PESTLE

American Politics, 5 year forecast

Well, for those readers who have been slightly numbed by the technology focus of recent posts, this may be a welcome change. It's time to look at American politics over the next 5 years.

The key political change has been Democratic control of the levers set in motion by the 2010 Census. The passing of state legislatures into Democratic hands, the ability of Congress to move towards inference instead of enumeration in some instances will tend to make Democratic districts stronger and some fence-sitting districts lean leftwards. Spoils of victory and all that. The effect will be that Democrats will be able to continue to control much of the machinery of government despite what I predict will be a 10% loss of 'countable' popularity--countable meaning various outputs including, but not limited to, voting.

The Democrats would be crazy not to factor in this 10% loss in popularity--there is no magic wand to fix the economic mess America's in, and they are the party in power during a downward slope in the economy. But the Democrats are not crazy--the Democratic leadership is experienced, savvy and saw Republicans play the same game twice during their careers. They will maintain working control with the grudging assent of a thin majority.

At the top, President Obama seems sure to be re-elected, mostly due to the lack of a qualified candidate on the Republican side. There does not seem to be one Republican or even independent candidate who could move the polls significantly, and the most likely nominee, Romney, will not exactly unite the Grand Old Party.

There are 16 senators over the age of 74, so nature will change the composition of the Senate more than will the next two elections. Those 16 are split evenly between Democrats and Republicans, so no predictions here. The oldest members of the Supreme Court are liberals or moderates and will probably allow President Obama to name their replacements during his term. But they will be hoping its his second term.

The 2010 elections are a threat to Democrats, as the only event that they can use as leverage is the state of the economy. I do believe the economy will be recovering by election day, but perhaps not enough to help Democratic incumbents--especially if conservatives find effective talking points, and voices to utter them. Democrats will be happy if Rush Limbaugh and Anne Coulter continue to be the mouthpieces for conservative doctrine--but they are unlikely to be so lucky. Fortunately for Democrats, 8 Republicans have already decided to retire by 2010, compared to only 4 Democrats (so far--both numbers are likely to grow).

The external factors most likely to influence the political situation in America are narco-war in Mexico, the disintegration of Pakistan and/or Afghanistan, and the follow-on effects of severe problems in China. I would suspect the third as being the most likely cause of political problems in the U.S.

Alternatives to alternative energy (1)

(If like me you're a geezer, you'll be seeing the fine hand and inspiration of a certain Jerry Pournelle in all of this--what hat tip could be big enough?)

Five years from now we will be spending prodigious sums of money on alternative ways of generating power. Today, most people think that means building more windmills and installing more solar panels--and that may end up being the case. 

But if that is all it means, it will also mean we have missed the bus. If we don't look seriously at systems that produce serious amounts of energy, then this will have been an exercise in ego-stroking and vanity, the equivalent of using a butterfly fan to cool ourselves as we reach for a cocktail on a summer afternoon. Neither windmills nor solar panels will get us to where we need to be. We are apparently too stubborn to license expansion of nuclear power. So what's left on the table?

There are two robust systems that don't get talked about enough: One is OTEC (which when I heard about it was OTS, but times change). OTEC stands for Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion, and it exploits the temperature differential between the surface of the ocean and the much colder water x number of feet below. (The bigger x is, the greater the differential and the more power is delivered). You could put thousands of them unobtrusively all over the world. 

They've been in existence since, oh, 1930, and there was a pilot plant near Hawaii that produced 50,000 watts during a trial. 

Someone will have to explain to me why we are not jumping all over this. It also provides free air conditioning, fish love it and it produces desalinated water. Join the org and see what's up.

The second source is solar power satellites that collect energy and beam it to Earth as microwaves at about 85% efficiency. Now it has an acronym, too SBSP or SSP, for Space Solar Power. Japan's looking at it, the Pentagon says they want to use it, and (finally) a company has been formed to provide it commercially. Again, this has been talked about since 1968, and although numerous engineering problems would need to be solved, nothing new would have to be invented to make this work. Where is the government contract for energy that would kick-start this thing?

