🚀 Faster, Please! Week in Review #61
Please check out some great highlights from my essays and interviews!
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Melior Mundus
Some shameless self promotion: I have a book coming out on October 3. The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised is currently available for pre-order pretty much everywhere. I’m very excited about it! Let’s gooooo! 🆙↗⤴📈
In This Issue
Essay Highlights
— Was the Shale Revolution a missed opportunity?
— The big questions about AI have nothing to do with killer machines
— NASA’s Space Launch System rocket program simply makes no sense
Best of the pod
Essay Highlights
🛢 Was the Shale Revolution a missed opportunity? (Monday)
The increase in oil and natural gas production in the United States from unconventional sources such as shale rock, via hydraulic fracturing, unexpectedly turned the US into a major crude oil exporter, marking the peak of the notion of Peak Oil. US shale oil production rose by more than 7 million barrels per day from 2010 to 2019, according to the Dallas Fed, tripling total US oil production. The Shale Revolution also accounted for a tenth of the increase in US economic growth from 2009 through 2019. And while many environmentalists were and continue to be resolutely anti-fracking, their criticism ignores an inconvenient truth. The rapid increase in shale gas extraction starting in 2009 led to natural gas supplanting coal as the primary energy source for electricity generation in the US. Yet with a different set of public policies, according to a new paper, “the shale gas boom could have massively improved welfare and output.” How so? By using that period of reduced emissions from the shale gas boom to implement what the authors see as pro-energy transition policies so as to not get caught in the “fossil-fuel trap” where long-run energy innovations shift away from renewables.
🤖 The big questions about AI have nothing to do with killer machines (Tuesday)
The big questions that I find interesting concern the true economic importance of AI and, assuming it is an economically important technology, the follow-on impact on society. It’s more those kinds of questions that Capital Economics, a consultancy, examines in a short recent note from economist Neil Shearing, “The five questions that will determine AI’s ultimate economic and market impact.” The first of those five questions: “Should the new breed of generative artificial intelligence be considered a general-purpose technology or GPT?” Whether machine learning (and deep learning and generative AI) qualifies as a GPT hinges on its potential for wide application and significant economy-wide impact. Like past GPTs such as steam power, electrification, the internal combustion engine, and computing, AI may profoundly transform multiple sectors. Yes, early days here, especially with GenAI, but I read the early evidence as suggesting its capabilities to generate realistic text, images, and audio might well result in big productivity boosts for writers, coders, customer service providers, and researchers across sectors.
🚀 NASA’s Space Launch System rocket program simply makes no sense (Wednesday)
Anyone interested in America’s lunar ambitions is no doubt shaking their head in frustration at a new Government Accountability Office report on NASA’s Space Launch System rocket, which is supposed to be the backbone of the space agency’s Artemis lunar exploration program. The GAO sees SLS as facing serious challenges due to high costs and delays. Furthermore, NASA lacks transparency on the true costs of the program and a reliable baseline to measure its performance, according to the report. Then there’s this zinger: “Senior NASA officials told GAO that at current cost levels, the SLS program is unaffordable.” Alternative launch vehicles may be needed to fully realize the potential of lunar and asteroid mining in the coming decades. Here’s an interesting question: What if NASA canceled the SLS, although it won’t for political "reasons" (also known as jobs in key congressional districts) and did something else with all those billions of bucks? NASA could launch more payloads with Falcon Heavy rockets, which are cheaper and more reliable than SLS.
🤖 How will AI help us, exactly? (Friday)
How will artificial intelligence/machine learning/generative AI boost technological progress, make workers more productive, and accelerate economic growth? In a study from last April, “Generative AI at Work,” economists Erik Brynjolfsson, Danielle Li, and Lindsey R. Raymond found that the productivity of call center workers improved by 14 percent when using an AI system, with less-skilled newbies seeing over 30 percent gains. Additionally, customers were more satisfied when interacting with these AI-enabled operators, leading to lower employee turnover. Along similar lines, the new Goldman Sachs report “AI's Sustainable Solutions: Getting from Risks to Opportunities” gives a great overview of the many companies putting the latest AI advances to good use with the promise of helping society deal with some big problems in some key areas like human capital, healthcare, agriculture, and climate. When you put it all together, the possibilities are pretty exiciting — as is the chance that we are seeing a technology at least as economically significant as the PC + internet + smartphone combo. And maybe much more.
