Recently I discussed the possibility some have raised of what it would take to occupy Iran--or for that matter, fight a ground war with it. The requisite numbers, along with the country's geographical position (any approach to Iran would be far different from an invasion of Iraq from the south) makes a major ground clash appear comparatively implausible.
What does seem more plausible--as highlighted by Iran's downing of a Global Hawk drone last week--is a conflict fought in the air, which has raised the question of the capabilities of Iran's air defenses.
According to most counts, Iran has a couple of hundred fighters, five hundred or so surface-to-air missile launchers, and seventeen hundred anti-aircraft guns. It might be noted that the Iranian systems today are in the main older aircraft--F-4s, F-5s, and MiG-21 variants comprising over half the fleet, with the most advanced of them just some thirty or so export versions of early model MiG-29s (while the country may dispose of another forty or so early model F-14s). And while Iran's purchases of S-300 SAMs from Russia get all the press, the great bulk of its SAM force consists of older and mostly much less capable Hawks, SA-2s and Crotales. The guns are similarly old models (Soviet-made 23 mm, 37 mm, 57 mm and 85 mm cannon).
By contrast in 1991 Iraq had three hundred fighter planes, seven hundred SAM launchers and four thousand guns--more systems, covering a country just a third Iran's size, and of roughly the same types, many already obsolescent or obsolete then, but not so much as they would be a whole three decades later in comparison with America's state-of-the-art. (There were no F-22s or F-35s, no B-1s or B-2s, to say the least of the matter.)
The result was that, if far from a cutting edge force, Iraq's air defense system still utilized a far larger collection of systems, by the standard of the time more technically advanced and deployed rather more densely than is the case with Iran. Moreover, questions unavoidably hang over the serviceability of the still very substantial American and British-made component of these forces (in spite of claims that Iran has been able to keep them operational on the basis of third-party purchases and its indigenous manufacturing resources)--while the fact that, for all the difficulties they pose, Iran keeps them in service bespeaks its limited ability to get large numbers of more modern, more convenient replacements.
Of course, attentiveness to the guns and missile launchers only takes one so far. There is the question of the radar coverage of the country, the command and control systems, the training of crews, the serviceability of all that equipment and its robustness in the face of electronic or cyber-attack--more abstruse matters lending themselves less well to sound bites and tidy quantification and neat tables for side by side comparisons. By and large armed forces tend to skimp on such essentials in favors of the flashy systems, the more so in as they are cash-strapped or developing--and certainly Iran's forces appear to have been in poor condition in these respects just a decade ago.
In short, Iran's capabilities on this score appear less than formidable.
Still, this assessment does not include the possible supplementary role of indigenous Iranian systems. Often not mentioned at all in comprehensive assessments (consult, for example, a recent edition of the International Institute of Strategic Studies' Military Balance), they got more attention after the report that the missile that downed an American Global Hawk this June was one of its domestically produced models. I have not found much in the way of comprehensive overviews of the types and numbers of these weapons--with the principal exception the Wikipedia page devoted to Iran's Air Defense Force.
When I checked the page in question (on June 27 of this year) it reported that Iran has deployed over a thousand such long-range surface-to-air missile launchers (100 km range or more), citing over four hundred Sayyad-1s; more than a hundred and fifty Sayyad-2 and Sayyad-3 systems; over four hundred locally upgraded S-200s (in contrast with the handful of examples it was supposed to have); and over a dozen Bavar-373 missile batteries which Iran claims have successfully shot down ballistic missiles in tests. Supplementing them in this listing are some five hundred medium-range SAM launchers, of the Raad (150+), Mersad (300+) and Kamin-2 (?) types, and a roughly equal number of short-range types (some two hundred-plus Ya Zahara-3 and Herz-9 missile launchers).
Amounting to some two thousand more launchers in all, this multiplies the number of launchers fivefold, and the number of long-range launchers perhaps twenty-five-fold (such that a few more or less S-300s seem nearly trivial).
Meanwhile, many credit Iran with having made significant progress in improving the deeper functioning of its air defense system in the past several years. At least one assessment from the Washington Institute claims "significant" progress there since 2011, stressing, besides the number of weapons, a comprehensive system of sectoral command centers subordinate to a national center enjoying a "comprehensive threat picture" enabling it to exercise effective control over the whole. Additionally the oft-noted variety of Iranian radar systems, while a "maintenance nightmare" means
"any opponent must find a solution for facing multiple radars at once," complicating the defense suppression efforts so key to avoiding U.S. combat losses in past wars, and includes some reputedly high-quality Russian and Chinese systems (such as over-the-horizon radars which may have significant capability against currently cutting edge stealth aircraft).
All of this would potentially be game-changing, making Iranian air defenses much, much tougher than the more restricted listings suggest. However, the Wikipedia article does not provide sources for its grandiose claims--and for that matter, neither does the Washington Institute piece, which is, to be frank, fairly superficial. (It offers some discussion of the structure of Iran's air defense establishment and makes reference to recent exercises--but offers no real clue as to how well all this would work, let alone concrete support for such claims on the basis of those exercises. And the Institute is, of course, a right-wing think tank selling a hawkish line on "the Iranian threat," making vagueness the more suspect.)
Moreover, there is ample reason for skepticism. Many writers seem incapable of telling the difference between a launcher and a battery. (Iran imported 32 S-300 launchers; one item I saw from a relatively reputable think tank claimed it was 32 batteries, a very different thing, with an S-300 battery having up to eight launchers.) This seems all the more problematic given that Western analysts have, with some plausibility, long argued for Iranian claims on behalf of their advanced indigenous weaponry consistently proving shabby hoaxes on close examination. Even assuming that Iran has deployed large numbers of such SAMs, their quality is, as a practical matter, unknown for lack of prior combat use. (A single downing of an unmanned, non-stealth aircraft in unclear circumstances does not necessarily reveal very much about even the system in question, let alone the broader gamut of them.) And of course, the assessment of command and control capabilities and the like is a subtler matter still.
The upshot of this is that there seems wide room for argument. The most well-grounded claims give the impression that Iran would not be much better able than other states the U.S. has faced in recent decades (Iraq, Yugoslavia, Libya) to counter American air power--with the result that even a large-scale, prolonged campaign may see few or even no losses of manned U.S. combat aircraft to enemy action, especially if it concentrates on strategic and fixed targets rather than forces in the field (where low-altitude operations would entail increased vulnerability to ground fire). However, if one takes seriously the claims made for Iran's deployment of massive numbers of advanced, medium- and long-range SAMs; and considerable upgrading of the system tying them together into a coherent defense of its aerospace; Iran's systems may pose a challenge such as the U.S. has not seen since at least the Vietnam era. Even that, however, appears slight next to the bigger danger of a wider conflict--which, even as the news buzzes with headlines about war with Iran at the very same time that it buzzes about Russian troops in Syria, Russo-American competition over Turkey, and cyber-war against Russia's electrical grid, astonishingly few seem to acknowledge as part of the picture.
Friday, June 28, 2019
An Occupation of Iran? Crunching the Numbers
Amid the Trump administration's tearing up of the 2015 deal the U.S. made with Iran regarding its nuclear program, the escalation of tensions in the region, the dispatch of substantial U.S. forces to its region, and the recent downing of a U.S. drone which, it is reported, led to the order of a retaliatory air strike rescinded mere minutes before it went through, there has been more than the usual consideration of full-blown war between the two countries--with one possible U.S. objective being the regime change in Iran long coveted by the neoconservatives, who have been in the ascendant again in Washington.
All of this, of course, evoked the memory of the attempt to do so in Iraq in 2003, which saw a highly successful conventional campaign--and disastrous aftermath. Rather than the brisk, easy transition from the Baathist regime to a more congenial successor, what resulted was a complex of wars that, in their metastasizing into the war with the ISIS organization, spilled across Iraqi borders in catastrophic fashion (and in Syria led the U.S. to perhaps its most dangerous confrontation with Russia in over a half century). And that memory has, in turn, raised the question of what would be required for an occupation of Iran were the administration to carry its action that far.
One approach to the problem has been to extrapolate from the requirements of the occupation of Iraq to those that similar action against Iran might require. One estimate espoused by then-Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki was that hundreds of thousands--perhaps 800,000 troops--would be needed for occupation duty. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld insisted that a force a fraction that size (100,000) would be sufficient. As events quickly and predictably showed, they were not, and one could (conservatively but not unreasonably) take that 800,000 figure as a baseline.
Iran has over three times' Iraq's population (82 million to the 25 million or so Iraq had then), and almost four times' its territory (636,000 square miles to Iraq's 169,000), one could plausibly picture three to four times' the number of troops being necessary. On this basis scholar of Middle Eastern history Juan Cole tripled the 800,000 figure for 2.4 million in his own analysis, but one could just as easily speak of 2-3 million.
The need for up to 3 million troops to occupy Iran may, even in light of the Iraqi precedent, seem unduly pessimistic. After all, 3 million troops was what the U.S. had in Europe on V-E Day, and just over half those (1.6 million) in Germany, and even that figure dropped rapidly afterward.
And surely occupying Iran is a smaller job than occupying Germany?
The reality, however, is that Iran is a quarter more populous than Germany was in 1945, over four times as big as Germany was in area. Indeed, it is an eighth larger than Germany, the Benelux countries, Austria, France and Italy combined (a collective 560,000 square miles or so).
It should also not be forgotten that that occupation was a joint effort with the other Allies, not least Britain, France and the Soviet Union, with smaller areas assigned other nations like Belgium, Norway and Poland, the commitment discussed here a mere fraction of what was required. Where American occupation of Germany specifically is concerned, it should be remembered that the U.S. zone in western Germany amounted to a rough quarter of Germany, some 33,000 square miles and 16 million people--a twentieth of the territory and a fifth of the population of Iran today--and at the time this demanded some three hundred thousand troops a year after the end of the war.
Worth considering, too, is the occupation of post-war Japan the U.S. carried out more single-handedly, with nearly a half million troops at the outset when the Ryukus are included.
Iran is more than four times as large as Japan (636,000 to 145,000 square miles); and its population substantially larger than Japan's was at the time (81 million to 70 million or so).
The reader should also note that Iran is substantially more urbanized than Western Europe or Japan was at the time (nearly three-quarters of its people living in cities, compared with a third or so of Japan's in that period)--a fact which makes territorial occupation more rather than less manpower-intensive. One may point out, too, that in contrast with the situation in a Europe firmly under Allied control in 1945, or insular Japan, Iran has very long, very mountainous borders with populations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan which might view the highly likely emergence of violent opposition to a U.S. occupation with sympathy. This would enlarge the problem of controlling the country, and perhaps, lead U.S. operations to extend beyond it in the event of trouble (just as the attempt to occupy Afghanistan drew the U.S. into involvement in Pakistan).
Also significant is the fact that armies have changed, especially high-tech mechanized armies like those of the U.S., whose proportion of "tail" to "tooth" has risen enormously. In the World War II period some 65 percent of troops were combat personnel, but the figure was down to a quarter by the early twentieth century. One could argue for an even sharper drop in the "foxhole strength" a large unit could muster--troops who would be available to, for instance, patrol on the street rather than keep the gear running, or the flow of supplies continuing to come in. This raises the necessary ratio of troops-to-occupied yet again.
