Category: Transformational Ideas

Ukraine War Reveals Our Broken Military Supply Chain

The Daily Escape:

Archangel Falls, Zion NP, UT – August 2023 photo by Torsten Hartmann Photography

The most important thing we’ve learned from the Ukraine War is that the US isn’t ready for a protracted war. One of the big reasons why, as The Insider says, America no longer builds weapons the way it used to. And we need to start building weapons again at tempo.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) has drawn a similar conclusion about US weapons manufacturing: There is no surge capacity and it will take years to revive it. According to their study, replacing the inventory of the critical items used in Ukraine, like 155 millimeter artillery shells, will take 4-7 years; Javelin missiles will take 8 years to replace; Stinger missiles 18 years. Before the Ukraine War broke out, the US was producing only about 14,000 155mm shells per year, enough for two days of fighting in Ukraine at current usage rates.

This scramble for ammunition reflects how ill-prepared the US and its allies are to sustain an intense and/or protracted land war.

Think back to America’s weapons building capabilities during World War II. We became an industrial powerhouse, cranking out warships and aircraft at a breakneck pace. One example: The Navy built ships in just weeks — its fleet grew from just 700 to over 6,000 over the course of the war.

The US maintained this capacity for decades but, as The Insider reports:

“Nowadays, it might take years to build a US Navy ship. The reasons for this are complex — shifted priorities, increased technology on board…labor costs — but the effect is clear: In a high-intensity conflict, the US would face challenges in not only producing vessels but also repairing any ships damaged in battle.”

These aren’t the only weapons that are in short supply. The Pentagon issued a study in April on the contraction of our Defense Contracting industry, which went from 52 primary contractors in the 1990s down to just six today. (full disclosure: Wrongo owns what is for him, a substantial number of shares in one of the six companies.)

During Clinton’s presidency, following the fall of the Soviet Union, Defense Secretary Bill Perry convened defense industry CEOs (known in the industry as the “last supper”) and told them that they should not assume production contracts would be maintained at Cold War levels, and they needed to diversify to survive. Many of the companies got out of defense production, and those that remained merged to secure market share of what became dwindling orders from the Pentagon.

This insured that US weapons suppliers wouldn’t be ready for a future that included China’s defense spending surge, the Russia-China strategic partnership, or today’s war in Ukraine.

Now, the Pentagon is revisiting whether industry consolidation has gone too far.

The WSJ reports that today, the industrial base of defense vendors is about 55,000 companies, down from 69,000 in 2016, and many of them are small firms. This smaller base has become a choke point as shortages of labor, chips, rocket motors and other components are stymieing efforts to boost arms production. The WSJ quotes Halimah Najieb-Locke, the Pentagon’s deputy assistant secretary of defense in charge of industrial-base issues, that the Pentagon:

“…is increasingly reliant on a smaller number of contractors for these critical capabilities….That impacts everybody’s ability to ramp production.”

These supply chain issues also dog the global arms manufacturing industry. US companies hold the first five spots in the top 10 ranking of arms sales, with China taking another four. The consolidated sales of the top five have fallen since the start of the Ukraine War.

Having this paradoxical slowdown in sales amid an increase in demand speaks to the larger challenges of a defense contractor base that is geared to peacetime production. The Defense Department has a role in this failure, since they rarely award contracts for multiyear procurements beyond current requirements. Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. CQ Brown said that the military hasn’t focused enough on keeping a steady flow of munitions production and procurement:

“In some cases, because you don’t have a threat on your doorstep, munitions aren’t…high on our priority list…”

Making the age-old point that sometimes, “just in time” isn’t. More from the WSJ: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“Lockheed and second-ranked Raytheon Technologies Corp. jointly produce…Javelin antitank missiles, but they expect it will take two years to double output that is now at around 400 a month.”

More:

“Greg Hayes, chief executive at Raytheon, said that Ukraine has burned through five years of Javelin production since February and 13 years’ worth of Stinger antiaircraft missiles.”

Aerojet Rocketdyne is an example of a small but crucial cog in the defense industry. It builds the rocket motors used in the Javelin and Stinger missiles deployed in Ukraine. Labor and supplier issues have delayed its deliveries of rocket motors. Raytheon, who makes the Javelin along with Lockheed, said it will be 2024 before Aerojet catches up with engine orders.

The US is also facing a nearly $19 billion backlog in arms sales to Taiwan. Control of the Pacific would be a crucial part of any war with China, and Beijing has the world’s largest navy. According to a 2022 Pentagon report, the country has about 340 ships and submarines. The US, meanwhile, has fewer than 300 warships. Despite that, the US is committed to growing its fleet. Its number of ships is expected to increase to 350 by the 2040s.

To keep up with China, the US will need to build more ships and submarines more quickly. But it has a smaller number of shipyards and a skilled-labor shortage.

All of this will take money, billions of it. But we’re already first in the world’s defense spending. The worst military equipment is equipment that isn’t unavailable when it’s needed. That is not to say that the Defense Contractors should be given a blank check, but we are in dangerous times.

The US spends more on national defense than the next ten countries combined. Defense spending accounts for 12% of all federal spending and nearly half of US discretionary spending. The Defense Contractors are floating on a sea of profits from their captured Pentagon customer.

But is it better to spend extra dollars to have weapons inventory on hand than pay the much higher political cost of a military failure? Can those dollars be found within the existing defense budget rather than by adding to it? From a strategic viewpoint, shouldn’t we build capacity in peacetime when we don’t yet need it (while hoping never to), so that if the US does need it, the capital assets are in place?

