Showing posts with label climate. Show all posts
Showing posts with label climate. Show all posts

Saturday, November 18, 2023

Truth and the Silo

Living in a silo, and wondering what is outside.

The first season of Apple's Silo series was beautifully produced and thought-provoking. Working from a book series of the same name which I have not read, it is set in a devastated world where about 10,000 people live in a huge underground silo. As the show progresses, it is clear that the society got a little totalitarian along the way. We are introduced to a "pact", which is the rules set up ~150 years ago, when a revolution of some undescribed sort happened. Now there is a "judicial" department that sends out goons to keep everyone in line, and there are the rules of the pact, which seem to outlaw fun and inquiry into anything from the past or the outside. It also outlaws elevators.

On the other hand, the population has a window to the outside, which shows an extremely drab world. A hellscape, really. But due to the murky nature of political power and information control within the silo, it is hard to know how real that view is. I won't give away any spoilers because I am interested in exploring the metaphors and themes the show brings up. For we are all working in, living in, and raised in, silos of some sort. Every family is a world more or less closed, with its own mood and rules, generally (hopefully) unwritten. The Silo portrays this involution in an incredibly vivid way.

(Third) Sheriff Nichols meets with the (second) mayor in a lovingly retro-decorated set.

It is fundamentally a drama about truth. One could say that most drama is about seeking truths, whether in a literal form like detective and legal dramas, or in more personal forms like romance, coming of age, and quest-for-power dramas. The point is to find out something, like how attractive the characters are, who will betray whom, who has lined up the better alliances, what a person's character is really like. Why read a story unless you learn something new? Here, the truths being sought are in bold face and out front. What is outside? Who really runs this place? What built this place? Why are we here? Why is everyone wearing hand-knit woolens? And the lead character, Juliet Nichols, is the inveterate truth-seeker. A mechanic by inclination and training, she really, really, wants to know how things work, is proud of mastering some of that knowledge, and is dedicated to dealing with reality and making it work. This quest leads her into rebellion against a system that is typical for our time ... at least in China, North Korea, and Russia. A surveillance and control state that watches everyone, pumps out propaganda, outlaws contrary thought, symbols, and objects, imprisons those who disagree, and ultimately sends inveterate truth seekers outside ... to die.

The nature of truth is of course a deep philosophical question. A major problem is that we can never get there. But even worse, we don't necessarily want to get there either. We automatically form a narrative world around ourselves that generally suffices for day-to-day use. This world is borne largely of habit, authority, instinct, and archetypes. All sorts of sources other than a systematic search for truth. For example, the easiest truth in the world is that we and our group are good, and the other group is bad. This is totally instinctive, and quite obvious to everyone. Religions are full of such truths, narratives, and feelings, developed in the least rigorous way imaginable, ending up with systems fired in the crucible of personal intution, and the imperatives of group dynamics and power. But truth? 

Lighting tends to be a little dark in the Silo, as are the politics.

The Orwellian society is curious, in a way. How can people's natural thirst for truth be so dangerous, so anti-social, and so brutally suppressed? Due to the processes mentioned above, each person's truth is somewhat distinct and personal, each person's quest goes in a different direction. But a society needs some coherence in its narrative, and some people (say, our immediate former president) have an intense yearning for power and need to dominate others, thus to bend them to their own version of truth. Reality distortion fields do not occur only in the tech industry, but are intrinsic to social interaction. The Silo, with its literally closed society, is a natural hothouse for a social fight for dominance and control of reality. Oh, and it has a eugenic program going on as well, though that is not a big focus in the first season.

One can almost sympathise with the fascists of the world, who see truth as functional, not philosophical. Whatever glorifies the state and its leader, whatever keeps the society unchanging and sheltered from uncomfortable truths and surprises. Who needs those pesky and divergent people, who just want to make trouble? And the more baroque and unhinged the official narrative has become, the more dangerous and easy the work of the social sabateur becomes. If the emperor has no clothes, it only takes a child to ask one question. In the Silo, there are various underground actors and uneasy officials who are losing faith in the official line, but where can they go? Is their doubt and desire for the facts more important than the continuation of this very tenuous and smothered society? Could a free-er society work? But why risk it?

In our contemporary world, the right wing is busy making up a parallel universe of obvious and button-pushing untruths. The left, on the other hand, is pursuing a rather righteous investigation into all the mainstream truths we grew up with, and finding them lies. Is the US founded on genocide, slavery, and imperialism? Or on democracy and opportunity? Is capitalism salveagable in light of its dreadful record of environmental, animal, and human abuses? It is not a comfortable time, as the truths of our society are shifting underfoot. But is the left unearthing the true truth, or just making up a new and self-serving narrative that will in time be succeeded by others with other emphasis and other interests? 

History is a funny kind of discipline, which can not simply find something true and enshrine it forever, like the laws of gravity. There is some of that in its facts, but history needs to be continually re-written, since it is more about us than about them- more about how our society thinks about itself and what stories it selects from the past, than it is about "what happened". There are an infinite number of things that happened, as well as opinions about them. What makes it into books and documentaries is a matter of selection, and it is always the present that selects. It is a massive front in the formation / evolution of culture- i.e. the culture war. Are we a culture that allows free inquiry and diverse viewpoints on our history, and welcomes observations that undercut comfortable narratives? Or are we a more Orwellian culture that enforces one narrative and erases whatever of its history conflicts with it?

The top level dining room has a viewport to the outside.


The Silo is definitely a culture of the latter type, and its history is brutally truncated. Yet interestingly, character after character nurtures some object that violates the pact, representing a bond with the forbidden, hazy past - the forebears and former world that must necessarily have existed, even as nothing is officially known about them. The urge to know more, especially about our origins, is deeply human, as is the urge to keep one's society on an even keel with a unified and self-satisfied narrative. This tension is built up unceasingly in the Silo, which is as far as we know a unique and precious remnant of humanity. It asks the question whether its stability is worth so much oppression and ignorance.

Parenthetically, one might ask how all this connects to the dystopia outside. The Silo is only painting in extreme colors trends that are happening right now in our world. As the climate gets weirder, we spend more time inside, increasingly isolated from others, entertaining ourselves with streaming offerings like the Silo. Its apocalypse appears more nuclear than climatological, but for us, right now, a dystopia is unfolding. After decades of denial and greed, the truth of climate heating is no longer at issue. So what if the truth is known- has gotten out of the bag- but no one wants to act on it? Another form of courage is needed, not any more to uncover the truth, but to meet that truth with action- action that may require significant sacrifice and a fundamental re-design of our Silo-like system of capitalism.


  • Leave your silo, please.
  • How many lies can one person believe?
  • How one Confederate resolved to move on in Reconstruction.
  • Want to turn off your brain for a little while? How about some stutter house?

Saturday, July 1, 2023

Portents of Overpopulation

The many ways we can tell humans have overrun the planet.

I was reading a slight book on the history of my county, built around photos from our local historical society. What struck me was how bucolic it used to be, more agrarian and slow paced, yet at the same time socially vibrant. A scarcity of people makes everyone more positive about meeting and being with other people. Now the region is much more built-up, with more amenities, but less open space and seemingly less social mixing. All this got me thinking about the social indices of overpopulation.

