The Politics of Keir Starmer--and What Might Happen if a General Election Was Indeed Called Now

With the resignation of Liz Truss there is talk of call of a general election.

My thought is that it is mostly talk since the governing party has ample opportunity to avoid one for more than two years in anything like the present situation, and, given public feeling toward it (bluntly put, extreme disgust with the recent turmoil evident at the top of the Conservative Party), expected to make the most of that opportunity.

Still, the possibility would seem to have increased the interest in the politics of opposition leader Keir Starmer (who has, of course, called for such an election).

Last year I published a working paper analyzing Keir Starmer's political rhetoric as a way of considering that matter, focusing on his February 2020 leadership contest pledges and his "New Chapter for Britain" speech one year later. My conclusion in it was that Starmer's contest pledges could safely be considered a solidly social democratic platform--while his speech one year later showed him, to put it mildly, less than stalwart in that stance. Before the year was out he declared himself ready to break those pledges for the sake of "electability" and then this year formally abandoned them altogether, while, in case there was any doubt left that he was in fact a centrist neoliberal New Labour Blairite pretending not to be one (because 2022 is a long way from 1997), he confirmed it amply at just about every opportunity since, down to his keynote speech at the party conference in Liverpool last month (my reading of which you can find here).

The result is that if there were an election in the very near term we would see a neoliberal-pretending-to-not-be-a-neoliberal New Labour-led party running against a Conservative Party whose fundamental neoliberalism endures in spite of its misunderstood populist poses--with, in centrist eyes, the Blairite looking like possibly the more competent custodian of a neoliberal economic regime (the more easily as the bar is set so low these days for competence in this as in any other sphere of political life). Popular feeling and elite support alike would likely converge in the return of Labour to government, with said Labour government fulfilling those expectations of a more competent neoliberal regime squarely prioritizing the needs of investors over those of working people (smaller budget deficits paid for by service cuts, etc.), and being applauded it for it by those centrists who so adore phrases like "adults in the room," as the voters who had actually expected "change" grumble about having been "fooled again.

How does that saying go again? "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice . . ."

Another Day, Another Prime Ministerial Resignation: Liz Truss Resigns

As I write these words Elizabeth Truss is announcing her resignation from the Prime Ministership of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland after the shortest tenure of anyone in that job in the history of that office.

I don't think anyone's shocked by the fact of the event given the fiscal-monetary train wreck of her government's budget.

But the point is that what we vaguely knew was coming has happened, which makes it not unfair to step back a moment from the multitude of little factoids, baseless speculations and trivial comments with which the media is constantly overwhelming everyone to try and relate this to the larger picture.

As things stand Ms. Truss is the country's fourth Prime Minister in the twelve-and-a-half years since the Conservatives ended New Labour's single patch in office since 1979 --while in the latter part of that period the occupant of 10 Downing Street will have changed three times (with Theresa May replaced by Boris Johnson replaced by Truss replaced by . . . Johnson again after departing the job a mere six weeks ago, if he has his way).

Personally when I bother discussing such matters my inclination is to focus on policy, not politics, with this certainly my emphasis when writing about the records of Thatcher and Blair. But of course one can go only so far in separating the two--not least because turmoil in politics tends to indicate a ship of state adrift on the high seas. Exemplary of the fact is that this turnover at 10 Downing Street has been nothing like since at least Suez crisis-era Britain (with Eden giving way to Macmillan--in this case, over and over and over again), with the same, we have been told, going for the fortunes of sterling.

Still, if Britain's drift captures the headlines today I can't think of a single major country that is not in pretty much the same sad state as internationally the quality of governance races to the bottom. Truly, looking at the "world leaders" of today it seems to me that had Mike Judd's Idiocracy contained an international summit scene the vast majority, at least, would not have been out of place in the scene--all as the mainstream media in every country, whose talking heads these days routinely make a Ron Burgundy look like a man of profundity and gravitas, go on playing their parts as courtiers to those holders of high office they treat like latterday Sun Kings. (Indeed, the word courtier seems the more appropriate given how suspect having so many changes of head of government without a general election can seem to anyone with the slightest regard for pretenses of democracy . . .)

All of these things are infinitely more worthy of being called "disgraces" than a country which happens to neighbor some of the most renowned cheese-making countries on Earth importing and consuming their fine products.

Revisiting Emmanuel Todd's After the Empire

Not long ago I wrote of the "unipolar moment" of the late '90s and a particular vision many geopolitical thinkers in the U.S. had during it of a New Economy America enjoying a quasi-permanent tech boom and in the process bounding above and beyond the rest of the world (ever more "the Michael Jordan of the world system," as Thomas Friedman had it). By contrast Russia and China, Europe and Japan, would wither into irrelevance, the former staying poor and maybe collapsing outright, the latter stagnant at best within the shackles of their outdated, insufficiently dynamic economic models. The result would be that the unipolar moment would be much, much more than a moment. (Indeed, George and Meredith Friedman in The Future of War spun visions of the American Century, rather than drawing to a close, opening out into an "American epoch.")

At the height of this euphoria Emmanuel Todd anticipated a very different outcome, perhaps not addressing every detail (not least in emphasizing the western end of Eurasia at the expense of the eastern), but still dealing with the fundamentals of the picture. In his book After the Empire he contended that far from continuing to race forward America's dynamism would actually prove to be an illusion; that far from Russia's decline proceeding all the way to the point of collapse the country's decline was bottoming out; and that the U.S. would find the EU very much a relevant actor, one that would not necessarily remain deferential.

