Australia's Nuclear Sub Program: The Global Britain Angle

In considering the Australian decision to acquire nuclear submarines in a deal made with Britain and the U.S. my thoughts turned back to Britain's "tilt to the Indo-Pacific"--the British government's decision to focus British foreign policy, and reorient its military policy, on the region, in a break with the European emphasis that has prevailed since the 1960s.

Considering that move one fact of the situation I have repeatedly noted has been that Britain's ability to project force into the region is relatively limited, especially as that region becomes more militarized--with Japan acquiring attack carriers and India a nuclear sub fleet, and Australia expanding its old force of diesel subs and frigates/destroyers into something much larger and more ambitious, reducing the "value" of what Britain can bring from so far away. (Already in the '60s the country's Far East forces, while vastly larger than anything Britain could really afford to station in the area, were inadequate to make being "east of Suez" worthwhile.)

However, Britain's capacity to provide technology that as yet few others can may be a handy supplement to such resources--especially where the resources are so sensitive. Apart from the U.S.' provision of technical support to Britain's nuclear submarine program, and Russian collaboration with India in the development of its own nuclear sub program (which has seen India lease working Russian vessels, in the '80s and again in this century), I cannot think of anything to compare at all with the new deal. Certainly what some have suggested as one possible form the deal may take (given Australia's lack of a nuclear industry), Australia's purchase of nuclear subs outright--possibly from Britain--simply has no precedent.

It is also no isolated action. Indeed, it may be useful to think of how some proponents of a post-Brexit Britain have suggested stronger ties to the Commonwealth--in this case, a relatively large piece of the Commonwealth in the crucial Indo-Pacific arena--as a replacement for its continental connections, with the sub deal a building block for a broader partnership with Australia that would strengthen Britain's local influence. Such an approach seems the more plausible given that, if rather less sensitive and controversial in nature, Indo-Pacific-minded Britain has already turned to a collaboration with Japan to produce their own sixth-generation fighter.

Meanwhile, even as they strengthen Britain's military connections with nations in East Asia such deals can be seen as conducing to the strength of the British military-industrial base that remains a key strategic asset for the country, more important than many appreciate. Like Russia Britain is a nation which has suffered considerable deindustrialization but still possessed of a disproportionately large and advanced military-industrial complex--not least because as British policy from Thatcher forward proved ready to sacrifice the country's manufacturing base for the sake of the bigger neoliberal program, the defense-industrial portion of the sector continued to get government support (with Thatcher herself making a personal lobbying effort to clinch the infamous "deal of the century" with the Saudis back in '88) that has translated to the complex's political and economic importance also being disproportionate. As the cost and complexity of weaponry only continues to grow exports become only more important as a way of keeping such a base viable--while what remains of Britain's manufacturing is that much more dependent on it.

Selling Australia critical technology--and perhaps, even its own versions of the Astute-class submarine--might not balance the country's payments by itself. However, it also does not evoke the derisive laughter that the "tea and biscuits" plan did.

Nuclear vs. Conventionally-Powered Subs--and the Australian Turn to a Nuclear Submarine Fleet

It appears that most have misperceptions about non-nuclear subs, and in particular their underwater endurance. This seems partly reflective of misapprehensions about the history of submarines. Remembering the submarine campaigns of the First and Second World Wars they rarely realize just how much time those vessels spent on the surface, and submerged only when actually on the attack or evading attack themselves--precisely because when underwater they had to run on the batteries of that earlier day, and because when underwater they could operate only at much lower speed.1 Submarines were, properly speaking, submersibles, capable of going under the water, with the capability important, but subsurface not where they spent most of their time. This was one reason why it was such an important turning point in the Battle of the Atlantic when the Allies extended their aerial patrols to cover the entirety of the trans-Atlantic convoy routes (and the increasing equipment of those aircraft with radar)--on the surface the U-boats were not much less detectable than any other surface ship of comparable size and profile. It was also why the advent of the snorkel was important--it let submarines use their diesel engines when just below the surface, permitting some trade-off between stealth and endurance.

Nuclear power plants, however, enabled submarines to effectively operate underwater for as long as their crews and their supplies could hold out, while running as fast as any other vessel afloat, over ranges limited only by their speed and endurance, and all that while carrying a far heavier armament. This made them virtually a requirement for large ballistic missile submarines; for any submarine intended to attack them or protect them from attack; for subs simply intended to carry large payloads of tactical weapons for any other purpose, like large loads of cruise missiles for anti-ship or land-attack; and for subs which are simply intended for rapid dispatch to distant regions, whether out in the open ocean or littorals far from home.

To use that horribly overused and misused term, they were a game-changer.

Of course, impressive as the performance afforded by a nuclear power plants is it comes with significant downsides. Those plants are not cheap or easy to build, operate, refuel, maintain—and bring all the safety risks so famously dramatized in, for example, Kathryn Bigelow's K19. And the vessels with all the extra capabilities that are the whole point of going in for a nuclear power plant are not cheap. Even limiting the comparison to attack-type boats a high-quality diesel submarine like the German Type 212 or Swedish Gotland runs about a half billion dollars--while a Virginia-class boat runs about three billion, six times as much. It is even the case that the quietest diesel-electric boats tend to be quieter and therefore stealthier than their nuclear counterparts—-while, as if all that were not enough, air independent propulsion has wrought a great improvement in the underwater endurance of non-nuclear vessels, perhaps to the point of giving conventionally-powered subs with trans-oceanic range while submerged (exemplified by the Ocean-class submarine concept).