The real issue is the stop/start government procurement process. We saw this in N95 mask sourcing, where domestic suppliers downsized over the years to a point where they couldn’t meet the surge in demand when Covid hit. After they ramped up, the government walked away from them when mask mandates ended.

This is also true in defense. Over the last 25 years, Congress has passed more than 120 Continuing Resolutions to fund the Pentagon instead of annual appropriations bills. With Continuing Resolutions comes chronic uncertainty for companies about when they’ll get paid, or when they can proceed to a new phase of weapons development or production.

Nothing is forcing the DOD to only do business with a small group of contractors (other than no one else bids on the contracts because the DOD won’t award to them). The issue is a shrinking domestic manufacturing base, and a lack of sustained business in the defense sector to support a larger field of competitors.

Market forces require efficiency. Sadly, efficiency comes at the cost of resiliency. National security priorities should deal with the stop/start issues that face our defense industry. In 2020, the National Defense Industrial Association’s report on the readiness of the Defense Industrial Base said 27% of critical defense supplier industries would likely experience shortages in the event of a surge in demand for combat-essential products.

And two years later, it happened in Ukraine.

Over the longer term, the US should develop an industrial reserve policy that pays companies to maintain excess capacity, such as warehousing critical, long lead-time parts. Much of today’s production challenges could be easily resolved by giving selected weapons or weapons systems a “protected” status, making them outside of the usual DOD acquisition and contracting rules that limit the flexibility and commitment needed to ensure a continuous production line.

This strategy would be expensive. But Russia’s war in Ukraine has reinforced the necessity of maintaining a deep inventory of weapons which we no longer have today. And it’s no longer a question of whether the US industrial base is prepared to rapidly surge production. It’s clear that we are not, because the necessary investments have not been made.

(hat tip to Brendan K. for his useful insights for this article)

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How To Think Differently About Housing

The Daily Escape:

Sunrise, Outer Banks, NC – June 2023 photo by Stephen P. Szymanski

Wrongo and Ms. Right have 12 grandchildren, only one of which is still in high school. The other 11 are out of school and pursuing their careers or are finishing their education. Only one of the 12 owns a home. Their experience with real estate is representative of what most younger Americans face in today’s real estate market. Ben Carlson uses data from Redfin to show us that mortgage payments are way up over prior years:

The median mortgage payment was up by more than $1,000 over four years. Carlson reminds us that this is just the monthly mortgage payment, it doesn’t include insurance, property taxes or upkeep. This is part of the reason that housing affordability is more excruciating — the pace of the increases has happened so quickly. We’ve simply never seen prices and rates rise this fast in such a short period of time. And asking prices are up as well:

Note that at the end of May 2023, the median asking price was $397k, up from $300k in May 2020, a 32% increase in four years.

But high mortgage rates and rising home prices aren’t deterring all buyers. John Burns Research shows buyers still outnumber sellers by a wide margin in today’s market. They report that as of April, even with 7% mortgage rates, 78% of all real estate agents say that buyers outnumber sellers in their markets.

And for rentals, the national median rent for a one-bedroom apartment has climbed to $1,504, according to research from Zumper. That’s significant: It’s only the second time in history that it has risen past $1,500. But the median doesn’t represent what you’ll pay in big cities:

In America, buying an investment property near work is more lucrative than actually working. The growth of asset values has outstripped returns on labor for four decades. Last year, one in four home sales was to someone who had no intention of living in it. Investors are incentivized to buy the type of homes most needed by first-time buyers: Inexpensive properties generate the highest rental-income cash flows.

Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies found that in 2019, the median net worth of US renters was just 2.5% of the median net worth of homeowners: $6,270 versus $254,900. There’s no better example than the economic challenges to America’s young persons than trying to find (relatively) affordable housing near where they work.

A very interesting article in the May 23 NYT Magazine suggests a possible solution to housing inflation. Vienna, Austria began planning it’s now world-famous municipal housing in 1919. Prior to that, Vienna had some of the worst housing conditions in Europe. Vienna’s housing program is known as “social housing” (Gemeindebauten), a phrase that captures how the city’s public housing and other limited-profit housing are a widely-shared social benefit:

“The Gemeindebauten welcomes the middle class, not just the poor. In Vienna, a whopping 80% of residents qualify for public housing, and once you have a contract, it never expires, even if you get richer.”

Vienna isn’t a small town. Its population is just under 2 million, and if it were in the US it would be our fifth largest city, between Houston and Phoenix.

The availability of Vienna’s social housing also helps to keep costs down even for private housing:

“In 2021, Viennese living in private housing spent 26% of their after-tax income on rent and energy costs on average, which is…slightly more than the figure for social-housing residents overall (22%).”

One of the reasons Vienna’s social housing works is that it is not means-tested; it is open to middle class people. And as a result, the residents care more about whether their grounds stay clean and beautiful. In the US we restrict public housing to the poorest of the poor, making public housing something to escape from, not to enjoy.

Meanwhile, 49% of American renters are paying landlords more than 30% of their pretax income, In New York City, the median renter household spends 36% of its pretax income on rent.

The key difference is that Vienna prioritizes subsidizing construction, while the US prioritizes subsidizing people, like with housing vouchers. One model focuses on supply, the other on demand. Vienna’s choice illustrates a fundamental economic reality, which is that a large-enough supply of social housing offers a market alternative that improves housing for all.

