He quotes at length from an article by the French columnist Jean François Revel:

You can read the Mexican press for months without meeting with the least little article that really criticizes the government. All the newspapers show a fawning respect for the world of political power, completely accept its most insignificant statements, and never exhibit any independent investigation, any honest reporting on the real situation of the country.

And yet the daily newspapers are big business and the publishers are major financial powers. A newspaper lives on its advertising, on paid articles, on blackmail (all the major businesses have to pay up in one way or another or else they might read “Coca-Cola is bad for your health” or some brand of cigarettes “can cause harm to your eyes”). But above all the newspapers feed on politics. It is a matter of playing the game with those who are in power and earning a share of the sure business opportunities that are the perquisites of the politicians.

The owners of the newspapers reap these benefits. As for those who do the writing, their salaries are miserable. Some of them are forced to find other means of access to the company safe and it can be said that, in this respect, honesty is all the more admirable in that it certainly does not pay. In Mexico, a daily newspaper consists of forty to fifty pages. Twenty are entirely filled with advertising; ten carry social news, entertainment and sports; six to ten pages are devoted to enormous displays in commercial type: they are messages from various organizations, states, unions, chambers of commerce or private groups and addressed to the authorities of the government, whether to thank them, ask them for something, wish the president a happy birthday, etc.

All the above brings in money. The rest, five or six pages, reports the official line and emphasizes if possible the event the government wants to stress. In general an inauguration or an official trip earn an eight-column headline on the first page. For international news, the agency dispatches are reproduced verbatim, faithfully echoing the line from Washington.

The press then is part of the governmental system, among whose primary beneficiaries are the owners of the papers. And the government can also exercise, as a last resort, a radical means of control. It has a monopoly on the importation and distribution of newsprint. As a result, the newspapers are in constant contact with a government credit institution, the Nacional Financiera, to which they are all more or less in debt.

Thus the press is shackled in a hundred ways and besides it cheerfully puts up with its chains.

But unlike the Soviet Union or pre-war Fascist states of Europe, the media didn’t fall down an extremist rabbit hole. “What kind of press was it, then?” Krauze asks, and cites Daniel Cosío Villegas‘ answer: “It is a free press that does not make use of its freedom.” Speaking of Villegas, Krauze writes:

The phenomenon seemed especially painful to him because during those years, while he was beginning his new role as a historian of modern and contemporary Mexico, Cosío Villegas was immersed in an intellectual and political world much closer to his temperament and convictions, the environment of nineteenth-century liberalism. With nostalgia and fascination for those times when Mexico, as at no other moment, had almost seemed to be a Western democracy, he was looking through hundreds of political newspapers of the era (argumentative, satirical, analytical, literary, Catholic, Conservative, Liberal) that had been issued across the years of the Reform and the French Intervention and in some cases survived till the year 1896 when Porfirio Díaz, as one of his projects, established the first “mass-market” newspaper in Mexico, El Imparcial.

Before that time, newspapers in Mexico had been not a business but “an extension of the activities of a man of letters.” Someone would start a newspaper to express and defend a system of ideas and would find in freedom of expression reason enough for its existence and the condition for its success. But with the creation of El Imparcial, things changed because of three factors that were basically still operative in the age of Alemán: the regime of Porfirio Díaz was dictatorial, the publishers of the newspaper were his friends, and it was a genuinely mass-market enterprise, with freedom of expression (or the defense of it) no longer a requirement for success.

19th century newspapers sound like early 21st century blogs for the somewhat monied “man of letters.” Paramount being bought up by a tech oligarch’s son who immediately fired of Stephen Colbert. Extortion of bribes from various news outlets through legal settlements. Even the name of the (de facto) state newspaper “El Imparcial” sounds like “Fair and Balanced.”

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• Asset Revaluation and the Existential Politics of Climate Change — a paper from 2020 by Jessica F. Green and others, about how the portfolio of fixed assets held by an entity affect its position on climate. Climate vulnerable, climate forcing, or (now) climate benefiting (e.g. Chinese PV manufacturing assets). A prelude to her upcoming book Existential Politics.
• Falling battery costs can unleash Mexico’s full solar potential and boost energy security — from Ember Climate, looking at near-term electrification / energy-transition options for Mexico. Disponible en español también.
• Market Failure: The Climate Crisis and the Limits of Capitalism — a discussion between Brett Christophers (author of The Price is Wrong) and economic historian Adam Tooze, moderated by Kate Aronoff.
• Beyond the Marshall Plan: China’s solar boom as world-changing industrial policy — a post by Adam Tooze synthesizing a bunch of other holyfuckingshit It’s Happening data that’s been circulating lately.
• The Power of a Russia-China Energy Deal — Columbia Energy Exchange podcast episode talking about the dynamics of the global natural gas market in light of a possible 50 bcm Power of Siberia II pipeline doubling Russia’s capacity for delivering pipeline gas to China. Sounds like it is likely to be negotiated on *extremely* favorable terms to China. Like Russia has to build it, and China gets an option on buying the gas, and at a very low price. So low that maybe they just decide to pass it through to the international LNG market. It seems like Russia is going to end up totally subservient to China. It’s a weird relationship. China elsewhere is doing everything it can to make itself (and the world) indifferent to the fuels that Russia has to offer. Why are they not in conflict? Maybe because they both have (different) interests in decentering the west.
• The Electrotech Revolution — a weirdly climate-agnostic reframing of the energy transition from Ember Climate. I did a thread on BlueSky while reading it. Not that it’s wrong to think about the tech diffusion independent of the climate lens, but I’m not sure where we end up if that lens gets fogged up. I doubt it’s to zero emissions.
• It Isn’t Just the U.S. The Whole World Has Soured on Climate Politics — David Wallace Wells in NYT Magazine. To which I can’t help but respond… “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” — Phillip K. Dick
• Electricity is the new price of eggs — a spicy episode of the reconstituted Energy Gang (Open Circuit) in which Jigar Shah goes after Charles Hua (Powerlines) on some of his assumptions about the political economy of utility regulation.
• Marissa Gillett to resign, ending turbulent era at PURA — sadly in the same vein… even when you DO have a “permission structure” to do things like performance based regulation, it may well turn out that the utilities have more power than your state does. See also David Roberts’ interview with Gillett on Volts.wtf. This stings especially since we were hoping to work with PURA on some open regulatory data stuff, but now who knows what the situation there will be like.
• China’s Green Leap Outward: The rapid scale-up of overseas Chinese clean-tech manufacturing investments — a new database (not yet publicly available) of Chinese foreign direct investment in clean energy manufacturing overseas. About $220B total since 2022, including batteries, EVs, solar, wind, materials refining. Others are ca

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Five Times Faster takes a systems approach to understanding why we haven’t made nearly as much progress on climate as we need to over the last 30 years of trying. Sharpe — a former UK climate diplomat — looks at the problem from 3 different angles: the way we assess and communicate the potential impacts of climate change; the way we think about the economy in the context of climate action, and finally how diplomacy and international agreements around climate action have been structured and negotiated. In each of these contexts he highlights the need for more consideration of non-linearity, feedbacks, and the potential for changing the underlying dynamics of the climate, economic, and political systems.

Assessing Climate Risks

Rather than taking the typical scientific approach of trying to identify the most likely outcomes, and quantifying the uncertainties on those predictions, he suggests that we should be using risk assessment tools that are common in the world of insurance or national security. We shouldn’t focus on trying to avoid or adapt to the most likely outcome, rather we should consider the worst plausible outcomes, and if they would result in unacceptable losses. This would mean communicating climate change risks and scenarios to policymakers very differently than has historically been done in the guarded, conservative language of the IPCC reports.

This felt a lot like how I came to climate change work. In 2008 I happened to read Nassim Taleb’s book Fooled by Randomness and Richard B. Alley’s The Two Mile Time Machine at the same time. Taleb’s book is about epistemic uncertainty and the inherent difficult of learning about the probability of rare events. Alley’s book is about paleoclimate and what we know about the last few hundred thousand years based on Greenland ice cores. Together they were pretty disturbing! The climate is a complex system filled with feedbacks and tipping points, capable of rapid and potentially irreversible state changes. Our GHG emissions are pushing the climate system into a domain that we don’t understand because we have no experience of it — the last time Earth was as warm as we expect it to be by the end of the 21st century, there were no humans, not even any other members of the genus Homo. We have no ice core records that old.

In this paradigm, decisions are driven by outcomes that may be unlikely, but would have very high impact, such as the rapid collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, or the irreversible collapse of the AMOC.

