Harvard University Press Blog

The Future of Russia as an Energy Superpower

Russia’s energy wealth has long been the main pillar of the country’s economy, but what’s the long-term future of that financial security in a world that is gradually moving toward decarbonization? Thane Gustafson, whose Wheel of Fortune: The Battle for Oil and Power in Russia we recently released in a paperback edition, addressed that question earlier this fall when he delivered the Chatham House’s Annual Russia Lecture. The text of his address is below.

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The last time I had the honor of giving a speech here at Chatham House was thirteen years ago, in 2004. The talk was entitled “The Russian Oil Miracle.” Five years before, after sinking to a low point equal to about half of the Soviet-era record of 1988, Russian oil production had abruptly turned around, and between 1999 and 2004, it had regained much of the lost ground. During those years, Russia accounted for all of the net addition of crude to world oil supply.

What we could not see at the time, however, was that 2004 was the last of the miracle years, which were essentially based on capturing the “Soviet dividend.” By 2004 much of the Soviet dividend had been extracted, and while Russian oil production has continued to grow steadily since then, progress has been very gradual, and every year the net increase in production is far outstripped by the volume of drilling required to produce it, as each year’s production must overcome the built-in decline rate of existing fields as well as the diminishing returns from new ones. The Russian oil industry is very much in the position of an athlete that is running uphill against a slope that is steadily growing steeper.

But it is not my purpose today to deliver an update of the Russian Oil Miracle, but rather, to ask a very different sort of question, reflecting the revolutionary changes that have taken place in the world of energy, and especially in our perceptions of it, in just a decade-and-a-half, and to reflect with you on the implications of these changes for Russia as an energy producer and as—I think we can fairly use the term—a “petro-state.” Namely—what happens to Russia as an energy superpower as global demand for oil approaches a peak?

Cycles within Cycles: How to Think about the Energy Future of Russia

Trying to predict the future of Russian energy, and indeed of Russia itself, is like predicting climate change. And here I’m not talking about Mark Twain’s famous wisecrack that “everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” Rather, what I mean is the classic difficulty in any conversation about climate change—namely, that of distinguishing between long-term cycles and near-term ones, or, to put it another way, between signal and noise. Rising ocean levels are signal, whereas last year’s winter temperatures in Washington are noise.

Let me take as one example the cycles of global crude oil prices and their impact on the Russian economy. Russia has gone through four economic crashes since the mid-1980s, all four of them connected to the rise and fall of commodity prices and specifically oil. The precise causes and course of each of these cycles has been different from case to case. Yet the following would have seemed like a safe prediction just a few years ago:

• The cycle of peak and trough in global commodity prices will continue—that is what commodities do—and since oil markets are increasingly globalized and commoditized, the same cyclical pattern will govern oil prices as well—and gas too, by the way, as liquefied natural gas (LNG) increasingly turns gas into a globally traded commodity.
• And with each downturn—possibly at more frequent intervals in the future than in the past, but roughly once every decade—Russia will be thrown into recession, although with improved macroeconomic management (as in the last downturn) the extent of the decline may be cushioned. Conversely, as Alexei Kudrin has been warning for a decade, the stimulative effect of each upswing in oil prices will also be smaller each time, as the dependence of the Russian state budget on oil revenues increases.

The Science and Politics of Identifying the Dead

Earlier this month, the New York City medical examiner’s office positively identified the remains of a man killed in the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center—the first positive identification in over two years. Below, Jay Aronson, author of Who Owns the Dead? The Science and Politics of Death at Ground Zero, considers some of the questions raised by the open-ended effort to identify the dead.

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The recent identification of the 1641st victim of the September 11, 2001 World Trade Center attacks highlights both the continuing development of DNA profiling technology and the ongoing commitment of the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) to endeavor to identify the remains of 9/11 victims. Before this, the most recent identification occurred in March 2015 when 26-year-old Fiduciary Trust employee Matthew David Yarnell was identified using newly available testing methods.

In Who Owns the Dead? I chronicle the efforts of scientists, construction workers, politicians, and uniformed service personnel to recover and identify the remains of the victims of the World Trade Center attacks. The identification of Yarnell and the most recent victim are the fruits of a promise made by Medical Examiner Charles Hirsch that his office would never end its efforts to identify the missing.

Despite these recent successes, Who Owns the Dead? suggests that the promise was problematic at a variety of levels, not least of which that it means that the events of 9/11 can never be fully put to rest and that unidentified remains of victims will be in a permanent state of limbo—neither buried in marked individual graves nor interred in a collective mass grave. Instead, they are housed in the Medical Examiner’s repository seven stories below ground behind a wall of the National 9/11 Museum.

