Category Archives: Year in Review

2010s: order of magnitude increase in renewable energy cost-effectiveness

This article in Project Syndicate presents the numbers on renewable energy cost-effectiveness for the decade.

The costs of solar and wind power have fallen more than 80% and 70%, respectively, while lithium-ion battery costs are down from $1,000 per kilowatt-hour in 2010 to $160 per kWh today. These and other breakthroughs guarantee that energy systems which are as much as 85% dependent on variable renewables could produce zero-carbon electricity at costs that are fully competitive with those of fossil-fuel-based systems.

Project Syndicate

the decade in cybersecurity and cyberwarfare

Wired goes over the major data breaches and cyber attacks of the decade. Huge amounts of data were stolen from both corporations and government agencies, but what really surprised me was the amount of actual cyber warfare between nation states.

  • Stuxnet – attack by U.S. and Israeli governments against Iran in 2010. One thing I didn’t know is this targeted industrial control software made by Siemens. So major industries are controlled by computers, and hacking can increasingly have real-world consequences.
  • Shamoon (2012) – attack by Iran against Saudi Aramco, “inspired” and possibly retaliation for the Stuxnet attack.
  • Sony (2014) – attack by North Korea against Sony in response to a movie depicting the assassination of a North Korean leader
  • Office of Personnel Management (2013-2014) – attack by Chinese government on the U.S. government. This was a massive information theft but was not intended to shut anything down.
  • Russia vs. Ukraine (2015-2016) – several attacks leading to blackouts and confusion coordinated with an actual military attack.
  • Shadow Brokers (2016-2017) – NSA malware stolen and released into the wild, probably by North Korean hackers. The most well-known one was ransomware “Wannacry” which disrupted major corporations including hospitals.
  • And of course, Russian propaganda and disinformation during the 2016 U.S. election.
  • NotPetya (2017) – this was Russian malware targeted at Ukraine, but so bad it affected computers around the world and blew back to affect Russia itself

a “decade of disillusion”?

According to Vice magazine, the 2010s were a “decade of disillusion”. The first article in the series covers how the world went from cautious optimism to something approaching giving up on climate change. Other articles cover how the decade “broke American politics”, the worsening inequality situation, and the opioid crisis.

2019 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing stories:

  • JANUARY: Writing in 1984, Isaac Asimov thought we would be approaching world peace, living lives of leisure, children would love school, and we would be mining the moon and manufacturing things in orbital factories by now.
  • FEBRUARY: Cyber-attacking may be a lot easier than cyber-defending. Also, nuclear proliferation is back partly thanks to diplomatic unforced errors by the United States.
  • MARCH: Invoking of emergency powers was the first step down the slippery slope for the democratic Weimar Republic. New research suggests that climate change can be the trigger that pushes a society over the edge.
  • APRIL: The most frightening and/or depressing story often involves nuclear weapons and/or climate change, because these are the near-term existential threats we face. Oliver Stone has added a new chapter to his 2012 book The Untold History of the United States making a case that we have lost serious ground on both these issues since then. In a somewhat related depressing story, the massive New Orleans levy redesign in response to Hurricane Katrina does not appear to have made use of the latest climate science.
  • MAY: Without improvements in battery design, the demand for materials needed to make the batteries might negate the environmental benefits of the batteries. I’m not really all that frightened or depressed about this because I assume designs will improve. Like I said, it was slim pickings this month.
  • JUNE: The world economy appears to be slowing, even though U.S. GDP is growing as the result of the post-2007 recovery finally taking hold, juiced by a heavy dose of pro-cyclical government spending. The worry is that if and when there is eventually a shock to the system, there will be little room for either fiscal or monetary policy to respond. Personally, the partisan in me is thinking any time before November 2020 is as good a time for any for a recession to hit the U.S. I am a couple decades from retirement, and picturing that bumper sticker “Lord, Just Give Me One More Bubble”. Of course, this is selfish thinking when there are many people close to retirement and many families struggling to get by out there. And short-term GDP growth is not the only metric. The U.S. is falling behind its developed peers on a wide range of metrics that matter to people lives, including infrastructure, health care costs and outcomes, life expectancy, maternal and infant mortality, addiction, suicide, poverty, and hunger. And it’s not just that we are no longer in the lead on these metrics, we are below average and falling. Which is why I am leading the charge to Make America Average Again!
  • JULY: The water situation in India, and the major city of Chennai in particular, sounds really bad.
  • AUGUST: Drought is a significant factor causing migration from Central America to the United States. Drought in the Mekong basin may put the food supply for a billion people in tropical Asia at risk. One thing that can cause drought is deliberately lying to the public for 50 years while materially changing the atmosphere in a way that enriches a wealthy few at everyone else’s expense. Burning what is left of the Amazon can’t help. 
  • SEPTEMBER: Being a TSA air marshal may be the worst job ever.
  • OCTOBER: A third of all of North America’s birds may have disappeared since the 1970s. (Truth be told, it was hard to pick a single most depressing story line in a month when I covered propaganda, pandemic, new class divisions created by genetic engineering, and nuclear war. But while those are scary risks for the near future, it appears the world is right in the middle of an ongoing and obvious ecological collapse, and not talking much about it.)
  • NOVEMBER: The Darling, a major river system in Australia, has essentially dried up.
  • DECEMBER: Pilots occasionally go crazy and crash planes on purpose.

