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A mere 36 companies worldwide account for half of CO2 emissions. Kind of amazing when you think about it — such a targetable list.
If Saudi Aramco was a country, it would be the fourth biggest polluter in the world after China, the US and India, while ExxonMobil is responsible for about the same emissions as Germany, the world’s ninth biggest polluter, according to the data.
As the chart indicates, the big offenders are those companies still operating “high up” on the carbon chain — namely, with coal and oil.
Twenty-five of the 36 are nationally owned companies, with China owning ten of them — to no surprise.
Then again, we know that NOBODY is working renewable energy like China is today, so at least the self-awareness and ambition to do better is there.
Meanwhile, America is treated to drill, baby, drill as geo-political self-empowerment (“America is back!”), when we’re already the biggest oil producer in the world, begging the question: Back from what? Not polluting enough?
People getting rich now and passing down the costs to future generations — an environmental Ponzi scheme that requires a lot of suckers and merely one great Enabler in the White House — sad to say.
DOGE is all just screwing around UNTIL it addresses the DoD and its follow-on charge, the Department of Veterans Affairs. In combination, they’re the 80% in the 80/20 breakdown of discretionary spending.
It costs America hugely to have so many in uniform, picking up that tab for decades post-service.
I don’t argue against the compensation: they earn it completely.
I just think the looming Military Singularity means we should have a much smaller end-strength military in 10-20 years — much smaller.
The military pivot we need is not from Europe or the Middle East to Asia, but from platform-centric force structure planning to drone-centric force structure planning — or one built around munitions alone (meaning, bullets and bombs that can fly and kill on their swarming own). If your force increasingly becomes the equivalent of flying bullets and bombs, then you don’t need the guns to fire them, nor the soldiers to man the guns. Your platforms serve more and more as mere motherships.
Companies like Anduril and Palantir are the future defense base — printing on demand, whereas the Old Guard contractors are looking at some serious pivoting in their offerings (and/or desperate efforts to buy the newbies).
We’ll see how serious DOGE truly is when DoD gets its turn in the barrel. The notion that we should be moving toward a trillion-dollar defense budget is nuts.
The more the US acts economically like a wannabe North Korea, the more we incentivize the rest of the world’s major economies to cut deal after deal.
That is the enduring throughline: trade pacts are not concluded during the good times but during the bad.
If I am Europe, I am looking to deal big-time with both India and China, while standing up to Russia and the US.
India and the EU cooperate closely on issues including foreign policy, security and technology. The EU is India’s largest trading partner, ahead of the U.S. and China.
This is the EU playing its best card: its demand function within the global economy.
I’ve always had a potty mouth. My dear Mother actually washed it out with soap on more than a few occasions when I was a child — seriously. I think I was the only kid in my family who earned this particular punishment.
Yup, that was me at age 5 in 1967: rebel without a jaws.
Think about when you hurt yourself and need to recover on the spot: that’s when swearing is at its best and most functional. I dare you to stub your pinky toe and not let loose with the expletives.
Also when you’re carrying that sofa up the narrow stairwell and you’ve got to dig deep or get crushed. In those moments, the right F-bomb is crucial.
Then again, my wife the hospice social worker likes to note that a great sign of dementia is increased swearing, which I guess means that cursing is a young person’s game — damn it all to hell!
When Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye (both later Harvard professors of mine, with the former as my graduate academic advisor and the latter as chair of my dissertation committee; I also TA’d for Nye) wrote their landmark study of trade and political relations called Power and Interdependence: World Politics in Transition (1977), they based their analysis primarily on the US-Canada relationship, considered by them to be the most advanced such bilateral relationship in the world — as it was and remains, even with the rise of the EU.
So, no surprise that, when a trade war is threatened, America as a whole is likely to get a big-time education on the concept of economic interdependence.
As such, I expect a lot of feints and jabs from the Trump Administration with almost no serious follow-through on tariffs actually imposed. The pain will be too severe and too immediate for all involved, so face-saving deals will be made as deadlines pass and get extended.
Canada is just the most wrong nation out there for us to pick a fight with.
Again, they — simply by being who they are — have come to define economic interdependence with the United States in our globalized world.
Like, they didn’t have to write the book on it because they ARE the book on it.
Over time, we are going to learn SO MUCH from Canada — count on it — as we together navigate our climate-changed world that empowers them so much more than us. We are supremely blessed to have them as our northern neighbors while so much of the rest of the world looks up at Russia.
If I gotta bend the knee in some climate-ravaged future, I’d much rather do it before my relatives (almost exclusively on my mom’s side) above the border than to anybody else.
We need to be more respectful now so they’ll be more willing to share then.
I make this argument more and more: the EU right now is like Britain under Churchill holding out all by their lonesome against Nazi Germany in 1940-41.
We, the world, are going to ask so much from them as America loses itself — and its mind — in its self-inflicted Cultural Revolution. The EU is now officially the only adult in the room.
So, yeah, the free world needs a new leader, and that person needs to be European for the foreseeable future.
Seriously, the EU stepping up and remaining strong at this point in history will constitute big-time payback for all America did to protect them across the Cold War.
Somebody has to mind the store while we run mad, smashing windows and looting and threatening to round up the globalists (read, Jews).
We’ll eventually tire ourselves out, and Europe will still be there.
News coverage of a serious study: actuaries and academics doing the math on what climate change could do to our global economy if not well managed (combination of mitigation and adaptation) between now and 2070.
