How's Your Relationship With Jesus?

Review of American Gospel, Christ Alone- an evangelical hate letter to prosperity- and happy-gospel televangelists.

As an atheist, my relationship with Jesus is not very good. I regard him as historically questionable, and if a real person, then wildly misinterpreted and inflated by the subsequent mythological process that resulted in Christianity and Islam. Oh, and also dead, really most sincerely dead. But just for fun, I watched a film provided by my library- American Gospel, Christ Alone. It features a parade of mostly white evangelical male pastors excoriating the prosperity gospel- the Joel Osteins, Benny Hins and Creflo Dollars of televangelism. They get rather worked up- Why? Aren't there actual atheists and heathens about, or sick and destitute to help? As usual, internecine conflict is the most bitter (remember early Christianity, or the refomation and counter-reformation). It is about an attention market where conventional evangelicals, Baptists, etc. compete perhaps mostly closely and intensely with this other theology that is so uncomfortably close to their own. Though Mormons come in for a few potshots as well, as do Catholics.

For, did Jesus die for your sins, or your happiness? Is faith enough, or would a donation help? It is a fine line, really. Even if one takes the conventional, Lutheran attitude that faith alone, scripture alone, and Christ alone are sufficient for salvation and whatever else is putatively desirable in worshipping and satisfying god, why do we want to satisfy god at all, or want salvation, or want our sins redeemed? Might that be to make us happy? To be righteous, better than one's neighbor, part of the tribe, and to have that great insurance policy, heading to the big family reunion in the sky? There is no getting around the happy part of the gospel. It is supposedly good news, not bad. And the parts that are difficult, like giving up one's family and possessions, and waiting in penance for the end of the world? Well, who takes that seriously? Not the evangelicals.

Creflo Dollar freely misinterprets the Bible. "Provision" is no part of the original. Rather, the kingdom is heaven, and the very next verse is.. "Sell your possessions and give to the poor. Provide purses for yourselves that will not wear out, a treasure in heaven that will not be exhausted". But do the Evangelicals take this rank communism seriously either? Hardly.

The prosperity gospel may be gauche and low class, aimed like a heat-seeking missile at the downtrodden who need something a little more concrete to hope for than snooty biblical correctness and heavenly rewards. But it is not so far from the original message of Christianity, which offered a tight-knit community along with the sugarplums of heaven in return for the acceptance of Christ as one's totem in opposition to all the other totems available, particularly the official ones of the Roman Empire. And those early Christian communities were no monastaries. They were full of normal people, including merchants, who benefited from the commercial networks and moral creeds taking shape in this church. While the creed had an ideal of communism and anti-materialism, in practice it quickly came to an appreciation of money as a beneficence, for clergy, and for alms and other good works. Does that make money good?

There was a long tangent in this film about health and sickness. The prosperity preachers generally have a sideline in faith healing. Which is likewise low-class and disreputable. Evangelicals, in contrast, portray themselves as demurely thanking god for everything good that happens, and if in the mood, thanking for the trials and tribulations as well, all without expecting that prayer is going to help. Nothing so gauche as a transactional prayer! But lo, what happens after every tragedy and in every evangelical church? Thoughts and prayers go out to those in hardship, with a wink-wink that god presumably must be paying attention, big as "he" is. It may not be as callous as selecting the not-very sick for dramatic faith healings and speaking in tongues, but the principle is exactly the same. We pray, and someone should listen, and all that should lead to results, in a the world we want to see, hopefully here, but if not, then hereafter.

So, high or low, it is all equally nonsense in the service of personal comfort and mass psychotherapy, whether one has the fancy degrees to go with one's Biblical references or not. The film is positively crawling with citations- cherry picked quote after quote, to say (among many other things) that faith alone is sufficient, no dollars required to enter into heaven. But the televangelists have plenty of quotes too, and so do the Jews! Rather contrasting belief systems can all draw from the same well, and all the rhetorical hellfire and brimstone isn't going to resolve these endless contradictions. Second, and more important, what on earth does god want? That is what this whole drama is about. But after a god treats his originally chosen people with derision and scorn, then issues himself in human form to conduct some rather cryptic repentence preaching, and then has himself killed in grisly fashion in order to show the world that he is the soverign king of all creation... Well, no wonder there are various interpretations.

It is not a focus of this film, which is full of self-righteous pastors, but religious people often proclaim the inscrutability of god. And that would be a good place to leave the subject, rather than saying in one's next breath what god wants, how we miserable sinners are both so important to him (always him!) that we have to do what he or she says, but at the same time how complete he or she is, great, omnipotent, and omniscient, needing nothing whatsoever. The sheer idiocy of these contradictions and paradoxes are generally meant to cow the humble sinner under the eagle eye of the charismatic pastor. Heaven forbid that a thought enters one's head. For, back in the day, pastors used to be the most educated and intellectually capable members of society. Similarly, American protestantism has settled on having a "personal" relationship with Jesus, or, if one wants to be ambitious, with god. The therapeutic value of meditation, mantras, and lucid dreaming are real enough. But communing with dead people, voids, and imaginary friends? Really? It is a method of mass and self-hypnotic propaganda- pure nonsense.

So, spew vitriol on each other as much as they like, but what we are seeing here is simply upper-class versus lower class charlatanism at loggerheads. Conventional pastors uphold conventional (reformed) understandings, like our sinning depravity and undeserving natures that can only be saved by faith and repentence - that is what god wants. Since their parishioners tend to be well-to-do, conservatism is quite sufficient for this world, and faith can be directed mostly at the next. (Plus, the collection plates fill up without any crass appeals to transactional prayer.) But the unconventional pastors speak to a more downtrodden demographic. Sure, they prey on their hopes and dreams, but they also strengthen those hopes by saying that god is not the disinterested, damning character you hear about in mainline churches. No, he is powerful, and healing, and helpful.

The film ends with the wife of the producer proclaming that despite her many health woes, (which she wouldn't dream of asking god to fix!), she knows Jesus is in her heart, and that makes her super-happy. That, and having a delightful house, husband, and kids. Oh, and a tube sticking out of her nose, presumably for oxygen, and some more tubes out of her insides, for feeding. But thankful for all the clever people who researched the feeding mixture, and invented the tubes, and manage their sterility, and who performed the operations, and who serve her at the hospital? Not a word about all that. It is Jesus in her heart that she is thankful for. And by the way, they could use some money.

• Enter your prayer request here, and god will answer.
• BBC looks askance.
• Christianity Today is alarmed. And no, God does not want you to be happy.
• Treatments for Covid-19 will probably save us before a vaccine does.
• People who know, know creeping fascism.
• Recessions are damaging and unnecessary.
• What it is like working for a weasel. Or being an idiot.
• History and Henry Wallace.
• Why aren't the gun nuts equally vociferous about women's rights against state interference on their most personal and significant actions?

