To continue the subject of the Constitution, it seems that the problems we face are more fundamental than we would like to think.

I want to begin by going back to the post-World War II America of my childhood.  At that time we were proud of our Constitution precisely because of the way in which it was able to adapt to new eras that could not have been imagined when it was written.  We were privileged to have a Constitution that was most fundamentally a statement of principles that could guide us on into the future—whatever that might be.

We now see that whole story was a myth.  The only way that the Constitution could play such a role was that in those days the country was largely unified in outlook.  Putting aside the anti-communist hysteria, the country was in a humanistic mood coming out of both the Depression and World War II, and we looked at the Constitution in that way. Also the history of the Constitution fit that mold—written by people who created a democracy by defeating a tyrant.  So the meaning of the Constitution was our shared idea of what the humanistic founding fathers would say about the problems of today.

We now understand that there is no solid legality behind any of that.  Nothing in the Constitution guarantees that interpretation, and the document can be interpreted in wildly different ways—both honestly and dishonestly—by different readers. (That’s not just a matter of “strict interpretation,” which in practice means getting rid of what you don’t like, with no constraint on what you do!)  From a practical point of view it’s hard to say how much of the Constitution exists at all—its meaning is entirely determined by the Supreme Court, and they don’t even have to say how they reach their conclusions. If a President can break the law in the exercise of his office do we still have rule of law?  Do we really have a Constitution?  What exactly do we need to do to get one that works?

As it turns out, two recent books help drive those problems home.  Steven Pinker’s latest “When Everyone Knows What Everyone Knows” talks about the whole notion of common knowledge—what gave us the Constitution of my childhood—as a kind of distributed process independent of its norms.  That’s no way for today’s internet-fragmented society to produce a basis for law.  The second was Jill Lepore’: ‘s “We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution”.  In passing she notes that the Reconstruction civil rights amendments—numbers 13, 14, and 15—were interpreted out of existence by the Supreme Court for fully fifty years after passage!  It seems words on paper have never been enough.

So the Constitution is a large, serious problem area.  Somehow we have to fix the Supreme Court, determine what level of specificity we need for an enforceable Constitution, and deal with at least some of the other problem areas from our previous note.  That leads to a rather different relationship to the Constitution than we have today.  Instead of trumpeting our Constitution as a world-unique miracle, we’re going to need to turn pragmatic, to understand what the experience has been with constitutions worldwide. And somehow or other we’ll need to find a process to fix it without losing what we’ve got.

There is a lot that is good about the Constitution. In today’s world we’re more conscious of that than ever. But despite our past dreams it can’t defend or update itself.  That, today, is a problem for everyone.

From a comment to the Washington Post:

There is one effect of Trump’s destruction of the international order that hasn’t received enough notice—nuclear proliferation. Every country—even Canada—now has to think seriously about nuclear weapons for defense. Otherwise they are sitting ducks for conquest.

Any kind of nuclear non-proliferation agreement is out the window. This is terrible. It not only increases the risk of use by national actors, it greatly increases the risk of theft for terrorism.

In our greed for conquest we are inviting catastrophe.

(from a NY Times article comment)

Post-Brexit Britain is a cautionary tale for the US: Britain is a nation whose bad choices made it dramatically weaker and poorer based on lies and rosy-colored dreams of past glory. Under such circumstances it not surprising that people will grasp for scapegoats. The British far right certainly has every incentive to whip up its supporters and try to sidestep blame.

I want to say more about the parallels to Brexit. Trump is proposing a US behind trade barriers and totally self-sufficient in its imperial power—just like the good old days. Kick out the foreigners and we don’t need anyone else. But we can’t be a world power out of selling over-priced cheap stuff to one another. We are a world power because of what we represent at a world scale. Our standard of living and our military power are both based on economic and technological power at world scale. Trump’s isolationism is retreat.

That’s not to say people don’t get hurt by foreign competition (or other changes), but we can’t fix those problems by running away from them. Taking care of people is the real job to do. Hiding behind nativism and xenophobia is Brexit, and just like Brexit it will leave its enthusiastic supporters worse off than ever. And ready, as in Britain, to jump on the next scapegoat bandwagon.

As point of departure it’s worth asking a simple question: why after the second world war did the United States emerge as dominant, with the major powers of Europe clearly reduced to playing second fiddle? The answer is straightforward: even after recovery from the war the economic and military power represented by the US dwarfed anything that a single European could marshall. (In that it’s worth recognizing the tight coupling between economic and military power.)

So where are we today? If we compare the US to China, we’re close to being superceded as a production powerhouse and we’re certainly well-behind in population and market size (an issue for training of AI systems or for migration to electric cars). Does that mean we’re on the way out?

The answer is in how to think about it. Our economic and military unit is the US plus our allies in Europe and Asia, with an overall population and market size comparable to or greater than China’s. Like it or not they are all us. It’s important to recognize that our economic and military relationships are not benevolence–they exist to serve us. NATO in particular exists, because after World War II and still today the European allies are our first line of defense against the power of Russia. And it’s not just NATO.

