Latest news with #Malthusian
The Age
2 days ago
- Business
- The Age
Elon Musk is right about one thing – we're spiralling towards bankruptcy
Posting on his social media platform X, Musk has indicated his disappointment with the unwillingness of Republicans to carry out spending cuts, musing that the only way out of the 'bankruptcy of America' is to radically boost GDP growth. It's difficult to disagree with his assessment, or to find much reason for optimism in either Britain or America. Trump and Starmer are very different leaders leading very different countries, but they face the same core question: how do you keep the show on the road when your voters demand more spending? The demographic challenges facing both countries are well known: an older population has more voters who no longer work, who vote themselves a larger share of income, which increases fiscal pressure on the young and weighing on birth rates. Loading It's a doom-loop that the West's democracies have yet to find an escape from. Growing our way out of trouble would require a technological revolution. Older voters prioritise healthcare and pensions ahead of investment in infrastructure or education, which reduces the funds available for pro-growth policies. Worse still, redistribution requires taxation that directly weighs on economic activity. If Musk succeeds in solving AI, robotics and space exploration, then we might get the resources and growth we need to escape the spiral, just as the Industrial Revolution pulled us out of the Malthusian trap. If he doesn't, we'll need another way out of this mess. Solving demographics isn't the answer. Boosting birth rates is a necessary long-term fix, but doesn't address the more pressing present concerns. Short of drawing on Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal and rendering workers into Soylent Green at retirement age, there's no obvious policy that will. And if we're stuck with our inverted pyramid of people, that leaves us with 'democracy' as the factor most likely to give way. About 48 per cent of all UK public spending goes on welfare, health and social care and debt interest spending. These are the items of spending that are either too toxic to touch – imagine the outrage if Starmer stood up and announced an end to the triple lock, or swinging cuts to the bloated NHS – or would tip the country into a financial crisis via defaulting on our obligations. They're also some of the items with the most forecast growth, as today's young become tomorrow's old. The state pension is set to hit 8 per cent of GDP, health spending 15 per cent and adult social care somewhere about 2.5 per cent. A little over 25 pence in every pound earned in Britain will be earmarked for these line items alone. If we can't cut spending democratically, we'll be made to cut it. And cutting spending democratically is hard. Loading One implication of the median voter theorem – the observation that in a democratic system, the man in the middle tends to get his way – is that when median incomes are below the mean, the state will tend to engage in more redistribution. This is certainly true in Britain, where 53 per cent of the population lives in households that pay less in taxes than they receive in benefits, and it's likely to be true in the United States as well (where the top and bottom quintiles are net losers and net beneficiaries, respectively). In fact, 'democracies spend more' seems to be a good general rule. Match V-Dem democracy scores to IMF data and – with some caveats around matching names and entries – the general gist is that more democratic countries spend somewhere about 12-15 points of GDP more than their less democratic peers, with researchers emphasising spending on social protection and education. Combine this with the observation that it's entirely possible for older generations to burden their younger successors with debts, and you have a recipe for disaster. The incentives given to today's politicians are to spend to win today's votes. Unless voters today are altruistic about future generations – and when the population is ageing because fewer people have children, their motive to be so is greatly reduced – then you can end up in the sort of unsustainable spiral Britain and America have found themselves in. By 2055, the US national debt is expected to be 156 per cent of GDP, and deficits around 7 per cent. In Britain, it's for 130 per cent of GDP, and a deficit of 9 per cent. Project that out to 2073, and debt hits 274 per cent of GDP, with the deficit a healthy 21 per cent of national income. If politicians ignore the warning signs – or voters punish those who attempt to correct course – we could find the choice between debt and democracy made for us. These are ludicrous numbers. There is no prospect of funding that sort of deficit at that sort of debt. The question is what we'll get instead. The most likely answer seems to be some form of fiscal cliff-edge ending up with less democratic choice in government. This could take a 'soft' form, such as self-imposed restrictions on spending and debt which politicians agree to adhere to in order to restore market confidence. A souped-up form of the Office for Budget Responsibility and harsher fiscal rules would be one version of this. Government by bond market – where investors demand higher yields for risky policies, driving the state towards fiscal consolidation – would be another. Loading At the other end of the scale, a debt bailout would effectively cede a large degree of sovereignty to whichever institution sets the terms of the loan. Britain has been down this road before, in 1976, when the IMF imposed higher taxes and lower spending. This would be an extreme outcome. It is not entirely out of the range of possibilities. Cutting spending democratically is hard. Undermining institutions is relatively easy.