Recall my brief’s BLUF slide:
My baseline argument on climate change: Between now and about 2075, all that damage and reordering … pretty much baked in, as in, not much we can do to change that trajectory through mitigation but rather through adaptation. The mitigation stuff? That is the true long-term payoff, which this study seeks to define — negatively.
Getting a sort of Pandora vibe from that cover, right?
From the report: We are basically dependent on our “Earth system” and we’re grossly underestimating the damage already in the works and looming downstream.
As a result:
Global risk management practices for policymakers are inadequate, we have accepted much higher levels of risk than is broadly understood.
Doesn’t that just sound like us?
From the Forbes article comes this telling bit: we routinely underestimate what’s going on because … we’re given to “treating damages as incremental rather than systemic.”
That’s what gets us the slow, slow, slow and then fast pathway of collapse.
To me, that Zone of Turbulence, as I call it, from now to 2075 isn’t so much to be endured as exploited for the opportunity that it is: getting as much of our world, as safely as possible, to that downstream tipping point (defined here as 2070-2090), by which time we have hopefully already paid the piper (mitigation) and can live to tell the tale (successful adaptation between now and then).
That’s why I call my BLUF slide basically humanity’s OODA Loop of the 21st century.
That is the BIG PICTURE. Get on board or get left behind.
Great bit of NYT reporting. The above drawing is the way we used to fight. Russia was supposed to win that war, hands down at top speed.
Three years later and my, how the world has turned.
The opening bit is brilliantly scary:
When a mortar round exploded on top of their American-made Bradley infantry fighting vehicle, the Ukrainian soldiers inside were shaken but not terribly worried, having been hardened by artillery shelling over three years of war.
But then the small drones started to swarm.
They targeted the weakest points of the armored Bradley with a deadly precision that mortar fire doesn’t possess. One of the explosive drones struck the hatch right above where the commander was sitting.
“It tore my arm off,” recounted Jr. Sgt. Taras, the 31-year-old commander who, like others, used his first name in accordance with Ukrainian military protocols.
Scrambling for a tourniquet, Sergeant Taras saw that the team’s driver had also been hit, his eye blasted from its socket.
The two soldiers survived. But the attack showed how an ever-evolving constellation of drones — largely off-the-shelf technologies that are being turned into killing machines at breakneck speed — made the third year of war in Ukraine deadlier than the first two years combined, according to Western estimates.
Understand the euphemism here: “deadlier” means far more pointless conflict, with lots more casualties undeterred by actual military achievements. Battlefields aren’t deadly when you’re winning and taking territory; they are when you’re accomplishing next-to-nothing except killing on both sides.
The looming Military Singularity renders the battlefield too dangerous and too deadly for troops. It’s as simple as that.
America sent its top-of-the-line tanks to Ukraine. Most of those Abrams are now out of commission, with most being taken out by drones.
Ukraine’s military “fire[d] more drones last year than the most common type of large-caliber artillery shells.”
That is a serious, world-history tipping point.
Thirty-six months for this transformation to unfold.
This war will likely go down as one of the most pointless conflicts ever, along with being the most influential development in military combat ever: the war that ended the utility of troops on the battlefield.
On one level it scares me; on another it thrills me to no end.
We are witnessing the death of conventional war as we have known it throughout history, effectively ending the life cycle of what has long constituted our military industrial complex.
Humanity will miss neither.
9) Old man, take a look at my life
VISUAL CAPITALIST: The Global Retirement Boom
It used to be a staple data point in my brief for years: by midcentury China would have more old people than America has people.
Now, it looks like I was off by 15 years — too slow.
Notice, however, that our burden relative to overall population will be almost 50% higher than that of China’s (3.4/100k v 2.3/100k).
Climate change and demographic aging: I could write an entire book on those two subjects alone!
Of interest: whenever your primary customer base gets into their 50s in terms of median age, you’re in trouble, whether you’re NASCAR, the NFL, the beef industry, Christian churches, or the GOP.
It’s just not a good indicator, especially when your competition (other religions, spirituality minus a church) are skewing so much younger.
Other data explored in this year’s report: spirituality remains high even as churches are woefully underperforming — as in, under-attracting.
The primary reason is not hard to guess: the average person doesn’t like their politics and their religion mixed — the recent and growing trend in the US.
In other words, don’t shit where you pray.
11) Japan gets seriously scared about its birth dearth
Imagine, your biggest age cohort is 75-79 years old — 1/12th of your total population.
It’s not just that you sell more adult diapers than baby diapers; you’re going to run out of people to help those elders regularly change those diapers [Tom, the un-self-aware 62yo smugly noted.]
The four-day work week is coming anyway, so this excuse is as good as any.
The new policies come as the birth rate in Japan hit a record low in 2024. From January to June, the country recorded 350,074 births, down 5.7% from the same period in 2023, according to the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare.
But as noted in this space previously, the real culprit holding back baby production isn’t hours in a week but the lack of husband housework hours.
The more the US cracks down on illegal migrants coming across its southern border, the more Canada finds people trying to sneak into their country from the US side of the border.
The number of illegal crossings into the United States from Canada was relatively low to begin with, and has now plummeted, indicating that Canada’s response to Mr. Trump’s pressure is working.
But now a new dynamic is emerging at the border: Asylum seekers are fleeing north to Canada as Mr. Trump has embarked on his plan for sweeping deportations.
Numbers remain small for now — tiny even. But it’s not at all crazy to expect that someday down the road the northerly flow will outpace the southerly flow.
I know, I know … inconceivable.
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