Super-Republican and super-polluters

I have been familiar for several years with the existence of “super-polluter” petrostates whose per capita extraction-based greenhouse gas emissions are hundred of times the global average. Economically, these “super-polluter” ruling classes who sell the fossil fuels profit from runaway ecological distraction caused by unlimited fossil fuel usages to an extent orders of magnitude larger than the average global ruling class. The wealth of these ruling classes, allows them to dictate policy globally to a very high degree — most especially to prevent demands for ecological justice and even for anything except carte blanche to emit however much greenhouse gases their rulers can profit from. The super-polluters of the Persian Gulf — Kuwait, Qaṭar and the UAE — are well documented by emissions figures. They become especially egregious if we debit zero emissions to expatriates and measure emissions per citizen, a perspective implied correct by Arun Saldanha’s ‘A Date with Destiny: Racial Capitalism and the Beginnings of the Anthropocene’. By such a calculation, Qaṭar’s per-citizen emissions are 450 times(!) the global average, and those of Kuwait and the UAE around seventy times.

The question of whether other super-polluters exists at a more local level has interested me recently. The fifty states of the United States provide a unique opportunity to examine this possibility, because I have long known of statewide breakdowns of fossil fuel production for coal, oil and natural gas, which can be used to approximate state-by state cumulative and present extraction-based greenhouse gas emissions.

Whilst it was too difficult for me to print all the figures, I have shown for each US state details of:

1. percentage of cumulative US extraction-based emissions
2. percentage of global cumulative extraction-based emissions
3. percent of current US population
4. percent of current US emissions
5. percent or ratio to total US extraction-based emissions per capita
1. I have used percent where the ratio is less than one, and ratio if it is greater
6. percent or ratio to global extraction-based emissions per capita

It might be noted that there are small extraction-based emissions from other sources which I did not calculate for lack of time and unavailability of data. (Extraction-based emissions are not zero for polities producing no fossil fuels currently or cumulatively, which includes a third of US states). Nevertheless, this table should be a clue as to which US state ruling classes are the biggest profiteers from global warming.

I have also shaded “red wall” states in red and “blue wall” states in blue to see how much US political divides relate to actual greenhouse gas emissions.

US Extraction-Based Emissions by State:

State	Percentage of US cumulative emissions	Percentage of global cumulative emissions	Percent of US population (2020s)	Percent of Present US emissions	Percent of or ratio to US per capita emissions	Percent of or ratio to global per capita emissions
Alabama	1.65%	0.36%	1.52%	0.63%	41.526%	1.356784592
Alaska	2.29%	0.50%	0.22%	1.63%	7.463	24.38419474
Arizona	0.31%	0.07%	2.23%	0.00%	0.012%	0.04%
Arkansas	0.46%	0.10%	0.91%	0.47%	51.978%	1.698253119
California	3.59%	0.78%	11.62%	1.08%	9.294%	30.36%
Colorado	2.02%	0.44%	1.76%	3.67%	2.089	6.824671159
Connecticut			1.08%
Delaware			0.31%
Florida	0.08%	0.02%	6.89%	0.01%	0.149%	0.49%
Georgia	0.01%	0.00%	3.29%	0.00%	0.000%	0.00%
Hawaii			0.43%
Idaho	0.05%	0.01%	0.59%	0.00%	0.269%	0.88%
Illinois	4.83%	1.05%	3.74%	1.88%	50.252%	1.641858174
Indiana	1.95%	0.42%	2.04%	1.13%	55.179%	1.802853651
Iowa	0.00%	0.00%	0.96%	0.00%	0.000%	0.00%
Kansas	1.30%	0.28%	0.88%	0.37%	42.098%	1.375445865
Kentucky	6.69%	1.45%	1.35%	1.45%	1.071	3.500860065
Louisiana	5.64%	1.22%	1.35%	3.66%	2.700	8.821153759
Maine			0.41%
Maryland	0.29%	0.06%	1.85%	0.06%	3.498%	11.43%
Massachusetts			2.10%
Michigan	0.27%	0.06%	2.99%	0.11%	3.540%	11.57%
Minnesota			1.71%
Mississippi	0.44%	0.10%	0.87%	0.29%	16.721%	54.63%
Missouri	0.04%	0.01%	1.84%	0.00%	0.220%	0.72%
Montana	1.56%	0.34%	0.34%	1.54%	4.607	15.05241983
Nebraska	0.06%	0.01%	0.59%	0.01%	2.153%	7.03%
Nevada	0.01%	0.00%	0.96%	0.00%	0.184%	0.60%
New Hampshire			0.42%
New Jersey			2.80%
New Mexico	2.70%	0.59%	0.63%	7.13%	11.355	37.10152528
New York	0.02%	0.01%	5.85%	0.01%	0.194%	0.63%
North Carolina			3.25%
North Dakota	1.72%	0.37%	0.23%	5.23%	22.297	72.84921958
Ohio	3.05%	0.66%	3.50%	2.52%	72.055%	2.35423961
Oklahoma	3.52%	0.76%	1.21%	3.69%	3.057	9.987822025
Oregon	0.00%	0.00%	1.26%	0.20%	15.952%	52.12%
Pennsylvania	12.84%	2.78%	3.85%	9.41%	2.441	7.974852848
Rhode Island			0.33%
South Carolina			1.61%
South Dakota	0.01%	0.00%	0.27%	0.01%	2.777%	9.07%
Tennessee	0.46%	0.10%	2.13%	0.00%	0.219%	0.71%
Texas	16.23%	3.52%	9.22%	24.74%	2.683	8.767608641
Utah	1.15%	0.25%	1.03%	1.10%	1.070	3.495456591
Vermont			0.19%
Virginia	1.82%	0.40%	2.60%	0.61%	23.374%	76.37%
Washington	0.07%	0.02%	2.34%	0.00%	0.000%	0.00%
West Virginia	10.05%	2.18%	0.52%	6.81%	13.060	42.66954766
Wisconsin			1.76%
Wyoming	10.11%	2.19%	0.17%	13.47%	77.804	254.2074428
Federal offshore	2.71%	0.59%		7.08%

The table above shows a remarkable concentration of US greenhouse gas emissions, and a major political divide:

• Four states account for fifty percent of cumulative US greenhouse gas emissions
• Five states account for 61 percent of current US greenhouse gas emissions
• “Red Wall” states have 22 percent of the US population but produce 64 percent of emissions
• “Blue Wall” states have 34 percent of the population but produce only 9 percent of emissions
• as noted earlier, this figure is an understatement, but even so the “blue wall” states undoubtedly produce low emissions relative to population — lower than the global average

There is definite evidence of “super-polluter” states in Wyoming and perhaps North Dakota, West Virginia and New Mexico. Wyoming is a definite super-polluter, with per capita emissions 250 times the global average, half that of Qaṭar. It is the least populous US state yet the second-largest greenhouse gas emitter and third-largest cumulative emitter! North Dakota has per capita emissions comparable to Kuwait or the UAE, and West Virginia and New Mexico about half that. Excluding New Mexico, these have constituted Trump’s three best states in all his presidential campaigns, which is extremely telling. New Mexico is a complicated and very much sui generis state, which Trump did not win in any of his three campaigns and did not even trend Republican in 2024. It has a countercultural mountain culture akin to Colorado or New England in its highest lands, politically detached from the pollution-producing northwest and Plains regions. In the other three the political influence of fossil fuels is as hegemonic as in the Gulf oil monarchies, and this is also likely to be true in Texas and Oklahoma. Even more than with the Gulf states globally, the tax-free or low-tax policies of super-polluting US states limit the range of policies possible elsewhere in the country, as business relocation is easier.

An overview of Wikipedia citation statistics

Although I have known of Wikipedia’s citation templates for some time — it is true that when I first made edits there I either did not use them or they had not been created — it is only recently that I have studied them in detail.

What one might call the “big four” — {{cite book}}, {{cite journal}}, {{cite news}}, {{cite web}} — have been familiar to me for some years now, because they can be used directly when adding a citation without copying the blank template from the appropriate linked site below. It is only recently though that I have attempted to look at all the templates in “Citation style 1”, and to see if and where I can use them.