There are many ways to evaluate human overpopulation. Famine and starvation is perhaps the simplest, a specter that was thought to be imminent in the 1970's, with "The Population Bomb". Lately we have become aware of more subtle problems that the planet has due to our numbers, like pervasive plastic pollution, deranged nitrogen and other chemical cycles, and climate heating. There has been a constant descent down ladders of resource quality, from the mastodons that were hunted out thousands of years ago, then fisheries destroyed, then ranges overgrazed, to the point that we are making hamburgers out of peas and soy beans now. Minerals follow the same course, as we go farther afield to exploit poorer ores of the critical elements like copper, aluminum, rare earth elements, helium, etc. 

Sustainability is not just a word or a woke mantra. It is a specter that hangs over our future. Will humans be able to exist at our current technological level in a few hundred years? A thousand? Ten thousand? There is no way that will be possible with our current practices. So those practices unquestionably have to change. 

But apart from the resource constraints that overpopulation presents, I have been struck by the sociological factors that point in the same direction, and are spontaneous responses to what is evident in the environment. In my community and the state of California, there is a vocal debate about housing. Localities have settled into a comfortable stasis, where no new housing is zoned for, existing housing values go up, and existing residents are happy. But the population of the state continues to go up, housing becomes increasingly unaffordable, and the homeless lie all over the streets and parks. There seems to be a psychological state where most current residents see the current situation as sufficiently dense- they are not interested in more growth, (We don't want to become LA!). They instinctively sense that we have collectively reached some kind of limit, given our technological setting and psychology.

Declining birth rates across the developed world point in the same direction. Perhaps the expense of raising a child into the current lifestyle is too high, but there may be something more basic going on. Likewise the broad acceptance of gay / LGBTQ lives, where previously the emphasis was on "natural" and fertile growth of the human population, without any consciousness of limits. People seem less social, less likely to go out from their cocoons and streaming pods. Political divisiveness may also be traceable to this sociological turning point, since if growth is off the table, the pie is static, and political and economic competition is increasingly zero-sum instead of collective and growth-oriented. Public works fall into this trap as well, with public agencies increasingly sclerotic, unable to plow through conflicting entrenched interests, and unable to grow, or even maintain, our infrastructure. One could invoke a general anti-immigrant sentiment as another sign, although anti-immigrant campaigns have featured periodically throughout US history, usually mixed, as now, with racial selectivity and animus.


Imaginatively, dystopias seem to rule over the science fiction universe, as Hollywood seems to take for granted a grim future of some kind, whether inflicted by aliens or AI, or by ourselves. Heroes may fight against it, but we do not seem to get many happy endings. The future just looks too bleak, if one is looking far enough ahead. It is hard to generate the optimism we once had, given the failure of the technological deliverances of the twentieth century (fossil fuels, nuclear power, fusion power) to provide a truly sustainable future. Everyone can sense, at an intuitive level, that we are stuck, and may not get a technological fix to get us out of this jam. Solar power is great, but it is not yet clear that the triumvirate of wind, solar, and batteries are truly enough to feed our need for power, let alone the growing appetites of the not-yet-fully developed world. And if it is? Human populations will doubtless grow to the point that those technologies become untenable in turn, with a hat-tip to Thomas Malthus. 

We should be proud of the many great things that this period of prosperity has allowed us to accomplish. But we should grieve, as well, for the costs incurred- the vast environmental degradation which at the current pace is accelerating and compounding through many forms. Humans are not going to go extinct from these self-induced crises, but we will have to face up to the absolute necessity of sustainability over the long term, or else "the environment" will do so for us, by reducing our populations to more sustainable levels.


  • Similarly in China...
  • A turning point in Chinese attitudes.
  • The Gym Industrial Complex.

Saturday, June 3, 2023

Eco-Economics

Adrienne Buller on greenwashing, high finance, and the failures of capitalism viz the environment, in "The Value of a Whale".

This is a very earnest book by what seems to be an environmental activist about the mistaken notion that capitalism gives a fig about climate change. Buller goes through the painstaking economic rationales by which economists attempt to value or really, discount the value of, future generations. And how poorly carbon taxes have performed. And how feckless corporations are about their climate pledges, carbon offsets, and general greenwashing. And how unlikely it is that "socially conscious" investing will change anything. It is a frustrated, head-banging exercise in deflating illusions of economic theory and corporate responsibility. Skimming through it is perhaps the best approach. Here is a sample quote from Buller's conclusion:

Given this entrenched perspective, it is unsurprising that resistance to the kinds of bold change we need to secure a habitable planetary future for all and a safe present for many tend to focus on what we stand to lose. Undeniably, available evidence suggests that 'addressing environmental breakdown may require direct downscaling of economic production and consumption in wealthier countries'. This is an uncomfortable idea to grapple with, but as philosopher Kate Soper writes: 'If we have cosmopolitan care for the well-being of the poor of the world, and a concern about the quality of life for future generations, then we have to campaign for a change of attitudes to work, consumption, pleasure, and self-realization in affluent communities.' There is a sense that this future is necessarily austerian, anti-progress, and defined by lack. Indeed, the same media study cited above found discussion of economies defined by the absence of growth to focus on bleakness and stagnation. Comparatively little attention is directed at what we stand to gain - but there is much to be gained. Understanding what requires us to ask what the existing system currently fails to provide, from universal access to health case and education, to basic material security, to free time. It certainly does not offer a secure planetary future, let alone one in which all life can thrive. And it does not offer genuine democracy, justice or freedom for most. Absent these, what purpose is 'the economy' meant to serve?


Unfortunately, the book is not very economically literate either, making its illusions something of a village of straw men. Who ever thought that Royal Dutch Shell was going to solve climate change? Who ever thought that a $5 dollar per ton tax on CO2 emissions was going to accomplish anything? And who ever thought that the only reason to address climate heating was to save ourselves a dollar in 2098? All these premises and ideas are absurd, hardly the stuff of serious economic or social analysis. 

But then, nothing about our approach to climate heating is serious. It is a psychodrama of capitalism in denial, composed of cossetted capitalist people in the five stages of grief over our glorious carbon-hogging culture. Trucks, guns, and drive-through hamburgers, please! Outright denial is only slowly ebbing away, as we sidle into the anger phase. The conservative Right, which mixes an apocalyptically destructive anti-conservative environmental attitude with a futile cultural conservatism, is angry now about everything. The idea that the environment itself is changing, and requires fundamental cultural and economic change, is an affront. The eco-conscious left is happy to peddle nostrums that nothing really has to change, if we just put up enough solar panels and fund enough green jobs. 

Objectively, given the heating we are already experiencing and the much worse heating that lies ahead, we are not facing up to this challenge. It is understandable to not want to face change, especially limits to our wealth, freedoms, and profligacy. But we shouldn't blame corporations for it. The capitalist system exists to reflect our desires and fulfill them. If we want to binge-watch horror TV, it gives us that. If we want to gamble in Las Vegas, it gives us that. If we want to drive all around the country, it makes that possible. Capitalism transmutes whatever resources are lying around (immigrant labor, publically funded research, buried minerals and carbon, etc.) to furnish things we want. We can't blame that system for fouling up the environment when we knew exactly what was going on and wanted those things it gave us, every step of the way.