Eating the Wild Things

Despite humanity's long tradition of eating wildlife, it is high time to rethink it as a practice. 

The coronavirus outbreak certainly gives one pause, and time to think about what we are doing to the biosphere and to ourselves. It also makes one wonder about the wisdom of killing and eating wildlife. I have been reading a book about a different disaster, the struggles of the crew of the ship Essex, back in 1820. This Nantucket-based factory ship was hunting whales in the middle of the Pacific when, in an ironic, yet all too-rare turn of events, a huge male sperm whale rammed and sank the mother ship as the smaller whaleboats were out killing its relatives. Months of drama, extremity, and cannibalism ensue, (for the humans), after which a fraction of the crew survive to tell the tale. It seems to us now bizarre, and beyond wasteful, that street lights in Nantucket were lit with whale oil, and that people would sail all over the world's oceans just to kill whales for the oil in their heads and blubber. Humans have an instinct for survival, and for the most concentrated source of various goods, and, whether under the colors of capitalism or simple greed, think little of externalizing costs, no matter how brutal and far-reaching, whether eating each other, "fishing out" some rich source of food, causing extinctions, or setting Charles island of the Galapagos ablaze in an inferno (another episode that occurs in this ill-starred history). One must be "hard" in this business of living, after all.

Well, we can do better. Now, two centuries on, we are still abusing the biosphere. Some ways are new, (climate change, plastics, insecticides), but others are old, such as over-fishing. Factory ships are still plying the great oceans of the world, vacuuming up wild animals so that we can eat them. And not just do they derange whole ecosystems and litter the oceans with their waste, but they also kill a lot of innocent bystanders, euphemistically called "bycatch"- sea turtles, albatrosses, dolphins, whales, etc. Albatross populations are in steady decline, from very low levels and heading towards extinction, for one main reason, which is the fishing industry.

This simply has to stop. It is a tragedy of the commons, on a collossal scale, all for the atavistic desire to eat wild animals. Human overpopulation, coupled with technology, means that no wild animals stand a chance in an unregulated environment- not in Africa, not in Brazil, and not in the international oceans. We are killing them by a thousand cuts, but do we also have to eat them, as the final indignity and form of waste?

If we want to save the biosphere from utter impoverishment, humanity needs a change of heart- an ethic for keeping the wild biosphere wild, rather than running it like so much farmland, or so much "resource" to be pillaged, whether "sustainably" or not. Obviously, eating meat at all is a fraught issue- ethically, and environmentally. But surely we can agree that wild animals, and wild ecosystems, deserve a break? Conversely, where we have so screwed up ecosystems by eliminating natural predators or introducing invasive species, we may have to kill (and yes, perhaps eat) wild animals in systematic fashion, to bring back a functional balance. Go to town on feral hogs, boa constrictors, Asian carp, etc. (But try to do so without poisoning yourselves and the evironment with lead.) The point is that we are stewards of this Earth now, like it or not, and ensuing generations over the next hundreds and thousands of years deserve an Earth with a functioning biosphere, with some semblance of its original richness.

• Lying is a weapon of war.
• It's the same old Pakistan.
• Astronomers take a whack at the virus.
• What to do after the protests. And then prohibit public employee unions from corrupting political campaigns. And then prohibit all other special interests from corrupting campaigns as well, for good measure.

SARS E!

How does this virus assemble and get out of the cell? The key proteins are named S, M, N, and E.

True to their tiny size, viruses typically have short genomes and short names for their genes, which are relatively few. Coronaviruses generally have two halves to their genomes- a big polyprotein that gets translated right away from the genome RNA, and encodes key proteins, some of which interfere with host functions, and others of which include its own replicase, and proteases that cleave itself into those pieces. The other half of the genome is expressed later, into the proteins that make up the baby virions- the envelope and nucleocapsid, along with a slew of smaller proteins that have other, and sometimes still unknown, functions.

Once all this has gotten going, the virions have to assemble and escape from the cell- a complicated and interesting process, not completely understood, though blowing up the cell through inflammation, apoptosis, and general tissue destruction certainly helps. Genomic viral RNAs, as they are made in the cell cytoplasm by the viral replicase, get bound by the N protein, which is the viral protein that binds and packages the genome, and also has binding sites for the M protein, which organizes the outside envelope. N has other roles in controlling host processes, but this is its major function. These N+genome RNA complexes (which are regarded as the nucleocapsid) find their M partners sticking out of the endoplasmic reticulum (ER, or actually a post-ER compartment called ERGIC) that is the major site in cells of protein synthesis of membrane proteins and secreted proteins. Binding promotes budding of the genome complex into the ER, forming a nascent virion, now inside the ERGIC.

Final portion of the SARS life cycle. Virion proteins are made by ribosomes (green) from gene-sized portions of the viral genome, at lower left. The nucleocapsid protein (yellow) gathers up the replicated RNA genomes into packages, and then docks onto the membranes of the ERGIC, or endoplasmic reticulum-golgi intermediate membrane compartment, specifically on the M proteins (red) exposed there, that have been translated into the endoplasmic reticulum and formed homogenous rafts. Then all that is left is to follow the endocytic pathway out of the cell, or wait for the cell to blow up by other means. In actual virions, there are many more M proteins than S proteins, and extremely few E proteins.

The M protein has in the mean-time been synthesized in vast amounts and has several important properties, being the main protein that constitutes and drives formation of the viral envelope. It is an integral membrane protein, and associates with itself, in a particular array that prefigures the complete virion and excludes non-viral membrane proteins. M protein also, in these rafts of itself, makes space for the S protein- the surface spike which gives the virus its name (corona) and which binds to the next target cell- in someone else's lung tissue. And it binds to the N protein, so that the virus envelope engulfs the packaged genome as it docks from the cytoplasm.

E protein from original SARS. That is it! Red denotes hydrophobic amino acids, blue hydrophilic, and stars the charged amino acids.

That leaves the E protein.. what is it doing? It is a tiny (76 amino acid) membrane protein, important, though not essential, for viable viruses. Indeed it is so important that viruses with this gene experimentally removed, while able to limp along at low levels, quickly evolve a new one from scratch. But it is present in virions only in very small amounts. Its structure indicates one transmembrane domain, but predictions have been ambiguous- some methods predict two, some only one. This may suggest that this protein truly has somewhat ambiguous membrane localization, which might suggest a key function in the budding process, encouraging the last, critical transition from membrane invagination to true, fully enclosed virion.

You might not need many E proteins to do this, just a small ring around the final lip of the M-protein led vesicle. E binds to M protein, and the two of them alone are sufficient to make virion-like particles in experimental cells. N protein is not needed at all, nor a genome! Yet E is thought to also be able to bind to S, helping anchor it in the viral envelope. E can also bind to itself in complexes form membrane pores, one of whose effects is to promote inflammation and apoptosis, i.e. cell death. As if that weren't enough, E protein also contains a regulatory domain (PBM) that can bind hundreds of cellular proteins to regulate cell function, particularly dysregulating cell-cell junctions to form multi-cellular synctia that allow viral spread to neighboring cells, while impeding immune responses. A lot to do for such a small protein!