Economy as Ecology

In the second part of the book, he sharply criticizes the prevailing equilibrium economics that treats the economy as relatively mechanical, stable, and efficient, and discourages interventions beyond correcting “market failures” such as externalized costs. Instead, he encourages thinking about the economy more like an ecology — an interconnected web of dynamic relationships that can change dramatically when disturbed due to feedback loops and other nonlinear dynamics.

He draws on the work of Mariana Mazzucato (author of The Entrepreneurial State) and others who study how innovation can be catalyzed to radically and permanently alter the structure of the economy. The now canonical example of this dynamic is the dramatic reduction in the cost of solar (and batteries) as overall deployment has scaled up. Greg Nemet chronicles the policy interventions made by the US, Japan, Germany, and China that led to this outcome over decades in How Solar Energy Became Cheap.

The point being, we can intentionally change the nature of the economy not just through brute force, but by nudging it in new directions with the development and early deployment of technologies that we want to have around. If we choose well, then a small push can result in huge movement in a new direction, if it becomes self-sustaining. Potentially to the point of becoming an accelerating, runaway process. I mean:

China alone now has the manufacturing capacity to pump out 1 TW (1000 GW) of solar PV every year. Total global energy consumption is only about 20 TW. In terms of that capacity, we’re probably past the peak of the growth curve. There will never be 10 TW of solar PV manufacturing capacity.

But this kind of dynamic likely doesn’t apply to every technology equally, so it’s worth trying to understand which ones are susceptible to it and why. In 2021 some folks at Oxford looked at the current trajectories and learning rates of solar PV, batteries, wind, and electrolyzers in this paper, and compared them to fossil energy sources. interview with Dave Roberts here). Abhishek Malhotra and Tobias Schmidt have tried to understand why some technologies behave this way and others don’t. (another interview with Dave Roberts, and their paper in Joule).

80/20 Sectoral Diplomacy

He notes that the massively multiplayer negotiations between the ~200 parties to the UNFCCC, aimed at adopting economy-wide, global emissions targets that are often decades in the future, he suggests that narrower initiatives are likely to be more tractable and productive. He wants narrower focus along at least two dimensions.

First, rather than looking at the entire economy, which results in very diffuse responsibility and doesn’t tend to lead to any specific policies (other than economy-wide carbon pricing schemes which… read Making Climate Policy Work by Danny Cullenward and David Victor). Sharpe suggests focusing on individual high-emitting sectors like electricity generation, building HVAC, road transport, shipping, aviation, cement production, steel production, petrochemicals, or ammonia synthesis… Negotiating within a particular sector makes it possible to be much more specific, about the processes, technologies, incentives, bottlenecks etc. that need to be addressed or developed to reduce emissions. And to develop concrete short and medium term goals that are actionable now.

Second, he suggests negotiating among a smaller group of countries, companies, and industry groups that aren’t literally everyone, but that do cover enough of the sector that if they were all to agree on a path, it would be hard for the rest of the sector not to follow. What that threshold is and how many actors it takes to get there will depend on the sector, and he thinks it’ll be easier to start with those that are more concentrated and potentially subject to nation-level interventions. The two he looks at in some detail are electricity generation and road transport.

The goal of all this policy making and negotiation is to try and set up what he calls tipping cascades — large and varied positive consequences that result from a couple of relatively small interventions. For example, in the case of supporting the early deployment of EVs, you get cheaper batteries, which also helps further decarbonize the electricity system economically, and might result in oil companies choosing to diversify their businesses once they see the writing on the wall:

In contrast to that plausible happy story, he also looks at how hard it will be to prevent deforestation in the service of producing agricultural commodities. While there are a small number of countries that account for a large share of both the world’s remaining forests and all agricultural commodity production and consumption, there don’t seem to be the same kind of advantageous technological feedbacks to take advantage of. So maybe there are some domains where Sisyphus does just have to push the boulder up the hill forever.

Utilitarian Corporatism?

The decision to focus on entities like electric utilities and car manufacturers because they’re huge and centralized and thus susceptible to focused pressure is understandable, but man it sure leaves a lot on the table. Zoning, building codes, transportation that isn’t cars, eating (much) less meat, etc. are mentioned but written off for the most part because they are personal or local government decisions. This makes them harder to influence with nation-level interventions, and also more likely to be salient to citizens & consumers who are considered resistant to change.

I would like to think that there are opportunities for desirable tipping cascades in these systems too. Maybe it’s not for everyone, but for many people once you’ve experienced Barcelona’s Superblocks, or lived in a city built for biking, or a co-housing community, it’s hard to imagine going back to “normal.” If these experiences were available to more people, and the laws and financial regulations that functionally prohibit them could be swept away, couldn’t those changes also be self-reinforcing?

Focusing on actions that will move and appease the biggest corporate (and national) actors seems likely to further entrench or at least replicate their powerful positions in whatever systems come next. Which I guess is part of the idea. They have the power now. We either have to pay the ransom they demand, or take their power away. And that latter option doesn’t seem to be going well at the moment.

Nonlinear Race Conditions

I appreciated the focus on dynamical systems, and the potential for much more rapid change than you might expect because of extremely non-linear behavior. This is great in the context of economic and technological change, and terrifying when it comes to the climate system.

Some of the diplomacy chapters dragged and felt overly self-congratulatory, with shallow descriptions of recent agreements and initiatives whose ultimate outcomes are yet to be determined and (if history is any guide) may not come to much. More concrete, successful examples that have had longer to bear fruit would have been nice, even if they had to come from other domains.

By the end of the book, I felt like we are struggling with dueling complex systems, with the outcome totally unpredictable. On one hand, we have the climate system that is purely reactive — it has its own internal dynamics that we don’t fully understand, especially as we reach further and further into a new and unfamiliar regime. (See Zeke Hausfather’s NYTime OpEd about the climate freak show that was 2023-2024, or this NASA Earth Observatory piece). This system is responding unsympathetically to our forcing.

On the other hand, we have our own complex sociotechnical & economic systems that, at least in theory, we can influence with the goal of minimizing our perturbation of the climate system. We’re not all pulling in the same direction, which makes this a mess. One advantage of technology driven change is that once a new thing is cheap and easy, it can be hard to put it back in the box. If PV and batteries are dirt cheap, then price-sensitive consumers will flock to them. Witness Pakistan’s totally unexpected emergence as the world’s 3rd biggest importer of solar panels in 2024. They imported 13GW of PV in the first 6 months of 2024; the whole country only had ~50GW of installed generation capacity in 2023.

This is good because another giant non-linear thing we have to deal with is skyrocketing electricity demand — and I don’t mean because of EVs, heat pumps and AI data centers in the US and Europe. Most people globally don’t have access to enough energy to get good quality of life outcomes (2-3kW per capita, far less than the 5-10kW that rich countries use). Over the remainder of the century they’re going to do whatever they can to get it.

But economics alone also isn’t destiny. We’ve been able to build self-perpetuating systems that are economically insane for many of the participants trapped in them. The same land use and transportation systems that Sharpe thinks are too difficult to shift in the time that we have left make no economic sense from many different angles, but the US is culturally committed to them anyway, to the tune of trillions of dollars, and has successfully exported them around the world as an aspirational model. Close to half of all US soy and corn go toward uneconomic biofuels with no end in sight.

The interlocking interests of construction contractors, sprawl developers, car manufacturers, oil companies, agribusiness, unions representing auto workers, and marketing companies selling an American Fever Dream on credit have kept it all humming along, and as a result US burns a huge portion of its national income supporting the system, even though other options exist, and are cheaper, safer, healthier, and more enjoyable to live in. So I’m apprehensive about relying entirely on technological change and learning rates to make change happen.

But it’s clear there are no linear futures available. The only way to avoid horrendous climate change is with non-linear change in the systems causing it. If we fail to create that change, we’ll explore the non-linear response of the climate system at our peril.

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I listened to this conversation between Nathan Schneider and Marjorie Kelly this week, about her new book Wealth Supremacy and why simply trying to build more ethical economic entities is insufficient. It’s a retrospective look at the evolution of her own thinking, which has been very solutions oriented, and focused on bringing additional values into business, either through entities like B-corps or the recently much maligned ESG initiatives. One thing she seemed particularly regretful about was falling into the trap of using the framing of business to advocate for these kinds of changes: accepting that the profit maximization is the most appropriate metric, and then making the case that more sustainable, equitable, diverse, egalitarian etc. businesses are more profitable, and therefore those attributes should be more widespread, even within the very narrow logic of Actually Existing Capitalism.

