Gregg Easterbrook

Tuesday morning, I rose at 2 A.M. and stood for an hour in the freezing cold to watch a total eclipse of the full moon, occurring on a solstice: a conjunction that last occurred in 1638, and won’t occur again until 2094. Standing there, I wondered if this exceptional moonglow would give me a superpower — nothing to report yet. The sense of awe I felt right away.

The more astronomers look out into the universe, the more vast and majestic it is understood to be. As the holidays arrive, and the year comes to a close, it is well to ponder this.

Many generations ago, our ancestors gazing up at constellations and eclipses believed the cosmos bounded by such stars as could be seen unaided by the eye. Just a century ago, even after people considered themselves advanced owing to developments like powered flight, it was not known that any other galaxies existed. Our Milky Way was considered the totality of creation.

In 1923, the existence of galaxies beyond the Milky Way was proven. Initial estimates were that there might be as many as a few dozen additional galaxies — a number then viewed as stunning. The latest estimate, from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, is 100 billion galaxies. The count is expected to rise.

Star estimates have risen in concert. A century ago, even the best-informed believed the Milky Way contained perhaps a few million stars. By the 1960s, astronomers contended the Milky Way held a billion stars, a number many found hard to believe. By the 1980s, the estimate had grown to 40 billion stars. Today it’s thought the Milky Way contains at least 90 billion stars and perhaps as many as 400 billion. Many other galaxies are likely to contain similar numbers.

Recently, researchers led by Yale University cosmologists proposed there exists at least three times as many stars as previously thought. The Yale estimate is 200 sextillion stars, a 2 followed by 23 zeroes.

In his 1988 book Coming of Age in the Milky Way, the science writer Timothy Ferris supposed there were so many stars that to spend one second contemplating each star in creation would require as long as the universe has existed. The star count has shot up so much just since 1988 that at 200 sextillion, you would need to contemplate a million stars per second, for as long as the cosmos has been here, to contemplate them all.

And stars are still forming, some right in our neighborhood. This active star-forming region is about 170,000 light-years from Earth, incomprehensible distance to us but not far in cosmic terms. This star-forming region is dense with very large, blue stars — the kind that may have dominated the early universe — meaning it’s a young star-forming region that has only “recently” become a stellar nursery. If the extremely bright star-forming region shown at the second link were inside our Milky Way, it would cast shadows at night, like a full moon.

Large numbers of new stars are forming as close to us as the Orion Nebula, which is 1,300 light-years away, “nearby” in the galactic sense.

There is a reasonable body of evidence that the cosmos came into being about 14 billion years ago, during a Big Bang or some kind of singular event. The universe is 14 billion years old — and stars are still forming.

Compared to us, the cosmos is unimaginably old. Compared to itself, creation glistens with the dew of morning.

Current evidence suggests the universe may continue, in roughly its current form, for at least hundreds of billions more years: which, to us, might as well be eternity. The universe may well exist forever, though evolving into a form with features that would seem strange, such as the deaths of hot stars and galaxies so far apart they would lose the ability to see each other. But that would happen over trillions of years, a time-scale that can’t be considered in any common-sense way.

This atlas offers a modest impression of cosmic scale, from our galaxy to the visible boundary of existence. Try clicking on the Virgo Supercluster, the suburb of galaxies in which is Milky Way is situated. Bear in mind that each tiny dot on that map represents 20 billion to 400 billion stars. If one star system in a thousand contains a planet similar to Earth, the number of Earthlike worlds will be in the billions. And that’s just “nearby.”

Are researchers wrong, and overestimating the magnitude and age of the universe? Perhaps. Many beliefs now asserted by top scientists, and received as advanced rationalism, may in light of future knowledge be scoffed at as superstition. That’s been the pattern of the past.

But it is as likely that contemporary estimates understate creation. There may be still more galaxies beyond the visible universe; other universes in other dimensions; some energy-adding process by which our cosmos never runs down. The firmament, and physics, may have majestic basic properties we haven’t even guessed at yet.

The magnitude of the universe might make you feel small — but should make you feel important. Even if we are short-lived little blips in an extremely long-lived enormous cosmos, life grants the cosmos meaning.

