Category Archives: Web Article Review

Limits to Growth “data check”

In 2021, Gaya Herrington published a comparison of the World3 model’s (from Limits to Growth) predictions to date. She concluded that we are on a path either to collapse or to a sort of steady state where technology will blunt the worst consequences of pollution but further growth will not be possible.

The scenario that depicts the smallest declines, SW, is also the one that aligned least closely with empirical data. Furthermore, one of the best fit scenarios, BAU2, shows a collapse pattern. The other best fit scenario however, CT, shows only a moderate decline. Both scenarios show a slowdown in industrial and agricultural output. My research results at this point thus indicate that we can expect a halt in economic growth within the next two decades, whether we consider that a good thing or not. (Indeed, as the informed reader knows, economists and organizations like the IMF have been pointing out recently that we’re seeing a “synchronized slowdown in global growth“.) The strongest conclusion that can be drawn from my research therefore, is that humanity is on a path to having limits to growth imposed on itself rather than consciously choosing its own. However, my research results also leave open whether the subsequent declines in industrial and agricultural output will lead to sharp declines in population and welfare levels.

Club of Rome

what happened in Ukraine?

I’ve been puzzled by the seeming irrationality of the Russian invasion ever since it happened. We are being buffeted by propaganda from both sides, so it is hard to tell what is true, but we can probably assume the truth lies somewhere in between the two extremes. I can’t independently verify the information in this Courthouse News Service (which I had never heard of before…) article, but it at least tells a story that passes the logic test for me. Here’s my attempt to summarize their story:

  • Ukraine had a really rough time in the 1990s and early 2000s following the end of the Soviet Union. It was ruled mostly by ex-Soviet cronies – the economy was in freefall, corruption and assassinations of politicians, journalists and activists were rampant, and they lost a big chunk of their population as many people who could move elsewhere in Europe or Russia chose to do so. Some people went so far as to call it a failed state.
  • There were major protests (the “Orange Revolution”) against corruption and political violence in 2004. Viktor Yanukovych, a pro-Russian politician, was elected shortly afterward in an election widely believed by international observers to be rigged and interfered with by Russia. This is also when his opponent, pro-EU and anti-Russian Viktor Yushchenko, was poisoned, most likely by Russian or pro-Russian agents. Courts ordered a run-off election and Yushchenko was elected. [Part of the problem is these names sound very similar to western ears. Imagine a U.S. election where the candidates were named something like Thomas and Thompson.]
  • Russians and pro-Russian elements in Ukraine saw these events as U.S. interference in their political affairs, and feared that the same tactics could be tried in Russia itself. [I can’t argue pro or con, but the U.S. certainly doesn’t refrain from openly lobbying to try to influence other country’s elections, and we do know that the CIA has repeatedly tried to interfere in elections around the world in the past, typically in developing and middle income countries.]
  • Yushchenko turned out not to be all that anti-corruption or pro-western, at least not effectively so. In 2010, he ran against an even more anti-Russian and Ukrainian-nationalist politician, Yulia Tymoshenko. In this election, Yanukovych was re-elected in an election that international observers deemed fair.
  • The economy was extremely poor during this period, and Yanukovych accepted a bailout from Russia in exchange for abandoning plans to deepen trade and travel ties with the EU.
  • This caused public protests and street violence to break out again, with a neo-Nazi element in evidence. The presidential palace was stormed (this is sometimes called an “insurrection”), Yanukovych fled to Russia, and an anti-Russian, Ukrainian nationalist element took over.
  • The Russian government (“Putin”, “the Kremlin”) saw this as a coup orchestrated by the U.S. They believed this justified a military takeover of Crimea, which the largely pro-Russian population of Crimea seemed to support. This was an invasion and occupation in all but name – un-uniformed Russian soldiers basically fanned out from their bases already in Crimea and took over the government more or less opposed unopposed. A referendum was held in which the people voted to leave Ukraine and become part of Russia.
  • Pro-Russian elements then launched an armed rebellion in other eastern provinces of Ukraine.
  • Partly because Crimea and rebel-held areas of Ukraine did not participate in elections, an anti-Russian president (Poroshenko) was elected next. Russia believed U.S. interference was involved again. Ugly communist and fascist symbols and language was used by both sides, such as “decommunization” and “denazification”.
  • Ugly warfare between the Ukrainian army and the pro-Russian eastern rebels continued. Russia may have believed U.S. and “western” forces were involved in this warfare and that Ukraine was becoming increasingly likely to join NATO and/or the EU. [and who knows? some or all of this may be true.]
  • The current president, Zelenskyy, was elected in 2019 on a platform of negotiating a peaceful agreement to end the fighting. He used to play the president on TV. [This is exactly why the U.S. Democrats should have run either Harrison Ford or that guy who played the President in the first couple seasons of 24.]
  • The “Minsk Accords” were an attempt to end the warfare with a political solution, most likely some form of partial autonomy for the eastern provinces while remaining part of Ukraine. This was not successful. Zelenskyy became more hard-line anti-Russia and pro-resistance as the conflict dragged on.
  • Russia chose to invade in 2022. In my view, this was still a sovereign UN member state choosing to invade another sovereign member state’s recognized international borders, with the intention to occupy it indefinitely. I do not think there is any excuse for this. I do however think it is a useful exercise to try to put myself in the Russian shoes and try to understand what the thought process may have been. And when I do that, I can see a plausible case that they thought the U.S. and NATO were actively interfering in Ukrainian elections and supporting the Ukrainian military in suppression and atrocities against ethnic Russian civilians. They may have also thought the loss of Ukraine to NATO and the EU was only a matter of time until the U.S. was able to get a compliant regime in place that would allow it.

