Climate change

Trump’s Tariffs are a Dry Run for the World’s Future

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As the Trump administration ramps up its efforts to sabotage climate action, we have to think about what that means.  There is only one atmosphere, and the consequences of climate change are becoming ever more obvious.  Our policies are not just putting the US at risk, we’re putting everyone at risk.

So it is only a matter of time before the rest of the world will have to react.  The US has become not just a rogue state but a criminally insane one.  The only reasonable action is a global embargo.  The US has to be treated as a matter for quarantine.

Fortunately for the rest of the world, Trump is providing an excellent transitional strategy.  As exports to the US become subject to draconian and unpredictable risks, the world has a chance to live without us. The supposed lifeline we’re throwing to the rest of the world is actually worthless—building factories in the US just increases the exposure to Trump’s whims, and further the fossil-fuel-privileged industries of the US (e.g. cars) will have little future elsewhere.

There is a remarkable consistency in US policy—we are doing everything we can to turn ourselves from a world power into an afterthought.  That’s not just the tariffs, it’s the attacks on education, healthcare, and forward-looking research.  The demonizing of all immigrants. It’s amazing what dreams of past imperial greatness can do.

Maybe it’s in part an Anglo-Saxon thing.  The parallels with Britain are close, although our fall is much greater.  Brexit was Britain’s effort to restore its nineteenth century dominance by withdrawing from cooperation with the EU.  The result was an instantaneous economic downturn that took about five years for the population to understand.  There may well be no way back—with more Farage populism in the offing, the downward spiral could continue.

We voted for Trump to bring back the glories of the post-war fifties.  He has promised to make everyone rich by shaking down the rest of the world.  With tariffs, we are in essence doing our own Brexit with everyone else. Whatever the evangelicals may believe, there is no God protecting us from folly.

We Are Russia In Ukraine

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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.

Two Views of Government

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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.

Clarifying Some Issues for Climate Change

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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:

  1. Make the electric grid what it has to be:  sustainably generated with much more capacity and much better connectivity.
  2. Move all applications to the electrical network. (Note that hydrogen apps fit here since most of the hydrogen will be electrically-generated.)
  3. 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.

Right-Wing Fantasyland meets Chinese EVs

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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!

Down with Monotheism

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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-EU 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.

We’re Wrong About Divisions

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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.

The One Million Covid Victims Have a Message

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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.