Cold War 2.0 Incoming

Although the rich Democrats managed to block Henry Wallace from becoming president and embraced a permanent war economy, the first cold war did help most Americans. The communist promises of a decent life for all outstripped American leaders’ vision, and resulted in decent governance, including labor and commercial law. I wonder if Cold War 2 .0 will have a similar effect. My guess is no, because the elites have such tunnel vision that they can’t distinguish between foreign and domestic challenges — just have violent tantrums in response to any recalcitrance to their privilege.

@Ian Welsh

You are almost completely ignoring the incredible dynastic rot of China, which now is run by a dictator who is turning the entire country into one big open air prison. You know, the kind of place that takes loud mouthed bloggers like you and sends them off to be re-educated.

You talk like a big man from Canada (with an ISP in Arizona?), let us see exactly how courageous you would be in Beijing?

It used to be that Chinese dynasties lasted a couple hundred years at least. This one is about to come crashing down well before that time, which explains all those Chinese elites buying real estate in London and New York City. Yup.

I don’t mind skepticism about US policy, mistakes, and failures, but I am surprised by the lack of a similar skepticism toward China. No mention of 3,000 years of Chinese imperial history which Xi is eagerly falling into. Its treatment of its Tibetans and Uighurs. Tensions with India. Its support of North Korean nuttery. There is a near defense of Chinese imperial ambitions in the South China Sea. No mention of some of China’s hardball in its deals in its Belt and Road projects. Or even just some doubt about the whole idea behind Belt and Road, its length and routes through some of the most politically unstable places on earth.

Free trade with China was a mistake, but now that China has become a major economic power, an economic war with China may be a mistake.

I don’t get Stoller’s hatred of China. Regardless how evil China’s government is or is not, since when does the U.S. care about evil governments? Saudi Arabia, for example? I oppose free trade with China, not out of any hostility to China, but because it is not in the best interest of American manufacturing workers like me.

The Cold Warriors are making things worse, but can we imagine a scenario where great powers are not rivals and competitors? I’m not seeing it. The best we can hope for is detente.

“an they know it.)”

and

China understands capitalism is a tool, not a way of life.

Another co-reason the US ruling elites seek Cold War 2.0 with China is because they would plan to use it as a Total Sensurround Social Brain-Control Matrix-Field against the inhabitants of America.

They want to keep us under mental control as we adjust to the coming Revolution of Falling Expectations.

People who understand this might be able to pre-install some counter-regime brain-blocks into their own minds to semi-immunize their thinking against regime input.

IMHO the US is the last surviving 19th Century Empire. And is a decaying empire.

The end game as mentioned above is not China, but Global Warming, which remains unaddressed, because the world is run by greed.

I expect possibly one half a billion will survive the coming desolation of the planet, living in a hunter/gatherer primitive civilization.

We no easily exploited minerals for them to climb out of the ecological trap in which they live.

The new cold war will feature diminishing returns, profit-wise. Thus, whoever “wins” still needs to negotiate the end of capitalism. It need not be traumatic, the world has the productive and distributive ability to care for everyone right now. Notice how society has continued without all the laid off workers. All we need is to eliminate profit as necessary.

Thanks for the news Hugh, I had wrongly picked Kamala Harris to be the D’s flag bearer because she was Hillary’s pick. But, after Tulsi Gabbard knocked Kamala Harris to the floor and proceeded to wipe the it with her ample carcass I knew Hillary would have to find another way to be queen…and she did, Biden. Now Hillary has, in the words of FBI lawyer Peter Strzok to his lover Lisa Page…an insurance policy.

The D’s of today have no relationship to the Democratic Party of FDR.

A couple of points —

[1] Yes, the U.S. dollar will lose global reserve currency status.

No, the Chinese probably won’t let the yuan/renminbi replace it. China would then have to take on all the negatives that the ‘Triffin dilemma’ points out: ever-growing trade deficits because other countries have to hold enough of the reserve currency, rising exchange rates causing in-country manufacturing — especially of goods for export — to become non-competitive, and other problems.

The problems that in fact are the things that over the decades have done in the U.S. as a whole as it’s maintained the dollar as the global reserve currency. (But which have been great for Wall Street and U.S. elites.)

Indeed, China *cannot* play the same game. Unlike the U.S., it cannot be food self-sufficient (unless biotech absolutely revolutionizes agriculture in the next decade) and it needs massive inputs oil and other commodities. To pay for those, it must continue to make money exporting.

