Getting real on carbon emissions

Eminent energy expert Vaclav Smil delivers quite the reality sandwich in his latest New York Times interview.

“We live in this world of exaggerated promises and delusional pop science. I’m trying to bring it onto some modest track of reality and common sense. The official goal in the U.S. is complete decarbonization of electricity generation by 2035. That’s Biden’s program: zero-carbon electricity in 2035. The country doesn’t have a national grid! How will you decarbonize and run the country by wind and solar without a national grid? And what will it take to build a national grid in a NIMBY society like the U.S.?“

…

“What we need is the dull, factually correct and accurate middle. Because only from that middle will come the solutions. Solutions never come from extremes. It’s also irresponsible to state the problem in ways where, when you look closer, it’s not like that. There are these billions of people who want to burn more fossil fuel. There is very little you can do about that. They will burn it unless you give them something different. But who will give them something different? You have to recognize the realities of the world, and the realities of the world tend to be unpleasant, discouraging and depressing.“

Smil is very smart – Bill Gates is a big fan – and he has a new book out on how the world really works. His older work Energy and Civilization: A History is very good too.

Read the interview.

Dan Hannan on the limits of the West

An interesting counterpoint to my recent speech courtesy of Dan Hannan. The West is back, and its strength is evident. But its geographical limitations have also been made evident by war in Ukraine.

“The West, in short, turns out to be a small collection of rich nations grouped around the Anglosphere. Many of us had assumed that, after the fall of communism, our values would spread, as people recognized that open societies based on individual freedoms were happier as well as more successful. Boy, were we wrong.”

Read it all.

Revitalising the West

A transcript of my speech at this weekend’s New Culture Forum conference is available to read at The Critic:

“Our greatest threat comes from those, without and within, who think that the West’s strangely divided nature is too weak to survive, or that its day is done. Those who dismiss the West always believe they are opening the door to something new, a better alternative. More stable, or more efficient, or more socially just. Or perhaps, even, more like the past. Instead, as it always turns out, they are letting back in what Kipling called the “old king”. Imperial despotism.”

Read the whole thing.

Friday Cocktail: British space power, a royal birthday and Elon Musk’s toilet

Sip: on a Queen Elizabeth Cocktail. Happy 96th birthday, Ma’am (although this drink is named after the wife of a Philadelphia bartender).

Weekend browsing:

• Post-Brexit liftoff: Britain prepares for its first space launches since the Seventies

• France’s doomed love affair with state power

• Ignore his tweets from the toilet: Elon Musk is giving the world a brighter future

• As China heads for decline, both demographic and economic, dangers mount

Listen to: Sarah McLachlan singing Rainbow Connection

“Some day we'll find it

The rainbow connection

The lovers, the dreamers, and me.“

Nassim Taleb on the West

A fascinating essay from Nassim Taleb (author of The Black Swan, Antifragile, etc.) on the two systems at war in Ukraine.

“This war […] is a confrontation between two systems, one modern, decentralized and multicephalous, the other archaic, centralized and autocephalous. Ukraine wants to belong to the liberal system: while being Slavic-speaking, like Poland, it wants to be part of the West.”

He goes on to give a interesting working definition of the West:

“What we call ‘the West’ is not a spiritual entity, but an administrative system first and last. Is is not an ethno-geographical ensemble, but a legal and institutional system: it includes Japan, S. Korea, and Taiwan. It mixes the thalassocratic Phoenician world of network-based trade and that of Adam Smith, based on individual rights and freedom to transact, under the constraint of social progress. In the United States, the difference between Democrats and Republicans is minor when seen from a different century. Both sides wants social progress, but at different rates of growth.

On the other hand, nationalism requires the All-Mighty Centralized –worse, Hegelian — State, and one that curates cultural life to weed out individual variations.“

Read the whole thing.

The War on the West reviewed: my latest for the Telegraph

My review for the Telegraph of Douglas Murray’s latest book is now up.

I reference Susan Sontag’s famous “cancer of human history” putdown, published in 1967 in Partisan Review (online here, beginning on page 51). As you’ll see if you follow the link above, it’s part of a much longer essay and contextualised as a critique of contemporary America. Still, it is worth reading the whole extraordinary putdown, which is rarely quoted in full because of its length:

“If America is the culmination of Western white civilization, as everyone from the Left to the Right declares, then there must be something terribly wrong with Western white civilization. […] The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, Balanchine ballets, et al., don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone – its ideologies and inventions – which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself. What the Mongol hordes threaten is far less frightening than the damage that Western ‘Faustian’ man, with his idealism, his magnificent art, his sense of intellectual adventure, his world-devouring energies for conquest, has already done, and further threatens to do.”