If we evolved on a wholly natural basis, who can say where evolution, and our own thinking, may take us? If there is a higher intelligence behind the universe, who can say what may be in store? In either event, even in a firmament of 100 billion galaxies, it is life that invests the cosmic enterprise with meaning.

Look up at that unfathomably large universe on some clear, dark night. Stare at the stars in wonder. They are staring back at you, also in wonder.

Happy holidays.

Photo captions:
Top: A supernova within the galaxy M100, that may contain the youngest known black hole in our cosmic neighborhood, is seen in this composite image. REUTERS/Chandra X-ray Observatory Center/Handout
Bottom: The Moon is engulfed in the Earth’s shadow as it nears the peak of a rare winter solstice total lunar eclipse as viewed through a telescope from Palm Beach Gardens December 21, 2010. REUTERS/Doug Murray

With 2011 around the corner, what big developments might be expected in the coming year? Here are a few possibilities, bad and good:

Bad: Freshwater shortages. China is depleting its aquifers at an alarming rate in order to grow rice, the most water-intensive cereal. Freshwater supplies are approaching critical in much of the Middle East.

Discussion of climate change has focused on rising temperatures, which in and of themselves aren’t a threat and have some positives (such as lowering winter heat demand). As UCLA geographer Laurence Smith shows in his important new book The World in 2050, nearly all our globe’s surface freshwater is in glaciers and snowpack. Warming is causing “more of the world’s water to leave the mountains to run to the sea,” warns Smith, and “no amount of engineering” can reverse this loss in the short term.

Good: The boom resumes. Call me zany, call me wacky — the conditions are in place for a resumption of significant global economic growth. The world economy was hit with a broadside and shook but didn’t sink. This shows the fundamentals are sound. An up cycle is due.

Bad: Air strikes against Iran’s nuclear installation. Israel, lacking long-range force projection, could mount only a token strike that would destabilize the region but accomplish little. The United States has the means to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities from the air, but would kill many civilians in the process — as well as kill Russians, potentially restarting the Cold War. In 10 years, everything would be rebuilt anyway.

Encouraging Iran’s internal democracy movement is a lot more promising than military force. Remember, internal democracy movements are what worked against the old Soviet Union. Plus a United States attack that kills innocent Iranians would be a great way to discredit the country’s internal democracy movement.

Good: Barack Obama matures into a centrist, Bill-Clinton-style president. Clinton’s first two years were rocky as he focused on appeasing the party’s left wing. After he began to govern from the center, things improved for everyone, including for the left. Obama might undergo the same transition.

Bad: China or India go haywire. Both have done better than expected, economically and sociologically, for two decades. Both have gigantic populations and internal stresses that could spiral out of control all too easily. It’s especially amusing when you read in the Western press about China as some unstoppable super-efficient colossus. Within China, things are so crazed the attitude is: Will we make it through tomorrow?

Good: The death of Fidel Castro leads to the opening of Cuba. It’s ridiculous that the United States and Cuba are quasi-enemies, while the U.S. embargo against Cuba has accomplished nothing except causing average Cubans to suffer. If Castro’s dictatorship crumbles, Cuba should be a natural democracy. Offer Havana a Major League Baseball expansion franchise to seal the deal.

Bad: On the deficit — tomorrow comes. Politicians of both parties, at the federal and state levels, have spent the last five years borrowing recklessly in order to fill goody bags to hand out to interest groups. Those to blame cynically assume the debt won’t cause a monetary emergency, or a return to inflation, until after they have left office. Money manager David Einhorn, who saw the failure of Lehman Brothers coming long before others, warns that problems caused by the national debt will hit sooner than we think.

Right now Congress thinks a bright sunny day is a crisis: a lot of Capital Hill blather boils down to, “We must have a special giveaway because of the [insert word chosen at random] crisis.” Imagine if a true governing crisis began — such as foreign investors and sovereign wealth funds refusing to lend the United States any more money. Is there in Washington a single politician of either party with the intestinal fortitude to face a true crisis, as opposed to presiding over reckless giveaways?

