Cohen the Barbarian on a Proper King

“Look at history. Whenever you come across a king where everyone says, ‘Oo, he was a good king all right,’ you can bet your sandals he was a great big bearded bastard who broke heads a lot and laughed about it.

"But some king who just passed decent little laws and read books and tried to look intelligent…‘Oh,’ they say, ‘oh, he was all right, a bit wet, not what I'd call a proper king.’ That's people for you.” – Terry Pratchett, Interesting Times

Initial Notes On The Assassination Of Qassem Suleimani

1. The assassination of Qassem Suleimani is a de facto declaration of war on Iran.
2. Trump does not understand Iran well enough to know who to target, so who told him to target Qassem Suleimani?
3. The Senate now faces a choice: impeach Donald Trump or abdicate its constitutional authority to declare war to the Presidency.
4. The House now may impeach Donald Trump for declaring war without the consent of the Senate.
5. “Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and I discussed the decisive defensive action @realDonaldTrump employed in Baghdad to protect American lives. I emphasized that de-escalation is the United States’ principal goal.” – Secretary of State Pompeo, tweet.
6. People are talking about preventing war with Iran. It's too late. There is going to be a response, probably not a conventional military response, but something brutal. At best, we can prevent escalation.
7. It is not clear to me that any peace with Iran can be remade. It may be Trump has entangled us in war for years to come.

The Best Green Future May Be Socialist

Writing the last two posts has been a wrenching experience. I knew, abstractly, just how big a task we face in decarbonizing the US economy, let alone the global economy, but laying out the problem with natural gas in the USA – only one fuel in only one country – brought home the scale of the problem. Hundreds of millions affected. 30 trillion cubic feet of natural gas consumed in 2018. (Or, if you like, 850 billion cubic meters.) 7.5 billion barrels of petroleum. And we are to make a significant dent in this in just ten years?

Just dropping fossil fuel subsidies and eliminating hydraulic fracturing (fracking) within the USA would raise the price of natural gas significantly. Before fracking became a routine practice, natural gas cost roughly 2.75 times its current price. Abandoning fracking and subsidies would perhaps raise the price to 5 times its current level. There would be knock-on effects. Roughly 35% of US electric power comes from natural-gas fueled plants. But doing that alone would simply lead to a shift to petroleum, which is priced on an international market. So there have to be other changes: tariffs on imported petroleum to maintain parity with still-subsidized imported fuels as a start. This would raise energy prices overall. Plastics are made from natural gas and petroleum byproducts and those prices would also be affected. In turn, the prices of products made from plastics will rise.

Wind and solar energy might, if brought online fast enough, fill much of the gap in energy production, but those technologies have their limits. (I’ve written about this before, in several posts. Start with The Green New Deal: Running the Numbers.) And there are sure to be problems, because there are always problems.

The cascading changes and the need to respond to unexpected consequences demand a managed economy. Not managed in minute detail, no, there is no need to pre-calculate exactly the number of each type of widget a factory is to produce, but management that responds to gross systemic needs as they emerge. This is exactly what conservatives have been fighting against, all these years. In their fight, they rejected every moderate solution, until a managed economy is the best hope that remains.

If this is not quite the moneyless planned economy of communism, it is at least Keynes’ “somewhat comprehensive socialization of investment” and nearer to planned state socialism than anything that has previously been attempted.

The best green future may be socialist.

Getting Green Wrong

So, let’s suppose that there is a blue wave, the Democratic Party sweeps the Presidency and the Senate, and the Democratic-controlled government legislates an end to fracking and fossil fuel subsidies. What happens? To begin with, coal mining stops almost completely. The price of natural gas perhaps quintuples, while US domestic petroleum stops being a marketable product. Ten million aggrieved suburban homeowners descend on Washington DC with trowels.

If we’re going to do this properly, we have to have subsidies to convert our heating systems away from fossil fuels.

