stub

(My Responses)

Dubious Comparisons.

The authors state that, due to internal political considerations, Japan has repudiated certain long-term commitments of the Kyoto Protocol, taking effect in ten, or twenty, or thirty years. This paper was of course written before the earthquake, but a naive reader might get the impression that the Japanese nuclear accidents during the earthquake were somehow related to Japan's distinctive policy.

Japan is an island, or, rather, four islands. It has an oceanic climate, rather than a continental climate, similar to Western Europe, and in contrast to the United States. Its electricity requirement, on a per capita basis, is roughly comparably to that of Western Europe, and about half of that of the United States, with much less in the way of daily surges associated with air conditioning in this country. In Western European terms, Japan is not an outlier as far as nuclear power goes. It has about as much nuclear power per capita as Belgium or Germany, less than France, and more than Britain.

The singular thing about Japan is that it has just taken a massive earthquake and tidal wave-- and has come through in fairly good order, considering.

The authors make a lot of dubious comparisons. For example, in note 37 of the full paper, they refer to the state of New York's renewable energy target of 24% by 2014, and the state of California's target of 33% by 2020, seemingly much higher than Japan's target of 1.63%. Leaving aside whether these are comparable data (the American figures include increased efficiency in energy usage, and there is more scope for increased efficiency in a continental climate than in an oceanic climate), the authors lump everything into one big bucket, labeled "renewable," and do not ask how much is traditional hydro-power. They neglect to mention that New York proposes to meet its target with hydro-power coming from the James Bay project in Quebec. A Japanese equivalent would be to build an undersea electric power line to Vladivostok, and proceed from there to Irkutsk, and draw upon the power of the great Siberian rivers. Apart from technical issues, that would involve political complications of the highest order. Parenthetically, I understand that the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador, with its own hydro-power developments, is pursuing undersea cables to Nova Scotia, in order to bypass Quebecois obstructionism. Likewise, the hydro-power resources available to California reflect the existence of the Sierra Nevada Mountains and Rocky Mountains. California, Oregon, and Washington contain most of the population west of the Continental Divide-- obviously, they have vast hydro-power resources in their hinterlands. Hydro-power is cheap if you can spare the land, but if you have to displace people, that is something else again. Experience shows that dams sometimes give way, especially under such provocation as earthquakes. When that happens, there is a flash-flood. In building dams, one has to take account of who lives downstream. In a densely populated country, such as Japan, that can be difficult.

The Japanese simply chose not to unilaterally commit to being the world leaders in green energy, doing things other people did not do, over the next thirty years. I realize this may be a disappointment to "green" enthusiasts, but it is not unexpected.

My resonse to Jan Kunnas, History Offers Hope that We Can Reduce the Risk of Global Warming, HNN Post, Aug 3, 2009

08/06/2009 06:31 AM

http://hnn.us/articles/100828.html

History is not a Substitute for Engineering.

I found Jan Kunnas' essay uncomfortably diffuse, and when I went and looked at the posted introduction of his dissertation, that was not much better. It did not compare favorably to much shorter business-school case-studies, which are expected to be produced in a few weeks, or to military staff college paper, which is typically expected to be produced overnight ("The Panzers are rolling. Make up your mind, fast!"). Kunnas talks vaguely about technological changes without spelling them out. Energy policy is not so complex a topic that one has to shroud it in statistical regression, or proceed by historical analogy. We understand how machinery works. We don't understand how the human mind works. When the professional scholar tries to approach a mechanical problem as if it were the Protestant Reformation or the French Revolution, he tends to get lost in Rube-Goldberg-isms.

