Sunday Cutdown XXXV (b) 28 July 2024

Clearing my inbox of stories I want to document

1) A tide that lifts all boat people

MIAMI HERALD: Cuba admits to massive emigration wave: a million people left in two years amid crisis

The numbers are stunning:

A stunning 10% of Cuba’s population — more than a million people — left the island between 2022 and 2023, the head of the country’s national statistics office said during a National Assembly session Friday, the largest migration wave in Cuban history.

The data confirmed reporting by the Miami Herald and Cuban independent media that sounded the alarm over the mass migration of Cubans amid a severe economic downturn and a government crackdown on dissent in recent years.

According to the official figures made public for the first time, Cuba’s population went from 11,181,595 on Dec. 31, 2021, to 10,055,968 on December 2023.

How is this not a huge political issue? Have you read anything on this over the past two years?

Understand: Cubans are given an ideological pass because they can cite the communist regime. It’s the ultimate grandfather clause — one that frankly should have expired 35 years ago (what communist threat?) but still holds.

At ten million, Cuba as the 51st state would fall behind #9 North Carolina and just above present #10 Michigan in population ranking.

Tell me Cuba wouldn’t be better off in our Union.

2) Can I start leaving some of my stuff at your place?

DEFENSE NEWS: Pentagon creates regional partnerships to sustain gear far from home

The gist:

Seeking to move away from its reliance on hauling equipment back stateside for repairs, the Pentagon is working with allies and partners to better sustain capability forward in operational theaters, beginning with the Indo-Pacific region.

This is a big accommodation of that “tyranny of distance” that is the Indo-Pac combatant command.

Historically, sustainment has been viewed solely as a national responsibility, with the U.S. government sustaining its own forces in theater …

The idea is not to build new maintenance and repair capabilities in theater, but to take advantage of what already exists while “making the appropriate changes to accommodate specific U.S. needs and then utilizing that through a joint venture arrangement, as opposed to a U.S. funded, built, owned and operated capability,” [Assistant Secretary of Defense for Sustainment Christopher] Lowman said.

This model will be replicated in all of the other combatant commands, it seems, over the next several years.

A smart accommodation of a geopolitical landscape in which two competitors (Russia, China) can regionally stress our global naval presence. Socializing the problem among allies is the way to go.

Reduce the distance between repair need and repair solution — proximity.

The great advantage the US has over both Russia and China is that we have friends and allies the world over, so why not leverage that national brand strength?

3) Four can play that game

WSJ: U.S. Intercepts Russian and Chinese Bombers on First Joint Mission Off Alaska

Two-hundred miles off our Alaskan airspace and still inside the designated buffer zone, but still …

Russian and Chinese warplanes were intercepted off the coast of Alaska by U.S. and Canadian fighters Wednesday, marking the first time strategic bombers from the two U.S. adversaries have operated together near North America, a U.S. official said.

Completely performative aggression, mind you, but it gets our attention alright.

The event is less fascinating to me than where it occurred and that it drew a joint US and Canadian response. Tell me the last time you’ve read a story about Canadian military jets.

Keep your eye on the Arctic for future chest-beating displays.

4) Right Dx, Wrong Rx

RESPONSIBLE STATECRAFT: US general wants 'Marshall Plan' to counter China in LatAm

I am a fan of the current SOUTHCOM boss. Her ongoing effort to highlight Chinese activities across Latin America … well, she’s pretty much alone in that Paul Revere-like role — for now.

The Wall Street Journal’s judgment is: right question, but wrong person to be asking, and I get that gripe when the answer offered is a Marshall Plan-like effort.

It’s not that the subject is beyond her pay grade. Regional combatant commanders are well positioned to make such arguments.

Plus, her diagnosis is spot on: with 22 of 31 countries in her area of responsibility signing up for the Belt and Road Initiative, the general is reaching for something — anything — that seems like a counter-offer:

“How are we competing Team USA and Team Democracy with the tenders that are coming out from [other] countries? How are we getting our U.S. quality investment and talking about our U.S. companies investing in the region? We have a lot of companies in the region. I don’t think we’re branding Team USA as we should. It should be better. We’ve got to be bragging about what U.S. quality investment does,” she said.

Great argument, just not the Marshall Plan.

Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA)? Closer.

Opening up USMCA (revamped NAFTA) for new members, as proposed in the Americas Act? Just as good.

But we’re not going to outspend the Chinese, who are the natural integrators right now across the globe, having risen and pocketed lots of trade surplus doing so.

All we can really offer is a superior form of integration toward — ideally — full membership in the world’s most successful economic union in history. That’s the EU model to deny Russia control over Eastern Europe. That should be our model to deny Chinese control over Latin America — far from a fantastic state of affairs.

And that sort of vision is above Richardson’s pay grade. It requires the fabled president who’s actually going to prioritize our hemisphere for once — after so many of them have promised such a “new beginning” and never delivered.

Still, it’s good to be a lone voice, crying out in the diplomatic wilderness. Beats indifference.

