Climate change

The Revision of IPCC’s Climate Scenarios

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The UN’s international climate group has revised its set of possible climate change scenarios. They eliminated the most damaging scenario, because of progress in sustainable technologies and because details of the scenario itself seemed unlikely to occur. Trump and other climate deniers have seized upon this change to claim it shows all discussion of climate change is bogus. The following piece was done as a comment to an article in the NY Times.

It seems to me one of the problems with this discussion of scenarios is that people want the scenarios to tell them something different than what the scenarios are trying to do. The scenarios are attempts to model different levels of response to the problem of climate change. There is no default case where we do nothing. For that case the only limit to the temperature is the end year in the study—the temperature would just keep increasing.

The main thing that has happened since the original scenarios is that the world has taken some measures that help: costs of wind and solar solutions have come way down to the point that those make up the majority of new electricity generation worldwide. Electric cars have become cheaper, better, and more prevalent. So it’s not surprising that the current view is somewhat more optimistic.

Where that actually leaves us can never be completely clear. I’m willing to bet the models never considered that the most powerful country in the world would be run by someone trying to sabotage the whole effort. Or that data centers would suddenly demand more power than cities. Or that the Iran war would show everyone the risks of imported oil. There will always be reassessments.

This new set of scenarios should make us appreciate the work that has been done. We can make progress against climate change. But there is much that needs to happen and very strong forces against it. This will never be easy, but it needs to be done.

On Top of the Heap

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We’ve been there for more than 75 years, since the end of World War II.  We are the power that maintains the world order. As such we’ve overseen a remarkable period of growing global (and our own) prosperity.  People from both political parties agree that we are the ones that make things happen.  We’re so comfortable with that role we’ve come to believe it is ours by right and permanent.

Recently though our attitudes toward that role have changed.  We’ve now decided that since we’re in position to run the world, we ought to be able to keep more of the benefits for ourselves.  So instead of maintaining that world order, we’re now in it for everything we can get—confident that the sky is now the limit.

However we have found there’s a hitch.  We attacked a medium-sized country—Iran–to put them in their place, and we didn’t win.  Not only that, an even more minor power—Ukraine—has shown itself more capable of defending our allies than we are. We still have more bombs and aircraft carriers than anyone else, but somehow that doesn’t do the job anymore.  And the problem is getting worse.  We’ve been so preoccupied with China, we haven’t noticed that the problem is not just that.

With nuclear proliferation, computer-controlled drones, and rapidly evolving AI the past pecking order no longer holds.  Instead the future looks considerably more chaotic—with murky and changing notions of international strength and weakness and risks of conflict from both overconfidence and paranoia.  When we tell everybody our new story—that powerful countries should be able to do anything they want to everybody else (because that’s the way it ought to be)—it not always so clear which side of the story is us.  And lowering the threshold to war isn’t necessarily such a great idea either.

Whether we want to admit it or not, we were pretty stupid in the Iran war.  We ignored obvious issues when we attacked, and we were so overconfident that we didn’t do even the most basic job of preparing for the fight.  We didn’t win.  But that’s not the end of it.  Our changed notion of international roles was equally stupid and blind.  We gave up on the idea of international order just when we actually need it, when we can no longer count on always ruling the roost.

Neither problem has a simple solution.  We’re going to come out of the Iran war worse off than when we started.  It’s hard even to guess what we’ll have to give up.  For the world order things are different.  We have proven that a reasonable world order can benefit everyone (at least generally).  We don’t have to be able to shakedown everyone else.  We just have to participate in recreating and inventing conditions for international success.  That must now include addressing climate change, for example, in addition to preventing war.  The job is not simple but the choice itself is: we can either help to create a livable world or suffer in nuclear-armed chaos.

Disconnects

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One of the biggest problems with politics in this country is assumed connections that simply don’t exist.  DOGE and the closing of USAID and other government programs were money in the bank for the Trump base (instead it went to tax cuts for the rich).  Getting rid of immigrants would leave more of the pot of gold for everyone else (but growing the pot is the big issue and immigrants are contributors).   The reason we can’t have free public college here is that the Europeans didn’t contribute enough to NATO (though the Republican Party has consistently blocked any such public services).  And of course the big one—making rich people richer will trickle down to everyone else (which has never happened anywhere—they just get more power to help them keep it).