Most hopeful stories:

  • JANUARY: The dream of fusion power is not dead. There is even some hope of new advancements in fission power.
  • FEBRUARY: Here is the boringly simple western European formula for social and economic success: “public health care, nearly free university education, stronger progressive taxation, higher minimum wages, and inclusion of trade unions in corporate decision-making.” There’s even a glimmer of hope that U.S. politicians could manage to put some of these ideas into action. Seriously, I’m trying hard not to be cynical.
  • MARCH: The Green New Deal, if fleshed out into a serious plan, has potential to slow or reverse the decline of the United States.
  • APRIL: There is forward progress on a male birth control pill.
  • MAY: Planting native plants in your garden really can make a difference for biodiversity.
  • JUNE: There have been a number of serious proposals and plans for disarmament and world peace in the past, even since World War II. We have just forgotten about them or never heard of them.
  • JULY: Deliberate practice is how you get better at something.
  • AUGUST: I explored an idea for automatic fiscal stabilizers as part of a bold infrastructure investment plan. I’m not all that hopeful but a person can dream.
  • SEPTEMBER: I think Elizabeth Warren has a shot at becoming the U.S. President, and of the candidates she and Bernie Sanders understand the climate change problem best. This could be a plus for the world. I suggested an emergency plan for the U.S. to deal with climate change: Focus on disaster preparedness and disaster response capabilities, the long term reliability and stability of the food system, and tackle our systemic corruption problems. I forgot to mention coming up with a plan to save our coastal cities, or possibly save most of them while abandoning portions of some of them in a gradual, orderly fashion. By the way, we should reduce carbon emissions and move to clean energy, but these are more doing our part to try to make sure the planet is habitable a century from now, while the other measures I am suggesting are true emergency measures that have to start now if we are going to get through the next few decades.
  • OCTOBER: I’ll go with hard shell tacos. They are one of the good things in this life, whether they are authentic Mexican food or “trailer park cuisine” as I tagged the story! 
  • NOVEMBER: There is progress on carbon capture technology. Also, just restoring soil on previously degraded farm and grazing land could provide large benefits worldwide. There may also be real progress on fusion power.
  • DECEMBER: Deep inside me is a little boy who still likes bugs, and I spotted some cool bugs in my 2019 garden, including endangered Monarch butterflies. So at least I made that small difference for biodiversity in a small urban garden, and others can do the same.

