April 22 2024
Au-some ascent
1 House passes $95B Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan military aid bill
2 OPINION “Net Zero” carbon by 2050 unrealistic
3 Gold surges to all time high on geopolitical tensions, Chinese demand
4 Remote work will transform American social, political, and economic life
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4/22/1970 The first Earth Day
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1 House passes $95B Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan military aid bill
The House passed a $95 billion foreign-aid package Saturday that included long-stalled funding and weapons for Ukraine, after House Speaker Mike Johnson put his political career on the line to push the measure past intense Republican opposition. Lawmakers approved separate measures for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, and another bill that would force the sale of TikTok by its Chinese-controlled owner. The vote on Ukraine—the most contentious of the four—passed 311 to 112 with all Democrats in support and more than half of Republicans opposed with one GOP lawmaker voting present. The measures will be bundled together and sent to the Senate, which will begin consideration of the bill on Tuesday and is expected to quickly approve the measures. President Biden also supports the package, praising “bipartisan coalition of lawmakers in the House who voted to put our national security first.”
2 OPINION “Net Zero” carbon by 2050 unrealistic
Few terms have become as common during the first half of the 2020s as energy transition, decarbonization, and net zero by 2050, all conveying the grand global goal of eliminating fossil fuel combustion—and the attendant emissions of CO2—by the middle of the 21st century, and hence preventing further undesirable increases of tropospheric temperature. “Net,” the zero qualifier, is a hedge that considers the possibility of continued reliance on some fossil inputs whose emissions would be captured from the atmosphere and sequestered, resulting in no additions of anthropogenic CO2.
severing modern civilization’s reliance on fossil fuels is a desirable long-term goal but one that (for many reasons) cannot be accomplished eitherrapidly or inexpensively.
Vaclav Smil does interdisciplinary research in the fields of energy, environmental and population change, food production, history of technical innovation, risk assessment, and public policy. By June 2023 he published 47 books and more than 500 papers on these topics. He is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Manitoba, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (Science Academy), and a Member of the Order of Canada.
3 Gold surges to all time high on geopolitical tensions, Chinese demand
Gold’s rise to all-time highs above $2,400 an ounce this year has captivated global markets. China, the world’s biggest producer and consumer of the precious metal, is front and center of the extraordinary ascent. Worsening geopolitical tensions, including war in the Middle East and Ukraine, and the prospect of lower US interest rates all burnish gold’s billing as an investment. But juicing the rally is unrelenting Chinese demand, as retail shoppers, fund investors, futures traders and even the central bank look to bullion as a store of value in uncertain times.
4 Remote work will transform American social, political, and economic life
the greatest migration on planet Earth is not in the wilderness. It is in and around the human cities of our world. Morning and evening, five to six days a week, hundreds of millions of commuters have long swarmed into and out of the world’s central business districts. The human commuters may not face crocodiles and grizzly bears on their treks, but they nevertheless provide vital nourishment for the denizens of the concrete jungles at the end of the commute. Building and maintaining the office towers in the dense urban cores toward which the swarms of migrants converge, feeding the hordes on their lunch breaks, building and operating the mass transit and road networks that ferry them to and from their homes, storing millions of cars in parking garages and lots throughout the city center and surrounding train and subway stops far out into the suburban ring: These activities employ tens of millions of people around the world and are are consume a significant portion of the world’s daily energy and financial expense. In America, the Great Migration is both the creator and the defining institution of the “car city,” the dominant form of urban life. The car city, with its mix of suburban and exurban sprawl and legacy central cities, shapes patterns of wealth accumulation, income distribution, and political division across the country. Mass commuting by car across a widely dispersed urban area made America’s post-World War II middle-class society possible. But the rise of the car city was a mixed blessing. The environmental, social, and financial costs of the daily commute are responsible for many of the most acute problems our society confronts. It isn’t just urban geography and political economy that the Great Migration has transformed. The Migration shapes the social lives of the commuters and their families so profoundly that we often aren’t aware of just how massive the consequences are. Before the Industrial Revolution, for example, most families spent the majority of their waking hours working together on tasks that were necessary to keep the family housed, clothed, and fed. Usually, the nuclear family was a small and not always very distinct element in a large pool of relatives with many generations with aunts, uncles, and cousins all part of the mix. The modern family, an isolated nuclear unit in which parents might work in very different jobs in very different parts of an urban megaplex, surrounded all day by people who their spouses rarely meet, and both the education and care of the children largely delegated to teachers and out of the home day care workers, is radically different from anything previous generations knew. It is almost certainly a factor in the weakening of institutions like marriage, the general loosening of family ties, and the rise of isolation and alienation endemic to modern life.
After 100 years in which the rise of the car city and the gradual decline of the rail cities of the 19th and early 20th centuries shaped American culture and politics, we are seeing the beginning of a radically different form of urban life. Think of it as the cyber city. The rise of the cyber city is going to be at least as disruptive as the move from rail to car cities, and many of our social and political institutions may not survive the shift. Nevertheless, for social, economic, and environmental reasons it is something to welcome. Among other things, it promises to renew the economic machinery that made post-World War II America a paradise for the middle class and to provide Gen Z and its successors the kind of opportunity their predecessors enjoyed.
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NBA top seeds go 8-0 in first rd of playoffs
4/22/1970 The first Earth Day
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