Good: There will be a breakthrough in cost-effective small-scale, on-site electricity generation that allows offices, schools and even homes to begin detaching from the power grid, reducing the fossil fuel waste that is caused by transmission losses and cutting greenhouse gas emissions without any sacrifice in lifestyles. Sorry to sound a bit wonkish, but it feels to me like this is the next breakthrough coming.

Bad: A crop failure. The reason predicted Malthusian calamities have not occurred in the developing world is that in all years save one since the war, global food production has increased ahead of population growth. But the agricultural system is perilously poised – some factor such as rainfall patterns disrupted by climate change could stop always-increasing farm yield. The phrase “crop failure” hasn’t been used in international politics since 1979. If there were a food shortage, it would rapidly swamp all other international issues combined.

Good: Another Earthlike world will be found. Twenty years ago, no planet outside the solar system had been detected. Improved astronomy has led to the discovery of about 500 “exosolar” planets, all unlike Earth — much colder, much hotter, much larger (extreme gravity) or gaseous. But it’s only a matter of time until another world similar to ours — with the conditions for the one form of life we know  possible — is discovered, perhaps even “nearby” in galactic terms.

The finding of another planet similar to Earth would be thrilling and unsettling both at once.  Even from galactic distance, it may be possible to determine if an Earthlike world has an oxygen-rich blue sky (meaning plants and marine organisms, since oxygen would rapidly deplete from the atmosphere without life) and artificial lights on the planet’s side that is in darkness (meaning cities).

The sci-fi aspects of the discovery of a distant world are improbable under known physics — at the fastest speed a spacecraft has achieved, the closet star system to our sun is 40,000 years away.

But if another world similar to Earth is discovered, this would renew our sense of hope and wonder — and that could be a good feeling for 2011.

“If we don’t take meaningful steps to rein in our debt, it could …  jeopardize our recovery.”

–President Barack Obama, January 2010.

“Next year [I will] start presenting some very difficult choices to the country” on debt reduction.

–Obama, June 2010

Bartender, giveaways for everyone!

–Essentially what Obama said, in so many words, December 2010.

Barack Obama pledged to reduce the national debt during his presidential campaign, but instead has added $2.7 trillion to that debt so far – more than the entire national debt in the year 1975. Throughout 2010, he repeatedly promised there will be no more treating the Treasury as a cookie jar. Now, suddenly, there will be $900 billion in new giveaways, financed entirely by borrowing.

Just a week ago the deficit reduction commission proposed wrenching cuts and tax increases that, best-case, would cut several hundred billion dollars from the deficit over the next few years. The deficit commission recommendations had only been out a week before the White House, most Republicans and some Democrats endorsed a giveaway of significantly more money than the wrenching cuts would save!

But don’t we need more giveaways to stimulate the economy?

First, there is little reason to believe this will work. Second and more important, constant additions to the national debt — coupled with the sense that Washington is out of control — may be the reason the economy keeps sputtering. The latest giveaway may cause more economic malaise, rather than cure it.

Won’t tax cuts save the economy?
The argument that extending the 2003 tax cuts is needed to boost the economy simply ignores that the economy declined with these cuts in place. Federal income taxes (for the working class and the middle class as well as the rich) were reduced in 2001 and again in 2003. Right after that, the economy began to sputter.

Maybe this would have happened anyway. But it’s incontestable that low taxes on the middle class and especially on the rich did not pull the country out of the recession of 2007-2009, or out of the slow growth of 2010. Reckless fiscal policy didn’t work. Now we’re supposed to believe that the same tax cuts that didn’t work before magically will work in 2011 and 2012.

Stimulus spending didn’t work either. George W. Bush supported $200 billion in stimulus spending in 2008. Obama added another nearly $800 billion in 2009, and about $300 billion rationalized as stimulus in 2010. All was backed by debt. Now we’re told $900 billion in additional debt will boost the economy — magically, though it didn’t before.

Of course everyone wants lower taxes. But federal income and corporate taxes are already at historical lows, while national debt keeps breaking records. The White House deal is transparently a package of giveaways. In the very worst of Washington traditions, a spending-spree mentality took hold — I’ll prove that I can give away more than you can! — with the negotiators emerging having agreed to hand out substantially more than the worst-case estimate when the talks began.