Sydney Morning Herald
2 days ago
- Business
- Sydney Morning Herald
Elon Musk is right about one thing – we're spiralling towards bankruptcy
Posting on his social media platform X, Musk has indicated his disappointment with the unwillingness of Republicans to carry out spending cuts, musing that the only way out of the 'bankruptcy of America' is to radically boost GDP growth. It's difficult to disagree with his assessment, or to find much reason for optimism in either Britain or America. Trump and Starmer are very different leaders leading very different countries, but they face the same core question: how do you keep the show on the road when your voters demand more spending? The demographic challenges facing both countries are well known: an older population has more voters who no longer work, who vote themselves a larger share of income, which increases fiscal pressure on the young and weighing on birth rates. Loading It's a doom-loop that the West's democracies have yet to find an escape from. Growing our way out of trouble would require a technological revolution. Older voters prioritise healthcare and pensions ahead of investment in infrastructure or education, which reduces the funds available for pro-growth policies. Worse still, redistribution requires taxation that directly weighs on economic activity. If Musk succeeds in solving AI, robotics and space exploration, then we might get the resources and growth we need to escape the spiral, just as the Industrial Revolution pulled us out of the Malthusian trap. If he doesn't, we'll need another way out of this mess. Solving demographics isn't the answer. Boosting birth rates is a necessary long-term fix, but doesn't address the more pressing present concerns. Short of drawing on Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal and rendering workers into Soylent Green at retirement age, there's no obvious policy that will. And if we're stuck with our inverted pyramid of people, that leaves us with 'democracy' as the factor most likely to give way. About 48 per cent of all UK public spending goes on welfare, health and social care and debt interest spending. These are the items of spending that are either too toxic to touch – imagine the outrage if Starmer stood up and announced an end to the triple lock, or swinging cuts to the bloated NHS – or would tip the country into a financial crisis via defaulting on our obligations. They're also some of the items with the most forecast growth, as today's young become tomorrow's old. The state pension is set to hit 8 per cent of GDP, health spending 15 per cent and adult social care somewhere about 2.5 per cent. A little over 25 pence in every pound earned in Britain will be earmarked for these line items alone. If we can't cut spending democratically, we'll be made to cut it. And cutting spending democratically is hard. Loading One implication of the median voter theorem – the observation that in a democratic system, the man in the middle tends to get his way – is that when median incomes are below the mean, the state will tend to engage in more redistribution. This is certainly true in Britain, where 53 per cent of the population lives in households that pay less in taxes than they receive in benefits, and it's likely to be true in the United States as well (where the top and bottom quintiles are net losers and net beneficiaries, respectively). In fact, 'democracies spend more' seems to be a good general rule. Match V-Dem democracy scores to IMF data and – with some caveats around matching names and entries – the general gist is that more democratic countries spend somewhere about 12-15 points of GDP more than their less democratic peers, with researchers emphasising spending on social protection and education. Combine this with the observation that it's entirely possible for older generations to burden their younger successors with debts, and you have a recipe for disaster. The incentives given to today's politicians are to spend to win today's votes. Unless voters today are altruistic about future generations – and when the population is ageing because fewer people have children, their motive to be so is greatly reduced – then you can end up in the sort of unsustainable spiral Britain and America have found themselves in. By 2055, the US national debt is expected to be 156 per cent of GDP, and deficits around 7 per cent. In Britain, it's for 130 per cent of GDP, and a deficit of 9 per cent. Project that out to 2073, and debt hits 274 per cent of GDP, with the deficit a healthy 21 per cent of national income. If politicians ignore the warning signs – or voters punish those who attempt to correct course – we could find the choice between debt and democracy made for us. These are ludicrous numbers. There is no prospect of funding that sort of deficit at that sort of debt. The question is what we'll get instead. The most likely answer seems to be some form of fiscal cliff-edge ending up with less democratic choice in government. This could take a 'soft' form, such as self-imposed restrictions on spending and debt which politicians agree to adhere to in order to restore market confidence. A souped-up form of the Office for Budget Responsibility and harsher fiscal rules would be one version of this. Government by bond market – where investors demand higher yields for risky policies, driving the state towards fiscal consolidation – would be another. Loading At the other end of the scale, a debt bailout would effectively cede a large degree of sovereignty to whichever institution sets the terms of the loan. Britain has been down this road before, in 1976, when the IMF imposed higher taxes and lower spending. This would be an extreme outcome. It is not entirely out of the range of possibilities. Cutting spending democratically is hard. Undermining institutions is relatively easy.