The result is that a government with purely local security concerns--which wants its subs mainly for coastal defense purposes--or which has a limited budget, has enormous incentive to stick with the simpler, cheaper conventional boats. Indeed, the attractions have been such that those who follow the naval literature have likely seen over the years many analysts make the case for the long all-nuclear U.S. Navy supplementing its forces with such boats for littoral warfare.

What, then, does it mean that Australia has taken the nuclear submarine path?

One may see the matter in terms of the country's position being fairly unique, starting with the plain facts of its physical geography. Australia has what may be the world's seventh-longest coastline (about 16,000 miles), and its third-largest Exclusive Economic Zone (some 3.4 million square miles). Moreover, there are Australia's additional military commitments across Southeast Asia and the South Pacific (with troops and planes still rotating through Butterworth Air Field in Malaysia, its membership in the Five Power Defence Arrangements tying it in also with Singapore and New Zealand, its preparedness for interventions as far afield as East Timor, the Solomon Islands and Fiji as seen in the past) extending the Australian Defence Force's expected zone of operations considerably beyond that. And Australia undertakes all this with relatively small forces--recruiting from its population of 25 million an armed forces of 60,000, with 15,000 in the navy--with comparatively little military back-up furnished by large allies close at hand (in comparison with other countries with small populations and vast areas of concern like Canada, with its proximity to the U.S., or Norway, with its inclusion within the European NATO space).

Seen from the purely naval perspective that is a lot of "battlespace" to cover, especially with the military resources at hand, with one reflection how, given its combination of unavoidably small forces and desire for a long reach has long played an important part in Australian procurement decisions (the country the only customer for the F-111 strike aircraft besides the U.S. Air Force). With the region ever more intensely militarized it is unsurprising that the tendency is particularly evident now, with the submarines just one element in a shift to a larger, longer-ranged armed forces, navy included (with the manning of the Australian Defence Force to go up a third to 80,000, and the navy replacing its little, relatively lightly armed frigates with "frigates" like cruisers, with long-range cruise missile and anti-ballistic missile capabilities part of the package).

Even if one takes entirely for granted the broader political premises of the course the Australian government is taking (a larger subject than I care to discuss here), this does not in and of itself make the nuclear sub decision the right one, of course (there is the cost-effectiveness issue, and the technical problems are vast--especially when one remembers that, in spite of the expectations of local construction, Australia has no nuclear technology sector), but the point is that this is part of a larger complex of decisionmaking in regard to a profoundly shifting military posture that seems to get too little attention in such coverage of the issue as I have seen.

1. I remember a straight-to-video remake of The Land That Time Forgot where a World War I-era German submariner spoke of spending weeks beneath the surface of the sea--something submariners of that time never did.

Battleships, Cruisers, Destroyers, Frigates--What's the Difference? And Why Should We Care Anyway in 2022?

The terminology denoting warship types can, at a glance, seem bewildering--in part because old usages have become profoundly muddled over time.

The term "battleship" derives from "line-of-battleship," the vessels topmost in size, protection and armament (i.e. the biggest ships with the thickest armor and biggest guns) and so intended to "stand" in the line of battle during head on fleet clashes like Trafalgar or Jutland, because they could take and give the heaviest of beatings.

Cruisers were different. They were supposed to "cruise" independently, whether scouting for the fleet, or commerce raiding. (Indeed, it was once common to refer to submarines as "submarine cruisers," precisely because they were submersible vessels that did the cruiser's job of scouting and commerce raiding.) The premium on mobility meant that while they could be "light," "medium" or "heavy," or even "battle cruisers"--packing an armament that could compete with a battleship, but in each and every case less well-armored, and reliant on superior speed and agility to chase down their prey or escape pursuers rather than their ability to endure punishment.

The term destroyer derives from "torpedo boat" destroyer. As the name implies these were intended to fend off attacks against a fleet by the smaller vessels, which could most certainly not stand up to a battleship in a fight, but which nonetheless threatened even the biggest ships with the torpedoes they carried. Of course, torpedo boats only proved to be the beginning in that respect, with those "submersible cruisers" and the advent of aircraft translating to comparable threats to naval and civilian vessels, and in the process, what destroyers were more likely to be fending off in action.

Finally the term "frigate" was originally used in the "age of sail" to refer to swift, agile vessels too small for the line of battle. Fairly general, it had fallen out of favor in the age of mechanical, fossil fuel-driven fleets, and one might add, their more precise classification. However, the Second World War, with its submarine and other attacks, and the emergence of convoys in response to them, saw a vastly increased need for ships fulfilling the destroyer's protective function--to such a degree that there was call for smaller (cheaper and more easily and quickly produced) vessels that did the job. In American usage at the time these were "destroyer escorts," but the British term "frigate" has since become more commonplace.

Increasingly over the course of the Second World War and Cold War, with the carrier assuming the central role in naval warfare over the battleship; missiles supplanting guns in shipborne and aerial armament; with physical armor decreasingly utilized as a way of protecting vessels; and aerial, electronic and even space surveillance coming to the fore; the old combination made less sense. Given their vulnerability and the limited reach of their guns armored, big-gun battleships increasingly increasingly seemed pointless aside from a very few, limited uses for which few navies could not justify keeping them, with the few remaining examples curiosities (like America's battleships, utilized primarily for shore bombardment rather than fighting other ships). Big surface cruisers made less sense as a way of performing the commerce raiding and scouting missions, and so, especially as time wore on, such anomalies as the Soviet Union's Kirov-class vessels aside, "cruisers" were really just big destroyers or frigates. Indeed, the usage of one term or another mainly an indicator of size and armament--with cruisers particularly large and heavily armed, frigates representing the low end of the spectrum in that regard, and destroyers somewhere in the middle.

