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 The Economist's latest cover.

Wind turbines are friendlier to birds than oil and gas

From The Economist

Birders get nervous when they see landscapes covered in wind turbines. When the wind gets going, their blades can spin at well over 200km per hour. It is easy to imagine careless birds getting chopped to bits. Campaigners often point to the possibility when opposing the building of new wind farms.

No one doubts that wind turbines do indeed kill at least some birds. But a new analysis of American data, published in Environmental Science & Technology, suggests the numbers are negligible, and have little impact on bird populations.

Wind power has expanded dramatically in America over the past 20 years, from 2.6 gigawatts of installed capacity on land in 2000 to 122 gigawatts in 2020. Many studies have analysed the effects in specific locations or on specific bird species. But few have looked at the effects on wildlife at the population level. Enter Erik Katovich, an economist at the University of Geneva. Dr Katovich made use of the Christmas Bird Count, a citizen-science project run by the National Audubon Society, an American non-profit outfit. Volunteers count birds they spot over Christmas, and the society compiles the numbers. Its records stretch back over a century.

Dr Katovich assumed, reasonably, that if wind turbines harmed bird populations, then the numbers seen in the Christmas Bird Count would drop in places where new turbines had been built. He combined bird population and species maps with the locations and construction dates of all wind turbines in the United States, with the exceptions of Alaska and Hawaii, between 2000 and 2020. He found that building turbines had no discernible effect on bird populations. That reassuring finding held even when he looked specifically at large birds like hawks, vultures and eagles that many people believe are particularly vulnerable to being struck.

But Dr Katovich did not confine his analysis to wind power alone. He also examined oil-and-gas extraction. Like wind power, this has boomed in America over the past couple of decades, with the rise of shale gas produced by hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, of rocks. Production rose from 37m cubic metres in 2007 to 740m cubic metres in 2020.

Comparing bird populations to the locations of new gas wells revealed an average 15% drop in bird numbers when new wells were drilled, probably due to a combination of noise, air pollution and the disturbance of rivers and ponds that many birds rely upon. When drilling happened in places designated by the National Audubon Society as “important bird areas”, bird numbers instead dropped by 25%. Such places are typically migration hubs, feeding grounds or breeding locations.

Wind power, in other words, not only produces far less planet-heating carbon dioxide and methane than do fossil fuels. It appears to be significantly less damaging to wildlife, too. Yet that is not the impression you would get from reading the news. Dr Katovich found 173 stories in major American news outlets reporting the supposed negative effects that wind turbines had on birds in 2020, compared with only 46 stories discussing the effects of oil-and-gas wells. Wind turbines might look dramatic. But their effect on birds is not.

 

Lights at night suggest dictators lie

From The Economist

Benito Mussolini was a tyrant, but at least he made the trains run on time. Or so the story goes. Dictators are often seen as ruthless but effective. Official gdp figures support this view. Since 2002 average reported economic growth in autocracies has been twice as fast as in democracies.

But in fact, Mussolini’s trains often ran late—and dictators’ economic stewardship may not be as effective as they claim. New research finds that autocrats greatly overstate their countries’ economic growth.

In a peer-reviewed article that will be published this month, Luis Martinez, an economist, investigated dictators’ gdp-growth figures. To do so, he first obtained data on the brightness of countries’ lights at night, as measured by satellites, a well-known proxy for gdp. He combined it with data from Freedom House, a think-tank, on countries’ political systems. Assuming that the most democratic countries reported growth figures accurately, he then used the satellite data to estimate if other countries under- or over-stated theirs.

The data showed that dictators’ reported gdp tended to grow much faster than satellite images of their countries would suggest. This could not be explained by their economies being based on different industries from other countries, or that people there had lower average incomes.

Curious patterns in the data suggest manipulation as the cause. Mr Martinez found that the mismatch between satellite and gdp data did not appear in dictatorships until they were too rich to receive some types of aid: only showing up when governments would not forfeit money. The irregularities were most prevalent in the parts of gdp figures that are easiest to manipulate such as investment and government spending, and was bigger when these countries’ growth was low compared with others’. And as countries moved towards or away from dictatorship, their numbers grew more or less suspicious.

The differences between reported and estimated gdp-growth rates were large. While others have found similar relationships, Mr Martinez was able, using satellite data up to 2013, to estimate the bias more precisely. In updated figures he has provided to us, cumulative gdp growth between 2002 and 2021 in countries “not free” is nearly cut in half: from 147% to 76%.

The explanation is probably simple: opportunity and motive. Part of what makes dictatorships dictatorships is that questioning the official line is dangerous. At the same time, autocratic regimes have a strong incentive to report healthy growth: its absence may be taken as a sign of incompetence or weakness, which dictators can ill afford.

Autocrats’ subordinates face similar incentives. In a related study Jeremy Wallace, a researcher, found misreporting by Chinese provinces, too. As he notes, a leaked American diplomatic cable from 2007 revealed the view of Li Keqiang, the prime minister, then a provincial party secretary. He had said, with a smile, that gdp figures were “for reference only”: he relied instead on proxies, such as electricity use.

Like their leaders, citizens in dictatorships often assume they are being lied to. Outsiders should be similarly sceptical.■

Chart sources: “How much should we trust the dictator’s GDP growth estimates?”, by L.R. Martinez, 2022; Freedom House; World Bank

I posted a piece on the dodgy data for Chinese growth here: Just how big is China.  

Click to see clearer chart, or visit original article.

