Sam's L33t Journal

(I want some more dynamic content on my new website, so I'm starting a blog there and putting more thought-out blog entries there. For now at least, I'll be cross-posting. So, cross-posted.)

The story of the Gulf oil spill have been on my mind a lot lately, I've been following it since the initial disaster, and there are some interesting recent developments, so it's as good a topic as any to start with. Basic background:  On April 20, there was an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig (belonging to Transocean, leased by BP, operating 80 km off of the Louisiana coast).  The resulting fire could not be extinguished, and after two days, the rig sank.  The disaster killed eleven crew and caused a massive oil spill.

The oil spill should have been stopped by the rig's blowout preventer device.  It's unknown if the crew tried to trigger the device manually.  The failsafe dead-man's switch failed to trigger the device.  Subsequent attempts to activate the device with ROVs failed.  Some countries require an acoustic remote control for the blowout preventer on offshore wells, but BP had successfully lobbied against US regulation that would require that.  It's not clear that would have helped.  Yesterday, the well casing collapsed.

( More to it... )

On to my predictions for the coming decade!

Peak Oil: I expect that the peak is behind us and that will be a major cause of economic trouble. Sticking to my "major trouble by end of 2015" prediction. Oil prices will go up, but will remain very volatile. Fuel will get expensive or scarce unless the economy declines ahead of oil supply. Either way, American cities will see a lot of trouble in the next decade.

Efforts to Sustain the Unsustainable: There will (still) be a lot of attention on things like efficient combustion engines, plug-in hybrids, electric cars. But Americans aren't going to be buying 300 million new cars in the next decade or two. On the electricity side of things, there will be a lot of attention paid to "clean coal" and carbon capture and sequestration schemes before renewable energy gets the attention it should. Maybe we'll get around to talk of solar and wind and wave and tide, electric passenger trains, and walkable communities before the end of the decade, but solutions that don't benefit existing players will be largely ignored until things are quite bad.

Ubiquitous Computing: Augmented reality will not come in the form of heads-up displays or VR goggles, but cheap smartphones with cameras and internet access. How much of an effect this has (and what sort of effect) depends on how cheap it gets, how widespread wireless broadband gets, and how much internet access spreads to the poorest areas of the world. Location-based social networking is a cool toy, but that's just the beginning. Combining information about product certifications with visual search could go a long way, for example. Mobile computing could also help mitigate transportation problems if fuel gets too expensive and centralized solutions are absent. I mentioned Avego before and thought it was a bit premature, but startups like that might take off during the next decade. I said that real cellphone use didn't begin until this past decade, and I expect I'll say the same at the end of the next decade.

The Long Tail vs. The Fat Head: Media companies will actually reach a point of change or die in the coming decade. The question is whether they'll have to change their business model, or whether they'll first change our political system in increasingly extreme ways. This is one reason why "net neutrality" will be an important issue, many of these increasingly desperate media companies are closely tied to companies that provide the lion's share of internet access. I expect that on this one reformers will be able to squeeze out some sort of victory, but TV and radio are not out of the picture yet, so don't underestimate the power of the persuasion machine.

No Reform Without Revolution: The US has a shot at real political change if things get bad enough, but that could go in any number of directions. Best guess: At some point during the decade, Republicans will get elected and they will go flying back to Bush-era policies with a vengeance, even if that's not at all what the people who elected them wanted. Who knows where things will go from there. (Past predictions reiterated: Obama will definitely be the Democratic candidate in 2012. And if he's not, things will be so bad that the Democrats will definitely lose.) If the Republicans can't win in 2012 or 2016, either things will have gone far better than even my most optimistic predictions, or there will have been some other radical deviation from the status quo. Without radical deviation from the status quo: Intellectual property reform might happen. Electoral reform probably won't happen. Who knows how healthcare reform will go in the long run. (Tax reform or foreign policy reform, maybe, depending on how pressing the financial constraints on the federal government are and whether we get ourselves into any new wars.)

Regularly Scheduled Apocalypses: On December 21, 2012, the 14th b'ak'tun will begin and nothing of significance will happen (nothing not caused by some crazy people doing something crazy, anyways). There will be lots of awesome parties. No prediction on how Pinchbeck will react to the non-event. (Also, good odds that this will be yet another decade in which no nuclear weapons are used on actual targets. WWIII will probably not happen. The LHC will produce lots of data of technical interest to particle physicists, but fail to destroy the world. The US will remain united. Etc.)

Things Get Worse for the "Global South": Only massive investment in alternative energy in the developing world could keep the global (real) economy growing, but that probably won't happen. At best, they'll get some money for disaster mitigation. The effects of climate change will get worse. Less screwed parts of the world may start to have more of a problem with refugees. There will probably be some efforts directed at mitigating climate change (see below), but not enough to do anything significant climate-wise.

The Carbon Bubble: There will probably be some sort of cap and trade scheme for carbon dioxide emissions because Goldman Sachs seems to want it and they get what they want. Such a scheme will probably involve giving away wealth to those who currently pollute the most and include some sort of "offsets" scheme that hurts the poorest people in the world at the expense of the richest without actually decreasing emissions.