As all this happened ships of all types got bigger, with destroyers and even frigates becoming cruiser-sized vessels, while designated cruisers became something of a rare anomaly, in part because they seemed superfluous. Certainly the U.S. Navy has been an obvious example. The Ticonderoga-class cruisers (21 of which still serve) were not much bigger than the Arleigh Burke-class destroyers that came along by the late 1980s (9,600 to 8,000 long tons), with the latest edition of the Arleigh Burke class about the same size (9,500); and the Ticos considerably outmassed by the Zumwalt-class destroyers (15,600 tons), with the DDG(X) vessels likewise to also outmass them in their turn (10,000 tons+).

And thus does it even go with frigates. Australia's new Hunter-class "frigates," with their 8,800-ton displacement, 7,000-mile cruising range and AEGIS combat systems (with anti-ballistic missile capability), look not unlike the "Ticos" in size, reach and function--the more so if one compares them with the preceding ANZAC class of frigate (3,600-tonner vessels, closer to the stereotype of such vessels), or even the country's relatively new Hobart-class destroyers (which displace 6,900 tons).

As the Australian example should make clear a country's replacing even a frigate with "another frigate" may well indicate that what the country in question is really buying is a cruiser--and that much greater an increase in capability, less obviously dramatic than the country's shift to a nuclear submarine fleet and Tomahawk cruise missiles, but still significantly indicative of aspirations to a far more formidable naval position, with all it implies for its connections with the U.S. and Britain, the general balance of power in what it is increasingly fashionable to call the "Indo-Pacific," and the sharp acceleration of the already years-long trend of increased militarization and global rearmament in the wake of the war in Ukraine.

What Might a Carrier Program Mean for the German Navy?

It was a month ago that German Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced the most dramatic German armaments program since at least the early Cold War. The announcement, of course, drew great media attention, but, to go by what I have seen of the mainstream press, at least, very little insight, with one aspect of this the references to the F-35 as being considered as a carrier aircraft--which I took as a suggestion that German officials are thinking about carriers, and not for the first time. Not long ago they floated the idea of an "EU" carrier jointly operated with France--an idea that, it seems to me, was implausible at best (co-owning a warship isn't easy), with the implausibility itself bespeaking an eagerness to have a carrier aviation capability so extreme that it was not going to let a little thing like not being ready to actually put up the money stand in the way. Now, with German defense spending likely to be something on the order of $170 billion this year taking care of a good many previously unmet wants, and German defense budgets likely to run $80 billion+ and rising in the years ahead (as against the $50 billion of recent years), the funding side of the matter would seem less of a problem.

Since then Germany has indeed gone in for the F-35s, buying 35 of the "A" model--the conventional take-off and landing type not designed for carrier operations (unlike the Short Take-Off and Landing-capable "B" and catapult-assisted take-off and arrestor-recovery-oriented "C" versions), while I have not noticed any other reference to carriers in the discussion of the new program. Again, it was a hint of interest, perhaps confirmed by the country's going in for the F-35 (with non-carrier versions perhaps a prelude to orders of the other type), perhaps not.

All the same, if it was indeed the idea that the F-35 has interest for the German government as a potential carrier aircraft why drop hints in this way that, thus far, has gone over so many heads? The obvious reason is that the prospect of a German carrier is not really relevant to the present conflict. Even were such a program begun today it would be years before Germany could have a really effective carrier force, while even were it operational sooner it would not be of much use in a conflict at all like the present one. NATO's position in Eastern Europe, after all, means all the facilities for land-based air power that could be wanted, while the small and enclosed Baltic, and even the Black Sea (entered through the narrow Bosporus and not much more than seven hundred miles across at its widest point), are hardly ideal locales for carrier operations (even before one considers Russian anti-access capabilities).

Rather an announcement of a carrier program would be by far the most serious declaration of intent yet in a long-term, global posture, which would look like the German government is merely seizing on the present ultra-hawkish mood (among elites and the media anyway) as a chance to force through dramatic changes with far-reaching consequences, the way governments constantly do amid times of "national security" crisis (like oh, you know, tripling what was already one of the world's largest defense budgets). After all, consider how the German navy has generally operated since World War II. In contrast with Britain and France with their far-flung empires, the Federal Republic of Germany's military orientation in the post-World War II period was thoroughly regional from the start, with NATO strategy and international agreement combining with geographic fact to reinforce the country's orientation to land power over sea power. As a result the German government operated what by the Cold War's end was a very powerful but locally-oriented navy. Circa 1989 the German navy had some forty major combatants, but these consisted of diesel submarines, small destroyers, and frigates, supported by a sizable force of lighter corvettes and missile boats, and a considerable land-based air element, rather than carriers, cruisers, nuclear subs.1

All of this was cut sharply after the Cold War, with the reunified Germany circa 2020 operating a force essentially the same in kind but only a fraction of the size of the old West German force, never mind the combined forces of the two Germaniesd.2 The submarine force fell from about 25 to 6, the destroyer-frigate force shrank from maybe 13 vessels to 10 or so now, as the bavy ceased to operate missile boats, reducing the forty-plus "coastal combatant" surface vessels to just a half dozen corvettes--while the naval aviation arm dispensed with its hundred Tornado-strong force of strike aircraft and cut the force of maritime patrol planes by more than half (a mere eight of them flying now).

Compared with that carriers would make for a very different profile indeed, especially when one considers that the acquisitions likely would not stop there. A navy that wants its carriers to be survivable and effective is apt to think not only in terms of carriers, but of carrier groups, with the carriers properly escorted by vessels likely to include air defense-type ships--like AEGIS-type warships, especially in an age of heightened air and missile threats (including Anti-Ship Ballistic Missiles). Moreover, having a carrier available at all times means more than one such ship, and having even one carrier group out while still having other vessels available for other duties would likely require more than the present ten ships (and, especially if an AEGIS-like system is on the table, maybe some bigger and more heavily armed escorts too).