On one level, it would be awfully convenient if that were true, and in the context of the Long Algorithm I think it should probably be our goal to create an economy where it is true by construction: through the laws, taxes, markets, policies and social norms we adopt. But in general it doesn’t seem like that’s the world we live in right now. Extractive, monopolistic, wealth-concentrating businesses still seem to have some pretty high margins, and many folks arguing for more ethical, sustainable, equitable business have said that a lower rate of return might be acceptable or even necessary.

Mathematically, I don’t think that works out.

We have to let go of the idea of maximizing returns to capital. If a corporation will do something that’s beneficial to sustainability and it breaks even… why isn’t that good enough?

Marjorie Kelly

If you have two segments of the economy with different approaches, and one of them has a higher exponential growth rate then in the long run it will come to dominate, even if it starts out as a very small enclave. Right now (unsurprisingly) the chunk of the economy that tries to maximize its growth at all costs grows faster. And has grown faster for the last 150-250 years. So it is almost the entire economy.

Any alternative model that grows more slowly, and at this point necessarily starts out as a small fraction of the overall economy, will become an ever smaller fraction of the economy over time. Even if it grows in absolute terms! So if you want to transition from a dominant, fast-growing economic model to something else, you either need that something else to grow even faster, or you need to kneecap the dominant, fast-growing segment.

Which sounds like a pretty unpopular proposal to a lot of people.

But then, what fraction of the prevailing “fast growth” is attributable to the liquidation of natural resources, or the pervasive externalization of costs, or monopoly rents, or the arbitrary political power imbalance between capital and labor? If our laws didn’t systematically advantage capital by letting accumulate this extracted wealth and recycle it to produce more of the same type of “growth” maybe it wouldn’t be growing as fast.

But if only some people or companies choose to adopt more just and sustainable practices, and as a result they grow more slowly, they will eventually die out in relative terms as the less constrained organizations that don’t do it will grow faster and ultimately dominate.

Except of course they already dominate. In the US the wealthiest 10% of people own about 70% of everything:

• The top 0.1% own 12.8% of all wealth.
• The remainder of the top 1% owns another 18.6%.
• The remainder of the top 10% owns another 37.6%.

So you either have to convince all of them to behave differently, or you have to take a lot of that wealth away from them and ensure that it ends up invested in another economic system. It could be a one-time redistribution, if the same kind of extraction and concentration simply isn’t going to be allowed going forward. Or it could be an ongoing process like Piketty’s progressive wealth tax, if that’s more politically feasible, or you believe there’s some societal value that comes from striving for greater wealth within some bounds on the overall wealth concentration.

You can imagine separating sustainability and wealth concentration into separate issues — if you don’t care about the concentration, then you can just make sustainable investments the ones that perform better, and the existing wealth will be directed toward sustainable things, but you’ll end up replicating the existing wealth and anti-democratic power imbalances.

Systemically, maybe a more interesting questions is: what would happen if we enacted polices that ensured the distributive economy had the higher growth rate? Like what if people could choose whether they wanted to invest in an economy with a lower expected rate of return, but a higher dispersion in individual economic outcomes, vs. an economy where nobody gets super rich and the overall rate of return is higher?

I honestly don’t know which one people would pick! In the US people are weirdly fixated on outcomes at the upper tail of the distribution, rather than the lower 50% of the population where nobody owns anything. It’s like playing roulette — the expected value is negative, but you’ve got an 11.5% chance of multiplying your money by a factor of 8 if you just bet on red 3 times in a row. And people play roulette, so probably some people would prefer to participate in a low-growth, high-inequality economy.

Systemically, it wouldn’t matter that much. If the distributive segment of the economy grows faster, and the fraction of the population that’s prone to gambling is pretty stable, then over time the distributive economy would dominate and the unicorn-hunting VCs would be relegated to their own quirky corner.

Redistribution vs. Predistribution

Mathematically this isn’t so different from a progressive wealth tax, which intentionally limits the rate of growth of wealth that has already been concentrated by confiscating some portion of it every year, and increasing the amount that is confiscated in proportion to the level of confiscation. But qualitatively, a confiscatory tax pushes our psychological loss aversion buttons. The money was mine, but then they took it away.

If we instead had financing, tax, and governance polices that encouraged cooperative capital formation, employee owned companies, stakeholder enterprises, steward ownership trusts and other distributive economic models more profitable than the wealth-concentrating alternatives then the egalitarian segment of the economy would ultimately dominate. This kind of predistribution isn’t a new idea, but I think making distributive structures more profitable overall than wealth concentrating structures is an important threshold to consider where the overall behavior of the system might change.

A Civilization of Gamblers

Collectively, I suspect we’re already making a version of the choice posed above between low-growth wealth-concentration, and high-growth wealth-distribution. If we were to account for the socialized costs of our current economy, and ignored the sources of “growth” that are really just zero-sum wealth transfers across an artificial boundary into the portion of our society and biosphere that we’ve labeled The Economy, how much lower would the real rate of economic growth be? Would it even be positive?

The real long-term driver of economic growth and human development is the creation of knowledge, which once produced can be made available to everybody at zero marginal cost. Because we try to maximize economic growth, but in calculating our metric of growth we ignore a bunch of enormous externalities and count transfers of natural resources and commercialization of previously non-commercial activities, we’re choosing to do a lot of the wrong things.

The post The Math of Ethical Growth appeared first on Amateur Earthling.

Carbon Captured is another book in the vein of Leah Stokes’ excellent Short Circuiting Policy and Making Climate Policy Work by David Victor and Danny Cullenward. It examines the political economy of climate policymaking over the last ~30 or so years starting mostly in the late 1980s when the issue started showing up on national policy agendas.

The central idea of the book (as Mildenberger repeats many, many times) is that carbon-intensive power centers enjoy political representation on both the Labor and Capital ends of the political spectrum that organizes most national parties. Mining and industrial unions as well as the owners fossil-fuel based businesses have all fought climate policy, and this means that no matter who is in power, someone is going to me working against the energy transition. Before 1990 carbon intensity just wasn’t a dimension anybody thought about in politics. In most places it’s still not a dominant political axis, though in the US it seems like the parties tried very hard to turn climate action into a partisan litmus test for the time being.

On top of this idea of “double representation” Mildenberger layers a couple of additional dimensions: how “corporatist” vs. pluralist are a country’s policymaking institutions, and whether the Labor movement has a deep, direct connection to leftist political parties (he ignores the analogous variable on the right, since he found that conservative parties are universally deeply tied to the interest of capital). With these variables in mind he explores the climate policy trajectories of 7 wealthy countries: the US, Australia, Norway, Germany, the UK, Japan, and Canada.

The idea is that a country’s level of corporatism vs. pluralism, and how tightly integrated Labor is with the left-leaning political parties will strongly influence what kind of policy trajectory the country takes. Countries with political institutions that reinforce the double representation of carbon interests will tend to take weak action earlier, with little public engagement, while those with less institutionally entrenched interests will tend to have more open conflict, likely resulting in later — but potentially more aggressive — policies. I wasn’t particularly convinced of this on the basis of the 7 case studies he explored.

It was kind of tragicomic that he chose the Clean Power Plan as the US example of “late but costly” climate policy, given that it was immediately repealed and never implemented, and then the policy targets were met anyway ahead of time with net cost savings. In contrast to his predictions, to me the IRA seems more like a policy implemented late but which is entirely composed of carrots rather than sticks (with the possible exception of the methane fee).

Regardless of whether this hypothesis is valid it was still very interesting to read these condensed policy histories. It definitely gave me some surprising wider context.

Carbon Captured Chaos

I was much less familiar with the political history of climate in countries outside the US, and disturbed by how much of a mess it was. I’d like to believe that the US has been uniquely bad, but that seems untrue. All of the policy trajectories traced in the book read like pure chaos. The policy instruments and level of ambition fluctuates wildly from year to year depending on who is in power. Nobody seems to have any idea what level of action is either politically reasonable or necessary. It seems like people are just throwing stuff against the wall to see what sticks. And almost nothing sticks.

Often it seems like politicians are fighting over whether to successfully pass a policy that has been approved by the carbon lobby and therefore does nothing, or to fight for a meaningful policy that is doomed to fail because the carbon lobby has a lot of power and will fight to the death to kill it. Ironically these options tend to end up splitting climate advocates, some of whom want to see any action at all even if it’s symbolic, while others are unwilling to accept an empty policy win.

One strategy that seemed to recur frequently was that carbon interests would seek to deflect policy costs away from producers and onto consumers. They would frame this as a relatively neutral choice, maybe within the mythology of freedom consumer choice. This ends up making policy costs salient for the population at large, while allows carbon-intensive producers to easily bring policy conflict into the public sphere, and stoke widespread opposition, even in cases where there are other policies meant to offset consumer impacts (since normal people have no clue how policy works). This seems like a very intentional strategy.

