Visible Transition to the Middle Class

Posted on August 1, 2017 by climatechangefork

I am back from a family vacation that took me to Australia, South Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, and a few other Asian countries. I still haven’t completely recuperated from the jet lag (distance, duration, and age) so this blog will be heavy on photographs that I took on the trip. As usual, I tried to look around to see if I could identify any markers with useful global implications that I could use in class and include in the blog. One of the interesting aspects of the countries that I visited is that they span a range from developing to developed nations, starting with Cambodia on one end and ending with Australia on the other.

Table 1 shows the GDP/Capita (PPP – US$) of these countries (taken from the IMF 2016 data). I also included China and the world as a whole to give context. I wrote blogs (August 11 and 18, 2015) that addressed similar issues after my vacation in China and intend to correlate some of the data from these countries with what I covered then.

Table 1

Country 2016 GDP/Capita (PPP) (US$)
World 16,138
Cambodia 3,500
Vietnam 6,499
China 15,399
Thailand 16,888
South Korea 37,740
Australia 48,899

Last week’s blog discussed the global shift taking place in primary carbon emissions origins from the production of electricity to transportation. My analysis points to the growth of the global middle class as the main cause of this shift. “Global Trends” described the group as follows:

There are multiple applicable definitions of what constitutes membership in the middle class. The International Futures model that we use in this report focuses on per capita consumption expenditures rather than GDP per capita. In that model, middle-class membership is defined as per capita household expenditures of $10-50 per day at PPP. Goldman Sachs used a comparable GDP per capita of $6,000-30,000 per year, which yields a similar estimate of 1.2 billion middle-class people in the world in 2010. Kharas (OECD study) calculated the number of those in the middle class at 1.85 billion in 2009; Ravallion (World Bank) calculated that 2.64 billion people were in the middle class in 2005.

Going back to Table 1, it is clear that Australia and South Korea are fully developed countries while the other countries in Southeast Asia that I visited are in various stages of development. Cambodia has yet to reach the “middle class” level; Vietnam is on the lower end and China and Thailand rest in the middle of the scale.

The transportation transition from bicycles to cars in China was mostly generational. These other countries’ transitions from scooters to automobiles have been much more gradual.

Figures 1 and 2 show “typical” urban traffic in Hanoi and Bangkok. Thailand has a similar GDP/Capita to China, and in the Thai capital of Bangkok, traffic looks almost identical to that which dominated Shanghai when I went two years ago – almost entirely made up of automobiles and not much different from what you would see in other large metropolitan areas like Seoul, Sidney, or my home of New York City. The traffic in Hanoi, which sits on the lower end of the middle class scale, is more of a mix of scooters and cars.

Figure 1 – Traffic in Bangkok, Thailand

Figure 2 – Traffic in Hanoi, Vietnam

Figures 3 and 4 show a coffeehouse in Hanoi with its predominant clientele of socializing youngsters and their preferred transportation.

Figure 3 – Coffee shop in Hanoi

Figure 4 – “Parking lot” near the coffee shop from Figure 3

Figures 5 and 6 show the loading of extra-large loads on a scooter and a bike. Figure 5 was taken at a painting gallery near the coffee shop in Hanoi while Figure 6 is from an exhibit at a museum in the same city. It is worth noting that the latter has been deemed worthy of such display.

Figure 5 – A loaded up scooter in Hanoi

Figure 6 – A fully loaded bike, as shown at a museum in Hanoi

Families riding together on scooters (Figure 7) are a common sight in both Vietnam and Cambodia that makes me extremely nervous. I have no idea about any safety rules or regulations in place but safety doesn’t seem to be their primary concern.

Figure 7 – Family transportation near Siem-Reap, Cambodia

Starting next week I will get back to climate change. The headline-dominating stories here in the US and around the world are starting to bore me and many others. Climate change doesn’t seem to be at the forefront of the news now but many things are in motion behind the spotlight and it’s time to refocus.

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Driving Forces in the Anthropocene 2 – Shift in Carbon Emissions Dominance from Electricity to Transportation

Posted on July 25, 2017 by climatechangefork

The global shift that I talked about last week – from electricity to transportation as the biggest contributor to carbon emissions – is complicated. It has to do with the increased demand for transportation (mainly fueled by gasoline) within developing countries just as much of the electricity production is shifting from coal to natural gas and correspondingly reducing carbon emissions. The indicator that plays a fundamental role in both phenomena is the recent swell in both the size and consumption of the global middle class.

The two most recent Global Trends reports issued by the American intelligence community touched on that marker. The Global Trends – 2030 report discussed it in “Megatrend 1: Individual Empowerment”

Middle classes most everywhere in the developing world are poised to expand substantially in terms of both absolute numbers and the percentage of the population that can claim middle class status during the next 15-20 years.

Figure 1 shows the projected shift in graph form (Global Trends uses the same graph but the one that I show here is much clearer)

Graph of shares of global middle class consumption 2000-2050

Figure 1 – Shares of global middle class consumption (OECD)

Here is how Global Trends defines the middle class:

There are multiple applicable definitions of what constitutes membership in the middle class. The International Futures model that we use in this report focuses on per capita consumption expenditures rather than GDP per capita. In that model, middle-class membership is defined as per capita household expenditures of $10-50 per day at PPP. Goldman Sachs used a comparable GDP per capita of $6,000-30,000 per year, which yields a similar estimate of 1.2 billion middle-class people in the world in 2010. Kharas (OECD study) calculated the number of those in the middle class at 1.85 billion in 2009; Ravallion (World Bank) calculated that 2.64 billion people were in the middle class in 2005.

I observed the rapid shift to automobile use in urban China and described some of the consequences in two previous blogs, “China – How Many Cars Can a City Handle” and “Cars in China – Cap and Pay.” Many of the largest Chinese cities now have so many cars that they are approaching their estimated “saturation ranges.” This is an immense contrast with what I observed in China on my previous visit in 1995, when the predominant mode of urban transport was bicycles.

The world electrification for a similar period of time is shown in Figure 2 (the actual data in Figures 1 and 2 are similar; the time period between 2015 and 2050 in Figure 1 are extrapolated data). Global availability of electricity as a share of global population has expanded by 10% according to the Energy Information Administration (EIA).

Map of electrification rate by country 1994 vs 2014Figure 2 – Global electrification rate

Below is the EIA explanation of the reasons for the expansion of access of electricity:

Part of the increased share of access to electricity is attributable to the faster rate of population growth in urban areas; the share of the world’s population living in urban areas grew from 44% in 1994 to 53% in 2014. Urban areas tend to be more electrified, but most of the world’s population without access to electricity live in rural areas. In 2014, 27% of the world’s rural population did not have electricity access compared with 4% of urban populations.

