Posts Tagged ‘environment’
“When these systems work well, they hide in plain sight”*…
Plumbing, like most bits of the infrastucture on which we depend, is ideally out of sight and out of mind. It’s usually only when it fails that we pay attention… and then, too late to preempt the damage done and the problem that we then have to fix.
Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman turns to Nathan Tankus to discuss a wonky, but crucially-important, piece of financial infrastructure now being beset by the Trump administration…
Nathan Tankus has become an essential resource during these strange and scary times. My last chat with Nathan was about DOGE’s depredations at government agencies. This time I spoke with him about disruptions in financial markets.
I continue to be astonished at how important the “plumbing” of these markets — the stuff that makes them function, which we normally don’t even notice — becomes when everything falls apart. And economists in general don’t know that much about the plumbing, so we need help from people like Nathan who do.
One thing that struck me during the conversation was Nathan’s explanation of the partial easing of financial stress after the crazy tariffs announced April 2 were replaced by the equally crazy tariffs of April 9. He points out that while a serious analysis of the April 9 tariffs showed that they were as bad in their own way as the original tariffs, the narrative was that policy had eased. And markets, he insists (and I agree) are less information processors than conventional wisdom processors.
Much more in the interview…
Watch, listen, and/or read: “Liquidity, Volatility and Market Craziness: Paul Krugman Interviews Nathan Tankus Again.”
* Deb Chachra [and here], How Infrastructure Works
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As we batten down the hatches, we might recall that this date in 1970 inaugurated a celebration of the mother of all infrastructures: it was the first Earth Day. Initially suggested by John McConnell for March 21 (the Equinox in the Northern Hemisphere, a day of natural equipoise), Secretary General U Thant signed a UN Proclamation to that effect. But Earth Day as we know it was founded by U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson (who was later awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom Award for his work) as an environmental teach-in to be held on on this date. The first Earth Day had participants and celebrants in two thousand colleges and universities, roughly ten thousand primary and secondary schools, and hundreds of communities across the United States. Later that year, President Nixon signed the Environmental Protection Agency into being. Earth Day is now observed in 192 countries, coordinated by the nonprofit Earth Day Network, chaired by the first Earth Day 1970 organizer Denis Hayes– according to whom Earth Day is now “the largest secular holiday in the world, celebrated by more than a billion people every year.”
Earth Day Flag created by John McConnell (source)
“You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today”*…
… But you might be able to make a buck on it.
We humans are prone to illusions– ideological enthusiasms, avoidance, et al.– that don’t just allow, but encourage us to avoid hard truths. If there’s one sector in which that’s less true, it’s likely finance– where the altogether unemotional logic of profit-making prevails. But as Corbin Hiar illustrates, that can accrue as finding ways to profit from, rather than avoid, the problems that are brewing…
Top Wall Street institutions are preparing for a severe future of global warming that blows past the temperature limits agreed to by more than 190 nations a decade ago, industry documents show.
The big banks’ acknowledgment that the world is likely to fail at preventing warming of more than 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels is spelled out in obscure reports for clients, investors and trade association members. Most were published after the reelection of President Donald Trump, who is seeking to repeal federal policies that support clean energy while turbocharging the production of oil, gas and coal — the main sources of global warming.
The recent reports — from Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase and the Institute of International Finance — show that Wall Street has determined the temperature goal is effectively dead and describe how top financial institutions plan to continue operating profitably as temperatures and damages soar.
“We now expect a 3°C world,” Morgan Stanley analysts wrote earlier this month, citing “recent setbacks to global decarbonization efforts.”
The stunning conclusion indicates that the bank believes the planet is hurtling toward a future in which severe droughts and harvest failures become widespread, sea-level rise is measured in feet rather than inches and tropical regions experience episodes of extreme heat and humidity for weeks at a time that would bring deadly risks to people who work outdoors.
The global Paris Agreement, from which the U.S. is withdrawing under Trump, aims to limit average temperature increases to well below 2 degrees Celsius. Scientists have warned that permanently exceeding 1.5 degrees — a threshold the world breached for the first time last year — could lead to increasingly severe climate impacts, such as the demise of coral reef ecosystems that hundreds of millions of people rely on for food and storm surge protection.
Morgan Stanley’s climate forecast was tucked into a mundane research report on the future of air conditioning stocks, which it provided to clients on March 17. A 3 degree warming scenario, the analysts determined, could more than double the growth rate of the $235 billion cooling market every year, from 3 percent to 7 percent until 2030.
“The political environment has changed, so some of them are conforming to that,” Gautam Jain, a former investment banker who is now a senior research scholar at Columbia University, said of Wall Street’s increasingly dire climate projections. “But mostly it is a rational business decision.”
The new warming estimates come as heat-trapping gases continue to rise globally and as international commitments to limit the burning of oil, gas and coal that’s responsible for the bulk of emissions have stalled. Meanwhile, megabanks like Wells Fargo are backsliding on their previous climate pledges and exiting from the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, a United Nations-backed group that encouraged members to slash their emissions in line with the Paris Agreement.
