Henrik Karlsson is optimistic about AI and energy; Aaron Renn on Evangelicals and Israel; Scott Alexander reads Rene Girard; Frank Furedi on the decline of parental authority
"I wish that I knew enough to be able to sort out the competing claims about renewable energy. For now, I am inclined to side with pessimists like Peter Zeihan and Michael Muthukrishna, rather than with the optimists like Karlsson and Noah Smith."
An easy heuristic is to carefully read the optimists, and the people they cite. Noah Smith and like-minded people like Andrew Dressler cite studies that prominently state that continued and expanded subsidies, and legal/regulatory mandates, are necessary in order to continue expanding renewable energy. In other words, renewables are currently nonviable economically, and depend on political preferences for viability.
".....ultra-progressives will continue to control the definition of what is cool, and society will just rot away" is where we're headed.... and have been (on an exponential curve) for some decades now. Most right-thinking people find this just too depressing so prefer to avert their intellectual gaze from it. I believe the wheel will eventually turn (don't know when)....but it will get ugly while it turns. I don't know if that counts as any kind of optimism or not?
"When I’m feeling optimistic, I think that the Overton Window will shift, and ultra-progressives will be derided and despised by everyone else. In the 1950s, no German wanted to admit to having been a Nazi supporter. Maybe today’s ultra-progressives will follow a similar path."
The things about the German example is that Germany lost a war. I.e., "Regime Change." Thus Nazis came to be seen as losers in large part because they actually were literally losers, also, formerly high-status leaders were now being tried and executed, *because* of their Nazism. Germany was then occupied both physically and spiritually by regimes which hated Nazism almost above all else and insisted - quite forcefully and often brutally - that it should be more or less impossible for any influential German to feed his family were he to say anything about the Nazis or Nazism that wasn't a denunciation in the strongest terms. Greatest Generation didn't play around.
So, as an example, if that's the kind of thing it's going to take, well, um ... that's not exactly the optimistic case. The optimistic case would be for all that to happen somehow but magically without the progressives who survived their loss of Civil War 2.0 being sent to re-education camps in the Texan Occupation Zone.
But then that raises the question, has this ever actually happened to the progressives in America? My impression is, no, that the worst that ever seems to happen is, if not a 'ratchet', something like an anchor escapement on a pendulum clock, and which there might be occasional temporary reversals and setbacks after tiks, the gear train still only pauses during toks, and the hands of the clock move relentlessly clockwise in the long run.
So, the problem is, the Progressives have to lose a BIG war. And the trouble is that the progressives aren't some mere political party, they ARE the American Regime as progressivism is the American State Religion. The kind of thing that has to happen for there to be regime change in America sufficient to make progressivism look like Nazism is not likely to work out well for any American, no matter how anti-progressive. "When elephants fight, the grass loses."
After the war, as they answered these surveys from the rubble, a large number of Germans still thought national socialism was a good idea badly implemented.
An amazing reference, thanks for that link. The True Scotsman "real socialism has never really been tried" form of excuse for political theory that led to catastrophic reality is so effective, a majority of Germans even applied it as, "*National* Socialism has never really been tried." This paints the intensity and duration of Denazification efforts in a new color, as even conquering victors able to wipe out the old status hierarchy and install themselves and their ideology at the peaks of prestige had trouble getting people to genuinely purge themselves of any esteem for national socialist political ideas. Makes one think about Reconstruction too.
Attitudes in the post-war South, not about slavery, but about segregation, retained majority approval for a long time, and affection for Confederate symbols and leaders was strong until the day before yesterday.
"Further indications of this are to be found in the postwar population's unwillingness to reject Nazism completely. In eleven surveys between November 1945 and December 1946, an average of 47 per cent expressed their feeling that National
Socialism was a good idea badly carried out; by August 1947 this figure had risen to 55 per cent remaining fairly constant throughout the remainder of the occupation (#60, 68, 175). Meanwhile, the share of respondents thinking it a bad idea
dropped from 41 to about 30 per cent ... "
Then again, this is the occupation - by no means allergic to lying to the public - justifying itself, and pushing the Allies' preferred brown scare narrative that unless constantly and vigorously suppressed, "who goes nazi" instinctive appeal of authoritarian fascism is always lurking below the surface waiting to pop back into existence, popularity, and power. So we have to take these survey results with a grain of salt.
Also, on many of the specific questions, strong majorities had rapidly shifted away from what would have been the "Nazi answer" to many of those questions, so we may have another demonstration of "ideological abstraction beer-goggles" where the more general and vague some idea is, and with a label the population has been taught is a feel-good word they should always applaud for "Equality! Democracy!", you can get lots of people to "support" the ill-defined generalization even as they oppose most of the implicated specific proposals.
To be fair, I don't think German opinions on national socialism in late 40s carry much weight. Germans lived very well under national socialism for a decade after a preceding period of war, disastrous hyperinflation and mass poverty, and in the late 40s they were living in an even poorer, bombed-out country under foreign occupation. Why wouldn't they prefer n-s? I don't think it's much more complicated than that. Holocaust was not made a huge deal of until decades later and most Germans honestly did not know about it (though they may not have made any effort to learn about its existence) even when they approved of disenfranchisement and removal of German Jews to some unspecified place they wished to know nothing about. Yes, this latter is also morally culpable, but it is not exactly tantamount to the enthusiastic mass support for mass murder that is often painted by modern propaganda as the main element of support of n-s.
