Panama Canal

 

In all the talk about infrastructure and supply chair shortages, nobody mentions the Panama Canal, which was a major infrastructure project and could help solve supply chain problems if could accept the large container ships used today.  

The many container ships anchored off the California coast are too big to go through the Panama Canal.  Since they are coming from Asia, any goods destined for the east coast or the mid-west have to be shipped across the country by rail or truck.  It would be more efficient and demand less transit within the US if the ships could reach New York or Baltimore on the east coast, but there is no easy way, whether via the Suez Canal, around Cape Horn or around the Cape of Good Hope. 

The Panama Canal was an amazing construction project which greatly facilitated shipping, but it has become dated and too small for the ships that carry most of the cargo today.  President Biden often talks about Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal; he should also recognize Teddy Roosevelt and his contribution to east-west commerce by overseeing the construction of the Panama Canal. 

Putin and Ukraine

 

Two recent articles on the Foreign Affairs website deal with the question of what Putin plans to do about Ukraine.  Will he invade or not?

·       Russia Won’t Let Ukraine Go Without a Fight

·       Ukraine in the Crosshairs

I think the first ignores the history of the relationship between Russia and Ukraine, while the second tends to downplay the importance of the history.  The second article refers to an essay by Putin on the history of the relationship, calling it “revanchist drivel.” 

There are several matters that may be prompting Putin to threaten to invade Ukraine. 

·       Putin see Ukraine as a historical part of Russia and does not want to see it move further toward the West. He may try to keep it physically under Russian control.   

·       Lukashenko, the Putin-supported president of Belarus is being challenged by a popular movement in Belarus. Putin may fear losing his proxy in Belarus as he did in Ukraine. 

·       Putin’s popularity and support are sinking in Russia as he faces opposition from Navalny and other challengers.  He may think a foreign success will strengthen his support within Russia. 

Ukraine and Russia

For the last thousand years, Ukraine has been an ethnic and geographical region, but not an independent country.  Kiev, founded around 500 A.D., was in many ways the first capital of Russia, before Moscow, founded around 1150, or St. Petersburg (1700). 

In his article, Putin says:

Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians are all descendants of Ancient Rus, which was the largest state in Europe. Slavic and other tribes across the vast territory – from Ladoga, Novgorod, and Pskov to Kiev and Chernigov – were bound together by one language (which we now refer to as Old Russian), economic ties, the rule of the princes of the Rurik dynasty, and – after the baptism of Rus – the Orthodox faith. The spiritual choice made by St. Vladimir, who was both Prince of Novgorod and Grand Prince of Kiev, still largely determines our affinity today.

The throne of Kiev held a dominant position in Ancient Rus. This had been the custom since the late 9th century. The Tale of Bygone Years captured for posterity the words of Oleg the Prophet about Kiev, ”Let it be the mother of all Russian cities.“

 

Over the years, as Russia or Poland became more or less powerful and expanded or contracted, parts of Ukraine became more Russian or more Polish.  The western Polish parts tended to be Roman Catholic, while the eastern Russian parts were Orthodox Catholic.  After World Wars I and II, Ukraine became more fully Russian.  The Russian Communists made the Ukraine SSR one of the Socialist Republics which was part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.  In 1954, the Crimea region was transferred from the Russian SSR to the Ukrainian SSR, probably to advance the career or Nikita Khrushchev, who was the party official responsible for Ukraine.  Thus, when the USSR disintegrated in 1991, Ukraine, including Crimea, automatically became a separate country for the first time. 

For the first few years of independent Ukraine continued as largely a satellite of the Russian Republic.  In 2004, however, a disputed election resulted in the Ukrainian supreme court overturning the election of Putin’s candidate, Yanukovich.  The opposition to Yanukovich created the Orange Revolution, which brought in opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko as the new president.   Yanukovich, however, returned to power as prime minister in 2006, and after a hiatus, again in 2010. 

Mounting opposition to Yanukovich was expressed in the Euromaidan protests in 2014 resulting in new elections and the election of Petro Poroshenko.  The ousting of Yanukovich, however, prompted Putin to annex Crimea, and return it to Russian rule.  American, Russian, and European political strategists have been involved in the various campaigns for president, including Paul Manafort, who was Donald Trump’s campaign manager for a while.  Manafort worked for the pro-Russian candidates.  In 2019 Volodymyr Zelensky was elected president, replacing Poroshenko.

In addition to annexing Crimea, Putin has used more or less covert military means to bring the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine back into the Russian orbit.  Pro-Russian Ukrainians, supported by covert Russian military, have fought against Ukrainian soldiers.  Reuters reported on November 23 that Russian-controlled forces in Donbas were increasing readiness and hold exercises.   The Atlantic Council reports that on November 15, Putin issued a decree removing trade barriers between Russia and the Donbas region, but not with the pro-Western parts of Ukraine.       