Given these precedents with regard to territory, population, urbanization and borders, and the tasking of any given quantity of military manpower in the current high-tech, high-tail era, a total figure comparable to the U.S. force in Western Europe, or a multiple of the force inserted into Japan, does not seem at all outside the bounds of the plausible.
Of course, this is far beyond the capacity of American forces as presently constituted. Consider the active-duty U.S. armed forces. These come to some 1.3 million personnel. However, half of that is Air Force and Navy--and the other half Army and Marines. Moreover, of the 660,000 or so Army and Marines (480,000 Army, 180,000 Marines) not all are ground troops trained, armed and organized into usable formations.
The two services have some 13 divisions between them--on average, 15,000 troops each. This comes to about 200,000 troops that could actually be put on the ground--a third of the 660,000 figure, and the rest a vast organization for recruitment, training, administration and support in logistical and other ways required to keep those 200,000 in the field, especially in a faraway country. Additionally, it would be out of the question for the entire force to be deployed to one contingency, at once. The U.S. has military commitments all over the world; and in any event, units are rotated in and out of operational duty. (They need rest; they need retraining and reconstitution.) This is the case even in world wars. As a result, rather less than the whole would be available for a given task.
Of course, there are reserves. The Army and Marine Reserves together have some 240,000 personnel (200,000 Army, 40,000 Marines), while the Army National Guard can supply 340,000 more. However, one again has to think in terms of actual, usable ground units. The Army Reserve has 8 divisions, the Marine Reserve one, the Army National Guard 8 more divisions than that--a maximum of 17 divisions in all, and plausibly some 250,000 personnel, whose actual use would be subject to the same constraints as the active-duty troops.
Recent U.S. experience is telling. Even with the biggest mobilization of reservists since the Korean War swelling their ranks (150,000 National Guard and Reservists, providing up to a quarter of the force rotating through Iraq), keeping 200,000 troops in Iraq and Afghanistan--equaling just a quarter of nominal Army and Marine strength at the time--was a considerable strain.
The result is that even a complete mobilization of the Reserve and National Guard (a time-consuming process that will raise the political difficulty of action) gives the U.S. under a half million deployable combat troops, and to go by the Iraq precedent, just 300,000-400,000 available for all operational contingencies.
It is somewhere between a fifth and a tenth of the 2-3 million personnel figure.
Now think about what it would take to close that gap. It would not be a simple addition of 2-3 million more troops, but 2-3 million in deployable combat units. Assuming the ratios of nominal service strength and combat strength remain the same, this will mean an enlargement of the Army (the more logical locus of the expansion, given the Marines' more specialized nature as an amphibious assault/rapid reaction force) to 6 million, 8 million, or even more. It is scarcely conceivable that such a body of ground troops could be supported abroad without a commensurate expansion of the Air Force and Navy, and especially their airlift and sealift capacities, meaning millions more personnel in those forces. In the end one might imagine something like that all-services' wartime peak, 12 million under arms in all.
The U.S. population is about two-and-a-half times larger today than it was during in World War II (330 million to 130 million then). Still, raising such a force would mean a fairly comprehensive draft, as some of the more astute observers have pointed out.
Daunting as all this sounds, it still overlooks a key issue here, which is that one ordinarily has to defeat a country's armed forces before they can occupy their territory. Given recent U.S. experience--above all, with Iraq--this may seem a simple matter. Still, Iraq proved an exceptionally "convenient" opponent. It had a long border with Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, permitting the U.S. and allied forces wide leeway in their approach to the country, the more so given the open desert of the south. The Iraqi armed forces had already been badly mauled in the 1991 Gulf War, and substantially denied a chance to recover by international sanctions (with its air force and air defenses further degraded by low-grade air war). When war broke out, Iraq waged a defensive conventional campaign of a kind that left its forces as vulnerable as they could conceivably be to American strengths. And of course, the 2003 conflict saw Iraq totally on its own, with Russia, China and other actors limiting themselves to political opposition.
By contrast Iran's borders afford no such convenient entry points or staging areas. With four decades to adapt since the loss of American and British sponsorship, and three decades to recover from their last major war, Iran's armed forces are in a far less battered condition--and for all their undeniable limitations with regard to equipment and other matters, far more numerous (with the regular military, Revolutionary Guard and Basij paramilitaries plausibly raising 2 million or more). Iran may be less passive than Iraq in regard to a build-up nearby, using its far less likely to fight back along the rigidly conventional terms so implausible given the undeniable disparity in military power (with the prospect of unconventional Iranian naval tactics being used to sink American warships oft-noted). And of course the country will be nowhere near so isolated--with the possibility of Russian intervention impossible to leave out of any such calculations. Indeed, a U.S. attack on Iran may be less tolerable to Moscow than regime change in Syria because of the country's bordering ex-Soviet states Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Armenia, as well as its size and energy reserves; while the logistics of Russian intervention would be easier. (Russian aircraft need only fly over the Caspian, while enjoying quite direct access to Iranian airspace through bordering states.) While a Chinese response seems far less likely to take the form of direct military intervention, the country's objections to such action are likely to count for much more in 2019 than they did in 2003.
In short, any conflict against Iran, not simply including a full-blown national occupation, but any military action whatsoever, is quite a different thing from the question of action against Iraq in 2003--which itself proved a far, far different thing from what Donald Rumsfeld and company promised.
All of this, of course, evoked the memory of the attempt to do so in Iraq in 2003, which saw a highly successful conventional campaign--and disastrous aftermath. Rather than the brisk, easy transition from the Baathist regime to a more congenial successor, what resulted was a complex of wars that, in their metastasizing into the war with the ISIS organization, spilled across Iraqi borders in catastrophic fashion (and in Syria led the U.S. to perhaps its most dangerous confrontation with Russia in over a half century). And that memory has, in turn, raised the question of what would be required for an occupation of Iran were the administration to carry its action that far.
One approach to the problem has been to extrapolate from the requirements of the occupation of Iraq to those that similar action against Iran might require. One estimate espoused by then-Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki was that hundreds of thousands--perhaps 800,000 troops--would be needed for occupation duty. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld insisted that a force a fraction that size (100,000) would be sufficient. As events quickly and predictably showed, they were not, and one could (conservatively but not unreasonably) take that 800,000 figure as a baseline.
Iran has over three times' Iraq's population (82 million to the 25 million or so Iraq had then), and almost four times' its territory (636,000 square miles to Iraq's 169,000), one could plausibly picture three to four times' the number of troops being necessary. On this basis scholar of Middle Eastern history Juan Cole tripled the 800,000 figure for 2.4 million in his own analysis, but one could just as easily speak of 2-3 million.
The need for up to 3 million troops to occupy Iran may, even in light of the Iraqi precedent, seem unduly pessimistic. After all, 3 million troops was what the U.S. had in Europe on V-E Day, and just over half those (1.6 million) in Germany, and even that figure dropped rapidly afterward.
And surely occupying Iran is a smaller job than occupying Germany?
The reality, however, is that Iran is a quarter more populous than Germany was in 1945, over four times as big as Germany was in area. Indeed, it is an eighth larger than Germany, the Benelux countries, Austria, France and Italy combined (a collective 560,000 square miles or so).
It should also not be forgotten that that occupation was a joint effort with the other Allies, not least Britain, France and the Soviet Union, with smaller areas assigned other nations like Belgium, Norway and Poland, the commitment discussed here a mere fraction of what was required. Where American occupation of Germany specifically is concerned, it should be remembered that the U.S. zone in western Germany amounted to a rough quarter of Germany, some 33,000 square miles and 16 million people--a twentieth of the territory and a fifth of the population of Iran today--and at the time this demanded some three hundred thousand troops a year after the end of the war.
Worth considering, too, is the occupation of post-war Japan the U.S. carried out more single-handedly, with nearly a half million troops at the outset when the Ryukus are included.
Iran is more than four times as large as Japan (636,000 to 145,000 square miles); and its population substantially larger than Japan's was at the time (81 million to 70 million or so).
The reader should also note that Iran is substantially more urbanized than Western Europe or Japan was at the time (nearly three-quarters of its people living in cities, compared with a third or so of Japan's in that period)--a fact which makes territorial occupation more rather than less manpower-intensive. One may point out, too, that in contrast with the situation in a Europe firmly under Allied control in 1945, or insular Japan, Iran has very long, very mountainous borders with populations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan which might view the highly likely emergence of violent opposition to a U.S. occupation with sympathy. This would enlarge the problem of controlling the country, and perhaps, lead U.S. operations to extend beyond it in the event of trouble (just as the attempt to occupy Afghanistan drew the U.S. into involvement in Pakistan).
Also significant is the fact that armies have changed, especially high-tech mechanized armies like those of the U.S., whose proportion of "tail" to "tooth" has risen enormously. In the World War II period some 65 percent of troops were combat personnel, but the figure was down to a quarter by the early twentieth century. One could argue for an even sharper drop in the "foxhole strength" a large unit could muster--troops who would be available to, for instance, patrol on the street rather than keep the gear running, or the flow of supplies continuing to come in. This raises the necessary ratio of troops-to-occupied yet again.
Given these precedents with regard to territory, population, urbanization and borders, and the tasking of any given quantity of military manpower in the current high-tech, high-tail era, a total figure comparable to the U.S. force in Western Europe, or a multiple of the force inserted into Japan, does not seem at all outside the bounds of the plausible.
Of course, this is far beyond the capacity of American forces as presently constituted. Consider the active-duty U.S. armed forces. These come to some 1.3 million personnel. However, half of that is Air Force and Navy--and the other half Army and Marines. Moreover, of the 660,000 or so Army and Marines (480,000 Army, 180,000 Marines) not all are ground troops trained, armed and organized into usable formations.
The two services have some 13 divisions between them--on average, 15,000 troops each. This comes to about 200,000 troops that could actually be put on the ground--a third of the 660,000 figure, and the rest a vast organization for recruitment, training, administration and support in logistical and other ways required to keep those 200,000 in the field, especially in a faraway country. Additionally, it would be out of the question for the entire force to be deployed to one contingency, at once. The U.S. has military commitments all over the world; and in any event, units are rotated in and out of operational duty. (They need rest; they need retraining and reconstitution.) This is the case even in world wars. As a result, rather less than the whole would be available for a given task.
Of course, there are reserves. The Army and Marine Reserves together have some 240,000 personnel (200,000 Army, 40,000 Marines), while the Army National Guard can supply 340,000 more. However, one again has to think in terms of actual, usable ground units. The Army Reserve has 8 divisions, the Marine Reserve one, the Army National Guard 8 more divisions than that--a maximum of 17 divisions in all, and plausibly some 250,000 personnel, whose actual use would be subject to the same constraints as the active-duty troops.
Recent U.S. experience is telling. Even with the biggest mobilization of reservists since the Korean War swelling their ranks (150,000 National Guard and Reservists, providing up to a quarter of the force rotating through Iraq), keeping 200,000 troops in Iraq and Afghanistan--equaling just a quarter of nominal Army and Marine strength at the time--was a considerable strain.