Meanwhile, along with that increased number of combatants--expected to operate far from home--there would need to be more support capability, meaning that many more support ships, and indeed, overseas bases, Germany especially requiring them because, in contrast with the rest of NATO's big, carrier-operating navies, its existing naval facilities are that much further from the conflict zones NATO planners generally concern themselves to the south and east. (France, Spain, Italy are all of course right on the Mediterranean, while even the British have Gibraltar, and have been extending their base network east of Suez in ex-colonies like Bahrain and Oman.)

While the Germans were at it they might also wonder about other assets favored by overseas intervention-oriented navies--like the longtime world-class submarine operator and builder going in for a nuclear-powered sub program, to provide subsurface escort to those carriers on their missions far from home, and maybe also for their cruise missile-lobbing capacity, while if the German government finds itself looking again at a nuclear deterrent (such as was being talked of even before the present crisis) the associated construction and maintenance capacities might also be handy if the country went in for a sea-based missile deterrent like the British and French and others have (while countries with nuclear missile submarines like to have nuclear-powered attack boats as escorts for those vessels).

In short, rather than that coastal-regional, strictly conventional, force Germany has had since the World War Two era, we would be talking about the beginnings of a much expanded, blue water-ish, carrier-equipped, nuclear-powered and even nuclear-armed navy, on par with the existing forces of Britain and France--and, depending on German means and German ambitions, not necessarily stopping there.

No, one does not broach such things lightly. (Even amid the present situation it would be difficult to imagine that London and Paris, which seemed to be losing their minds over German reunification three decades ago, are not seeing some anxious over a Germany ramping its military efforts way up, even without thinking too much about that "Das Kampfflugzeug F-35 kommt als Trägerflugzeug in Betracht" statement. And how others would react aside, were the government, perhaps mindful of just how much pricier such programs have a way of being in the end, as Britain itself has demonstrated, might decide that all this may not be the best use of its resources, and back away from it, having been too public initially would mean a certain loss of prestige . . .) But I would not be in the least surprised if, beyond the matter of the carriers, we were to hear more of any or all of these objects in the coming years, especially barring a turn from the present direction of Germany, and of European and world affairs.

1. The Lutjen--modified U.S. Charles F. Adams vessels--and Hamburg-class vessels the German navy operated were in the 4-5,000 ton range, compared with the 8,000-ton Spruance and 10,000-ton Kidd-class vessels serving the U.S. (and the Bremen-class vessels smaller still).
2. The East German navy had at the Cold War's end somewhere around 70 fast attack-type vessels of various states (its "Koni"-class ships get called frigates sometimes, but were too small and poorly armed to really compare with Germany's Bremen-type ships), and a squadron of 23 strike aircraft (Sukhoi-22s).

The Truth About Investors’ Money and the Startup Scene

Over the years I have had many an occasion to remark the terrible job the media generally does keeping the public apprised of developments in science and technology. One failing I have had particular occasion to remark has been their tendency to treat technologies as much further along in development than they really are (to the point of, in terms of NASA’s system of evaluation, treating technologies on Level 1 as if they were all the way up on Level 9). Their superficiality on this level interacts with superficiality on others, not least the fact that following up stories, and putting together "the big picture," has never been a priority for the media, subjecting the news reader, listener and viewer to a hard rain of disconnecting details that can be so overwhelming as to leave them knowing less the more they tried to follow along (studies have literally documented this). Thus some technology story tells us something big is around the corner. We never hear about it again, in part because it never actually happens, another story telling us about something else that never happens. People forget the second part--the nothing happened part--and remember the dramatic announcement, the hype sticking, forming the general mood of expectation that endures even in a context which may be one of technological stasis.

Going along with this has been the coverage of the R & D side of things itself. We are always hearing about "startups," while the media hangs on every act, every pronouncement, of the "tech billionaires." All of that gives the impression that there is thus no end of money pouring into the research and development bringing "new things to life." Yet anyone who studies the actual flow of money through the arteries of the global economy knows full well that the picture is very different, with a new report from McKinsey & Co. showing that for the last two decades the game has mostly been speculative, and mostly centered on buying and selling that old commodity, real estate, in the hope of extracting profits from price changes, not grand new technological endeavors.

The pattern of investment (a reminder of the enormous media bias where financial news is concerned, ever selling the narrative of finance, globalization and the rest turbo-charging "INNOVATION!") would seem to correspond to the fact that, in actuality, the past two decades have not been terribly dynamic technologically, with obvious reflections in the slowness of the energy transition, in spite of the enormous potentials consistently revealed in the advances that have happened; and how, even in that scene supposed to epitomize the progress of our era, information technology, disappointment has been so commonplace. (Consider how many of its promises fizzle out, especially at the practical level. Artificial intelligence beating Go champions is all very well--but the AI that can take over your morning drive is a more significant test of practical efficacy, and we all know how that has been going.) However, we are still left with the question--is this because we live in an era where the technological possibilities are simply not all that promising (as Robert Gordon, for example, gives us cause to think), or because the potentials are there but, in this investment climate, not the incentives?

That question I put to you, reader.

F-35s and Aircraft Carriers for Germany?

As I remarked previously while certain details of Olaf Scholz's policy statement of last Sunday were widely reported the reporting was generally fragmentary and lacking in context. Simply put, few seemed to process that he was talking about a tripling of the defense budget this year (to $150-200 billion, making Germany the world's third-biggest defense spender by a long way), and maintaining a much elevated defense budget in the years ahead at or above NATO's 2 percent target.