No, there is another mechanism to address big problems like climate heating, and that is government. That is where we can express far-sighted desires. Not the desire for faster internet or more entertaining TV, but deep and far-reaching desires for a livable future world, filled with at least some of the animals that we grew up with, and maybe not filled with plastic. It is through our enlightened government that we make the rules that run the capitalist system. Which system is totally dependent on, and subservient to, our collective wisdom as expressed through government. 

So the problem is not that capitalism is maliciously ruining our climate, but that our government, representative as it is of our desires, has not fully faced up to the climate issue either. Because we, as a culture, are, despite the blaring warnings coming from the weather, and from scientists, don't want to hear it. There is also the problem that we have allowed the capitalists of our culture far too much say in the media and in government- a nexus that is fundamentally corrupt and distorts the proper hierarchy of powers we deserve as citizens.

The US games out in 2012 how various carbon taxes will affect emissions, given by electricity production. These are modest levels of taxation, and have modest effects. To actually address the climate crisis, a whole other magnitude of taxation and other tools need to be brought to bear. The actual trajectory came out to more renewables, no growth for nuclear power, and we are still burning coal.

Let me touch on just one topic from the book- carbon taxes. This is classic case of squeemish policy-making. While it is not always obvious that carbon pricing would be a more fair or effective approach than direct regulation of the most offensive industries and practices, it is obvious that putting a price on carbon emissions can be an effective policy tool for reducing overall emissions. The question is- how high should that price be to have the effect we want? Well, due to the universal economic consensus that carbon pricing would be a good thing, many jurisdictions have set up such pricing or capping schemes. But very few are effective, because, lo and behold, they did not want to actually have a strong effect. That is, they did not want to disrupt the current way of doing things, but only make themselves (and ourselves) feel good, with a slight inducement to moderate future change. Thus they typically exempt the most polluting industries outright, and set the caps high and the prices low, so as not to upset anyone. And then Adrienne Buller wonders why these schemes are so universally ineffective.

Carbon prices in California are currently around $30 per ton CO2, and this has, according to those studying the system, motivated one third of the state's overall carbon reductions over the current decade. That is not terrible, but clearly insufficient, even for a forward-thinking state, since we need to wring carbon out of our systems at a faster pace. Raising that price would be the most direct way for us as a society to do that. But do we want to? At that point, we need to look in the mirror and ask whether the point of our policies should be addressing climate heating in the most effective way possible, or to avoid pain and change to our current systems. Right now, we are on a sort of optimal trajectory to avoid most of the economic and social pain of truly addressing climate change, (by using gradualist and incremental policies), but at the cost of not getting there soon enough and thus incurring increasing levels of pain from climate heating itself- now, and in a future that is measured, not in years, but in centuries. 

The second big point to make about this book and similar discussions is that it largely frames the problem as an economic one for humanity. How much cost do we bear in 2100 and 2200, compared with the cost we are willing to pay today? Well, that really ignores a great deal, for there are other species on the planet than ourselves. And there are other values we have as humans, than economic ones. This means that any cost accounting that gets translated into a carbon price needs to be amplified several fold to truly address the vast array of harms we are foisting on the biosphere. Coral reefs are breaking down, tropical forests are losing their regenerative capability, and the arctic is rapidly turning temperate. These are huge changes and harms, which no accounting from an economic perspective "internalizes". 

So, we need to psychologically progress, skipping a few steps to the facing-it part of the process, which then will naturally lead us towards truly effective solutions to get to carbon neutrality rapidly. Will it cost a lot? Absolutely. Will we suffer imbalances and loss of comforts? Absolutely. But once America faces up to a problem, we tend to do a good job accepting those tradeoffs and figuring out how to get the results we want. 


Saturday, February 25, 2023

Drought Causes Cultural Breakdown

What happened to the Hittites, and the late Bronze Age?

Climate change is already causing wars and migration, misery on a vast scale. The global South takes the heat, while the global North keeps making it, pumping out the CO2. Can we adapt, or is the human population going to decrease, either gently or not so gently, as conditions deteriorate? The answer is not at all clear. The adaptation measures taken by the rich world involve highly contentious politics, and uncertain technology that, at best, requires a great deal more resource extraction. The poor, on the other hand, are left to either try developing (if they can maintain good political and economic governance) to join the rich in their extractive ways, (China, India), or migrate en masse to rich countries (Africa, Central America). All this is going to get worse, not better, since we are still at peak CO2 emissions and only beginning the process of global heating.

Our emissions of CO2 are still going up, not down. Therefore climate change will be getting worse, faster. Conflict is one likely outcome.


Well, migrations and dislocation have happened before. Over the last millennium, it was cold temperatures, not hot, that have correlated with conflict. Epic migrations occurred in the declining days of the Roman Empire, when the Huns drove a domino series of migrations of Germanic tribes that fought their way throughout Europe. What prompted the Huns out of the Asian steppe is unknown, however. Jared Diamond wrote of several other cultures that met their end after exhausing their resources and technologies. A recent paper added one more such case- the Hittites of late Bronze Age.

The Hittites were a big deal in their time (1700 to 1200 BCE, very roughly), running what is now Eastern and Southern Turkey, and occasionally Syria and points South. They were an early offshoot of the Indo-European migrations, and had a convulsive (though not very well understood) history of rises and falls, mostly due to their political dynamics. At the height of Hittite power, they fought Egypt directy at the battle of Kadesh, (1274 BCE), which occured just a little north of current-day Lebanon. This was the complex frontier between Assyria / Babylon, the Hittites, and Egypt. Egyptian history is full of expeditions- military, economic, and diplomatic- through the Levant.

The Hittites were artists as well as warriors.

The Hittites were also one of several communities around the Mediterranean that shared in the late Bronze Age collapse. This is the epic time that saw the Greek siege of Troy, (~1200 BCE), and the "Sea People's" invasion of Egypt. Its causes and details remain a long-standing historical mystery. But its scale was vast. Greece entered its dark age that lasted from 1200 to the 800's BCE. North Africa, the Balkans, Turkey, Levant, and the Caucaus all declined. Assyria and Egypt were weakened, but did not collapse. The latest paper uses tree-ring data from junipers from around the former Hittite capital in what is now central Turkey to more precisely date a severe drought that may have caused this collapse. Drought is just the kind of cause that would have been wide-spread enough and foundational enough to destroy the regional economies and prompt migrations and wars. Wars.. there are always wars, but no single war would have caused the collapse of cultures on such a wide scale, including a weakening of Egypt. Plagues are also not a great candidate, since they do not harm a society's resource base, but only its population. Such population reductions typically benefit the survivors, who rebuild in short order.

