Monday, May 31, 2021

How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

"How to Avoid a Climate Disaster", is a recent book by Bill Gates, 2021, 275 pages, 74k words. It is subtitled "the solutions we have and the breakthroughs we need". It has an Introduction, 12 Chapters, and an Afterword.


[Well, I finished this book in early April, and I have waited too long to write this review. In the meantime, Bill & Melinda Gates have announced they are divorcing after 27 years of marriage, possible driven by Bill's ties to sexual offender Jeffrey Epstein. Other tales of bizarre, entitled sexual practices by Bill are also circulating.

Meanwhile, among others, our previous author Cory Doctorow has called out Bill for his priorization of intellectual property rights (aka maximizing corporate profits) in the handling of the COVID-19 vaccine: talking Oxford University out of giving their patents to the world for free and instead giving them to AstroZeneca; and heading the to-date toothless vaccine charity program COVAX.

Professionally, I have disliked Bill Gates and Microsoft going back to the 1980s. Microsoft's monopolistic practices (make it child's play to pirate Word and Excel until they have driven WordPerfect and VisiCalc out of business, then start harping on intellectual property) were rightly busted by the Feds. Then W took office and it all went away. The complete lack of security in MS-DOS and early Windows still plagues the computer industry today.

Oh well. On to the review. I suspect I will be making short shrift of it.]


The introduction is titled "51 Billion To Zero". 51 billion is "is how many tons of greenhouse gases the world typically adds to the atmosphere every year". That the 1st 2 words of the book represent a number tells us that Gates is going to take a quantitative approach to this topic.

Gates gives us the motto of his foundation: "Everyone deserves the chance to live a healthy and productive life". This is a similar sentiment to the George Orwell quote which is my pinned tweet: "Either we all live in a decent world or no one does". So this is a good sentiment.

Gates also introduces us to Vaclav Smil, the Czech-born expert on ecology, particularly focusing on energy.


Chapter 1 is titled "Why Zero?". It lays some scientific groundwork.

Hotter air can hold more moisture, and as the air gets warmer, it gets thirstier, drinking up more water from the soil.
Gates calls out the danger of heatstroke, recalling the horrifying scenario that opens KSR's "The Ministry For The Future":
In the regions that are most in jeopardy — the Persian Gulf, South Asia, and parts of China — there will be times of the year when hundreds of millions of people will be at risk of dying.


Chapter 2 is titled "This Will Be Hard". Right at the time then the developing world can start to see the light at the end of the tunnel in getting lifestyies somewhat like the developed West, we realize that the light is the headlight of the onrushing train of the climate crisis. Gates states that

The best books I have read on this topic are Vaclav Smil’s Energy Transitions and Energy Myths and Realities ...
This is a pretty strong statement:
Unless we move fast toward zero, bad things (and probably many of them) will happen well within most people’s lifetime, and very bad things will happen within a generation. Even if climate change doesn’t rank as an existential threat to humanity, it will make most people worse off, and it will make the poorest even poorer.


Chapter 3 is titled "Five Questions To Ask In Every Climate Conversation". The 5 questions are Gates' "mental framework" for understanding the climate crisis. They are:

  1. How Much of the 51 Billion Tons Are We Talking About?
    These are great numbers to have - the numbers are probably the book's greatest strength.

  2. What’s Your Plan for Cement?
    Who knew that cement (which holds concrete together) was such an environmental disaster?
  3. How Much Power Are We Talking About?
    Another great table.

  4. How Much Space Do You Need?
    And another great table.

  5. How Much Is This Going to Cost?
    Gates defines the term "Green Premium": how much more does the green, i.e. no CO2 emitted, solution to a problam cost than the current, presumably fossil fuel-based, solution.

    [I found myself at a disadvantage throughout these discussions - I think MMT has ruined me. Because once you start thinking in MMT patterns, the question "how much does it cost?" immediately triggers the MMT truism, "cost doesn't matter - only the availability of resources does". I'm going to try to put that aside for now and just address it at the end.]