On every one of these points Todd was correct, and the fact seems to me to testify to the essential robustness of his analysis--which on the whole was more impressive than that of the theorists of permanent unipolarity. Still, there were ways in which he overstated things that proved important. He did not merely anticipate that the New Economy hype would fall apart, but went so far as to, on the basis of scandals like Enron and Arthur Anderson, suggest that the U.S. economy was riddled with accounting fraud of the type in which they had been implicated--to the point of making "American GNP . . . resemble that of the former Soviet Union when it comes to treating the numbers," the exposure of which would lead to a major write-down of America's economic weight.

Of course, that never happened.

Todd's errors also extended to events in Europe. Certainly from the vantage point of 2022 he would seem to have been overoptimistic about Russian democratization (even if probably not to the extent of this by itself modifying his vision). And more significantly he was overoptimistic about the European Union, which he pictured drawing together with Russia (and perhaps Britain too) to create a super-powered European bloc whose mere existence would put an end to what he saw as a deindustrializing U.S. living beyond its means (largely, via the readiness of the rest of the world to let it run massive and growing trade deficits), and compel "imperial" retrenchment on the part of the United States (with, again, all this helped by the extent to which American weakness was telling).

Why did Todd get these parts of his scenario wrong? Looking back I think it worthwhile to remember that no one thought the U.S. could go on running the trade deficits it has for decades with so little apparent consequence to the acceptability of its currency, or its economic weight in the world--and that this has much to do with how thoroughly unprecedented the "creditism" of the twenty-first century has been, and its keeping a troubled economy superficially afloat through speculative fever and the sustenance of "zombie firms." (Indeed, Todd was far from being the only one picturing a big write-down of the U.S. economy--Eamonn Fingleton predicting exactly that before the end of the century in Blindsight, a book that had on its back cover the endorsement of none other than then-U.S. President Bill Clinton himself--before he started talking about putting Social Security tax revenue into the stock market.)

I think it worth remembering, too, the horrified response to those accounting scandals of the tech bubble era, which was so severe that a right-wing Republican administration passed Sarbanes-Oxley and appointed a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chairman who actually took the job seriously. That mood did not last, of course--as demonstrated by Mr. Donaldson's short time as SEC chair, and his replacement by the far more accommodating Harvey Pitt--and I get the impression that mainstream (read: neoliberalism-cheerleading) opinion has since striven mightily to forget it ever happened. But it did exist at the time in which Todd was writing, amid which his prediction, if pessimistic, would not have seemed so implausible as it does now.

I cannot speak so well to his prediction about Russia--but again, it was not too important to Todd's vision, with Russia's human and natural resources, and military capacities, giving it sufficient value as a partner that its failings from a democratic or civil liberties perspective could be overlooked. More significant is his optimism about the European Union at the time, which I think reflected the moment in which he was writing yet again. Todd, whom it seems to me can be thought of as at least left-leaning in the classical sense (not the same as left, and certainly no Marxist, just left-leaning), like many others of similar inclination entertained certain hopes about the European Union as an at least somewhat progressive alternative to the neoliberal/neoconservative/identity politics-obsessed U.S.--more capable of long term-thinking and pragmatic compromise in the social and international spheres, "greener," less militaristic, etc.. Indeed, I remember Jeremy Rifkin then writing of "the European Dream" as against "the American Dream," and which Todd would seem to have shared.

Since that time all of this has been dashed--by the EU's brutal handling of the sovereign debt crisis in Greece, Italy and elsewhere, by the institution's increasing militarism as it prosecuted wars in Libya, Mali and elsewhere--with Todd since characterizing the once "wonderful project" and "beautiful dream" of "many free, democratic, liberal, equal nations getting over the past and building a general European democracy," turned into "a monstrous hierarchy," with Germany reducing the EU to a "power zone"--a new German Empire. Indeed, he has since tended to wax emphatic about France's having more in common culturally with the English-speaking nations than its continental neighbor, and become a proponent of outright Euroskepticism. Asked if he expected Britain(whose joining the EU in After the Empire, by bringing its financial importance to the bloc, was the likely decisive last act in the story of American hegemony) was going to leave the EU he replied "Of course!"--and added in the same breath that "I, a . . . Frenchman, confronted with the disappearance of my nation’s autonomy, if I have to make a choice between German hegemony and American hegemony, I'll choose American hegemony without hesitating."

It is a stark turnaround from his earlier position indeed, underlining just how dead the "European Dream" now lies.

The Continued Remilitarization of Germany and Japan

In 2022 we have seen major announcements of vast increases in spending on defense by Germany and Japan. By and large the response from other advanced industrial countries, where the sorts of commentators who dominate the mainstream have for many years been calling for such a development, has been enthusiastic, even celebratory.

Considering the implications of all this recently I found myself thinking of how different the situation was three decades ago, when such developments were seen more anxiously--with German reunification panicking Margaret Thatcher and Francois Mitterand to the point of secretly turning to Mikhail Gorbachev with pleas for him to stop the event, or provide them with reassurance against German power; and the way that Japanese politician Shintaro Ishihara prompted alarm with his grandiose declarations in The Japan That Can Say No; and going even further than Ishihara, George Friedman and Meredith LeBard warned darkly of "the coming war with Japan," and freer still to indulge their speculations, writers in the then-popular military techno-thriller genre routinely envisioned scenarios in which the U.S. had to fight a remilitarized and aggressive Germany or Japan, as in works like Tom Clancy's 1994 bestseller Debt of Honor. (The second highest-selling U.S. novel of its year according to the Publisher's Weekly list, it depicted at great length and in great detail the kind of war that Friedman and LeBard discussed in only general fashion.)