A quick bit of Googling and Wikipedia-crawling reveals that in 1977-80, about 2500 Megawatts of nuclear power plants (Russian-built and Swedish-built) began operating in Finland. Furthermore, nuclear power and District Heating/Cogeneration, taken together, make up a major share of Finland's electric supply. The natural gas which fuels the district heating power plants comes from West Siberia. Of course, the Siberian gas fields were largely opened up in the 1980's. Yes, naturally, those changes would have had a substantial effect on sulfur emissions. A reasonable proposal for reducing Finland's carbon emissions would involve combining smart drilling with deep geothermal, in effect, producing artificially, by remote control, what nature has supplied in Iceland. One would drill wells down to, say, 10,000 feet and then turn sideways and drill large numbers of collection galleries, and circulate water through them to reach boiling point. This is not a new idea, of course. Wily Ley devoted a chapter to the subject of geothermal energy in his _Engineers' Dreams_ (1954), and reached the point of an "artificial geyser."

Carbon reduction is basically just a question of committing the necessary funds. It needn't involve very many people materially altering their lifestyle, if they don't want to. There is a political question of how the public comes to accept the necessity of such funding, and _that_ is within a historian's grasp. For example, one could presumably write about the politics of district heating. It might possibly turn out that the people who were promoting it were trade unionists or whatever, and that the people opposing it had involved fantasies about their urban houses really being out in the wilderness, and were prone to invoke the symbolism of the old pagan gods. If so, that might turn out to be a worthwhile topic to study.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Finland

http://www.energia.fi/en/news/energy%20year%202007%20-%20electricity.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Finland

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heating#Finland

http://www.geni.org/globalenergy/library/national_energy_grid/finland/EnergyOverviewofFinland.shtml

http://www.naturalgas.org/naturalgas/processing_ng.asp#sulphur

[In response o Kunnas's complaint that Ihad misundersood him, I repliedthat:]

Does it matter whether they are Liars?

I am not greatly interested in whether Pipes and Posner are liars or ignorant fools. The latter are more dangerous. As one commentator remarked about sincerity: "Everyone's sincere! Easiest person to fool is yourself. "

I think you haven't quite grasped the whole concept of "virtual reality" and "telework." The workers would not be in the oil fields. The workers would probably be in India, fifteen hundred miles away. They would be operating the machinery via electronic controls and long-distance telecommunications, experiencing the whole business as if they were playing a video game. They would no more be afraid of the radioactivity than you are afraid of the fire-breathing dragons in the more conventional variety of video game. A bulldozer might have twenty or thirty little video cameras mounted on it, enough to give the driver a better view than he could ever have from the driver's seat. The bulldozer would probably be fitted with "fly-by-wire"-type controls similar to those in advanced airplanes, designed to keep it pointing in the same direction until specifically directed to turn. The workers would probably be safe enough in Abu Dhabi, but if they feel more comfortable back home in Mumbai, why not accommodate them? Robots are used to repair nuclear reactors now. Of course they get contaminated, but they never leave the reactor enclosure. If they break, they are simply replaced, and shoved off to the side. It is better to be wasteful of machines than of men.

You understand, the things I'm saying about your people, I've also said about Bennett Harrison and Barry Bluestone ("De-Industrialization of America, " etc), so it's not a partisan thing. The Neo-cons are basically sixties leftists, and they all think about the same way, whether or not they changed sides. There is a certain technophobia which runs through their thinking. It's not just ignorance, but a pervasive resentment of people who know how to control technology well enough to adapt it to their needs. If you are making an argument which hinges on technology, then of course you do have to understand technology.

05/19/2005 08:30 PM

05/25/2005 05:02 PM

In the first place, the cited article

Sanjiv Singh, The State of the Art in Automation of Earthmoving
http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~ssingh/pubs/asce97.pdf

is eight years old. That is a very long time in terms of electronics. In the second place, the author is talking about peacetime economics. He is mostly concerned with the extent to which computers can replace human labor, and save money. Wartime economics are something different. So are disaster economics. There are helicopters rusting on the ground beside the power plant at Chernobyl, and they will never leave Chernobyl. They were used as mobile cranes to dump gravel on top of the reactor, in order to seal it off. By the time it was over, of course, the helicopters were much too "hot" to be removed. It is not generally considered economic to use helicopters in that fashion, but, you will agree, there were special circumstances.