    Meanwhile, Gates puts the "Green Premium" concept to use:

    Looking at all the different premiums, we can decide which zero-carbon solutions we should deploy now and where we should pursue breakthroughs because the clean alternatives aren’t cheap enough.


The next 5 chapters discuss in turn the 5 "things we do" listed in the 1st box above.

Given it's foundational nature, electricity generation ("How We Plug In") is discussed 1st. Clearly energy storage for renewables is 1 of the critical technologies that must be improved. Gates also is an advocate for (and investor in) nuclear power. I also believe that nuclear power should be vigorously developed.

It would surely be a lot easier to "avoid a climate disaster" if nuclear fusion power generation had been developed at any time in the last 70 years. This is a place where science and technology have let us down.

Gates provides many computations and estimates of the Green Premiums associated with activities and objects within these 5 domains.


Chapter 9 is titled "Adapting to a Warmer World". Gates raises an interesting point about the developing world - that helping them adapt to our warming world is more important than reducing their miniscule carbon footprint.

Please don’t take away vaccine money and put it into electric cars. Africa is responsible for only about 2 percent of all global emissions. What you really should be funding there is adaptation. The best way we can help the poor adapt to climate change is to make sure they’re healthy enough to survive it. And to thrive despite it.
Gates introduces us to CGIAR. Per Wikipedia, "CGIAR (formerly the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research) is a global partnership that unites international organizations engaged in research about food security." Gates is apparently a leader of the Global Commission on Adaptation.


Chapter 10 is titled "Why Government Policies Matter". Gates begins by talking anecdotally about the creation of the EPA as an example of government addressing environmental issues. Other successful government projects:

  • Electrification;
  • Energy security - pursued after the Oil Embargo of the early 1970s;
  • Economic recovery - as was done after the Great Recession of 2008.
Gates lists 7 "high level goals they [government] should be aiming for." I think these section headers could have been a lot more explanatory.
  1. Mind the Investment Gap ...
  2. Level the Playing Field ...
  3. Overcome Nonmarket Barriers ...
  4. Stay Up to Date ...
  5. Plan for a Just Transition ...
  6. Do the Hard Stuff Too ...
  7. Work on Technology, Policy, and Markets at the Same Time


Chapter 11 is titled "A Plan For Getting To Zero". Gates divides the elements of "the my plan" into 2 categories:

  1. expanding the supply of innovations; ...
  2. accelerating the demand for innovations.
Under the 1st branch, Gates details 19 innovations we need - quite a laundry list.
  • Hydrogen produced without emitting carbon
  • Grid-scale electricity storage that can last a full season
  • Electrofuels
  • Advanced biofuels
  • Zero-carbon cement
  • Zero-carbon steel
  • Plant- and cell-based meat and dairy
  • Zero-carbon fertilizer
  • Next-generation nuclear fission
  • Nuclear fusion
  • Carbon capture (both direct air capture and point capture)
  • Underground electricity transmission
  • Zero-carbon plastics
  • Geothermal plastics
  • Pumped hydro
  • Thermal storage
  • Drought- and flood-tolerant food crops
  • Zero-carbon alternatives to palm oil
  • Coolants that don’t contain F-gases
Gates states that "To get these technologies ready soon enough to make a difference, governments need to do the following:"
  • Quintuple clean energy and climate-related R&D over the next decade. ...
  • Make bigger bets on high-risk, high-reward R&D projects. ...
  • Match R&D with our greatest needs. ...
  • Work with industry from the beginning.
Gates subdivides the second branch, the demand side.
The demand side is a little more complicated than the supply piece. It actually involves two steps: the proof phase, and the scale-up phase.

...

The proof phase is a valley of death, a place where good ideas go to die.

...

Governments (as well as big companies) can help energy start-ups make it out of the valley alive because they’re massive consumers. If they prioritize buying green, they’ll help bring more products to market by creating certainty and reducing costs.