The Amazon rainforest is now an emitter of CO2

 From a  tweet by The Economist

The Amazon rainforest’s flora absorb 1.5bn tonnes of CO2 a year, equivalent to 4% of emissions from fossil fuels. The Brazilian Amazon has been a net carbon emitter since 2016. Rapid deforestation outweighs carbon capture by remaining trees

Why Ukraine must win

 

Starship goes mainstream

 For a long time, it was just internet dweebs who were excited about Starship.  If you talked to most people, they'd never even heard of Starship, and if they had, they thought it was about creating a bolt-hole for billionaires (hint: no it isn't) There were enthusiasts on YouTube, but the mainstream media mostly ignored the story, or when they did cover it, did shallow and inaccurate reports.  Readers of this blog will know that I have been enthusiastic about Starship since it was first mooted, under the name 'Interplanetary Explorer'.  

But .... The Economist magazine has finally taken the whole thing seriously enough to do a reasonably in-depth and accurate piece, which I summarise below.   Starship is now mainstream enough to get the serious attention of a prestigious news magazine.  

WHEN IT COMES to size and spectacle, the peak of the Space Age passed in 1973, with the final flight of the Saturn V rocket that had carried the Apollo astronauts to the moon. Taller than the Statue of Liberty, the Saturn V could lug 140 tonnes into orbit. Its first flight, in 1967, provoked Walter Cronkite, an American news anchor reporting far from the pad, to exclaim: “My God, our building’s shaking here!” as ceiling tiles fell around him. Despite half a century of technological progress, nothing as powerful has reached orbit since.

Not far from Boca Chica, a Texan hamlet a couple of miles from the Mexican border, SpaceX, a rocketry firm founded by Elon Musk, is developing a machine that it hopes will change that. Built from gleaming stainless steel, with its nose adorned with fins and ten metres taller than even the Saturn V, “Starship” looks like something from the cover of a 1950s pulp science-fiction magazine. Its planned payload of up to 150 tonnes means that five Starship flights could put more stuff into space than the rest of the world managed with 135 rocket launches in 2021. Its upper stage contains more pressurised volume than the International Space Station, which took a decade, dozens of launches and perhaps $100bn to assemble.

But it is not just the size that matters. When a Saturn V took off to send men to the moon, the only bit of the 2,800 tonnes of hardware which came back was a cramped five-tonne capsule with three men inside. Each new mission meant a new Saturn V. With Starship, the idea is that all the hardware will come back: the massive booster stage almost immediately, the second, orbital stage after fulfilling whatever mission it had been sent on.

At a press event on February 10th to show off an assembled rocket Mr Musk reiterated his reasons for founding SpaceX in the first place: to buy humanity an insurance policy against existential risks by establishing a colony on Mars. Starship is designed to transport the million tonnes of supplies he thinks might be necessary for that job—roughly 100 times more mass than has been launched since the start of the space age. To that end, it is designed to be not only the biggest rocket ever built, but also the cheapest. Existing rockets cost tens to hundreds of millions of dollars per launch (the Saturn V may have cost over $1bn in today’s money). Despite Starship’s size, SpaceX hopes to cut that to single-digit millions.

 [....]

But first the rocket needs to fly. A series of test flights of Starship’s upper stage (which, in isolation, is rather confusingly also called “Starship”) have ended in crash-landings and explosions. A successful flight came on May 5th last year, when an upper stage flew 10km into the air before landing safely back on its pad. A full-fledged orbital test of the two-stage form of the rocket, with one “Starship” upper stage sitting atop a “Super Heavy” booster, had been due in January.

That orbital flight, though, needs approval from regulators, who were deluged with thousands of public comments. Officials have promised a decision within weeks. But broader environmental issues could yet force the firm to suspend work at Boca Chica entirely. An internal memo leaked last year revealed serious problems with the “Raptor” engines intended to power Starship. In his press conference, Mr Musk left himself a fair amount of wiggle room. An orbital flight, he said, might come in “a couple of months”—though it could also slip to the end of the year.

Something like Starship has been in development at SpaceX for over a decade, under names such as MCT (“Mars Colonial Transporter”), ITS (“Interplanetary Transport System”), and BFR (“Big Fucking Rocket”). Earlier versions were huger still: at one point the ITS was to have a 300-tonne payload. But all versions have had one thing in common: they are designed to be entirely reusable.

SpaceX already flies partially-reusable rockets: the first stages of its Falcon 9 machines fly back to Earth under their own power. Once refuelled and refurbished, they can fly again, spreading their construction cost over many launches. But their second stages, which end up much higher and moving at orbital speeds, remain expendable. (One, first launched in 2015, is due to crash into the Moon in March.)

With Starship, SpaceX plans to recover both parts. Its “Super Heavy” first stage, like the Falcon 9’s, is designed to fly back to the ground shortly after launch. SpaceX plans to catch it in mid-air with a pair of robotic “chopsticks” attached to the launch tower from which it took off.

Recovering the upper stage requires more drama. The plan is for Starship to fall belly-first from space, relying on atmospheric drag—rather than scarce fuel—to shed most of its speed. It will use its stubby fins for control, “rather like how skydivers use their hands and feet,” says Scott Manley, a physicist and programmer who runs a popular rocketry-focused YouTube channel. When it is within a few hundred metres of the ground it will flip itself upright, relight some of its engines and make a rocket-powered landing of its own.

Several test flights have practised this flipping manoeuvre already, though not after a descent from orbit. Mr Musk (whose bold visions sometimes work, and sometimes do not) hopes that each “Super Heavy” booster could be ready to fly again within an hour. Since the rocket’s upper stages would have to complete at least one orbit before returning to Earth, he hopes they might one day manage three flights a day. (The minimum re-use time for a Falcon first stage is about a month.)