Another sadly consistent feature of all these histories is just how ineffectual environmental activists in general and green parties in particular have been. Only in exceptional circumstances (as when the Greens were kingmakers in Australia’s parliament) do they end up having any power or relevance. Mostly they’ve been treated as outsiders and ignored, or even viewed as toxic.

The Inefficiency of Inaction

With the benefit of hindsight, it seems clear that many of the policies that people fought for or against so passionately ended up being pretty inconsequential. They were weak, or they didn’t get passed, or went unenforced, or were quickly repealed. While policies that have ended up most profoundly reshaping the technological, economic, and political landscape were seen as minor, non-threatening side-shows at the time, not even really worth being opposed by the carbon interests.

Policies like the notoriously uneconomic feed-in-tariffs for solar power in cloudy Germany began the process of scaling up the global market for solar power, which drove costs down further than anybody could have imagined. Technological changes drove economic changes which are still fundamentally reshaping the landscape of political power. They affected what kinds of energy systems are self amplifying, vs. which ones might be expected to decay away.

Can that kind of thing be done again, now that we know how it might turn out? Or would carbon interests block these kinds of forward looking technological investments? With the passage of the infrastructure bill and the IRA, it seems like the US is trying to do the same kind of thing with batteries, hydrogen, electrolyzers, carbon capture and storage (CCS), direct air capture (DAC), and advanced nuclear. But are all of these technologies susceptible to the same kind of cost reductions? Are CCS, DAC, hydrogen and nukes just in there to soak up fat subsidies for a decade or two while setting up new constituencies that end up in conflict with renewable energy? I guess we’re gonna find out!

In the light of this experience, the longstanding obsession with short-term economic efficiency to the exclusion of intentional long-term reshaping of the landscape of political power seems like some kind of conspiracy intent on policy failure. Power is not evenly distributed, and policymaking that ignores the distribution of power (as has often been the case with carbon pricing) is doomed.

Sharing the Savings not the Costs

In all of the national case studies, efforts to “impose significant costs” on carbon-intensive economic actors fail and then rise from the dead to try again. I found this “cost” framing both annoying and confusing. It was often unclear whether he was talking about imposing a direct cost to erode the economic standing of incumbents (for example, an emissions trading scheme where nobody gets free credits). Or conversely, a policy that broadly imposes a cost on society, but with individual carbon interests both shielded and given an economic incentive to change their behaviors. (For example, an emissions trading scheme where a coal dependent electric utility is given free emissions credits).

More than that ambiguity, the “high cost of climate action” framing feels very stale. In the US it’s now been a full decade since (some) new renewable energy has been cheaper than just operating (some) existing coal plants. In 2013 it was just the cheapest high-plains wind beating out the most expensive coal plants, but in 2023 essentially the entire US coal fleet costs more to operate than newly constructed wind and solar — so much so that with the net savings from replacing all existing coal, we could afford 150GW of 4-hour battery storage. Displacing a substantial fraction of existing fossil fuels with renewable electricity and the electrification of transportation and domestic thermal applications would mean dramatic improvements in energy efficiency, lower energy costs overall, and lower volatility in energy prices. On top of that there are huge local and regional public health benefits resulting from reduced air pollution.

So while there are big “costs” when we look at the energy transition through the lens of distributional effects — coal, oil, and natural gas are going to be impacted, unavoidably — it doesn’t feel appropriate to frame the entire question in terms of how we allocate costs to different political actors. Even if we totally ignore the climate benefits and global free-rider problem, we can instead have a debate about how to allocate the economic benefits of climate action. What fraction of the real cash money savings should go to rate payers vs. bribing utility shareholders to go along vs. softening the blow to communities that are currently dependent on fossil fuels for their livelihoods? This is the kind of discussion we’ve seen playing out in conjunction with state-level utility asset securitization.

Land vs. Anti-Land

This book is framed almost entirely in terms of the interests of Capital and Labor, and the way in which climate happens to cut across that weirdly pervasive one-dimensional representation of politics. In this story about their signature issue, the Greens are a political non-entity because they wield almost no power.

But whenever I read about economics, I can’t help but think about Land, and at a fundamental level, I think the Greens are a Land party. I first came across Land as a set of economic interests distinct from Labor and Capital in the context of US housing and land-use policy, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.

Classical economists thought about land as one of the primary factors of production, mostly in the context of agricultural productivity, since that was top of mind in the 17th and 18th centuries. But the underlying attributes that make Land distinct from Labor and Capital show up in other things we might not label Land. Land is a natural monopoly. It’s a natural form of wealth in the world that exists outside of human control and you can’t make more of it. We’ve decided (especially in the US) that it should be an extremely rivalrous, excludable good. If you have “good land” (whose definition will vary depending on the context) then you can capture monopoly land rents determined by how much better your land is than other marginal land.

Fossil fuels are a quintessentially Land like asset. They’re an inequitably distributed natural resource, with wildly varying “quality” determined almost entirely by their physical nature: energy density, sulfur content, ease of extraction, etc. They are perfectly rivalrous: if you burn a gallon of gasoline, nobody else can ever burn it. Low cost producers like Saudi Aramco can extract massive rents because it costs them $10 to produce a barrel that might cost a deep offshore well $50.

Georgists are the anti-Land polity in an urban context, opposing the Landlords who privatize locational value that is produced by the community at large. I’d argue that the Greens are another kind of anti-Land polity, who oppose the extraction and privatization of value from the preexisting wealth of the Earth and similarly also oppose the destruction of the intrinsic value of the natural world through actions like dumping trillions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere radically and permanently altering Earth’s climate.

But you know what else is Anti-Land? Information. Informational goods can be both extremely non-rivalrous and non-excludable. Once a book is written, especially in digital form, the cost of a 2nd copy or another million copies is zero. Look at the persistence and widespread use of resources like Wikipedia, the Open Street Map and the insane success of open source software, or even of totally illegal information sharing services like Sci-Hub and Z-Library.

The economic dynamics of informational wealth — knowledge and technology — are the polar opposite of single-use natural resources like fossil fuels. The accumulation and global diffusion of knowledge and knowhow is why computer processing, disk storage, solar PV, heat pumps, genomic sequencing, and batteries have all been able to get onto learning curves and sustain their exponential cost declines as deployment scales up, sometimes for decades on end.

Obviously renewable energy is not a “dematerialized” technology. It still consumes silicon, lithium, copper, aluminum, cement, and steel. But the dynamics driving its commercialization and rapid deployment at ever lower costs and larger scales are driven for the time being by how information works, which is the opposite of how Land works. As the share of value in these technologies that’s made up of materials increases (because the technology costs decline over time) there will be ever increasing pressure to increase material efficiency to remain competitive. A similar dynamic existed historically with fossil fuels, but you just can’t build a gas turbine that’s much more than 60% efficient, and the vast majority of the material inputs in a fossil fuel energy system are the fuels themselves, which are consumed permanently. Whereas in renewable energy systems the materials become persistent capital stock that sticks around for decades and can (at least potentially) be recycled and used again.

It’s just a completely different game, and I’m very interested to see where it goes and how fast we can get there.

The post Carbon Captured by Matto Mildenberger appeared first on Amateur Earthling.

The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World is a series of case studies looking at what happened when organized pre-industrial administrative states or globalized markets came in contact with other human societies with less organizational capacity and power. It was a little dry, but I really liked the diversity of examples and the way they fed into each other, knitting together almost 300 years of history, from about 1500 to 1800. I’d highly recommend it to anyone who wonders what the global economy looked like in its awkward teenage years.

This is the first time that all the disparate parts of the human world became connected persistently, with flows of information, material resources, pathogens, culture and people growing almost continuously throughout. Communication and travel weren’t fast, but they were reliable enough that people kept doing them, and built huge economic and cultural and political structures around globe-spanning trade. Capital markets that vaguely resemble what we have today were starting to form. The state and market apparatus were sophisticated enough in some places to wield huge collective resources in very focused ways, impacting huge populations and natural resource stocks, even for what seem like kind of trivial ends. European fashion trends and status hierarchies nearly drove the North American beaver to extinction, dramatically reshaping the watersheds of half a continent.

