Germany

Newsom Vows to Fast Track Toward Germany's Failed Climate Goals

Ronald Stein — Wed, 16 Sep 2020 20:29:01 -0400

Governor Newsom announced on Friday September 11th that he is about to take one giant step toward following Germany’s failed climate goals which should be a wake-up all for governments everywhere. Like Germany, California’s renewables are becoming an increasing share in intermittent electricity generation, but at a HIGH COST. Power prices in Germany are among the highest in Europe.

California’s high cost of electricity is already fifty percent higher than the national average for residents, and double the national averages for commercial, and are projected to go even higher. The inability to replace the closure of continuously uninterruptable electricity from nuclear and natural gas power plants with intermittent electricity from renewables of industrial wind and solar is causing the state to import more and more of its electricity.

California is proud of being the only state in America that imports more electricity than any other state, now at 32 percent. With the state having no plans to replace the capacity of the recent three natural gas power plants that were shuttered in 2018 and the upcoming five power plant closures (four natural gas and one nuclear) with in-state intermittent electricity from wind and solar, California will need to increase its imports of high-priced electricity from the Northwest and Southwest to fill the void, and let residents and businesses pay the premium.

Germany tried to step up as a leader on climate change, by phasing out nuclear and natural gas power plants, and pioneered a system of subsidies for industrial wind and solar that sparked a global boom in manufacturing those technologies. Germany is failing to meet its climate goals of reducing carbon-dioxide emissions even after spending over $580 billion by 2025 to overhaul its energy systems. Germany’s emissions miss should be a “wake-up call” for governments everywhere, but Governor Newsom has yet to wake up.

Not only has the shuttering of four gas plants been deferred to a later time, but the zero-emission generating plant at PG&E’s Nuclear 2,160 megawatt plant at Diablo Canyon to be shuttered in 2024 remains on schedule. The Diablo plant supplies zero emission electricity to 3 million households.

The four gas plants, that are part of the fossil fuel arsenal, that were given a shuttering deferral for the time being, to allow them to continue providing continuous and uninterruptable generated electricity are:

The 310 mw Natural Gas Power Plant at Redondo Beach, that was scheduled to be shuttered in 2023.
The 823 mw Natural Gas Power Plant at Scattergood in Playa Del Rey, that was scheduled to be shuttered in 2024.
The 575 mw Natural Gas Power Plant at Haynes in Long Beach, that was scheduled to be shuttered in 2029.
The 472 mw Natural Gas Power Plant at Wilmington, that was scheduled to be shuttered in 2029.

Until the 2020 summer, California utilities and grid operators were able to purchase extra electricity from the Southwest and Northwest, but when the heat wave stretches from Texas to Oregon there is little available to make up for California’s power shortage.

By continuously shuttering in-state power plants, the state will need to import more high-priced electricity from the Southwest and Northwest to fill the void as the states continues to support the disparate cost effects onto the poorer, less educated residents of all races and ethnicities, resulting from importing electricity at premium rates.

As California fires rage, nobody is taking responsibility for the unlimited “fuel” for the fires. Rather than addressing ways to reduce the amount of “fuel” awaiting the next spark, homeless campfire, gender reveal, or lightning strike, California’s Governor Newsom’s solution is for more litigation and a reorganization of a utility company to prevent devastating wildfires.

It’s a shared responsibility of all parties as to why we’ve accumulated so much fuel for a fire and continue to allow its growth. Year after year, Democrats have supported environmentalists who have litigated and lobbied to stop efforts to clear the forests through timber harvesting, underbrush removal, and controlled burns.

California has forbid forest management, and builders continue to build wood tinder box homes adjacent to the stockpile of “fuel” for any fires in the forest, and homeowners do very little to fireproof their homes sitting amongst all that “fuel” for the fire.

In addition to promoting the growth of fuel for the next forest fire, the dysfunctional energy plan to “leak” emissions to other states for California’s electricity needs, to help achieve in-state emission reductions, is also based on the hopes that other states will be able to generate enough to replace the shuttered California power plants and will have the extra capacity to add to the grid!

This piece first appeared and Fox & Hounds Daily.

Ronald Stein has decades of experience as a certified professional engineer and is a private business spokesperson for the energy and infrastructure industries.

Is America About to Suffer Its Weimar Moment?

Joel Kotkin — Wed, 01 Jan 2020 20:29:01 -0500

Is America about to suffer its Weimar moment, culminating in the collapse of its republican institutions? Our democracy may be far more rooted than that of Germany’s first republic, which fell in 1933 to Adolf Hitler, but there are disturbing similarities.

A polarizing would-be despot as national leader, rising anti-Semitism, an out-of-control upper bureaucracy, a politicized media and education systems, an economically stressed middle class, widespread dalliance with extremist ideologies and the rise of armed militant groups. America’s descent to authoritarianism is far from pre-ordained, but the reality remains that it could happen here, and perhaps already is.

As happened in Germany, we are seeing the collapse of any set of common beliefs among Americans. Before the first votes are case in 2020, “the majority of Americans already believe that we are two-thirds of the way to being on the edge of civil war. That to me is a very pessimistic place,” says Mo Elleithee, the executive director of Georgetown University’s Institute of Politics and Public Service.

In Weimar Germany, the prospects of civil war were greater by far, as the institutions of the young Republic were never fully accepted by the old monarchist elites, the military, the industrialists or the far left, notably the Communists. In comparison, American institutions may be battered, but have more than 200 years of “street cred”; even far left politicians like the members of the socialist “squad” still try to wrap themselves in the American flag rather than wave their own symbol, as occurred in Germany, where Nazis waved the swastika and Communists their Die Rote Fahne.

Yet there are still disturbing parallels, for example in the often lenient treatment for violent protesters whether on the streets or on the campuses. When Bavarian judges gave Hitler a light sentence for his 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, they treated treason against the republic as a minor offense. Nazism was particularly strong at the universities, which became a powerful base for the party, and supplier of its specialists, commanders and scientists. In Germany, as here, anti-republican sentiments were not confined to the “deplorables” but were also widely shared, as historian Frederic Spotts has detailed, by many painters, poets, filmmakers and sculptors—at least those not Jewish or openly communist. Many creatives were thrilled by Hitler’s dream that “blood and race will once more be the source of artistic intuition” as an inflation-devastated generation lost faith in the values of compromise, responsibility and justice. The parallels with the assault on free speech and discussion on our campuses are disturbing.