A few days ago, I edited an article on the geography of Antarctica and did not know what to do with publications of the Geological Society of London, and of “Scientific Reports”. Presuming by the title that they must be reports of some sort, and seeing they did not fit the criteria to use {{cite report}} (a template I had used before discussing civil rights politics),  I put them under {{cite tech report}} — a rarely-used template found in only a little over two thousand Wikipedia articles (vis-à-vis over a million for the “big four”).

However, re-reading the template for {{cite tech report}}, it was clear to me that the articles I had cited therewith on Geography of Antarctica did not fit the criteria for {{cite tech report}}. They seemed to be closer to {{cite conference}} or {{cite journal}}, although I know nothing about what conference proceedings are.

The problems I had with this made me both message my brother for some discussion and to actually tabulate the frequencies of the various {{cite...}} templates, which I have done below, alongside percentages of Wikipedia pages used and how the template appears in links (if it does do so).

Frequencies and Appearance in Reference Texts of All Style 1 Wikipedia Templates:

Template	# of Wikipedia pages	% of Wikipedia pages	Template in reference text
{{cite arXiv}}	5,865	0.0099%	in link
{{cite AV media}}	61,062	0.10%	as |type=
{{cite AV media notes}}	29,630	0.050%	as |type=
{{cite bioRxiv}}	415	0.00070%	in link
{{cite book}}	1,763,420	3.0%
{{cite CiteSeerX}}	427	0.00072%	in link
{{cite conference}}	19,030	0.032%
{{cite document}}	1,653	0.0028%	as |type=
{{cite encyclopedia}}	219,847	0.37%
{{cite episode}}	18,233	0.031%	as |number=
{{cite interview}}	9,492	0.016%	(Interview)
{{cite journal}}	1,094,239	1.9%
{{cite magazine}}	338,377	0.57%
{{cite mailing list}}	811	0.0014%	(Mailing list)
{{cite map}}	46,609	0.079%	(Map)
{{cite medRxiv}}	159	0.00027%	in link
{{cite news}}	1,734,008	2.9%
{{cite newsgroup}}	653	0.0011%
{{cite podcast}}	5,158	0.0087%	(Podcast)
{{cite press release}}	76,594	0.13%	(Press release)
{{cite report}}	61,348	0.10%	(Report)
{{cite serial}}	279	0.00047%
{{cite sign}}	833	0.0014%	as |medium=
{{cite speech}}	1,426	0.0024%	(Speech)
{{cite SSRN}}	557	0.00094%	in link
{{cite tech report}}	2,351	0.0040%	(Technical report)
{{cite thesis}}	41,638	0.071%	(Thesis)
{{cite web}}	5,013,194	8.5%

Why climate change helps the rich — evidence of a nondoctrinaire kind

Although publications like Red Flag Magazine have long demonstrated that capitalism is entirely incapable by its very nature of ameliorating, let alone solving the climate crisis — and are perfectly effective even with deeply flawed and outdated geopolitical assumptions — Red Flag have now become truly open that the fight to prevent runaway climate change is purely and simply class struggle against the wealthy. In ‘Tropical Cyclone Alfred and the politics of ‘keeping politics out of it’’ and ‘Why Only Socialism Can Save Us from Climate Catastrophe’, alongside articles I could not find or were rewritten, Red Flag demonstrate that climate change is purely and simply class struggle on a global scale.

What is interesting is that Harvard University’s Branko Milanovic, Peter H. Lindert and Jeffrey G. Williamson, so early as 2007, in their thesis ‘Measuring Ancient Inequality’, made a strong implication that the capitalist class does have much to gain from global warming.

‘Measuring Ancient Inequality’ is a study of inequality in preindustrial societies. The critical issue the thesis notes is how the presence of a “subsistence minimum” below which human survival is impossible creates an Inequality Possibility Frontier (abbreviated to IPF) at a Gini index that appears low by modern industrial standards. Hence, in these ancient societies, even if extraction by the ruling class was the maximum possible, it only permitted seemingly modest inequality before the majority could not survive.

The symbol ε is used for the proportion of the population belonging to the ruling class, and s is used for the substance minimum in 1990 US dollars. The initially assumed value for the subsistence minimum is $PPP 400 — a value based upon the work of Angus Maddison in The World Economy: Historical Statistics from 2003.