The result is that even a complete mobilization of the Reserve and National Guard (a time-consuming process that will raise the political difficulty of action) gives the U.S. under a half million deployable combat troops, and to go by the Iraq precedent, just 300,000-400,000 available for all operational contingencies.
It is somewhere between a fifth and a tenth of the 2-3 million personnel figure.
Now think about what it would take to close that gap. It would not be a simple addition of 2-3 million more troops, but 2-3 million in deployable combat units. Assuming the ratios of nominal service strength and combat strength remain the same, this will mean an enlargement of the Army (the more logical locus of the expansion, given the Marines' more specialized nature as an amphibious assault/rapid reaction force) to 6 million, 8 million, or even more. It is scarcely conceivable that such a body of ground troops could be supported abroad without a commensurate expansion of the Air Force and Navy, and especially their airlift and sealift capacities, meaning millions more personnel in those forces. In the end one might imagine something like that all-services' wartime peak, 12 million under arms in all.
The U.S. population is about two-and-a-half times larger today than it was during in World War II (330 million to 130 million then). Still, raising such a force would mean a fairly comprehensive draft, as some of the more astute observers have pointed out.
Daunting as all this sounds, it still overlooks a key issue here, which is that one ordinarily has to defeat a country's armed forces before they can occupy their territory. Given recent U.S. experience--above all, with Iraq--this may seem a simple matter. Still, Iraq proved an exceptionally "convenient" opponent. It had a long border with Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, permitting the U.S. and allied forces wide leeway in their approach to the country, the more so given the open desert of the south. The Iraqi armed forces had already been badly mauled in the 1991 Gulf War, and substantially denied a chance to recover by international sanctions (with its air force and air defenses further degraded by low-grade air war). When war broke out, Iraq waged a defensive conventional campaign of a kind that left its forces as vulnerable as they could conceivably be to American strengths. And of course, the 2003 conflict saw Iraq totally on its own, with Russia, China and other actors limiting themselves to political opposition.
By contrast Iran's borders afford no such convenient entry points or staging areas. With four decades to adapt since the loss of American and British sponsorship, and three decades to recover from their last major war, Iran's armed forces are in a far less battered condition--and for all their undeniable limitations with regard to equipment and other matters, far more numerous (with the regular military, Revolutionary Guard and Basij paramilitaries plausibly raising 2 million or more). Iran may be less passive than Iraq in regard to a build-up nearby, using its far less likely to fight back along the rigidly conventional terms so implausible given the undeniable disparity in military power (with the prospect of unconventional Iranian naval tactics being used to sink American warships oft-noted). And of course the country will be nowhere near so isolated--with the possibility of Russian intervention impossible to leave out of any such calculations. Indeed, a U.S. attack on Iran may be less tolerable to Moscow than regime change in Syria because of the country's bordering ex-Soviet states Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Armenia, as well as its size and energy reserves; while the logistics of Russian intervention would be easier. (Russian aircraft need only fly over the Caspian, while enjoying quite direct access to Iranian airspace through bordering states.) While a Chinese response seems far less likely to take the form of direct military intervention, the country's objections to such action are likely to count for much more in 2019 than they did in 2003.
In short, any conflict against Iran, not simply including a full-blown national occupation, but any military action whatsoever, is quite a different thing from the question of action against Iraq in 2003--which itself proved a far, far different thing from what Donald Rumsfeld and company promised.
Understanding Neoconservatism
Recently I have had occasion to think about the word "neoliberal."
Some, apparently desperate to ward off its association with the policies of the Democratic Party in recent years, have gone to the risible extreme of denying that the word has any meaning at all.
However, it is a simple enough matter to establish that the word does in fact have a distinct meaning, and that its use to describe the conduct of governments and major political parties around the world is reasonable enough. The term refers to a recognizable, distinct political ideology emergent in a particular historical moment (idolization of and calls for a return to Victorian-style classical liberalism, hence the "neo" in the 1940s, in response to the advance of socialism and social democracy in Eurasia and North America), consolidated by figures who did indeed regard themselves as participants in a movement (Friderich von Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman, among others, were all there at Mont Pelerin in 1947). Moreover, the abstract theorizing quickly became manifest in a concrete political program (small governments with light taxes and balanced budgets and no concessions to egalitarianism like welfare states, progressive taxation, labor unions and the like), and was soon promoted by an array of organizations largely founded and funded by an interlinked network of actors including but extending beyond the figures named above, and avowing a common purpose (the economics departments of the universities of Chicago and Virginia, think tanks like the Cato Institute, publications like Reason magazine).
The historian can also trace the increasing implementation of neoliberalism's key ideas by a growing number of governments from the 1970s forward, typically in dramatic fashion and open sympathy for neoliberalism's objectives (the governments of Pinochet, Thatcher, Reagan, Yeltsin marking the turn in their respective countries). Of course, their realization of the program has to date been imperfect (no one quite realizing its ideals, welfare states enduring in reduced form, corporate welfare flourishing), but all the same, the trend is indisputable, and even in its inconsistencies and contradictions, quite recognizable.
It is much more difficult to present any such case in regard to the neoconservatism so much in the news again, even if one concentrates on only its most common usage in American political discussion, its use to refer to the advocates of intensive overseas military interventionism on the part of the United States associated with certain publications (Commentary, The National Interest, The Weekly Standard), statements of principle (like the Project for a New American Century), and figures active in political punditry (Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol, and their sons John and William, respectively) and the national security scene (Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, R. James Woolsey, convicted Iran-Contra scandal figure Elliot Abrams, Donald Rumsfeld, John Bolton).
On close inspection, however, the grouping is rather looser, no Mont Pelerin moment identifiable. That has not stopped some from trying to work out a lineage that will help it make all sense, for instance pointing to '30s-era Marxists who became disenchanted with the ideology after Stalin, like Irving Kristol; to the teachings of philosopher Leo Strauss, whose lectures Paul Wolfowitz attended; to the tutelage of Cold Warriors like Albert Wohlstetter, or Henry Jackson, with both of whom Richard Perle has been closely associated. However, after the search for antecedents in ex-Communists-turned-fanatical-anti-Communists, obscure professors, and the rest, one does not have very much--and may realize that, really, there was far more obvious precedent for them, not least in the long, and broadly mainstream, "Wilsonian" tradition to which a good many have also pointed over the years.
In considering that one has to acknowledge that observers do so on differing grounds and in differing ways, not least because different observers emphasize different aspects of Wilsonianism (some stressing the image of Wilson as "idealist," others his forceful use of American power in support of those ideals), in part because they themselves have different attitudes to the figure.1 For my part, I think it most useful to consider the neoconservatives as simply Wilsonians of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Consider the essential attributes of Wilsonianism:
* The championing of the "liberal international order"--a global, capitalist economy founded on a (relatively) free flow of money and goods across borders; and legitimated by its identification with the ideals of self-determination, freedom, and economic efficiency and thus prosperity as understood by classical liberals and their heirs--and a leading role for the U.S. in it as its organizer and protector, following the precedent of nineteenth century Britain.
* To the end of preserving or extending that order, a preparedness to intervene militarily, on a massive scale, not just against acts of aggression by one state against another, but for the sake of "regime change" where a government's conduct has been deemed unsatisfactory--such principle trumping sovereignty and even democracy. ("I am going to teach the South American republics to elect good men!" Wilson declared, and his penchant for intervention in Latin America makes it clear his declaration was sincere--and the conduct afterward, routine.)
* In line with the above, Wilsonianism tends to take the existence of alternative political ideologies as in themselves threatening, with the most obvious example a tendency to extreme anti-Communism. (While the Cold War is normally regarded as having begun in the 1940s, it is worth remembering that the U.S. was at odds with the Soviet government from the start, Wilson sending tens of thousands of U.S. troops to fight the Bolsheviks as part of the foreign intervention by the Allies after the Russian Revolution.)
* In line with the above, Wilsonianism also displays intense concern for the European and Eurasian balance of power, typically tending toward a partnership with the English-speaking nations, and Atlantic Europe more broadly, against continental states potentially capable of dominating the region. (This was seen in the U.S. joining Britain and France in their war against Germany in 1917, and subsequent preoccupation with the two principal such powers, Germany and Russia.)
Not only is each of these principles part of the neoconservative package, but I would argue that they cover all of the essentials in that package--with the differences relatively minor, matters of means rather than ends. Certainly Wilson's campaigning for the League of Nations is a far cry from the neoconservatives' raging contempt for the United Nations, and even the closest and most longstanding American allies, which neoconservatives openly display (recall Donald Rumsfeld's disdain for "Old Europe?"), and the preference for unilateralism that goes with it. There is their "obsession" with the Middle East.
However, it is worth remembering that, however sincere Wilson may have been, the League of Nations, and the concern for international community more broadly, was a means with which to realize this vision, not an end in itself--and that those of similar vision cannot but act differently in today's very different circumstances.
The same goes for the preoccupation of the neoconservatives with the Middle East. In Wilson's day the region was largely passing into the control of America's ally, Britain, and the United States not overly troubled by the fact. Britain's decline as an imperial power, and the increasing importance of the region's oil and gas production and exports (not least, for the economy of the U.S. itself), meant that the U.S. greatly stepped up its involvement there from the 1940s, and especially the 1970s, on, an involvement which interacted with but survived the end of the Cold War.
Afterward the emphases on "rogue states" and "resource security" (well-described by Michael Klare at the time) meant it remained prominent within rationales for American possession of superpower-level forces. (These were by no means the only factors, of course, but plenty by themselves to assure such a posture.)
Affecting perceptions may also be the fact that Wilson is distant enough that most of us know him and those who surrounded him from court historians equally inclined to glorifying past figures of the kind, while the news coverage of the moment, for all the media's toothlessness, means that the poison and the dirt of contemporary politics are rather harder to miss than the poison and the dirt of politics past. Making it harder to miss, too, is how singularly lacking neoconservatism has been in charismatic and inspiring advocates. (Anyone else recall Richard Perle responding to callers on C-SPAN with crude insults?)
Remembering all this helps us better understand the neoconservatives, but it also helps us better understand American foreign policy more generally. After the invasion of Iraq led to disaster and quagmire rather than the tidy institution of a liberal government in that country, the neoconservatives who had so championed the action were regarded as on the outs in the media and in Washington, even before the end of the second term of the George Bush administration, and certainly after his replacement by Barack Obama. However, there was relatively little change in American policy. Not only did the Obama administration continue to have boots on the ground in Iraq, but it pursued regime change in still more countries--Libya, Syria--with similarly disastrous result. The end of the Obama administration, its succession by that of Donald Trump, saw prominent neoconservatives like William Kristol and Max Boot win plaudits from "establishment" Democrats for their criticism of the new administration, even as some of their colleagues held positions of power and even enjoyed promotions--John Bolton becoming National Security Advisor, while Elliott Abrams became the Special Envoy to Venezuela (regime change was never just for the Middle East, after all), with the same Democrats pleading his case. In a very real sense the neoconservatives had returned to the mainstream--but it is equally true to say that they never actually left, and their departure would scarcely have been noticed if they had, because even if they were cruder about it, and arguably more reckless, in the end their ideas were well within the scope of the longtime orthodoxy of the policymaking establishment.