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

  • JANUARY: Some in the U.S. Senate and military take UFOs seriously.
  • FEBRUARY: We could theoretically create a race of humans with Einstein-level intelligence using in-vitro fertilization techniques available today. They might use their intelligence to create even smarter artificial intelligence which would quickly render them (not to mention, any ordinary average intelligence humans) obsolete.
  • MARCH: China is looking into space-based solar arrays. Also, injecting sulfate dust into the atmosphere could actually boost rice yields because rice is more sensitive to temperature than light, at least within the ranges studied. This all suggests that solutions to climate change that do not necessarily involve an end to fossil fuel burning and carbon emissions are possible with existing or very near future technology.
  • APRIL: Genetic engineering of humans might have to play a big role in eventual colonization of other planets, because the human body as it now exists may just not be cut out for long space journeys. In farther future space colonization news, I linked to a video about the concept of a “Dyson swarm“.
  • MAY: Joseph Stiglitz suggested an idea for a “free college” program where college is funded by a progressive tax on post-graduation earnings.
  • JUNE: In technology news, Elon Musk is planning to launch thousands of satellites. And I learned a new acronym, DARQ: “distributed ledger technology (DLT), artificial intelligence (AI), extended reality (XR) and quantum computing”. And in urban planning news, I am sick and tired of the Dutch just doing everything right.
  • JULY: I laid out the platform for my non-existent Presidential campaign.
  • AUGUST: Liquid hydrogen could theoretically be used as a jet fuel.
  • SEPTEMBER: I mentioned an article by a Marine special operator (I didn’t even know those existed) on how to fix a broken organizational culture: acknowledge the problem, employ trusted agents, rein in cultural power brokers, win the population.
  • OCTOBER: A list of “jobs of the future” includes algorithms, automation, and AI; customer experience; environmental; fitness and wellness; health care; legal and financial services; transportation; and work culture. I’ll oversimplify this list as computer scientist, engineer, doctor, lawyer, banker, which don’t sound all that different than the jobs of the past. But it occurs to me that these are jobs where the actual tools people are using and day-to-day work tasks evolve with the times, even if the intended outcomes are basically the same. What might be new is that even in these jobs, you need to make an effort to keep learning every day throughout your career and life if you want to keep up.
  • NOVEMBER: Google claims to have achieved “quantum supremacy“. This may allow us all to live lives of Fully Automated Luxury Communism.
  • DECEMBER: Estonia is supposedly the most digitally advanced country in the world. Finland has posted a free AI literacy course.

I want to give the reader some brilliant synthesis of all that, but you could probably go back to my past year in review posts and find that I am saying pretty much the same things each year. Well, here goes.

There is a list of serious risks that are being acknowledged but not effectively addressed. These include climate change, nuclear war, drought, rainforest loss, loss of freedom and human rights, economic recession, cyberwarfare, and automation leading to job loss. Climate change, drought, and rainforest loss are clearly intertwined. Solutions are largely known and just not being implemented due to dysfunctional politics at the national level and lack of international cooperation. These trends seem to be going in the wrong direction at the moment unfortunately.

Other than rainforest loss, the ongoing catastrophic loss of biodiversity, biomass and ecosystem function is mostly not even being acknowledged, let alone addressed. Biodiversity is a somewhat esoteric concept to most people, but hearing about mammals and birds and even insects just vanishing on a mass scale really starts to get to me emotionally. I don’t hear others in my social circles talking about these issues much, so I wonder if they just haven’t heard the same facts and figures I have or if they just don’t have the same response. Politicians are certainly not talking about these issues.

The risk of catastrophic war is very real. The world is in a very cynical place right now, but we have made progress on this before and we can do it again.

Recession and automation have an interesting relationship, where recession is a short- to medium-term reversal of economic growth, and automation, at least in theory, should lead to a longer-term acceleration of it. Of course, even if the acceleration happens it will benefit the majority of workers only if the wealth is shared. I’ll just repeat what I said above: “Here is the boringly simple western European formula for social and economic success: “public health care, nearly free university education, stronger progressive taxation, higher minimum wages, and inclusion of trade unions in corporate decision-making.” Or just copy the Dutch because they seem to know what they’re doing, the smug bastards.

You could accuse my blog of being US-centric, and I would accept that criticism. I am living in the US after all. I’ve lived and worked abroad though, and came to appreciate the strengths of my country more when I spent some time away from it. The US is still a good country to live in as a middle class professional person, but we are cruising along on the momentum of our past extraordinary success. We have lost momentum and begun to slip not only out of the leadership position among our developed country peers, but below the middle of the pack. The hard evidence on this is clear. We have politicians that just tell us that we are “great again”, because that is what we want to hear, without taking any necessary steps that would at least help us to keep up. 2020 is an election year and we have a chance to make some changes. We need to deal first and foremost with our systemic corruption problem which causes our government to respond to wealthy and powerful interests rather than citizens. We need real, inspiring, once-in-a-generation leadership to make this happen. I have decided to support Bernie Sanders for this reason, even though I don’t agree with every one of his stated policy positions.

There are some interesting and even astonishing technologies in the list above, from fusion power to micro-satellites to quantum computing to genetic engineering. It is 2020 after all.

