Ukraine putting out its begging bowl at the Berlin “Restoration and Infrastructure Conference” this week has led to a smidge more press attention to the impact of Russia’s campaign against Ukraine’s electrical system. Similar to coverage of the war as a whole, bad information is being dribbled out, accompanied by doses of hopium as to how conditions could be made markedly better if the West only provided more weapons, money, and other salves.
Another telling aspect is that the articles are only willing to project out to Ukraine having the high odds of a cold and dark winter, and the impact of that on households. It’s as if we were given old fashioned naval maps, with their warnings at the periphery, “Beyond here lie dragons.” They avert their eyes from the fact that highly constrained power translates into massive constraints on and likely cascading problems with commerce.
Even if you consider only the difficulties for residents, it is not just that they will be in freezing, blackout conditions come winter. What about food? What about getting gas, since many stations rely on electricity to run their pumps?
And when we get to commerce, just start with processing transactions. What happens when Internet access is limited, and retailers and suppliers can’t take card or electronic payments on their merchant systems? Or for that matter, banks if theres is only power for a few hours a day?
And most of all, what about sewage, which John Helmer identified as the big chokepoint in terms of municipalities having a hope of remaining habitable? From his post earlier this week:
Independently of one another, Russian and Ukrainian reporters are confirming the impact of the power losses on the operation of water and sewerage systems in the majority of Ukrainian cities. According to Oleg Popenko, a Ukrainian expert on energy for communal services, “Armageddon has already arrived. We just don’t feel it yet. But the residents of Poltava, for example, feel it, because since May 5 of this year, 120,000 residents of the city receive water by the hour and use sewerage by the hour. You can imagine what happened in Zhitomir when the central sewerage collector didn’t work there for a week, but now in Poltava [it’s been] a month. And this is the problem with water utilities in 70% of Ukrainian cities. Water utilities are probably more important than rest of the infrastructure in the city. Heat and electricity can be replaced somehow, and you can go somewhere. But if the sewer system breaks down in a city, the city is no longer viable in principle.”
Also note that there is some artful positioning on the extent of the devastation. Ukraine’s biggest energy company DTEK confirmed Washington Post reporting. From DTEK on June 7:
In a recent Washington Post article, DTEK CEO Maxim Timchenko revealed that russia’s missile attacks have devastated Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, with the country’s largest private power producer losing 86 percent of its generating capacity.
“What makes the situation worse is that many of the electrical facilities have been targeted repeatedly — a cycle of destruction, recovery, destruction,” Timchenko told the Washington Post. He pointed to one DTEK power unit that was repaired just weeks ago only to be struck again over the weekend, saying “Now it’s just gone.”
Yet various new reports state that Ukraine has lost only 50% of its generation. This is plausible given that DTEK in 2019 and 2020 supplied only 18% to 19% of Ukraine’s electricity, per Fitch. So the math could work. But 86% for DTEK versus 50% overall would mean DTEK has been singularly unlucky. So it’s not unreasonable to think that 50% is an understatement.
BBC provided one Ukraine electricity update this week. The Twitterverse amplified this section:
If Russia continues to attack power plants, the worst-case scenario is that come winter Ukrainians could be spending up to 20 hours a day without power and heating, according to Ukraine’s largest private energy company DTEK. Part of the issue is that Ukraine’s thermal and hydroelectric power stations are difficult and expensive to fix.
They skipped over the significance of this part:
Ukraine is buying energy from the European Union to try to cover its shortfall. Its energy ministry said it was planning on Wednesday to import its largest amount of power to date. However, this is not enough to make up its deficit, meaning nationwide power cuts have been planned during an eight-hour window, from 3pm to 11pm, in order to protect critical infrastructure such a hospitals and military facilities.