Calls for a federal social-housing plan in America might sound far-fetched but the US government is already deeply involved in the housing market. There’s generous support for homeowners and deliberately insufficient support for the lowest-income households. In 2017, the US gave $155 billion on tax breaks to homeowners and to investors in rental housing and mortgage-revenue bonds, more than three times the $50 billion spent on affordable housing.

For many, housing expense can be an economic burden. And it’s hard to even contemplate what it would mean to have it not be a problem. What’s mind-boggling is how social housing gives the economic lives of Viennese an entirely different shape.

Imagine where the rest of America’s young adults’ income might go if they were able to spend much less of it on housing. Vienna’s program is a look into a world in which homeownership isn’t the only way to secure a financial future.

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The Two-Edged Sword Of Federalism

The Daily Escape:

Mount Evans Road, 14,100′, Idaho Springs, CO – May 26, 2023 photo by Reid Neureiter

Here at the Wrongologist, we often talk about Constitutional rights, but we rarely talk about Federalism. So today, let’s lean into federal vs. states’ rights. We’ll start with the recent Supreme Court decision in Sackett vs. EPA, which concerned the power of the EPA to regulate wetlands. Last week, the Supreme Court concluded that the Clean Water Act only applies to wetlands with “a continuous surface connection” to bodies of water.

This defined what waterbodies are considered waters of the United States (WOTUS), an issue that has been in the courts for years. The ruling narrowed the scope of the Clean Water Act, and severely limits the federal government’s ability to regulate wetlands.

Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion affirmed the principle that bureaucrats cannot broadly define statutory language. Alito’s opinion struck a blow for federalism. Federalism is a system of government in which the same territory is controlled by two levels of government. The US Constitution originally divided the exercise of political power between one national and many state governments. The national government is given control over matters affecting the whole nation. All other issues were reserved to the states.

  • Article VI of the Constitution contains the Supremacy Clause, which says that when the laws of the federal government are in conflict with the laws of a state’s government, the federal law supersedes the state law.
  • Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution describes specific powers which belong to the federal government. These powers are referred to as enumerated powers.
  • The Tenth Amendment reserves to the states those powers that are not delegated to the federal government.

The Sackett vs. EPA decision is another step in the Right-wing program to move as much federal government rule-making authority as possible to the states. This is the continuation of Nixon’s efforts to shrink the federal government’s power by devolving decisions to state and local governments. The best recent example of this is the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision on abortion that wiped out the precedent set in Roe v. Wade that guaranteed a national right to abortion and passed that responsibility back to the states.

At the same time, the Right is moving to nationalize policy on social issues, from what books to allow on library shelves to limits on transgender rights, a rollback of state environmental actions, and an attack on anything that can be labeled as “woke.”

So we’ve got Red states pushing to centralize decisions about social and cultural issues in Washington, while the Right-wing Supreme Court pushes devolution of voting rights, abortion rights, and indeed national agency rule-making (EPA) to the states.

This 2023 brand of two-way Republican federalism is upending the delicate balance of power between the federal government and state governments. It raises questions about the allocation of authority, cooperation, and the ability of the national government even to define what is a pressing national issue.

Today’s Washington gridlock makes policymaking nearly impossible. That has shifted much of today’s policymaking to the states, where the Parties often have comfortable majorities. Many states (39) have government trifectas, with one Party controlling the governorship while holding majorities in the legislature, making policymaking simpler than in a divided and polarized US Congress.

Interest group activists have followed this trend and focused their efforts on these 39 states. Much of a state’s policies – abortion, voting rights, gun control, immigration, LGBT rights, healthcare, or taxation – are on widely divergent paths. For example:

  • In Democratic states it is easy to vote; in Republican states there are many barriers to voting.
  • In Democratic states fewer people are medically uninsured; in Republican states there are more uninsured people.
  • In Democratic states access to abortion is easier; in Republican states it is harder, if not criminalized.

Although federalism (for now) seems to protect the country from presidents amassing power in dictatorial ways, anti-democratic figures (think DeSantis and Abbott) are able, because of the resurgence of state-level policymaking, to transform Republican states into laboratories against democracy.

The Covid pandemic also put federalism to the test. The response to the pandemic highlighted the tension between national coordination and state autonomy. While the federal government provided guidance and resources, the implementation of measures like lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccination campaigns, was largely left to individual states. This decentralized approach led to significant variations in pandemic response across the country, creating challenges in coordinating efforts and potentially exacerbating the spread of the virus.

Federalism properly implemented, brings government closer to the people and holds it accountable. But when badly implemented, you get the USA in 2023: A country trending toward autocracy.

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Saturday Soother – May 27, 2023

The Daily Escape:

Milky Way, Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park – May 2023 photo by Hasanur Khan

The WaPo’s Paul Farhi writes about “The looming existential crisis for cable news”:

“As recently as 2016, when Trump was narrowly elected president, just over 70% of all households with a TV had cable or satellite TV subscriptions. Today the figure is just under 40%, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence, a research firm.”

And it’s dropping fast:

“During the first quarter of 2023, another 2.3 million customers (or 7% of the total) cut the cord to traditional cable…the number of homes receiving TV via cable is now about the same as it was in 1992, when the industry was still on the rise.”

So, what does this mean for the Cable TV industry? Last year, the licensing fees collected by the six biggest cable news networks (Fox, CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, Fox Business and HLN) amounted to just over $4 billion. Advertisers added another $2.6 billion.

Farhi quotes Alan Wolk, a veteran advertising executive and media consultant:

“Cable news is dying….Not because it’s become irrelevant, but because the medium it lives on, cable TV, is dying.”