If we are going to be serious about alternative energy, let's focus on schemes that will provide an adequate bang for our buck and do not require the invention of new ways of converting and storing energy. Just sayin'.

Green Technology and Pres. Obama's Energy Policy

As Kevin Drum has so succinctly pointed out, President Obama's recently announced Cap and Trade policy, properly executed, will reduce overall emissions without overly tight management of how it is achieved. Further targeting through a modest carbon tax can supplement this. An increase in the gas tax can push consumption down. Investment in alternative generating technologies and in a smart grid for transmission is long overdue and badly needed.

In short, President Obama's energy policy is really, really good. I voted for him and I am still surprised at how good he has been in the past six weeks.

How can technology support his policy? Perhaps I should rephrase the question--how can society use technology to steer towards his policy ends?

Given what he is preparing to spend money on (weatherizing residences and pushing broadband infrastructure, and a more intelligent power grid), it appears that the easy win is broad encouragement of more working (and schooling) from home. This may be a bit easier than it would have been just a year ago, as recessions usually generate a higher start-up rate of small, home-based businesses. Distance learning and distance training are getting easier and more widely accepted, and can reduce education costs for students as well as institutions. Employers can retain more staff by spending less on infrastructure.

What am I missing?

George Will and the Madness of Bloggers

One reason that it's tough to slog through the blogs is that they are susceptible to a rigid madness of dogma, a sort of hysteria that prevents them from looking at an issue with any sort of reason. This hysteria is the same for both 'left' and 'right' wing bloggers, and it means that it's tough to trust what you read out there.

George Will wrote a column in the Washington Post about climate change. (And he offended me in his first paragraph: "Predict catastrophe no sooner than five years hence but no later than 10 years away, soon enough to terrify but distant enough that people will forget if you are wrong." I guess pundits don't need forecasts.) He went on to sound the horn on the recent history of debate on climate change, with the familiar skeptic chorus of the previous debate on global cooling and the more recent news which so obviously served as a hook on which to hang his column, the recent recovery of Arctic ice. Because of the controversy this column caused, he wrote a follow-up piece published February 27.

Liberal bloggers went berserk. Bloggers I have read (and considered reliable) for years--Brad DeLong, Mark Kleiman and many more went on multi-post tirades, blasting Will for having 'invented' the global cooling consensus of the 70s and lying about the Arctic ice recovery. They seized on this as evidence of the moribund condition of the Washington Post and demanded a retraction or, amusingly enough, a factual correction of an opinion piece.

I hold no brief for George Will. He plays the game the same way he's getting played now, and has a bigger stage to play from. But he's right on both of these counts. Will quoted numerous articles in the national press from the 70s on global cooling, and it took me 15 minutes on Scirrus.com to find two dozen scientific, peer-reviewed articles between 1970 and 1975 that mentioned global cooling in the abstract. Download Scirrus search for global cooling . Will didn't call it a consensus, and he was correct about the level of coverage.

More important is the issue of Arctic ice. Will wrote "As global levels of sea ice declined last year, many experts said this was evidence of man-made global warming. Since September, however, the increase in sea ice has been the fastest change, either up or down, since 1979, when satellite record-keeping began. According to the University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979." Liberal bloggers jumped all over this, saying that ice was lower by a mass the size of California. But at about the time Will's piece was published, the NSIDC had a sensor give out and gave out wrong data on ice levels for a few days. Global warming skeptics had a bit of a field day on this, with some blog commenters (not the bloggers themselves) muttering about conspiracy.

Yesterday, Walt Meier of the NSIDC wrote an open letter to Watts Up With That (a rationally skeptical weblog--one of the good ones), explaining what had happened, why and what they were doing to avoid future incidents of this type. It was an extraordinarily gracious communication, full of good will and the presumption of good will on the part of his readers.