Good point. One could go even further and beyond the improving pre-war conditions and try to figure out the main associated tenets of what "true NS" was actually interpreted to mean to the people who answered such surveys. "Folk NS" for post-war Germans was likely quite different from Folk NS for non-germans today, but maybe much closer to post-war Folk Americanism than people would care to admit.
Modal American opinions have been both nationalist and redistributivist for a long time, with elites being more internationalist but also more enthusiastic for collectivism and central planning, social engineering, coordination of all 'estates' and hierarchies, and so forth. The American regime will not consciously think about it or express it in such terms to say that its elites are a master race with divine right to spread its gospel and annex any place it can and rule over an empire, but, you know ...
I would say that Henrik Karlsson has really drunk the Kool Aid regarding solar energy and batteries. I can't square what he says with what I have seen elsewhere. Rather than trying to refute all he says, I will just note that the places that have gone most in on solar and wind power (think California and Germany) have very expensive electricity, not cheap electricity.
He is wrong on battery prices where it matters. Battery prices are proportional to the lithium price, as that one factor accounts for most of the cost, even when plugging in lifecycle and recycling issues. That means there is no more juice left to squeeze on the battery production side out of any kind of process innovation or economies of scale.
And there hasn't been for 30 years! The amount of easily falsifiable zombie hype in this field's press is incredible. "Normative Sociology" is now "Normative Electrochemistry". Lithium batteries are also not fungible per kilowatt-hour because of differences in quality. When you see a suddenly lower than normal price per kilowatt-hour, you are usually dealing with low quality and/or simple fraud.
At the high end of quality, (durability, charging speed, etc.) there has been very little movement in price vs the lithium content in decades.
The problem is that you are dealing with a single commodity, and prices for single commodities for which there is booming demand are infamously volatile. That's not to mention the extra special role of equally volatile government subsidies.
What happened was this. 20 years ago lithium cost about $1,500 per ton. Then battery use with all kinds of electronic devices grew fast and globally, and the price crept up gradually to about $7k maybe seven or eight years ago. And then it went hyperbolic or whatever finance hypesters say these days, getting up to $25k five years ago. Then it eased off for a few years back to $10k but then suddenly exploded to $80k during 2021, where it stayed during 2022 (Covid? War?), but this year had steady easing back down to $20k.
Now what happens, similar to plenty of other perpetual nonsense in the finance press, is that people without any knowledge of this context and background (or who are just intentionally lying to hype about it) take a look at a few spot prices on a limited section this curve with a """trend""" that fits their hopes or narrative or pitch or whatever, and they extrapolate recklessly saying batteries are gonna be basically free soon! Um, nah. What we need are reporting platforms that don't allow anyone to publish anything unless they have ante'd up and put a minimum amount of their own money where their mouth is.
Careful brother, take it from someone who barely made it back from the bottom, this matter is complicated and the rabbit hole is very deep: how far down do you really want to do?
Consider that many of the world's best minds in the relevant fields have been been trying to build better, cheaper batteries for a long, long time and they have been generously funded with enormous research resources because there are potential fortunes to be made and even national security matters at stake, not to mention that a lot of potentially life-changing sci-fi technologies could be plausibly realized in the short term if only we had substantially better battery tech. Just to now have to recharge smartphones as often would be nice.
But if you want to start your journey, you could do worse than look up Argonne National Lab's "BatPac" model and whatever their latest edition is of "Modeling the Performance and Cost of Lithium-Ion Batteries." Skip to the bottom for "Overall Cost Breakdown" for the various battery options they run through the model.
What you'll see is that "Materials" tends to represent about half the total cost (the genuinely marginal plus some pro-rated amount of the fixed), and most of the marginal cost, because the plants are way more capital-intensive than labor-intensive. But this is kind of misleading because, as they point out, the cost contribution depends on ratio between marginal materials prices and the fixed capital investment, but the market price of the materials flies all over the place and is anybody's guess.
It's also misleading because, like I said, not all Lithium batteries are created equally. There are a number of possibilities of other materials to compound with the lithium atoms (e.g., Cobalt Oxide is the classic approach, also Iron Phosphate, Manganese, Titanium, Nickel, etc.), and those have different propensities to plate, and have different possible crystallization structures which affect other important properties as regards ability to handle high voltages and amperages at both the cathode and anode. Now, it's important to point out that the knowledge of the existence of all the potential varieties is actually quite old.
It's just that developing them as plausibly feasible and economical substitutes that don't require lots of expensive Cobalt and Nickel (lately flying between $30-$90k and $20-$30k per ton, respectively) wasn't as urgent a matter as it has recently become in the last decade or so with exploding demand. And these different ways of using Lithium are also not all well-suited to every use-case, so substitution options are more limited than just a headline "$/kWH" number would tell you.
Indeed, a lot of recent "progress" in battery prices has been due to just this. Not development of unknown tech, but shifting to varieties of Lithium that are less reliant on including other expensive metals as well.