I think I would be inclined to take exception to your denigration of "toy" robots. In the film, Flight of the Phoenix, a German model airplane engineer says to a stubborn American pilot (as near as I can remember): "Mr. Livingston, a toy airplane is something you wind up and it rolls along the floor. A _model_ airplane is something entirely different. It flies. If anything, the stability requirements are greater because there is no pilot to correct for errors." If the kind of robot one buys at Radio Shack lasts for five minutes in the field, it may still have done enough work to justify its modest price. One good question to ask about cheap, expendable systems is: if one fails completely, are you any worse off than you were before? If the answer is no, then a ninety percent failure rate might be perfectly acceptable.

To the extent feasible, one would bypass as much infrastructure as one could. One would use slant drilling to intercept oil wells a few hundred feet underground, rather than fighting fires at the surface. One would use a self contained piece of equipment, basically similar to an offshore oil rig, except that it would ride on a massive array of small trucks. You would have a system of leveling beams which is fairly tolerant of any one truck failing, and the system might only be good for one mile an hour, but that is enough. Most of the well sites are not more than a hundred and fifty miles from the sea, and it's a one-way trip. The idea behind this system is that as much as possible of the assembly gets done in Singapore or Korea. You try to design in enough redundancy so that most malfunctions can be coped with by shutting down the afflicted component, and using another one. That's the sort of design approach that the U.S. Navy takes to building warships. It's just that the oil industry has traditionally been rather more tight-wadded.

Back in 1991, the conventional wisdom was that oil fires were hard to fight, because you were supposed to fight them in heroic Texan fashion, a la Red Adair, with minimal equipment. The clever Hungarians didn't think so. They took a surplus Soviet tank, a surplus Mig fighter jet engine, and a non-surplus American industrial robot arm, and fitted the whole business up for remote control. The tank drove up to the burning oil well, the jet engine blew the fire away from the tank, and the robot arm fitted a plug over the well top. That was the real secret-- that the Hungarians didn't feel compelled to prove that they were more Texan than the Texans.

Another point: you do not have to attain perfection. You merely have to get the quantity of onsite work down to the point where it can be done by the inevitable "danger junkies."

HNN post, re: Mark Safranski, Why Some Are Calling Thomas P.M. Barnett Our Age's George F. Kennan, HNN, 12/27/2004

http://hnn.us/articles/9212.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20050910233959/http://hnn.us/articles/9212.html

has a table of comments which are themselves lost

My Comment (12/29/2004 12:59 PM):

What Kind of Economics Do You Assume?

I think that _The Pentagon’s New Map_, as described by Safranski, is based on the economy as it used to be, not the economy as it is becoming.

The "flow of energy" in practice means oil, which is to say, gasoline to power automobiles. As a general principle, if you use more energy than can be obtained locally, it becomes a pollutant. Importing energy from the far corners of the earth is not an ecologically sustainable strategy. Manufacturing in the third world is based on cheap labor. However, no human labor is cheaper than that of machines, once the machines get to the point of being economically priced. For example, a personal computer costs hundreds of dollars, not tens of thousands of dollars, and its raw operating expenses in the right context might be on the order of a penny or two per hour. What applies to a computer ultimately applies to a robot as well. The single biggest manufactured good is the automobile. There are few if any tasks in the manufacturing of an automobile which cannot be robotized. Further, all the transportation-related industries are in competition with computers and telecommunications. The latter are winning-- we are not at a convention, after all. This will inevitably result in a scaling-back of manufacturing, and reduced rates of consumption of natural resources. The developed countries will import less from the third world. At a certain point, the military industrial complex will cut in as a form of price supports. There will be firms which are paid by the Pentagon to maintain a certain manufacturing capacity of certain commonly useful items, and as a byproduct, supply the rest of the population for free. The interstate highways are an example of something analogous. The lucrative business opportunities will all involve getting paid by the government to do something, but they will carry a condition that the resulting employment has to be distributed along lines of political advisabity.

Third-world economies will practically have two choices: autarchy or contraband. Autarchy means essentially producing for the needs of one's own population, and not for export, modifying designs as necessary to avoid having to import raw materials.