And finally, when I’m not thinking and worrying about the world at large, I’ll be tending to my garden and my family and eating my hard shell tacos, and reminding myself that life here in the United States on the planet Earth is actually pretty good.

urban technologies of the twenteens

Curbed has a list of 10 technologies that affected cities over the last decade: Uber, bike and scooter sharing apps, Airbnb, Instagram, Amazon, WeWork, Waze, Grubhub, and Pokemon Go. I’ve used 5 out of 10, 6 out of 10 if you count the bike sharing app I have used that is a little different than the one they cover. The tone of the article is negative, but if I think back, these technologies have improved my life on balance. I moved close to my job in a walkable city in 2004. At the time, I had one smallish grocery store to choose from (which was great, because many neighborhoods had none). I could rely on taxis around the central city and to and from the airport, but visiting friends outside the city was a problem. I biked for recreation, but didn’t ride to work because I was afraid my bike would be stolen. (I was also afraid of safety – I might nominate improved adoption of bike lanes in U.S. cities as an important urban technology of the last 10 years. Although it’s certainly not new technology, the U.S. has been very slow to adopt and there has been a lot more progress in the last decade than before. There is certainly a long way to go.) I don’t know if I would have managed to stay car-free with two children if it weren’t for ride share, grocery and takeout delivery. These have made a big difference both because of the transportation issue and the tremendous time savings these apps can offer working parents. I tried Instagram once for a project where I was going to document 100 buses running 100 red lights, but a Russian hacker took over my site within days. I am curious about WeWork. I understand their business model hasn’t worked out, but the idea of flexible work spaces as work becomes less tied to physical location (I would nominate Skype and other video and screen sharing apps as critical technology too) appeals to me. I could even see similar concepts working for students and even retirees wanting to get out of the house and pursue various projects for a few hours.

2019 garden retrospective

A retrospective on my 2019 garden may not be of great interest to anyone but me, but here it is for my future reference.

My gardening philosophy is basically to try to design a diverse ecosystem that can take care of itself with just a little nudging from me. Every plant should be useful to me in some way, useful to wildlife in some way (which generally means natives), or preferably both. Aesthetics come last, but I find that a diverse array of useful plants arranged in a gently guided ecosystem tends to be interesting at a minimum, and beautiful at best. Sterile, ornamental plants are pretty boring to me. I’ve been influenced by the permaculture and native plant movements, among other things. Anyway, here we go…

what did well this year:

  • My 4-year-old Asian pear tree grew a pretty impressive crop of fruit. The final score? Squirrels – 20 or so, humans – 0. But nonetheless, the tree seems to be doing well. My 3-year-old Asian persimmon tree grew its first persimmon. The final score? Squirrels – 1, humans 0.
  • Spring color – violets, dandelions, chives. These are all common plants that a lot of my neighbors probably consider weeds. But they add up to some nice color right when you need it in the spring. I also have a nice carpet of green and gold, a nursery-grown cultivar of a native species listed as threatened in Pennsylvania. All but the green and gold are edible if I am so inclined, and all are tough competitors that can hold their own against the urban weeds.
  • Milkweeds are everywhere. Particularly butterfly milkweed, which has some really cool orange flowers. But also common milkweed, which I don’t plant on purpose but leave alone whenever and wherever it decides to crop up. And the monarchs did indeed make an appearance.
  • Anise hyssop, beebalm, and mountain mint all are doing well without getting completely out of control. These are attracting a ton of pollinators, particularly bumblebees.
monarch butterfly, Black-eyed Susan and butterfly milkweed

too much of a good thing?

  • fennel – When I planted a few fennel plants from the farmer’s market a few years ago, I didn’t really understand that it was a different thing than dill, specifically a perennial that comes back year after year from the root, spreads aggressively by seed, and is hard to dig up. Don’t get me wrong – it’s an attractive plant, looks and smells nice for most of the year, attracts a ton of pollinators and caterpillars, and is edible from root to stem to leaf although I haven’t availed myself of it much. It’s just becoming a thicket that I will need to start limiting next year.
  • lemon balm – This is attractive, out-competes weeds and is nice in tea. It’s tough enough that it is starting to invade a lot of my ground covers and out-compete other desirable plants, however. I may have to start limiting it.
  • Black-eyed Susans – These are in two big clumps and looked absolutely fantastic in mid- to late-summer. They are expanding and aggressively out-competing other plants so I may need to limit them if I don’t want a garden of nothing but Black-eyed Susans. Pollinators love them, but so, surprisingly, do mice. After gorging themselves on Black-eyed Susan seeds, sure enough the mice came in at the first sign of frost to hang out in my nice warm kitchen.
  • garlic (Chinese) chives – These are nice-looking, grassy, edible, beloved of pollinators and also spiders and predatory insects that like to eat pollinators. They are aggressive enough that they are spreading into groundcovers in the front of the garden, and I kind of wish I had planted them in the back.
  • Sunchokes – planted four little raisin-sized tubers in a desperate bid to block a neighbor’s plants from invading. They took a long time to sprout, but just when I had written them off as either DOA or eaten by the squirrels – boom! in the space of a week or two my living fence popped up. They did exactly what they were supposed to do, creating a biological moat that nothing could cross, and attracting lots of bees and butterflies. I didn’t try digging up and eating any but I know that is a possibility. I have seen them get aggressive elsewhere so I will have to keep an eye on them.
caterpillars munching on the fennel thicket – probably black swallowtails although I’m not sure why these two look different
black swallowtail hanging out on the neighbor’s ornamental grass, persimmon leaves in the foreground

