ScienceDaily reports an interesting discovery:

“Electrochemical water splitting driven by electricity sourced from renewable energy technology has been identified as one of the most sustainable methods of producing high-purity hydrogen.”

Professor O’Mullane said the new composite material he and PhD student Ummul Sultana had developed enabled electrochemical water splitting into hydrogen and oxygen using cheap and readily available elements as catalysts.

“Traditionally, catalysts for splitting water involve expensive precious metals such as iridium oxide, ruthenium oxide and platinum,” he said.

“An additional problem has been stability, especially for the oxygen evolution part of the process.

“What we have found is that we can use two earth-abundant cheaper alternatives — cobalt and nickel oxide with only a fraction of gold nanoparticles — to create a stable bi-functional catalyst to split water and produce hydrogen without emissions.

“From an industry point of view, it makes a lot of sense to use one catalyst material instead of two different catalysts to produce hydrogen from water.”

Professor O’Mullane said the stored hydrogen could then be used in fuel cells.

Although wind and solar have a role in a diverse energy infrastructure, it seems to me that technologies like this are much more likely to enable us to reduce the use of fossil fuels. The most significant barriers to the adoption of fuel cells are distribution infrastructure, safety, and the cost of producing hydrogen. Technologies like this address the third of those barriers.

Well, well, well. A study from the University of Southern California’s CREATE program has found that by and large refugees and asylum-seekers from Central America are neither refugees nor asylum-seekers:

USC study looking at motivations of asylum seekers from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras finds that family ties and economic opportunities are important motivators; evidence on the influence of crime and violence is mixed.

Completing a 12-month study on immigration from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras to the United States, researchers found that juvenile migrants are primarily motivated by economic opportunities and reunification with family members, while economics have motivated adult migrants. The study found mixed evidence on the impact of crime and violence on migration from these countries.

exactly as I’ve been saying. It also supports another point I’ve been making. A more effective, smarter way to enforce our laws is at the employer level rather than building a wall. Universal biometric ID, an improved e-Verify system, and increased even criminal penalties for knowing violation will help us enforce our laws and take the pressure off the border.

I think that John Micklethwait’s piece in Bloomberg, claiming that China is “inching in the right direction”, teeters between being maliciously wrong and just plain delusional:

Dec. 18 is the 40th anniversary of the third plenary session of the 11th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, which was the moment in 1978 Deng Xiaoping started opening up China’s economy. Xi is likely to unveil a series of commemorative reforms; foreign banks that have been waiting to take bigger stakes in their Chinese joint ventures may well find the approval process is speeded up.

So China is inching in the right direction. Its task is made harder by Trump’s enormous unpredictability. His tweets do not just move markets, but also the heart rates of Chinese civil servants who have to interpret his intentions to President Xi.

So, Lucy, how is that football came coming along? China promised greater participation in its banking system 17 years ago and continues to yank the football away.

But I’ll bite. Precisely how is concentrating more power in President Xi’s hands “inching in the right direction”? Militarization of the South China Sea? Building a worldwide network of military bases? Enormously expanding its “blue sea” navy?

And is this true at all?

China’s biggest handicap is its public inability to admit that it has done anything wrong, when on issues like intellectual property it obviously has. This not only makes other countries and businesspeople cross, it leaves the Chinese mystified with what the famous British philosopher Monty Python might call the bleedin’ obvious.

That’s China’s biggest handicap? I would think that lack of a robust system of civil law, demographics, a banking system filled to the gills with non-productive loans, capital flight, and its self-undermining of its own environment were all bigger handicaps. Not to mention public corruption which in China’s case is not episodic but endemic.

George H. W. Bush has died. From USA Today:

HOUSTON — George Herbert Walker Bush, the president who managed the end of the Cold War and forged a global coalition to oust Iraqi forces from Kuwait, has died at age 94. In a political career that spanned three decades, he lost his bid for re-election and lived to see his son win the Oval Office.

The death of Bush — nicknamed “41” to distinguish himself from son George W. Bush, “43” — was announced in a statement released late Friday.