In America, too, respect for the main institutions of our society—corporations, banks, Congress, the presidency, religion, the media, academia—has declined over decades. Only 10 percent of Americans feel that the federal government is suited to meeting the challenges before it; 40 percent feel it is totally incapable, a percentage roughly twice that in 1970. These feelings are strongest, significantly, among the younger generation. Recent revelations about the Afghan conflict, and the military’s systematic lying about it, are not likely to boost confidence.

Under these circumstances, it’s not surprising that respect for the basic folk ways of our republic has disappeared, even at the highest levels of society. President Trump, with his all-too-evident lack of knowledge of how the system works, is a classic authoritarian personality who identifies those who oppose him, like the media, as “enemies of the people.” Some fear that Trump is weaponizing the courts to go after opponents in the bureaucracy and the military, just as Hitler and other dictators once did.

But if Trump is nauseating and dangerous, so too are his critics. From the moment of his election, a large part of the entrenched establishment—in the military, the court systems, the FBI and CIA as well as large parts of the old GOP establishment—have sought to violate their oaths so they can undermine his rule. Even the foreign policy establishment has been weaponized against the current administration to wage “war by other means” against a sitting President.

Despite claiming to be the protectors of “American values,” many progressive politicians now display their contempt for constitutional norms by calling for “packing” the Supreme Court, eliminating the electoral college and even overhauling the Senate to favor more populous urban states. Calls by leading Democrats for establishing “states of emergency,” particularly to address climate issues, eerily reprise similar practices towards the end of Weimar, which helped set up the logic for the Hitler dictatorship.

Read the rest of the piece at The Daily Beast.

Joel Kotkin is the Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Executive Director for the Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His last book was The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us (Agate, 2017). His next book, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class, is now available to preorder. You can follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

American Cities and Others Moving to Ban Natural Gas and Repeat Germany's Climate Failures

Ronald Stein — Wed, 09 Oct 2019 21:29:58 -0400

American cities such as Berkeley, San Jose, San Francisco, Houston, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Albuquerque, and other U.S. cities are moving to ban natural gas as a step toward becoming carbon free in the next few decades. They’re about to take one giant step toward Germany’s failed climate goals which should be a wake-up call for governments everywhere, but it appears our leaders deliberately intend to follow the German failure.

Germany tried to step up as a leader on climate change, by phasing out natural gas and nuclear, leaving them short of continuous generation plants that can work on the breezeless and dark days when wind farms and solar plants won’t provide much to the grid—and demand is at its peak. To replace that 24/7 generation, they pioneered a system of subsidies for wind and solar that sparked a global boom in manufacturing those technologies.

Power prices in Germany are among the highest in Europe – but many customers continue to support the switch to renewable energy sources regardless. Today, German Households pay almost 50% more for electricity than they did in 2006.

To go carbon free in the next few decades in America is not going to be done focusing on just the limited and stymied “new” construction. To achieve the target will require inclusion of buildings built before 2020 that were constructed over the last 50+ years.

The renewable energy term currently on the lips of anybody with a microphone in front of them is not energy in its totality, but just “electricity”. The world’s wind and solar farms can only produce electricity, and even that is intermittent, as we need the wind to blow or the sun to shine, or both continually, as far north as Oslo and as far south as Christchurch. It is a given that this is not going to happen. Electricity alone has its limitations about being able to energize (no pun intended) societies around the world.

With the shuttering of nuclear and natural gas plants that have been generating continuously uninterruptable electricity, our elected officials seem to be oblivious to the fact that America has no electricity generating capacity to replace what’s being shuttered.

But wait, cities cannot generate that much renewable wind and solar electricity. The industry is still in its budding years and the technology to create or store massive amounts of electricity to be available “on demand” has not yet been developed.

Nor can electricity from wind and solar provide the thousands of products from petroleum that are part of every transportation infrastructure, electricity generation, cooling, heating, manufacturing, agriculture, and virtually every product used in our daily and leisurely lifestyles.

By driving the oil and gas industry out of America and into the dust bin of modern economics, cities are moving to lessen the power of one of the most successful industries in world economics and play right into the hands of Russia’s plan to control oil and natural gas exploration and distribution in the western world. But Russia’s plan to control the world’s energy needs is a topic for a more grandiose presentation. Let’s stick to the fallacies of electrical energy being able to support entire infrastructures.

The Green New Deal’s push to bad mouth deep earth fuels and transform the U.S. and eventually the world into an ecologically sound “utopia” of intermittent electricity will not end well for small and medium economies across the U.S. and the world. This banning directive of natural gas without a “real” replacement fuel is a logistical boondoggle. It’s forcing the hand of experimental scientists to push their studies into high gear to come up with a product or system that is going to provide continuous reliable power to light and run entire cities 24/7/365 for the foreseeable future.

These cities are trying to influence elected officials nationwide to focus on those subsidized low-power density renewables of wind and solar intermittent electricity for their economies, but the world economies are driven by continuous power, not intermittent power. The two prime movers that have done more for the cause of globalization; the diesel engine and the jet turbine, get their fuels from oil and without this fuel transportation and commerce would return to the pre-Industrial revolution age.

Leaders of American cities seem to ignore the fact that the State of California, the 5th largest economy in the world, is already a National Security Risk to America because of its desire to import oil from friendly and not so friendly foreign countries as its in-state crude oil production and Alaskan oil imports have been in decline for decades and exponentially not meeting the states’ growing energy needs. According to the California Energy Commission, California increased crude oil imports from foreign countries from 5% in 1992 to 57% in 2018. The cost of importing crude at such a rate will bankrupt almost every other state in the U.S.