The problem is that you can only take this process so far, because while you may be able to drastically reduce the quantity needed for Cobalt and Nickel and so forth, you *can't* get rid of the Lithium itself, the ions oxidations states of which are the heart of the easily-reversible storage of electrical energy. And so even if you've made the rest of the battery cheap and scaled up your factory to Chinese levels, you still need those Lithium atoms and you still need to pay a pretty penny for them.
The only way battery prices are going to come down substantially is by discovering cheaper ways to produce Lithium (that's a whole other rabbit hole) or discovering a totally new electrical energy storage technology that is both superior to and cheaper than any Lithium-based cell. It's not impossible, but again, lots of smart people have been throwing lots of resources at this problem with enormous stakes, and so far they have come up short for a long time. Maybe they will crack it soon; we can hope!
But it's just not enough to look at something that purports to be a recent price trends chart and conclude that it can and will just go on and on like that. Cars and planes and lots of other things came down in price for a long time until ... they stopped getting cheaper. So, one needs to have a model for why new tech gets gradually cheaper for a while and then .. stops getting cheaper anymore. And then one needs to apply that model to anything they are making bold and hopeful price forecasts about.
The solar optimists are liars or useful idiots. Karlsson produces a map for the 'cost of solar power', where the only input is the cost of solar panels * the amount sunlight that hits it. It is complete bullshit because the major drawback for solar is the intermittent nature- and not the day night cycle, but the summer/winter cycle. In places like Greenland- which his map claims solar will be the cheapest type of power by 2030- you cannot get solar power in the winter. Not you need 2x, or 5x, or 10x as many panels as in the summer, as in you cannot use solar for power in the winter. So now you need 6 months of battery capacity (when 6 hours is beyond our economic capability) or you need multiple power sources which makes the whole process more expensive than using any of natural gas or nuclear alone all year. This isn't 2000 anymore where people are excited about a new tech that is just barely forming, this is a known, major problem for solar which Germany is experiencing first hand (and using more coal than ever with the issues with Russian gas).
Re: high status opinions, I think if that shift was going to happen, it would have happened already. Being on the side of sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll fifty years ago, rebelling against stuffy, puritanical attitudes of older generations couldn't help but be cool. Today, though, being the advocates of gender surgery (gross!), aggrieved minorities, despising your own culture/ethnicity, and weaponized mental fragility? There's nothing cool about any of those things. Nothing.
In a more feminized world, though, that doesn't matter. Being cool isn't relevant anymore. It's more going to be what views are deemed to be pro-social vs anti-social, because that's the paradigm with which women view these kinds of things.
Support for Israel will continue to decline until Jew hating Palestinians behave better, and have materially better lives. Probably requires a lot of Israeli occupation and semi-prison conditions for the violent men who refuse to be peaceful.
Bibi needs to not only destroy Hamas, he needs to create a non-Jewish neighbor state willing to live in peace with Israel. They can’t stop the hate, but can punish criminal behavior.
They should combine Singapore authoritarianism with a Swiss style Gaza Palestine Confederation ( 5 cantons). With job offers, like re construction, for all workers.
“The AI had better be able to filter out ‘information’ that comes from users who are relatively ignorant.”
I dunno: If you want the AI to plumb the depths of human nature, you’ll want the dumb stuff left in. Suppose you wanted to query an AI trained in this manner about whether a new consumer product will succeed. The “relatively ignorant” have money to spend.
"even American Jews increasingly question Israel in light of its hard right turn under Netanyahu."
Any time you see modifiers in front of 'right' like, "hard right", "far right", "extreme right" or whatever, grab your wallet. Recently it's even "Extreme MAGA Right" which is even more nonsensical though kind of hilarious and it makes me laugh out loud anytime I hear some progressive try to use the phrase un-ironically.
Any time you ask anybody using those terms to actually explain what positions go over the line from merely socially-tolerated 'normal right wing' to the far, hard, MAGA extremes, you get ... positions so mainstream that they are not just help by the majority of the right, but a majority of the population at large! "Believed we should control flows of people across the border?" - "EXTREME FAR HARD MAGA RIGHT!!!!"
With two recklessly spendthrift parties, the right one slightly less crazy than the left in the regard, there are just a handful of voices calling for the tiny-minority and not plausible 'centrist' position of implementing some reasonable fiscal restraint. By any objective attempt to define what ought to be considered 'extreme', these penny-pinching misers are EXTREME FAR HARD RIGHT (though certainly not MAGA!)
So, I ask people, what exactly makes Netanyahu's policies 'hard' right that isn't, you know, supported by practically the entire right, i.e., 'mainstream right'.
If it's the thing that prior to the war actually got all the leftist in the street to protest (and in the Israeli Deep State for insider-threat undermining) then, um, I have news for people, which is that the entire "American Conservative Movement" has put "Do everything you can for as long as it takes and by any means necessary to tame the out-of-control leftist judiciary and legal bureaucracy" at the top of its implicit manifesto *for decades*. Half (often more) of the country fed up with that stuff is extreme, far, hard, etc.