Moisture levels inferred from tree ring data, with lower values dryer. There are three consecutive catastrophic years dated to 1198-1196 BCE in this region, which is around the ancient Hittite capital. The ensuing decade was also unusually dry and likely poor for agriculture. The 20% and 6.25% levels of drought are by comparison to wider sampling, including modern data.


The drought these authors identified and located with precision was extraordinary. They note that, using modern data for indexing, the 20% level (representing about 30 cm of annual rain) is the minimum viable threshold for growing wheat. The 6.25% level is far below that and represents widespread crop failure. They developed two types of data from the tree rings, drawn from 18 individual trees whose rings spanned about a thousand years across the second millenium BCE. First is the size of the rings themselves, whose data are shown above. Second is the carbon 13 isotope ratio, which is a separate index of dryness, based on the isotopic discrimination that plants exercise over CO2 respiration under different climatic conditions. 

The same tree rings that provided the inferences above from their geometry (width) also here provided carbon 13 isotope data that lead to a similar conclusion, though with much less precision. High proportions of C13 indicate drier climate, here continuous around 1200 BCE.

The paper shows three consecutive years at the 6.25% level of rainfall, starting at 1198 BC. The ensuing decade was also harshly dry. All this correlates with cuneiform texts found in the Levant that were letters from the Hittites, bemoaning their drought and begging for assistance. But everyone in the region was in a similar position. The Hittite culture never recovered. 

So drought is now a leading hypothesis for the ultimate cause of the late Bronze Age collapse around many parts of the Mediterranean, with Greece and Anatolia particularly affected. While it is reasonable to imagine that such conditions would lead to desperation, migration, and war, there is no direct link yet. The nature and origin of the Sea Peoples who attacked Egypt remain unknown, for instance. The reasons for the seige of Troy are lost to myth. The Illiad never mentions drought, nor would Troy have been in a much better position than Mycenaean Greece, climatically speaking. But the consequences of geopolitical shifts in alignment can be unpredictable, as we continue to experience today. It is exciting (as well as sobering) to get a glimpse into this cloudy history- into a vast swath of human experience that built great cultures and suffered epic defeats.


Saturday, October 8, 2022

Science Fiction as Theology

Let's look higher than the clouds. Let's look to the stars.

I have always been rather dismissive of theology- the study of something that doesn't exist. But if one takes it in a larger sense of a culture of scripture, story telling, morals, and social construction, then sure, it makes more sense. But then so do alot of other stories. I have been enjoying the Foundation series via streaming, which is at best "inspired" by the original books, yet takes its premises reasonably seriously and grows a complex and interesting set of story lines to what by the end of the first season is a positive and promising conclusion. I would ding it for excessive adherence to Star Wars-style action and simplistic morality, compared with the more cerebral original, but that is only to be expected these days.

Science fiction is having a golden age, as a way to tell important, probing stories and consider alternative futures. The Star Trek franchise generally sticks with hopeful futures, which I certainly favor. Their world is post-money, post internal conflict, post-disease. But philosophically alive through contact with other civilizations. The theological implications are momentous, as we envision a culture very different from our own, and blessed with various magical means of deliverance, like transporters, replicators, and warp drives. Where the "science fiction" books of the Bible were mostly dystopian (Job, Revelation, Genesis), Science fiction in our era straddles the line, with plenty of dystopian offerings, but also hopeful ones. Whether Star Wars is hopeful might be a matter of debate, since bad guys and bad empires never seem to go away, and the position of the resistance is always impossibly dire.

White male mathematician Hari Seldon takes on the role of god, in the Foundation series. He calculates out the future of the galaxy, clairvoyantly predicting events, and then comes back from beyond the grave to keep guiding his flock through crisis after crisis.

Are Star Trek futures any more realistic than those of Revelation? Are they theologically more sound? I think yes on both counts. Revelation is a rather unhinged response to the late Jewish era in its apocalyptic relations with Rome, as it headed into exile and the diaspora. There is a welter of reworked Old Testament material and obscure references, turning into florid visions that have misled Christians for centuries. Star Trek and the other science fiction franchises, on the other hand, are a bit more restrained in their visionary quests and escatologies, and more hopeful, for abundant futures where some problems have been solved while other forms of politics and history continue to call for strong moral values. This is quite different than the bizarre and ecstatic culmination of Revelation at the end of history, in the last days.

We also get to live out the visions, on a small scale, as technology advances in the real world. Smart phones have transformed our lives, for instance, one promise kept from the early science fiction days. And our only real hope for dealing with climate change is to harness better technologies, rather than going down dystopian roads of degrowth, famine, and war. So there are real futures at stake here, not just visions of futures.

While our current physics totally bars the adventures that are portrayed in contemporary science fiction epics, their theological significance lies in their various visions of what humanity can and should do. They, as Revelation, are always keyed to their historical moment, with America ascendent and technologically advanced over other cultures. But they do not use their magical elements and story arcs to promote quiescence and slack-jawed wonder at the return of the son of god, who will make everything right and mete out judgement to all the bad people. (Or do the opposite, in the case of Job.) No, they uniformly encourage resistance against injustice, and hopeful action towards a better world, or galaxy, or universe, as the case may be.


Saturday, October 1, 2022

For the Love of Money

The social magic of wealth ... and Trump's travel down the wealth / status escalator.

I have been reading the archly sarcastic "The Theory of the Leisure Class", by Thorstein Veblen. It introduced the concept of "conspicuous consumption" by way of arguing that social class is marked by work, specifically by the total lack of work that occupies the upper, or leisure class, and more and more mundane forms of work as one sinks down the social scale. This is a natural consequence of what he calls our predatory lifestyle, which, at least in times of yore, reserved to men, especially those of the upper class, the heroic roles of hunter and warrior, contrasted with the roles of women, who were assigned all non-heroic forms of work, i.e. drudgery. This developed over time into a pervasive horror of menial work and a scramble to evince whatever evidence one can of being above it, such as wearing clean, uncomfortable and fashionable clothes, doing useless things like charity drives, golf, and bridge. And having one's wife do the same, to show how financially successful one is.

Veblen changed our culture even as he satarized and skewered it, launching a million disgruntled teenage rebellions, cynical movies, songs, and other analyses. But his rules can not be broken. Hollywood still showcases the rich, and silicon valley, for all its putative nerdiness, is just another venue for social signaling by way of useless toys, displays of leisure (at work, no less, with the omnipresent foosball and other games), and ever more subtle fashion statements.

Conversely, the poor are disparaged, if not hated. We step over homeless people, holding our noses. The Dalit of India are perhaps the clearest expression of this instinct. But our whole economic system is structured in this way, paying the hardest and most menial jobs the worst, while paying some of the most social destructive professions, like corporate law, the best, and placing them by attire, titles, and other means, high on the social hierarchy.

As Reagan said, nothing succeeds like success. We are fascinated, indeed mesmerized, by wealth. It seems perfectly reasonable to give wealthy areas of town better public services. It seems perfectly reasonable to have wealthy people own all our sports teams, run all our companies, and run for most political offices. We are after all Darwinian through and through. But what if a person's wealth comes from their parents? Does the status still rub off? Should it? Or what if it came from criminal activities? Russia is run by a cabal of oligarchs, more or less- is their status high or low?

