“Why build 600 new unprofitable coal plants?”

The subtitle of Stuart Braun’s article asks

Governments in Asia are planning 600 new coal plants that could lose investors $150 billion and derail efforts to limit temperature rise in line with climate targets, according to a new report. But why?

But why not?

In the end, taxpayers will have to bear much of the cost of the money-losing new plants, according to the report. Of the $150 billion that Carbon Tracker estimates says could be lost, consumers and taxpayers will foot the bill in countries where coal power is subsidized and propped up with public money. 

Biocrude from algae without drying

[Following up to “The future is green … and salty” from 2010.]

According to “Engineers develop fast method to convert algae to biocrude”

The team has created a new mixing extractor, a reactor that shoots jets of the solvent at jets of algae, creating a localized turbulence in which the lipids “jump” a short distance into the stream of solvent. The solvent then is taken out and can be recycled to be used again in the process. “Our designs ensure you don’t have to expend all that energy in drying the algae and are much more rapid than competing technologies,” notes Mohanty.

This technology could also be applied beyond algae and include a variety of microorganisms such as bacteria, fungi, or any microbial-derived oil, says Mohanty.

and

“This is game-changing,” Pease says of their work on algae research. “The breakthrough technologies we are creating could drive a revolution in algae and other cell-derived biofuels development. The dream may soon be within reach.”

“Why can’t we do it with 1 percent of the people we have?”

According to Kevin Roose in “The Hidden Automation Agenda of the Davos Elite”

They’ll never admit it in public, but many of your bosses want machines to replace you as soon as possible.

All over the world, executives are spending billions of dollars to transform their businesses into lean, digitized, highly automated operations. They crave the fat profit margins automation can deliver, and they see A.I. as a golden ticket to savings, perhaps by letting them whittle departments with thousands of workers down to just a few dozen.

“People are looking to achieve very big numbers,” said Mohit Joshi, the president of Infosys, a technology and consulting firm that helps other businesses automate their operations. “Earlier they had incremental, 5 to 10 percent goals in reducing their work force. Now they’re saying, ‘Why can’t we do it with 1 percent of the people we have?’”

MLK on true compassion and a revolution of values

Brad Pierce's Blog

According to Martin Luther King on April 4, 1967 (exactly a year before he was martyred in Memphis on April 4, 1968)

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

and

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars…

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Tulipmania: More Boring Than You Thought

According to Lorraine Boissoneault in “There Never Was a Real Tulip Fever”

In fact, “There weren’t that many people involved and the economic repercussions were pretty minor,” Goldgar says. “I couldn’t find anybody that went bankrupt. If there had been really a wholesale destruction of the economy as the myth suggests, that would’ve been a much harder thing to face.”

That’s not to say that everything about the story is wrong; merchants really did engage in a frantic tulip trade, and they paid incredibly high prices for some bulbs. And when a number of buyers announced they couldn’t pay the high price previously agreed upon, the market did fall apart and cause a small crisis—but only because it undermined social expectations.

“In this case it was very difficult to deal with the fact that almost all of your relationships are based on trust, and people said, ‘I don’t care that I said I’m going to buy this thing, I don’t want it anymore and I’m not going to pay for it.’ There was really no mechanism to make people pay because the courts were unwilling to get involved,” Goldgar says.

But the trade didn’t affect all levels of society, and it didn’t cause the collapse of industry in Amsterdam and elsewhere. As Garber, the economist, writes, “While the lack of data precludes a solid conclusion, the results of the study indicate that the bulb speculation was not obvious madness.”

The age of fossil fuels is ending

According to Joe Romm in “In Historic Paris Climate Deal, World Unanimously Agrees To Not Burn Most Fossil Fuels”

The economic and environmental implications of this deal for Americans are staggering. In the near term, it will unlock an accelerating multi-trillion-dollar shift in capital investment away from carbon-intensive coal and oil, which were the cornerstone of the first industrial revolution, into clean technologies like solar, wind, LED lighting, advanced batteries, and electric cars. It means far less harmful carbon pollution will be emitted in the coming years.

