Dana Blankenhorn

Biden’s Solar Problem

Assuming Joe Biden wins Tuesday, he has a problem.

If he doesn’t win, America and the world have a bigger problem, one I don’t think we can overcome. So, let’s assume the world goes on for a moment.

Joe’s solar problem is something the computer industry faced around the time when I was becoming a reporter, in the late 1970s. Until then, computers were capital goods. They were either leased or purchased over time with loans. Even my first PC purchase, in 1982, was with a loan.

Loans and leases built a business model that was smashed by the PC era. Both loans and leases carry huge external costs and margins. My Massapequa neighbors had nice houses and cars. Their fat sales or engineering salaries were paid for by IBM customers, who compared the cost of having IBM handle their problems to the cost of doing things manually and signed their names to lines that were dotted.

In 1981 IBM didn’t just start selling a PC. It became a computer products company. It licensed the likeness of Charlie Chaplin, who had died in 1976, from his estate. It used the rose he offered his amour in City Lights, painting it a bright red. Then it distributed the PC through computer stores, who placed it on shelves alongside the printers and other peripherals. By the 1990s you wouldn’t think of hiring a “computer specialist” to sell you stuff, unless we were talking about a networking expert who got his own hands dirty.

The Common Good

Without an overwhelming victory for democracy on November 3, I’ll be glad to die.

Trump is the ultimate expression of a basic misperception, that private goods matter more than the public goods, that national well-being matters more than global well-being, that fences and borders can isolate and separate us.

This is especially true when it comes to the environment.

My children face a bleak future unless current climate trends are reversed. But the U.S. can’t change it alone. Every country must do its part.

The ice caps’ disappearance means many cities around the world are doomed. New Orleans is doomed. Miami is doomed. New York City is doomed. So are Calcutta, Mumbai, Shanghai, and Kuala Lumpur. Sea level rise means these places will soon be underwater.

Meanwhile, the methane of the Siberian tundra is bubbling to the surface. Fires in the Amazon and West mean the Earth can no longer breathe. The “habitable” part of the U.S. will be cut by two-thirds within 50 years. The oceans are warming so that, along with overfishing, all that’s left will be jellyfish.

In past bouts of global warming, when the ice caps disappeared, nature adjusted. Cooling trends returned and nature came back. With man-made global warming, there’s no natural reversal. It takes 80 grams of energy to melt a gram of ice. Once the ice is melted, 80 grams of energy take its temperature to 112.

Creating Demand

Right now, the biggest problem for the U.S. economy is a lack of demand.

We didn’t go on vacation. We didn’t go out to restaurants. We’re not getting on planes, or trains. We’re not even using our automobiles much.

This service sector of the economy, where today’s unemployed were working before the pandemic, has been crushed. It remains crushed. It will remain crushed until the pandemic is over.

The only solution offered has been to subsidize spending. That subsidy ended in September. Trump’s people stole the money, and the Fed pumped trillions into Wall Street investors who didn’t need it. The result is the greatest transfer of wealth in history, from the poor and the middle class to the wealthy and, indeed, to the ultra-wealthy.

Better Days Are Coming

When you hit bottom, when you are at the end of your rope, when you're in true despair, you can’t imagine getting out.

America is at the bottom. We’ve found that what we said about ourselves was tissue thin. The economy has collapsed around our ears. Death is all around us.

But better days are coming.

We can beat COVID-19. We know how to do it. Other countries have done it. Europe and much of Asia are opening, coming out of their cellars, living again.

The key is cooperation.

That’s all it takes. Wear a mask when you go out, or a face shield. Try to stay home. Wash your hands. Stay away from other people. Love thy neighbor.

The virus travels on the droplets you expel when breathing. It travels fastest when you sneeze, but even those droplets don’t travel much further than 6 feet. If 95% of us cooperate with each other, then the rate of transmission will drop below 1 and we’ll be back on the downward slope again.

Toward a New Normal

A new, post-pandemic normal is coming into view.

It looks different from the world we left.

Presidents and Governors won’t decide when states open back up. Consumers will. Most Americans believe what medical experts are telling us.

That’s not what we’re seeing from Trump, or any other Republican. This willful ignorance is going to get people killed.

The most logical program is to practice social distancing for a year or two, until the pandemic has passed, and vaccines are widely available. Meanwhile, all industries that depend on crowds will have to build new business models. When sports come back, it will be to empty, or near-empty, stadia. Movie theaters and malls are gone. So are restaurants where people sit close together. So are cruise chips and casinos. Bailing them out is throwing money down the drain.

Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve has dramatically expanded the money supply, handing out cash to keep the economy going now. The money will remain after the storm has passed. Further money supply increases will be needed to repay today’s debt. The pandemic has whipped deflation. The worry now is the value of money.

