Tag Archives: climate change

Global Environmental Outlook 7

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The UN has a new UN-speak report on what we need to do to fix the global environment. The simplest take-home message is an economic one – the benefits greatly exceed the costs, but it requires up-front investment blah blah blah. UN-speak is off-putting to many, so talented politicians and other leaders need to translate it to platforms and policies that speak to us, and then do it. There’s a full report, an executive summary, and key messages from the executive summary. I’ll highlight just a few actions here in my own words:

  • Eliminate environmentally harmful subsidies in the energy, food, and mining industries.
  • Internalize external costs – the good old “Pigouvian taxes” that raise revenue and/or encourage behavior, and we win either way.
  • Alternative/supplemental measures of progress besides GDP
  • Circular economy – recycling and reducing waste
  • Renewable energy phase-in and fossil fuel phase-out
  • Electrify everything – transportation, manufacturing, housing/buildings, and agriculture

Nature-based solutions and conservation of natural ecosystems seem to be important things missing from from this list, but those are in other reports of course. Still, I find it strange to make a distinction between “ecosystems” and the “environment”.

Are we forgetting about robots? (or Brute’, where are you when we need you?)

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In fast-moving current events as I write on March 15, 2026, the illegal, unauthorized by any legislative body international or domestic, unprovoked US sneak attack on Iran continues to rage. I’ll leave further commentary to others except to say that, in totally unrelated news here on this Ides of March, remember it was SENATORS who had the guts to stab Caesar and try to save the Republic (which didn’t work all that well in the end.)]

Here are a couple headlines we could classify as “things China is doing well”.

China’s Clean Energy Push Has Made It Less Vulnerable to Energy Shocks, Including the Iran War [Is this not obvious? The US could be focusing on ramping up proven technology like electrification of all buildings and transportation, energy efficiency, renewable energy, and battery technology while also funding “moon shot” R&D in areas like materials science and nuclear fusion. We could also be using fission energy and, I hate to say it, domestic fossil fuel production as a bridge to get us over the hump while we scale up in these other areas. If the whole world were doing this we wouldn’t be so dependent on boats moving liquefied dinosaur turds through one little war-torn (by choice of the fools claiming to lead the US government) inlet.]

How China’s AI-Powered Robots Could Reshape the Global Order [Now that disembodied AI has became mainstream, the next somewhat obvious step is to get the AI brains into robots.]

February 2026 in Review

In fast-moving current events as I write on March 1, 2026, the United States (executive branch, which is unconstrained in this moment by the other supposedly co-equal branches or public opinion) has launched an unprovoked military attack on Iran, in crystal clear violation of the UN Charter and domestic law. Theoretically, there are mechanisms both international (International Criminal Court) and domestic (impeachment – which can apply to cabinet members, agency heads, and federal judges in addition to the President and Vice President; and court martial which applies to military officers who follow illegal orders) that could eventually hold the criminals involved accountable for their crimes. Lots of people have lots to say and we will see how this unfolds. I am just documenting that I am present at this particularly sad moment in history.

Most frightening and/or depressing story: I hadn’t heard of mirror life, technology we apparently have right now which can destroy all life on Earth. This new, shocking, theoretically existential threat narrowly edged out the usual stream of depressing climate disaster news, the existential threat known to be currently unfolding, but which I suppose I am somewhat desensitized to.

Most hopeful story: Falling consumer prices in China might represent a new industrial revolution analogous to the age of railroads and electricity in the west in the late 1800s, rather than a textbook financial recession which seems to be the (propaganda-tainted?) conventional wisdom. I put this in the win column because if it is true, I am hopeful we will see it spread peacefully to the rest of the world rather than representing a threat.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Ray Kurzweil predicts broad consensus that Artificial General Intelligence has arrived by 2029 (defined as AI equal to the leading experts in all fields), “longevity escape velocity” in 2032 (which would reverse the US slipping in recent decades), universal basic income in the U.S. sometime in the 2030s, and the Singularity in 2045 (defined as 1000X human intelligence – always pronounced TIMES according to me), but most importantly and the only thing that truly matters, robots doing my dishes in a couple years.

lies, lies, and more lies to the U.S. public about greenhouse gas emissions

The “endangerment finding” through the Clean Air Act may not have been the ideal way to incentivize clean energy technology in our country. But it was one dial we had to turn, and now it has been turned back. This is just a temporary giveaway to the short-term interests of corporate donors in the automobile and fossil fuel industries. In the case of the auto industry, it is not in their long term interests to subsidize inefficient outdated technology, then use propaganda to swindle the public. The lie about “affordability” is particularly egregious.