Discussing their results, Milanovic, Lindert and Williamson note on pages 15 and 16 that:

“If we used Maddison’s subsistence level of $400, then four estimated Ginis would be significantly greater than the maximum Gini (at their level of income) implied by the IPF: three of these are based on data from India, and the fourth is from Nueva España.[The 1752 Old Castille is also slightly above the IPF.] Recalling our definition of the IPF, these four cases can only be explained by one or more of these five possibilities: (i) a portion of the population cannot even afford the subsistence minimum, (ii) the actual ε is much smaller than the assumed ε=0.001, (iii) inequality within the rich classes is very large, (iv) our estimate of inequality is too high, and/or (v) the subsistence minimum is overestimated. We have already analyzed and dismissed the first three possibilities. The fourth possibility is unlikely: since our estimates of inequality are based only on a few classes, they are likely to be biased downwards, not upwards. The last possibility offers the more likely explanation. It could well be that the subsistence minimum was less than $PPP 400 for some societies. In particular, this is likely to be the case for subtropical or tropical regions where calorie, housing and clothing needs are considerably less than those in temperate climates....”

“If the IPF is drawn under the S=$300 assumption, it shifts the frontier upwards enough to encompass at or below it all our estimated inequalities, with the possible (and modest) exceptions of Moghul India and Nueva España.”

If we reverse what ‘Measuring Ancient Inequality’ says above about tropical and subtropical societies, we would logically conclude that in genuinely cold climates with extremely high food, shelter and clothing needs, subsistence minima might be substantially greater than $PPP 400. We would also conclude that in the hottest regions with the most minimal such demands, the subsistence minimum might be still lower than $PPP 300, although probably there is a lower limit no less than $PPP 200. ‘Measuring Ancient Inequality’ says nothing about how high or low subsistence minima could potentially be.

If the subsistence minimum were greater than $PPP 400, this would however be difficult to prove using the methods used by the thesis — although I do not rule out other methods. One would be required to prove inequality as sufficiently restricted relative to income that a higher requirement becomes probable, and even then there is always the possibility of lesser extraction above a lower minimum. No society in any climate colder than temperate oceanic Western Europe is analysed in ‘Measuring Ancient Inequality’, and partly for reasons I will discuss below, candidates for such are few. [China in 1880 would lie partially within climates likely to have subsistence minima above $PPP 400, but the average subsistence minimum for the whole society would be dominated by the hot southern regions — at least judging by the result of the thesis.]

The above facts acquire deep relevance in light of runaway global warming. Milanovic, Lindert and Williamson imply that a hotter and hotter world will, ipso facto, increase the profits of the capitalists by reducing the absolute minimum wage they are required to provide to workers. Thus, the international capitalist class not merely has zero incentive to ameliorate global warming, but has vast potential gains from making it as bad as possible and permitting lower wages and greater profits. The results also explain why, before runaway global warming began in about 1980, there was a rapid movement in many countries from cooler to hotter regions: capitalist classes were seeking areas where they could gain greater profits, and the lower subsistence minima in hotter regions fit this goal perfectly.

Another fact explained very clearly by ‘Measuring Ancient Inequality’ is why civilisations evolved predominantly in hot deserts. The establishment of a stratified society requires that a surplus be produced, and logically this surplus will initially be small. Thus, it would be critical for the development of a surplus that the society’s subsistence minimum be as low as possible. Hot deserts — especially as they are the most likely region after extremely high mountains to evolve animals with the hierarchical social structures required for domestication — are ideal as the would-be elite is required to give such limited wages. Even more dramatically, the absence of even one origin of civilisation or even of crop agriculture in any latitude beyond the subtropics — European agriculture came via migration from the Middle East — suggests very low subsistence minima were critical for the evolution of stratified societies.

Did Barrington Moore write too early?

