Tag Archives: migration

RAND solves the border crisis!

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RAND has all the answers on what we need to do at the border.

While politically challenging, a holistic update to U.S. immigration laws based on a better understanding of American immigration needs and the factors that are driving people to make the dangerous trek to cross the border would help reduce the numbers of migrants arriving daily to the U.S.-Mexico border and the challenges migration poses to receiving localities. This would require building on the current efforts to provide lawful pathways, easing the burden on host communities, matching immigration policies with the needs of the labor market, and addressing root causes of migration, while adhering to American legal and humanitarian responsibilities.

https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2024/02/the-crisis-at-the-border-a-primer-for-confused-americans.html

There you go. This sounds like a decade-long project at least, so politicians with 2-4 year election cycles would need to sell voters with 20 minute attention spans on it now, then competently implement it over the course of a generation.

2023 in Review

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Warning: This post is not 100% family friendly and profanity free. 2023 was just not that kind of year!

I’ll start with a personal note. After 24+ years of engineering consulting practice, I have decided to leave the world of full-time professional employment and go back to school for a bit. This is some combination of mid-life crisis and post-Covid working parent burnout. I spent a lot of time thinking about it, ran all the financial numbers, and decided I can swing it for a year or so without major implications for my eventual retirement 15-ish years down the line. So, gentle reader, you too can do this sort of thing if you want to. Just be patient, plan, prepare, do the math, and be rational about it.

The Year’s Posts

Stories I picked as “most frightening or depressing”:

  • JANUARY: How about a roundup of awful things, like the corrupt illegitimate U.S. Supreme Court, ongoing grisly wars, the CIA killed JFK after all (?), nuclear proliferation, ethnic cleansing, mass incarceration, Guantanamo Bay, and all talk no walk on climate change? And let’s hope there is a special circle of hell waiting for propaganda artists who worked for Exxon.
  • FEBRUARY: Pfizer says they are not doing gain of function research on potential extinction viruses. But they totally could if they wanted to. And this at a time when the “lab leak hypothesis” is peeking out from the headlines again. I also became concerned about bird flu, then managed to convince myself that maybe it is not a huge risk at the moment, but definitely a significant risk over time.
  • MARCH: The Covid-19 “lab leak hypothesis” is still out there. Is this even news? I’m not sure. But what is frightening to me is that deadly natural and engineered pathogens are being worked with in labs, and they almost inevitably will escape or be released intentionally to threaten us all at some point. It’s like nuclear proliferation, accidents, and terrorism – we have had a lot of near misses and a lot of luck over the last 70 years or so. Can we afford the same with biological threats (not to mention nuclear threats) – I think no. Are we doing enough as a civilization to mitigate this civilization-ending threat? I think almost certainly, obviously not. What are we doing? What are we thinking?
  • APRIL: Chemicals, they’re everywhere! And there were 20,000 accidents with them in 2022 that caused injuries, accidents, or death. Some are useful, some are risky, and some are both. We could do a better job handling and transporting them, we could get rid of the truly useless and dangerous ones, and we could work harder on finding substitutes for the useful but dangerous ones. And we could get rid of a corrupt political system where chemical companies pay the cost of running for office and then reward candidates who say and do what they are told.
  • MAY: There are more “nuclear capable states” than I thought.
  • JUNE: Most frightening and/or depressing story: Before 2007, Americans bought around 7 million guns per year. By 2016, it was around 17 million. In 2020, it was 23 million. Those are the facts and figures. Now for my opinion: no matter how responsible the vast majority of gun owners are, you are going to have a lot more suicides, homicides, and fatal accidents with so many guns around. And sure enough, firearms are now the leading cause of death in children according to CDC. That makes me sick to think about.
  • JULY: Citizens United. Seriously, this might be the moment the United States of America jumped the shark. I’ve argued in the past or Bush v. Gore. But what blindingly obvious characteristic do these two things have in common? THE CORRUPT ILLEGITIMATE UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT!!!
  • AUGUST: Immigration pressure and anti-immigration politics are already a problem in the U.S. and Europe, and climate change is going to make it worse. The 2023 WEF Global Risks Report agrees that “large scale involuntary migration” is going to be up there as an issue. We should not be angry at immigrants, we should be angry at Exxon and the rest of the energy industry, which made an intentional choice not only to directly cause all this but to prevent governments from even understanding the problem let alone doing anything to solve it. We should be very, very angry! Are there any talented politicians out there who know how to stoke anger and channel it for positive change, or is it just the evil genocidal impulses you know how to stoke?
  • SEPTEMBER: “the accumulation of physical and knowledge capital to substitute natural resources cannot guarantee green growth“. Green growth, in my own words, is the state where technological innovation allows increased human activity without a corresponding increase in environmental impact. In other words, this article concludes that technological innovation may not be able to save us. This would be bad, because this is a happy story where our civilization has a “soft landing” rather than a major course correction or a major disaster. There are some signs that human population growth may turn the corner (i.e., go from slowing down to actually decreasing in absolute numbers) relatively soon. Based on this, I speculated that “by focusing on per-capita wealth and income as a metric, rather than total national wealth and income, we can try to come up with ways to improve the quality of human lives rather than just increasing total money spent, activity, and environmental impact ceaselessly. What would this mean for “markets”? I’m not sure, but if we can accelerate productivity growth, and spread the gains fairly among the shrinking pool of humans, I don’t see why it has to be so bad.”
  • OCTOBER: Israel-Palestine. From the long-term grind of the failure to make peace and respect human rights, to the acute horror causing so much human suffering and death at this moment, to the specter of an Israeli and/or U.S. attack on Iran. It’s frightening and depressing – but of course it is not my feelings that matter here, but all the people who are suffering and going to suffer horribly because of this. The most positive thing I can think of to say is that when the dust settles, possibly years from now, maybe cooler heads will prevail on all sides. Honorable mention for most frightening story is the 2024 U.S. Presidential election starting to get more real – I am sure I and everyone else will have more to say about this in the coming (exactly one year as I write this on November 5, 2023) year!
  • NOVEMBER: An economic model that underlies a lot of climate policy may be too conservative. I don’t think this matters much because the world is doing too little, too late even according to the conservative model. Meanwhile, the ice shelves holding back Greenland are in worse shape than previously thought.
  • DECEMBER: Migration pressure and right wing politics create a toxic feedback loop practically everywhere in the world.