Note the reference to “Faustian” man, which reveals Sontag’s debt to Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West. Indeed, as Sontag goes on to make plain in the same piece, her dismissal goes hand in hand with her certainty that the United States is already heading for the scrapheap:

“This is a doomed country, it seems to me; I only pray that, when America founders, it doesn’t drag the rest of the planet down, too.”

Do robots dream of electric drugs? An AI that ‘hallucinates’ new proteins is about to change the world

I was excited when it was announced at the end of 2020 that Alphafold had used DeepMind’s AI to solve the 50-year-old protein folding problem. Now the applications of that breakthrough are starting to emerge and according to this article in Nature they are remarkable. From better drugs to synthetic enzymes that eat plastic, whole new fields with powerful real-world applications are opening up in molecular biology.

Alongside mRNA vaccines and CRISPR gene-editing, and all the other applications of AI that are on the way, it’s a reminder of what an exciting time we are living through. It’s also a sign of the strength of British innovation. DeepMind remains London-based, after being acquired by Google in 2014.

Thanks to @perrymetzger for tweeting the Nature piece.

Good Friday 1613. Riding Westward

A poem by the incomparable John Donne.

“Let mans Soule be a Spheare, and then, in this,
The intelligence that moves, devotion is,
And as the other Spheares, by being growne
Subject to forraigne motion, lose their owne,
And being by others hurried every day,
Scarce in a yeare their naturall forme obey:
Pleasure or businesse, so, our Soules admit
For their first mover, and are whirld by it.
Hence is't, that I am carryed towards the West
This day, when my Soules forme bends toward the East.
There I should see a Sunne, by rising set,
And by that setting endlesse day beget;
But that Christ on this Crosse, did rise and fall,
Sinne had eternally benighted all.
Yet dare I'almost be glad, I do not see
That spectacle of too much weight for mee.
Who sees Gods face, that is selfe life, must dye;
What a death were it then to see God dye?
It made his owne Lieutenant Nature shrinke,
It made his footstoole crack, and the Sunne winke.
Could I behold those hands which span the Poles,
And tune all spheares at once peirc'd with those holes?
Could I behold that endlesse height which is
Zenith to us, and our Antipodes,
Humbled below us? or that blood which is
The seat of all our Soules, if not of his,
Made durt of dust, or that flesh which was worne
By God, for his apparell, rag'd, and torne?
If on these things I durst not looke, durst I
Upon his miserable mother cast mine eye,
Who was Gods partner here, and furnish'd thus
Halfe of that Sacrifice, which ransom'd us?
Though these things, as I ride, be from mine eye,
They'are present yet unto my memory,
For that looks towards them; and thou look'st towards mee,
O Saviour, as thou hang'st upon the tree;
I turne my backe to thee, but to receive
Corrections, till thy mercies bid thee leave.
O thinke mee worth thine anger, punish mee,
Burne off my rusts, and my deformity,
Restore thine Image, so much, by thy grace,
That thou may'st know mee, and I'll turne my face.”

Happy Easter.

Putin’s war against the West

In 1938, Aurel Kolnai published War Against The West, a remarkable and prescient book, which used the Nazis’ own words to reveal the National Socialist project as inimical to the West. There was no choice, Kolnai warned. The Nazi regime would have to be confronted and defeated by a revitalised Western alliance.

Reading Kolnai in the light of today’s Russian aggression, it’s hard to avoid the parallels.

“There exists today in Europe a great nation, of the highest achievements in the past, which now professes a creed of unbridled and irrational power. [….] a fountain-head of propaganda and a menace of war.”

Or how about this?

“It will always ‘irritate’ those who nurse dark designs if those around them, who cannot help being ‘around’ them, arrange for their own protection.”

Incidentally, this article from the Telegraph is very good on the Nazi roots of Putin’s mystical theo-fascism. In 2005, Putin ordered the corpse of Ivan Ilyin to be disinterred from its Swiss grave and flown back to Russia to be buried with all the honour his regime could provide.

“Ilyin was a conservative philosopher exiled from communist Russia for his opposition to the Bolsheviks. He washed up in Berlin just as the new ideology of fascism was taking off in Italy and Germany. Ilyin saw in Mussolini and Hitler models for the reinvention of a new Russian tsarism, in which a strong leader could abolish the individuality of his people and bind them into one spiritual, collective whole, free of corruption and impurities.