Starship’s “Raptor” engines are likewise designed with reusability in mind, says Mr Manley. They use a sophisticated, highly efficient design pioneered—but never flown—in the Soviet Union in the 1960s. That helps reduce wear on components. Somewhat unusually, they run on methane rather than kerosene, a more-commonly used rocket fuel. One reason is that methane produces very little soot, which helps keep the engine’s internals clean—another boon for an engine intended to fly again and again. And both methane and the oxygen necessary to burn it can be made from Mars’s thin carbon-dioxide atmosphere with the help of some fairly straightforward industrial chemistry. SpaceX hopes that could, one day, allow Mars-bound Starships to refuel for a return trip to Earth.

But high-level design decisions are not the only reason Starship is cheap. SpaceX has an iterative, rapid-fire, startup-style culture very different from that of older aerospace firms (hence all the crash-landings and explosions). Mr Musk’s development philosophy is that “if things are not failing, you aren’t innovating enough.” In a speech in November to America’s National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine he spoke of running a dozen test flights in 2022. The firm mixes high-tech, bespoke design in some areas (such as the Raptor engines) with a make-do-and-mend attitude elsewhere (some Super Heavy prototypes have fins controlled by electric motors taken from cars made by Tesla, another of Mr Musk’s businesses).

One good example is the rocket’s stainless-steel construction. Starship was originally going to be built from high-tech carbon-fibre composites, which are both very strong and very light. But in 2019, despite having produced several big components, SpaceX changed its mind and went back to the drawing board. Carbon composites, it turns out, have several disadvantages. They are porous, fiddly to work with, and need to be cured in an autoclave—not easy when making rocket-body segments that are 9 metres across. And, at around $130 per kilogramme, composites are expensive.

Stainless steel, by contrast, is strong but heavy and therefore not an obvious choice for rocket-building. Some steel alloys, though, get significantly stronger as they cool down, meaning less is required for a given strength. And since Starship uses cryogenic propellant, cooling is in abundant supply. Steel is tougher, too, which can save weight elsewhere. SpaceX hopes to get away with applying a heat shield to only the “windward” part of the upper stage, which feels the full force of re-entry heating, leaving the “leeward” side as bare metal and saving mass. Steel does not need painting, which cuts weight a bit more. It is much easier to work with, and can be had for mere dollars per kilogramme. For a company that intends to mass-produce its gigantic rocket, says Mr Potter at BryceTech, a firm of space-industry analysts, that matters.

That may sound like a risky approach when it comes to something as unforgiving as rocket science. But it has served SpaceX well so far. It has pulled off 111 Falcon 9 launches in a row without failure, making it one of the most reliable rockets ever flown. Some individual Falcon-9 first stages have already been launched ten times.

[....]

SpaceX, for its part, knows exactly what it wants to do with Starship, even before it starts thinking about Mars. Its “Starlink” project aims to use swarms of thousands of low-flying satellites to beam high-speed internet to anywhere on the Earth’s surface. Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s chief executive, has noted that the global telecommunications market is worth perhaps $1trn a year. SpaceX thinks it might reasonably aspire to about 3-4% of it.

Because low-flying satellites can see only a small portion of the Earth’s surface, Starlink requires enormous numbers of them. The firm already has about 1,655 in orbit, about a third of the total number of active satellites in space. It has permission from American regulators to fly 12,000, and is trying to obtain a licence for 30,000. And that number will need topping up regularly, as individual satellites in the fleet fail, or as the tiny traces of atmosphere that are present in low orbit eventually pull them from the sky. (The satellites are designed to disintegrate on re-entry.) Starship should be able to launch around 400 at a time, of a bigger and more advanced design, and for much less to boot.

Other challenges will need solving. Satellite internet has a bad record of bankrupting those who try it, as Mr Musk has noted. The cost of the satellite dishes that consumers use to receive the service is another issue. SpaceX presently sells those at a substantial loss. Nonetheless, excitement over Starlink’s potential accounts for almost all of the firm’s $100bn valuation.

But first, SpaceX has to make the rocket work. In his press conference Mr Musk was at pains to play down the probability of the orbital test—when it happens—going smoothly. Even if it did, plenty more testing and development would be needed before the rocket would be ready to fly real cargo.

Regulatory battles may be looming, too. The firm’s Boca Chica facility was built on the understanding that it would be used for the Falcon Heavy, a much smaller rocket than Starship. Explosions from failed flight tests have scattered debris over a wide area, says Mr Manley, while road closures annoy locals. Environmental regulators are reportedly unhappy, and pushing for a full review of the firm’s licence. Mr Musk has said that, in the worst case, SpaceX would have to move Starship development to Cape Canaveral in Florida, which would delay things for months.

Even then, Starship’s capabilities could go unused. The true size of the market for Starlink remains unknown, even if SpaceX can drive costs down. As for his grandest ambition of all, it is not at all clear how many people would volunteer to live on Mars. The sales pitch, said Mr Musk, is that “it’s going to be cramped, dangerous, difficult, very hard work [and] you might die.”

But the only way to know for sure is to get the rocket working. Here, at least, it would take a bold person to bet against SpaceX. In 2008, after the first three launches of its tiny Falcon 1 rocket had failed, the firm almost went under. But the fourth launch worked. Later, it took its engineers more than a dozen attempts to master landing the first stage of the Falcon 9. These days, it is among the most reliable rockets ever built. Mr Musk, for his part, is confident. “[Starship] will work,” he said. “There’ll be a few bumps along the road, but it’ll work”.

[Read more here]

Americans want reforms to curb gerrymandering

 From The Economist

America’s states are required to redraw their electoral districts every ten years, to take account of changes in the population or new rules on how to delineate districts. After 2010 many Republican state governments passed notoriously biased maps—called “gerrymanders”—which discriminated against voters by their race and partisan affiliation. According to an analysis of election results by The Economist, Democrats in 2010 would have won roughly 213 seats in America’s House of Representatives in a perfectly tied election. After maps were redrawn, they were favoured in just 197.