The agreement “sends a very powerful message to the business and investment community that the age of fossil fuels is ending,” explained the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Alden Meyer. Thus, “continued investments in high-carbon assets conflicts with their fiduciary responsibility.”

MLK on true compassion and a revolution of values

According to Martin Luther King on April 4, 1967 (exactly a year before he was martyred in Memphis on April 4, 1968)

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

and

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

According to Clayborne Carson, as interviewed in “Clayborne Carson: King’s Chronicler”

He always put the immediate issue into greater context. In all of his great speeches, what he does is say we’re here, engaged in this immediate struggle, but the broader struggle is global and historical. The movement for human rights is taking place on a global level. And it has deep historical roots. It’s been going on since the time of slavery and after the passage of civil rights legislation, and if he were alive today he would say it’s still going on. That’s why he was an inspiring, visionary figure. He understood the larger context.

and

What I try to emphasize in my work is how deeply rooted his ideas were and how radical they were. Look at love letters he wrote to Coretta in 1952, which I quote in the book. If those letters had been revealed in the late ’50s — where he’s talking about his anti-capitalism orientation — he probably would have been seriously damaged as a leader. That’s why Coretta kept the letters hidden — rumored to be under her bed — almost to the end of her life. She realized how politically damaging they could be to him.

Turning natural resources into garbage and pollution as fast as possible

According to a commenter somewhere on the web

Most jobs in this world involve turning natural resources into waste, throwing away energy in the process. All this, for the most trivial and inconsequential desires, desires that are implanted into the minds of the people through advertising.

According to another

Everything our economy does is based on turning natural resources into garbage and pollution as fast as possible.

But as I wrote in “Devouring the Earth is a traditional value”

It’s easy to blame our unsustainable devouring of the Earth on capitalism, but the human tendency to kill the goose that laid the golden eggs far predates that system.

It’s natural, like metastatic cancer. If a society consumes and kills and reproduces as quickly as possible, it will outcompete a society with longer-term vision.

The world desperately needs a rational, new economic system designed against this root cause.

According to another commenter

Give a man a fish, and you’ll feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he’ll ruin an ecosystem.

Cheapest, fastest path to development is deworming, immunizing, antibiotics, clean water, …

According to Hans Gosling in one of the most famous TED talks

I would like to compare Uganda with South Korea with Brazil. You can see that the speed of development is very, very different, and the countries are moving more or less at the same rate as money and health, but it seems you can move much faster if you are healthy first than if you are wealthy first.

and

Health cannot be bought at the supermarket. You have to invest in health. You have to get kids into schooling. You have to train health staff. You have to educate the population.

According to Physorg.com, regarding the scientific study “Parasite prevalence and the worldwide distribution of cognitive ability” by Christopher Eppig, Corey L. Fincher and Randy Thornhill,

Researchers in the US have noted areas of the world with the lowest average intelligence quotient (IQ) also tend to have the highest rates of infectious diseases, and suggest the energy required to fight off the diseases may hinder brain development in children because both are metabolically costly processes.

and

Eppig points out the study does not suggest “that parasites are the only thing affecting the global diversity of intelligence,” but that it may be even more important than factors such as wealth and access to education. He said disease saps the body’s energy and in the early years of childhood a lot of energy is going into building the brain. “If you don’t have enough, you can’t do it properly.” If the results are right, the IQ of a nation will not be raised unless the burden of disease can be lifted, Eppig said.

An obvious example are the helminth infections that, according to WHO and UNICEF, affect at least 2 billion people, because

Studies have shown clearly the detrimental effects of infection on educational performance and school attendance, as well as the significant improvements in language and memory development that can be realized following treatment. Helminth infections are also associated with nutritional deficiencies, particularly of iron and vitamin A, with improvements in iron status and increases in vitamin A absorption after deworming.

It would be so cheap to stop wasting this human potential! The above study says

Deworming improves health, nutrition and physical development, makes pregnancy safer and improves birth outcomes. It is inexpensive, with a school-based deworming programme typically costing between US$ 0.25 and 0.50 per child per year.

