…or How moving fast and breaking things…breaks more than just things

(Crossposted with Inverse Square)

So…it turns out that among his many other sins, Elon Musk, with a boost from the now-unmentionable fact of climate changes, is turning low earth orbit into an overgrazed commons…to the impoverishment of us all. That’s the message of this study, published last week in Nature Sustainability. That work explores the effects of injecting anthropogenic (AKA us) greenhouse gases on the thermosphere—the bit of the upper atmosphere that extends all the way into Low Earth Orbit (LEO, up to 2000 kilometers above the planet).

The TL:DR is that climate change heats the earth’s surface, but cools and shrinks the higher-up regions of the atmosphere. That in turn means satellites in low earth orbit experience less atmospheric drag. Which leads to the following problem: without such drag bits of space junk don’t get slowed down…which means their orbits don’t decay (as fast) and they don’t burn up. As the corresponding author of this work, MIT graduate student William Parker put it in an interview with the MIT news office, “The sky is quite literally falling — just at a rate that’s on the scale of decades…And we can see this by how the drag on our satellites is changing.”

More dead satellites and orbital debris boosts the risk of collisions that knock out still-useful spacecraft. Such wrecks generate more debris, which makes crashes yet more likely, until it becomes too dangerous to try to park a satellite in some patches of space. And when that happens, a global commons will have been tragically exhausted.

Bit of backstory here: the idea of a common is an old one. In practice, it probably dates back to the beginnings of anything resembling hominid society, and as an explicit term in property law (in England, at least) it extends back to the feudal manorial system.

The basic concept is simple, and kind of evident in the name. A common is (in its first incarnation) some bit of land on which the people who live on or around could do something—the ability to use the property for one or more purposes, usually up to some defined limit. For example, someone could hold the right to graze five sheep, or gather some amount of wood, or some similar privilege.

Note the idea of limits—constraints on an individual’s use of a common resource. Our commoner (!) could put five sheep out to nibble…not six or seven or any number they chose. And if it turned out that the already granted rights of pasturage were too much in a bad year, existing rights could be reduced. All of which is to say that on a lasting, well run common property, its use was tightly regulated. If that weren’t so…well that’s where the tragedy comes in. If any member of commons can run as many ewes as they want on a field of grass then the endgame comes fast: the meadow gets munched down to the roots and its carrying capacity drops. Fewer animals can graze and everyone grows poorer.

Historically, lots of commons have avoided this outcome. They have been actively managed and the commoners involved in any given set of rights have policed potentially cheats with great assiduity.

But, beginning perhaps in the 19th century, certainly by the 20th, new kinds of commons have emerged that have proved much more difficult to police. Think the oceans and overfishing, or of the use of air, land, and water as depositories for pollution, or (my current focus) a way of thinking that sees the effectiveness of antibiotics as a kind of commons that can be destroyed by uses that promote antibiotic resistance. And, of course, there is the most common commons of them all: the earth’s atmosphere, in which the tragedy of billions of individual decisions (and national and multi-national corporate choices) is producing profound physical and chemical changes on a planetary scale.

Back to the cooling thermosphere and the rise of space junk. In the study authors’ analysis, less drag leading to longer decay times for debris will reduce the carrying capacity of some or all of the LEO region. As they write, “the worst-case scenario capacity carries many fewer satellites across broad swaths of LEO by the year 2100.”

2100 is a bit of ways out. But the problem is already here. Why? Because of Musk and a handful of other overgrazers of this space-commons. Here’s what’s happening, again, as told to the MIT news office:

Their predictions forecast out to the year 2100, but the team says that certain shells in the atmosphere today are already crowding up with satellites, particularly from recent “megaconstellations” such as SpaceX’s Starlink, which comprises fleets of thousands of small internet satellites.

“The megaconstellation is a new trend, and we’re showing that because of climate change, we’re going to have a reduced capacity in orbit,” [MIT associate professor Richard] Linares says. “And in local regions, we’re close to approaching this capacity value today.”

