In case you haven’t noticed we just declared war on our independent neighbor Canada. We haven’t sent an army yet, but that’s only because we think we can win with financial weapons. But there’s no mistaking it—it’s war. And our declaration of war was beyond ludicrous—for few immigrants, just about no fentanyl, and a balance of payments deficit that has nothing to do with protectionism. The real reason is no better—a vanity project so that Trump can say he personally added the extra territory to the USA.
That’s pretty bad, but it is certainly not the worst of the lying going on. For that, you can point to all the talk about getting rich. We’re constantly told that everything going on, no matter how painful or immoral is about getting rich. But no one has any intention of creating a world where the population gets rich. This is government of, by, and for big corporations.
There is no linkage between all the firings and the well-being of the population—the money being saved is to justify the tax cuts for rich people and Wall Street. The tariffs are a sales tax paid by buyers—a regressive tax. The deportations will raise prices even on basic foodstuffs and essential services such as elder care. Finally and most importantly, as even Adam Smith understood and the entire nineteenth century demonstrated, the big corporations are not going to shower golden paychecks.
If you want to understand what’s in store for the population just look at what uncontrolled free enterprise did in the nineteenth century. The picture was very much like the story Trump tells—the European powers dominated their colonies and brought all the profits home. Industrialists made fortunes, controlled government, and kept the work force desperate. Uncontrolled capitalism is good at making money for itself full stop. Most people are in no position to bargain.
There is no miracle world of uncontrolled free enterprise—the only people who preach that religion are handsomely paid to do so. Governments can do bad things too, but without the countervailing power of government there is no one to speak for the well-being of the population. Just look at some problems facing us today:
– AI (with robotics) is already becoming a hit on employment. Musk’s savaging of government jobs is actually a foretaste of what to expect throughout the private sector. Someone will have to help.
– Climate change is real—whether Trump likes it or not—and there will be major changes to be managed if the population is to be kept whole.
– Education and healthcare are necessary for personal financial success and stability. The private sector is not going to fund it. Punting it to the states is something business interests do to avoid paying for it. Musk goes a step beyond that—preferentially hiring H1B slaves whose education was paid-for by someone else, and who can’t quit or change jobs.
– The technological environment is changing faster and faster. No one predicted just how far generative AI would be able to go. Unless we are prepared to spend real money on pure research we will be left behind. That means not only missed opportunities in the economy but these days also military weakness. Regardless of what politicians may say—the private sector does not do basic research.
Trump’s golden world does none of these things. It’s not good for the vast majority of people. Except in the very near term it’s not even good for the billionaires.
In business I’ve been to plenty of meetings where someone proposes a new idea—different and exciting, thinking outside the box. Frequently what makes it new, different, and exciting turns out to be that it’s wildly unethical—kind of like invading Canada. Wildly unethical may be different, but that does not mean good. In fact most of the time it’s terrible. And with Trump that’s what we’ve got.
It seems to be taken for granted that everyone knows the objective of government: it exists for the good of the country. However it’s not obvious what the “good of the country” means, and that ambiguity leaves plenty of room for confusion. There are two models.
Model number one is more or less derived from the family. The good of the family is the well-being of its members. Government exits for the well-being of the population. Reasonable enough.
Model number two is a business. The goal of a business is returns to its investors. The employees are a cost center, and every dollar earned by the workforce is a dollar lost to investors. The population is at best a necessary evil, with fewer and fewer really required for business operations and with available slave substitutes (who can’t quit or change jobs) as Musk’s beloved H1B’s.
We are currently seeing model two in full operation. Everything has to be sacrificed to the 4.5 trillion dollar tax cut for rich people and businesses. Despite all the rhetoric about a golden era, all the money from the cuts and firings ends there. It’s golden for the people with the gold.
And that’s not the end of the story. As even Adam Smith understood perfectly, the private sector is actually not good at providing for its own success. Left to its own devices it rutherlessly sacrifices everything to immediate profit, which leads to longer-term collapse. Think about the cuts to education, research, and climate change. So as far as the two models of government are concerned, we’re running headlong into a worst of both worlds–sacrificing both the population and the economy.
