Month: August 2013

A reader writes:

You quoted Sam Anderson as saying, “The tradition goes back at least to Benjamin Franklin, who chased twisters on horseback, watching them chew paths through virgin Colonial forest.” While I found the article very interesting overall, this seems a bit fanciful. While Franklin was known for his interest in thunderstorms, it seems doubtful that he ever saw more than one or two tornadoes. Franklin’s home of Philadelphia is far from tornado alley, and while tornadoes do occur along the Eastern seaboard, they do so far less often than the Great Plains (there are some goods maps and data here).

In addition, storms that might be visible from miles away on the plains wouldn’t be in the virgin colonial forest. The Philadelphia area sees between one and three tornadoes per year per 10,000 square miles (larger than neighboring New Jersey; overall Pennsylvania sees 2.22 tornadoes per 10k sq mi per year) and I doubt Mr. Franklin had the means to easily traverse a 100-mile-square area to find these two tornadic storms each year. Even if he could easily ride 10 miles in search of storms, he’d have to wait 50 years before a tornado crossed his neck of the woods.

I’ve lived on the East Coast most of my life and never seen a tornado here (or, for that matter, even in Minnesota, where I lived for several years). While Ben Franklin’s interest in electrical storms is well-documented, I doubt he every paid mind to tornadoes.

Update from a reader:

Look, I don’t know whether Ben Franklin chased tornados or not, but your reader is flat-out wrong about tornados in Philadelphia.  I lived in downtown Philly for 12 years and we had several damaging tornados while I was there. I was in the 1989 tornado that cut a path 50 yards wide through Society Hill and killed a girl from my neighborhood. Here’s a video of the aftermath of the 2011 tornado. Heck, a tornado touched down in South Jersey an hour from Philadelphia this morning.

Another:

Your reader’s response is a novel way of answering the question of whether Franklin saw a tornado. Another way is to go look at what Franklin wrote himself!

A cursory search of the great website franklinpapers.org, which makes his extant writings and incoming correspondence freely available to academics and the public alike, shows that Franklin did write about “whirlwinds.” I didn’t spot any evidence that he saw one in person. The pressing question for him seemed to be explaining waterspouts at sea. These were reported by sailors plying the busy ocean shipping lanes of the eighteenth century. Arm-chair natural philosophers such as Franklin later sought to explain such reports after the fact (and gain some prestige back in Europe while they were at it). A contemporaneous paper presented by one John Perkins to the American Philosophical Society in 1786 seems to have argued that these funnels were formed out of rainwater. I haven’t had the chance to read the paper myself, but an academic review describes it as “essentially extrapolated speculation and almost wholly erroneous.”

Franklin looks to have been closer to the mark by arguing that waterspouts were caused by low atmospheric pressure at their center, pulling up water at sea or debris on land as the vortex descended. I’m sure that other readers can better assess the scientific details of Franklin’s theory compared to our current understanding of tornadoes. At the least, while it would be false to picture Franklin as an eighteenth-century storm chaser on horseback, he did a better job of analyzing the data that other people collected than some of his contemporaries.

The reader follows up:

As a quick addendum to my previous email, it seems that I misunderstood that Perkins piece from 1786.  Perkins makes some correct arguments about rainwater in spouts, despite many other errors in his piece compared to current science.  Rather than having me stray so far from my own knowledge, perhaps you or your readers would be interested in reading Perkins’ paper here.  There must be a waterspout expert somewhere in the world who reads your blog!  And I hope that the point stands that Franklin wasn’t chasing cyclones around on horseback.

(Video: An interview with the author of Storm Kings: The Untold History of America’s First Tornado Chasers)

Max Fisher argues that Mexico’s new plan to allow global oil giants like Exxon and Shell to invest in its state oil monopoly could “potentially revolutionize the Mexican oil and gas industry.” But not everyone is onboard:

Mexicans opposed to the reforms worry that it may be a step toward privatizing [state-owned firm] Pemex or the entire Mexican energy sector outright, something [President] Peña Nieto pledges not to do. John M. Ackerman, a prominent Mexican law professor and columnist aligned with the political opposition, argued that the proposal “exposes the gross ambition of big national and foreign companies to get themselves an even larger slice of the national wealth.” He disputed what he characterized as the pro-reform view that “greater ‘involvement’ by Exxon-Mobil and Halliburton will automatically benefit the Mexican people.” Ackerman’s view seems to be a common one among those opposed to the plan.