The other possibility is contraband. The United States proceeds on the assumption that drugs are a problem of certain South American countries, not a problem of the United States itself. Attempts to project our own internal drug problem onto foreign countries are ultimately doomed to failure. A cocaine molecule only has forty-three atoms (C_17-H_21-O_4-N). The gross chemical composition approximates that of the B-complex vitamins. What makes cocaine cocaine is essentially in the ordering of those forty-three atoms. Sooner or later, it is inevitable that the end user will develop the ability to make his own supply for immediate consumption, probably via a genetically engineered yeast . In any case, cocaine is being superseded by "crank," that is, amphetamines refined by essentially traditional bootleggers or moonshiners from over-the-counter medications. Respectable pharmaceutical firms do all the heavy lifting of producing the stuff, and turn a blind eye to its actual use. These firms make all the right political campaign contributions, of course.

[in response to Stuart Berman comment (January 2, 2005 at 7:00 PM, lost), I observed (01/03/2005 08:55 AM) that:]

It is useful to compare the illicit drug trade to the illicit music trade. Music bootlegging is driven by the fact that just about everyone has a computer, and a computer can copy things. The recording industry's efforts to suppress music bootlegging merely result in it becoming more perfectly dispersed, to the point that each illicit listener does his exact proportionate share of the work. Enforcement is nearly impossible. The Recording Industry Association of America has reached the desperation measure of going after little girls who live in housing projects, and who share Britney Spears recordings back and forth. Who else, after all, would even want Britney Spears recordings?

Imagine the same principle operating with respect to molecular biology. One suitably skilled person can create a micro-organism which replicates, and produces a desired biochemical, in much the same fashion that brewer's yeast turns grape juice into wine. At a certain level, biology is just another information science, similar to computer programming, with the same basic properties. This method is being used, legitimately, to produce things like insulin. However, the method can also be used for recreational drugs. Unskilled users can share their starter cultures back and forth. An early formulation of this idea is found in Diana L. Paxson's science fiction novel _The Paradise Tree_ (1987). The present assumption in the illicit drug trade is that users use up their supply, and have to go back for more. When that assumption ceases to be true, enforcement will become effectively impossible. The only remaining question is when.

George Bernard Shaw summed the drug problem up for all time: "Whiskey is a very necessary article... It makes life bearable to millions of people who could not endure their existence if they were quite sober..." (_Major Barbara_, 1906, Act II). Instead of addressing the question of why large numbers of people could not endure American society if they were quite sober, we project the drug problem outwards, pretending that it is something the evil foreigners are doing to us. On a larger scale, this is of course the paranoiac behavior of a certain type of drug-user. Using the Army to fight the War On Drugs by invading Columbia or Bolivia is ultimately futile.

[Somewhat later in the conversation (12/31/2004 07:04 AM), I provided a note to a better book]

A Better Book

Here is a book that is much sounder than what I have read of Barnett.

George and Meredith Friedman, The Future of War: Power, Technology, and American World Dominance in the Twenty-First Century, 1996.

The Friedmans adopt a Mahanian position ("sea power"), revised and corrected for modern technology. By contrast, Barnett's position, so far as I can gather, is essentially Makinderian ("control the heartland"). Mahanianism is the traditional strategy of the Anglo-Saxon democracies, going back to William Pitt the Elder (if not before). It has a much better fit with democratic values than Makinderism does, whose natural heroes are people like Temujin, Phillip II, Napoleon, Hitler, and Stalin. My impression is that the Friedmans have a much sounder command of technology than Barnett has.

[in response to Steven L. Frank's comment that there were "rule sets" (January 1, 2005 at 5:37 AM), I replied (01/01/2005 11:13 AM):]

The problem is, whose rule set? European rule sets differ in important particulars from American rule-sets. Take Kyoto Protocol. If you believe in global warming, it follows that American automobile usage will cause Antarctica to melt, putting London three hundred feet under water. Similarly, from an engineering standpoint, it really isn't all that difficult to conform to Kyoto Protocol over a period of decades. It would cost a good deal of money of course, tens of billions of dollars, which would have to come from the government, but in terms of defense spending, that isn't so big a deal. Here is a website covering some of the possible solutions.

http://faculty.washington.edu/jbs/itrans/

The American response to Kyoto Protocol is not practical so much as it is moral or ethical. Look at the way that working stiffs burn rubber on their way out of the parking lot of a highly regimented factory. I know a place where you can see ten cars in succession run a red light which was put in to protect the pedestrian approaches to an elementary school.