It bothers me how much confusion there still is about what it takes to fight climate change. A recent article in Bloomberg was a case in point. They rank new EV’s by “greenness”. I’m not going to talk about the details of what they call green, but the problem is that the whole idea is wrong. All EV’s are green in the only way that matters, and a ranking by “greenness” just confuses the issue.
I’ll try to be organized about this. First of all, the primary change that has to take place is the replacement of fossil fuels by sustainable sources of power. In practice that comes down to moving everything to the electric grid, with a beefing up of that grid to handle the greatly increased demand and with sustainable sources.
The timescale for this transformation is dictated by a carbon budget—there is only so much more carbon dioxide we can put into the atmosphere before the consequences become catastrophic. All that carbon dioxide just adds up, and the results continue to get (exponentially) worse. To succeed we have to stop burning fossil fuels before we hit the carbon budget limit. That process has three parts:
Make the electric grid what it has to be: sustainably generated with much more capacity and much better connectivity.
Move all applications to the electrical network. (Note that hydrogen apps fit here since most of the hydrogen will be electrically-generated.)
Cut down on usage for all of the remaining fossil fuel applications.
The first thing to note is that most conservation efforts fit under item #3, so it’s worth stating unequivocally that conservation by itself is not the solution to climate change. It’s only a piece of what has to happen, and the rest is most of the problem. And conservation for EV’s doesn’t fit here at all. Item #1 has to happen for all energy uses, so “greenness” of particular car models is an insignificant blip on a much bigger issue. Finally, it should be obvious that despite what the oil companies tell you, climate change is not primarily a matter of everyone’s personal responsibility: governments have to take large-scale action.
It’s worth saying a little more about items 1 and 2. There is quite a lot of #1 that can start now: improving and expanding the capabilities of the network as well as deployments of solar and wind power. There are of course limitations to what we can currently get done. The biggest current issue is in-network energy storage, to handle periods where there isn’t sun or wind. However, this is an area of such active work that one can expect big improvements in the next few years. For that reason it’s fair to regard item #1 as mostly a matter of money and commitment. (That’s not to say there can’t be big contributions from new technologies—such as fusion—as they become available.)
Item #2 is harder. This involves not just familiar issues such as heat pumps but also industrial processes, such as for steel, cement, and plastics. For these there is still research to be done before we can talk about worldwide deployments. Overall this is an area with many different application-specific issues and deployment scenarios, so lots of work has to be organized and done in parallel. Again this goes way beyond individual responsibilities. Note that EV’s fit under item #2—changing to an EV is a contribution regardless of whether your electric utility has done its work yet or not.
Finally there is the international aspect to the whole problem. It’s amazing how much of the discussion of climate change is about us doing our part–as if our atmosphere were somehow detached from everyone else’s. This really needs to sink in: there is only one atmosphere, and we will only succeed if everyone else succeeds too. Helping poorer countries to cope is not a matter of charity; it’s a matter of our own survival. Obviously there are going to be negotiations over whose money gets spent on what, but rich countries are going to have to do what it takes for poor countries to redo their infrastructures. Like it or not we are going to have to help with technology development and deployments worldwide.
There was a good article in Bloomberg today describing the many aspects of Chinese dominance in EV’s. It’s useful if discouraging reading. How did this happen? Why is the West so far behind?
Obviously there are multiple items and reasons behind them. However all of them trace back to a single big one: the endlessly propagandized right-wing fantasy of the miraculous, all-knowing, perfectly-adaptive private sector.
In this case there were two principal failings of the private sector:
Denying climate change, because it was inconvenient for current operations.
Discounting any role for government, because the private sector by definition knew better
With these two failings the private sector was blindsided by a market transition they had gleefully dismissed as nonsense—because it didn’t fit with current mindset and current operations of business. The Chinese did strategic planning, and the private sector in this country congratulated itself on its ability to squelch it. The oil companies are still at it. Trump will do it again if he gets a chance. We lost four years of opportunities to position for change–an eternity for competition.
That is not a surprise. There are things the private sector does well—principally optimizing current operations. However the current economic powers-that-be are very poor at major transitions. Instead they will act, as in this case, to hang on to the optimized past and to delay that future for as long as possible. In other words to defend their their own immediate private interests against the interest of the country as a whole.