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Some, apparently desperate to ward off its association with the policies of the Democratic Party in recent years, have gone to the risible extreme of denying that the word has any meaning at all.
However, it is a simple enough matter to establish that the word does in fact have a distinct meaning, and that its use to describe the conduct of governments and major political parties around the world is reasonable enough. The term refers to a recognizable, distinct political ideology emergent in a particular historical moment (idolization of and calls for a return to Victorian-style classical liberalism, hence the "neo" in the 1940s, in response to the advance of socialism and social democracy in Eurasia and North America), consolidated by figures who did indeed regard themselves as participants in a movement (Friderich von Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman, among others, were all there at Mont Pelerin in 1947). Moreover, the abstract theorizing quickly became manifest in a concrete political program (small governments with light taxes and balanced budgets and no concessions to egalitarianism like welfare states, progressive taxation, labor unions and the like), and was soon promoted by an array of organizations largely founded and funded by an interlinked network of actors including but extending beyond the figures named above, and avowing a common purpose (the economics departments of the universities of Chicago and Virginia, think tanks like the Cato Institute, publications like Reason magazine).
The historian can also trace the increasing implementation of neoliberalism's key ideas by a growing number of governments from the 1970s forward, typically in dramatic fashion and open sympathy for neoliberalism's objectives (the governments of Pinochet, Thatcher, Reagan, Yeltsin marking the turn in their respective countries). Of course, their realization of the program has to date been imperfect (no one quite realizing its ideals, welfare states enduring in reduced form, corporate welfare flourishing), but all the same, the trend is indisputable, and even in its inconsistencies and contradictions, quite recognizable.
It is much more difficult to present any such case in regard to the neoconservatism so much in the news again, even if one concentrates on only its most common usage in American political discussion, its use to refer to the advocates of intensive overseas military interventionism on the part of the United States associated with certain publications (Commentary, The National Interest, The Weekly Standard), statements of principle (like the Project for a New American Century), and figures active in political punditry (Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol, and their sons John and William, respectively) and the national security scene (Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, R. James Woolsey, convicted Iran-Contra scandal figure Elliot Abrams, Donald Rumsfeld, John Bolton).
On close inspection, however, the grouping is rather looser, no Mont Pelerin moment identifiable. That has not stopped some from trying to work out a lineage that will help it make all sense, for instance pointing to '30s-era Marxists who became disenchanted with the ideology after Stalin, like Irving Kristol; to the teachings of philosopher Leo Strauss, whose lectures Paul Wolfowitz attended; to the tutelage of Cold Warriors like Albert Wohlstetter, or Henry Jackson, with both of whom Richard Perle has been closely associated. However, after the search for antecedents in ex-Communists-turned-fanatical-anti-Communists, obscure professors, and the rest, one does not have very much--and may realize that, really, there was far more obvious precedent for them, not least in the long, and broadly mainstream, "Wilsonian" tradition to which a good many have also pointed over the years.
In considering that one has to acknowledge that observers do so on differing grounds and in differing ways, not least because different observers emphasize different aspects of Wilsonianism (some stressing the image of Wilson as "idealist," others his forceful use of American power in support of those ideals), in part because they themselves have different attitudes to the figure.1 For my part, I think it most useful to consider the neoconservatives as simply Wilsonians of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Consider the essential attributes of Wilsonianism:
* The championing of the "liberal international order"--a global, capitalist economy founded on a (relatively) free flow of money and goods across borders; and legitimated by its identification with the ideals of self-determination, freedom, and economic efficiency and thus prosperity as understood by classical liberals and their heirs--and a leading role for the U.S. in it as its organizer and protector, following the precedent of nineteenth century Britain.
* To the end of preserving or extending that order, a preparedness to intervene militarily, on a massive scale, not just against acts of aggression by one state against another, but for the sake of "regime change" where a government's conduct has been deemed unsatisfactory--such principle trumping sovereignty and even democracy. ("I am going to teach the South American republics to elect good men!" Wilson declared, and his penchant for intervention in Latin America makes it clear his declaration was sincere--and the conduct afterward, routine.)
* In line with the above, Wilsonianism tends to take the existence of alternative political ideologies as in themselves threatening, with the most obvious example a tendency to extreme anti-Communism. (While the Cold War is normally regarded as having begun in the 1940s, it is worth remembering that the U.S. was at odds with the Soviet government from the start, Wilson sending tens of thousands of U.S. troops to fight the Bolsheviks as part of the foreign intervention by the Allies after the Russian Revolution.)
* In line with the above, Wilsonianism also displays intense concern for the European and Eurasian balance of power, typically tending toward a partnership with the English-speaking nations, and Atlantic Europe more broadly, against continental states potentially capable of dominating the region. (This was seen in the U.S. joining Britain and France in their war against Germany in 1917, and subsequent preoccupation with the two principal such powers, Germany and Russia.)
Not only is each of these principles part of the neoconservative package, but I would argue that they cover all of the essentials in that package--with the differences relatively minor, matters of means rather than ends. Certainly Wilson's campaigning for the League of Nations is a far cry from the neoconservatives' raging contempt for the United Nations, and even the closest and most longstanding American allies, which neoconservatives openly display (recall Donald Rumsfeld's disdain for "Old Europe?"), and the preference for unilateralism that goes with it. There is their "obsession" with the Middle East.
However, it is worth remembering that, however sincere Wilson may have been, the League of Nations, and the concern for international community more broadly, was a means with which to realize this vision, not an end in itself--and that those of similar vision cannot but act differently in today's very different circumstances.
The same goes for the preoccupation of the neoconservatives with the Middle East. In Wilson's day the region was largely passing into the control of America's ally, Britain, and the United States not overly troubled by the fact. Britain's decline as an imperial power, and the increasing importance of the region's oil and gas production and exports (not least, for the economy of the U.S. itself), meant that the U.S. greatly stepped up its involvement there from the 1940s, and especially the 1970s, on, an involvement which interacted with but survived the end of the Cold War.
Afterward the emphases on "rogue states" and "resource security" (well-described by Michael Klare at the time) meant it remained prominent within rationales for American possession of superpower-level forces. (These were by no means the only factors, of course, but plenty by themselves to assure such a posture.)
Affecting perceptions may also be the fact that Wilson is distant enough that most of us know him and those who surrounded him from court historians equally inclined to glorifying past figures of the kind, while the news coverage of the moment, for all the media's toothlessness, means that the poison and the dirt of contemporary politics are rather harder to miss than the poison and the dirt of politics past. Making it harder to miss, too, is how singularly lacking neoconservatism has been in charismatic and inspiring advocates. (Anyone else recall Richard Perle responding to callers on C-SPAN with crude insults?)
Remembering all this helps us better understand the neoconservatives, but it also helps us better understand American foreign policy more generally. After the invasion of Iraq led to disaster and quagmire rather than the tidy institution of a liberal government in that country, the neoconservatives who had so championed the action were regarded as on the outs in the media and in Washington, even before the end of the second term of the George Bush administration, and certainly after his replacement by Barack Obama. However, there was relatively little change in American policy. Not only did the Obama administration continue to have boots on the ground in Iraq, but it pursued regime change in still more countries--Libya, Syria--with similarly disastrous result. The end of the Obama administration, its succession by that of Donald Trump, saw prominent neoconservatives like William Kristol and Max Boot win plaudits from "establishment" Democrats for their criticism of the new administration, even as some of their colleagues held positions of power and even enjoyed promotions--John Bolton becoming National Security Advisor, while Elliott Abrams became the Special Envoy to Venezuela (regime change was never just for the Middle East, after all), with the same Democrats pleading his case. In a very real sense the neoconservatives had returned to the mainstream--but it is equally true to say that they never actually left, and their departure would scarcely have been noticed if they had, because even if they were cruder about it, and arguably more reckless, in the end their ideas were well within the scope of the longtime orthodoxy of the policymaking establishment.
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Wednesday, June 26, 2019
Announcing . . . The Long Drawdown: British Military Retrenchment, 1945-1979
A few years ago I was researching the James Bond series.
Looking back on the relevant history, Ian Fleming's original James Bond novels seem to me to have had enduring achievements in their updating the half century old "clubland" hero tradition, and in the process, laying the groundwork for the further development of the spy tale into the "security state epic"--out of which grew our later techno-thrillers.
The original, EON-produced James Bond films similarly had two enduring achievements. One was their carrying forward Fleming's updating to create what, a half century later, remains the enduring, popular image of the secret agent.
The other was their invention of the modern action-adventure film (the set-piece-based, fast-paced structure, the associated battery of cinematographic and editing techniques, etc.), and more broadly the movie blockbuster as we know it, down to the high-publicity, wide-release model intended to deliver a "boffo B.O." on the opening weekend, and at least equally great revenues through merchandising.
Obvious today, it is worth remembering that Hollywood did not get around to seriously following and mastering this model until the 1980s--substantially, by way of George Lucas.
Still, despite these massive and lasting effects on pop culture, any real study of the series can hardly miss the extent to which the Bond films, and perhaps more so the Bond books, were a creation of their time--that brief and now long lapsed moment when, among other things, Britain transitioned from the status of international superpower and seat of global empire to "ordinary" mid-sized West European nation-state. (Indeed, it is very hard to understand why the books present a globe-trotting British agent in the way that they do without some reference to this fact.)
The fact had me delving deeply into the historical background.
I soon found that the discussion of the economic history has prolific, varied, even rich. There was, in fact, so much there that I found myself, in the midst of processing and applying it all, producing a book of my own.
It was a very different matter where the more narrowly military history was concerned, satisfying overviews of how Britain's global, imperial force was adapted into the more modern but more limited force Britain operated three decades later.
I actually found myself to a surprising extent scraping up information from different sources to produce such a picture, and wound up producing a number of papers I published via SSRN.
More recently I have brought heavily revised editions of those papers together with other, related, but so far unpublished pieces in my new collection, The Long Drawdown: British Military Retrenchment, 1945-1979.
It is now available in print or e-book format at Amazon and other retailers.
Get your copy today.
Tweet
Looking back on the relevant history, Ian Fleming's original James Bond novels seem to me to have had enduring achievements in their updating the half century old "clubland" hero tradition, and in the process, laying the groundwork for the further development of the spy tale into the "security state epic"--out of which grew our later techno-thrillers.
The original, EON-produced James Bond films similarly had two enduring achievements. One was their carrying forward Fleming's updating to create what, a half century later, remains the enduring, popular image of the secret agent.
The other was their invention of the modern action-adventure film (the set-piece-based, fast-paced structure, the associated battery of cinematographic and editing techniques, etc.), and more broadly the movie blockbuster as we know it, down to the high-publicity, wide-release model intended to deliver a "boffo B.O." on the opening weekend, and at least equally great revenues through merchandising.