Affordable vehicle ownership is essential to the American Dream and a primary driver of economic mobility out of poverty in the United States. The Endangerment Finding led to vehicle and engine regulations with an aggregate cost of more than $1 trillion and played a significant role in EPA’s justification of regulations of other sources beyond cars and trucks, resulting in additional costly burdens on American families and businesses. Americans rely on vehicles to reach jobs, education, health care, and essential services. This is especially true in rural areas and regions without robust public transit. The costs imposed by these climate policies have placed new cars out of reach for many American families and harmed Americans’ ability to climb out of poverty or reach essential services. The Trump EPA is expected to deliver Americans over $1.3 trillion in cost savings, which includes reduced costs for new vehicles and avoided costs of purchasing equipment related to EVs. This action will result in an average cost savings of over $2,400 per vehicle. By lowering vehicle and regulatory compliance costs, EPA is improving affordability and expanding consumer choice and ultimately advancing the American Dream by making it easier to reach jobs, grow small businesses, and participate fully in the transportation and logistics systems that power the U.S. economy.

Here is what Gemini has to say about this. And the analysis below is true in the United States. In China, most new vehicles being sold are electric and you can buy one for $10,000. We are being lied to, and as we have withdrawn even more from the world, we are even less aware what is going on elsewhere, but still U.S. consumers are intelligent enough that we will catch on even if there is some delay. Our legacy auto companies will fail again and again, and eventually need to be bailed out again and again, until eventually the economics of electrification is just too obvious to lie about and get away with it.

While the sticker price of an EV is typically higher, the savings in fuel and maintenance usually “pay back” that difference within 3 to 7 years. By the time a car reaches the end of its life, an EV owner in the U.S. has typically saved between $6,000 and $11,000 compared to a gas-car owner. [generated by Gemini]

There’s another sleight of hand. There is rock solid scientific and economic work showing the costs of air pollution, and here I am talking about good old fashioned toxic smoke from factories and tail pipes. There is also solid (but controversial) economic work over decades quantifying the economic value that people place on a year of worker life. For example, a construction worker on a roof might get paid more than one doing the same job on the ground, because there is a greater statistical risk of death on the roof. Aggregate these numbers over many workers, jobs, and time, and you can say the “value of a statistical life” is a certain number of dollars. It seems cold, but it provides a sound data point when a new regulation with some cost is being considered. Put these two things together and you have the scientific and economic basis to compare the costs and benefits of a policy decision. This is old school environmental economics and really a basis for some pretty conservative policy because you are acknowledging it may be rational to sacrifice some human health and life for economic production. And we are not really assigning the environment any intrinsic value in this equation, unless knowing the environment is a little better brings people some pleasure which some value can be placed on, which economists sometimes try. Of course, real world policy decisions are some combination of science, economics, and politics, as they probably should be in a democracy. But what the EPA has recently suggested it is prepared to do is set the value of a statistical life to zero when analyzing costs and benefits of air pollution. [See pp. 214-217 of the document I link to above. I acknowledge this not a crystal clear policy directive, then again, it may be intentionally buried to try to avoid scrutiny, when in fact if you dig deeper EPA is departing from official directives of the federal government, including the President’s own Office of Management and Budget.] In other words, they propose to assume the cost of pollution is zero. This is wrong, fake, naked propaganda! Their policies are killing us AND stealing our money. It is time to get rid of these immoral people claiming to lead us.

more on how tipping points could unfold

I’ve suggested that the climate tipping point might only be called in retrospect, and that the year we pick might be 2025. Not because it can be pin-pointed that precisely, but because if we decide in retrospect that the 2020s were about when it happened, that will be a nice round number to pick.

Here is one scenario from OneEarth journal on what a cascade of tipping points could look like.

The risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory

Warming from greenhouse gas emissions accelerates Arctic sea ice and Greenland Ice Sheet loss, reducing albedo and adding meltwater that weakens the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). A weakened AMOC shifts tropical rainfall patterns, increasing drought risk and potential dieback in the northern Amazon forest, further amplifying global warming through the feedback involving carbon loss. Note that once one tipping point is crossed, it will likely impact the timing and temperature thresholds for other tipping points.

January 2026 in Review

Well, I seemed to be in a political mood in January. I try to stay on the policy side of the line, but that is hard when bad politics makes good policy impossible. Inspired by a Nate Silver post, I took a look back at what I see as key moments in the last 25 years of U.S. history, and there were just so many that were on a knife edge and ended up going the wrong way, in my view. Maybe there are other universes where things went better, but remember my scientific theory that once they make a Spiderman movie about a scientific theory, it is almost certainly wrong. I find it depressing how we got here, but there is no sense crying over it. We need to learn from the past yes, but then face up to the present moment and start picking up the pieces from where we are.