Figure 3 quantifies the split between rural and urban gains in access to electricity.

World population access to electricity 1994 vs 2014Figure 3 – Urban and Rural Split Access to Electricity

By 1994, the urban areas throughout the world were already close to fully electrified. What happened afterward was a massive migration from the rural areas to the urban ones. As we’ve discussed repeatedly, the middle class is moving to the cities on a global basis, in both developed and developing countries. The planet is becoming more and more urbanized, with major political consequences and related environmental impacts. Most of the people that move do so to find work in the cities, hoping to escape poverty and rise to the middle class. Since the cities are already hooked up to power, they are more or less able to accommodate this massive migration. The use of electricity is increasing much slower as a result of the newly urbanized population. Other elements are starting to play major role. The residents of these booming cities are starting to demand clean air on par with international standards. These demands for cleaner city air are forcing governments to switch fuels in nearby power stations from coal to the cleaner options of natural gas and sustainable energy sources. These shifts result in much slower increase in carbon emission.

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Driving Forces in the Anthropocene 1 – Education and Transportation

Posted on July 18, 2017 by climatechangefork

As I have often mentioned, I teach two courses: one undergraduate climate change class and a more advanced one about Physics and Society that is open to both undergraduate and graduate students. The latter mainly aims to provide advanced students – especially those who focus on Physics – with broader opportunities in their career choices. My lower level course falls under Brooklyn College’s General Education program. Like all such setups, the school seeks to widen its students’ horizons and facilitate their ability to contribute constructively to a changing society. Both courses mix basic principles of science with current events.

Governance plays a large role in shaping current events and in a democratic society, much of that control is subject to politics. In many countries, including the United States, academics tend to be more liberally inclined than the rest of the general public. This creates a political gap between academics and the government.

One such rift came to light recently in Israel. Naphtali Bennet, the Education Minister and the head of a right-leaning Nationalist party, decided to take action to reduce this divide. His strategy was to issue guidelines for university faculty forbidding any digressions from published syllabi – especially if they regarded politics:

Last December, Bennett asked Asa Kasher, who wrote the IDF’s ethics code, to draw up a document laying down the lines for acceptable behavior by academic lecturers regarding political activism during teaching sessions. Kasher recently presented the code to Bennett and the latter now plans to submit it for approval by the Council for Higher Education in Israel, the national governing body for academic institutes, according to a Friday report in the Yedioth Ahronoth daily.

Although the code is not directed at any particular political orientation, Israeli academia is often seen as left-leaning. Bennett, head of the religious-nationalist Jewish Home party, has been seen as attempting to limit left-wing voices in educational institutions while bringing in more views from the right.

While all of the academic institutions in Israel object to the law, they lack the voting power to prevent it from passing. Topics such as mine will be unteachable in such an environment.

In a global epoch dominated by humans (Anthropocene) politics cannot be left out of the classroom. I have touched on this topic many times [Politics (May 3 and May 17, 2016) and Education (May 24 – June 14, 2016) in the Anthropocene]. I firmly believe, however, that this teaching should be balanced, anchored on first principles, and not used as a recruitment opportunity for a particular party or dogma.

Right now, our energy use (and the production of such energy) is most likely the largest impact that humans are making on the physical environment. The brunt of this comes from the corresponding changes in the chemistry of the atmosphere, which in turn affect our planet’s energy balance with the sun and therefore the global climate. We have extrapolated that these changes – based on business as usual practices – over just a few generational lifetimes, will destroy the planet’s ability to support life. That relatively short timespan is barely enough time to reverse these practices. The world is now in the process of trying to actively slow or mitigate climate change but the current administration is forcefully pulling the US out of this effort. The educational system is feeling the pull between the two directions, as is the political arena.

Some of the main driving forces that power the changes in the atmospheric chemistry are summarized through the IPAT identity. The IPAT identity contains two basic socioeconomic indicators – population and standard of living, and three energy terms that specify the yearly carbon emissions that result from energy use. Traditionally, the electricity generation sector is the dominant carbon emitter, followed by the transportation sector. Figure 1 demonstrates typical global carbon dioxide emissions by sector. Figures of this sort vary because of different sector accounting (e.g. power generated on site is often associated with industry or residential sectors).

Figure 1 – Global carbon dioxide emissions by sector (2015)

There is a major new shift taking place within such sector distributions. Rather suddenly, carbon emissions from transportation are starting to compete for impact with those that result from generation of electricity. The shift starts in developed countries, with a strong indication that it is expanding to developing countries as they get richer. Figure 2 demonstrates the change in the US. As we will see below, markets are responding quickly to accommodate.

US carbon dioxide emissions in billions of metric tonsFigure 2 – Carbon dioxide emission in the US resulting from energy use that drives electricity production and transportation.

Recently the valuation of Tesla Motors ($51.4B) overtook that of the 109-year-old company General Motors, in spite of the fact that the latter has yearly sales of more than 100 times that of the former. Tesla is developing and selling electric cars, one of the main selling points for which is that they are the future of motor vehicles because they don’t burn carbon fuel and thus don’t pollute the air. Of course, electric cars get their energy from the electric grids. The sales pitch doesn’t include the obvious detail that if said electric power is being generated using coal plants, the electric cars are far from being environmentally benign. As a matter of fact, they might be more polluting than their fossil fuel counterparts. Yet the attraction of electric cars is not confined to the US. Here is a Reuter’s story about the global trend:

Demand for gasoline in Asia may peak much earlier than expected as millions of people in China and India buy electric vehicles over the next decade, threatening wrenching change for the oil industry, oil and auto company executives warned.

They said refiners should prepare for a future in which gasoline, their biggest source of revenue, will be much less of a cash cow.

Change is being prompted by policy moves in India and China, where governments are trying to rein in rampant pollution, cut oil imports, and compete for a slice of the fast-growing green car market.

In its “road map”, released in April, China said it wants alternative fuel vehicles to account for at least one-fifth of the 35 million annual vehicle sales projected by 2025.

India is considering even more radical action, with an influential government think-tank drafting plans in support of electrifying all vehicles in the country by 2032, according to government and industry sources interviewed by Reuters late last week.

“We will see a clear shift to electric cars. It’s driven by legislation so electric cars are coming, it’s not a niche anymore,” Wilco Stark, vice president for strategy and product planning at German car maker Daimler (DAIGn.DE), told Reuters.