[and, expanding on this (01/02/2005 03:20 PM), I added]:

Energy Conservation a Theological Dispute

Well, I take the view that the disagreement between the United States and Europe about Kyoto Protocol is ultimately a theological dispute. Do you know what a "rice burner" is? It's a derogatory term for a small Japanese car, and by extension, for its driver, who may himself be an Asian-American.

Here are some links to usage. I should warn the more sensitive readers that these tend to be fairly foul-mouthed.

=================================================
[These posts sem to have gone through an extreme degree of atrition. None still point to the expected content, and, in about half the cases, the domain itself has lapsed]

http://www.newcelica.org/other/funny/anti-rice/
NF

http://www.foulmouthshirts.com/bikerpages/Fuck%20you%20and%20the%20Rice%20Burner%20you%20rode%20in%20on%20T-shirt.htm
NF

http://home.grandecom.net/~chughes/temp/ricexws.htm
NF

http://www.streetracersonline.com/gallery/displayimage.php?album=2&pos=21
NF

http://www.allguinness.com/steamedrice/000139.html
NF

http://autoracing.about.com/od/racingperspectives/a/Riceburn_Street_4.htm
NF

http://www.atvnews.com/forum.cfm/fuseaction/thread/tid/14714590/gotomsg/14750705.cfm
NF

http://www.musclecars.net/showcardetail.php?c=m&o=339
NF?

http://www.nostaljack.net/august_01.htm
NF

http://forums.majorgeeks.com/archive/index.php/t-35677
NF

http://www.dodgedakotas.com/boards/v8/101.html
NF

http://www.mysportscar.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=40&whichpage=13
NF

http://www.f150online.com/forums/archive/topic/120962-1.html
NF

htt p://www.citizinemag.com/commentary/commentary-0211_driversed.htm
NF

http://www.rsdb.org/?2
NF, goes to a short dictionry of derogatory language

http://slack-ass.com/corkboard/
NF

http://www.wog.com.au/article_main.asp?ArticleID=209&PageNo=25
NF

http://www.popsci.com/popsci/bown/2004/cars/article/0,22221,750401,00.html
NF

http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/499s2004/newsgroup1.html
NF

http://www.christianguitar.org/forums/showthread.php?s=f492564b99d7db47ad9e1f878fabadbf&p=1415186#post1415186
NF

http://www.pathfinderscc.com/Become%20a%20Path%20Finder.htm
NF

http://www.ls1tech.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-28752
Site exists, but seems to havbe lost its archive
===========================================

"Rice burner," in its most literal sense implies that Japanese are running their automobiles on grain alcohol distilled from Sake, because they aren't sufficiently manly to go and kick the Arabs' teeth in and take the oil. Within this world-view, energy conservation, or concern about pollution, is immoral, and makes one a "girly-man." This world-view incorporates not only elements of racism and sexism, but also a deep resentment of the upper middle class, dislike of pedestrians, bicyclists, etc. The speaker is apt to refer to "euro-trash," and assert his God-given right to drive drunk. I grant that this may only be five percent of the population in its more extreme form, but that is still more than the President's margin of victory.

This cultural conflict is manageable, provided that neither side is asked to do too much. The problem about war is that it tends to ask too much of too many people, and sometimes triggers a revolution within one of the combatants. That is of course what happened with Afghanistan and the Soviet Union.

Of course there are always oddities, but I think I would be fairly safe in saying that there is a broad correlation between Green sentiment, pacifism, secularism, etc. and, on the other side, between the opposing ideologies. If I am correct, the concessions necessary to meet Europe's stipulations would tend to antagonize precisely those Americans who provide the political support for military intervention in the Third World.