Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please.
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John Quiggin 
Are you, your family, and your neighbours all right?
Paper tigers
I thought I’d check out the academic parts of the cvs of the three new political leaders of North American countries.
Mark Carney, Canada: B.A. Harvard magna cum laude, 1987: D.Phil. Oxford, 1995, in economics; Governor of the Bank of Canada, 2008–2013; Governor of the Bank of England, 2013-2020: no elected office
Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico : Licentiatura (roughly B.A.) in physics, UNAM, 1989; Ph.D. in energy engineering, UNAM 1995 (based on work at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California); contributor to the mitigation section of the 4th report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2007; lead author for the same in the 5th report, 2013; Mayor of Mexico City, 2018-2023.
Donald Trump, USA: attended Fordham University 1964–66, no degree; University of Pennsylvania, B.A in economics, 1968, no honours. (He claims to have attended the postgraduate Wharton business school, which teaches some undergraduate programmes but does not award the corresponding degrees). No elected office before the presidency in 2016.
Of course, paper qualifications should not be more than a part of the criteria for holding high public office, which calls for a very wide range of knowledge and abilities. No politician comes ready endowed with all of them, and a good leader recognizes their own limitations and picks advisors who can fill the many gaps – FDR was extraordinarily good at this.
Part of the skill set is understanding the complex world, and the strengths and limitations of the current body of knowledge about it. Carney and Sheinbaum have serious professional chops in two different but important fields. They know how the sausage is made, and what good work looks like. Trump does not. He has more important and reprehensible vices, but this may be the one that will bring him down.
The US stock markets were understandably down today (Monday 10 March), by 2% to 4% depending on the index. Tesla’s share price didn’t just drop, it dived by 15%. This must have cost Elon Musk around $16 billion (411m shares at $40 drop per share). Is this a Guinness record for the most money ever lost by one person in a single day? Musk’s holding is still worth $91 bn so there is plenty of room for more record-breaking attempts.
(Sorry for hogging the mike, bu this one had to be today=
There is someone else to be considered for North America:
Vladimir Putin; Law degree from Leningrad State University 1975, where he was willingly recruited by the KGB. In 1997 an economics degree from St Petersburg Mining University. His supervisor at that time later became his campaign manager.
The validity of these academic accomplishments is in doubt;
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Putin-Dissertation-Event-remarks-with-slides.pdf
Yes, my family and my neighbours are all right. Thanks for asking, James. Oh, you were asking J.Q.? Sorry, joking. 🙂
On your topic. Clearly intelligence, ethics and formal learning in the sciences and/or arts/ humanities are a drawback for the modern, ultra-right-wing populist. Rat cunning, inhumane levels of insensitivity and zero ethics are the key qualities. Plus the ability to pathologically lie, non-stop.
Also playing a role has been the deliberate dumbing down of almost the population by destroying free public education to technical and tertiary level and via the disinformation / misinformation barrage from MSM and Social Media run by billionaires.
Kevin Drum finally lost his battle with cancer. His last blog post, dated three days earlier, was a lucid report of the death sentence, with no typos and a nicely formatted chart. This does not quite match Rilke’s terrifying last poem, Komm Du, Du Letzter… | Rainer Maria Rilke, J.B. Leishman | The New York Review of Books : Rilke refused morphine so as to experience his dying from leukaemia to the full and tell us about it. He said it was like being burnt alive. That was not entirely sane, which you would never say about Drum. RIP.
Our politicians are spouting the usual positive platitudes about the wondrous nature of South East Queensland’s disaster response and initial recovery efforts re Tropical Cyclone Alfred. Perhaps the disaster response and recovery process to date are very good. Perhaps they are not very good. I have not formed a full opinion yet. The process is not complete and I have little access to data.
However, there is something I am more concerned about. The vulnerability and fragility of our power and communications infrastructure has been highlighted. In my opinion, our infrastructure is not nearly as robust as it needs to be. This is especially so when we consider the dangers we will soon face from climate change.
The accumulated numbers of homes and businesses (or “premises”) left without power, internet and phones during the tropical cyclone and tropical low event were disturbingly high. According to authorities, over 400,000 premises were left without power at some point in the event due to the cyclone. Many people expressed frustration on radio (anecdotal) that they had no internet, no data access and no phone coverage, as well as no power. These problems are linked of course with the power outages as the primary cause in most cases. We might call this entangled fragility rather than multi-system robustness.