The Old World

I liked how there was often a narrative link between the chapters, even as they jumped around the world. There was a weirdly long introduction to the Dutch Republic, and how they came to set up some of the first successful capital markets and became a global seafaring power, but then we follow the VOC (Dutch East India company) to its colonization of Taiwan — which I was previously unaware of. They used Taiwan as a kind of staging area to access Japanese and Chinese markets, as part of the silk / spice / silver trade they were engaged in, circling SE Asia endlessly, ultimately indirectly shuttling Spanish silver extracted from the Americas to China. They had a not entirely terrible relationship with the indigenous people of Taiwan (who are the progenitors of all the pacific islanders… even as far afield as Madagascar!). But eventually the Dutch were kicked out of Taiwan by the Chinese! I had no idea that China didn’t take over Taiwan until the 1600s, and in the end the Ming Dynasty fled to Taiwan in exile after being defeated by the Qing, in a weirdly familiar parallel to the Nationalists being exiled to Taiwan after the mid-20th century Chinese Civil War. It makes more historical sense now why the PRC feels so strongly about the current situation. Eventually the Qing take over Taiwan and drive out the last of the Ming holed up there, and engaged in a different kind of colonization with the indigenous people than we’ve typically seen in the west. They granted them land rights, and allowed them to collect rents on the land that was being occupied by Chinese settlers engaging in agriculture or forestry. In the long run the original Taiwanese still ended up dwindling and being assimilated, but the process was different. This is another running theme in the book — that while the means and even intentions behind the expansion of these systems of organization (markets and states) were pretty different in different contexts, the outcomes were remarkably similar. The highly organized systems, wielding distant collective resources with a very clear purpose in mind pretty much universally overwhelmed whatever smaller scale localized organization they encountered.

Then we hop across the straights to mainland early-modern Ming China, and the expansion of the centralized Chinese administrative state (and its attendant markets) into the foothills of the Himalayan Plateau to the south, where indigenous mountain peoples lived a localized, subsistence existence. Weirdly, it was partly the introduction of New World crops that made this expansion possible — wet rice agriculture wasn’t possible in the uplands, and so people had a more pastoral way of life. The introduction of maize and sweet potatoes meant that the mountain people could become farmers, and were more sedentary, which made it much easier to incorporate them into the systems of the Chinese state. Even though they often weren’t directly controlled by the state, they were integrated economically, and became a huge source of forest products for imperial China, leading to massive deforestation and loss of topsoil.

Weird aside on sweet potatoes: they were first domesticated in the Americas, but genetic studies indicate that they had been adopted by Pacific Islanders as a staple crop by about 1000 years ago — centuries before Europeans started exporting new cultivars from the Americas. So it seems that there was tenuous communication between the peoples of the Pacific and South America. They just didn’t stick around or engage in frequent, ongoing trade. But it was Europeans that introduced maize and sweet potatoes (and chiles!) to China, enabling this wild ecological / economic / societal chain reaction in the south.

From the disaster of South China’s deforestation, we hop over to Tokugawa Japan, famous for its isolationism and longsighted forestry practices. Japan is about as close as we get to a modern voluntary autarky. Communication with the outside world was punishable by death. The islands had a finite resource base and a powerful centralized administrative state. It’s one extreme of how a society can respond to encountering real ecological limits — one that I’d really like to read more about. Strict management of forest resources kept harvesting within sustainable bounds. Birth control was common. The material aesthetic of the culture became spartan. They made extensive use of marine resources. They adapted and survived, but didn’t really progress much technologically. They did have their own colonial relationship with the Ainu people of Hokkaido though, extracting deerskin from them in exchange for trade goods not unlike the French/English & Native American relationship. Through the Dutch (given special access to the Japanese markets through Nagasaki as protestant heretics — the Japanese did not like the Jesuits…) they also had access to deerskins from Taiwan (one of their main exports).

Then we bounce all the way around the world to another island nation off the coast of a big continent: Great Britain. Facing similar problems, the British had almost the polar opposite response to the Japanese. The gleefully cut down every tree in sight, and moved on to burning coal. They aggressively sought to import resources from absolutely anywhere on Earth, at gunpoint if need be: India, South Africa, North America, Myanmar. Rather than adapting their society to finite resources, the expropriated the resources of others, and developed ever more powerful technologies and economic institutions.

Then we jump to the borderlands between modern day Russia and Ukraine, and the settling of what had previously been a more pastoral environment by agriculturalists. I’d never really thought about the processes of “settling” these parts of the world that have been nominally connected for all of human history, but it does sound strangely similar to the colonization and frontier mentality we’re familiar with from the New World. Russia was a fairly brutal feudal state in the 1400s, with serfs all but enslaved to their landlords. But to the south and east were the differently brutal Tatars of the steppes. In between was a mix of grasslands and woodlands with incredible topsoil, not entirely under the control of either Russia or the Tatars. The Russians tacitly allowed outlaws and runaway serfs to percolate into the borderlands and settle down outside of the feudal system, gradually expanding their cultural and economic sphere and transitioning the area from nomadic pastoralism to settled agriculture.

Then we’re back with the Dutch, but this time in South Africa. I hadn’t realized that the Dutch basically colonized South Africa as a way station for the VOC — a small outpost raising cattle, running a hospital, and providing provisions to inbound and outbound ships rounding the cape for hundreds of years (until they lost it to the British around 1800). The “commercial pastoralism” of the Dutch displaced the indigenous Khoi Khoi pastoralists with more intensive export-oriented ranching practices. They imported slaves from India, Indonesia, the Malay Peninsula, and Madagascar. They also killed off an enormous proportion of the charismatic megafauna both for sport and for food.

The New World

Only at this point, halfway through the book, do we get to what I think we (at least in the Americas) more frequently think of as “the frontier.” And here the main character in the human drama is strangely non-human. Shortly after contact all throughout the Americas, wherever and whenever it happens, the indigenous peoples are decimated by disease. Often within a single generation, 90% or more of the population dies out, from wave after wave of different kinds of plague. Smallpox, influenza, measles. Often the very first accounts of the New World from Europeans describe a well peopled place — bustling towns, productive agriculture, trade networks, infrastructure, wealth, power — But the next time a chronicler passes through there’s nothing but the ghosts of a collapsed civilization.

I did not appreciate how rapid and complete this destruction was before, and I can’t help but wonder what the story of the Colombian Exchange would have been like in the absence of this dimension. Without pestilence on the side of the Europeans, would the Americas have seemed so much like an untrammeled wilderness? How different would the power dynamics have been? Once the Native Americans had widely adopted horses, writing, metalworking, firearms, and other imported technologies… would they have been so easily dominated if there had been 10 or 20 times as many of them up for a fight? The conquests of Pizarro in Peru and Cortez in Mexico were at least a little bit freakish, and only worked because they were able to take advantage of preexisting divisions within the empires they conquered, playing different factions off against each other.

Or what if the balance of pestilential power had been reversed? What if the the diseases of the New World had been vastly more deadly than those of the Old? What if the Europeans had unwittingly carried back a host of plagues, and the population of Afroeurasia had crashed by more than 90% in the 1500s instead? And what if at the same time the peoples of the Americas had adapted newly encountered technologies to their own purposes? Horses, iron smelting, printing presses, firearms, new crops, ocean-going vessels. What kind of multi-polar cultural world would we live in today? How long would the industrial revolution have been delayed?

But that’s not what happened. Instead, not long after conquering the Mexica with the help of their Tlaxcala rivals and turning Tenochtitlán into a smoking ruin, the Spanish found themselves occupying a suddenly depopulated, rewilding mesoamerica. The economy that developed hinged primarily on ranching and mining, where “ranching” frequently meant hunting down feral cattle, skinning them for their hides, and leaving the meat to rot. Silver and leather were the main exports back to Spain. A very “land-ist” economy — just taking what was buried in the earth, or were arose through biological productivity with minimal effort. Only gradually over centuries was the land repopulated and intensively worked again.

A different version of this played out with the Portuguese along the coast of Brazil. They really only took over a thin fringe of the country in pre-industrial times. The area under cultivation of sugar cane and the colonial population were both tiny. The natives were resistant to being enslaved, but susceptible to disease. Only the discovery of gold in the interior finally tempted Europeans away from the coast. Indigenous people retreated into the forest, and were pursued. But the forest was so vast that both the indigenous peoples and many African slaves were ultimately able to simply disappear and live independently away from their colonizers / enslavers.

As with the minimal amount of land being cultivated along the coast of Brazil, it’s wild to think that sugar production on the tiny Caribbean islands could have been significant in the context of the European economy. They ended up being a kind of laboratory for industrial agriculture, with just a single local crop, and all other necessities being shipped in from elsewhere — food, equipment, labor. There was a terrible feedback loop between sugar production, the slave trade, and the extraction of furs from northern latitudes. A constant flow of slaves was needed from Africa, since they were worked to death, and almost entirely male. With all provisions being shipped in to support sugar production, the plantation owners didn’t think it was worth supporting women and children. The islands were denuded of their original forests and indigenous populations. Some of the sugar and molasses were used to make rum. Rum was shipped north and part of it was used to create dependency in Native American populations, who were hard at work procuring fur bearing pelts for European traders. Profits from the sugar and furs and rum were plowed back into buying new slaves for the plantations.