In other words: as Musk and his minions are attacking the US federal gov’t efforts to combat climate change, he’s running his space-grab as fast as he can, to the point where we may lose access to the territory currently used by everything from earth sensing satellites, the Hubble Space Telescope, both the International Space Station and China’s Tiangong sation, not to mention a wealth of communications satellite (including Starlink, of course).

The response is obvious, previewed in the history of the commons. Resources that belong to/are valuable to society (or societies) as a whole need to be closely regulated. We have to make sure that the asshole in the third cottage down doesn’t ruin it for everyone by grabbing the temporary advantage of running some extra livestock on the pasture. In other words: we have to tell Musk and his ilk that a common resource like low earth orbit—is not one in which they can do whatever they want.

Of course, the idea of regulating global commons is exactly the antithesis to the Silicon Valley “move fast and break things” credo, the one Musk embodies, of course. But as that techno-capitalist view takes hold it’s important to recognize how unsustainably extractive it is in many domains—and how much can be broken.

I have little hope of anything moving to protect LEO as a resource under the current regime, nor any of the other crucial modern commons. But here’s the thing: nature, the material world we inhabit, gets its vote too. It doesn’t care if MAGAts think climate change is a hoax (or rather, that elite MAGAts are happy to suggest it’s a hoax to squeeze the next dollar out of a declining resource). Elementary physics tells us that if we go on as we are now, the troposphere will shrink and satellites will crash. That’s reality. I hope that we can minimize the cost of our education at the hands of this most explicit of teachers. But pay we will.

And in the meantime…open thread.

Image:  Thomas Sidney Cooper, Shepherd with Sheep,  1868

The post Tragedies of the Commons… appeared first on Balloon Juice.

With a heavy heart, I have to tell you that after a long battle with cancer my husband Kevin Drum passed away on Friday, March 7, 2025.

No public memorial services are planned.

In lieu of flowers, please donate to the charity or political cause of your choice.

A Facebook page, 'In Memory of Kevin Drum', has been created as a place for friends and family to share memories of Kevin. I encourage you to post your thoughts and memories there.

Thank you to all the wonderful blog readers who supported, encouraged and challenged him through the years.

He will be greatly missed.

Marian

A couple of weeks back, I wrote a post about some of the work that USAID did.  Now I’d like to drill down a bit and talk about some of the work that I personally did for USAID.

This runs a bit long, because this sort of thing is all about context.  But if you’re curious about what some of these people who just got fired from USAID actually did all day long?  Here’s one story.


For most of the last decade, I’ve been a USAID “Chief of Party”, meaning a manager of large or complex USAID projects.  And one thing I learned in this job was that most people really had no notion what I actually did.  If people have any idea of USAID, it’s usually “something something starving children?”  And to be fair, there were plenty of projects that helped starving children.  But that wasn’t what I did.

My next-to-last job was in Rwanda, where I managed a project to improve Rwanda’s trade with its neighbors.   It was a small project — me and half a dozen Rwandans, mostly IT people.  We were working to (1) help Rwanda integrate into the East African Community, and (2) improve the functioning of Rwanda’s “Electronic Single Window”, where traders go to move their goods through Customs.

Most readers won’t be international trade nerds, so let me expand on that a little.

The East African Community

The East African Community (EAC) is a free trade zone in East Africa.  It was originally built around Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda but has now expanded to include eight countries across the region.  Here’s a map:

The EAC includes a customs union, harmonization of commercial laws and regulations, the lowering and eventual disappearance of barriers to trade, and free movement of people across the region.  They also coordinate on everything from plant protection rules to building new highways.  And every year they’re making it easier for East Africans to live, work and study in neighboring countries.

If this sounds familiar, it should. The EAC is absolutely inspired by the European Union. It has a Chairman, and a EAC Court of Justice, and they’re moving towards (eventually) a single currency.  