This time it is Democrats who have gained. Our analysis of new congressional plans shows the party would this year be favoured to win about 211 seats in a perfectly tied election. That is close to the number they would have won in 2010 before the Republican-led gerrymandering, and up from a hypothetical 202 in a tied election in 2020. Their gains are a result of both new rigging, in states such as New York and Illinois, and court cases which have forced Republicans to rethink their own gerrymanders. The new maps also show a decline in competition. In 2020, 44 of the 435 districts in the House were considered competitive (ie, the Democratic candidates’ share of the vote was within five percentage points of the national average in the past two election cycles). After all states submit their new maps, we estimate that just 40 will be.

What can states do to prevent rigging? One idea is to hand over the redistricting process to a nonpartisan commission of citizens who have full power to draft, review and finalise new maps. Four states—Arizona, California, Colorado and Michigan—already do this. In the latest round of redistricting, those states submitted maps that were more balanced than they had been in 2020. In a poll conducted by YouGov for The Economist, 63% of American adults said they wanted the maps for their electoral districts to be drawn by independent commissions. More than 60% of Democrats and Republicans supported this. And voters broadly favour other reforms, such as removing lobbyists from the map-making process and requiring input from the public on new boundaries. A majority of Democrats (67%) and Republicans (50%) also want the Supreme Court to smack down partisan gerrymanders. But states have to enact these reforms on their own, and it is in legislators’ interests to keep rigging. What voters want is not so easy to get.

The pandemic's true death toll

 From The Economist

How many people have died because of the covid-19 pandemic? The answer depends both on the data available, and on how you define “because”. Many people who die while infected with SARS-CoV-2 are never tested for it, and do not enter the official totals. Conversely, some people whose deaths have been attributed to covid-19 had other ailments that might have ended their lives on a similar timeframe anyway. And what about people who died of preventable causes during the pandemic, because hospitals full of covid-19 patients could not treat them? If such cases count, they must be offset by deaths that did not occur but would have in normal times, such as those caused by flu or air pollution.

Rather than trying to distinguish between types of deaths, The Economist’s approach is to count all of them. The standard method of tracking changes in total mortality is “excess deaths”. This number is the gap between how many people died in a given region during a given time period, regardless of cause, and how many deaths would have been expected if a particular circumstance (such as a natural disaster or disease outbreak) had not occurred. Although the official number of deaths caused by covid-19 is now 5m, our single best estimate is that the actual toll is 17.1m people. We find that there is a 95% chance that the true value lies between 10.5m and 19.7m additional deaths.

Emissions: beef is like coal

 From The Economist

The impact of food on greenhouse-gas (ghg) emissions can slip under the radar. In a survey in Britain last year, the share of respondents saying that “producing plants and meat on farms” was a “significant contributor” to climate change was the lowest among ten listed activities. Yet two papers published this year in Nature Food find that food, especially beef, creates more ghgs than previously thought. Forgoing steaks may be one of the most efficient ways to reduce your carbon footprint.

In 2019 the un’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimated that the global food system was responsible for 21-37% of ghg emissions. This March researchers from the European Commission and the UN’s Food and Agriculture Office released a study with a central estimate near the top of this range. It attributed 34% of ghgs produced in 2015 to food.

This elevated share stems in part from accounting choices. The paper assigns the full impact of deforestation to the agriculture that results from it; includes emissions after food is sold (such as from waste and cooking); and counts non-food crops like cotton. But even when the authors excluded embedded emissions from sources like transport and packaging, they still found that agriculture generated 24% of ghgs. According to the World Resources Institute, a research group, cars, trains, ships and planes produce a total of 16%.

Another recent paper, by Xiaoming Xu of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and eight co-authors, allocates this impact among 171 crops and 16 animal products. It finds that animal-based foods account for 57% of agricultural ghgs, versus 29% for food from plants. Beef and cow’s milk alone made up 34%. Combined with the earlier study’s results, this implies that cattle produce 12% of ghg emissions.

Relative to other food sources, beef is uniquely carbon-intensive. Because cattle emit methane and need large pastures that are often created via deforestation, they produce seven times as many ghgs per calorie of meat as pigs do, and around 40% more than farmed prawns do. This makes beef a bigger outlier among foods than coal is among sources of electricity: burning coal generates just 14% more ghgs than burning oil, another common fuel.

These figures may understate the environmental benefits of shrinking the cattle population. Methane dissipates relatively fast, meaning that past bovine emissions soon stop warming the planet if those animals are not replaced. Such a change could also raise output of plant-based foods, by making land now used to grow animal feed available for other crops. It takes 33 plant calories to produce one calorie of beef.

The simplest way to cut beef output is for people to eat other animals instead, or become vegetarians. But convincing carnivores to give up their burgers is a tall order. Fortunately, lab-grown meats are moving from Petri dishes to high-end restaurants (see Technology Quarterly). Doing without beef from live cattle is hard to imagine, but the same was true of coal 100 years ago. Cultured meat could play an essential role in staving off a climate catastrophe.

There are 4 things you can do to slash your personal emissions:

1.  Become vegetarian
2.  Buy your electricity from a green electricity retailer.  (Make sure they're not fake green, using offsets to 'sanitise' their generation from fossil fuel sources.)
3. If you can, put solar panels on your roof
4. Switch your car to a plug-in hybrid, or if you can afford it, a full-electric.

Climate change made Europe's lethal floods more likely

 From The Economist

IN A YEAR scarred by one extreme weather event after the next, the question of how far climate change is to blame has continually come to the fore. On August 23rd a group of climate scientists issued its preliminary assessment of the role of climate change in the devastating floods that killed more than 220 people in Germany and Belgium last month. The researchers estimate that global warming has made such extraordinary rainfall up to nine times as likely as in the pre-industrial age.

