Bill Gates and Climate Change

Bill Gates has just published his first book, How To Avoid A Climate Disaster. It’s a good book.  The beginning of the book explains the basis of the climate problem, and probably won’t provide much new information to anyone who has been attending even peripherally to this debate. But the remainder of the book makes three good points that seem to be missed by many activists:

1.      Useful as they are, currently fashionable “green” technologies – primarily solar and wind, and electric cars – are not enough to make a significant difference, nor (as the Mark Mill’s paper we all studied a while ago made clear) is there any chance that they will follow some sort of “Moores Law” like microchips have, and evolve the 10-fold or 100-fold improvements that some activists are counting on.  

2.      To make the changes that would be required to make a significant difference will be far, far more difficult and painful than most people realize. Climate activist for the most part are pretty naïve about what would be required to really make a difference. In a world where we have trouble getting adults to wear simple masks in a pandemic, imagine how much harder it will be to get people to change their diets, curtail their traveling, downsize their houses, and give up most of their consumer goods. Or to get China or India to forgo further development.

3.    The solution, Gates argues, is to invest far, far more into research into new technologies for how we use electricity, how we make things, how we grow things, how we get around, and how we stay cool and keep warm. The remainder of the book talks about possible developments in these five categories

Gates’ pragmatic approach is certainly refreshing, devoid as it is of ideological mythology. He is, however, a technologist, and sees the problem primarily as a technological problem. I am not nearly as optimistic as he is that governments can move quickly enough, that politicians and industry can be persuaded to do the difficult, unpopular and expensive things needed, or that the public can be persuaded to change their habits enough to make a difference in time.   

Still, it is a good book, worth reading.

Recommended: Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

George Friedman argues in his latest book that one of the forces underlying the nation’s current unsettled political situation is the growing disenchantment with experts. And indeed one can see that playing out in the tensions created by the COVID pandemic. The medical “experts” are advising us to close down schools and businesses – no doubt the correct strategy from a narrow medical point of view – but seem not to have thought much about the equally serious economic or educational consequences of their advice. So of course it is producing increasingly strong pushback from those put out of work, and from parents who are increasingly worried about the educational progress of their children.

In that context, David Epsteins’s 2019 book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, is particularly relevant. Very readable, with some fascinating stories and history (who knew that Vivaldi’s music was so influenced by the orphan girls of Venice, for example?), it makes a well-documented case for encouraging a true generalist education rather than the sort of specialization that is now so embedded in our culture. I highly recommend this book, and find it interesting that Amazon has paired it in their recommendations with Bill Gates’ new book on climate change – a good book from another generalist.

I suppose I resonate with this book because a deliberate generalist is in essence what a system engineer is. I happened to work in the aerospace field (rockets and satellites particularly). These devices are made of hundreds or thousands of subsystems, each developed by experts who are brilliant at optimizing their own particular piece of the system. But these devices as a whole live within a mass of constraints – power, weight, reliability, error budgets, thermal limits, thrust requirements, etc, etc. What we learned (at great expense) in the 1960’s was that left to their own devices, all these narrow experts optimizing their own subsystems in isolation produced products that failed disastrously if they worked at all. Successful development required that someone have an overall picture, and the authority to optimize across subsystems, not just within subsystems, and to negotiate necessary tradeoffs between subsystems, and hence the field of system engineering was born.

I can’t help but think that what was needed in this pandemic was some generalist thought across all the relevant fields – medical, economic, educational, political – to find a national COVID strategy that was optimal across all these domains, not just the medical domain. Of course the issue has gotten politicized, which hasn’t helped.

In any case, I highly recommend this book.

 

The immigration issue

For context let me offer the opinion that one of America’s core problems these days is that on most important issues we have no rational, widely-debated, thought-out national policy; we are just reacting day-by-day, usually on the basis of mindless partisan ideology, media-driven focus, or momentary emotion. We are not alone in this – most nations seem to operate this way – but it is one of the things that is impeding our ability as a nation and a culture to adapt to the rapidly changing world.

I would argue that this applies to our immigration policy. We have never had a rational national debate about just whom we ought to allow to emigrate to the United States, and whom we ought to exclude. Well, we had better have that debate, because bad as the problem is right now, it is about to get much, much worse over the coming decades.

Why? For at least two reasons:

First, because of global warming. Global warming is almost certainly going to happen, despite all the empty promises made by nations in the Paris agreement (see, for example the 2019 Forbes article here) Our current worldwide civilization is built on the profligate use of energy, and it is exceedingly unlikely that we can change human behavior enough and in time to halt climate change. Most climate activists are fairly naïve about just how drastic the worldwide lifestyle changes would have to be to make a significant difference, and about how difficult it would be politically to impose those lifestyle changes on populations. We have trouble even getting people to wear masks in a pandemic. Think about what it would take to get Americans to give up, among other things, travel, meat, air conditioning, social media including their phones, and most consumer goods, or for India or China to abandon their drive to modernize - yet that is the level of change that would be required.

And in fact many climate researchers think we have already passed the point where we can make much difference. No one is quite sure how bad the global warming will be, and exactly what effects it will have, but it is already clear it will disrupt crops and hence the economies of many countries, and rising sea levels may displace millions of people who live in low-lying areas, and these effects will inevitably create serious social and political unrest, and perhaps even local wars, which will drive millions to seek to migrate to more favorable lands.

