Climate change

What We’ve Lost and Must Find

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We read regularly that many of our traditional strengths as a nation are being undermined in this administration.   But frequently such pieces end up tempering their concerns with a belief in America’s fundamental dynamism and vision, as contrasted with (say) the central control of the Chinese regime.  I’m all for believing in progress, but we’re not going to make any if we refuse to recognize how deep a pit we’ve fallen into.  Like it or not we are living with an administration that has deliberately attacked precisely those “American values” we want to believe in.

Here is a notion of what we’ve lost and need to find.

  1. Americans used to believe in the future.

 It was our future, and we did all we could to own it.  Our research institutions were the peak of the world, and people came from everywhere to participate. The list of Nobel Prizes records our success.  Part of that enterprise was to understand what was possible, and we built science into the functioning of government, so we knew where we were going.

All of that is now by the wayside, replaced by Trump’s “intuitions”.  He knows everything there is to know, and what he likes is by definition truth.  That holds for climate change, for research grants, and even (incredibly) for airplane launchers on aircraft carriers.  Even for NIH—a critical source of US competitiveness—grant money has been reduced and RFK’s decision logic hidden.   We’re not looking for truth, we’re looking for loyalty.

We still have the fruits of past successes in AI, SpaceX, and BioTech (all started with pre-Trump government money) and we even have a venture capital community to help fund it.  But all of that is today.  VC’s may sound future-looking, but they’re not going to fund anything that doesn’t pay back big and soon.  All of our present investments are at risk, because we’re too busy selling the present to think more than a step ahead.  The idea that we’re going to win with bigger and bigger investments in AI hardware sounds like the Maginot Line from pre-World War II France.  That was a huge defensive investment based on their experience with World War I, but the German Blitzkrieg just went around it.  In our case the Chinese, with a broader view of AI applications, may do the same.  In addition the obligatory government payoffs from big corporations mean that new entrants face vested interests with government-protected monopoly powers.  It’s like the old joke that someone in the nineteenth century patent office proposed to close it down because everything important had already been invented.  We just did that.

The Chinese have built up their universities and research institutions to be world class.   They figured out the coming importance of rare earths, solar cell and battery technologies, and medical research.  They may have government-defined five-year plans, but at least they have competent technical input and in many areas they have more internal competition than we do.  By contrast our focus now seems to be on the past—strong-arming our friends in hopes of delivering the jobs of the 1950’s.  What we call American dynamism comes not just from individuals, but also from the opportunities for such people to succeed.  For our current leadership that dynamism is unwelcome competition for its own all-embracing genius—something to be stamped out ASAP.

To succeed we must work to see the future and provide means to go there.

  1. Americans used to believe in our people

The American belief in its people goes all the way back.  The whole point of American democracy was to capture the strength of the population.  That’s why George Washington stepped down as President from the dictatorship that most of the world expected to see.  That’s why Lincoln talked about how “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” The democracy was far from perfect, but it was still a big step forward.

Coming out of that mindset was the revolutionary idea of education as essential to the role of the population in a democratic state.  This country pioneered the idea of educating the whole population, first at the high school level and then for colleges.  The power of the country expressed the capabilities of its people. Even the “robber barons” of the nineteenth century recognized the need to in some sense or other give back to the society to which they belonged. Immigration has always been a tricky issue, but we have learned that a multiplicity of people can participate in the democratic experiment and that diversity can be a source of strength.

Today we have replaced all of that with a dramatically different model.  We live in an age of self-declared superheroes.  We have a President who thinks he is infallible (and spends much of his time on monuments to himself), and business leaders who are convinced they belong to a different race.

Nothing in the Big Beautiful bill shows government has a role to play specifically for the population.  We’re running a huge deficit and cutting desperately-needed benefits to poor people so we can have big tax cuts for businesses and rich people.  There’s more detail on who gets benefits here.  When Trump talks about the golden future, there is no mechanism for it other than to make rich people richer.  When he attacks Social Security (e.g. with bogus claims of fraud) he’s attacking the whole idea of direct government support for the welfare of the population.  Crucially government has no role in protecting the population from the powers-that-be running everything for themselves.  Government of, by, and for the people should perish from the earth. 

People don’t necessarily see things that way, but one way or another they understand that there is no one protecting them from the abyss.  So the AI future looks pretty damn scary, and they’re not so enthusiastic about those datacenters either.  Owning the future sounds ridiculous.