Between July 12th and 15th a slow-moving low-pressure system, named “Bernd” by meteorologists, poured heavy rain onto Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. The images of widespread destruction served as a stark reminder that even the richest nations were unprepared for such unusual events.

But what role might climate change have played? Climate-modelling studies had already warned that western and central Europe would experience more pluvial and river flooding as accumulating greenhouse gases continue to push global average temperatures upwards. This was confirmed in the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, published earlier this month.

The climate scientists behind Monday’s report—organised by the World Weather Attribution group, a research coalition—used climate models to compare the July floods with what might have happened in a hypothetical world in which average temperatures were the same as before the industrial revolution. Similar studies have been used to assess other recent extreme-weather events. They have concluded that a Siberian heatwave in 2020 was made as much as many thousand times more likely by human greenhouse-gas emissions, and that the heatwave in the Pacific Northwest earlier this year would have been virtually impossible in the absence of global warming.

Such “climate attribution” studies are far easier to carry out for anything related to extreme heat, because there is a direct and relatively simple relationship between global warming and air temperature. Anything involving water, however, is more complex. A hotter atmosphere can hold more moisture and so deliver fiercer downpours, but these also depend on local and regional weather conditions and, crucially, floods are not created just by rainfall. They also depend on a great number of topological and geological factors, such as the depth and saturation of soil, the shape of the landscape and the capacity of waterways. The same amount of water will have very different consequences if it falls on a flat plain or in a long, narrow mountain gully.

In mid-July, unusually heavy rain fell on top of already wet terrain, making the flooding more severe. Around the Ahr and Erft rivers in Germany, for instance, 93mm bucketed down in a single day; in Belgium, around the Meuse, 106mm fell in two days.

The team modelled the odds of this kind of precipitation falling in different areas (130km by 130km for the purposes of the study) between the north of the Alps and the Netherlands, and ran the simulations under two different scenarios: one in which the world was 1.2°C warmer than in pre-industrial times, as it is today, and one in which the world had not warmed at all.

They found that climate change made the kind of extreme rainfall recorded in July between 1.2 and nine times as likely as in the hypothetical unwarmed world. (The wide range reflects the breadth of results produced by different climate models.) The modelling also found that climate change has increased the amount of rain that can fall in one day in Western Europe by 3-19%. Running the models in another hypothetical world that is 0.8°C warmer than today’s (or 2°C warmer than in pre-industrial times) increased the chances of an event further still, by 1.2-1.4 times.

Even in today’s climate, the heavy rainfall last month was “a very rare event”, says Maarten van Aalst of the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, who contributed to the study. The team estimates that locations in western Europe can expect similar rainfall only once every 400 years.

That is less reassuring than it sounds. The study shows, in accordance with the IPCC report, that the risk of these rare extreme events is rising and will become greater still as the world continues to warm. What is more, if different regions in Western Europe are each likely to suffer such events only once every four centuries, they are likely to happen somewhere in the whole continent much more often.

Global electricity trends in 2020

 From EMBER

1 Pandemic paused electricity demand growth.

Global electricity demand fell slightly (-0.1%) in 2020, the first fall since 2009. But this pause has already ended: by December 2020, electricity demand was already higher than in December 2019 (India +5%, EU +2%, Japan +3%, South Korea +2%, Turkey +3%, US +2%).

2 Wind and solar showed resilient growth, rising to supply almost a tenth of global electricity.

Wind and solar generation rose robustly in 2020 by 15% (+314 TWh). This meant that wind and solar produced almost a tenth (9.4%) of the world’s electricity last year, doubling from 4.6% in 2015. Many G20 countries now get around a tenth of their electricity from wind and solar: India (9%), China (9.5%), Japan (10%), Brazil (11%), the US (12%) and Turkey (12%). Europe is leading the way, with Germany at 33% and the United Kingdom at 29%. Indonesia, Russia and Saudi Arabia still have near-zero.

3 Wind and solar helped push coal power to a record fall.

Coal fell a record 4% (-346 TWh). This was similar to the rise in wind and solar power of 314 TWh, more than the UK’s entire electricity production. This dwarfed the aggregate changes across global electricity: demand fell 23 TWh, gas and oil fell 12 TWh. A rise in hydro of 94 TWh was mostly countered by a fall of 104 TWh of nuclear. In comparison, coal collapsed almost everywhere, with large falls in the US (-20%), EU (-20%) and even India (-5%).

4 China was the only G20 country with a large increase in coal generation.

China’s coal generation rose by 2% in 2020. That was because electricity demand growth continued to outstrip new clean electricity. China’s electricity demand was 33% higher in 2020 than in 2015, rising by more than all electricity demand in India in 2020. Across those five years, China’s fossil-free generation met only 54% of the rise in electricity demand, so 46% was met from fossil generation. That pushed China’s coal generation 19% higher in five years. China is now responsible for more than half (53%) of the world’s coal-fired electricity, up from 44% in 2015.

5 Global power sector emissions were still higher than in 2015 when the Paris climate agreement was adopted.

Electricity demand rose 11% (+2536 TWh) since 2015, but the increase in clean electricity generation (+2107 TWh) didn’t keep up. That led to an increase in overall fossil generation: gas-fired electricity rose 11% (+562 TWh) and coal fell only 0.8% (-71 TWh). As a result, power sector CO2 emissions were around 2% higher in 2020 than in 2015. Fossil-free electricity met only 54% of the rise in electricity demand in China, 57% in India and 37% in Indonesia. Meanwhile in Europe, and especially the US, coal’s fall was caused not only by a rise in clean electricity, but also a rise in gas generation. Of the 10% rise in global gas generation since 2015, half of that was in the United States.

