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 depressingclimate 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 industrialrevolution 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.
This article from something called the Institute for New Economic Thinking has some depressing info (not many stats though) on U.S. life expectancy. I’ve had this feeling for a few years now, that the U.S. is not only not the leader of the pack when it comes to developed nations, we are not even solidly in the middle of the pack, and we are slipping to developing country status on many indicators. But even saying that is not entirely fair to developing countries, because they are making gains on many quality of life measures out of proportion to their income levels, while we are losing quality of life in spite of our nominally growing economy.
That’s what public health researcher Steven H. Woolf, professor of family medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, has documented. By 2019, just before COVID‑19 hit, U.S. life expectancy ranked 40th among the world’s most populous countries, trailing places like Albania and Lebanon. The pandemic only made things worse: by 2020, the U.S. had fallen to 46th, as six more nations overtook it.
Woolf hasn’t just compared the U.S. to wealthy countries like Canada, Germany, or the U.K. He looked at life expectancy across dozens of nations with very different histories and economies, and the results are startling. The U.S. began falling behind as early as the 1950s, with countries in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East steadily overtaking it.
The reasons are not really secret: our lack of a universal health care system, our food system and lack of physical activity, our motor vehicle dominated lives, and our unusual level of deadly violence. There are many examples of effective policies to address these issues if our leaders choose to look to other developed and middle income countries, and even to pockets of sanity in some U.S. states and cities.
The Trump administration has announced that the U.S. intends to withdraw from the 1992 U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. I think this is awful, as I naively thought that a treaty being “ratified” by Congress and signed by the President meant that the legislative and executive branches had come to a consensus on adopting it, and therefore a consensus would be needed to break it. By contrast, recent agreements including the Paris agreement were signed only by the executive branch. Here is what a site called Just Security (which I know nothing about) has to say.
As a matter of domestic law, the mainstream legal view, as taken in the Restatement (Fourth) of Foreign Relations Law, is that the president may constitutionally withdraw the United States from a Senate-approved treaty where, as here, the withdrawal is lawful under international law and neither the Senate’s resolution of advice and consent nor a congressional law has put limits on withdrawal. The president’s power to do so has never been definitively resolved by the courts. In the 1979 case of Goldwater v. Carter (which involved President Jimmy Carter’s termination of a mutual defense treaty with Taiwan), a fractured Supreme Court declined to address this issue. In practice, however, presidents have exercised this unilateral withdrawal power, especially in the years since Goldwater.
Theoretically, it sounds like the Senate could try to insert language saying a President cannot unilaterally break a treaty. But there is really no protection. A treaty is a weaker agreement than I thought, and in recent decades Congress has not even been participating in the process of discussing and signing them. Other countries really cannot rely on the U.S. to honor any agreement from one four-year political administration to the next.
Here is what the Constitution actually says:
He [i.e. the President, whom the Founding Father-Gods assume in 1783 shall henceforth be male] shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur
Too bad it doesn’t say “make, break or modify”, but it doesn’t. Perhaps we need some more practical mechanism for modernizing our outdated constitution. But those rules would have to be updated in…the Constitution.
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.
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?
This Silver Bulletin post is called “The 51 biggest American political moments of the 21st century”. I liked it because it made me think. I found that the non-chronological nature of it threw me off a little bit. So I decided to come up with a “top 10 (U.S.) political/geopolitical moments of the 21st century” of my own. I picked some events off Nate Silver’s list, thought of a few extra of my own, and then put them in chronological order. Limiting it to 10 forced me to really think about what was most important, although like Nate I occasionally cheated by putting things together. I leaned towards events that were true “watershed moments” in the sense that they could have gone differently and the outcome for the U.S. and possibly the world might have been very different. I also leaned towards events where I remember where I was or what I was doing at the time, because I suspect those are important. I included 2000 as Nate did.
December 12, 2000: Bush v. Gore. I remember literally falling on my knees when CNN “called Florida for Gore” (the floor of my rental apartment in New Jersey was carpeted). Where would we be if this had gone differently? In general, you may see a theme below that I see Democrats as basically protectors of the pro-big-business, pro-low-profile-foreign-wars center-right consensus in the U.S. George W. Bush was on the right edge of this consensus, while Gore likely would have been on the left edge. I suspect 9/11 and the Afghanistan invasion would still have happened exactly as they did, but I don’t think the Iraq invasion would have happened. Who knows if other aspects of the 20-year “war on terror” would have unfolded as they did? We would have seen more action and progress on climate change and more standing up to fossil fuel industry propaganda for sure.