Second, because of the collapse of the global order that has prevailed since the end of World War II. Peter Zeihan’s books and lectures explain this fairly clearly (watch his YouTube lectures here, or here, for example, if you are not acquainted with his works), and most other geopolitical experts pretty much agree with his overall view, though of course they differ on details. The consequences of the impending breakdown in global trade will leave many nations short of energy and food, providing yet another impetus for mass migrations to better lands. (It will also drive many back to using coal as their only available domestic energy source, exacerbating the climate change problem.)

The upshot is that the pressure on our borders, for both legal and illegal immigration, will become more intense in coming decades. Clearly we cannot accept hundreds of millions of immigrants. It would disrupt our economy, our culture, and probably lead to political unrest even worse than we have today. So there are hard choices to be made about just whom we will admit, under what circumstances, and with what sort of social support to help them assimilate and find work. On what basis should we make those choices? That is what needs a national debate, as free as possible from mindless ideology or partisan political point-scoring and virtue-signaling.

And it needs to be made by those with real skin in the game, who will suffer the effects of whatever policy is adopted along with everyone else.  Thus far immigration policy for the most part has been set by politicians and bureaucrats who are relatively insulated from the consequences of their decisions. It’s not their jobs that would be threatened, their cultures that would be disrupted, nor their neighborhoods that would be invaded. That’s why there is so much political unrest around the immigration issue.   

Will we ever get such a debate? It seems unlikely in the current highly-polarized political atmosphere. But we had better find a way to have this discussion, because the problem is about to get a lot worse!

 

The other side of the argument

Yes, yes. I know I am apparently almost the last of a dying breed, a fiscal conservative who actually believes that someday the government ought to, indeed is morally obligated to, pay back the enormous debt it has accumulated. But I do understand that the world I grew up in, in which people and governments were expected to live within their means, is passé, and that we now live in a never-never land in which politicians in both parties compete to offer us voters ever more debt-financed goodies from the government and it is gauche to worry about the debt.

Still, despite the press drumbeat for a crisis to justify yet another massive $1.9 trillion stimulus package (with borrowed money), on top of the $3.1 trillion the government borrowed in 2020, there is another side to the argument that ought to be heard.  

I suggest reading an article in Issues & Insights today which can be seen online here. Yes, it is a bit right-wing in tone, as you can see from the title, but they make a reasonable case, worth considering, that $1.9 trillion is too much, and although some help is certainly needed, it ought to be more targeted toward the places that really need it.

The official federal debt currently stands at about $20.5 trillion, which is about the size of the entire U.S. GDP for 2020 (about $20.8 trillion), and that doesn’t even count the truly massive ($100-175 trillion) unfunded promises in things like Medicare and Social Security.

In 2020 the average interest on the federal debt was very low, about 2%, and the government paid $376 billion in interest payments. To put that in perspective, that $376 billion is more than  half of what we spend on the military ($636.4 billion in 2020), or about three quarters of what we spend on the rest of  the government agencies, not counting the military ($470.3 billion).

If inflation returns just to its historic level of about 4%, then interest alone on the federal debt will increase to about $760 billion, or more than 70% of what it costs to run the whole government. And that is just returning to the historical average. If we actually got real inflation of 5-6% or more, interest payment on the debt would absolutely swamp the federal budget. And remember, during the Carter administration in the 1980s fed rates reached 20%, so even higher rates are not unprecedented.

All of which is to say it is not unreasonable to be uncomfortable with the size of these big debt-financed stimulus packages, especially since no one in either party has proposed any way of ever paying back the debt.

Bad precedents

It seems to me we are on the verge of creating some bad precedents that will haunt us in the future.

Take the case of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. The House is about to vote on stripping her of her committee assignments because of comments she has made in the past, before she was elected. Now it is true she has said some pretty off-the-wall things, since she apparently believes a lot of the crazy QAnon conspiracy stuff. But I worry about the precedent of the majority stripping an elected representative of legislative power just because we don’t agree with them. That precedent opens up a lot of potential for abuse in the future.

Then there is the idea being floated of voting to deny Trump the ability to run for president again. Now I personally don’t want to see Trump in the presidency again, but this move sounds to me a lot like the candidate “vetting” that Russia and Iran do before their elections – ruling out certain candidates simply because they don’t fit the party line. The proper way, in my opinion, to deny Trump another term is to offer candidates that can beat him in an open and free election, not to deny the American voter the chance to re-elect him if enough of them feel so inclined. The argument that we need to deny Trump the ability to run again because a large number of the American voters are likely to make the “mistake“ of re-electing him is unbelievably condescending and self-serving, and certainly doesn’t fit the premise of our form of government.

I have argued in a previous post that the current fad for using impeachment as a political weapon, first with Clinton and now twice with Trump, is a bad precedent.  And certainly, it is now clear that Harry Reid’s move to eliminate the 60-vote rule in the Senate for confirming judicial appointment backfired on the Democrats once they were out of power under Trump.

We have already made the serious mistake of letting our rage and fear from the 9/11 attacks justify massive intrusions into our privacy and civil rights, and that is a very bad precedent.

There is that old saying that the “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”. No doubt all these moves and proposals are made with the best of intentions, but it seems to me they all set bad precedents that may come back bite us in the future.