5) Ready Player One

BBC: Ukraine thrown into war's bleak future as drones open new battlefront

A reporter embedded with modern military forces: speeding along in a Ukrainian army truck with drone jammers on the roof, trying to stay alive and hoping that, as Russian drones pass over, they don’t consider them a worthy enough target — a single truck.

This is the future of war on display:

Ukraine has been thrown into the bleak future of war, where within minutes individual soldiers, fast-moving vehicles and trench positions can be precisely targeted. Drones have civilians in their sights too: about 25 from Russia attacked Kharkiv on Tuesday night, although most were intercepted.

Ukraine's army is fighting back with its own drones, and there are dozens across this stretch of front line. One Ukrainian soldier tells me every day they kill 100 Russians.

The last images from drone cameras are usually of men panicking, their arms flailing, weapons firing before they are killed. The brigade’s 37-year-old drone commander, who goes by the call sign Aeneas, says that without shelter in a building there is little chance of survival - for Russians, and his men too.

"It's the new way or a new path in modern war. In 2022 it was only infantry war and today one half is only a war of drone, a battle between Russian drones and ours," he says.

How much you wanna bet that in another two years it’s drone-on-drone basically all the time?

6) Ice Station Zebra

DOD: DoD Announces Publication of 2024 Arctic Strategy

For now, the updated DOD Arctic Strategic retains the calm air of the world’s strongest military, the notion being “monitor-and-respond.”

The ways DOD will execute this approach are grouped into three main lines of effort:

• DOD will enhance its capabilities to campaign in the Arctic especially its domain awareness, communications, and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities.

• DOD will engage with Allies and partners to uphold defense and deterrence in the Arctic, build interoperability, and increase its understanding of how to operate in the region.

• DOD will exercise calibrated presence in the Arctic by regularly training in the region and conducting routine operations critical to upholding deterrence and homeland defense.

The theater is very much cast as NATO-v-Russia/China, but the utility of actual warfare in the Arctic is doubtful, meaning this is mostly a balancing exercise, which is fine.

But like with Richardson at SOUTHCOM, I’d be a whole lot more interested in hearing about America’s non-military ambitions for the Arctic. Otherwise, what are we really gearing up to fight about? Who can plant a flag where?

As I noted in my book, the vast majority of known hydrocarbons up there fall within recognized EEZs (exclusive economic zones). Fighting over sea-lanes of communication (various Northern Sea Routes) isn’t really all that … I dunno … practicable? Thus, one needs to get pretty specific here about the national interests over which any struggle is going to occur.

And that strikes me as a monitor-and-respond sort of theater.

7) I’m not afraid of death. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.

Houston, the new Venice of Texas

AP: UN asks nations to better prepare, cool the vulnerable as ‘extreme heat epidemic’ breaks records

WAPO: Companies are reshaping operations to cope with a changing climate

BLOOMBERG: The Market’s Next Black Swan Is Climate Change

It always feels global when the UN feels the need to weigh in:

“If there is one thing that unites our divided world, it’s that we’re all increasingly feeling the heat,” United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Thursday at a news conference where he highlighted that Monday was the hottest day on record, surpassing the mark set just a day earlier. “Earth is becoming hotter and more dangerous for everyone, everywhere.”

Nearly half a million people a year die worldwide from heat related deaths, far more than other weather extremes such as hurricanes, and this is likely an underestimate, a new report by 10 U.N. agencies said.

“Billions of people are facing an extreme heat epidemic -- wilting under increasingly deadly heat waves, with temperatures topping 50 degrees Celsius around the world,” Guterres said. “That’s 122 degrees Fahrenheit and halfway to boiling.”

Some financial experts are arguing for a pricing-in calculation when it comes to stock markets:

Failing to do more to slow the planetary heating caused by greenhouse-gas emissions will gouge 40% from global stock valuations.

Companies seem to be getting the memo, whatever their denialism over the utility of ESG. Per Harvard Law’s resident expert on climate change (whom I met in Los Alamos last month at the national lab’s conference on climate change, where we both spoke):

“The effect of extreme weather events and rapid climate change on businesses’ operations is slowly coming onto radar screens around the country. But it’s a slow evolution. I think the extreme weather events we’re seeing this summer are speeding up the intellectual uptake,” said Susan Crawford, a Harvard Law School professor.

Along with safeguarding their own facilities, companies must monitor their suppliers’ climate resilience, according to Crawford, the author of a 2023 book about Charleston, S.C., and its struggle with rising seas.

The drumbeat grows louder …

8) Americanos live to work

VISUAL CAPITALIST: Ranked: Average Working Hours by Country

Notice the regional skew:

• Americans of all nations work too damn much (hey, it’s our nature!)

• Europeans … not so much (less work, more life).

Without including Asians, though, we’re really left a bit in the dark. Remember Jason Hsu’s argument about hardworking Asia presently subsidizing the better work-life-balanced West.

9) Insults to injury

WAPO: A post-fire ‘nightmare’ in New Mexico: Eight floods in four weeks

YAHOO FINANCE: Climate change is ending the Sun Belt boom

Frankly, I saw a lot of this during my trip to New Mexico last month: large swaths of charred forest, plus some stunningly strong downpours.