Also, in California, as a result of the state’s over regulations, its emissions crusade, the subsidizing funds required by low-power-density renewables, and the state’s general high cost of living, California households are already paying more than 40% more, and industrial users are paying upwards of 100% more than the national average for electricity according to 2018 data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). Those costs are expected to increase significantly with the implementation of SB 100 (The Renewable Energy Mandate) and the need to import more electricity.

The future economic viability of the American economy will depend on our citizens electing representatives who understand basic math.

Ronald Stein, P.E. is the Founder and Ambassador for Energy & Infrastructure at PTS Advance.

This OpEd first appeared on CFACT.org

Europe’s Fading Cosmopolitan Dream

Joel Kotkin — Wed, 14 Aug 2019 01:30:38 -0400

In headier days, Europe’s leaders dreamed of a multicultural continent, its aging cities saved by millions of new migrants eager to join a stable, prosperous urbanity. This was the promise behind former U.K. prime minister Tony Blair’s Cool Britannia, the multicultural fervor of Herman Lebovics’s Bringing the Empire Back Home: France in the Global Age, and the early enthusiasm that greeted Germany’s refugee influx in 2015—estimated now at 1.6 million.

That dream has faded, with Europeans now opposing new migration by wide margins. Once-peaceful German and Swedish cities have seen a spike in crime, a resurgence of anti-Semitism, and growing political unrest—all associated with the migrant influx. In 2016, Pew Research found that 59 percent of Europeans thought that immigrants imposed a burden on their countries. In addition, less than a third believe immigration has improved their countries, with 63 percent of Greeks and 53 percent of Italians, respectively, stating that immigrants have made things worse in their economically challenged countries. As the British political thinker Kenan Malik acknowledged in a 2015 Foreign Affairs essay, “multiculturalism” has devolved from “an answer to Europe’s social problems” to a fraught reality of “fragmented societies, alienated minorities, and resentful citizenries.”

Read the entire piece in City Journal.

Joel Kotkin is the Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University, director of the Chapman Center for Demographics and Policy and executive director of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism in Houston, Texas. He is author of eight books and co-editor of the recently released Infinite Suburbia. He also serves as executive director of the widely read website www.newgeography.com and is a regular contributor to Real Clear Politics, the Daily Beast, City Journal and Southern California News Group.

Photo credit: Michael Dawes, via Flickr, using CC License.

Germany Went Totally Green Too Quickly

Ronald Stein — Tue, 13 Aug 2019 01:30:38 -0400

Has U.S. leadership gone awry? Senators Chris Coons and the honorable Dianne Feinstein recently announced they will introduce the Climate Action Rebate Act, which aims to generate $2.5 trillion in tax revenues over 10 years by slapping a fee on oil, natural gas and coal starting in 2020. This isn’t leadership. This is followship without the fairy tale ending.

Germany tried to step up as a leader on climate change by phasing out nuclear and pioneering a system of subsidies for wind and solar that sparked a global boom in the manufacturing of those technologies.

Germany’s failed climate goals which should be a wake-up all for governments everywhere, has sparked America’s leadership to take a giant step in the same direction. Taking the road less travelled isn’t always a good idea.

Germany was the first major economy to make a big shift in its energy mix toward low carbon sources, but Germany is failing to meet its climate goals of reducing carbon-dioxide emissions. Even after spending over $580 billion by 2025 to overhaul its energy systems, Germany’s emissions miss/fail should be an eye-opener for any city, state or country seriously considering going green straight out of the gate. Such a major shift requires years, nay decades, of planning.

Like Germany, America’s renewables are becoming an increasing share in electricity generation, but at a HIGH COST. Emission reduction goals have increased the costs of electricity and transportation fuels and may be contributing to America’s growing homelessness and poverty populations.

Power prices in Germany are among the highest in Europe – but many customers continue to support the switch to renewable energy sources regardless. Today, German households pay almost 50% more for electricity than they did in 2006. Much of that increase in electricity cost is the Renewable Surcharge that has increased over the same period by 770%.

Senators Coons and Feinstein, as well as many Americans who believe the Green New Deal is a good idea, apparently want to ignore the fact that 100 percent of the industries that use deep earth minerals/fuels to “move things and make thousands of products” that literally support the economies around the world, are increasing their demand and usage each year of those energy sources from deep earth minerals/fuels, not, as they would like you to believe, decreasing their demand for them.

Prosperity around the world from deep earth minerals/fuels is now being weaponized against the West since the oil, natural gas and particularly coal prosperity has led to reduced infant mortality, extended lifespans, and allowed the movement of goods and people anywhere in the world via the diesel engine and jet turbine.

Both diesel and turbine technologies have done more for the cause of globalization than anything else; and both get their fuels from oil. Without transportation – there is no commerce – since globalized road and air travel dominate most people’s lives in industrialized countries and emerging markets.

Whether its advocates admit it or not, truth is, intermittent electricity from wind, solar, or from the batteries and storage units made from exotic materials like cobalt and lithium CANNOT supply the thousands of products made from petroleum that are demanded by every infrastructure. These scores of petroleum-based products are, at present, the basis of everyone’s standard of living across the globe.

Wind and solar obsessed Germany, Australia, and Denmark fight it out for the honor of paying the world’s highest power prices. America is following them into known disastrous territory. Just like Germany, Australia, and Denmark, before trudging into the green morass, our leaders cannot “see’ the direct correlation between energy costs for electricity and fuels, and homelessness and poverty.

Getting-off-fossil fuels would reverse much of the progress society has made over the last few centuries. Until electricity storage technology can support intermittent electricity from wind and solar, the world will continue to have redundant fossil fuel backups for windless and cloudy days to provide electricity to the world’s economies around the clock.

Subsidizing investments in low-power density renewables of wind and solar to obtain intermittent electricity from their huge land mass requirements, are all resulting in higher costs of electricity and fuels to consumers. Like in California, Germany and Denmark, the unintended consequence is the climate goals costs put an undue strain on economically challenge individuals who already count every dollar they earn to make ends meet. This will not end well for them.