In the next blog I will try to correlate this shift in energy use with a shift in socioeconomic class – the world is getting richer and the global middle class is exploding the use of cars, trains and airplanes.

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Vacation Notice

Posted on July 11, 2017 by climatechangefork

This week I am taking a break from the blog, so there will be no post. Please do come back next Tuesday, when I promise to continue our discussions.

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Coal

Posted on July 4, 2017 by climatechangefork

Happy 4th of July, everyone!New rooftop solar panels on the Kentucky Coal Museum

Figure 1 – The rooftop of the Coal Mining Museum in Kentucky

A coal mining museum in Kentucky is switching to solar energy, hoping to save money on energy costs.

The Kentucky Coal Mining Museum, owned by Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College, houses four floors of coal mining equipment, memorabilia, and displays. A two-ton block of coal sits at the front door, and the museum also houses an actual underground mine guests can walk through.

“We believe that this project will help save at least 8 to 10 thousand dollars off the energy costs on this building alone, so it’s a very worthy effort,” KCTC Communications Director Brandon Robinson told WYMT.

President Trump specifically mentioned our country’s continuous coal use in his withdrawal speech from the Paris Agreement:

According to this same study, by 2040, compliance with the commitments put into place by the previous administration would cut production for the following sectors: paper down 12 percent; cement down 23 percent; iron and steel down 38 percent; coal — and I happen to love the coal miners — down 86 percent; natural gas down 31 percent. The cost to the economy at this time would be close to $3 trillion in lost GDP and 6.5 million industrial jobs, while households would have $7,000 less income and, in many cases, much worse than that.

Further, while the current agreement effectively blocks the development of clean coal in America — which it does, and the mines are starting to open up. We’re having a big opening in two weeks. Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, so many places. A big opening of a brand-new mine. It’s unheard of. For many, many years, that hasn’t happened. They asked me if I’d go. I’m going to try.

China will be allowed to build hundreds of additional coal plants. So we can’t build the plants, but they can, according to this agreement. India will be allowed to double its coal production by 2020. Think of it: India can double their coal production. We’re supposed to get rid of ours. Even Europe is allowed to continue construction of coal plants.

In short, the agreement doesn’t eliminate coal jobs, it just transfers those jobs out of America and the United States, and ships them to foreign countries.

In spite of the president’s dire predictions, US electric utilities are becoming the first to shift away from the use of coal – for economic reasons rather than as a result of the previous administration’s policies:

WASHINGTON — In Page, Ariz., the operators of the Navajo Generating Station, the largest coal-fired power plant in the West, have announced plans to close it by 2019. The electric utility Dayton Power & Light will shut two coal plants in southern Ohio by next year. Across the country, at least six other coal-fired power plants have shut since November, and nearly 40 more are to close in the next four years.

President Trump campaigned on a pledge to restore the limping American coal industry, vowing to bring jobs and production back to a sector that has been on a steady decline for over a decade. But to do that, he would have to revive demand for coal by electric utilities, which for decades have been the largest consumer of the heavily polluting fuel. Nearly all the coal mined in the United States generates electricity.

The trend away from coal started long before the Paris Agreement – even before the Obama administration took office; our withdrawal from the Paris Agreement is unlikely to reverse that pattern. Figure 2 shows the numbers:

Graph of US coal mining employment 1985-2015

Figure 2 – Coal mining jobs in the US 1985-2015

The Energy Collective and NYT each put out highly relevant articles:

“Trump Coal Obsession Largely Irrelevant To Electric Utility CEOs”

The Trump administration’s obsession with the coal industry has driven many of its early energy and environmental policy initiatives—with the Energy Department’s thinly veiled baseload power plant review just the latest in a string of efforts to buttress the troubled sector. But none of these policies are going to change coal’s central problem: The utility industry, far and away its largest customer, is steadily moving away from the black rock. This transition won’t happen overnight, but the direction is clear, as a close review of recent utility executive statements and company publications clearly demonstrates.

“Coal Mining Jobs Trump Would Bring Back No Longer Exist“

Pressured by cheap and abundant natural gas, coal is in a precipitous decline, now making up just a third of electricity generation in the United States. Renewables are fast becoming competitive with coal on price. Electricity sales are trending downward, and coal exports are falling. All the while, the coal industry has been replacing workers with machines and explosives. Energy and labor specialists say that no one — including Mr. Trump — can bring them all back.

“Coal Country’s Power Plants Are Turning Away From Coal”

Coal is on the defensive in the nation’s power industry. Even in coal country.

The pressure to shift more of the country’s electric supply to renewable sources is not just a rallying cry for environmentalists. Some of the power industry’s biggest customers, like General Motors and Microsoft, have made a commitment to clean energy. And to help them meet it — and keep them from taking their business elsewhere — utilities are changing their ways.

West Virginia, where coal is king, is no exception.

Appalachian Power, the leading utility there, is quickly shifting toward natural gas and renewable sources like wind and solar, even as President Trump calls for a coal renaissance. Appalachian Power still burns plenty of coal, but in recent years it has closed three coal-fired plants and converted two others to gas, reducing its dependence on coal to 61 percent last year, down from 74 percent in 2012.

Recently, natural gas driven electricity generation overtook coal powered electricity generation in the US:

US electrical generation by source 1949-2011

Figure 3 – Share of US electricity generation by source

The gradual departure from coal is not restricted to the US, so President Trump’s argument that the Paris Agreement’s main consequence will be shifting coal mining jobs from the US to China doesn’t have a leg to stand on. Here are some data from the most recent BP Plc Statistical Review of World Energy as published by Bloomberg:Carbon Crash: Production of coal fell the most on record last year as consumers turned to cleaner energyFigure 4

Stable Emissions: The volume of CO2 pumped into the atmosphere has barely changed for the past three yearsFigure 5

Rise of Renewables: The combined growth of wind and solar power continues to accelerateFigure 6

The global energy transition is probably here to stay. President Trump’s withdrawal will almost certainly have an impact (see my last several blogs) but the results are likely to be different from the “America First” world that he envisions.

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America First and American Sovereignty

Posted on June 27, 2017 by climatechangefork

I have cited President Trump’s withdrawal speech a lot in my previous two blogs so I will restrict myself to the directly relevant paragraphs. Below is the part of his speech on American sovereignty:

At what point does America get demeaned? At what point do they start laughing at us as a country? We want fair treatment for its citizens, and we want fair treatment for our taxpayers. We don’t want other leaders and other countries laughing at us anymore.  And they won’t be. They won’t be.

