Niall Ferguson on the debt trap and the fate of empires

Via:  Newsweek   Big picture stuff worth reading. 

Is global warming unstoppable?

Via:  Science Daily

ScienceDaily (Nov. 24, 2009) — In a provocative new study, a University of Utah scientist argues that rising carbon dioxide emissions -- the major cause of global warming -- cannot be stabilized unless the world's economy collapses or society builds the equivalent of one new nuclear power plant each day.

"It looks unlikely that there will be any substantial near-term departure from recently observed acceleration in carbon dioxide emission rates," says the new paper by Tim Garrett, an associate professor of atmospheric sciences.

Garrett's study was panned by some economists and rejected by several journals before acceptance by Climatic Change, a journal edited by Stanford University climate scientist Stephen Schneider. The study will be published online the week of November 23.

The study -- which is based on the concept that physics can be used to characterize the evolution of civilization -- indicates:

• Energy conservation or efficiency doesn't really save energy, but instead spurs economic growth and accelerated energy consumption.
• Throughout history, a simple physical "constant" -- an unchanging mathematical value -- links global energy use to the world's accumulated economic productivity, adjusted for inflation. So it isn't necessary to consider population growth and standard of living in predicting society's future energy consumption and resulting carbon dioxide emissions.
• "Stabilization of carbon dioxide emissions at current rates will require approximately 300 gigawatts of new non-carbon-dioxide-emitting power production capacity annually -- approximately one new nuclear power plant (or equivalent) per day," Garrett says. "Physically, there are no other options without killing the economy."

Getting Heat for Viewing Civilization as a "Heat Engine"

Garrett says colleagues generally support his theory, while some economists are critical. One economist, who reviewed the study, wrote: "I am afraid the author will need to study harder before he can contribute."

"I'm not an economist, and I am approaching the economy as a physics problem," Garrett says. "I end up with a global economic growth model different than they have."

Article continues here.

Read the paper at arXiv.org here.  Should be read in conjunction with that oldie-but goodie, “Finite-time singularity in the dynamics of the world population, economic and financial indices” found here.

Moral: Prepare for a lower standard of living.

Update on thorium

Sounds a lot better than uranium.  Thanks Anonymous for the reference.

The triumph of social Darwinism or American self-reliance?

Americans of all stripes seem poised to renounce with a certain finality any shred of unselfishness or social responsibility in an understandable rejection of “government” as we have come to know it in the latter days of the plutocracy, as the oligarchs of Wall Street complete their vacuum-cleaning of the incomes and assets of the drowning American middle class.

Can you blame good-hearted Americans for rejecting the calls of Keynesians to spend even more money on projects to be chosen by a kept Congress?  More pork for the friends of the Democrats this time, when we just finished watching the Republicans enrich Halliburton and Blackwater (now Xe) and untold others in military Keynesianism and financial deregulation, both now getting a second wind under Obomba?

Americans are a self-selected group of self-reliant risk-takers and establishment-leave-takers.  It is my guess that the majority of Americans are ready to leave the existing establishment in their dust.  Whether they succeed in creating a new American social contract, with a government that works for them and not the elite—or are ground down under the heel of the empire for another century or more in a fascist neo-feudalism—this will be the central drama of the twenty-first century.  The world is watching. 

But let me say to Americans of the left and right and center, as you reject government, remember that you cannot reject each other, for no man or woman is an island, and as the probable failure of the American state unfolds, we will need each other’s help more than ever. 

Happy Thanksgiving, gentle readers, and may your Black Friday be sustainable.

Global warming cooling

With the hacking of the East Anglia climate lab’s data and documents, and the revelations therein (that Mish does an adequate job of summarizing) I am reminded of the late Michael Crichton’s remarks on the subject to the National Press Club.  Crichton was admirable for maintaining throughout his life—even after becoming rich and celebrated—the ability to apply critical thinking skills typical of college graduates of the early postwar period to current events.  In other words, he resisted spin.  I recommend reading “The Case for Skepticism on Global Warming” (2005).  Crichton shows that just on the face of the research presented, global warming was a fraud.

But remember, Al Gore (allegedly) invented the Internet, so he must know what he’s talking about.  And he also got really rich selling fear, a topic that Crichton addressed in his novel State of Fear.  George W. Bush made fear-mongering his stock in trade, and Dick Cheney is pathetically still carrying the torch.

We have so many fear-mongers now that it’s hard to get good panic attack going.  Was that a meteor streaking across the Western sky that if it had been bigger could have started the next ice age in six months?  Oh well, back to worrying about the collapse of the world economy….

Maybe people will wake up, learn to think, and shut the fear-mongers up.

***

Movie rental recommendation:  Food, Inc.  Eye-popping.  Corporate consolidation of the food industry based on mass production and the horrors thereof; the demand for organic food by consumers is the only hope as Walmart and others come on board. 

When the Supreme Court gave corporations the right to patent life forms, they set the stage for evil on a planetary scale by agribusinesses.  Thank you, Clarence Thomas.

Crichton’s novel Next is an entertaining diatribe on this topic, although he seems to have given up the fight spiritually.  It was one of his last novels.

The housecleaning that the human race faces over coming decades is truly staggering, if we are not to perish by our own misdeeds.

What will it take to forge a new social contract?

Via:  FT 

Clive Crook reviews Creating An Opportunity Society by Elizabeth Sawhill and Ron Haskins.

By international standards, intergenerational mobility in the US is quite low. This will surprise few who have ventured into a US public housing project or troubled inner-city school, but many middle-class Americans never have. The figures show that US children born in the lowest and highest quintiles of the income distribution are more likely to stay there than in Britain, for example, and much more likely than in countries such as Sweden and Denmark.

But what to do about it? The book confirms a finding well established in the literature, that transition to the middle class is all but guaranteed for poor children if they do three things: finish high school, work full time and marry before having children. The US underperforms as an opportunity society because so many of its young people fail at one or more. The book focuses on these areas.

Education, as the Obama administration recognises, is pivotal. The book calls for gradual increases in spending on early education programmes for the poor, an exceptionally productive investment according to all the research.

The authors also suggest policies to improve schools, such as adopting national standards (a strengthening of the state-based standards of the No Child Left Behind law); new federal incentives (like those being introduced by the Obama administration) to encourage the hiring and retention of good teachers; and support for “paternalistic” schools that stress order, good attendance, basic skills and frequent assessment. Teachers’ unions find plenty to object to here.

Incentives to find and stay in work could be improved by extending the earned-income tax credit, say the authors, and through support for vocational training. But work requirements under the 1990s welfare reforms should be maintained or tightened, they say. At this many liberals will bridle, as they will at the claim that the “success sequence” of school, employment, and children after marriage requires firmer pro-family suasion and incentives. “To those who argue that this goal is old-fashioned or inconsistent with modern culture, we argue that modern culture is inconsistent with the needs of children.” So there.

The cost of these new and expanded interventions, net of savings from schemes the book wants trimmed, would be about $20bn (€13.4bn, £12bn) a year. This seems modest by current standards, but, as good fiscal conservatives, the authors think the country cannot afford its present commitments, let alone new ones. Here, therefore, they make their boldest suggestion of all. The US social contract needs to be revised, so that the elderly, many of whom are comparatively well off, receive less so that the poor can get more.

The authors lay out an admirable agenda.  The only problem is that it would require a new social contract already in place to get it legislated.

I had a neighbor years ago when I was living in an apartment complex in Philadelphia who first expressed to me what I have come to think of as the “perennial wisdom” on this topic:

“It will take a depression to bring people back to their senses,” the cantankerous gentleman said.

Going Galt with Stephen Colbert

Brilliant.

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