To succeed we must support our people.

  1. Americans used to believe in our role in the world.

Coming out of the horrors of the Second World War, we and everyone else hoped for a better future, a new world where this horrible thing would never happen again.  America, as the major power of the age, took its responsibilities seriously.  A world at peace was a world where everyone could prosper.  That meant rules and responsibilities for everyone and institutions to support them.  It was easy for the US to want to be magnanimous; we were the richest, most powerful nation hands down.

We’re actually much richer now than we were then, but something else has also happened.  On an international front we are no longer so dominant, with China specifically challenging us in just about any dimension of wealth and power.  That’s our primary subject of discussion for international affairs these days, but in fact that’s only part of the picture.

The other part is about American society.  After World War II our nation was as equitable as it had ever been, with prosperity widely shared and new opportunities for personal success, particularly through the GI bill and expansion of education.  In the years since then that equality has been eroded until today, we have reached unheard-of levels of wealth and poverty, beyond even the Gilded Age of the nineteenth century.  The following charts show the magnitude of the changes to both wealth and income:

There is no question that the quality of life for many people has deteriorated.  And it is conventional to say that the international idealism of the post-war years has been replaced by a grubbier reality where we are no longer dominant and every country struggles to compete with all others.  And the quality of life issue reflects that grubby struggle, in particular with the Chinese.  So the post-war idealism makes no sense anymore—we just have to win.

It is no accident that this conventional picture elected Trump.   That’s what it was created to do.  There is no shortage of money in this country, but in the years since World War II the powers-that-be have learned to protect their wealth from the population at large.  And electing Trump has enabled a pillaging of the country without precedent.  You have to blame someone, and it’s always the foreigners and the immigrants.

We certainly do have competition with other countries.  But the idea that all our economic problems are because we are under assault from the rest of the world is patently false.  Trade deficit numbers simply don’t tell today’s true story.  An example is the Apple iPhone—a big winner for the USA but counted as a trade deficit loser.  Much of the economy works like that. And the quality of life issue is unquestionably something we have done to ourselves.  This is a prosperous country, but not everyone has felt that prosperity.

In other words we as a nation are in the curious position of carrying out a foreign policy designed to protect domestic inequality! Of course it’s all about those foreigners! In that we are doubly hurt.  We are unable to deal with the actually tractable problem of population insecurity.  And we have lost our essential (and historical) role of helping worldwide stability in the face of the huge problems of climate change, nuclear proliferation, and the unclear consequences of AI.

To succeed we must—especially now—be able to recognize our broad interest as a nation in the world, above and beyond any corruption or special interests.   

We (and everyone else) need a stable, prosperous, and peaceful world for our success.  That is a worthy and achievable goal.  We used to understand these three keys to doing that, and we can do it again.  Our challenge is to recapture them—for ourselves and for our children.

The European Heat Wave is Coming for Us

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The amazing thing about this title is that it has to be said at all.  There is only one world, and what happens to everyone else on this planet is going to happen to us too.  However the Trump-induced national insanity is such that the European heat wave has made zero impact on the national consciousness.   Those Europeans are just too stupid to understand air conditioning the way we do. We’re too good for climate change.

The Europeans have been hit by climate change that is beyond what their world is equipped to handle.  It  didn’t have to be very many more degrees to have a monumental impact.  This isn’t just a matter of personal discomfort.  Costs of crop failures are monumental, energy costs are way up, wild fires are burning in unheard-of places, and water levels in rivers are so low that they block commerce and cooling for nuclear power plants.  Once nature starts getting out of whack, it hurts everyone. However as the following chart shows, we’re not so far behind.

The results for us will be different, because our national infrastructure is different.  We do have more air conditioning, but we are not equipped for the electricity needs to double at precisely the same time that we need vast new power for data centers—which also need water supplies for cooling.  We have a large and vulnerable agricultural sector and our own potential for wildfires.  We have not been spared because we are smarter. We’ve been lucky enough to get a little more time to prepare, and all we do is pat ourselves on the back.

I have to end by repeating what always needs emphasizing—there is NO NEW NORMAL we can somehow prepare ourselves to handle.  If we don’t address climate change things will just continue getting worse—more and more rapidly.  There is no alternative to action.  By now we have a pretty good idea of what to do, both immediately and going forward.

We need to beat back the giddiness and do the work.

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 standing 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 that meets the actual needs of the 21st century.) 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 here 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 it.

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.