“Putin is clearly no philosopher, but of all the intellectuals in Russian history, it is Ilyin whom he quotes the most. According to the Yale historian Timothy Snyder, just as troops were being readied to invade Crimea in 2014, the Kremlin arranged for all of Russia’s senior officials and regional governors to be sent a copy of Ilyin’s Our Tasks, in which the philosopher predicts the emergence of a ‘national dictator’ who will be ‘the living organ of Russia’.”

Terrifying. For a deeper dive, the BBC Radio podcast series on Putin is full of interesting detail on Russia’s new living organ.

As Kolnai saw, National Socialism was a conscious rejection of the Western tradition. Yet Putin’s Russia shares the delusion that Nazism was instead a Western evil, which is how he can proclaim himself the true “anti-fascist”. According to the sociologist Lev Gudkov, under Putin’s tutelage many Russians have now come to understand the Great Patriotic War of 1941-45 as the most important event in Russia’s history, because it was “a victory not only over Germany but also over the West”.

They are wrong about that. Let us hope proving them wrong can be done without a deepening war.

Here is Kolnai again, on how to prepare against such terrible delusions.

“The only possible course is to provide for such an incontestable and crushing superiority – moral and juridical, material and strategic – as will either deter irresponsible anti-European powers from taking arms to pursue their schemes, or else will ensure that those desperate adventurers who still prefer to take the sword shall ‘perish by the sword’.”

Why everything is stupid and it’s all Mark Zuckerberg’s fault

Beware of monocausal explanations. With that proviso, a new essay in The Atlantic by Jonathan Haidt is an excellent attempt to lay almost all the blame for our current madness at the feet of social media and Facebook in particular. (Although I have to admit that I wouldn’t have come across this without following the always-interesting @georgetrefgarne on Twitter).

“This, I believe, is what happened to many of America’s key institutions in the mid-to-late 2010s. They got stupider en masse because social media instilled in their members a chronic fear of getting darted. The shift was most pronounced in universities, scholarly associations, creative industries, and political organizations at every level (national, state, and local), and it was so pervasive that it established new behavioral norms backed by new policies seemingly overnight. The new omnipresence of enhanced-virality social media meant that a single word uttered by a professor, leader, or journalist, even if spoken with positive intent, could lead to a social-media firestorm, triggering an immediate dismissal or a drawn-out investigation by the institution. Participants in our key institutions began self-censoring to an unhealthy degree, holding back critiques of policies and ideas—even those presented in class by their students—that they believed to be ill-supported or wrong.“

Haidt rightly references Martin Gurri. It’s also delightful to see a shoutout for the late, great Steve Horwitz.

“A brilliant 2015 essay by the economist Steven Horwitz argued that free play prepares children for the ‘art of association’ that Alexis de Tocqueville said was the key to the vibrancy of American democracy; he also argued that its loss posed ‘a serious threat to liberal societies.’ A generation prevented from learning these social skills, Horwitz warned, would habitually appeal to authorities to resolve disputes and would suffer from a ‘coarsening of social interaction’ that would ‘create a world of more conflict and violence.’“

Read the whole thing. It’s unsparing to all sides, as it should be, and even softens its monocausal frame toward the end with Haidt’s concerns about parenting styles.

Love what you copy

A valuable video essay from the always-interesting Kirby Ferguson, known for his work on creativity as “the art of the remix”. Ferguson’s essay tackles cultural appropriation head-on. His main point: respect becomes visible when you love what you copy.

David Hyde Pierce on food for the soul

I’m a big fan of Frasier, so it’s intriguing to see the hugely-talented David Hyde Pierce (Niles) returning to TV playing husband to the chef Julia Child. This recent Guardian interview is a fascinating glimpse into a very private but by all accounts enormously warm and generous man.

I especially enjoyed this digression about the importance of art in the midst of crisis:

“[Hyde-Pierce] becomes especially animated about a cellist he saw playing Bach on the streets of Ukraine. ‘There’s a reason. There’s a reason Yo-Yo Ma played Bach cello suites in the midst of the pandemic. The sparest, most elemental kind of music that you wouldn’t think of as popular entertainment – because it wasn’t, it was lifeblood.’”

Read the whole thing. Or just watch Niles channeling Buster Keaton below.