Best of the pod
🌎 My chat with climate scientist Zeke Hausfather (Thursday)
Zeke Hausfather is a climate scientist and energy systems analyst. He is the climate research lead for Stripe and a research scientist at Berkeley Earth.
James Pethokoukis: How do we know that our planet is warming? And secondarily, how do we know the actions of people are playing a key role?
Zeke Hausfather: That's a great question. In terms of how we know it's warming: We've been monitoring the Earth's climate with reasonably dense measurements since the mid-1800s. That's when groups like NASA, NOAA, the UK Hadley Centre, my own Berkeley Earth group, have been able to put together reliable global surface temperature estimates. And we've seen in the period…
That's since the 1980s?
1850.
1850. NASA was not around in 1850.
No. But enough measurements were being taken both at weather stations around the world and on ships in the oceans that we can reconstruct global temperatures with an accuracy of a couple tenths of a degree going back that far. We know that the world has warmed by about 1.2 degrees centigrade since 1850 with the vast majority of that warming, about 1 degree of it, happening since 1970. That isn't in much dispute in the scientific community at all. Now, going further back is harder, obviously. We only invented the thermometer in the early 1700s. There are a few locations on land that go back that far, but to go back further in time, we need to rely on what we call climate proxies: things like ice cores, tree rings, coral sediments, pollen in lakes — various natural factors that are in some way related to the temperature when those things occurred.
Those have much higher uncertainties, of course, but we do know using those reconstructions that current temperature levels are probably unprecedented in at least the last 2000 years and are at the high end of anything we've seen in the last 120,000 years or so. Certainly if current temperatures were to stay at today's levels for another century, they'd be higher than anything we've seen in 120,000 years. But it's harder to precisely make those claims because the time resolution of these indirect proxy measurements is very coarse when we go back further in time. You might have one ice core measurement reflect a hundred-year average period, for example, rather than a specific year. We know from the temperature record that the world has warmed. How do we know that human activity is playing a role? Well, we've known since the mid-1800s, due to pioneering work by folks like John Tyndall or Arrhenius, that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, water vapor, methane are critical to maintain a habitable planet. Without greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, the Earth would be a snowball and life would probably not exist.
We also know that the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased pretty dramatically. We have measurements from ice cores going back about 800,000 years of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at a reasonably high resolution. And because carbon dioxide is well mixed, knowing it in one location in one ice core gives us a good picture of carbon dioxide for the whole planet. And we know that prior to the year 1850, carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere varied between about 170 to 280 parts per million. They're lower during ice age periods; they're higher during warmer interglacial periods. But since the 1850s, that value has increased dramatically. The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased by about 50 percent. It's gone from 280 parts per million, which was over the last 10,000 years since the end of the last ice age, up to about 420 parts per million today.
And that reflects a huge amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. I don't think people realize quite the magnitude we're talking about. The amount of carbon dioxide that humans have added to the atmosphere by digging up stuff from underground and burning it is roughly equal in mass to the entire biosphere. We took every single bit of life on Earth and burned it. That was about how much CO2 we put up in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution. Or to put it another way, it's equal in mass to all of everything humans have ever built: the pyramids, every skyscraper, every road. We took all that mass and put it up into the atmosphere. That's the amount of CO2 we've emitted. And so that's had a pretty big effect on what we call the radiative forcing of our climate, essentially the amount of outgoing longwave radiation — or heat, in common parlance — that gets absorbed and reradiated back toward the surface.
Excited to hear more about the book!