Charlie StrossMar 16

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?

Show threadGraydonMar 16

@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.

Show threadGraydonMar 16

@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.

Show threadGraydonMar 16

@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.

Show threadCharlie StrossMar 16
@graydon I suspect the "Coalition to Decarbonize" is going to be led by China, as a matter of Party Doctrine (if my read on Xi is accurate), with India and the EU joining in for hopefully-obvious reasons. That's half the world population right there, with nukes and a large military-industrial complex.
Show threadChip ButtyMar 16
@cstross @graydon I didn't expect that geo-political realignment
Show threadGlen T, heated, not stirred

@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.

Mar 16 at 3:06pmWeb
Show threadThe Penguin of EvilMar 16
@glent @otfrom @cstross @graydon If you look at the graphs and data India is already playing noticeable catchup with China. It's skipping a whole massive boost of coal/gas as it grows and switching before it builds a ton of stuff China did in the process.