You have to be really careful with anyone’s tacitly-assumed connections.  Even if they existed in the past, there’s no guarantee they’re going to continue as before.  The particular case I want to talk about is the assumed link between national power (military and corporate) and population well-being.  For most of the 20th century that link was real.  That’s Trump’s factory economy with good jobs and the corporate might that won two world wars.  But that’s not the reality today–manufacturing is 8% of GDP, unions cover 10% of workers, and many service sectors are low-wage and dead-end.  It’s going to be even less the reality going forward.  The AI world is simply not going to supply that kind of employment-linked prosperity—there will be good jobs but not so many of them for a good long while. Experts spill ink arguing about the impact of AI, but the desperation of new college graduates (and current students) is the real world.

Many people have compared AI to the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century.  Britain at the time was the most powerful and prosperous country that had ever existed.  It was a world of fabulous wealth and horrendous destitution, both domestically and in its empire.  Eventually the world was able to adapt to the new reality, but that took a whole century of well-documented horrors.  Economies can’t adapt overnight.  The private sector will not miraculously solve the problem.  The only way is for government to create the link that is broken. (Note there is another side of this picture–we are all increasingly dependent on a relatively limited group who make the difference for rest of us. There is no alternative to spending money on education and research and also restoring our status as the destination for the best and brightest from everywhere.)

Despite all the propaganda to the contrary, government needs a bigger role in employment. This isn’t charity. Government needs to finance work that needs to be done but won’t get done by the private sector alone.  An obvious case is climate change, which will require monumental transformations well beyond the cost of the new equipment.  In this country we have the dubious distinction of currently paying for a huge, debt-financed, fossil-fuel-powered datacenter expansion–that will end up being reworked in short order for a cheaper sustainable successor whether we like it or not! There are also many other parts of the public sector that have been starved for years–for example in healthcare and education.  All of that sounds like a recovery plan from a depression—how to put people to work–but there’s a big difference: we have the money. As with the industrial revolution the problem is not a shortage of work or a shortage of money—it’s making the link.  This time we need to do it.

That isn’t a trivial problem, but it’s worth understanding it as THE economic challenge of our era.  The wealth growing out of the new AI economy has to benefit societies overall. In this it’s worth recognizing that the companies we’re talking about are not in cut-throat price competition with each other–if anything our problem today is too much consolidation and sector monopoly behavior.  Tech companies operate with profit margins that would have been unthinkable in competitive industries. Google’s operating margin runs over 25%. Apple’s over 30%. Microsoft’s over 40%. But we do need to be careful to make taxation work effectively, and we need to avoid an international race to the bottom.  I’m not going to attempt to solve all of that here. But I will note that the prevalence of stock buybacks is an indication that companies have more money than they know what to do with, and also that some kind of equity participation by the government in business is consistent with the value of the infrastructure provided. Fitting this wealth distribution into international trade rules isn’t simple, but we’ve done that sort of thing before–with labor standards and environmental regulations.

To end this piece I’d like to take the international part a step farther. There are many reasons why the world today needs new forms of cooperation–including tough problems like nuclear proliferation and war. This economic issue is everyone’s problem, and (as opposed to many other issues) it can be rationally addressed. It would also be stabilizing for the welfare of national populations.  So if we can make progress with this one, perhaps it is also a step towards the rest. We need to do this.

Hanging Over Our Heads

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Suppose the Iran war somehow reaches a conclusion, and we have a good, rational, democratically-elected regime in Tehran.  What would be a first act of such a regime?  In today’s world they’d need to start a nuclear weapons program as an absolute requirement to maintain sovereignty.

And what would happen after that?  The clear answer to that question shows what is really on the table.  Trump would decide. His Board of Peace is no sideshow–Trump wants to run the world. That may sound great to a US audience, but only until the story collapses. We can see what that means now.

Trump is not worried that the world he has called into being is really chaotic and dangerous.  Since he is THE universal genius, he’ll just take care of it. But in the Iran war we see how little grasp he has on reality. The two-day surgical intervention is out of control in all directions. We’re not always going to be in charge and not always even going to know where our actions will lead. Who knows where we’ll be after a Presidential version of Trump’s six bankruptcies.

The only way we know to control major wars is a system for international governance where war is to the greatest extent possible off the table.  Competing spheres of influence don’t work. International governance isn’t easy either, but we’re all lucky to have lived through such a period.  For all the flaws it mostly worked for peace.  We’re now in an era where many players now think they need nuclear weapons, and the restraints on acts of war are weakening.  Thus far no one has used those weapons, but it’s hard to avoid the feeling we’re getting closer to the brink.