The dimensions of power have changed, so that in the world of today we can’t think just domestically. At the end of the second world war, even enemies like France and Germany recognized that in the new world they had no choice but to learn to get along. We similarly need to go farther in defining bonds of cooperation. In that sense even Brexit is less important than establishing the dimensions of cooperation within the entire alliance.

In today’s world chest-beating xenophobia is suicidal (this recent article has some interesting examples of counter-productive domestic monopolies). High tariff walls translate to non-competitive industries with technology obsolescence and ultimately a lower standard of living and military weakness. Internationalism is necessary and in two distinct pieces. The working relationships with our allies are as important to get right as the working relationships between the states of the US. While those relationships are weaker, they count for market size, technology, and military power. Beyond that, relations are tougher, but there are some areas–peace, climate change, control of nuclear weapons–where it just has to happen. Ignoring those challenges is also suicidal.

Despite the messiness of everyday news we don’t necessarily live in bad or discouraging times. We just need to recognize our strengths and what it takes to leverage them. And the overriding common interest we all have in a single interrelated world.

(From a comment to the Washington Post)

There is a lesson to be learned here. The CEO who died really believed his own story. And also really believed that any regulation was a bad idea that did nothing but block innovation.

That’s par for the course. Anyone who gets regulated thinks that way. Years ago I worked for the Bell System, which felt exactly the same way about regulators. The fact that people sincerely believe their own story is no proof that the story is true. If you want to protect against bad outcomes, you need a structure that forces real concern.

That’s true up and down the line. It’s true for protecting the public from all forms of pollution, it’s true for doing something about social media, and it’s true for protecting the Supreme Court from being bought.

There’s an important article about climate change in the latest IEEE Spectrum.  It’s only two pages long, but there is much to think about.  It is high time to recognize the reality of what we’re fighting.

The article points out that a reasonable estimate for the cost of the energy transition is $275 T.  That’s an enormous, almost unthinkable number.  It may well be right.

While the article itself is not big on drawing conclusions, it does have an important one: “because the world’s low-income countries could not carry such burdens, affluent nations would have to devote on the order of 15 to 20 percent of their annual economic product to the task.  Such shares are comparable only to the spending that was required to win World War II.”  We’ve talked about the “rest of the world” problem before, but without such dramatic support.   No one anywhere is talking about that level of effort.

In fact, as a nation, we still have the idea that climate change is a matter of every country (or state) putting its own house in order.  Once we’ve done our part, it’s up to everyone else to do theirs.  However we in the US have:

• The highest per capita energy usage in the world.  Only Russia is close.
• Close to the highest per capita GDP
• Historically, still the biggest contribution to global CO2 and the climate mess we’re in

And somehow all we have to do is take care of ourselves?  And this can be handled as a small activity on the side?  There’s only one atmosphere, and with that mindset we’ll get nowhere.

Biden has finally started something, but there are still major barriers here.  Here are a few:

• Oil company control of the Republican Party and many media outlets.  (Let’s call a spade a spade:  the Kochs—an oil services company—have complete control of the judiciary!)
• Oil company propaganda about “individual responsibility” versus government action
• Arrogance in the environment movement that has made climate a culture war item.
• Splits in the environmental movement on needed electric infrastructure (supported by a kind religious faith in purely local solutions)
• “America first” attitudes about aid to the rest of the world

Furthermore internationally the picture has continued to deteriorate:

• Trump’s catastrophic renouncing of the Paris Agreement has been impossible to walk back.  He killed the idea of world unanimity, so cheating by Russia, Saudi Arabian and others is now the order of the day.
• There are continuing and intensifying international fights over contributions of rich nations to the climate efforts of poorer ones.
• Trump’s bullying view of international relations has been taken up with a vengeance by both Russia and China.  So most international discussion and cooperation is effectively dead.

Given the size of the problem and the limited time available, where do we go from here?

One recent answer came in a set of climate scenarios coming from Princeton University.  They claim that they have evaluated a comprehensive set of climate control approaches, but all of their options end up with a huge role for carbon capture. Maybe they were influenced by oil company money, but in any case they have given up on the energy transition itself!  And carbon capture on that (unproven) scale would end up in the same $275 T ballpark.

So the conclusion, I’m afraid, is that we can’t rule out geoengineering.  However distasteful and risky that may be, we’d better find out as much about it as we can   It is a fact (however often denied) that we don’t have all the technologies we need, and we’ve done a bad job with the ones we do have.  We may well have to buy time until we’re better able to cope. 

But given the uncertainties in geoengineering effects, we had better make sure that anything we put into the atmosphere will be back out in a matter of months–so we’re not stuck with a global disaster of our own making. And we’d better recognize that geoengineering has a drug-like dependency:  we can never get off of it until all that extra CO2 has been taken back out!