But it’s different in a bunch of ways, too. For one thing, it’s young — in terms of integration, it’s maybe where the EU was around the turn of the century. For another, there’s no “ever closer union”.  Countries can grow closer, or not, as they please.  There’s a legislature, but it’s kept small and its powers are clearly defined and limited to economic issues. 

And there’s nothing about human rights.  Let’s face it: half the EAC members are dictatorships, and a number of them have unhappy human rights records.  So there’s very little emphasis on democracy and such.  The EAC is laser-focused on economic development, and avoids politics.  

Also, countries are allowed to integrate at different speeds.  If you look at that map again?  The DR Congo is formally a member, but has done basically nothing meaningful so far and may drop out.  (The DR Congo is an extremely poor, troubled country and it may not even be able to pay its dues.  Also, they’re having a bitter dispute with Rwanda right now.)  Somalia and South Sudan are, frankly, half-assed members. 

But the other five countries are really serious and are working hard to reduce barriers and build a no-kidding free trade zone.  And this is actually happening, and with remarkable speed.  The EAC is a real thing, and it’s already having a pretty significant impact.  People living in those core five countries are very aware of the EAC.

Right now the EAC is barely known outside East Africa. But I don’t think that will last.  Most of the core members have very rapidly growing economies.  They’re still poor, but they’re no longer desperately poor, and in the 2030s they’ll be moving into lower middle income status.   

That said, the EAC does face a bunch of challenges.  One particular challenge is that, until quite recently, the various members hardly traded with each other. So, Kenya and Tanzania are neighbors, but until the 2000s they barely traded with each other at all.  Instead they traded with the UK, China and India. Mostly they exported primary products in return for manufactured goods: pretty much the old colonial pattern, surviving decades after the end of colonialism.  Even the infrastructure was built to support this.  If you look at the rail lines, they mostly run perpendicular to the sea, so that the colonial powers could export from inland plantations and mines.  Kenya and Tanzania are neighbors, but you can’t get from one to the other by rail.

[h/t brilliantmaps.com]

But in recent years, all that has been changing. Manufacturing and services have been growing fast across the region. So, a modern house in Rwanda might get its window frames and fuse box from China and its copper wiring from Australia — but the PVC piping can be produced in Tanzania, the cement for the concrete can come from Kenya, and the roof tiles and paint can be produced locally in Rwanda. And the mortgage would probably also come from a Rwandan bank, although that bank would be looking for capital abroad — traditionally in Hong Kong, Brussels or London, but these days more likely Johannesburg or Chennai.

For most EAC countries, trade within the EAC region has been growing very rapidly, if from a very low base. The Rwandan government is particularly enthusiastic about this. Under colonialism, and for a long time afterwards, Rwanda produced coffee and exported that to pay for goods and services. This is, as everyone knows, a pretty crap way to run an economy. In the particular case of Rwanda, crashing coffee prices back in the late 1980s and 1990s helped destabilize the government, which was one of the drivers of the Rwandan Genocide in 1994. Everyone in Rwanda remembers that. So they’re extremely keen on diversifying their economy — more and different exports, more and different trading partners.

The Electronic Single Window

Which brings us to the “Electronic Single Window”  (ESW) for Rwandan Customs.  About half the world’s countries have ESWs.  Basically it’s a portal where you can go and say, I want to import a freight container filled with, oh maybe sacks of rice:



or construction rebar, or garden hoses, or flatscreen TVs.  You can put pretty much anything in a freight container, yes?  That’s kind of the point.

So you go to the ESW and you enter all your information — shipper, receiver, nature of cargo, insurance, waybill, you name it.  And then the ESW software tells you what tariffs and fees apply.  And then you can pay it right there, boom, done.  And the system logs it: okay, this particular container load of stuff, all the tariffs and fees have been paid in advance.

You send that information to your shipper, who gives access to the truck driver.  So when your truck full of flatscreen TVs (or whatever) crosses the border, the truck driver can literally just wave his phone at a terminal, wait a minute, get a green light and drive on through.  (Unless Customs wants to do a spot check, of course.  Which they always can do but usually won’t.)