The smartest criticisms of Trump and his administration are mostly that he and it was never sufficiently serious about doing exactly this for anything else he tried to do to matter, because, duh, the judges and DOJ and Intel Community and broader bureaucracy would just neutralize it all. And then they would pull no punches with infinite legal harassment and try with all their might to win elections by other means, such as disqualifying him from even running again.
Heck, reportedly even the NY Governor and NYC mayor have gone extreme, far, hard right in BOTH complaining about the administration's effectively open borders policies, AND complaining about their local out-of-control leftist judiciaries imposing impossible onerous financial burdens on their jurisdictions by having simply invented out of whole cloth purported duties of the city and state to pay any price needed to house every illegal immigrant that shows up. Note that Hizzoner's award for such complaints was the very Soviet move of the feds siccing the DOJ on him to charge him with bribery, or something, it's kind of hard to tell from the flimsy case, though that hardly matters.
Netanyahu might know something about being investigated on a flimsy case of bribery and of the legal system inventing reasons why it can just disqualify him from either running for office or hold him in contempt for even speaking publicly on certain matters!
So, the thing that makes Netanyahu (also the whole legal team, also half the country) super duper extreme far hard right is that when push came to shove and the options were surrender or actually take on the corrupt judiciary and legal apparatus the only legal way possible remaining to him, he -get this- actually called their bluff and started to do it! That is, he started to do what literally 100% of people in the American Conservative Movement has always believed needed to be done, one way or another, in this or any country facing the same structural problems with governance. There is tremendous Israel / Netanyahu-envy among Americans who know the score.
That no prominent individual on the American Right has actually done this or even dares propose to do it because they are all justifiably terrified about getting The Treatment is why anything actually 'conservative' is destined for and doomed to extinction. "Lets not go extinct" is apparently a pretty hard, far, extreme, and perhaps even MAGA position to take these days.
While I don't disagree that Greta Thunberg has stage parents at the back of her - like most child celebrities - who elected to make her unusual affect and prodigy's interest her talent in the way that Shirley Temple's was dancing - I'm less convinced that the environmental movement (which, as depressingly few seem to realize, is about a lot more than just climate activism) shouldn't be intertwined with children. It's not just Furedi's "recycling adult obsessions" or politics through children (like the LGBTQ+ stuff).
Here in Texas, we asked children to collect pennies to pay for our first national park - in that now-lost age of enthusiasm for parks (during the Depression!). Hard to imagine that now. When I was little, kids were considered natural targets for campaigns like "Hoot, hoot, don't pollute" and misguided but well-intentioned campaigns like Smokey the Bear. The first anyone ever heard of recycling in my city was aluminum can drives at elementary schools. We were taught to turn out the light when we left the room because it was the right thing to do, because conserving energy was - conserving energy, not yet a communist bid to destroy capitalism.
The environmental movement has been targeted by wokeness like almost nothing else... This is a matter of actual record in, for instance, the sabotage of one of the nation's oldest and once-effective environmental groups, the Sierra Club, by a single, wealthy individual who thought that it should be about immigration rather than conservation, and threatened its board into silence or exile. The other groups have been similarly coerced into talking about human needs not nature - always from the top down. Before that happened environmental conservation benefited us in many ways, but that's being memory holed.
"For now, I am inclined to side with pessimists like Peter Zeihan and Michael Muthukrishna, rather than with the optimists like Karlsson and Noah Smith."
Regardless of whether it is right or wrong, I don't see 50% solar as optimistic. Getting beyond that is increasingly difficult.
Are you saying that 50% solar is currently economically viable? Based on what? All the studies I've seen advocating more solar power claim that continued and expanded subsidies are needed, as well as continued ultra-low interest rates as seen from 2008 through 2021.
Are you saying that 50% solar is currently technically viable? Again, based on what? The technical analyses I've seen say that relying on nondispatchable renewables for more than 10-20% of electricity requirements makes the grid unstable and prone to failure.
Maybe subsidies will continue to be needed, maybe not. I don't see them going away unless they become unnecessary, maybe not even then.
Technically viable? 4x the raw materials plus lots for batteries in 25 years doesn't seem unrealistic to me. Google it. I'm sure you can find "experts" on either side. Just remember that 50% is WAY easier than 90 or 100%. And needs WAY less batteries.
The Palestinian position would seem to me the most obvious one sans the weird historically contingent US support for Israel. There are many, many more Muslims after all.
Even Japanese news wrt to Israel-Palesrtine looks "left wing" compared to a lot of US discourse.
"I wish that I knew enough to be able to sort out the competing claims about renewable energy. For now, I am inclined to side with pessimists like Peter Zeihan and Michael Muthukrishna, rather than with the optimists like Karlsson and Noah Smith."
An easy heuristic is to carefully read the optimists, and the people they cite. Noah Smith and like-minded people like Andrew Dressler cite studies that prominently state that continued and expanded subsidies, and legal/regulatory mandates, are necessary in order to continue expanding renewable energy. In other words, renewables are currently nonviable economically, and depend on political preferences for viability.
Yeah, Construction Physics https://www.construction-physics.com/ is a nice blog for things energy related.
