Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com

Is “green growth” possible?

Green growth is the holy grail where human wellbeing is able to grow exponentially over the long term without depleting natural resources including the natural environment’s ability to assimilate our wastes. I won’t claim to understand all the words in this abstract, but the author is basically coming up with a big fat NO.

Is green growth possible and even desirable in a spaceship economy?

There seems to be a consensus among many growth and resource economists that perpetual growth can be ensured if it gets increasingly resource-efficient and if growth focuses on creating values, a result derived by models using production functions that allow asymptotically complete decoupling of the economy from its resource base by substituting natural resources through physical and knowledge capital. This growth process can be called green growth. The following paper attempts to show, within the framework of an semi-endogenous growth model using a linear-exponential production function (Linex function) with bounded resource efficiency, that the accumulation of physical and knowledge capital to substitute natural resources cannot guarantee green growth. As the population grows, per capita income decreases, and the economy’s capital base decays. In addition, an ecological displacement effect resulting from the biophysical embeddedness of the economy further exacerbates the result. Physical capital pushes back the natural spaces necessary to regenerate natural services and resources and can, therefore, not be accumulated endlessly. A comparison with standard resource models shows that this displacement effect also limits growth for models with production functions with low elasticities of substitution. Finally, the analysis of transitory dynamics addresses aspects of intergenerational equality in a limited biosphere.

I’ll take a crack at interpreting this. The human economy cannot be fully separate from the natural environment because it will always result in some physical displacement, even if pollution could be eliminated. Well, what if all human enterprise were built on stilts well above the earth? All food would also be grown on these stilts, all materials recovered and cycled endlessly. This would shade out natural ecosystems, but you could use giant space mirrors to beam in sunlight that would otherwise have uselessly bypassed the earth (which is all but a vanishingly tiny fraction of sunlight). Now, you might say why not just go live in orbit? But the advantage of my scheme is that you can just take an elevator down to the earth, and the entire earth is a park for your enjoyment. What about tigers, you say? Well, we will just invite those rolling bubble things from Jurassic Park.

Are markets underestimating climate risk?

This sprawling Naked Capitalism article says yes, basically because investors don’t consider the long term. But if it were really true that most investors are not aware or not correctly valuing the risk, a small minority of investors should in theory be able to make money on that and bring markets back into equilibrium. Maybe the “long term” is just too long for mortal human investors to consider? But corporations and other institutions like pension funds are not mortal humans. Fossil fuel companies could try to exploit these opportunities to hedge their bets while they continue to cast doubt on the science and technology needed to get out of the mess.

How would an investor exploit other investors’ underestimation of climate risk, if this actually exists? Short-sell companies insuring homes, businesses, and lives in coastal and fire-prone areas? Buy construction and engineering companies that will get our tax money to clean up after disasters? Military and security contractors who build walls and detention camps (a morbid thought, but mass migration driven by climate panic seems likely to hit us at some point). Clean energy? Nuclear energy? It’s hard to guess and time these things – basically comes down to luck, and there are always going to be people with deeper pockets and political influence to keep us small-time investors from getting ahead. Diversifying across asset classes and internationally, and not having all our savings tied up in our houses, still seem like the best options for us little people.

Venice flood protection

The Italian government has completed an $8 billion coastal flood protection system. It is interesting because it is submerged under normal sea conditions and can be raised when a storm is coming in.

Youtube

$8 billion sounds like a lot of money, but perhaps it is not to protect a major coastal city and international cultural treasure. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has spent $14 billion to protect New Orleans and is undertaking a projected $31 billion project to protect Houston (and projections have a way of running over). These are guaranteed to be far uglier projects than the Venice one. These U.S. cities may have “benefitted” from being the first to be devastated by coastal storms in the climate collapse era. Do we really think the U.S. Congress will not pony up even more enormous sums to protect New York, Washington D.C., and San Francisco when the time comes? They will. Cities with major military bases like Norfolk, Virginia and San Diego might make the cut. Smaller but still major cities with less political clout may have more trouble getting their fair share. Boston and Miami might make the cut. Major cities with less political clout, like Philadelphia and Baltimore, might not make the cut. And all this money Congress will find to protect major urban areas, while it will have some economic multiplier effect, will be money not spent on other priorities.

Whoever is Responsible for The Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, LOCK THEM UP!

This thing is a major serial killer of around 40,000 Americans every year, including children, and gets away with it! Essentially, it sets the design standards that determine what road and street designs can get federal funding, and it ends up flowing down to a lot of state and local design standards. Making the relative modest changes recommended here by the National Association of City Transportation Officials would help, but really I feel like this is thinking pretty small. Maybe if we held the known serial killer, the Federal Highway Administration, to account it might deter the many copycat killers known as state and local transportation agencies.

NACTO

This also reminded me of this Freakonomics podcast: The Perfect Crime. If you want to kill somebody and get away with it, just run over a pedestrian with your car.

peak natural gas demand by 2030?

The International Energy Agency is forecasting that global demand for natural gas will peak and fall by 2030. In the short term, the Russia-Ukraine war has led to a drop in supply, a spike in prices, and a shift to liquid natural gas from the Middle East. In the longer term though, the shift is toward nuclear (at least, restarting underutilized plants or delaying retirement of already existing plants) and renewables according to this article. It sounds somewhat hopeful and welcome, although of course still too little too late to stop the unfolding climate catastrophe.

are “western elites” “irrational”?