But Meier continued the dialogue in the comments thread of the post, and was drawn into commentary on Will's opinion piece. He cited three mistakes he felt George Will had made (the other two are substantive and well worth a look, but my post here is exactly about the froth on weblogs that deliberately obscures the substance--I strongly advise you to go to Watts Up With That and read his letter and later comments). The first mistake was:

"1. He was factually incorrect on the date that he reported his “daily
global ice” number. However, he was merely out-of-date with his facts (it was true on Jan 1, but wasn’t 6 weeks later). This is somewhat nit-picky, though it illuminates how fast things can change in a relatively short period of time, meaning that one should be very
cautious about drawing any conclusions about climate from an isolated event." (Don't forget to go look at his other two mistakes.)

My clients pay me money to tell them what's going to happen in the environment in the medium term future, the 5 years out that George Will laughs at. It's a pity that I won't be able to rely on Brad DeLong and Mark Kleiman as anything more than weathervanes on environmental topics. It's more of a pity that I will have to treat everything they say going forward in much in the same way they treat the Washington Post.

And because of all this froth, we put off to yet another distant day the serious discussion about global climate change, green technology and Obama's energy plan that we so sorely need to have. Much in the style of Karl Rove, the news cycle got hijacked in the service of jihad. We are all poorer as a result.

But at least I got to use religion as a category tag for this, because that's what this is all about.

Update: Mark Kleiman very classily commented on my post, in a very non-frothy and measured way. Thanks, Mark. His point, that Will is entitled to err, but should correct mistakes when they are pointed out, is quite reasonable, and one that Will has had countless opportunities to ignore in the past.

Kleiman is also correct substantially on the measures he cites--scientific work in the 70s did use a geologic timescale when referring to the next Ice Age, and models did and do predict Arctic ice melting rapidly while Antarctic ice modelling is uncertain.

I'm happy to see and to say that Mark Kleiman is still the gracious writer that I have always seen on the Reality Based Community. Which is not to say that I agree with him 100% on the substance of this. I think we're training a microscope on Will's columns when we should be using a telescope to look at other things. I hope I'm wrong about Brad DeLong as well.

 

Green Technology--part 1 of about a hundred and thirty two posts, I imagine

One symptom of the complicated nature of green technology can be seen in the fact that I assign four categories to this post--economic, environment, politics, and, only lastly technology.

Green technologies can be separated into the following categories:

Generative: Nuclear, biomass, biofuels, solar, wind, tide, and maybe more

Recuperative: Recycling, re-using, retrofitting for insulation, etc.

Distributive: Smart power grids, micro-generation, land-use policy, etc.

The stated goal of green technology is to displace fossil fuels. The politics is fraught. The economics is dubious. The technology needs work. And the environment is waiting.

Just some brief notes from the generative side of things:

This year, the US passed Germany and became the largest producer of wind power. Are people celebrating? Do people even know? Germany, meanwhile, is the largest subsidizer of solar power--in a land that is not famous for being sun-drenched. Do people know or care?

In 2005, the US used about 21% of all energy consumed, about 100 quadrillion BTUs. In 2007, about 7% of US energy production was renewable (mostly nuclear and hydroelectric). President Obama wants to double that in the next three years. This would involve either doubling the number of nuclear power plants, tripling the number of dams, increasing 100 fold the number of windmills and solar panels, or some combination thereof. It's a challenge.

The challenge got bigger when oil prices collapsed (and those who think they will bounce right back should be talking to Brazil's Petrobras about their production plans). And, as nuclear power plants and dams are both contentious and long-term in the planning, we are left contemplating the wind, the sun, biomass and, presumably, our navels.

It seems to me that it would take about the same effort as did gearing up military production for World War II. (This may not be a coincidence--many are writing about how WWII 'cured' the Great Depression).

Windmills cost several million dollars ($4.2 million in 2001, although prices may have declined. They may also have increased, as they are incorporating more technology.) Solar panels are cheaper. America has lots of sun. But any way you slice it, renewable energy doesn't double for $50 billion, the price I heard Obama give. Perhaps he wasn't including nuclear and hydroelectric in his initial calculations? I'll check for the next post.

More later.