Morgan Stanley, which in October watered down its climate-related lending targets, declined to comment.
Betting on potentially catastrophic global warming is both an acknowledgment of the current emissions trajectory and a politically savvy move in the second Trump era, according to Jain.
“Nobody wants to be seen as going against” the administration’s pro-fossil-fuel energy policy, he said. “These banks are businesses, so they have to look at the risk that they have in their portfolio and the opportunities that they see in the most likely environment.”…
Making hay in the havoc: “Big Banks Quietly Prepare for Catastrophic Warming,” from @corbinhiar.bsky.social and @eenews.bsky.social via @sciam.bsky.social.
Related: “Reinsurers: placing an economic price on climate change.”
* Abraham Lincoln
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As we sweat it out, we might spare a thought for Hugh Robert Mill; he died on this date in 1950. A geographer (President of the Geographical Association) and meteorologist (President of the Royal Meteorological Society), he was influential in the maturation of geography and cartography– and relevantly to this post, in the development of meteorology as a science.
“Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand”*…
(Roughy) Daily has looked before at that most common– and essential– of substances, sand. (See here, here, and here.) Today, via Michaela Büsse, an update…
After water, sand is the second most used material in the world. Each year, approximately 40-50 billion metric tons of sand are consumed worldwide.
This accounts for 79% of all aggregates extracted and traded, making sand the literal foundation for global human infrastructure. Sand plays a vital role in the production of glass, steel, and concrete. Silica, one of the most common minerals found in sand, is the key ingredient in silicon chips and thus for the development of digital technologies. But sand is also fundamental to the creation and maintenance of land itself, rendering it constitutive to processes of urbanization. Artificial islands, port expansions, and beach nourishment projects consume vast quantities of sand. As the bedrock of urban infrastructures, sand is embedded in the very fabric of modern life. Yet, its ubiquity belies its complexity. As a sediment, sand is foundational for the functioning of ecosystems. The relentless expansion and intensification of cities is starving rivers and coasts of sediment, depleting sand at a rate that far exceeds its natural replenishment.
Intensive dredging of rivers and seabeds has fundamentally altered sedimentation patterns, disrupting the delicate equilibrium that governs ecosystems. Rivers, which once carried sand from mountains to coastlines, now struggle to replenish beaches and wetlands. This depletion has far-reaching consequences. Without sufficient sand deposits, coastlines are left vulnerable to erosion, rising sea levels, and the devastating impact of extreme weather events. In ecosystems already on the front lines of climate change—like deltas, wetlands, and estuaries—the effects of sand extraction are compounded. Delta regions, for instance, rely on continuous sediment deposits to counteract the natural sinking of land. When sand is removed faster than it can be replaced, these regions are exposed to subsidence, where land sinks at an accelerated rate, amplifying flood risk and increasing the salinization of freshwater resources. Such impacts are often delayed, manifesting years or even decades after extraction, making them challenging to monitor and mitigate effectively.
As global sand consumption surges to unprecedented heights, the profound and far-reaching consequences of extraction come sharply into focus. Numerous journalistic and scientific accounts warn of the “looming tragedy of the sand commons,” highlighting environmental concerns related to dredging and mining sand, such as pollution, biodiversity loss, and soil disturbance, as well as illegal practices in the sand trade. The reality of the sand trade is both dirty and messy, intertwining national and transnational politics. In regions like Southeast Asia, rapid urbanization and investments in large-scale infrastructure projects have spurred an unprecedented demand for this essential resource. Here, land reclamation has emerged as a flashpoint where extraction practices intersect with issues of sovereignty, livelihoods, and environmental justice, transforming sand into a highly sought-after and contested commodity. Building new land for some means taking old land from others. The exploitation of sand goes hand in hand with exploitative labor and geopolitical maneuvering.
Sand’s impending scarcity has fueled a black market, giving rise to “sand mafias”—criminal organizations that exploit extraction and trade through corruption, violence, and intimidation, often circumventing national mining and export bans. It is not uncommon for sand to become a matter of life and death for those who mine it as well as for those who seek to prevent it from being mined. Across the world, activists and local communities have mobilized against sand extraction and land reclamation, fighting the prevailing narratives of development and progress that often justify environmental exploitation. However, these initiatives are rarely successful, resulting (at best) in compensation payments to the affected communities. A transboundary governance of sand would require international standards, which many researchers and organizations have requested. Even so, it is nearly impossible to control the natural flow of sand.
As sand transitions from a sediment to a precious resource, it has become instrumental in urban ideals of late modernity. Cities like Dubai and Singapore epitomize how architectural ambitions is built on vast quantities of imported sand. Land built from scratch, towering skyscrapers, and sprawling infrastructure are testaments to sand’s transformative potential. Yet, these urban landscapes are haunted by their materiality: each grain is a silent witness to the ecological and social disruptions that enabled its journey. The sand in these structures embodies the persistence of environmental degradation, displaced labor, and the exploitation that made them possible. In this way, sand is both an architect and a specter of modernity’s unrestrained ambitions, leaving us to confront the shadows cast by our own constructions…
Eminently worth reading in full: “Granular Power: The Gritty Politics of Sand,” from @michaelabussey.bsky.social and @eflux.bsky.social.
