Ah, the innocent days of February 2020! (I’m writing this on March 14.) Just two weeks ago, the coronovirus shit hadn’t yet hit the fan in the U.S. (the Pennsylvania governor just ordered schools closed statewide, I have been strongly encouraged, though not coerced, to work from home, the governor has implemented not-strictly-enforced movement restrictions in several neighboring counties and mine could be next, and the closure of all businesses except grocery stores, drug stores and gas stations appears to be next – and yes, this appears to include bars and liquor stores. Luckily, Pennsylvania just recently lifted Prohibition and started allowing some grocery stores to sell beer and wine.) Anyway, coronavirus is about the only thing on anyone’s mind at the moment, even considering we are in an election year (Bernie Sanders looked like a front-runner two weeks ago!) But let’s rewind the clock two weeks and see what was on my mind in more normal times.
Most frightening and/or depressing story:
The Amazon rain forest may reach a tipping point and turn into a dry savanna ecosystem, and some scientists think this point could be reached in years rather than decades. Meanwhile, Africa is dealing with a biblical locust plague. Also, bumble bees are just disappearing because it is too hot.
East Africa is dealing with a massive locust plague, according to Grist. And of course, they just couldn’t resist using the phrase “biblical proportions”.
East Africa had an unusually wet year in 2019 — warming waters in the Indian Ocean produced a high number of tropical cyclones, which doused the coast and created “exceptional” conditions for locust breeding, Nairobi-based climate scientist Abubakr Salih Babiker told the Associated Press. Now, swarms of hungry insects are feasting on crops in the Horn of Africa, where millions of people already lack reliable access to nutritious food.
JANUARY: Writing in 1984, Isaac Asimov thought we would be approaching world peace, living lives of leisure, children would love school, and we would be mining the moon and manufacturing things in orbital factories by now.
APRIL: The most frightening and/or depressing story often involves nuclear weapons and/or climate change, because these are the near-term existential threats we face. Oliver Stone has added a new chapter to his 2012 book The Untold History of the United States making a case that we have lost serious ground on both these issues since then. In a somewhat related depressing story, the massive New Orleans levy redesign in response to Hurricane Katrina does not appear to have made use of the latest climate science.
MAY: Without improvements in battery design, the demand for materials needed to make the batteries might negate the environmental benefits of the batteries. I’m not really all that frightened or depressed about this because I assume designs will improve. Like I said, it was slim pickings this month.
JUNE: The world economy appears to be slowing, even though U.S. GDP is growing as the result of the post-2007 recovery finally taking hold, juiced by a heavy dose of pro-cyclical government spending. The worry is that if and when there is eventually a shock to the system, there will be little room for either fiscal or monetary policy to respond. Personally, the partisan in me is thinking any time before November 2020 is as good a time for any for a recession to hit the U.S. I am a couple decades from retirement, and picturing that bumper sticker “Lord, Just Give Me One More Bubble”. Of course, this is selfish thinking when there are many people close to retirement and many families struggling to get by out there. And short-term GDP growth is not the only metric. The U.S. is falling behind its developed peers on a wide range of metrics that matter to people lives, including infrastructure, health care costs and outcomes, life expectancy, maternal and infant mortality, addiction, suicide, poverty, and hunger. And it’s not just that we are no longer in the lead on these metrics, we are below average and falling. Which is why I am leading the charge to Make America Average Again!
AUGUST: Drought is a significant factor causing migration from Central America to the United States. Drought in the Mekong basin may put the food supply for a billion people in tropical Asia at risk. One thing that can cause drought is deliberately lying to the public for 50 years while materially changing the atmosphere in a way that enriches a wealthy few at everyone else’s expense. Burning what is left of the Amazon can’t help.
OCTOBER: A third of all of North America’s birds may have disappeared since the 1970s. (Truth be told, it was hard to pick a single most depressing story line in a month when I covered propaganda, pandemic, new class divisions created by genetic engineering, and nuclear war. But while those are scary risks for the near future, it appears the world is right in the middle of an ongoing and obvious ecological collapse, and not talking much about it.)
NOVEMBER: The Darling, a major river system in Australia, has essentially dried up.
FEBRUARY: Here is the boringly simple western European formula for social and economic success: “public health care, nearly free university education, stronger progressive taxation, higher minimum wages, and inclusion of trade unions in corporate decision-making.” There’s even a glimmer of hope that U.S. politicians could manage to put some of these ideas into action. Seriously, I’m trying hard not to be cynical.