TC Alfred was a relatively weak cyclone in wind velocity terms and relative to storm and cyclone building codes in place It was only a moderate Cat 2 in a grading system which goes up to the admittedly much rarer Cat 5 cyclones. Alfred’s area extent was average, I think, but I am willing to be corrected on this. Its rain and flooding effects, especially from the resulting tropical low, were and are serious and significant.
However, I refer here only to the wind speeds and the wind-caused power outages. The winds, and even the gusts, were scarcely sufficient on their own to cause such extensive outages. There was another key factor. This factor was and is trees. We have made a basic “greening mistake”. In planting trees everywhere to green Brisbane and environs we have forgotten that trees can be hazardous to humans and infrastructure. The wrong species, even native species, have been planted in the wrong places. Native tree regeneration and even exotic tree growth has also been permitted, even encouraged, again in many of the wrong or unsuitable places.
Too many trees, indeed seemingly innumerable trees, are permitted to grow too close to powerlines. Too many of our downed powerlines, broken poles and damaged electrical equipment units were damaged by trees. That is my contention at this point, albeit without survey or study data. I will follow this up when I can. I heard one number of 1,500 live wires down. I cannot confirm this as yet. Is or will there be any data on how many were brought down by near or “too-near” large trees and their branches? “Too near” may simply be defined as “If the tree height is greater than the distance from its base to the base of a power pole or to a power line’s plan view line, then the tree is too near.
“Greening”, in a form that is infrastructure damaging and hence environmentally unsustainable, has – I argue at this stage – become an unassailable shibboleth. We need to re-examine this shibboleth. Is it economic to permit trees to grow within falling distance of powerlines? Would not the cost of clearing such trees be less than the economic costs of power loss and power restoration? Is it ecologically sustainable? Is the ecological benefit of a tree that eventually brings down a power pole or power line not ipso facto now less than the ecological pollution costs of repairing the damage? I argue that these issues need examination. There are other, more suitable and sustainable places to grow large trees than within falling distance of power lines. There is also of course the issue of moving more power distribution underground.
I will leave it at that for now or my post will get too long as usual. I hope this engenders some debate or maybe even a new sandpit debate.
After watching the somewhat viral youtube presentation from senator Chris Murphy a few days ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hycoCYenXls
It’s provided me a new perspective of Trumps motives and actions for lots of things ie. one based around corruption front and centre. Most of us tend to agree the arrangements he has with Russia involves significant corruption and collusion, but I’d like to gather thoughts about his tariff war and his endgame motives for that. Is it really all about “America 1st” or is there an underlying ulterior motive based around the expectation of significant corrupt kickbacks (purchase of Trump coin for example) in return for tariff relief?
Yes, you’d expect such a scheme to be too tenuous for dealing with states and institutions that pride themselves on transparency and setting an example, but hey, this is Trump and his willingness to disclose the setting up of the foundations for widescale corruption including the removal of any cops to police it, is utterly staggering.
He’s all about coercion and self interest. Is there really any other dimensions to the man?
Troy
Nassim Taleb argues that a decentralised system is superior to one that is centralised. Centralised systems tend to be authoritarian and rigid and intolerant of variations – they consume vast resources in having to maintain the status quo of the state.
Decentralised systems are innovative and transparent, successes are shared, mistakes are isolated and rectified and personal freedoms are maintained.
WRT cyclones and energy, I think that the principle of decentralisation and transparency, when applied to energy, would favour renewables and batteries over Nuclear.
How to lose a democracy:
“Australians who believe life was better 50 years ago and will worsen over the next 50 years exhibit lower trust in government and stronger populist attitudes. Conversely, younger Australians express greater optimism but remain less politically engaged.”
https://politicsir.cass.anu.edu.au/research/publications/erosion-hope-social-and-financial-wellbeing-and-relationship-political
Glad you’re okay, Iko!!
N,
Thanks. I hope you survive cyclone Donald. He is very, very dangerous, not least because he is crazy and totally incompetent. He is driven by a number of pathological character traits including complete dishonesty, narcissism, self-interest, vindictiveness and a lack of all shame, remorse, sympathy and empathy. It’s a sociopathic character set so severe it’s very close to psychopathy. He’s also a criminal, a convicted criminal let off and empowered. He will push to be President for Life by conducting an a self-coup. Many coups historically have been self-coups carried out by someone originally elected lawfully. There are a lot of infamous names on the self-coup list.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-coup#:~:text=A%20self%2Dcoup%2C%20also%20called,of%20themselves%20or%20their%20supporters.