* Jorge Luis Borges
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As we get grainy, we might send insightful birthday greetings to James Hansen; he was born on this date in 1941. An atmospheric physicist, he was Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (from 1981-2013). He is best known for his (June, 1988) testimony to the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee that there was 99% certainty the cause of climate change was known with 99% certainty to be the buildup of carbon dioxide and other artificial gases in the atmosphere– helping raise broad awareness of global warming– and for his advocacy of action to avoid dangerous climate change. (Hansen has since proposed a revised explanation of global warming, where the 0.7°C global mean temperature increase of the last 100 years can be to some extent explained by the effect of greenhouse gases other than carbon dioxide (such as methane).
Currently the Director of the Program on Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, he remains a climate activist.
“One feels the need to bow to unquestioned sovereigns”*…
Confronting ancient redwoods can be a transformative experience, helping us appreciate both our place in a larger scheme and the transitory nature of our lives.
The earliest redwoods showed up on Earth shortly after the dinosaurs – before flowers, birds, spiders… and, of course, humans. Redwoods have been around for about 240 million years, and in California for at least 20 million years, compared to about 200,000 years for “modern” humans. – source
But redwoods also play a key role in our ecosystem…
The coast redwood and giant sequoia forests are home to the tallest and largest trees on the planet. They represent the original face of nature, embodying a beauty millions of years in the making. These forests store more carbon from the atmosphere than any other forest ecosystem, and they support communities of life found nowhere else on Earth.
The redwood forests are the greatest forests on Earth.
But the redwood parks and private lands we have protected over the last century still need help. The primeval forests today resemble islands of disconnected old-growth stands — pinched at the edges by clear-cuts, development and agriculture. They depend on streams choked by sediment, and they are cared for by parks organizations that are under-funded and under-resourced… – source
* John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley in Search of America
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As we prioritize preservation, we might spare a thought for Charlemagne; he died on this date in 814. A ruler who united the majority of western and central Europe (first as King of the Franks, then also King of the Lombards, finally adding Emperor of the Romans), he was the first recognized emperor to rule from western Europe since the fall of the Western Roman Empire three centuries earlier; the expanded Frankish state that he founded is called the Carolingian Empire, the predecessor to the Holy Roman Empire.
Committed to educational reform and extension, he began (in 789) the establishment of schools teaching the elements of mathematics, grammar, music, and ecclesiastic subjects; every monastery and abbey in his realm was expected to have a school for the education of the boys of the surrounding villages. The tradition of learning he initiated helped fuel the expansion of medieval scholarship in the 12th-century Renaissance.
Charlemagne is considered the father of modern Europe, the first of the Holy Roman Emperors, and thus the forerunner of the Holy Roman Empire. At the same time, in accepting Pope Leo’s investiture, he set up ages of conflict: Charlemagne’s coronation as Emperor, though intended to represent the continuation of the unbroken line of Emperors from Augustus, had the effect of creating up two separate (and often opposing) Empires– the Roman and the Byzantine– with two separate claims to imperial authority. It led to war in 802, and for centuries to come, the Emperors of both West and East would make competing claims of sovereignty over the whole.
We might note that as Charlemagne’s life unfolded, the oldest (officially-recognized) living Redwood was already 400 years old (though some foresters believe some coast redwoods may be as much as 1,000-1,500 years older).
“I’d rather fight 100 structure fires than a wildfire. With a structure fire you know where your flames are, but in the woods it can move anywhere; it can come right up behind you.”*…
The devastation in the Los Angeles area is just the latest reminder that wildfires are a massive problem that continues to grow. Caleb X. Cunningham, Grant J. Williamson, and David M. J. S. Bowman put the threat into alarming perspective…
Climate change is exacerbating wildfire conditions, but evidence is lacking for global trends in extreme fire activity itself. Here we identify energetically extreme wildfire events by calculating daily clusters of summed fire radiative power using 21 years of satellite data, revealing that the frequency of extreme events (≥99.99th percentile) increased by 2.2-fold from 2003 to 2023, with the last 7 years including the 6 most extreme. Although the total area burned on Earth may be declining, our study highlights that fire behaviour is worsening in several regions—particularly the boreal and temperate conifer biomes—with substantial implications for carbon storage and human exposure to wildfire disasters…
An unlocked article from Nature Ecology & Evolution: “Increasing frequency and intensity of the most extreme wildfires on earth.”
Looking forward: “Five Climate Realism Insights on California’s Wildfires.”
Apposite: “Climate Change, Disaster Risk, and Homeowner’s Insurance,” from the Congressional Budget Office.
And very practically: “Wildfire Prep.”
* Tom Watson
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As we contemplate conflagration, we might recall that on this date in 1949, after two days in which a few flakes fell, Los Angeles “enjoyed” a real snow fall (the first that anyone can recall).
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