Virions lacking E, made with only M, are abnormally shaped, and ones made with mutant E proteins have novel, still abnormal, shapes. This leads to the idea that M forms flat sheets, and E helps the viral envelope curve, as it must to form the spherical virion. As mentioned above, it is also quite possible that E helps with the ultimate encirclement of the virion, the final membrane-fusing stage of budding that is actually rather tricky to accomplish and requires specialized machinery in the cell and in most membrane-envelope viruses. So there remains quite a bit to learn about the machinery of this virus, for all we know so far. And we are naturally even more curious about more practical matters, like whether all this can help create a vaccine, how exactly it spreads, whether it provides immunity after infection and for how long, and how much each of our protective measures, like masks, gloves, washing, disinfecting, etc., really help.

• Social networks, evolution, the friendship paradox, and epidemic modeling.
• Coronaviruses remain viable for over an hour in aerosol, and for many hours on hard surfaces. So they spread everywhere, mask or no mask.

De-carbonize it

... Sung to the tune of Peter Tosh's "Legalize it". How are we doing on greenhouse gas emissions? Not very well, if the goal is zero.

Climate heating has, over the last few decades, changed from a theoretical spectre to a universal reality. The seasons have shifted. The weather is more extreme. The fires have ravaged whole regions. The arctic is melting, the corals are dying, and the wildlife is thinning out and winking out. But our emissions of CO2, far from declining, keep reaching yearly highs. Humanity is not facing up to this crisis.

Global CO2 emissions keep going up, while the climate has already gone out of bounds.

The goal needs to be zero. Zero emissions, not in 30 years, but as soon as humanly possible. Here in California, we pride ourselves in a progressive and leading-edge approach to climate policy. So how are we doing? A graph of CO2 emissions shows that California emissions have been going down since a peak in 2004, and now are roughly at 85% of that peak, despite increases in population and GDP. That is laudable of course. But we are still emitting hundreds of millions of metric tons of CO2 per year. Millions of tons that will be extremely difficult to recapture, as we inevitably will have to if we want to restore the Earth's climate to a semblance of the form it had for the last few million years of evolution across the biosphere.

California CO2 emissions. Going in the right direction, but far from zero. Note the Y axis cut off at 400 million metric tons CO2 per year.

Breakdown of California emissions. Note how refinery emissions alone are higher than all household emissions (principally heating).

Can we get to zero? Yes, we can if we are serious enough. There are two ingredients to get there. One is policy to drive the change, and the other is the technical means to get there. One optimal policy is a stiff carbon tax. California already has a sort-of carbon cap/pricing system, covering a fraction of emitters and using a market-based mechanism that has sent prices under $20 per metric ton. This is not enough to make a difference, being the equivalent of about 15 cents per gallon of gasoline. To be serious, we would wish to triple the cost of gasoline, which would get users off of fossil fuels in a hurry. Such a tax would come to about $700 per metric ton of CO2 emissions- an unprecedented level when you look at carbon pricing schemes around the world, but if we want results we need to think about serious policy to get there. In order to insulate such tax systems from cost-shifting to other countries, they would need a complex system of boundary taxes to make sure that imported goods and forms of energy are all subject to the same effective carbon taxation, so that in-state sources are not penalized. This is an important goal for international agreements like the Paris accords, to make such boundary taxation normal and systematic, preventing races to the bottom of emissions regulation. It is the only way that any jurisdiction can set up a strong carbon taxing/pricing system.

Can we get to zero? The technical means are not all in place, but given enough motive force from policy, we can get there very soon. The key is storage. Fossil fuels not only hold huge amounts of solar energy, but they have stably locked them up for tens of millions of years, just waiting for humanity to mine them out and burn them up. Their storability turns out to be as significant as their energy density. Solar and wind energy do not have that property, and we are just beginning to devise the means to store their energy at scale, whether by chemical means (batteries, hydrolysis of water to hydrogen) or mechanical (pumping hydro stations, spinning rotors). Whether nuclear energy enters the mix is another and very appropriate question as well, as new, safer reactor designs become common, and a strong carbon tax makes them economically viable again.
 
Natural gas is not a transitional fuel- it is another fossil fuel, only slightly less bad than coal. Another fix for an addicted economy, like switching from heroine to oxycontin. We need to break this addiction, and as fast as possible, with strong policy that takes the problem seriously. Elizabeth Warren aims her policy at decarbonization by 2030. Bernie Sanders aims at 2050. Donald Trump says to hell with us all.

• January sets another heat record.
• Bumble bees are dying.
• Quote of the week: "Here, then, is a discovery of new evils, I said, against which the guardians will have to watch, or they will creep into the city unobserved. What evils? Wealth, I said, and poverty; the one is the parent of luxury and indolence, and the other of meanness and viciousness, and both of discontent." - Plato's Republic

Russia and its Sphere of Influence

What happens if no one wants to be in your club? Review of "Putin's World: Russia against the West and with the rest", by Angela Stent.

History plods on, despite our pride in having achieved "modernity", so that everything can now stop and rest at our state of perfection. Nowhere is that more apparent than in Russia, where the past weighs heavily, affecting attitudes and policy in substantial contrast to interests and current conditions. Russia has been an imperial power for centuries, gradually beating most of its neighbors into submission and incorporating them into a multi-ethnic but hardly socially equal empire. This process was capped by the Great Patriotic War, aka World War 2, which ended with the USSR in control of new territories inside Europe, and others inside Japan, and with ideological friends in many other lands. It was not a happy empire, but it was a huge one, and the Russians were and remain proud of its achievement.

Then everything fell apart, and since the end of the Cold War, Russia has been trying to get it back. That would be a brief synopsis of Stent's book, which goes in very professional fashion through Russia's history, current relations, conflicts, and friendships all over the world. On the whole, Russia has over the last couple of decades managed its relations quite well, leveraging what little strength it has (lots of oil and gas, a ruthless attitude towards politics near and far, and a prodigious ability to suffer) into substantial strides back to relevance on the world stage.

But what should the West think and do about it? We came in for a great deal of criticism for our cavalier attitude during the breakup of the USSR. We advocated "shock therapy", and boy were they shocked! Without effective state control or cultural traditions of capitalism, what was a rotten system of communism turned into a laissez-faire wild west of rampant economic and political corruption. State control has now been re-asserted, but the patterns that formed in those days, which frankly reflect a long history of "informal" political relations throughout the region, persist to this day, despite verying formalities of democracy and rule of law. There remains a fundamental misunderstanding (and mistrust) of what political and economic liberalism means and how the West has gotten to its dominant position, despite centuries of study, copying, inferiority complexes, and deep economic and political relations. Russia remains instinctively authoritarian, not only due to the cleverness of Vladimir Putin, but apparently as a general cultural default. Maybe this did not have to be, maybe there was an opening in the early days of Yeltsin's rule, but our thoughtless and disastrous prescriptions at the time helped sow a bitter harvest. Now Russia equates democracy with weakness, and has decided to demonstrate that principle by deploying its most expert propaganda into our free media spaces.