He is currently empowered because there are a lot of “little Donalds” in the US population. The US is not alone in this. I am not just singling out the US. A kind of contagious madness is gripping large swathes of the global population. It would be interesting to study and analyse this and all its many causes. I have my theories but this is just the message board. I won’t weight it down again with one of my screeds.
I became aware of this website yesterday (Mar 12), which has modelled scenarios for radioactive fallout under four different wind directions from each of the sites of the Coalition’s proposed reactors should a Fukushima magnitude event occur.
I do not doubt the serious dangers of nuclear power stations. Nor do I doubt the facts that they are too expensive and too slow to build, relative to our current and future imperatives. They will not help us meet necessary de-carbonisation targets. I fear Peter Dutton will use the news of impending power price rises to again spruik his “nuclear solution”, this time as a solution for high power prices.
These impending power price rises demonstrate the utter failure of power privatisation in Australia. I mean from the point of view of the ordinary citizen as worker and/or consumer. From the point of view of oligarchs, corporations and the richest 1%, privatisation has been a huge success… for them and them only. They get richer. We get poorer. Power rices have almost continually risen higher than average inflation since privatisation.
“Electricity has risen 63 per cent *on top of inflation* across the last decade (Grattan.edu.au), and Australia is facing price increases of between 4-7% in 2025.” – Reposit.
https://repositpower.com/blog/blog/why-are-electricity-prices-so-high-in-australia
The only answer is renationalisation of power. The democratic governments and the people must own all the power. There must be no private profit taking from power or from other essential utility services. This is the only solution. Privatisation is the root cause of power price rises. Privatisation must be smashed and dumped in the dustbin of history.
But sadly it seems that capital (as power) has won. The re-carbonisation agenda has been pushed through across the globe and our climate will be destroyed.
“A quarter of the way into the twenty-first century, global average temperature has risen by 1.5°C above preindustrial levels for over a year, placing the whole world on the edge of a dangerous precipice. To make matters worse, the policy of energy transition (replacing fossil fuels with alternative energies) and the accompanying target of net zero carbon emissions by 2050, constituting the dominant approach to climate change for more than three decades, is now being openly discarded by the ruling capitalist powers with nothing to replace it. This has gone hand in hand with the takeover and destruction of the United Nations climate talks by fossil fuel interests supported by the G7 (the United States, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and Canada), with COP28 in Dubai and COP29 in Baku both presided over by present/former oil company executives.” – The Editors, Monthly Review.
https://monthlyreview.org/2025/03/01/mr-076-10-2025-03_0/
My Endnote:
The Monthly Review is largely scientific in its analysis of climate change and late stage monopoly capitalism. Nonetheless, the editors and contributors are Marxist and hence ideological on certain matters. They are ideological and unscientific in their support of legacy “Marxist” or “Socialist” states like China. They apparently do not recognize or understand that the developed Soviet and Chinese “Socialist” states were in essence state capitalism systems nor do they understand that China today is a state capitalist system with a presiding dictator. Russia is something even worse, a dictatorial kakistocracy and kleptocracy. This is not to exonerate the USA, an oligarchy with a deranged president almost certainly intent on stealing all future elections and carrying out a self-coup or autocoup which would essentially make the USA many times worse than Russia.
It appears that the West sans the USA is the only place where democracy still has any hope. I would also say even that hope is not great. The EU is the only significant geo-strategic power in this group. Our hopes essentially rest on the EU alone and there are cracks in its edifice too. Dark times! 😦
David Spratt has had an article published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on 12 Mar 2025, titled Is scientific reticence hindering climate understanding? The Abstract included:
I managed to get on-air at Radio 2GB yesterday afternoon (Mar 13) with host Michael McLaren. Hear the Afternoons with Michael McLaren Full Show for 13 Mar 2025 podcast, from time interval 1:01:07.
During the period 1970-2010, the linear best fit rate of warming of the Earth System global mean surface temperature (GMST) was 0.18 °C/decade, but post-2010, has accelerated to 0.36 °C/decade. See Figure 1 in the communication by James Hansen and Pushker Kharecha, dated 20 Feb 2025.