Other than an unknown number of undocumented immigrants who were never officially reported missing, it is highly unlikely that any victims of the attacks suffered an anonymous death. In an interview with CNN, Matthew Yarnell’s mother Michelle Yarnell said that she never doubted that her son had died in the attacks. She said that receiving the call from the OCME about Matthew “opened up all of the old wounds and old pains,” but enabled her family to “finally put everything to rest.” She also noted that she was grateful that the ME’s office was not going to give up in their quest to identify as many remains as possible. “I hope for everyone that lost a loved one there, that they’ll have closure someday, and, hopefully, sooner rather than later.”

Identifications like Yarnell’s and the one that just occurred will likely continue sporadically over the next few decades as DNA extraction technology continues to improve and profiling techniques become ever more sensitive. This will also likely become the norm for future mass disasters in which identification programs are declared open-ended.

One question that needs to be answered, then, is what impact these long-delayed identifications have on families and communities. Do they bring solace and relief after so many years? Are outcomes for families that receive remains years or decades after death different in any way from those of families that receive them early on, or not all? Is the lingering hope that an identification may occur in the future healthy or unhealthy for families that do not receive remains? In cases where families receive partial remains, what are the effects of being informed of the identification of additional remains years later? And, more controversially, whatever the answer to these questions, might the resources expended on extended identification projects be used more helpfully in other ways?

These are questions that must be analyzed empirically by psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, ethicists, historians, and forensic scientists. We must not assume that we already know the answers.

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Aronson recently spoke with the University of Pittsburgh Humanities Center’s Being Human podcast about his work; you can listen to that conversation via the player below.

 

A Wonderful Story of Spacetime

In Ripples in Spacetime: Einstein, Gravitational Waves, and the Future of Astronomy, internationally-acclaimed science writer Govert Schilling takes us through a century of scientific adventures to one of the biggest discoveries of history: the September 2015 detection of gravitational waves by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). Gravitational waves are produced by some of the most large-scale objects and cataclysmic events in the universe, associated with supermassive black holes, pulsars, colliding galaxies, and the Big Bang itself. There’s already a great deal known about how gravitational waves are produced—efforts to detect them have been ongoing since the 1960s—and further detections made with ever more sensitive equipment will provide astronomers with a completely new way of studying the violent universe, perhaps helping physicists finally solve a number of persistent uncertainties about spacetime.

Schilling looks back to the development of the theoretical and technical aspects of gravitational wave detection and also forward to those expectations for the future, all while conveying the persistence, excitement, and scientific significance of the hunt. As British Astronomer Royal Martin Rees notes in his Foreword to the book, Schilling “tells of boisterous controversies, setbacks, and amazing technical achievements by scientists and engineers who struggled for decades to achieve fantastic precision. He relates how they emerged triumphant, revealing clues to the bedrock nature of space and time. It is a wonderful story, engagingly and rivetingly told.”

In the video below, Schilling introduces Ripples in Spacetime.

Humans and Nature, Hopelessly Entangled

Henry David Thoreau, born two hundred years ago today, is known for his stay on Walden Pond but at heart was really one for rivers. So argues Robert Thorson in The Boatman: Henry David Thoreau’s River Years, which shows just how deeply Thoreau’s thinking and writing were connected to paddling and sailing. Thorson’s presentation of Thoreau as a data-driven environmental scientist also gives us a Thoreau for the Anthropocene, an outdoorsman deeply attuned to the ways in which mankind was reshaping the natural world. Perhaps surprisingly, from today’s vantage, Thoreau regarded that reshaping not as pure debasement, but as the unavoidable entwining of human actions with natural processes, a snarl that heightened conditions for his beloved boating, among many other effects. In the passage below, adapted from The Boatman’s Conclusion, Thorson gives us a Thoreau determined to both appreciate the benefits and diminish the detriment of that hopeless entangling.

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Concord’s makeover began when English colonials arrived to create a religiously based communal village on the banks of this lush river meadow. Historian Brian Donahue proved that theirs was a largely sustainable agrarian culture. Yet within a decade they were trying to reengineer their “Great River” landscape by ditching its bedrock outlet. When that failed for lack of technology, they explored the possibility of diverting floodwaters eastward through the meadows of Thoreau’s birthplace, over the watershed divide, and into the Shawsheen Valley. Their pioneering efforts inaugurated more than two centuries of human “improvements” driven by an exponentially rising American population and improved technologies. Maximum development—agricultural land conversions and industrial hydropower development—occurred in Thoreau’s generation. By the time of his death, virtually every square inch of the land had been transformed in some way: rock to quarry, river to canal, brook to millstream, wood to fuel, land to pasture, and field to cropland. The entire valley had become a network of dams, canals, turnpikes, railroads, factories, town streets, and country roads.

