What the Iranian Government Could Use Now

A U.S. embassy to sic 'students' on, to distract the attention of Iranian anti-government protesters. If only the ayatollahs didn't shoot their bolt with that strategy 30 years ago. Here are a few tweets from Iranian protesters, courtesy of Andrew Sullivan's Atlantic blog (the photo above is from his blog as well):

- reports of large pro-Gov Baseej militia in front of UK embassy Tehran

- Khamenei indicate in last Friday prayers that Gov relationship with UK will become bad

- we expect that Gov will arrange for demo outside UK embassy to become serious - maybe cut diplomatic ties with UK

- Gov demos outside UK embassy in Tehran today shouting 'death to England' - 'death to BBC'

"Death to England"? "Death to the BBC"? What red-blooded Iranian Islamic revolutionary can get excited about that? Another Iranian Twitterer notes,

- Today is aniversary of raiding of USA embassy in Tehran 1979 - #Iranelection - today Gov planning anti UK demo outside UK embassy!!!!

Somehow, I doubt that stirring up the pot with the U.K. is going to help the Iranian establishment much. At this late date, using the U.K. to stir up revolutionary, anti-Western, or anti-imperialist sentiment sounds as archaic as cries of "Perfidious Albion" -- probably, even to Iranians, who seem especially sensitive about past perceived slights to their national honor. In any case, the U.K. has already started to evacuate the families of its diplomats. What happens if it evacuates its embassy too? What's Khamenei going to do, have his 'students' lay siege to the Canadian embassy? I doubt even the most zealous Islamic revolutionary would get excited about that. Khamenei and Ahmadinejad would be better off hoping that the Stratfor's George Friedman is right, and that the anti-government protesters represent only a vocal minority, with the current Iranian establishment enjoying broader popular support. Time will tell, I guess.

George Friedman on the Iranian Election

Interesting column on the Iranian election by George Friedman of Stratfor, "Western Misconception Meets Iran Reality" (Hat Tip: RealClearWorld). Below are a few excerpts:

There are undoubtedly people who want to liberalize the Iranian regime. They are to be found among the professional classes in Tehran, as well as among students. Many speak English, making them accessible to the touring journalists, diplomats and intelligence people who pass through. They are the ones who can speak to Westerners, and they are the ones willing to speak to Westerners. And these people give Westerners a wildly distorted view of Iran. They can create the impression that a fantastic liberalization is at hand — but not when you realize that iPod-owning Anglophones are not exactly the majority in Iran.

[...]

Some still charge that Ahmadinejad cheated. That is certainly a possibility, but it is difficult to see how he could have stolen the election by such a large margin. Doing so would have required the involvement of an incredible number of people, and would have risked creating numbers that quite plainly did not jibe with sentiment in each precinct. Widespread fraud would mean that Ahmadinejad manufactured numbers in Tehran without any regard for the vote. But he has many powerful enemies who would quickly have spotted this and would have called him on it. Mousavi still insists he was robbed, and we must remain open to the possibility that he was, although it is hard to see the mechanics of this.

It also misses a crucial point: Ahmadinejad enjoys widespread popularity. He doesn’t speak to the issues that matter to the urban professionals, namely, the economy and liberalization. But Ahmadinejad speaks to three fundamental issues that accord with the rest of the country [piety, corruption, and an assertive national security posture as a salve for Iranians still bitter over their country's pyrrhic draw in the Iran-Iraq War -- Friedman elaborates on each of these issues in his column].

[...]

Perhaps the greatest factor in Ahmadinejad’s favor is that Mousavi spoke for the better districts of Tehran — something akin to running a U.S. presidential election as a spokesman for Georgetown and the Lower East Side. Such a base will get you hammered, and Mousavi got hammered. Fraud or not, Ahmadinejad won and he won significantly. That he won is not the mystery; the mystery is why others thought he wouldn’t win.

The image above, of a post-election protest, comes from Andrew Sullivan's Atlantic blog, where he is posting the tweets of some of those tech-savvy Anglophones who Friedman notes are not exactly representative of the broader Iranian society.

Tilting at Windmills: Peter Huber on Quixotic Efforts to Limit Carbon Emissions

John Mauldin's Outside the Box e-mail newsletter this week ("On Energy Production and U.S. Intelligence Failures") features two essays worth reading, especially the first one ("Bound to Burn") by Peter Huber. A few excerpts from Huber's essay follow.