All this used to make more sense, in small groups where reputations were built over a lifetime of toil in support of the family, group, and tribe. Worth was assessed by personal interaction, not by the proxy of money. And this status was difficult to bequeath to others. The fairy tale generally has the prince proving himself through arduous tasks, to validate the genetic and social inheritance that the rest of the world may or may not be aware of. 

But with the advent of money, and even more so with the advent of inherited nobility and kingship, status became transferable, inheritable, and generally untethered from the values it supposedly exemplifies. Indeed, in our society it is well-known that wealth correlates with a decline in ethical and social values. Who exemplifies this most clearly? Obviously our former president, whose entire public persona is based on wealth. It was evidently inherited, and he parlayed it into publicity, notariety, scandal, and then the presidency. He was adulated, first by tabloids and TV, which loved brashness (and wealth), then by Republican voters, who appear to love cruelty, mean-ness, low taste and intellect, ... and wealth. 

But now the tide is slowly turning, as Trump's many perfidies and illegal practices catch up with him. It is leaking out, despite every effort of half the media, that he may not be as wealthy as he fraudulently portrayed. And with that, the artificial status conferred by being "a successful businessman" is deflating, and his national profile is withering. One might say that he is taking an downward ride on the escalator of social status that is in our society conferred largely by wealth.

All that is shiny ... mines coal.

Being aware of this social instinct is naturally the first step to addressing it. A century ago and more, the communists and socialists provided a thoroughgoing critique of the plutocratic class as being not worthy of social adulation, as the Carnegies and Horatio Algers of the world would have it. But once in power, the ensuing communist governments covered themselves in the ignominy of personality cults that facilitated (and still do in some cases) even worse political tyrannies and economic disasters. 

The succeeding model of "managed capitalism" is not quite as catastrophic and has rehabilitated the rich in their societies, but one wouldn't want to live there either. So we have to make do with the liberal state and its frustratingly modest regulatory powers, aiming to make the wealthy do virtuous things instead of destructive things. Bitcoin is but one example of a waste of societal (and ecological) resources, which engenders social adulation of the riches to be mined, but should instead be regulated out of existence. Taking back the media is a critical step. We need to reel back the legal equation of money with speech and political power that has spread corruption, and tirelessly tooted its own ideology of status and celebrity through wealth.


Saturday, July 23, 2022

Why Did we Have a Civil War?

It is still a hard one to figure out.

One of the dividends of winning the Cold War was internal division. With no outside enemies or competing ideologies, we were left to become irritated with each other, Newt Gingrich leading the way. It is a general feature of humanity that we are competitive and find points of irritation with each other if there are no supervening projects or conflicts to bind us together. One would think large projects like climate change might be such an overwhelming common challenge and project, but no, it doesn't seem have the immediacy and social drama we need. Thinking and caring deeply about the biosphere is a specialized affair. 

No, our divisive dramas are much more trivial. But in the US there is a pattern, and that is the role of the South as a political / cultural block. It is reminiscent of the process leading up to our first Civil War, where a morally progressive North irritated and alienated a traditional and depraved South. Not that both sections of the country were not fully complicit in slavery, dispossession of the native peoples, and other forms of oppression. It was a matter of degree. But at some point of cultural and moral advancement, it becomes untenable to express our greed and competitiveness in terms of slavery. Slavery requires, as Harriet Beecher Stowe illustrated, a comprehensive deadening of moral sensibility, even while one's senses of honor, greed, religion, not to mention social propriety, may remain fastidious. Dedication to social competition rather than social justice is the order of the region. 

I have been listening to a lengthy podcast narrating the events of the Civil War, which is particularly strong on the introductory phase, explaining various proximate and deep causes of the conflict. What strikes me again and again is the contingency of the whole thing. And its nobility, in a way. The North could easily have washed its hands of the whole conflict, and let the South secede and go its own way. That is what the South was counting on, and many foreign countries, and many (Democrats) in the North as well. As the Union was battered in battle after battle, the mood in the North came perilously close to letting go. 

It took two converging arguments to hold the Northern coalition together- union and abolition. Each one was somewhat abstract and each one alone would probably not have been sufficient to force a war. Abolition was a minority position all the way through the war, and evidently afterwards as the South slid back into de facto slavery. Yet it fired a key segment of the Northern population with great fervor, to take an active interest in what the South was doing, and force an end to slavery rather than let it continue in an independent breakaway nation. There were religious arguments, and arguments of simple humanity, but why young men from Maine should kill those in Virginia about it was not entirely obvious.

The case for union was even more abstract. The union of the states was ostensibly a voluntary affair, and while no mechanism was offered to secede, no formal bar to secession was enshrined in the constitution either. The logic of union was that a nation made up of voluntary associations that could crumble at will was no sound nation at all, and not the kind of country that the prosperous, growing, Manifest Destiny United States was supposed to become. Lincoln labored long and hard to articulate this argument, in his debates and other speeches, including eventually the Gettysburg Address. 


But I think it remains difficult to grasp, even in retrospect. The Southern states felt understandably snookered into a constitutional deal that did not explicitly say it was a one-way trap, but turned out to be one, depending on the (military) willingness of the North to keep them in chains, as it were. The Northern states had many commercial, cultural, and other reasons to regard the South as an indissoluble part of the nation, (most Founders were Southern, for one thing), but fighting a war over it? That was a lot to ask, especially when the result would be at best the forced subservience of half the states and population- what kind of union is that? On the other side, the South didn't fully realize that once you start a war, positions harden and emotions heighten, such that the North felt increasingly bound to see it through to the bitter end. A bit like Ukraine today.

Which feeling was stronger, that of Southerners for preservation of their independence, prerogatives, and economic basis, that of Northerners in their revulsion over the retrograde moral environment of slavery? Or that of Northerners over the preservation of the unique constitutional / democratic experiment as a precious, indissoluble inheritance? The motivations of the South were clear enough, however base. But the motivations of the North, while understandable, seem insufficient to fully justify an extremely bloody war (not that they imagined that extremity at the outset). Thus I see the Northern policy as in some degree idealistic and noble, going far beyond the minimum needed to keep its business going and people happy. 


The North could never have kept the union together and abolished slavery without a war. Some in the North were more abolitionist than pro-Union, and some more pro-Union. Despite the manifest breakdown in North-South relations and the various ante-bellum compromises that kept the union together, keeping those factions aligned was very difficult, before the war, during the war, and through the endless aftermath of reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights movement, and now Southern Republicanism (of all things!) and Trumpism. 

Was the outcome beneficial, in any historical sense? It is very difficult to know how the counterfactual would have turned out. The South might have become a vast banana republic, incorporating Cuba and other territories to its own south. The North would doubtless have continued its ascent to be an industrial collusus and leader of the next century. They might well have remained at peace, despite many points of competition and contention, and traded so that the North would have retained effective access key raw materials from the South. Slavery would have continued, and it is very hard to tell for how long and in what form.

