A Few Things to Ground Us

As the vortex grows

It’s a lot. I haven’t confirmed, but at this point there are probably explainers about the explainers for all of the executive actions that Trump has undertaken since assuming the US presidency again on Monday (it’s Wednesday). Maybe that’s part of what this post is doing. This on the threat to democracy from Zach Beauchamp is nice. As is the Prospect’s Executive Action Reaction. The sheer number of issues, inanities, and disasters being inflicted is overwhelming. This is a key piece of Trump’s politics, so many wounds are inflicted that you can’t stare at them individually in their horror. One car crash is a tragedy, one thousand are a statistic. Tragedies with the emotions they create have political power in ways that statistics often fail to.

This political pattern is literally Machiavellian.

“Injuries, therefore, should be inflicted all at once, that their ill savor being less lasting may the less offend; whereas, benefits should be conferred little by little, that so they may be more fully relished.”

Though to be honest I have to admit that my brain usually turns to the indestructible nature of Mr. Burns, where all of the diseases get in the way of each other and somehow mysteriously protect him.

So, my basic advice is to not just let it all wash over you but — if you can and to the extent that you can, remembering that it’s January 2025 — to stare at the ones most deeply felt in your space and continue to sound the alarm about them, while acknowledging that others have different lives and different perspectives. Give them solidarity and try not to compete about which is the greater harm (I realize this is difficult untraining for a policy debater).

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In the energy and climate space, Heatmap is doing a great job with precision, detail, and volume. If I’m going to follow my own advice (very hard), then I should probably comment on what all of the tumult in the US means for China and the world.

One strand of thought is that rather than competing by both growing stronger, a more realistic depiction of what’s happening in the United States and China is that they are both being dismantled, and the question is which is falling apart faster. Opinions differ. China’s economy continues to chug along, but there are lots of worrying signs that its post-real estate period is one of stuttering and real concern.

For all of the disbelief about the official growth numbers, electricity usage really was up some 6.8% last year, with a lot of that being in the service sector and representing real growth there. The industrial sector had a very strong first half of 2024 but has slowed markedly in the second half, making predictions about 2025 very difficult to gauge. Obviously some of it will depend on Trump policy — how hard will tariff man strike China? — but Xi Jinping’s own reluctance to more people-centric economic stimulus is perhaps the main drag.

One way to think about what’s happening at a big picture level is that the United States under Trump is betting on the broligarchy, while China is betting on hardware. The platforms and attention grabbers and crypto punks and sports gamblers and AI believers are the future, and if they are American then the future will be directed by America (there’s probably more than a little conflict to come on the question of whether that direction will come out of DC or the bro’s corporate jets/boardrooms). Xi, on the other hand, and the various Chinese entrepreneurs and companies and bureaucrats are building around an alternative vision. One that embraces a future where Chinese-made products can be everywhere with as little dependence on materials from elsewhere. In the energy space, this means deep investment in clean energy resources — manufacturing and deploying immense numbers of solar panels and wind turbines and batteries. It means reducing dependency on oil and natural gas, where China is import-dependent, and replacing them with domestic electricity generation.

This is a cartoon version of the different visions of the future, and there are all kinds of contradictory notes that may end up becoming major stories. Elon Musk, after all, is rich because of his ownership of Tesla, which is mostly a meme stock at this point but does make and sell electric vehicles. Chinese AI bets seem to be software-led rather than doubling down on the latest and greatest NVIDIA chips since Biden’s high fence has long included these in its small yard.

Jesse Jenkins, as happens often, nails it.

If I were a betting man (“your winnings, sir”), I’d prefer to have mine placed on clean tech than on oil.