MARCH: The Green New Deal, if fleshed out into a serious plan, has potential to slow or reverse the decline of the United States.
MAY: Planting native plants in your garden really can make a difference for biodiversity.
JUNE: There have been a number of serious proposals and plans for disarmament and world peace in the past, even since World War II. We have just forgotten about them or never heard of them.
AUGUST: I explored an idea for automatic fiscal stabilizers as part of a bold infrastructure investment plan. I’m not all that hopeful but a person can dream.
SEPTEMBER: I think Elizabeth Warren has a shot at becoming the U.S. President, and of the candidates she and Bernie Sanders understand the climate change problem best. This could be a plus for the world. I suggested an emergency plan for the U.S. to deal with climate change: Focus on disaster preparedness and disaster response capabilities, the long term reliability and stability of the food system, and tackle our systemic corruption problems. I forgot to mention coming up with a plan to save our coastal cities, or possibly save most of them while abandoning portions of some of them in a gradual, orderly fashion. By the way, we should reduce carbon emissions and move to clean energy, but these are more doing our part to try to make sure the planet is habitable a century from now, while the other measures I am suggesting are true emergency measures that have to start now if we are going to get through the next few decades.
OCTOBER: I’ll go with hard shell tacos. They are one of the good things in this life, whether they are authentic Mexican food or “trailer park cuisine” as I tagged the story!
DECEMBER: Deep inside me is a little boy who still likes bugs, and I spotted some cool bugs in my 2019 garden, including endangered Monarch butterflies. So at least I made that small difference for biodiversity in a small urban garden, and others can do the same.
Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:
JANUARY: Some in the U.S. Senate and military take UFOs seriously.
FEBRUARY: We could theoretically create a race of humans with Einstein-level intelligence using in-vitro fertilization techniques available today. They might use their intelligence to create even smarter artificial intelligence which would quickly render them (not to mention, any ordinary average intelligence humans) obsolete.
MARCH: China is looking into space-based solar arrays. Also, injecting sulfate dust into the atmosphere could actually boost rice yields because rice is more sensitive to temperature than light, at least within the ranges studied. This all suggests that solutions to climate change that do not necessarily involve an end to fossil fuel burning and carbon emissions are possible with existing or very near future technology.
APRIL: Genetic engineering of humans might have to play a big role in eventual colonization of other planets, because the human body as it now exists may just not be cut out for long space journeys. In farther future space colonization news, I linked to a video about the concept of a “Dyson swarm“.
MAY: Joseph Stiglitz suggested an idea for a “free college” program where college is funded by a progressive tax on post-graduation earnings.
JUNE: In technology news, Elon Musk is planning to launch thousands of satellites. And I learned a new acronym, DARQ: “distributed ledger technology (DLT), artificial intelligence (AI), extended reality (XR) and quantum computing”. And in urban planning news, I am sick and tired of the Dutch just doing everything right.
JULY: I laid out the platform for my non-existent Presidential campaign.
SEPTEMBER: I mentioned an article by a Marine special operator (I didn’t even know those existed) on how to fix a broken organizational culture: acknowledge the problem, employ trusted agents, rein in cultural power brokers, win the population.
OCTOBER: A list of “jobs of the future” includes algorithms, automation, and AI; customer experience; environmental; fitness and wellness; health care; legal and financial services; transportation; and work culture. I’ll oversimplify this list as computer scientist, engineer, doctor, lawyer, banker, which don’t sound all that different than the jobs of the past. But it occurs to me that these are jobs where the actual tools people are using and day-to-day work tasks evolve with the times, even if the intended outcomes are basically the same. What might be new is that even in these jobs, you need to make an effort to keep learning every day throughout your career and life if you want to keep up.
DECEMBER: Estonia is supposedly the most digitally advanced country in the world. Finland has posted a free AI literacy course.
I want to give the reader some brilliant synthesis of all that, but you could probably go back to my past year in review posts and find that I am saying pretty much the same things each year. Well, here goes.
There is a list of serious risks that are being acknowledged but not effectively addressed. These include climate change, nuclear war, drought, rainforest loss, loss of freedom and human rights, economic recession, cyberwarfare, and automation leading to job loss. Climate change, drought, and rainforest loss are clearly intertwined. Solutions are largely known and just not being implemented due to dysfunctional politics at the national level and lack of international cooperation. These trends seem to be going in the wrong direction at the moment unfortunately.
