Tag: technology

Oil Companies are not Responsible for Climate Change

Oil companies have become the scapegoats for rage against onrushing climate disasters. The combustion products of hydrocarbon energy are largely responsible for climate change, and oil companies have lied about the effect of their product on the climate for as long as there have been oil companies. 

What was the lie? Earth scientists understood the physics of carbon warming as early as the mid-19th century. They also knew that the planet’s ecosystem absorbed atmospheric carbon by several pathways. What they didn’t know was the tipping point, the point where the CO2 generated exceeds the capacity of the sinks. The oil companies couldn’t lie for very long about the basic effect of atmospheric carbon, but they could deny that we were anywhere near saturating the carbon sinks, and they continued to do so well into the 1980s and beyond, when the capacity of the sinks was being better quantified. They also lied about the ecological damage caused by oil spills, well leaks, and their copious release of methane, an even more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.

Humans have been putting carbon into the atmosphere since they learned to control fire. It wasn’t very much. There weren’t many humans after all. In those days, human-generated carbon—most from burning wood—was a small fraction of the carbon produced by volcanoes and lightning-triggered forest fires. 

A few thousand years ago, humans discovered coal. As the expanding population needed more heating and cooking, carbon emissions jumped. Coal was the energy source that powered metallurgy and produced steam for the Industrial Revolution, while also heating homes and cooking meals. Another jump in carbon output. Some people noticed. In the 18th and 19th centuries, London was infamous for its coal-caused “killer fogs.”

Coal producers didn’t lie about the climate implications of their product. Not until the mid-18th century did anyone even suspect such a connection, and not until the mid-19th century did earth science have experimental confirmation. Nor did coal producers “push” their product. People adopted coal because it was better than wood for all uses, old and new, as the centuries marched on. Coal is more “energy dense” than wood, a superior energy source—when it could be obtained—for most uses.

By the time oil came along, earth science was well aware of the causal link between carbon and atmospheric warming. Suppose the oil companies didn’t lie about it? Suppose their executives, all saints, began to preach the danger of too much atmospheric carbon (remember, they didn’t know how much was too much) in 1910? Do you suppose there would have been, between then and now, a significant moderation in the exploding development of technology energized by oil?  

Would the German admiralty have forgone the production of submarines (the first modern ships designed around oil), the British abandon tank production, and everyone eschew airplanes? Would the industrial nations of the world have heeded oil company warnings and artificially limited growth in carbon-linked energy until research had cleared up the “limits” issue decades later? Humans shifted away from wood because coal is more energy-dense. Coal energy supported larger populations and, therefore, expanded military and economic power. Oil, when it came along, triggered and sustained a further expansion of energy-intensive technological innovation, all having military implications. Would it ever have been politically possible to restrict the expansion of an oil economy?

What could oil producers have said without lying? They might have honestly said: “We don’t know how much is too much, but given an expansion of carbon-based energy from 1910 onwards, we must eventually reach those limits.” Unfortunately, for various technical reasons, even the most pessimistic earth scientists could only guess at the limits until we began to breach them. Only by observing a failure here and there could we become aware of the real limits. The first breaches likely occurred in the early 1950s. Scientists didn’t begin to notice them until the 1970s. By the 1990s, the limits became quantifiable. We are still refining the numbers today.

In the second half of the 20th Century, the world’s much-expanded population and virtually all of its technology and economy were dependent, directly or indirectly, on oil. The first international agreements aimed at reducing the use of carbon-based energy were signed in the 1990s. By 2015, the combined nations of the world were, every year, pumping twice as much carbon into the atmosphere as they were when those first agreements were struck—see reference to the Wallace-Wells book below.    

There were “climate scientists” in the first half of the twentieth century, and also “climate change deniers” who were not oil executives. These people are still with us today. Others accepted the science, but the excuse was always “we do not know how much is too much.” If oil companies hadn’t lied? There would, I think, have been more and better-funded early research. We might have begun quantifying “too much” in the 1950s rather than in the 1980s. But by 1950, the world was already addicted to oil. 