He predicts that cable could:

“…for all intents and purposes, disappear within a decade”.

The popular cable networks are profitable, largely because of how pricing works in the cable industry. The financial foundation of cable news isn’t advertising but the license fees that cable-system operators pay for the right to carry them. Regardless of whether a cable subscriber watches Fox, CNN or MSNBC, their monthly cable payments fund those companies.

The day could soon come when the exodus of cable subscribers leaves cable operators unable to pay the hefty license fees that those cable companies now command.

The cable industry sees what’s coming. They have all tried to distribute programming via streaming apps, YouTube channels, podcasts, and social media platforms in an effort to meet the cord-cutters where they are.

Yet so far, no news app comes close to matching cable in popularity and profitability.

Alan Wolk thinks cable news will have a particular problem in crossing the bridge to streaming: The median cable-news viewer is in their 60s and is resistant to new technologies.

The trouble signs are there. Viewers of the cable lineup other than news has sagged over the past decade as younger viewers have deserted cable. USA Network, once the most popular cable channel, has lost 75% of its nightly audience over the past 10 years. FX is down 68%, while the History Channel is off by 65%.

So what does this mean for US politics? Kyle Tharp posts weekly political advertising statistics on new media:

“…political advertisers spent just over $6.6 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week…. For the fourth week in a row, the Biden campaign was the top-spending political advertiser nationwide on Facebook and Instagram. Their team continues to lean heavily on the platforms for growing their network of grassroots donors…..Political advertisers in the US have spent around $800,000 on Snapchat advertising in 2023.”

Tharp reports that DeSantis’ campaign launch video was heavily watched across all social media:

“On Twitter, the video received 23.8 million impressions…. compared to 2.9 million impressions for Tim Scott’s…launch video, and 9.1 million impressions on Nikki Haley’s…launch video…..Joe Biden’s launch video received 44.8 million impressions. The [DeSantis] video also received 125,000 views on Facebook, 1.9 million views on Instagram, and 236,000 views on Rumble. It’s a strong showing by any measure.”

(An “impression” is how many times it was displayed or had potential “eyeballs” on it.)

When you learn that Trump’s CNN town hall attracted an audience of just 3.3 million viewers, It’s clear that social media is already a major competitor to cable for the political class.

OTOH, if cable news goes away, how will Wrongo get his daily diet of pharmaceutical commercials?

That’s enough for this week. It’s time to forget about the “groundhog day” feeling that you get with the news bunnies constantly talking about the Debt Ceiling. It’s time for our Saturday Soother.

Here on the fields of Wrong, the baby bluebirds have fledged, and you can see them flying from tree to tree. We seem to be in for about 10 days of warmth and sun, with no rain in sight. People around here will soon need to choose between watering their plants and having a full well.

So grab a chair outside in the shade and put on your sunglasses. Now watch and listen to Dvoƙák’s “Piano Trio No. 4 in E minor, Op. 90 (the “Dumky”)”. Dvoƙák completed the trio in February 1891, and it is among the composer’s best-known works. The term Dumky is Ukrainian. It refers to epic ballads.

Here the Dumky is performed in the Herbst Theater, San Francisco in 2008 by the Beaux Arts Trio, with Daniel Hope on violin, Antonio Meneses on cello and Menahem Pressler on piano:

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Saturday Soother – April 22, 2023

The Daily Escape:

Rainbow, Blue Ridge Parkway, VA – April 2023 photo by Tim Lewis

American carnage is real, my friend. Just not in the way that Trump stated in his inaugural rant. The American carnage Wrongo speaks of is the gun attacks made on others by angry or fearful lone American gunmen. From Charlie Sykes at The Bulwark:

“Ringing the wrong doorbell, making a wrong turn, getting in the wrong car, and an errant basketball. A wounded teenager, a dead young woman, cheerleaders in critical condition, and a 6-year-old girl and her father shot.”

The Indiana man who shot a 16-year-old boy for knocking on his door is described by his grandson as a conspiracy theorist and avid consumer of right-wing media: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“I feel like a lot of people of that generation are caught up in this 24 hour news cycle of fear and paranoia perpetuated by some…news stations. And he was fully into that, sitting and watching Fox News all day, every day blaring in his living room…..that doesn’t necessarily lead people to be racist, but it reinforces and galvanizes racist people. And their beliefs.”

Right wing propaganda is about fear. And some people bathe in it for hours a day. So, while the rest of us enjoy walks in the park or a trip to the market, they’re terrified of every swarthy stranger at the Publix or Home Depot.

Add this level of fear to the implicit permission given gun owners by “stand your ground” laws, and you have the elements of an environment of violence.  Vox provides background:

“Some of these shootings took place in states with so-called “stand your ground” laws, which offer expansive legal protections for people who use deadly force against others out of self-defense….and experts have noted that the laws can bolster a “shoot first, ask later” mentality.”

More: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“Under such laws — which exist in some form in 38 states — people can use lethal force if they reasonably believe their life is under threat, and they don’t have to take steps to retreat or avoid the confrontation first. That’s a stark change from prior laws….In the past, the “castle doctrine,” which has been adopted by most states, allowed people to use deadly force if a person entered their home.

Stand your ground laws take that idea one step further, with some making such allowances no matter where a person is, whether that’s a public place, their vehicle or their office.”