Other than rainforest loss, the ongoing catastrophic loss of biodiversity, biomass and ecosystem function is mostly not even being acknowledged, let alone addressed. Biodiversity is a somewhat esoteric concept to most people, but hearing about mammals and birds and even insects just vanishing on a mass scale really starts to get to me emotionally. I don’t hear others in my social circles talking about these issues much, so I wonder if they just haven’t heard the same facts and figures I have or if they just don’t have the same response. Politicians are certainly not talking about these issues.
The risk of catastrophic war is very real. The world is in a very cynical place right now, but we have made progress on this before and we can do it again.
Recession and automation have an interesting relationship, where recession is a short- to medium-term reversal of economic growth, and automation, at least in theory, should lead to a longer-term acceleration of it. Of course, even if the acceleration happens it will benefit the majority of workers only if the wealth is shared. I’ll just repeat what I said above: “Here is the boringly simple western European formula for social and economic success: “public health care, nearly free university education, stronger progressive taxation, higher minimum wages, and inclusion of trade unions in corporate decision-making.” Or just copy the Dutch because they seem to know what they’re doing, the smug bastards.
You could accuse my blog of being US-centric, and I would accept that criticism. I am living in the US after all. I’ve lived and worked abroad though, and came to appreciate the strengths of my country more when I spent some time away from it. The US is still a good country to live in as a middle class professional person, but we are cruising along on the momentum of our past extraordinary success. We have lost momentum and begun to slip not only out of the leadership position among our developed country peers, but below the middle of the pack. The hard evidence on this is clear. We have politicians that just tell us that we are “great again”, because that is what we want to hear, without taking any necessary steps that would at least help us to keep up. 2020 is an election year and we have a chance to make some changes. We need to deal first and foremost with our systemic corruption problem which causes our government to respond to wealthy and powerful interests rather than citizens. We need real, inspiring, once-in-a-generation leadership to make this happen. I have decided to support Bernie Sanders for this reason, even though I don’t agree with every one of his stated policy positions.
There are some interesting and even astonishing technologies in the list above, from fusion power to micro-satellites to quantum computing to genetic engineering. It is 2020 after all.
And finally, when I’m not thinking and worrying about the world at large, I’ll be tending to my garden and my family and eating my hard shell tacos, and reminding myself that life here in the United States on the planet Earth is actually pretty good.
In this short story by Charlie Jane Anders, a relatively near-future (it refers to events “way back in the 2040s”) smart city is beset by supply chain problems with automated trucks that no human can seem to control. It also seems like nobody can leave. I’ll try not to spoil the plot but I’ll just list a few of the technologies woven into the story:
automated passenger and freight vehicles. Algorithms seem to determine who gets what in terms of food, and the government is not functional enough to step in. You can rent a car but where it can go depends on its software license.
jobs seem to be mostly professional tech and amorphous “business”, plus service jobs to support them. No truck drivers, construction workers, assembly line workers, etc.
“bioplastic” seems to be the key building material, produced by crops and/or genetically engineered fungus. Using crop land for this stuff rather than food seems to be part of the problem.
augmented reality goggles, but people are also still staring at screens
vertical farms producing maybe a sixth of the food supply. These seem to mostly or completely automated.
The title is a reference to the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, which was a World War II-era scientific study in which people actually volunteered to (partially) starve and then test out different ways to recover. According to Wikipedia it was a diet of about 1500 calories per day consisting mostly of potatoes, rutabagas, turnips, bread and macaroni for 24 weeks. It actually doesn’t sound all that terrible to me because these are relatively filling, satisfying foods. But 24 weeks sounds like a long, long time. I think I could handle this for 24 days if I was allowed unlimited seasonings and condiments, and maybe a beer or two on Fridays.
I find it interesting that Thailand is banning the herbicide glyphosate, which is widely used in the U.S. The U.S. is protesting this ban, and I wondered why until I realized that it could include a ban on importing food from the U.S. grown with glyphosate. One chemical and one relatively small export market might not be a big deal, but food is one thing the U.S. does still export in enormous quantities, and if bans like this spread on a larger scale and encompass more chemicals and biotechnologies, it could start to affect our agricultural practices. Probably for the better, but it could be complicated.
My work-life balance situation continues to not favor a lot of blog posts. Or is it work-life-family balance? Or is family part of life? Yes, I guess so. Anyway, what there is not a lot of time for is personal leisure activities like reading, writing, and thinking. Not that I don’t enjoy reading Green Eggs and Ham for the 50th time. I do. Anyway, here are a few highlights of the slim pickings that constituted this blog in August 2019.