This leads to the demand side list of goverment to-dos [I guess his editor didn't notice the lack of parallelism in these section headers]:
  • Use procurement power. ...
  • Create incentives that lower costs and reduce risk. ...
  • Build the infrastructure that will get new technologies to market. ...
  • Change the rules so new technologies can compete. ...
  • Put a price on carbon. ...
  • Clean electricity standards. ...
  • Clean fuel standards. ...
  • Clean product standards. ...
  • Out with the old. ...
Gates discusses the roles appropriate to various levels of government:
The federal government ... collects most tax revenue, which means that federal financial incentives will be the most effective at driving change.

...

Two things are clear. First, the amount of money invested in getting to zero, and adapting to the damage that we know is coming, will need to ramp up dramatically and for the long haul. To me, this means that governments and multilateral banks will need to find much better ways to tap private capital. Their coffers aren’t big enough to do this on their own.

Second, the time frames for climate investment are long, and the risks are high. So the public sector should be using its financial strength to lengthen the investment horizon—reflecting the fact that returns may not come for many years—and reduce the risk of these investments. It’ll be tricky to mix public and private money on such a large scale, but it's essential. We need our best minds in finance working on this problem.

State and local governments also have their role to play, via state legislatures and agencies, and city councils and municipal agencies.


Chapter 12 is titled "What Each Of Us Can Do". Gates provides to-do lists for our different roles in society.

  • As a Citizen ...
    • Make calls, write letters, attend town halls. ...
    • Look locally as well as nationally. ...
    • Run for office. ...
  • As a Consumer ...
    • Sign up for a green pricing program with your electric utility. ...
    • Reduce your home’s emissions. ...
    • Buy an electric vehicle. ...
    • Try a plant-based burger. ...
  • As an Employee or Employer ...
    • Set up an internal carbon tax. ...
    • Prioritize innovation in low-carbon solutions. ...
    • Be an early adopter. ...
    • Engage in the policy-making process. ...
    • Connect with government-funded research. ...
    • Help early-stage innovators get across the valley of death. ...
Here's the last paragraph of the book (not counting the Afterword on the COVID-19 pandemic):
I’m an optimist because I know what technology can accomplish and because I know what people can accomplish. I’m profoundly inspired by all the passion I see, especially among young people, for solving this problem. If we keep our eye on the big goal—getting to zero—and we make serious plans to achieve that goal, we can avoid a disaster. We can keep the climate bearable for everyone, help hundreds of millions of poor people make the most of their lives, and preserve the planet for generations to come.


This book is a quick read, and chock full of facts and figures. Thanks Bill! Kobo says it takes 5-6 hours to read, I strongly recommend that you do so. Meanwhile ...


At the start of Chapter 11, Gates states:

In energy, software, and just about every other pursuit, it’s a mistake to think of innovation only in the strict, technological sense. Innovation is not just a matter of inventing a new machine or some new process; it’s also coming up with new approaches to business models, supply chains, markets, and policies that will help new inventions come to life and reach a global scale. Innovation is both new devices and new ways of doing things.
To me this totally begs the question: what about innovation in our basic society, our basic economy, our basic monetary system? Particularly on the issue of money, we saw in Chapter 11 Gates talked about playing fast and loose with $$$ moving between governments, banks, and private capital - "We need our best minds in finance working on this problem". But he still is worried about investment and ROI.

I guess it goes back to the title of Naomi Klein's 2014 book "This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate". In Chapter 2 Gates admits that the climate crisis might represent "an existential threat to humanity", but then when it comes to addressing the threat, he takes pretty much a "business as usual" approach to the crisis.

Note, just to make sure we are all on the same page, "an existential threat to humanity" means that the human race could completely die out, could become extinct, could be totally wiped from existence.

What if "business as usual" is not enough? What if we need a "This Changes Everything" approach?

But of course Bill Gates is not going to go there. Why? Because he is 1 of the richest men in the world. So, by and large, he's really pretty OK with the status quo just as it is now. Capitalism, A-OK. Free markets everywhere, even when inappropriate, A-OK. And modern money theory (MMT), which says, money doesn't matter, only resources do?