Therefore, expect to see more talk of special drawing rights, bancors, baskets of reserve currencies, or some such.

[2] All the canonical assumptions about climate change are being expressed here with the certainty of religious belief, I see. I’m going to express a heresy.

People in the West can chant whatever mantras they like about how if everybody only invested enough in renewable energy, or switched to a no-growth, steady-state planetary economy, or magically reduced the population by an order or two of magnitude in a couple of decades, then that would solve the problem. They can quote Einstein all they want about how a problem can’t be solved by using the same thinking that created it, in order to make the claim that since the human race’s use of technology was what had created global warming so more technology cannot never fix it. Whatever.

In the real world, when the excrement hits the fan – when it actually looks like billions of people might die unless geoengineering technologies can be deployed to stop the apocalypse – well, the governments of Russia, China, and most countries around the world will deploy them. What’s a declining U.S. and West — after all, a small minority of the world’s population — going to do stop those other countries if we don’t like them geoengineering? Start a nuclear war?

And believe the science, right? Well, from glancing at the science, it looks to me like those technologies will probably work — and frighteningly cheaply. They’ll do nothing to stop ocean acidification, they’ll have frightening side-effects, and — most terrifyingly — once the world as a whole climbs on that on-ramp, it won’t be able to get off.

But they’ll probably work.

I also correctly predicted that Harris would be the VP pick, though I did it less than a month ago.
Here is the copy-pasted comment for proof.

As much a loser as the Harris revealed itself to be, I still suspect that the Biden’s hidden masters will instruct the Biden to pick the Harris as its VP running mate. ( And if elected, make the Susan Rice its Secretary of State.)

If events prove me wrong about that, people can laugh as much as they like. If it turns out the way I sorta feel like it might ( Biden/Harris), then I will go ahead and say why I felt that way.

Posted by: different clue | 31 July 2020 at 02:58 PM

And here is the blogpost whose thread I made that comment in.

https://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2020/07/what-exactly-is-the-biden-coalition.html

@Mark Pontin,

Yes, the geoengineering will probably work in the narrow sense of stopping the global further warming and maybe even dewarming it some.

As we starve and freeze and die, beneath a silver-yellow sky.

Gorsh, I´m so old, I remember when China was last on the list of “threats” to be neutralized — after the Middle East and Russia — but I guess since the prior neutralizations didn’t go so well, heh, neutralization emphasis shifted to China because it was all that was left. It puzzled me when Obama did his China Pivot, but once done, it seemed baked in.

I’m no fan of imperial projects — which modern China certainly is though in a culturally specific Chinese way that doesn’t necessarily track with Western ideas of Empire — but the Chinese “threat” to the US, like the Russian one, and the Middle Eastern one is way overblown. We need an existential enemy, though, because without one, the US disunifies. So, China it is, at least for now. Watch out, though, Canada may be next if it continues to bar Americans at the gates.

A note: Tibet was pretty horrible prior to Han Chinese acquisition and occupation. It’s somewhat better in some ways for more Tibetans now, but in other ways, nah. Native Tibetans are second class citizens at best. The suppression of the lamaseries is probably on balance a good thing, but the way it was done and the way it has been maintained was and is as cruel, maybe more cruel, that anything that happened routinely under the rule of the lamas and Tibetan feudalism.

China appears to be weathering the current anti-Chinese fervor in the West well enough; better than previous episodes of hysterics over the Yellow Peril. It’s partly due to the fact that China is in essence a domestic empire rather than an expansionary one, and almost all that it needs to maintain itself and build a better future for its people is within its borders. Chinese know how to do it, too. Its technical expertise and manufacturing power mean that (almost) no matter what else happens, China will survive and in part will flourish. Chinese leadership appears to know this and governs accordingly. The US is a disaster of chaos and incompetence by comparison.

Russia seems to have decided to fit in to the White Nationalism of much of the Western leadership, even offering some pointers to the confused Western elites. I don’t like it, but the predilection toward authoritarianism, fascism and nationalism in the West is hard to escape. It’s a natural result of allowing free rein to the NeoLibCons for so many years. The paradigm may be shuddering, but it hasn’t fallen. Not at all.