There are serious legal and constitutional issues as well. Foreign leaders in Europe, Asia, and across the world should not have more to say with respect to the U.S. economy than our own citizens and their elected representatives. Thus, our withdrawal from the agreement represents a reassertion of America’s sovereignty. (Applause) Our Constitution is unique among all the nations of the world, and it is my highest obligation and greatest honor to protect it. And I will.

As president, I have one obligation, and that obligation is to the American people. The Paris Accord would undermine our economy, hamstring our workers, weaken our sovereignty, impose unacceptable legal risks, and put us at a permanent disadvantage to the other countries of the world. It is time to exit the Paris accord — (Applause) — and time to pursue a new deal that protects the environment, our companies, our citizens, and our country.

It is time to put Youngstown, Ohio, Detroit, Michigan, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania — along with many, many other locations within our great country — before Paris, France. It is time to make America great again. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Of course, some of the countries are laughing at America but that is in part a reaction to Trump’s decision. The first one to mock us is (perhaps unsurprisingly) North Korea. 🙁

Now, in what is easily one of the strangest stories of 2017, they’re taking the piss out of America for pulling out of it. North Korea has, for the first time in eons, the moral high ground.

Responding to the Rose Garden announcement, an unnamed North Korean official from their Foreign Ministry released a statement declaring the President’s decision to be “the height of egotism and moral vacuum seeking only their own well-being at the cost of the entire planet.”

“Whoever chooses to blindly follow the Trump administration overpowered by its bravado should be fully aware that the judgment of history shall take them all as one,” they added.

In an attempt to explain President Trump’s “America First” emphasis, two of the four so-called “adults” in his administration – his National Security Adviser Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster and his and Director of the National Economic Council Gary Cohn – tried to put an intellectual spin on the concept:

“a clear-eyed outlook that the world is not a ‘global community’ but an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors and businesses engage and compete for advantage”

Gary Cohn is essentially describing the planet as an exchange forum – a concept he probably brought with him from his background at Goldman Sachs. Well – the “global community” is not comprised solely of heads of state trying gain home advantages; it also includes 7.4 billion people and the unique, fragile physical environment that can sustain them.

Meanwhile, security does not only mean military hardware or building high walls to isolate our country from the world (June 13th blog). President Trump is more than ready to spend large amounts on exactly that sort of military hardware and to twist the arms of our allies to do the same. Historically, though, a much more effective approach is to directly address the root causes of the danger.

Here is what the US intelligence community’s two most recent Global Trends documents (May 23rd blog) say about current and future causes of global insecurity:

Global Trends – 2030:

Food and water shortage:

Demand for food, water, and energy will grow by approximately 35, 40, and 50 percent respectively owing to an increase in the global population and the consumption patterns of an expanding middle class. Climate change will worsen the outlook for the availability of these critical resources. Climate change analysis suggests that the severity of existing weather patterns will intensify, with wet areas getting wetter and dry and arid areas becoming more so. Much of the decline in precipitation will occur in the Middle East and northern Africa as well as western Central Asia, southern Europe, southern Africa, and the US Southwest.

We are not necessarily headed into a world of scarcities, but policymakers and their private sector partners will need to be proactive to avoid such a future. Many countries probably won’t have the wherewithal to avoid food and water shortages without massive help from outside. Tackling problems pertaining to one commodity won’t be possible without affecting supply and demand for the others.

A New Age of Migration:

The first globalization of the late 19th and early 20th centuries saw a massive movement of people within the European continent and from Europe to the New World. We will not see the same high proportion of migrants as in the first industrial revolution, but international migration is set to grow even faster than it did in the past quarter-century. The factors promoting cross-border migration are likely to remain strong or intensify. These factors are globalization, disparate age structures across richer and poorer countries, income inequalities across regions and countries, and the presence of migrant networks linking sending and receiving countries.

Migration—unlike trade and other central features of increased globalization—is relatively unregulated by international agreements or cooperation. Immigration and border security is still largely—with the exception of the Schengen area in continental Europe—seen as coming under the purview of the country and not a subject for more international cooperation by most states in both the developing and developed worlds.

Global Trends – 2035:

The nature of conflict is changing. The risk of conflict will increase due to diverging interests among major powers, an expanding terror threat, continued instability in weak states, and the spread of lethal, disruptive technologies. Disrupting societies will become more common, with long-range precision weapons, cyber, and robotic systems to target infrastructure from afar, and more accessible technology to create weapons of mass destruction.

Climate change, environment, and health issues will demand attention. A range of global hazards pose imminent and longer-term threats that will require collective action to address—even as cooperation becomes harder. More extreme weather, water and soil stress, and food insecurity will disrupt societies. Sea-level rise, ocean acidification, glacial melt, and pollution will change living patterns. Tensions over climate change will grow. Increased travel and poor health infrastructure will make infectious diseases harder to manage.

The Global Trends 2035 publication provides the following as a likely scenario:

Imagining a surprise news headline in 2033 . . . Bangladesh Climate Geoengineering Sparks Protests April 4, 2033 – Dhaka Bangladesh became the first country to try to slow climate change by releasing a metric ton of sulfate aerosol into the upper atmosphere from a modified Boeing 797 airplane in the first of six planned flights to reduce the warming effects of solar radiation. The unprecedented move provoked diplomatic warnings by 25 countries and violent public protests at several Bangladeshi Embassies, but government officials in Dhaka claimed its action was “critical to self-defense” after a spate of devastating hurricanes, despite scientists’ warnings of major unintended consequences, such as intensified acid rain and depletion of the ozone layer.

The intelligence community wrote a separate document dedicated entirely to the implications of climate change on our national security:

The national security establishment needs to prepare for a series of global crises sparked by climate change, a group of experts wrote in a report released today.

The analysis by the Center for Climate and Security identifies 12 “epicenters” where climate change could stress global security, possibly igniting conflicts around the world.

American diplomats and military planners have already started grappling with some of these problems—but the links between them do not get enough attention, the experts said. And it is an open question whether the Trump administration confronts those challenges or tries to ignore them.

Many of the risk epicenters stem from resource shortages and dislocated populations, but the experts also consider an increased likelihood of nuclear war, more pandemics and tensions in the Arctic.

Any one of those factors is enough to cause serious problems, but together they threaten to undermine the international order, said Francesco Femia, one of the authors of the report, titled “Epicenters of Climate and Security: The New Geostrategic Landscape of the Anthropocene.”

It is crucial that we find a way to heed these warnings. Once again, I emphasize the importance of grassroots movements given the current administration’s hubris.