Government of course has no perfect crystal ball, but it doesn’t have the same limitations and the same vested interests. It can act to support future businesses even before their time has come. We have had some of that. Both Tesla and SpaceX exist because of Obama-era seed money. (Some readers may remember Romney’s ridiculing Obama for such initiatives!) The mRNA vaccines that stopped Covid were only possible because of decades of government-funded research. All of that in the face virulent right-wing opposition. The Chinese government locked up resources and initiated new businesses. We were too smart for that!
The bottom line here is explicit. The private sector is not a miracle machine. Its interests are not the same as our national interests, and it can’t even do a good job of providing for its own success. We need government to care about the well-being of our people and even about the well-being of its businesses.
As a final point here it’s worth noting that–contrary to the usual sloganeering–when Adam Smith talked about the “invisible hand” of the marketplace, he was not arguing for government to stay out of the miraculous private sector. Instead he was making the case for a competitive “free” market, something only possible if government would stop the private sector from perverting the economy with monopolies and government influence. That’s still a battle today!
Monotheism amounts to an imperialistic assertion of primacy. That sounds like one of those wild-eyed slogans from the radical left or right. But in fact it is a simple statement of what drives quite a lot of policy, both domestic and international.
Let’s start close to home. In both Britain and the US there is a big problem with past imperial grandeur. The Brits just can’t get over their lost empire, and they keep doing completely illogical and crazy things (e.g. Brexit) in hopes of getting it back. The fact that the world has changed since then, with new powers and new bases for strength doesn’t register. Since the empire is taken to be an expression of British superiority (and of God’s grace raining down on Britain) there is no reason why it can’t just happen again. There is only one God and he’s ours.
The US has a similar problem, just a little later in time. We had the 1950’s and even 60’s when in the years following the destruction of the World War II the US was unquestionably the world’s only remaining superpower. If anything we were more dominant than the British as their peak. And we’re just as blind in looking back to it. Our dominance was a result of national superiority and God’s grace. We are the chosen rulers of the world and there’s nothing that ought to stop that.
The Chinese and the Russians have similar issues. Having lived in Italy at one point, there’s more than a bit of it (going back several centuries) there too.
The Old Testament (as I understand it) had a more limited notion of monotheism: each nation had it’s own god or gods and international struggles were also struggles of those gods. That sounds a little more accurate. Contemporary monotheism amounts to assertions of primacy. An astounding percentage of Americans are ready to talk about God’s protective shield over the US and our God-given role in running the rest of the world. That gets in the way of any notion international cooperation or any workable national objectives. With God on your side, reality just doesn’t matter.
The Brits have already driven themselves to at least a short-term future of poverty. It is relevant to notice—although seldom mentioned—that the pre-EO version of Britain was much slower than the continent in recovering from World War II and generally poorer per capita.
The US is on the brink of doing the same thing. We’ve got a dictatorial theocracy going, as well as a “we don’t need anyone” ethos on the right that denies any need to interact with the rest of the world except under terms of dominance. Furthermore the pervasive xenophobia denies the (currently enormous) contribution of foreigners to the economic strength of the US.
However the biggest problems are not even that. As climate change and also Covid and the Ukraine crisis show us, we have only one world. All the national gods are going to have to cooperate if we’re going to get out of this mess. Enough with national monotheism.
The most important division in American society is not between Republicans and Democrats. It’s within the Democratic Party itself.
As an indication of what I’m talking about, I think about an episode of the program Peaky Blinders. In that episode the hero Thomas Shelby’s sister’s boyfriend is a communist, and the hero has to figure out how to keep him alive. When the subject comes up with the police, the answer is “Normally we don’t have to worry about those people. They’re so busy killing each other that they’re just not a problem.”
The Republicans can say amen to that for our tamer version of the left:
We’re still living down “defund the police”
We’ve had an endless supply of articles about how privileged, racist whites just have to get used to taking a well-deserved hit, including for education.
Virtually any statement made about “neo-liberals” is a whitewashing of Republican failures so that chosen Democrats can be blamed instead. One hopes George W. Bush is duly grateful.