".....ultra-progressives will continue to control the definition of what is cool, and society will just rot away" is where we're headed.... and have been (on an exponential curve) for some decades now. Most right-thinking people find this just too depressing so prefer to avert their intellectual gaze from it. I believe the wheel will eventually turn (don't know when)....but it will get ugly while it turns. I don't know if that counts as any kind of optimism or not?
"When I’m feeling optimistic, I think that the Overton Window will shift, and ultra-progressives will be derided and despised by everyone else. In the 1950s, no German wanted to admit to having been a Nazi supporter. Maybe today’s ultra-progressives will follow a similar path."
The things about the German example is that Germany lost a war. I.e., "Regime Change." Thus Nazis came to be seen as losers in large part because they actually were literally losers, also, formerly high-status leaders were now being tried and executed, *because* of their Nazism. Germany was then occupied both physically and spiritually by regimes which hated Nazism almost above all else and insisted - quite forcefully and often brutally - that it should be more or less impossible for any influential German to feed his family were he to say anything about the Nazis or Nazism that wasn't a denunciation in the strongest terms. Greatest Generation didn't play around.
So, as an example, if that's the kind of thing it's going to take, well, um ... that's not exactly the optimistic case. The optimistic case would be for all that to happen somehow but magically without the progressives who survived their loss of Civil War 2.0 being sent to re-education camps in the Texan Occupation Zone.
But then that raises the question, has this ever actually happened to the progressives in America? My impression is, no, that the worst that ever seems to happen is, if not a 'ratchet', something like an anchor escapement on a pendulum clock, and which there might be occasional temporary reversals and setbacks after tiks, the gear train still only pauses during toks, and the hands of the clock move relentlessly clockwise in the long run.
So, the problem is, the Progressives have to lose a BIG war. And the trouble is that the progressives aren't some mere political party, they ARE the American Regime as progressivism is the American State Religion. The kind of thing that has to happen for there to be regime change in America sufficient to make progressivism look like Nazism is not likely to work out well for any American, no matter how anti-progressive. "When elephants fight, the grass loses."
After the war, as they answered these surveys from the rubble, a large number of Germans still thought national socialism was a good idea badly implemented.
https://libsysdigi.library.uiuc.edu/OCA/Books2009-07/publicopinionino00merr/publicopinionino00merr.pdf
An amazing reference, thanks for that link. The True Scotsman "real socialism has never really been tried" form of excuse for political theory that led to catastrophic reality is so effective, a majority of Germans even applied it as, "*National* Socialism has never really been tried." This paints the intensity and duration of Denazification efforts in a new color, as even conquering victors able to wipe out the old status hierarchy and install themselves and their ideology at the peaks of prestige had trouble getting people to genuinely purge themselves of any esteem for national socialist political ideas. Makes one think about Reconstruction too.
Attitudes in the post-war South, not about slavery, but about segregation, retained majority approval for a long time, and affection for Confederate symbols and leaders was strong until the day before yesterday.
"Further indications of this are to be found in the postwar population's unwillingness to reject Nazism completely. In eleven surveys between November 1945 and December 1946, an average of 47 per cent expressed their feeling that National
Socialism was a good idea badly carried out; by August 1947 this figure had risen to 55 per cent remaining fairly constant throughout the remainder of the occupation (#60, 68, 175). Meanwhile, the share of respondents thinking it a bad idea
dropped from 41 to about 30 per cent ... "
Then again, this is the occupation - by no means allergic to lying to the public - justifying itself, and pushing the Allies' preferred brown scare narrative that unless constantly and vigorously suppressed, "who goes nazi" instinctive appeal of authoritarian fascism is always lurking below the surface waiting to pop back into existence, popularity, and power. So we have to take these survey results with a grain of salt.
Also, on many of the specific questions, strong majorities had rapidly shifted away from what would have been the "Nazi answer" to many of those questions, so we may have another demonstration of "ideological abstraction beer-goggles" where the more general and vague some idea is, and with a label the population has been taught is a feel-good word they should always applaud for "Equality! Democracy!", you can get lots of people to "support" the ill-defined generalization even as they oppose most of the implicated specific proposals.
To be fair, I don't think German opinions on national socialism in late 40s carry much weight. Germans lived very well under national socialism for a decade after a preceding period of war, disastrous hyperinflation and mass poverty, and in the late 40s they were living in an even poorer, bombed-out country under foreign occupation. Why wouldn't they prefer n-s? I don't think it's much more complicated than that. Holocaust was not made a huge deal of until decades later and most Germans honestly did not know about it (though they may not have made any effort to learn about its existence) even when they approved of disenfranchisement and removal of German Jews to some unspecified place they wished to know nothing about. Yes, this latter is also morally culpable, but it is not exactly tantamount to the enthusiastic mass support for mass murder that is often painted by modern propaganda as the main element of support of n-s.
Good point. One could go even further and beyond the improving pre-war conditions and try to figure out the main associated tenets of what "true NS" was actually interpreted to mean to the people who answered such surveys. "Folk NS" for post-war Germans was likely quite different from Folk NS for non-germans today, but maybe much closer to post-war Folk Americanism than people would care to admit.
