The "Super Tuesday" primaries take place tomorrow. The polls tells us we will see the Anointing of Hillary on the one side, and the Triumph of Trump on the other. It is more and more likely that those will be our choices in November.
Boiled down, our choices are 1) corrupt Business as Usual (Hillary); or 2) unrepentant barbarism (The Donald).
This clearly poses a problem for thoughtful Americans. We've already got a nascent move to Canada movement. There will be a lot more stuff like that after tomorrow. The standard joke will be we need Trump's Wall to keep Americans in, not Mexicans out.
Political noise in America has obscured any glimpse of reality we are lucky enough to see. The world economy continues to unravel, with China leading the way. The Chinese leadership is now feeling so threatened by the economic implosion that they have been suppressing data and arresting people for reporting unhappy facts.
Here's my favorite quote from the New York Times report—
Ms. Stevenson-Yang, of J Capital Research, said she and her colleagues had seen growing discrepancies in official data in the last two years in a variety of sectors, including retail, shipping and steel production. She said a colleague had once called a Chinese cement factory to ask for production data, and a factory employee had thought the researcher was calling from a government-affiliated research association. The employee told the researcher that the factory had already changed its numbers twice and would rather not do it again, so the researcher could choose any number that fit.
“When you go around and meet state-owned industry people, everybody laughs at the national statistics, so I don’t know why foreigners believe them,” Ms. Stevenson-Yang said.
Great! Now, when Americans start laughing at their national statistics, we'll be making progress. By the way, Ms. Stevenson-Yang, foreigners believe Chinese bullshit because it's always positive bullshit.
Of course the problem is deeper than that here in the United States because it's impossible to get Americans to pay any attention whatsoever to the deteriorating global economy, or astonishing warmth in the Arctic, or anything else. The global economy includes of course the faltering U.S. economy (and here or here). They're too busy hanging on The Donald's every word.
The mainstream media continues to be baffled by the fact that Americans are so unhappy with the current socioeconomic arrangement. Isn't America awesome as is? What's the problem?
Mohamed El Erian, who is out flogging his latest book, thinks we have reached a critical point (a "T" junction, where the road ends and you have to go left or right). Either the governments of the major economies will get their shit together, or we'll have a global train wreck (video below).
As I've said lately, humans can't seem to manage a global economy. Regarding the possibility of the world's major economies getting their shit together to stimulate growth, see China just above. Or politics in the United States
Bill Gates recently wrote his annual letter and it's getting some attention because he addressed the climate problem this year (a Vox interview with Ezra Klein). The target audience was high school students. The letter contained a simple mathematical formula describing why solving the climate problem is very hard. Here it is, with Bill's explanation.
Bill Gates: Yeah, it's important for people who care about climate to not think it's easy to solve.
The equation is: How many people are there? And that's P, which today is about 7 billion, and will grow to be bigger than 9 billion.
Then you take how many energy-related services each person takes advantage of — that's heating, cooling, transport, lighting. We call that S, and that will go up quite a bit as poor people in India are getting lighting, air conditioning, refrigeration. The average number of services used by a person will increase, and it should — that's a very good thing.
Then you have E, the energy used per service. In some areas, like lighting, that number can go down a lot. In some, like transport, planes, making fertilizer — those processes are extremely optimized, and so there's not that much room to innovate on the energy-per-service front. Even if you're optimistic about that, maybe you'll get to 0.6. That is, 40 percent more efficient across all services.
And so if we take these first three factors — 7 billion going to 9 billion, double the services per person, and efficiency at about 0.6, that's increasing [emissions].
The last factor is C, the carbon per unit of energy. And so if you multiply today, you get 36 billion tons. And if you multiply in the future, you need to get zero.
And so the first three factors are not going [to change] — the first one is going up; the second one, hopefully, is going up; the third one is going down, but not enough to offset those other two.
You have to take transport, industry, household, electricity — and, at least in the middle income and rich countries, put it into a zero emission mode.
All this policy talk is just a way to pass the time between now and the election. It doesn't matter how strong Bernie Sanders's single-payer health care plan is — it's not going to pass, just like Donald Trump isn't going to get Mexico to pay for a wall and Hillary Clinton isn't going to get universal pre-K past a Republican Congress and Ted Cruz isn't going to set up a value-added tax.
It's obvious that debating the details of campaign proposals is, on some level, fantasy football for wonks. Events will intercede, bureaucracies will weigh in, Congress will balk, promises will be broken. Remember when Barack Obama ran for president opposing an individual mandate and then flip-flopped and supported one?
So what's the point of paying attention to any of this at all?
Good question! It looks like Ezra is having an existential crisis.
Or is he? Surely Ezra can't simply conclude that his own existence is pointless, not to mention the pointless existence of all those policy "wonks" Ezra hired to write at Vox.com.
This post's title is taken from a Ted Talk by social psychologist Paul Piff. Before I make some comments, watch the video (16:35).
Does money you make mean? Yes, it does.
Social psychologist Paul Piff describes how wealth changes behavior and how almost anyone's behavior can change when they're made to feel rich...
His studies include running rigged games of Monopoly, tracking how those who drive expensive cars behave behind the wheel, and even determining that rich people are more likely to take candy from children than the less well-off.