Update: Well, the President didn't answer my questions in his speech, but here are the bullet points from the Obama-Biden Comprehensive New Energy Plan for America, published in August of 2008:

Provide short‐term relief to American families facing pain at the pump • Help create five million new jobs by strategically investing $150 billion over the next ten years to catalyze private efforts to build a clean energy future. • Within 10 years save more oil than we currently import from the Middle East and Venezuela combined • Put 1 million Plug‐In Hybrid cars – cars that can get up to 150 miles per gallon – on the road by 2015, cars that we will work to make sure are built here in America  • Ensure 10 percent of our electricity comes from renewable sources by 2012, and 25 percent by 2025 • Implement an economy‐wide cap‐and‐trade program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent by 2050

I need to do some more digging, apparently.

China's decline

It's a testimony to something--I dunno, PR, fear, political distaste--that we pay so much attention to China. After 20 years of near double digit growth, their stated GDP is about $2.7 trillion U.S. dollars, compared to the U.S. figure of over $13 trillion. They produce about as many patents as the Netherlands, 19% of their population lives on less than $1 per day, and the average adult has 6.4 years of schooling. (These stats are from Nationmaster.)

China has a lot of what they call 'mass incidents,' which in other countries would be called demonstrations or riots. 87,000 last year. 20 years of double digit growth and 87,000 mass incidents per year. That's not a sign of a governmental system with widespread legitimacy amongst the governed.

Now, no developed country that I know of achieved that status without a hiccup--most countries had several long periods of economic stagnation or decline. Someone will have to explain to me why China should be the exception to this pattern. One such hiccup has arrived for China, and my 5-year prediction is that they will suffer through a depression that makes Western recession look mild. Remember one thing from this post, if no other: Hard times are harder for the poor. China is poor.

Their economy is export driven. People aren't importing their products. Their own consumers have a strong tradition of saving. They are not going to start spending when times get bad. Their economy is not free. There is no band of young entrepreneurs in garages plotting an internet boom. Their country is savagely corrupt. Companies that have invested heavily there will soon find out what that means in times of trouble. This will deter new waves of investment after Western economies start to recover. 

Now, however, their economic problems are also ours. They own a lot of our debt. The US has depended on it in its economic calculations. They will not be able to continue purchasing Treasuries. In another post I will look at the effects on Western politics and economics.

PIGS will fly

Obviously, at the beginning of this weblog it is a temptation to be provocative and dramatic, elements one would typically avoid in a PESTLE. But, in a search for readers, one looks for headlines, I suppose.

The European Union will face considerable stresses over the next 5 years. While I don't forecast the break-up of the EU or abandonment of the Euro, it is not unimaginable that one or more countries will drop the currency. The obvious candidates would be the PIGS--Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain, which used to be referred to by the more dignified sobriquet of the Olive Belt. These countries have weaker economies, difficult political situations internally--almost to the point of paralysis in some cases--and fairly high levels of corruption and organised crime, in some cases.

What they also have is very high levels of public sector debt heading into a deep recession--not a good position to be in. This table from an article titled "Do BRICS (and Germans) Eat Pigs?" perhaps makes the point better:

Table 2: Actual Debt & Age Related Contingent Liabilities

Source: Goldman Sachs, European Weekly, 22/01/2009

The stronger and more open economies of the EU need (and have the political clout to insure) very different economic policy than one which would meet the urgent needs of the PIGS. The EU is growing in different directions, with new members Albania, Romania and Bulgaria aligning their (mis) governance and economies with the PIGS, while the more robust countries of Scandinavia, France and Germany move in another direction. Something will eventually have to give.

If the PIGS unite with the new members, they may be able to push policy in their favor. In which case, the policy surprise to watch for (not that I predict it, but I would not be surprised to see it) is a move by Germany to return to the Deutschmark, something that would be quite popular with large segments of the German population.

An article by Ian Bremmer in Foreign Policy disagrees, and makes the obvious point that weaker countries enjoy eurozone protection in many ways, and predicts that other weaker European economies may actually join the Euro. That may well happen. But it doesn't exclude the possibility that a Eurozone full of weak economies will certainly not suit Germany, and may not suit other countries as well. Germans feel strongly that they are bearing more of the burden for the EU than other countries. By many measures, they are correct.

5 year prediction: Something of an existential crisis, caused by economic turmoil, with members of the EU having serious discussions about their continued membership.