The BBC piece made it sound as if 3 PM to 11 PM power outages are the new normal (although in fairness “power cuts” could mean rolling blackouts in this window). Anyone who has read about load balancing in connection with solar power knows that residential usage peaks when people come home from work. They cook dinner (and open their fridges, also increasing power demand), turn on lights, turn on air conditioning or turn up heat, depending on the time of year, and in normal circumstances, many turn on entertainment devices.
So this window is part of the business day and the most active time for households. In the US, the consumer sector is the largest user of electricity, but represents less than half the total (commercial and industrial are classified separately). Ukraine is probably not wildly different (it probably has a larger industrial sector, but that was concentrated in the Donbass, which Russia now deems to be part of Russia). So even though the outage time is only 8 hours a day, on a guesstimated basis, it seems consistent with a 50% reduction. But when you consider the profile, it already represents a lot of pain for individuals.
A new story in the Wall Street Journal applies as much porcine maquillage as possible to this dire and worsening situation. Key extracts:
Ukraine is imposing blackouts, launching hasty repairs and hunting for spare parts after a Russian bombing campaign targeting power infrastructure in recent months slashed the country’s electricity production by half.
The Russian attacks, using waves of missiles and explosive drones, have sparked fears of a painful winter should the power outages severely hamper the economy and lead to an exodus from cities. Ukraine has long pleaded with the West for more air-defense systems, and Ukrainian officials say deliveries have been insufficient to protect both cities and the front lines.
In reviving and expanding a tactic used earlier in the war, Ukrainian officials say Russia is seeking to spark a humanitarian crisis as part of an effort to break Ukrainians’ will to fight and force a capitulation.
The streets of Kyiv are already filled with the sound and fumes of generators, as power companies impose hourslong blackouts to manage consumption and carry out repairs. Ukraine has increased electricity imports from European Union neighbors it was exporting power to as recently as March. And repair crews are working across its energy grid to restore capacity, sometimes only to see the same facilities struck again.
This section implies, and more Ukraine complaints in the article later explicitly claim, that this campaign could be neutralized if the West provided more air defenses. While technically accurate, it breezes past the fact that that’s na ga happen. Ukraine’s former Soviet weaponry generally outperformed Western replacements. As anyone who has been even dimly following this story knows, the US and NATO have been scrounging to find more Patriot missiles, even as Russia has been successfully hunting and destroying the platforms. Ukraine has also been pinning far too much hope on the eventual delivery of F-16 fighter jets, which the Anglosphere media has dutifully also overhyped. And we see no mention of ever-more effective Russian signal jamming.
It’s not surprising to see frustration and upset on Twitter:
Once again… we've a Full House. Ukraine is being pummeled. Air defense is as scarce as electricity. pic.twitter.com/jsV35z8CgX
— ₦₳V𝚜𝚝é𝚟𝚊 🇷🇺 ᴢ (@Navsteva) June 14, 2024
🇺🇦💡 ALL THERMAL POWER PLANTS IN UKRAINE HAVE BEEN DAMAGED OR DESTROYED, THEIR SHARE IN ELECTRICITY GENERATION REDUCED TO 5% – UKRENERGO
▪️ The hydropower sector also suffered losses: 2 HPPs are completely out of operation. pic.twitter.com/3ACnTm1MNX
— Malcolm X (@malcolmx653459) June 13, 2024
The Journal piece turns to the notion that Ukraine can restore service as the war is on, which is akin to bailing water out of a badly leaking boat:
DTEK estimates the price of restoring the energy system at $50 billion…Focused on maintenance, they are looking for spare parts, equipment and investment to keep Ukraine’s grid working. To address the need for parts, [Maxim] Timchenko [CEO of DTEK] said DTEK has been working with countries across Europe to visit decommissioned power plants to scour for usable parts. At least 10 countries have opened their doors.
