Enceladus skrev: ↑onsdag 15 mars 2023 18:26
Varifrån kommer manskapet? Ryssland har inte längre de demografiska förutsättningarna för ett utdraget utnötningskrig.
The Five Futures of Russia: And How America Can Prepare for Whatever Comes Next
Foreign Affairs skrev:Demography is a special sore point for Russia’s blood-and-soil nationalists, not to mention the military brass and many ordinary people. Since 1992, despite considerable immigration, Russia’s population has shrunk. Its working-age population peaked in 2006 at around 90 million and stands at less than 80 million today, a calamitous trend. Spending on the war in Ukraine has boosted Russia’s defense industrial base, but the limits of the country’s diminished labor force are becoming ever more evident even in that high-priority sector, which has around five million fewer qualified workers than it needs. The proportion of workers who are in the most productive age group—20 to 39—will further decline over the next decade. Nothing, not even kidnapping children from Ukraine, for which the International Criminal Court indicted Putin, will reverse the loss of Russians, which the war’s exorbitant casualties are compounding.
Productivity gains that might offset these demographic trends are nowhere in sight. Russia ranks nearly last in the world in the scale and speed of automation in production: its robotization is just a microscopic fraction of the world average. Even before the widened war in Ukraine began to eat into the state budget, Russia placed surprisingly low in global rankings of education spending. In the past two years, Putin has willingly forfeited much of the country’s economic future when he induced or forced thousands of young tech workers to flee conscription and repression. True, these are people that rabid nationalists claim not to miss, but deep down many know that a great power needs them.
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Russia’s world is effectively shrinking despite its occupation of nearly 20 percent of Ukraine. Territorially, it is now farther from the heart of Europe (Kaliningrad excepted) than at any time since the conquests of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great. More than three centuries after appearing on the Pacific, moreover, Russia has never succeeded at becoming an Asian power. That was true even when World War II presented it with opportunities to avenge itself against Japan for the defeat Russia suffered at its hands in 1905, to reestablish the tsar’s position in Chinese Manchuria, and to extend its grasp to part of the Korean Peninsula. Russia will never be culturally at home in Asia, and its already minuscule population east of Lake Baikal has contracted since the Soviet collapse.
Russia’s influence in its immediate neighborhood has been diminishing, too. The bulk of non-Russians in the former Soviet borderlands want less and less to do with their former overlord and certainly do not want to be reabsorbed by it. Armenians are embittered, Kazakhs are wary, and Belarusians are trapped and unhappy about it. Eurasianism and Slavophilism are mostly dead letters: the overwhelming majority of the world’s non-Russian Slavs joined or are clamoring to join the European Union and NATO. Without Russia menacing its European neighbors, NATO’s reason for being becomes uncertain. But that means Russia could break NATO only by developing into a durable rule-of-law state, precisely what Putin resists with all his being.
There is no basis for Russia to serve as a global focal point, drawing countries toward it. Its economic model offers little inspiration. It can ill afford to serve as a major donor of aid. It is less able to sell weapons—it needs them itself and is even trying to buy back systems it has sold—and has been reduced in some cases to bartering with other pariah states. It has lost its strong position as a provider of satellites. It belongs to a pariah club with Iran and North Korea, exuberantly exchanging weapons, flouting international law, and promising much further trouble. It’s not difficult to imagine each betraying the other at the next better opportunity, however, provided they do not unravel first; the West is more resilient than the “partnerships” of the anti-West. Even many former Soviet partners that refused to condemn Russia over Ukraine, including India and South Africa, do not view Moscow as a developmental partner but as scaffolding for boosting their own sovereignty. Russia’s foreign policy delivers at best tactical gains, not strategic ones: no enhanced human capital, no assured access to leading-edge technology, no inward investment and new infrastructure, no improved governance, and no willing mutually obliged treaty allies, which are the keys to building and sustaining modern power. Besides raw materials and political thuggery, the only things Russia exports are talented people.
Historikern Stephen Kotkin har publicerat en läsvärd artikel om Rysslands bleka framtid. Han beskriver fem möjliga scenarier: "France as Russia", "Russia retrenched", "Russia as vassal", "Russia as North Korea" samt "Russia in chaos". Han ser inget scenario där Ryssland utgör en egen pol i en multipolär värld.
Demografin är ett av landets bekymmer. Putin försökte lindra problemet genom att anamma massinvandring - en av få saker som han gjorde rätt i - men han skrämde också iväg sina bästa. Vidare fick han betala priset i form av en etnonationalistisk opposition som består än idag. I Europa är dessa Putins vänner...
Global Electricity Review 2024
Ember skrev:In 2023, growth in solar and wind pushed the world past 30% renewable electricity for the first time. Renewables have expanded from 19% of global electricity in 2000, driven by an increase in solar and wind from 0.2% in 2000 to a record 13.4% in 2023. China was the main contributor in 2023, accounting for 51% of the additional global solar generation and 60% of new global wind generation. Combined with nuclear, the world generated almost 40% of its electricity from low-carbon sources in 2023. As a result, the CO2 intensity of global power generation reached a new record low, 12% lower than its peak in 2007.
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Global electricity demand rose to a record high in 2023, with an increase of 627 TWh which is equivalent to adding the entire demand of Canada (+607 TWh). Nevertheless, the 2023 increase of 2.2% was below the average for recent years, due to a pronounced decrease in demand in OECD countries, notably the US (-1.4%) and the EU (-3.4%). In contrast, the rapid demand growth in China (+6.9%) was equivalent to the total global growth in demand in 2023. More than half of the electricity demand rise in 2023 was from five technologies: electric vehicles (EVs), heat pumps, electrolysers, air conditioning and data centres. The spread of these technologies will accelerate the growth in electricity demand, but overall energy demand will decline as electrification is much more efficient than fossil fuels.
Ember forecasts fossil generation to fall slightly in 2024, leading to larger falls in subsequent years. Demand growth in 2024 is expected to be higher than in 2023 (+968 TWh) but clean generation growth is forecast to be even greater (+1300 TWh), leading to a 2% fall in global fossil generation (-333 TWh). Already the rollout of clean generation, led by solar and wind, has helped to slow the growth in fossil fuels by almost two-thirds in the last ten years. As a result, half the world’s economies are already at least five years past a peak in electricity generation from fossil fuels. OECD countries are at the forefront of this, with power sector emissions collectively peaking in 2007 and falling 28% since then.
Som sagt, tiden är inte på Rysslands sida. Både Kina och Indien föredrar dessutom det inhemska kolet framför olja och gas - på grund av
nationell säkerhet!
Tillägg: Carbon Brief har som vanligt en
bra sammanfattning av Embers rapport. Den brittiska webbplatsen har förstås också en
bra artikel om sitt hemland.
i att dra in rymdfartsäventyr i tråden.