The Bloomberg editors, on the other hand, are excited:

Mexico has much more oil to find, but Pemex lacks the technology and knowledge to tap new and complex deepwater fields.

And because its finances and management are tightly controlled by the government, which relies on Pemex for about one-third of its revenue, it can’t make strategic investments. One analysis says that the money needed to exploit current opportunities is equivalent to 30 years of Pemex’s 2013 investment budget.

Passage of the reforms could unlock tens of billions in needed investment and lift Mexico’s annual growth by as much as two percentage points. A less-heralded but in some ways equally disruptive element of Pena Nieto’s proposal would break the electricity distribution monopoly of the state power company CFE, whose grip on power has left Mexicans with some of the highest electricity costs in the developed world.

The Economist is more pessimistic:

Whatever reforms the government announces, they will stop a long way short of privatising Pemex. It is so wrapped up in a myth of national sovereignty that even the energy minister, a champion of reform, insists that not a “single screw” will be sold. Reformists hope the government will at least let private firms work with Pemex to develop shale, deep-water and other challenging fields. But even this would require constitutional changes, and would face much resistance. Since Mexico has no significant private-sector oil industry, much of the investment would have to come from foreign firms, and for nationalists this would be hard to stomach.

Juan Carlos Hidalgo calls the proposed reforms “timid”:

Peña Nieto’s efforts to bring more private investment to Mexico’s oil industry should be commended. However, even if his energy reform is approved, Mexico will still have the most tightly state-run energy sector in the Americas (even more than Cuba and Venezuela). That, in itself, should indicate how much room for further reform will be needed.

A reader writes:

Rewards to whistleblowers who report fraud against the government?  That’s what I do; I’m an attorney specializing in representing whistleblowers under the federal False Claims Act.  The FCA allows private citizens to bring a lawsuit on behalf of the federal government against those who commit fraud against government programs – Medicare fraud, defense program fraud, and many more.  The Act makes defendants liable for triple the actual damages and – critically – provides that the whistleblowers who bring successful cases can be awarded 15-30% of the amount recovered.

According to the organization Taxpayers Against Fraud, since 1987, False Claims Act lawsuits have resulted in recovery of over $40 billion from fraudfeasors.  The False Claims Act is a critical piece of combating waste, fraud and abuse in government contracting and grants, and has generally enjoyed bipartisan support in Congress.  Many states have their own false claims acts, modeled after the federal act.

The federal government has more recently enacted other whistleblower reward programs (tax fraud and securities law, for example).

Unfortunately, the procedures for these programs, including provisions for the protection, involvement, and payment of whistleblowers, are not as strong, and they have not (yet) been as effective as the FCA.  There are many reasons these newer laws depart from the proven model of the FCA, but much of it has to do with successful lobbying by large corporate defendants, who work to demonize whistleblowers they label as “opportunistic,” and the lawyers who represent them. Never mind that the FCA has strong provisions to bar claims brought by me-too whistleblowers who don’t bring anything new to the table, once the boogeyman of “Plaintiffs’ Lawyers” has been identified, some lawmakers are scared off.

I should add, government employees are generally barred from acting as whistleblowers and receiving rewards under the FCA with respect to fraud they discover in the course of performing their official duties.  Why?  Because we’re already paying them to discover and stop fraud.

The FCA does not, however, help the Snowdens of the world, because he is not reporting monetary losses.  However, the FCA clearly teaches that financial incentives matter.  As Taxpayers Against Fraud puts it:

Incentivized whistleblower laws work because whistleblowers bring hidden information to the government’s attention and their lawyers act as ‘force multipliers’ when cases are investigated and prosecuted.  Because successful whistleblowers [under the FCA] are awarded 10 to 30 percent of the sum recovered, whistleblowers and their lawyers are incentivized to investigate frauds in a timely manner, to find as much fraud as possible, and to present evidence of fraud to the government in way in which it can be easily understood and prosecuted.