“Jeb, Neil, Marvin, Doro and I are saddened to announce that after 94 remarkable years, our dear Dad has died,” his son, former President George W. Bush, said in a statement released by family spokesman Jim McGrath. “George H.W. Bush was a man of the highest character and the best dad a son or daughter could ask for. The entire Bush family is deeply grateful for 41’s life and love, for the compassion of those who have cared and prayed for Dad, and for the condolences of our friends and fellow citizens.”

I don’t have a great deal to say about the late President Bush. I voted for him in 1992 because I believe that foreign policy, the military, and the administration of the federal government are the primary responsibilities of the president, Mr. Bush was well-qualified for those tasks, and his opponents were neither qualified in the areas of primary presidential responsibility nor men of good character.

I didn’t vote for him without reservations. I thought the Gulf War was an error. That we continued to bomb Iraq over the period of the next 11 years supported that view. Leaving Saddam Hussein in power was the price that Mr. Bush paid for his coalition, a devil’s bargain.

I hope it is not lost on the editors of the New York Times and Washington Post, presently heaping encomiums on the late President Bush, that their endorsements of Bill Clinton in 1992 contributed materially to Donald Trump’s election in 2016. If you value character, you should reward it.

In a pun-laden op-ed in the Wall Street Journal (examples: “Lettuce Try Not to Panic”, “Will a tragic overreaction topple Caesar and lead to the decline of the romaine empire?”) Jim Prevor argues that the CDC overreacted to the E. coli outbreak of a few weeks ago:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention urged before Thanksgiving that “U.S. consumers not eat any romaine lettuce, and retailers and restaurants not serve or sell any” until the current E. coli outbreak is resolved. This effectively closed down the romaine industry, producing tens of millions of dollars in losses of the highly perishable crop. The advisory remains in effect for romaine from the Central Coastal growing regions of Northern and Central California.

The waste is worth it, right? It seems straightforward that no one should eat romaine when the lettuce is making people sick. But it isn’t so clear when you look at the numbers.

The way the CDC identifies a food-safety outbreak is by interviewing sick people and healthy people. If there is a big difference in their answers, the CDC zeroes in on a cause. There are 43 people known to be infected with the outbreak strain of E. coli 0157:H7. The CDC interviewed 25 of them. Eighty-eight percent of those 25 people, as opposed to 47% of the general population, said they ate romaine lettuce in the week before they got sick.

So it probably was romaine that got those people sick—16 severely enough to be hospitalized. But what rational people should do with this information is much less certain.

The U.S. population is about 326 million. If 47% of the population eats romaine each week, that’s about 153 million people. We know of 43 people who have been infected with E. coli from romaine lettuce. According to the CDC, illness start dates range from Oct. 8 to Oct. 31—a period of about three weeks. If we assume, conservatively, that each of those 153 million people eats one serving of romaine each week, then we can figure there were 459 million servings consumed during the three weeks the infection was being transmitted.

This means the odds that eating a serving of romaine will make you sick are about 1 in 11 million, and the odds it will put you in the hospital are less than 1 in 28 million. To put this in perspective, the probability of getting a royal flush in poker is dozens of times as great, at 1 in 649,740, and the probability of an amateur hitting a hole-in-one in golf is hundreds of times as great, at 1 in 12,000. If you are that risk-averse, you should stay away from dogs—the lifetime odds of getting killed by a dog attack are about 1 in 112,000. Even the odds of getting struck by lightning in a particular year are higher than 1 in a million.

To put it another way: If this outbreak were active every day, and you ate one salad a day, on average you would be hospitalized for E. coli once every 77,000 years.

I suppose I shouldn’t blame Mr. Prevor for the puns. Those are probably editorial.

I think his argument is specious. The cases weren’t distributed uniformly throughout the country—they occurred in clusters. Since we don’t keep records at a fine enough granularity (and shouldn’t) we can’t identify precisely what field produced the lettuce that carried the bacteria. We don’t know the actual incidence (it could have been hundreds of times higher but unreported). We don’t even know the actual incidence in the areas in which the cases were reported.