This long article on Naked Capitalism claims the leadership of western countries is not effective in a crisis, and I think there may be something to this. The Covid non-response and some recent bungled natural disaster responses from New Orleans to Puerto Rico to Hawaii come to mind. This article focuses more on Ukraine, and while that situation is certainly unsatisfactory, it is hard to see what the good options would have been. The U.S. choices (NATO expansion, Balkan War, CIA interference with foreign elections) you can point to as questionable were all made years or decades ago, when this author presumably thinks leadership was better.

I certainly share the sense that our political leadership today is not particularly confidence-inspiring. So why is this? The author gives a few possibilities [my thoughts in brackets]:

  • the rich and powerful are out of touch with ordinary people [nothing new here]
  • stormtrooper syndrome – assuming you are the good guys, your opponents or competitors are the bad guys, and the bad guys can’t win [but this was certainly the case during the Cold War and the public loved it!]
  • a “conspiracy of degenerates” – this would have to be hidden from public view
  • right-wing demagogues promoting conspiracy theories and offering a simple message as an alternative that appeals to the public [certainly happening, and this is the good old Hitler playbook we have to watch out for]
  • Iron Law of Oligarchies – any organization is controlled by a small number of powerful individuals whose top priority is increasing their own power, rather than the success of the organization
  • crabs in a bucket – one crab can escape a bucket, but supposedly two or more crabs will stop each other from escaping, the implication being that relative rank is important to us animals – if I can’t succeed at everyone else’s expense, I will make sure nobody can succeed
  • the “Mowshowitz theory” – a variation on the above where power seeking behavior is rewarded within organizations rather than alignment with the stated goals of the organization, and in fact furthering the goals of the organization without seeking power can be punished
  • “intra-elite signaling dynamics” – the power of ritual to signal acceptance of a particular belief system, and the more bizarre the better [exactly what these rituals are I had trouble following]

I have had my own theories for awhile, and they have to do with education. I do not think children are being educated well in basic logic and being able to spot logical fallacies. This makes us susceptible to propaganda. They are not being educated well in the behavior of complex, dynamic systems. They are learning plenty of math and science, but it results in short-term and literal thinking rather than longer-term and abstract thinking. And finally, I don’t think children are being challenged to think morally. I’m just talking about the habit of asking yourself before you make a small daily decision whether you think on balance the consequences are on the side of right or wrong, justice or injustice.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

an agent-based stock market simulator

This agent-based stock market simulator, which was originally programmed in NetLogo and later moved to R, captures the behavior of the market in a statistical sense. Which is to say, it shows how multiple traders following logical strategies can add up to a whole lot of randomness and unpredictability. Also known as autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity and/or generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity, if I remember my statistics class correctly. But the article does not go into that.

stock market returns as simulated by an agent-based model

the world is drying out

Increased carbon dioxide concentrations have spurred plant growth up to a point, but at the same time increased temperatures have led to increased evaporation and transpiration (evaporation of water from plants to the atmosphere). The net result, if I understand this article in Science correctly, is that the drying effect now more than offsets the increased carbon uptake effect, so the growth rate of plants is no longer increasing as carbon dioxide concentrations increase.

Maui

The Maui fires are awful. First of all, my sympathy for all the loss of life, property, and all the displacement and disruption people are experiencing. The Los Angeles Times has some coverage of factors that may have contributed to the disaster.

  • Rain shadow and seasonal dry conditions, which are normal
  • Severe drought on top of these conditions
  • Low humidity
  • High winds (gusts up to 80 mph) caused by a hurricane nearby, but not close enough to cause rainfall on the island
  • High ocean temperatures made even worse by El Nino this year

The severity and frequency of both drought and hurricanes have increased due to climate change, making this catastrophic combination of factors more likely to occur than it would have been in the past. The article also says cooler ocean temperatures in the past have tended to steer hurricanes away from Hawaii, and this is also less like to occur now than in the past. So all this is bad luck, but we humans have made our own bad luck to a certain extent.

What is Obama up to?

According to this rambling article, he has houses in Hawaii (Oahu), Hyde Park (I’m assuming Chicago, not New York or London?), Martha’s Vineyard, and the Kalorama development inside Washington D.C. The latter is popular with current and ex-government types, celebrities, diplomats, and captains of industry. Some conspiracists believe he is running a “shadow government” from this location, and for this the offer two points of evidence: (1) He is a retired career politician who still lives in Washington, D.C. at least some times and (2) higher ups in the current administration are sometimes spotted at his house. This seems pretty weak to me. His house seems like a convenient place to have an offsite meeting where you would already have the maximum possible security presence and you might get some free advice from the former leader of the free world in the bargain. Giving take-it-or-leave-it advice would not be “running a shadow government”. Doing some fundraising and persuading at the request of the current party leadership would not be “running a shadow government”. So I don’t know but it seems unlikely.

There’s also some gobbledygook about Ukraine in the article. The only real data points we have on that are that (1) Obama instinctively opposed Hillary Clinton’s push for more or less unprovoked war on Libya (although he gave in), (2) he offered Ukraine only non-lethal aid following the invasion of Crimea, and (3) he supported the Minsk peace accord. We can only speculate now whether Russia would have invaded Ukraine under a Hillary Clinton administration, although I think they were scared enough of her that it may have motivated them to interfere with the 2016 U.S. election (after the U.S. almost certainly interfered in the 2014 Ukraine election, at least in terms of propaganda.) If they had, we can only speculate whether she would have responded with a no-fly zone or some other Cuban Missile Crisis level gamble. I think she might have. Now we need to look ahead and consider whether a second Trump administration will just give up the farm and allow Ukraine to be partitioned or conquered outright.