Stories I picked as “most hopeful”:

  • JANUARY: Bill Gates says a gene therapy-based cure for HIV could be 10-15 years away.
  • FEBRUARY:  Jimmy Carter is still alive as I write this. The vision for peace he laid out in his 2002 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech is well worth a read today. “To suggest that war can prevent war is a base play on words and a despicable form of warmongering. The objective of any who sincerely believe in peace clearly must be to exhaust every honorable recourse in the effort to save the peace. The world has had ample evidence that war begets only conditions that beget further war.”
  • MARCH: Just stop your motor vehicle and let elephants cross the road when and where they want to. Seriously, don’t mess with elephants.
  • APRIL: There has been some progress on phages, viruses intentionally designed to kill antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Also, anti-aging pills may be around the corner.
  • MAY: The U.S. Congress is ponying up $31 billion to give Houston a chance at a future. Many more coastal cities will need to be protected from sea level rise and intensifying storms. Now we will see if the U.S. can do coastal protection right (just ask the Dutch or Danish, no need to reinvent anything), and how many of the coastal cities it will get to before it is too late.
  • JUNE: It makes a lot of sense to tax land based on its potential developed value, whether it has been developed to that level or not. This discourages land speculation, vacant and abandoned property in cities while raising revenue that can offset other taxes.
  • JULY: There is a tiny glimmer of hope that Americans might actually value more walkable communities. And this is also a tiny glimmer of hope for the stability of our global climate, driver/bicyclist/pedestrian injuries and deaths, and the gruesome toll of obesity and diabetes. But it is only a glimmer.
  • AUGUST: Peak natural gas demand could happen by 2030, with the shift being to nuclear and renewables.
  • SEPTEMBER: Autonomous vehicles kill and maim far, far fewer human beings than vehicles driven by humans. I consider this a happy story no matter how matter how much the media hypes each accident autonomous vehicles are involved in while ignoring the tens of thousands of Americans and millions of human beings snuffed out each year by human drivers. I think at some point, insurance companies will start to agree with me and hike premiums on human drivers through the roof. Autonomous parking also has a huge potential to free up space in our urban areas.
  • OCTOBER: Flesh eating bacteria is becoming slightly more common, but seriously you are not that likely to get it. And this really was the most positive statement I could come up with this month!
  • NOVEMBER: Small modular nuclear reactors have been permitted for the first time in the United States, although it looks like the specific project that was permitted will not go through. Meanwhile construction of new nuclear weapons is accelerating (sorry, not hopeful, but I couldn’t help pointing out the contrast…)
  • DECEMBER: I mused about ways to create an early warning system that things in the world or a given country are about to go seriously wrong: “an analysis of government budgets, financial markets, and some demographic/migration data to see where various governments’ priorities lie relative to what their priorities probably should be to successfully address long-term challenges, and their likely ability to bounce back from various types and magnitudes of shock. You could probably develop some kind of risk index at the national and global levels based on this.” Not all that hopeful, you say? Well, I say it fits the mood as we end a sour year.