When they missed even that it was unsurprising that they also missed the smaller, more ambiguous details, as when Scholz was discussing some of what the money was to be used for. In discussing the air force specifically Scholz made reference to Germany's continuing to "build the next generation of combat aircraft . . . here in Europe together with European partners, and particularly France," and in the meantime "continu[ing] to develop the Eurofighter [Typhoon] together," making specific reference to how the "Eurofighter is set to be equipped with electronic warfare capabilities." However, he also made reference to "a modern replacement for the outdated Tornado jets in good time" for the sake of NATO's "nuclear sharing" arrangement, which sounded oddly ambiguous given the prior talk of procuring F-18s (even if that decision had seemed to be dragging out endlessly), while he also mentioned, in a way that feels "random" at least when read in the transcript, that "[t]he F-35 fighter jet has the potential to be used as a carrier aircraft."

Germany has not previously been a partner in the F-35 project, or a customer for the aircraft. Does this statement then imply that Germany might purchase F-35s? Additionally the reference to its "potential to be used as a carrier aircraft" is confusing. The plane does not have the "potential" to be a carrier aircraft. The "C" version of the F-35 was specifically designed for carrier operations, and the U.S. Navy has been using it in that role operationally for many years now.

Considering the fact I responded by doing what all interested persons with any knowledge of the German language whatsoever, or even sufficient mental adroitness to properly use Google Translate properly (admittedly, probably not many of those in the English-language press, for all the idiot Hollywood propaganda about "elites" like journalists all being polyglot geniuses) should have done when coming upon that statement, namely lookg at the transcript of the statement in the original language. The relevant portion of the text reads as follows: "Das Kampfflugzeug F-35 kommt als Trägerflugzeug in Betracht"--does not mean that the "F-35 fighter jet has the potential to be used as a carrier aircraft," but that the "fighter jet comes into consideration as a carrier aircraft" (emphasis added). Thus the statement concerns not what the plane might be able to do, but what the German government might want to do with it--as a carrier aircraft. (Moreover, lest one think that Scholz must have meant something other than ship-based combat aircraft, rest assured that "Träger" is indeed the German word for aircraft carrier, "flugzeug" means plane, and that "Trägerflugzeug" means carrier plane, just as "kampfflugzeug" means warplane.)

Of course, even assuming that I have not missed some subtlety of the language (anyone who knows better than I do may feel free to explain where I have gone wrong) and in fact succeeded in clearing up one confusing point I find myself faced with another, namely why Germany, a country without any aircraft carriers, and which has not announced the intent of procuring aircraft carriers, is considering the F-35 or anything else as specifically a carrier aircraft? One possible explanation would seem that the author of the statement had in mind the 2019 German proposal for a joint "European Union" carrier (which I must admit had seemed to me unlikely--I know of no such arrangement in the past and the European Union has never impressed me as likely to break this particular ground). Another is that a German government now spending so much more on defense than it was then, looking at its bigger budget, is thinking of acquiring its own carriers outright--and that this has been let slip as a subtle clue that went over the heads of, well, pretty much the whole press in the English-speaking press so far as I can tell. Regardless of what exactly this was about I suspect the matter will be made clear one way or the other soon enough.

Don't Count the Energy Transition Out Just Yet

Two years ago it seemed that the energy transition was accelerating, with the price of oil turning negative, coal in collapse, and solar and wind installations breaking records. Now it seems as if it is slowing down again, maybe even grinding to a halt, with the renewables-bashing and fossil fuel-boosting press cheerfully announcing the end of the era of renewable energy's falling prices as fossil fuels make their "comeback" and exact their "revenge."

What happened?

The answer would seem to be: an unhappy constellation of events. Among the more consequential is how the abruptness of the economic shock, and the subsequent "recovery," created an exaggerated sense of just how fast the coal industry's decline was proceeding--and produced an equally exaggerated sense of rebound when in a moment in which utilities needed more power right away the spare power-generating capacity it had (as a result of the long decline in its competitiveness) meant takers for its electricity. This was all the more the case given that natural gas, use of which has been expanding so greatly, meant that, given the tightness of supply, it was more susceptible than those little utilized coal plants to inflationary shock. That same inflationary shock, and the greater susceptibility to it of those sectors which are running full steam ahead rather than those providing something no one wants (like what, in normal times, is more expensive and more polluting coal-fired electricity), in raising the price of everything else inflation, also raised the price of photovoltaic panels and wind turbines and batteries--a shock to the surprising number of people who do not realize these things are made of stuff that passes through global supply chains and not "magic."

As if all that were not enough Britain had a summer that somehow managed to be both exceptionally windless and sunless, providing grist to the mill of renewables-bashers who fancy themselves engineers rather than "Git a hoss!"-yelling hecklers when they use words like "baseload" and "scalability." Meanwhile the Biden administration, whose "Build Back Better" bill joins the now four decade long list of Democratic Party initiatives of similar type that, running up against the prevailing political winds fell far, far short of the promises initially made, or simply never went anywhere (Clinton's stimulus package and climate action plan, Obama's undersized and short-lived stimulus and quick shift from green energy to the fossil fuel-boosting "All of the Above" policy) was a source of additional disappointment for renewables-watchers.

