Tag Archives: Tom Friedman

Thanks to Vlad, The Greatest Tranformation Ever is Now Beginning

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Billions poured into electric-vehicle companies, but much more will be needed before the auto industry changes - MarketWatch

At the risk of sounding like a poor man’s Tom Friedman, I’m watching the truly astonishing turns of events in response to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and thinking that this holds potential to be the single most transformative global episode since WWII. And not just militarily.

Just a few things that come to mind:

In automotive terms, the rubber is truly meeting the road in the US of A. I see no one expecting the price of gas to return to pre-invasion levels for months, if ever. In fact, based on my diet of articles and YouTube videos of economists, finance ministers, etc. there isn’t anyone who does not see prices continuing to escalate upwards all summer long. $6 a gallon and higher in Minnesota is not out of the question this year.

The effect on vacation travel — by car or plane — and commuting habits is plain to be imagined . (And this just as businesses, post-COVID, were coaxing employees back into the office.)

Then imagine consumer demand for immediate alternatives to the average family’s 5000-pound SUV and pickup. With the US cutting off the 8% of oil it gets from Russia, and Europeans slapped across the face with the existential dilemma they’ve created buying billions of euros of gas from a homicidal maniac, an even more dramatic/disruptive tightening of the tap is inevitable.

(In a couple months, I expect to see some real bargains for people shopping for a 13 mpg Ford F-150. Computer chip shortage be damned.)

“Transformative” also applies here to the no doubt foul-smelling deals being cooked up with the Saudis, Iranians and Venezuelans to reduce cost-at-the-pump issues here and make up for fuel Europeans will need next winter when — not if — they stop doing business with Vlad the Invader.

So let’s imagine the new-found demand for electric transportation. Mass and personal transportation-wise. It’s been a common understanding for years now that cost is the critical factor in any transition to electric vehicles. Well, a 50%-80% increase in gas prices is pretty much what the good green doctor has always ordered if you want to dramatically increase the US’s 2% electric vehicle fleet substantially and permanently higher. True, there are basic material issues related to the invasion, but I’d bet the longer term viability of electric wins out over ever more impractical internal combustion cars. (It would be nice if we could capture some of that gas price increase for state and national treasuries but … share-holder value, you know.)

Then we get to the power required to both manufacture and charge not thousands but tens of millions more electric vehicles. Solar and wind and other nice green renewables are simply not sufficient — currently — to handle such demand. Which is where next generation nuclear becomes a serious part of any grand energy (and climate) transformation.

When I think of the great, convulsive events that have taken place in my lifetime — the Cold War/Cuban missile crisis, Vietnam, various assassinations, the fall of the Berlin Wall, 9/11, the crash of 2008 — none of them set off the combined shift or reinvigoration of alliances, reexamination of national priorities and changes in day-to-day consumer habits and lifestyle that we can see erupting here from Putin’s hellish blunder.

And this is all based on the situation as it stands today, before a truly desperate Putin — a man for whom “losing” equals death, figuratively and quite possibly literally — escalates this war into something truly catastrophic.

Please feel free to tell me where I’m mistaken about any of this.

Wanted for the Winter Ahead: A Stronger Pair of Rose-Colored Glasses

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Even as someone who was well old enough to remember 1968, I can’t shake the feeling that this … today … is worse. And that drift toward fatalism isn’t helped when Dr. Michael Osterholm predicts “another 12 to 14 months” before we’ll begin to feel true relief from the pandemic.

There’s a psychological fragility in the air that I’ve never felt before. 1968 was a terrible year. But even with 400 or more GIs being killed a week in Vietnam, (i.e. less than half of one day of this pandemic), even with the assassinations, the street protests and riots it was still possible to grasp The Silent Majority’s rationale for supporting the war, for supporting Lyndon Johnson (until they didn’t) and eventually Richard Nixon. The Commies were bad. We couldn’t let them win … no matter how much damage we did to ourselves.

It didn’t make a lot of sense. But it made some sense.

As much as we loathed Johnson, Nixon, Curtis LeMay and all the establishment warriors of that era, in retrospect at least we regarded them as fact-based characters. Rational but seriously misguided.

Today though, and without question, our fate, is in the hands of utter fools. Fools lacking even a waving relationship to scholarship, honesty and the basic efforts of their job decriptions. Fools being given stalwart legal support by deeply cynical (i.e. Nixon-like) characters, but fools none the less.

The combination of an eight-month old pandemic for which the government still has no plan, and against which our president long ago decided not to bother fighting, racial tension as bad as 1967 and a truly apocalyptic wildfire season out west, a scene long predicted by Osterholm-level climatologists and regularly mocked as a “hoax” by fools creates a cocktail of despair unlike anything in my lifetime.

I was a big fan of “Game of Thrones”, but the “Winter is coming” jokes have lost their gallows humor punch.

Write it off as the congenital mental weakness of elitist libtards, but I am struck by how often and unbidden friends and neighbors are saying, “God, I’m dreading this winter.” And how could a rational person not?

We have an election marked by utter stupidity and “viciousness”. An election we know with near total certainty will end in a culture war battle royale no matter who wins.

Plus, we have an unmitigated pandemic that is almost certain to regain deadly strength as we seal ourselves back indoors and cut off what limited physical contact we’ve been able to enjoy with others. And, as I say, all that plays against terrifying, conclusive proof that scientists have been right all along about both virus and climate … and yet the fools are still mocking both. So yes, the ingredients are there for a season of extraordinary psychological pain.

Facing this, every trite homily will encourage us to practice saintly quantities of patience toward each other. Some might even advise that each of us has to take heightened responsibility for our own sanity and stability … in order to be of any value to others. But the larger question is, “What percentage of us are prepared to reflect on our responsibilities to the culture at large?”

And will that percentage be enough?

Even if Donald Trump is dragged out of office, his army of self-pitying fools, catalyzed by their grievances, their sense of humiliation or their anachronistic genetics far more than any policy, will continue to resist and obstruct any science-based plan to restore “normal order.”

So yeah. If you have a new, stronger prescription for rose-colored glasses, you know where to find me.