During the Ukraine Recovery Conference in Berlin, Ukraine’s Energy Ministry said it helped coordinate a dozen new cooperation agreements for rebuilding and maintaining the country’s power grid. State power company Ukrenergo said it has received 30.4 million euros, equivalent to around $33 million, from Germany to support energy infrastructure. The EU said 1.4 billion euros in grants will be available to businesses working in the sector. DTEK announced partnerships with U.S. energy companies Honeywell International and GE Vernova as well as French energy company Schneider Electric, which has donated 43,000 pieces of emergency equipment worth 4 million euros since February 2022.
In fairness, the article does acknowledge, as minimally as possible, that energy facilities are “sometimes” destroyed again after repairs.
The Journal describes Ukraine plans to rely more on solar and other distributed generation, with DTEK having launched a new wind farm even while the war was on. But the article also describes the use of generators as a stopgap, without acknowledging that they are not a viable ongoing solution. Again hoisting from Helmer:
On June 7, a video recorded stroll down one of Odessa’s shopping streets revealed an emergency generating set providing electricity for almost all of the commercial establishments.
“This is in no way sustainable,” comments a NATO military engineer. “Note how each shop has its own genset. The generators in the video are not designed for the duty cycle they’re being run at. They’ll wear out soon enough. The military, including deployed NATO personnel, use the shops and the gensets, too. The idea of pooling their resources, sharing load among gensets, thus reducing wear and tear on the whole network, while collectivizing fuel and maintenance costs, doesn’t seem to have occurred to them. To be sure, what follows will be no lack of electrocutions, carbon monoxide poisonings, and fires. We can bet the manifestations of the social pathology we’re seeing here have been factored in by the General Staff. Their attack point will now be to stop fuel, engine oil, spares, and replacements from getting through.”
Russia is working on two overlapping tracks, that of degrading Ukraine’s power system so severely as to cripple its military’s ability to supply itself and communicate, with the ancillary effect of getting civilians to leave cities, which would give Russia more degrees of freedom in taking them, if it has to resort to offensive operations. At the same time, it is relentlessly attriting Ukraine’s men and weapons in the east. Russia can decide how to manage the tempo of each campaign. It will be interesting to see which vector Russia prefers over time, since this may also give early signals as to how Russia is thinking about the end game. For instance, more emphasis on the electrical campaign could presage Russia eventually asserting control over western Ukraine, which they would regard as an unwelcome necessity. Consistent with that notion, John Mearshimer on Judge Napolitano pointed out yesterday (starting at 8:58):
Ukrainians needs more manpower on the battlefield, they need more weaponry, and we don’t have weaponry to give them in meaningful numbers, and we certainly don’t have any manpower to give them. So there is not much we can do at this point in time. And I would argue, by the way, that by doubling down the way we are doubling down, especially by giving Ukraine a 10 year military commitment, we’re just guaranteeing that Russians have a powerful incentive to really wreck Ukraine.
Mearshimer did at least disagree with Gilbert Doctorow and said he thought Russia would not flatten Kiev. But that view does not make the overall trajectory that much better.
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I’m glad for once to see someone mention water and sewerage, something often overlooked in all the high level military/geostrategic theorising. Ukraine is topographically flat, which means that nearly all its water services require active pumping.
This has clear strategic implications (nevermind the hardships this will cause for millions of Ukrainians). There is a good reason why most uncontentious national boundaries follow watersheds, not the obvious boundary of rivers – because once a river is shared, you need intensive co-operation on a wide range of issues, from fishing to bridges and dams and flood controls and… water quality. This is obviously unlikely for many years after whatever resolves the war.
Since Russia needs to control the mouth of the Dnieper for strategic purposes, and needs to control the lower dams and canals for water supply, the obvious question is what happens if a rump Ukraine state is either unwilling or unable to maintain infrastructure upriver. Not just dams – what happens if they pump all of Kievs sewerage into the Dnieper? Russia can hardly complain if its crippled Ukraines infrastructure.