Obvious today, it is worth remembering that Hollywood did not get around to seriously following and mastering this model until the 1980s--substantially, by way of George Lucas.
Still, despite these massive and lasting effects on pop culture, any real study of the series can hardly miss the extent to which the Bond films, and perhaps more so the Bond books, were a creation of their time--that brief and now long lapsed moment when, among other things, Britain transitioned from the status of international superpower and seat of global empire to "ordinary" mid-sized West European nation-state. (Indeed, it is very hard to understand why the books present a globe-trotting British agent in the way that they do without some reference to this fact.)
The fact had me delving deeply into the historical background.
I soon found that the discussion of the economic history has prolific, varied, even rich. There was, in fact, so much there that I found myself, in the midst of processing and applying it all, producing a book of my own.
It was a very different matter where the more narrowly military history was concerned, satisfying overviews of how Britain's global, imperial force was adapted into the more modern but more limited force Britain operated three decades later.
I actually found myself to a surprising extent scraping up information from different sources to produce such a picture, and wound up producing a number of papers I published via SSRN.
More recently I have brought heavily revised editions of those papers together with other, related, but so far unpublished pieces in my new collection, The Long Drawdown: British Military Retrenchment, 1945-1979.
It is now available in print or e-book format at Amazon and other retailers.
Get your copy today.
Tweet
Rehabilitating War
Originally posted at RARITANIA on June 18, 2019.
The reality was that by the turn of the twentieth century the industrialization of war had made going to war an act of self-immolation--as Ivan Bloch recognized presciently and argued meticulously, comprehensively and irrefutably in his brilliant study of the subject. The ministers and monarchs and generals of the great powers did not like his analysis, and in their stupidity, cowardice, arrogance, irresponsibility, ignored it as, when the logic of empire demanded it, they went to war in their accustomed manner.
In the fighting that followed the commanders on both sides bore out the definition of insanity (and stupidity) as repeating the same action over and over again in the expectation of a different result they mounted offensive after offensive in which they squandered the lives of a generation and drove their economies to the breaking point. Ultimately numbers told, and the exhausted Central Powers gave in, but not before Russia collapsed, Italy was plunged into chaos, and even France and Britain became shaky--while the catastrophe of the war was such, and the continuing cynicism of the leadership such, that the prospects for a lasting peace were dim, and unrealized, World War I paving the way for the still vaster horror of World War II.
This does not suit the right-wing revisionists, who have still not learned the lesson about the impracticability of war, even after industrial war gave way to mechanized war, chemical war, aerial war, and even intercontinental, thermonuclear, "push-button" war. They dislike the image of wastage of human life in pointless offensives on a static battlefield. They dislike the view that the war cost so much and decided so little and led to worse in a generation's time.
So they pretend that the belligerents going to war and then, after stalemate set in, sticking it out as long as they did, in the manner that they did, was the right and proper thing to do in the circumstances. They demand that the reader sympathize with the leaders whose mediocrity and conformism and cowardice led to the allegedly "practical option" that more intelligent and braver people had already realized had long since become impractical to the point of insanity. They shrug off the wastage, saying it was not so bad, really--or even, as Correlli Barnett has, that our image of trench warfare's horrors tells us about nothing but the softness of public school boys exposed to the "real world" for the first time. They marginalize the simple-minded brute force approach of the generals and the profligacy with human life on which it was founded (we are not asked to sympathize with the soldiers condemned to their deaths, here), preferring to play up the idea that the armies were truly dynamic, innovating technologically and tactically (never mind how little it altered the lines). They insist that the war's victims be called "heroes," insist that any critic be ashamed to speak ill of anything for which they "sacrificed" their lives (rather than had their lives thrown away by the others who had the power in the situation), and contend that to the extent the war or the peace were less than satisfactory, they all did the best they could, that things would have been worse had they been otherwise, that the fault really lay elsewhere--perhaps the peoples of the West becoming too little army-minded and too much welfare-minded.
The revisionist vision is as obscene as it is idiotic, a whitewash of the war rather than an attempt to expose overlooked truth, and their hatred for anyone who would give the lie to their false narrative such that figures like Niall Ferguson devote so much ink to attacking Blackadder Goes Forth for the bit of truth about that war it conveyed to the viewer amid the laughter.
That last is unforgivable.
Thursday, June 6, 2019
'Nineties Dreams
Looking back one does not think of the 'nineties as a particularly utopian, optimistic, moment. The right crowd that history was at an end, and no one within the mainstream dared seriously challenge it.
Still, the period had expectations of something better ahead. The mainstream, at least, assumed a breathing spell from international conflict--not an end to conflict, but at least a lot less danger of great power war, and perhaps, more effective international management of such conflict as broke out, with the United Nations becoming a vehicle for a revived effort at collective security through which East and West together could conduct such humanitarian intervention as was needed. (Such thinking is even evident when one looks back at the pop culture of the time. Remember the plot of the first Street Fighter movie, where Guile commanded a peacekeeping force? Remember the UN special forces team in Clive Cussler's Sahara? Probably not. But I do.)
Such arrangements were not regarded as precluding a "peace dividend," which it was thought might help the country get its house in order. Even if much of the rhetoric could be read as nationalist rather than social democratic, preoccupied with competitiveness rather than equity, even conservatives thought neoliberalism had gone too far, and something had to be done (as one recalls reading, for instance, Mr. Southern Strategy himself, Kevin Phillips). The financialization and deindustrialization of the economy; the country's dilapidated physical infrastructure and the flaws of the educational system; the high-priced and underperforming health care system--there was expectation that all this would be redressed.
There was, too, some thought for the amelioration of the pressure on the natural environment. One heard much of deforestation, and pesticides, and the hole in the ozone layer, while the danger of climate change was already widely known, well understood. These were, after all, the years when, in what was then an exceptional investment for a basic cable channel, TBS produced Captain Planet, and the revival of G.I Joe sent Flint off to lead the Eco-Warriors (because a Joe has "got to care about the environment"), and on the big screen Steven Seagal battled eco-criminals in movies like On Deadly Ground. These were the years of the Rio Declaration, and of even Texas oil man and Middle East oil war-wager George H.W. Bush claiming that if reelected he would be "the environmental President" (and if far from perfect on that score, in light of the legislation he did sign in his four years, not necessarily insincere in making the claim, certainly in comparison with many of his successors).
Of course, the decade, and the generation since, proved a colossal disappointment. War with Iraq became permanent, with grave consequences for all concerned ("We think the price is worth it"), while in just a few years Cold War-style crises were becoming routine again (the Norwegian rocket incident, the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis, the confrontation at the Pristina airport where, legend has it, James Blunt "saved the world"). Even before that the vision of collective security and humanitarian intervention via the UN broke down as Russia opposed NATO action in the Balkans (a far from trivial factor in reviving tension between Washington and Moscow), and a genocide in Rwanda unopposed by the world community revealed the gap between rhetoric and reality.
Peace dividend? By and large little changed from the Cold War. The force was cut by a couple of battle carriers, a few divisions, some wings; a few acquisitions programs were cut but replaced with others that, to the surprise of no one, proved equally expensive (the Seawolf subs replaced by the not-so-budget Viriginia class); and American forces remained massively present in Europe, East Asia, and more than ever before, the Middle East (with the Navy newly forming a Fifth Fleet, and headquartering it in Bahrain).
Where the American economy was concerned, the 'nineties did not mark the end of neoliberalism, but its locking in by a Clinton administration committed, above all, to balanced budgets achieved at the slightest possible trouble to the well-off and considerable trouble to those least well-off (up went fuel tax and payroll tax, while welfare was nearly "reformed" out of existence, even as corporate welfare moved ample, not least the giveaway of the airwaves to Big Media); to "Reinventing Government" along business lines; to free trade (NAFTA, GATT) and deregulation (regarding the ownership of telecommunications, banks, brokerages, while Reinventing Government meant regulatory enforcement generally became fairly "hands-off") and privatization (indeed, much more ambitious privatization, for instance, in regard to the military-owned utilities infrastructure and the Federally-owned portion of the electric grid and maybe even Social Security) than it actually managed to realize.*
Reversing financialization and deindustrialization? Forget it. Financialization, certainly, went into overdrive. The infrastructure? Well, that bill that Bill promised during the campaign as stimulus fell by the wayside, as did any really active role for government in industrial or uban development, the President preferring Third World-ish "enterprise zones" for bringing investment to poor areas. Education? The administration certainly proclaimed ambitious goals--and then mostly backed the private sector again, by way of support for charter schools. Health care reform? Sorry, Bill said to the supporters who had expected it, "I used up all my political capital on those free trade agreements you guys didn't want," treatment of the issue limited to Medicaid cuts and a feeble, market-centered attempt to hold down costs through Health Management Organizations.
The treatment of the environment? Entirely consistent with all that . . .
Of course, there was less backlash than there might have been, for various reasons. Where international relations was concerned, it mattered that Americans tuned out the rest of the world amid end-of-the-Cold War triumphalism, and that criticism of the country's military posture had become far less allowable since the '70s (a story David Sirota, among others, has told memorably), and that with the "culture wars" and upper-class identity politics swallowing up defense policy along with everything else, the debates over gays and women in the military were treated far more lengthily and seriously than the issue of what a military was for in the first place. (It mattered, too, that collective security, humanitarian intervention and the rest never had much of a popular base of support.)
Where the country's economic life was concerned, the initial confusion and surprise entailed a certain disenchantment, but this was muted by the fact that those who desired alternative policies had nowhere else to go (this was the behavior of the Democrat, after all!), and by the fact that, in the latter half of the decade, a Silicon Valley-cum-Wall Street bubble meant the kind of growth the country had not seen in a generation as people got new toys to play with ("What are these Internets I keep hearing so much about?"), convincing them there was fire as well as smoke here, while neoliberal hucksters like Tom Friedman talked up the moment for all it was worth. That Dow Jones average would go up and up for ever, they said, and through your pension fund, or even if you just quit your day job to become a day trader, you too would get a piece of the action, with the hugeness of the rapidly, eternally growing pie meaning that even a very little slice could have you retiring at forty. And all this would somehow take care of everything else, even the environment, as growing wealth and ever-more efficient technology effortlessly solved these problems that seemed to loom so large . . .
The illusions died, of course, war and even great power war resurging (Afghanistan, Iraq, Georgia, Libya, Syria, Ukraine), neoliberalism rolling on and on from catastrophe to catastrophe (tech crash, global fuel and food crisis, the Great Recession and the decade of austerity which followed) as the talking about those same old economic and associated social problems (deindustrialization and infrastructure and health care) just went on and on and on without action, and the environmental calamity worsening well beyond the fears of most at the time (as climate change-driven apocalypse increasingly appeared in even the most mainstream discussion a threat not only within the life of the living, but the present generation). In the process the 'nineties has actually come to seem even to someone who thought they were fairly awful as, in at least some respects, less bleak than the vista before us now.