Friday Cocktail: UFOs and other invisible friends

Sip: on an Enigma

Weekend browsing:

• How to stop the next pandemic now

• Anniversary letters between Argentina and the Falklands

• Company in solitude: Roger Scruton on the life of the mind

• The truth is out there: US Navy warship chased by two car-sized balls of light (for context: Obama’s CIA head on UFOs)

Listen: to Jesus Met The Woman At The Well, sung by Mahalia Jackson

“…She went running, crying, God help me

She said whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, you must be the prophet

Because you told me everything that I've done“

Orbán’s victory

In Hungary, Victor Orbán’s fourth landslide election victory has overturned all expectations and appalled those who united in an effort to throw his party from power. At Unherd, Aris Roussinos offers a useful, nuanced guide to what on earth is going on.

Ironically enough, Orbán’s playbook is in many ways an inversion of the left’s long march elsewhere: seizing cultural power through the co-optation of institutions.

“Where conservatives in Britain and America can win elections but find their governance impeded by a liberal powerbase in the media, NGOs and the judiciary (termed by conservative Hungarian intellectuals as an anti-democratic “juristocracy”), in Orbán’s Hungary the liberal intelligentsia’s political powerbase has been dismantled and replaced with a confident new conservative elite. A wealth of glossy conservative magazines, universities, think tanks and NGOs are the lavishly-funded product of Orbán’s Gramscian conservativism.“

The long-term costs of cultural warfare, by either side, are considerable. I wrote in my book about why such a counter-march is inconceivable and undesirable in Britain. It is fascinating to see the experiment pursued with such energy and success, and there is much to admire in any spirited refusal to admit defeat. But it comes with many well-publicised downsides, in terms of corruption but perhaps more importantly through delusion and distraction from the real task.

Hungary has in its time produced an extraordinary range of world-class talent out of all proportion to its size. But it’s not clear that Orbán’s regime is unleashing any kind of cultural flowering. There is, after all, nothing Western about a static, insulated culture nursing past glories. Indeed, that is very much the oriental caricature against which the West used to enjoy defining itself.

Still, what is happening in Budapest does show that other futures are possible. A competitive pluralism between power centres has always been one of the West’s great strengths. In that sense, Orbán’s determination to hew to his particular vision of the national interest against progressive imperialist claims from without, that seek to constrain how any country should be run, is indeed a sign of hope.

Friday Cocktail: How to keep your diary at the end of the world

Sip: on a Snowfall

Weekend browsing:

• We thought we knew who would win the next war – not any more

• Take this down – Dominic Hilton on his lifelong obsession with notetaking, a bittersweet joy

• Civilisation is dying in San Francisco – and elsewhere, soon

• Doubled energy bills are brutal. The plunging price of light has been a staggering achievement

Listen: to The Peace of Wild Things, read by Wendell Berry

“…I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.“

The Great (Female) Realignment

The FT has created a new app called FT Edit with unpaywalled access to some of its journalism.

One of today’s offerings is a piece by Stephen Bush, “Why are women voters moving to the left?”.

He’s not the first writer on this territory – see for instance this New York Times piece from January: The Gender Gap is Taking Us To Unexpected Places.

For a more academic source, see this paper from Inglehart and Norris. It concludes:

“Studies carried out in many countries in previous decades found that women were more conservative than men […]

“This study establishes that gender differences in electoral behavior have been realigning, with women moving toward the left of men throughout advanced industrial societies [….]

“…in postindustrial societies the modern gender gap was strongest among the younger age groups while the traditional gender gap was evident among the elderly. […] the process of generational turnover will probably continue to move women leftwards.”

As Bush notes, in the 2019 election in Britain, the average women was more likely to vote Labour than the average man by a startling 13 points.

Whoever cracks the political code of this ongoing shift looks set to do very well at the ballot box indeed.

Michel Houellebecq: “the horror of the world without God”

While I was out of commission, my review of Michel Houellebecq’s new collection of journalism was published at the Telegraph. I’m not a particular fan of Houellebecq, but it was interesting to spend some time with his work. There’s no denying he has a good line in dark apothegms.

“Sexual desire came to him aged 13 ‘like a natural biological disaster’. Partying is a way to ‘forget that we are lonely, miserable and doomed to death’. The logical consequences of individualism are ‘murder and unhappiness’.”

Houellebecq’s political incorrectness makes him a figure of admiration for some, but his personal abyss is one I’m very glad not to journey down.