It is generally realized now that China, in contrast, did things correctly, becoming a booming capitalist state while keeping absolute political control. That is how an properly authoritarian state manages things, (as previously modeled by various Asian tigers, particularly Singapore), and is now a model for Russia among many others. Unlike the Russian breakdown, China's ability to change its spots from communism to capitalism raises deep questions of whether liberalism and democracy are the best system, not only in human rights terms, but in their ability to manage capitalism. For it is clear, from both the Russian debacle and from the Chinese success, that capitalism is not self-perpetuating or self-managing. It relies inextricably on a strong state and legal system that sets rules by which competition among oligarchs, firms, workers, and other actors remains on the economic level, not on the military, political, or criminal levels. Democracy can be responsive to these issues, but we are, in the US, currently in the grip of a very destructive ideology that denigrates the state, is restoring corruption at all levels, and appears heedless of the future in economic, political, and planetary terms. The outcomes of this ideology became frighteningly apparent in our chaotic occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, yet the lesson may still not have been learned.

But getting back to Russia ... The nations of the former USSR have developed in almost linear relation to how closely they are positioned to Europe, geographically and culturally. The Baltic states turned relatively easily and completely to the European model. The middle area of Romania and Bulgaria, among others, have turned more slowly, but are also firmly in the pro-Europe camp. But those bordering Russia, like Belarus out east to Kazakstan, remain authoritarian and mired in "informal relations". Ukraine has tried to buck this trend and is deeply divided. Partly this is due to the large number of expatriate Russians living in these areas. But in any case, each has its own nationalism, and no one wants to re-unite with Russia to remake the old empire. Recent news stories show that even Belarus, Russia's most reliable and sycophantic ally, draws a line.

"Ultimately, Russia, China, and the states of Central Asia share fundamental ideas of what stability in the region looks like and how to maintain it. They are a group of authoritarian states dedicated to maintaining themselves in power and ensuring no Islamist or color revolutions threaten their rule. Whereas they view with great suspicion any Western attempts to open up their societies, Central Asian elites welcome Russian and Chinese support of the status quo."

So Russia is determined to have a club that few want to join. The ex-Soviet republics may share many cultural, political, and economic patterns, and cooperate to some extent in organizations like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, but Russia's dreams of expansion and re-integration are generally rebuffed. It has turned to invasions like the takeover of Crimea, South Ossetia, and the creeping war in Eastern Ukraine, treating its neighbors like piñatas to be whacked at will and bullied with fossil fuel subsidies and threats. It is reminiscent of the spoiler role Pakistan maintains in its region, fomenting unrest in Afghanistan lest that country ever have peace and positive economic development.

And then Russia demands that we all respect its "sphere of influence", as though we were still in Victorian times, playing some sort of great game on a map of the world, and heading in to World War 1. But this supposed sphere is entirely composed of unwilling and oppressed neighbors- not quite as badly treated as in Soviet times, but uniformly uninterested in recreating those glory days. Russia has no intrinsic or deserved "rights" in this respect, despite its vaunting desires- we need to keep offering self-determination and choice to its neighbors, as we do to all other countries around the world. Russia is armed to the teeth, and really needs no defensive buffer of this kind, nor is its cultural influence so positive that its bullying should be regarded as a family matter. Quite the opposite.

NATO countries of Europe, in blue.

Which brings us to NATO. We did not think through its fate very carefully when the cold war ended. NATO stood during the cold war as a defense against the USSR, pure and simple, plus a way to keep Germany pacified and integrated in Europe. When the USSR collapsed (foremost because its captive nationalities and "republics" wanted out), and the Warsaw pact dissolved, we half-heartedly offered coordination to Russia. But never really thought through what our military posture should be towards this new friend, or offered a comprehensive and durable peace. We were, however, eager to integrate as many of the newly ex-Soviet states as wanted to join, such as Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, the Baltic states, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia, not to mention various members of the former Yugoslavia. That makes it look like a rather offensive affair, from Russia's perspective. And then Ukraine wanted to join as well. Integrating all these countries into a modern mutual defence organization was certainly positive for them, as one more element of their cultural headlong run away from Russia and communism.

But what is it really defending? One gets the distinct sense that, like in the post-WW2 era, NATO's purpose has become keeping the principal adversary of the latest war at bay. But whereas Germany was integrated into NATO, subject to continued occupation, though of a relatively friendly sort, now the enemy, i.e. Russia, is outside, and is not being killed with kindness, but rather being provoked by encirclement. All this is relatively obvious and not terribly objectionable now, now that Russia has become increasingly anti-Western, but that did not have to be the outcome. (Though Stent is dubious- she maintains that Russia's historical attitude strongly re-asserted itself after the breakup, and it would be chimerical to think that Russia would ever align fully with the West, such as joining NATO and allowing extensive occupation / collaboration by foreign forces- see the quote below) We drifted into it by inertia- by lazy thinking in our foreign policy and military establishments, not to say simple gloating. Would Russia have responded more positively if we had given them a better deal? Only if we had matched it with more effective economic reconstruction assistance as well. But neither of these things happened, and attitudes in Russia quickly hardened and became, understandably, rather bitter. Nevertheless, this does not justify an undeserved sphere of influence or renascent empire on Russia's part. Does Britain demand a sphere over France? Does Germany over Denmark? No. Did we invade Cuba when it turned to communism? Well, sort of and half-heartedly(!)

"As Putin consolidated his rule, it became clear to much of the world that a main reason for Russian's rejection of Western-style economic and political programs was because they are Russians, not because they were communists. Seventy years ago, George Kennan understood that communist ideology reinforced and exacerbated, but did not contradict, the characteristics of traditional tsarist rule. Communism had been superimposed on centuries of Russian autocracy and personalistic rule, and had, if anything, strengthened those traditions. The ideology was a means to consolidate the Bolsheviks' rule, mobilize society, and, with great pain, drag Russian peasants into modernity. ... The minority who supported Gorbachev and Yeltsin and believed that Russia should become more like the West both politically and economically, were outnumbered from the outset."

Reading this book reinforces that it is the US and the West in general that is the revolutionary agent afoot in the world. We are the ones fomenting color revolutions. We are the ones planting thoughts of human rights, rule of law, justice, and prosperity around the world. We think that all this is obvious, progressive, and unexceptional, but democracies are still the minority, and the other countries, notably including Russia and China, have developed a countervailing authoritarian bloc who studiously refrain from criticizing each other's miserable internal politics, and complain ceaselessly about those who do.