desirable species still there but not competing well

  • white clover – Surprisingly, it is there but unobtrusive. This is okay with me, and I don’t plan to add or subtract any, just let it do what it is going to do.
  • chicory – I think it is there, but it wasn’t distinguishable from the dandelions this year and didn’t put up any flower stalks. Perhaps it has a biennial habit and will be back next year. Most people consider this a weed but I think it is cool, and another plant that I don’t get around to eating but take some pleasure in knowing I could.
  • miner’s lettuce – I left this for dead seasons ago but one sad little plant did pop up. It disappeared again shortly due to whatever animal it is that likes to dig at night in that particular part of the garden.
  • wild strawberries and garden strawberries – The problem here is not animals, but friendly, well-intentioned human neighbors who keep pulling what they are certain are “weeds”. Well, they never get all the roots and the strawberries will be back. They are in a losing battle with the Black-eyed Susans however and may need some help even if I can get the neighbors to leave them alone.

what didn’t make it

  • French sorrel – I had a healthy clump of this for several years and it was just nowhere to be found this year. I’m not sure I will miss it.
  • prairie smoke – This was something I was enticed to plant by a nursery catalog. It didn’t survive the digging animals.
  • cucumbers – They are supposed to be easy, but I planted some and they either didn’t sprout or withered and died before I could even be sure they were there. They were hard to distinguish from the pumpkins.

problem species

  • ornamental ground covers and grasses. The neighbors tend to like these, or in some cases neighbors from years or decades gone by liked them. It’s a forever war.
  • general urban weeds – the trick is keeping them under control March-June. If you do this, your desired plants can take over and out-compete them by mid-summer on.
  • mosquitoes – I use bacillus thuringiensis and try to avoid all standing water. It doesn’t matter. By June on they are out there and just vicious. I don’t want to use harsher chemicals so we rely on insect repellant.

notable sitings

  • monarchs, as I mentioned earlier. Other butterflies too, particularly black swallowtails which love the fennel, parsely and celery, and yellow swallowtails which like some of the neighbors bushes. These last two aren’t rare but give no end of pleasure to kids and the young-at-heart.
  • praying mantises, both the native Carolina mantis and the introduced (but still cool) Chinese mantis. The native mantis liked to hang out on my introduced Chinese chives, so go figure. But when the Chinese chives flowered, they attracted a ton of little flies and wasps which were probably easy pickings. The Chinese mantis liked to climb my house. I can’t explain that one, unless it was for the warmth of the bricks.
Carolina mantis hanging out upside down on garlic chives
Chinese mantis climbing my house

the pots

  • Asian yard-long beans – these are prolific, interesting, and delicious.
  • Thai sweet basil and holy basil – these are beautiful, delicious and tough. We cook with them all summer. Leave italian basil alone in the sun for one mid-summer weekend and it is done, but the Thai version can handle the heat no problem and bounce back from a dry spell within reason.

interesting volunteers and self-seeders

  • Virginia creeper – it’s native so I let it go
  • Thai chillis – didn’t plant them but got lots of them, probably from the compost. They are so spicy they grew more than we could ever practically eat.
  • sweet peppers – didn’t plant these but got some, most likely just from last year’s kitchen scraps thrown in the compost. They were good, and there was no sign of cross pollination with the hot peppers.
  • pumpkins – probably because I tossed the previous year’s Halloween pumpkin in the compost. I thinned to just one per half barrel out front, but still they got massive. They flowered but didn’t set any fruit.
  • celery – planted last year because I mistook them for flat-leafed parsley. Self-seeded. The black swallowtails like them.
  • parsley – the curly-leaf kind. Survives the winter and self-seeds. A surprisingly tough competitor in the urban garden.

