"US military primacy has underwritten America’s world position since the Soviet capitulation. But dominance is not hegemony. Hegemony is the willingness of other powers to follow your lead. The underlying strength of the American world position is due to the scale and dynamism of American civilization. With the exception of a few hermit kingdoms and revolutions masquerading as states, all the world’s nations, even our adversaries, want access to the world’s largest consumer product markets; to the deepest financial markets in the world; to our technology, skills, and know-how; to our cultural innovations. All these advantages are ultimately based on American economic preeminence. Through the American century, all nations on the planet have looked with envy at our living standards; itself a reflection of the great productivity of American civilization."
Speaking of squandering, the US and the West still enjoy great reserves of soft power, which they insist on squandering.
Thank you for thoughtful essay, but I disagree with you on two points:
1. Rational foreign policy is always hostage of the Home Front. You can advocate for it, but demanding democrats adopt unpopular foreign policy, you just increase chances of Trump win, which is self-defeating.
2. The reason why tariffs are more popular among manual workers is that there is really simple explanation how they would benefit. If there are high tariffs on cars, all cars on the streets in U.S. would be made in U.S. which would translates into more mfg jobs. If we compare it with your reasoning why free trade is better, your reasoning is much harder to communicate to layman and also ducks the question of relative economic status. At least for me, it's unclear if workers would be happier in E.U. which is poorer but the gap between them and white-collars employees is much smaller.
The proposed recommendations amount to an acceptance, that US primacy has come to an end. I have a feeling this is much too bitter a pill to swallow - for the generation of senior policymakers who rose into positions of responsibility in the 1980s, and 1990s.
The "run harder" element, while of course the sane thing to do, is also the most radical departure from the existing state of affairs. On so many levels, the US economy is set up to do the opposite. From education (we rely on importing talent), to industry (where did those other 4.5 million jobs go besides the 500k attributed to China?), to technology (in trying to get to leading edge of computing, in the rate-limiting "hard parts", ie not software and not commercialization, China doesn't actually compete with US nearly as much as with globally exposed players like Taiwan, Japan, and Korea).
The observation about US having to compete not only with China, but also with allies like Korea is particularly keen. The currently existing doctrine has an answer for this, and it's not pretty. Ask today's industrial leaders in Germany. This is the likely default future path. There's good money to be made holding back the tide, and such is a readily available method to do it - for a time at least.
Biophysical reality dictates we can only build and maintain solar energy harvesting infrastructure - that has a 20-30 year life span - with fossil fuels, which are rapidly depleting.
This means at best a "green reindustrialization" and "the energy transition" is only possible for far fewer than ~8 billion humans - and even if you did that with the least pain and suffering, it would only last for a few decades - because fossil fuels are rapidly depleting.
Fossil fuel depletion is measured by the 'Energy Returned on Energy Invested' (EROI) of fossil fuels, which is decreasing. The EROI for the production of oil and gas globally by publicly traded companies has declined from 30:1 in 1995 to about 18:1 in 2006 (Gagnon et al., 2009). The EROI for discovering oil and gas in the US has decreased from more than 1000:1 in 1919 to 5:1 in the 2010s, and for production from about 25:1 in the 1970s to approximately 10:1 in 2007 (Guilford et al., 2011). Alternatives to traditional fossil fuels such as tar sands and oil shale (Lambert et al., 2012) deliver a lower EROI, having a mean EROI of 4:1 (n of 4 from 4 publications) and 7:1 (n of 15 from 15 publication). In 2013 world oil and gas had a mean EROI of about 20:1
This essay is 'energy blind' rendering it's discourse deeply misleading.
For example "More precisely, the long-term competition between the United States and China is about productivity growth. The side that sustains greater dynamism will prevail."
But since we live on a finite planet, this is obviously wrong: the "long-term competition" between all of us is back down the resources bell curve, led by fossil fuel depletion in handful of decades. You can't mine minerals needed for a "green reindustrialization" and "the energy transition" without diesel due to its ~40 times higher energy density than batteries, which are close their maximum density the laws of physics dictates.