Especially for those who pinned their hopes of the too long delayed transition from fossil fuels to alternatives, and amid an otherwise wretched 2020 hoped it would all be onward and upward, all of this is deeply dispiriting--the saga gone from a New Hope to the Empire Strikes Back. Yet these developments would seem less fundamental that those cheering for renewables' being defeated yet again would have us believe. Coal's comeback, certainly, seems likely to be short-lived. The commodity price shock affecting renewables affects everything else, with the result that, especially given the long-term trend to the cheapening of solar, wind and battery storage the long-term fall in price is likely to continue (the more obviously and quickly should, as governments and central banks promise, they get a handle on inflation), reinforcing their position as the winners on price as well as sustainability. Britain had a tough summer, and the renewables-bashers have made the most of it, but there is an argument to be made that Britain's problem was not having too much wind and solar in the mix, but too little. Meanwhile it is worth remembering that if helpful government support is not forthcoming renewables have already come a long way in a market where, contrary to the endless complaints of the business press about government favoring them with subsidies, they have been competing with fossil fuels getting government backing far exceeding any help they may have got (in Europe as well as the U.S.), such that--it bears repeating--in spite of everything that has been done to stop it from happening, photovoltaic solar is the cheapest source of electricity provision around, with wind coming in right after it, while the prospects for progress here seem brighter than for any of the old rivals.

The result is that despair is no more appropriate or helpful than complacency. Still, if the long-term trend remains in favor of renewables the speed of the transition does matter greatly, given the economic and ecological stakes--and concern for maximizing that speed would seem the appropriate object of concern for those wanting to see this change happen.

Coal's Supposed Comeback is a Blip. The Future is Renewable.

In 2020 we constantly heard about the collapse of the coal industry. By contrast today the media hails the renaissance of fossil fuels, the centerpiece of which is the "comeback" that coal is reportedly making, with all that would seem to imply for the greening of the energy base.

Fossil fuels boosters and renewables-bashers across the relevant industries and throughout the media are clearly delighted, but for those who had hoped to see fossil fuels generally on the way out, and relieved to see coal, generally accounted the ecologically worst and most readily dispensable of the lot, finally in terminal decline, this is the kind of nightmare situation which they had hoped safely relegated to the past. What happened to bring it about?

It would seem the situation reflects the extremity of the shock to the world economy amid the pandemic. In 2020 we saw energy consumption drop. As a result the coal sector, which was increasingly marginal, suffered severely, encouraging the view that it was on its way out. The economic recovery from that extreme shock--combined with the inflation into which many factors, not least expansionary monetary policy, have fed--has seen demand for energy from whatever source soar. Meanwhile coal-fired power stations have been running at lower and lower capacity for a long time (under 48 percent in 2019, 40 percent in 2020), so that even after massive shutdowns of coal stations over the past decade there was considerable extra capacity here when demand went up, with the result more call on coal-fired plants, which burned through more coal.

Of course the mobilization of spare coal-fired capacity is one thing. The economic incentive to, for example, build new coal-based electricity generation instead of natural gas-burning facilities, or the renewables-based generation that is cheapest of all, is quite another thing--a matter not of a short-term crunch that may be only very temporarily making established coal capacity economically for a while, but the longer-term prospect. Especially as there has been no revolution in the efficiency of coal mining and coal-based electricity production, and no really fundamental decline in the efficiency of production from other sources, there seems no basis for thinking that the coal sector has somehow regained its competitiveness with them. Quite the contrary, it seems that the longer-term trend has coal's decline continuing. Yet the fact remains that this event is feeding the illusions among the many influential parties that desperately want to believe otherwise--their bias in favor of fossil fuels, the "short-termism" afflicting far too much decision making in business, and the shallowness of the media coverage and analysis of the phenomenon encouraging a bias in favor of continuing investment here, in spite of the warnings that such investment is likely to end up stranded, and coming at the pace of that already too oft-delayed shift to other technologies which are likely to prove financially sounder in the long run.

Reflections on Thomas Hobbes' Behemoth

I recall knowing about Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan at least as far back as the ninth grade--because I distinctly remember that Hobbes and his Leviathan were both mentioned in the World History texbook the class used in a chapter which discussed the English civil war and the beginnings of contemporary political theory. (Yes, contrary to the sniveling of certain political hacks one is taught about such things as a matter of course in an American public school, even in a part of the United States less than renowned for the quality of its school system.) Some of Leviathan's more significant selections were required reading in my undergraduate years, certainly in my International Relations courses, while I read the book itself cover to cover in grad school.

Yet amid all that I never heard a word breathed about Hobbes' other book Behemoth, which I found my way to through the circuitous route that passed through Franz Neumann's classic sociological study of Nazi Germany, Behemoth. In the volume he discussed Hobbes' book and the significance of his title--that where the Leviathan represented state-imposed order (rational, presumably consent-based and law-abiding, with obligations resting on the sovereign--indeed, if swallowing society "not swallow[ing] all of it"), the Behemoth represented a "non-state . . . characterized by complete lawlessness," which was certainly Neumann's understanding of Nazism.

Given the parallels between "Behemoth" and "Leviathan" I expected to find in the book a complement or companion to Leviathan--but ended up with something quite different. Where Leviathan is a work of political philosophy, Behemoth is a work of political history, recounting the course of events from the outbreak of the English Civil War to the Restoration of the Stuarts in the form of a question-and-answer dialogue, which I suppose is one reason why it has fallen into such obscurity compared with the other book. Rather than a milestone in the development of modern philosophy it is a secondary history of the events, heavy on commentary that is less anything of really deep interest to political theorists than commonplace op-ed-type stuff--which, unexpectedly, proved to be its main source of interest for me. While most such stuff is merely a matter of political hacks repeating the same stale clichès over and over and over again there was an interest in seeing those clichès, the very same ones, being uttered in relation to the events of almost four hundred years ago. In discussing the causes of the English revolution Hobbes (who was, of course, an opponent) chalked it up to how self-aggrandizing intellectuals and the pernicious influence of the universities corrupted the young "of the better sort" rather than "bringing up . . . young men to virtue"; how the young were susceptible to a dubious idealism and even others not so young might be seduced by foreign ways; how intellectuals and their democratizing notions "corrupted" a swinish multitude "ignorant of their duty" and ever ready to follow any side pandering to their vanity and offering the best prospects with regard to "pay and plunder"; upsetting even the most established and happiest of orders, like some latterday ranter against "Marxists."

