The Good Earth and SWB

The Millets stunningly merge art, science and engineering. 

After Francois Millet painted “The Sower” for which he was criticized, Felix Theodore Millet;

evolved the concept of the bicycle to that of a motorcycle powered by a radial engine;

Millet's radial engine inspired one which would power flight;

My antecedent, Sylla, financed Bleriot’s first flight across “The Manche,” the English Channel. He then turned Saint Lunaire i to a resort; a celebration of life.

Nearby, Mont-Saint -Michel

represents the spiritual and architectural evolution of mankind, to Civilization - in the 13th Century; as depicted in Henry Adams’ Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres. 

The Medieval Imagination 

Review: “Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres is a record not of a literal jouney but of a meditative journey across time and space into the medieval imagination. Using the architecture, sculpture, and stained glass of the two locales as a starting point, Adams breathes life into what others might see merely as monuments of a past civilization. With daring and inventive conceits, Adams looks at the ordinary people, places, and events in the context of the social conventions and systems of thought and belief of the thirteenth century turning the study of history into a kind of theater.”

Sadly, as depicted in Barbary Tuchman's A Distant Mirror;

the 14th Century was dominated by plague and death; a reminder of the fact that yellow fever and malaria had to be conquered (with the collaboration of Dr. Carlos Finlay, tropical medicine specialist of Cuba) before the U.S. could successfully build the Panama Canal;

the path between the seas;

This achievement has led to the grand delusion that Civilization is achieved by science and engineering. Civilization is created by inspiration, imagination and courage.

The Connection; Art, Science and Imagination

Einstein 

The Millet motorcycle, designed in 1892 by Félix Théodore Millet, 

may have been the first motorcycle to use pneumatic tires. It had an unusual radial-configuration rotary engine incorporated into the rear wheel, believed to be the first one ever used to power a person-carrying vehicle of any type. Wikipedia

Actually, the first man-carrying vehicle was invented by Nicolas Cugnot, in 1769. It was invented as a farrier- to carry cannon barrels.

Exponential Disruption-From GM to SWB

The Economist

The $174bn for electric vehicles in President Joe Biden’s American Jobs Plan, unveiled on March 31st, dwarfs the amount the Obama administration spent bailing out Detroit in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. Yet it is also less than one-tenth of the $2trn in total spending envisaged by the plan, of which half would go to measures designed to lessen climate change. As we report this week, it is a vast undertaking.

That it may, even so, be too small is a measure of the unconscionable size of the problem it addresses. In 2015, when the countries of the world agreed in Paris to reduce net greenhouse-gas emissions to zero well before the end of the century, they took on a task unlike any other in human history: to remake the fundamentals of industrial civilisation on a planetary scale. In essence everything that emits carbon dioxide needs to be replaced by something which does not. This means that the vast majority of the world’s power stations, cars, tractors, ships, planes, steel works, furnaces, cement factories and more have to go, and ways of making replacements powered by some other energy source have to be deployed on a planetary scale.

Even when the successor technologies exist, as they do for cars and vans, the industrial realignment required will be enormous—hence the $174bn for electric vehicles. In many areas such alternatives do not yet exist at scale—hence a similar amount of spending in Mr Biden’s plan for research and development. This includes welcome provision for a tool which is often ignored: the building of full-up demonstration plants for various new technologies. These should go some way to bridging the “valley of death” between promising innovations and industry-upending roll-outs.

Add that spending on R&D and electric vehicles to similarly generous amounts for clean electricity, railways and urban transit, transmission lines and more, and you run through $1trn pretty fast—which is probably why, when campaigning, Mr Biden said he would spend $2trn on such investments. But even this more modest proposal will encounter fierce opposition from Republicans, very few of whom are willing to acknowledge the urgency of climate action and hardly any of whom are willing to face the fact that it means that industries such as coal mining, and mythic devices such as ’69 Chevys, really have had their day—even those that boast a 396, Fuelie heads and a Hurst on the floor.

As we argue in our leader , a right-headed right-wing party could provide really constructive opposition to a plan like this, not just attacking some of its inefficiencies but also adding to its overall effectiveness. The measure Mr Biden is proposing pushes industry towards new technologies through an energy-efficiency and clean-electricity standard. Orthodox economists would tell you that broader effects could be achieved much more efficiently through a carbon tax. Pricing pollution has not always been anathema to Republicans. George H.W. Bush’s administration put a price on sulphur emissions in 1990; John McCain campaigned on a carbon-pricing system in 2008. But the idea of such a device being added to Mr Biden’s plans by today’s Republicans seems inconceivable given their besetting climate nihilism and the unwillingness to talk seriously about emissions cuts.

You could argue that, in global terms, this is a bit of a sideshow. The developing world increasingly dominates emissions, and it faces a much more daunting challenge in reducing them than a rich country like America does: as Adam Tooze, an economic historian, recently remarked, “The entire drama of the political economy of climate change is, broadly speaking, Asian.” What is emitted in China and India over the next 50 years will matter more to America’s climate than what is emitted in America will. But what America, Europe, Japan and others do still matters. It matters because it will hasten the elimination of some important sources of greenhouse gas; it matters because it will hasten the development of non-emitting technologies; and it matters because, along with the provision of a lot of cross-border finance as per the Paris agreement, it can show the rest of the world that these countries are truly committed to climate action. 

For a long time that was not a claim that America could make. That will not be true if Congress can turn Mr Biden's ambitious plans into meaningful legislation.

SWB, the Imagination and the "Bank of Dreams?

The founder and leader of a small business which is prominent in water remediation is located in fracking-rich Pennsylvania, one of the “keystone states” in the 2020 US Presidential election. The chief executive of this Pa. company calls the U.S. Eximbank the “bank of dreams.” US Eximbank, formed in 1934 by FDR, has provided the credit insurance and guaranties whereby this bank must be streamlined to move faster because the U.S. is being outcompeted by the EU. The forfaiting-based methodology used by EU countries to sell to their former colonies in Asia, Africa and South America outcompetes the U.S.. Because of the efficient flow of credit information on buyers, European banks are able to process structured trade finance transactions in a time of 2 weeks; what takes Eximbank 6 months to process.