Add pervasive fear and permission to stand your ground to the proliferation of guns in America (aided by the Supreme Court’s expansive reading of the Second Amendment) and the US has come undone. From Umair Haque: (emphasis by Haque)

“Did you know that America isn’t just the most violent nation in the industrialized world — but an off the charts extreme outlier? Iceland is the world’s most peaceful society. Canada is the world’s 12th most peaceful society. America is the
 129th.”

That’s 129 out of 163 countries tracked. Further evidence is in the recent TSA statistics about intercepting guns about to be carried on to planes:

“Officers with the Transportation Security Administration confiscated more than 1,500 guns at airport security checkpoints in the US during the first quarter of the year, more than 93% of which were loaded. The 1,508 firearms equate to an average of 16.8 intercepted each day during the first three months of the year…”

The gun gives its owner the power of life and death. No training needed. The power of God right there in your hand. It’s very attractive to a certain type of person. And we cultivate that type of personality in America.

We have no safety nets, no social bonds, no norms of decency. That means we ask each other to bear the unbearable.

We don’t invest enough in safety nets, insurance, public goods, healthcare, education, and, in most states, gun laws. According to Haque, it’s all justified by politicians saying, “I can bear the unbearable — why can’t they?” But we can’t do that forever. Someone will snap, and the frustration of bearing the unbearable pours out as rage that’s visited on whomever is nearest, or easiest to hurt. That’s American Exceptionalism at work. America’s extreme violence, caused in large part by the twisted ideology that asks Americans to bear unbearable things.

Enough about guns and people snapping. It’s time for our Saturday Soother! Here on the Fields of Wrong, our crabapple trees are in bloom. They’re being visited by both birds and bees, each looking for high calorie snacks. The bees for the flowers, the birds for the buds. Our spring clean-up is lagging, so there’s still much to do.

But first, let’s relax for a few minutes. Grab a comfy chair near a big window and watch and listen to Valentina Lisitsa, a Ukrainian-American pianist, play “Rustle of Spring”, a solo piano piece written by Norwegian composer Christian Sinding in 1896:

If you are interested in amazing piano technique, watch Lisitsa perform Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2.

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Nuclear Power vs. Solar And Wind

The Daily Escape:

Bright Angel Trail, Grand Canyon NP – February 26, 2023 photo by Adam Schallau Photography. The Grand Canyon NP was created on 2/26/1919.

There’s lots of talk about America’s need to move away from traditional sources of energy to renewable energy. Wolf Richter gives us some perspective: (brackets by Wrongo)

“Electricity generation, as measured in gigawatt-hours, [faced] near-stagnation in demand since 2007, as efforts to make everything more efficient…produced results…[but]…These upfront costs by electricity users…reduced electricity consumption. For electric utilities, it meant that they were stuck in a demand quagmire….But…in 2022…electricity generation rose by 3.5% from 2021, to a new record of 4,297,000 gigawatt-hours…”

Wolf helpfully provides a chart of electricity generated by type:

The decline in coal and the remarkable increases in natural gas and renewables are easy to see. The renewables category includes wind, hydro, solar, geothermal, and biomass.

The green line above is for nuclear power, which very few people think of as a “green” source of power generation. Wrongo believes we need to reconsider nuclear power if we are to hit our ambitious targets for lowering greenhouse gas emissions in the next few decades.

Jonathan Rauch in The Atlantic has a long and well-reasoned article about how, after a decade of regulatory and financial uncertainty, small modular light-water nuclear reactors are getting closer than ever to commercialization. Rauch describes the vision is for small nuclear reactors:

“Forget about those airport-scale compounds…and 40-story cooling towers belching steam. This reactor will sit in an ordinary building the size of…a suburban self-storage facility. It will be mass-produced in factories for easy shipping and rapid assembly. Customers will be able to buy just one, to power a chemical or steel plant, or a few, linked like batteries, to power a city.”

Given new technologies currently in advanced testing, even if a local disaster cuts the power to the reactor cooling system, this new type of reactor will not melt down, spew radioactive material, or become too hot and dangerous to approach. It will remain stable until normal conditions are restored.

But for decades, nuclear has flopped as a commercial proposition. It has broken its promises to deliver new plants on budget and on time. And despite an enviable safety record, the public still fears catastrophic accidents. The Three Mile Island plant’s partial meltdown in 1979 was the US nuclear industry’s worst accident. Although no one died or was injured, it hardened the public and environmentalists against increasing the use of nuclear power in the US. In fact, the plant’s second reactor operated without problems until 2019 when it was decommissioned. Today legacy nuclear power supplies about 18% of American electricity, and the US has fired up only one new nuclear power reactor since 1996.

It seems perverse to avoid nuclear, since it’s carbon-free, and as few realize, very safe. Only the 1986 accident at Chernobyl has caused mass fatalities from radioactivity. Remember, that plant was subpar and mismanaged by Western standards.

Excluding Chernobyl, the total number of deaths attributed to a radiation accident at a commercial nuclear power plant is zero or one, depending on your interpretation of Japan’s 2011 Fukushima accident. Yes, more than 2,000 people may have died in Fukushima, but most of that happened during the evacuation.

Solar and wind have huge problems because of how much land they require. According to Armond Cohen of the Clean Air Task Force, meeting all of the eastern US’s energy needs requires 100,000 square miles of solar panels, an area larger than New England. Wind is worse: It requires more than 800,000 square miles of onshore windmills to meet the eastern US power needs, an area the size of Alaska plus California. NIMBY opposition will prevent the building of sufficient power generation from wind and solar.

Contrast this with the space required by small nuclear reactors: They would take up about 500 square miles of nuclear plants, equal to the size of Phoenix, Arizona to power the eastern US.