Source: The Economist

My comments:

1.  If the growth rate of the last 5 years (15% p.a.) continues for the next 5, wind and solar will make up 20% of total electricity generated.  There is every reason to expect that this growth will be maintained or increased, because wind and solar are cheaper even than the operating costs of coal.
2. Global electricity demand is growing by 2.1% p.a..   So for emissions from electricity to start falling, renewables will have to add at least 2.1% p.a. to global electricity supply for fossil fuel emissions to fall (ignoring any replacement of coal by gas).  On my calculations that will happen from 2023 onwards.  This isn't soon enough to prevent a 1.5 C degree rise.  To do that, emissions have to fall by at least 5% p.a..
3. China is critical to an early peak to emissions from generation.  The new carbon trading system set up China will take time to bite, and reforms to the electricity market, such as inter-provincial HVDC interconnectors will also only be built over time.  Emissions in China may well be falling fast by 2030, as electricity generation transitions to renewables plus nuclear, and EVs gain market share, but they're not going to fall much this decade.
4. Thus average global temperatures are likely to rise another 0.2 degrees C this decade.  Let us hope that pernicious positive feedbacks are not triggered, although already Arctic permafrost is melting every summer, and the melting of Arctic sea ice has led to Arctic temperatures rising three times faster than the world average.

Climate panic

 From The Economist

The ground under the German town of Erftstadt is torn apart like tissue paper by flood waters; Lytton in British Columbia is burned from the map just a day after setting a freakishly high temperature record; cars float like dead fish through the streets-turned-canals in the Chinese city of Zhengzhou. All the world feels at risk, and most of it is. Six years ago, in Paris, the countries of the world committed themselves to avoiding the worst of climate change by eliminating net greenhouse-gas emissions quickly enough to hold the temperature rise below 2°C. Their progress towards that end remains woefully inadequate. But even if their efforts increased dramatically enough to meet the 2°C goal, it would not stop forests from burning today; prairies would still dry out tomorrow, rivers break their banks and mountain glaciers disappear. And even if everyone manages to honour their pledges, there is still a risk that temperatures could eventually rise by 3°C above pre-industrial levels.

What happens when climate panic occurs?  I feel that that isn't far away.

Well, for a start, net-zero by 2050 will be unceremoniously dumped, and the net-zero target will be brought forward by at least a decade.  The world would go on a war footing to cut emissions.  

Just how fast could we cut emissions?  To cut emissions by 50% by 2030 would require that emissions would have to fall by a cumulative 7.5% per annum.  Could we do that without a catastrophic collapse in economic activity?  Well, in a word, yes.  

Roughly 30% of the world's emissions come from baseload electricity and another 12% from variable electricity (gas peaking).  Wind and solar are already cheaper than coal and (in gas-importing countries) than gas too.   We can take the grid to 85% wind and solar with 4 hours of storage.   The remainder could be supplied by nuclear, hydro, biomass, wave power or green gas (hydrogen or green ammonia or green methane, produced from surplus renewable electricity).  And climate panic may well reduce public hostility to nuclear power.  Existing nuclear generators will prolly be allowed to continue.  SMRs (small modular reactors) may be built, though they're unlikely to be ready in time.

Another 16% of global emissions come from road transport.  Governments could simply ban the sale of new internal combustion engine cars, lorries and buses, and they probably will, not from 2030 or 2035 bur from 2025 or earlier.  They will set stringent annual targets to get to this point, or they will introduce big subsidies for EVs, or both.  With climate panic, a slow recasting of our economies will be ditched in favour of a very rapid adjustment.  With an average life of 10 years, it will take 10 years for the whole fleet to transition to plug-ins, so that process will have to be accelerated.  There will be 'cash for clunkers' programs, designed to take aging petrol cars and trucks off the roads.  Petrol (gasoline) will be taxed more heavily.  ICEV licence fees will be upped.

And governments will be looking at every source of emissions.  Iron and steel will have to switch to making steel with green hydrogen or methane.  Air travel will be taxed heavily unless it's electric or fuelled by carbon-neutral jetfuel.  

All land clearing and forest burning would have to stop immediately.  The world would have to apply sanctions in the form of diplomatic pressure and import tariffs and bans to the countries  where this is worst: Australia, Brazil, Indonesia, Borneo.  And don't think we won't.  As climate panic builds, the pressure to conform will be irresistible.

Agriculture won't be given a free pass any more, either.  Cows will be fed seaweed, to cut emissions.  Governments may even become frightened enough to tax meat. 

But above all, the world needs a carbon tax and an end to fossil fuel subsidies.  The EU's border carbon tax will be a powerful goad for the rest of the world to introduce their own carbon taxes.  Climate panic will remove any opposition to their spread.  Climate free-loaders will get short shrift.

Together, these measures could cut emissions by 90%.   Most of that could happen in the first 10 years.  And these measures, rapidly effected, would in fact limit the rise in global temperatures to 1.5 degrees  above pre-industrial levels.

The world has been repeatedly warned.  The warnings have been brushed off or ignored.  Instead of a gradual adjustment over decades, starting decades ago, we have phaffed and dithered and allowed ourselves to be lied to by oil and coal companies.  And now a modest  1 or 2% a year decline will not do.  We will need a 15% per annum decline to cut emissions by 90% by 2035, to prevent temperatures rising by more than 1.5 degrees.  

As the Economist says: 'There will be nowhere safe.'  And the public is beginning to realise this, and is both frightened and angry.  Expect serious steps to cut emissions.

Emissions will rebound in 2021

 From The Economist

Emissions dropped sharply (5.8%) during 2020 because of Covid.  The IEA is forecasting that almost all that decline will be reversed in 2021.  I haven't done the numbers, but I wonder whether global emissions have in fact peaked, because of the rising percentage of electricity generation from renewables and the increasing penetration of EVs.  Yes, emissions will rise this year.  But will they rise next year, and the year after?  Or have global emissions finally peaked?