But it doesn’t stop there. Natural gas is used for other things than heating. Liquefied natural gas (LNG) is used as a maritime fuel, where it is preferable to the incredibly dirty marine diesel oil (MDO) that ships burn. (The whole merchant marine is a huge pollution problem, but that is for another post.) Ethane from “wet” natural gas is used as a plastics feedstock. Propane is used as a ground transportation fuel, and everything heavier goes into the various petroleum industries.

We need to plan for all this. We need to be thinking about it. Is there anyone planning?

Decarbonizing: Running the Numbers and Economic Modeling

(This is a reply to a Twitter question from a retired OECD energy policy expert on what numbers I would like to see run when thinking about decarbonization.)

When I wrote “if anyone has actually run the numbers, I haven't seen their work” I was thinking “built an economic model of the transformation required to move the world away from fossil fuels.” It seems to me direly important that we do so.

We’ve been talking about natural gas. We know that as various subsidies are removed the price of natural gas will rise. (By the way, the USA has a production subsidy, the depletion allowance.) Ideally, users of natural gas as fuel will, therefore, replace their systems with some combination of heat pumps and electric furnaces. Many furnace owners quite literally cannot afford to upgrade their systems. Others may be able to afford the change but will be adversely affected by it. All businesses in this area will be in competition with international businesses that have not converted their systems. So subsidies and, probably, tariffs will be needed for this change to be carried out in an equitable way.

Natural gas is also used for transportation, and natural gas liquids are used as a chemical feedstock for plastics manufacture. DOE’s Energy Information Agency does not even know the amount of NGLs that are used in plastics manufacture; probably no-one does.

The scale of this problem is vast. In the USA, there are tens of millions of single-family homes with gas furnaces. If fuel prices spike sufficiently, there is likely to be a voter backlash against the conversion. There is going to be resistance in any event.

The scale of the mobilization required to decarbonize the economy will be vast and it must be done very quickly. Back in 1991, Al Gore said we needed the equivalent of a Manhattan Project to guide the change. Time has gone by, and the urgency is much great. Now we need a mobilization equivalent to that required for a total war.

If this is going to be done at all, we need the best planning possible. Hence, we need models, and I am not aware of anyone who has built even the prototypes of those models.

Enough of an answer?

Boris Johnson, Donald Trump, and the Zeitgeist

🎶
I’ve come down from the upper class
to mend your rotten ways
🎶

Where did we get Boris Johnson from, for heaven’s sake? The man is an obvious grifter. And why Donald Trump?

Be afraid, there is an answer.

Time are hard. And when times are hard, people of most nations look back to the Olde Days when things were better. This was where Afghanistan got the Taliban from: godly men from the days of the Caliphs. Donald Trump is an image (entirely an image, he is apparently actually a failure as anything but a television personality) of the American entrepreneur. Boris Johnson plays the noble.

It’s all bosh. The Taliban were not godly, Donald Trump is a failure as an entrepreneur, and Boris Johnson is a fake noble with a fake name and a fake accent. But “Mundus vult decepi, ergo decipiatur” (“The world wishes to be deceived, so let it be deceived”) and enough of the public believes. (Lying, character assassination, and a press dominated by the far right helped.)

The world, truly, stands on the edge of a new age. Humanity either will change and prosper, learning to master its numbers and its use of resources, or its numbers will collapse and it will sink into poverty in an ecologically impoverished world. And so humanity stands, as Rome once did, on the edge of vast change, and there are purges and the reinstatement of state gods. In utter panic, the world turns to the values of its past, failing to recognize that these either never were honored in their own times and often never were even valid. And so we get the grifters and the ethnic cleansing.

If humanity is to thrive, it must live in the present looking towards the future. It must look to the future and listen to visionaries like Greta Thunberg and Bill McKibben.

All the major media firms, old and new, support Trump

(My lump of coal for the day.)

The support ranges from lukewarm (MSNBC) to full-throated (Fox), but they all support him. Facebook allows any lie to distributed to any identifiable group for a price. Twitter refuses to ban white supremacists because its software has trouble telling the difference between white supremacists and Republicans.

How the devil are we supposed to win this election? It may be possible; we won in 2018, we might, I suppose, win in 2020. But it's going to be work.