Democracy Index, with darker green denoting greater democracy. Note how China rates slightly higher than Russia, due to its better governance and more functional political culture, despite lacking any electoral process.

Are we right to do so? The issue of self-determination is perhaps the thorniest area where this ideology hits the real world- not everyone can or should have their own country. The USSR broke up over the failure of the center to, in the face of countless failures, justify holding on to its huge empire, and has now turned into 15 successor states, most with an ethnic character. Several of those successor states have experienced civil wars and separatist movements of their own. The fact is that few large countries have ever become large by voluntary means. Given generally peaceful conditions, most peoples with any kind of distinct culture want their own country, as is being expressed in such places as Catalonia, Scotland, Quebec, Kurdistan, and even 150 years ago in our own Confederate South. As Stent acidly points out, separatism is Russia's (and China's) bête noir, leading to its brutal repression of Chechnya, among many other places ... until it comes to Ukraine and Georgia, where Russia uses separatism in the most cynical way.

"Russia will push to jettison the post-Cold War, liberal, rules-based international order driven by the US and Europe in favor of a post-West order. For Russia, this order would resemble the nineteenth-century concert of powers, with China, Russia, and the United States dividing the worlds into spheres of influence."

But there was one place that had a "velvet divorce". Slovakia and the Czech Republic parted ways without bloodshed, because they were oriented to the European model, and negotiated their differences. As a foreign policy stance, we should not encourage separatism generally, but should always support peaceful resolutions and reasonable accommodations. One might add in passing that, if one holds an election to validate a minority breaking away, referendums of this sort should have a high bar, such as 75% , rather than the typical 50%. At any rate, this episode illustrates a key point- that the Western model is good, and tends to lead to peaceful and durable outcomes, because it is not repressive and takes people's interests and rights seriously. Repression can keep the peace for a while, but durable, prosperous peace (and good governance) is best kept with respect, moderation, and truthful communication.

So the order of preference, from all these historical lessons, is as follows. The worst government is none, representing chaos and unleashing the worst forms of power- criminal and informal military. The next best is authoritarian, which can range from brutally repressive, like Stalinist Russia, to repressive and even quite functional, if not benevolent, like China, Turkey, and Russia today. And the best is liberal (and functional!) democracy, which respects its citizens while maintaining a strong state. Unfortunately, democracies are difficult to run, have various inefficiencies, and are perpetually at risk of turning to authoritarianism, particularly when new technologies of propaganda arise that can hypnotize and misinform the populace, as happened during the fascist era, and is happening again today.

Does this mean that we should agitate for democracy everywhere and all the time? Yes, in short, it does. We can and must work with all governments as they exist, to manage what interests we have in common. But we should never mistake our instrumental relations with countries like Saudi Arabia, Russia, and China for true friendship and ideological compatibility. We need to keep our eyes on the interests of people across the world now and into the future, which are uniformly best served by freedom and democracy, with strong and effective states founded on the active participation and decisive decision-making by their citizens. Authoritarianism can be an effective form of government, and sometimes a stepping stone to better conditions. But it is not a desirable end-point, and nor is its correlate, a spheres-of-influence world. And who knows? Maybe one of the democracies that we encourage will someday be in a position to save us in turn.

• One view of Russia's tangles with the West.
• Russia's "productive" role in Syria.
• What are the prospects for democracy in poor countries? Dim, but possible.
• Will Russia save the world?
• The toxic legacy of gerrymandering. And of Citizens United.
• Our tax law becomes even more corrupted.
• War has been declared.

Power

And lack of power.

The recent power shutdowns in California were maddening and disruptive. They also showed how utterly dependent we are on the oceans of fossil fuels we burn. With every convenience, gadget, trip, comfort, appliance, and delivery we get more enmeshed in this dependence, and become zombies when the juice is suddenly cut off. Not only is our society manifestly not robust, but every drop of fuel burned makes the problem still worse: the biosphere's decline to miserable uninhabitability. The children are right be be pissed off.

Do we have the power to kick this habit? This addiction makes opioids look like amateurs.  It won't be a matter of checking into rehab and going through a few weeks of detox. No, it is going to take decades, maybe centuries, of global detox to kick this problem from hell. Living without our fix of CO2 is impossible on any level- personal, social, political, economic, military. And the pushers have been doing their part to lull us even further into complacency, peddling lies about the risks and hazards they deal with as an industry, their own research into climate change and what our future looks like, not to mention our complicity in it.

Do we have the moral and political power to get off fossil fuels? Not when half of our political community is in denial, unwilling to take even one step along the 12 step path. I am studying the Civil War on the side, which exhibits a similar dynamic of one half of the US political system mired in, even reveling in, its moral turpitude. It took decades for the many compromises and denials to play themselves out, for the full horror to come clear enough that decent people had had enough, and were ready to stamp out the instution of slavery. Which was, somewhat like the fossil fuels of today, the muscular force behind the South's economy and wealth.

Do we have the technical and intellectual power to kick this habit? Absolutely. Solar and wind are already competitive with coal. The last remaining frontier is the storage problem- transforming intermittant and distributed forms of power into concentrated, dispatchable power. And that is largely a cost problem, with many possible solutions available, each at its price. So given a high enough price on fossil carbon, we could rapidly transition to other sources of power, for the majority of uses.

A 300 MW solar power plant in the Mojave.

Does the US have the power to affect climate change policy around the world? We don't have all the power, but have a great deal. If we were to switch from a regressive laggard to a leader in decarbonization, we would have a strong effect globally, both by our example and influence, and by the technical means and standards we would propagate. We could amplify those powers by making some of our trade policy and other relations more integrated with decarbonization policy.

Do individuals have the power to address these issues? The simple answer is no- all the virtuous recycling, biking, and light-bulb changing has little effect, and mostly liberates the unused fossil fuels for someone else to use at the currently criminally low prices. Individuals also have little power over the carbon intensity of the many products, services, and infrastructure they use. Maybe it is possible to eat less meat, and avoid fruit from Chile. But we can not unplug fully from this system- we need to rewire the system. It is fundamental economics that dictates this situation, which is why a stiff carbon tax and related regulation, with the associated political and moral will are so important.

Finally, does the State of California have the power to take responsibility for the PG&E mess? Absolutely, but probably not the will. The power shutdowns led to a common observation that the state should just buy PG&E at its bankrupt price and run it in the public interest. But keen observers have noted that the state's politicians would much rather have someone else to blame, than be saddled with a no-win institution that puts the blame on them. Power lines are going to cause fires in any case, unless we cough up the billions needed to put them underground. Customers will always complain about the price of utilities, so it is hard to see the state stepping up to this mess, or even reforming the public utilities commission, which has been so negligent as well.

• Why did the GOP nominate, and the American people elect, a Russian asset to the White House?
• Battle lines on health care.
• Point to Bernie.
• The church and psycho-social evolution.

