Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com

happy financial crisis anniversary

Happy 10-year anniversary to the 2008 financial crisis! The Week has a short summary of what caused it.

The bursting of the U.S. housing bubble triggered a chain reaction that nearly brought down the global financial system. Between 1997 and 2006, a combination of low interest rates, relaxed lending regulations, and government policies designed to encourage home buying fueled a housing boom that saw the average price for a U.S. home increase by 124 percent. Amid the speculative frenzy, financial institutions issued hundreds of billions of dollars in questionable loans to so-called subprime borrowers with poor credit histories. Borrowers’ ability to repay didn’t matter to lenders, because they were able to get subprime mortgages off their books by repackaging them into wildly complex derivative financial instruments like mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations. Corporate and institutional investors gobbled up these offerings, which not only offered attractive returns but also received high safety ratings from the major credit-rating agencies. In 2007 and 2008, the inevitable wave of foreclosures finally arrived — exposing the entire financial system to catastrophic losses…

The worst financial panic since the Great Depression. Already dangerously over-leveraged from years of risky bets, banks were unable to absorb the huge losses. The first big domino to fall was the investment bank Bear Stearns, which collapsed in March 2008. Later, Lehman Brothers filed for the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history, and the government bailed out insurance giant AIG, which had sold enormous amounts of credit default swaps insuring the bad investments. As panic spread, lending and investment screeched to a halt, and the country was plunged into the worst financial crisis since the stock market collapse of 1929…

The U.S. government took extraordinary measures to prevent a full-scale economic collapse. Under President George W. Bush, Congress approved a $700 billion bailout purchasing toxic assets to restore confidence in the market; under President Barack Obama, it authorized a $787 billion stimulus package to stimulate spending in the private sector. But massive damage had already been done. The economy slipped into a deep recession. The Dow Jones industrial average and the S&P 500 lost more than half their value. Unemployment peaked at roughly 10 percent by October 2009.

They say the system is safer now because of Dodd-Frank. Well, Dodd-Frank is under savage attack by our current administration, so I would not be too confident the system is safe. The article also explains that even though the economy has come back on average, Americans of average income and below are still feeling the effects and may never fully recover to where they would have been without the crisis.

March 2018 in Review

Most frightening stories:

Most hopeful stories:

  • One large sprawling city could be roughly the economic equivalent of several small high-density cities. This could potentially be good news for the planet if you choose in favor of the latter, and preserve the spaces in between as some combination of natural land and farm land.
  • The problems with free parking, and solutions to the problems, are well known. This could potentially be good news if anything were to be actually done about it. Self-parking cars could be really fantastic for cities.
  • The coal industry continues to collapse, and even the other fossil fuels are saying they are a bunch of whining losers. And yes, I consider this positive. I hope there aren’t too many old ladies whose pensions depend on coal at this point.

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

renewable energy economics

Coal is already starting to get squeezed out by the dropping cost of renewable energy and battery storage, and natural gas is next, according to Bloomberg.

“Some existing coal and gas power stations, with sunk capital costs, will continue to have a role for many years, doing a combination of bulk generation and balancing,” said Elena Giannakopoulou, head of energy economics at BNEF. “But the economic case for building new coal and gas capacity is crumbling…”

One new factor: lithium-ion batteries have enjoyed a 79 percent drop in costs since 2010, making the idea of storing energy a possibility the coming years. The price per megawatt-hour for generating from wind farms built on land fell 18 percent in the first half of 2018 to $55 while photovoltaics dropped 18 percent to $70…

The cheapest solar and wind costs can now be found in China and India, which are also among the worst polluters. The tumbling costs will continue until at least until 2040 for both renewable energy sources worldwide and they’ll become cheaper than coal and gas within five years, the report showed.

 

subway construction cost

A New York Times article has some stats on the cost of subway construction in New York City compared to elsewhere:

  • NYC: $2.5-3.5 billion per mile
  • Paris: $0.45 billion per mile
  • Madrid: $100 million per mile
  • San Francisco: $1 billion per mile
  • Seattle: $0.5 billion per mile

This particular article doesn’t cover costs in Asia. From my personal experience in Singapore, I know that low-cost “guest labor” is part of the equation there. And while environmental, health and safety regulations were relatively stringent there, that is certainly not the case everywhere. Still, nothing like that is going on in France or Spain to the best of my knowledge.

Seek

This is pretty cool – a phone app to help you identify backyard plants and animals.