Obviously there are about six hundred possible different complications to this.  What if you share a container with another shipper?  What if your container is arriving on an airplane, or by sea?  What if there’s an issue with the insurance?  What if Customs disagrees with your valuation?  Maybe you said the rice was substandard, good only for animal feed (which has a low tariff) but Customs thinks that rice is perfectly edible for humans (which means a higher tariff).  Many many possible issues!  So, the system has to be pretty robust. 

That said, the basic concept is simple:  (1) Most goods should be able to just pass the border quickly, and (2) you should be able to arrange for that in one sitting, online. 

This is how it works in most developed countries, by the way.  Want to ship a container full of laptops from the US to Germany, or car engines from Germany to Canada?  All done online.  

Now, Rwanda already had an Electronic Single Window, which right there was pretty impressive.  Most countries at Rwanda’s level of development are still using paper or at best a hybrid system.  But as I said, Rwanda is pretty serious about trade, so they had already invested in an ESW.  And — it was good!  It worked really well!  

That said, their ESW was pretty basic and simple.  It got the job done, but it didn’t have a lot of advanced functionalities.  In particular, it didn’t cross-connect to most other government agencies, and it didn’t connect across borders at all.  And this was a problem.

Why?  Well, suppose you wanted to ship live animals — a truckload of cows, say.  Oh, boy.  There is a lot of paperwork involved in moving animals across a border.  Veterinary certificates, vaccination records, breeder records, health inspections, you name it.  So you would have to get all this paperwork, yes? 

Now, the Rwandan ESW could tell you what paperwork you would need.  So you enter “cows” and it will give you a printable list: you need this certificate, you need that clearance.  And you would run around to get those documents from different government agencies.  And then you would scan those, and upload them into the ESW.  And then someone would review your application and then give you an all-clear.

So this isn’t a bad system.  It’s years ahead of most of Rwanda’s neighbors.  (Also, you’ll notice it eliminates a lot of possible opportunities for petty corruption.   That is absolutely deliberate.)   

But you’re still running around getting paper certificates and scanning them.  What if you could do everything online — get an electronic certificate that you could just click onto your application?  Well, many countries — including the USA and all members of the EU — have exactly that!  But for that to work, you have to connect a bunch of different government agencies to the ESW. 

And that was my project: first connecting all those government agencies together in the Electronic Single Window, and then making sure the resulting super-Window could talk to other systems in neighboring EAC countries, particularly Tanzania and Uganda. 

(The EU went through exactly this process, by the way.  Because there are so many countries in the EU, it took a long time, literally decades  The resulting system goes by the euphonious name EU Customs Single Window Certificates Exchange System, or EU CSW-CERTEX, or just Certex to the cool kids.  So if you are ever talking to an exporter or a freight forwarder in Europe, you can casually drop “and I suppose you use Certex, how is that working out” into casual conversation.)  

So first we had to do “business process mapping” — meaning, we had to figure out what you needed to get a phytosanitary (plant safety) certificate, or animal vaccination records, or industrial certification, or whatever.  Then we had to turn that map into a software system that could integrate with the existing ESW.  Then we had to use a subcontractor to draft that software; in cooperation with the different government agencies, beta test the heck out of it; and finally, deploy it.  

One thing that was very helpful to us: the various ministries and agencies were all on board with this.  We didn’t encounter much pushback or resistance.  That’s because — as noted — the government of Rwanda is pretty serious about trade.

Me and Annie

I said it was me and half a dozen Rwandans, mostly IT people.  I was only there for less than a year, though.  That’s because the plan from day one was to hand over the project to a qualified Rwandan.  Which we did!  After I left, my deputy — who I’ll call Annie — took over as Chief of Party.  