The original Cold War didn’t have to happen, and it wouldn’t have if FDR had kept Wallace as his VP. But water under the bridge. It looks like our rulers can’t conceive of international rivalry as anything but war, when it doesn’t have to be. Once these things are put in motion, they are very hard to stop.

different clue wrote: ‘Yes, the geoengineering will probably work … as we starve and freeze and die, beneath a silver-yellow sky.’

Beneath a permanently white sky, if the aerosolized sulphate particulate route is taken.

Starving, freezing, and dying implies a nuclear winter-type effect hanging permanently up there, however. That’s unlikely: the opposite problem exists in the real world. Particles put up in the lower stratosphere will disperse and settle within a matter of weeks.

We know this not only because of how the atmospheric effects of volcanic eruptions like Mt. Pinatubo’s have played out, but because we’ve been running an ongoing geoengineering experiment we briefly put on hiatus after the GFC in 2008, when much of the world’s economy and industrial activity contracted. Here’s a paper on what happened —

‘Disentangling greenhouse warming and aerosol cooling to reveal Earth’s climate sensitivity’
https://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo2670
‘…we present an observation-based study of the time period 1964 to 2010 … approximately 1,300 surface sites into an energy balance framework … We find that surface radiation trends, which have been largely explained by changes in atmospheric aerosol loading, caused a cooling that masked approximately one-third of the continental warming due to increasing greenhouse gas concentrations over the past half-century.’

Here’s a later paper that goes into things in more breadth —
‘Amplification of Arctic warming by past air pollution reductions in Europe’
https://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo2673

And another, which isn’t stuck behind a paywall —
‘Bounding the role of black carbon in the climate system: A scientific assessment’
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/jgrd.50171

In 2009 with the GFC and the subsequent global industrial contraction, in other words, the one-third of global warming that was *masked* as long as industry was releasing aerosolized particulates into the atmosphere alongside all those greenhouse gases *ceased* to be masked. As a directed result, global warming seriously *accelerated*

In other words, we’ve been doing geoengineering via aerosolized particulates and thanks to the industrial shutdown after the GFC in 2008 we *know* that if we stop doing it the particulates drop out of the atmosphere quickly. Which in turns means that doing geoengineering via this route would have to be a permanently ongoing global maintenance process. And then, half a century from now, what happens if the system fails mechanically and suddenly stops?

The planet boils over — most especially the Siberian taiga and the Arctic. There’s some seventeen trillion tonnes of carbon dioxide – at least double the amount currently in the Earth’s entire atmosphere – locked in the tundra. A similar quantity of methane is stored there and at the Arctic Ocean’s bottom, and methane is twenty-eight times more potent at trapping heat than carbon dioxide. So if all that methane is released, you’d very quickly get temperatures that aren’t in the historical record.

They aren’t in the historical record because, for one thing, the human race wouldn’t have survived them. Nor would most life on Earth. As was demonstrated by the fact that it didn’t – there’ve been five great extinction events in Earth’s prehistory and each coincided with massive methane releases into the atmosphere. The Permian Mass Extinction and the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, in particular, almost ended all life on the planet.

Pretty terrifying, right?

Here’s the thing, though. If we don’t geoengineer, we’re headed there anyway. These effects are locked in now, as those papers I’ve linked to above indicate, as Ian W. likes to point out, and indeed as a cursory study of the literature on how much heat is already in the Earth’s oceans makes clear. The difference will be that if/when we don’t geoengineer the process will happen gradually, but *sooner*.

Pick your poison, I’d say. Except it’s not going to be decided by you and me, but by the governments of the world when they’re more acutely confronted with millions or billions of their citizens dying.

@Mark Pontin,

I would have thought that a stratosphere-level shroud-layer of sulfuric acid droplets would bias the light getting through slightly toward yellow. And their extreme reflectivity would give it a silver cast. So I imagined a silver yellow sky if the sulfuric acid droplets approach is tried.

If it would be white, then the doggerel would have to read ” beneath a frozen dead-white sky.”

Too Funny.

The Ignominious Fall of Kamala Harris

Don’t count your falling stars before they fall entirely.

The title should read: The Ignominious Fall and then Rise of Kamala Harris.

Her Parallax file says, “A substantial bosom and she gives good head. Easily passes for African-American but not of the culture. She’s white through and through. Poodle white. She’ll do whatever is asked of her. Husband is a corporate lawyer. He’s a perfect First Gentleman. He’ll advocate for tougher IP laws as his First Gentleman purpose.”