“‘I don’t know if I’m a conservative,’ he admits at another point, and it’s hard to disagree. Conservatism contains a spirit of moderation and respect for the past out of kilter with Houellebecq’s coarse style and his rejection of our inherited world. His equal opportunity contempt includes the modern West as one more evil and unsustainable mistake. Where conservatives look back to a rose-tinted past, Houellebecq hankers after an impossible future, in which human connection, which he finds so elusive, is somehow finally made real.“

Read it here (paywalled).

Blowing Up the Multipolar World

On February 4, Russia and China issued a joint manifesto for a new world order, announcing their shared commitment to “advancing multipolarity”. (I’d link to it but it’s hosted on the Kremlin site.)

But is is still worth reading, or has it already been overtaken by events? The multipolar dream of the rising non-western powers has run slap-bang into the brick wall of Putin’s humiliation in Ukraine. While the fallout remains hard to predict, Brian Balkus makes a strong case in Palladium Magazine that the likely outcome is not a multipolar but a bipolar future, with Europe more reliant on American power and Russia reduced to China’s client.

“The U.S. and China are unified markets that together comprised 42% of global GDP and 52% of global defense spending in 2021. Their ability to leverage hard military power and economic coercion is an insurmountable obstacle to the emergence of the other powers that would make a multipolar world order. With the potential long-term exception of India, no country has the size and strategic resources to compete individually, and current multinational institutions like the UN and the EU are built on soft foundations which cannot be transformed into hard power.

“If world history continues to be driven by power and intimidation, where will that leave these weak multinational institutions? City-state-type entities like Qatar or Singapore may establish stable positions as bridges and traders within this world order, but they will not be sovereign within it, nor become primary players. New alliance structures arguably built on firmer foundations, such as AUKUS, a trilateral security pact signed between Australia, the U.K., and the U.S. in 2021, may evolve into more consequential forces within the world order.

“For now, the Ukraine war is hastening the birth of a new world order, but it isn’t a multilateral one. The U.S. and China are establishing themselves as the two separate suns that all other nations orbit.”

It’s been less than two months since the manifesto for a multipolar world, but in great power politics that may turn out to be a very long time indeed…

Shattering the China Dream

Normal service resumes, after a rather longer hiatus than intended.

And how better to begin than with a report than runs counter to the consensus of Beijing’s inevitable march to global economic hegemony. The Lowy Institute offers a detailed analysis of the limits on further growth from the China model.

This is hardly a prediction of collapse, but it does suggest that the idea of the US receding from its economic dominance is less likely than many have believed.

Three key takeaways:

• China will likely experience a substantial long-term growth slowdown owing to demographic decline, the limits of capital-intensive growth, and a gradual deceleration in productivity growth.

• Even with continued broad policy success, our baseline projections suggest annual economic growth will slow to about 3% by 2030 and 2% by 2040, while averaging 2–3% overall from now until 2050.

• China would still become the world’s largest economy, but it would never enjoy a meaningful lead over the US and would remain far less prosperous and productive per person even by mid-century.

It is worth pointing out that this is a “best-case” scenario. That is, even if China continues to sustain growth, the authors believe China’s growth rate will not achieve escape velocity. There remains, in addition, the possibility of a deeper dive in China’s fortunes of the kind that bearish types usually contemplate.

“Importantly, our argument is not based on China ‘failing’. Rather, a substantial growth slowdown is likely even if China continues to see a good degree of ‘success’ in terms of productivity growth, education, business investment, containing financial risks, and generally sustaining strong increases in average living standards. In this sense, our argument is qualitatively different to those of other China growth pessimists who predict a substantial slowdown due to increasingly deficient policy, mounting financial vulnerabilities, or the simple statistical improbability of China sustaining its growth exceptionalism forever.”

The Lowy Institute is an Australian think tank of some note, which also publishes the Asia Power Index and has hosted an impressive roster of speakers:

Past Lowy Lecturers have included H.E. Dr Angela Merkel, Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany; General David Petraeus AO, former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency; Rupert Murdoch AC, Executive Chairman of News Corp; and Lionel Barber, Editor of the Financial Times.

Read the whole thing.

Friday Cocktail: Dickens, fusion, megafloods and Jodie Nicholson

Sip:

On a Rome with a View, a dream of summer afternoons in a glass

Weekend Browsing:

• Cracking the Dickens code

• Big milestone in fusion research (see my earlier post)

• How to resist climate doomscrolling (via @tomchivers)

• A waterfall 1.5km high in the middle of the Med

Listen:

To the brilliant Jodie Nicholson singing Midnight (via @tedgioia)

Here we are again/ I don’t remember you.

I’m on holiday until the end of the month, so posts will resume in March. Have a great weekend.