Still, the period had expectations of something better ahead. The mainstream, at least, assumed a breathing spell from international conflict--not an end to conflict, but at least a lot less danger of great power war, and perhaps, more effective international management of such conflict as broke out, with the United Nations becoming a vehicle for a revived effort at collective security through which East and West together could conduct such humanitarian intervention as was needed. (Such thinking is even evident when one looks back at the pop culture of the time. Remember the plot of the first Street Fighter movie, where Guile commanded a peacekeeping force? Remember the UN special forces team in Clive Cussler's Sahara? Probably not. But I do.)
Such arrangements were not regarded as precluding a "peace dividend," which it was thought might help the country get its house in order. Even if much of the rhetoric could be read as nationalist rather than social democratic, preoccupied with competitiveness rather than equity, even conservatives thought neoliberalism had gone too far, and something had to be done (as one recalls reading, for instance, Mr. Southern Strategy himself, Kevin Phillips). The financialization and deindustrialization of the economy; the country's dilapidated physical infrastructure and the flaws of the educational system; the high-priced and underperforming health care system--there was expectation that all this would be redressed.
There was, too, some thought for the amelioration of the pressure on the natural environment. One heard much of deforestation, and pesticides, and the hole in the ozone layer, while the danger of climate change was already widely known, well understood. These were, after all, the years when, in what was then an exceptional investment for a basic cable channel, TBS produced Captain Planet, and the revival of G.I Joe sent Flint off to lead the Eco-Warriors (because a Joe has "got to care about the environment"), and on the big screen Steven Seagal battled eco-criminals in movies like On Deadly Ground. These were the years of the Rio Declaration, and of even Texas oil man and Middle East oil war-wager George H.W. Bush claiming that if reelected he would be "the environmental President" (and if far from perfect on that score, in light of the legislation he did sign in his four years, not necessarily insincere in making the claim, certainly in comparison with many of his successors).
Of course, the decade, and the generation since, proved a colossal disappointment. War with Iraq became permanent, with grave consequences for all concerned ("We think the price is worth it"), while in just a few years Cold War-style crises were becoming routine again (the Norwegian rocket incident, the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis, the confrontation at the Pristina airport where, legend has it, James Blunt "saved the world"). Even before that the vision of collective security and humanitarian intervention via the UN broke down as Russia opposed NATO action in the Balkans (a far from trivial factor in reviving tension between Washington and Moscow), and a genocide in Rwanda unopposed by the world community revealed the gap between rhetoric and reality.
Peace dividend? By and large little changed from the Cold War. The force was cut by a couple of battle carriers, a few divisions, some wings; a few acquisitions programs were cut but replaced with others that, to the surprise of no one, proved equally expensive (the Seawolf subs replaced by the not-so-budget Viriginia class); and American forces remained massively present in Europe, East Asia, and more than ever before, the Middle East (with the Navy newly forming a Fifth Fleet, and headquartering it in Bahrain).
Reversing financialization and deindustrialization? Forget it. Financialization, certainly, went into overdrive. The infrastructure? Well, that bill that Bill promised during the campaign as stimulus fell by the wayside, as did any really active role for government in industrial or uban development, the President preferring Third World-ish "enterprise zones" for bringing investment to poor areas. Education? The administration certainly proclaimed ambitious goals--and then mostly backed the private sector again, by way of support for charter schools. Health care reform? Sorry, Bill said to the supporters who had expected it, "I used up all my political capital on those free trade agreements you guys didn't want," treatment of the issue limited to Medicaid cuts and a feeble, market-centered attempt to hold down costs through Health Management Organizations.
The treatment of the environment? Entirely consistent with all that . . .
Of course, there was less backlash than there might have been, for various reasons. Where international relations was concerned, it mattered that Americans tuned out the rest of the world amid end-of-the-Cold War triumphalism, and that criticism of the country's military posture had become far less allowable since the '70s (a story David Sirota, among others, has told memorably), and that with the "culture wars" and upper-class identity politics swallowing up defense policy along with everything else, the debates over gays and women in the military were treated far more lengthily and seriously than the issue of what a military was for in the first place. (It mattered, too, that collective security, humanitarian intervention and the rest never had much of a popular base of support.)
Where the country's economic life was concerned, the initial confusion and surprise entailed a certain disenchantment, but this was muted by the fact that those who desired alternative policies had nowhere else to go (this was the behavior of the Democrat, after all!), and by the fact that, in the latter half of the decade, a Silicon Valley-cum-Wall Street bubble meant the kind of growth the country had not seen in a generation as people got new toys to play with ("What are these Internets I keep hearing so much about?"), convincing them there was fire as well as smoke here, while neoliberal hucksters like Tom Friedman talked up the moment for all it was worth. That Dow Jones average would go up and up for ever, they said, and through your pension fund, or even if you just quit your day job to become a day trader, you too would get a piece of the action, with the hugeness of the rapidly, eternally growing pie meaning that even a very little slice could have you retiring at forty. And all this would somehow take care of everything else, even the environment, as growing wealth and ever-more efficient technology effortlessly solved these problems that seemed to loom so large . . .
The illusions died, of course, war and even great power war resurging (Afghanistan, Iraq, Georgia, Libya, Syria, Ukraine), neoliberalism rolling on and on from catastrophe to catastrophe (tech crash, global fuel and food crisis, the Great Recession and the decade of austerity which followed) as the talking about those same old economic and associated social problems (deindustrialization and infrastructure and health care) just went on and on and on without action, and the environmental calamity worsening well beyond the fears of most at the time (as climate change-driven apocalypse increasingly appeared in even the most mainstream discussion a threat not only within the life of the living, but the present generation). In the process the 'nineties has actually come to seem even to someone who thought they were fairly awful as, in at least some respects, less bleak than the vista before us now.
Friday, May 31, 2019
A 100 Percent Renewable Energy World?
I recently posted a lengthy piece in which I reviewed the familiar charges made by detractors of renewable wind and solar energy against the possibility of its playing a significant role in the energy mix during the coming decades.
Examining their charges with regard to price, subsidies, pollution, land use, I have been singularly unimpressed. For all their imperfections, they remain cheaper and less taxing to the environment in these respects than more established sources, often significantly. ("Wind power requires fossil fuels," the detractors whine--yes, in production and installation, and just that, so that its carbon footprint is about 1 percent that of a coal plant, 2 percent of a natural gas plant, which I suppose is why they don't usually get around to talking numbers.)
I remain unsure as to the real value of the EROEI calculations we have. These estimates often seem to me a case of impressive-seeming precision with much more doubtful accuracy. But the assessments are far from being altogether damning.
It also seems the matters of the intermittency, compensatory energy storage, and raw materials consumption get played up excessively. However, here I concede that the problems, past a certain point, are more substantial.
For example: it is clear that the intermittency of wind and solar creates challenges for those seeking to derive a large part of their electricity from them. However, we also know that modern, flexible, sufficiently connective grids can deliver reliable electrical output with a far higher proportion of intermittent wind and solar in the grid than the naysayers imagined. Twenty percent as the limit? The Germany and Danish grids are among the most reliable around with twice that, and it may be that with currently existing technology and known practice this can continue to be expanded into the sixty percent range.
Of course, that leaves the question of the other forty percent, which would seem to have to come from less intermittent sources. However, we know that hydroelectric works here, supplying many a nation with nearly all its power (advanced, high-income, intensively energy-consuming Norway getting 98 percent from this one source), while it provides the world as a whole with a sixth of its power. Geothermal production, rather less exploited, offers similar stability, and can be vastly expanded on the basis of current, never mind future, technique. Solar thermal energy production, increasingly affordable, offers considerable potentials (a decade ago there was already talk of its providing the world a quarter of its energy), with biofuels potentially playing a role in this area.
In short, with current know-how one can push the contribution of a broader mix of renewables far beyond sixty percent--perhaps not yet all the way to one hundred percent globally, but at least in a good part of it, not least the United States, coming fairly close. Meanwhile, advances in grids, and storage tecnologies for energy production of all kinds (battery prices are falling) hold out the hope of still more than that (all on top of the continued cheapening and increasing productivity of power output from these various sources).
This raises two possibilities, broadly speaking. One is to attempt to capitalize on known technique to the fullest extent, and develop the other possibilities to the end of closing the gaps.
The other is to deem the successes and the perhaps easily realizable potentials irrelevant, and declaring the cause totally and hopelessly lost for all time, write them off and seek something else entirely. Never mind what we're seeing in northern Europe and elsewhere; never mind how consistently wrong they have been in the past on this score. Don't bother going for more wind and solar, we may have too much already. Let's go on cooking with gas!
In the circumstances, it is astonishing that so many, so vehemently, promote the latter course as the sounder of the two options. But that is where the situation stands, with proponents of this view promoting their ideas as if they were rigorous, tough-minded thinking in contrast with the flakiness of those wishing for a 100 percent renewable base for electrical production--and viciously beating down anyone who suggests otherwise. (Mention Fukushima, and they roll their eyes at you ostentatiously, as if to say you're making a mountain out of a mole hill. You're not.)
The wrongheadedness of this view apart, there is also the dishonesty of their view of nuclear as tried and true and somehow a safe, conservative bet. The truth is that any course we take in regard to our energy base, like any large-scale, long-range investment, will involve uncertainty and risk, proportioned to the scale and range of that investment. (And indeed, has there ever been a larger-scale, longer-range investment than the need to change the energy base so as to ward off climate catastrophe?) Someone who thinks that multiplying the number of atomic reactors in the world is a risk-free, costless endeavor is not as out of touch with reality as the climate change deniers who insist that fossil fuels are JUST DANDY, but still needs to think long and hard about that position.
For my part: I have already gone on the record as saying I am not taking the hard, never-nuclear line. I am certainly for the 100 percent renewable energy objective, requisite moonshots and all. But I have also argued for continued development of Generation Four nuclear. (Think thorium-fueled molten salt plants.) The difference is that I see them as a Plan B, to fill in whatever gaps emerge in the broader plan. I trust they will not be many. Perhaps we will not even need the alternative at all. But the object of moving, moving in a big way, moving fast, is far too important for us to totally rule anything out.
The Mendacity of the Renewable Energy-Bashers
5/31/19
Don't Believe the Trolls; 100 Percent Renewable Energy is Our Best Bet: Postscript
5/31/19
Don't Believe the Trolls; 100 Percent Renewable Energy is Our Best Bet
4/23/19
Tweet
Examining their charges with regard to price, subsidies, pollution, land use, I have been singularly unimpressed. For all their imperfections, they remain cheaper and less taxing to the environment in these respects than more established sources, often significantly. ("Wind power requires fossil fuels," the detractors whine--yes, in production and installation, and just that, so that its carbon footprint is about 1 percent that of a coal plant, 2 percent of a natural gas plant, which I suppose is why they don't usually get around to talking numbers.)
I remain unsure as to the real value of the EROEI calculations we have. These estimates often seem to me a case of impressive-seeming precision with much more doubtful accuracy. But the assessments are far from being altogether damning.
It also seems the matters of the intermittency, compensatory energy storage, and raw materials consumption get played up excessively. However, here I concede that the problems, past a certain point, are more substantial.
For example: it is clear that the intermittency of wind and solar creates challenges for those seeking to derive a large part of their electricity from them. However, we also know that modern, flexible, sufficiently connective grids can deliver reliable electrical output with a far higher proportion of intermittent wind and solar in the grid than the naysayers imagined. Twenty percent as the limit? The Germany and Danish grids are among the most reliable around with twice that, and it may be that with currently existing technology and known practice this can continue to be expanded into the sixty percent range.
Of course, that leaves the question of the other forty percent, which would seem to have to come from less intermittent sources. However, we know that hydroelectric works here, supplying many a nation with nearly all its power (advanced, high-income, intensively energy-consuming Norway getting 98 percent from this one source), while it provides the world as a whole with a sixth of its power. Geothermal production, rather less exploited, offers similar stability, and can be vastly expanded on the basis of current, never mind future, technique. Solar thermal energy production, increasingly affordable, offers considerable potentials (a decade ago there was already talk of its providing the world a quarter of its energy), with biofuels potentially playing a role in this area.
In short, with current know-how one can push the contribution of a broader mix of renewables far beyond sixty percent--perhaps not yet all the way to one hundred percent globally, but at least in a good part of it, not least the United States, coming fairly close. Meanwhile, advances in grids, and storage tecnologies for energy production of all kinds (battery prices are falling) hold out the hope of still more than that (all on top of the continued cheapening and increasing productivity of power output from these various sources).
This raises two possibilities, broadly speaking. One is to attempt to capitalize on known technique to the fullest extent, and develop the other possibilities to the end of closing the gaps.
The other is to deem the successes and the perhaps easily realizable potentials irrelevant, and declaring the cause totally and hopelessly lost for all time, write them off and seek something else entirely. Never mind what we're seeing in northern Europe and elsewhere; never mind how consistently wrong they have been in the past on this score. Don't bother going for more wind and solar, we may have too much already. Let's go on cooking with gas!
In the circumstances, it is astonishing that so many, so vehemently, promote the latter course as the sounder of the two options. But that is where the situation stands, with proponents of this view promoting their ideas as if they were rigorous, tough-minded thinking in contrast with the flakiness of those wishing for a 100 percent renewable base for electrical production--and viciously beating down anyone who suggests otherwise. (Mention Fukushima, and they roll their eyes at you ostentatiously, as if to say you're making a mountain out of a mole hill. You're not.)
The wrongheadedness of this view apart, there is also the dishonesty of their view of nuclear as tried and true and somehow a safe, conservative bet. The truth is that any course we take in regard to our energy base, like any large-scale, long-range investment, will involve uncertainty and risk, proportioned to the scale and range of that investment. (And indeed, has there ever been a larger-scale, longer-range investment than the need to change the energy base so as to ward off climate catastrophe?) Someone who thinks that multiplying the number of atomic reactors in the world is a risk-free, costless endeavor is not as out of touch with reality as the climate change deniers who insist that fossil fuels are JUST DANDY, but still needs to think long and hard about that position.
For my part: I have already gone on the record as saying I am not taking the hard, never-nuclear line. I am certainly for the 100 percent renewable energy objective, requisite moonshots and all. But I have also argued for continued development of Generation Four nuclear. (Think thorium-fueled molten salt plants.) The difference is that I see them as a Plan B, to fill in whatever gaps emerge in the broader plan. I trust they will not be many. Perhaps we will not even need the alternative at all. But the object of moving, moving in a big way, moving fast, is far too important for us to totally rule anything out.
The Mendacity of the Renewable Energy-Bashers
5/31/19
Don't Believe the Trolls; 100 Percent Renewable Energy is Our Best Bet: Postscript
5/31/19
Don't Believe the Trolls; 100 Percent Renewable Energy is Our Best Bet
4/23/19
Tweet
The Mendacity of the Renewable Energy-Bashers
I have been writing about energy issues for over a decade. In that time I have noticed, time and again, the reliance of those who denigrate renewable energy on "fighting dirty"--relying on shoddy, mendacious argument, and irrational appeals, to bully those who disagree with them. It seems only appropriate to say something of that.
Double Standards in Technological Comparisons
First and foremost I have been struck by the tendency of detractors of renewable energy to present a balance sheet consisting solely of its credits, not its debits--often while pretending to compare it with the more established sources, often without actually presenting the figures on that balance sheet at all.
For example, they are quick to point out that renewables have received subsidies, and that they carry ecological costs--accounting for greenhouse gas emissions during their life cycle. They do not, however, concern themselves with the fact that the same goes for fossil fuels and nuclear energy--as if they had no costs or problems at all, as if they were totally wonderful and perfect. The result is that there is no comparison among these diverse options to see how they stack up in these respects, no consideration of whether renewables may, in fact, be advantageous to some appreciable, worthwhile degree--only much harping on any imperfection they may have, as if this were an automatic deal-breaker.
This may be an oversight on their part--albeit, one which suggests a strong bias in their focusing on the downsides of renewables while ignoring those of established energy sources. However, it may also be a matter of their knowing full well how poorly their favored sources stack up in any such comparison.
Yes, renewables have received subsidies--feed-in tariffs and the like. But so have fossil fuels--which may now be getting the benefit of as much as five trillion dollars a year according not to Greenpace, but to that high church of neoliberalism, the International Monetary Fund. Nuclear energy, too, has been a beneificary of heavy subsidy, and produced great externalities. (The renewables-basher gets contemptuous if you mention Fukushima, but guess what? The clean-up bill for that disaster was estimated at $200 billion--three years and much bad news ago.)
Yes, renewables have not been competing on a level playing field--because that field has been tilted so long and so sharply in favor of the established energy sources.
Yes, while the spinning of a wind turbine does not in itself produce greenhouse gas emissions, the production, installation, disposal of a wind turbine entails carbon dioxide emissions. How much?
Eleven grams per kilowatt-hour.
It is not zero.
But compare that with the kilogram of carbon dioxide (980 g) produced by a coal plant, the half-kilo (465) by a natural gas plant, which means that a wind turbine generates 98-99 percent less carbon dioxide per unit of electricity. Rather than cause for despair about them this is a powerful argument on their behalf.
Treating Technologies in Isolation
The pattern of giving half of the picture or less in the manner described above extends beyond comparisons between renewables and more established sources to lengthy debunking of the prospect of one source of renewable energy carrying the whole burden--100 percent solar, for example. This is, in part, because the idea of such a "monoculture" is an easy straw man. By and large, proponents of renewable energy, cognizant of the limits of any one form of production, advocate a mix of technologies, to cover a wide variety of circumstances and locations--solar working with wind working with hydropower and whatever else may be available at a particular location that, much as nuclear and coal and gas complement each other in today's grids, would do the same in a renewables-based economy, substantially overcoming weaknesses such as the intermittency of sources. The sun may not shine all day--but when it is not shining, the wind turbines may be spinning.
They also tend to ignore the significant ongoing changes in the way grids as a whole are run--in particular, the shift from grids generating wasteful "baseload" energy ("too much when you don't need it, not enough when you do") to flexible, "smart" grids able to cope swiftly and precisely with shifting supply and demand. As Germany has demonstrated, where grids are sufficiently flexible and connectivity, they can already substanially handle the task of matching intermittent wind and solar to demand at least as reliably as a grid based on more traditional supplies. The incorporation of still other options, like dispatchable hydroelectric power (already well-developed) and solar thermal (pricier as an electricity producer, but relatively low-cost as a way of storing renewable solar energy for dispatch later), provides still more options.
Ruling Out Further Technical Progress
In addition to their tendency to give the advantages of renewables (and disadvantages of other sources) short shrift, and envision renewables-based grids in straw man terms, the detractors of renewable energy, when going beyond the question of whether the technologies can bear a given burden now to whether they can possibly do so in the foreseeable future, dismiss any prospect of improvement in their cost or performance. That the price of solar power-generated electricity fell by seven-eighths in the last decade (to name just one of the more striking of the field's many areas of progress), and thus holds out promise of further improvements, especially if proper support were provided, is, in their view, completely irrelevant.
Of course, one may be willing to grant the point that one cannot build on the basis of unrealized possibilities. Yet, it is another thing to take that as reason not to try and develop those possibilities if the resources are available; and still more, rule out the option for all time. Moreover, while such detractors are extremely exacting with renewables in this area, they are often quite bullish on the prospects of technical progress in the areas they favor, like palliatives for the carbon emissions of continued fossil fuels consumption. Remember how Carbon Capture and Storage was going to save the world?
Once more, a double standard is in evidence.
"Too Good to Be True"
As might be guessed by anyone who has had much experience of specious argument, and those who offer it, the renewables-bashers cross the line into appeals to "truthiness"--the "quality of seeming or being felt to be true, even if not necessarily true." How so? Simply put, much of their appeal rests on the idea that the promises made for renewables are just "too good to be true"--an appeal to cynicism and pessmism as such.
Why is that the case? One reason is that the pervasiveness and prestige of the idea that the world must always not be as we would like it to be, that the cosmos is rigged against any chance of human happiness (the "tragic view"), is somehow the beginning and end of wisdom--and that anyone expecting better is a fool--can scarcely be overstated. The idea that we cannot have a green modernity, being unpalatable, consequently seems the "truthier" for being unpalatable. Truthier, too, because of the pompous aloofness with which such words are often spoken, the comfortable being so inclined to lay down the "hard facts of life" to those they see as inferiors; and because of the simple-minded equation of irony with wit, the more for how snobbish irony can be. And truthier because we live in such a postmodernist, end-of-history cultural atmosphere, where people in middle age have no memory of a major problem being solved, only of endless talk, broken promises, betrayals, as things go on getting worse, much worse, especially in regard to the environment. (The environmental movement has won battles, but just about never any big ones, while everything we see in 2019 tells us just how badly they have been losing the war--for decades.)
It seems to me that it might even be the case that, even if people suspect the claims that a renewable energy-based modernity is unworkable are untrue, they are susceptible to going along with it because of that same harsh experience in these decades--that Big Business never loses a fight, that a greener economy can only happen at their sufferance, and that if this means atomic energy, nuclear or nothing, as their shills and their trolls so endlessly insist, then that is preferable to the alternative.
All of this derives additional force from the identification of aspirations to a world which is happier and greener with the countercultural "hippie," still after all these years held up as a straw man for the contempt of the right-wingers who won that particular kulturkampf and never let anyone forget it--hippies contrasted with the "practical men" (I suspect the gendered aspect of this is relevant) laying down the "hard facts of life."
Looking back over it all, one can see how many are intimidated, if not persuaded, by all of that. But to say that it is a logically compelling argument is something else.
There, they lose and lose decisively--and no one should ever forget that.
Double Standards in Technological Comparisons
First and foremost I have been struck by the tendency of detractors of renewable energy to present a balance sheet consisting solely of its credits, not its debits--often while pretending to compare it with the more established sources, often without actually presenting the figures on that balance sheet at all.
For example, they are quick to point out that renewables have received subsidies, and that they carry ecological costs--accounting for greenhouse gas emissions during their life cycle. They do not, however, concern themselves with the fact that the same goes for fossil fuels and nuclear energy--as if they had no costs or problems at all, as if they were totally wonderful and perfect. The result is that there is no comparison among these diverse options to see how they stack up in these respects, no consideration of whether renewables may, in fact, be advantageous to some appreciable, worthwhile degree--only much harping on any imperfection they may have, as if this were an automatic deal-breaker.