E. coli isn’t endemic in romaine lettuce. It was introduced from outside. Possibilities include animals, the water used in the field, or poor field sanitation conditions. One worker eliminating in a field can sicken hundreds of people. What incentives should be put in place to ensure that producers take sufficient care?

The argument Mr. Prevor is making can be levelled against most laws and most preventive measures. Every restaurant (at least every restaurant I’ve ever worked in) has prominent signs urging workers to wash their hands. Should those be removed? They were made the law due to incidents of disease being spread in restaurants a century ago. Has it all been a waste? Should we abandon all public health measures?

That’s my question for Mr. Prevor. What prevalence is enough for us to take steps in cases of preventable death?

Update

It isn’t just about reducing risk. It’s also about confidence. Do warnings like the CDC’s increase or decrease confidence? Our present system of food distribution depends on trust. What would happen to California produce growers if there were a catastrophic decrease in trust in the food supply?

In a sort of companion piece to Mr. Ignatius’s column, the editors of the Washington Post argue for surrender:

The question is what Mr. Trump proposes to do now that he has Beijing’s attention. One approach would be to continue condemning China’s failure to meet U.S. demands, and press ahead with higher tariffs, then settle in for what might be a protracted trade war. But the collateral damage to U.S. businesses and consumers would be severe. The wiser course, which Mr. Trump has hinted at adopting in recent days, would be a temporary truce: a further delay in additional U.S. tariffs in return for comparable Chinese concessions, to be followed by negotiations — serious negotiations — on the full range of issues between the two countries.

They are behind the curve. We will have been in a Cold War with China for 17 years come this December 11. We just haven’t been fighting back. We have experienced millions of casualties. The editors of the Washington Post are unconcerned because the casualties haven’t been their friends, families, or even people they associate with or like. They’ve been the proles.

We must demand reciprocity from the Chinese and accept no less. At the very least they should live up immediately to the commitments they made when they were admitted to the World Trade Organization or be summarily expelled. Another strategy for motivating the Chinese authorities is by using tariffs. They are part of the process of securing the concessions the editors are seeking. A one-sided concession from the U. S. would be foolish in the extreme.

What would the editors prefer? Embargo? Blockade? What other leverage do they think we have?

In his latest Washington Post column David Ignatius notes that subtlety is more effective than bluster:

The calmest voices lately have been the Chinese, as they glide into the vacuum left by Trump as he embraced “America First” and abandoned leadership of the global order. China’s approach, of course, is to win wars without fighting, as enunciated 2,500 years ago by master strategist Sun Tzu. Beijing doesn’t ram boats or buzz aircraft carriers in the South China Sea; the Chinese slowly turn reefs into islands and then fortify them into air bases. By the time people see what’s happening, it’s too late. Their answer to disruption is stealth.

Commentators often argue that the United States should penalize Putin’s aggression by matching his tough tactics. “NATO should look at increasing naval patrols in the Black Sea,” argued John Herbst, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, during an Atlantic Council briefing this week. But I’d tend to agree with Mark Galeotti, a British Kremlin-watcher, who tweeted: “Calls for Western naval forces to be sent into Azov [are] dangerous, impractical & illegal.”

Far better than tit-for-tat U.S. bluster and belligerence would be quiet, hard-nosed use of power. Make Russia pay a price for its aggression, but invisibly. Pressure Saudi Arabia’s crown prince to stabilize his regime and stop the fighting in Yemen, but silently.

The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.

Stealth is, of course, one way but there are others. Possessing overwhelming power, for example. Your enemy’s conviction that he will lose any confrontation is a great weapon. Nothing has undermined America’s power more than the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. 15 years of war not only saps your resources and your willingness to fight, it looks weak and possessing overwhelming power must be complemented by the perception that you possess overwhelming power.

Another great weapon is for your enemy or, at least, your enemy’s people to want what you want. We didn’t defeat the Soviet Union just by possessing overwhelming power and being perceived to have overwhelming power. The Russian people wanting the same things we do was a powerful supporting factor. We didn’t defeat communism simply by possessing weapons. We did it with blue jeans and canned goods.