By the way, did you know that pneumonia is the #1 killer of children worldwide, killing about 1.4 million children under age 5 each year? According to WHO fact sheet 331

Pneumonia can be prevented by immunization, adequate nutrition and by addressing environmental factors. Pneumonia can be treated with antibiotics, but around 30% of children with pneumonia receive the antibiotics they need.

and

The cost of antibiotic treatment for all children with pneumonia in 42 of the world’s poorest countries is estimated at around US$ 600 million per year. Treating pneumonia in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa – which account for 85% of deaths – would cost a third of this total, at around US$ 200 million. The price includes the antibiotics themselves, as well as the cost of training health workers, which strengthens the health systems as a whole.

According to Gourdas Choudhuri

The role of vaccines in preventing the disease cannot be overlooked. However, a vaccine may work well against some of these but not all. So it is difficult to have a complete vaccine for full protection.Some vaccines, like the Hib vaccine, are good and a must, which can be given routinely. The pneumococcal vaccine is another good vaccine. But the issue is whether the strains causing the disease, which are present in the community, are the same as those present in the vaccine, otherwise the vaccine will not work, and the money spent will not get the protection one is expecting. Pneumococcus, one of the germs that cause pneumonia in children, has many strains. The vaccine, which is currently available, has strains that are found chiefly in the western world, and its profile does not match with the strains found in our country. So a routine immunization with one vaccine may not work.

Humans spend US$ 2 trillion per year on the military. It would take a tiny sliver of that to crush helminths, pneumonia, and the rest. Humanity chooses to let its children be stunted and killed.

A question I’d love an answer to: If I wanted to tithe some portion of my income to defeating the parasites, viruses, and bacteria of children, which avenue of donation would save the most lives per dollar, and which would save the most cognitive potential?

Wheat and water — money is just information, it’s not real wealth

Pavan Sukhdev in 2009 made a strange comparison here between the loss of notional capital during the banking crisis and the ongoing loss of actual capital such as forests. According to the SAPA news story

The world was losing as much potential capital annually through the destruction of forests as was wiped off the major markets in last year’s financial crisis, an economist warned on Friday. […] He said the current pace of forest loss meant a potential economic cost of the order of two to $4.5 trillion a year. “In other words, if we continue business as usual that’s how much natural capital we are throwing down the tube,” he said. That was comparable to the amount of capital lost by Wall Street and City firms when the worst financial crisis in the history of the world hit in 2008.

According to Hakim Bey

Information in the form of culture can be called wealth metaphorically because it is useful and desirable – but it can never be wealth in precisely the same basic way that oysters and cream, or wheat and water, are wealth in themselves. Information is always only information about some thing. Like money, information is not the thing itself. Over time we can come to think of money as wealth (as in a delightful Taoist ritual which refers to “Water and Money” as the two most vital principles in the universe), but in truth this is sloppy abstract thinking. It has allowed its focus of attention to wander from the bun to the penny which symbolizes the bun. In effect we’ve had an “information economy” ever since we invented money. But we still haven’t learned to digest copper.

According to Wikipedia

According to Silvio Gesell, all human-produced goods are subject to expensive storage, whereas money is not: Grain loses its weight, metal products rust, housing deteroriates. Therefore money has a supreme advantage over all other goods. John Maynard Keynes found another effect, which he deemed more important: liquidity preference. Being “liquid” with money is a great advantage to anybody, much more so than having comparable amounts (past utility) of any product. The result is that people will not even provide zero-risk, inflation corrected credits unless a certain interest rate is offered. Freigeld simply reduces this ‘primordial’ interest rate, which is estimated to be somewhere around 3% to 5%, by an absolute, in order to lower the average interest rate to a value around 0.

According to the dek of “The second economy” via Sean Murphy’s blog

Digitization is creating a second economy that’s vast, automatic, and invisible — thereby bringing the biggest change since the Industrial Revolution.

See also these ( 1 2 ) summaries of the most recent Singularity Summit.