DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

The Chron published a nice post-mortem on the electric car industry: Owners charged up over electric cars, but manufacturers have pulled the plug

The story, in brief, is that the Califoria Air Resources Board passed a law in the 1990s that required all manufacturers to produce some small percentage of zero-emissions vehicles every year. Electric was the only way to achieve true ZEV.

The automakers turned out some great solutions, like GM’s EV1 and Toyota’s RAV4 EV. But the laws changed, and one by one the big automakers pulled the plug on their electric-car programs.

GM had not sold any of its über-sexy EV1s; rather, they’d leased them. One by one, as the leases expired, GM collected the vehicles — ignoring hundreds of requests from owners who wanted to extend leases or purchase the ZEVs outright — trailered them to the desert, and crushed them.

Is that the most astoundingly evil and stupid thing you’ve read all day? It gets better. Or worse, depending on how much oil-company stock you own. Here’s the explanation for GM’s abandonment of its EV1 program, as reported by the Chronicle:

GM stopped EV1 production, spokesman Dave Barthmuss said, because “after spending over $1 billion over a four-year time frame, we were only able to lease 800 EV1s. That does not a business make. As great as the vehicle is and as much passion, enthusiasm and loyalty as there is, there simply wasn’t enough at any given time to make a viable long-term business proposition for General Motors.

“If we’re really going to make a difference in environmental auto issues, we have to be able to see vehicles in the hundreds of thousands of units, instead of hundreds,” Barthmuss said.

Asked why GM didn’t just sell the cars to the clamoring motorists, as Ford finally did with the Rangers, Barthmuss said that “parts are no longer available.” Even though buyers might waive the right to sue GM over any design or production defects, he said, “in today’s litigious society, there is no such thing as no liability.”

The explanation smacks of greenscamming. Let’s dissect it.

Barthmuss claims GM was only able to lease 800 EV1s. How does he explain the long waiting lists of would-be EV1 owners? GM has been under-reporting the demand for electric cars ever since they cancelled the program.

Barthmuss implies that the few ZEVs they sold were not making a great enough impact on the environment, but he doesn’t explain how selling fewer would be an improvement.

Addressing the question of why GM recalled all 800 EV1s, which were only about 2 years old at the time, and destroyed them, Barthmuss claims, “parts are no longer available.” Even if this were believable, it’s irrelevant; I’m quite sure GM’s high-powered attorneys could craft an end-of-lease transfer agreement that releases GM from the responsibility of supplying parts in the future.

For that matter, what car has ever come with a guarantee that parts will always be available?

Moreover, if GM had done a better job of putting EV1s in the driveways of the folks who were waiting in line for them, there would be enough customers to support an aftermarket parts manufacturer.

Finally, Barthmuss said something that is true — but still fails as an explanation for GM’s awesomely wasteful and short-sighted ZEV-crushing. He said, “in today’s litigious society, there is no such thing as no liability.”

GM sells something like 8 million vehicles every year. The 800 EV1s they managed to lease constitute about one-one-hundredth of a percent of the total. How much liability could there possibly be? Compared to the cost of cancelling leases, collecting and dismantling and crushing the EV1s, and enduring the ongoing public relations challenge of explaining the whole mess, I can’t help but think someone slipped a digit.

Maybe I’m an optimist, to think that GM could spend a billion dollars and come up with something fun and safe and eco-friendly and life-affirming, something to pay back a little of the negative karma they’ve developed by selling the hell out of those road-mashing Escalades.

At least Ford learned from GM’s mistake.

DSW Shoe Warehouse lost control of 1.4 million customer records — credit card numbers, driver’s license numbers, checking account numbers. A company spokesman said, “we greatly regret any inconvenience this may cause.”

LexisNexis reported that identity thieves stole or modified data on over 310,000 US citizens — names, addresses, driver’s license numbers, and Social Security numbers. A company spokeseman said, “we sincerely regret these incidents.”

ChoicePoint, whose sole mission is to collect data about you and your purchases, admitted having sold the personal data of at least 145,000 U.S. citizens to a group of fraudulent businesses that were possibly fronting a ring of identity thieves. The notification postcards sent to victims read, “we deeply regret any inconvenience.”

I have a message to DSW, LexisNexis, ChoicePoint, and any other companies with insufficient security procedures: regret doesn’t butter the biscuit.

If these examples prove anything, it’s that identity theft is a matter of when rather than if. Too many companies aggregate too much data, and have insufficient means of protecting it. It’s enough to make a guy move to the country and write a manifesto, or at least a bunch of privacy rants on a website. Pardon me while I grow a beard.

I’m considering using cash for purchases. I don’t know how e-commerce would work, but I’d be interested in anonymous payment mechanisms or one-time account numbers. I’d gladly trade the inconvenience for security.

In case you’re wondering why we even know about these incidents, you can thank the great state of California, which passed a law requiring companies and government agencies to notify California citizens if their private data has been accessed by unauthorized parties.

Coming out of the Santa Clara Westin, I was approached by an earnest women with a flyer in her hand. I usually avoid such solicitations, because people rarely want to give me anything of value — if they had anything valuable, they’d keep it for themselves, right?

This was a rare exception. The flyer proclaims:

Don’t give this hotel your home phone number, unless you like telemarketers.

Under a loophole in the federal “Do Not Call” legislation, businesses like Starwood are allowed to call people with whom they have an “existing business relationship.”

Every time you stay at a Westin, Sheratin, St. Regis, W or other Starwood hotel you’re giving them permission to call you about timeshares.