Modal American opinions have been both nationalist and redistributivist for a long time, with elites being more internationalist but also more enthusiastic for collectivism and central planning, social engineering, coordination of all 'estates' and hierarchies, and so forth. The American regime will not consciously think about it or express it in such terms to say that its elites are a master race with divine right to spread its gospel and annex any place it can and rule over an empire, but, you know ...
I would say that Henrik Karlsson has really drunk the Kool Aid regarding solar energy and batteries. I can't square what he says with what I have seen elsewhere. Rather than trying to refute all he says, I will just note that the places that have gone most in on solar and wind power (think California and Germany) have very expensive electricity, not cheap electricity.
He is wrong on battery prices where it matters. Battery prices are proportional to the lithium price, as that one factor accounts for most of the cost, even when plugging in lifecycle and recycling issues. That means there is no more juice left to squeeze on the battery production side out of any kind of process innovation or economies of scale.
And there hasn't been for 30 years! The amount of easily falsifiable zombie hype in this field's press is incredible. "Normative Sociology" is now "Normative Electrochemistry". Lithium batteries are also not fungible per kilowatt-hour because of differences in quality. When you see a suddenly lower than normal price per kilowatt-hour, you are usually dealing with low quality and/or simple fraud.
At the high end of quality, (durability, charging speed, etc.) there has been very little movement in price vs the lithium content in decades.
The problem is that you are dealing with a single commodity, and prices for single commodities for which there is booming demand are infamously volatile. That's not to mention the extra special role of equally volatile government subsidies.
What happened was this. 20 years ago lithium cost about $1,500 per ton. Then battery use with all kinds of electronic devices grew fast and globally, and the price crept up gradually to about $7k maybe seven or eight years ago. And then it went hyperbolic or whatever finance hypesters say these days, getting up to $25k five years ago. Then it eased off for a few years back to $10k but then suddenly exploded to $80k during 2021, where it stayed during 2022 (Covid? War?), but this year had steady easing back down to $20k.
Now what happens, similar to plenty of other perpetual nonsense in the finance press, is that people without any knowledge of this context and background (or who are just intentionally lying to hype about it) take a look at a few spot prices on a limited section this curve with a """trend""" that fits their hopes or narrative or pitch or whatever, and they extrapolate recklessly saying batteries are gonna be basically free soon! Um, nah. What we need are reporting platforms that don't allow anyone to publish anything unless they have ante'd up and put a minimum amount of their own money where their mouth is.
This is great information. Thanks.
Do you have any links - especially to the cost of lithium as a percent of the cost of the batteries?
Have you looked at the feasibility of scaling up lithium production to support changing all car production to EVs, as well as backup for utilities?
Careful brother, take it from someone who barely made it back from the bottom, this matter is complicated and the rabbit hole is very deep: how far down do you really want to do?
Consider that many of the world's best minds in the relevant fields have been been trying to build better, cheaper batteries for a long, long time and they have been generously funded with enormous research resources because there are potential fortunes to be made and even national security matters at stake, not to mention that a lot of potentially life-changing sci-fi technologies could be plausibly realized in the short term if only we had substantially better battery tech. Just to now have to recharge smartphones as often would be nice.
But if you want to start your journey, you could do worse than look up Argonne National Lab's "BatPac" model and whatever their latest edition is of "Modeling the Performance and Cost of Lithium-Ion Batteries." Skip to the bottom for "Overall Cost Breakdown" for the various battery options they run through the model.
What you'll see is that "Materials" tends to represent about half the total cost (the genuinely marginal plus some pro-rated amount of the fixed), and most of the marginal cost, because the plants are way more capital-intensive than labor-intensive. But this is kind of misleading because, as they point out, the cost contribution depends on ratio between marginal materials prices and the fixed capital investment, but the market price of the materials flies all over the place and is anybody's guess.
It's also misleading because, like I said, not all Lithium batteries are created equally. There are a number of possibilities of other materials to compound with the lithium atoms (e.g., Cobalt Oxide is the classic approach, also Iron Phosphate, Manganese, Titanium, Nickel, etc.), and those have different propensities to plate, and have different possible crystallization structures which affect other important properties as regards ability to handle high voltages and amperages at both the cathode and anode. Now, it's important to point out that the knowledge of the existence of all the potential varieties is actually quite old.
It's just that developing them as plausibly feasible and economical substitutes that don't require lots of expensive Cobalt and Nickel (lately flying between $30-$90k and $20-$30k per ton, respectively) wasn't as urgent a matter as it has recently become in the last decade or so with exploding demand. And these different ways of using Lithium are also not all well-suited to every use-case, so substitution options are more limited than just a headline "$/kWH" number would tell you.
Indeed, a lot of recent "progress" in battery prices has been due to just this. Not development of unknown tech, but shifting to varieties of Lithium that are less reliant on including other expensive metals as well.
The problem is that you can only take this process so far, because while you may be able to drastically reduce the quantity needed for Cobalt and Nickel and so forth, you *can't* get rid of the Lithium itself, the ions oxidations states of which are the heart of the easily-reversible storage of electrical energy. And so even if you've made the rest of the battery cheap and scaled up your factory to Chinese levels, you still need those Lithium atoms and you still need to pay a pretty penny for them.