Will the latest giveaways harm the economy rather than help it?
If the White House plan goes through, national debt will have increased to nearly $6 trillion during the first term of the Obama presidency. Republicans are as much to blame as Democrats — no one has been more irresponsible with national finances in the last decade as Republicans. Regardless, you should be shocked by this number — almost as much debt taken on in four years as in the entire previous history of the Republic! And no plan to do anything about it.

Each time Washington increases the debt, it makes the United States less valuable — in the same way that each time you borrow against your house, you make your house less valuable. To you, at least. (The country, in this analogy, is becoming steadily less valuable to Americans, though more valuable to Chinese and Arab sovereign wealth funds.)

Since 2006, Congress and the White House, under leadership and presidents of both parties, have steadily made the United States less valuable via reckless fiscal policy.

This is a core reason the economy continues to sputter. Corporations are sitting on big piles of cash they won’t invest. Why invest in a country that keeps becoming less valuable?

Why innovate in hopes of future profit when systemic fiscal irresponsibility by both parties means either the United States will become a stagnant mega-Japan, or steep tax increases will be the only way out when panic sets in?

Corporations aren’t investing to spark new growth and create more jobs because they think Washington’s Democrats and Republicans alike are running the country into the ground. The new $900 billion giveaway provides evidence this view is correct. No one in the White House or in Congress is willing to act like a responsible adult. They’ve all got hands in the cookie jar, and future generations will suffer.

Bear in mind, when the early 1990s recession afflicted the country, President Bill Clinton did not back any form of giveaways. Instead he reigned in federal spending in order to reduce the deficit and create confidence the United States was becoming more valuable, not less.  This worked! The deficit declined and the decade that followed was the best-ever economically for the nation.

Maybe this week’s deal tells us Barack Obama is simply becoming yet another political phony — a depressing thought at many levels. Last January during the State of the Union Address, when Obama declared there would be strict fiscal disciple but not “till next year,” the transcript recorded that there was laughter. Suddenly it’s not funny.

But the worst fear is that the deal tells us the president and congressional leaders have no backbone: whenever an interest group squeals, it will receive a handout, regardless of harm to the country.

Cutting the debt, by taxes and by spending reductions, could pull the economy of out the quicksand. Increasing the national debt will likely make matters worse.

Bravely, international diplomats, United Nations officials and environmentalists are meeting in Cancun this week to demand that other people use less fossil fuel. Bravely they met in Copenhagen a year ago to make the same demand, after also bravely meeting in Bali, Montreal and similar resort locales in prior years.

I will skip the obvious point about the greenhouse gases emitted by the jets and limos that bring the participants to these annual confabs, where preaching-to-the-choir is the order of the day.

Most of what happens at the annual international conference on climate change has been decided on in advance, so the greenhouse emissions could be avoided by a tele-meeting. But then the delegates won’t get a paid trip to Cancun!

Last year, the majority of the world’s heads of state, including President Barack Obama, attended the climate change conference in Copenhagen, where they bravely made vague, nonbinding comments about how other people should use less fossil fuel.

Obama ended the conference by declaring the United States would make a nonbinding commitment to engage in future greenhouse gas negotiations — exactly what the elder president George Bush was mocked for saying at the conclusion of the 1992 Earth Summit, in Rio, a place the delegates bravely went.

Nearly two decades after Rio, nothing has changed in the international legal status of greenhouse gases, which are all but unregulated; nothing has changed in the United States, which does not regulate greenhouse gases; and President Obama was even using 17-year-old meaningless boilerplate!

Wait, the 2009 meeting did vote out this extremely vague, nonbinding document, whose only clear conclusion is that the United Nations and its member countries should continue to provide cushy jobs to the kinds of people who attend these kinds of conferences. Amorphous as the 2009 document was, only about half the heads of state present endorsed it. The rest just made hollow speeches then jetted away, after posing for pictures. But they posed bravely! It takes tremendous courage to stand in a fancy hotel in a beautiful locale and demand that other people use less fossil fuel.

