: New Drugs Pricing and Medical Mistakes,” University of Akron Intellectual Property Journal (March 2016), available online for free at https://ideaexchange.uakron.edu/akronintellectualproperty/vol7/iss1/1/. The notion that concealing mistakes and wrongs advances the type of competition that trade-secret law is designed to sustain proves too much. And the notion that concealing mistakes and wrongs benefits society is absurd.

But protecting employees’ freedom to work from boilerplate noncompete clauses in contracts of adhesion is just the tip of the iceberg. We still have boilerplate that purports to prevent workers from speaking truthfully, without defamation, about their bosses, their work, how they’ve been wronged, and how their employers may have harmed the public. Boilerplate still purports to keep workers from accessing the common-law and statutory protection and institutions of free Anglo-Americans since Magna Carta. And boilerplate still tries to suppress class actions that might address the small swindles that rankle.

All these things make our American workers today resemble modern serfs more than the “noble, free workers” of American history and legend. So the FTC will still have plenty of work to do. (For more on this vital modern theme, focusing on citizens as customers, rather than employees, see https://jaydiatribe.blogspot.com/2017/06/lawless-life-under-corporate-governance.html).

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

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2023: The Year of the EV

When things go spectacularly wrong, we call it a “perfect storm.” We don’t have a similar saying for many conditions coming together to make things right. But we ought to: That’s what’s likely to happen in 2023 with electric cars, or more generally, electric vehicles, known as EVs.

Conditions are ripe for millions of consumers to abandon forever the polluting, high-maintenance and planet-killing Rube Goldberg device called the “internal combustion engine” (ICE). Those who do will enjoy quieter, simpler, lower-maintenance and much cheaper driving, often with better performance. Dense cities will enjoy drastically reduced smog, pollution and traffic noise. And many drivers will be able to “gas up” in their own garages, without ever leaving home.

Three powerful new conditions favor electric car sales this year. The first is President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. It provides $370 billion in federal subsidies to curb greenhouse-gas emissions and promote electric driving. Many of its subsidies go to ordinary consumers. Properly exploited, they bring down the prices of electric cars, high-power quick-charging stations in homes and businesses, and solar arrays to generate independent power for driving, sometimes at zero marginal cost.

The second favorable condition is also totally new. This year, the global auto industry is finally ready.

This year, it’s not just Tesla offering great but overpriced cars at the hidden cost of aggrandizing and enriching an egomaniacal celebrity. This year, most if not all major automakers will have new electric models.

New electric cars will come from GM and Ford, BMW, Mazda, Toyota, and Hyundai, among others. Whole new companies, such as Rivian and Polestar, will have new electric models this year. The gamut runs from pickup trucks (made by Chevrolet, Ford, and maybe Tesla), through small sedans and crossover vehicles, to luxury and performance cars that can shut any ICE vehicle down. To get a feel for just how various and attractive this year’s EV offerings will be, watch this thirteen-minute video.

The third and final favorable condition is a leap in consumer understanding. Last year’s big inflation let consumers feel in their pocketbooks the disadvantages of gasoline as an energy source for driving.

Gas prices over $5 a gallon are gone now, but not forgotten. Consumers now know that the US, for all its technological prowess, commands only a small fraction of global oil reserves. They also know that oil is a global commodity, priced by global supply and demand. So control of drivers’ cost per mile of driving on gasoline depends on the whims, wars, and production of nations like Russia, Saudi Arabia, other Gulf States, and Venezuela. All of them are run by despots who, to put it mildly, don’t share our goals or values. As all this sinks in, consumers are starting to look at EVs with fresh eyes.

It’s not just the high gas prices alone. After all, they’ve come down a bit from their recent peak. It’s the uncertainty. Do you really want your cost of driving—and thus an important part of your cost of living—to continue to depend, for the life of your next vehicle, on the likes of Vladimir Putin, Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and Nicolás Maduro Moros?

From the standpoint of sheer economics, the Biden Bill (Inflation Reduction Act) makes a huge difference. For example, the Chevy Equinox, a compact crossover, will reportedly sell for “around thirty grand.” [Set the timer at 2:00.] It will reportedly qualify for the first half of the $7,500 federal purchase subsidy in 2023, and for all of it in 2024, for a net price of around $27K in 2023 and $23K in 2024.

These days, it’s hard to get a good used car for that price, let alone a brand new car with totally new electric technology that will likely cost you three or four times less for energy. And the Equinox, like all pure EVs, will come without pistons and rings, rods, valves, a crankshaft, a camshaft, a timing chain, a distributor, a radiator, a transmission, a differential, and a gas tank, all of which can break down and increase maintenance costs.

Another thing that new EV buyers will come to appreciate is independence from gas stations. If you install a charging station in your home, or if your apartment complex has stations available, you’ll never have to go to a gas station again, except on long trips. (Well, hardly ever: only if the car breaks down, which EVs do far less often than ICE cars.) Rather than heading out to gas up in too cold or too hot weather, or into a dangerous part of town, you’ll simply plug into your garage overnight.