Belarus

Alexander Lukashenko has been Russia’s strongman in Belarus since Belarus became independent in 1994.  He had managed to keep politics relatively quiet until the 2020 election, when protests erupted, somewhat like those in Ukraine in 2004 and 2014. The protests have been led by a blogger, Sergei Tikhanovsky, and presidential candidate Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya.  Lukashenko cracked down hard on the protesters with beatings, arrests, and torture.   Lukashenko remains in control, but his 2020 election is not recognized by the UK, the EU, or the US because of election fraud. 

The opposition to Lukashenko, may have Putin worried that he is in danger of losing his man in Minsk, like he lost his man in Kyiv/Kiev.  He may think that some kind of military showing in Ukraine will make the Belarussians think twice about following the Ukrainian example. 

 

Putin’s Hold on Russia

Putin still has a strong hold on Russia, but opposition to him is growing, or at least becoming more visible.  His poisoning and imprisonment of Alexei Navalny and the crackdown on the opposition Navalny led indicate that he is worried.  He may think that an exercise showing Russian military strength in Ukraine would help cement his leadership position in Russia.  Putin would see it as a restoration of Russian greatness, and he would expect nationalist Russians to see it that way as well. 

 

 

Carbon Trading at COP26

 

The carbon trading plan set up by COP26 seems to be vague.  In the reports of it, I don’t see any numbers about how it would work in detail.  The main issue seems to have been how much money would be given to poor countries as part of the arrangement.  The new UN-backed trading system would coordinate with existing carbon trading arrangements, but with no accounting standards that I see described. 

There does not appear to be any enforcement mechanism.  It is basically an undertaking by the governments to “do good” by trading carbon emissions for carbon reductions.  I suppose this is nice, but what we really need is a carbon tax.  We need an agreement that emitting a ton of carbon dioxide will cost x agreed dollars paid into a fund with some kind of agreed distribution system.  Alternatively, the emitter could do something that would absorb the ton of CO2 he emitted, such as plant trees.  It sounds like some countries and localities have trading/tax plans like this, but they are not widespread, and so far, not very effective. 

From my point of view a carbon tax is necessary because it makes it more economically feasible to develop nuclear energy to reduce carbon emissions.  Nuclear power plants are expensive and not competitive with old-style coal and gas power plants, but a real carbon tax would make it more expensive to burn fossil fuels, and would make nuclear more competitive.  The more EVs get their power from nuclear, the less global warming gas is released.  Of course, this true if they are powered by solar or wind, but so far solar and wind are unable to meet the demand. 

Of course, most environmentalists hate nuclear power, but they must decide if they are willing to bring about global warming by running their EVs on coal and gas.  I think that nuclear energy can produce electricity safely, and the environmentalists’ fear of it is not based on science, but prejudice and ignorance. 

Ice Ages and Climate Change

 Earth has experienced a number of cooling and warming cycles in the last few billion years.  According to Wikipedia, there have been at least five major ice ages in Earth’s history, the first starting about three billion years ago.  The most severe occurred about 300 million years ago.  Earth is currently in an interglacial period, with the last glacial period having ended about 12,000 years ago. 

Scientists posit a number of causes for the cycles of heating and cooling of the Earth, although none seem to be definitive.  Over this period continents and seas have moved.  Land has been covered more by vegetation (darker and heat absorbing) or more by ice (reflecting heat away from Earth).  Many other factors have played roles.  But the main takeaway is that Earth has heated or cooled due to natural cycles for billions of years.  Certainly, the huge increase of manmade carbon dioxide will be important to what happens in the next cycle, but so will natural causes.  Earth has not had a fixed average temperature over its lifetime.  Some scientists think that at one time Earth may have been a “snowball” completely covered in ice. 

In an opposite process from ice ages, is the creation of fossil fuels under what is now desert.  Fossil fuels are remains of dead plants, often found now in places were few plants grow today.  The biggest oil fossil fuel reserves are in Saudi Arabia, Russia, the United States, and Iran.  The largest coal reserves are in the US, Russia, China, Australia, and India.  The vegetation that became these fossil fuels grew in lush, swampy forests, which no longer exist in those locations. 

Although the issue does not come up often in discussions of climate change, we are depleting our deposits of fossil fuels very quickly in relation to the millions of years that it took to create them. 

The other non-renewable source of energy is uranium.  The World Nuclear Association estimates that uranium should be available as a fuel for centuries to come.  It is the 51^st most abundant element in the Earth’s crust, about the same as tin.  A lot of processing is necessary to turn uranium into reactor fuel, but a lot of processing is also necessary to turn petroleum from the ground into usable fuel.   

Climate will change.  We have limited control over how it will change.  We should certainly devote our efforts to getting it to change in a good direction.  Mankind can adapt, but we are used to living within a relatively small temperature range.  It would be more pleasant to continue to live within that same temperature range.