This year’s conference may not even result in a vague nonbinding memo. Though there is sure to be lots of talk about … next year’s conference.

Perhaps you think I am mocking the Cancun event because I believe climate change to be inconsequential. Rather, I am mocking the Cancun conference because I believe climate change is a real threat.

Going-through-the-motions of international gatherings that accomplish nothing other than a luxurious week of travel for climate-o-crats are part of the problem. Such conferences make global warming concern seem the kind of thing only United Nations officials and environmental fundraisers care about. Having the United States president, and other heads of state, attend such conferences and then reach no agreement only makes the climate change concern seem ridiculous — as yet another self-promotion photo-op for politicians.

Greenhouse gases won’t cause the instant-doomsday calamities spoken of in Hollywood and environmental literature. But there is real risk climate change will harm agriculture, by altering rainfall patterns; will raise sea levels and change ocean currents; will reduce the global freshwater supply, by melting the snowpack and glaciers that provide most of the freshwater used for farming and drinking. Plus we should be reducing fossil fuel consumption regardless of climate trends.

The above paragraph contains ample rationale for action to reduce greenhouse gases. But wasteful international meetings in resort cites will not get this job done — no matter how fancy the chardonnay and canapés may be.

The United States should drop out of all international negotiations on greenhouse gases — such negotiations are a total waste of everyone’s time — and go it alone. Regulate carbon within the United States, on a domestic-policy basis. This will inspire U.S. engineers, inventors and business people to devise clever ways to reduce greenhouse gases cheaply. Once we invent them, we give them to the world.

That is how rapid global progress against smog and acid rain was achieved. The United States regulated these problems on a domestic-policy basis, invented cost-effective engineering and economic solutions, then gave the solutions away. Smog and acid rain are now declining almost everywhere in the world, even with population growth. Yet no international treaty governs these issues, and the United Nations has nothing to do with them.

International negotiation regarding greenhouse gases is not only complex, expensive and goin’ nowhere, there is no chance — none, zip, zilch — that the United States Senate ever will ratify a treaty that grants the international community decision-making input into American energy policy.

The Senate ratified the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change, under whose auspices the annual meetings are held. But the Framework Convention has no teeth — basically, it authorizes annual meetings. In 1997, a test vote on the Kyoto Protocol was rejected 97-0. Not even one Democrat voted in favor!

The current Kyoto Protocol is somewhat improved over the 1997 version – it might draw 15 or even 20 votes in the Senate. There is no chance — none, zero, zilch — that Kyoto or a hypothetical better-written Daughter of Kyoto will be ratified by the Senate. Not in the lifetime of anyone reading this column, at least.

So why does the White House and State Department continue to participate in climate change negotiations and send officials to conferences like Cancun to make empty speeches? In order to create the appearance of action, distracting attention from the lack of real change.

The cap-and-trade greenhouse legislation failed last year in Congress, and good riddance to the bill, which was ultra-complex, plus larded with bureaucracy and special-interest handouts.

The United States needs a carbon tax, the simplest and most cost-effective means to address greenhouse gases. Free-market economists such as N. Gregory Mankiw, head of the White House Council of Economic Advisors under George W. Bush, have endorsed a carbon tax — to inspire inventors and business people to seek profit by finding cost-effective ways to reduce greenhouse gases.

Right now Washington is debating raising taxes to fight national debt. Rather than tax labor or capital — all current proposals call for one or the other — let’s tax greenhouse gases. This will create a profit incentive to fix the global warming problem. Then we’ll give the solution to the world.

That’s American can-do spirit, and that’s what can protect us against climate change. Not conferences in Cancun.

Photo caption: A member of an environmental organization holds a sign during a protest outside the U.S. Embassy in San Salvador November 30, 2010, to demand that the U.S. sign the Kyoto treaty on climate change at the United Nations Climate Change Conference that is being held in Cancun, Mexico. The talks are seeking a successor for the U.N.’s 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which obliges almost 40 developed nations to cut greenhouse gas emissions by at least 5.2 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-2012. The U.S. never joined Kyoto, believing it would cost U.S. jobs and excluded developing nations. REUTERS/Luis Galdamez