We had a chance to pass a Biden agenda, but the Democratic Party spent so much time posturing and pretending that Manchin and Sinema didn’t exist that when they finally got around to voting it was too late–inflation was THE issue and it was easy for Manchin to hide. The left wing of the party is gleefully blaming Biden, without any alternative policy or blame for Republicans.
Democrats are actually fighting over whether Biden will be the nominee in 2024—when the real issue is the 2022 midterm election. The only result of this fight is weaking the remaining days of the Biden administration and undermining the Democrats’ message for 2022.
With friends like this who needs enemies. As in the Peaky Blinders quote, they hate each other so much that it trumps any desire to do anything good for anybody. It’s hard even to count the self-inflicted wounds.
Just think about it. That Democrats can do anything good at all—given this nonsense—means that they could perhaps do something really big if they could get organized and stop the knife stabbing. If they stopped providing amunition to Republicans, they might just be able bridge the other divisions we hear so much about.
At least half of these deaths were due to deliberate misinformation from political interests calling the whole pandemic a left-wing plot. For month after month the most popular story in the Wall Street Journal was the latest reason why there was really nothing going on: it was just like normal flu; it was worst in New York because it was only in disgusting cities full of disgusting people.
Everyone in the country suffered, including very many who bought into the party line because they thought the propagandists were on their side. Since vaccines were coming, deaths delayed could be deaths avoided. What’s worse, almost of half the people who died were unvaccinated when they could have been, convinced by the arguments of people like the Fox hosts-who were actually vaccinated for themselves.
This Covid story is unfortunately typical of what’s happening in this country. The “populists” are the Kochs and the Mercers and the Thiels—people with the money to fill newspapers with issues they don’t care about (abortion, guns) so they can ride them all the way to the bank. The only major piece of legislation passed in the Trump years was the monumental tax cut for the rich. As with Covid, the supporters drawn in with identity issues are the ones who will suffer—in jobs, healthcare, education, climate, you name it.
Taking this one step further, it is worth noting that the damage with Covid was not from action but from inaction. Most of the endless discussions of our fractured political system are missing the point. The country is ungovernable because they want it that way. If government can’t act, the powers that be are running things. As Steve Bannon put it, all we need to do is create chaos.
This story isn’t complicated, just lost in the cacophony of bought media.
It seems to me more important than ever that we think about real scenarios for dealing with climate change. There’s so much religion here that we can be missing the boat. I’m going to take an extreme position in this piece, both because I think it should be on the table and because I think it’s more likely than a lot of what is taken for granted.
I believe that fusion is going to work and be deployable in about the next ten years. We’re going to know quite soon where that stands. Both the Commonwealth Fusion people and Helion (among others) plan to generate net positive energy by 2025. There are also regularly new developments: more powerful magnets, longer plasma retension times, higher energies attained, even AI-based methods for controlling stability of reactor plasmas. Higher temperature superconductors have been game-changers. It is time to be serious about fusion.
The consequence is that we are entering (in the relatively near term) into an era not of energy scarcity but of energy abundance. That’s not just a matter of fusion—solar, wind, and better in-network storage also contribute—but fusion represents real abundance. That’s a different mindset with different conclusions than most of what gets discussed. I’ve argued earlier that it’s the proper mindset for the long-term, because it is the only serious way to address our worldwide problems. The difference is that progress in fusion has been such that we can move that indefinite future to the nearer term.
With that point of view, we can view the response to climate change as two distinct issues:
– Keeping things from getting too bad in the interim while the new energy sources get up to speed.
– Deploying abundant energy to combat climate change.
It’s important to look at the second issue first, because the first (assuming we can solve it) is temporary. The architecture for the second issue is relatively straightforward. We’re going to have generation stations of significant size with high-capacity interconnection for distribution to users. Electricity will be the basic form in which energy is delivered, but we’re going to have to deal with significant applications (industrial processes, air travel) where electricity itself is not the answer. For such applications we’ll need ways to convert electricity to other forms of energy. That may involve using electricity to make hydrogen or using electricity to achieve climate neutrality by pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere for synthetic fuels. (It’s interesting that carbon capture has value even without large-scale CO2 storage.)