The World Hunt

The last section of the book is about “the world hunt” — direct extraction of wild animal populations for furs, leather, ivory, oil, or meat, especially in the northern latitudes. In North America furs were obtained through trade, while in Siberia the Russian state extracted them by force as a kind of tax, with failure to pay punishable by violence against a person or their extended family. The outcomes were weirdly similar, despite being engaged with very different systems. Native Americans ended up totally dependent on Europeans for trade goods (firearms, steel tools, alcohol), and almost depopulated the continent of fur bearing animals. The Siberians were chased all the way to the Pacific, hunting desperately after sable and marten and ermine. Alcoholism, disease, dependency, and disempowerment.

New World cod fishing and arctic whaling were the only two case studies where the story really only involved one human population, going directly after a product of the natural world, and pushing both stocks to the point of collapse. It took hundreds of years to get there with the cod fishery, which only finally collapsed with the advent of “super trawlers” in the mid-20th century, which caught as much cod off Newfoundland in 15 years as was taken in the century from 1650-1750.

Being so accustomed to the use of petroleum it’s bizarre to imagine hunting whales for oil — not food oil, but oil for lubricating machinery. Oil to burn for light. But it was cheaper and easier than growing vegetable oil at the time. The plankton grows in the ocean for free, no fertilizer required. And the whales concentrated all that captured sunlight into a nice compact package you just had to go haul out of the water. One thing that amazed me about this story was that before commercial whaling took off, the entire population of right whales was only a few tens of thousands. This whole species in its pristine state only had as many individuals as the population of a medium sized university town. A college football stadium would hold more people. And yet they outweighed the entire circumpolar population of reindeer and caribou. It is totally bizarre that there are as many human beings as there are today. 8 billion. We make up a third of all the biomass of terrestrial mammals. And our livestock make up almost all of the remaining two-thirds. We are an anomaly.

What did I learn?

The dynamics of colonialism and unsustainable resource extraction aren’t unique to the story of European colonization. Very similar stories seem to have played out whenever large institutional organizations come into contact with smaller, less well organized sociotechnical polities that have something they want.

Organized commercial markets and administrative states can play the role of resource aggressor equally well. In the case of markets the focused attention is coming from a diffuse network of incentives, that get transmitted down to individuals on the ground, as in the case of Native Americans sent into the wilds to extract every last beaver. In the case of administrative states, the incentive structure is much more obviously hierarchical and intentional. It’s easier to think of markets as something that “just happens” but throughout the book there were many, many examples of intentional government policies being made to create, protect, and shape the markets that ultimately ended up doing the extraction.

Globalized markets that change quickly in a coordinated way are terrifying. Especially today, any local or niche product that gets noticed by the world can explode in an orgy of destruction. I heard people talking about this with mescal in Oaxaca — suddenly it’s the new popular hipster cocktail mixer in the US, and so artisanal distilleries are cropping up all over the place. Plantings of the espadín maguey are taking over land that used to grow food. Wild type maguey varietals that take longer to mature and can’t be cultivated are being hunted in the woodlands in the mountains and harvested with abandon to produce rare, higher priced products. Avocados have experienced something similar in Guanajuato and Michoacán, expanding monocrop plantings, and inviting drug cartels to diversify their business lines. Not everything can be commoditized and scaled up to serve the whims of global market attention, at least not rapidly, and not when it’s a natural product of the world. That’s what we’ve come to expect on the basis of our experience with manufactured goods that are just novel assemblages of already commoditized inputs. We can change the informational aspects of products very quickly, but the material parts are much slower. The US and Europe haven’t been on the receiving end of this dynamic for a long time, but as they shrink as a proportion of the global economy, it’s going to happen more and more, and it’s going to be uncomfortable.

Old World diseases are what destroyed the indigenous people of the Americas. We would be living in a very different world if the pathogens had been fighting against the Europeans instead. The colonizing Europeans were also horrible actors, but their intentional impact pales in comparison. This is not just a historical curiosity. After 3 years of the coronavirus pandemic we still don’t get it. COVID was a horror show, but it could have been much, much, much worse. All the risk factors that warned us to watch out for a pandemic are still there. We haven’t really changed anything systematically (though the mRNA vaccines are nice). If it had been a MERS pandemic we would have 2 billion dead instead. And that still wouldn’t have been nearly as bad as what happened to the indigenous people of the Americas.

Societies that acknowledge limits can adapt and evolve within them. The example of Tokugawa Japan is really interesting, and I want to read more about it. It wasn’t entirely something you’d want to emulate: widespread infanticide and general technological stagnation aren’t great selling points. But you could imagine an island nation (*cough* planet *cough*) that accepted physical resource limits without simultaneously isolating itself technologically and culturally. How would that be different?

The energy transition is a big natural resource shift, and that’s weird. If we are successful in pulling of the transition from coal, oil, and natural gas to an almost entirely electrified economy that depends primarily on solar, wind, battery storage, heat pumps, etc. we will be redirecting vast streams of primary material resource demands — billions of tons a year less of fossil fuels, and hundreds of millions of tons more of lithium for batteries, copper for motors and dynamos, rare earth elements for magnets and semiconductors, etc. This will be a different kind of change than when we use all the same materials but arrange them differently this year than we did last year, and maybe use 5% more of them overall. We’re talking about ramping up production of some raw inputs by a factor of 100x, and crashing production of some of our highest volume commodities to zero. In a single generation. It will be a discontinuity.

The post The Unending Frontier by John F. Richards appeared first on Amateur Earthling.

Ironically, many advocates of degrowth claim exactly the same thing: that in the short term technological solutions can’t deliver the scale and speed of emissions reductions required to limit warming to 2°C (and certainly not 1.5°C). As a result the 1.5-2°C emissions trajectories that get taken seriously today all include substantial negative emissions later in the 21st century. Substantial as in, on the order of tens of billions of tons per year. (Both camps could be correct: our success is not required.)

Gopal’s take is totally understandable and common given trends over the last few decades. It’s charitable, even — a lot of the climate policy wonkosphere won’t even give lip service to social change as a meaningful possibility. I think these assessments are missing an acknowledgement of the degree to which our social norms are literally legislated and then enforced by the state. The fact that we haven’t seen society in places like the US adopt a different, less consumptive way of life doesn’t necessarily mean that it can’t be done, or that there aren’t people eager to do it.

Social Rheology

The overwhelming majority of people just want to do what they see other people doing. Occasionally a few weirdos want to do something else. In isolation they have almost no impact, but just like a Rayleigh-Taylor instability in a non-Newtonian fluid, if the pocket of weirdos gets big enough, it can become self-amplifying. They can create a new pocket universe with a different set of social expectations. Once that happens normal people have an easier time picturing themselves as part of that alternative social context. If it has something valuable to offer, it can grow.

This process doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Beyond social norms we have laws, financing mechanisms, tax codes, legacy physical infrastructure, business models, interest groups and other social constructs that can either amplify or dampen newly formed local social changes. These often determine what kinds of things are allowed to establish a positive feedback loop and grow exponentially, and what things are quickly snuffed out. Obviously policy isn’t all-powerful — no amount of state support was able to make Lamarckian genetics work for Soviet agronomists, or backyard steel production work for Mao, or spur a coal revival under Trump — but I think its power to shape society is underappreciated.

It’s impossible to avoid this kind of “social engineering.” Society has been a work of engineering since we started having structured processes for making and enforcing shared rules. It’s just a question of who the rules are engineered by and for.

This is also the (frequently dark) magic underlying Capitalism: we get more and more of whatever produces higher returns in a self-reinforcing loop. With the right underlying ruleset we could imagine getting widespread innovation, improving human well being, and a thriving biosphere out of that machine. With the wrong ruleset we get handwavy technobable nothing burgers, grotesque wealth inequality, and ecological collapse.

At a high level we’re at least talking about explicit industrial and technology policy again. Which sectors do we want to have an easier time growing going forward? Which ones do we want to see wind down? As with social engineering, there’s no way to avoid this fitness landscape existing. The best we can do is acknowledge it and be purposeful about how it’s shaped.

If that conversation is worthwhile in the context of solar, wind, nuclear, biofuels, batteries, carbon removal, geoengineering and heat pumps, why not also have it about the rules that shape our daily social patterns? What patterns of behavior do we want to outlaw, allow, or encourage? What do we want the path of least resistance to be? What do we want to amplify, and what do we want to dampen?