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“America First” and the Green Climate Fund

Posted on June 20, 2017 by climatechangefork

Figure 1 – Cumulative Carbon Emissions

In his exit speech from the Paris Agreement on Thursday, June 1st (see the previous two blogs), President Trump characterized the parts of the agreement that call for developed countries to help pay for climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts in developing countries as ridiculous. He said that our participation makes the United States a laughingstock. He also referred to the transition toward sustainable energy sources as an excuse for allowing more American coal miners to lose their jobs while their Indian and Chinese counterparts benefit. The next three blogs will focus on these claims as well as his repeated motto of “America First” and his assertion that he was elected by Pittsburg and not by Paris (the inaccuracy of which I have already pointed out). I will quote the relevant parts of the speech in order to avoid the common pitfall of cherry picking factual information that fits with my argument.

I will start here with the aspect of monetary distribution:

This agreement is less about the climate and more about other countries gaining a financial advantage over the United States. The rest of the world applauded when we signed the Paris Agreement — they went wild; they were so happy — for the simple reason that it put our country, the United States of America, which we all love, at a very, very big economic disadvantage. A cynic would say the obvious reason for economic competitors and their wish to see us remain in the agreement is so that we continue to suffer this self-inflicted major economic wound. We would find it very hard to compete with other countries from other parts of the world.

The agreement is a massive redistribution of United States wealth to other countries. At 1 percent growth, renewable sources of energy can meet some of our domestic demand, but at 3 or 4 percent growth, which I expect, we need all forms of available American energy, or our country (Applause) will be at grave risk of brownouts and blackouts, our businesses will come to a halt in many cases, and the American family will suffer the consequences in the form of lost jobs and a very diminished quality of life.

The Paris Agreement handicaps the United States economy in order to win praise from the very foreign capitals and global activists that have long sought to gain wealth at our country’s expense. They don’t put America first. I do, and I always will.  (Applause)

Beyond the severe energy restrictions inflicted by the Paris accord, it includes yet another scheme to redistribute wealth out of the United States through the so-called Green Climate Fund — nice name — which calls for developed countries to send $100 billion to developing countries all on top of America’s existing and massive foreign aid payments. So we’re going to be paying billions and billions and billions of dollars, and we’re already way ahead of anybody else. Many of the other countries haven’t spent anything, and many of them will never pay one dime.

The Green Fund would likely obligate the United States to commit potentially tens of billions of dollars of which the United States has already handed over $1 billion — nobody else is even close; most of them haven’t even paid anything — including funds raided out of America’s budget for the war against terrorism. That’s where they came. Believe me, they didn’t come from me.  They came just before I came into office.  Not good.  And not good the way they took the money.

In 2015, the United Nation’s departing top climate officials reportedly described the $100 billion per year as “peanuts,” and stated that “the $100 billion is the tail that wags the dog.”  In 2015, the Green Climate Fund’s executive director reportedly stated that estimated funding needed would increase to $450 billion per year after 2020.  And nobody even knows where the money is going to.  Nobody has been able to say, where is it going to?

Of course, the world’s top polluters have no affirmative obligations under the Green Fund, which we terminated. America is $20 trillion in debt. Cash-strapped cities cannot hire enough police officers or fix vital infrastructure. Millions of our citizens are out of work. And yet, under the Paris accord, billions of dollars that ought to be invested right here in America will be sent to the very countries that have taken our factories and our jobs away from us. So think of that.

In his speech, president Trump treats all countries as equal parties to deals, regardless of their size – Vatican City is tiny, the island of Nauru has 9,488 inhabitants and China has close to 1.4 billion people (close to 20% of the world population).

The United States, under the Trump administration, will continue to be the cleanest and most environmentally friendly country on Earth. We’ll be the cleanest. We’re going to have the cleanest air. We’re going to have the cleanest water. We will be environmentally friendly, but we’re not going to put our businesses out of work and we’re not going to lose our jobs. We’re going to grow; we’re going to grow rapidly.

Well, the United States under Trump administration cannot be “the most environmentally friendly country on Earth with the cleanest air and water. You cannot build a wall around our air or water. Pollutants don’t recognize national boundaries; they spread around and spread fast. Climate change is a global issue.

Figure 1 at the top of this blog depicts the global accumulation of carbon emissions since 1960. The Unites States’ share of those emissions is close to 40% even though our population makes up only about 4.5% of the worldwide total. But, some might say, this is history – who cares? What about the future? Figure 2 illustrates the future, taking into account the commitments of the Paris Agreement. These projections were made by the US Energy Information Administration (EIA). In 2040, one generation from now, countries that do not belong to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), what President Trump calls the “poor countries” are projected to put out close to 70% of the emissions.

Figure 2 – Emissions projections given the Paris Agreement

Figure 3 shows business as usual projections– disregarding any international agreements committed to emissions reductions.

Figure 3 – Projected carbon emissions in Business as Usual Scenario

Short of war, how could a country like India – with a GDP/capita 30 times smaller than the United States’ and about quarter of its 1.4 billion people not connected to the electrical grid – be persuaded not to use its cheapest, most abundant energy source – coal? The financial help that President Trump so strenuously objects to is designed to provide India and other developing countries with the fiscal incentives to do just that. Without these incentives, developing countries will continue to use dirty fuel as needed as they attempt to bring their people out of poverty. President Trump’s efforts will not be able to prevent Americans, along with the rest of the word, from bearing the full brunt of unchecked climate change.

The organization that was put in charge of this effort is the Green Climate Fund:

The Green Climate Fund (GCF) is a fund established within the framework of the UNFCCC to assist developing countries in adaptation and mitigation practices to counter climate change. The GCF is based in the new Songdo district of Incheon, South Korea. It is governed by a Board of 24 members and initially supported by a Secretariat.

The objective of the Green Climate Fund is to “support projects, programmes, policies and other activities in developing country Parties using thematic funding windows”.[1] It is intended that the Green Climate Fund be the centre piece of efforts to raise Climate Finance under the UNFCCC, and raise $100 billion a year by 2020.

U.S. President Donald Trump in his announcement of U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on June 1, 2017, also criticized the Green Climate Fund, calling it a scheme to redistribute wealth from rich to poor countries.[4]

U.S. President Obama committed the US to contributing US$3 billion to the fund. In January 2017, in his final 3 days in office, Obama initiated the transfer of a second $500m installment to the fund, leaving $2 billion owing. Incoming President Trump was not expected to make further contributions.[14]

As of June 2017, the Green Climate Fund has raised USD 10.3 billion in pledges from 43 state governments. The objective is for all pledges to be converted into contribution agreements within one year from the time at which they are made. I hope that happens.

