RE: https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/116232524241982831
Additional note: when foodprices rocket, that is ALMOST ALWAYS the trigger for civil unrest and revolutions. (The other is a fiscal/tax/revenue crisis, caused by government turning into rent-seeking by the rich *and* trying to fund a war simultaneously, as with the French Revolution.)
Does this look familiar to you, too?
@cstross Right-to-repair is a huge issue for farm equipment.
One of the reasons is not so much that the OEM prices are high is that the stocks of spares are sized based on the order rate against the high prices; you order it, they make it, and you get it many weeks later.
Combine "the software servers are down" with "the supply chain to the plant that makes spares is disrupted" with "fuel prices are too high for profitable farming according to the financial system" and food supply shrinks.
@cstross What I think people don't get is that the farm skillset in the US is in old people (on the whole and by and large), COVID has been hard on them, and the ethnic cleansing has taken away big chunks of the skills base.
Compelled system change in a context where you've got some patrician landowners and invalidated-axioms agribusiness and not much else is not going to hold together so well. Then throw in the extreme weather events, plural, the US has already had through the Midwest.
@cstross A lot of this has been driven by a desire to re-open Russia's sales channels so they can afford their war of conquest. (Dropped sanctions by the US, calls from the EU right, etc.)
We're seeing late stage Carbon Binge efforts to use military force to be the last supplier standing.
What we aren't seeing yet is the Coalition to Decarbonize; I think we're gonna, and then we're going to see military efforts to prevent any such thing.
Society insists you buy gas, even when there isn't any.
@Nazani @cstross "extinction burst" is by and large and on the whole complete nonsense.
Systems try to keep running; that's a property of systems.
If it's running on a billion people instead of eight billion, nothing requires it to care.
Fossil carbon dependence cannot go away by any working of the existing system. It takes a conscious, sustained effort to kill it. (Which cannot possibly be non-violent because the people who profit from the existing system will not accept change.)
@Nazani @cstross Updating the model hurts.
(For obvious reasons; an unstable mental model is high-cost/low-benefit and experiences higher-than-average selection pressures.)
Climate change deniers are, by and large, perfectly well aware they're expressing a preference for mass death over their personal experience of loss of status. They're fine with being in favor of that. It's not really analogous to an infant not having developed the machinery of learning just yet.
@otfrom @cstross It's de-facto everyone vs the US, once you realize that Russia and the US are the same entity. (Same aristocracy, same strategic goals, same issues with fading glory, same memetic capture by TESCREAL and mammonism).
From that perspective, one may recognize the UK ongoing political wrangle as being over whether the emotional comfort of identifying with the fading glory faction is worth the economic devastation.
The USA could have been the driving force behind world transport/renewable electrification, but we didn't have the political will nor the insight.
Much like VHS videotape and the transistor radio, the US invented something, looked at it, said "meh", and continued doing what we were doing. Another country (Japan before, China now) looked and said "Ooooooh, we can use that!" Japan also did a similar move with small, excellent cars when the US couldn't be bothered.
China realized there's no future in polluting with coal nor in buying oil - it's a mug's game.
They made a calculated political decision to take over the world solar market, and to be the driving force behind world electrification. (Maybe something only possible in a command economy.)
Result? Lots of money coming into China for solar panels and electric cars / bikes. Economic destruction of the petroleum car and petroleum extraction industries. The world looking to China as the provider of energy needs, instead of the US and the Middle East.
Oh, and BTW, much cleaner air and water, and maybe slowing down climate change.
@PhilSalkie The US had both; what it didn't have was a way to stop the original October Surprise.
@graydon @PhilSalkie @cstross the thing about oligarchies is that they are really unstable, they play for keeps, and we're just collateral damage.
I don't think that the EU/China/India oligarchy vs the US/Russia oligarchy (non petro-states vs petro-states?) is any more stable than any other.
I am surprised how historical contingency forces new and unexpected forms though.
@PhilSalkie @otfrom @cstross @graydon
America invented electricity?
Faraday, Swan and many others would beg to differ.
@cstross @WellsiteGeo @otfrom @graydon
"Electrification" should have specifically been "Renewable Electrification", which is the key point here. An electrified world driven solely by coal is a disaster - what China has realized is that there is no beating the economics of free fuel, so the winning move is not to keep milking the stranded assets of fossil fuels, but to be the go-to solar supplier for the planet. Can't sell the fuel anymore? Sell the hardware that uses the free fuel. And as a byproduct? Cleaner air, healthier populace, less crazy weather.