He writes, "I have been finding that increased wealth and status in society lead to increased self-focus and, in turn, decreased compassion, altruism, and ethical behavior."
“We’ve got this huge El Niño out there, we have the warm blob in the northeast Pacific, the cool blob in the Atlantic, and this ridiculously warm Arctic,” says Jennifer Francis, a climate researcher at Rutgers University who focuses on the Arctic and has argued that Arctic changes are changing mid-latitude weather by causing wobbles in the jet stream. “All these things happening at the same time that have never happened before”...
“I think this winter is going to get studied like crazy, for quite a while,” says Francis. “It’s a very interesting time.”
... for the week beginning on February 7, 2016, the Mauna Loa Observatory measured403.76 carbon dioxide molecules per million in the atmosphere (ppm).
One year ago this week, it measured CO2 levels at 400.05 ppm. Ten years ago, the Observatory measured levels at 382.43 ppm.
It appears to me that humans are seriously underestimating total emissions. Or maybe one of the large carbon sinks (oceans, terrestrial) is weakening fast.
Nothing humans do or say they will do matters if CO2 continues to rise at >3 ppm/year.
The year-over-year difference as of the week of February 7, 2016 was 3.71.
And that's happening at a time of global economic weakness when we might expect human-caused emissions to be declining year-over-year. At this rate it will take 13 years to get to 450, at which point Homo sapiens would be wise to acknowledge its own inadequacy, throw in the towel, bend over, put its collective head between its knees, and kiss its sorry ass goodbye.
If you want to know just how serious the warming has been lately, read here.
How can we interpret the incredible success of the “socialist” candidate Bernie Sanders in the US primaries? The Vermont senator is now ahead of Hillary Clinton among Democratic-leaning voters below the age of 50, and it’s only thanks to the older generation that Clinton has managed to stay ahead in the polls.
Because he is facing the Clinton machine, as well as the conservatism of mainstream media, Sanders might not win the race. But it has now been demonstrated that another Sanders – possibly younger and less white – could one day soon win the US presidential elections and change the face of the country. In many respects, we are witnessing the end of the politico-ideological cycle opened by the victory of Ronald Reagan at the 1980 elections.
Let’s glance back for an instant. From the 1930s until the 1970s, the US were at the forefront of an ambitious set of policies aiming to reduce social inequalities. Partly to avoid any resemblance with Old Europe, seen then as extremely unequal and contrary to the American democratic spirit, in the inter-war years the country invented a highly progressive income and estate tax and set up levels of fiscal progressiveness never used on our side of the Atlantic...
I'm here to tell you — this is total (albeit high-quality) bullshit.
Are we really supposed to believe that democracy in America works? Are we really supposed to believe that we are "witnessing the end of the political-ideological cycle" which started with a bad Hollywood actor? That such cycles actually exist? That the appalling power and money-grab which began in 1980 was merely a temporary setback ? (We were in the wrong part of the cycle.)
The sky's the limit, Progress is inevitable, and Human Nature does not exist
But in particular, are we supposed to believe that all this corruption, immorality and inequality is just going to melt away? That the elites ("winners") will do nothing to defend their interests in the face of a "socialist" threat to their interests by disgruntled American voters ("losers")? Or, if not Bernie, a future "possibly younger and less white" version of Bernie?
If we believe Piketty, we start to doubt that words like elites, power and money have any meaning at all. Vote for Bernie! That's all you need do to turn The Titanic around. We can still miss the iceberg!
Roberts supports that position by noting that climate change doesn't stop in 2100; it will go on for thousands of years. This is a crucial time in the history of humanity, but the fight will go on for a long time. He cites this recent Nature perspective, which concludes that
... short-term emissions targets are important, as they represent tangible steps that individual countries are taking towards reducing emissions. Some of these reductions will come from the deployment of non-fossil-fuel technologies and increasing energy efficiency. But accelerated investment in the technologies required to achieve deeper reductions over the long term — such as electric or fuel-cell vehicles, or advanced biofuels — will not necessarily result from these new agreements. These and other disruptive technologies are unlikely to have a major impact on emissions if one's perspective on the problem of human-caused climate change does not extend beyond 2100.
Taking the longer 10,000-year view means that a balance is needed between policies that focus on lowering near-future emissions and policies that accelerate the development and deployment of new technologies that can transform our energy systems and infrastructure in the long term.
This is not merely a call for more research, but also for a re-examination of financial incentives, energy regulations, international agreements and the global equity considerations they entail, because key elements of innovation occur as much during widespread deployment as they do in the laboratory. The success of the COP21 Paris meeting and of every other future COP must be evaluated not only by levels of national commitments, but also by looking at how the various commitments will lead to the proliferation of non-fossil energy systems, and ultimately to the point when zero-carbon energy systems become the obvious choice for everyone.
Long story short, humans are in this game for the long-run.
Bernie Sanders' grand vision for a happy future has lots of appeal, especially to the young. But let's cut to the chase — Bernie Sanders is an idealist, a man with a utopian vision for America and humanity in general. All such people are out of touch with reality, and thus dangerous. Sorry, that's the bad news.
What is the biggest existential threat to humankind?
Is it the dire effects of anthropogenic climate change? The threat to the biosphere posed by our rapidly deteriorating oceans? The eventual consequences of the ongoing, human-caused mass extinction?