Dozens of companies and labs in the US and abroad are pursuing small nuclear plants. GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy has a signed agreement to build the first grid-connected small modular reactor (SMR) for Ontario Power Generation. It will be a 300-megawatt light-water SMR in Ontario, Canada.

NuScale Power, a pioneer in small reactors, cleared the ultimate US regulatory hurdle when the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission certified the design of NuScale’s 50-megawatt power module. It’s the first design ever approved for use in the US. The US Department of Energy is helping to fund NuScale’s project at the Idaho National Laboratory, including $1.35 billion in funding. The first of six clustered SMRs at the site is expected to go online in 2029, with the rest expected to follow in 2030.

Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act also provides a tax credit for advanced nuclear reactors and microreactors.

Ultimately, choice of energy generation will come down to cost. Solar is widely deployed today because it’s the lowest-cost generation source. But how can it scale?

If SMRs can demonstrate a cost advantage in real-life operation, orders will follow. And the long-promised nuclear renaissance might actually arrive.

Along with a better shot at a low carbon future.

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Monday Wake Up Call – February 6, 2023

The Daily Escape:

Sea smoke, South Portland, ME looking towards Portland Head light – February 2023 photo by Benjamin Williamson Photography

On Saturday, Wrongo and Ms. Right went to a dinner party with friends and two generations of family. The after dinner talk turned to how quite a few of the kids and grandkids weren’t planning on having children.

We tossed around ideas about why they were unlikely to procreate, and somethings stood out. First, they see climate change as an existential threat that society is unwilling to solve, even though the technology already exists. Why bring a kid into that?

Second, society seems broken. Our group meant that we face simultaneous crises, layered on top of each other.  This situation involving simultaneous global challenges, for which we have few solutions, is called Polycrisis.

And a crisis in one global system can spill over into other global systems. They interact with each another so that each new crisis worsens the overall harm. The Polycrisis environment weakens every individual’s sense of security and their place in the world.

One impact that seems related to the simultaneous climate, health, economic and geopolitical challenges are the effects on children. The needs for special education and special services for the very young has never been greater in America. It’s forcing big changes in public school budgets across the country.

No one is really sure why this is happening.

Wrongo isn’t proposing a solution, just suggesting we need to think more about how the problems of declining birth rates, coupled with the growing issues our young children are facing, might be interrelated.

Noah Smith an economist, has an interesting newsletter about how we define community:

“In the past, our communities were primarily horizontal — they were simply the people we lived close to….Increasingly, though, new technology has enabled us to construct communities that I’ve decided to call vertical — groups of people united by identities, interests, and values rather than by physical proximity.”

Smith says that in the past few decades, Americans became disengaged from their local communities, hunkering down in their houses, and failing to interact with the people around them. That led to a well-documented decline in Americans’ participation in civic organizations, local clubs, etc. Our neighbors can also be stifling and/or repressive because they impose uncomfortable community norms on us.

We’ve always had Smith’s vertical communities: “the Jewish community”, “the LGBT community”, and many others. But in the past, an identity grouping wasn’t a true community. We all have identities that connect us with faraway people — other Irishmen, other Taylor Swift fans.

Prior to the internet, we couldn’t have much contact with them. These loose vertical communities weren’t efficient ways to exchange ideas. Before email, text and streaming video, getting the word out was very slow, and our horizontal communities would decide whether what we wanted to share was worthwhile.

Now, we’re no longer isolated. The internet brought us a world of human interaction: social media feeds, chat apps, and so on. Suddenly we’re surrounded by people through their words, their pictures, and their videos.

Now we organize much of our human interaction around virtual vertical communities. Former occasional connections became Facebook groups, subreddits and personal networks on Twitter. And like our small towns back in the day, vertical communities use social ostracism to punish those who deviate from consensus norms.

But vertical communities can’t provide things like public education, national defense, courts of law, property rights, product standards, and infrastructure that we all depend on.

These require a government to administer them. And governments are organized horizontally; mostly defined by lines on maps. But what if we socialize, cooperate, and fall in love with the people from our vertical community? What if we grow apart from the people next door and the relationship is irreparable?

We see this every day in America when citizens go to a PTA meeting and discover a bunch of strangers saying things that they despise.

Wrongo isn’t saying that vertical communities are another enemy. But they can and do exacerbate the polycrisis by making truth harder to see. And by making effective action more difficult.

If you doubt this, remember how powerful the anti-vaxx vertical was at the height of the Covid pandemic. Today’s vertical communities are strong enough to keep our government from getting much of anything done. How can we work together with neighbors when we share few common bonds?

America today is a predatory society. We predate on politics, ideas, values, and culture. Biden’s trying to change this, but can he succeed? How many of us are trying to help? Changing a society that’s this broken, one that’s moving deeper into vertical communities will be a very heavy lift.

Time to wake up America! What can we do to maintain what Lincoln in his first inaugural address said:

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.”

To help you wake up, listen and watch the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s 2022 cover of Bob Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released” with Larkin Poe (Rebecca Lovell and Megan Lovell) on vocals and a fabulous slide guitar solo:

Sample of Lyrics:

Standing next to me in this lonely crowd
Is a man who swears he’s not to blame
All day long I hear him shout so loud
Just crying out that he was framed

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China’s Population Declines

The Daily Escape:

Dune Evening Primrose, Anza-Borrego Desert SP, CA – January 2023 photo by Paulette Donnellon

From the NYT:

“The world’s most populous country has reached a pivotal moment: China’s population has begun to shrink, after a steady, years long decline in its birthrate that experts say is irreversible.”