High Intelligence is Highly Overrated by Highly Intelligent People

AI, the singularity, and watching way too much science fiction: Review of Superintelligence by Nic Bostrom.

How far away is the singularity? That is the point when machine intelligence exceeds human intelligence, after which it is thought that this world will no longer be ours to rule. Rick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford, doesn't know when this will be, but is fearful of its consequences, since, if we get it wrong, humanity's fate may not be a happy one.

The book starts strongly, with some well argued and written chapters about the role of intelligence in humanity's evolution, and the competitive landscape of technology today that is setting the stage for this momentous transition. But thereafter, the armchair philosopher takes over, with tedious chapters of hairsplitting and speculation about how fast or slow the transition might be, how collaborative among research groups, and especially, how we could pre-out-think these creations of ours, to make sure they will be well-disposed to us, aka "the control problem".

Despite the glowing blurbs from Bill Gates and others on the jacket, I think there are fundamental flaws with this whole approach and analysis. One flaw is a failure to distinguish between intelligence and power. Our president is a moron. That should tell us something about this relationship. It is not terribly close- the people generally acknowledged as the smartest in history have rarely been the most powerful. This reflects a deeper flaw, which is, as usual, a failure to take evolution and human nature seriously. The "singularity" is supposed to furnish something out of science fiction- a general intelligence superior to human intelligence. But Bostrom and others seem to think that this means a fully formed human-like agent, and those are two utterly different things. Human intelligence takes many forms, and human nature is composed of many more things than intelligence. Evolution has strained for billions of years to form our motivations in profitable ways, so that we follow others when necessary, lead them when possible, define our groups in conventional ways that lead to warfare against outsiders, etc., etc. Our motivational and social systems are not the same as our intelligence system, and to think that anyone making an AI with general intelligence capabilities will, will want to, or even can, just reproduce the characteristics of human motivation to tack on and serve as its control system, is deeply mistaken.

The fact is that we have AI right now that far exceeds human capabilities. Any database is far better at recall than humans are, to the point that our memories are atrophying as we compulsively look up every question we have on Wikipedia or Google. And any computer is far better at calculations, even complex geometric and algebraic calculations, than we are in our heads. That has all been low-hanging fruit, but it indicates that this singularity is likely to be something of a Y2K snoozer. The capabilities of AI will expand and generalize, and transform our lives, but unless weaponized with explicit malignant intent, it has no motivation at all, let alone the motivation to put humanity into pods for its energy source, or whatever.

People-pods, from the Matrix.

The real problem, as usual, is us. The problem is the power that accrues to those who control this new technology. Take Mark Zuckerberg for example. He stands at the head of multinational megacorporation that has inserted its tentacles into the lives of billions of people, all thanks to modestly intelligent computer systems designed around a certain kind of knowledge of social (and anti-social) motivations. All in the interests of making another dollar. The motivations for all this do not come from the computers. They come from the people involved, and the social institutions (of capitalism) that they operate in. That is the real operating system that we have yet to master.

• Facebook - the problem is empowering the wrong people, not the wrong machines.
• Barriers to health care.
• What it is like to be a psychopathic moron.

Goal: One Billion

The Earth can't take 10 billion people. 

We have environmental and cultural problems at all scales, from the local to the global. From water shortages, drought, plastic pollution, overfishing, and species extinction, to global warming, authoritarianism, social fraying, anti-immigrant fervor, and gridlocked traffic and real estate markets. There is a common thread, which is that there are way too many people. We have (at least in some places) remediated some of the worst practices we used to take for granted, like killing whales for oil, using explosives for fishing, or dumping chemical wastes into rivers and soils. But there are are few practical ways to remediate our carbon emissions, water scarcity, or need for vast farmlands. We need to take a long look in the mirror and realize that the Earth can't take it, and we are the problem- the shear number of us.

Consider the range of problems like housing costs gone wild, traffic choked to a standstill, rising education costs and competition, and political gridlock. Are these related to overpopulation as well? I think very much so. Real estate is self-explanatory. As the old saying goes, they aren't making more land. Even while plenty of land is worthless, the need for people to live near other people means that we need to live together in what have become increasingly choked megalopolises. While rich metropolises like San Francisco and London struggle with traffic congestion and decaying public services, poorer ones like Lagos, Sao Paulo, and Mumbai had few services to start with and attract ever widening circles of destitute slums.

Lagos

A deeper issue is why our political systems are breaking down as well. Public services are decaying for a reason, which is that solidarity has weakened. Half of the US electorate has checked out of communal projects of good governance, rational and positive foreign policy, and caring for others. After two centuries of extraordinary growth, first sponsored especially in the US by a marvelously depopulated New World, and then again by bounding over technological frontiers such as fossil fuels, electricity, and the green revolution, we seem to have reached a general growth plateau, (barring development of robots who will do everything for us, but burn ever more fuel in doing so), and the expansive mood has ground to a halt. One consequence is that the elites of the culture, principally the rich, no longer subscribe to an egalitarian ethic. Growth can not be relied on to lift all boats, rather it is now every class for itself. Which class wins, when money runs politics and the media, and has been turned into "free speech" by the supreme court, is obvious.

It used to be, in the "population bomb" 1970's, that we thought that famine would be the limit on population. But it turns out that, given enough fossil fuel inputs for fertilizer production, machinery, and clearing new arable land, plus a green revolution in crop breeding, food is not the limiting factor. It is a thousand other things that we are doing to the biosphere and to our societies. The tide against immigrants is clearly borne of fear, that the number of the poor who want to flee their wretched conditions is essentially limitless, and thus that prosperous countries, i.e. Europe and the US, can not offer the relatively free immigration conditions they have heretofore. The US gained vast goodwill throughout the world over the last couple of centuries by admitting countless immigrants and playing a central role in many of the technological improvements that have allowed populations to grow everywhere.

But that process seems to have reached an end point. We have picked much of the low-hanging fruit, and have come up against insurmountable barriers. Fusion power has not happened. Space colonization is completely impractical. Even electricity storage is presenting tremendous difficulties, making a large scale switch to renewable electricity virtually impossible. And the biosphere is being degraded every day. We have come up against Malthusian limits that are more subtle than famine, but need to be heeded, lest we relentlessly immiserate ourselves.

There are two general political responses to all this. The Left response is to cooperate as best we can and tighten our belts to fit in a few billion more. Open borders, save the children, conserve water and reduce electricity usage, so that all can have at least a share of whatever resources are left. The Right response is to deny that there are significant ecological limits, cast whatever limits there are in economic terms and compete to take what we can while we can, and devil take the hindmost. Neither response is very forward-looking. One can make the argument that development is the only proven way to reduce demographic growth. Therefore, we should promote development, and bring everyone up to first world standards of resource consumption, which will in turn bring birth rates down to what in Europe and Japanare less than replacement rates. But the Earth can't take that policy either. Global heating is already having dire effects. The biosphere is already decimated and impoverished.

