At this time of year, as regular readers know, I ask myself what were the biggest stories of the year slipping away, in terms of its busin ess/fina ncial news. Last year, for example, stories with a bearing on the financing of the war in Ukraine were dominant. This year ... not so much. With the single exception of July that particular war stays outside of this list. The war in Gaza, and the question of "what next in financial/business terms for that fraught tract of land," does make an appearance. But Sino-American economic relationships dominate the list this year. I'll break matters down by month as usual, and as is my habit I will avoid assigning priority among the various monthly champions. Each is tagged with a theme but each is a news story, NOT a theme. Each is a story about some "who" doing some "what" at a where and when. January. Sino-America economic relations I. The new President of the US and c...
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I only recently encountered a brief discussion of the Jamesian will to believe in the context of climate change. It appears as a chapter in an anthology, Philosophical Tools for Climate Change (2024), prepared at the University of Groningen, in the Netherlands. One odd feature of this book is that, although all the other chapters have an author credited by name on the table of contents, the will-to-believe chapter goes uncredited. So I don't know to whom we owe it. The anonymous author chiefly wants us to recall James' point that some choices are forced. They are (as we say in the 21st century) binary. Either I act in a certain way or I don't. Either I attend my usual religion service this weekend or I don't. There may be many reasons why I don't -- difficulty with transportation, loss of the underlying beliefs, conversion to a different set of beliefs and attendance at another service. Whatever. But if someone is interested in whet...
The Republic of India experienced a terrible heat wave, and more than 700 heat deaths, in 2024. Frequency and intensity of heat waves in the country have increased steadily over decades. With regard to the monetary measurement of the 2024 heat wave: there was a loss of 247 billion potential labor hours, chiefly in the construction and agricultural sectors, amounting to a cost of $194 billion dollars. India is sometimes regarded as a climate-change anomaly. In a fortunate way. At one scientific conference on the subject, researchers presented a world map on which the degree to which an area’s 2024 temperatures deviated from historical baseline was illustrated by color, from deep red to white. The scientists acknowledged they didn’t know why India was strikingly pale. The pattern is paradoxical: India is subject to devastating summer heat waves, but on an annual basis it is warming more slowly than other countries. The public danger posed by heat waves may be under...
This is my annual post on the top Financial stories of the year now ending. As usual, I do not try to rank them, merely listing one Big Story for each of the twelve months of the year. Each story is accompanied by a ( bold ) acknowledgement of the theme it may illustrate. But my emphasis is on the story, not the theme. Something happened with a particular who-what-when-where structure in each of these twelve instances. Despite all the storm-and-stress over the election campaign in the US, and the obvious financial significance of the result both within the US and without, you will not find much of that campaign in this post. It isn't even featured in the November entry. Yet four of our grafs are US-focused. They focus not on the racehorse of the campaign, but on the stakes. If there is a theme here, though, it is the significance of financial/economic sanctions in wartime. Most of the "western world" has sanctioned Russia for its assault upon the sovereignty of U...
There are many tech ideas that are always on the horizon, never actually here. Personal air travel (formerly known as "flying cars"), quantum computing, fusion energy, the commercial use of superconductivity. Another item for this list is surely "small nuclear reactors". Even in the heyday of the nuke/anti-nuke debates, after Three Mile Island, there was a theory on the pro-nuke side that the real problem was the endless delay that comes with bigness. Smaller ("modular") reactors could mean less expensive projects, a quicker licensing cycle, more expeditious actual building, and the gradual popular acceptance that would come with familiarity. "Okay, in my back yard, because it seems to be in just about everybody's back yard." That's the idea. More recently, the growing concern over climate change as THE great environmental issue, and on the burning of hydrocarbons as the great controllable cause there of, the politics of nuclear pow...