Irreversible. It was the first time that deaths had outnumbered births in China since Mao’s Great Leap Forward.

Feng Wang, Professor of Sociology, UC Irvine agrees: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“As a scholar of Chinese demographics, I know that the figures released by Chinese government on Jan. 17, 2023…. is the onset of what is likely to be a long-term decline. By the end of the century, the Chinese population is expected to shrink by 45%, according to the United Nations. And that is under the assumption that China maintains its current fertility rate of around 1.3 children per couple, which it may not.”

China has tried different policies for years in an effort to delay this moment, first, by loosening a one-child policy and then, by offering financial incentives to encourage families to have more children. Neither policy worked. Now, facing a population decline, coupled with a continuing rise in life expectancy, China’s demographics will have consequences not just for China but possibly for the rest of us.

China’s rise as an economic powerhouse is the result of its becoming the world’s factory floor. That created the world’s largest middle class. It moved hundreds of millions of rural Chinese to urban areas and fueled the spectacular growth of its largest cities. It made China the world’s second-largest economy, and also led to the increase in life expectancy.

Both Feng Wang and the NYT worry that China’s declining population will lead to a time when China will not have enough people of working age to fuel its growth. In the short run, there will be fewer workers to generate future growth in their economy. In the longer run, the costs to maintain an aging, post-work population will become very high (like in the US).

But economies don’t stand still for long. That China has a manufacturing-oriented economy isn’t a negative but a positive in this scenario. China has been moving up the manufacturing value chain for more than 20 years. So they are in a good position to use automation to address increasing labor scarcity and (presumed) rising labor costs.

They could also encourage work after normal retirement age, even if part time, with better wages and job environments. And like other countries facing similar issues, they could encourage immigration.

The US may be closer to China’s fate than we think. The US Census says that: (brackets by Wrongo)

“The U.S. population grew at a slower rate in 2021 than in any other year since the founding of the nation….[growing by]  only 0.1%…”

It looks like we’re on a similar trajectory to China as are many other developed nations. Japan is currently dealing with it. South Korea and Taiwan are currently at a crossroads as both are facing a massive demographic crash. But, both are smaller and more economically developed than China, so they also have options. Much of Europe is looking at the same problem.

The solution would seem to be to allow immigration from the less developed world. But that comes with the likelihood that the newcomers will change our social and cultural norms.  With immigration, our norms will change, and control of the politics in each country is likely to evolve as well.

The alternative to permanent economic growth is to allow the population shrinkage to happen. It’s kind of infuriating that big business and their captured politicians fail to recognize that a shrinking population (within reason) is both essential for our future and a good thing in the long run.

It can be scary: But transitioning from an economic model based on a constant input of young, working people to one where, we create fewer jobs, can work. If we make sure that those jobs are extremely productive.

What is the end game of an ever expanding population and perpetual economic growth for the human race? The world population when Wrongo was born was about 2.3 billion. It’s 3.5 times that today. Since resources are finite, it’s an inescapable conclusion that someday we must shrink the number of people. So why not today?

Sure, we can extend the economic life of certain resources by using new technologies. But if we continue to expand the number of humans on earth, we’ll see a global war for those resources, which will be a catastrophe.

Is a commitment to low population/low economic growth even possible at this late stage of capitalism?

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The Midterms Need Your Support

The Daily Escape:

Fort Hill, Eastham, Cape Cod, MA – October 2022 photo by Wrongo

Anyone else getting nervous about the midterms? As Wrongo has said, the avalanche of frantic email solicitations from Democrats can worry you even if you are by nature, an optimistic person.

Wrongo has recommended three Senate candidates as worthy of donations: Fetterman in PA, Kelly in AZ, and Warnock in GA. But there are other paths to retaining the Senate for Democrats.

Wrongo wants to add Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH) to that list. He’s currently in a virtual tie with the execrable JD Vance to succeed the retiring Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH). But Trump won Ohio by 8 points in 2020. One issue for Ryan is that the Democratic campaign funding arms have not been very supportive of Ryan in his bid to help them retain the Senate. NBC has reported that the decision by Democrats to put money elsewhere reflected a judgment about which races they believed they were most likely to win.

But Ryan’s surprising showing thus far in Ohio indicates that those judgments may not have been correct. While Vance has raised about $46 million, principally from Mitch McConnell ($30 million and from authoritarian entrepreneur Peter Theil ($15 million), Ryan has relied on small donors to fund his campaign. Still, with four weeks to go, Ryan has a decent chance of pulling off an upset (assuming the polling is accurate). If Ryan wins, it almost certainly ensures that Democrats maintain their majority in the Senate.

ICYMI, on Monday, Ryan debated Vance. The consensus is that Ryan easily beat him. From Jennifer Rubin in the WaPo:

“Ryan’s performance should be mandatory viewing for Democratic contenders. They should pay attention to Ryan’s tone and demeanor. He repeatedly took down his opponent without appearing nasty. His tone was more incredulous (Can you believe this guy?) than angry. Ryan looks like a regular guy. He appeared totally at ease, often standing with one hand in his pocket.”

From Ryan in the debate: (parenthesis by Wrongo)

“We need leaders who have courage to take on their own party, and I’ve proven that, and he (Vance) was called an ass-kisser by the former president. Ohio needs an ass-kicker, not an ass-kisser.”

Ryan also challenged Vance’s support for police by reminding voters that Vance had contributed money to a defense fund for a Jan. 6th rioter.

