Futurology

There must be sinister reasons. The tariffs sound stupid but they seem to at least not destroy the US economy instantly. Likewise somebody has also thought about this policy. What is the goal?

Khruschev supposedly once said “We will take America without firing a shot. We do not have to invade the U.S. We will destroy you from within”. Things have changed a bit since then, but I think Putin has always carried a grudge and has invested hugely in kompromat across a broad range of potentially important Americans of the future, for decades. It’s possible that Trump has been a Russian asset since 1987, but regardless of the truth of that detail, it’s clear that Russia and China both stand to benefit hugely from the collapse of US power and global influence. The motive is there, and perhaps it’s also helped by kompromat on every spineless Republican in the legislature rubber stamping the executive agenda.

Let’s stick with facts instead of kompromat theories. Back in March, not long into this administration, the US stopped most cyberoffense against Russia. Before that, they cancelled the FBI task force investigating foreign influence in US elections and also cancelled the task force for seizing Russian oligarch assets. Starts to look like maybe someone in charge has a conflict of interest.

More recently, even having a meeting on Alaskan soil is considered far more significant to Russians than to Americans. There is a slow roll coming here, and Trump is not in the drivers seat.

If you’ll indulge my conspiracy theory hat for a bit, a lot of Russian frozen wasteland has potential to be great farmland with a bit more global warming. With some help from China, the two of them could easily become the dominant countries of the future. Ukraine has a lot of great farmland right now and could jumpstart Russia on the path to agricultural superpower.

You already pointed out:

With cheap renewable energy China will run circles around the US’ AI programs.

Cheap energy can be truly instrumental in nation-state conflict. I have a long excerpt for you from Marc Reisner but I promise it’s relevant and worthwhile:

When the first electricity began to flow out of Bonneville Dam…, the government tried to induce Alcoa's potential competitors to build plants in the Northwest by offering them bargain rates, but nobody was particularly interested. By the time the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, however, the luxury of persuasion could no longer be afforded. The government simply went out and built the plants itself.

No one knows exactly how many planes and ships were manufactured with Bonneville and Grand Coulee electricity, but it is safe to say that the war would have been seriously prolonged at the least without the dams. Germany's military buildup during the 1930s gave it a huge start on Britain and France. When Hitler invaded Poland and war broke out in Europe, the United States was, militarily speak-ing, of no consequence; we had fewer soldiers than Henry Ford had auto workers, and not enough modern M-1 Garand rifles to equip a single regiment. By 1942, however, we possessed something no other country did: a huge surplus of hydroelectric power. By June of that year, 92 percent of the 900,000 kilowatts of power available from Grand Coulee and Bonneville Dams-an almost incomprehensible amount at the time— was going to war production, most of it to building planes. One writer, Albert Williams, estimates that "more than half the planes in the American Air Forces were built with Coulee power alone." After France capitulated, England was left hanging by a thread. It was rescued by a European sky suddenly full of American planes. The Columbia River was a traffic jam of barges carrying bauxite to the smelters in Longview, Washington. By the middle of the war, almost half of the aluminum production in the country was located in the Northwest—nearly all of it going toward the war effort. American planes were being downed almost as fast as they could be produced. German planes, however, were being downed faster than they could be produced. The Nazis had neither the raw materials nor the electricity to produce what they needed fast enough.

…“By the end of the war, at Grand Coulee, we were generating 2,138,000 kilowatts of electricity. We were the biggest single source of electricity in the world. The Germans and the Japanese didn't have anything nearly that big. Imagine what it would have been like without Grand Coulee, Hoover, Shasta, and Bonneville. At the time, they were ranked first, second, third, and fourth in the world.”

Although few of the people who lived there knew it at the time, the strange squat structures going up in 1943 at the Hanford Reservation, an ultrasecret military installation along the Columbia River near Richland, Washington, were intimately connected to the Manhattan Project. A lot of the history is well-known now: how Niels Bohr was smuggled out of Nazi-occupied Denmark in the wheel well of a British balsa-wood aircraft; how pacifistic Albert Einstein urged Franklin Roosevelt to build the bomb before the Nazis did; how thousands of technicians and scientists descended on the tiny mountain hamlet of Los Alamos, New Mexico, to figure out how to build their catastrophically explosive device. The key material was plutonium-239, an element virtually unknown in nature which has just the right fissile characteristics for an atomic bomb. The problem with plutonium— aside from its being fiendishly toxic—is that its production is energy-consumptive in the extreme. The amount of electricity used by the eight plutonium-production reactors at Hanford is still classified in-formation, but a good guess is fifteen or twenty megawatts each— perhaps 160 megawatts in all. Nowhere else in a country involved in a gigantic war effort could one have found that kind of power to spare.

In the end, the Axis powers were no match for two things: the Russian winters, and an American hydroelectric capacity that could turn out sixty thousand aircraft in four years. We didn't so much outmaneuver, outman, or outfight the Axis as simply outproduce it.

(Emphasis mine)

China doesn’t need sinister reasons for their huge investments in renewable energy. They’re entirely reasonable for transforming their economy to keep times with the 21st century. But one might note that huge amounts of excess energy can be very helpful in conflict, and sinister reasons aren’t typically provable in advance. Frankly the US mostly got lucky in the timing of all that hydroelectric energy coming online, but it sure was critical.

There’s no mutiny because everything is fake news and we’re in a post-truth dystopia. The masses work paycheck to paycheck up to their eyeballs in debt. They don’t have time or energy to care about large scale action, and many of them are under the spell of the fabulist.