The Inflation Reduction Act provides tax credits of 30% of the cost of in-garage chargers, up to $1,000. My own Level-2 Charger (240 V, 20 A) cost me about $540. At 4.8 kW, each hour of charging adds about 14.4 miles of range to my Volt, or about 19.2 miles of range to my wife’s Tesla.

Then there’s the price of driving energy. As of the day after Christmas, the national average cost of a gallon of gasoline (all grades) was $3.20. If an ICE car gets thirty miles per gallon, that means it costs over 10 cents to drive a mile. But at the national average residential retail cost of electricity, 11.1 cents per kWh, it costs 3.7 cents to drive a mile on electricity in my Chevy Volt (at 3 miles per kWh) and only 2.8 cents (at 4 miles per kWh) in my wife’s Tesla.

That means the cost of driving a Volt one mile is just over one-third that of driving the ICE car, and the cost of driving a Tesla a bit over one-fourth. If you drive 30,000 miles a year, burning 1,000 gallons of gas, you would spend $3,200 on fuel for the ICE car and would save over $2,000 per year with the Volt or almost $2,400 with the Tesla, year after year. And if the cost of gasoline ever goes up again to $5 per gallon (or more!), the annual cost of driving the ICE car would rise to $5,000, so you would save about $3,900 per year with the Volt or over $4,100 per year with the Tesla.

But the best thing that EVs provide is peace of mind. When you drive on electricity, the price you pay for driving each mile is regulated by your local Public Utility Commission, based on your local utility’s actual cost of producing the electric energy. It doesn’t depend on the global supply and demand for oil, far less on the whims, wars and production of despot-ruled petro states. And as your state’s power grid comes to depend more and more on lower-cost renewable wind and solar power, instead of increasingly scarce and expensive fossil fuels, your energy cost per mile is likely to go down, not up.

Finally, there’s the cost of maintenance. EVs cost far less to maintain than ICE cars because they have far fewer and simpler mechanical systems. The electric motors that drive the wheels double as generators (in regenerative braking and in serial hybrids like the Volt). They have far fewer parts and systems than any ICE. They are far more symmetrical and therefore more vibration-free. And what controls the power from the battery is basically high-power transistors. Have you ever known a transistor to break down?

So about the only EV parts that may need maintenance are the battery, the brake pads, the tires and the windshield-wiper blades. And the brake pads get less use in an EV than in an ICE car because electromechanical regenerative braking takes up much of the slack in slowing and stopping the car.

It gets even better. If you invest in a solar array to power your home, you can drop your energy cost of driving down to zero. That’s what I’ve done.

My state (New Mexico) offers so-called “net metering.” That means I pay for only the excess electric power that I use but that my solar array doesn’t generate. So far, I’ve never used up all the power my array generates, at least averaged over any whole month. (I’m retired and don’t drive much; your experience may vary.) In addition, I get a “renewable energy credit” (“REC”) of 4 cents per kWh for every kWh that my array generates, whether I use it or not.

As a result, I’ve not paid my power company (PNM) a penny for electricity since I installed my 6.4 (nominal) kWh array in 2013, except for a month when a lightning strike or power surge blew fuses in my array while I was away. And though I have burned some gasoline in my serial hybrid on rare long trips, it amounted to less than a tankful over a year. (To reduce vehicle weight and allow tank space for “freshening” the gasoline when it gets stale, I keep only three to four gallons in my serial hybrid’s tank.)

The Inflation Reduction Act’s subsidies are complex. They’re designed in part to encourage Americans to manufacture EVs and their batteries. So subsidies depend on how much of the lithium in the batteries and (separately) the rest of the car are made in America. But the new law has eliminated the old numerical threshold for EV-production, which once phased out subsidies for Teslas and some Chevy EVs after 200,000 cars were sold. Now the subsidies apply to all EVs, no matter how many, that meet the American manufacturing requirements.

So, on inquiry, millions of drivers will now find that they can benefit from federal subsidies on the EVs they buy. Even used-EV buyers can enjoy a subsidy of up to $4,000 per car. In addition, the high-level chargers they install, and the solar arrays they install to power their homes and charge their EVs, will all get federal help. Many of these subsidies are now arranged to provide actual point-of-purchase price reductions, rather than just a tax credit that requires waiting until next April’s tax-time to enjoy the help.

Last but not least, our whole society will reap a huge dividend as EVs reach a critical mass on our roads. Greenhouse gases will abate. Smog will subside. Traffic noise will lessen dramatically. And no one will die, by suicide or accident, from carbon monoxide effluent from EVs.

With all these benefits, it looks as if EVs will come of age this year. The initial-purchase-price subsidies will bring prices within a range acceptable to most consumers. This year will also offer consumers a wide variety of EVs and hybrids to choose from, and both domestic and foreign brands can enjoy the subsidies. (The subsidies depend on where the car and its parts are manufactured, not who owns the brand. Many foreign makes have American factories and/or use American-made parts.)

Modern EVs have decisive advantages over ICE cars in saving our planet, ease of use, ease of “refueling,” simplicity, reliability, quiet, comfort, startling performance, and peace of mind. As word spreads about these advantages, 2023 will jolt their sales as much as the new Chevy Blazer EV is reported to jolt from zero to sixty in four seconds, using its “Wow!” mode. [Set the timer at 3:00]


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