Re-downloading and re-reading Ron Rogowski’s Commerce and Coalitions, I was struck by a quite interesting and revealing quotation:

“In one of the classic works of modern comparative sociology, Barrington Moore, Jr. (1967) [Social Origin of Dictatorship and Democracy] focused attention on a particularly malignant — indeed, protofascist — developmental coalition, namely the protectionist one of capitalists and landowners against labor. If the present [Commerce and Coalitions, 1989] approach is correct, such an alliance was likeliest to arise in the formative nineteenth century in countries where land and capital were both scarce and only labor was abundant — that is, virtually all of Europe save its economically advanced northwestern corner, and all of eastern and southern Asia. There capital and land could be expected to unite in support of protection and imperialism; only labor, and the most labor-intensive agricultural and manufacturing enterprises, will normally have supported free trade and a less expansive foreign policy.

What Moore saw — rightly, in my [Rogowski’s] estimation — as the far more hopeful coalition of capital and labor should have arisen, according to the present theory, principally in two quite different circumstances: where both of those factors were abundant, and only land was scarce (essentially northwestern Europe, our first case[)]; and where both labor and capital were scarce, and only land was abundant (the “frontier” societies of the third case). In the former case, workers and capitalists alike will have favored free trade and a foreign policy of restraint; in the latter, both will have embraced protection and imperialism. In either of the two cases, however, the fatal alliance of land and capital is circumvented and, in Moore's perceptive telling, the path to a tolerably free society remains open.”

In light of last year’s US presidential election, the rise of Peter Dutton, and the much longer-term rise of geopolitically powerful petro-dictatorships, I get the feeling that Moore wrote his book too early, indeed much too early.

As I have repeatedly emphasised over the past two years, during the era discussed by Moore there existed no example of Rogowski’s “fourth case” — where both capital and land were abundant and only labour was scarce. Under such a situation, which today prevails in:

1. North America
2. continental Oceania [Australia, New Zealand, New Caledonia]
3. the Persian Gulf oil states
4. the more advanced countries within North and Central Asia

capital and land are expected to unite in favour of free trade and a (theoretically) less expansive foreign policy, while labour and more labour-intensive enterprises will favour protectionism and (theoretically) imperialism. The problem, which Rogowski does hint at, is that the recent history of the United States and the East Slavic and Turkic “core USSR”, alongside the entire history of the Gulf States since oil was discovered, demonstrate the capital and land are never satisfied with whatever suppression of labour they achieve, because their goal, as emphasised here and here by Red Flag Magazine, is always to increase profit. Moreover, the scarcity of labour encourages ruling classes to import labour in order to lower wages in the labour-intensive nontradable sector. This has several critical effects:

1. it virtually eliminates the ability of labour in those labour-abundant countries [South Asia, Tajikistan, the Levant, Central America and the Caribbean, non-continental Oceania] from which labour is imported to gain from exporting
2. it reduces the ability of the countries noted in 1) to offer competition for the capital- and land-intensive production via labour-intensive production
3. it thus eliminates the political power of labour in the countries noted in 1) and further increases the control of capital and land in countries rich in both
4. as Christopher Allen Culver of Pennsylvania State University and the US Air Force Academy has noted in his ‘Remittances and Autocratic Regime Stability’ and ‘Manipulating Remittances’, remittances sent back to the countries noted in 1) allow these labour-abundant countries stronger currencies, which further:
1. weakens export competitiveness
2. strengthens local capital and land against labour
3. strengthens the global hand of the ruling elites in capital- and land-rich nations

As discussed most explicitly by the late Sophie Body-Gendtrot in her 2002 The Social Control of Cities: A Comparative Perspective, the ruling elites of this free-trading coalition favour the most extreme possible social control of the domestic underclass. Although it is not explicitly discussed, the fact that the wealthy favour the most intense policing is, plainly, because political activity — requiring international class solidarity — is the only exit route for the ghetto underclass. Mass incarceration is a direct reflection of the political hegemony of America’s very rich, whose primary goal is closing any route to a challenge from the bottom ninety percent. Placing the poorest and potentially most dangerous under direct control is a huge step towards this goal, and the Gulf States do the same thing via their contract system with expatriate workers. Labour, contrariwise, will favour a much more open and free domestic policy, illustrating Sigmund Freud’s principle that economic freedom is opposed to political and sexual freedom.