Yahoo
30-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Superconductors are poised to solve the economic alarm story of our age
Humans are ever prone to Malthusian scares. The economic alarm story of our mid-2020s is exponential growth in power demand for AI and data centres, threatening to blow apart the world's energy system. This fear has a broad hold on the energy elites, government planners and the global media. Some embrace it with fervour. This year's CERAWeek energy summit in Houston was a celebration of AI, the godsend that would keep the fossil fuel industry in rude good health for decades to come. It ignores the radical breakthroughs under way in advanced superconductors, which have no electrical resistance and therefore dissipate almost no energy as the current goes round and round in a closed loop. I suspect that superconductors will be the next Nasdaq darling once markets grasp the colossal (and benign) implications for the world economy. Right now, exploding power demand for AI does indeed look terrifying. Data centres consume 26pc of total electricity in Virginia, the spillover effect of the US military complex. They are breaking the grid in greater Atlanta, where power demand for processing has surged 12-fold since 2022. Data centres are overwhelming the Austin-Dallas corridor of Texas, ground zero in the global race for AI supremacy. The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that the US economy will consume more electricity for data processing than for steel, cement, aluminium, chemicals and all energy-intensive manufacturing put together by 2030. The rest of the world lags but data centres nevertheless soak up 21pc of Ireland's power. Britain's booming hub around Slough, Berkshire – Europe's largest – needs so much electricity that it is already clashing with Labour's housebuilding plans and its 2030 clean power target. National Grid expects commercial power demand for British data centres to rise six-fold over the next decade. But technology never stands still. Tokamak Energy, in Britain's 'superconducting valley' near Oxford, is already moving the needle with high-temperature superconducting magnets that operate at 20 kelvins (minus 253C), a spin-off from its world-leading work on nuclear fusion. These are made from ribbons of rare-earth barium copper oxide that are one to three microns thick. They superconduct at high enough temperatures (a relative term) to slash the cost of cryogenic cooling. 'It's absolutely transformational,' said Warrick Matthews, the Tokamak chief executive. 'We don't have losses from copper resistance or heat so it reduces energy use by 17pc in a data centre. We're in talks with several companies already.' These super magnets can be used for all kinds of industries, from hybrid electric aircraft to the operation of wind turbines. 'Each nacelle on a 15-megawatt wind turbine has three to four tons of rare-earth magnets. Our magic tape can replace 99pc of those rare earths, reducing our reliance on supply from China,' he said. Further in the future – but close enough to call into question the intoxicating forecasts of the world's gas drillers – is an entire redesign of the way data centres are built. In crude terms, if you soak semiconductor chips in liquid helium at minus 269C and keep them cold, you may be able to stack them a hundred layers high in a 3D structure – impossible now because copper wires overheat. This could slash power use by orders of magnitude. The global nanotechnology institute IMEC is developing a system that does exactly this. 'We think we can start building it for real in five years,' said Anna Herr, the scientific director. 'It could raise energy efficiency by a hundred times, and that covers the whole system, including the cost of cooling.' Prof Herr said we may be looking at a future where data centres are no bigger than a fridge or even a shoebox, so small that they can be built wherever you need them. Moore's law of semiconductor progress is that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every two years or so. Superconducting transcends this ever harder task of miniaturisation, offering a way to do it with standard 28 nanometre chips that are relatively cheap. Cooling helium to minus 269C costs money but it pays for itself once computing speed reaches the threshold of 10 petaflops, or one quadrillion 'floating-point operations' per second. It is not easy science but the basic idea is that superconducting enables ultra-short pulses. 'We lose 70,000 times less energy with each pulse than conventional computing,' Prof Herr told me. The world is now in an awkward phase. The computing demands of AI are doubling every six months. Average data centres consumed eight kilowatts per rack in 2022. Nvidia's latest GB200 chip needs nearer 120 kilowatts for training models such as ChatGPT. This risks an immediate crunch for the global electricity system before the solution is ready. The IEA says the US accounts for 45pc of global data centre demand, and China 25pc, making the AI revolution very fossil fuel-heavy. It threatens to smash the Paris and Glasgow accords on CO2 emissions and set off a renewed gas and coal boom. American utilities plan a torrid expansion of gas-fired plants, despite a five-year waiting list for new turbines. Gas is no longer just a 'bridge fuel' on the way to decarbonised power, said Freeport LNG's Michael Smith at CERAWeek. 