It seems like a move toward some form of autonomy for the eastern provinces and Crimea is the logical outcome here, under nominal Ukrainian rule within its original borders except that some big chunk of Crimea can just be considered a big Russian military base (like Guantanomo Bay). It could be demilitarized with a beefy UN peacekeeping force for an agreed period of time, and Ukraine could agree not to be eligible even for consideration to join the EU or NATO for some agreed period of time.

messing with asteroid orbits

This Nautilus article points out that the same technology that could be used to divert a dangerous asteroid from Earth’s path could be used to divert one into Earth’s path. That could happen either accidentally, say by an asteroid mining company, or in theory it could be done intentionally (secretly?) and pretty precisely.

If, as I have suspected all along, Elon Musk really is a Bond villain, this could be his end game.

Living Planet Report 2022

WWF’s Living Planet Report is out. They mean this at least in part as a report card on the UN’s “Decade on Biodiversity”, and the grade is a failing one. A few things caught my eye:

  • They have a discussion of “connectivity conservation”, which is intended to reduce fragmentation by connecting protected areas.
  • They determined there is an average 69% global decline in abundance of monitored vertebrate populations between 1970 and 2018. The situation in the tropics is much worse than this average.
  • Populations of corals and sharks in particular are crashing.
  • The “Amazon as we know it” may cease to exist in less than a decade.
  • They give an update on the global ecological footprint from the “National Footprint and Biocapacity Accounts, 2022 edition”. Maybe I’ll have a more detailed look at this another day. The value they give is in hectares per person and I find it hard to interpret given that the population is not constant. They seem most interested in showing that people in more developed countries are using more than their fair share of the planet’s “biocapacity”. Previously, I understood the unit to be the number of planet Earths needed to sustain humanity’s current level of consumption and waste production long-term. A value less than 1 would be sustainable long term, while a value greater than 1 indicates a drawdown of natural capital, creating a debt that will eventually come due.

IMF World Economic Outlook, October 2022

Here is what the IMF has to say, when we are in this weird time when pretty much anybody who wants a job can get one (in the U.S.), growth as measured by GDP is low or negative in the US and elsewhere, reported inflation is high but the shock has sort of worn off, and I can predict with total confidence that we may or may not be teetering on the edge of a recession, which if it happens might be either mild or severe and either short or long.

  • “Global growth is forecast to slow from 6.0 percent in 2021 to 3.2 percent in 2022 and 2.7 percent in 2023.”
  • “Global inflation is forecast to rise from 4.7 percent in 2021 to 8.8 percent in 2022 but to decline to 6.5 percent in 2023 and to 4.1 percent by 2024.”
  • If this forecast is wrong, it will probably be wrong on the “downside”. The long list of risks includes monetary policy not working, US dollar appreciation disrupting trade, energy and food price shocks, emerging market debt distress, natural gas supply shocks in Europe caused by the Russia-Ukraine war, a continuation of the last pandemic and/or a new pandemic, a bursting of the real estate bubble leading to a financial crisis in China, and “geopolitical fragmentation could impede trade and capital flows, further hindering climate policy cooperation”.
  • “successful multilateral cooperation will prevent fragmentation that could reverse the gains in economic well-being from 30 years of economic integration.”

I emphasized the word “will” above. Is that “will” like we think successful cooperation will happen, or “will” like if successful cooperation could somehow happen, then this positive outcome will happen. It’s hard to be optimistic these days. About the most optimistic thing I can say is that when almost everybody in the world is feeling pessimistic, maybe we have hit bottom and can start clawing our way back up.

Michael Vick was the most fun college football player to watch of all time

This isn’t the sort of thing I usually post, and there was the thing with the dogs later on, but what the heck, it’s football season and I am low on queued posts.