By the 1950s, there had been two carbon-intensive world wars. International air travel was an established industry, and America—at least—was addicted to cars. In those days, there were no “clean” alternatives (and we can argue about how clean the present alternatives really are). By 1950, it was already economically untenable and politically suicidal to attempt to minimize, let alone abandon, carbon. Had we, in the 1950s and 60s, invested more in solar and wind technology, we might, by the 1990s, have developed renewable, efficient energy and transport technologies at scale. But the same carbon-intensive mining and material processing required to produce the technological inputs for those products would still be necessary, and no military on earth would have abandoned faster fighters, bigger bombers, more powerful tanks, and so on. None of that would have changed.

The economic and social forces driving the doubling of annual atmospheric carbon emissions in 2015—twenty years after the first international agreements to limit them—were equally present in 1975! There might have been some moderation in the growth of atmospheric carbon emissions if we had understood the Earth’s limits thirty years earlier than we did. Still, by that time it was already too late—economically and politically—to do more than produce a small alteration of the present trajectory. 

Oil companies lied about atmospheric carbon to protect their markets. But they didn’t need to lie. The energy density of oil, coupled with the coal-based technological explosion that began in the 19th century, ensured oil’s ready adoption over coal (which took over from wood without any lies by the coal industry). Even if oil companies publicly acknowledged the science already known in their earliest days, it wouldn’t have made much difference to the world’s present addiction to oil. Almost literally everything in our lives, everything we own, or use, in every culture, rests on oil in some part of its lifecycle. The oil companies are not responsible for climate change. We, ourselves, our governments, our culture and economy are responsible. It has been us all along.  

References: The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells (2018)

The Geography of Risk by Gilbert Gaul (2019)

The End of the World is Just the Beginning by Peter Zeihan (2022)

Review: Waste Land by Robert D. Kaplan

Amazon link to Waste Land

My fourth (read) book by Kaplan is the apex of his thesis. What thesis? First, geography matters. Still true, Kaplan says, but in this book, modified by other forces. Second, geography does not determine history but strongly conditions it. This conditioning remains, but a set of global and interlocking destabilizing phenomena skew its impact. Third, individuals make a difference from two directions. On one side are rare individuals, typically members of the political elite, whether democratic or autocratic, whose choices can shift historical momentum in one direction or another. Kaplan refers to these individuals as “hinge persons.” On the other side is the mob (and he means a literal mob), whose actions can constrain, for good or ill, what the elite can do, even having the ability, sometimes, to force them from power.

Waste Land is Kaplan’s most inclusive view of everything, and its overall effect is pessimistic. He considers:

