Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com

what if everything we thought we knew about the green revolution is wrong?

The story I have always accepted about the green revolution is that the world avoided famine by learning to manufacture and dump enormous quantities of fossil fuel-derived synthetic nitrogen fertilizer on crops. This came at an enormous environmental price, but saved literally billions of people. To the extent I have ever questioned this, I have wondered if there are any good alternatives to this system going forward, given the world’s enormous human population, and whether the system is sustainable (in the dictionary sense of can we continue to feed the world’s population this way even accepting the high environmental price) for the long term.

This article questions the mainstream story of the green revolution. The tag line of this website/blog is “ecosocialism or barbarism”, so I am not saying it is 100% credible, I am just saying I found it thought-provoking and the ideas/claims are worth digging into.

Meanwhile, the government urged Indian farmers to grow nonfood export crops to earn foreign currency. They switched millions of acres from rice to jute production, and by the mid-1960s India was exporting agricultural products.

Borlaug’s miracle seeds were not inherently more productive than many Indian wheat varieties. Rather, they just responded more effectively to high doses of chemical fertilizer. But while India had abundant manure from its cows, it produced almost no chemical fertilizer. It had to start spending heavily to import and subsidize fertilizer.

India did see a wheat boom after 1967, but there is evidence that this expensive new input-intensive approach was not the main cause. Rather, the Indian government established a new policy of paying higher prices for wheat. Unsurprisingly, Indian farmers planted more wheat and less of other crops.

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2023/10/11/how-not-to-feed-a-hungry-planet/

So even if we continue with the current system, will the planet’s biophysical limits push back at some point? Synthetic fertilizer contributes to global warming emissions both through the industrial process required to fix nitrogen gas from the air and from releases from farms (nitrogen dioxide, tractors, cows, livestock, etc. All other things being equal, heat drives down grain yields. And all other things are not equal, because drought, flooding, and salinization are in the mix. Then we have nutrient-laden runoff poisoning the oceans.

On the plus side, we hear there is a demographic transition that could at least reduce the growth rate in the number of new mouths to feed. This is partly due to improving living standards particularly for women and children, but improving living standards also mean people want to eat more meat and processed food and not just bowls of grain. Meat substitutes are coming along (Chicky Nobs anyone?), so there is a lot going on.

Food is where the climate change sh**, er, rubber meets the road.

Red Caesarism

“Red Caesarism” is the idea that some right-wing white Christian nationalist type will swoop in and save the United States by establishing himself as a dictator. Sounds crazy, but some people out there are quite serious about it. Among them Kevin Slack, a professor at Hillsdale College, Steve Bannon, and quite possibly Donald J. Trump.

Sure, who wouldn’t want a benevolent dictator, as long as they agree with you. Of course, one group’s benevolent dictator will be another’s tyrant. Just give Handmaid’s Tale a quick reread and see if you want that to come true. Which is why we have a system of government that, despite its many faults, has remained relatively stable and allowed for a peaceful transition of power longer than any other one on Earth at the moment (I think this is true…somebody feel free to provide a counterexample.)

I can still envision a scenario where Red Caesar tries to do his thing, ends up with his head on a pike, and we get a military governor instead. At least for awhile. And then the whole cycle could repeat. Let’s hope not. Let’s try to restore some faith in our election system instead.

private surveillance

Private companies are making money vacuuming up photos of things in the public realm, like license plates and peoples’ faces, and selling them to law enforcement. I think we have to accept that the technology of potential tyranny is here to stay, and in fact it is necessary in a world of mass shootings and potentially much worse things, like bioterrorism. We need to figure out a way to regulate and channel it to positive purposes in democratic societies, but we will never be able to make it go away or even slow it down.

keep an eye on Iran…

I always say I don’t want to comment on fast-moving current events, and I always say I don’t want to comment on other countries’ politics, especially ones I have never been to and have no connection to, and most especially Israeli politics. But I have thoughts, you don’t have to read them and here they are:

