PITY THE POOR PETROPHILES:

The End of Oil (Ryan Kellogg, November 2024, NBER: Working Paper 33207)

It is now plausible to envision scenarios in which global demand for crude oil falls to essentially zero by the end of this century, driven by improvements in clean energy technologies, adoption of stringent climate policies, or both. This paper asks what such a demand decline, when anticipated, might mean for global oil supply. One possibility is the well-known “green paradox”: because oil is an exhaustible resource, producers may accelerate near-term extraction in order to beat the demand decline. This reaction would increase near-term CO2 emissions and could possibly even lead the total present value of climate damages to be greater than if demand had not declined at all. However, because oil extraction requires potentially long-lived investments in wells and other infrastructure, the opposite may occur: an anticipated demand decline reduces producers’ investment rates, decreasing near-term oil production and CO2 emissions.

remember Peak Oil? That was hilarious.

IF THERE’S ONE THING WE KNOW maga LACKS…:

Musk and Ramaswamy Are Making a Big Mistake (Nicholas Bagley, 12/03/24, The Atlantic)

What’s more, you need smart bureaucrats to make sure that rescissions hold up in court. Under settled law, established way back in the Reagan administration, “an agency changing its course by rescinding a rule is obligated to supply a reasoned analysis for the change.” Compiling that analysis requires technical skills that agency bureaucrats will have and that DOGE will lack. Slashing the federal workforce will thus work at cross-purposes to deregulation.

…it’s a deep bench of smart bureaucrats to replace the ones they hate.

NOTHING COSTS MORE THAN FOSSIL FUELS:

Lead Exposure Drove a Hidden Mental Health Crisis in the U.S., Study Reveals (Ed Cara, December 4, 2024, Gizmodo)

Scientists at Duke University and Florida State University conducted the study, building on their past research of lead’s impact on our health. They estimated that childhood lead exposure—particularly during the decades when it was most found in gasoline—has directly contributed to 151 million more cases of psychiatric disorder among Americans over the past 75 years. The findings indicate that lead has been even more dangerous to humanity than we knew.

Car manufacturers began to add lead to gasoline in the 1920s, aiming to reduce wear and tear on the engines.

THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS SPECIES:

Footprints Reveal Two Early Human Species Walked the Same Lakeshore in Kenya 1.5 Million Years Ago (Sarah Kuta, 12/02/24, Smithsonian)

Their footprints, made within hours or days of each other, provide the first direct, physical evidence that multiple early human species coexisted in the same habitat, according to a new study published last week in the journal Science.

WE ARE ALL DESIGNIST:

Philosophical Dead Ends: John Dupré reviews Richard Dawkins’s “The Genetic Book of the Dead” and Sara Imari Walker’s “Life as No One Knows It.” (John Dupré, November 30, 2024, LA Review of Books)

First, Dawkins remains, loosely speaking, a genetic determinist. I say “loosely speaking” because, of course, he does not believe that genes are sufficient to produce an organism. DNA alone in a test tube does not somehow turn into an elephant or an orchid. But Dawkins does take genes to be what matters. The additional necessary resources—oxygen to breathe, parental care, and so on—are background conditions normally sufficient to allow the genes to do their causal work. A crucial consequence of this is that development doesn’t matter for evolution. If the phenotype is fully inscribed in the genes, then it makes sense to think of evolution as ultimately a sequence of genomes competing with one another. The phenotypes are proxies for the genomes that determine them.

But life is not like that. Development is complex and multifactorial. Various nongenetic factors—e.g., cultural or epigenetic (non-sequence-based features of genomes), which may have their own distinct evolutionary trajectories—play a role.

LEAVE WELL ENOUGH ALONE:

Is Oedipus Rex the Mother of All Drama? (Thom Delapa, 12/01/24, The Collector)

It is keenly ironic and tragic that Oedipus’s steely, admirable determination to solve this mystery and save his people sows the seeds of his own undoing. Throughout the play, Sophocles provides instance after instance of his protagonist making pledges and oaths that, in retrospect, not only prove to be wrong but serve to implicate him in the “cold case” of Laius’s homicide. But perhaps the greatest irony in Oedipus Rex is that its hero undertakes a noble and indeed universal human quest—to discover his true origins, that is, find out who he is—but the answer itself spells his own doom.

DONALD’S BLACK BART STRATEGY:

America Is Not an Economic Island (Desmond Lachman, November 27, 2024, AEIdeas)

Much as Trump might want America to go it alone behind high tariff walls, the fact of the matter is that the US economy is highly integrated in the world economy. As such, if Trump’s high tariff policy has the effect of tipping the European and Chinese economies into recession and of inviting trade retaliation, those economies troubles might come back to adversely impact both our economy and our financial markets. That could cause serious political trouble for Trump in the 2026 mid-term Congressional election.

One indication of how integrated we are with the rest of the world economy is the fact that exports currently constitute around 11 percent of our economy and a multiple of that number in the agricultural, aerospace, and pharmaceutical industries. Any marked slowing in the global economy or the resort by our foreign trade partners to retaliatory tariffs would be sorely felt in those industries.

Other indications of how interlinked we are with the rest of the world’s economy are the high percentage of the total earnings that our companies derive from abroad and the massive exposure of our financial system to foreign lending. It is estimated that foreign revenues comprise almost 30 percent of the S&P 500’s total revenues. Meanwhile, our banking system has literally trillions of dollars of foreign loans on its books. One only has to recall the shockwaves that the Asian, Russian, and the Eurozone economic crises caused to our financial system to recognize the importance of a healthy world economy for our banking system.