To run a project like this you want someone with a particular mix of skills.  These include:

— Experienced in project management.  Ideally, experienced in managing USAID projects.
— Experience working in developing countries.  Ideally, experience in sub-Saharan Africa. Preferably, experience working with government agencies in developing countries.
— A background in trade facilitation and/or Customs
— Some experience with e-governance
— Some experience with business process mapping
— Experience working across borders (stuff like regulatory harmonization, cross-border connectivity between Customs agencies) a plus; and,
— Fluent native speaker of at least one of these languages and competent in at least one other: English, French, Swahili, Kinyarwanda.

So I ticked all these boxes.  Annie ticked most of them.  She was a fortyish Rwandan woman with deep experience in doing IT stuff for Rwandan Customs — in fact, she had been a leader of the team that designed and deployed the original Single Window.  So all she was really missing was USAID experience and the international perspective.  My job was to do, as we say, skills transfer — she’d shadow me and learn how to run a USAID project, and I’d learn a bunch of stuff about software design for a Single Window.

And that was more or less how it worked out.  Like I said, I was only there less than a year.  Once I left, Annie took over and the project was completely Rwandan.

— A brief digression here:  I’ve been in and out of sub-Saharan Africa for years.  And there’s a rising generation of young educated Africans — people Annie’s age and younger, in their twenties and thirties — who are just amazing.  Annie, for instance, was a refugee in Uganda until she was ten years old; her family only came back to Rwanda some time after the genocide.  But she got a university degree in Rwanda, then a Masters in Sydney, Australia, plus a bunch of certifications in everything from Customs risk management to tax audits.  She spoke all four languages I mentioned above — Africa is full of people who speak three or four languages, that’s a thing — and was diligent, competent, organized, and generally unflappable.  

Anyway: a couple of obvious questions arise.

Why do this particular project?

A couple of reasons.  One, teach a man to fish.  Feed a baby, you’ll need to feed that baby again tomorrow.  Build a strong economy where food is widely available and everyone has jobs, and the babies will get fed regardless.

Does that sound suspiciously broad and optimistic?  Let me give a very specific example.

Rwanda grows a lot of rice, and so does Uganda.  And both of them can get two rice crops per year.  But their growing seasons are slightly offset — the Rwandan rice crops get harvested a few weeks after the Ugandan.  So if Rwanda and Uganda can freely trade, then they can effectively get four rice crops per year, meaning a lot less hungry babies.  Win-win!

Except: when you grow rice in central Africa, you have to worry about aflatoxins.  Aflatoxins are produced by a fungus that loves to grow on damp rice.  And central Africa is basically always damp.  You can dry the rice — this works just fine. But commercial dryers cost money, while sun-drying takes time, which is also money.  Also, then you have to /keep/ the rice dry through shipping and warehousing.

Still with me?  Okay, a couple of other things.  One, aflatoxin is a cumulative toxin.  A small dose won’t do much harm.  But it takes forever to clear your system — weeks, months.  So if you get repeated doses, you get slowly sicker and weaker, probably without realizing what’s affecting you.  Two, babies and little kids are extra susceptible.  In particular, aflatoxin can block a baby or small child’s ability to take up nutrition from food — meaning that even if the kid is being properly fed, they might still be malnourished and slowly wasting away.  And three, you can’t tell if rice has aflatoxin just from looking at it.  The fungus is mostly microscopic, and doesn’t become visible unless the infestation is very advanced.  So you have to test for it.

That last bit sets up a perverse incentive.  Suppose you’re a rice wholesaler, and you have rice that you suspect might be contaminated.  If you’re honest, you’ll test it.  But if it is contaminated, it’ll have to be destroyed — a dead loss, not great.  So if you’re not completely honest, you want to sell it.  But if you sell it to your regular customers, and people get sick, they might realize you slipped them some bad rice.

Ah, but what if you export that rice?  Hey, anybody who gets sick will be in another country!

So therefore: both Rwanda and Uganda are super paranoid about importing contaminated rice.  