The most important conclusion is straightforward: we’re going to have to vastly increase and improve the facilities to generate and distribute electricity! That is job number one and the most essential thing to be spending money on. Existing technology will contribute to but not solve that problem. We also need to figure out how to move everything that isn’t currently electric onto that network. Note that ultimately it is much less important how efficiently we use electricity than that electricity is what’s used. We’re not getting rid of air conditioners, and we’re not making sure that every electric hot water heater has a heat pump.
As to how we’re going to survive until then, the most important message is that survival means focusing on heavy hitters. It is not the case that every little bit helps. I’ve given this chart before for energy use in the US:
The key sectors are transportation, industrial, and electric power—not residential. Electric cars are clearly an important contributing technology, but even they are only an infrastructure investment until the underlying power plants are converted.
For the rest of the world, the corresponding charts can be quite different, often tilted toward industrial uses. Focusing exclusively on the US distorts the issue. We have to get world CO2 emissions down overall, regardless of where it comes from. This is not a question of “every country needs to do its part”. It’s a question of the most effective way to get the CO2 total down fast.
We have to think about where all the sources are and how to get at them. Carbon pricing schemes such as CCL are particularly helpful because of their wide impact. In this country a simple calculation tells you that the current annual subsidy to fossil fuel interests is about a trillion dollars, so we’re a long way from a rational economy. Putting solar panels on suburban roof tops—however useful—is not commensurate with the problem. Furthermore, as the following chart indicates, we rich countries need to get used to the idea of helping the others in a big way or the job will never get done!
As the latest IPCC report (2/28/2022) put it: “Rich governments must quickly and dramatically scale up the level of adaptation finance for low-income countries.”
Or else—there’s no getting around it—we’ll end up stuck with geoengineering and hope for the best. Simply stated (for those who haven’t heard) geoengineering delays global warming by filling the atmosphere with chemicals that put the whole world in shade. That can stop most (but not all) aspects of climate change, but with many known and unknown risks.
It’s hard to come to a proper judgment of geoengineering. On one hand, it’s exceedingly scary to start messing with the whole world’s atmosphere, but on the other hand we don’t yet have all the technologies we need and we’ve been slow to deploy the ones we do have, so we may well need to be buying time. One can argue that geoengineering reduces the motivation for alternative energy progress, but that work today seems to have its own motivation. So in the end there is nothing immoral about geoengineering, and we may have to use it. But given the risks and the fact that all that extra CO2 has to come out before we can quit, we had better do as little of it as possible. (These systems require regular replenishing, so turning them off isn’t a big issue; getting rid of the extra carbon dioxide is.)
You might wonder at this point why we brought up geoenginerring instead of the much-discussed topic of carbon capture? There’s a good reason. Despite all of the publicity around it, there’s no near-term silver bullet with carbon capture. For the yearly CO2 production in the US we would need huge infrastructure of processing plants full of giant fans—a multi-trillion dollar project using enormous amounts of energy to build and run it. And that’s before you even start to talk about where to put the output. The main reason carbon capture has such prominence is that it plays to the fossil fuel companies’ delaying tactics—if we can get rid of the carbon dioxide later, why worry about creating it now? Carbon capture is a project of energy abundance, AFTER we have somehow managed to survive. Going forward, unburning everything you burn is only sensible in particular application areas (e.g. air travel) where there is nothing else to be done.
Climate change unavoidably means a huge, expensive project—which is why it is important to be clear about what we’re doing. As general principles, conservation for conservation’s sake is wrong, a focus on local issues is wrong, and an exclusive focus on current technology is wrong. What’s right is to recognize that the future requires an electrical infrastructure capable of driving everything and that in the near-term we have to avoid distractions and focus on heavy hitters—worldwide—to keep from going over the edge. Near-term and long-term projects are not necessarily the same. Finally we should realize that despite our current concerns, we are actually moving toward a period of abundant energy with enormous benefits for all—if we can stop fighting over the pieces of a pie that will become much bigger.
As an analogy I remember the early days of voice over IP networks, where the whole focus was how we would ever meet the realtime performance needs of speech. It wasn’t so many years later that those same networks were handling realtime video to hundreds of millions of people worldwide—and voice was an almost invisible blip. That’s the kind of transformation we’re talking about. Limitless clean energy will change the world.
on the outside 