So Russia has three choices – seek complete control over most of the Dnieper watershed (which is most of Ukraine), or accept that it has no control over it becoming a sewer and construct alternative infrastructure, or it can try to ensure that whatever deal finally finishes the war includes a comprehensive watershed management. The latter seems very convoluted and unlikely, not least because Russia might then have no choice but to pay for a lot of Ukraines infrastructure repair. So this may well be a major factor in Russias calculations – maybe even more so than the more obvious military calculations. Water infrastructure is very, very expensive, its not something that can be overlooked.
‘what happens if a rump Ukraine state is either unwilling or unable to maintain infrastructure upriver. Not just dams – what happens if they pump all of Kievs sewerage into the Dnieper?’
Considering the fact that the Ukrainians were crazy enough to blow up the Dnieper dam causing all sorts of catastrophic flooding downstream, by this stage the Russians would put nothing past them.
I doubt very much if Kiev will belong to Novo-Ukraïna. It is too Russian to be left in the hands of the Banderites.
Seems to argue for Sauve qui peut. US/NATO/EU have everything to answer for in aiming Ukraine at Russia. The PTB had no idea of the reality of Russia. Poor Ukraine, so far from God so close to the West.
if it has to resort to offensive operations
Paul Craig Roberts is the only one I’ve read that asserts that Putin bungled by not going offensive, early and in a big way. He claims that by going slowly and cautiously, the potential damage in life and expansion to a global war is much greater. The counter argument I’ve heard is that Russia did not initially have the means and that Putin primary goal is, and continues to be, the preservation of Russian (and Ukrainian) life. By trying to minimize Ukraine’s infrastructure and not going in with overwhelming force, I have to wonder if PCR is correct. I don’t know.
Yea, Putin should take advice from Paul Craig Roberts, just like Yeltsin did from Jeffrey Sachs. Shock (and awe) therapy all the way.
I can’t put my finger on it, but I have seen a relatively recent interview with Sachs where he claims his advice was not followed when he was an advisor in the 90s. Sachs had milder reforms in mind, but Yeltsin listened to the Harvard boys who were all in on the looting. And it may have been a different interview, but Sachs also claimed that the US higher ups did go with his suggested policies in a different country, but denied those same policies when it came to Russia, despite the countries being in similar situations. They gave Sachs no good reason for doing so.
The US has wanted to break Russia apart for its own benefit for quite some time.
That being said, I don’t think Russia should take PCR’s advice either. Russia has made it clear to the rest of the world how untrustworthy the West is over the last couple years, and I don’t think that would have happened had they used the “shock and awe” approach.
Sachs has been completely unwilling to accept culpability for his role in Russia in the 1990s. He goes through mental gymnastics to depict himself as innocent. If his advice was being ignored, he should have quit.
My sense is that his inability to admit fault is not about his image with the public, but his perception of who he is.
That’s what I haven’t been able to figure out – whether he was really ignored then or if he’s trying to bolster his public or self image now without a mea culpa. Because at the time, it was his name that was everywhere in regards to those reforms. Sachs was portrayed as the leader, and I couldn’t give you the name of any of the other “Harvard boys” who were involved at the time off the top of my head.
If he really was opposed, he should have quit, but not everybody does. Could be that he really did complain and couldn’t get the word out much due to the lack of interwebs in the early 90s, but my recollection was that at the time, it was his signature on the deal so to speak.
He does seem to be on the right side of history now though, and I’m glad he’s been so outspoken in recent years and able to get the word out.
On behalf of Sachs, he did yield power in Russia at the time. Yegor Gaidar and Anatoly Chubais were main culprits who pushed trough the privatization at high speed.
Their main aim was to prevent return to the planned economy, which was somewhat serious possibility when you combine unhappy population with a democracy of sorts.
As for looting, the first round happened already during Gorbatchev’s perestroika, and it was mostly the people who played the system then that were in the best positions to do the big looting during the privatization. Basically US investors were involved only in the third round, when all the previous looting was being legalized and consolidated.
