Blain’s Morning Porridge Dec 17^th 2024 – Guest Post: Elon Musk should be watching Wolf Hall!

“No space of regret can make amends for one life’s opportunity misused!”

This morning’s Guest Post is from Adrian Jones, who argues there are clues in the fate of Henry VIII’s fixer Thomas Cromwell as to Elon Musk’s possible future. Society swirls around themes and narratives, and being caught on the wrong side of them as they chop and change can be fatal! Let’s not lose our heads over complex issues like Climate Change and Vaccinations, but understand them and the power of consensus…  

Something different this morning: I am delighted to offer a guest post from Adrian Jones, one of the top infrastructure financiers in the global real world asset markets – and is currently between engagements. We’d been chatting about how markets and society are evolving, and he came up with some fascinating insights into the role of Elon Musk, polarisation, climate change and healthcare, informed by the BBC’s current adaptation of the Wolf Hall books by Hillary Mantel.

Is Elon Musk fated to be our century’s Thomas Cromwell?

By Adrian Jones

Rare these days that a BBC drama excites one’s attention but the excellent second series of Wolf Hall has not disappointed yet.  The exquisite acting of Mark Rylance and Damian Lewis prompted this note as I was listening to a panel of market worthies last week at a London conference. The journos and politicians on the panel spanned the mainstream political spectrum but had eerily similar reactions to the diametrically opposite results of the UK and US elections: no faith in the winner but a sense of relief that the loser had deservedly lost, being so tired and bereft of ideas, and possibly slightly corrupt.

I think many people who lean towards the Right share many of the same reactions to the Trump victory: appalled by the uncouth man himself,  suspicious that his Vulcan Death Grip on the Republican Party is all for personal convenience (he being so recently a paid-up Democrat supporter and possibly in need of presidential immunity ), BUT still sharing his supporters’ disdain for the silliness and intrusiveness of ‘woke’ and other excesses of the ‘big state’ and wanting to see both brought to heel, WHILE concerned where some of the more extreme radicalism of some of his gang may lead.

Which made me think of Henry VIII (he of the many wives and the break with the old religion), and more particularly his servant Thomas Cromwell, whose led the dissolution of the monasteries. Cromwell might well be a metaphor for Elon Musk’s promised/threatened (depending on one’s perspective) demolition of bloated big government.

The range of beliefs in Tudor England was extraordinary; between the Catholic zealots burning Protestants, the Protestant zealots burning Catholics, and latterly the Puritans banning Christmas. The vast majority of the populace were stuck somewhere in the middle probably just thinking “While I like to be able to read the bible in English now, a bit of art in the church never hurt and cheered the old place up.  Oh! Do put down the axes!”

Henry was a grotesque figure. Initially the closure of the monasteries enriched just him while hurting those grown to depend on the institutions of the medieval church. But the excesses and corruption of the monasteries were real, and most economic historians acknowledge that the long-term effect of their dissolution was (probably) to grow the mercantile classes and make the UK as a whole, richer and more powerful, eventually….

For many, in our own age the state – which was supposed to provide a safety-net and basic infrastructure and institutions of society; courts, police, armed forces, basic welfare, roads – has outgrown itself and its worst excesses often seem as deplorable as those of late medieval monks.  Criminalised Post Office postmasters, haemophiliac contaminated blood victims and of course, what many see as the madness of Lockdown.

There can by now be little doubt, in all but the bureaucratic mind, that Lockdown was a disaster made possible by QE and the  “government knows best” attitude which has [nearly] bankrupted and broken the spirit of the West, turning ever more of its citizens into permanent supplicants like so many beggars clamouring for alms at the monastery gates, rather than some needing an occasional “hand up” back to self-reliance.

Similarly to my mind, (though no doubt here many readers will reach for their rosary beads and smelling salts, or a box of matches and can of petrol depending on their temperament), there is no permitted debate about something as profound, nay existential, as ‘net zero’ in polite society, certainly not in corporate-land.  It is outside the “Overton window”. [Editor comment: the spectrum of ideas on policy and social issues considered acceptable at any particular time.]

Whatever the truth of the imminence, seriousness or contribution of anthropogenic climate change to observed climate change, reduced reliance on hydrocarbon combustion (if only to save them for more useful things like making plastic and precursors to other more useful organic chemicals while weakening the geopolitical hands of authoritarian regimes blessed more with oil and gas than liberal institutions) is probably a good thing.