Country Signed (M) Signed/capita($) GDP/Capita($) Emissions/capita(MT)
UK 1,211 18.77 46K 7
Germany 1,003 12.40 48K 9
Japan 1,500 11.80 36K 9
US 3,000 9.41 55K 17
Italy 268 4.54 35K 7
Spain 161 3.46 30K 6
South Korea 100 1.99 28K 12
Indonesia 0.25 <0.01 4K 2
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Remedies for Abdication of Duties?

Posted on June 13, 2017 by climatechangefork

Figure 1 – Trends in global urbanization

I am starting to write this blog on Tuesday, June 6th. I am doing this a bit earlier than usual in preparation for a trip that I will be taking in July to Australia and a few countries in Southeast Asia.

June 6th is the anniversary of D-Day. On this date in 1944 160,000 American, British, and Canadian troops landed on the shores of Normandy, France. That event ultimately resulted in the defeat of Nazi Germany and in the process saved my life, what remains of my family, and in a broader sense, saved us all.

The start of America’s direct involvement in World War II can be traced to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The US declared war on Japan the following day and on December 10th Germany and Italy declared war on the US. The United States found itself fighting on both fronts. This is history. I wonder now what would have happened if – after the Pearl Harbor attack – FDR had decided not to respond, declaring that our involvement in the war would cost too many American jobs. Both chambers of Congress at that time were controlled by Democrats, so it is unlikely that they would have impeached FDR and declared war on their own. The more likely scenario to that hypothetical event is that the post-war world would have been dominated by Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. My family and I would obviously not be around to write about the consequences.

The main role of any government is to protect its citizens. We understand this concept well. I think that if Canada or Mexico were to invade the US or North Korea were to drop one of its nuclear war heads on American property, even the Trump administration would have to respond.

And yet, what the Trump administration did on Thursday, June 1st was an abdication of the federal government’s primary duty: it declared that the US will formally withdraw from the global effort to respond to the danger that climate change poses to the safety of all of humanity. Given the structure of Congress now, it is most probable that it will not take action to challenge this decision. The judiciary branch is still independent but it is vulnerable to continuous changes by the two other branches of government and can do little to change this outcome.

Climate change is a global threat but it is up to sovereign countries to make individual decisions that affect the whole. The federal government of the richest big country in the world (in terms of GDP/capita of countries with more than 50 million citizens) – which is also historically the largest contributor of greenhouse gases emission/capita – is taking itself out of the mitigation efforts. This deliberately puts us all in great danger – not from war but from the drastic changes in physical environment triggered by human activities. Our federal government is not protecting us; it is abandoning its responsibilities.

What can we do?

Revolution? Military coup? Historically, these methods have not worked very well here – this is not our way. Shifting the responsibilities from top-down mandates to bottom-up trial and error efforts appears to be a more successful approach.

I was made aware of one specific such attempt of a major bottom-up resistance, via Reuter’s on Monday, June 5th. Given that I didn’t find much follow-up to this announcement, I will quote the article in full:

Bloomberg delivers U.S. pledge to continue Paris climate goals to U.N

By Valerie Volcovici | WASHINGTON

WASHINGTON Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg submitted a statement to the United Nations on Monday that over 1,000 U.S. governors, mayors, businesses, universities and others will continue to meet the goals of the Paris climate agreement abandoned by President Donald Trump last week.

Bloomberg, who is the U.N. Secretary-General’s special envoy for Cities and Climate Change, submitted the “We Are Still In” declaration to U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Executive Secretary Patricia Espinosa.

He also launched a process to work with local governments and non-state entities to formally quantify the combined – and overlapping – emissions reduction pledges, which will be known as “America’s Pledge,” and submit the report to the United Nations.

“Today, on behalf of an unprecedented collection of U.S. cities, states, businesses and other organizations, I am communicating to the United Nations and the global community that American society remains committed to achieving the emission reductions we pledged to make in Paris in 2015,” Bloomberg said in a statement.

Signatories to the new initiative include 13 Democratic and Republican governors, 19 state attorneys general, over 200 mayors, and CEOs of Fortune 500 companies and small businesses.

Trump on Thursday pulled the United States from the landmark 2015 agreement designed to fight climate change, fulfilling a major campaign pledge despite entreaties from U.S. allies and corporate leaders.

Although the formal process to withdraw from the Paris agreement takes four years, Trump said the United States will not honor the pledge the Obama administration submitted, known as the nationally determined contribution to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 26-28 percent below 2005 levels by the year 2025.

To fill the void, “America’s Pledge” will be submitted to the UNFCCC as a “Societal NDC.”

“The UNFCCC welcomes the determination and commitment from such a wealth and array of cities, states, businesses and other groups in the United States to fast forward climate action and emissions reductions in support of the Paris Climate Change Agreement,” said Espinosa.

The coalition will align a number of different efforts to show U.S. support for the Paris agreement, including a commitment of over 260 corporations including Kellogg , Pepsi Co. and Walmart to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions in line with the latest science.

Thirteen governors have also pledged to continue to honor the Paris pledges.

“It will be up to the American people to step forward-and in Virginia we are doing just that,” said Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe.

The process is already underway. Jerry Brown, the governor of California, recently made a fruitful visit to Beijing to make the case that individual states can now represent the US’s efforts to fight and adapt to climate change; he made similarly successful overtures in Germany to do the same. In fact, Canada has just decided that its own coordination of climate change mitigation and adaptation with the US will be directly with cities and states and not via the federal government.

The auto industry is also experiencing bottom-up activity:

The auto industry can’t count on a rollback of environmental standards by U.S. President Donald Trump to escape increasing worldwide pressure to make vehicles cleaner.

Rather than national and international bodies, the big push for change is coming from urban centers like Paris, Seoul and Mexico City, and U.S. states such as California, where leaders are reacting to the health hazards caused by deteriorating air quality.

“The air in London is lethal and I will not stand by and do nothing,” Mayor Sadiq Khan said in April as he announced plans to set up an ultra-low emissions zone around the city center.

Automakers can’t afford to ignore these initiatives, especially as a growing slice of the world’s population crowds into urban areas. The push by cities gained momentum in the wake of Volkswagen AG’s emissions-cheating scandal, which highlighted the smog-causing nitrogen oxides emitted by diesel vehicles. Madrid, Athens, Paris and Mexico City have all said they will ban these vehicles from their roads by 2025.

