Let’s Face It: We’re Not Going to Stop Climate Change

Two major reports in recent days tell us that unless we take immediate action to slow climate change, the consequences will be dire. But the world has waited so long to take that action, that there is a growing dread that it’s too late. The parameters have to be so severe at this late hour that there is no political will to force drastic changes nor would humans be willing to endure them.

Just as the reports came out — from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and the National Climate Assessment that is mandated
by Congress every four years — and just as representatives from the 197 nations that signed onto the Paris climate accord were about to meet in Poland for the U.N.’s 24th climate conference, out came bad news. Instead of the reduction in emissions that all these nations had pledged, the year 2018 is registering an increase of between 1.8% and 3.7% in greenhouse gases emissions. Following an encouraging three-year 2014-2016 trend of flat emissions, the new record high of 37.1 billion metric tons is the second straight year of increase. Mostly, the causes were India with a 6% rise and China with 5%, both heavy users of coal. Even United States emissions were up 2.5%, after declines in seven of the last ten years.

The members had asked the IPCC what needed to be done in order to hold temperature rise to 1.5° centigrade (2.7° Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels, a notch below an increase of 2.0° centigrade (3.6° Fahrenheit) generally agreed to be a threshold beyond which planetary changes would be catastrophic. The report’s answer was that emissions must be cut 50% by 2030 and driven to net zero by 2050.

Yet here were the nations of the world already heading in the wrong direction. “We are in deep trouble. It is hard to overstate the urgency of our situation”, was U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ plaint.

The good news is that industry has made spectacular advances in renewable energy technology. At the scale of the big projects developed by power utilities, solar now costs only 22% of what it did in 2010. The cost of generating power from wind has declined about 25% over the same period, with greater efficiency to come from ever taller turbine towers, reaching higher to where the wind is stronger. The biggest, which run to over 600 feet high (722 feet is currently the highest) have blades the length of a football field. Soon to come: turbines reaching 850 feet in the air. That’s the equivalent of an 85-storey building.

But after the extensive deployment of wind and solar during this new century, these renewables still account for less than 2% of the world’s energy. Those who do not believe that humans have caused warming, or think that the rate of future warming is over-estimated, are tagged “deniers”, but those of the other camp are themselves in denial about the fantasy of cutting emissions by 50% in just a dozen years. The pace of replacing fossil fuel energy with energy from renewables is nowhere sufficient even if energy consumption were to stand still. Which it won’t. As greater prosperity expands in the world, with the peoples of developing countries wanting the better things of life, the striving for emission reduction will be competing with voracious increases in demand for energy. (Think no further than increasingly prosperous India’s demand for air conditioning.)

China is now the world’s largest market for autos. At least they will convert to electric far faster than the U.S., where there are now about a million electric cars. But there are nearly 270 million cars and trucks already on the roads in this country. Conversion of those fleets to electric and Obama’s increasing fuel efficiency standards on new vehicles — to the extent they survive Trump’s rollbacks — will contribute far too slowly toward reaching the 50% goal of 2030, given how long people keep those cars and trucks before replacing. Their average age is 11.6 years.

Putting a price on carbon is the most widely agreed on way to cut emissions. Even the big oil companies recommend a carbon tax, although that is public relations posturing. William Nordhaus, the Yale University professor who just won the Nobel Prize for his work on the economics of climate change, advocates a whopping carbon tax. If industry and auto drivers must pay to pollute, they will do so less. To not cross the threshold of a 2°-centigrade (3.6° Fahrenheit) rise Nordhaus calculates that would require a global carbon dioxide price of about $250 a ton in 2020, and rising rapidly after that.

Getting a carbon tax of any price past Republicans in Congress is an impossibility, and that’s just this country. Congress won’t even raise the gasoline tax, stranded at 18.4 cents a gallon since 1993 (apace with inflation, that should be 32.5 cents today). That utilities would pass on a carbon tax to consumers in their electricity bills freezes Congress members with the fear of losing votes. To assuage that, there’s a bill that would charge only $40 a ton for CO2 release, with the money collected from the power companies passed on to consumers by the government offset their increased electricity costs. It has gone nowhere.

Remember, we are talking about a refusal to take even this one step to somewhat tamp down a climate change threat that scientists fear could become disastrous and irreversible. How much clearer can it be that action against climate change will fall far short of the mark?