What we amplify and dampen

This is the same question we’re grappling with on social media, but IRL, and on longer timescales. The Algorithm wants to hold our attention for as long as possible so that it can sell our eyeballs and our clicks. So it seeks to enrage us, and inspire in-group reinforcing hot takes. What does our Long Algorithm want us to do? What kind of society does it exponentiate and who does it snuff out?

US Land use codes are designed to isolate us from each other. Shared and intrinsically affordable housing is outlawed in many places. Do it, and eventually Sheriff’s deputies will come and physically throw you out, even if you own the house. In places where it’s legal, financing mechanisms functionally outlaw the creation and stewardship of community managed affordable housing. Who wants to pay 5% interest with 20% down on a 7 year commercial balloon mortgage when the nuclear family can bet everything on a 4%, fully amortized 30 year loan to buy an undiversified, speculative real estate portfolio with only 5% down? Even when that bet works out, it means someone else eventually gets screwed. Apartment buildings are illegal in large majorities of almost every US city.

Legally codified land use patterns and bloated parking requirements make it impossible to serve US cities with active transportation or mass transit, so new infrastructure investments are largely poured into more unhealthy, isolating, dangerous, time-wasting, impoverishing auto dependence. It’s the Lysenkoism of our time. Any time someone says that the energy transition has become inevitable because of the economics, I just think of the US land use and transportation system and wince.

No US city has bike infrastructure on par with all of the Netherlands or Denmark, or a mass transit system that compares to Switzerland. It’s almost impossible to take someone’s divers license away in the US no matter how many DUIs they get because in many places it amounts to an economic death sentence. No matter how much somebody would prefer to bike for transportation, if it feels like they’re risking their life every day to do it, eventually they’ll give up. Massive tax credits for electric cars but a pittance for electric bikes (with much lower income caps) certainly don’t help.

The Long Algorithm of the US does its best to structurally amplify wealth-concentrating hyperconsumption, and damp out the emergence of lower intensity ways of daily life. It effectively prohibits joyful communitarian sufficiency even before we’ve discussed the problems of advertising and public relations campaigns specifically designed to generate artificial demand for unnecessary positional goods by stoking social anxiety.

So it’s hard for me to take someone seriously when they say this kind of social change can only contribute at the margins. Not because what they’re saying is false, but because we’ve specifically engineered society so that it’s true. And it will remain true, until we decriminalize low-consumption social norms, and allow the pockets of weirdos who want to do something different to make examples of themselves.

The post The Long Algorithm appeared first on Amateur Earthling.

For me the wildest parts of this story had to do with the ability of fungi to process information and react appropriately. They appear to be more actively engaged in the world than plants, and in some ways almost resemble animals. This study published in Nature in 2019 found that fungi had a sense of direction and some kind of memory. The researchers put a small block of wood inoculated with a fungus into an environment where it could grow and explore and eventually discover another block of wood. Then they’d remove the original block of wood and put it in a new environment, and they found that the mycelium would continue preferentially growing and exploring in the direction that had led to the “bait” before!

Mycelial Minds

In addition, it’s been shown that information propagates through mycelial networks faster than can be explained by chemical diffusion or the active transport of cellular fluids. It turns out that at least in some cases, the hyphae can transmit waves of changing electrochemical potentials in much the same way that neurons do in animals. So there’s clearly some amount of information processing and sensing of the environment going on, but nobody seems clear on how it works, or how much is happening.

This gets extra weird in the chapter that talks about the ways in which fungi directly interface with brains. Why do some of them make hallucinogens? Apparently psilocybin has evolved independently in several different lineages of fungi. The molecule that LSD is based on is synthesized by the ergot fungus. How does it help a fungus to make a difficult molecule that dissolves the egos of complicated mammals? Why do these compounds affect the brains of such a wide range of animals? Is it really just a coincidental side-effect?

He also gets into the new wave of research into the use of psychedelic drugs to treat addiction, depression, and other mental illnesses. Unlike most drugs, where the effect is pretty much just chemical, and they do their biological work largely regardless of your psychological experience of them, the medicinal utility of psychedelics seems be a function of the experience itself. Given the range of societies that have used psychedelics in analogous ways for thousands of years, this is maybe not so surprising. Still, it’s nice to see western society maybe getting over it’s deranged mid-20th century fears of these drugs.

And then there are the ophiocordyceps fungi that turn ants and other invertebrates into zombies, forcing them to take very specific actions that help spread the spores of the fungi far and wide. Again nobody knows exactly how these fungi work, but apparently they colonize the entire body of their host, with hyphae interwoven through muscle fibers and organs — but curiously, not the brain.

Promiscuous Collaborators

Another running theme in the book is the promiscuity of fungal collaborations. Lichen are hybrid organisms that bring together fungal and photosynthetic partners to make a more robust and adaptable whole. But it’s not a fixed one-to-one relationship. The same partners can work with a variety of different species. And sometimes an “individual” lichen is made up of 3 or 4 or more “separate” organisms! That may reproduce together as a whole, or not, depending on the situation.

Fungi have been working with larger plants for at least as long as there have been plants on land. Almost half a billion years ago, they grew into some of the first towering organisms, called Prototaxites, before any plant had figured out how to stand tall.

As with the lichen, one type of fungus can have relationships with many different species of plants at the same time. Different mycelial networks can share resources with each other. Individual plants can have relationships with several different kinds of fungi — including cheating in some cases! Bright red snowflowers and striped candycanes don’t photosynthesize at all, and instead tap into mycorrhizal networks, apparently only to extract resources without giving anything back.

Fungi engage in arbitrage. They will extract mineral resources like phosphorous from one location, and move it to plants that need it in another. In exchange, they get supplied with sugar, but the exchange rate varies by location depending on how plentiful phosphorous is. The same fungus will “charge” different prices to different plants. They also apparently maintain a genetic library of different kinds of enzymes, for disassembling different materials. In some cases mycelium will encounter a new material, and be unable to take it apart initially, only to suddenly realize a week later that in fact it does have the key, and start noshing down. Bacteria get shuttled around in mycelial networks too, like some kind of micro-subway. Is it done with purpose? Are they another resource to be redistributed? Or are they just along for the ride?

Then there are the termites and leaf cutter ants that have both domesticated (or been domesticated by?) their own independent species of fungus, which they cultivate inside dark chambers underground, feeding them leaves and wood pulp.

Given that some mycelial networks span many acres, and may live almost indefinitely, it’s hard not to wonder what kind of complex resource shuffling and information processing they’re engaged in under our feet. The fungal way of life is as different from ours as it is from plants. While humans have fermented foods for millennia, we haven’t dependent as completely on fungi as we have on our domesticated plants and animals, and so much of what they do takes place out of sight and out of mind, that it seems like they’ve been neglected a bit by science so far. But it sounds like this is changing, and there will be plenty of truly psychedelic findings in the years to come.

What to Read Next?

• How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan, for more on the pharmacological uses of fungi, and the ongoing research renaissance.
• Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard, for a deeper investigation of the plant side of mycorrhizal relations, and how the forest works.
• The Overstory by Richard Powers would be different — a novel about the relationships between people and trees.

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After reading Metazoa I wanted to explore a different branch of our phylogenetic tree, and so picked up The Hidden Life of Trees. It’s a bunch of short anecdotes about the ecology of European beech forests, which is an awfully niche thing to write a book about. But then it did make the NY Times bestseller list in 2016.

I knew that this book probably wasn’t written for me, but the material is definitely cool, and I wanted to compare its style with Metazoa. Both books are trying to communicate a collection of scientific findings that border on the mystical. What makes a mind? How do ancient trees communicate through a living internet? And they both end up anthropomorphizing their very non-human subjects. Peter Godfrey-Smith makes it very clear up front that he’s a materialist. Wohlleben is much harder to pin down. I was never able to tell if he literally believes the things he’s saying, or if it’s a literary device. Normally this would get some eyerolls from me, but like I said, I don’t think I’m the intended audience. Clearly the book connected with a huge audience and successfully diffused these ideas into public consciousness.

Forests are much more communicative and cooperative communities than we’d previously thought, filled with an almost social drama playing out over centuries instead of decades. Different species share both information and materials, sometimes with kin, sometimes more generally. The fungi link together different individual organisms, and extract minerals as well. Mother trees sustain their offspring in the darkness below the canopy, so they are ready to leap toward the light when the time comes. Fire clears out the underbrush and makes minerals easily available, triggering the release of seeds. Forests migrate south en masse as the glaciers advance, but some species can get trapped, unable to climb over the Alps, and are wiped out locally. It’s a seething, adaptive civilization that you can only see through time lapse eyes.