Geo Political analysis without this back drop of biophysical reality leads nowhere. Below I give more references and discussion on exactly why electricity cannot build machines that collect and use electricity, meanwhile please read these very insightful researchers / authors.
Q: How does anybody propose to build - with electricity alone - a "green energy" powered society by any target date?
A: We can't because nearly all the following processes here today can only be done with diesel, we can't build a "green energy" civilization on this pale blue dot with electricity alone ...
… mining usually in remote areas heavy transport; refining; mechanical materials processing; component manufacturing; on site preparation; final build out; earth works for connection to existing grid infrastructure and new electricity distribution networks; ongoing maintenance machinery; manufacturing proposed future micro grid electronic power switching / grid balancing infrastructure at several orders of magnitude greater scale than today's industrial electromechanical machinery outputs; and all end of life re-cycling processes; etc.
These process are needed to build, maintain, and recycle solar energy flow harvesting infrastructure, sorry "green energy" and all the end use electric machines and storage devices that also need to be built. These process can only be done with Diesel, which is ~40 time more energy dense than the energy density of electricity storage systems, which are close to their maximum physical limits. There are no magic wands waiting to be discovered that will get battery energy density anywhere near to matching the energy density of liquid fuels.
Practically none of these above listed tasks can be done today with electricity, beyond a few demonstration efforts that can't scale up much beyond a few more % of global energy supply than they do already: Solar ~2%; Wind ~ 3%; other renewables ~ 2%; traditional biomass ~ 6%; Oil ~30%; Coal ~ 25%; Gas ~22%; Nuclear ~4%; Hydro ~6% (2021 data).
If it were that easy to replace diesel - the first commercial electric motors for a lathe and a locomotive were developed two decades or so BEFORE (in the 1840s) the first commercially successful internal combustion engine created by Étienne Lenoir (around 1860) - then why haven't electric machines replaced diesel machines yet?
Meanwhile, hydrogen as an energy storage solution, is a hoax, in summary: a) it always rapidly leaks due to small molecular size; b) causes embrittlement; c) is explosive; and d) is terribly inefficient to manufacture with electricity except for small niche applications; see these links for more:-
Also, relegated as an externalities in the "green energy" thesis is dozens of vital metals and rare elements and vast quantities of ordinary building sand needed for “decarbonizing the economy with a transition” but which are already running out in rich enough deposits to extract economically requiring exponentially more energy inputs nearly always fossil fuels - and you can't build anything much at all without those material inputs, and power recycling process, let alone expand the current 5% of global energy supplied by “green energy” to 100%.
From a biophysical perspective "green energy" is thus rendered a deeply misleading propaganda oxymoron: a more accurate name would be a 'net energy sink - low density solar energy flow harvesting and concentrating infrastructure dream'.
Access to dwindling global fossil energy resources has been the main driver of geopolitical turmoil for many decades and explains the 'Western' lust for global chaos and wars to dominate those resources for as long as possible. For example in 2019 'Western' Big Oil firms Shell and BP told us their supply will decrease by 1 - 2% per year, which means that in about 70 years it will 25% of what it was in 2019. In March this year they are now revising their targeting to a reduction of 25% by the end of the decade. A 25% decline over 7 years is a 5% decline per year, which means in 28 years time oil production by Shell and BP by about 2050 will be 25% of what it was in 2023.
Clearly Russia and Kazakhstan and others have greater reserves than 'Western' Big Oil but the trajectory is the same just delayed a hand full of decades or so. But since all the above listed industrial activity today currently uses diesel, how does the global "green energy” lobby propose to make electric machines to replace diesel machines needed to achieve “zero greenhouse gas emissions by [insert favourite date]”?