We're not going to "kill the earth." We may, by virtue of an impact on earth, kill each other, but sentimental save-the-earth talk is not to the point at all. And actually, the human race is adaptable, so ongoing climate changes (one no longer needs to say 'coming climate changes') won't be quite so disastrous as advertised for us either. We have to allow ourselves to adjust by abandoning this notion that it is either a fixed equilibrium or extinction. Heck, the Rose family (see yesterday's item) made an adjustment. Here is something germane: https://backreaction.blogspot.com/?fbclid=IwAR0Eild3WJDSYbL1NjgSjMsmenRUf6wbPy9HQE7DEkIrfLnlxHbvzp0g9Xc
A pivotal figure in climate science died recently. Wallace Smith Broecker, the fellow who popularized the phrase "global warming" in the 1970s, passed away on Monday, February 18, after a long illness. His passing reminds me: there has been a fair amount of talk recently, from rightward pundits, abut the supposed difference between the phrases "global warming" and "climate change." The idea is that the alarmists used to say global warming," but they later decided that they had to be less directional and falsifiable in their alarmism, so they had to start using the phrase "climate change" instead. That talk is nonsense. Indeed, a pivotal paper by Broecker uses one of these phrases in the title, the other in the subtitle: "Climate Change: Are We On the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?" The phrases have always both been in use as synonyms. Nobody is in fact deep-sixing one for the other. In the 1990s, in an interview,...
The news from Germany I discussed yesterday is fairly typical of developments around the globe. The Paris Agreement allowed nation-states to adopt their own targets. One might naively have expected that they would adopt easy-to-meet targets, i.e. "we will emit no more than twice as much carbon into the atmosphere next year than we did last year." But no, the politics hasn't worked that way. As a matter of what one might fairly call virtue signalling, governments have set difficult targets, such as cutting emissions by 40% as of 2020 and 50% as of 2030. They can't and won't meet these targets. Then the different political parties can flagellate each other over whose fault it is that they didn't. Meanwhile, of course, the sort of tough medicine that might make such targets in principle reachable will be blocked by the political pull of the affected interests, because the virtue signalling can't stop the politics of ass protection. All in all, I hav...
Won't happen. But it is pathetic that he should think to play this game. If he does believe that it is in the interests of the US to defend its coal industry, and that this defense requires keeping the US out of the Paris Accords, then it is just games-playing for him to hint of a reversal of policy on this point to Macron. My guess is that he doesn't really 'believe' anything in this line. His pose as defender of the coal industry, like just about everything about him, is pure posing. With Macron, he struck another pose, as statesman and alliance builder. So he said whatever Macron wanted to hear. Thus, stories such as that to which I've provided a link above.
In the front matter of the December issue of Harper's, Rebecca Solnit writes about the climate change talks in Paris. I'm afraid I can't follow her points very well, because my mind has been distracted to the guessing game of when she wrote this essay. It was obviously written before the Paris talks, which concluded with an agreement December 12th . The political/diplomatic leadership of the 196 nations involved committed to keeping global warming at or below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Solnit essay was not only written before that (and phrased sensibly in the future tense), it was probably written before the terrorist attack on the streets of Paris on November 13, 2015. She writes of "the possibility that the most important activity in Paris this month will happen not in any meeting room but in the place where most revolutions happen: the streets." Context indicates that she meant that scruffy activists in their street demonstratio...
Below I'll provide a link to a well-written blast at the expense of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's latest book, Anti-Fragile. The thesis of the book is that there are three different states-of-being for institutions, individuals, even academic theories: fragility, robustness, and anti-fragility. These are also, in order: really bad, not so bad, good. [I've written about one aspect of this book in this blog quite recently -- Taleb figures in my series of posts about Krugman and Gould. ] A brief illustration of the thesis might run this way: a nation that has built its whole economy around the production and sale of wine would be fragile. It would depend for its livelihood on the international market for wine, and, (even if demand for wine holds up forever) it could be devastated by climate changes that make its own terrain less hospitable to grapes. A nation that was less dependent on any single market or product would be robust. But better than robustness...