The US has wanted to break Russia apart for its own benefit for quite some time, and he joined that gang, and was directly involved in the process, and was thinking that it was all a charity work. There is no way he could be lying about everything in order to make himself look innocent.
All Western advisors advising the East are doing it in the interest of the West, and have always been. They think that Russians (and Ukrainians, and Poles, and Taiwanese, and everyone else) should do what fits their own Western ass. Aforementioned PCR wants shock and awe because it fits him, not Russian people or anyone else outside his own bubble. Being outside of USA, it might be more obvious to me than to those in it.
I think Sachs has talked about loan guarantees and aid that were extended to Poland, in order to further market reforms, but when Sachs asked for the same treatment for Russia, he was astonished and shocked that such loans were refused. If memory serves, I think Sachs said the one who delivered (and most likely had a hand in the decision) was (quelle surprise!) Dick Cheney.
There was a hell of a lot more going on. For Sachs to talk only about loan guarantees is disingenuous re his role. But it is a good factoid re the real Western game plan for Russia.
It seems likely that there was no plan to try and “de-capitate” the regime, Russia thought that just the fear of it would be enough to bring Kiev to the table. And it almost worked, until it didn’t, then Russia had to go with Plan B. A reminder that you have to fight the war you get, not the one you want.
Realistically there are pros and cons on both sides to an attritional war. A long-term war of attrition probably favors Russia, because supply lines are much closer, vs. the long haul of weapons into Poland, then Lviv, then to the east. It seems we are now at the point where Ukraine is going to face a real crisis of manpower. This morning’s Military Summary Channel update featured Dima reporting that an entire brigade of the 42nd Ukrainian division went missing in the northern Kharkiv front. (“Hello my dear friends, you’re in the Military Summary Channel, and today’s short video we’re going to talk about the latest developments …)
The manpower losses of the UAF seem to be now 2000/day, which of course using simple math means 60k casualties a month. Keeping in mind the new mobilization law, Ukraine does have fresh recruits but the estimates I’ve seen are only 30k/month, and these are raw recruits with no combat experience and likely very little training.
Those “maths” don’t pencil out, as they say.
So, the West is now going to face the ultimate choice – send their own men and women to die, or just keep pumping confetti money and dwindling stocks of weapons into the project, to kick the can past elections.
Other than Macron, who may not even last much longer, there are so far no takers.
Im no expert but I thought the absurd destruction of the 1st Guards Tank Army looked like a de-capitation attempt. I also thought I had read of a large number of civic leaders who were arrested in the early days of the war. I suspect Putin did try a coup de main of Kiev but it failed. Where as the attempt succeeded with Mariupol which was definitely absolutely critical any war effort.
In my view PCR was incorrect in fact but correct in theory.
First, plan A was the correct plan and it was successful in showing that an agreement was possible and when that plan was rejected by Washington it showed world leaders that the imperialists (that is what neocons are) in Washington wanted war, as they always do. Internationally, this was a win for Russia which they would not have had if they had gone into the fight in a bigger way.
Second, the Russian military and the Russian economy in general had to prepare the country to navigate through the sanctions, secure the economy and prepare for what Putin believed would be a long war not only with Ukraine but with Washington. For that Russia must not only dramatically increase production of materiel but also reform corrupt elements within the military (I don’t believe Putin trusted the leadership), avoid destroying infrastructure and also human-rights abuses in order to win international support to some degree in order to gradually (important word) to encourage Putin’s higher goal to develop a multi-polar alternative to US imperialism. I think people, like PCR, don’t understand how Washington manages to control so much of the “international community” through a variety of methods involving some carrots and lots of sticks. Though Washington works in its propaganda outlets (the entire MSM) to demonize Putin in the most outrageous, puerile way copying the totalitarian regimes of the 30s, reasonably intelligent people can see the Orwellian aspect to all this although two out of three if my friends are fanatically attached to the Democrat Party and the notion that Putin is Hitler so I no longer talk about politics with them.