Thus we need an even more impractical, impolitic, and direct strategy, which is to aim to dramatically reduce the human population. A rigorously enforced one-child policy over three generations would get us from the current 7+ billion people to 1 billion, which, I think, given the current technological state, is reasonably sustainable. China did an amazing thing with its one-child policy, nipping in the bud its most significant problem- that of vastly too many people for its capabilities and resources. China is now reaping the rewards of that policy, though it hardly went far enough, and China remains heavily overpopulated and rapacious as it ascends the ladder of development.

If combating climate change is a problem from hell, structurally diffuse and resistant to responsible policy, then population control is far more so. National power is to a great extent dependent on economic and population size. We have for centuries had a mania for growth, embedded in every fiber of our economic policy and national outlook. We are Malthusian to the core, and our major religions are even worse offenders, propagating the most Darwinian of reproduction policies, even while they so ironically decry Darwin's intellectual bequests. No, it is not an easy problem. But at very least, we should not fear declining birth rates as some existential catastrophe and sign of general decline. No, they should be welcomed as the least we can do, and a small part of our path to a sustainable future, for ourselves and for the biosphere that is our home.

• Jupiter flyby.
• Accounting for Iraq.
• What the Kochs and their ilk have wraught.
• Are the Taliban more trustworthy than Donald Trump?
• Have richer people have become more handsome?
• Bonus quote of the week, from "If We Can Keep It", by Michael Tomask.

We are in trouble. Our political culture is broken, but it is not broken for the reasons you often read that it's broken- because Washington is 'dysfunctional' or because politicians have no 'will'. No. It's broken because some people broke it. It was broken by the people who pushed the economic theory on the rest of us that has driven trillions of dollars that were once in middle-class people's pockets to the comparative few at the very top. Who refused to invest in the country anymore. Who will not even negotiate real investment. Who have been telling us for years that the market will take care of all our needs, while the market has in fact left thousands of towns and communities strafed and full of people addicted to drugs- the drugs, by the way, tht the same free market is pumping out in vastly greater quantities, and for vastly greater profits, than it did twenty years ago. And who have built up a parallel media universe in which any of these commonsense assertions are dismissed as socialist, and in which anyone who doesn't endorse the thesis of Donald Trump's greatness is denounced as un-American. 

They broke it. They broke it to gain power and to remake society in a way that was less communitarian, explicitly less equal, than the society we were building from 1945 to 1980. And- let me not forget this part- less democratic. I wrote earlier of Donald Trump's contempt for our institutions, our processes, put another way, for the democratic allocation of power. Many observers (me included, sometimes) have wondered why this didn't make Republicans recoil. The typical explanation has to do with fear of his base, but I've come to believe that the simplest explanation is the best: They didn't recoil because they're not especially bothered. They find him embarrassing at times, and they disagree with him here and there, but his demagogic approach doesn't really trouble them on the whole. They- not all of them, but certainly a critical mass of elected officials, operatives, and billionaires- no longer want to compete with and merely defeat liberalism on a level democratic playing field. They want to destroy it. This is why they do things like aggressive gerrymandering, the voter suppression laws, the attemt to change the way we elect senators, the blocking of Merrick Garland- all of which preceded Trump. They want to change the rules so they they never lose. And if destroying liberalism requires breaking the system- as it surely does- then so be it as far as they're concerned.

We'll Keep Earth

The robots can have the rest of the universe.

The Apollo 11 aniversary is upon us, a wonderful achievement and fond memory. But it did not lead to the hopeful new-frontier future that has been peddled by science fiction for decades, for what are now obvious reasons. Saturn V rockets do not grow on trees, nor is space, once one gets there, hospitable to humans. Earth is our home, where we evolved and are destined to stay.

But a few among us have continued taking breathtaking adventures among the planets and toward other stars. They have done pirouettes around the Sun and all the planets, including Pluto. They are our eyes in the heavens- the robots. I have been reading a sober book, Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence, which works through in painstaking, if somewhat surreal, detail what artificial intelligence will become in the not too distant future. Whether there is a "singularity" in a few decades, or farther off, there will surely come a time when we can reproduce human level intelligence (and beyond) in machine form. Already, machines have far surpassed humans in memory capacity, accuracy, and recall speed, in the form of databases that we now rely on to run every bank, government, and app. It seems inescapable that we should save ourselves the clunky absurdity, vast expense, and extreme dangers of human spaceflight and colonization in favor of developing robots with increasing capabilities to do all that for us.

It is our fleet of robots that can easily withstand the radiation, weightlessness, vacuum, boredom, and other rigors of space. As they range farther, their independence increases. On the Moon, at 1.3 light seconds away, we can talk back and forth, and control things in near real time from Earth. The Mars rovers, on the other hand, needed to have some slight intelligence to avoid obstacles and carry out lengthy planned maneuvers, being roughly 15 light-minutes from Earth. Having any direct control over rovers and other probes farther afield is increasingly impossible, with Jupiter 35 minutes away, and Neptune four light hours away. Rovers or drones contemplated for Saturn's interesting moon Titan will be over a light hour away, and will need extensive autonomous intelligence to achieve anything.

These considerations strongly suggest that our space program is, or should be in large part joined with our other artificial intelligence and robotics activities. That is how we are going to be able to achieve great things in space, exploring far and wide to figure out how we came to be, what other worlds are like, and whether life arose on them as well. Robots can make themselves at home in the cosmos in a way that humans never will.

Matt Damon, accidentally marooned on Mars.

Bostrom's book naturally delves into our fate, once we have been comprehensively outclassed by our artificial creations. Will we be wiped out? Uploaded? Kept as pets? Who knows? But a reasonable deal might be that the robots get free reign to colonize the cosmos, spreading as far as their industry and inventiveness can carry them. But we'll keep earth, a home for a species that is bound to it by evolution, sentiment, and fate, and hopefully one that we can harness some of that intelligence to keep in a livable, even flourishing, condition.

• Some impressive mind reading.

At the Climate's Mercy

Volcanic eruptions have interrupted our fragile existence.

A recent research article made the news, telling of the worst year to be alive: 536 AD. This was surely the darkest moment of a dark age, and scientists have tracked its source to volcano(s) in Iceland. It darkened skies around the world, led to a ~4ºF drop in temperature, and crop failures throughout Europe and the near east, and crop delays in China. There seem to have been repeated eruptions over the ensuing years, though perhaps volcanos elsewhere contributed. The result was the coldest decade in at least 2,000 years, and a plague in 541-3 that wiped out at least 1/3 of the Byzantine population, among others. It took decades for Europe to recover, notably shown by ice cores with high lead pollution about 640 AD, showing that silver mining in France had recovered, presumably being pursued for minting coins.

Turner's "Chichester Canal", of 1828, thought to reflect some of the atmospheric effects of the  1816 global volcanic pall.