“Electric cars are the main driver of our technology effort because we are seeing many cities, urban cities, which are going to be zero-emissions and because the most affordable, known, popular technology is going to be electric,” Carlos Ghosn, chief executive officer of French carmaker Renault SA and chairman of Japan’s Nissan Motor Co., said in an interview.

In the U.S., 30 cities including New York and Chicago asked automakers for the cost and feasibility of providing 114,000 electric vehicles, including police cruisers, street sweepers and trash haulers, to improve air quality and show demand for low-emission vehicles.

The opening figure at the top of the blog describes present and near future rates of global urbanization. Cities all around the world are growing:

Global population in urban areas is expanding quickly…

Every year, 65 million people are added to the world’s urban population, equivalent to adding seven cities the size of Chicago or five the size of London annually.

At some point the courts will have to intervene.

California and New York are low carbon states. However, each country’s carbon emissions are a component of global carbon emissions. The Paris Agreement is a global covenant that amounts to more than individual countries’ future commitment to lowered carbon emissions. Until the US withdrawal, the agreement was signed by nearly every country – big and small, rich and poor, democratic or totalitarian. The only exceptions were Syria and Nicaragua. Now we are adding the US to the list.

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Me vs. Them vs. We – Time

Posted on June 6, 2017 by climatechangefork

Thursday (June 1st) was an event to remember. President Trump did indeed turn his back on the world, declaring that he was elected to serve Pittsburg and not Paris – except for the small detail that Pittsburg didn’t vote for him. Allegany County gave 259,480 votes to Trump and 367, 617 votes to Clinton.

Aside from that small discrepancy from reality, the speech was an astronomical declaration that the US is an isolated planet unaffected by anything that happens around it. Strangely, there was not a word in the speech about the future. Last week’s blog focused on the conflict between globalism and nationalism. I wrote there that “Me” and “Them” are very well defined. “We” includes me but needs an additional description of the collective that is being referring to. I am especially interested in where we position our family members and friends on this spectrum. In my book (Climate Change: The Fork at the End of Now), I defined “Now” in terms of the expected life span of my grandchildren, which approximately brings me to the end of the century.

Well, President Trump is thinking about his youngest son Barron. He reacted swiftly to the comedian Kathy Griffin’s awful exhibition of holding what appeared to be the president’s decapitated bloody head. The act immediately raised strong objections from everybody, irrespective of political affiliation. Ms. Griffin apologized and lost her job with CNN and had to cancel other performances. President Trump responded with the following tweet:

He was right. Except that he forgot to mention his eight grandchildren (not yet including Eric and Lara’s expected new baby). In his speech on Thursday, in which he removed the US from the Paris Agreement, there was plenty of “America First” rhetoric, implying that the rest of the world can go to hell. He said nothing at all, however, about the future that his youngest son and eight grandchildren can expect – especially if they reside in coastal cities as America and the world drown.

The American people do not share Trump’s cavalier neglect of the future – especially one that might directly affect their families. Recent Gallup polls show the numbers:

Figure 1 – Recent Gallup numbers of Americans worry about climate change

President Trump didn’t try to debunk the science of climate change in his speech. So in a sense he didn’t try to deny the future that “business as usual” scenarios will bring to us all. He was basically saying, as I understand him, that 60 or so million out of a US population of 330 million voted him in on his promise to extract the US from the Paris Agreement, so he is delivering on that promise. Barron and his eight grandchildren, and the hundreds of millions that will join them toward the end of the century, didn’t have the option to vote – too bad – they will be the ones to bear the consequences. His daughter, Ivanka, mother of three of his grandchildren, tried in vain to persuade Mr. Trump to remain in the Paris Agreement.

Well, if we cannot do anything to mitigate climate change, who can? A few of President Trump’s supporters have an answer:

Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.) told a constituent last week that God can solve the problem of climate change if the global phenomenon truly exists.

The 66-year-old Republican, who is a climate change skeptic, made the remark at a town hall in Coldwater, Michigan, on Friday.

“I believe there’s climate change,” Walberg said, according to a video of the exchange obtained by HuffPost. “I believe there’s been climate change since the beginning of time. I believe there are cycles. Do I think man has some impact? Yeah, of course. Can man change the entire universe? No.”

“Why do I believe that?” he went on. “Well, as a Christian, I believe that there is a creator in God who is much bigger than us. And I’m confident that, if there’s a real problem, he can take care of it.”

Or:

It’s hard to refute someone’s deeply held beliefs.

On the other side of the world, the dynamics in Australia are a bit different. Apparently, the disparity in attitude toward climate change is generational:

SPRING RIDGE, Australia — Mark Coulton and his daughter, Claire, both believe there is a future in rural living. They are both active members of Australia’s National Party, which traditionally represents farmers and voters outside the main cities who lean conservative, and they agree on most things — but not on how to deal with climate change.

Mr. Coulton, 59, thinks measures like carbon trading are “symbolic things that really won’t have any impact.” Claire Coulton, 33, supports carbon trading as a means of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and worries that Australia’s economic dependence on coal could undermine her future.

“I think it’s something all young people should be looking at with real interest,” she said, “because if there are negative effects of opening up that coal mine, our generation will be the one to bear the brunt of it.”

The elder Coulton is a lawmaker in the Australian Parliament, representing the electoral division of Parkes in New South Wales, and his daughter belongs to the party’s youth wing, but their disagreement is not limited to family debate. Last month, the regional youth wing, the NSW Young Nationals, including Ms. Coulton, went against party leaders at an annual meeting and voted to endorse a plan that would place a cost on emissions, known as an emissions intensity plan.

President Trump’s withdrawal speech last Thursday is a good focal point for the choices that we all must make in prioritizing the benefits for Me vs. Them vs. We, so I will do away with this awkward title for the next few blogs and instead look into the ramifications of the president’s departure from the Paris Agreement. I will address his emphasis on the Green Climate Fund, which he depicted negatively as a program for massive wealth redistribution. I will also speak to his emphasis on ramping back up our use of coal-powered energy as a means of bringing back coal mining jobs and his depiction of the Paris Agreement as a detriment to that goal. I will go on to enumerate the probable impacts of our withdrawal from the accord. Probably the most important aspect will be revisiting the issue of global wealth distribution as it ties in to any attempt to mitigate human contributions to climate change.

All of these are predicated on what might be a faulty belief that he now “suspects” that humans are important contributors to climate change. This might be a stretch given that he made no such mention in his speech.