Here is Michael Vick as an Eagle in 2010. Unfortunately he didn’t look like this in every game as a pro player.

Twitter

But in college, he was just simply the most fun player to watch of all time, in my opinion. And I am not really a Virginia Tech partisan although there are a couple alums in the family.

I’ll vote for Joe Burrow as the second most fun college quarterback to watch of all time. And I am most definitely, most certainly not an LSU partisan. Those people are barely civilized down there, although they are certainly passionate.

human brain cells in rats

You wouldn’t necessarily get the idea from this Nature article that it is about implanting human brain cells in rats. But according to this (sensationalized?) article in Axios, that is exactly what it is about. The scientists are doing this to study diseases like autism that they can’t just study by growing human brain cells in a jar (which they have been doing for some time, apparently!).

Given all that, this is the paragraph that really caught my eye:

A current concern, though, is whether organoids might be transplanted to non-human primates. Paşca says there is no need: “It’s not something that we would do or that I would encourage doing.”

Axios

So it could be done then. And what can be done, Somebody somewhere will probably eventually do.

I have a childhood memory of seeing the Rats of Nimh on the big screen and being utterly terrified. By the Rats. Who were supposed to be the good guys in the story.

stagflation?

The new era of stagflation is here, according to Nouriel Roubini.

It is much harder to achieve a soft landing under conditions of stagflationary negative supply shocks than it is when the economy is overheating because of excessive demand. Since World War II, there has never been a case where the Fed achieved a soft landing with inflation above 5% (it is currently above 8%) and unemployment below 5% (it is currently 3.7%). And if a hard landing is the baseline for the United States, it is even more likely in Europe, owing to the Russian energy shock, China’s slowdown, and the ECB falling even further behind the curve relative to the Fed…

But US and global equities have not yet fully priced in even a mild and short hard landing. Equities will fall by about 30% in a mild recession, and by 40% or more in the severe stagflationary debt crisis that I have predicted for the global economy. Signs of strain in debt markets are mounting: sovereign spreads and long-term bond rates are rising, and high-yield spreads are increasing sharply; leveraged-loan and collateralized-loan-obligation markets are shutting down; highly indebted firms, shadow banks, households, governments, and countries are entering debt distress. The crisis is here.

Project Syndicate

But at the moment, pretty much everybody who wants a job can get one, whereas stagflation would imply high unemployment coupled with inflation that won’t go away.

So we will see what happens here. For people just a few years away from (planned) retirement, this must be nerve wracking. For those of us a decade or more away, we hope we can ride this one out (as the bumper sticker says, lord just give me one more bubble…). Or is this the one where we have a human-caused financial crisis, and then food supply and fires and floods and earthquakes and volcanoes and (nuclear) warfare prevent us from ever returning to the baseline? No, I’m not predicting that, but I think it is a possible outcome that we are not doing much to mitigate.

UN General Assembly to Scrutinize and Comment on Security Council

It’s easy to be cynical about the UN. Take this statement directly from the UN:

Russia on Friday vetoed a Security Council resolution which described its attempts to unlawfully annex four regions of Ukraine earlier in the day with a formal ceremony in Moscow, as “a threat to international peace and security”, demanding that the decision be immediately and unconditionally reversed…

Due to Russia’s veto, following a new procedure adopted in the UN General Assembly in April, the Assembly must now meet automatically within ten days for the 193-member body to scrutinize and comment on the vote. Any use of the veto by any of the Council’s five permanent members triggers a meeting…

“The Charter is clear”, said the UN chief. “Any annexation of a State’s territory by another State resulting from the threat or use of force is a violation of the Principles of the UN Charter”.

UN News

The UN clearly has no ability to enforce violations of its own charter by “permanent” members of its own Security Council. It’s easy to point to violations of the charter by at least 3 of the 5 permanent members (Russia, China, and the United States) that have gone unpunished. Fixing the UN would have to start with fixing the Security Council, and that is difficult because these permanent members are not about to give up any fraction of the the power they hold over the rest of the world. So you can either argue that the Security Council is too powerful or that it is powerless. Either way, it prevents the UN from accomplishing its own mission.

One of the clearest visions for how to fix the UN was articulated by Mikhail Gorbachev (may he rest in peace) in his “Westminster College speech” in 1992. Let’s have a look at that.

No, the idea that certain states or groups of states could monopolize the international arena is no longer valid. What is emerging is a more complex global structure of international relations. An awareness of the need for some kind of global government is gaining ground, one in which all members of the world community would take part. Events should not be allowed to develop spontaneously. There must be an adequate response to global changes and challenges. If we are to eliminate force and prevent conflicts from developing into a worldwide conflagration, we must seek means of collective action by the world community…

Nuclear and chemical weapons. Rigid controls must be instituted to prevent their proliferation, including enforcement measures in cases of violation. An agreement must be concluded among all presently nuclear states on procedures for cutting back on such weapons and liquidating them. Finally a world convention prohibiting chemical weapons should be signed.