September 11, 2001. I was in my office building in Philadelphia. My mother called me on my desk phone (I didn’t yet have a cell phone) and told me what was happening. We turned on a small black and white TV with rabbit ears we had in our conference room at the time and watched the events unfold. The streets filled with panicky people and you couldn’t get on a train or highway for hours. There were rumors of additional planes in the air over Pennsylvania (which turned out to be true), but in the end nothing happened to us in Philadelphia directly. When I finally got back to my apartment in New Jersey, there were highway signs saying all roads to New York were closed.
March 20, 2003: Iraq invasion. A weird thing I remember is Dan Rather updates on the invasion during halftime of NCAA basketball tournament games. We aren’t used to mixing sports and serious news like that.
September 15, 2008: Lehman Brothers collapse. This is a stand-in for the larger financial crisis, surely one of the most important world events of my life time (I might pick the Berlin Wall as the single most important, but now we are going back to a previous century). The sub-prime mortgage derivative collapse might have been inevitable, but letting a major institution collapse was a key decision by the Bush administration that led to panic. It certainly played a large role in the Obama election. Obama understood that however distasteful, avoiding panic was the single most important thing he had to do, and he did it. I am an Obama fan, as I was a Bill Clinton fan and fan of the first 2-3 years of Joe Biden. He was just an effective keeper of the pro-big-business, pro-low-profile-foreign-wars center-right consensus. All these leaders pushed to accomplish the most incremental progress that was politically possible in their moments without blowing up the system.
January 21, 2010: Citizens United decision. No, I don’t remember where I was or what I was doing. I probably wasn’t even aware of this in real time. But this was crucial and the U.S. and maybe the world could be different without it. Maybe a marginally less corrupt election system would have delivered different results in 2016, and climate change and health care among other issues could be on a very different track.
October 28, 2016: the “Comey letter”. I picked this to represent the catastrophe of the 2016 election (which took place on November 8, 2016). The situation was on a knife edge, and without this “October surprise”, which turned out to be a complete hoax, maybe history would have unfolded differently.
November 4, 2016: Paris climate change accord takes effect. Obama really pushed and deserves a share of credit for getting this one done. It could still be in effect if Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders had won the 2016 election, OR if the U.S. Congress ever did its job of considering and ratifying treaties. Because none of these things happened, the U.S. never gained any momentum on climate action, and generations of our descendants are going to suffer as a result.
Friday, March 13, 2020: Covid shutdown. I picked this date because it is the date the Philadelphia public school system, where my son was in first grade at the time, insisted it would not shut down, and then announced late morning that it would shut down for two weeks, which turned into about a year. It was also the day my employer told me I wouldn’t be coming back to the office on Monday. I picked this date to represent the Covid-19 pandemic as a whole, but I could also have picked the date the first vaccinations were approved by the FDA, which was December 11, 2020.
November 30, 2022: Chat-GPT goes public. Not on Nate Silver’s list, but seems important no?
June 27, 2024: Biden-Trump debate. Of course, the real watershed moment was whenever Biden and his team decided he would run for re-election. Had he announced sometime in 2023 that he would be walking off gracefully into the sunset and allowing a real primary process to play out in 2024, maybe history and our present moment would be very different.
Now is the time on the show when I summarize my monthly wrap-up posts and try to draw some conclusions.
2025 Post Roundup
Most frightening and/or depressing story of each month:
JANUARY: Longreads #1 stories of 2024 – this is a lookback but I posted it in January and it has a ton of interesting stuff. Interesting, frightening, and depressing. The story on Israel’s dispatching of air strikes based on statistical analysis is the single most disturbing article I read last year. Everyone should read this article and decide for yourselves where you stand. Another one is called “When the Arctic Melts”. Even as the shadow of fossil fuel propaganda once again overspreads the land, I am afraid the globe could be approaching an irreversible tipping point into runaway warming and sea level rise. Let’s hope the world can afford another four-year round of U.S. backsliding and then pick up the pieces, but I am not sure.