Most frightening and/or depressing story: Evidence is crystal clear that sabotaging R&D spending is a very effective way to sabotage economic growth and progress. Attaboy to the fools, assholes and traitors currently in nominal charge of the U.S. government. Meanwhile, if a more rational administration ever takes hold, research on learning curves might provide some clues on where to concentrate our efforts for the greatest gains.

Most hopeful story: New York City congestion pricing was a hard-won U.S. transportation policy win in 2025. This is just good, economically sound urban policy that would be apolitical in a more rational world.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: I reviewed book reviews from 2025, one of which was Ezra Klein’s Abundance (not the 2012 book Abundance by Peter Diamandis, which while I am not a huge fan I continue to be puzzled how Ezra Klein could either not be aware of that book or intentionally choose to name his book the same thing.) I still find it hard to summarize that book in a sound bite, which would need to be done if it were ever going to serve as the basis for a political campaign. But here is an attempt: (1) Continuously review and streamline federal regulations, (2) increase public and private investments in critical technology and infrastructure, including recommitting to clean energy, and (3) address market failures in housing, health care, and education. #3 is a doozy of course, but the un-sexy answer just has to be understand and implement the latest evidence-backed policies. I would think ramp up housing supply, Medicare for All, and free (tax-funded) college or trade school for all. And um, if we want a chance for any domestic agenda to succeed, we also need serious plans to manage international risks including war, ecosystem collapse, famine, and massive refugee flows that may be coming. Now, I just want to acknowledge that there is a rosy future scenario where AI magically solves all these problems. The way that could work is that technological progress and economic growth suddenly pick up so drastically that we are awash in cash and resources to the point that even the wildly suboptimal operations of our dysfunctional political system are adequate to solve the problems. I don’t think it is safe to put all our eggs in that basket! We better assume that we will need to continue doing the hard work of allocating scarce resources to manage difficult problems for the foreseeable future.

climate refugees

This Common Dreams article goes into the existing legal framework governing refugees and how it could be extended to define and benefit climate refugees. For example:

  • The Refugee Convention of 1954 was set up in the wake of WWII and addresses “those who must leave their home countries due to war, violence, conflict, or any other kind of maltreatment”. So it doesn’t address environmental displacement or internal displacement, but it could be adapted to address these things.
  • The “1998 Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement” are what they sound like – they have not been formally adopted and are not legally binding. They could be developed into a treaty and/or countries could just adopt the principles as part of their own internal legal frameworks, hopefully also offering aid to neighbors experiencing hardship.
  • A “Global Compact for Migration” was adopted by the UN in 2018. It “promotes safe, orderly pathways for migrants, including planned relocation, visa options, and humanitarian shelter”. “Adopted” means the general assembly adopted it as another voluntary, legally non-binding set of principles. This also could be developed into a treaty and/or countries could incorporate the principles into their own internal legal frameworks.
  • The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is an actual treaty ratified by many countries including the United States Congress. Trump has announced the US is withdrawing from the treaty – which I don’t understand. I naively thought that if Congress ratified a treaty (which is extremely rare nowadays when win-win agreements are viewed by our cynical politicians as a loss of sovereignty), the executive branch didn’t have the right to unilaterally withdraw.
  • “The Loss and Damage Fund was established in 2022 at COP27 to address the financial needs of communities severely impacted by climate change. The money would support rehabilitation, recovery, and human mobility.” It is underfunded of course.

I don’t want to be cynical, but the global political mood is just cynical at the moment. US politicians in particular are not in the mood to sign international agreements or even cooperate informally. So while I think it is good to pursue all of these ideas, I do not think it is a good idea to put all our eggs in this basket.

Climate crisis-fueled migration is already a driving force behind the rise of right-wing parties in the US and Europe, and this ugly feedback loop looks to just keep accelerating over time. As economic conditions in the destination countries deteriorate, the right-wingers are able to scapegoat migrants and that accelerates the feedback loop even more. The most rational way I can see to try to break the feedback loop is to address the environmental and economic conditions in the source countries. Aid and trade are the consensus center-left and center-right ways to do that. The right-wingers are probably aware of this, and so they sabotage both, which accelerates the feedback loop again. So they have no incentive to solve problems, because increasing problems fuel their agenda. Meanwhile more rational politicians can point to the rational solutions, but then when they can’t deliver them within a political cycle, real peoples’ real economic pain again accelerates the feedback loop. We could try to deliver the best economic performance possible as a strategy with some chance of success. Here, the current US administration is unpatriotically sabotaging the foundations of economic success such as R&D, education, and a strong central bank. Sorry for the doom and gloom as I am not seeing an easy way out of this political conundrum. Sit back and hope AI raises productivity in spite of our currently incompetent government and institutions?