  1. Rising populations are, in most places, becoming poorer by the year. Many populations, including China’s, are rapidly aging and shrinking, deviating from the typical demographic trend. By contrast, Africa, which in 2025 hosts about twenty percent of the world’s population, is expected to grow to forty percent by 2050. India, South America, and much of Southeast Asia are also increasing. Overpopulation exacerbates every other destabilizer.
  1.  The fragile economics of interconnected supply chains rest on a non-existent global political order. An international order only appears to exist when relations between nations are peaceful. However, peace between trading partners can easily collapse: witness Russia versus the EU. As the population expands and, in particular, as expectations rise (see technology below), continuing peace and progress depend on the smooth functioning of these mechanisms.
  1. The technology revolution, and in particular the now globe-spanning Internet. People in poor places now see how people in rich places live, stoking demand for a bigger slice of the pie. Events are reflected across the world almost instantly, but not their more nuanced causes or other details. Partial information can impel political elites to act precipitously before they fully understand what has happened. The lack of detail also opens the door to malicious actors who take such opportunities to flood the Internet with false information, lending strength to counterproductive, precipitous action, sometimes by mobs. AI, for all the good it could do, also enhances this problem. Large Language Model AI can generate such volumes of disinformation and misinformation at the behest of malicious actors that it becomes impossible to discern what is true from what is false.
  1. Pollution and ecological degradation. We are poisoning our biosphere. Carbon and methane foul our atmosphere, the oceans become acidic, and plastic accumulates on our cropland, rivers, lakes, and oceans. Most of the Earth’s populations now live with measurable amounts of plastic in their brains. Microplastics are bad. Nanoplastics—so small that ordinary microscopes cannot see them —are much worse. A disproportionate amount of these (estimates vary from 30 to 70 percent) comes from one source: the daily wearing down of trillions of automobile and truck tires, whose residue is picked up by winds and rain and deposited everywhere. Nor is plastic the only material poisoning us. Industries and large-scale farms have been dumping toxic pollutants into waterways and landfills for two centuries. Many of the coastal dead zones and declines in fish and shellfish populations stem from this. More esoterically, every satellite that burns up in the atmosphere releases toxic metals that slowly settle into the air we breathe. The settling process can take a decade or two, but satellites have been burning up at an increasing rate, year after year, for over sixty years.  Kaplan doesn’t get into these last details. I include them for the edification of my readers.
  1. Resource exhaustion. In the late twentieth century, oil appeared to be a significant constraint. We have figured out how to coax more from the Earth, but there is still only a limited amount in the ground. Today, water is the greater geopolitical issue. Half the world lives with water scarcity. Larger populations demand more water, while the sources of water are shrinking. The glaciers that supply fresh water to much of the world are shrinking faster than anyone thought possible. Upstream countries (China in Tibet, Turkey in the Middle East, and Ethiopia in North East Africa, to name a few) are damming rivers to hold more of the water for themselves while the downriver nations dry up even faster than they otherwise would. If anything immediately exposes the lack of a formal global order, it is this.
  1. Climate change is the bookend to population expansion. The carbon we put into the atmosphere is slowly warming the planet. Warming the planet is akin to pressing down on the accelerator of a car. More energy means faster transitions in our weather, more tornadoes and hurricanes, floods, and wildland fires. More energy means more chaotic behavior. Wind, floods, and fires destroy crops, making it harder to feed growing populations as seasonal cycles (longer droughts, larger floods) become less reliable. Sea levels are rising steadily as glaciers melt away. Even the Antarctic and Greenland glaciers are melting back more rapidly than expected. 

Everything in the above list is a destabilizer of what falsely appears to be a world order based on trade, and it so happens that at this historical moment, what order exists is being deliberately undermined by a hinge person: the presently unhinged president of the United States.

What does a destabilized world look like? We are already experiencing it, and the international state of affairs is on a deteriorating path. More and deadlier wars, mass migration, expanding disease, and starvation of people due to food and water shortages. As resources dwindle, those places that have vital resources will hoard them. More nations will become failed states. More people will be left to their own devices with ever-diminishing resources, along with steadily rising temperatures. There will be no safe place to move tens or even hundreds of millions of starving people. Wars of the have-nots against the haves will become an existential necessity: starvation the only other option. All this Kaplan foresees.

But even Kaplan does not see (yet) how climate change, in combination with ecosystem collapse (to which climate change contributes directly), will gradually grow to overwhelm everything else, possibly precipitating a global nuclear holocaust. Even if hinge people prevent the exchange of H-bombs, conditions everywhere will grow worse at an ever-quickening pace. Year after year, disaster mitigation will consume more of the world’s accumulated capital. The U.S., the world’s wealthiest country, cannot keep up with its annual disaster bill even now. Fragile supply lines will collapse if there is no capital to maintain them. In no place on Earth will there be seasonally reliable weather in which to grow the food needed to feed the planet’s population.

Technology will not save us. Capital, not to mention polluting energy, is required to maintain the technology we have, from the mining and smelting of raw materials to transport and assembly—and maintenance—of finished products. Electricity grids will fail when supply chains break, and there are no parts to maintain them. Our technological way of life will come to an end. With the collapse of industrial capacity, large portions of the Earth will become uninhabitable due to extreme temperatures. With no viable air conditioning or sufficient water, through much of the year, temperatures will exceed the limits of the human body to cool itself.

The severity and frequency of humanitarian crises will grow in inverse proportion to the world’s ability to mitigate them. It will not be possible for parts of the world to assist other parts because disasters will become financially and then physically overwhelming everywhere, and roughly at the same time. 