Stories I picked as “most interesting, not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps a mixture of both”:

  • JANUARY: Genetically engineered beating pig hearts have been sown into dead human bodies. More than once.
  • FEBRUARY: It was slim pickings this month, but Jupiter affects the Sun’s orbit, just a little bit.
  • MARCH: Chickie Nobs have arrived!
  • APRIL: I had heard the story of the Google engineer who was fired for publicly releasing a conversation with LaMDA, a Google AI. But I hadn’t read the conversation. Well, here it is.
  • MAY: Peter Turchin’s new book proposes four indicators presaging political instability: “stagnating or declining real wages, a growing gap between rich and poor, overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees, declining public trust, and exploding public debt“. I found myself puzzled by the “overproduction of young graduates” part, and actually had a brief email exchange with Peter Turchin himself, which I very much appreciated! Anyway, he said the problem is not education per se but “credentialism”. I have to think some more about this, but I suppose the idea is that education, like health, wealth, and almost everything else, is not equally distributed but is being horded by a particular class which is not contributing its fair share. These are my words, not Peter’s, and he might or might not agree with my characterization here.
  • JUNE: The U.S. may have alien spacecraft at Area 51 after all. Or, and this is purely my speculation, they might have discovered anti-gravity and want to throw everybody else off the scent.
  • JULY: We are all susceptible to the “end of history effect” in that we tend to assume our personalities will not change in the future, when in fact they almost certainly will. So one way to make decisions is to imagine how a few different possible future yous might look back on them.
  • AUGUST: There are a number of theories on why “western elites” have not been (perceived to be) effective in responding to crises in recent years and decades. Many have to do with institutional power dynamics, where the incentives of the individual to gain power within the institution do not align with the stated goals of the institution. Like for example, not killing everyone. The possible silver lining would be that better institutions could be designed where incentives aligned. I have an alternate, or possibly complementary, theory that there has been a decline in system thinking and moral thinking. Our leaders aren’t educated to see the systems and or think enough about whether their decisions are on the side of right or wrong.
  • SEPTEMBER: Venice has completed a major storm surge barrier project.
  • OCTOBER: The generally accepted story of the “green revolution“, that humanity saved itself from widespread famine in the face of population growth by learning to dump massive quantities of fossil fuel-derived fertilizer on farm fields, may not be fully true.
  • NOVEMBER: India somehow manages to maintain diplomatic relations with Palestine (which they recognize as a state along with 138 other UN members), Israel, and Iran at the same time.
  • DECEMBER: Did an AI named “Q Star” wake up and become super-intelligent this month?

And Now, My Brilliant Analytical Synthesis!

Climate Change. Well really, I’m likely to just say things now I have said many times before. The climate change shit is really starting to hit the fan. Our largely coastal civilization and the food supply that sustains it is at risk. The shit we can obviously see hitting the fan right now is the result of emissions years if not decades ago, and we have continued to not only emit too much but to emit too much at an increasing rate since those emissions, and we continue to not only emit too much but to emit at an increasing rate today. This means that even if we stop emitting too much right now and going forward, the crisis will continue to get worse for some time before it eventually gets better. And we are not doing that, we are continuing to not only emit too much but we are doing it at an increasing rate. We are already seeing the beginnings of massive population movements fueling a downward spiral of nationalist and outright racist geopolitics, which makes it even harder to come together and address our critical planetary carrying capacity issue in a rational manner. We are not only seeing “the return of great power competition”, we are insanely patting ourselves on the back for aiding and abetting this, and piling nuclear proliferation on top of it. Is a soft landing possible in this situation? I am not going to tell you I think it is, or even if it is possible that our species and cowards that pass for our leadership have any hope of making it happen. I think about the best we can hope for is some kind of serious but manageable collapse or crisis that brings us to our senses and allows some real leaders to emerge. To throw out one idea, maybe we could come to a new era of arms reduction for the major nuclear powers, and halts to proliferation for all the emerging nuclear powers, in exchange for civilian nuclear power for everyone who wants it, all under a strict international control and inspection regime. This would begin to address two existential risks (nuclear war and climate change) at once. Or maybe, just maybe, we are on the verge of a massive acceleration of technological progress that could make problems easier to solve. Maybe, but new technology also comes with new risks, and we shouldn’t put all our eggs in this basket. Besides, the singularity is nearing but it still feels a decade or so away to me.

UFOs. Aside from all of that, maybe the weirdest single thing going on in the world right now is the UFOs. There seems to be no real controversy about them – they are out there. They are flying around and if not defying the laws of physics as we know them, defying any technology that is able to accommodate the laws of physics as we know them. And what this logically leads to is that somebody (or some intelligent entity) knows something about the laws of physics that the rest of us do not know. Einstein explained how gravity behaves, but he wasn’t able to fully explain what gravity is or certainly how or why it came to be the way it is. Einstein’s predictions have since been proven through incontrovertible evidence, and the predictions of quantum theory have also been incontrovertibly proven, but the two theories are still at odds and in need of unification despite the efforts of the most brilliant minds today. But…are the most brilliant minds today operating in the open, or are they behind closed doors at private defense contractors and subject to censorship on national security grounds? If there has been a major discovery, would it see the light of day or would it be suppressed? I have no information here, I am just saying this is a narrative that would fit the evidence, and I don’t see other plausible narratives that fit the evidence. Why would aliens be playing with relatively easily discoverable toys in our atmosphere, while in the meantime we have discovered no radio signal evidence, no evidence of their existence in our telescopes? Those things would be very hard if not impossible to cover up, so I think we would know. The Fermi Paradox persists.