So that is the gardening year that was. Kind of sad when everything is so brown and lifeless now. But that is how the seasons, and eventually years and decades, go by. I mulched the trees with a summer’s worth of coffee grounds, kitchen scraps and garden trimmings today, and the kids helped me sweep up the leaves and put them in the compost for next year’s garden.

I’ll give some thought to new things I want to try in the 2020 garden sometime soon.

best urban planning books of 2019

Planetizen blog puts this out every year. Here are a few that caught my eye:

  • Better Buses, Better Cities. I ride buses a lot. I wouldn’t mind knowing more about best practices in running a bus authority. I would miss them if they went away in my city, but I also know they could be a lot better. I’m talking to you, Southeast Pennsylvania Transportation Authority.
  • Cities, the First 6,000 Years. It sounds like this book goes into ancient cities and how they functioned on the ground.
  • Choked: Life and Death in the Age of Air Pollution. Because it’s possible that if we tackled only one environmental issue in cities, this should be it. Solving air pollution would be a huge gain for public health in itself and would force us to make progress on a lot of other problems.
  • Soft City: Building Density for Everyday Life. Because the pictures look really cool, and coming back from a European city and telling your friends in words how much better it is than our cities just doesn’t cut it. They just need to go there. But a book with really cool cartoons of European cities might be an affordable start.
  • Vancouverism. It’s about Vancouver. Actually, I don’t know that I am likely to read this. But I have heard good things, have never been, and would like to go. I’ve also heard that housing prices are a problem there. But I’m going to state the inconvenient truth: most U.S. cities are not that great. Cities that are great are in very short supply, and thus the wealthy bid up prices there until only they are able to live there. So let’s build more cities that are at least good.

“climate emergency” and “global heating”

The Oxford Dictionary has announced that “climate emergency” is the word of 2019. “Global heating” was a close runner up. They also explain why each of these can be considered “a word”.

Such multipart constructions, like “heart attack”, “man-of-war” or the 2017 American Dialect Society word of the year “fake news”, are commonly accepted by linguists as words.

Oxford Dictionaries

2018 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing stories:

  • JANUARY: Cape Town, South Africa looked to be in imminent danger of running out of water. They got lucky, but the question is whether this was a case of serious mismanagement or an early warning sign of water supply risk due to climate change. Probably a case of serious mismanagement of the water supply while ignoring the added risk due to climate change. Longer term, there are serious concerns about snowpack-dependent water supplies serving large urban populations in Asia and western North America.
  • FEBRUARY: Cape Town will probably not be the last major city to run out of water. The other cities at risk mentioned in this article include Sao Paulo, Bangalore, Beijing, Cairo, Jakarta, Moscow, Istanbul, Mexico City, London, Tokyo, and Miami.
  • MARCH: One reason propaganda works is that even knowledgeable people are more likely to believe a statement the more often it is repeated.
  • APRIL: That big California earthquake is still coming.
  • MAY: The idea of a soft landing where absolute dematerialization of the economy reduces our ecological footprint and sidesteps the consequences of climate change through innovation without serious pain may be wishful thinking.
  • JUNE: The Trump administration is proposing to subsidize coal-burning power plants. Meanwhile the long-term economic damage expected from climate change appears to be substantial. For one thing, Hurricanes are slowing down, which  means they can do more damage in any one place. The rate of melting in Antarctic ice sheets is accelerating.
  • JULY: The UN is warning as many as 10 million people in Yemen could face starvation by the end of 2018 due to the military action by Saudi Arabia and the U.S. The U.S. military is involved in combat in at least 8 African countries. And Trump apparently wants to invade Venezuela.
  • AUGUST: Noam Chomsky doesn’t love Trump, but points out that climate change and/or nuclear weapons are still existential threats and that more mainstream leaders and media outlets have failed just as miserably to address them as Trump has. In related news, the climate may be headed for a catastrophic tipping point and while attention is mostly elsewhere, a fundamentalist takeover of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is still one of the more serious risks out there.
  • SEPTEMBER: A huge earthquake in the Pacific Northwest could be by far the worst natural disaster ever seen.
  • OCTOBER: The Trump administration has slashed funding to help the U.S. prepare for the next pandemic.
  • NOVEMBER: About half a million people have been killed in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan since the U.S. invasions starting in 2001. This includes only people killed directly by violence, not disease, hunger, thirst, etc.
  • DECEMBER: Climate change is just bad, and the experts seem to keep revising their estimates from bad to worse. The Fourth National Climate Assessment produced by the U.S. government is not an uplifting publication. In addition to the impacts of droughts, storms, and fires, it casts some doubt on the long-term security of the food supply. An article in Nature was also not uplifting, arguing that climate change is happening faster than expected due to a combination of manmade and natural trends.