The last time there were no fossil fuels, back in ~1759, there were ~ 0.7 billion humans and Watt's steam engine was first being developed to kick start the global industrial revolution. On the back of coal and steam, it took a century for populations to double to ~1.3 billion, when in 1859 the first modern commercial oil well was drilled by Edwin L. Drake in Titusville, Pennsylvania. A century and a half later there are nearly 8 billion of us, with 84% of primary energy consumption in the world and 64% of its electricity was from fossil fuels in 2019.
And how do "green energy" lobbyists propose to make fertilizer to grow food for 8bn people without fossil fuels? How do they suggest we plough fields with batteries that are over half the weight of vehicles they power, will not to sink into mud? How will you charge them up in remote locations, etc? If electric agriculture machines were viable, where are they?
Fairly sharing out unequal distribution of resources and wealth at all scales is a vital step, but the case remains, what energy inputs will we use if electricity is not a dense enough energy source to support 8 billion humans? Once this is answered, then we can then debate about what fair should look like.
As such, global warming in and of itself is a self limiting distraction from the symptoms of overshoot on the only pale blue dot in the cosmos known to support life: the correct foundational question to focus upon, before we can answer any of the others in any meaningful way, must thus be, that since access to fossil fuel supply is crashing anyway, how do we deal with populations crashing back to where they were ~250 years ago, but in ~50 or ~100 years or so?
Well written, but regarding the disparity in military spending, one must make more adjustments than just a ppp adjustment, for example, when including ALL pay and benefits, not just salaries and pensions but also the GI Bill and veterans health which exposes the US military's budget to the US's preposterously expensive health care and education industries, well, the US military is spending a bit more than half its budgets on pay and benefits whereas the PLA is like20%. Then if you start getting into the expenses of the US military's global presence, you lose more alot more. And even the basic ppp adjustment needs to me modified heavily because of the industrial ppp diff for some stuff being do much larger, for example, they can build ships *faaaaaar* cheaper than we can (and much faster too).
An especially thoughtful essay, any politician or regulator involved with China should read this. You sum up security, economic and foreign policies concerns very well here.
Savings rates seem to correlate with cultural vertical discipline, other things being equal. Probably due to greater social cohesion / less need for individual consumer expression and a tendency to take a longer-term view. So countries like Germany (Authoritarian Family, in Todd's framework) and China (Exogamous Community Family) tend to have higher savings rates than Nuclear Family nations like the US, UK (Absolute) or France (Egalitarian).
Hard to counter these habits of mind without fairly radical policy measures.
You've covered all the bases. We're doomed anyway. Two niggles:
1. "China’s balance sheet recession means that its growth may be tempered for some time”. China's economy will grow more this year than in any but two years in history. There is no recession, balance sheet or otherwise.
2. "Exposure to the world market ignited a productivity miracle in China”.
Mao ignited a productivity miracle, says Maurice Meisner: "From 1957 to 1975 (a period held in low esteem by Mao's successors), even taking into account the economic disasters of the Great Leap, China's national income increased by 63% on a per capita basis during this period of rapid population growth, more than doubling overall.
* In Germany the rate of economic growth 1880-1914 was 33% per decade.
* In Japan from 1874-1929 the rate of increase per decade was 43%.
* The Soviet Union over the period 1928-58 achieved a decadal increase of 54%.
* In China over the years 1952-72 the decadal rate was 64%".
A brilliant essay. Much food for thought. Thank you.
"US military primacy has underwritten America’s world position since the Soviet capitulation. But dominance is not hegemony. Hegemony is the willingness of other powers to follow your lead. The underlying strength of the American world position is due to the scale and dynamism of American civilization. With the exception of a few hermit kingdoms and revolutions masquerading as states, all the world’s nations, even our adversaries, want access to the world’s largest consumer product markets; to the deepest financial markets in the world; to our technology, skills, and know-how; to our cultural innovations. All these advantages are ultimately based on American economic preeminence. Through the American century, all nations on the planet have looked with envy at our living standards; itself a reflection of the great productivity of American civilization."