It’s not just a government failure. People may have become increasingly alarmed about climate change, but they don’t want to pay anything. In France, the riots began over an increase in the tax on gasoline and diesel as part of French president Macron’s plans to make emissions more costly. Washington state voters just rejected a $15-per-ton carbon “fee”. Oil companies spent more than $31 million into the state to defeat the proposition. BP, which had “postured” with a recommendation of a $40-per-ton tax nationwide, subversively spent the most to scuttle the bill.

Nuclear, a third technology with no CO2 emissions, is barely mentioned and is in retreat. We are always left with just solar and wind. Germany has closed its nuclear plants in the wake of Fukushima. In the U.S., cost overruns ended construction of the country’s only new plants in 2017, the two that were being built in South Carolina. Nuclear generates 20% of the nation’s electricity, but a third of America’s nuclear plants could be taken offline in coming years, an economic victim of cheaper natural gas. It takes more than 800 average-size wind turbines or 15.8 solar panels to replace the electricity generated by a single nuclear reactor.

But the public fears nuclear. Will there someday be fearful climate ravages enough to make the public wish they’d embraced nuclear as as a controllable hazard?

Solar and wind have their own problems. Nature inconsistently supplies both, of course. Robert Bryce, of the conservative Manhattan Institute, has for years tried to make environmentalists discover the math of their impractical technologies. Debunking one plan that purported to completely eliminate the use of fossil fuels in the U.S., he says the wind turbines needed would cover nearly 500,000 square kilometers, roughly 6% of the continental United States. “The idea of covering a land area larger than California with nothing but wind turbines is ludicrous”, says Bryce. Solar, too, uses huge tracts of space, although solar arrays on the rooftops of the world would mitigate that need.

How can the fight again climate change be won when there is a growing not-in-my-backyard backlash against what is an indispensible technology. Rural and coastal communities do not want wind farms and are combating their development with law suits from the Dakotas to Scotland.

It is a recognition of coming failure that we see more mention of “decarbonization”, the removal of CO2 from the atmosphere. It we can’t control emissions, we’ll have to vacuum the gas from the air and bury it underground. In October, a United Nations scientific panel called the technology critical to keeping global temperatures below the 2-degree centigrade mark. In an interview at the Poland conference, Al Gore called decarbonization “nonsense”. More moderately he went on to say, “I just think it’s an extremely improbable solution right now”. In any case, expensive “CCS” — carbon capture and sequestration — cannot happen without a carbon tax, because only avoidance of a steep tax would spur industries to invest in CCS.

As the country with 5% of the world’s population generating 25% of its greenhouse gas emissions, the United States could at least use its strong economy to take the lead against the climate threat in a number of ways. But the country is trapped in the freakish happenstance of a denier occupying the White House backed by locked-step Republican disbelievers in the Senate. Together, they block any sort of action. They want to do away with the subsidies that encourage transition away from fossil fuels. They leave research and development to companies without a boost from government funding. China backs its industries to make them worldwide industrial champions. The United States has no national energy plan.

With the world alarmed by the disruptions climate change will bring, ranging from violent weather to reduced food production to mass migration, the U.S. has a president who has called climate change “a hoax” and has instituted policies that deliberately work against the efforts of all those countries trying to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Donald Trump and his energy and interior departments have opened offshore, wildlife preserves, and even national park lands to oil and gas drilling. He has tried to revive the dirtiest of the fossil fuel industries, coal, even going against the marketplace which is converting to natural gas.

And he refuses to learn. Presented with the 1,656-page National Climate Assessment produced by some 300 scientists in his own government that outlines the serious negative economic effects the shifting climate will have on the different areas of the country, his reaction was, “I’ve read a few pages and it’s fine” but “I don’tis an impossibility, and that’s just this country. Congress won’t even raise the gasoline tax, stranded at 18.4 cents a gallon since 1993 (apace with inflation, that should be 32.5 cents today). That utilities would pass on a carbon tax to consumers in their electricity bills freezes Congress members with the fear of losing votes. To assuage that, there’s a bill that would charge only $40 a ton for CO2 release, with the money collected from the power companies passed on to consumers by the government offset their increased electricity costs. It has gone nowhere.