This may be an oversight on their part--albeit, one which suggests a strong bias in their focusing on the downsides of renewables while ignoring those of established energy sources. However, it may also be a matter of their knowing full well how poorly their favored sources stack up in any such comparison.
Yes, renewables have received subsidies--feed-in tariffs and the like. But so have fossil fuels--which may now be getting the benefit of as much as five trillion dollars a year according not to Greenpace, but to that high church of neoliberalism, the International Monetary Fund. Nuclear energy, too, has been a beneificary of heavy subsidy, and produced great externalities. (The renewables-basher gets contemptuous if you mention Fukushima, but guess what? The clean-up bill for that disaster was estimated at $200 billion--three years and much bad news ago.)
Yes, renewables have not been competing on a level playing field--because that field has been tilted so long and so sharply in favor of the established energy sources.
Yes, while the spinning of a wind turbine does not in itself produce greenhouse gas emissions, the production, installation, disposal of a wind turbine entails carbon dioxide emissions. How much?
Eleven grams per kilowatt-hour.
It is not zero.
But compare that with the kilogram of carbon dioxide (980 g) produced by a coal plant, the half-kilo (465) by a natural gas plant, which means that a wind turbine generates 98-99 percent less carbon dioxide per unit of electricity. Rather than cause for despair about them this is a powerful argument on their behalf.
Treating Technologies in Isolation
The pattern of giving half of the picture or less in the manner described above extends beyond comparisons between renewables and more established sources to lengthy debunking of the prospect of one source of renewable energy carrying the whole burden--100 percent solar, for example. This is, in part, because the idea of such a "monoculture" is an easy straw man. By and large, proponents of renewable energy, cognizant of the limits of any one form of production, advocate a mix of technologies, to cover a wide variety of circumstances and locations--solar working with wind working with hydropower and whatever else may be available at a particular location that, much as nuclear and coal and gas complement each other in today's grids, would do the same in a renewables-based economy, substantially overcoming weaknesses such as the intermittency of sources. The sun may not shine all day--but when it is not shining, the wind turbines may be spinning.
They also tend to ignore the significant ongoing changes in the way grids as a whole are run--in particular, the shift from grids generating wasteful "baseload" energy ("too much when you don't need it, not enough when you do") to flexible, "smart" grids able to cope swiftly and precisely with shifting supply and demand. As Germany has demonstrated, where grids are sufficiently flexible and connectivity, they can already substanially handle the task of matching intermittent wind and solar to demand at least as reliably as a grid based on more traditional supplies. The incorporation of still other options, like dispatchable hydroelectric power (already well-developed) and solar thermal (pricier as an electricity producer, but relatively low-cost as a way of storing renewable solar energy for dispatch later), provides still more options.
Ruling Out Further Technical Progress
In addition to their tendency to give the advantages of renewables (and disadvantages of other sources) short shrift, and envision renewables-based grids in straw man terms, the detractors of renewable energy, when going beyond the question of whether the technologies can bear a given burden now to whether they can possibly do so in the foreseeable future, dismiss any prospect of improvement in their cost or performance. That the price of solar power-generated electricity fell by seven-eighths in the last decade (to name just one of the more striking of the field's many areas of progress), and thus holds out promise of further improvements, especially if proper support were provided, is, in their view, completely irrelevant.
Of course, one may be willing to grant the point that one cannot build on the basis of unrealized possibilities. Yet, it is another thing to take that as reason not to try and develop those possibilities if the resources are available; and still more, rule out the option for all time. Moreover, while such detractors are extremely exacting with renewables in this area, they are often quite bullish on the prospects of technical progress in the areas they favor, like palliatives for the carbon emissions of continued fossil fuels consumption. Remember how Carbon Capture and Storage was going to save the world?
Once more, a double standard is in evidence.
"Too Good to Be True"
As might be guessed by anyone who has had much experience of specious argument, and those who offer it, the renewables-bashers cross the line into appeals to "truthiness"--the "quality of seeming or being felt to be true, even if not necessarily true." How so? Simply put, much of their appeal rests on the idea that the promises made for renewables are just "too good to be true"--an appeal to cynicism and pessmism as such.
Why is that the case? One reason is that the pervasiveness and prestige of the idea that the world must always not be as we would like it to be, that the cosmos is rigged against any chance of human happiness (the "tragic view"), is somehow the beginning and end of wisdom--and that anyone expecting better is a fool--can scarcely be overstated. The idea that we cannot have a green modernity, being unpalatable, consequently seems the "truthier" for being unpalatable. Truthier, too, because of the pompous aloofness with which such words are often spoken, the comfortable being so inclined to lay down the "hard facts of life" to those they see as inferiors; and because of the simple-minded equation of irony with wit, the more for how snobbish irony can be. And truthier because we live in such a postmodernist, end-of-history cultural atmosphere, where people in middle age have no memory of a major problem being solved, only of endless talk, broken promises, betrayals, as things go on getting worse, much worse, especially in regard to the environment. (The environmental movement has won battles, but just about never any big ones, while everything we see in 2019 tells us just how badly they have been losing the war--for decades.)
It seems to me that it might even be the case that, even if people suspect the claims that a renewable energy-based modernity is unworkable are untrue, they are susceptible to going along with it because of that same harsh experience in these decades--that Big Business never loses a fight, that a greener economy can only happen at their sufferance, and that if this means atomic energy, nuclear or nothing, as their shills and their trolls so endlessly insist, then that is preferable to the alternative.
All of this derives additional force from the identification of aspirations to a world which is happier and greener with the countercultural "hippie," still after all these years held up as a straw man for the contempt of the right-wingers who won that particular kulturkampf and never let anyone forget it--hippies contrasted with the "practical men" (I suspect the gendered aspect of this is relevant) laying down the "hard facts of life."
Looking back over it all, one can see how many are intimidated, if not persuaded, by all of that. But to say that it is a logically compelling argument is something else.
There, they lose and lose decisively--and no one should ever forget that.
Don't Believe the Trolls; 100 Percent Renewable Energy is Our Best Bet: Postscript
Recently, irritated by the endless repetition of the same tired, debunked arguments purportedly showing why renewable energy sources can never be a major factor in resolving the energy-climate crisis by nuclear energy shills and others of their vile ilk (as well as a good many perfectly honest people taken in by their propaganda), I decided to write a post debunking these arguments--specifically the claims that renewables are too expensive, too unreliable, have too low an EROEI, and are too ecologically unsound (too polluting, too intensive in their use of land area and raw materials).
In that piece I concentrated on the production of electricity of wind and solar, to the exclusion of other types of renewables. Of course, no one expects that even the full diversity of these two sources (onshore and offshore wind, photovoltaic and thermal solar in its centralized and decentralized forms) will have to carry the burden by themselves, even in a 100 percent renewable energy-based economy. Hydroelectric and geothermal power each provide other options, with hydroelectric especially notable for its low monetary and energy cost, and easy dispatchability--alleviating one of those areas where wind and solar may be at some disadvantage, and in general simplifying the problem of shifting to a grid completely powered by renewables. I also limited my discussion of the prospects for progress in these areas, and particularly the possibilities of more radical technology rapidly aiding our progress--like the development of high-altitude wind power (one striking estimate regarding which is that it may have a whopping EROEI of 600!).
This was, in part, because as it was the piece quickly grew far longer than I had originally intended (4,500 words, with close to seventy hyperlinks playing the role of endnotes). However, it was also because I wanted to focus on the fuller capabilities of these technologies which seem so likely to be critical in any solution, as their concrete possibilities actually stand at the present time--the better to fulfill that object of answering those detractors whose attacks drove me to write in the first place.
In that piece I concentrated on the production of electricity of wind and solar, to the exclusion of other types of renewables. Of course, no one expects that even the full diversity of these two sources (onshore and offshore wind, photovoltaic and thermal solar in its centralized and decentralized forms) will have to carry the burden by themselves, even in a 100 percent renewable energy-based economy. Hydroelectric and geothermal power each provide other options, with hydroelectric especially notable for its low monetary and energy cost, and easy dispatchability--alleviating one of those areas where wind and solar may be at some disadvantage, and in general simplifying the problem of shifting to a grid completely powered by renewables. I also limited my discussion of the prospects for progress in these areas, and particularly the possibilities of more radical technology rapidly aiding our progress--like the development of high-altitude wind power (one striking estimate regarding which is that it may have a whopping EROEI of 600!).
This was, in part, because as it was the piece quickly grew far longer than I had originally intended (4,500 words, with close to seventy hyperlinks playing the role of endnotes). However, it was also because I wanted to focus on the fuller capabilities of these technologies which seem so likely to be critical in any solution, as their concrete possibilities actually stand at the present time--the better to fulfill that object of answering those detractors whose attacks drove me to write in the first place.
Reflections on "The Moral Equivalent of War"
Several years ago I wrote a brief piece recalling the view of the energy crisis as "the moral equivalent of war," and why the crisis has so signally failed to call forth the implicit, and required, leadership, enthusiasm and effort.
One factor that I think merited more discussion is the utter failure of the environmental movement to offer any vision of a better life for the people of the world. Odd to me then, this now seems to me easily ascribable to its having been so strongly shaped by a constellation of toxic, reactionary ideas--Malthusianism, postmodernism, neoliberalism. After all, not only are such ideas incapable of offering visions of hope to people, but they emerged from a vicious desire to crush such hopes. And of course, neoliberalism, in as well as out of its environmental variation, was devoted to assaulting the idea of the public, the collective--the use of government power to solve problems--for the sake of protecting the prerogatives and profits of the financial sector.
Today, amid talk of a Green New Deal--in the United States, vehemently opposed not only by the avowed right, but the staunchly neoliberal "establishment" of the Democratic Party whose face has now become the sneering visage of Nancy Pelosi, and at the same time, resonating with a public increasingly demanding action--one wonders if the day of neoliberal environmentalism, in spite of the continued faith of elites, in it, is not drawing to a close.
One factor that I think merited more discussion is the utter failure of the environmental movement to offer any vision of a better life for the people of the world. Odd to me then, this now seems to me easily ascribable to its having been so strongly shaped by a constellation of toxic, reactionary ideas--Malthusianism, postmodernism, neoliberalism. After all, not only are such ideas incapable of offering visions of hope to people, but they emerged from a vicious desire to crush such hopes. And of course, neoliberalism, in as well as out of its environmental variation, was devoted to assaulting the idea of the public, the collective--the use of government power to solve problems--for the sake of protecting the prerogatives and profits of the financial sector.
Today, amid talk of a Green New Deal--in the United States, vehemently opposed not only by the avowed right, but the staunchly neoliberal "establishment" of the Democratic Party whose face has now become the sneering visage of Nancy Pelosi, and at the same time, resonating with a public increasingly demanding action--one wonders if the day of neoliberal environmentalism, in spite of the continued faith of elites, in it, is not drawing to a close.
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