First successful flight of Starship

 

SpaceX has successfully launched and landed Starship, without it blowing up.  It wasn't perfect: there was a methane fire after landing (soon extinguished); the rocket appears to have skipped a metre or so when it landed; and one of the Raptor engines appeared not to ignite.   

All the same, it was a magnificent achievement.  Remember, everything about this rocket is new technology: the methane Raptor engine; the use of steel as a construction material; and the "belly-flop" landing manoeuvre.  And they all worked.  In development, SpaceX started with the Starship upper stage first, because this was the hardest  part of the two-stage Super Heavy booster + Starship combo. The success of Starship brings the colonisation of Mars much closer, because SpaceX knows all about making re-usable boosters.  That's what the Falcon 9 rocket is.  

There is much further to go.  To make Starship truly re-usable, the ceramic tiles used as a heat shield must be easily replaceable.  Starship must demonstrate that it can return to Earth at orbital velocity without burning or breaking up.   But all the -out-there concepts that SpaceX pushed have been shown to work, at a cost 1 thousandth of current rockets, even before they are re-used.

Starship will change everything about space and a great deal about Earth.  Technology responds to need.  As Musk says, the colonisation of Mars will drive a forcing function in technologies, like genetic engineering, air and water purification, construction techniques, AI, to name just a few.  The most obvious right now is high speed internet access round the world via SpaceX's Starlink.  Here's an interesting article about that from The Economist.  Starlink is being used to fund Starship, but it's also being advanced by Starship because Starship will cut launch costs so much.

Here's The Guardian's take on the launch:

Success came on the 60th anniversary of the flight of first American in space, Alan Shepard. And it capped a stunning two weeks of achievements for SpaceX: the launch of four more astronauts to the space station for Nasa, the nation’s first night-time crew splashdown since the Apollo moonshots, and a pair of launches for its mini internet satellites.

Less than a month ago, Nasa chose SpaceX’s Starship to deliver astronauts to the lunar surface in the next few years. The $3bn contract was halted last week, however, after the losing companies – Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin and Dynetics – protested against the selection.

And here's a video of the whole sequence from launch to landing, with however the sections where signal from the rocket was lost omitted:

China still hooked on coal

 From The Economist

LAST YEAR was a bad one for coal in much of the world. As countries went into lockdown, demand for energy plummeted. With many workers obliged to stay at home, and financing for coal projects proving ever more difficult, the development and construction of coal-fired power plants stalled. There was one bright spot, however [for coal, not the climate]. According to a report published this week by Global Energy Monitor, an American NGO, China commissioned 38.4 gigawatts (GW) of coal-power plants in 2020. This boost in global coal-fired capacity means that, although the rest of the world idled 37.8GW of coal plants, total capacity actually increased last year for the first time since 2015. [But because capacity utilisation fell, the amount of coal consumed by China actually fell.]

China’s affinity for coal, the biggest source of greenhouse gases, may be surprising given the country’s recent pledge to cut emissions to net-zero by 2060. There are, however, other mitigating factors. Local government officials, whose performance is often measured against targets for economic growth, have long used infrastructure projects—especially coal plants—to inflate their GDP figures. In 2020, when China was one of the few countries in the world to register any growth, three-quarters of the coal-fired capacity approved for construction was sponsored by local governments and firms. Regulators did not get in their way. China’s National Energy Administration gave several provinces the nod to approve new coal power plants.

But just because China has commissioned more coal-fired capacity does not mean that it will use it. Because so many coal plants are built to serve economic targets rather than energy needs, the country has a glut of around 400GW of excess coal-fired capacity. The average thermal power plant in China generates only about 50% of its total capacity. This means that, although China accounted for three-quarters of the world’s new coal plants in 2020, it produced just half of the world’s coal-fired power.

One of the critical steps we must take to net zero is to stop burning coal to make electricity.  We must build no new coal power stations anywhere in the world, while shutting down existing power stations as quickly as we can.  

2019--A bad year for democracy

 From one of The Economist's most popular pieces in 2020.  Their assessment is based on 60 indicators, so it's not just wetting one finger and testing the breeze.

Democracy is in retreat, according to the latest edition of the Democracy Index from our sister company, The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU). This annual survey, which rates the state of democracy across 167 countries based on five measures—electoral process and pluralism, the functioning of government, political participation, democratic political culture and civil liberties—finds that democracy has been eroded around the world in the past year. The global score of 5.44 out of ten is the lowest recorded since the index began in 2006. Just 22 countries, home to 430m people, were deemed “full democracies” by the EIU. More than a third of the world’s population, meanwhile, still live under authoritarian rule.

The sharpest decline in democratic freedoms occurred in China. There discrimination against minorities in the western region of Xinjiang and other infringements of civil liberties, such as digital surveillance, contributed to a drop in the country’s score, from 3.32 to 2.26. India, the world’s biggest democracy, also slid down the EIU’s rankings after the Hindu-nationalist government stripped the Muslim-majority region of Jammu & Kashmir of its statehood in August. The decision by the Indian state of Assam to exclude nearly 2m mostly Muslim residents from a tally of native citizens—in effect removing their citizenship—also contributed to the drop. The passage by Parliament in December of the discriminatory Citizenship (Amendment) Act suggests India’s decline will continue in the 2020 index.

[Read more here. There's an interest interactive chart at the top of the piece, showing the 14 year trajectory of each country.  Just hover your cursor over the chart to see.]

Pressing the flesh

 From The Economist

Changing greetings could slow Covid's spread. But handwashing is essential.