Where are the Small Modular Reactors?

Small modular nuclear reactors might be a key part of the solution to the climate crisis, or they might not. They seem to be near the end of the R&D stage (although doubtless they can and will continue to be improved) and at the very beginning of pilot testing/proof of concept. They are not yet economically competitive with other forms of power generation (including traditional large nuclear reactors), which you could say about pretty much any new technology. There is a chicken and egg problem where you have to implement it and scale it up for the unit price to come down, and it is hard to get the private sector (and public sector, if they are short-term financial return focused) to take the chance on implementation of something that might end up not working out. Of course, the idea is to invest in a portfolio of things that have some chance of working out, such that there is a high chance at least one of them will pay off. Anyway, some facts and figures in this Physicsworld article (isn’t that name slightly redundant?):

  • Nuclear power generated 17.5% of the world’s electricity in 1996, vs. only 9% today (2026 if you are a future historian reading this).
  • I somewhat naively thought US firms might be leaders in this technological knowledge (if not in implementation of anything at scale, where I would never be that naive). But it turns out that there are two of these reactors currently operating in the world, and they are in Russia. Two are being built in China.

Sure, there are mining, supply chain and waste problems, but in my view you have to balance them against the unfolding global ecological catastrophe caused by burning fossil fuels for two centuries and counting.

WEF Global Risks Outlook 2026

I think of this thing as not so much a prediction but an indicator of what political and business leaders are thinking and talking to each other about. The results seem to be very sensitive to whether people are asked about a 1-, 2-, or 10-year horizon. So I don’t know that the rankings make a lot of difference. Rather, it makes sense to look at a “top 10” or so. Chillingly, more than half of poll respondents seem to think there is an “elevated” to “looming” risk of “GLOBAL CATASTROPHE” within the next 2-10 years. Within 2 years, they are most worried about “geoeconomic confrontation” while within 10 years they identify environmental disaster as the top 3 worries – “extreme weather events”, “biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse”, and “critical change to earth systems”. “State-based armed conflict” (would it be simpler to just call this WAR?) is also up there somewhere near the top. “Inequality” doesn’t rank as high, but the analysts identify it as the risk that is most “interconnected” with the others.

How pathetic for our species and civilization that our leaders believe environmental disaster is looming a decade out, and yet they are starting wars with one another on our behalf in the present, when they know damn well they need to be cooperating to head off the environmental disaster that is going to affect all of us, the winners and losers of today’s useless wars alike. People don’t want war, so how are we putting people in leadership positions over us who are failing us so utterly?

https://www.weforum.org/publications/global-risks-report-2026/infographics-global-risks-report-2026/
https://www.weforum.org/publications/global-risks-report-2026/infographics-global-risks-report-2026/

natural disasters in 2025

An insurance company called Aon publishes an annual list of natural disasters and their estimated costs. They also provide fatalities. Costs and fatalities do not track because the highest costs tend to be in developed countries and the highest fatalities tend to be in developing countries. Case in point – the most expensive disasters of 2025 were the January California wildfires (~USD 60B, 31-400 deaths depending on source), and the worst loss of life was the flooding in Southeast Asia that just happened in November (~USD 25B, 1750 deaths). Given what I know about real estate and informal land use in Southeast Asia, the latter was a massive disaster.

https://earth.org/2025-one-of-costliest-years-for-climate-disasters-report/

Other notable disasters were flooding in China, Pakistan/Bangladesh, and Texas; and hurricanes/typhoons that hit Jamaica/Cuba/Bahamas, Philippines, Australia, and Reunion which is a small island near Madagascar and Mauritius. Finally, a drought affecting Brazil makes the “top 10” list.

Every single one of these disasters is a type that will be more frequent and more severe due to global warming, I would say. Flooding, fires, and food – this is how climate change will hit home for almost everyone eventually.

The headline calls 2025 “one of the costliest years”. Is this right? It’s hard to say, but I got CoPilot to give me a plot of estimates released by Aon for the past 10 years. It wasn’t able to access Q4 for 2025 so I asked it to project the trend from the first three quarters, which is likely to be inaccurate. But nonetheless, 2025 doesn’t look particularly exceptional over the past decade. This doesn’t prove anything except that year to year variability is high.

CoPilot (ChatGPT4?) – not extensively verified by any human!