In short, I believe Putin has done the best he can managing a lot of moving pieces in a pretty good way–he is changing international politics in a big way sort of like Metternich.
PCR’s heart is in the right place, but he sometimes gets in a muddle when facts don’t conform to his ideology. All the “Putin should’ve gone big early” theorists are talking like Russia had the same capabilities in early 2022 that they have now and that they had the same level of knowledge about how NATO would react. And that Ukraine did not have air defense systems that were still intact and more reserves to draw upon back in 2022.
Where we are now is that the front line is creeping forward very slowly and Ukraine is losing troops at a rate where there will probably be another 100,000 KIA between now and US election day. No amount of big talk and federal money printing can do much to change that.
“Ukraine’s former Soviet weaponry generally outperformed Western replacements. As anyone who has been even dimly following this story knows, the US and NATO have been scrounging to find more Patriot missiles, even as Russia has been successfully hunting and destroying the platforms. Ukraine has also been pinning far too much hope on the eventual delivery of F-16 fighter jets, which the Anglosphere media has dutifully also overhyped. And we see no mention of ever-more effective Russian signal jamming.”
Given that many US systems of control over, for one example, comprador elites – from agreements on the siting of military bases to the use of the dollar as a reserve currency – are based on the use of effective force to maintain those systems of control across a wide spectrum; the thought occurs as to just what those comprador elites think about the credibility of US control and enforcement abilities when they daily witness the kind of issues described here?
“Even if you consider only the difficulties for residents, it is not just that they will be in freezing, blackout conditions come winter. What about food?”
You mean, a bit like Britain in winter? When poor people and many pensioners cannot afford to switch the heating on? In Britain, there are now over 2000 food banks used by over 3 million people. And we are not even being attacked by Russia!
Wait. Are you saying that the effects of Neoliberalism on a population are equivalent to them being attacked by a foreign power?
Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.
I think this has a lot to do with the complete separation of modern western political elites from reality, and their belief that the world is essentially one big Amazon store, where you can place an order for anything and have it delivered the next day. I’d be surprised if more than a scattering of western leaders and their entourages have had any technical education at all, or have the remotest idea what power generation and distribution involves.
The reality is that you can’t do anything in a modern country without electricity, and that there are so many potential points of failure that even to think of defending them all is pointless. But we don’t have a political class capable of understanding that.
Very good observation, Aurelien. The notion that “more air defense” is some sort of solution strikes me as particularly delusional. The entire European continent is running short on those systems, as most countries have given away systems that were subsequently destroyed by Russia.
Even if a large stock of systems could be somehow found, transported to Ukraine and moved into position without being discovered and destroyed by the Russians, there is the reality that those need to be carefully husbanded to protect military targets (airfields, troop concentrations) and used to protect against Russian air power. Ukraine is a huge country. There are just too many targets to protect with Patriots, even in the US such a thing would be impossible.
Then again, as we see in Gaza, when faced with an unsolvable problem, the go-to move for the West is fraud and lies. So perhaps this is just cope mixed with lies to soothe the Ukies.
“There are just too many targets to protect with Patriots, even in the US such a thing would be impossible.”
Patriot defends a relatively small area, maybe 60 mile radius. Some other “systems” need to cue Patriot radar to the targets. Jam comms! Jam ESA radar is difficult, Russia ELINT is studying it!.
What Ukraine needs is MEADS, oops that one was never built! Aegis SM X has higher altitude engagement, but those launchers can also fire nuclear armed cruise missiles, and I do not know of survivable mobile launchers for SM-X.
F-16 was widely deployed in the early 1980″s most airframes are 40 years old! And USAF can’t meet its budgeted readiness, how will Lockheed keep it flying without further wrecking USAF spare pools?
Whatever spares the EU donors will have will be consumed before any pilots are fit to challenge Russian SAMs.
Good luck with F-16!
The real “value” of F16s, I tend to think, is that they will have to be based in NATO countries and, as such, force Russia into a dilemma, or do they think.