Artificial Intelligence. I tend to think the AI hype is ahead of the reality. Nonetheless, the reality is coming. It will probably seize control without our noticing after the hype has passed. Is it possible we could look back in a decade and identify 2023 as the year it woke up? There were a couple queer (in the original dictionary sense – I just couldn’t think of a better word) stories in 2023. One was a Google engineer getting fired after publicly declaring his belief that a Google AI had become conscious. The other was the “ethics board” of a major corporation firing its CEO in relation to a rumored artificial general intelligence breakthrough. Only time will tell what really happened in these cases (if it is ever made public), but one thing we can say is that technological progress does not usually go backwards.

Synthetic Biology. It’s pretty clear we are now in an age of synthetic biology breakthroughs that was hyped over the last few decades, and the media and publics of the world are predictably yawning and ignoring. But we are hearing about vaccines and cures on the horizon for diseases that have long plagued us, genetically engineered organs, synthetic meat, engineered viruses to fight antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and anti-aging pills among other things. And then there is the specter of lab accidents and biological weapons, which might be the single most scary thing in the world today out of all the terrifying things I have mentioned in this post.

2024 U.S. Presidential Election. Ugh, I’m still not ready to think about it, but it is going to happen whether I am ready to think about it or not. I’ll get around to thinking and writing about it soon, I’m sure.

Happy 2024!

December 2023 in Review

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Most frightening and/or depressing story: Migration pressure and right wing politics create a toxic feedback loop practically everywhere in the world.

Most hopeful story: I mused about ways to create an early warning system that things in the world or a given country are about to go seriously wrong: “an analysis of government budgets, financial markets, and some demographic/migration data to see where various governments’ priorities lie relative to what their priorities probably should be to successfully address long-term challenges, and their likely ability to bounce back from various types and magnitudes of shock. You could probably develop some kind of risk index at the national and global levels based on this.” Not all that hopeful, you say? Well, I say it fits the mood as we end a sour year.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Did an AI named “Q Star” wake up and become super-intelligent this month?

anti-immigrant riots in Ireland?

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Ireland is not immune to the surge in anti-immigrant sentiment. Could there be shadowy anti-EU political actors fanning these flames? I recommend examining the photos carefully to see if Steve Bannon is lurking somewhere in the background, wearing an Emperor Palpatine hood with the ghost of Joseph Goebbels whispering in his ear.

migration

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In the U.S., it’s “secure the border”. In the UK, it’s “bring down net migration“. In the Netherlands, it’s the possible rise to power of an openly anti-Islam party. As I happen to be reading one of the Bernie Gunther novels by Philip Kerr (A Quiet Flame, 2008) set partially in 1930s Berlin with the Nazis on the cusp of power, I find all this thought-provoking and concerning. In most countries, we’ve come far enough that openly advocating discrimination against a group already in the country is not an acceptable mainstream position. But expressing open anti-immigrant nationalist views is the next best option.

There is some rational fear of job loss and wage suppression that all this feeds on. But inequality between richer and poorer countries is somewhat clearly the root driver of migration, and climate change driven disasters and droughts are adding fuel to the fire. Add in some old-fashioned geopolitical conflict and you have a very volatile mix. The irony is that the policies needed to counteract these forces – economic and technological aid from richer to poorer countries, education, trade, reasonable guest worker programs, arms control and peace negotiations, serious emissions reduction and climate change adaptation investments to name a few – are anathema to anti-immigrant nationalist politics. So you have a feedback loop where the migration pressure drives the anti-migration political rhetoric, and the political rhetoric drives politicians and policies that increase the migration pressure.

Rationally explaining all this to enough voters to elect politicians who would break these feedback loops does not seem to be a viable option. It’s a tough one, and if I come up with the answers that have eluded a lot of smarter people than me up until now, I will let you know.

August 2023 in Review

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Most frightening and/or depressing story: Immigration pressure and anti-immigration politics are already a problem in the U.S. and Europe, and climate change is going to make it worse. The 2023 WEF Global Risks Report agrees that “large scale involuntary migration” is going to be up there as an issue. We should not be angry at immigrants, we should be angry at Exxon and the rest of the energy industry, which made an intentional choice not only to directly cause all this but to prevent governments from even understanding the problem let alone doing anything to solve it. We should be very, very angry! Are there any talented politicians out there who know how to stoke anger and channel it for positive change, or is it just the evil genocidal impulses you know how to stoke?

Most hopeful story: Peak natural gas demand could happen by 2030, with the shift being to nuclear and renewables.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: There are a number of theories on why “western elites” have not been (perceived to be) effective in responding to crises in recent years and decades. Many have to do with institutional power dynamics, where the incentives of the individual to gain power within the institution do not align with the stated goals of the institution. Like for example, not killing everyone. The possible silver lining would be that better institutions could be designed where incentives aligned. I have an alternate, or possibly complementary, theory that there has been a decline in system thinking and moral thinking. Our leaders aren’t educated to see the systems and or think enough about whether their decisions are on the side of right or wrong.

climate change, migration, and right-wing politics

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Climate change is already causing displacement in poorer countries in Central and South America, Africa, and the Middle East, and this is clearly already fueling the rise of anti-immigration politics in developed countries including the United States and western Europe. The rational response, beyond dealing with climate change, is two-fold and fairly obvious. (1) Rational immigration policies based on the economic needs of the more developed countries, and (2) the more developed countries ponying up to help people in the less developed ones where they live.