Of course, the world has changed greatly since that time, and the more benign view of the development reflects that. Most obviously the Second World War has become a far more remote thing in many an imagination--and so have even the newer fears of the '90s, namely that the end of the Cold War would see the U.S.-led alliance and trading order give way to cutthroat neomercantilist competition. There is, too, the fact that fear of Russia and China overshadows any fear observers in the U.S. have of Germany or Japan. This would seem in part a matter of Russian recovery and China's rise, but one should also not forget the fact that Germany and Japan, in relative terms, are much less formidable than they appeared to be back in the '90s, enough so that in the circumstances they are expected to be not just partners, but fairly junior partners, in the balance of power, and that much less potentially threatening were the amity among them to give way to something else.

The Anomaly of the F-14 Tomcat: What Generation Fighter Should We Consider It To Be?

Systems of classification are often less than perfect. We use them anyway because they can be useful even without being perfect--generalization, as anyone with the slightest acquaintance with logic knows, one of the indispensable tools of reasoning. (Indeed, anyone who says "Don't generalize" is likely to be telling you "Don't think"--and anyone saying "Don't think," likely to be telling you "Just believe--and do--what I say.")

In fact I would go so far as to say that even the imperfections can be useful--by helping focus our attention on what does not fit in, and in the process find new patterns.

So does it go with that generational system for classifying fighter aircraft in the jet age, which I have found highly useful--while being well aware of a number of anomalies that simply do not fit in, among which there was indeed a pattern. In particular most of the better-known jet fighters that did not fit in tended to be planes of the 1960s and 1970s that seemed too advanced to fit in with the second-generation jets as we usually talk about them (the F-104s, the Mirage IIIs, the MiG-21s), but at the same time did not fit in with the later generations either (the multipurpose third-generation jets like the F-4 and Mirage F-1 and MiG-23, the air superiority-oriented fourth-generation jets like the F-15 and Mirage 2000 and MiG-29). I speak of planes like the unrealized U.S. YF-12 and F-108 and F-111B, and what actually did follow from them in actual service, the F-14 Tomcat; of jets like the Russian MiG-25 and MiG-31; and perhaps even the anomaly that is the British Lightning (a '60s-era jet with ahead-of-its time hands-on-throttle-and-stick controls and actual supercruise capability), or the European Tornado ADV ("Air Defence Variant," which can seem like a European answer to the F-111B).

What these planes had in common was their being built for the mission of the second-generation fighter--not operating as multipurpose jets capable of handling aerial combat, strike and the rest as needed, or air superiority jets designed to win dogfights, but high-speed, high-altitude interception against formidable attack (the MiG-25 intended to engage B-70 Valkyrie bombers, the F-14 to shoot down waves of Russian air and missile attackers attempting to sink American carriers); and at the same time their being set apart from the classic, generally '50s-era, second-generation fighters by their later appearance (in the era of third- and fourth-generation aircraft), and their being so much more capable, due to

1. Aircraft performance, as with the near-Mach 3 speed and extreme high altitude flight of the Russian MiGs, or the Lightning's supercruising, or

2. The potency of their radar and armament. Where the second generation jets mainly relied on ranging radars and guns and infra-red-seeking missiles, these planes often packed relatively massive and long-range radar and by the standard of the time very long-range radar-guided missiles, often far exceeding the capabilities of later planes--exemplified by the MiG-25's radar and AA-6 missiles, the YF-12's 300 mile-range radar and AIM-47 missiles, and the F-14's AWG-9 radar and AIM-54 missiles (developed from the YF-12's radar and weaponry), which was supposed to let the F-14 fire all six of those 100 mile-range missiles simultaneously at separate targets.

It is, of course, common to lump in the F-14 with the other contemporary fourth-generation jets with which its performance was thought at the very least comparable--while the F-14 towered over its later-generation contemporaries in the public imagination (as the #1 movie this year, Top Gun: Maverick, has reminded everybody). Part of this, I think, was the plane's look, which had its effect on people who know nothing about the intricacies of radar performance—that the big plane, with its twin tails and swing-wings looked like the future (the more in as it had the cachet of carrier aviation, and yes, the way in which pop culture has made the most of it, not least that movie). Still, it seems to me worth talking about it (and the similarly quasi-fourth-generation Tornado, the MiG-25 and MiG-31, etc.) as more properly describable as part of that weird but interesting category that one could call "second generation super-fighters."

Eight Tips For Staying Sane Amid the Climate Panic

Let us first get one thing out of the way--namely what I am not doing here. In writing of "climate panic" I am not denying, or even minimizing, the existence of climate change. Quite the contrary, I recognize that anthropogenic climate change is real, ongoing and very serious; that it is, in fact, proceeding more rapidly and with more complex and apparently threatening effect than was widely acknowledged even a short time ago; that the record of action on the problem (of which I have myself had something to say when examining the record of recent presidential administrations) has been consistently dismal; that there is, in light of all of the above, an urgent need for redress of the problem; and, accordingly, that anything which could appear to slight any of these facts would be irresponsible.

However, I also recognize that the discourse on the subject has seen misinformation, and outright disinformation, running rampant and interacting with the severely limited and flawed intellectual basis that mainstream thinking affords for considering issues like this one, producing extremely irrational responses, and indeed a well-substantiated mental health crisis, and that all this has been, as well as much else, exceedingly counterproductive from the standpoint of progress on the problem. The result is that it actually seems worthwhile to spell out something of what individuals, as individuals, can do to keep their sanity amid the insanity of the situation--and, hopefully, give us that much better a chance of not only surviving the panic, but resolving the crisis to which it has given rise.