Apparently that one-two punch is proving incredibly damaging to the environment there:

It’s a worst-case scenario that may become more frequent as weather extremes intensify in the American West. Studies suggest climate change is increasing the risk that severe rainfall comes in the wake of wildfires. Increasingly hot and dry conditions breed fiercer blazes. Warming air can also hold more moisture, leading to more intense storms. The burn scars from fires can elevate the flooding risk for more than five years, as vegetation regrows.

Notice how much, in climate change stories, you hear about “worst case scenarios” being surpassed? Like the century flood that happens every two years?

The second story cited above is the first one I have found indicating that potential Northern snow birds are catching on:

Sun Belt migration is now skidding to a halt, according to a new working paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. As climate change makes warm places hotter and cold places more livable, more Americans are staying put in the North, while others are leaving the South. In coming decades, net migration might flow in the other direction.

“The US population is starting to migrate away from areas increasingly exposed to extreme heat days toward historically colder areas, which are becoming more attractive as extreme cold days become increasingly rare,” economists Sylvain Leduc and Daniel Wilson wrote in the San Francisco Fed paper. “The previous century’s migration pattern from the Snow Belt to the Sun Belt is likely to ultimately be reversed.”

Bingo!

Already, climate change is changing where people are choosing to live — in rich America. Imagine its potential to put migrants on the move is less advanced economies.

10) Gaslighting ice melting

NPR: Days are getting slightly longer — and it's due to climate change

You’re not imaging things: the weather is getting worse and the days ARE growing longer.

It reminds me of the old joke about the couple who went out to dinner at a new restaurant. When later asked about it by a friend, the wife said, “The food was horrible” and the husband approvingly chimed in “And the portions were so small!”

Here’s how this dynamic works (or disrupts):

Climate change is causing widespread global impacts, but now scientists are finding that it's altering the very planet itself. Earth's rotation is slowing down, extending the length of a day ever so slightly.

As temperatures rise, massive amounts of ice are melting from Greenland and Antarctica. That meltwater flows into the oceans, redistributing the mass closer to the equator. When the planet is thicker around the middle, its daily rotation takes a bit longer.

You know, as I’ve grown thicker around the middle, MY daily rotation takes a bit longer too.

So, all I can say, Earth, is I feel your pain.

11) Beggaring thy neighbor

RFERL: Dead Fish And Dirty Air: Chinese Firms Leave Waste As They Mine Tajikistan's Gold

China rightfully fields a lot of complaints about its overseas mining operations. I mean, I get it: China does mining pretty dirty and nasty at home, so why behave any. better abroad?

As I wrote in America’s New Map:

The clock is ticking. For now, the world blames America for globalization’s defects and damage. Over time, that fierce anger will shift overwhelmingly to China.

Bet on it.

12) Money money money … MON-NEY!

THE HILL: Climate inflation is eating your paycheck — and it’s only going to get worse

CNBC: Many Americans think they’re insulated from climate change. Their finances indicate otherwise

Let me leave you on these happy notes:

• Last year alone, 28 big weather disasters (each causing more than $1 billion in damages) cost a total of $93 billion, the highest on record. Over the last decade, big weather disasters caused more than $1.2 trillion in reported damages. The actual damages were significantly higher because the government doesn’t count disasters where damages are less than $1 billion. 

• According to the Center for Energy Poverty and Climate, the average price to cool a home will be $719 this summer, up 9 percent over last year. 

• One study predicts that rising temperatures could increase food inflation by more than 3 percent annually in the next decade. 

• The First Street Foundation, a climate-risk research organization, says nearly 36 million homes face rising insurance costs or reduced coverage, and homes in parts of the United States are becoming uninsurable.

• Atlantic Council has predicted that the United States could lose an average of $100 billion annually from lost labor productivity due to extreme heat. Productivity losses already affect all regions and sectors of the national economy. The council says productivity losses could double by 2030 and rise to $500 billion nationwide by mid-century. 

• Realtor.com says nearly 45 percent of homes in the United States, worth about $22 trillion, are at risk of severe or extreme damage from floods, high winds, wildfires or heat. 

• Just 55% of Americans believe global warming will “hurt them a moderate amount,” according to a new study by Stanford University and Resources for the Future.

• An American born in 2024 can expect to pay about $500,000 during their lifetime as a result of climate change’s financial impacts, according to a recent study by ICF, a consulting firm.

• The economic fallout will be “increasingly adverse” with each additional degree of warming, the report said. For example, 2°F of additional warming is expected to cause more than twice the economic harm than an increase of 1°F.

Young people should consider all this as a generational tax.

Can you believe we still have to deal with climate denialism?

Or what Project 2025 is promising along these lines?

• Dismantling climate programs

• Expanding fossil fuels

• Weakening environmental regulations, like relaxing fuel economy standards for vehicles

• Reorganizing or eliminating key climate and environmental offices, such as dismantling NOAA and privatizing weather forecasting services

• Installing political appointees to oversee scientific activities at federal agencies

• End U.S. participation in global climate efforts, including cutting off USAID funding for climate resilience in vulnerable countries.

• Promoting climate skepticism by referring to "environmental extremism" as "anti-human.”

Think your vote doesn’t matter?

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