They're already converting their existing coal infrastructure from baseload generation to adaptive, which will mean less coal burned and more flexibility for handling weather related variation in renewable generation.
Battery storage - lithium ion cells invented in the US and Germany. World leaders in the field now? China. They realize that storing power as pumped hydro is absurdly inefficient, as is storing power as Hydrogen. Battery round trip efficiency is in the 90s, and inverters can respond to grid stabilization requirements orders of magnitude faster than a peaker plant. Just have to get the production infrastructure to the point that churning out storage systems is just like turning a crank.
An interesting thing in the EV world - BYD is installing charge stations with multiple 1.5MW outlets. Every _week_ they install more stations than the entire 4-year US NEVI project will.
@cstross @WellsiteGeo @otfrom @graydon
If the US isn't careful, in 10 years we will look like some sort of Victorian steampunk retro theme park in comparison to the rest of the world's zero-carbon electric future.
@WellsiteGeo The US was well ahead in solar photo-voltaic technology in the 1970s; for what would have been his second term, Carter ran on a platform of 25% renewables by 2000.
A lot of oil money woke up and objected in ways which were most probably extra-legal in order to install Reagan. (They absolutely did know at the time that climate change would kill many, many people. That was part of Carter's stated motivation.)
@graydon @WellsiteGeo @PhilSalkie @otfrom @cstross
He put solar panels on the roof... Regan took them down
@otfrom @cstross @graydon It's very much the case that China and the EU want an embedded CO2 tariff as a way of preventing the US from using older plants with a lower marginal cost of production from undercutting newer zero-CO2 plants which are still paying down their loans for the construction.
Not all zero-carbon industrial capital goods are as fortunate as electricity generation with the zero-carbon plant costing less to buy than the four-year running cost of the carbon-emitting plants. There's real pain involved in moving steel production to be zero-carbon.
When the timing is right, China and the EU will do a deal on a revised international trading system. India is a little further behind decarbonisation, but China will be looking for somewhere to sell its solar and wind goods once the Chinese market is mostly satisfied, so it wouldn't shock me if decarbonisation in India was astonishingly fast, maybe 15 years.
@cstross I don't think India can join. Too much incumbency.
It's kinda strange, really; is Xi's ruthlessness and the tottery state of China's economy a consequence of "get with the program or else, comrade" or is he doing the bloody-handed tyrant power consolidation thing? is it going to be possible to distinguish these cases in Xi's (or my!) lifetime? Probably not.
@cstross The "every empire established since the late medieval has exploited a power source" take goes slaves (Spain; slaves existed since time immemorial, but not the way Spain did it); coal (Britain); oil (US); electricity (China).
It's not that neat in the historical record but there's a lot to be said for it as an analysis, even before it makes George H. W. Bush the greatest villain in human history.
One of the exceedingly frustrating things is that anyone else could go electric anytime.
@bjn @cstross Slaves and slavery were systemic, yes.
The Spanish Empire "these are industrial feedstock" take and mechanisms can be argued for being novel; I do not have the expertise to have a strong opinion about the argument, but find it at least plausible. (How well one can really make the distinction between "is this capital or a consumable?" looking at Roman practices is a tough and circumstantial question.)
@graydon The verdict of 100-year-plus history may be that the UK got lucky by having the Brexit referendum before things got bad globally—as of 2026 there's a wide majority who think it was a terrible idea and want back in with the large, moderate neighbouring bloc.
(Situation weirded by (a) fascist ratfucking, bankrolled by the oligarchs, and (b) a gigantic protest vote (maybe as big as 60% of the voting electorate) saying "none of the above" to the old incumbent parties in an FPTP system.)
@graydon @cstross It's also old people because new people see the capture involved. A US farmer basically buys overpriced one use seed from a vendor that requires overpriced one use fertilizers and other products to grow, then they harvest it and have to take the price the tiny number of buyers will give them.
They were told this was where their behaviour was leading in the 1980s, so now there is no point being a new US farmer.
Even bailouts will just end up captured by the big corporations.
@annejohn @cstross Oh yeah. There's going to be a lot of that going on.
One of the absolutely critical things about OODA loops is to get them working on the same time scale as the problem. Only nothing structural thinks the problem is "having food to eat"; you've got a supermarket problem of maintaining margins, you've got a financial problem of minimizing risk, you've got a shipping problem that reduces to scheduling, but no systemic representation of "people need to eat every day".
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