The only way battery prices are going to come down substantially is by discovering cheaper ways to produce Lithium (that's a whole other rabbit hole) or discovering a totally new electrical energy storage technology that is both superior to and cheaper than any Lithium-based cell. It's not impossible, but again, lots of smart people have been throwing lots of resources at this problem with enormous stakes, and so far they have come up short for a long time. Maybe they will crack it soon; we can hope!
But it's just not enough to look at something that purports to be a recent price trends chart and conclude that it can and will just go on and on like that. Cars and planes and lots of other things came down in price for a long time until ... they stopped getting cheaper. So, one needs to have a model for why new tech gets gradually cheaper for a while and then .. stops getting cheaper anymore. And then one needs to apply that model to anything they are making bold and hopeful price forecasts about.
The solar optimists are liars or useful idiots. Karlsson produces a map for the 'cost of solar power', where the only input is the cost of solar panels * the amount sunlight that hits it. It is complete bullshit because the major drawback for solar is the intermittent nature- and not the day night cycle, but the summer/winter cycle. In places like Greenland- which his map claims solar will be the cheapest type of power by 2030- you cannot get solar power in the winter. Not you need 2x, or 5x, or 10x as many panels as in the summer, as in you cannot use solar for power in the winter. So now you need 6 months of battery capacity (when 6 hours is beyond our economic capability) or you need multiple power sources which makes the whole process more expensive than using any of natural gas or nuclear alone all year. This isn't 2000 anymore where people are excited about a new tech that is just barely forming, this is a known, major problem for solar which Germany is experiencing first hand (and using more coal than ever with the issues with Russian gas).
Thanks for good points on Germany and most N Euro countries unable to depend on winter solar.
But Gaza & Israel probably can-Gaza reconstruction under Israeli occupation should include lots of solar, maybe also lots of wind.
Re: high status opinions, I think if that shift was going to happen, it would have happened already. Being on the side of sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll fifty years ago, rebelling against stuffy, puritanical attitudes of older generations couldn't help but be cool. Today, though, being the advocates of gender surgery (gross!), aggrieved minorities, despising your own culture/ethnicity, and weaponized mental fragility? There's nothing cool about any of those things. Nothing.
In a more feminized world, though, that doesn't matter. Being cool isn't relevant anymore. It's more going to be what views are deemed to be pro-social vs anti-social, because that's the paradigm with which women view these kinds of things.
Support for Israel will continue to decline until Jew hating Palestinians behave better, and have materially better lives. Probably requires a lot of Israeli occupation and semi-prison conditions for the violent men who refuse to be peaceful.
Bibi needs to not only destroy Hamas, he needs to create a non-Jewish neighbor state willing to live in peace with Israel. They can’t stop the hate, but can punish criminal behavior.
They should combine Singapore authoritarianism with a Swiss style Gaza Palestine Confederation ( 5 cantons). With job offers, like re construction, for all workers.
When one door closes, another opens. See Argentina
“The AI had better be able to filter out ‘information’ that comes from users who are relatively ignorant.”
I dunno: If you want the AI to plumb the depths of human nature, you’ll want the dumb stuff left in. Suppose you wanted to query an AI trained in this manner about whether a new consumer product will succeed. The “relatively ignorant” have money to spend.
new antisemitism in the USA explained
elite schools in the USA are day care for junior future managers
jews are greatly over represented in the managerial class in the USA
chasing jews out of polite society would free up all those jobs
therefore anti semitism is very attractive to students AND (non jewish) admins
"even American Jews increasingly question Israel in light of its hard right turn under Netanyahu."
Any time you see modifiers in front of 'right' like, "hard right", "far right", "extreme right" or whatever, grab your wallet. Recently it's even "Extreme MAGA Right" which is even more nonsensical though kind of hilarious and it makes me laugh out loud anytime I hear some progressive try to use the phrase un-ironically.
Any time you ask anybody using those terms to actually explain what positions go over the line from merely socially-tolerated 'normal right wing' to the far, hard, MAGA extremes, you get ... positions so mainstream that they are not just help by the majority of the right, but a majority of the population at large! "Believed we should control flows of people across the border?" - "EXTREME FAR HARD MAGA RIGHT!!!!"
With two recklessly spendthrift parties, the right one slightly less crazy than the left in the regard, there are just a handful of voices calling for the tiny-minority and not plausible 'centrist' position of implementing some reasonable fiscal restraint. By any objective attempt to define what ought to be considered 'extreme', these penny-pinching misers are EXTREME FAR HARD RIGHT (though certainly not MAGA!)
So, I ask people, what exactly makes Netanyahu's policies 'hard' right that isn't, you know, supported by practically the entire right, i.e., 'mainstream right'.
If it's the thing that prior to the war actually got all the leftist in the street to protest (and in the Israeli Deep State for insider-threat undermining) then, um, I have news for people, which is that the entire "American Conservative Movement" has put "Do everything you can for as long as it takes and by any means necessary to tame the out-of-control leftist judiciary and legal bureaucracy" at the top of its implicit manifesto *for decades*. Half (often more) of the country fed up with that stuff is extreme, far, hard, etc.