LOL, probably the main purpose of money is to keep the rich people rich, and the ultra-rich even more so. So of course he's going to take a "business as usual" approach. [snark]He's in the finest 1st class suite on the Titanic, but he's still got to hold onto that privilege, and the power to abuse women and underlings that comes with it.[/snark]

I'll repeat a statement from Chapter 11:

To me, this means that governments and multilateral banks will need to find much better ways to tap private capital. Their coffers aren’t big enough to do this on their own.
Government "coffers aren't big enough"??? MMT completely disagrees - any government with its own fiat currency has infinite coffers of money. Gates probably knows that, but, again, that's not something 1 of the world's richest men is going to admit to.

Part of the reason that this review wound up being so late was that I was ruminating on My Latest Mad Scheme, which will be revealed in my next post.

But before that, I kept having this thought as I approached the end of this book: how about we put 2 grad students to work and rewrite this book making the following changes: 1 grad student tallies how much everything costs - pretty much just as a thought experiment (Gedankenexperiment).

Meanwhile, grad student #2 identifies what the resources involved are, and where there are potential shortages thereof. We then know what we REALLY have to worry about trying to avoid a climate disaster. The other, the $$$, is BS.

What does the book read like then?


[Updated 2021-06-01 2:18 pm]

1 thing I meant to mention and forgot: why aren't insurance companies being more activist in the face of the climate crisis? The continuing worsening of natural disasters is surely costing them $B or 10s or 100s of $B. I would think at some point it will become existential for them. Why aren't they acting?

Saturday, May 01, 2021

How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism

"How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism", is a recent "anti-monopoly pamphlet" by Cory Doctorow, 2020, 103 pages, 27k words. It is a quick, easy read.

I am a big admirer of Doctorow. He seems to be a really hardworking guy. In addition to his fiction and non-fiction writing, he has been very active in the EFF and a champion of "right to repair". I just recently found his blog, "Pluralistic", which amazingly has I'd guess an average of 2 articles/day - and they are well-thought-out, well-written, and interesting.

I got to meet Doctorow in maybe 2012-13, when he and Charlie Stross were promoting "Rapture of the Nerds" (released September, 2012), at Joseph-Beth Bookstore in Lexington. I told him that he was a bard of the revolution, and to please keep it up. He totally has not disappointed.

In his blog, he describes this book as "an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution." "Surveillance capitalism" is easy to spot: think Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, aka Big Tech.

I tweeted my initial reaction to Doctorow's solution:

This is indeed Doctorow's solution: break up the monopolies, bust the trusts, make Teddy Roosevelt proud.

Why are the online surveillance companies bad? Why are they evil? Well, for starters, they allow Nazis to thrive & prosper. Even when they try to police the content on their platforms, Nazis can add new stuff as fast as Big Tech can take it down.

1 thing Doctorow contends that I thought was really interesting: that Big Tech vastly exaggerates the effectivity of their targetted ads.

Big Tech lies about just about everything, including how well its machine-learning fueled persuasion systems work.
Doctorow also contends that, by and large, the vast amounts of data collected by Big Tech are worthless. Location-based data is indeed highly useful (you're right out front, come in our store & buy something), but it has a very short lifespan (oops, you're no longer in front of our store). Seems to me, tho, that collating this data into 2nd order data (this person is often in front of our store between 12 & 2 pm on weekdays) would be less time sensitive. But Doctorow contends that, once the Big Tech companies are broken up, their mountains of data will quickly become worthless.

Whatever happened to antitrust? When was the last time a corporate merger was shot down as being monopolistic?

It seems like, increasingly, you can identify people who basically have been incredibly successful at fucking the rest of us under the radar. Like the Koch Brothers, who, via their minion Mitch McConnell, have succeeded in filling the Supreme Court with Federalist Society indoctrinated judges. If originalism is not lame, I do not know what is. I mean, of course, absolutely nothing meaningful has changed in the world since the US constitution was written [sarcasm]. I'm sure that the slave-owing Founding Fathers all treated their slaves very humanely.