For all intents & purposes, the GMST anomaly has now breached the +1.5 °C threshold, relative to the 1850-1900 baseline.
On current warming trajectory, the +2.0 °C threshold is likely to be breached within the next 15-20 years, and the +3.0 °C threshold could be breached as soon as the 2060s, perhaps even sooner.
What are the consequences for civilisation in a continuing warming world?
The IFoA report, titled Planetary Solvency–finding our balance with nature: Global risk management for human prosperity, is suggesting without immediate policy action to change course, Catastrophic (i.e. ≥25% GDP loss and ≥25% human mortality) or Extreme (i.e. ≥50% GDP loss and ≥50% human mortality) impacts by year-2050 are eminently plausible.
Geoff,
We might as well face it. The planetary boundaries are already crossed or as good as crossed. Most of them anyway. There is no feasible way to avoid catastrophe now. The system is clearly in runaway mode already.
When I say “the system” I mean the whole system including the human system within it. The whole system is the complex of the basic physical world and the humans and human socioeconomic system within this physical world. The physical world, as we know, is studied by the hard sciences: physics, chemistry, biology and their complex system elaborations such as the geosciences and ecology. The human world, which is entirely physical too but is also *somehow qualitatively different* (a phrase I can come back to) is studied by the soft sciences or social sciences. The soft sciences are inevitably an unavoidable mix of science and ideology. This is a clear problem and a point I can also come back to if people wish.
The power of modern technology, as its power within and acting through the economy, is such that it is able to create severe negative externalities as serious and irreversible damage to the natural world. If the people wielding this technology are in a state of general runaway delusion when the physical crisis tipping point is near then the tipping point becomes “whole of system inevitable” before it becomes strictly “basic physical system” inevitable.
I do not think there is any doubt that much of the global population is in a state of manufactured ignorance and runaway delusion already. This is not population wide yet, though a significant and increasing majority are obviously acting in more lunatic fashion already. The election of Donald Trump, a convicted criminal and blatant grifter, and giving him unlimited, untrammelled legal immunity as President, is a case in point and points to an entire political system off the rails. Trump’s behaviour since his election is becoming more and more deranged. To tolerate him is essentially a socially, economically and ecologically irrational decision or a complete paralysis of the ability to decide and act.
Thinking this whole system is sustainable, on the current course, without radical change to address climate change and other tipping point problems, IS delusional. There is no other word for it. Doubling down on this essentially endless growth position (in a finite world) when the dangers are becoming manifest is lunatic. With the majority of the global population falling into this state of runaway lunacy, or living in daily desperation with no good choices, then electing or tolerating crazier and crazier leaders and doubling down on excess unsustainable consumption where they have that privilege, then runaway ecological and civilizational collapse are rendered inevitable.
“We’re in the midst of an authoritarian takeover of the U.S. government. It’s been coming and coming, and not everybody is prepared to read it that way. The characters regarded as people to emulate, like Orban and Putin and so on, all indicate that the strategy is to create an illiberal democracy or an authoritarian democracy or a strongman democracy. That’s what we’re experiencing. Our problem in part is a failure of imagination. We cannot get ourselves to see how this is going to unfold in its most frightening versions. You neutralize the branches of government; you neutralize the media; you neutralize universities, and you’re on your way.
We’re beginning to see the effects on universities. It’s very, very frightening.’
Lee Bolinger
Lee Bollinger retired as president of Columbia University in 2023 after 21 years in office. A First Amendment scholar, he is one of the most influential academic administrators in recent American history. As president of the University of Michigan from 1996 until 2002, he successfully defended affirmative action at Michigan’s law school in the landmark 2003 case Grutter v. Bollinger, which was the law of the land until 2023, when the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.
https://archive.md/1ZNGI#selection-3313.11-3319.80a
John Quiggin was one of the first, if not the first, of the commentators I read to call and predict Trump’s intentions to become a dictator. I always detested Trump. I thought he was crooked, deranged and dangerous. But even my suspicious and catastrophising mind had not progressed to the point of taking the danger of Trump’s ambitions fully seriously until I read J.Q.’s posts and publications on the issue.
I must have basically thought, “Even Americans can’t be stupid enough to let him get away with this.” That was my failure of imagination.