In 1439 King Henry VI of England banned kissing as a greeting to stop the spread of the Black Plague. Today, as covid-19 spreads around the world, authorities are encouraging similar measures to fight infection. In China, to avoid hand-shaking, people are being told to greet one another with a gong shou gesture, where a palm is folded over the opposite fist. In the Gulf, citizens are saying hello with a wave rather than the traditional “nose to nose” greeting. And in Italy and France, friends and acquaintances are eschewing the customary peck on both cheeks.

Such efforts are more effective than they might seem. A paper published in 2014 explored how greeting rituals spread infectious diseases. David Whitworth and Sara Mela, two biologists at Aberystwyth University in Wales, dipped a glove in bacteria, before using it to greet another person wearing a sterile glove. Bacteria can be transmitted in a similar way to the new coronavirus. They found that a handshake transfers almost twice as much bacteria as a high five, which in turn transmits twice that of a fist bump. The duration of greetings matters, too. Stronger and longer handshakes transfer more bacteria than weaker, shorter ones. The same goes for high fives.

Massive underperformance of value stocks

 From The Economist

The age-old strategy of buying cheap shares is faltering

Shares of value firms have underperformed the market since 2010

In the US,  the 'growth' stocks which dominate the indices are the tech stocks, including Tesla, Apple, Twitter, Facebook.  The 'value' stocks tend to be older  industries. And oil has traditionally been classified as 'value' but has underperformed direly as the cost of new oil fields has risen while the price of oil has fallen.   

Coronavirus--democracies better at epidemics

From The Economist.

Note double log scales.  So deaths/million ten times less in democracies.

We analysed all recorded epidemics since 1960 and found democracies handle epidemic diseases better than their non-democratic counterparts.  Diseases like Covid-19 are deadlier in non-democracies.  Even though China says otherwise.

US life expectancy falls again

For the third year in succession, US life expectancy has fallen.

Source: The Economist
Does not include 2017 & 2018 data.

From Science Alert:

The US is the only wealthy country in the world where the life expectancy needle is moving the wrong way.

Between 1959 and 2014, the average length of time that Americans were expected to live was on the rise. Now, for the third year in a row, it's declining, according to a new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

"Americans operate under a lot of misconceptions about how superior we are in many facets of our lives and this is not one of them," the study's lead author Steven Woolf told Business Insider. "We may think we have best medical care in world and highest life expectancy … but that's not the case."

This decline can't be linked to just one ethnicity, gender, or geographic area, either: It originates among an entire age group. People between the ages of 25 and 64 in the US are dying at higher rates, wracked by health problems like opioid addiction, obesity, alcoholic liver disease, and suicide.

Despite having the highest per capita health care spending in the world, Americans are "more likely to die before age 65 than people in other countries," Woolf added. "Their children, too, are less likely to live as long".

Woolf and his co-author Heidi Schoomaker's new study looked at more than 50 years' worth of data on US life expectancy from the US Mortality Database and the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention's WONDER database.

Results showed that, in the 1970s, the country experienced a rapid and significant jump in life expectancy. But by the 1990s, that increase started to level off.  In 2011, US life expectancy plateaued, and three years later it started to drop.

"We've reached the point where we're going into a free fall," Woolf said.

Medical advances, particularly in the realms of cancer treatment and heart health, prompted an almost 10-year increase in the average American's lifespan. Between 1959 and 2013, life expectancy rose from 69.9 years to 78.9 years. Now, however, that average has dropped to 78.6 years.

The news isn't good if you compare it to other countries, either. In 1960, Americans had the highest life expectancy of any country in the world. But in the past couple of years, the US has plummeted to the bottom of the list of countries with a similar GDP and high average income, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

In fact, the US is currently ranked in the mid-40s globally in terms of life expectancy, squished between countries like Lebanon, Cuba, and Chile, which have GDPs that fall far short of our own.

This counterintuitive trend – of an affluent, first-world country that spends billions on privatised healthcare losing swaths of their middle-aged working class – could be traced back to one massive elephant in the room.

"It's a quandary of why this is happening when we spend so much on healthcare," Woolf said, adding: "But my betting money is on the economy."

Upticks in suicides, drug overdoses, and alcohol-related diseases "are all symptoms of people struggling in a poor economy who can't afford housing, find consistent jobs," and despair because of it, according to Woolf.

Drug overdose, alcohol abuse, and suicide – referred to by some as "deaths of despair" – appear to be the primary culprits [of the rising mortality rates].

This age group [25 -64] experienced a nearly four-fold increase in fatal drug overdoses between 1999 and 2017.

Suicide rates went up by nearly 40 percent for people between the ages of 25 and 64, and by 56 percent for people ages 55 to 64 during the same time frame. For Americans between the ages of 25 and 34, the rate of alcohol-related disease deaths spiked almost 160 percent, as well.

Obesity-related mortality rates among this age group also went up by 114 percent, and deaths linked to high blood increased by about 80 percent.

"Working-age Americans are more likely to die in the prime of their lives," Woolf said. Between 2010 and 2017, midlife US adults experienced a 6 percent total increase in mortality rate.

"We are seeing social determinants of health shaping well-being and outcomes," Howard Koh, a professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of public health who was not involved in the study, told Business Insider.

"Forces like income inequality and unstable employment cause psychological distress and drive conditions by which diseases and deaths occur," he added.

In countries around the world, research has shown that people with lower incomes die sooner than their wealthier counterparts.  A 2017 study linked low socioeconomic status to significant reductions in life expectancy.

But what makes the US unique, according to Woolf, is that "poor people in other countries live longer than poor people in our country".

[Read more here]


I talked about this before, in my piece Shit-Life Syndrome.  The standard American diet (SAD) is undoubtedly one factor in falling life expectancy, but that doesn't explain suicide, now at the highest rate since the Great Depression, nor rising deaths from alcoholism.  Rising inequality is killing people.  It's time for a change.