Assuming this is true, it illustrates one of the problems with “existing business relationship” clauses on privacy and marketing legislation.

On the one hand I have a hard time getting excited about fax laws, because I don’t have a fax machine. On the other hand, I remember what a pain in the ass it was to get unsolicited faxes when we used our main voice line to receive the occasional fax from Europe a few years back.

Unsolicited faxes are currently illegal, and have been since 1991, since the passage of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. This doesn’t prevent some companies from sending them, nor does it prevent other companies from buying unsolicited faxes by the boxload in hopes of winning legal judgements against fax-spammers.

I believe the problem is that the TCPA was not specific enough in spelling out when fax communications are legal; for example, according to Sen. Lautenberg (NJ), “[the TCPA] generally prohibits anyone from faxing unsolicited advertisements without prior expressed invitation or permission from the recipient.”

What does “prior expressed permission” mean?

The TCPA stands as a law with its existing language, but the FCC published an “interpretation” of the law in October 1992. According to Lautenberg, the FCC’s interpretation contains this footnote: “facsimile transmission from persons or entities who have an Established Business Relationship with the recipient can be deemed to being invited or permitted by the recipient.” (Lautenberg’s speech can be found in the video transcript of a Senate meeting, at 41:15 in this RealVideo stream.)

Does this footnote to an “interpretation” constitute an amendment or revision to a law passed by Congress? I wouldn’t think so, but lots of junk-fax companies apparently disagree, or there would be no such thing as “junk faxers.”

Curiously, the courts disagree with the FCC’s interpretation, according to an editorial in the Mercury News: “courts have repeatedly rebuked the FCC, saying that Congress had not authorized the [EBR interpretation].”

In response, the FCC revised its initial TCPA interpretation in July 2003, requiring that companies have written consent prior to faxing solicitations. This is a neat idea, not only that I’d have to opt in, but that I’d have to do it in writing. But it places an unreasonable burden on business owners and consumers alike: if I want a written bid from a vendor, I wouldn’t want to have to fax or mail a request for it.

Enter Representative Fred Upton (R, Michigan)… he proposed Senate bill 714, which would make the FCC’s initial footnoted interpretation into law. In other words, according to the Mercury News editorial, “any business you’ve ever walked into, visited online, called or bought from would be exempt from” the 1991 junk-fax ban.

EBRs are evil, especially for large companies such as banks, hotels, and chain stores, for they often have tens to hundreds of affiliate relationships with other companies, so if you’ve done business with any of them, you’re eligible to solicited by of all of them.

The Senate hearing (see the video link above) provides an entertaining, but frustrating half-hour of education on the issue. Senator Boxer spoke intelligently on the matter, and called out the bill’s Luntz-esque name when she said the “Junk Fax Prevention Act” should more appropriately be called the “Junk Fax Promotion Act.” Leave it to a Republican to name a bill for exactly the thing it will not do.

The Merc editors were even less kind; they suggested calling it the “License to Advertise by Theft Act.”

Read more news at Steve Kirsch’s junkfax.org website.

By the way, the title of this article comes from Sen. Boxer’s prediction (quoting unnamed analysts) that the current annual total of 2,000,000,000 faxes sent would double to 4 billion, should the “Junk Fax Prevention Act” become law.

I am simultaneously elated and sad:

The Bush administration is violating a law…

The law in question is the Energy Policy Act, passed in 1992 following the Gulf War. Its goal is to replace 30% of all oil used for transportation in the U.S with alternative fuels by 2010.

It’s an ambitious goal, and the benefits would be huge:

• significantly reduce dependence on foreign oil
• create less toxic air and water pollution
• push down prices on alternative fuel vehicles through economies of scale

The law focuses not on individual auto buyers, but on fleet operators, beginning with the biggest vehicle fleet operator in the country: the federal government.

The Energy Policy Act requires that at least 75% of the vehicles purchased by federal agencies use alternative fuels. Further, the Energy Policy Act gave the US Dept. of Energy the ability to mandate that state, municipal, and even private fleets (e.g. national package delivery companies) also purchase some percentage of alternative-fuel vehicles, if it determined that that would be necessary to meet the Act’s goal of a 30% reduction in oil used for transportation.

Unfortunately for everybody on the planet, the DOE punted this responsibility by announcing in January 2004 that it would not require private or local-government fleets to purchase AFVs, because, as far as I can tell, it wouldn’t do enough good. Add that to the list of the dumbest things I’ve heard this year: it will help, but not enough, so don’t bother. Curiously, the DOE requests voluntary compliance, which makes even less sense to me than not enforcing minimums: We don’t think alternative-fuel vehicles will help reduce petroleum consumption, so we won’t require you to buy AFVs… but we’d like you to buy AFVs anyway because they will help reduce petrol— er, umm… Bah.

Fortunately, the federal mandates of the Energy Policy Act still apply. The Center fo Biological Diversity and Bluewater Network have filed a lawsuit demanding compliance.

My favorite quote from the Chronicle article notes the stupidity of the Bush Administration’s energy policy:

Full compliance with the law would save 1.4 billion barrels of oil a year, or four times as much oil as drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as the administration proposes, said Peter Galvin of the Center for Biological Diversity.

For additional info, see the following:

• the press release announcing the lawsuit filed by the Center for Biological Diversity and Bluewater Network: Environmental Groups Sue 14 Federal Agencies for Failure to Implement Energy Policy Act (PDF; 104k)
• the main site for the Energy Policy Act