FEBRUARY: Donald Shoup died in February. He was a pioneer in parking economics, which doesn’t sound all that sexy, but his clear explanations really helped me see the light of what walkable, livable, healthy and low environmental impact cities can potentially be. What they can’t be is low-density and automobile-oriented. I put this in the depressing category both because I am sad at his passing, and because I do not see these trends going in the right direction.
MARCH: The U.S. might be headed forrecession. Recessions happen, but this would be the first one where the U.S. government obviously and counter to all competentadvice throws a monkey wrench in a perfectly healthy economy, that I know of anyway. Lest we think GDP growth is only a statistic that does not affect real people, the U.S. poverty rate among children was 5% in 2021 and rose to over 13% in 2023, when the economy was doing relatively well as measured by GDP growth and employment, but Congress forced the end of Biden’s tax credits for parents. So pop quiz: force a completely unnecessary recession by choice and will more or less children suffer? Shame shame shame on the Trump administration and Congress you stupid assholes.
APRIL: Maybe an irreversible methane tipping point is happening. This could be the scariest thing out there short of nuclear war.
MAY: The India-Pakistan conflict seems to have died down a bit (or did the media outlets I pay attention to just lose interest?). But both the potential nuclear conflict and the long-term loss of glacial ice billions of people depend on are terrifying.
JULY: In case we still don’t have enough feedback loops to worry about, loss of Antarctic ice could also trigger volcanoes under Antarctica.
AUGUST: A gigantic incoming object could be the alien ship that will put us out of our misery. Okay, probably not. The interesting and scary thing is that as our ability to look at the nearby universe improves, we are seeing more surprising stuff. But how are we supposed to think about let alone do anything about a very low probability existential threat like this one? We are not even responding to the “somewhat likely” (nuclear war, pandemics) and “likely happening right now” (a climate tipping point leading to future collapse) existential threats in front of us. I suggested that the tipping point will be called in retrospect, and 2025 might be a nice round number for the history books.
SEPTEMBER: We are most likely on a path to the AMOC tipping point. I distinguished between the tipping point, which is when collapse becomes inevitable, and the actual collapse itself. These are separated in time, which means the tipping point may only be called in retrospect when it is too late to prevent the collapse. This is why being “on the path to the tipping point” is important, because we can still do something.
OCTOBER: The evidence for an increasing worldwide collapse in insect diversity and abundance continues to mount. What’s that you say, you don’t actually like bugs? Well, they are the base of the food chain (after plants) and generally indicators of biodiversity and healthy ecosystems more broadly. That’s right, the proverbial “canary in the coal mine” may have actually been a cockroach. There was also news this month that another “planetary boundary” has been breached. The biodiversity one that would cover insect collapse was already breached a long time ago, and this new one has to do with ocean acidification. Only two more to go for a perfect score of 9/9!
NOVEMBER: Wait, I actually had trouble coming up with a frightening or depressing story this month! It’s not because I was in a particularly good mood. Okay, I’ll go with all the terrible things identified in Project Censored’s yearly roundup of terrible things. These include PFAS, melting ice sheets, police violence, and the generally sorry state of the Native American community.
JANUARY: I noted that congestion pricing in New York City could provide a glimmer of hope that transportation in the United States could begin to implement 21st century international best practices. (Yes, I am aware the century is a quarter over already – one more indicator of the U.S. slipping towards the bottom of the world’s more advanced nations.) Unfortunately, as I write this on February 13 we see the President himself actively interfering in this state and local matter. “States’ rights” for thee, not for me (i.e. only when it’s convenient to some disingenuous argument).
FEBRUARY: The fool in the White House and the devils whispering in his ear can weaken enforcement of the Civil Rights Act, but they can’t actually make laws go away. They can try to ignore them, and then we will see how effective our court system and third party legal action can be at activating the checks and balances we are supposed to have. The other potential players are congress and widespread public action, and these do not seem to be active at the moment.