Remember, we are talking about a refusal to take even this one step to somewhat tamp down a climate change threat that scientists fear could become disastrous and irreversible. How much clearer can it be that action against climate change will fall far short of the mark?

It’s not just a government failure. People may have become increasingly alarmed about climate change, but they don’t want to pay anything. In France, the riots began over an increase in the tax on gasoline and diesel as part of French president Macron’s plans to make emissions more costly. Washington state voters just rejected a $15-per-ton

Autocracies Soon Wealthier Than Democracies

<|||>

Within five years, non-Democratic nations such as China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia will be collectively richer than the liberal democracies of the West, reports Axios. By 2022, more than 1.5 billion people will live in autocratic states with fully mature economies, up from a mere 34 million or so in 1995.

Trump Slamming the Door on Chinese Tech Invaders

Tariffs get the headlines in Donald Trump’s war with China. An increasingly vigorous campaign by his administration to block Chinese acquisition of American companies, to ban the sale of certain of their products into the U.S., and to combat espionage and outright theft of trade secrets should get greater notice. At issue is the perceived threat to national security.

Two-or-so decades back, China decided it was entitled to become a world power. It would count the West’s naïve belief that countries act ethically and live up to agreements. When the U.S. complained of counterfeited goods, pirated software and films, and outright theft of technology, China would assure Washington of crackdowns and make token efforts, but only to distract U.S. attention while the thievery went on. Agreements were made to be broken. An accord signed by President Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping three years ago offers example. Both pledged that neither country would thenceforward engage in economic espionage. How did that turn out? This November the National Security Agency announced that Chinese hacking of U.S. companies to steal proprietary technology has gone “well beyond the bounds of the agreement”.

The U.S. had paid little heed to what was coming. A 2011 report to Congress two years in the making by America’s intelligence agencies warned of cyber spying against U.S. companies, bluntly stating that “Chinese actors are the world’s most active and persistent perpetrators of economic espionage”. Richard Clarke, cybersecurity adviser to George W. Bush, stated at the time that “the Obama administration has not ever attempted to develop a proposal for spotting and stopping vast industrial espionage”. Why? Because it feared a negative reaction from privacy rights and Internet freedom advocates, Clarke said. In 2012, Obama and Biden “warned” (the quotes are meant as ridicule) Xi Jinping that they “had been hearing more and more from U.S. businesses about intellectual property and trade secret theft”. Yet they stood by and watched it happen, doing little more than politely asking China to stop.

Nor was anything done to stop American companies from knuckling under to the Chinese demand that they enter into joint ventures with Chinese partners and share their technology as the ticket of entry into the Chinese market.

To his credit this president came to office with no such delusions about China. “We have the greatest technology in the world”, Trump said in July. “People come and steal it”. Largely through his Commerce Department and the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) we have seen his administration step up action.

u-turn

There was one notable exception. Trump’s Commerce Department had banned the export of U.S. electronic components to ZTE Corp., the world’s No. 4 maker of telecommunications equipment, for violating U.S. sanctions by selling to North Korea and Iran. ZTE is viewed as a security threat and use of its equipment by U.S. companies is effectively banned. But this spring the president, protecting what he touted as “tremendous progress” in his relationship with Xi Jinping after their April meeting at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, overrode the ban when he learned that ZTE, which relies on American microchips for its smartphones and other products, would be crippled once supplies ran out.

Both sides of the aisle in Congress were irate that the president was rescuing a company that had broken their sanction law. ZTE had been a bad actor in other ways, with several of its officials convicted for bribery to win contracts. The matter was resolved allowing exports to resume on condition of a $1.3 billion fine, replacement of ZTE’s board and senior management, and installation of compliance officers on site reporting to Washington.

the prize

U.S. companies are in a race with China to develop the next generation of wireless technology called 5G. As much as a hundred times faster than its predecessor, the 4G standard, and capable of handling huge amounts of data, it will pave the way for driverless autos, mobile video and the ever-expanding uses of the Internet such as doctors manipulating devices to perform surgeries half the world away.