As we were painfully reminded during the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, our economy is deeply intertwined with the global supply chain. We rely on imports of key raw materials like rare earth metals for electronics, renewable energy, and defense technologies. In addition, many consumer products, including automobiles, depend on components coming from abroad. This makes our economy highly vulnerable to retaliation by our trade partners in general and China in particular should they choose to withhold key materials or components needed for our production process.

IT’S A LIBERAL WORLD, THE ILLIBERAL JUST LIVE IN IT:

Neoliberalism didn’t Fail and isn’t Dead, Yet (Zachary Karabell, Nov 27, 2024, The Edgy Optimist)

[I]n 1999, when those protestors violently railed against globalization in Seattle, the value of global trade in merchandise was just over $5 trillion dollars. That was on a global GDP of about $30 trillion so trade was about one-sixth of that. In 2023, trade in merchandise was about $24 trillion on a global GDP of just over $100 trillion, making trade about a quarter that. Trade in services, which is hard to measure, is another $6-7 trillion at least, whereas in 1999, services trade was much more modest. While trade has dipped slightly in the past two years, it is now a far greater share of global economic activity than ever before.

Trade patterns are also morphing. It is no longer resource-rich countries selling oil, minerals, and commodities to the developed nations of the West and East Asia. It is now everyone selling something to everyone and everyone buying stuff from everywhere. The arrows used to be simple, with the developed world sending raw materials and the industrial powerhouses, and the U.S. most of all, selling finished goods to the world. Now the lines go from Africa to Asia, from Asia to Latin America, from Latin America to Africa, and Africa to Europe, and Europe to the United States, and the United States to everywhere. Hundreds of lines now link nations, peoples, and companies in unprecedented ways.

In the process of that explosion of commerce, the world became vastly richer, and average incomes across the world rose from about $5000 per person to about $17,000 per person in constant dollars (meaning inflation-adjusted). That tripling of income is directly correlated to trade, and hence to the very neoliberalism currently derided.

TOUGH BEAT FOR RENE GIRARD:

The First Christmas Tree (Henry Van Dyke)

“None of these things will please the god. More costly is the offering that shall cleanse your sin, more precious the crimson dew that shall send new life into this holy tree of blood. Thor claims your dearest and your noblest gift.”

Hunrad moved nearer to the group of children who stood watching the fire and the swarms of spark-serpents darting upward. They had heeded none of the priest’s words, and did not notice now that he approached them, so eager were they to see which fiery snake would go highest among the oak branches. Foremost among them, and most intent on the pretty game, was a boy like a sunbeam, slender and quick, with blithe brown eyes and laughing lips. The priest’s hand was laid upon his shoulder. The boy turned and looked up in his face.

“Here,” said the old man, with his voice vibrating as when a thick rope is strained by a ship swinging from her moorings, “here is the chosen one, the eldest son of the Chief, the darling of the people. Hearken, Bernhard, wilt thou go to Valhalla, where the heroes dwell with the gods, to bear a message to Thor?”

The boy answered, swift and clear:

“Yes, priest, I will go if my father bids me. Is it far away? Shall I run quickly? Must I take my bow and arrows for the wolves?”

The boy’s father, the Chieftain Gundhar, standing among his bearded warriors, drew his breath deep, and leaned so heavily on the handle of his spear that the wood cracked. And his wife, Irma, bending forward from the ranks of women, pushed the golden hair from her forehead with one hand. The other dragged at the silver chain about her neck until the rough links pierced her flesh, and the red drops fell unheeded on her breast.
A sigh passed through the crowd, like the murmur of the forest before the storm breaks. Yet no one spoke save Hunrad:
“Yes, my Prince, both bow and spear shalt thou have, for the way is long, and thou art a brave huntsman. But in darkness thou must journey for a little space, and with eyes blindfolded. Fearest thou?”

“Naught fear I,” said the boy, “neither darkness, nor the great bear, nor the were-wolf. For I am Gundhar’s son, and the defender of my folk.”

Then the priest led the child in his raiment of lamb’s-wool to a broad stone in front of the fire. He gave him his little bow tipped with silver, and his spear with shining head of steel. He bound the child’s eyes with a white cloth, and bade him kneel beside the stone with his face to the cast. Unconsciously the wide arc of spectators drew inward toward the centre, as the ends of the bow draw together when the cord is stretched. Winfried moved noiselessly until he stood close behind the priest.

The old man stooped to lift a black hammer of stone from the ground,–the sacred hammer of the god Thor. Summoning all the strength of his withered arms, he swung it high in the air. It poised for an instant above the child’s fair head–then turned to fall.
One keen cry shrilled out from where the women stood: “Me! take me! not Bernhard!”
The flight of the mother toward her child was swift as the falcon’s swoop. But swifter still was the hand of the deliverer.

ARBITRARINESS IS THE ENEMY OF JUSTICE:

Dead Tape: Annual Federal Paperwork Hours Consume Equivalent Of 14,983 Human Lifetimes (Nov. 20th, 2024, Forbes)

The ICB’s “Paperwork Reduction Accounting” appendix indicates that 10.5 billion hours were required to complete paperwork from 39 departments, agencies and commissions—up from 10.34 in 2022. A table below depicts these.

The bulk—6.657 billion hours—is attributable to the Department of the Treasury (up from 6.603 in 2022). The runner-up Department of Health and Human Services clocks in at 1.59 billion hours (compared to 1.65 billion in 2022; here we do find reduction). Past years’ cross-governmental paperwork-hour tallies appear below, by fiscal year.

2015: 9.865 billion hours
2016: 11.442
2017: 11.529
2018: 11.357
2019: 10.998
2020: 11.618
2021: 9.974
2022: 10.34

Despite the emphasis on ease of access to programs, paperwork hours are considerably higher today than the 7.2 billion at which they stood back in 2000. There are far more programs today, although the Government Accountability Office (GAO) affirms we don’t know how many.