Still, what made the accusations really interesting was that while they were familiar, the targets against which he directed them were different, profoundly different from those of today--as with the foreign ways in question, and the kinds of people he regarded as troublemakers, and in what he considered the ignorance of the commons to consist, and what sort of persons he saw cozening them. Today no one pontificates more than the right (in the English-speaking countries, anyway) about liberalism being some wholly Anglo-Saxon invention, all but derived from the very DNA of the English-speaking peoples, who had always been and always would be natural liberals (if not without significant variations, with American centrists championing their own). But as a conservative three centuries back Hobbes was emphatic about liberalism being a pernicious foreign notion-- governance such as the Dutch enjoyed (the notion that "like change of government" such as the Dutch had had in England "would to them produce the like prosperity") in his view an invasive species of weed that no one had any business planting in the soil of Merrie England, with Hobbes the one sounds like what a right-wing writer less than fastidious with his words would today call a Marxist in his attacks on the "entrepreneurial." (Thus did he denounce those "merchants, whose profession is their private gain" and whose "only glory [is] to grow excessively rich by the wisdom of buying and selling," and whose "setting the poorer sort of people on work" supposed to make their calling "the most beneficial to the commonwealth" he regarded in actuality as merely "making poor people sell their labour to them at their own prices . . . to the disgrace of our manufacture"--while more important still assailing them for the anti-tax mentality that has them throwing their lot in with rebellions, unleashing forces they cannot control.) The right exalts the Classical heritage, and maligns the left for, in its view, failing to respect it --but here Hobbes lamented the way the Classics had filled those better-sort young men's heads with republican ideas ("the books written by famous men of the ancient Grecian and Roman commonwealths . . . in which . . . the popular government was extolled by the glorious name of liberty, and monarchy disgraced by the name of tyranny"). And where the right today would that more read the Bible, it was for Hobbes a great tragedy that so many did so (the translation of the book into English meaning that "every boy and wench, that could read English, thought they spoke with God Almighty, and understood what he said," again, upsetting order in the kingdom), as his usage imbued the word "Presbyterian" with the same ring "Jacobin" or "Bolshevik" would have for a later era.

All that, just part of the bigger look at how the events were perceived at the time by an observer who happens to be one of the most foundational political theorists of modern times meant that the book ended up being worth the read--and I would say, deserving of rather more attention than it has got in an era where even what pass for our experts prove themselves frighteningly lacking in either a grasp of the most basic ideas of political philosophy, or the slightest degree of historical perspective.

Stranded Trillions? A Note on RethinkX's Report on "The Great Stranding"

In recent years the RethinkX think tank has been the source of some of the more interesting analysis of the major problems facing the world today (energy, climate, food production)--its address of those issues theoretically rigorous, data-based, bold in its conclusions, and while not slighting the challenges and dangers the world faces, managing to offer intelligent arguments for something other than hopelessness in the face of exceedingly daunting difficulties and grave dangers. Where the climate-energy problem is concerned they see the solution lying in the falling price of renewable-supplied electricity, a pattern RethinkX's authors have compared to the falling price of computing power.

Recently the RethinkX team's Adam Dorr and Tony Seba have produced a report ("The Great Stranding: How Inaccurate Mainstream LCOE Estimates are Creating a Trillion-Dollar Bubble in Conventional Energy Assets") on one of the less obvious consequences of the kind of energy transition they anticipate--namely that new investment in older, conventional electricity generation in coal, gas, nuclear and hydro power will prove to be "stranded," unviable investment. This will be due not to changes in laws forcing "greener" energy on utilities, or government subsidies helping to make it happen, but rather the sheer market forces that have already made renewables cheaper than the older options, such that photovoltaic Solar and onshore Wind, in combination with likewise cheapening Battery backup ("SWB"), are well on their way not only to being the cheapest source of electricity around by 2030, but to providing electricity at "near-zero marginal cost." The result is that selling electricity provided by the other sources at anything approaching break-even cost, never mind a profit, becomes an increasingly rare occurrence, driving down the capacity usage of fossil fuels, nuclear and hydro-based generation to financially unviable levels, with coal's recent past the very near future of the rest. (America's dwindling, aging coal plant fleet, in spite of government solicitousness, and the improvement of the average by the shutting down of the least competitive, averaged a mere two-fifths utilization rate as of 2020, compared with two-thirds in 2010. As a result coal's share of American electricity production fell by half from 40 to just 20 percent. As RethinkX acknowledges cheap fracking-produced gas was the principal cause in coal's decline, but even cheaper SWB will be factoring more heavily in every case in the years to come.)