John Barry, in his history of American river engineering, describes the cultural zeitgeist of Thoreau’s century: “This was the century of iron and steel, certainty and progress, and the belief that physical laws as solid and rigid as iron and steel governed nature, possibly even man’s nature, and that man had only to discover these laws to truly rule the world. It was the century of Euclidean geometry, linear logic, magnificent accomplishments, and brilliant mechanics. It was the century of the engineer.”

Local monuments to that century were the Billerica dam, the Middlesex Canal, the Fitchburg Railroad, and the Union Turnpike. Each was a battle won in a war against nature launched by General George Washington’s Revolutionary Army. Since the dawn of antiquity, rivers, even more so than coasts, have been the primary battlefields in this war. The U.S. Geological Survey, acting through the U.S. National Research Council, summarized the situation in 2007: “Deforestation, industrialization, urbanization, floodplain cultivation, dams and levee construction, and channelization have altered dramatically natural flow regimes.” Thoreau, by the end of his life, had encountered all of these disruptions and disconnections in his own field studies.

One Line to Rule the World

Spring has arrived, and with it, daylight saving time. As the clocks go forward an hour in the UK, as they did earlier this month in the US, we’re taking a look at how Greenwich became the home of time. A new book by Geographer Royal for Scotland, Professor Charles Withers, asks the question, how did the prime meridian, a singular world-ruling feature, come to be sited in southeast London? Why was it chosen over Washington, Paris, or Beijing? The passage below, excerpted from the prologue of Zero Degrees: Geographies of the Prime Meridian, explains how the choice of Greenwich to mark 0° longitude would go on to solve complex problems of global measurement that had engaged geographers, astronomers, and mariners since ancient times.

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In November 1883, a sixty-seven-year-old English sailor addressed a letter to the world’s geographical societies. There are, he began, “some things that belong to all mankind.” What William Parker Snow had in mind was nothing less than a single prime meridian, a global base point or line to be used by all nations. From such an agreed point of terrestrial measurement, he reasoned, navigators and geographers could plot their voyages and align their maps, and perhaps astronomers could even chart the heavens, all using a standard point of earthly reference. One prime meridian for the world and only one, stressed Parker Snow, would be of “vast benefit to Science and Humanity.”

His appeal for a uniform base of measurement was rooted in personal experience. Born in 1817 in Poole, England, William Parker Snow was a sailor, an author, a sometime Patagonian colonist, a historian of the American Civil War, and, important to his own self-image, a veteran of Arctic exploration. He was also reputed to be psychic and lived, as one contemporary remarked, “on the edge of the Fourth Dimension.” Parker Snow’s supposed otherworldly powers, revealed in a dream in January 1850, convinced him (but few others) of the location of the ill-fated Franklin expedition that was lost in the Arctic in 1847–1848. As a young man, Parker Snow had himself nearly perished at sea during a storm when his vessel had a close encounter with another ship that had derived its mid-ocean position and course from an initial meridian different from his own.

Deepwater Horizon's Parable of Risk

The big-budget Hollywood take on the 2010 explosion of the offshore drilling rig known as Deepwater Horizon opens today. Directed by Peter Berg and featuring Mark Wahlberg, the film arrives as a star-driven disaster movie, suspensefully depicting events that included the deaths of eleven men, the destruction of a half-billion-dollar drilling platform, and the worst human-made ecological disaster in Gulf Coast history.

As is frequently the case with big productions, where the film ended up isn’t where it was always headed, and initial director J. C. Chandor had a different vision for the story before being replaced over “creative differences” with the studio. Chandor’s plan was apparently to tell the story from the perspective of “everyone that was on the rig,” with an ensemble cast of over one hundred people. It’s worth noting that, according to a new analysis of the disaster by two senior systems engineers, Chandor’s version was on the right track.

Earl Boebert and James Blossom use a systems model to investigate what happened at the Macondo well, focusing on the complex interactions of technology, people, and procedures. From their book, Deepwater Horizon: A Systems Analysis of the Macondo Disaster:

A system is a collection of components developed more or less independently—plus the people who operate them. Two things make it a system: it has an intended purpose, and it exhibits what systems engineers call emergent properties. An emergent property is something that arises from the interaction between components rather than from the behavior of a single one. Emergent properties are things like safety, security, and reliability. They are typically important and hard to quantify.