The labor-market shortages in advanced economies are not some temporary or short-run phenomenon. In the US, a recent Brookings Institution study documents a shortfall of 2.4 million workers as of December 2022, relative to the 12-month average ending in February 2020. Most of this decline would have happened without the pandemic, owing to changes in the age and education of the population. But there was also a decline in the average weekly hours worked, producing an additional labor-supply shortfall equivalent to another 2.4 million people…

A well-designed immigration policy that allows for the controlled entry of willing workers, and that helps integrate them into host countries, would go a long way toward easing labor-market tightness and preventing humanitarian tragedies caused by smugglers’ shameless exploitation of migrants and refugees. But policymakers will need to look beyond the next election cycle and rise above partisan political interests.

At the same time, it is neither possible nor desirable to move the entire populations of low-income countries to America and Europe, so it is imperative to reject short-sighted economic nationalism. Advanced economies must do more to address the huge imbalances that still exist across the world economy. Reducing global inequality is essential to a sustainable future.

Project Syndicate

This is rational and fairly obvious, and yet politically very, very difficult. Anti-immigrant sentiment and fears over job displacement are common. And anti-immigrant sentiment is not just among people who consider themselves “native born” for several generations. Recent immigrants do not always support the idea of more people following them, especially if they perceive that the more recent immigrants might have an easier path or that they may have to compete with them. Combine that with legitimate fears of job loss and low wage growth among the general population, and sprinkle in some right-wing assholes, and the general apathy toward foreign aid when we have plenty of problems at home, and you have a pretty potent coalition. On the other side, big business generally favors immigration because they like low wages. So maybe there is something there you can work with, but unfortunately on this one issue it seems like politicians pay serious attention to the perceptions of voters and not just deep-pocketed big business. Maybe big business could divert some of their propaganda efforts from voters to support war and pollution and instead work on this issue. Or what about declaring war on climate change. That worked for drugs and poverty, right…ruh-roh!

2022 in Review

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First, my heart goes out to anyone who suffered hardship or lost a loved one in 2022. People still died from Covid-19 of course, not to mention other diseases, violence, and accidents. People are living, dying, and suffering horribly in war zones from Ukraine to the Middle East to Myanmar. Having said all that, for those of us living relatively sheltered lives in relatively sheltered locations like the United States, 2022 does not seem like it will rank among the best or worst of years in history.

Highlights of the Year’s Posts

These are the posts I picked each month as most frightening and/or depressing, most hopeful, and most interesting.

Most frightening and/or depressing stories:

  • JANUARY: A collapse of the Game of Thrones ice wall holding back the Thwaites glacier in Antarctica could raise average sea levels around the world by one foot, or maybe 10 feet “if it draws the surrounding glaciers with it”. The good news is that no army of zombies would pour out.
  • FEBRUARY: Philadelphia police are making an arrest in less than 40% of murders in our city, not to mention other violent crimes. Convictions of those arrested are also down. Some of this could be Covid-era dysfunction. But there is a word for this: lawlessness.
  • MARCH: What causes violence? It’s the (prohibition and war on) drugs, stupid. Or at least, partly/mostly, the drugs.
  • APRIL:  The use of small nuclear weapons is becoming more thinkable. Just a reminder that nuclear war is truly insane. Assuming we manage to avoid nuclear war, food insecurity might be our biggest near- to medium-term issue. One lesson of World War II is worries about food security played a role in the diseased minds of both Hitler and Stalin. And food prices right now are experiencing a “giant leap” unprecedented over the last couple decades. Food security, natural disasters, sea level rise, migration, and geopolitical stability all can form ugly feedback loops. And no, I couldn’t limit myself to just one depressing story this month!
  • MAY: The lab leak hypothesis is back, baby! Whether Covid-19 was or was not a lab accident, the technology for accidental or intentional release of engineered plagues has clearly arrived. And also, the world is waking up to a serious food crisis.
  • JUNE: Mass shootings are often motivated by suicidally depressed people who decide to take others with them to the grave.
  • JULY:  One way global warming is suppressing crop yields is by damaging pollen.
  • AUGUST: The fossil fuel industry intentionally used immoral, evil propaganda techniques for decades to cast doubt on climate science and make short-term profits, probably dooming us, our children, and our children’s children. Also, and because that is apparently not enough, nuclear proliferation.
  • SEPTEMBER: If humans are subject to the same natural laws as all other species on Earth, we are doomed to certain extinction by our limited genetic variety, declining fertility, and overexploitation of our habitat. So, how different are we? I can spin up a hopeful story where are evolving and overcoming our limitations through intelligence and technology, but time will tell if this is right or wrong.
  • OCTOBER: Hurricanes are hitting us (i.e., the United States: New Orleans and Puerto Rico being the examples) and we are not quite recovering back to the trend we were on before the hurricane. This seems to be happening elsewhere too, like the Philippines. This is how a system can decline and eventually collapse – it appears stable in the face of internal stressors until it is faced with an external shock, and then it doesn’t bounce back quite all the way, and each time this happens it bounces back a bit less.
  • NOVEMBER:  Asteroids could be used as a weapon.
  • DECEMBER: The U.S. legalized political corruption problem is getting worse, not better. This was one of Project Censored’s most censored stories of 2022.