There are other factors too. Computer-controlled drones have clearly changed the rules for warfare in ways we are only beginning to understand.  They have already overturned traditional measures of military strength in both Ukraine and Iran.  They’re cheap, readily available, and we can’t even protect our own radar systems from them. AI is another destabilizer at an even earlier stage of understanding.  Uncertainty and volitily in national assessments of strength or weakness risk wars of overconfidence or paranoia–with weapons of horrendous power.  More than ever we need to restore a framework for stability.

There are really only two ways to do that:  stability is either imposed by dictatorial fiat or assembled by common effort.  The first is Trmp’s vision, but it simply doesn’t match reality.  The second is something we have to make work.  For that everyone needs a stake in the game. There is a base of common interest from both climate change and the obvious risks for war, but the common effort takes more than that–a commitment to international well-being. Obama was able to do something of the sort with the unanimity he achieved around climate change, but it was unstable.  There was too much to be gained in the short term by cheating, and once cheating became respectable, it was hard to fight. Now we’ve got Trump’s sabotage instead.

That doesn’t say the effort was wrong or naive, just hard. Reality won’t wait, and the risks are only increasing. It’s worth noting that there are other success stories for cooperation among nations. The US itself is one–individual states had to decide (with some difficulty) to give up sovereignty for the union to succeed. The EU–despite its bad press–is another one, with prosperity after centuries of bitter wars. Shared prosperity can work, but it requires national governments to make sure benefits reach their populations. In addition here in the US people need to realize that an international order isn’t selling out our national self-interest—in fact we’re doing that today as an unreliable partner in any enterprise.

At some point climate change will become too serious to pretend away.  However, as has been noted many times, by then it may well be too late.  Similarly for war.  We don’t have a choice.  We have to recognize what is at stake now.  We can’t let Trump’s ego wreck the one marvelous world we’ve been granted.

Climate Change is Jewish Physics

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It goes with the territory. Fascist leaders are convinced they are always right and therefore empowered to make judgments about anything that comes their way. As often noted, for Hitler that meant denial of most of 20th century physics, especially relativity and quantum mechanics, as “Jewish physics”. There was a direct line from that to the Germans’ inability to mount any significant challenge to allied development of nuclear weapons. In the end the Germans were defeated without such weapons, but it was only a matter of luck that it happened in time. Hitler in effect defeated the entire German war machine, because he was always right.

The parallels to climate change are exact. Climate change is real, and the technological underpinning for the rest of the world is being built about combatting it. We’re either part of that future or we’re not. It affects not only how energy is generated and distributed but also how major applications (transportation, construction, steelmaking. heating and cooling) use it. We sit around talking about how to “win” our competition with China when we have ceded all of that to them. It was an accident that Jewish Physics didn’t lose the war for Germany–we’re choosing to have our version of it lose our dominance to China.

Our power network gives one example. The many new mega-datacenters demand vast increases in electrical power to run them. We could use that opportunity to upgrade our (outdated and insecure) electrical infrastructure nationwide in a way that would serve the datacenters, the public, and the evolution to new energy sources. That would buy benefits for the datacenters themselves, and would certainly improve public attitudes about their construction–and that’s in addition to the benefits as we address climate change and new energy sources come online. (See what China is doing here.) In fact we have refused to do any such thing, leaving the implementation as a bunch of point solutions based primarily on fossil fuels and an outright prohibition on wind and solar.

We the human race may or may not succeed in avoiding real climate disaster, but any successes we achieve will be despite Trump’s sabotage. Whatever international order comes out of it all will reflect the interests of those who build it. And the status of the US will recognize that Trump’s sabotage was in literal terms a crime against humanity.

We’re Betting Everything Against Climate Change

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The takeover of Venezuela has made us a colonial power. Trump is now the dictator of Venezuela for the indefinite future. It has also led to new rhetorical heights about spheres of influence and how we should be able to use our superpower status to take whatever we want from anyone. So seizing Greenland from a NATO member is our perogative by right.

We’re telling all nations of the Americas that their independence is only for as long as we like it. Outside the Americas we’re threatening NATO’s existence by seizing territory. More generally we’re legitimizing the use of military force by anyone with the power to do it. History shows where that goes.

And what we’re getting for all that is oil. Oil that for the most part is not going to become available without billions of dollars of investment and years of development. Even without climate change that’s a shaky prospect; with the reality of climate change it’s nuts.