Hopefully, BEFORE committing to an all-electric world, we can meet the technical challenges of discovering an affordable green replacement to the “power” and conveniences currently provided to every known earth-based infrastructure by the thousands of products developed from fossil fuels. And, hopefully, society will accept the challenge of altering their lifestyles that will result from less services and more personal input to accommodate losing the advances fossil fuels have afforded them.

This piece originally appeared on CFACT.

Ronald Stein is the Founder and Ambassador for Energy & Infrastructure at PTS Advance headquartered in Irvine, California and a researcher and commentator on climate, energy, environment and public policy.

Is America Now Second-Rate?

Joel Kotkin — Mon, 19 Jun 2017 01:33:38 -0400

President Donald Trump’s recent renunciation of the Paris climate change accords has spurred “the international community” to pronounce America’s sudden exit from global leadership. Now you read in the media aspirations to look instead to Europe, Canada, or even China, to dominate the world. Some American intellectuals, viewing Trump, even wish we had lost our struggle for independence.

Yet, perhaps it’s time to unpack these claims, which turn out to be based largely on inaccurate assumptions or simply wishful thinking. In reality, these countries are hardly exemplars, as suggested by the American intellectual and pundit class, but rather are flawed places unlikely to displace America’s global leadership, even under the artless Trump.

We’ll always have Paris, or is it Beijing?

California Gov. Jerry Brown’s recent trip to China reflects the massive disconnect inherent in the progressive establishment worldview. The notion that the country that is the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide, emitting nearly twice as much as the United States, and is generating coal energy at record levels, should lead the climate jihad is so laughable as to make its critics, including Trump, seem reasonable. All this, despite the fact that the U.S., largely due to the shift from coal to natural gas, is clearly leading the world in greenhouse gas reductions.

Paris is good for China in that it gets it off the hook for reducing its emissions until 2030, while the gullible West allows its economies to be buried by ever-cascading regulations. The accords could have cost U.S. manufacturers as many as 6.5 million industrial jobs, while China gets a basically free pass. President Xi Jinping also appeals to the increasingly popular notion among progressives that an autocracy like China is better suited to address climate change than our sometimes chaotic democratic system.

Xi has played the gullible West with a skill that would have delighted his fellow autocrat, Joseph Stalin, who did much the same in the 1930s. (“Purges? What purges?”) Of course, Xi does not have to worry much about criticism from the media — or anywhere else. Trump may tweet insanely and seek needless fights with the media, but critics of the Chinese Communist Party end up in prison — or worse. To accuse Trump of loving dictators and then embrace Xi seems a trifle dishonest.

Ultimately, the Paris accords are much ado about nothing. The goals will have such little impact, according to both rational skeptics like Bjorn Lomborg and true believers like NASA’s James Hanson, as to make no discernible difference in the climate catastrophe predicted by many greens. In reality, Paris is all about positioning and posturing, a game at which both Brown and Xi are far more adept than the ham-handed Trump.

Read the entire piece at The Orange County Register.

Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book is The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

Photo by Michael Temer via Flickr, using CC License.

Death Spiral Demographics: The Countries Shrinking The Fastest

Joel Kotkin — Thu, 02 Feb 2017 09:01:17 -0500

For most of recent history, the world has worried about the curse of overpopulation. But in many countries, the problem may soon be too few people, and of those, too many old ones. In 1995 only one country, Italy, had more people over 65 than under 15; today there are 30 and by 2020 that number will hit 35. Demographers estimate that global population growth will end this century.

Rapid aging is already reshaping the politics and economies of many of the most important high-income countries. The demands of older voters are shifting the political paradigm in many places, including the United States, at least temporarily to the right. More importantly, aging populations, with fewer young workers and families, threaten weaker economic growth, as both labor and consumption begin to decline.

We took a look at the 56 countries with populations over 20 million people, nine of which are already in demographic decline. The impact of population decline will worsen over time, particularly as the present generation now in their 50s and 60s retires, begins drawing pensions and other government support.

Europe: Homeland of Demographic Decline

Heading up our list of slowly dissipating large countries is the Ukraine, a country chewed at its edges by its aggressive Russian neighbor. According to U.N. projections, Ukraine’s population will fall 22% by 2050. Eastern and Southern Europe are home to several important downsizing countries including Poland (off 14% by 2050), the Russian Federation (-10.4%), Italy (-5.5%) and Spain (-2.8%). The population of the EU is expected to peak by 2050 and then gradually decline, suggesting a dim future for that body even if it holds together.

The most important EU country, Germany, has endured demographic decline for over a generation. Germany’s population is forecast to drop 7.7% by 2050, though this projection has not been adjusted to account for the recent immigration surge. The main problem is the very low fertility rate of the EU’s superpower, which according to United Nations data was 1.4 between 2010 and 2015. It takes a fertility rate of 2.1% to replace your own population so we can expect Germany to shrink as well as get very old.

Nor can Europe expect much help from its smaller countries. Although too small to reach our 20 million person threshold, many of Europe’s tinier “frontier” countries have abysmal fertility rates. Among the 10 smaller countries with the greatest population declines, all are in Europe, and outside Western Europe, with Bulgaria’s population expected to shrink 27% by 2050 and Romania’s 22%. Each of these have below replacement rate fertility. Things are not that much better in Western Europe, where fertility rates are also below replacement rates, but not quite so low. Long-term, the only option for Europe may be to allow more immigration, particularly from Africa and the Middle East, although this may be impossible due to growing political resistance to immigration.

Demographic Decline: The Asian Edition

If this were just a European disease, it would not prove such a challenge to the economic future. Europe is gradually diminishing in global importance. The big story in demographic trends is in Asia, which has driven global economic growth for the past generation. The decline of Japan’s population is perhaps best known; the great island nation, still the world’s third largest economy, is expected to see its population fall 15% by 2050, the second steepest decline after Ukraine, and get much older. By 2030, according to the United Nations, Japan will have more people over 80 than under 15.

But the biggest hit on the world economy from the new demographics will come from China, the planet’s second largest economy, and the most dynamic.

Until a generation ago, overpopulation threatened China’s future, as it still does some developing countries. Today the estimates of the country’s fertility rate run from 1.2 to 1.6, both well below the 2.1 replacement rate. By 2050 China’s population will shrink 2.5%, a loss of 28 million people. By then China’s population will have a demographic look similar to ultra-old Japan’s today — but without the affluence of its Asian neighbor.

Other Asian countries have similar problems. Thailand ranks as the fifth most demographically challenged, with a projected population loss of 8%. The population of Sri Lanka, just across Adam’s Bridge from still fast-growing India, is projected to increase only 0.6%.

Also going into a demographic stall is South Korea, another country which a generation ago worried about its expanding population. With its fertility rate well below replacement (1.3), the country will essentially stagnate over the next 35 years, and will becoming one of the most elderly nations on earth.

Full List: The Countries Shrinking The Fastest

Smaller Singapore is an anomaly. The city-state has a rock-bottom fertility rate of 1.2, but projects a population increase of 20% by 2050 due to its liberal and vigorously debated immigration policies.

Economic Consequences

Most world leaders are fixated on the unpredictable new administration in Washington in the short term, but they might do better to look at the more certain long-term impacts of diminishing populations on the world’s most important economies. Economists, including John Maynard Keynes, have connected low birth rates to economic declines. On the “devil” of overpopulation, Keynes wrote, “I only wish to warn you that the chaining up of the one devil may, if we are careless, only serve to loose another still fiercer and more intractable.”

It is already fairly clear that lower birthrates and increased percentages of aged people have begun to slow economic growth in much of the high-income world, and can be expected to do the same in long ascendant countries such as China and South Korea. Economists estimate that China’s elderly population will increase 60% by 2020, even as the working-age population decreases by nearly 35%. This demographic decline, stems from the one-child policy as well as the higher costs and smaller homes that accompany urbanization, notes the American Enterprise Institute’s Nicholas Eberstadt. China’s annual projected GDP growth rate will likely decline from an official 7.2% in 2013 to a maximum of 6% by 2020.

There are several reasons these demographic shifts portend economic decline. First, a lack of young labor tends to drive up wages, sparking the movement of jobs to other places. This first happened in northern Europe and Japan will increasingly occur now in Korea, Taiwan, and even China. It also lowers the rate of innovation, notes economist Gary Becker, since change tends to come from younger workers and entrepreneurs. Japan’s long economic slowdown reflects, in part, the fact that its labor force has been declining since the 1990s and will be fully a third smaller by 2035.

The second problem has to do with the percentage of retirees compared to active working people. In the past growing societies had many more people in the workforce than retirees. But now in societies such as Japan and Germany that ratio has declined. In 1990, there were 4.7 working age Germans per over 65 person. By 2050, this number is projected to decline to 1.7. In Japan the ratios are worse, dropping more than one-half, from 5.8 in 1990 to 2.3 today and 1.4 in 2050. China, Korea and other East Asian countries, many without well-developed retirement systems, face similar challenges.

Finally, there is the issue of consumer markets. Aging populations tend to buy less than younger ones, particularly families. One reason countries like Japan and Germany can’t reignite economic growth is their slowing consumption of goods. This challenge will become all the more greater as China, the emerging economic superpower, also slows its consumption. The future of demand, critical to developing countries, could be deeply constrained.

What about the USA?

To a remarkable extent, the United States has avoided these pressing demographic issues. The U.N. has the U.S. tied with Canada for the fastest projected population growth rate of any developed country: a 21% expansion by 2050. Yet this forecast could prove inaccurate.

One threat stems from millennials who, even with an improved economy, have not started families and had children at anything close to historical rates. Today the U.S. fertility rate has dropped to 1.9 from 2.0 before the Great Recession; population growth is now lower than at any time since the Depression. This places us below replacement level for the next generation. Projections for the next decade show a stagnant, and then falling number of high school graduates, something that should concern both employers and colleges. The United States’ high projected population growth rate, like that of Singapore, is entirely dependent upon maintaining high rates of immigration.

But even before the election of Donald Trump, who is hell-bent on cracking down on at least undocumented immigration, total immigration to the United States has been slowing. At the same time the fertility rates of some immigrant groups, notably Latinos, have been dropping rapidly and approaching those of other Americans. This is despite the fact that as many as 40% of women would like to have more children; they simply lack the adequate housing, economic wherewithal and spousal support to make it happen.

In the coming decades, the countries that can maintain an at least somewhat reasonable population growth rate, and enough younger people, will likely do best. To a large extent, it’s too late for that in much of Europe and East Asia. For countries like the United States, Canada and Australia, with among the most liberal immigration policies and large landmasses, the prospects may be far better. However, we also need native-born youngsters to launch, get married and start creating the next generation of Americans.

This piece originally appeared at Forbes.

Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, was published in April by Agate. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

Photo: Ahmet Demirel [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Germany Also Having Big Problems Building Infrastructure

Aaron M. Renn — Mon, 28 Jul 2014 01:38:40 -0400

Der Spiegel had an interesting article recently called “Angry Germans: Big Projects Face Growing Resistance.” The article (linked version is English) talks about how it is increasingly difficult to get infrastructure projects built in Germany.

Wherever ambitious construction ventures loom on the horizon in Germany — from the cities to the countryside, from the coastlines in the north to the Black Forest in the south — opponents are taking to the streets…. As the public’s enthusiasm for constant innovation has lessened, so has the appeal of these sorts of projects, and, as a result, they now inevitably come accompanied by picketers. Germany’s graying society, it seems, is so cozy and settled that it resists anything threatening to upset the status quo. In the process, it has lost sight of the bigger picture.

There are a lot of key points in this article that immediately raised parallels to the United States, where infrastructure projects are also under increasing siege. In fact, some of this reminded me of elements of the Tea Party movement. The protestors are uninterested in compromise. They are devoted, full time activists who are unrelentingly opposed to the projects in question:

[Hartmut] Binner’s form of protest has a radical undercurrent: Well-informed, confrontational and devoid of respect for authority, he is typical of the new grassroots activism spreading across Germany.

….

Binner’s entire life revolves around the campaign. He monitors the routes of departing and landing planes. He plays his self-designed noise simulator on market squares. He kicks off his court appearances by singing the Bavarian national anthem. “If you want to be heard as a member of the public, you need to push the envelope,” he shrugs.

…

These days, he sees grassroots protests, activism and political responsibility from a different perspective. “The typical protesters are gray-haired, know-it-alls and very networked,” [Freiburg Mayor Dieter Salomon] says. “But they’re not remotely interested in consensus-building, political processes and pluralism.”

…

Grassroots groups have become so livid, intransigent and single-minded that even the most respected politician in the country, Angela Merkel, is feeling their sting. In early May, hundreds of furious residents had gathered in central Ingolstadt to protest against the construction of a power line from Bad Lauchstädt in Sachsen-Anhalt to Meitingen in Bavaria.

This certainly reminds me of the no-compromises view of the Tea Party. Also, a number of early American Tea Party activists were unemployed, and thus able to basically be full time activists. Even the singing of national anthem has echoes of the Tea Party and their tricorn hats. I don’t want to claim there’s a philosophical or other link between the Tea Partiers and Germany, however.

Not everything lines up with the Tea Party, however. In Germany it seems to be disproportionately retirees who are the most engaged and militant:

Germany’s graying society, it seems, is so cozy and settled that it resists anything threatening to upset the status quo. In the process, it has lost sight of the bigger picture.

…

Many of the protestors are pensioners with no vested interest in Germany’s future. “It’s striking that the leader of the protests against the Munich runway is a 75-year-old and not someone in the middle of his working life,” [Munich Airport CEO Michael Kerkloh] points out.

…

Salomon’s nemesis is Gerlinde Schrempp, a determined and argumentative 67-year-old retired teacher with attitude to spare. She’s the leader of the Freiburg Lebenswert movement, which translates roughly to “make Freiburg worth living in. The movement just got elected on to the district council and is first and foremost opposed to any new building in the city.

There’s a stereotype out there of the average Republican voter as an old white guy. But the average Tea Party activist I’ve seen tends to be working age. I look at this one a bit differently. We need to see these types of controversies against the substrate of an aging population. Aging populations are not noted for dynamism, and older people’s self-interest is better served by starving investment for the future in order to save money and avoid uncomfortable change in the present. As a country whose population is projected to decline into the future thanks to this demographic inversion, we are seeing in Germany what’s likely a preview of coming attractions elsewhere around the world.

Indeed, I’m reminded of what one analyst friend of mine in Indiana has said about the property tax caps there. He sees the push to cap property taxes as driven by an aging population in a stagnant state. Old people generally aren’t earning a lot of taxable income nor are they buying huge amounts of stuff, so they are disproportionately less affected by income and sales tax hikes, whereas they often own homes and are hit hard by property taxes. Thus property tax caps serve as another income transfer mechanism from young to old, holding revenue constant. They are in part an artifact of an aging society. Disinvestment in infrastructure can be seen in the same light.

But there’s another part of this that shines a light on yet another group of opponents, namely the intelligentsia.

The term “Wutbürger” (“enraged citizen”) was coined during the Stuttgart 21 fiasco to describe people like Hartmut Binner, and much has been written about them since. They often aren’t the “common man.” According to the Göttingen Institute for Democracy Studies, they tend to be highly educated people with steady incomes and white collar jobs. And while protests movements of the past were often steered by sociologists, today their leaders are more likely to stem from the technical professions, the researchers found.

When we look at opposition to infrastructure in the United States, at least certain types of infrastructure, we see a similar profile of people (though not necessarily technical) behind it. It’s the leftist intelligentsia that oppose the Keystone Pipeline, suburban highway projects, fracking, and many other types of things, often with a militant unwillingness to compromise similar to the Tea Party.

As with Germany, this opposition is enabled by environmental reviews and public participation laws that, while they serve important public purposes, make it easy to delay projects for years through repeated objections and scorched earth litigation. Traditionally environmental lawsuits were associated with the left, but conservatives have started saying, why not us too? Hence litigation against San Francisco’s regional plan. The Hollywood densification plan was recently overturned by lawsuits, and lawsuits have plagued California’s proposed high speed rail line as well.

Whatever the project, it’s sure that somebody on the left and/or the right hates it, and thus will do everything in their power to kill it, which probably means years of delays and untold millions in increased costs.

Also as with the United States, German governments have shot themselves in the foot with a series of financial debacles:

Political and bureaucratic bodies are partly to blame for their own diminished authority. Every major venture seems to entail spiraling costs. Berlin’s new airport was supposed to cost €1.7 billion, a price tag that has shot up to well over €5 billion. Meanwhile, the €187 million earmarked for the Elbphilharmonie concert hall under construction in Hamburg is expected to exceed €865 million by the time the project is completed. Albig is well aware how bad this looks. “People see us as financially incompetent,” he says.

Until politicians can convince the public they have a handle on this, the taxpayer will remain rightly skeptical of many major megaprojects. This is doubly true since it’s very clear, as has been documented by folks like Oxford professor Bent Flyvbjerg, that in many of these cases the politicians were simply lying all along about the real costs.

I’m not sure what all the takeaways are, but there are clearly many forces operating on a global basis to inhibit the development of infrastructure in the West.

Aaron M. Renn is an independent writer on urban affairs and the founder of Telestrian, a data analysis and mapping tool. He writes at The Urbanophile, where this piece originally appeared.

"MittlererSchlossgartenKundgebung 2010-10-01" by Mussklprozz - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The Leveraged Buyout of the GDR

Matthew Stevenson — Sat, 24 Mar 2012 09:03:47 -0400

Until the European Central Bank purchased a call option on the future assets of the Greek government (which remains out-of-the-money), the largest leveraged buyout of a sovereign state had taken place in 1990, when the West German government acquired the German Democratic Republic (GDR), thought at the time to consist largely of liabilities. By most accounts the Bonn government paid over the odds for East Germany, estimated to have cost the West more than $1 trillion.

The resulting peaceful unification of Germany has been one of the great achievements of postwar European integration. In recent months, Germany has faced the opportunity for another buy-out of a European neighbor, this time of Greece, but it has showed little appetite for the purchase. Does East Germany provide a model for the Greek bailout? ,

To take stock of what the West Germans got for their investment, my son Charles, aged 16, and I recently biked around the principle cities of the East—Dresden, Leipzig, Weimar, Potsdam, and East Berlin—that for a long time fell on the dark side of the Iron Curtain.

Berlin is unified and elegant, Dresden is a restored cultural monument, and Leipzig (where J.S. Bach lived) is a city of vast commercial and artistic ambitions. If our bike ride along the ragged edges of the Iron Curtain taught us anything, it was that the GDR was worth the money.

To get to Dresden, we loaded the bikes onto an overnight express from Basel to Prague and slept until the train joined the River Elbe, historically the frontier between Western and Eastern Europe. In the last days of World War II, American and Russian armies met on its riverbanks at Torgau, just north of Dresden.

At the end of the Cold War, the city synonymous with World War II fire bombings was a tired European backwater, with only a fraction of its royal splendors rebuilt and a trickle of Bulgarian tourists.

Starting with the main railroad station in the early 1990s, the German government has transformed Dresden into a showroom for tourists and industry. The station is elegant and grand, a hybrid of the classical and the new, and Charles and I toured an ultramodern Volkswagen plant where the VW Phaeton, a bourgeois saloon car, is assembled largely by hand.

We steered our bikes around the revived cathedral square, rolled past the elegant opera house, and wandered around the grounds of the royal palace. The city museum—like Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse Five (a reference to his prisoner-of-war location, from which he witnessed the February 13, 1945 bombings)—tells how the city was engulfed in fireballs, the effect of detonating explosives detonated at an altitude of 2000 feet, which then sucked the air and life out of Dresden.

To get to Leipzig, we biked northwest along the River Elbe, through industrial suburbs, apartment complexes, shopping centers, and finally a pristine landscape of orchards, villages, and river scenes. Only occasionally did we see the remnants of the GDR, the crumbling concrete so synonymous with the central committee’s five-year plans. Otherwise, the East has been gentrified.

The 1989 revolution that brought down the Berlin Wall and the East German government started in Leipzig, with vigils in front of the Stasi headquarters and with larger rallies at the St. Nikolai Church.

The Stasi building has been preserved as a memorial to its victims. The display cabinets are arranged around the offices of the secret police, complete with exhibits of wigs, tape recorders, phone taps, uniforms, typewriters, metal desks, maps, shoe phones, and devices suitable to steam open letters.

Were its practices and legacies not alive and well in Homeland America, I would consign the Stasi to some dead-letter file, to be archived with Hitler’s SA in the dark nights of German history. The Stasi museum had the feel of an amateur theater production that had opened in East Germany and, after 9/11, moved to Broadway.

From the museum director, I bought Anna Funder’s memoir of the GDR, Stasiland. She writes: “In Hitler’s Third Reich it is estimated that there was one Gestapo agent for every 2000 citizens, and in Stalin’s USSR there was one KGB agent for every 5830 people. In the GDR, there was one Stasi officer or informant for every sixty-three people.”

In the U.S., the ratio of Homeland Security employees to the general population is one for every 1500 citizens.

Weimar is the path not taken in German history—toward representative government and the celebration of intellectual enlightenment over what Bismarck called “iron and blood.”

Charles and I found the assembly hall that lent its name to the post-World War I governments that were wiped away in the 1923 currency inflation. We rode to the houses of the poets Goethe and Schiller, each of whom found artistic freedom in the city that has the feel of a small university town, with libraries and parks. Nevertheless, the choreographers of Nazism and Communism arranged their own Weimar stage sets to tell the story that democracy leads to weakness, chaos and bankruptcy.

Potsdam and East Berlin are monuments to vanished empires. Prussia’s Hohenzollern dynasty settled on Potsdam for its imperial palaces and amusements (one ballroom we saw is lined with thousands of seashells), and East Berlin was the people’s court of Stasiland.

Funder writes of her visit to the condemned East German parliament: “Like so many things here, no one can decide whether to make the Palast der Republik into a memorial warning from the past, or to get rid of it altogether and go into the future unburdened of everything, except the risk of doing it all again.”

Riding along the remnants of the Berlin Wall, which is preserved as an art gallery in several sections, I was curious about “ostalgie”—nostalgia for the simpler ways of the GDR, absent unified Germany’s cult of material ambition.

Funder quotes a conversation about the Wall’s legacy: “It was an historical necessity. It was the most useful construction in all of German history! In European history.... Because it prevented imperialism from contaminating the east. It walled it in.”

The highlight of the ride came between Leipzig and Weimar, where we spent much of our time exploring the Napoleonic battlefields of Jena and Auerstädt, where in 1806 France doomed Prussia to the fate of a second-rate European power until Bismarck redeemed the nation in the 1870 Franco-Prussian war.

In tracking down the routes of Napoleon’s marshals, we rode through farm villages, towns, and small cities, many of which are rebuilding town squares or repainting important buildings—all part of the East German renovation. When Erich Honecker was the East German party chief, buildings were only painted up to the first floor, allegedly because that’s all he could see from the backseat of his limousine.

It was just up the road in Leipzig where Napoleon lost his empire, in the 1813 Battle of Nations. It was perhaps the first attempt at a European Union. But Austria, England, Prussia, and Russia all decided that Napoleon was a nuisance on the continent, and sent him packing to Elba—even if they had to repeat the exercise at Waterloo.

A similar coalition has tendered its offer to keep Greece in the grand alliance. Having East Germany in the money should give the EU confidence in its convictions, proof that it can be more cost effective to buy a nation than to put one through liquidation.

Photo by Matthew Stevenson. Near Leipzig, formerly in East Germany, a railroad station that will soon be renovated.

Matthew Stevenson is the author of Remembering the Twentieth Century Limited, a collection of historical essays. He lives in one of the wine regions of Switzerland. His next book is Whistle-Stopping America.

Who’s Racist Now? Europe’s Increasing Intolerance

Joel Kotkin — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 12:42:15 -0400

With the rising tide of terrorist threats across Europe, one can somewhat understandably expect a surge in Islamophobia across the West. Yet in a contest to see which can be more racist, one would be safer to bet on Europe than on the traditional bogeyman, the United States.

One clear indicator of how flummoxed Europeans have become about diversity were the remarks last week by German Chancellor Angela Merkel saying that multi-culturalism has “totally failed” in her country, the richest and theoretically most capable of absorbing immigrants. “We feel tied to Christian values,” the Chancellor said. “Those who don’t accept them don’t have a place here.”

One can appreciate Merkel’s candor but it does say something the limitations about the continent’s ability, and even willingness, to absorb immigrants. It’s quite a change from the generations-old tendency among Europeans, particularly on the left, to denigrate America as a kind of hot bed for racism. Yet even before the latest report of potential terrorist attacks in several western European cities, the center of Islamophobia – and related ethnic hatreds – has been shifting inexorably to the European continent.

Of course, America has always had its bigots, and still does. And of course, Islamists who threaten or commit violence need to be arrested and thrown behind bars. But, to date, neither major political party has been able to make openly white-supremacist politics a successful leading platform. After all, what was the last time anyone took Pat Buchanan , who has made comments similar to those of Merkel, seriously? Despite the brouhaha over the Arizona anti-illegal alien law, only 5% of Americans consider immigration the nation’s most pressing issue, according to a September Gallup poll.

The situation in Europe is quite different. Openly racist, anti-immigrant and Islamophobic groupings are on the rise, and they are wreaking havoc on once subdued European politics. Traditional mainstream parties are declining, and the new racist parties can be seen in broad daylight in Austria, Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands, where populist firebrand Geert Wilders has suggested banning the Koran. In Italy the anti-immigrant Northern League is already hugely powerful.

It is true that as many Europeans as Americans–about half–think immigration is bad for their countries. The big difference is what Europeans are willing to do about it. Just consider French President Nicholas Sarkozy’s farcical effort this fall to expel the hapless Roma.

Yet for most Europeans the big issue is not purse-snatching gypsies but fear and loathing toward the expanding presence of Muslims–who are at least three times as numerous in the E.U. as in the U.S. Over half of Spaniards and Germans, according to Pew, hold negative views of Muslims. So do roughly 40% of the French. In contrast, only 23% of Americans share this sentiment.

More disturbing, Europe is actually putting these ethnic hostilities into law. An early sign came this winter, when the usually phlegmatic Swiss voted to prohibit the building of new minarets. More recently a ban on burqas – the admittedly unattractive female body suits favored by some orthodox Muslims – passed in France, home to Europe’s largest Muslim community. The same measure is now being considered in Spain.

These actions reflect a broad, and deepening, stream of European public opinion. A recent Pew survey found that over 80% of the French support banning the burqa, as do over 70% of Germans and a large majority of Spaniards and British.

In contrast, nearly two-thirds of Americans find the burqa ban distasteful. Burqas don’t exactly stir admiring glances in the shopping mall, but few Amercians think we need to ban them. The basic ideal of “don’t tread on me” means “don’t tread on them” as well – at least until they start blowing themselves up at Wal-mart.

This nuance escapes some of our own knee-jerk racial obsessives, like the Atlanta Journal Constitution’s Cynthia Tucker, who equates opposition to a mosque at Ground Zero as proof of a “new McCarthyism” aimed against Muslims. But you don’t have to be a bigot to have second thoughts about erecting a mosque at the very spot where innocents were slaughtered by radical Islamists.

Critical here are profound differences between the U.S. and Europe in the role played by ethnicity, race and religion. On the continent national culture is precisely that — the product of a long history of a particular ethnic group. Small minorities, such as Jews in Holland or Armenians in France, are tolerated but expected to submerge their ethnic identities. France has many artists and writers who may be Jewish, but you don’t see many French Woody Allens or Larry Davids who exploit their otherness to help define the national culture.

Muslim attitudes in Europe are not exactly helpful either. European Muslims often seem more interested in breaking the national mold than adding to its contours. More than 80% of British Muslims, for example, identify themselves as Muslims first before being British. This is true of nearly 70% of Muslims in Spain or Germany. Similarly, up to 40% of Britain’s Islamic population believe that terrorist attacks on both Americans and their fellow Britons are justified.

This alienation also reflects an appalling social and economic reality. In European countries immigrants can receive welfare more easily than join the workforce, and their job prospects are confined by education levels that lag those of immigrants in the United States, Canada and Australia. In France unemployment among immigrants–particularly those from Muslim countries–is often at least twice that of the native born; in Britain Muslims are far more likely to be out of the workforce than either Christians or Hindus.

Partly due to a less generous welfare state, American immigrant workers with lower educations have, for the most part, been more economically active than their nonimmigrant counterparts. The contrast is even more telling among Muslim immigrants. In America most Muslims are comfortably middle class, with income and education levels above the national average. They are more likely to be satisfied with the state of the country, their own community and their prospects for success than are other Americans—even in the face of the reaction to 9-ll.

More important still, more than half of Muslims identify themselves as Americans first, a far higher percentage than in the various countries of Western Europe. More than four in five are registered to vote, a sure sign of civic involvement. Almost three-quarters, according to a Pew study, say they have never been discriminated against–something that is definitely not the case in Europe where a majority, according to Pew, complain of discrimination.

Over time, these differences between Europe and America may become even more pronounced. America is becoming increasingly diverse, but it is also growing demographically, and Muslims make up a very small part of that. There’s little fear in Anerica of the kind of Muslim envelopment that appears to threaten a rapidly aging, and soon to be depopulating, Europe.

Of course the U.S. still has its bigoted Islamophobes, just as it has its own small cadre of vicious Islamists. One law of history appears to be that morons will be morons. But America’s culture seems strong enough to resist the anti-immigrant hysteria emerging throughout Europe. This is one case where la difference between America and Europe may prove a very good thing indeed.

This article originally appeared at Forbes.com.

Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a distinguished presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University. He is author of The City: A Global History. His newest book is The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, released in February, 2010.

Photo by World Economic Forum