APRIL: 3-30-300 is a nice, simple idea. “you can see 3 trees from your window, your neighborhood has 30% tree canopy cover, and you are within 300 m of a half-hectare park.” Sure, you have to figure out some details and make some sustained effort over time to implement simple ideas. Still, not rocket science. Combined with the “15 minute city”, this is a pretty good urban planning philosophy that should be communicable.
MAY: I came up with four keys to my personal happiness in the moment: sleep, coffee, exercise, and down time. What, no family, community, career accomplishment, or making a lasting difference in the world you ask? No, those are about reflecting on life satisfaction, not being in the moment. No “fun”? Well, my idea of fun may be different than your idea of fun. I wish you joy and happiness as you pursue your idea of fun, only try to have some empathy and don’t force your own idea of fun on others. So there.
JUNE: This is the best I can do – Biden wasn’t able to take political credit for his infrastructure and energy transition accomplishments because his accomplishment was getting money appropriated for them, whereas implementation of these will be painfully hard and painfully slow. (Yes, I believe based on evidence and logic that investments in infrastructure and energy production that do not destroy the biosphere are good ideas.) But at least part of this agenda will be implemented over time, and Trump is spending substantial energy of his own only partially rolling back these programs.
SEPTEMBER: Spain has been so successful at rolling out solar power that the price of solar power has “collapsed”. I’ve been beating a drum lately that economic incentives have tipped in favor of renewable energy worldwide and this fact is being largely hidden from us in the US by propaganda.
OCTOBER: The seems to be some mixed evidence, tainted with industry and government propaganda in my opinion, but overall there are some hopeful signs that the global transition to renewable energy is real. It may be too slow and too late to avoid consequences, but it may also avoid the worst possible consequences.
NOVEMBER: RENEWABLE ENERGY IS NOW CHEAPER THAN FOSSIL FUELS, AND ANYBODY WHO CLAIMS OTHERWISE IS EITHER MISINFORMED OR LYING. Note I said “misinformed”, because I try to be nice and “ignorant” is not a nice word. But they are synonyms. Despite the propaganda coming from the U.S. fossil fuel industry, government, and press, the renewable energy transition is happening and the fossil fuel stranded assets problem (for that industry) is real. Speaking of propaganda, Noam Chomsky is 96, still writing, and surer than ever that people don’t want war and only acquiesce to it because of the propaganda machine.
DECEMBER: From Our World in Data, carbon dioxide emissions in the US and most developed countries peaked around 2006 and have been falling. Global internal combustion engine vehicles peaked around 2018, while electric vehicle sales are rising. Renewable electricity generation is growing exponentially as costs of existing technology fall, and there are some promising advances in materials science that could improve wind turbines and batteries. There is hope for fusion power, although it still seems to be the proverbial two decades away.
Most interesting story of each month, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:
FEBRUARY: I continued to follow the emergence of AI agents in February. Outside the bananas state of U.S. and global geopolitics, this is one of the biggest things going on, or at least a big change playing out quickly. Even a “singularity watch” item – I’m going to give a 5% chance this is the start of the singularity. Hopefully not the Terminator version. But has anyone noticed we now have Starlink and Stargate – these even sound like Skynet. We already had Operation Warp Speed of course. What puzzles me is that conservatives usually don’t like science fiction because they lack imagination. So either somebody is a science fiction fan, or more likely they have these words in the backs of their minds from indirect exposure to science fiction, and now they think they thought of them.
MARCH: Prospera is a weird quasi-autonomous city-state nominally inside Honduras run by crypto-currency weirdos.
APRIL: I made what I would consider a “common sense” trade policy proposal. “I generally support…free trade. But if we are going to trade freely, we need a safety net for people who are hurt. We could do this with generous unemployment benefits and retraining programs. We could help people relocate to places with jobs. We could provide much better communication and transportation infrastructure allowing them to commute regionally to places with jobs. We could educate their children so they are prepared for the jobs of tomorrow. We could institute a value added tax on our productive, growing economy and use it to provide services or cash to workers. We could invest even more in research and development to make our economy even more productive and growing. We could invest in neighboring countries to help them be more productive and growing, import cheap stuff from them, and reduce some of the migration pressure on our borders.”