Most hopeful stories:

  • JANUARY: LED lighting has gotten so efficient that it is a tossup on energy efficiency with daylight coming through a window, because no window is perfectly sealed. Windows still certainly have the psychological advantage.
  • FEBRUARY: “Green ammonia” offers some help on the energy and environmental front.
  • MARCH: There are meaningful things individuals can do to slow climate change, even as governments and industries do too little too late. For example, eat plants, limit driving and flying, and just replace consumer goods as they wear out. I’m mostly on board except that I think we need peace and stability for the long term survival of both our civilization and planetary ecosystem, and we are going to need to travel and get to know one another to give that a chance.
  • APRIL: While we are experiencing a disturbing homicide wave in U.S. cities, violent and overall crime are not necessarily at historical highs and are more or less flat. And yes, this was the most uplifting story I could come up with this month. Brave politicians could use the Ukraine emergency to talk about arms control, but if anybody is talking about that I am missing it.
  • MAY: I came up with (but I am sure I didn’t think of it first) the idea of a 21st century bill of rights. This seems to me like a political big idea somebody could run with. I’ll expand on it at some point, but quick ideas would be to clarify that the right to completely free political speech applies to human beings only and put some bounds on what it means for corporations and other legal entities, and update the 18th century idea of “unlawful search and seizure” to address the privacy/security tradeoffs of our modern world. And there’s that weird “right to bear arms” thing. Instead of arguing about what those words meant in the 18th century, we could figure out what we want them to mean now and then say it clearly. For example, we might decide that people have a right to be free of violence and protected from violence, in return for giving up any right to perpetrate violence. We could figure out if we think people have a right to a minimum standard of living, or housing, or health care, or education. And maybe clean up the voting mess?
  • JUNE: For us 80s children, Top Gun has not lost that loving feeling.
  • JULY: Kernza is a perennial grain with some promise, although yields would have to increase a lot for it to be a viable alternative to annual grains like wheat, corn and rice.
  • AUGUST: “Effective altruism” may give us some new metrics to benchmark the performance of non-profit organizations and give us some insights on dealing with existential risks (like the ones I mention above).
  • SEPTEMBER: Metformin, a diabetes drug, might be able to preemptively treat a variety of diseases colloquially referred to as “old age”.
  • OCTOBER: Gorbachev believed in the international order and in 1992 proposed a recipe for fixing it: elimination of nuclear and chemical weapons [we might want to add biological weapons today], elimination of the international arms trade, peaceful sharing and oversight of civilian nuclear technology, strong intervention in regional conflicts [he seemed to envision troops under Security Council control], promotion of food security, human rights, population control [seems a bit quaint, but maybe we would replace this with a broader concept of ecological footprint reduction today], economic assistance to poorer countries, and expansion of the Security Council to include at least India, Italy, Indonesia, Canada, Poland, Brazil, Mexico, and Egypt [maybe this list would be a bit different today but would almost certainly include Germany, Japan, Brazil, India, and Indonesia].
  • NOVEMBER: A review of Limits to Growth suggests our civilization may be on a path to stagnation rather than collapse. Or, we may be on the cusp of a fantastic science ficition future of abundance brought to us by solar energy, asteroid mining (there are those asteroids again!), and biotechnology.
  • DECEMBER: Space-based solar. This just might be the killer energy app, the last energy tech we need to come up with for awhile. Imagine what we could do with abundant, cheap, clean energy – reverse global warming, purify/desalinate as much water as we need, grow lots of food under lights in cities, power homes/businesses/factories with little or no pollution, get around in low-pollution cars/buses/trains, electrolyze as much hydrogen from water as we need for fuel cells to power aircraft and even spacecraft. Solve all these problems and we would eventually come up against other limits, of course, but this would be an enormous step forward. And space-based solar seems like much less of a fantasy than nuclear fusion or even widespread scaling up of new-generation fission designs.

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

Brilliant Synthesis

Technology

The last couple years, I led off with other things and came around to a technology roundup towards the end. This year, I’ll just shake things up (yes, I’m wild and crazy like that) and lead off with technology developments during the year.

Solar energy has been a long time coming, but 2022 was a year when it really started to be at the forefront of the energy conversation and hard for the skeptics to ignore. We keep hearing that it is now the cheapest form of energy to build and put into operation. That means it is now limited by the materials needed to produce the panels, by the space needed to deploy the panels, and by the transmission and temporary storage infrastructure. Building rooftops take up a lot of space and are mostly not used for other things, so this seems like an obvious place to put the panels. The oceans of pavement we use to operate and park vehicles make up another somewhat obvious place – we can toughen the panels and drive on them, or we can put cheap roofs over the pavement and cover them with panels. Materials can be an issue because many of them are mined and sold by unsavory characters and governments, and there is clearly an environmental impact. But remember that we are trading this off against today’s coal, oil, and natural gas industry, not against some socially and ecologically blameless party. This industry intentionally lied to the public for decades and in the process did immeasurable damage to a planetary biophysical system.