Cut to the chase. We rich people can't stop the world's 5 billion poor people from burning the couple of trillion tons of cheap carbon that they have within easy reach. We can't even make any durable dent in global emissions -- because emissions from the developing world are growing too fast, because the other 80 percent of humanity desperately needs cheap energy, and because we and they are now part of the same global economy. What we can do, if we're foolish enough, is let carbon worries send our jobs and industries to their shores, making them grow even faster, and their carbon emissions faster still.

We don't control the global supply of carbon.

[...]

We no longer control the demand for carbon, either. The 5 billion poor -- the other 80 percent -- are already the main problem, not us. Collectively, they emit 20 percent more greenhouse gas than we do. We burn a lot more carbon individually, but they have a lot more children. Their fecundity has eclipsed our gluttony, and the gap is now widening fast. China, not the United States, is now the planet's largest emitter. Brazil, India, Indonesia, South Africa, and others are in hot pursuit. And these countries have all made it clear that they aren't interested in spending what money they have on low-carb diets. It is idle to argue, as some have done, that global warming can be solved -- decades hence -- at a cost of 1 to 2 percent of the global economy. Eighty percent of the global population hasn't signed on to pay more than 0 percent.

[...]

Might we instead manage to give the world something cheaper than carbon? The moon-shot law of economics says yes, of course we can. If we just put our minds to it, it will happen. Atom bomb, moon landing, ultracheap energy -- all it takes is a triumph of political will.

Really? For the very poorest, this would mean beating the price of the free rain forest that they burn down to clear land to plant a subsistence crop. For the slightly less poor, it would mean beating the price of coal used to generate electricity at under 3 cents per kilowatt-hour.

[...]

And with one important exception [nuclear power], which we will return to shortly, no carbon-free fuel or technology comes remotely close to being able to do that. Fossil fuels are extremely cheap because geological forces happen to have created large deposits of these dense forms of energy in accessible places. Find a mountain of coal, and you can just shovel gargantuan amounts of energy into the boxcars.

Shoveling wind and sun is much, much harder. Windmills are now 50-story skyscrapers. Yet one windmill generates a piddling 2 to 3 megawatts. A jumbo jet needs 100 megawatts to get off the ground; Google is building 100-megawatt server farms. Meeting New York City's total energy demand would require 13,000 of those skyscrapers spinning at top speed, which would require scattering about 50,000 of them across the state, to make sure that you always hit enough windy spots. To answer the howls of green protest that inevitably greet realistic engineering estimates like these, note that real-world systems must be able to meet peak, not average, demand; that reserve margins are essential; and that converting electric power into liquid or gaseous fuels to power the existing transportation and heating systems would entail substantial losses. What was Mayor Bloomberg thinking when he suggested that he might just tuck windmills into Manhattan? Such thoughts betray a deep ignorance about how difficult it is to get a lot of energy out of sources as thin and dilute as wind and sun.

It's often suggested that technology improvements and mass production will sharply lower the cost of wind and solar. But engineers have pursued these technologies for decades, and while costs of some components have fallen, there is no serious prospect of costs plummeting and performance soaring as they have in our laptops and cell phones. When you replace conventional with renewable energy, everything gets bigger, not smaller -- and bigger costs more, not less. Even if solar cells themselves were free, solar power would remain very expensive because of the huge structures and support systems required to extract large amounts of electricity from a source so weak that it takes hours to deliver a tan.

The second essay in this week's Outside the Box newsletter, "Torture and the U.S. Intelligence Failure", by Stratfor's George Friedman, I won't excerpt from here, as this post is long enough already, but it stands out from some of the more hysterical recent punditry on this subject in its calmly-worded survey of the subject.

The photo above, of Denmark's Middelgrunden offshore windmill farm, comes from Daylife.com. As a small, geographically compact country on the windy North Sea, Denmark may be one of the few places where wind energy can fulfill a large percentage of electricity. According to Wikipedia, wind power currently provides 19% of Denmark's electricity (the largest percentage provided by wind power anywhere). Globally, Wikipedia says that wind power fuels 1.5% of electricity use, though this number sounds a little high.

Stratfor's Predictions for the Next Hundred Years, Part II

Again via John Mauldin, George Friedman of Stratfor offers some of his predictions for the rest of this century, "The Next 100 Years". Below are a couple more excerpts.

Poland hasn't been a great power since the sixteenth century. But it once was—and, I think, will be again. Two factors make this possible. First will be the decline of Germany. Its economy is large and still growing, but it has lost the dynamism it has had for two centuries. In addition, its population is going to fall dramatically in the next fifty years, further undermining its economic power. Second, as the Russians press on the Poles from the east, the Germans won't have an appetite for a third war with Russia. The United States, however, will back Poland, providing it with massive economic and technical support. Wars—when your country isn't destroyed—stimulate economic growth, and Poland will become the leading power in a coalition of states facing the Russians.