So what this means is, in order to get that win-win four seasons I mentioned?  You need systems of rice testing that are fast, trustworthy, and are quickly communicated across the border.  If a Ugandan lab certifies that a container of Ugandan rice is clean, the Rwandans have to be able to (1) get that certification quickly (because if it sits around too long, even clean rice will go bad) and (2) trust that certification — trust that the Ugandan lab has all the necessary equipment, and that the techs are competent and not taking bribes.  This means you need an electronic system of cross-border communication and mutual certification.  Which… oh hey, that’s exactly what we were working on.  The ESW would help provide clean safe rice!  Along with about sixty other things.

So that’s one reason.  Another reason: this is what the Rwandan government specifically asked for.  Modern development work isn’t about parachuting in and handing out food or whatever.  It’s always, always, a negotiation with the local government.  What do you think you need?  Do we agree with that?  (We don’t always.  Sometimes governments want vanity projects, or flavor-of-the-month.  Sometimes they only want projects that serve the President-for-life’s ethnic group, or his home province.)  What are our resources?  Can we fashion a project that does useful work, on the budget that we have?  Who would we work with?  Who might oppose or foot-drag?  Are there gatekeepers, veto points, potential deal killers?  

But in this case, the Rwandan government really wanted to expand the Electronic Single Window and improve cross-border connectivity.  Could they do it themselves?  Eventually, sure, yes.  They have the technical capacity.  (As witness the fact that my project, once I left, was 100% Rwandan.)  But Rwanda is a poor country with limited resources and lots of demands on a small budget.  If they did it themselves, they’d have to wait for years.  So USAID stepped in to move things along.

Yeah, okay, but why do this KIND of project?  Why should American taxpayers care about cross-border trade in Rwanda?

Because a peaceful, prosperous world is good for everyone.

I could throw in a bunch of other stuff.  The project wasn’t particularly expensive about a million dollars a year over four years.  (To build this kind of system?  Very cheap.)  The Rwandan government really likes these USAID projects, so it’s an arm of soft power.  The US Embassy had a lot of influence in Rwanda, in large part because of things like this.  — And yes, Rwanda is worth influencing.  Despite being small, Rwanda is strategically very important — they sit right in the middle of everything, and they punch far above their weight.  The last time things went badly wrong in Rwanda, it killed half a million people within Rwanda itself, and then set off a chain reaction that reached the Atlantic Ocean and killed a couple of million more.

Also, the region famously produces a number of strategic minerals. Rwanda itself mines a fair chunk of the world’s tantalum, and then a lot of minerals from neighboring Congo pass through Rwanda en route to the world.  There’s a decent chance that the device you’re using to read this uses some minerals that either came from Rwanda or passed through it.  So, improving the flow of trade through Rwanda might eventually take a cent or two off that device’s cost.  Trivial… but multiply that by hundreds of millions of devices and suddenly you’re talking real money.

And then there’s the moral argument: that the rich have a moral obligation to help the poor, and that therefore rich countries should try to help poor countries stop being poor.  That one is badly out of fashion at the moment, of course.  I happen to believe in it personally, but I have literally been outvoted, so never mind.

But really, I think the case can rest on that single big point: a peaceful, prosperous world is good for everyone.  (And if that world is also democratic and free, better still!  But those guys worked in another building from me.)  So, nudging the world in that direction — especially the more troubled, struggling parts of the world — is a thing worth doing, and yes, worth spending some taxpayer dollars.

Obviously not everyone agrees!  As witness the fact that USAID has been shut down.  And my old Rwanda project — which was about halfway done — got axed last week.  Annie and the rest of the team are shutting it down, and will soon be unemployed.  They’re super smart and competent people, so I’m sure they’ll find other work.  But the expansion of Rwanda’s Electronic Single Window?  The cross-border certification and connection?  That’s being dropped, not quite half complete.  When and how it will ever be finished I do not know.

And that’s the story of my next-to-last project, in Rwanda.