So when Singapore’s Broadcom Ltd. launched a $117 billion takeover bid of U.S.-based Qualcomm Inc., this country’s major player in the 5G development battle, Qualcomm unusually asked for a review by CFIUS, which looks at proposed deals for their security implications. It amounted to Qualcomm asking that the takeover be blocked. That was one free market transaction that was not going to happen. The Trump administration intervened, not wanting to lose to a foreign buyer what is so far this country’s strongest competitor against Huawei Technologies, China’s telecommunications and electronics giant with thousands of engineers working to win the 5G sweepstakes. If Huawei, backed by the Chinese government, wins against American companies — which our government mindlessly leaves on their own to compete — it could be in a position to dictate the 5G standards and drive competitors from the field.

sleeper cells

If the government doesn’t help Qualcomm, it at least has high on its list the campaign against Huawei. It’s the world’s No. 1 maker of telecommunications equipment that wireless carriers use in cell towers. America’s big telecom companies don’t use Huawei equipment, deterred by a 2012 congressional report that raised the alarm of how the Chinese government could force Huawei to do its bidding. At the time a former member of the military’s Joint Chiefs said, “We’d be crazy to let Huawei on our networks, just crazy”.

The concern was that the Chinese government could be ordering Huawei (its founder was a former engineer with China’s People’s Liberation Army) to insert code capable of disabling cell towers or launching cyberattacks. Complex software installed in a tower’s base transmits calls and data and is frequently updated remotely by Huawei. The wireless carrier is blind to what changes and when. A “back door” implant would go undetected.

In the latest move, the U.S. has even asked foreign allies to avoid further use of Huawei equipment, warning them of cybersecurity risks. The U.S. worries about countries that host our military bases, such as Germany, Italy and Japan, where the military is a heavy user of commercial services outside its own satellites and telecom network that could be exploited by Huawei.

firewall

CFIUS (explained momentarily) has been busy. Last year it blocked a Chinese company resident in the U.S. from acquiring Lattice Semiconductor. It was after Lattice’s gate array technology that goes into chips used in missile guidance systems and radar, perhaps the same chips that two Chinese nationals were caught smuggling by the FBI in 2012.

CFIUS blocked a Chinese truck company from buying a Colorado company developing motors for electric cars. It stopped the sale to a Chinese company of a Massachusetts producer of testing equipment for semiconductors and electronics. The attempt by a Chinese government-backed investment group to buy an American semiconductor maker was rebuffed. CFIUS even closed the barn door to keep out a technology company that wanted to buy a Nebraska outfit that sells pigs for breeding.

As seen, roadblocks halting Chinese investments in the U.S. are not limited to tech companies. Chinese conglomerate HNA was stymied from acquiring investment firm Skybridge Capital, founded by momentary White House communications chief, Anthony Scaramucci. Also stymied was the acquisition of online payment transfer company Moneygram by Ant Financial, the electronic payment company controlled by Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, the huge Chinese equivalent of Amazon.

In July, China Mobile, the world’s largest carrier, was ruled by the Trump administration as a threat to national security. In October, the Justice Department arrested a Chinese intelligence officer who is charged with stealing information from GE Aviation, one of the largest manufacturer of jet engines. The government recently announced that it would sharply reduce export of civilian nuclear technology to China. Experts divined that the technology was being diverted to power new generations of Chinese submarines, aircraft carriers, and floating nuclear power plants. China can never be trusted. An FBI survey in 2015 found that its caseload of economic espionage cases had increased by 56% from the year before and that 95% pointed to China.

heist

As police raided the offices of a Taiwan chip maker, engineers bribed by mainland China’s Jinhua Integrated Circuit Company handed USB drives, laptops and documents to an unsuspected lower-level female employee who simply walked them out the door on their way to China. They contained microchip designs from Idaho’s memory chip maker Micron Technology that China’s state-owned Fujian Jinhua wanted for its new $5.7 billion microchip factory, now that China is trying to build its own semiconductor industry so as not to be reliant on the U.S. In July of 2015, Tsinghua Unigroup, a state-owned company that is China’s largest chip maker, had tried to buy Micron in what, at $23 billion, would have been the biggest Chinese acquisition of an American company had it not been blocked for national security reasons. So China did what China often does: it stole Micron’s work.

As with ZTE, but this time with no reversal now that relations between the U.S. and China have worsened, the Commerce Department in October banned sales of American semiconductors to Jinhua Integrated in a move that could cripple the company. Micron has sued Jinhua in California accusing it of the theft. Jinhua counter-sued in a Chinese court and won a temporary order blocking the sale of Micron products in China.

the gatekeeper

Trump’s principle weapon against Chinese incursion is CFIUS. It is not new. Formed from representatives of the Defense, State, Commerce, Homeland Security and a dozen other departments and agencies, it was established in 1975 by an executive order from President Ford.