This next excerpt seems a little less plausible:

Today, developed countries see the problem as keeping immigrants out. Later in the first half of the twenty-first century [after the population bust Friedman predicts, as birthrates drop in the developing world], the problem will be persuading them to come. Countries will go so far as to pay people to move there. This will include the United States, which will be competing for increasingly scarce immigrants and will be doing everything it can to induce Mexicans to come to the United States—an ironic but inevitable shift.

These changes will lead to the final crisis of the twenty-first century. Mexico currently is the fifteenth-largest economy in the world. As the Europeans slip out, the Mexicans, like the Turks, will rise in the rankings until by the late twenty-first century they will be one of the major economic powers in the world.

A population bust is certainly plausible, and so might competition for skilled immigrants at that point, but I am skeptical that the U.S. will be paying to import unskilled immigrants from Mexico by the end of the century. Also, the idea of Mexico developing as an economic power is at odds with the recent report by the U.S. Military's Joint Forces Command that Mexico (along with Pakistan) is in danger of becoming a failed state (see "Among top U.S. fears: A failed Mexican state" in the January 9th edition of the International Herald Tribune). It also doesn't take into account the negative effects of Mexico's declining oil production.

The photo of the U.S.-Mexico border above comes from the IHT article mentioned parenthetically in the preceding paragraph.

Stratfor's Predictions for the Next Hundred Years, Part I

Via John Mauldin, George Friedman of Stratfor offers some of his predictions for the rest of this century, "The Next 100 Years". Below are a few excerpts; I'll post a couple more separately to keep this post from getting too long.

If we view the beginning of the twenty-first century as the dawn of the American Age (superseding the European Age), we see that it began with a group of Muslims seeking to re- create the Caliphate—the great Islamic empire that once ran from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Inevitably, they had to strike at the United States in an attempt to draw the world's primary power into war, trying to demonstrate its weakness in order to trigger an Islamic uprising. The United States responded by invading the Islamic world. But its goal wasn't victory. It wasn't even clear what victory would mean. Its goal was simply to disrupt the Islamic world and set it against itself, so that an Islamic empire could not emerge.

The United States doesn't need to win wars. It needs to simply disrupt things so the other side can't build up sufficient strength to challenge it.

[...]

The U.S.–Islamist war is already ending and the next conflict is in sight. Russia is re-creating its old sphere of influence, and that sphere of influence will inevitably challenge the United States. The Russians will be moving westward on the great northern European plain. As Russia reconstructs its power, it will encounter the U.S.-dominated NATO in the three Baltic countries—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—as well as in Poland. There will be other points of friction in the early twenty-first century, but this new cold war will supply the flash points after the U.S.–Islamist war dies down.

The Russians can't avoid trying to reassert power, and the United States can't avoid trying to resist. But in the end Russia can't win. Its deep internal problems, massively declining population, and poor infrastructure ultimately make Russia's long- term survival prospects bleak. And the second cold war, less frightening and much less global than the first, will end as the first did, with the collapse of Russia.

There are many who predict that China is the next challenger to the United States, not Russia. I don't agree with that view for three reasons. First, when you look at a map of China closely, you see that it is really a very isolated country physically. With Siberia in the north, the Himalayas and jungles to the south, and most of China's population in the eastern part of the country, the Chinese aren't going to easily expand. Second, China has not been a major naval power for centuries, and building a navy requires a long time not only to build ships but to create well-trained and experienced sailors.

Third, there is a deeper reason for not worrying about China. China is inherently unstable. Whenever it opens its borders to the outside world, the coastal region becomes prosperous, but the vast majority of Chinese in the interior remain impoverished. This leads to tension, conflict, and instability. It also leads to economic decisions made for political reasons, resulting in inefficiency and corruption. This is not the first time that China has opened itself to foreign trade, and it will not be the last time that it becomes unstable as a result. Nor will it be the last time that a figure like Mao emerges to close the country off from the outside, equalize the wealth—or poverty—and begin the cycle anew. There are some who believe that the trends of the last thirty years will continue indefinitely. I believe the Chinese cycle will move to its next and inevitable phase in the coming decade. Far from being a challenger, China is a country the United States will be trying to bolster and hold together as a counterweight to the Russians. Current Chinese economic dynamism does not translate into long-term success.