To be clear, I’m not saying “China good, US bad.” I’m very on the record about democracy being a key technology to help us through the climate crisis. China’s decarbonization is incredibly fraught and not to be taken for granted. One little piece of this can be seen in Robbie Andrew’s github: this is an image from the Global Carbon Budget, #84, on embodied land-use change, which, if I’m understanding correctly, the emissions connected to land-use change and push them back to the locations where the agricultural products that precipitated the land use change were consumed. Or, China has a hard time looking like a climate leader when its demand for soy and beef is largely responsible for Brazil’s deforestation.

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Ok, one final thought. Heatmap has really been cooking because before the wave of coverage of Trump, they were putting up tons of important analysis and commentary about the LA fires, a climate-fueled disaster of colossal proportions. One of the pieces made an argument that probably lands poorly as a headline even with the brilliant readers of this newsletter:

It’s Time to Recruit the Rich: Yes, even that guy.

Where “that guy” is Keith Wasserman, the scion of a real estate magnate, who wanted uber, but for firefighters to protect his home. And I’m not here to debate the extent to which the rich need to be brought on as part of the climate coalition, and certainly not Wasserman himself as an individual, but there’s a claim in the piece that I want to push people to think about more deeply.

But there’s a difference between being less vulnerable and being invulnerable. There are only so many times you can rebuild your beach house, only so many private firefighters you can hire, and only so often you can turn up the air conditioning. We saw in Asheville how a place believed to be a “climate haven” turned out to be just as susceptible to natural disaster as anywhere else. In the end, climate change comes for us all. And experiencing a climate-related event has a significant impact on whether people both accept the reality of climate change and prioritize it as a political issue.

It’s the line about Asheville, that it somehow demonstrates that anywhere is “just as susceptible to natural disaster as anywhere else.”

No. We need to stop this. My last post touched on the work of Stefan Eich on uncertainty and risk in the climate world, and particularly with his call for a “smart green state.” A basic point here is that while yes uncertainty exists, we do have a sense about likelihoods at play when thinking about climate-induced disasters and that we should use when thinking about investments in adaptation. We know that Malibu and the Palisades burn, that Phoenix is running out of water, that Miami is on top of porous limestone, that Shanghai and Guangzhou are coastal cities straddling mighty rivers with little elevation protecting them. And Vermont’s example of valley cities flooding with new precipitation patterns should give anyone trying to imagine that a place like Asheville is a haven from climate change pause.

Almost exactly two years ago I argued that we need to think about these issues more clearly. Gross ecosystem product (GEP) is useful in part for this reason — to put a value on a whale not to sell it in case Elon Musk’s next thing is a roasted whale tongue fetish but to push us to systematically measure the ways in which ecosystem services provide value for economic activities as they are structured today.

As I wrote then:

Despite China’s prior failure to develop Green GDP, researchers inside the country are doing some of the best work on a related idea — gross ecosystem product, GEP — which attempts to count the value of various services that the ecosystem provides. While we will never be able to account for all of the ways that we rely on our environment and ecosystems, attempting to measure systematically this reliance such as through GEP can provide some assistance in dealing with the uncertainties of the polycrisis.¹ That is, putting effort into considering what our rivers provide for us can improve awareness about what might happen should they dry up in a drought as happened around the world in the summer of 2022, whether it’s France losing nuclear power, Germans unable to ship coal, or China losing hydropower.

However, GEP estimates of, say, the transport value of a river will follow market rates for next best alternatives, which makes some sense as an economic exercise. But, critically, in most circumstances, there is no actual ability to shift to some hypothetical market transport mechanism should the rivers run dry. There is no untasked set of trains, trucks, or other vehicles that are prepared to actually move X objects Y distance when needed. As such, the actual estimates of the value of a given ecosystem service are likely radically underpriced, because if it were to disappear in a moment, there is insufficient reserve capacity to replace it. And normal market prices for substitutes for that service would disappear in the face of a step change in demand.

So, yes, anyone can be in danger and there is no perfect place that protects us completely from the true chaos unleashed by our dumping a trillion tons of carbon into the atmosphere, but we desperately need to think about the realities we can consider when thinking about where we should live and work and play and eat on this planet.