Climate change denial is not just a matter of sabotaging the Paris agreement and killing research funding.; it’s fundamental to everything they do. The rest of the world is continuing without us. It has to, since there is no other choice. China may be a dictatorship, but it values competence. Europe has kept its act together despite US pressure. Others are already seeing climate impacts. We’re off in our very own never-never land farther and farther from reality.

We’re going nowhere. The only question is whose sphere of influence gets us.

Jobs per Dollar

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As an indication of where the economy is going, someone should calculate permanent jobs created per dollar of capital expenditure for all the new datacenter construction.  That’s probably a new low for expenditures of this magnitude.  It’s more complicated to predict the effect on jobs in the rest of the economy, but that’s most probably negative.

It’s hard for me to think this doesn’t say something about the world we’re going toward.  It’s not so much that there will be a shortage of jobs overall as of good jobs.  What is it that we are going to use to bargain with employers?  Traditional education is about knowledge and capability.  In our familiar world it takes years to put together the package that an employable person represents, and there are many distinct niches that need to be filled.  In the new world, knowledge is more readily accessible, the capabilities required are more generic, and staffing levels may be reduced by efficiencies.  We’re only beginning to see how that will shake out.

As we noted last time, the private sector is not good at managing effects of radical change—on people and on the environment.  On the other hand, we’re talking about really significant productivity improvements, so in principle that should be a good thing.  But that’s not going to happen by itself. It sure didn’t happen at the start of the industrial revolution—for most of humanity that meant misery and war.

In this anniversary of the American Revolution there is a relevant quote from the signing of the Declaration of Independence: “We must, indeed, all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”  That’s now true worldwide.  In this time of economic ferment, climate change, and nuclear weapons we had better learn to work together for global well-being or there may be nothing left at all.

The Real Deal on Rare Earths

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The subject of “rare earths” is everywhere—now that Trump has discovered that not everyone he bullies backs down. (Like most bullies he clearly never thought of risks beforehand.)  But it is shocking how much of the discussion is both wrong and wrong-headed.

Let’s start with what’s wrong.  First of all, the set of rare earths includes 17 chemical elements that share some chemical properties, but whose significance is individual not collective.  Particular elements are important in particular ways.  Availability and processing requirements are not the same either.  So if Trump announces that we’re going to get rare earths from, say, Ukraine that may be relevant to an important issue or it may not be.  Similarly when someone announces with fanfare that we’re going to start processing rare earths somewhere outside of China, that may or may not have any importance at all—depending on what it is.

All that sounds like we need a lot of new information that would be hard to track down, but actually that’s not true.  There is an excellent, widely-available report from an unbiased source that goes right down the line on everything you would like to know.  And the answer is that there is nothing we are doing that is going to change China’s leverage any time soon (measured in years of course).  And that’s the news about rare earths. 

Wrong-headed is a different issue.  The important thing to realize is that the rare earth problem is NOT one-of-a-kind.  The rare earth problem is what happens when you don’t plan ahead for what the world is going to look like in the future.  There are two changes that made this problem happen:

  • The technology environment changed, so that suddenly these elements went from exotic to strategic.
  • The political environment changed to one of economic war with everyone, so that the US suddenly has to become economically independent of everyone whose arms it can’t twist. There is a strategic question with China, but we forced this issue by declaring war.

The impact of item one is only going to get worse.  Trump is preoccupied with the past (e.g. the 1950’s) not the future, so all kinds of necessary technologies won’t be here. He has done all he can to kill funding for future-oriented research at NIH and universities.  His climate denial has ceded leadership in all the (many) sustainable energy technologies to China.  His anti-trust policies favor existing large companies over new entrants.  He even told the troops on the aircraft carrier he visited that they should be happy it still used steam pressure to launch planes instead of the newer electronic system on the (single) new Chinese carrier.  We can count on being behind the eight-ball for the foreseeable future, and it’s going to be hard to reassemble the infrastructure to catch up.

On item two we have only begun to appreciate what it means to be at economic war with everyone.  We’re still in an environment where the US has many historical mutually-advantageous relationships with partners.  We benefit as participants in a common enterprise.  All such partners now find they are under attack.  Trump relies upon factors such as NATO membership and US market size to coerce other countries to do his bidding.  Neither form of coercion is permanent, as everyone can see that even Canada is under attack.  Resources and support come into question.  Whether we like it or not, allies are important.  And that’s not just a military matter.  It’s a basis of our economic strength and our standard of living.

Rare earths are no one-of-a-kind deal.  They’re a bellwether for our future.