Emergent properties suggest the possibility of emergent events: events that result from a combination of decisions, actions, and attributes of a system’s components, rather than from a single act or from the failure of a single piece of equipment. The Horizon disaster was the very model of an emergent event.

A systems analysis resists the tendency to focus on a single cause, an urge so common, and so misleading, that it has a name: “root cause seduction.” That seduction, write Boebert and Blossom, “is typically at the heart of efforts to assign blame or liability rather than prevent future accidents.”

Grief, Mourning, and the Politics of Memorialization

Jay D. Aronson’s Who Owns the Dead? tells the story of the recovery, identification, and memorialization of those killed in the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City. The assault came at just the moment in history when large-scale DNA identification efforts were becoming possible, and innovations in biotechnology and forensic science led NYC’s Chief Medical Examiner to pledge the identification and return of all human remains discovered in the wreckage of Ground Zero. This massive and monumentally difficult task—the largest and most costly forensic investigation in history—was undertaken not just for the victims’ families, but also for a range of social, cultural, and political reasons that have contributed to fifteen years of contention and debate both within the community of families and between families and officials responsible for finding, identifying, and memorializing the dead.

In interweaving the forensic identification effort with the vexed planning for the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, Aronson demonstrates America’s struggle with the fraught composite of private and public grief that’s regularly visited upon other parts of the world. His book’s closing thoughts are below.

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On the evening before the National September 11 Memorial and Museum formally opened to the public, donors and corporate supporters were fêted with a cocktail party to recognize their contributions to making the museum possible. For relatives who had labored tirelessly to ensure the creation of a museum that honored the memory of their loved ones, the party was a culmination of more than a decade of advocacy and planning. For relatives who opposed the museum plans and had worked so hard to bring victims’ remains above ground, the party was an outrage. The event added to their sense that the people who planned and financed the memorial and museum were more concerned about their own legacies than the feelings of those who lost family and friends on September 11. The dead, it seemed to some, belonged first and foremost to the powerful.

The insult of having victims’ remains stored in the basement of the museum, and the perception that those remains were being used to entice tourists to pay for entrance, was too much to bear. For Rosemary Cain, mother of firefighter George Cain, museum officials were “grave robbers” using the remains of World Trade Center victims for “greed and ego,” not to uplift the nation or provide solace to those in mourning. For Jim Riches, the presence of remains in the repository would keep him away. “I’ll never set foot in that museum,” he insisted, “until those remains are out of there and above grade on a plaza in a respectful place where it’s open to all the public to go for free.”

Thus, in the end, the situation appears to be stuck in a web of competing interests and viewpoints. One can imagine many different outcomes, but there is no simple solution to the storage of the remains of World Trade Center victims that will satisfy every one. Sites similar to the National 9/11 Memorial and Museum—Srebrenica, Auschwitz, Gettysburg, Hiroshima—did not have to weigh the need to memorialize against the need to redevelop and revitalize the surroundings in the stark terms that confronted the stakeholders at the World Trade Center site. While dissenting families offered alternative locations for the storage of remains, the city dismissed them as being impractical.

Ultimately, the dispute about the storage of remains points to the fact that the new scientific identification techniques being developed in the context of the September 11 attacks and other mass fatality events are a double-edged sword. They promise, at least in theory, to eliminate the possibility of identifiable remains being left unidentified. But the same advances in identification techniques mean that remains must be cared for and kept present, both physically and in the minds of surviving relatives and society at large, until they can be identified. In her letter to 9/11 families regarding the transfer of remains to the repository, acting chief medical examiner Barbara A. Sampson, who took over from Charles Hirsch when he retired at the end of 2014, reiterated the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME)’s commitment to “do whatever it takes for as long as it takes to identify all those who lost their lives.” Thus, the remains of the World Trade Center attacks can never fully be laid to rest and become part of “the past.”

Vermont’s Healing Spaces

In Healing Spaces: The Science of Place and Well-Being, Dr. Esther Sternberg brought neuroscience, immunology, and architecture together to look closely at how one’s immediate physical surroundings can affect mood, the immune system, neural functioning, and general health. Drawing equally on the history of medicine and on emerging knowledge, Sternberg sought to demonstrate the complex relationships between health and environment. The findings presented in the book have broad application, but the central concern for healing made hospitals and other healthcare institutions the main focus of the book’s prescriptions.