MAY: The U.S. approach to R&D is a partnership between government (through both grants and procurement power), universities, and the private sector (historically, including regulated monopolies like Bell Labs). Other countries including China have copied this model somewhat successfully, and our own government taking a monkey wrench to our own system that has worked so well seems like a really stupid idea. First we need to stop the damage and then let’s hope it can be repaired.
JUNE: A Minimal Quality of Life index has been developed which is intended to better capture the cost of living real working families and parents are experiencing.
JULY: Policies to increase housing supply in the most economically dynamic cities can theoretically accelerate economic growth, since housing supply is not expanding fast enough and is therefore holding economic growth back. A lot of discussion has been focused around zoning, which is a local matter. But I offered some additional suggestions: investment in better transportation and communication infrastructure to reduce the friction of working across distances between homes and offices, effectively enlarging housing markets. And serious investments in construction productivity, which has been flat in the U.S. for decades. Ideas include more factory-based modular components. The U.S. has tried and failed at this before, but of course China is now leading the way. AI should also be pretty good at construction scheduling and logistics. The U.S. is somewhat successfully partnering with Korean ship-building expertise, at least on a small scale.
AUGUST: Designer babies are here, and the trend towards the rich and powerful accelerating their own evolution (and a few governments making this available to the masses) can only accelerate.
OCTOBER: The seems to be some mixed evidence, tainted with industry and government propaganda in my opinion, but overall there are some hopeful signs that the global transition to renewable energy is real. It may be too slow and too late to avoid consequences, but it may also avoid the worst possible consequences.
NOVEMBER: The Tyranny of Small Decisions posits that many small but well-intentioned decisions made at inappropriately low levels within an organization can cause it to stray from its mission.
DECEMBER: BBC lists 25 most important scientific ideas of the 21st century. Highlights include various genetic technologies (stem cells that don’t come from babies, mRNA vaccines, tissue engineering for human organ transplants), attribution analysis, and of course large language models. Science magazine echoes some of these adds gene editing, new antibiotics, and progress on heat-resistant rice strains as 2025 breakthroughs.
Brilliant(?) Synthesis
The world is slowly bending the curve on emissions and energy. One theme that emerges is the clear arrival of economically viable renewable energy technology. All the international treaty-making and policy hand-wringing might have accelerated us toward this point, but it is now technology and markets that are finally in the driver’s seat. I was surprised to learn that peak emissions have already occurred in the U.S. and other developed countries. Emissions are still high and growing in developing and middle income countries including China and India. This makes sense – for all we hear about China being so advanced, their levels of income, consumption, and pollution at the individual level are still catching up to western countries. This is both good for them and terrifying for the world because China and India (add Indonesia, Brazil, others here if you want to) have such vast populations that their impact is going to dwarf anything the rest of the world does going forward. They are going through the same transition that the US, UK, Germany, Japan, or whatever western countries you want to name went through, just later in history, on a vaster scale, and when our planet’s ability to absorb the impact is mostly used up. So this is how China can simultaneously be the world leader on clean technology and the world’s largest creator of world-destroying pollution. Now, we want Africa to eventually develop and lift another 1.5 (headed to 3!) billion people out of poverty, but clearly we have to find lower-impact ways to develop if our civilization is going to survive.
But we could end up calling 2025 as the tipping point to disaster in retrospect. Getting over that technology and cost-effectiveness hump is nice, but it may still be too little too late to avoid disaster. An important concept I discovered/reminded myself about in 2025 is that a tipping point is not the point where a system changes drastically, but the point where that change becomes inevitable. As such, we may call the tipping point only in retrospect. The gradual increases in heat and sea level – overlaid with extreme events like heat waves, floods, fires, and storms – may have put us on a path towards unavoidable destruction of our food supply and our urban areas. That’s my elevator pitch for how climate change is hitting home – climate change is coming for our food and it’s coming for our houses. Add to the trends and extreme events the possibility that we have crossed a threshold leading to runaway methane releases and major shifts in ocean circulation patterns. We may look back and determine that the 2020s were when these outcomes became inevitable due to our failure to act quickly enough or on a broad enough scale. And if we decide the 2020s or mid-2020s are when this outcome became inevitable, why not pick 2025 as a nice round number when the climate shit hit the fan?