Doctorow introduces us to Robert Bork: The Man Who Destroyed Antitrust. Originally, antitrust legislation defined monopolies as bad - period. Bork's book "The Antitrust Paradox", published in 1978, said, "No, no, no, monopolies are only bad if they adversely affect consumers". In the 4 decades since then, this has become the accepted approach.

But, come on - hire expensive PR firms and lawyers and EVERY merger can be made to look advantageous to consumers. Of course in practice, if it doesn't work out, what happens? Nothing. For the last few decades, I've been asking "Why does the FTC or the SEC not break up {$monopolist}'s monopoly?" Well, now I know the answer. Robert Bork, fucking us from beyond the grave. Well, at least the son of a bitch is dead, as of 2012. He's probably gloating his ass off as he burns in hell.

Doctorow dismisses the argument that we should own and commoditize our own data.

It’s tempting to reach for the property hammer when Big Tech treats your information like a nail—not least because Big Tech are such prolific abusers of property hammers when it comes to their information. But this is a mistake. If we allow markets to dictate the use of our information, then we’ll find that we’re sellers in a buyers’ market where the Big Tech monopolies set a price for our data that is so low as to be insignificant or, more likely, set at a nonnegotiable price of zero in a click-through agreement that you don’t have the opportunity to modify.
Doctorow discusses the roots of current online Nazism, concluding:
Inequality creates the conditions for both conspiracies and violent racist ideologies, and then surveillance capitalism lets opportunists target the fearful and the conspiracy-minded.

...

Antitrust was neutered as a key part of the project to make the wealthy wealthier, and that project has worked. The vast majority of people on Earth have a negative net worth, and even the dwindling middle class is in a precarious state, undersaved for retirement, underinsured for medical disasters, and undersecured against climate and technology shocks.

I am so pleased and hopeful that our new president Uncle Joe appears to be trying to address inequality - or at least trying to make life easier for the working man or particularly woman via things like universal preschool and child care. Hopefully this can restore some faith in government and keep people from giving credence to the lies of wannabe dictators like our prior president. But Doctorow points out that this will be a slow process.

Wouldn't be great to once again have trustbusters, righteously smiting the monopolists!

But trustbusters once strode the nation, brandishing law books, terrorizing robber barons, and shattering the illusion of monopolies’ all-powerful grip on our society.
Ha ha, I was thinking about removing the f-bombs above, but I don't think I will. I seem to be following Doctorow's lead:
“Knock it off. We all know what the Sherman Act says. Robert Bork was a deranged fantasist. For avoidance of doubt, fuck that guy.” In other words, the problem with monopolies is monopolism — the concentration of power into too few hands, which erodes our right to self-determination.
In the end, it all flows from 1 wellspring: capitalism.
As to why things are so screwed up? Capitalism. Specifically, the monopolism that creates inequality and the inequality that creates monopolism. It’s a form of capitalism that rewards sociopaths who destroy the real economy to inflate the bottom line, and they get away with it for the same reason companies get away with spying: because our governments are in thrall to both the ideology that says monopolies are actually just fine and in thrall to the ideology that says that in a monopolistic world, you’d better not piss off the monopolists.

Surveillance doesn’t make capitalism rogue. Capitalism’s unchecked rule begets surveillance.

Doctorow concludes by getting back in touch with his inner geek, and stressing the importance in today's automated and connected world of getting the tech right.
I am, secretly, despite what I have said earlier, a tech exceptionalist. Not in the sense of thinking that tech should be given a free pass to monopolize because it has “economies of scale” or some other nebulous feature. I’m a tech exceptionalist because I believe that getting tech right matters and that getting it wrong will be an unmitigated catastrophe—and doing it right can give us the power to work together to save our civilization, our species, and our planet.
Please read this book. Kobo says it only takes 1-2 hours. I have been watching a lot of movies lately, each about the same time investment as this, reading this book is definitely time better spent.