Metals and minerals are also just limited. But even in hard-nosed economic terms, if solar panels are the lowest-cost option as we are hearing, they are holding their own with the costs of extracting, transporting, and burning fossil fuels. We could tax social and environmental impacts at international borders if we had the courage to do so, but even without that it is hard to imagine a system more damaging and irresponsible than the one we have been dealing with for the past century or so.

People will also say we haven’t kept the distribution infrastructure up to date, and this is true. In the United States at least, we don’t keep public infrastructure in a state of good repair. But we do create infrastructure when big business demands it, and they will demand an electric grid that can support their products when it comes to electric vehicles, devices and facilities. There may be a period of pain between when big business demands it and when the U.S. government provides it, and other countries will almost certainly outdistance us.

Longer term, as Fully Automated Luxury Communism tells it, space for solar panels will not be a problem because we will put them in, well, space. And this is not a far-future fantasy. The technology to gather the energy in space and beam it to the Earth pretty much exists now and governments and companies are seriously working on practical implementation. They swear it is safe, and even if it is not totally risk-free remember again all the death, pollution, and permanent planetary destruction the fossil fuel sociopaths have wrought.

Now, what about nuclear power? If we had really focused on it decades ago, we might not be in the climate change mess we find ourselves in now. It could still be a solution to the climate change mess in the future. But given how long it takes to bring new nuclear technology online at a large scale, and how fast solar energy appears to be scaling up and how reliable it appears to be, is it time to stop working on nuclear? I’m talking about known fission technology here. As for fusion, given that it is “always 20 years away” (no matter the year we are actually in), is it time to stop working on it and just throw all our research efforts at solar?

And materials will not be a problem either because we will produce them from asteroids and bring them to Earth, ending material shortages forever. I say, good but better to just use them to build things in space because we are running out of capacity to absorb the byproducts of the materials we already have down here. Just digging things up that were already in the ground and pumping them into the atmosphere and oceans has caused enough trouble.

By the way, once we are in space and messing around with asteroids, government and private actors will be able to divert their trajectories. It is easy to imagine scenarios where this is a great thing that actually saves all life on the planet. It is also easy to imagine scenarios where industrial accidents or intentional government actions threaten life on the planet. An international treaty and some oversight of this seems like a good idea as the messing-with-asteroids industry really starts to get going.

I don’t have my pet mini-mammoth yet, but biotechnology is continuing to gain steam. The idea of treating aging as a disease to be cured seems almost too obvious, but it seems to remove some bureaucratic obstacles that have been holding science and medicine back. Covid-19 was probably, maybe, perhaps not a lab leak. But it could have been, because the technology to make something like it, or much worse, exists in labs right now. It could be made if it has not already, and it could be leaked accidentally or intentionally, if it has not been already. And like nuclear technology, it will proliferate. Compared to nuclear technology, I think it will proliferate much faster and be much easier to hide. I have trouble envisioning any solution to this that does not involve heavy-handed surveillance.

On the positive side, biotechnology may be able to feed us when there are a lot more of us. With cellular agriculture, we can theoretically make meat or just about any kind of plant or animal tissue, and then we can eat it. We may finally be on the verge of modifying plants so they can make more efficient use of the sun’s energy, which is both exciting and scary. With a combination of abundant cheap electricity (from solar energy), abundant cheap materials, and highly efficient lighting though, we might be able to grow all the food we need in high rises without needing frankenplants.

And finally, the idea of controlling the weather with windmills is pretty fascinating. If we figure this one out, we might be able to end damage from floods, droughts, and hurricanes. But obvious Bond villain Elon Musk will also be able to use this to hold the world hostage for ONE HUNDRED TRILLION DOLLARS. That doesn’t really matter though because he is probably already planning to crash an asteroid into us anyway.

Propaganda, Social Media, and Truth

Social media is being blamed for a lot of our social ills at the moment. When we hear “social media” discussed, it seems to mean first and foremost interactive sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. where anyone can post a short snippet of any information they want and make it available to anybody else on the platform. Youtube also seems to fit this mold to some extent, although Youtube is a mix of personal and professionally-produced content. Then, underlying all this are Google search and other algorithms or “search” engines which are searching both for content to show individuals and individuals to show content. There are bloggers using WordPress and a million other tools and sites trying to get their content out, usually not all that widely if my personal experience is any indication (to the 5 or 6 people worldwide who read this blog regularly?) Then there is the huge ecosystem of Amazon and all the other sites trying to sell us stuff. Then there is professional journalistic media and traditional publishing companies trying to have their say (and sell us stuff), and finally there is some sense of the broader internet underlying all this.

Beyond trying to sell us stuff, corporations and non-profit entities are trying to manipulate all these communication channels to get their messages into our heads. This is propaganda, with the main goal being to sell us stuff and a secondary goal being to create awareness and positive images of their brands so they can keep selling us stuff. Also so people won’t complain to politicians about whatever the corporations are doing and risk those politicians meddling in the system in ways that are averse to corporate profits. At the same time, these companies and special interest groups are paying off the politicians to support their interests behind the scenes. This works out well for them (the corporations, special interests and politicians).