  1. My heart goes out to all the human beings suffering in this conflict.
  2. What could be the motive of the Hamas leadership and fighters responsible for this attack. One story could be that they are angry about the expanding settlements and other perceived losses of human rights and dignity, and that they feel they have exhausted all political recourse and only violence is left to make their point. Maybe this is all there is to it.
  3. But…assuming Hamas has some rational political aims, it is hard to imagine this furthering those aims. It seems more likely to embolden the most conservative parties in the Israeli government, and to rally to Israeli public and international governments to support them even more than they already do.
  4. I have heard suggestions that the political aim could be to stop the Israel-Saudi Arabia diplomatic normalization process. Iran would gain from this. But if there is even a hint that Iran was involved in planning this attack, if anything it seems more likely to accelerate that process after an initial pause.
  5. Which brings me to Iran. This just seems extremely risky for them. Reports are that their leadership has “publicly praised” the attacks. Maybe they have to do that for domestic political reasons. But again, if there is even a whiff… the Israeli right wing could use this as their excuse to attack Iran.
  6. The Israeli government has repeatedly said “they will not allow” Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon. How close are they to obtaining a nuclear weapon? Very close, it would seem. If the Israeli government can find some evidence that Iran was behind this attack, it would seem to give them the justification they need for a military attack. And it might just bring enough international opinion to their side, or at least keep it on the sidelines, to allow them to do it.
  7. If someone were to want to fabricate evidence that Iran was involved…well, before 2003 I might have said that was far fetched, but it is hard to imagine more flimsy see-through evidence than the W. Bush administration came up with against Iraq in 2003. And that was adequate to justify a mostly unprovoked invasion of a sovereign UN member nation at the time.
  8. Am I saying this was a false flag attack? No, as much as I enjoy a good conspiracy theory, I won’t say that without evidence. I’m just saying that false flag or not, partisans are smart enough to take advantage of something like this to justify their preferred course of action.
  9. So…it would not surprise me if Israel attacks Iran in the coming weeks or months. And it would not surprise me if the U.S. supports that or at least remains silent. It would surprise me if they joined in, but in the end that seems unnecessary. An the major players in the region of Egypt to Saudi Arabia to the UAE will probably be just fine with it too, whatever they say in public.

salt intrusion in New Orleans

As a water professional, I of course have access to cutting edge sources of news in my sector not available to the general public. I first heard about the saltwater intrusion situation in New Orleans from a random drunk guy in a bar the other day.

Because of the drought across the Mississippi River Valley, salt water is creeping upriver, where many communities, including New Orleans, draw their drinking water.

Axios

So not enough water coming from upstream to keep the saltwater from the ocean at bay. I wonder how much effect sea level rise has on this right now. In the future, it certainly will, and climate change may cause more and frequent droughts, although I don’t know what the forecast is for the U.S. Gulf region specifically.

This appears to be a short-term phenomenon. The salt will come and go. Cities will figure out how to get safe drinking water to people, they will keep the taps on so people can take showers and wash their clothes and fire fighters can fight fires, and they will assess any damage from corrosion after it passes. If it happens more frequently though, it seems like we need more of a plan than this. And groundwater salt intrusion is a longer-term, slower-onset issue but once it is there it is going to stay there in many cases.

So both flooding and drought are going to impact our coastal cities, like a one-two punch, over and over again. We might be able to deal with it for awhile, but if the recovery is not quite complete each time there is an episode, the impacts will accumulate over time until finally, there is some big event that is the one a city can’t recover from.

small-scale desalination

MIT makes some bold claims for a cheap, small scale desalination system.

The researchers estimate that if the system is scaled up to the size of a small suitcase, it could produce about 4 to 6 liters of drinking water per hour and last several years before requiring replacement parts. At this scale and performance, the system could produce drinking water at a rate and price that is cheaper than tap water.

MIT

If it works for salt water, I wonder if it could work for any type of water. Decentralized treatment is a worthy goal – if we could easily and safely reuse water from our rooftops, showers, dishwashers, etc., that would be a lot less water to be sucking out of the environment and moving around in pipes, and a lot less energy and chemicals than we use to run our water systems now. Toilets? People don’t like to hear this, but if we get desperate enough we might be open to it. For the water industry, it could be a “killer app” akin to the digital camera or cellular phone. Don’t expect the water industry to go quietly though.

MIT News

September 2023 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing story: “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-capital 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.”

Most hopeful story: 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 an hike premiums on human drivers through the roof. Autonomous parking also has a huge potential to free up space in our urban areas.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Venice has completed a major storm surge barrier project.

synthetic cocaine?

This article says waves of drug abuse tend to alternate between sedatives, like heroin and the current opioid wave, and stimulants, like cocaine and methamphetamine. Like opioids, people are hard at work in labs trying to create synthetic stimulants. One candidate, which according to this article is already popular in “the Middle East party scene”, is Captagon, which has effects similar to cocaine and can be as cheap as $3 per pill.