'It's the base-load fuel necessary for us to create the electrons for AI.' This sort of thinking lies behind moves by Shell, BP and others to drop the 'green stuff' and bet their corporate futures on a global gas boom lasting deep into the mid-century. Donald Trump aims to go further as an ideological end in itself, to the point of forcing the closure of wind farms already far into development. He has signed an executive order to 'turbocharge coal mining' and aims to double total power output, waving pollution curbs on toxic chemicals such as mercury and arsenic for good measure. 'We're ending Joe Biden's war on beautiful, clean coal once and for all. All those plants that have been closed are going to be opened,' he said. The IEA says data centres worldwide consumed 415 terawatt hours (TWh) of power last year, or 1.5pc of global electricity output. That will double to 1,000TWh by the end of the decade. It could double again by 2035 under its 'lift-off' scenario. So, yes, we have a big problem, but it is not as big as urban legend would have it. The IEA spells out in its 300-page report how AI itself will lead to a quantum leap in energy technology and savings, greatly mitigating the effect. Few believe that China's DeepSeek-R1 matched American AI rivals on maths, coding and reasoning with just a quarter of the power. But its inference model probably uses 40pc less electricity than GPT models. That alone has large implications. Chris Wright, the US energy secretary, says America and the world are going to need a vast expansion of fossil fuel-fired power to drive the AI revolution. 'Since the demand for intelligence is unlimited, so will be the demand for energy,' he said. Actually, it won't. He is committing the sin of false extrapolation. The greater probability is that AI coupled with superconductors will in the end slash energy demand. This article is an extract from The Telegraph's Economic Intelligence newsletter. Sign up here to get exclusive insight from two of the UK's leading economic commentators – Ambrose Evans-Pritchard and Jeremy Warner – delivered direct to your inbox every Tuesday Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. 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Telegraph
30-04-2025
- Business
- Telegraph
Superconductors are poised to solve the economic alarm story of our age
Humans are ever prone to Malthusian scares. The economic alarm story of our mid-2020s is exponential growth in power demand for AI and data centres, threatening to blow apart the world's energy system. This fear has a broad hold on the energy elites, government planners and the global media. Some embrace it with fervour. This year's CERAWeek energy summit in Houston was a celebration of AI, the godsend that would keep the fossil fuel industry in rude good health for decades to come. It ignores the radical breakthroughs under way in advanced superconductors, which have no electrical resistance and therefore dissipate almost no energy as the current goes round and round in a closed loop. I suspect that superconductors will be the next Nasdaq darling once markets grasp the colossal (and benign) implications for the world economy. Right now, exploding power demand for AI does indeed look terrifying. Data centres consume 26pc of total electricity in Virginia, the spillover effect of the US military complex. They are breaking the grid in greater Atlanta, where power demand for processing has surged 12-fold since 2022. Data centres are overwhelming the Austin-Dallas corridor of Texas, ground zero in the global race for AI supremacy. The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that the US economy will consume more electricity for data processing than for steel, cement, aluminium, chemicals and all energy-intensive manufacturing put together by 2030. The rest of the world lags but data centres nevertheless soak up 21pc of Ireland's power. Britain's booming hub around Slough, Berkshire – Europe's largest – needs so much electricity that it is already clashing with Labour's housebuilding plans and its 2030 clean power target. National Grid expects commercial power demand for British data centres to rise six-fold over the next decade. But technology never stands still. Tokamak Energy, in Britain's 'superconducting valley' near Oxford, is already moving the needle with high-temperature superconducting magnets that operate at 20 kelvins (minus 253C), a spin-off from its world-leading work on nuclear fusion. These are made from ribbons of rare-earth barium copper oxide that are one to three microns thick. They superconduct at high enough temperatures (a relative term) to slash the cost of cryogenic cooling. 