The economy is getting through thanks to the Internet. The Internet lets us continue to work from home. The Internet lets us order the goods we need to get through this. The Internet is telling us what’s what and what’s not.

The 1918 “Spanish flu” pandemic happened two years before the first radio broadcast. It makes a difference. (To learn more, I recommend Pale Rider  by Laura Spinney.)

Blessings of the Pandemic

The economy has tanked.

We are all in our homes, scared out of our minds.

But there are blessings amid the ruins.

The air is cleaner. The water is cleaner. It is quieter. Animals have come out of hiding around the world. People have re-learned the value of family. Science matters again. Community matters again.

There were pictures posted, early in April, of Venice with water you could see through, of LA without smog. Those were retouched. Things aren’t that good.

Still, they’re immeasurably better than they were.

The climate crisis doesn’t have to destroy that progress. Unless we have a death wish.

After the War on Oil

As the war drums beat post-war planning isn’t given a second thought. (To the right, the Air-Gen, which pulls energy directly from the air.)

We can do better. We need to do better regarding the War Against Oil.

Make no mistake. The War Against Oil, which I first wrote about over a decade ago, is behind our current crises. Saudi efforts to destabilize the Middle East are funded by oil. Russian efforts to destabilize the U.S. are built on oil. Trump is all about oil.

But oil is losing. Oil is doomed. The coronavirus, COVID-19, proves it. The International Energy Agency now sees falling global demand for oil at the end of the year.

We should have seen this coming. While Democrats were arguing about “banning fracking,” the frackers were flaring off more natural gas than ever before. Even with that, they couldn’t get $2/mcf for it. The UAE recently said it found a giant pool of gas, close to its export terminals. Texas gas is losing what markets are left.

The Death of the Oil Patch

Lost in my commentary on the coming decade was its first chapter, called The End of Oil.

The global economy has become dependent on oil since I was in college. Oil is behind most of our current problems, from global warming to the rise of Putin.

But the fall of oil is made possible by one fact. At the start of this decade I called it crossover. It’s the point where wind energy, and solar energy, become cheaper than energy from fossil fuels.

We made that crossover on schedule, in 2016. Since then, as I predicted, costs for renewables have continued to fall.

This is especially true for the most important form of renewable energy, efficiency. Insulation, LED lights, better furnaces and appliances, and computer controls mean demand for electricity in the U.S. has been stable through this decade. As a result, utilities have embraced electric cars, a technology as old as fossil fuels, but abandoned early in the 20^th century because electrical systems hadn’t scaled but oil infrastructure had.

All this should be good news. But it’s not. It’s a crisis the likes of which we haven’t seen since World War II.

Even OPEC now sees demand for its product falling. The International Energy Agency has cut its demand forecasts repeatedly this decade, and now agrees with me.

Elizabeth Warren on Tech Street

Ronald Reagan was not oil’s first choice in 1980.

John Connally was first. George H.W. Bush was second. Oil accepted Reagan and, through Bush, won political power for a generation, power it still has in the face of tech’s need for human capital.

So it is that we come to the 2020 game. Tech has been in the economic driver’s seat for 12 years, but in the political back seat for three. Tech has suffered for this. Its priorities have been ignored. It has been scapegoated by an Administration working in the interests of oil.

Technology is Democratic. It’s not a question of who tech prefers. Tech needs a seat at the political table, it will have a seat at the table, and that table will be Democratic. Assuming, of course, that democracy survives.

The 2020s: A Future in Three Parts

Moore’s Law accelerates change. Aging accelerates time.

Hard as it may be for me to believe, the 2010s will be over in less than 5 months.

In technology the last decade has been a Golden Age for clouds and devices. So, too, in business and in politics. The refusal of cloud companies to lock-down their technology elected Donald Trump. The result has been a march toward civil war, global war, trade war, the biggest crisis since the late 1960s.

But you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Moore’s Law of Health means I may live much longer than my parents did, long after history should have rolled over me. At least that’s true in those places where people can afford medical care. The likeliest replacements for Donald Trump are both older than he is. Al Gore is younger than either Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders. We’re still debating Woodstock, 50 years on.

We’re going to start turning the page on the current era in 2020. The hold of the autocrats is weakening. It’s weakening in Russia. It’s weakening in China. It’s weakening in Texas.

Moore’s Law continues marching onward, better and better, faster and faster, reaching further and further afield.

In this decade it has made Africa accessible to global markets, made India as well as China an economic power. Over 1 billion people have entered the middle class this century – they have homes, some material comforts, and they have hope.

What might the next decade bring? If I make it to the end of this decade, I’ll be 75, so this may be my last shot at predicting the future.

But here goes.