TBH, I doubt Russians will think twice about flattening airbases in Poland, Romania, or the Baltics if NATO tries that shtick and send the ball right back. That’d only make things, eh, more complicated of course.
Ukraine or sheep dipped pilots flying NATO standard fighters including Mirage will require air refueling maybe over Poland, but more likely over Ukraine as distances to bomb Donbas are long.
Unlike AWACS, NATO does not own aerial refuelers, U.S. has plenty, UK and France have some. At any rate refuelers will be tracked and targeted…..
May as well shoot them over Poland.
One motive for basing outside Ukraine the support tail is expensive and not deep on supplies and support equipment.
Aurelien: Thanks for this observation. Yes, the big bourgeoisie and their servants (the government and big business in mutual parasitism) are detached from reality. I suspect that Queen Elizabeth knew better how to get around in a grocery store than Boris Johnson, Macron, Ursula VDL, Stoltenberg, Biden, and Trump do.
With basic transactions more linked by computers, and with many basic transactions now almost completely reliant on computers (how many tellers remain at a U.S. bank?), turning off the electricity turns off society.
You note the lack of technical education, but it only takes some basic curiosity to understand that society now relies on milking machines, refrigeration, an electric grid that is in place and has to be maintained, electric metro systems, and electric waffle irons.
Much of this is an indication of how flat and dull education is in Western business schools and economics departments, as well as the many Anglosphere law schools infected by “Law and Economics.”
Posit a functioning society!
More and more, I understand why Chairman Mao sent “intellectuals’ to the countryside to dig cabbages. Surely there is some kohlrabi plantation for the likes of Scholz and Van der Leyen.
Meanwhile, three blocks from me, construction workers are putting the finishing touches on the Turin campus of École Supérieure de Commerce de Paris.
Just what Italy needs: A plague of locusts.
Great idea – surely having them tend the cabbages is better than putting them in office to see if they can outlast one.
lyman alpha blob: Thanks for the laugh.
And it is debatable if the lettuce has a higher IQ or not than the Truss.
Yet, even if these people are wholly ignorant about technical issues, come on, they can ask. Merkel looked for advice with the pandemic. I mean, this people have no excuse if they do not rely on experts to assess them. Do they no longer do consultations? Do they turn deaf ears to what they are told if their beliefs become challenged? Or is it that they ask for consultation people who are similarly ignorant (the PMC bubble).
Oddly enough, I’ve just started writing one of my weekly essays on that very subject!
TBF Merkel was a physical chemist by training so she probably always had at least one toe in more technical circles.
Aurelian will probably have a way better thought-out thesis than me. Like you mentioned with the bubble though, my guess is the social elite feel a combination of discomfort and “splitting” towards technical society (worshipping some aspects while disdaining others, all born out of their own ignorance and need for ego protection).
How they rationalize it though is probably related to how the very term “expertise” has been corrupted. I’m not sure you can just blame the elites for the rationalization sticking though. It sort of follows from the implicit metaphysics most of Western society seems to have rattling around in its head.
CP Snow’s The Two Cultures has spread into a yawning chasm.
Huge C.P. Snow fan here; I read the entire Strangers and Brothers series when I was like thirteen and working my way through the adult section of the town library.
Those who rely upon “spreadsheet land” as a guide while in “real resource land” are bound to encounter some unpleasant surprises.
the lack of technical understanding is taught from a very young age. you see this horrifically in the youth where computers are just black boxes- college students who dont know how file trees work. in the quest to make devices more accessible, people are discouraged from learning how they work. people are like atoms, they want to be in the lowest energy configuration, and there is no reason for them to learn things in depth when you can coast by without.
and us politics is such a media game; people who play the media game win. the local campaign im working on spends so much time on messaging and picking outfits because that is what convinces people to vote. you dont have to understand policy, you just have to make people think you do. democracy falling into populism. everything is about messaging and not actual policy! and more and more i think the only way out is making the citizens so stressed that revolution is preferred.
meanwhile, xi jinping studied chemical engineering at university. and his pedagogy shines through in his policy.
meanwhile, xi jinping studied chemical engineering at university.