Earth’s ecosystems are past the tipping point. Yesterday’s environmentalism has sort of evolved to focus almost fully on climate change, but intertwined with the climate crisis is the destruction and destabilization of Earth’s ecosystems, from the oceans to tropical forests. It is hard to make that elevator pitch that draws a straight line from ecosystem and biodiversity collapse to human wellbeing. A reliable food supply is certainly part of it, and yet our industrial food system is somewhat decoupled from natural ecosystems. To me this is a moral failing of our species and civilization, and it is just deeply sad. While there still might be a theoretical possibility to head off the worst possible damage to our climate, the damage to our ecosystems cannot be reversed at this point. Of course, this does not mean we should give up. We can always take action to make the outcome less bad than it could have been. We have a moral responsibility to do so, but I do not see much public or political energy directed at this issue. And maybe it makes sense to focus on the relatively simple to understand issue and relatively straightforward solutions (which is not to say easy!) to greenhouse gas emissions. Getting emissions under control is certainly necessary to protect ecosystems though not sufficient.
While we are focused on emerging artificial intelligence technology, biotechnology has matured all around us. We are hearing that artificial intelligence may be a bubble waiting to pop in the near term, a promising boost to productivity that will raise all boats in the medium term, and either a ticket to utopia or an existential threat in the (somewhat?) long(er?) term. But while so much attention is focused on this emerging technology, biotechnology has sort of matured and arrived fully all around us. We can now edit the genes of embryonic and adult humans, grow genetically engineered human body parts in pigs and then implant them back in humans, and genetically engineer vaccines. In agriculture, genetic technology has some promise to overcome the downward pressure on our food supply caused by global heating and extreme weather. The fact that all this technology is available doesn’t mean it will automatically applied morally or that it will be accessible evenly across countries and demographic groups, of course. Biotechnology is improving many of our lives and has potential to improve all human lives, but reaching that potential and managing the risks is going to vary depending on where you are and who you are.
It’s crystal clear the United States is in decline. The child poverty metric (13% in 2023) alone is damning. The state of Native Americans. Entrenched resistance to rational energy, transportation, housing, trade, and immigration policies with solid evidence of success in leading countries elsewhere in the world. Active, intentional weakening of Civil Rights Act enforcement. Corruption and propaganda (as I write this on January 4, it appears the US has invaded a sovereign UN nation-state to make it safe for US-headquartered multinational oil companies, who bankroll our elections). Intentionally destroying our research and development system which got us to the level of prosperity we enjoy today. The ineffectiveness of our legislative branch. We’re lucky at the moment that the stock market and incomes of top earners are allowing our economy to keep bumping along. If there is a financial panic or some external shock, I can envision the country going into a tailspin the current clowns and amateurs in charge will not be able to competently manage. Let’s hope we are lucky enough to bumble through the next three years without a major crisis, and then able to get better leadership in place. Chillingly, I probably said something like this in January 2018, and we only made it to the two year mark.
Whither war and peace? The stories that have come out about Israel using algorithms to target suspected Hamas associates and their families are chilling to me. As the use of big data and artificial intelligence becomes more and more widespread in all aspects of our economy and lives, this is one cautionary tale of how it can be used by governments in immoral ways. I see the technology as neutral, but we clearly need safeguards on how it is applied in the worlds of surveillance, social control, and outright war. We also had several examples of direct military confrontations between nuclear-armed nation-states in 2025 – India and Pakistan, Israel and Iran, the U.S. and Iran; and by proxy the U.S. and western Europe vs. Russia. This is clearly very risky for the future of the whole world. I would also note that in all these cases except the Russia one, the supposed liberal democracy appears to be the more aggressive party. (The U.S. has also illegally invaded Venezuela as I write this.) So the parliamentary and presidential democratic systems we have in place are not acting as safeguards against cross-border aggression like we might have hoped they would. Luckily none of these conflicts seemed to come close to a nuclear exchange in 2025, but we can’t continue to rely on luck. We need renewed respect for sovereignty as a bedrock principle. We need to reverse the recent expansion of nuclear arsenals, and we need new talks and treaties on arms control and non-proliferation. And we need to get serious about the risks of biological and AI-powered cyberwarfare.