This is where the diplomatically inclined would jump in to say.. it would have been better to negotiate a deal and avoid war. There is always a deal out there that is better than war, which is an ultimate failure and disaster. Compromise after compromise had been made before the war, and shattered by increasingly divergent views on states rights, voting rights, and human rights. If every party had clairvoyance about the future course of events, they might have seen a better way. But we are not clairvoyant, and war is a way to change the conditions of the future rather than to split differences. Wars are certainly the last resort, but remain the final way to decide fundamental existential and power issues, and to change the basis of the future. That is the simple fact of the matter, in a world that is fundamentally competitive. In the words of Vegetius, "Let him who desires peace prepare for war".

Do we today have the capacity to conceive of and adhere to such esoteric and high principles as actuated the North in the last civil war? Our recent president tried to stage a coup, and we can hardly bestir ourselves to care about it. The Supreme Court is impersonating the Taney court, finding that our constitution does not, in fact, protect elementary human rights, such as privacy. We are facing climatic catastrophe that is leading to mass migration, war, and challenges to our fundamental basis of existence, (farming, and addiction to fossil fuels), not to mention imperiling the biosphere at large. And we can hardly bestir ourselves to care about it. Again, half the country, centered in the South, feels morally condescended to and responds with spite and revanchism. Again, the rich fight with every tool to keep things the same and shut our eyes to the dangers ahead. 

While the political dramas of today will likely pass away without taking to arms, despite the militant recklessness of the Southern end of the political spectrum, it is hard to be as optimistic about our other challenges. When the US looks ahead today, it sees change, constraint, and decline. It is a hard future to face, and many quail from doing so, (whatever their vacuous and delusory slogans). But face it we must, lest it turn from a challenge into a rout.


  • The polycrisis of capitalism.
  • Krugman on pessimism and division.
  • Such a deal!
  • Either a carbon tax or a crypto tax.
  • We have not even hit peak oil yet.
  • The war we really don't need. Not that I generally agree with Chris Hedges.

Saturday, December 11, 2021

Cooking With Solar

Who knew cooking with energy from the sun would be so difficult?

Cooking with rays from the sun- what could be more delightful, or more efficient? The same rays that warm the skin can heat food as well- one merely needs to concentrate the heat a few fold. Well, doing so is remarkably difficult to do in practical terms. Not only do you need to concentrate the sun's heat, but then you have to preserve the heat you collect, without blocking out the light with all that insulation. This can be quite a trick. Thermostatic control? You must be joking- none of the currently sold or proffered DIY projects incorporate such an extravangance. The current state of play is a slightly demented world of youtube videos, fly-by-night companies, and charitable efforts pointed at developing regions. But rest assured, it can be done.

Naturally, the most significant drawback is that the sun doesn't shine all the time, confining solar cooking to mid-day times, and sunny conditions. Several kinds of cookers have been developed, each with individual drawbacks and features. 

  • Parabolic stove
  • Vacuum tube oven
  • Closed box oven
  • Open panel oven

First off, the parabolic solution puts the premium on power. While the other cookers are akin to ovens, this one is more like a range / stove. It gets extremely hot and cooks in a hurry. The concentrated light from the sun needs, however, to be constantly tracked and aimed at the pan on the burner. Yet it is an invisible flame, presenting some difficulty. It can burn a finger or blind you in an instant. One company developed a reasonably practical design, complete with glowing video. But then it promptly shut down and disappeared, I assume due to the daunting legal liability implied in selling such an appliance. These cookers remain very much a DIY, and at your own risk, proposition.

A parabolic cooker- adjust often, and use with care!

Second are vacuum tube ovens, which are basically thermos bottles with sun-facing inputs. These have outstanding insulation, so they capture the radiation coming in very effectively, storing it as heat. They can be used in cloudy conditions and maybe in non-mid-day conditions. The downside is that the thermos structure limits capacity for food, and also hides it from view. These also come in water-heating versions, filling a core camping and emergency need.

A vacuum tube style of oven. This one has quite high capacity. The central thermos provides extremely effective insulation, collecting every bit of the insolation.

Third are closed-box ovens, which are perhaps the most widely used form of solar cooking. Given enough insulation and a well-sealed glass top, you can make a reasonably practical oven out of cardboard boxes, wood, or metal, which get up to 350 degrees °F. This is a slow kind of cooker, perhaps more like a crockpot than an oven, taking quite a bit of time to heat up. They are not so sensitive to light direction, so can be left out for lazy afternoon and will still work. This is an amazingly active area of DIY activity, with endless variations. One of the most impressive I have seen is a sleek, low oven build of glass and wood, meant to stay outside full time.

 A commercially made box oven, with glass top and room for one or two pots.

A DIY version of a box oven, with clean lines and very high capacity.

Lastly, a more portable version of a solar oven is an open panel oven, where a set of foldable or collapsable reflective panels surround the pot, without much other structure. These are maximally simple, and aimed at camping and other portable needs. But they need something extra to hold in the heat around the pot, which may be a plastic oven bag, or a pair of glass bowls that go around the black pot inside. When properly protected, set up, and with large enough collectors, these can get to 300 degrees and work well cooking stews, rice, etc. These enjoy a wide variety of DIY efforts and styles as well, and one of the best is offered by a maker in Southern California.

A panel cooker being used on the go. Note the glass bowl holding the central pot.

Those are the current types, each with its pluses and minuses. Once one considers solar cooking, it is natural to want to deploy it to those who really need it- the rural and poor around the world, who have lots of sun, and not many other resources. The scourge of traditional cooking fuels in these areas is particularly alarming, usually being wood, coal, or dung, which lead to deforestation, climate change, land depletion, and copious pollution, both indoor and outdoor. Thus solar cooking becomes another sort of colonial dream foisted on the less fortunate, who have not set up proper infrastructure to pillage the earth and pollute the atmosphere. But the various impracticalities of solar cooking, including inconvenient timing, outdoor location, low capacity, slow speed, unusual, non-local, and fragile materials, have doomed such efforts to marginal effectiveness. Maybe some further leap in the technology, like incorporating a heat storage mechanism (rocks?) might solve some of these problems. It is amazing, really, how convenient the stored /reduced forms of carbon (in biomass and fossil fuels) are for our needs, and how hard they are to replace.


  • Shades of WW2: All Russia wants is a little elbow room.
  • The gravitational wave observatories are running, and recording the death spirals of black holes.
  • The next presidential election could start a civil war.
  • Carbon tax, now.
  • Good sleep, good life.

Saturday, November 27, 2021

What Would be an Effective Carbon Tax?

Carbon taxes could be effective if they are high enough. None are high enough now.

Look around, and you are struck by the myriad ways we use and waste fossil fuels. Live pigs are shipped by the airplane load from the US to China. Wildfires caused by global warming are fought with tanker airplanes. Plastic shopping bags by the trillion are churned out for single use followed by permanent entombment. Back-country hikers rely on helicopter rescues to get them out of jams. And of course we burn them with abandon for transport, heat, and electricity. Fossil fuels are far too cheap- from merely an efficient use perspective, quite apart from their disastrous role in climate heating, other forms of pollution, and overall sustainability.

The last decade has seen astonishing progress in renewable energy technologies, bringing them to par price with fossil fuels or even cheaper. But this price relationship is misleading, since it only reflects the low-hanging fruit of adding sporadic power to a grid that runs largely on fossil fuels with highly flexible dispatch characteristics. Making progress to a fully renewable and stable grid, and extending this to transportation, industrial processes, and chemicals will take vastly more work, including technologies not yet in hand.

We have such a long way to go to decarbonize.

The most  effective way to do this is to price the vice: price CO2 emissions. A uniform price will reach all the uses of fossil fuels, (I would add biomass as well, which generate CO2 emissions just the same), and harness the same capitalist motivation that has spent decades thoughtlessly expanding their destructive use. Government regulation can do a great deal, and is gradually driving coal to oblivion. But it will not be enough to drive the more complete transition that is needed, especially at the speed required. Climate heating is already rampant and highly destructive. 2040 is a mere 18 years away- nothing in infrastructure terms, and not much more in transport vehicle lifetimes. Natural gas remains the fuel of choice across the electric grid, residential, and industrial applications. Within twenty years, it needs to be demoted to minor status.

So what would be an effective carbon tax? One can take the baseline to be the carbon cap and trade system instituted by California, which ends up as an auction price for carbon emission credits. This is a very light tax with lots of exceptions, which has had a commensurately light effect. The price currently stands at ~$23 per ton of CO2 emitted. This is equivalent to about 22 cents per gallon of gasoline. This is not going to change many people's behavior, obviously. At ten percent or less of the retail price, this scale of tax is not going to drive a transition to electric vehicles. Overall in California, this tax brings in roughly a billion to two billion dollars per year, and is thought to be having a beneficial effect, but only as a fractional part of a much broader portfolio of regulations and policies.

In Sweden, the carbon tax is over $130 per ton. This is more significant, on the order of a dollar per gallon of gasoline. Again, there are so many exceptions, especially for heavy industry, that it touches only forty percent of emissions. Overall, it has caused only an eleven percent reduction in transport carbon emissions. Europeans pay much higher prices for motor fuels to start with, for many reasons beyond the carbon tax, so the relative effect of even such a larger tax is small. Europeans already use gasoline at a rate roughly one fifth that of the US, so are already very thrifty. We can expect in the US to have much greater elasticity to higher fuel prices, assuming a bit of political maturity instead of whining about our god-given right to cheap gasoline. 

At the same time, unless alternative fuels, forms of transport, or social behaviors appear, especially in the truck and other heavy vehicle segments, this kind of tax would still have limited effect and serious economic costs. So the modeler and prognosticator has to wonder where the response to carbon taxes will come from. The pandemic showed that we can telecommute very effectively, thereby saving prodigious amounts of fuel. Tesla has shown the way in electric vehicles- a segment that had previously been brutally decimated by GM in various bait-and-switch schemes. Hybrid technology is edging into in larger cars and transit. It will take a big price signal to switch these markets in a dramatic way. Even doubling the price of gasoline, which in the US would take a carbon tax on the order of $400 or more per ton of CO2 emitted, would only bring our fuel prices to those of Europe, which still drives, has traffic jams, and emits vast amounts of CO2 from the transport sector. Such a tax would bring in about $400 billion per year in the US, easily within the normal taxation and economic capacity of a $20 trillion economy.

Yet now there are replacement technologies, so a carbon tax will, in classic economic fashion, create change, not just disgruntlement and economic pain. It will also bring forth more replacements, while working at every margin to drive conservation. Do we need continued technology investment? Absolutely. Do we need more public policy and infrastructure investments, such as reducing give-aways to the fossil fuel industries, charging them for their many immediate as well as long-term harms, and reconfiguring electrical grids and natural gas grids? Yes. A carbon tax is an accellerant to save the biosphere from incalculable harm. Its revenue can be administered right back to citizens or into the government accounts, displacing other taxes. So its net economic effects could be minimal, even while its effects on economic reconfiguration and conservation would be strong. 


  • All laws must be enforced, or what good are they?
  • No wonder the internet has gone to the dogs.

Saturday, October 23, 2021

Remembrance of Climates Past

As the climate heats up, we are heading back in time, very rapidly.

Climate change is the challenge of our times and of our planet. However attractive it is to not care, to ignore it, to hide in traditional ways of thinking, to let inertia have its way, inexorable change getting worse by the year. The American way of life can not go on, and will not go on as before. This year has been a remarkable demonstration of the range of catastrophe, from melting Arctic villages to Pacific Northwest heat waves, California wildfires, record draught on the Colorado river, hurricanes running out of letters, and catastrophic floods in Europe. Migration crises around the world point to another implication- that as the global South becomes unlivable, increasing hordes of people will be knocking on the borders of the Northern countries, who have authored the mess.

To get some perspective on the change, we can look backwards into the geological record to see where we are going, and how fast. Earth has had a very diverse climatic history, from its beginning in a Venus-like cloud of high CO2 and no oxygen, to "snowball earth" freezes, to torrid warm periods extending to the poles. Over the last few billion years, earth's climate has had a fundamentally, if slowly, self-correcting mechanism based on CO2 production and consumption. CO2, needless to say at this point, is the main variable in our atmosphere's tendency to retain or give up solar heat. Volcanoes liberate CO2 from geologic and organic buried carbon. Organic carbon can also be liberated by fires and decomposition of organic carbon, including exposed coal, methane, and oil deposits. On the other hand, the biosphere fixes and buries carbon, and on an even more vast scale the weathering of exposed rocks drives the formation of carbonate minerals that lock up atmospheric CO2. When conditions are warm, weathering of rocks accelerates, as can organic fixation and burial, drawing down CO2. When conditions are cold, ice sheets cover the land and inhibit both organic fixation and rock weathering, allowing CO2 to build up in the atmosphere.

These cycles mean that over a scale of millions of years, earth does not get caught irretrievably (as Venus has) in an inhospitable climate. Instead, our recent ice ages ebbed and flowed, back and forth as the CO2 balance in the atmosphere responded fitfully to geologic conditions. The dramatic snowball periods, which occurred just before the Cambrian period, came to an end even though the earth-wide snow cover dramatically reduced solar absorbance. But it also reduced weathering and organic fixation of CO2, so eventually, CO2 built up to the very high levels needed to overcome the snowball effect and the climate snapped back to very warm conditions.

A key point in all of this is that climate change over earth's history has been driven geologically, and thus has been slow. Slowness has critical effects in allowing the biosphere to adapt. The typical driver is a new spate of volcanic eruptions, which release lots of CO2. This takes thousands of years to happen, so while this can be fast in geologic terms (a prime example is the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum, which took maybe 20,000 years to drive the climate from very warm to quite torrid, roughly 55 million years ago). However, the homeostatic mechanisms kicked in, and this torrid phase only lasted  a couple of hundred thousand years. Another example has been the slow uplift of the Tibetan plateau, which exposed a great deal of rock to weathering, thus drawing down atmospheric CO2. This is thought to have driven the cooler temperatures and glaciations of the last few million years.

A notorious exception is the K-T boundary extinction, where an asteroid hit the earth and changed the climate overnight. And life suffered correspondingly, with all the dinosaurs wiped out. (Well, all except for birds). Whatever was not pre-adapted somehow for this instant crisis failed to make it through. The stress this put on the biosphere is obvious, catastrophic, took many millions of years to recover from, and changed the trajectory of evolution dramatically.


An extremely rich graph of the last 70 million years of earth's climate, from a recent benchmark paper. Temperatures are shown on top right, while the isotopic findings that undergird them are shown on top left (temperature proxy based on oxygen isotopes) and bottom left (carbon concentration proxy based on carbon isotopes). The overall trend is correlation between the two, with CO2 the primary driver of higher temperature, and subject to swings for various geologic and biological reasons. Temperature is also affected secondarily by orbital mechanics and other factors. Even the Eocene high temperatures were driven by CO2, though the correlation is not so clear here.

What does all this mean for our current trajectory? The graph above helpfully supplies the current IPCC scenarios of temperature change, under stringent, medium, and business as usual scenarios. The temperature today (green) is already equivalent to conditions of about five million years ago. So in time machine terms, we have travelled, in the span of a century, five million years of climate history, to before the recent ice ages. We are already beyond the stringent scenario, obviously, so the only possible futures we have to look forward to are the medium and no-action scenarios, which, within the next fifty to one hundred years, will put us, in time machine terms, fourteen and forty million years into the past, respectively. And what of the century after that? CO2 stays in the atmosphere for many thousands of years, so not only do we have to reduce emissions now, we will have to remove those that have already happened. Climate stewardship will be humanity's job whether we like it or not.

The biosphere can not cope with this rate of change. While we often think in narcissistic terms of how humans will suffer, we are the lucky ones, being the most adaptable creatures ever devised by evolution. Our problems are nothing compared to the rest of the biosphere. The ability of animals to migrate or shift their ranges is highly strained by the availability of the rest of their essential networks, mostly based on plants at the base of the ecological network. And plants are not going to have the ability to migrate at these speeds and generate new ecosytems in more northerly areas. To us, the speed of climate change is slow, barely discernible on a lifetime scale. But in earth history terms, it is blindingly fast, just a blip over an asteroid impact, and far faster than normal ecosystem dynamics, let alone evolution, can cope with. Uncounted species are falling by the wayside, victims of another great extinction in earth history in this, the anthropocene geological epoch.

Time machines are exciting tropes of science fiction, allowing amazing journeys and byzantine plot twists. But usually, the outcome is not good, since changing the time line has unpredictable and sometimes catastrophic effects. Typically, a ruse is employed to extricate the heroes from the twisted plot, and everyone sighs with relief at the end when the normal time line is restored. Our climate path is not heading for such a happy ending. We are gambling, now consciously and willfully, with not only our own civilizational existence, but with the progressive and rapid degradation of the entire biosphere, on this warp-speed trip into the geological past.


  • Trendy Democrat turns to the dark side, leaves climate action in tatters.
  • Capitalism is ultimately at fault, channeling our greediest instincts and empowering the greediest people.
  • If we are serious, we would have a substantial carbon tax, and one thing that would kill would be crypto.
  • Bill Mitchell on Marxism and melioration.
  • The Balkanized streaming and video landscape.
  • Origins of the horses and domestication.

Saturday, September 4, 2021

Being American

With apologies to those outside the US, throughout the Americas, naturally.

The meaning of being an American is obviously a bit fraught right now. The US had a heyday in the post-WW2 era, when we ruled the world and enjoyed breakneck technological and economic growth. Many seem to think that the conditions of that era are some kind of birth-right, that a lifestyle of mainline Christianity, hamburgers, and trucks is a cultural patrimony worth fighting for, against the existential changes wraught by demography, immigration, climate change, and education. We have come a quite a way from the days of the Civil War, when a similar fight revolved around the right to keep Black people in bondage, but the current historical predicament does rhyme, as they say.

The US is still an incredibly rich country, and a technological leader in countless fields. But at the same time, other countries with lower military budgets and fewer world policing duties show us up in better living conditions, and more progressive political systems. But that is obviously not what grates on the right wing base- that other countries may be more liberal, prosperous, and happy. (Though in fairness, such competing countries are typically also less diverse, and thus have higher social solidarity, from a tribal / ethnic perspective, which does seem to be striking a chord with the right wing). No, what grates is that their god-given right to the American way is dissolving, for all kinds of reasons, but none that completely irresponsible policy, cynical politics, and general greed and obtuseness can't make go away, at least for a little while.

During the Civil War, Lincoln through his Gettysburg address and other writings tried to forge a new vision of what America was about, one with world-wide significance that left behind the stasis and meanness of slavery for the promise of equal opportunity and human development in an abundant and growing land. It was that vision that propelled the US through the next century, through railroads, flight, military might, the oil age, and to our current age of computer and biomedical technological frontiers.

It is clear that we again need a new vision, now that our peak of relative military and economic power is waning. There is no going back. Climate change is making sure of that, even if the Chinese don't follow it up with other unpleasant facts on the ground. The US of old is irrevocably gone, and pining for it isn't going to bring it back, especially if destroying our democracy is the method chosen to get there. What is worse, our moral authority is even more imperiled than those harder forms of power and influence.

Atlanta Olympics opening ceremonies, featuring lots of Stetson hats and pickup trucks.

Remember the 1996 Atlanta Olympics? Dreadful generally, but what sticks in my mind is the fleet of pickup trucks that were featured in the opening ceremony. How incredibly tone-deaf, and what an homage to greed and planetary destruction. But now, a quarter century on, we are still fighting that same fight, between those looking to the past, and those looking to the future. The past was one of abundance, thanks to the bountiful nature that the US was endowed with (or stole brutally from its occupants). The future looks a bit less abundant, because of the damage we ourselves have wrought on the way to all these technological wonders. Also because our population is itself unsustainable, and needs to be smaller, even after we adhere to more sustainable lifestyles and technologies. The future is going to be difficult, no question, and it will require us to think harder, and feel more keenly about others and the environment around us. Merely raping the environment will no longer do (just as chaining and whipping other humans no longer did a century and a half ago). We will have to work with it and in many cases, make sacrifices to heal it. Even pay reparations.

Land-grant colleges endowed throughout the US, courtesy of far-thinking Republicans of the Civil War era.

That is pretty clearly where the new vision of America should be going. To a prosperous future that is sustainable at the same time that it is abundant and equitable. This is a hard task, politically as well as technically, far more difficult than the great things we have accomplished in the past, like the Manhattan project or the Apollo program. And one can sense that the younger generations are ready for this task- they just need a little encouragement and vision to get us there.


  • The Taliban is better at politics than the US, or its Afghan allies, were. Politics, Islamic-style.
  • On the importance of spirit and core values.
  • Realignments in Asia.
  • What do you do if your party is a minority?
  • Natural selection at work.
  • "Valuing your bodily integrity"- idiots with degrees.
  • Trash-talking Larry Summers.