'It's absolutely transformational,' said Warrick Matthews, the Tokamak chief executive. 'We don't have losses from copper resistance or heat so it reduces energy use by 17pc in a data centre. We're in talks with several companies already.' These super magnets can be used for all kinds of industries, from hybrid electric aircraft to the operation of wind turbines. 'Each nacelle on a 15-megawatt wind turbine has three to four tons of rare-earth magnets. Our magic tape can replace 99pc of those rare earths, reducing our reliance on supply from China,' he said. Further in the future – but close enough to call into question the intoxicating forecasts of the world's gas drillers – is an entire redesign of the way data centres are built. In crude terms, if you soak semiconductor chips in liquid helium at minus 269C and keep them cold, you may be able to stack them a hundred layers high in a 3D structure – impossible now because copper wires overheat. This could slash power use by orders of magnitude. The global nanotechnology institute IMEC is developing a system that does exactly this. 'We think we can start building it for real in five years,' said Anna Herr, the scientific director. 'It could raise energy efficiency by a hundred times, and that covers the whole system, including the cost of cooling.' Prof Herr said we may be looking at a future where data centres are no bigger than a fridge or even a shoebox, so small that they can be built wherever you need them. Moore's law of semiconductor progress is that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every two years or so. Superconducting transcends this ever harder task of miniaturisation, offering a way to do it with standard 28 nanometre chips that are relatively cheap. Cooling helium to minus 269C costs money but it pays for itself once computing speed reaches the threshold of 10 petaflops, or one quadrillion 'floating-point operations' per second. It is not easy science but the basic idea is that superconducting enables ultra-short pulses. 'We lose 70,000 times less energy with each pulse than conventional computing,' Prof Herr told me. The world is now in an awkward phase. The computing demands of AI are doubling every six months. Average data centres consumed eight kilowatts per rack in 2022. Nvidia's latest GB200 chip needs nearer 120 kilowatts for training models such as ChatGPT. This risks an immediate crunch for the global electricity system before the solution is ready. The IEA says the US accounts for 45pc of global data centre demand, and China 25pc, making the AI revolution very fossil fuel-heavy. It threatens to smash the Paris and Glasgow accords on CO2 emissions and set off a renewed gas and coal boom. American utilities plan a torrid expansion of gas-fired plants, despite a five-year waiting list for new turbines. Gas is no longer just a 'bridge fuel' on the way to decarbonised power, said Freeport LNG's Michael Smith at CERAWeek. 'It's the base-load fuel necessary for us to create the electrons for AI.' This sort of thinking lies behind moves by Shell, BP and others to drop the 'green stuff' and bet their corporate futures on a global gas boom lasting deep into the mid-century. Donald Trump aims to go further as an ideological end in itself, to the point of forcing the closure of wind farms already far into development. He has signed an executive order to 'turbocharge coal mining' and aims to double total power output, waving pollution curbs on toxic chemicals such as mercury and arsenic for good measure. 'We're ending Joe Biden's war on beautiful, clean coal once and for all. All those plants that have been closed are going to be opened,' he said. The IEA says data centres worldwide consumed 415 terawatt hours (TWh) of power last year, or 1.5pc of global electricity output. That will double to 1,000TWh by the end of the decade. It could double again by 2035 under its 'lift-off' scenario. So, yes, we have a big problem, but it is not as big as urban legend would have it. The IEA spells out in its 300-page report how AI itself will lead to a quantum leap in energy technology and savings, greatly mitigating the effect. Few believe that China's DeepSeek-R1 matched American AI rivals on maths, coding and reasoning with just a quarter of the power. But its inference model probably uses 40pc less electricity than GPT models. That alone has large implications. Chris Wright, the US energy secretary, says America and the world are going to need a vast expansion of fossil fuel-fired power to drive the AI revolution. 'Since the demand for intelligence is unlimited, so will be the demand for energy,' he said. Actually, it won't. He is committing the sin of false extrapolation. The greater probability is that AI coupled with superconductors will in the end slash energy demand.