The former president of Honduras, Juan Hernandez, who was convicted of drug trafficking and then pardoned by Trump, has ties to Peter Thiel and the “charter city” Prospera. I keep tabs on Prospera, as I was initially interested in the charter city idea after hearing a lecture by Paul Romer (a Nobel prize winning economist). The original concept, which was about economic opportunity, efficiency, and clarity of mission, has morphed into something far more corrupt and ugly.
This governing arrangement was organized in part by Hernández, who served two terms as president of Honduras from 2014 until January 2022. Prospera was permitted to launch the charter city after Hernández allowed for the creation of semiautonomous Zones for Employment and Economic Development, or ZEDEs. The ZEDEs were then overseen by a committee that included three of Hernández’s underlings and several American libertarian activists.
So there you have it. I am not saying this is proof that Prospera is the reason for the pardon. But what we see in the press is a lot of puzzlement that the U.S. government can be simultaneously fighting an anti-drug war on the Venezuelan government and supporting a pro-drug former Honduran government. This is logically inconsistent. On the other hand, simultaneously supporting right-wing big business interests in Venezuela (think oil contracts if not outright ownership for US corporations) and right-wing big business interests in Honduras is logically consistent (not to mention corrupt and cynical).
The American Society of Civil Engineers (of which I am a member) has released their every-four-years assessment of U.S. infrastructure. Why every four years? Once per presidential cycle I assume, and maybe they aim for about a year after the election to avoid being overly political? Because the goal here is to influence policy and keep the taps flowing with money for infrastructure projects that engineers will work on. It’s a lobbying group and it’s a big business, but nonetheless they try to be objective and infrastructure investment is needed.
The “letter grades” thing is kind of a gimmick, but an effective one I think for getting headlines and communicating with the media and the political class. Then there is more detailed information that interested people, or hopefully people who might be drafting future legislation, can dig into. What is most interesting to me personally is the references.
Anyway, to summarize, the Biden infrastructure spending is slowly working its way through the system and this has resulted in some improvement. I think this is Biden’s true positive legacy, whether he eventually gets any credit for it or not. But the report comes across as pleading for the country to sustain the slightly increased momentum created by the Biden-era funding bill. In my ideal world, infrastructure wouldn’t be funded by One Big Bill once a generation, but continuously as it is needed. And the way for the federal and state governments to do it, I have always thought, would be in a counter-cyclical manner during recessions. Planning should be regional in nature, with local projects that are consistent with long-term planning goals ready to go as funding becomes available. Some funding should be local, because the local community needs skin in the game. Federal and state governments could then match this local investment at a higher or lower level depending on what is happening in the economy. And there needs to be money for the full life cycle including maintenance/repair/upgrade/replacement, not just for new construction. And that is my personal broken-record infrastructure rant from this one civil engineer, thank you for listening.
In a random AI experiment (Microsoft’s Copilot in this case), I have generated a list of 2028 US presidential candidates. Here were my criteria:
Current or previous mayors of the largest 100 US cities, re-elected at least once. Alive and under 70.
Current or previous governors of US states, re-elected at least once. Alive and under 70.
Current or previous US Senators, re-elected at least once. Alive and under 70.
No, Donald Trump would never have passed this screen, and nor does J.D. Vance because he has not been re-elected to any office so far. But my reasoning is these are people who showed they have what it takes to win high-stakes elections, then perform well enough in the eyes of voters and donors to get re-elected. Sorry to the 70 and up crowd, but for the Democrats in particular it is just time for the older generation to turn over the reigns.
A few familiar names: One person who is familiar, Barrack Obama, would not be eligible. People who have run before and not done all that well (Pete Buttigieg, Cory Booker, Tim Walz, Nikki Hailey, Chris Christie, Bobby Jindal, I’m looking squarely at all of you) should step aside and give others a shot. Marco Rubio and Rahm Emanuel are a couple household names that jump out at me from this list. Does anyone on this list actually excite me? Michael Nutter, best ever (and only really good) mayor of Philadelphia, your country needs you!
I also asked Copilot to help me encode the table as HTML, which it was able to do. There are undoubtedly better ways to add tables in WordPress, which maybe I will be smart enough to learn about some day. So without further ado, here is the list sorted from youngest to my mandatory retirement age of 69: