Two disturbing questions
... and letters from our readers
From Claire—We received excellent letters last week. Thank you for them! We greatly enjoy hearing from you, even when you’re crabby.
We really enjoyed the Ask us Anything. Didn’t you? We’ll do that again, soon.
The deadline for submitting questions was over when we received the two questions at the bottom, both from Adam Garfinkle. A good thing, too, because they’re hard. So hard that we don’t know the answers. So we thought we’d ask you.
If you know, would you like to write for us? Send us your response in a Word document, single spaced, left justified, Times New Roman, 12 pt. We’ll publish the best one we receive.
Our readers write
From Jonathan Katz
I am also a theoretical astrophysicist (for what that’s worth, not much in this context). I don’t have a Nobel Prize, and only about 150 papers versus his 375. (I’m also Claire’s first cousin once removed.) Unlike Dr. Marcy, I do have extensive government and a little industrial consulting experience, and some professional knowledge of these issues. I have even published a few peer-reviewed papers on climatology; my bibliography is online.
I take issue with Dr. Marcy on two points:
1. Nuclear power. Nuclear power is probably the safest kind of power (the tsunami that destroyed the Fukushima power plants killed about 18,500 people, none of them as a result of the destruction of the nuclear reactors). The Chernobyl disaster resulted from a combination of human error (that we will always have) and a reactor design that was well known to be unsafe (modified from a design used by the Soviet weapons program to make plutonium, where safety was irrelevant). We know, and have always known, what to do with nuclear waste: bury it deep underground. This supposedly unsolved problem has only remained unsolved because of doom-mongering activists who have blocked attempts to implement the solution.
But no one has been able to make nuclear power economic. Partly this is because of the roadblocks thrown up by activists, but partly it is because nuclear power plants are intrinsically expensive. Until we see detailed engineering and economic analysis showing that they can make power for less than about US$ 0.05/kWh, supported by a demonstration plant, we must be skeptical.
2. Climate doom-mongering. The climate is warming, slowly (about 0.01 C per year), as a result of anthropogenic greenhouse gases. The science is clear. What is not clear is whether this is, net, harmful. Warming has positive effects (longer growing seasons, more rain because a warmer ocean evaporates more) as well as harmful effects (rising sea levels). No one knows how to calculate the balance between these. There is no evidence it has made storms more frequent or severe. At the present rate of emissions, the world fifty years from now will be noticeably warmer, with earlier last frosts in the spring and later first frosts in the fall, different crops grown in different places, and changes in the local ecology (armadillos in Nebraska, and perhaps even in South Dakota, for example). But none of this will be catastrophic.
We seem to have accepted climate doomsaying in same the way so many accepted nuclear doom-saying: It became a tacit assumption that no one even thought to question. Like everything else, it should be questioned.
The cost of reducing the rate of warming with so-called renewables is large. Sunlight and wind are renewable, but the minerals that go into making power systems, and especially batteries, are not renewable. This is disguised by not counting the cost of backup power; as we recently learned again in Texas, power interruptions are very damaging. If Texas just had a hundred-year storm (it’s on the Great Plains, and gets Great Plains weather), someday renewables will have hundred-year interruptions owing to calm and overcast or foggy weather. We are unlikely to have sufficient storage capacity to deal with that, because it is a universal human characteristic to discount the possibility of rare events that have not been recently experienced. The obvious answer is back-up gas turbine generators, but if we are willing to spend their capital cost, why not use them as our principal power supply, and dispense with renewables? Natural gas is cheap as a result of the fracking revolution, and we have a century’s worth. The cost of switching the world to renewables should be compared to the harm, if there is even net harm, of climate change.
Name withheld at reader’s request
I’ll take “argumentative approaches that fall flat in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Jackson, Mississippi” for $200, Alex.
From Alan Potkin
In response to Adam Garfinkle and Robert Zubrin:
“Donald Trump is a national socialist demagogue. That is not to say that Trump is a Nazi. He certainly is not. But he is a fruit of the same rotten tree.”
Mighty white of Zubrin to allow us that much. Also to give us his nuanced advisory on Christian and Jewish theology vis-à-vis immigration, and his astute analysis of the what the Founders had in mind with the Declaration of Independence.
Even more unspeakably arrogant was the gratuitous dismissal by Prof. Garfinkle of all his moral and intellectual lessers out there in Trumpistan as “nitwits.” And of course, since his CV shows a life spent entirely within academia and also at the highest and most rarefied political circles, he absolutely groks their limitations and personal tragedies as they’ve been massively and collectively defenestrated by globalization: first hand and in great depth.
Maybe you could instruct your fellow Cosmopolitan Globalists to turn down the invective a notch or ten? They—and you—could make their points and pitch their ideas quite well without the depth of self-indulgent insultancy.
With each of your missives, I’m coming closer to pushing that button you mistakenly sent us all last week, Claire.
From Carl Palminteri
“Sane?”
Is it madness to have a questionably cognizant POTUS use executive orders to overrule congressionally mandated immigration policies and unilaterally create a SANCTUARY NATION while pretending we have territorial integrity?
Not a rhetorical question for your guest contributor. I thought Trump was the out-of-control authoritarian.
From Ken Snider
Almost everyone, including Republicans, conservatives and even Trump supporters, supports merit-based legal immigration. The policies should attempt to match immigrants’ numbers and skills to those needed in our labor force, being careful not to flood any one sector with too much labor and drive down wages.
I believe most would also support a way to legalize farm workers through some kind of temporary visa. If only our politicians could agree to such a program. Unfortunately, attempts at this kind of reform are frequently derailed by the volatile issues related to illegal immigration.
Please do not conflate legal and illegal immigration when attempting to read the minds of conservatives.
Believing most people on the conservative side of the political spectrum are against legal immigration is a strawman. It does not comport with conservative reality.
As far as I can tell, Trump, to his detriment, basically ignored the issue of legal immigration reform. His rhetoric and the wall were almost always focused on the illegal immigration issues that did and still do require our attention.
The policies conservatives oppose are those that would allow uncontrolled illegal immigration into a country with a generous safety net (from the perspective of the immigrant). For many illegal immigrants, our safety net is greater prosperity than they ever dreamed possible in their home country.
Conservatives also oppose policies that allow uncontrolled increases in the number of undocumented non-Americans who come to work in non-agricultural areas of the economy. They compete directly against lower-class working Americans, driving down wages. Lower-income American Blacks and Latinos, attempting to work in entry-level positions (construction and service industries are good examples), end up competing with those who will work off the books for cash. The employers pay lower wages, and don’t suffer the cost of taxes and benefits.
There will always be some of this, but allowing the population of these undocumented workers to grow too rapidly greatly reduces the opportunities for American lower class workers to attain greater prosperity.
The purpose of the wall is to create friction to reduce the number of illegals. Not, as you appear to imagine, to reduce legal immigration.
It also is a good thing that the friction the wall creates reduces the smuggling of Fentanyl and other drugs that are killing so many Americans.
A wall and immigration system that makes it difficult for MS-13 gang members to enter the US would save American lives.
Also from Ken Snider
Excellent answer by Geoff Marcy and the others.
It would be interesting to read his comments about the information below. [I have paraphrased—Claire.]
A Tesla lithium electric vehicle battery weighs more than 1,000 pounds. Typically, it contains:
25 pounds of lithium;
30 pounds of cobalt;
60 pounds of nickel;
110 pounds of graphite; and
90 pounds of copper.
How much rock has to be extracted from the earth and processed to yield this?
Typically, lithium brines contain less than 0.1 percent lithium. You have to dig up 25,000 pounds of brines to obtain 25 pounds of pure lithium.
Cobalt ore grades average 0.1 percent. So you’d need to dig up nearly 30,000 pounds of ore.
Nickel ore grades average 1 percent. So 6,000 pounds of ore.
Graphite ore is typically 10 percent. So 1,100 pounds.
Copper ore is about 0.6 percent—so 25,000 pounds.
Extracting enough of these elements to produce a single electric vehicle battery means mining some 90,000 pounds of ore. To assess the environmental impact of this mining and calculate its cost, you must also estimate the overburden, or the amount of earth you have to dig up to get to the ore. Depending on the or, and where it’s located, it will generally be between three and twenty tons for a single ton of ore.
So to make an electric vehicle battery—just one—you have to dig 200,000 to 1,500,000 pounds of earth out of the ground.
I suspect the elephant in the room is there might not be enough material—that we’re willing to dig up—to support the batteries required for electric vehicles, peaking, and backup.
From Claire—Whoa. I didn’t know that. This is a devastating argument against electric vehicles. I’d be curious to know what Geoff has to say, too.
And two disturbing questions …
From Adam Garfinkle
Now that the Covid episode seems at long last to be winding down, it is fair to conclude that hierarchical, managed polities did a lot better at dealing with the pandemic than Western societies, and especially the US. I think this means that all else more or less equal, liberal societies do better in normal times, because creativity and aspirational risk-taking thrive in liberal orders. But in public emergencies, they do worse because it’s just not possible quickly to shut off, or even throttle back, on the protean-individual juice. So if the future holds in store a series of zoonotic visitations—not a far-fetched possibility, unfortunately, with the warming trend we witness (and its sources for this purpose are irrelevant)—which kind of political authority model is going to benefit, and which not, over the next several decades? Is the answer as clear-cut as it seems?
Despite the Chinese government’s very bad behavior (which was hardly surprising; they did the same damned things when SARS hit), China and the CCP come out smelling like roses compared to the US. From all we know, there’s no reason to think the pandemic was a deliberate biological attack, or even an accident in any simple sense. But now it’s been shown that during pandemics, China gains prestige over the US and the West, where pandemic translates into political pandamonium. So is there now an incentive for the CCP to use the threat of engineered viral attacks to offset the massive US advantage in strategic nuclear power? In other words, given the differential societal capacities to handle a pandemic, which I doubt will change, does China now have, in effect, an asymmetrical equalizer to the US strategic deterrent? And does that make the anyway stupid idea of waging a Cold War against China, which we could never win, even stupider because China possesses, in effect, a doomsday retaliatory capability? Doomsday for us, perhaps, via a genetically engineered virus attuned to our allele clusters—but not necessarily doomsday for them? The future of biological warfare might epitomize the racialization of the security dilemma in ways we are presently very reluctant to imagine.
Vivek is game to take a shot at question number one, but the second one? We’re stumped. It’s a good question, though, isn’t it? If you know the answer, please share it with the rest of us.
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Adam Garfinkle is a bit too pessimistic about the performance of the West during the Covid crisis. He’s certainly right that many mistakes were made (mostly by politicians and the so-called experts who work for or advise governments) but there is one spectacular success that he neglects to mention. It’s the development of highly successful vaccines which hold the promise of ending the pandemic.
The Chinese vaccines are duds but the Russian vaccine (to Russia’s credit) looks pretty good. But the go-to vaccines that everyone wants are made by Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson and even AstraZeneca (who has a vaccine that’s not as bad as people seem to think.).
Soon we will have a vaccine from another Western company, Novavax, which is based in the Maryland suburbs of D.C.
Notice that China, Japan, South Korea and Adam’s home away from home, Singapore, are not on the list. India is good at manufacturing vaccines but not developing them.
Much of the credit for this unprecedented achievement goes to the vitality of Western pharmaceutical companies with a major assist from Operation Warp Speed. While Adam (and Claire) will be loathe to admit it; it’s the most successful governmental science endeavor since the Apollo project, and Trump is entitled to the credit as much as Kennedy was entitled to the credit for the moon landing.
It also bears mentioning that the three nations that have had more success than any others in getting vaccines delivered into arms are Israel, the United Kingdom and the United States; it’s an achievement worth celebrating.
Adam is right; the West has not exactly distinguished itself during the pandemic, but it has gotten more things right than he implies in his question.
Times New Roman? OK.
12 pt? Ok.
But I find 'left justified' to be a bridge too far---so far.