Having a social and political system that is seen to be dysfunctional or unjust works against us. We must work to make our systems just and effective and be perceived as such.

Before I comment on Steve Rattner’s op-ed in the New York Times on GM’s decision to stop producing electric vehicles in the United States, I should probably repeat my opinion of the man himself. I think that Steve Rattner is a Democratic Party rainmaker without the knowledge, experience, or temperament to conduct serious negotiations with GM or Chrysler back in 2009 but excellent credentials to be a messenger boy between the auto industry and the Obama Administration. Occam’s Razor suggests that was indeed his role. The problem with the Obama Administration’s handling of the near-collapse of the domestic auto industry was that it had, as an old friend of mine might have put it, too many oars in the water. One of those oars was electric vehicles.

This statement from the op-ed startled me:

Moves toward electric vehicles, in particular, will vastly change the types of factories and workers that G.M. needs.

Maybe I’m naive but what moves? GM’s sales of EVs (all models) have tanked. They aren’t increasing the way sales projections have thought they would. To my eye any bumps in EV sales have been produced by Tesla. Tesla has proved that, if an automaker produces a stylish vehicle and sells it at a loss, they can sell as many as they can produce. More. Exciting news. Also, you can sell as many quarters at a nickel a piece as you care to.

Increases in worldwide sales of EVs are largely due to sales in China. China uses and produces a lot of EVs. It’s amazing what you can in a command economy. China’s motives are clear: they want to reduce oil imports, at this point their largest category of imports.

In the United States EVs are likely to remain what they have been: a niche product.

When Mr. Rattner writes this:

Mr. Trump’s responses to G.M.’s decision also miss the mark. He called on G.M. to close one of its plants in China, even though G.M. doesn’t import a meaningful number of cars from there. He said G.M. should no longer have access to incentives to stimulate electric car production, which would simply damage the government’s effort to make the industry more competitive by spurring investment in new technologies.

I suspect he doesn’t understand the big picture. IMO Trump’s not trying to curb imports of Chinese EVs. He wants China to import EVs. I don’t think that’s going to happen for reasons I’ve suggested above.

Here’s the balance of Mr. Rattner’s piece:

In addition, the American government should increase spending on education and training and finally begin that the long-delayed infrastructure initiative. We need to foster Americans’ pioneer spirit, and encourage them to move to where the jobs are.

For some Americans, it’s too late for retraining or relocation. They deserve a stronger social safety net, including programs to reduce the tendency to turn to alcohol and opioids.

or, in other words, he thinks we can educate workers to take the mid-level jobs that aren’t being produced and give the increasing numbers of unemployed and unemployable health care. At the end of this process we’ll have highly compensated educators and health care providers and millions of bored unemployed people.

It sounds to me as though he wants to manage the decline rather than produce a recovery.

In response to Mike Pompeo’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal:

The kingdom is a powerful force for stability in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia is working to secure Iraq’s fragile democracy and keep Baghdad tethered to the West’s interests, not Tehran’s. Riyadh is helping manage the flood of refugees fleeing Syria’s civil war by working with host countries, cooperating closely with Egypt, and establishing stronger ties with Israel. Saudi Arabia has also contributed millions of dollars to the U.S.-led effort to fight Islamic State and other terrorist organizations. Saudi oil production and economic stability are keys to regional prosperity and global energy security.

Saudi Arabia is acting in what it perceives are its own interests and will continue to do so regardless of what we do or do not do. It is working to destabilize countries with Shi’ite majorities or minorities with power. It funds Al Qaeda. It funds Wahhabi mosques all over the world where hatred against us and our way of life is preached on a daily basis. They are not our friends. They aren’t even frenemies.

To whatever extent our relationship with KSA is vital we should take steps to change that. We shouldn’t have had “vital” relationships with Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, or China under Mao, either. There are tolerable authoritarian governments and intolerable ones. The Saudi government has become intolerable.