Finally we have the U.S. government and governments around the world trying to influence public opinion, occasionally by providing accurate information, sometimes outright lies, and often something in between.

All this is competing for our “attention”. Personally, I strongly prefer having more information to less, and I do not want to see regulation aimed at reducing the amount of information available to me. I believe, perhaps naively, that I have some ability to distinguish truth from falsehood, fact from opinion, and objective/honest communication from dishonest attempts to influence me. Regulation to protect children might be an exception to this – if social media sites are facilitating bullying and leading to mental health problems and even suicides, that is worth dealing with.

“Great Power Competition”, the “International Order”, and the United Nations

A major world leader of our time died in 2022. Okay, two world leaders if you really want to count Queen Victoria, but I am talking about Mikhail Gorbachev. To me, he represents a moment when optimism and visionary leadership had a chance to flower to the benefit of our civilization. He had a vision of long-term peace and stability, with powerful nation-states ceding some of their power to some form of world government. The basic vision was that no nation-state, no matter how powerful, would be able to succeed through violent means if it was opposed by all other nation-states acting together. With the threat of catastrophic war mostly behind us, humanity could have focused on solving all the other thorny problems, from food to energy to pollution to inequality. This was a beautiful vision, but unfortunately its moment passed us by, and we are back to the old cynical idea of coalitions of “great powers” arrayed against each other.

With the threat of catastrophic violence hanging over us, we are not focused on solving those other problems. The United Nations was supposed to at least be the seed of that new order that would usher in long-term peace and prosperity for our species. To be sure, the United Nations has accomplished a lot when it comes to human rights, science, agriculture, refugees, and other areas. It has also been a place where all the not-so-great powers of the world can band together and make their voices somewhat heard. But the Security Council was supposed to be the One Ring to Rule Them All and make “great power competition” obsolete. This has failed utterly, with the Security Council considered all but irrelevant at this point. Not only is “great power competition” ascendant, we seem to be proud of ourselves for bringing it back. If there is a devil, he must truly love “great power competition”.

With the threat of catastrophic violence hanging over us, we have failed utterly to solve other existential problems such as food security, global warming, sea level rise, ever-growing concentration of wealth, and the specter of a Captain Trips extinction plague whether of natural or manmade origin.

Resilience. Despite taking a gut punch, at the end of 2022 it feels as though our planetary civilization weathered the storm of Covid-19 and has more or less rebounded to something like the trend it would have been on. This is the textbook definition of resilience, and something to feel good about. If we get some time in between gut punches, we at least have an opportunity to work on our other problems while also preparing for the next gut punch. If we don’t make progress, maybe we can at least reach a state of stagnation rather than a self-actuated collapse. Can a civilization be resilient and stagnant at the same time? Maybe this is where we find ourselves, at least in the near term.

Happy 2023!

food crisis moves off the business page

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I’ve been thinking that when the food shortage headlines move off the (proverbial at this point) business pages and on to the (equally proverbial) front page, the situation may be coming to a head. Well, here is an Associated Press article on the subject (link is to the Philadelphia Inquirer but you can probably find the article elsewhere).

The Treasury Department announced that several global development banks are “working swiftly to bring to bear their financing, policy engagement, technical assistance” to prevent starvation prompted by the war, rising food costs and climate damage to crops.

Tens of billions will be spent on supporting farmers, addressing the fertilizer supply crisis, and developing land for food production, among other issues. The Asian Development Bank will contribute funds to feeding Afghanistan and Sri Lanka and the African Development Bank will use $1.5 billion to assist 20 million African farmers, according to Treasury…

As part of the effort to address the crisis, Secretary of State Antony Blinken will convene meetings in New York on the sidelines of the U.N. over the next two days focusing on food insecurity.

Philadelphia Inquirer

So the issue has not just moved from the business pages to news pages, it has moved from the Treasury Department to the State Department. You could say this situation has developed among a perfect storm of pandemic, climate change-driven droughts and storms, and now an unexpected war. But we live in a world where apparently supply was tight enough that the food system was not ready to absorb these shocks. Now the question becomes are we approaching physical/environmental limits for how much food the world can support, or can we boost production by opening up more land and dumping more fertilizer on it? And even if the latter is true, what is the lag time to make that happen compared to the time scale of the current crisis? And even if we solve these short term issues, are we preparing for the risks in the future? Is the current situation truly something so extreme we could not reasonably have prepared for it, or is it a magnitude of risk we should be expecting in an compromised biosphere and we need to be preparing for next time?

country-specific warming trends and projections

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Berkeley Earth has country-specific warming trends to date and projections to 2100. The accelerated warming predicted from here on out is startling, particularly if emissions continue to increase. I figure we can use air conditioning, but the biggest issues are going to be loss of places where food can be grown, and massive migration pressure. It seems too late to stop this, but making it less bad than it could be is more urgent than ever.