The smartest criticisms of Trump and his administration are mostly that he and it was never sufficiently serious about doing exactly this for anything else he tried to do to matter, because, duh, the judges and DOJ and Intel Community and broader bureaucracy would just neutralize it all. And then they would pull no punches with infinite legal harassment and try with all their might to win elections by other means, such as disqualifying him from even running again.
Heck, reportedly even the NY Governor and NYC mayor have gone extreme, far, hard right in BOTH complaining about the administration's effectively open borders policies, AND complaining about their local out-of-control leftist judiciaries imposing impossible onerous financial burdens on their jurisdictions by having simply invented out of whole cloth purported duties of the city and state to pay any price needed to house every illegal immigrant that shows up. Note that Hizzoner's award for such complaints was the very Soviet move of the feds siccing the DOJ on him to charge him with bribery, or something, it's kind of hard to tell from the flimsy case, though that hardly matters.
Netanyahu might know something about being investigated on a flimsy case of bribery and of the legal system inventing reasons why it can just disqualify him from either running for office or hold him in contempt for even speaking publicly on certain matters!
So, the thing that makes Netanyahu (also the whole legal team, also half the country) super duper extreme far hard right is that when push came to shove and the options were surrender or actually take on the corrupt judiciary and legal apparatus the only legal way possible remaining to him, he -get this- actually called their bluff and started to do it! That is, he started to do what literally 100% of people in the American Conservative Movement has always believed needed to be done, one way or another, in this or any country facing the same structural problems with governance. There is tremendous Israel / Netanyahu-envy among Americans who know the score.
That no prominent individual on the American Right has actually done this or even dares propose to do it because they are all justifiably terrified about getting The Treatment is why anything actually 'conservative' is destined for and doomed to extinction. "Lets not go extinct" is apparently a pretty hard, far, extreme, and perhaps even MAGA position to take these days.
While I don't disagree that Greta Thunberg has stage parents at the back of her - like most child celebrities - who elected to make her unusual affect and prodigy's interest her talent in the way that Shirley Temple's was dancing - I'm less convinced that the environmental movement (which, as depressingly few seem to realize, is about a lot more than just climate activism) shouldn't be intertwined with children. It's not just Furedi's "recycling adult obsessions" or politics through children (like the LGBTQ+ stuff).
Here in Texas, we asked children to collect pennies to pay for our first national park - in that now-lost age of enthusiasm for parks (during the Depression!). Hard to imagine that now. When I was little, kids were considered natural targets for campaigns like "Hoot, hoot, don't pollute" and misguided but well-intentioned campaigns like Smokey the Bear. The first anyone ever heard of recycling in my city was aluminum can drives at elementary schools. We were taught to turn out the light when we left the room because it was the right thing to do, because conserving energy was - conserving energy, not yet a communist bid to destroy capitalism.
The environmental movement has been targeted by wokeness like almost nothing else... This is a matter of actual record in, for instance, the sabotage of one of the nation's oldest and once-effective environmental groups, the Sierra Club, by a single, wealthy individual who thought that it should be about immigration rather than conservation, and threatened its board into silence or exile. The other groups have been similarly coerced into talking about human needs not nature - always from the top down. Before that happened environmental conservation benefited us in many ways, but that's being memory holed.
"For now, I am inclined to side with pessimists like Peter Zeihan and Michael Muthukrishna, rather than with the optimists like Karlsson and Noah Smith."
Regardless of whether it is right or wrong, I don't see 50% solar as optimistic. Getting beyond that is increasingly difficult.
"I don't see 50% solar as optimistic."
What is this based on?
Are you saying that 50% solar is currently economically viable? Based on what? All the studies I've seen advocating more solar power claim that continued and expanded subsidies are needed, as well as continued ultra-low interest rates as seen from 2008 through 2021.
Are you saying that 50% solar is currently technically viable? Again, based on what? The technical analyses I've seen say that relying on nondispatchable renewables for more than 10-20% of electricity requirements makes the grid unstable and prone to failure.
Solar was 2.8% of US electric generation in 2021 (https://www.energy.gov/eere/renewable-energy#:~:text=Renewable%20Energy%20in%20the%20United%20States,-Renewable%20energy%20generates&text=In%202022%2C%20solar%20and%20wind,with%20abundant%20renewable%20energy%20resources.) Getting to 50% would mean growing this by a factor of 18, which would imply 18 times more subsidies than we're currently providing. Do you think this is politically viable? Or won't be necessary?
Wind is solar energy so by your website we are at 12%. https://www.energy.gov/eere/wind/how-do-wind-turbines-work#:~:text=Wind%20is%20a%20form%20of,The%20rotation%20of%20the%20earth.
Maybe subsidies will continue to be needed, maybe not. I don't see them going away unless they become unnecessary, maybe not even then.
Technically viable? 4x the raw materials plus lots for batteries in 25 years doesn't seem unrealistic to me. Google it. I'm sure you can find "experts" on either side. Just remember that 50% is WAY easier than 90 or 100%. And needs WAY less batteries.
The Palestinian position would seem to me the most obvious one sans the weird historically contingent US support for Israel. There are many, many more Muslims after all.
Even Japanese news wrt to Israel-Palesrtine looks "left wing" compared to a lot of US discourse.