The peaceful uses of nuclear energy. The powers of the IAEA must be strengthened, and it is imperative that all countries working in this area be included in the IAEA system. The procedures of the IAEA should be tightened up and the work performed in a more open and aboveboard manner. Under United Nations auspices a powerful consortium should be created to finance the modernization or liquidation of high-risk nuclear power stations, and also to store spent fuel. A set of world standards for nuclear power plants should be established. Work on nuclear fusion must be expanded and intensified.

The export of conventional weapons. Governmental exports of such weapons should be ended by the year 2000, and, in regions of armed conflict, it should be stopped at once. The illegal trade in such arms must be equated with international terrorism and the drug trade. With respect to these questions the intelligence services of the states which are permanent members of the Security Council should be coordinated. And the Security Council itself must be expanded, which I will mention in a moment.

Regional conflicts. Considering the impartially examined experience obtained in the Middle East, in Africa, in Southeast Asia, Korea, Yugoslavia, the Caucasus, and Afghanistan, a special body should be set up under the United Nations Security Council with the right to employ political, diplomatic, economic, and military means to settle and prevent such conflicts.

Human rights. The European process has officially recognized the universality of this common human value, i.e., the acceptability of international interference wherever human rights are being violated. This task is not easy even for states which signed the Paris Charter of 1990 and even less so for all states members of the United Nations. However, I believe that the new world order will not be fully realized unless the United Nations and its Security Council create structures (taking into consideration existing United Nations and regional structures) authorized to impose sanctions and to make use of other enforcement measures.

Food, population, economic assistance. It is no accident that these problems should be dealt with in this connection. Upon their solution depends the biological viability of the Earth’s population and the minimal social stability needed for a civilized existence of states and peoples. Major scientific, financial, political, and public organizations — among them, the authoritative Club of Rome — have long been occupied with these problems. However, the newly emerging type of international interaction will make possible a breakthrough in our practical approach to them. I would propose that next year a world conference be held on this subject, one similar to the forthcoming conference on the environment…

The United Nations, which emerged from the results and the lessons of the Second World War, is still marked by the period of its creation. This is true both with respect to the makeup of its subsidiary bodies and auxiliary institutions and with respect to its functioning. Nothing, for instance, other than the division into victors and vanquished, explains why such countries as Germany and Japan do not figure among the permanent members of the Security Council.

In general, I feel Article 53 on “enemy states” should be immediately deleted from the UN Charter. Also, the criterion of possession of nuclear weapons would be archaic in the new era before us. The great country of India should be represented in the Security Council. The authority and potential of the Council would also be enhanced by incorporation on a permanent basis of Italy, Indonesia, Canada, Poland, Brazil, Mexico, and Egypt, even if initially they do not possess the veto.

The Security Council will require better support, more effective and more numerous peace-keeping forces. Under certain circumstances it will be desirable to put certain national armed forces at the disposal of the Security Council, making them subordinate to the United Nations military command…

In a qualitatively new and different world situation the overwhelming majority of the United Nations will, I hope, be capable of organizing themselves and acting in concert on the principles of democracy, equality of rights, balance of interests, common sense, freedom of choice, and willingness to cooperate. Made wise by bitter experience, they will, I think, be capable of dispensing, when necessary, with egoistic considerations in order to arrive at the exalted goal which is man’s destiny on earth.

Mikhail Gorbachev, 1992

He also goes into climate change and limits to growth in this speech.

So how can we translate this vision to 2022? Well, it seems to need surprisingly little translation 30 years later. Maybe the United States could show real leadership on nuclear disarmament. Maybe the UN could offer civilian nuclear technology to any nation that agrees to permanently give up pursuit of nuclear weapons. This might require the IAEA to have an international security force with some real teeth. From there, it seems critical now to elevate biological weapons and pandemic preparedness to a similarly serious framework as nuclear weapons, since you can argue it represents an equally existential threat going forward.

The Security Council needs to expand, and the veto needs to go. This is obviously a really tough one. Or maybe each country’s veto needs to have a sunset date, and its renewal needs to be reviewed and approved by the General Assembly or a court of some sort based on the country’s record complying with the UN charter. What incentive could the current Security Council members be offered to accept this new arrangement? Hmm, this is a tough one that I will have to think more about. But one quick thought is that as the Security Council becomes increasingly ineffective and increasingly divorced from the UN’s mission, the prestige of being on it will continue to decrease. It seems like membership on the Security Council just means you are a militarily powerful bully able to get your way. And that is the exact opposite of what the UN is supposed to represent!