Speaking of squandering, the US and the West still enjoy great reserves of soft power, which they insist on squandering.
Thank you for thoughtful essay, but I disagree with you on two points:
1. Rational foreign policy is always hostage of the Home Front. You can advocate for it, but demanding democrats adopt unpopular foreign policy, you just increase chances of Trump win, which is self-defeating.
2. The reason why tariffs are more popular among manual workers is that there is really simple explanation how they would benefit. If there are high tariffs on cars, all cars on the streets in U.S. would be made in U.S. which would translates into more mfg jobs. If we compare it with your reasoning why free trade is better, your reasoning is much harder to communicate to layman and also ducks the question of relative economic status. At least for me, it's unclear if workers would be happier in E.U. which is poorer but the gap between them and white-collars employees is much smaller.
Thanks for the detailed and thoughtful article.
The proposed recommendations amount to an acceptance, that US primacy has come to an end. I have a feeling this is much too bitter a pill to swallow - for the generation of senior policymakers who rose into positions of responsibility in the 1980s, and 1990s.
The "run harder" element, while of course the sane thing to do, is also the most radical departure from the existing state of affairs. On so many levels, the US economy is set up to do the opposite. From education (we rely on importing talent), to industry (where did those other 4.5 million jobs go besides the 500k attributed to China?), to technology (in trying to get to leading edge of computing, in the rate-limiting "hard parts", ie not software and not commercialization, China doesn't actually compete with US nearly as much as with globally exposed players like Taiwan, Japan, and Korea).
The observation about US having to compete not only with China, but also with allies like Korea is particularly keen. The currently existing doctrine has an answer for this, and it's not pretty. Ask today's industrial leaders in Germany. This is the likely default future path. There's good money to be made holding back the tide, and such is a readily available method to do it - for a time at least.
Biophysical reality dictates we can only build and maintain solar energy harvesting infrastructure - that has a 20-30 year life span - with fossil fuels, which are rapidly depleting.
This means at best a "green reindustrialization" and "the energy transition" is only possible for far fewer than ~8 billion humans - and even if you did that with the least pain and suffering, it would only last for a few decades - because fossil fuels are rapidly depleting.
Fossil fuel depletion is measured by the 'Energy Returned on Energy Invested' (EROI) of fossil fuels, which is decreasing. The EROI for the production of oil and gas globally by publicly traded companies has declined from 30:1 in 1995 to about 18:1 in 2006 (Gagnon et al., 2009). The EROI for discovering oil and gas in the US has decreased from more than 1000:1 in 1919 to 5:1 in the 2010s, and for production from about 25:1 in the 1970s to approximately 10:1 in 2007 (Guilford et al., 2011). Alternatives to traditional fossil fuels such as tar sands and oil shale (Lambert et al., 2012) deliver a lower EROI, having a mean EROI of 4:1 (n of 4 from 4 publications) and 7:1 (n of 15 from 15 publication). In 2013 world oil and gas had a mean EROI of about 20:1
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421513003856#s0020
This essay is 'energy blind' rendering it's discourse deeply misleading.
For example "More precisely, the long-term competition between the United States and China is about productivity growth. The side that sustains greater dynamism will prevail."
But since we live on a finite planet, this is obviously wrong: the "long-term competition" between all of us is back down the resources bell curve, led by fossil fuel depletion in handful of decades. You can't mine minerals needed for a "green reindustrialization" and "the energy transition" without diesel due to its ~40 times higher energy density than batteries, which are close their maximum density the laws of physics dictates.
Geo Political analysis without this back drop of biophysical reality leads nowhere. Below I give more references and discussion on exactly why electricity cannot build machines that collect and use electricity, meanwhile please read these very insightful researchers / authors.
https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/2023/11/10/265-explore-and-explain/
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2023/09/can-modernity-last/
Q: How does anybody propose to build - with electricity alone - a "green energy" powered society by any target date?
A: We can't because nearly all the following processes here today can only be done with diesel, we can't build a "green energy" civilization on this pale blue dot with electricity alone ...