Climate change, nuclear weapons, and pandemics. If I go back and look at last year’s post, this list of existential threats is going to be pretty much the same. Add to this the depressing grind of permanent war which magnifies these risks and diverts resources that could be used to deal with them. True, we could say that we got through 2018 without a nuclear detonation, pandemic, or ecological collapse, and under the circumstances we should sit back, count our blessings, and wait for better leadership. And while our leadership is particularly inept at the moment, I think Noam Chomsky has a point that political administration after political administration has failed to solve these problems and this seems unlikely to improve. The earthquake risk is particularly troublesome. Think about the shock we felt over the inept response to Katrina, and now think about how essentially the same thing happened in Puerto Rico, we are not really dealing with it in an acceptable way, and the public and news media have essentially just shrugged it off and moved on. If the hurricanes, floods, fires and droughts just keep hitting harder and more often, and we don’t fully respond to one before the next hits, it could mean a slow downward spiral. And if that means we gradually lose our ability to bounce back fully from small and medium size disasters, a truly huge disaster like an epic earthquake on the west coast might be the one that pushes our society to a breaking point.

Most hopeful stories:

I believe our children are our future…ya ya blahda blahda. It’s a huge cliche, and yet to be hopeful about our world I have to have some hope that future generations can be better system thinkers and problem solvers and ethical actors than recent generations have been. Because despite identifying problems and even potential solutions we are consistently failing to make choices as a society that could divert us from the current failure path. And so I highlighted a few stories above about ideas for better preparing future generations, ranging from traditional school subjects like reading and music, to more innovative ones like meditation and general system theory, and just maybe we should be open to the idea that the right amount of the right drugs can help.

Fossil fuels just might be on their way out, as alternatives start to become economical and public outrage slowly, almost imperceptibly continues to build.

There is real progress in the fight against disease, which alleviates enormous quantities of human suffering. I mention AIDS, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s disease above. We can be happy about that, of course. There are ideas about how to grow more food, which is going to be necessary to avoid enormous quantities of human suffering. Lest anyone think otherwise, my position is that we desperately need to reduce our ecological footprint, but human life is precious and nobody deserves to suffer illness or hunger.

Good street design that lets people get around using mostly their own muscle power. It might not be sexy, but it is one of the keys to physical and mental health, clean air and water, biodiversity, social and economic vibrancy in our cities. Come to think of it, I take that back, it can be sexy if done well.

Good street design and general systems theory – proof that solutions exist and we just don’t recognize or make use of them. Here’s where I want to insert a positive sentence about how 2019 is the year this all changes for the better. Well, sorry, you’ll have to find someone less cynical than me, and/or with much better powers of communication and persuasion than me to get the ball rolling. On the off chance I have persuaded you, and you have communication and/or persuasion super powers, let me know.

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

Whatever else happens, technology and accumulation of human knowledge in general march on, of course. Computer, robotics, and surveillence technology march on. The human move into space is much slower and painful than many would have predicted half a century ago, and yet it is proceeding.

I’ll never drop the waterless sanitation thing, no matter how much others make fun of me. It’s going to happen, eventually. I don’t know whether we will colonize Mars or stop defecating in our water supply first, but both will happen.

The gene drive thing is really wild the more I think about it. This means we now have the ability to identify a species or group of species we don’t want to exist, then cause it not to exist in relatively short order. This seems like it could be terrifying in the wrong hands, doesn’t it? I’m not even sure I buy into the idea that rats and mosquitoes have no positive ecological functions at all. Aren’t there bats and birds that rely on mosquitoes as a food source? Okay, I’m really not sure what redeeming features rats have, although I did read a few years ago that in a serious food crunch farming rats would be a much more efficient way of turning very marginal materials into edible protein than chicken.

The universe in a bottle thing is mind blowing if you spend too much time thinking about it. It could just be bottles all the way down. It’s best not to spend too much time thinking about it.

That’s it, Happy 2019!