Back to the (Wood)Land

Throughout the book Wohlleben argues for a much more ecologically sensitive approach to forest management and timber harvesting. He makes the case that tree plantations aren’t really forests, because they lack the complex interactions between different species that make forests function as they do, and give them a lot of resilience to different kinds of perturbations: insect pests, pathogens, droughts, etc. In contrast, monocultural silviculture makes for fragile, barren ecosystems, that probably aren’t as productive as they could be either.

He envisions something a forester’s back-to-the-land movement, where individual trees are hauled out of the woods by horses or other draft animals, and the arboreal ecosystem is left to play out its complex drama largely undisturbed.

This would be a radical departure from current practices. We consume timber and other forest products on a scale beyond almost all other materials, on the order of billions of tons a year. Only fossil fuels, iron, and cement are comparable (see Vaclav Smil’s Making the Modern World for an overview of just how much of everything we make). If anything, it seems likely that our consumption of timber for construction purposes may increase, as we (hopefully) displace energy and carbon intensive steel and concrete with mass timber in many applications (see this great overview from Dave Roberts).

“Smart” Forests?

There are other possible responses to this new understanding of how forests work. Once we start to develop models of how different species support each other and interact, why wouldn’t we use that knowledge to bend the forest more effectively to our will? What would stop timber companies from attempting to hack the Wood Wide Web to benefit themselves economically? I’m not saying this would be good, but it seems pretty consistent with our past behavior.

If you know a bark beetle infestation is spreading, and want the trees to prepare their defenses, maybe you could tell them ahead of time? Could the trees be told to activate drought-tolerant behaviors preemptively, to deal with climate change? Might we engineer mycorrhizal fungi that would only supply nutrients to the economically valuable species, and starve the others? Would it be possible to hijack the ability of trees to exchange carbon, and instead use it to deposit that carbon in the soil in some permanent form? Can we eavesdrop on the chemical messages being passed around in forests to build a picture of how pests and climate and harvesting are affecting them?

Or more prosaically, maybe we’ll just use this knowledge to make our plantations into better forest simulacra. Keep one tree in a hundred as a mother. Mix these three species in this pattern with that frequency. Inoculate the soils with a particular collection of genetically engineered fungal symbionts protected by patents owned by Georgia Pacific.

Further Reading

Suzanne Simard, the scientist behind a lot of the findings communicated in this book, has just released a book of her own “Finding the Mother Tree” if you’re interested in hearing about the science without the Wohlleben’s particular filter. She gave a talk about it at Google recently, and has several TED talks too.

I’m going to read Merlin Sheldrake’s book Entangled Life next, which gets at a lot of the topics in this book, but from the fungi’s point of view…

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Metazoa is kind of a sequel to “Other Minds”, Godfrey-Smith’s excellent book about the nature of cephalopod intelligence. Metazoa takes a broader view, and explores the nature of minds in general, and how they’re inextricably linked to the animal way-of-being: having a unified, unitary body that can sense and react to the world around it. It was also an interesting book to read in combination with Sean B. Carroll’s “Endless Forms Most Beautiful” about animal body plans, and how they evolved through the use of gene regulatory networks and a meta-genetic toolkit that we share with all bilaterians.

This author kind of feels like a Carl Sagan of Marine Biology — very clearly trying to understand the world within a Materialist / Naturalist framework (which I appreciate) but without losing a sense of the mystical nature of existence. He’s asking “What kind of thing is a mind?” and “How can that kind of thing arise through evolution and be composed of nothing but a particular collection of matter and energy?” Why does this happen at all? How general or common a phenomenon is it?

A lot of both this book and Other Minds is about highlighting similar features that seem to have arisen both in human / mammalian / vertebrate brains-and-minds, and the almost completely independently evolved brains-and-minds of other very different forms of life. Our family tree split more than half a billion years ago, and our last common ancestor was, by all indications, something like a flatworm.

So it’s kind of crazy that so many high level similarities have arisen — it makes it seem plausible that minds in general are just a kind of thing that matter does sometimes in the universe. Compound and camera eyes, the ability to sense pressure and heat and chemical gradients, to manipulate the world around you, to differentiate between yourself and other things, and the consequences of your actions, and phenomena that are independent of you — to a remarkable degree these phenomena exist in at least 3 big branches of Earth’s phylogenetic tree, mostly independently.

There’s a lot in here that gets at the connection between knowing and doing too, which is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, especially in the context of collective action and knowledge at the societal level.

One idea he explored that was interesting was the possibility of more distributed consciousnesses, as in the case of the octopus, which only has about 1/3 of its neurons in a centralized “brain” while the rest are distributed throughout its arms. The arms appear to be semi-autonomous, but also capable of acting in concert with each other and some more directed, centralized purpose when the creature wants to. So does each arm have its own independent or subsidiary consciousness? Do they meld together with each other? Or with the centralized mind when there’s more attention being paid? This seems pretty abstract and hypothetical… except that it turns out we have evidence for this kind of multiplicity of consciousness in humans too!

In some severe cases of epilepsy, the two hemispheres of human brains are surgically separated, and these split-brained folks are still generally able to function well under most circumstances. But when you isolate the sensory input to one side of the brain, things get weird. Like you can recognize an object, but not think of the word that describes it. I’d read about this before, but I hadn’t heard that you can induce this situation non-destructively in people too! It’s possible to put just one hemisphere of the brain under general anesthetic at a time, leaving you with the consciousness of half-a-brain! And it’s still conscious! And the kind of consciousness you have is different, depending on which half is awake! Knock out the side that deals with language, and every single word you know is suddenly just on the tip of your tongue… Part of me (which part?!) would honestly love to have this experience. What does the transition from one-sided consciousness to two-sided consciousness feel like? Waking up that other half of yourself?

Also wild: it turns out that this is how dolphins sleep! One hemisphere at a time. They’re never completely asleep. Also, it seems like many, many different kinds of minds need to sleep, and seem to dream!

Another thing I’d never realized is that there are macroscopic patterns of electrical activity in the brain. Not just cascades of neurons firing, but waves of coordinated electrical flow — a spatially oriented and temporally organized cascades. Almost like a clock cycle in a CPU, and operating at more than one frequency. It reminded me of a 1996 experiment by Adrian Thompson in which circuits were allowed to evolve toward some end in field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), and it was found that even some disconnected elements of the circuits were necessary for them to function — because they had evolved to take advantage of analog electromagnetic coupling within the computer (more anecdotes here)!

I love these long rambling explorations of some thread of our evolution. The book gave me a deeper appreciation for what it really means to be an animal in the general sense — like in a way that would make it possible to recognize the animal way-of-being in another entirely separate biosphere. It also made the idea of Other Minds more generally in the universe seem more likely to me. Will they develop radio telescopes and space ships? Maybe not, but I find it even hard now to imagine a Universe where Earth is the only home of sensitive, evaluative, coherent selves. I mean if hermit crabs can weigh several different pros and cons in whether or not they should change shells, and then make a decision, why not?

It also got me thinking about these other general ways-of-being that have evolved on Earth. Plants and Fungi seem like the other two obvious ones. The stationary light harvesters, and the disassemblers. What other strategies for macroscopic life exist out there? How often do the different strategies combine with each other? How prevalent are the different strategies? Is it common to get a planet that only has plants and fungi without animals? Or is the animal way-of-being irresistible to life? I want to read The Hidden Life of Trees (plants) and Entangled Life (fungi) for analogous takes on these other branches of our biosphere.

Also: what other kinds of hardware do these underlying strategies play out on? We happen to have cells made of lipid bilayers, and we use them to construct electrical networks using ion channels that influence each other and cause cascades of charge to flow. But surely there are other ways of evolving the same functionality. Are there animals that have fiber optic nerves? That transmit information internally using light instead of electrochemical systems? How does that affect their subjective experience? Are there light-harvesting-beings that make use of harder radiation? UV or X-rays? Or is it just too hard to maintain an ordered substrate with that much energy flowing through you in destructive packets?

At the very end of the book he briefly considers the idea of “artificial” minds — whether based on what we know about how animal minds are composed, we should expect to be able to create something similar in computers. Obviously the hardware is really different, and so the physical kind-of-thing that animal minds are wouldn’t be replicated, but it felt to me like he was too dismissive of the possibility just on the basis of that difference. The pulsing waves of electromagnetic fields that animal minds generate and are bathed within seem too orderly and ubiquitous to be an accident, and they wouldn’t exist in the same way for an artificial mind, but is it so crazy to think that we could figure out (or evolve) another system that would play the same regulatory or other role that those fields play in us?

In any case, plenty of good food for thought.

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