#1. Remember That There Really Are People Out There Trying to Demoralize You.
As climate scientist Michael Mann has observed, "doom-mongering has overtaken denial as a threat and as a tactic." The reason is twofold, it specifically being the case that denial, which was already a matter of contempt for the science well before the end of the century, has just gone on looking less and less credible (though not for lack of trying); while doomism and defeatism lead to the same result as denial, namely doing nothing, because if one believes the worst outcome is already unavoidable, why bother trying?

Naturally a measure of skepticism--actual skepticism, not skepticism as a euphemism for an idiot's contempt of hard fact--is a must.

In practical terms that means you shouldn't be too quick to believe everything you hear or read on this subject, any more than you should on any other, because as always there are people lying to you to get what they want.

#2. Remember That Even When Demoralizing You Isn't the Agenda the Commercial Media Lives on Shock, Fear and Anger.
As those who have been attentive to the discourse on climate change know, not only have "inactivists"--that vast and powerful array of interests opposed to redress of the climate crisis--exploited doom-mongering the way they have denial, but the mainstream media has been very happy to aid and abet them in spreading the word (just as it has been ready to go along with the narrative that climate change was "debatable" down to the present). This is, in part, because of the combination of the media's "political economy," and the ideology prevailing around and in it, leaving it relatively inattentive to important issues, uninterested in (or cowardly about) sorting out the truth, and extremely accommodating of the views of powerful interests, often from behind a veneer of (cowardly) bothsidesism (of which its coverage of climate change has been a textbook example).

As if all that were not enough (and it is, in fact, plenty) we know that the mainstream media is a commercial enterprise and that its commercial interests as read in the narrowest sense (as against, for example, the interests of its owners, which can be more expansive), take precedence over little things like fulfilling its role of informing the public by faithfully reporting the facts and endeavoring to explain them. They want you watching, reading, listening--whether you are being informed or not--and not only is it the case that surprise, fear and anger make people pay attention, but inducing and exploiting that emotional state has become a very sophisticated practice indeed, as Matt Taibbi's appropriately titled Hate, Inc. makes clear. Climate doom-mongering on climate fits that bill very nicely indeed--while it says a lot that the mainstream media supposedly so intent on limiting the conversation to officially recognized "experts" has given such publicity to Jonathan Franzen, no expert on the subject of climate science by even the most generous measure (and in my estimation, not much of a figure in his own field of literature, except to the extent that the Midcult brigade makes him into one).

Again, since you have that much less reason to trust in them, you have that much more reason to make sense of things yourself.

#3. Remember That (Mainstream) Environmentalists Have Been Very Vulnerable to These Tactics--and Often Sucked into Abetting Them.
Contemporary politics being the gatekept thing it is the range of ideas that one can bring into anything like a mainstream conversation in contemporary America is exceedingly narrow--and mainstream environmentalism has reflected that, founding itself on what are, in the end, deeply reactionary, Counter-Enlightenment ideas, like Malthusianism. Malthusianism does not, as some would innocently claim, mean no more and no less than the logically sound position that, all other things being equal, a larger number of people living off the same resource base would mean less to go around for everybody, or a refusal of complacency about science's ability to always deliver solutions when they are needed. As anyone who actually read Thomas Malthus' book can tell you (for the full title of the work is An Essay on the Principle of Population as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society, with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet and Other Writers), Malthusianism is also a doctrine of unswerving loyalty to the interests of the rich and contempt for the poor, whom it blames for society's problems; hostile toward egalitarian values and any reform that might alleviate the lot of the have-nots; and, rather than refusing to be complacent about science, disdainful of the idea of science and technology possibly allowing for progress.

The result is that with Malthusianism in this fuller sense looming so large within the movement's thought (even when the premises are not always acknowledged, or even understood, by its own members) one is not surprised to see an environmentalism which is absolutely uninterested in considering society's makeup, unconcerned for equity, harsh in its treatment of people who do not have much, and inclined to pessimism about technology and a very great deal else--with the result that it is unable to imagine a better world (a thing in itself crippling for any would-be great movement), quick to alienate working people (more on this later), dismissive of any prospect of effective political response, or technological response (inclining to Luddism as well as Malthusianism), and given all that, naturally inclined to a doom-mongering that leaves many would-be activists serving the cause of inactivism (and making the situation they fear even worse).

Meanwhile all this is reinforced by another problematic tendency of contemporary environmentalism--to think that the reason there has not been more progress on the issue is that people are not "scared enough," and to think that anything that scares them more must be helpful. Arguably the opposite has been the case--the emphasis on fear driving many to simply "shut down," or look away, with environmentalists refusing to face the fact, not least because, in line with their aforementioned limits (the lack of social ideas, the disdain for technology) they can offer no real program for a public to get behind.

Give people coming at you from that stance no more heed than they deserve.

#4. Pay As Little Attention as Possible to Headlines. Instead Focus on the Actual Content of Articles.
It may sound strange to draw a distinction between the headline of an article, and the text of that article. After all, is it not the case that a headline is a title, and a title should tell us what an article is about? Yes, it should--and would, if writers were as competent and scrupulous as they ought to be. However, such writers are not what one finds working for the news media, who necessarily answer to its imperative of compelling the reader to, if nothing else, stop and look--with the result that we have probably all had the experience of being grabbed by some headline, reading the piece below it, and then thinking "That was not what I thought it was going to be," what we were actually given not quite the shocker they promised many, many times.

I have found stories about climate change no exception here, with a good example those pieces that set some particular date as a deadline for some usually unspecified form of redress of some aspect of the problem (e.g. "If we don't completely solve this every last little part of this problem by 2040 then we are doomed, DOOMED!"). Of course the reality proves, if not exactly bright, at least more complex and less final.

And we are likely to see that if we do less headline-skimming, and more actual reading, before we react.

#5. Remember the Difference Between "May" Happen and "Will" Happen--and the Difference Between "Will Happen" and "Has Happened."
As the prior example indicates, those who want to spread doom, or simply grab attention, treat the time element in melodramatic and irresponsible fashion, with this extending beyond tossing out arbitrary deadlines that give a false impression of countdown to some known point at which game-ending catastrophe will occur to a tendency to confuse what could happen with what will happen, and to confuse both those things with what has happened. Exemplary of this particularly atrocious form of reporting has been coverage of the Thwaites glacier (which, with characteristic irresponsibility, the press calls the "doomsday glacier"). As the situation stands the glacier is melting. Some scientists have told us that the glacier may collapse within a number of years. And if a complete collapse occurs one may see sea levels rise--perhaps by several feet--over the course of a couple of centuries. However, the hazy discussion of the matter one sees (and the tendency of many to skim) easily makes it seem as if that final collapse is ongoing now, and the maximal sea level rise practically imminent--which makes an already bad situation seem profoundly worse.

And that matters, not least from the standpoint of our keeping our heads about us--and perhaps even doing something about the problem (a possibility that, tellingly, those screaming "WE'RE DOOMED!" seem to have no interest in whatsoever when one would guess that people who really cared about an emergency would be ready to look at even desperate courses of action).

#6. Do Not Let Yourself Be Made to Feel Personally Responsible for a Whole Planetary Crisis.
In discussing the way we talk about major problems one should never forget the hypocrisies for which the conventional, conformist mentality stands--not least the discrepancy between the truism that "With great power comes great responsibility," and the reality that society is always holding those with no power responsible for everything (or perhaps more accurately, using a rhetoric of "personal responsibility" as an excuse for vindictiveness toward the weak). We see it all the time in those who are always falling all over themselves to excuse undeniable, colossal, crimes by the powerful, but of the utmost severity toward the least privileged of us--as in the differing treatment of bankers who wreck a global economy, and a minor who shoplifts items of comparatively trivial value.

Thus has it tended to go with the problem of the climate crisis, with the result that, where the issue is overwhelmingly a matter of what governments and businesses do, the largest and most powerful governments and businesses of all, a great many environmental activists, in line with the Malthusian sensibility previously discussed, prefer to harangue the consumer--and then not even the super-rich with their private jets and their megayachts, but the working-class persons who eat burgers, for example, and indeed wildly exaggerate the toll taken by meat-eating (which, of course, also translates to their minimizing the toll taken by a fossil fuels-based energy-transport base). These efforts have, in fact, been so pervasive and so strident that they are in themselves quite literally contributing to the aforementioned health crisis--while the harangues about individual "carbon footprint" (a concept all too tellingly popularized by oil giant BP) has done much to divide and alienate the public from address of the problem in what has been yet another victory for inactivism.

So when you consider this issue, remember--you are one of only eight billion people on the planet, among whom power is very unequally distributed, and with it, responsibility. If you are in a position to alleviate the problem then by all means do so. However, the odds are quite good that, unless you are a high-ranking corporate functionary or large shareholder in a relevant firm, or a senior government official, or in some other way in a position to affect the larger picture, you are probably not in a position to do much as an individual as things are--with this especially likely if, in contrast with the folks who own Gulfstream jets you are unsure how you will manage to pay the rent on your one-bedroom apartment this month there is not much you can do even as an individual consumer, precisely because 1. You are not really consuming all that much, and 2. You simply couldn't consume very differently if you wanted to because, like almost everyone on Earth, there is just not much choice to be had at your socioeconomic level as a member of an industrialized society who must survive within its parameters.

Indeed, you should probably take to heart what Dr. Mann had to say about this side of the matter--that making you personally out to be the villain in the story is a deflection from the real, systemic sources of, and solutions to, the problem that neither the inactivists, nor the confused carbon footprint-flogging activists, want to talk about.

#7. Ask Yourself: How Much of My Time, Thought and Energy Do I Really Need to Give to this Issue?
If your responsibility is limited, then, arguably, so is the good that you can do by following the crisis. That is not to say that it is wrong to stay informed--but one can ask just how much detail you really need about a situation you can do virtually nothing to address yourself.

These days we hear that many irrationally "doomscroll" through the news, and this may well be significant. However, I also suspect that many find themselves engaging in similar behavior for quite another reason--that they react to pieces of bad news about the issues they care about (like climate change) the way they would a worrisome diagnosis from a doctor--they seek out a second opinion, hoping that the first was incorrect. In my experience this rarely goes well, again, because of the generally abysmal quality of the media's reporting. Read one article, and then go through the next ten, and you will likely find just the same content over and over and over again, merely arranged a bit differently, with any new piece of information, any meaningful difference in analysis, likely to be rare--the more in as the search engine you are likely using to this end favors a comparative handful of mainstream resources which tend to be awfully alike in their "sourcing" of their stories and their treatment of them. Ironically, this poverty of effort and insight works out in the favor of the cynically attention-seeking media. By not giving you what they want the first time they keep you looking for it--and so going on to pay attention to them. But in the end you are likely to come away not only empty-handed but that much more depressed having seen the same bad news over and over and over again.

To put it simply--do not look to the traffickers in doom and shock and fear and anger to make your feel better. They are far more likely to make you feel worse instead, taking their toll on you even if you do recognize the propaganda machinery and the corruption of the conversation for what it is. Accordingly just pay as much attention as you have to--and if you find yourself falling into the kind of pattern described here, stop at once and do something else. (As it happens those simple yet quite effectually distracting games everyone seems to have on their phone these days can be fairly good at getting a person's mind off of nasty shocks.)

#8. Be Wary of Touching the Issue on Social Media.
Just as reading about the problem will not make it go away neither will talking about it to others--either at the scene where you read the bad news, or on social media, use of which you should be wary about. Web sites like Twitter, after all, are an extraordinary vector for negative emotion where those feelings of shock, fear and anger, invariably "what's trending," are apt to prove extremely contagious.

Moreover, while in spite of their numerous flaws many can and do have positive interactions with others on social media web sites, including with people whom they would never have otherwise got to meet, the fact remains that most of social media is a sewer from this standpoint where, in contrast with climate inactivists and those who help them put a lot of effort into demoralizing everyone collectively, many people will try and demoralize you personally and individually. I will not go so far as to say "Don't talk to strangers." But it does seem reasonable to say "Don't argue with strangers" precisely because you don't know who they are--and because the kind of person who would pick a fight with a complete stranger online is automatically suspect as acting in less than in good faith. They may be bots. They may be paid trolls. They may be the sort of sick individual who trolls without pay, for the pure pleasure of making people they don't know feel pain. And of course they may be just plain idiots--alas, very, very common in this world, probably more common on social media than elsewhere, and ever-ready to confirm the adage that "You can't win an argument with an idiot."

In fact, if you find yourself running into bots/trolls/idiots a lot, you are probably spending too much time there anyway. Take a break from it all--maybe even the kind of break that doesn't exactly end. (Believe it or not, a lot of us have done it, after all, and found ourselves happier and healthier for having done so.)

Cellular Agriculture is About a Lot More Than Meat

When there is mention of cellular agriculture meat is the first thing of which people think, and not without reason. It seems that the earliest, largest, most publicized efforts have been in that area, and not accidentally. The high consumption of meat, its relatively great resource-intensiveness and general environmental impact, and the ethical issues it raises in regard to the treatment of animals, make the idea of being able to produce meat while relieving or eliminating the problems very attractive--with the possibility of more reliable supplies and lower prices making it more attractive still.

Yet it is far from being the case that meat, or animal products generally (similar initiatives exist in the areas of dairy, eggs, seafood, and even leather), are the sole object of such efforts. We are also seeing them in the production of plant-based foods (with word of cellular cocoa recently grabbing headlines), and even non-food items like textile fibers (such as cotton) and building materials (such as wood), in the hope of achieving similar environmental and economic advantages.
One may take the proliferation of such efforts, and their expansion into seemingly ever more areas, for a sign of confidence in the technology's progress. However, as one looks over the headlines one also notices that we hear far more about laboratory achievements and start-ups raising money than we do about actual products hitting the actual market. Indeed, after many, many years of being told that the consumer would be able to try "clean meat" for themselves not in some limited-scale special event in some faraway place but by buying it off the shelf at their local grocery store "before the end of this year" all that anyone looking for a burger or chicken nuggets or anything else made the conventional way still finds on offer are plant-based concoctions being sold (for now, at least) for rather more than "the real thing." Meanwhile the press, reflecting its longstanding prejudices (especially where anything that might alleviate environmental stress is concerned), gives the Malthusian-Luddite brigade ample platform space from which to sneer at the possibility and denounce the idea even if it were feasible--and with them, those vegans determined that carnivores desirous of "meat without guilt" shall have no escape from an all plant-based diet, forever.

I cannot say whether those trying to make cellular agriculture happen, or the naysayers, will prove right about the chances of clean meat becoming available to the consumer any time soon. I have simply seen too many technologies that looked promising, and even worked in the lab, fail to prove practical as a consumer good, and there is no doubt that we have already seen hopes raised and quashed here so many times in that way that has so often preceded interest in some concept fizzling out for a long while that I am put in mind of the self-driving car hype of recent years. Still, there is also no denying that those pursuing cellular agriculture have made enormous strides in reaching this point (the price of a burger made from cultured beef has fallen from $330,000 to $10 in a decade's time), while the good the technology can potentially do for a world in which it should never be forgotten that, contrary to what some seem to think, the problem of the vast majority of those living on the planet is that they have not too much but too little, is far too great to be dismissed.

Will Apartment Buildings Have a Bigger Role in American Housing in the Future?

In discussing the future of housing we hear a great deal about houses, but much less about apartments--and this is not at all accidental. A mere 1 in 6 Americans live in apartments, and while the numbers vary greatly by region, even in highly urbanized New York state, with the highest proportion of people residing in such homes of any state in the country, only 1 in 4 residents of that state do so. Moreover, the comparative fewness of apartment dwellers is reinforced by the tendency to think of people who do so doing so only temporarily (like single people who have yet to settle down); or doing so because they are, frankly, socioeconomically marginal--and therefore of no interest to the media, politicians or other opinion-makers. (Indeed, the marginalization of apartment living goes along with the marginalization of rental in a culture devoted to the ideal of "home ownership," apartment dwellers disproportionately accounting for the country's renters.)

Still, as a glance at Europe's situation makes clear this is not the only possibility in even a "First World," Western, country. Half of the European Union resides in apartments, and while the proportion is admittedly greater in the less affluent east and south of the Union, even in wealthy Germany over half do so--all as the proportion living in apartments in even richer Switzerland is still higher.

Is it possible that the U.S. could be more like Europe in the future in this respect?

There seem to me some reason for thinking so, not least in the prospects for technological innovation. There is, for example, the possible effect of technologies like prefabricated homes and the 3-D printing of structures--which, while mostly identified with small buildings, may be extendable well beyond that (with a 5-story building produced through the method several years ago). It may well prove the case that such technologies will achieve economies of scale in the construction of large multiunit structures relative to detached houses, to the advantage of apartments over houses in price.

There is also the prospect of apartment living itself being made more attractive than it has been to date--its disadvantages diminished. One can, for example, imagine that apartments themselves might be improved in such ways as interior design economizing the use of space, or improvements in soundproofing reducing the annoyances caused by noisy neighbors.

Of course, "innovation" has a tendency to materialize in significant fashion where it "sustains" rather than "disrupts" established businesses--while business is more enthusiastic about chasing the dollars of those who have most rather than those who have least, adding to the comfort of the rich rather than relieving the discomfort of the non-rich. However, the differing situation in Europe and elsewhere suggests that even where the U.S. may not be particularly fertile territory for it can still happen.

Meanwhile the shifts in the demography of the United States may suggest a population more open to apartment living than its predecessors. Young people, we are told, are less car-oriented and less city-averse than their elders, while, perhaps reflecting the harder economic times which have been so formative for them, also leerier of financial commitments. They are also less inclined to marry and raise families--conventionally the moment when people decide to buy houses. And many of them have gone on living at home, in part because of a lack of affordable housing. At the same time an aging world is moving toward an older age structure in which we would have more older persons, who not incidentally have had a harder time saving for retirement, who might find it a good move to sell off their family home after the nest has been emptied and move into an apartment to relieve themselves of the hassles of the high-maintenance housing we have, especially if they could improve their financial situation doing so. Between those young persons, and those older persons, one could picture a greater demand for affordable apartments, reinforced by other shifts in daily living--for example, the ascent of Transportation-as-a-Service making residence in a dense urban center more attractive than before, by making it that much easier to get along without cars.

One can picture the two lines of development (technological innovation improving the attractiveness of apartment living, more singles and older people looking for cheaper and more hassle-free units) converging, and in the process possibly remaking one of the most fundamental aspects of daily life in the United States, how we provide ourselves with shelter.

What Ever Happened to Prefabricated Housing?

Those who tell us that ours is an age of unprecedented technological change making science fiction into reality never tire of talking about their cell phone--but somehow never seem to have anything to say about a great many other things that are fundamental to daily living.

Like housing.

It remains far and away the norm to build homes one at a time, in a process largely consisting of craftsmen (carpenters, etc.) transforming raw materials at best only slightly processed (like planks of wooded) into the elements from which they laboriously construct the structure.

It is an artisanal process--remote from the mechanized mass manufacturing of the Industrial Revolution, which in regard to much of home construction seems never to have happened.

A person might wonder if this has not been because, for some reason, this style of housing has "withstood the test of time" as clearly superior to any industrial alternatives.

As is often the case with those who speak pompously of the "test of time" they would be wrong to do so--not least because the provision of adequate amounts of affordable, quality, housing has so long been recognized as beyond that older method. Indeed, writing of the lacks of America's "affluent society" in the 1950s John Kenneth Galbraith specifically noted housing as one area where the richest country in history, riding high on the post-war boom, was poor--and few would care to argue the point today. As any homebuyer is likely to learn we have the artisanal method's drawbacks without the individuality, beauty, durability it offered at its best--living instead in generic boxes that are as obscenely high-maintenance as they are expensive.

Moreover, the reality is that practical industrialization of house-building--through the "prefabrication" of structures--is at this point a generations-old practice that has consistently proven superior from the standpoint of building time and cost, even without the great economies of scale (and general productivity improvements) that might be achieved were the production of such houses carried out on a really widespread basis. (They have also been known to have numerous advantages over conventionally-built homes in such important respects as structural strength and energy-efficiency.)

Given both the failure of the old way, and the existence of a proven solution to it, one can only wonder why prefabricated housing--about which it was once common to hear as the "wave of the future"--never became more than the marginal thing it is within today's construction market. Those discussing the issue sometimes talk about consumers finding them off-putting because of poor "reputation"--but I must admit that this explanation has never struck me as really satisfying. People buy what they know about, and I am not sure so many are aware the product exists, let alone its having any reputation with the broad public. And where what they know about is concerned people buy what is made available to them within their price range--while it is clear that builders are not going out of their way to make prefabricated homes widely available. Instead, as anyone perusing the discussions of the pros and cons of such homes quickly finds that such homes, rather than being produced in large numbers for purchase like any other home, are something individuals must personally arrange to have constructed on land they buy, suffering through a great many expenses and hassles they would not have to suffer when purchasing an already existing, conventionally built home.

Of course, that raises the question of why the construction sector has not taken more interest. The most plausible answer seems to be that, contrary to what those besotted with words like "ENTREPRENEURSHIP!" and "INNOVATION!" tell us, the failure of prefab home-building to make much headway is yet another story of a disruptive technology being successfully warded off by established businesses making the most of their position to stick with their established practices.

Nevertheless, it is far from inconceivable that prefabricated housing may have the benefit of significant tailwinds in the coming years. The combination of shortages of skilled labor across the range of building trades (carpenters, framing crews, etc.), and the tougher situation faced by consumers, provides the construction business with more incentive to pursue cost-saving options--while there may be significant synergies between prefabricated housing and other new technologies. Certainly Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne speculated in their study The Future of Employment that the prefabrication of buildings may play an important role in the automation of construction by simplifying the on-site activity. Meanwhile the construction sector may be facing increasing disruption from another technology--the 3-D printer and its potential to "print" homes. Certainly that technology could prove a competitor to prefabrication--but it is also possible that by disrupting the industry it can also create openings for a greater use of prefabricated structures, especially if each technology proves to be more useful than the other in some tasks. If so then we may belatedly see this very important industry, which has left so few pleased with its delivery of the goods, finally join the modern world, and in the process take a long overdue step toward turning scarcity in this very important area of life into abundance.

Earth4All Deep Dive Paper #8 and the RethinkX Vision of Sustainability

The Earth4All Project was announced at the United Nations' Framework Convention on Climate Change back in November 2020. Led by teams at the Club of Rome, the Norwegian Business School and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, its activities includes the monthly series of "Deep Dive" papers, the August 2022 edition of which ("The Clean Energy Transformation: A New Paradigm for Social Progress Within Planetary Boundaries") comes from the RethinkX think tank's Director of Global Research Communications, Nafeez Ahmed.

Those who are already acquainted with RethinkX's work, and particularly its Rethinking Humanity report, will recognize much in the Deep Dive paper as familiar from that earlier publication. Once again this paper presents the think tank's argument that the world is going through a historic transition as the cost and material throughput of five essentials for human living--information, energy, transport, food and materials--drop by an order of magnitude or more, which will potentially be as radical as the rise of human civilization itself (shifting us from the exploitation-based "Age of Extraction" with which civilization has been synonymous to, one may hope, an "Age of Freedom"). Where energy in particular is concerned RethinkX's argument goes that the sharp decline in cost of solar, wind and battery storage relative to the alternatives (which has already left trillions of dollars' worth of recent investment in fossil fuel apparatus "stranded") holds out the possibility not only of a successful transition to a post-fossil fuels, carbon-neutral (or even carbon-negative) energy base, but by way of a deliberate construction of "excess" capacity along the lines they characterize as "Clean Energy Super Power," "green" abundance that will make the economics of energy look like what the economics of information have become in the age of the Internet.

All of that having been presented before the question is what is new in this specific report. What impressed me on that level was its treatment of two issues relevant to this energy transition, namely the Energy Return On Investment (EROI) that renewables yield, and the material throughput required to build a renewable energy base on a global scale--both points of particular interest because renewables-bashers have made so much of these issues. As Ahmed shows here, EROI is not the obstacle some make it out to be--the more in as he now finds that the EROI for fossil fuels has consistently been overestimated, while that for renewables has consistently been underestimated. That the EROI for fossil fuels tends to be "measured right at the well-head rather than the most relevant point, which is where the energy enters the economy as electricity or petrol" in itself leaves fossil fuels with a lower EROI than the estimates of renewables' EROI that Ahmed considers to be unfairly low. As he argues, estimates for the useful life of photovoltaics tend to lowball the figure (estimating twenty to thirty years when more realistically they may be good for forty to fifty years), and to treat batteries as a deduction from renewables' EROI when they can easily boost it (one empirical examination showing they "actually increased EROI by making available energy that would otherwise be lost to curtailment"), even before one gets into such "phase-changing" possibilities as he anticipates from a shift to renewables on a really large scale (epitomized by the Clean Energy Super Power concept). Where material throughput is concerned he observes that the construction of the requisite base would be coming not on top of, but instead of, the resource demands of sustaining and extending the existing fossil fuel base, the existing (and increasingly uneconomical) apparatus of which can be regarded as a "vast global repository" of materials for use (the steel in old offshore oil rigs, for example, convertible into raw material for new windmill towers), all while the recycling of the requisite materials would be quite ample to close the supply gaps--the bottlenecks here, again, wildly exaggerated by those euphemistically called "skeptics" of the transition.

The result is that Ahmed's case bolsters further still what has for a long time been the strongest aspect of the RethinkX analysis--the trend in the energy market, and the increasing technical feasibility of a world of "green" yet abundant energy. However, it seems worth acknowledging that it does not bolster what may have most needed bolstering, namely the think tank's treatment of other dimensions of the matter, not least the transportation and food sectors, whose interaction with the energy transition is crucial to their vision of sustainability, to say nothing of a new civilization. Transportation, after all, is a major user of energy, and the shift from human-driven, gasoline-burning cars generally operated on an individual basis to self-driving electric cars (Electric-Autonomous Vehicles, or E-AVs) that make possible "Transportation as a Service" (TAAS) is crucial to their vision of making transport cheaply and conveniently available to all. The RethinkX analysts also look to cellular agriculture to sharply cut greenhouse gas emissions from that quarter and open up vast amounts of land to climate change-offsetting reforestation. Where all that is concerned RethinkX's prior reports rigorously work out just what could be expected to happen were safe, reliable, affordable E-AVs and cost-competitive cellular agriculture to hit the market. However, that arrival in the market is another matter. Their expectations in the area of transport are based not on the kind of robust analysis of easily observable (and increasingly widely acknowledged) price trends on which RethinkX's claims regarding energy have been based, but comparatively opaque expert pronouncements that have already proved overoptimistic. (In RethinkX's 2017 report 2021 was supposed to be the year of the great disruption in which TAAS began the displacement of our current transport model. Alas, it has not been so--with many expecting no such displacement for a good long while to come.) If somewhat more data-based their predictions regarding food may similarly prove overoptimistic. (Their 2019 report on the matter had the first cellular meat products hitting the market in 2022--while as of July 2022 not only had no such thing happened, but it remained uncertain when it actually would.)

Rather than reassessment of the earlier analysis on that score what RethinkX offers here are the same essential predictions, albeit with a greater vagueness about the time frame (inclining to reference to significant movements over the broader 10-15 year time frame they predicted for the more general transformation, rather than predicting more specific developments at points throughout it). Additionally the report has nothing to add about that area RethinkX has had least to say about, materials (uncovered by a report of its own). Nevertheless, if "The Clean Energy Transformation" document falls short of a completion and update of the broad RethinkX vision, it remains a useful summation of that vision, and well warrants attention from those who would like an accessible introduction to it, as well as those interested in the think tank's most recent word on the progress of renewable energy that is the document's principal concern.