There have been several similar, though less extreme, events, like the "year without a summer" in 1816, due to the eruption of Tambora in Indonesia. This vocano is estimated to have ejected 40 cubic miles of material, but only lowered temperatures in Europe by about 3ºF, yet caused substantial famine, snowfalls in June, frost in August. A much smaller eruption, of Krakatoa in 1883 also caused dramatic sunsets and world-wide cooling, but had far less devastating effects, being smaller, and because it happened in August, and did not affect the following summer as severely.

Are our agricultural systems robust enough to withstand such an event today? I doubt it. We have optimized and stretched in every direction, supporting vast urban populations, without a thought given to adverse events of global scope. The only significant failsafe is that most agricultural production goes to supporting livestock, which under duress could be used directly for human consumption.

Conversely, we are engineering a permanent climate disruption of equal proportion but in a warming direction, by our emissions of CO2. Will temperatures go up by 3ºF? 4ºF? 5ºF? We are already at 2ºF, (vs temperatures at 1900), with much more baked in from our past emissions, and from their relentless continuance and growth. Will we survive if agriculture has to move to Canada and Siberia? If Florida and New York are under water? Sure, but at what cost to ourselves and more importantly, to the natural world?

• Doonsbury's Duke, in real life.
• On the way to modern capitalism: guilds.
• We are not as prepared as we think we are.
• Medical pricing in the US is insane. Weren't insurance companies supposed to solve this problem?
• Asset? Yes. And where is the outrage?

Solar Power is Not as Easy as it Looks

Adding the first increment to the grid is far easier than adding the last, if we want to decarbonize electricity. Review of "Taming the Sun", by Varun Sivaram

Global warming is no longer a future problem, but a now problem, and getting rapidly worse. We need a total societal focus on extricating ourselves from fossil fuels. Putting aside the brain-dead / know-nothing ideology of the current administration, the world is broadly, if grudgingly, onboard with this program. What is lacking are the political will and technical means to get there. California now gets 29% of its electricity (including imports from other states) from renewables, of which 10% is photovoltaic (PV) solar power. The grid operator shows a pleasing daily graph of solar power taking over one-third of electricity demand around mid-day.

A typical day on California's power grid. at mid-day, and fair portion of the state's power comes from solar power (teal). But come sundown, many other plants need to ramp up to provide for peak demand.

 
Varun Sivaram's book is an earnest, somewhat repetitious though well-written and detailed look at why this picture is misleading, and what it will really take to go the rest of the way to decarbonization. Solar power has very bad characteristics for electrical grid power- the grid operator has no control over when it comes in, (it is not dispatchable), and it all tends to come in at the same time of day. While this time (mid-day) is typically one of heavy usage, it is not the peak of usage, which comes during the transition to cooking and evening activities, from 5 to 7 PM. This means that not only does the rest of the grid have to work around solar's intermittency, but the rest of the grid has to constitute a full fleet of power plants for peak needs- solar will not reduce the need for either baseline or peak power capacity.

This is extremely disappointing, and means that adding the first 10% of solar to the grid is relatively easy, but adding more becomes increasingly difficult, and offloads rising expenses to other parts of the system. We do not have the technical means to economically address these issues yet. Solutions come in two basic forms- energy storage, or alternative modes of non-CO2 emitting generation.

Storage technologies by current capacity and capability. Pumping water uphill into reservoirs is the only existing method of storing power in grid-scale amounts over long periods.

Storage is easy to understand. If we could only bottle all that solar electricity somehow, all would be well. Even if we can't save summer power for winter, but save it only for a few days, we could build enough solar generation capacity (at the current cheap and falling prices) to cover our needs at the lowest production time of year, and throw away the excess the rest of the year. This assumes that, over a suitably large geographic area, there will not be so much extended cloud cover that this could not be reasonably planned. But such storage technology simply does not exist yet. The diagram above mentions some of the major candidates. The best known are chemical batteries, like lithium ion. This is how off-grid and home backup systems manage the intermittency of solar power. But these are expensive, which is why it is cheaper to buy power from the local utility than to go off-grid, and also cheaper to build a grid-tied solar system than go off-grid. The most mature grid-scale storage technology is hydropower- pumping water back uphill into a reservoir. This is obviously not available in most places where storage is needed.

Where various storage technologies are in development.

Other methods like flywheels, raising and lowering rocks, etc. are all on the drawing board, but not yet in practical deployment at grid scale, or even demonstrated to be economic at that scale. Making fuels like hydrogen or hydrocarbons from solar energy is another prospect for storage, but again are not currently economical. Hydrogen has been touted as the all-around fuel of the future for many uses, but is so difficult to handle that, again, it is far from currently practical. Getting there will take money and effort. 2050 is when we need the power sector substantially decarbonized, world-wide (if not sooner!). It sounds far off, but it is only about 30 years- a very short time in power technology terms. The scale needed is also gargantuan, so we need these solutions to get off the drawing board as soon as possible- there is no time to waste.

The alternative methods of no-carbon generation are currently wind and nuclear, with CO2 storage (sequestration) from fossil fuel plants as a further option. Carbon sequestration is not a new technology, and is something that would be directly motivated by a carbon tax, though it is also phenomenally wasteful (as are many of our more adventurous methods of producing fossil fuels, like tar sands)- a fair fraction of the energy produced goes right back into compressing and pumping the CO2 back underground. Wind is also getting to be a mature technology, and shares with solar the problem of intermittency, so is not a solution for dispatchable or baseline power. Sivaram does note at length, however, that a helpful technology for both solar and wind is long-distance DC transmission, which would allow rich sources, like the plains states, or the Sahara, to be connected to heavy users.

The dream of the next generation of nuclear power, which has not been demonstrated at grid scale.

That leaves nuclear power as an important element in future power systems. Generation IV nuclear power promises cleaner, proliferation-proof, more efficient, and more sustainable nuclear power. China has several programs in development, as does the US. Again, as with all the other necessary technologies for a fully sustainable grid, these are not mature technologies, and need a great deal of research and development to come to fruition. I will not even delve into fusion power, which is not demonstrated terrestrially in principle, let alone development.

The point of all this, as made at some length by Sivaram, is that the key to getting to a decarbonized future (for electricity, the easiest energy sector to deal with) lies not simply in scaling up the PV present into a glorious future. Rather, it lies in further intensive research and development of a variety of complementary technologies. The next question naturally is: will the private sector get us there, even if there were a carbon tax? The answer is- unlikely. The Silicon Valley model of venture capital is not well-suited to the energy sector, where innovation comes in small increments, the regulatory weather is heavy, and the scale in time and capital to money-making deployment is huge. There needs to be continued, and vastly expanded, government direction of the research, along with much other public policy, to address this crisis.

• Fed still fighting the last war, or the one before that, or a class war. But good policy it is not.
• IRS heading towards total impunity.
• Justice is in peril.
• What a year...