And now comes word that the hospitals of Vermont have taken a step towards filling them. Inspired by Healing Spaces, the Susan Sebastian Foundation has completed the multi-year project of installing original works of art in each of the state’s roughly 400 inpatient hospital rooms. Sternberg, who didn’t learn of the project until it was near completion, confessed feeling deeply moved by the story. “When you write a book,” she said, “you never know the impact it will have, and to see my words made into reality on this scale is tremendously fulfilling.”

Tremendously fulfilling, indeed.

Nuclear Iran

As has been noted, the fierce debate over a potential nuclear agreement with Iran—which reached a fever pitch this week with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to the United States Congress—amounts to an argument over nuclear fission being deliberated in an arena dominated by politics, not by knowledge of physics. Such knowledge is essential, though, both for assessing Iran’s current nuclear capacity to the extent we can, and for gauging the likelihood that Iran’s actual intentions align with those stated.

Theoretical physicist Jeremy Bernstein, known for his accessible science writing in the New Yorker and elsewhere, wrote Nuclear Iran last year to fill the need for a brief but complete discussion of the Iranian nuclear program from its inception to the present. The book offers lay readers a history of the sort of centrifuges used to produce the weapons-grade uranium needed for bombs, a discussion of the completely different technology required to produce plutonium and to use it in a nuclear weapon, and a blending of the technical and human aspects along the way. The piece below, adapted from the postscript to Nuclear Iran, compacts that science into a concise presentation of the state of Iran’s nuclear program and the potential for any agreement to contain it.

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The negotiations with Iran about its nuclear program are in process as I write this. The outcome is uncertain. But I would like to try to make the issues clear. To do this I will consider two limiting cases, neither one of which has any chance of being adopted but which serve as a useful foil for the discussion.

• Case 1: Iran agrees to give up its entire nuclear program. 
• Case 2: Iran does not agree to give up any of its program but does agree to enhanced inspections.

To discuss Case 1 we need to specify what Iran’s nuclear program is. I begin with reactors. To characterize a reactor, it is useful to specify three elements:

1. The power output
2. The fuel
3. The moderator

I begin with the power output. This is usually measured in watts—a unit of energy produced per second. The practical units for reactors are millions of watts (megawatts) and billions of watts (gigawatts). If the reactor is used to produce electricity, then two kinds of power produced are distinguished—thermal power and electrical power. The thermal power is the actual power that is produced in the fission process. This is generally converted into heat, which may boil water, making steam, which in turn runs the turbines that produce electricity. About two-thirds of the thermal energy is lost for various reasons in this process, hence the watts electric are about a third of the watts thermal.

Embryos and the Diverging Meanings of Life

In Embryos under the Microscope: The Diverging Meanings of Life, biologist Jane Maienschein gives us a thoughtful and historically contextualized look at embryos so as to better inform conversations that are too often clouded by politics. Scientific knowledge can and should affect our policy and social decisions, she argues, even when the science alone does not tell us what those decisions should be. In the conversation below, Maienschein outlines some of what we now know of embyros, and stresses the importance of allowing that knowledge to supplant conflicting assumptions about the workings and meanings of life.

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Q. Since before Aristotle cut open a developing chicken’s egg, scientists and theologians have theorized about embryos they couldn’t see. How does speculation about “invisible embryos” continue to shape contemporary thinking?

Most people have never seen an actual embryo, nor seen one develop from a fertilized egg cell. For them, embryos are largely “invisible” and imagined. Many people imagine a tiny person somehow there inside a woman who has just gotten pregnant, for example, and they imagine it as just growing larger over time. Yet in humans, the fertilized egg becomes an embryo and is called that until it is 8 weeks old; an embryo is not yet formed as a fully formed individual. Only after 8 weeks is it called a fetus, because it has the basic structure, the most important organs, and the very beginnings of the functioning of the human organism. Without knowing these developmental stages, and without actually seeing—through models or under a microscope—we are left to imagine what the invisible embryo looks like and how it behaves.

Q. What do the major advances in embryology over the course of the 20th century suggest about the trajectory of future science?

The case of embryo research shows how science is surprising and exciting in so many ways. Old assumptions give way to new knowledge, which leads to new insights and discoveries. The path is not always linear, and sometimes researchers get stuck in a way of thinking that takes a while to rethink. For example, most 20th-century researchers thought that once a cell becomes differentiated in a certain way, it will be fixed or determined in that way forever. We have learned that it is not that simple and that de-differentiation and re-differentiation is possible—with great potential for regenerative medicine. What history shows is the importance of becoming aware of underlying assumptions and rethinking them.