June 19, 2014
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As a police-state kleptocracy, China can”t carry civilization forward. The Core countries of Europe and North America need to support the Core countries of Asia”Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore”in their battle against this particular manifestation of the forces of darkness.
All this is based on the well-worn parallel between today’s China and Wilhelmine Germany. Given the real, terrible “forces of darkness” that were unleashed upon the world by Germany’s defeat, I am not sure that the right lessons are being drawn.
Archibald’s major area of expertise is energy policy. Here he writes authoritatively, with interesting and plausible (to a non-expert) proposals. He takes peak oil for granted, but is skeptical toward the “green” fads favored by fashionable environmentalists and leftist politicians: electric cars, wind farms, and such.
Shale oil and shale gas are good, he writes, but only as a breathing space while we get our energy house in order. For the future we should look to synthetic liquid fuel produced from coal””coal-to-liquid” or CTL”compressed natural gas, and nuclear power from cleaner, safer thorium-burning molten-salt reactors.
(While doing the background reading on thorium reactors, I got a smile from this at The Economist:
The Chinese Academy of Sciences claims the country now has “the world’s largest national effort on thorium,” employing a team of 430 scientists and engineers, a number planned to rise to 750 by 2015. This team, moreover, is headed by Jiang Mianheng, an engineering graduate of Drexel University in the United States who is the son of China’s former leader, Jiang Zemin (himself an engineer). Some may question whether Mr Jiang got his job strictly on merit.
My emphasis there.)
It’s going to be an interesting century all right, and might well turn out as nasty as David Archibald foretells. Who knows? As a survey of things that might happen, and as a handy primer on some technical topics”energy strategy, nuclear weapons technology”Twilight of Abundance is worth a read.
I could have done without the chapter epigraphs from Revelation, though, and the “forces of darkness” Manichaeism. Let’s keep our troops well trained, our weapons well serviced, and our borders well defended; let’s explore those energy strategies the author suggests, and stay on top of food production technologies; and let’s hope for the best. Warmed or cooled, we may yet come through this with our civilization intact.
