12 Comments

Re: The Case for more energy.

Matthew Yglesias shows his ignorance. Firstly, even if the energy was entirely pollution-free, as soon as it is used, it becomes heat. Ramping up energy use just heats the Earth. It buys us a few centuries at most, probably much less in practice, then we are screwed.

Energy efficiency is important. Again, it won't work indefinitely, but it is important to reduce waste and minimize resource use when we are already consuming beyond Earth's capacity.

Lastly, what we do with energy is important. There are lots of wasteful uses, as well as destructive uses that damage the biosphere. One obvious waste is moving meat bodies in space, when sending information is far less wasteful and has nth-order effects in other resource use and pollution (e.g. no cars, means no tires, which means no tire wear, which means no rubber and asphalt particulates, which means cleaner air, which means better health and lower healthcare costs. Broken windows fallacy? As for the biosphere, apart from obvious issues like oil spills in the ocean, the evidence is increasing that light pollution is one component of insect decline. Interestingly the replacement of sodium lamps with white light LEDS on roads makes this problem worse.

Expand full comment

Interesting update on the Yale Grand Strategy Program from Adam Tooze:

"I don’t have anything to add on that affair. I’ll just say that whilst at Yale, I taught pretty regularly on the program, alongside John Gaddis, Paul Kennedy and Charlie Hill. Given my interests, you might have thought it would have been a natural fit. It wasn’t. An ideology of cultural conservatism was hardwired into the program and not just by the donors."

Expand full comment

Re: Brink Lindsey

Is their proposals just a rehash of Bismarck's policies???

Expand full comment

Have you read Tanner Greer's recent blog post on the subject of Yale's Grand Strategy Program? If so, I am curious how you assess it. If not, well, of course you should read it for yourself, but here are the bones of the argument:

1) It is true that "... programs like these are fundamentally Ivy League networking clubs."

2) It is also true that networking "... is not, alas, what the Ivy League student most needs. Yale is a sick institution, home of the “excellent sheep” who have sold out their souls to leap through higher hoops."

But this is throat-clearing, designed to forestall objections to the actual argument:

3) " ... Yale’s largest problem is that it is training the next generation of American governing elites while refusing to admit that it is doing so. Here the Grand Strategy program earns high marks: if it is about any one thing, that thing is the wise and intentional use of governing power."

4) "Like the Kennedy-Gaddis version of the course, the Beverly Gage program is firmly grounded in the strategic studies perspective ... It still asks students “What would you do?” It is just that the things she imagines her students doing are a bit different from that imagined at the course’s conception."

5) "But there is a cost to orienting two thirds of a syllabus around domestic politics and social movements. To fit that stuff in other stuff must be left out. The older course’s broad, international perspective is one of the casualties of Gage’s winnowing. The new course is America centric."

6) "A related omission: we have a section on “generals,” “princes,” and “peoples” but no section on “diplomats.” ... This must be at least a part of the reason Nicholas Brady demanded Gage teach her course more like “Kissinger would have taught it.” ... This is not an unreasonable demand on Brady’s part."

7) "America is, and for several generations yet will be, a superpower. This superpower has produced—and is in part itself a product of—a colossal state apparatus. This state must be governed. Its governing class will disproportionately hail from institutions like Yale. These facts are unlikely to change. The Brady-Johnson program was a tacit admission of these realities."

8) A program conceived to teach future elites how to wisely use state power has morphed into a program teaching them how to wisely oppose it. ... an entrenched governing class that enjoys the privileges of elite status but refuses to prepare for the responsibilities of elite station.

This is a long chain of argument with many weak links (I have skipped over the various caveats and doubts that Greer raises himself.) But my view is that it is specious when judged by results: if there is one thing that has characterized the exercise of American hegemony since the program was founded, it is a conspicuous lack of the "wise and intentional use of governing power." If Yale has indeed been teaching this, then its graduates have had little influence over the course of American governance; and if its graduates really have the influence Greer claims for them, then Yale's education has had no impact on their decisions.

Expand full comment

> Instead, we should raise our clean energy production ambitions. We don’t want to replace 100% of our current dirty energy — we want to generate vastly more energy than we are currently using and make it zero carbon.

This is a monstrous degree of incompetence.

Firstly, and critically, even if our entire energy infrastructure was powered by something so perfect it didn't produce waste heat, we still have to stop doing things like running street lights all night. Widespread and continuous artificial light is an extinction driver for insects, and running out of insects crashes everything. Then we all starve. Anyone paying the least attention would know this. Anyone with any pretense of responsibility would know to not ignore the inconvenient fact.

Secondly, measuring technological effectiveness in Watts is daft. Human utility is not a function of waste heat. Human utility has to do with reliability, cost, and time. Doing things with less energy is how you do more things, and in more places, for more people. "Let's have a solar boom so nothing changes" is not an enticing policy position.

Expand full comment