… mining usually in remote areas heavy transport; refining; mechanical materials processing; component manufacturing; on site preparation; final build out; earth works for connection to existing grid infrastructure and new electricity distribution networks; ongoing maintenance machinery; manufacturing proposed future micro grid electronic power switching / grid balancing infrastructure at several orders of magnitude greater scale than today's industrial electromechanical machinery outputs; and all end of life re-cycling processes; etc.
These process are needed to build, maintain, and recycle solar energy flow harvesting infrastructure, sorry "green energy" and all the end use electric machines and storage devices that also need to be built. These process can only be done with Diesel, which is ~40 time more energy dense than the energy density of electricity storage systems, which are close to their maximum physical limits. There are no magic wands waiting to be discovered that will get battery energy density anywhere near to matching the energy density of liquid fuels.
Practically none of these above listed tasks can be done today with electricity, beyond a few demonstration efforts that can't scale up much beyond a few more % of global energy supply than they do already: Solar ~2%; Wind ~ 3%; other renewables ~ 2%; traditional biomass ~ 6%; Oil ~30%; Coal ~ 25%; Gas ~22%; Nuclear ~4%; Hydro ~6% (2021 data).
If it were that easy to replace diesel - the first commercial electric motors for a lathe and a locomotive were developed two decades or so BEFORE (in the 1840s) the first commercially successful internal combustion engine created by Étienne Lenoir (around 1860) - then why haven't electric machines replaced diesel machines yet?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_electric_motor
Meanwhile, hydrogen as an energy storage solution, is a hoax, in summary: a) it always rapidly leaks due to small molecular size; b) causes embrittlement; c) is explosive; and d) is terribly inefficient to manufacture with electricity except for small niche applications; see these links for more:-
i) Hydrogen 'hopium'
https://energyskeptic.com/?s=hydrogen
ii) Hydrogen or Electron Economy?
https://www.csrf.ac.uk/blog/hydrogen-or-electron-economy/
iii) Pursuing the hydrogen economy as a climate solution will be a big mistake
https://greenallianceblog.org.uk/2021/02/11/pursuing-the-hydrogen-economy-as-a-climate-solution-will-be-a-big-mistake/
iv) The Hydrogen Hoax: Confessions of a Former Hydrogenist
https://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2020/12/the-hydrogen-hoax-confessions-of-former.html
v) Hydrogen: The dumbest & most impossible renewable
https://energyskeptic.com/2019/hydrogen/
Also, relegated as an externalities in the "green energy" thesis is dozens of vital metals and rare elements and vast quantities of ordinary building sand needed for “decarbonizing the economy with a transition” but which are already running out in rich enough deposits to extract economically requiring exponentially more energy inputs nearly always fossil fuels - and you can't build anything much at all without those material inputs, and power recycling process, let alone expand the current 5% of global energy supplied by “green energy” to 100%.
https://www.dw.com/en/not-enough-sand-for-construction-industry-despite-abundance/a-49342942
https://energyskeptic.com/2021/renewables-not-enough-minerals-energy-time-or-clean-and-green/
https://resourceinsights.blogspot.com/2009/05/lets-party-til-heliums-gone.html
From a biophysical perspective "green energy" is thus rendered a deeply misleading propaganda oxymoron: a more accurate name would be a 'net energy sink - low density solar energy flow harvesting and concentrating infrastructure dream'.