Most frightening and/or depressing story:
Drought is a significant factor causing migration from Central America to the United States. Drought in the Mekong basin may put the food supply for a billion people in tropical Asia at risk. One thing that can cause drought is deliberately lying to the public for 50 years while materially changing the atmosphere in a way that enriches a wealthy few at everyone else’s expense. Burning what is left of the Amazon can’t help.
Most hopeful story:
I explored an idea for automatic fiscal stabilizers as part of a bold infrastructure investment plan. I’m not all that hopeful but a person can dream.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:
I’m reading that a major city in India, Chennai, has run out of water. (This article is a couple weeks old – the situation might have changed since then, but they are on a knife edge regardless.) Chennai is India’s sixth largest city, with a population around 4 million. It is also a major business center. My employer for example has a large operation in Chennai, and it is not exactly what I would call a major multinational corporation. So if professional workers are being told to go home and get in line for drinking water rations, that sounds pretty serious.
I remember hearing about groundwater depletion in India for years, and it appears that has gotten to the point where if rainfall patterns are unexpected, there is no groundwater to fall back on as they have in the past. And if cities don’t have drinking water, what does that mean for industry and agriculture? This would seem to be bad news for the food supply. Sure, India can import food, but what happens when this occurs in other food-producing countries (like the U.S. Great Plains and major rice growers in Southeast Asia), and India is also competing with China and other populous countries in Asia and Africa for dwindling food stocks. Food is the nexus of land, water, and climate.
Around 600 million people are dealing with high-to-extreme water shortages, according to a 2018 report by NITI Aayog, a policy think tank for the Indian government…
Here are a few more eye-opening, if not jaw-dropping, quotes from Hong Kong-based Asia Times:
The southwest monsoons remain the biggest source of water in the subcontinent. The monsoons lead to a combination of water sources supporting human habitats that includes glaciers, surface irrigation and ground water. But redundancy and surplus have gone missing from this once abundant system. Taking their place are galloping shortages…
Mukherjee is one of the editors of a landmark study that was published earlier this year. It predicts a terrible loss of the glaciers that dot the Hindu Kush-Himalaya region. “The Hindu Kush Himalaya Assessment” says that even if urgent global action on climate change is able to limit global warning to 1.5 degrees centigrade, it will still lead to a loss of a third of the glaciers in the region by the year 2100…
This has major implications for India, China, Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh. While the nearly 250 million who live in the Hindu Kush-Himalaya region will be most impacted from the outset, another 1.65 billion people who depend on the glacier-fed rivers are primarily at risk.
So there you have it – India historically has been supplied by redundant water sources including glacier-fed rivers, groundwater, and seasonal rainfall. Two of those three seem to be in doubt, and that leaves them at the mercy of whether the monsoon happens as expected each year or not.
India is a major democracy with a lot of technical and agricultural know-how. If they are not solving these problems, it does not seem to me to bode well for the rest of the world.
It also occurs to me that reducing carbon emissions is not the solution to this urgent problem. At least, governments can’t put all their eggs in that basket. They will have to invest in major water conservation and water reuse initiatives, and possibly high-tech and energy intensive measures like desalination.
A nasty virus called African swine fever has spread from pig farms in Africa to China.
The number of pigs China will fatten this year is predicted to fall by 134 million, or 20%, from 2018—the worst annual slump since the U.S. Department of Agriculture began counting China’s pigs in the mid-1970s. While the pig virus doesn’t harm humans even if they eat tainted pork, the fatality rate in pigs means it could destroy the region’s pork industry.
Invoking of emergency powers was the first step down the slippery slope for the democratic Weimar Republic. New research suggests that climate change can be the trigger that pushes a society over the edge.
Most hopeful story:
The Green New Deal, if fleshed out into a serious plan, has potential to slow or reverse the decline of the United States.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:
China is looking into space-based solar arrays. Also, injecting sulfate dust into the atmosphere could actually boost rice yields because rice is more sensitive to temperature than light, at least within the ranges studied. This all suggests that solutions to climate change that do not necessarily involve an end to fossil fuel burning and carbon emissions are possible with existing or very near future technology.
Would injecting sulfate particles into the atmosphere to counteract global warming affect rice yields in the tropics? Yes, according to this paper, but not in the direction I guessed. Even though rice is a tropical crop, it is sensitive to temperature – higher temperatures decrease its yield, and the effect of lowering temperature would be greater than the effect of having less light, leading to increased yield. At least in this study which wired together a complicated climate model with a complicated rice yield model.