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Me vs. Them vs. We – Nationalism/Populism vs. Globalism

Posted on May 30, 2017 by climatechangefork

The world is a shaky place right now. The best windows into this instability are countries where citizens can express their feelings in the voting booths. I am not alone in having mentioned repeatedly that the world is now entering into a period dominated by humans. For a global change this is taking place at a very fast pace – one which continues to accelerate.

In a previous blog (January 17, 2017) I cited the Economist’s description of a key proposal for the start of this new era:

The second slide (Figure 2) summarizes the state of approval for marking the Anthropocene as a new (and current) geological period. One important aspect, as shown on this slide, is the proposed marker for the beginning of this period. The Economist’s report from September 2016, demonstrates that the leading candidate for said marker is the high point of nuclear weapons testing in 1964.

Based on this proposed timeline, I am older than this new era, as are many of you. On a geological time scale that measures epochs in millions of years, this new era has barely reached infancy. An infant’s main job is to learn how best to survive in the new world that it is entering. Humanity is a collection of individuals who organize themselves into variously sized aggregates, including sovereign states, cities, towns, etc. Every one of these units keeps in mind its own interests as well as those of its largest grouping. Changes and instabilities always create winners and losers. In places where people can vote to decide on the direction of such change, people invariably have the choice of voting for either what they perceive to be their own good or that of the larger collective. On a global scale, these choices often exhibit themselves as a struggle between Nationalism (or Populism) and Globalism. Other scales are in play as well, including cities, towns, and states in federal systems, generational conflicts, etc. I will redefine these struggles as Me vs. Them vs. We (MTW – if you like abbreviation) and will devote my next few blogs to them.

These struggles are similar to the classic environmental NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) argument. (Type NIMBY into the search box and you will find at least 13 different blogs that deal with this issue in various contexts.)

Try to Google “me vs. them” and you will get a variety of results, ranging from police views on relevant conflicts with their communities to the band Radium’s album by that name. If you Google “me vs. them vs. we,” the search engine may correct it to “me vs. them or we.” The distinction between “me” and “them” is obvious but “we” necessitates including myself in some collective that needs to be defined separately. The other thing missing here is some gradation of the collective; do family, friends, etc. count under “me” or “them”?

On the political side, two Op-Ed pieces from the New York Times do an admirable job of illustrating some of these issues within the recent United States presidential elections.

The first is R.R. Reno’s April 28, 2017, “Republicans are Now the American First Party”:

For most of my career, the Republican Party was pretty easy to define. It stood for small government, an internationalist foreign policy, free trade, and moral and religious conservatism. Ronald Reagan was the party’s North Star. Of course, there have always been Republicans who veered from that line — but everyone understood what the party meant.

Of all the people still trying to process Donald Trump’s rise to the presidency, perhaps none are more confused than my generation of conservatives, who came of age under Mr. Reagan and drank deeply of that old orthodoxy. We are, by now, the establishment — the senators, governors, think-tank presidents and columnists who, until Mr. Trump came along, got to define what “Republican” and “conservative” meant. My cohort simply cannot accept that Mr. Trump has taken away that coveted role and revolutionized not just our party, but also the very terms of the American political divide.

But we need to. Because as Mr. Trump recognized, the new schism in American life is not about big versus small government, or more or less regulation. It is about immigration, free trade and the broad and deep impacts of globalization on America’s economy and culture. “Americanism, not globalism, will be our credo,” he told the Republican National Convention.

The second piece is much more controversial because it compares the Trump presidency with mid 20th century German and Italian Fascism and thus appears to “obey” Godwin’s Law (December 27, 2016 blog):

Godwin’s law (or Godwin’s rule of Hitler analogies)[1][2] is an Internet adage asserting that “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Hitler approaches 1“[2][3]—​​that is, if an online discussion (regardless of topic or scope) goes on long enough, sooner or later someone will compare someone or something to Hitler.

In this case, the Op-Ed was written by the grandson of Henry A. Wallace, the 33rd Vice President of the United States:

Seventy-three years ago, The New York Times asked the sitting vice president to write an article about whether there are fascists in America, and what they’re up to.

It was an alarming question. And the vice president took it quite seriously. His article, “The Danger of American Fascism,” described a breed of super-nationalist who pursues political power by deceiving Americans and playing to their fears, but is really interested only in protecting his own wealth and privilege.

That vice president was my grandfather, Henry A. Wallace. And in my view, he predicted President Trump.

To be clear, I don’t think the precise term “fascism” — as in Mussolini and Hitler — is fairly applied to Mr. Trump. Mussolini was a proponent of “corporatism,” defined by some as “a merger of state and corporate power.” And through that lens, using that term, my grandfather’s warning looks prescient.

Here’s an excerpt from an interview with the Israeli historian, Yuval Noach Harari, on the topic of the present conflict between Nationalism and Globalism. The interview was broadcasted as a part of an interactive TED talk:

YNH: Yeah, the old 20th-century political model of left versus right is now largely irrelevant, and the real divide today is between global and national, global or local. And you see it again all over the world that this is now the main struggle. We probably need completely new political models and completely new ways of thinking about politics. In essence, what you can say is that we now have global ecology, we have a global economy but we have national politics, and this doesn’t work together. This makes the political system ineffective, because it has no control over the forces that shape our life. And you have basically two solutions to this imbalance: either de-globalize the economy and turn it back into a national economy, or globalize the political system.

He continues:

YNH: Exactly. All the major problems of the world today are global in essence, and they cannot be solved unless through some kind of global cooperation. It’s not just climate change, which is, like, the most obvious example people give. I think more in terms of technological disruption. If you think about, for example, artificial intelligence, over the next 20, 30 years pushing hundreds of millions of people out of the job market — this is a problem on a global level. It will disrupt the economy of all the countries.

I wrote about Yuval Noach Harari in a previous blog (January 10, 2017):

I recently read Yuval Harari’s Homo Deus; he is an Israeli historian of some note and puts forward his view of humanity’s future. For those of us challenged in Latin, Homo is man or human (as in Homo Sapiens), while Deus refers to God or a deity. Harari’s implication is that man will become a deity, in the sense that he will have eternal life. As far-fetched as this concept sounds, attempts to prolong human life beyond the present limits of slightly more than 100 years are being widely pursued – including by people with significant means.

I will conclude with a paragraph from the Jewish Passover Haggadah:

What says the wicked son? He asks: “What mean you by this service”? By the word “you”, it is clear he doth not include himself, and thus hath withdrawn himself from the community; it is therefore proper to retort upon him by saying: “This is done because of what the Eternal did for me, when I went forth from Egypt;” for me and not for him; for had he been there, he would not have been thought to be redeemed.

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