In spite of this recent history (to say nothing of the pressure on business from civil society to move toward zero-carbon operations) business is continuing to invest trillions in indifference not only to the ecological implications but the dollars-and-cents facts as RethinkX have reported them--implying enormous confidence in the enduring viability of those more conventional sources. One possible conclusion is that they know something the rest of us do not. The other is that they are profoundly misinformed and making a very, very big mistake. It is the latter conclusion that RethinkX draws, holding that the investment is being driven by deeply flawed studies from such institutions as the Energy Information Administration (EIA) that greatly exaggerate the likely capacity usage of all those traditional sources, and thus greatly understate the "Levelized Cost Of Electricity" (LCOE) that takes into account all the associated expenses divided per kilowatt-hour. To cite an obviously glaring example they presume an 85 percent capacity usage rate for coal all the way through 2060, a figure absolutely without basis in recent history--the average capacity usage just 56 percent in 2010-2019, 52 percent in 2015-2019, and 47.5 percent in 2019, the trend fairly consistently one of decline even before the exceptional year of 2020 dragged the figure down so much further in the way noted above. Using more realistic figures, which have electricity providers recouping their costs from far lower capacity usage--far fewer per-kilowatt hours sold--translates to a higher LCOE,with the real per-kilowatt hour LCOE of a coal plant established today not 7.6 cents as the EIA said, but 32.4 cents, over four times as much. Thus does it go with the other sources (gas, nuclear, hydro), with the gap only going up over time (with a coal-fired plant established in 2030 likely to have to sell its electricity at 65 cents per-kilowatt-hour).

Quite blunt about the ill-foundedness of the more commonly touted figures (a "dogma . . . promulgated by a small number of self-appointed authorities within the electric power sector . . . that confirms and amplifies a fixed set of thoughts, beliefs and biases" in favor of conventional energy sources and against renewables), the result has been a "financial bubble" in coal, gas, nuclear and hydro that the RethinkX authors compare to the subprime mortgage bubble. This is not least in regard to the risk that, after having made massive investments that were not just ecologically terrible but quite stupid from a business standpoint, the public will be called on to rescue the parties that made those investments at its expense in the same manner seen time and again these past four decades. (Dorr and Seba, of course, argue that any such bailout should be opposed, and in the meantime everyone doing what they can to minimize the danger of such an outcome--investors steering clear of such investment, and financial lenders and government overseers not enabling those who would make the investment anyway.)

It is another bold prediction from the RethinkX team--the more striking because so few are questioning that massive investment in these older electricity generation technologies we are seeing on financial (or for that matter, any other) grounds. Indeed, it can seem as if the mainstream of the business world, and the media prone to faithfully promulgate its prejudices; and RethinkX; are in two entirely different worlds. Which of these is living in the real one, which in the fantasy? As it happens, the former have been relentlessly biased in favor of fossil fuels and nuclear power, and ferociously hostile to renewables, with all the fury of established businesses (and their allies) looking at a potentially disruptive force--and consistently underestimated, and even strained to deny, the long-term improvement in the economic viability of renewables (something to remember when looking at today's headlines, with their clearly delighted expressions of a "comeback" for fossil fuels and nuclear as, overlooking the way inflation is affecting the price of everything, they gloat about the supposed end of an era of falling renewables prices).

For its part RethinkX has not been unknown to be overoptimistic about the rapidity of dramatic and potentially beneficent technological change as their earlier report on Transportation-as-a-Service makes clear. Still, in the case of self-driving cars RethinkX was wrong about a technology that was as yet poorly understood by its own developers (the potential of today's machine learning, running on today's computers, to acquire an imperfectly specified level of competence at driving), which necessarily made any extrapolations that much more tenuous. By contrast, when it makes comparisons between solar and coal, for example, it is discussing developments that have for the most already happened, not only in their view but the view of other, less audacious, observers as well. (Lazard's report of last October had unsubsidized utility-scale solar running approximately $30-$40 and wind $25-$50 per megawatt-hour, versus $45-$75 for combined cycle gas, $65-$150 for coal, and $130-$200 for nuclear.)

Once again, solar and wind are cheaper than the established sources, a cheapness sufficient that even with current storage costs added in (which may add a $20-$40 per hour additional cost), they are, and are likely to remain, a good deal cheaper than coal or nuclear generally, and even competitive with gas in many cases. Accordingly the question becomes how much more progress one can expect in further lowering solar, wind and battery costs. As it happened the drop in the median price of solar has slowed, gone from perhaps a fall of 13 percent per year in 2010-2015 to a fall of 7 percent per year in 2015-2020. The price of wind power was almost as brisk, some 6 percent a year in that same 5 year period. The fall in the price of energy storage capacity has been more impressive still, an 18 percent a year drop in 2015-2020. Were the next five years to see only half that rate of progress across the board we would still see a one-sixth drop in the price of solar, a one-seventh drop in the price of wind, and a better than one-third drop in the price of batteries, meaning that in 2025 we would start to find ourselves looking at solar and wind with storage prices beginning under the $40 per megawatt-hour mark in today's terms--cheaper than the low end for combined cycle gas. Were the rate of improvement for 2025–2030 to average just half of the already reduced rate of the preceding five years we would at the end of them see solar and wind 20–25 percent cheaper than they are today, and battery storage 50 percent cheaper, giving us battery-equipped solar-and-wind power for as little as $30 per megawatt-hour, and even at the high end of the price range ($60) compete with medium-priced gas at today's, and likely tomorrow's, rates. (And in the view of proponents like RethinkX there is plenty of reason to expect much, much better than that.)

The result is that unless per-kilowatt-hour progress in renewables and batteries abrupt comes to a halt in the next few years, or technologists dealing with the already very mature technologies of coal, gas, Generation II atomic power or hydro pull off a technical miracle (or rather, several of them), it would be very hard to picture RethinkX being very far off the mark in this case about not only solar but the SWB combination beating the competition on price by 2030 as they predict. Accordingly it seems to me RethinkX's prediction deserves far more attention, and far more respectful attention, than it has been accorded to date--and indeed, far more respect than most of the "experts" the media so relentlessly flatters and promotes even as they so consistently show themselves lacking in the competence that business and society alike so sorely need.