Terrified or Not: Either the American people will find a way to ditch the security theater that's honestly been more of a problem than it's worth post-9/11, or they'll accept more and more of a police state. Not sure which is more likely. Also, if the color-coded terror alert system is kept, it will remain at orange at least 90% of the time (no one wants to reduce it below orange, since if it's below orange and a terrorist attack does happen it will seem like they were caught with their pants down, and no one wants to increase it to red because then they look foolish when nothing happens; besides, there's no incentive to change it from current levels because changing the alert level doesn't actually specify that anyone should do anything differently).

Roadmap in Pieces: During the next decade, the peace process in Israel will probably remain in tatters. Hamas will not abandon their delusion of provoking the Arab nations into action. A shift of opinion in Israel is perhaps somewhat more likely. The US could apply political pressure, too, and at least get Israel to lay off the war crimes. But despite Obama's minor revisions of US position with regard to conduct in war (opposing torture, trying to close the prison at Guantanamo), the US government will probably remain deeply ambivalent about (when not openly hostile towards) international law.

Main Street Strikes Back: The main thing that makes me optimistic about the coming decade is that there will probably be some real effort towards solving systematic problems in our economy / society. Probably a lot of those efforts will be wrong-headed, but there's still some real potential for positive change. The end of denial is an extremely important step, and I don't think it's possible for the "9/11 changed everything so go shopping" mentality to persist. Though the public response to Wall Street control of government has been subdued so far, the key words are "so fare". The situation on the ground is still bad, and the next decade will probably be more interesting than the last.

Note that I make no claim that I am good at predicting the future. (If I was, I'd have more invested in individual stocks!)

Questions, comments, predictions? Things I missed prognosticating on that you'd like me to take a crack at?

The "not happening but actually pretty moderate by the scientific community's standards" numbers:

• 60% reduction in emissions from 1990 levels by 2050 (including reductions that actually happen in the developed world, not just mandated by the developed world)
• lower atmospheric carbon dioxide to 350PPM
• global average temperature increases by 1.5°C before stabilizing
• $100B/year for disaster mitigation and investment in alternative energy in developing nations (mostly the latter)

The "'compromise' solution supported by the US, so that's what will be maybe almost done until the next time we elect a Republican president" numbers:

• 17% percent reduction from 2005 levels by 2020 (6% from 1990 levels, mostly achieved by buying carbon offsets (i.e. we would have razed that bit of rainforest but we didn't, look at all the carbon emissions we "saved") little reduction of emissions in the developed world)
• atmospheric carbon dioxide remains >>350PPM
• global average temperature increases by 2°C before stabilizing (the UN climate scientists predict 3°C)
• $10B for disaster mitigation and investment in alternative energy in developing nations (mostly the former)

Anyways, there seem to have been no big surprises on Friday: The G77 didn't walk out for reals, developing nations will take their Hobson's choice, US politics remains largely unswayed by basically every climatologist's opinion that the current spate of global warming is caused by human pollution (but don't expect that they are swayed by the disproportionately-skeptical know-nothings either). Obama talked a good talk on moral leadership, but did little of that himself (not that political martyrdom would have been productive). Real economic growth will undoubtedly require investment in alternative energy in developing nations, but the Obama administration is counting on enough of that coming reactively from the private sector (at least enough to prevent disasters here), or they expect that any more expensive alternative is politically unfeasible.

So yeah, no surprises.

The generically-named 15th Conference of the Parties (aka the Copenhagen climate change talk) is now ongoing. It's important to note that there are several significant goals being pursued related to climate change negotiations (at the conference and elsewhere), some of which are not primarily motivated by a desire to mitigate climate change:

1. Arrange a massive transfer of wealth from rich countries to developing countries to invest in renewable energy infrastructure. Hopefully, such countries would be able to leap-frog a fossil-fuel powered electrical grid in the same way as many skipped straight to cellular telephone infrastructures. The reason for this is simple: There's a need for economic growth, and most of the potential for rapid growth is in developing nations. However, if that growth comes with significantly increased demand for oil, prices will spike again, bringing the world economy to its knees. (Additional objective for poor countries: Try to get this amount of investment to be as high as possible. Talk about "climate reparations" and pretend that whatever foreign aid comes out of these talks has anything to do with social justice.)

2. Put some price, any price, on carbon dioxide emissions. That might help reduce emissions directly, but the more significant goal is creating a financial market based on carbon emissions. That allows the financial sector to better invest in / reward companies that improve their energy efficiency. It also allows Goldman Sachs et al to create the next gigantic speculative bubble to replace the housing bubble. (Additional objective for the financial sector: Keep the public focused on anything but that last point.)

3. Cut global greenhouse gas emissions. (Additional objective for rich countries: Try to get put as much of the burden of cutting emissions as possible onto poor countries, don't strive for equality in the near-term (or ever), don't let the poor nations know about your plans in that regard. Additional objective for environmental and anti-poverty activists: Demand emissions cuts in line with the recommendations of climate scientists, don't get too depressed that nothing of the sort has even a remote chance of happening.)

From peristaltor comes this excellent entry on Dennis M. Bushnell of NASA, Peter Ward's Under a Green Sky, and the implications of rising atmospheric CO₂ beyond the greenhouse effect.

More books for my list.