The Committee has been toughened by a bill signed into law this August, the culmination of a two-year campaign by John Cornyn, Republican senator from Texas, and Representative Robert Pittenger, Republican from North Carolina. They were concerned about Chinese money pouring into the country, often exploiting loopholes to evade review by the Committee so as to acquire U.S. technology, including technology with military applications. The law gives the Committee the broadened ability to examine positions taken by foreign entities in venture capital funds, transactions that use shell companies, and any deal structured to dodge the Committee’s review. The measure made it into law with prominent Democratic support and miraculously despite the strong objections of companies such as IBM and General Electric. (And yet such companies did succeed in weakening the bill to curtail CFIUS review of U.S. companies making deals abroad no matter what such deals might mean for national security. )

The administration has embraced the legislation, spurred by Trump’s determination to thwart China. With the intent to apply it broadly, it plans to review any foreign transaction involving a business that designs or produces technology in 27 categories such as telecommunications, computers, and semiconductors.

Cyber espionage, forced technology transfer, outright theft, hardware implants — China has attacked the United States from every angle so adroitly that one is left to wonder whether there is anything left to steal.

China’s Stealth Hack on Supply Chain Is Worst of All

There’s no better tale to demonstrate the threat of China’s sinister deceit than what Bloomberg Businessweek magazine brought to light in an October article.

Amazon’s Web Services division (AWS, their data storage “cloud”) was in 2015 looking to buy Elemental Technologies of Portland, Oregon, which develops software to compress massive video files and conform them to different devices for faster transmission. Elemental uses servers assembled by Supermicro Computer in San Jose, California, one of the world’s biggest suppliers of server motherboards. It has these manufactured by subcontractors in China.

As part of due diligence, Amazon sent a server to an outfit in Ontario that securitizes such devices. It found a tiny microchip on the motherboard that wasn’t a part of the original board’s design. It was hardly bigger than a grain of rice.

Investigators have been able to deduce that the chips, present in all Supermicro boards, were inserted by the Chinese subcontractors, most likely required to do so by the Chinese government or the People’s Liberation Army, and that their function is to open a door for an attacker to
pass through into any network to which the server is attacked. Hardware attacks are about access, access to whatever sensitive and secret data was on that network — corporate, government, military, whatever. The infiltration of the tiny saboteur chip is looked upon as the most significant supply chain attack known to have been carried out against American companies.

Hardware hacks are a magnitude more difficult to pull off than software implants, “like witnessing a unicorn jumping over a rainbow” said one hardware hacker. It’s “like black magic”. Engineers who have analyzed the chip say it appears to alter bits of code on their way to the CPU telling the device to communicate with computers elsewhere on the Internet.

The Portland company’s own promotional materials show that its servers process drone and surveillance-camera footage at the Department of Defense data centers, transmit feeds of airborne missions to Navy warships, and are used inside government buildings for videoconferencing. NASA, both houses of Congress, and the Department of Homeland Security have been customers. Some 30 companies, including banks, government contractors, even Apple, are known to have been affected. Apple had planned to buy over 30,000 servers from Supermicro, but it, too, spotted the chip and severed ties with the company.

With some 900 customers in about 100 countries, Supermicro is an industry giant few have heard of, dominating the $1 billion international market for special purpose motherboards in uses ranging from MRI machines to weapon system, and shipping millions into the U.S. yearly, all fabricated in China.

What is worse about this story according to someone who anonymously informed Bloomberg Businessweek is that in the first half of 2014, intelligence officials notified the White House that China’s military was preparing to insert chips into Supermicro motherboards. But the Obama administration was concerned that issuing a warning could cripple a major American hardware maker.

Bloomberg Businessweek has 17 people who attest to its truth, including two who worked inside AWS and one at Apple, who say that both Amazon and Apple reported their discovery of the embedded chips to the FBI in 2015. Yet Amazon, Apple, and Supermicro all deny the story. The magazine says a top-secret probe continues to this day. Neither the FBI nor the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, representing the CIA and NSA would comment.