He also spent some years “in the countryside” doing physical labour. He, probably, is the only leader of a major power (or even mid-level power) who actually has such experience of life in a really poverty-stricken situation.
Not being sure where your next bowl of rice is coming from may have given him a different viewpoint. This probably accounts in large part for China’s campaign to lift people out of abject poverty.
Let’s not get ahead ourselves. While the conditions faced by “sent down youths” are often quite harsh ( especially those sent to Manchuria, the northwest, and the more remote parts of the mountainous South, I’m not aware of any cases where they didn’t have enough to eat. Maybe monotonous or alien foods, but after the Great Leap Forward famine*, there were no further instances of mass hunger anywhere.
*I should note that whatever the Chinese did wrong to get themselves into the famine, they received no international assistance for the famine. The only break they got was that Australia and possibly Canada eventually broke with the Americans and sold them grain, which probably save many millions from starving to death. The Chinese government has a formal program of keeping a two year supply of rice in their granaries to protect against bad harvests.
Putin did not work in the fields but he grew up in what we would consider to be poverty, or alternatively, very difficult living circumstances. His two elder brothers died very young, again attesting to the difficulty of the times:
https://halfreeman.wordpress.com/2023/09/08/vladimir-putin-the-early-years-reposted/
I think they’re connected to their own reality, which is campaign contributions, generation of which requires clicks and/or votes. In the case of Bernie and others who try, I believe sincerely, to appeal to the have-not class, the contributions require an elevator-pitch-quality of not just problems but solutions–no long-form explanations desired.
What to do?
The ideology is that the market will provide. We saw this with masks in US during the early years of Covid. Meanwhile, Shareholder value means spare and surge capacity is just fat to be optimized away.
Many of leaders do have MBAs. Part of the curriculum is supply chain. Did they just sleep through those classes?
This is exactly Andrei Martyanov’s constant criticism of western elites, that they have no technical background that would enable them to understand modern war (or modern anything). As a result, he says, they fall back relentlessly on narrative management (which they are very good at) and think that if they can just convince their populations of a given fairy tale, it will somehow magically manifest.
A pending question is to what extent they have convinced themselves and each other of these gossamer constructs? My impression is that they churn out new dreams in the face of intrusive reality as illustrated in the WSJ article’s lengthy description of how Ukraine might put its grid back together despite clear evidence that it can’t happen. When that delusional exercise no longer works, what comes next?
Seems like an oopsie here:
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/05/united-nations-development-program-just-published-a-gushing-review-of-ukraines-digital-governance-model.html
Is this the lede that was buried?
“They avert their eyes from the fact that highly constrained power translates into massive constraints…”
Cheered on by Saw-lensky, the first NATO-Politicians have boldly sacrificed an eye¹ to do (fake) it like Nelson.
¹Not so hard to do after all those sacrificed billions
An interesting question: how is the Ukraine going to harvest it’s crops? It takes fuel for combines and trucks. Also, Russia will have taken out a lot transportation infrastructure by the time harvest starts in two-three months. And, where are they going to get the people to do it?
Not mentioned here, but mentioned before, is that this electrical system was built by the Soviets with Soviet parts. It is different from a Western system.
They can scrounge for spare parts from the former Warsaw, but the West can’t supply that many of them.
On this point : as a clue to Russian long term / end game planning, it would be worthwhile to know if Russia has already increased production of the components needed to repair the Ukrainian electrical system. Getting the electrical system fixed quickly after the war (with Russian provided equipment) in what’s left of Ukraine would be a sign the Russian saw a path to being good neighbors in the future. And it would probably be good politics. Something the US seems incapable of since as far back as the Marshall Plan.