Yahoo
06-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Why Is Trump Mad at the Zoo?
The order came down late in the evening, when the orangutans, lions, and crocodiles would be resting. The next morning, March 28, the animals awoke to a new political reality: The world's most powerful man had taken an acute interest in their place of lodging, the National Zoo. President Donald Trump had directed Vice President J. D. Vance to rid the Smithsonian Institution of all 'improper ideology.' As a ward of the Smithsonian, the zoo was not only covered by this mandate; it was specifically mentioned as one of the facilities to be cleansed of wrongthink. Trump's order leaves little mystery about what he wants changed at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History and its National Museum of African American History and Culture. It calls for the removal of 'divisive,' 'race-centered ideology' from those museums, and says that their exhibits should instead instill pride 'in the hearts of all Americans.' But the order's text is silent on the nature of the zoo's ideological transgressions, and my email to the White House asking what they might be went unanswered. Trump has not previously been counted among the zoo's critics, who tend to lament the life of captivity suffered by its animals, not their potential indoctrination. I reached out to the zoo staff to ask if they knew what the administration wanted changed. When I did not immediately hear back, I decided to visit the zoo, in the mindset of a freshly appointed cultural commissar. One morning this week, I arrived at its Connecticut Avenue entrance. Pollen-coated cars were lined up outside, and blossoms on the zoo's magnolias were turning themselves inside out in the clear morning sun. Just a few hundred yards down its central path, near the Asia Trail, a food truck was already serving cocktails. [From the July 1919 issue: Pessimism and the zoo] On my way over to the zoo, I'd read the institution's most recent strategic plan. In the introduction, former National Zoo Director Steven Monfort says that by going from a global population of 1 billion to 8 billion in only 200 years, 'humans have made things very hard for wildlife.' It occurred to me that Vance might find this characterization a touch too Malthusian; he has often railed against what he perceives as anti-natalism in liberal culture. But the sight of parents carrying Moscow mules and margaritas away from the food truck suggested family-friendliness, at least of a certain kind. At the zoo's newly renovated Bird House, I joined a long line of families clustered around strollers, waiting to be let into the aviaries. In 2023, I'd met the zoo's chief curator for birds, Sara Hallager, while reporting a story about the institution's decision to euthanize a fox that may have killed 25 of its flamingoes. Hallager had told me that after the renovation, the zoo would no longer acquire birds from Africa, Asia, or South America. Its new exhibits would showcase only North American birds. Now I wondered: With this 'America First' approach, had the zoo intended to obey (way) in advance? If so, that might explain why an enormous pink-marble sculpture of an eagle—salvaged from the original Penn Station—had been placed near the Bird House entrance. As I moved deeper into the exhibit, this theory seemed less plausible. Its interpretive panels were not overtly political—I searched high and low for land acknowledgments and found none—but they also didn't seem to have been designed to please Trump. For one thing, they're printed in English and Spanish, a first for the zoo. They also celebrate the ability of migrating birds to move freely among the Amazon rainforest, North America, and the High Arctic. I did find one potentially 'divisive' panel in the turkey enclosure. It drew a distinction between North America's Indigenous people, who hunted turkeys for thousands of years but took care not to wipe them out, and European colonists, who in just two centuries drove the birds to the brink of extinction. This may not be the sort of sentiment that 'instills pride in the heart' of Americans. And yet it's true. [Read: The aftermath of a mass slaughter at the zoo] Everywhere I went, I heard kids buzzing about the zoo's new star attractions, two pandas named Bao Li and Qing Bao that Xi Jinping had sent from China as a gesture of friendship. A source at the Smithsonian Institution who was not authorized to speak to the press told me that before the pandas went on public view, the zoo had been besieged with messages from senators requesting advance meet and greets. I briefly entertained the thought that the zoo had ended up in Trump's crosshairs because some key ally of his had been denied a picture with the bears. Whatever the case, Bao Li himself seemed entirely indifferent to politics. He sat, lolled back against a green hillside, chewing through whole sticks of bamboo like they were Twizzlers at the movies. The zoo features less explicit climate advocacy than you might expect from an institution devoted to animal conservation. Most of it is concentrated in a single room in the Amazonia building. The Trump administration has been relentless about scrubbing government websites of all mentions of climate change, no matter how anodyne, but this was gentle stuff. In the center of a large mural from the 1990s recommending solar power, a kid wearing baggy clothes—now back in fashion—picks up trash in a forest. No fossil-fuel multinationals are named and shamed in the surrounding panels. The staff members in green vests did not appear to be indoctrinating anyone. They just gamely answered questions about the neon-blue tree frogs in a nearby terrarium. The exit from Amazonia dumped me out onto a path that runs along the zoo's southern edge. Traffic noise wafted down from the Duke Ellington Bridge, reminding me that I was not in a rainforest, but in the middle of Washington, D.C.—a city that Trump has derided as a 'filthy and crime-ridden embarrassment to our nation.' Continuing down the path, I arrived at the Kids' Farm exhibit, a shining scene of rural Americana that would not have been out of place on a butter label. Near the big red barn and stables, toddlers were perched on a fence, petting mules. A cow's blotchy black coat shimmered in the bright heat of the afternoon. Like the Bootheel BBQ & Southern Catering food truck parked nearby, which promised to 'feed your Southern soul,' the exhibit seemed designed to flatter, not antagonize, a narrow and nostalgic view of 'real America.' Before leaving the zoo, I popped into the visitor's center. I confirmed that the bookstore inside was aimed at the nonpartisan animal lover, not the activist, and learned that the zoo usually holds a secular-coded celebration of Easter—its focus is nature's post-winter bounty, not the newly risen Christ. The zoo's website calendar does show that last year, and for several years prior, it also recognized International Family Equality Day. Local LGTBQ organizations participated in the event, and some described it as 'Gay Day at the Zoo.' As part of the festivities, guests were able to watch a beaver or seal eat rainbow-dyed ice cake. Last year's event also had a musical performance featuring themes of 'climate justice, inclusion, queer identity, and community.' When I emailed the zoo to ask whether International Family Equality Day would continue this year, I did not receive a reply. I could see how this celebration might inflame a social conservative, but the tame, one-day event did not seem like enough to merit the zoo's inclusion in the executive order. Nor did any of the other things that I'd found—unless the administration is taking a 'broken windows' approach to policing ideology. Then again, I can't claim that my audit was exhaustive. I had intended to visit every exhibit, but I ended up skipping the Reptile House. Not for lack of interest; it's actually one of my favorite places at the zoo—the pythons and unblinking crocodiles provide a real encounter with the animal other. But the line was very long, with little shade. And so I can't tell you for certain that the Reptile House isn't a hotbed of critical race theory, or other MAGA heresies. Vance and his team will have to find out and let us know. Article originally published at The Atlantic