Ryan’s being one point ahead with a month to go, and his shellacking of Vance in the debate should give Democrats some hope that he has a decent chance to pick up a Senate seat for Democrats in Ohio. So send him some dough at his direct site: https://timforoh.com/. Going direct means he won’t have to share a portion of your money with other candidates, which is what happens when you give to Vote Blue.

Wrongo stumbled across another idea (hat tip, Robert Hubbell) that you might consider using in an effort to get out the vote for the midterms. It’s called relational organizing, by which you reach out to your friends directly. Studies show texts from friends are 29 times more effective at bringing positive results than texts from strangers. And SwipeBlue is an app that helps you find all of the Democrats in your contact list by matching your phone contacts to the public voter files. It is secure, and since it doesn’t save the data, it also protects your privacy.

The app helps you divide your contacts into Blue and Red. The contacts that aren’t in either bucket can be coded Green. You can then text your Democratic friends with a call to vote by swiping the blue ­­- like Tinder for voting. The app then helps you to send them a customizable get out the vote text.

It can also help with registering them to vote, or to vote absentee.

This is critical since at least one current poll from the Morning Consult, shows that Democrats are flagging in voter enthusiasm. The chart below compares voter enthusiasm in 2018 with 2022. Democrats are lagging by 6 points over 2018:

Republicans are only one point lower than they were in 2022. While Independents are 6 points higher, there’s no reason to think that all of that increase will break toward the Dems. So texting your friends an encouraging message may be important.

This message while relaxing on Cape Cod is that we can’t relax. So open your wallets in races that are close and try texting a few friends.

Both could make a big difference.

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Are Americans Fatigued By Politics?

The Daily Escape:

Early fall, Andover, ME – October 2022 photo by Eric Storm Photo

A lethal combination for democracy in America may be that not only do we field very weak candidates who hardly know how government works, but Americans are also woefully ignorant about our government.

The Annenberg Public Policy Center released its annual Civics Knowledge Survey in September. It focuses on the public’s understanding of the US Constitution. Here are some of its 2022 findings:

  • Less than half (47%) of US adults could name all three branches of government (executive, legislative, judicial), down from 56% in 2021. Here’s a chart of their findings on the branches of government:

A quarter couldn’t name any branch!

When asked to name the protections specified in the First Amendment, the number of respondents who could identify them had declined:

  • Freedom of speech was cited by 63%, down from 74% in 2021.
  • Freedom of religion was named by 24%, down from 56% in 2021.
  • Freedom of the press was named by 20%, down from 50% in 2021.
  • Right of assembly was named by 16%, down from 30% in 2021.
  • Right to petition the government was named by 6%, down from 20% in 2021.

Note how dramatically these results have shifted in just one year.

Over half (51%) said (incorrectly) that Facebook is required to let all Americans express themselves freely on its platform under the First Amendment. The First Amendment applies to the government not to private companies.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center said:

“When it comes to civics, knowledge is power….It’s troubling that so few know what rights we’re guaranteed by the First Amendment. We are unlikely to cherish, protect, and exercise rights if we don’t know that we have them.”

The precipitous decline in the First Amendment responses has Wrongo questioning whether the survey was performed accurately.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Annenberg found that having taken a high school civics class continues to be associated with correct answers to civics knowledge questions. In 2022, nearly two-thirds (65%) of respondents with at least some high school education said they had taken a civics course in high school that focused on the Constitution or judicial system, about the same as in previous years. More than a third of those with at least some college education (36%) said they had taken a college course that focused on the US system of government and the Constitution, significantly fewer than in 2021.

Yet, according to the Center for American Progress, only nine states and the District of Columbia require one year of US government or civics, while 30 states require a half year and the other 11 states have no civics requirement. This may explain why Americans are so weak on how their government operates.

Can we link Annenberg’s results about poor civic knowledge with this Gallup poll showing that Americans’ views of the two major US political parties remain more negative than positive? It also shows that the Republican Party’s favorability is now better than the Democratic Party’s:

The GOP’s favorable rating has edged up by four percentage points to 44%, while the Democratic Party’s rating slipped by the same amount, to 39%. With our political gridlock, along with high inflation and economic uncertainty, it’s understandable that neither Party gets high marks. But why did the Republicans’ position improve over last year? Is it that Biden’s poor ratings are dragging the Democratic Party down?

In October, 2021, Biden’s approval numbers stood at 45%. Today, he’s at 42.1%. That means he’s dropped 3 percentage points while the Party has dropped 4%. It definitely looks like he’s a drag on the whole Party. Since Annenberg tells us that only 47% of us can name all three branches of government, maybe we can conclude that Americans are getting their negative opinions about the two Parties from cable news.

Does anything explain the results of these two polls? Blog reader David P. offered a different view of Wrongo’s column on “Democracy Fatigue” in a comment. He says:

“Democracy Fatigue may be a misnomer. “Politics Fatigue” is closer to what I see around me and struggle to fight off in myself. The amount of money, airtime, phone messages, snail mail, etc. seems disproportional to discernible progress. News about scandal, verbal embarrassments and tactical mishaps outweighs discussion of policy alternatives or actual policy achievements.”

Has America just become too numbed by the news media “flooding the zone” with scare headlines about crisis after crisis to care much about something real – like the threat Republicans pose to our democracy?

Maybe our democracy is in peril not just because of poor civics knowledge. It’s always been a joke how badly people do when asked about the workings of government.

Maybe it’s that we’ve just tuned out. If so, goodbye democracy.

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