As energy, food, and water become scarce or vanish, protest mobs seeking the impossible — to recover what has been lost — will grow and become progressively more violent, accelerating the decline of order. Local, national, and international orders will unravel. In the end, anarchy, Kaplan’s most dreaded political outcome, will prevail everywhere. 

Kaplan tells us that even all of the destabilizers taken together do not determine our future. Hinge people may redirect the course of history into stabilizing channels. I believe he knows in his heart that it is too late. Summing up his take on the world situation as a whole, I have to think Kaplan’s message is: we’re fucked! 

Here are some references pertaining to claims I’ve made above. If I have reviewed these in the blog, I will link to my review. The source link is always in there.

On the world’s fresh water problem.

On the plastic problem.

On the economics of disaster mitigation.

On the unraveling of the world order: From Peter Zeihan, and another from Kaplan

The climate problem

Review: We have been Harmonized

I’m putting this review on the blog not because there are dangling philosophical issues here, but because this book is so direct and exhaustive about its two most important themes:

  1. China is not a State with a party. The party is the State, and increasingly since 2012 and absolutely since 2018 Xi Jinping has become, like Mao before him and Stalin in the Soviet days, the chairman of the party for life.
  2. China, under Xi is embarking on a serious attempt (using everything modern technology can provide) to build the ultimate surveillance State! Further, there is nothing unrealistic about this effort. They are mostly there. 

We Have Been Harmonized by Kai Strittmatter

This book is geopolitical in scope and theme. It is a warning to everyone but particularly the West concerning China’s international intentions and its present and future capacity to get what it wants. It is also about the West’s abetting China’s goals politically and especially economically. But make no mistake, China is not only a people and industrial power, a State with a government. The Chinese Communist Party and the State are synonymous, and since 2013, the CCP is more and more synonymous with the will of Xi Jinping. 

As long as it is, this book is direct and to the point. Dr. Strittmatter does not spend chapters on Chinese history, alluding to it only where parallels pertain or narrative becomes part of the modern problem. There is enough reference to the period since 1949, and especially the cultural revolution (1966-1976) to bring a sense of what the Chinese people have been put through for the last three generations.

Following an unusual period of intellectual openness in the 2000s, China is, since 2013, constructing a now well-on-the-way-to-completion, ultimate surveillance State. Not only are AI-driven systems watching everyone from the outside, but citizens are being made to carry apps on their phones tracking everything from travel to conversation. It isn’t possible even to opt-out because doing so in itself brands you as an enemy of China and blocks you from any travel, jobs, apartments, and so on. Nor does complying with authorities guarantee your good standing. You will be docked social credit points if you do or say something you should not. If this isn’t bad enough, what counts as good or bad behavior or speech is at the daily whim of the CCP and Xi in particular.

Strittmatter cites many examples and drills the multi-faceted nature of the CCP program home. If the system isn’t quite finished (it is not), it soon will be. But this isn’t the end of the story. The Chinese are doing their very best to extend this ability overseas! Chinese citizens must travel with these apps and connect them to foreign Internets tracking them anywhere on Earth. When the Trump administration tried to ban certain Chinese-centered payment apps there was a huge outcry! Part of this came from Americans who now use those same apps, but a good measure was Chinese-sponsored propaganda. If the apps were blocked, the CCP would lose its best foreign surveillance asset! 

So far, in many instances, foreign governments and corporations have backed off when China cries foul.  The core motive is dollars flowing from China into NGOs on foreign soil and into the coffers of the world’s largest corporations (other autocratic governments can be paid directly). Unlike Russia, the Chinese, particularly the CCP which commands more capital than any other single entity in the world, is rich enough to buy much of what they want, including good press, and Western corporations are only too happy to sell it to them. 

“We Have Been Harmonized” is about all of this and more. Strittmatter delves into the effect this is having on the psychology of the Chinese people. He hopes, of course, that this will not go on for very long, but he does not see any end to it. There is nothing to suggest the CCP will not ultimately succeed within China. He is not so hopeful about the world outside of China either. Democracy is under assault everywhere. Even where not Chinese-influenced, the present internal struggles, political polarization, and populism play into CCP hands, some greased by the money China is throwing around. Everyone working in Western executive and legislative institutions should read this book!