Access to dwindling global fossil energy resources has been the main driver of geopolitical turmoil for many decades and explains the 'Western' lust for global chaos and wars to dominate those resources for as long as possible. For example in 2019 'Western' Big Oil firms Shell and BP told us their supply will decrease by 1 - 2% per year, which means that in about 70 years it will 25% of what it was in 2019. In March this year they are now revising their targeting to a reduction of 25% by the end of the decade. A 25% decline over 7 years is a 5% decline per year, which means in 28 years time oil production by Shell and BP by about 2050 will be 25% of what it was in 2023.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/shell-reviewing-oil-gas-output-reduction-targets-ceo-tells-times-2023-03-03/
https://goodcalculators.com/percentage-depreciation-calculator/
Clearly Russia and Kazakhstan and others have greater reserves than 'Western' Big Oil but the trajectory is the same just delayed a hand full of decades or so. But since all the above listed industrial activity today currently uses diesel, how does the global "green energy” lobby propose to make electric machines to replace diesel machines needed to achieve “zero greenhouse gas emissions by [insert favourite date]”?
The last time there were no fossil fuels, back in ~1759, there were ~ 0.7 billion humans and Watt's steam engine was first being developed to kick start the global industrial revolution. On the back of coal and steam, it took a century for populations to double to ~1.3 billion, when in 1859 the first modern commercial oil well was drilled by Edwin L. Drake in Titusville, Pennsylvania. A century and a half later there are nearly 8 billion of us, with 84% of primary energy consumption in the world and 64% of its electricity was from fossil fuels in 2019.
And how do "green energy" lobbyists propose to make fertilizer to grow food for 8bn people without fossil fuels? How do they suggest we plough fields with batteries that are over half the weight of vehicles they power, will not to sink into mud? How will you charge them up in remote locations, etc? If electric agriculture machines were viable, where are they?
Fairly sharing out unequal distribution of resources and wealth at all scales is a vital step, but the case remains, what energy inputs will we use if electricity is not a dense enough energy source to support 8 billion humans? Once this is answered, then we can then debate about what fair should look like.
As such, global warming in and of itself is a self limiting distraction from the symptoms of overshoot on the only pale blue dot in the cosmos known to support life: the correct foundational question to focus upon, before we can answer any of the others in any meaningful way, must thus be, that since access to fossil fuel supply is crashing anyway, how do we deal with populations crashing back to where they were ~250 years ago, but in ~50 or ~100 years or so?
Well written, but regarding the disparity in military spending, one must make more adjustments than just a ppp adjustment, for example, when including ALL pay and benefits, not just salaries and pensions but also the GI Bill and veterans health which exposes the US military's budget to the US's preposterously expensive health care and education industries, well, the US military is spending a bit more than half its budgets on pay and benefits whereas the PLA is like20%. Then if you start getting into the expenses of the US military's global presence, you lose more alot more. And even the basic ppp adjustment needs to me modified heavily because of the industrial ppp diff for some stuff being do much larger, for example, they can build ships *faaaaaar* cheaper than we can (and much faster too).
An especially thoughtful essay, any politician or regulator involved with China should read this. You sum up security, economic and foreign policies concerns very well here.
Great article!
Savings rates seem to correlate with cultural vertical discipline, other things being equal. Probably due to greater social cohesion / less need for individual consumer expression and a tendency to take a longer-term view. So countries like Germany (Authoritarian Family, in Todd's framework) and China (Exogamous Community Family) tend to have higher savings rates than Nuclear Family nations like the US, UK (Absolute) or France (Egalitarian).
Hard to counter these habits of mind without fairly radical policy measures.
You've covered all the bases. We're doomed anyway. Two niggles:
1. "China’s balance sheet recession means that its growth may be tempered for some time”. China's economy will grow more this year than in any but two years in history. There is no recession, balance sheet or otherwise.
2. "Exposure to the world market ignited a productivity miracle in China”.
Mao ignited a productivity miracle, says Maurice Meisner: "From 1957 to 1975 (a period held in low esteem by Mao's successors), even taking into account the economic disasters of the Great Leap, China's national income increased by 63% on a per capita basis during this period of rapid population growth, more than doubling overall.
* In Germany the rate of economic growth 1880-1914 was 33% per decade.
* In Japan from 1874-1929 the rate of increase per decade was 43%.
* The Soviet Union over the period 1928-58 achieved a decadal increase of 54%.
* In China over the years 1952-72 the decadal rate was 64%".