A gradual decarbonisation of electricity as replacement technologies become cheap and reliable enough (aka a real “transition” as opposed to a literal mad-dash) probably makes sense.  An artificial and probably wholly unrealistic political deadline of 2030 or 2035 less so. Why not 2037 or 2043? How are we so certain that x ppm CO2 is so much worse (and irreversible) than y ppm. And if others won’t make the same Herculean effort to ‘prevent’, maybe we should spend more to ‘mitigate’? (And if we don’t know what to spend on to mitigate then maybe we don’t understand it as well as we pretend).

Anybody who questions the theology of our time inside a corporation risks the fate of an early 16th century adherent of Luther reading the bible in plain English in church rather than just leaving it to the priesthood to mumble memorised Latin while the congregation nods in dumb acceptance and meekly accepts the burning of any heretics.

From the official news one would not think there is genuine scientific debate around some of the underlying physics of atmospheric warming mechanisms. The bigger topics include the unfathomable complexity of planet-wide dynamic physical and organic feedback loops, cycles; possibly, driven by extraterrestrial and even extra-solar system events, and even evidence that historical heating preceded atmospheric CO2 concentration rises – probably because of the well-observed phenomenon of CO2 being less solvent in water at higher ambient temperatures.

It is a fact that CO2 is a trace component of the atmosphere dwarfed by water vapour, oxygen and nitrogen.  And while only CO2 and H2O have the asymmetry that direct infra-red absorption requires, there are multiple ways to transfer radiated heat into a mixture of gases. The classic description of the CO2 dominated “greenhouse” effect itself relies on secondary “forcing” by CO2 absorption, not just its own insignificant direct absorption which can only occur across a very narrow range of frequencies and of which some saturation must occur.

I heard the facts of absorption saturation explained thirty years ago by a professor of physical chemistry – not some angry high-school drop-out in a pickup with a hand-gun fetish!  Equally, while evidence from other geological periods probably does indicate higher absolute concentrations of CO2 prevailed while life very similar to ours and the plants and animals on which we depend thrived on Earth, the rate of change of CO2 concentration caused by human activity is (probably) unprecedented.

Still others – ecologists in the main and proponents of ‘mob-grazing’ (a term I like to use as often as possible since I read it hence the digression) – argue that soil (humus) destruction is the thing driving CO2 concentration increases and that it has been occurring for 7,000 years since the first agriculture. Others argue that the CO2 itself may not be a problem but a warning indicator of a far worse disaster – global desertification from which the emphasis on hydrocarbon combustion distracts all and absolves local (mis)managers of land (and hence local climate) of all responsibility.  Everything bad is caused by global climate change. Everyone is to blame so no-one is accountable.

All views are probably right to a degree and policy needs to steer a winding path balancing risk and reward, cost and benefit, intergenerational burden sharing etc., sometimes changing without the insane shrieks of ‘U-Turn’ when someone has the courage to admit they were previously wrong and are therefore adapting.  None of this subtle disagreement is heard because of the zealots on both sides.

Which brings us back to the certainties of some of the Trumptites (being, by a further extension of my analogy, in this story akin to the Puritan zealots of the Tudor Age) with whom one cannot reason and who go too far in rejecting any and all government. For example, they don’t stop at (rightly in my view) questioning the immoral mandatory experimental mRNA vaccination of all against what was, for most, a relatively benign infection during the Lockdown madness, but now declare against ALL vaccines.

Edward Jenner’s use of Cowpox to deal with Smallpox proved some vaccines are worth the risk/return trade-off three centuries ago.  By the same token one would not take a yellow-fever vaccine or even an anti-malarial tablet unless one was going somewhere where the disease risk justified the mitigant’s risk.  The anti-ALL-vaxxers are as demonstrably in error as much as those who professed to believe one-way systems in narrow 24/7 corner-shops, and closing outdoor playgrounds for infants, were doing anything to stop the spread of Covid.

A thoughtful probing of the sheer number of vaccines the young can be offered today – especially in the USA is reasonable.  But that is a system where overprescription of everything is a problem and where every emotional feeling is now medicalised as a mental health condition and increasingly prescribed for.

We need a Good Queen Bess to arise. Maybe should could unite the reasoning but questioning majority, and drive the absolutely certain zealots back to the fringes. Although in an age of Twitter whether it will ever again be possible to “stop making windows into men’s souls” is questionable – when they make them themselves – much as I have done here!

But let me finish on a warning to Musk: King Henry VIII had Cromwell beheaded long before the long-term effects of his revolution were known, disappointed by his fourth marriage Cromwell had brokered.  How many is Trump at now? Three I think…

Tread lightly Elon…

Adrian Jones…

(Very lightly edited by Bill Blain…)

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