Drawing from millions of wildlife observations on iNaturalist, Seek shows you lists of commonly-recorded insects, birds, plants, amphibians, and more in your area. Use our maps and charts to determine what you want to look for and snap a photo when you think you’ve found it. Our image recognition software lets you know if you got it right and, if it’s a match, adds it to your collection. The more your collection grows, the more badges you’ll earn!

See something that’s not on the list? You can still take a photo of it and Seek will add it to your collection if it’s recognized!

brain uploading

Good news – instead of killing you, slicing up your brain, freezing it and keeping it on ice so they can revive your consciousness centuries in the future, scientists might now be able to scan your brain and just store the pattern for later use. The bad news – they still have to kill you, slice up your brain, and freeze it first before they do the scanning. And of course there is still the old Star Trek transporter problem – when they save your pattern, disintegrate your matter, and recreate the pattern somewhere else using new matter, is it really still the same you, or is it a different you with the same memories as the original you? The new you won’t know the difference, and you won’t know the difference either because you won’t exist, so does it matter? Well, the technology still has a ways to go before we really have to worry about any of this. If they can ever find a way to save a detailed copy of your brain without killing you first, there would be very little downside to trying it. And before you ask, yes, I have read the book Altered Carbon, and no, I have not seen the new show Altered Carbon.

more on Richard Muller

BREAKING NEWS: According to Richard Muller from UC Berkeley, global warming is caused by the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Not changes in the Earth’s orbit, not changes in volcanic activity. Either changes in carbon dioxide or something else that happens to exactly match changes in carbon dioxide. But in all seriousness, this guy is a serious physicist who set out to challenge the findings of the IPCC using hard data, and says he ended up confirming them beyond a shadow of a doubt.

a new option for nuclear waste?

Can nuclear waste be stored safely in horizontally drilled fracking tunnels? Well, maybe…

Nuclear waste experts have contemplated deep-drilling for half a century, mostly by proposing to bore straight down into granite and crystalline rock. But tests of these techniques haven’t gotten very far, being blocked, on occasion, by the public. These approaches have been deemed costly and possibly unsafe, because stacking containers on top of one another puts so much weight on the bottom drums. The Mullers say it’s much cheaper and safer to drill horizontal tunnels, and to do so in shale. They can fit the typical waste canisters (each 1 foot in diameter and 14 feet long) quickly and safely into shale tunnels, they say, given advances in fracking equipment. “Drilling the holes takes a couple weeks at most,” says Elizabeth…

The elder Muller first made his name dealing with radiation much farther away. As a professor at the University of California at Berkeley and senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Richard did that pioneering research on dark energy and cosmic radiation, including work on projects that eventually earned Nobel Prizes. After he and Elizabeth co-founded Berkeley Earth, a nonprofit that measures global temperature and climate change, he went from being one of the most prominent global warming doubters to one of the loudest voices confirming that climate change is real and caused by humans.

The idea for Deep Isolation grew out of the climate change work. Richard and Elizabeth are convinced that shifting China from coal to natural gas should be a priority, and when their effort to form a gas fracking venture in that country bogged down, they applied their newfound knowledge of drilling techniques to nuclear energy. The Mullers argue that the world must increase its use of nuclear energy to slow climate change and say solving the waste problem would encourage adoption.

food crises

Food crises in the world got worse last year, according to a network of researchers (somehow, loosely?) affiliated with the UN. According to Bloomberg:

Food crises are increasingly determined by complex causes such as conflict, extreme climatic shocks and high prices of staple foods, often happening at the same time, the UN’s Food & Agriculture Organization, World Food Programme and EU said in a report Thursday.

Conflict will remain a major driver of food insecurity in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, while drought is likely to worsen crop and livestock output, increasing food insecurity in countries such as Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya, they said…

Extreme climate events –- mainly drought — were the main triggers of food crises in 23 countries, while conflict continued to be the main driver of acute food insecurity in 18 nations. The report defines acute food insecurity as hunger so severe that it poses an immediate threat to lives or livelihoods.

Dig a little deeper and it sounds like El Nino played a role in intense droughts in many parts of the world. I know El Nino happens with or without climate change, but climate change may arguably be making it worse. War may or may not be caused by climate change, but societies devastated by war are going to have a lot more trouble adapting to extreme weather and changes in water supplies than ones that are not. Food is the nexus of water, energy, and ecosystem services, so if we are exceeding the world’s carrying capacity this is where the signal is likely to show up, both in a long, steady climb in prices and in decreased capacity to recover from extreme events. The poor are always going to feel these effects first and most acutely.