Free-trading capital and land under expanding trade must ensure trade continues to expand. Externally driven declining trade [via export controls by labour-rich nations, as with Cold War-era Southern Africa] will in these labour-scarce trade-open economies empower previously powerless labour, as discussed by Ron Rogowski, and Texas Tech’s David Letzkian and Dennis Patterson. A free-trading coalition of capital and land must thus ensure labour-rich nations cannot restrict exports to them. Consequently, the theoretically less expansive foreign policy of the free-trading coalition of capital and land becomes much less restrained than Stolper–Samuelson theory predicts. This factor explains the existence of the IMF, World Bank and WTO, whose strict and enforceable trade rules are exceedingly critical to the global power of the United States and its Gulf Cooperation Council allies. Alexander Etkind in his Russia Against Modernity (reviewed here) similarly suggests that Russia’s war against Ukraine is aimed to prevent foreign states decarbonising and Russia losing its fossil fuel profits. Whilst Etkind’s assessment is debatable, massive and influential lobbying by the Gulf States in the West is much more definitively aimed at preventing the loss of profits through reduced global oil and gas use. US wars against Central America (between 1944 and 1996) undoubtedly had the same aim of preventing those nations controlling trade.

Returning to Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, Moore did note the importance of the alliance between Southern planters and northern industrialists to US politics — transformed today into an alliance of fossil fuel producers and giant agribusinesses — since the great globalisation following Reconstruction. He noted the possibility of this coalition evolving earlier, which presumably would have shaped the US into the de facto oligarchy it became during the Jim Crow era and more decisively after the expansion of trade that began according to Rogowski in 1963 — but minus the democratising reforms of Reconstruction. In Saudi Arabia, power-sharing between the Al Saud and Al Ash-Sheikh meant an alliance between the rentier capital of the state and the Wahhabi clergy (land) had forged a free-trading coalition even before capital became abundant after oil was discovered. Similar links between imams and sheikhs developed in other Gulf states. This has prevented any possibility of a tolerably free society for anyone except capitalists and the traditional nomadic pastoralists, and, as noted in the preceding paragraph, is potentially much more dangerous in the long term than the better-known protectionist alliance of land and capital.

Another missing sequence

Today, looking again through OEIS, I noticed I could create the following sequence:

5, 67, 5, 13, 7, 17, 11, 37, 11, 31, 13, 29, 17, 61, 17, 37, 19, 41, 23, 127, 23, 139, 31, 53, 29, 109, 29, 61, 31, 71, 97, 199, 37, 73, 37, 83, 41, 157, 41, 167, 43, 89, 47, 181, 47, 97, 151, 101, 53, 307, 53, 109, 61, 113, 59, 229, 59, 127, 61, 131, ...,

Tabulated, this sequence is:

n	k	Representation
2	5	101two
3	67	2111three
4	5	101four
5	13	23five
6	7	11six
7	17	23seven
8	11	13eight
9	37	41nine
10	11	11
11	31	2911
12	13	1112
13	29	2313
14	17	1314
15	61	4115
16	17	1116
17	37	2317
18	19	1118
19	41	2319
20	23	1320
21	127	6121
22	23	1122
23	139	6123
24	31	1724
25	53	2325
26	29	1326
27	109	4127
28	29	1128
29	61	2329
30	31	1130
31	71	2931
32	97	3132
33	199	6133
34	37	1337
35	73	2335
36	37	1136
37	83	2937
38	41	1338
39	157	4139
40	41	1140
41	167	4341
42	43	1142
43	89	2343
44	47	1344
45	181	4145
46	47	1146
47	97	2347
48	151	3748
49	101	2349
50	53	1350
51	307	6151
52	53	1152
53	109	2353
54	61	1754
55	113	2355
56	59	1356
57	229	4157
58	59	1158
59	127	2959
60	61	1160
61	131	2961

Each member of the sequence [the second column] is the smallest prime greater than n whose base-n expansion is also a valid decimal expansion of a prime.

Without the requirement to be bigger than the base, every member for n greater than 2 would be 2 itself.

Although it is normally difficult to write bases larger than 35 (if it be assumed O and 0 are not distinct as I have always done) and it is not easy to establish a standard convention for them, the numbers in the above table can be written easily without differences of convention. This is because the decimal digits are a subset of the digits for any larger base, so that a basic decimal representation is also possible for any larger base, and this is the objective behind this sequence.

Looking at the list, one notices a clear pattern by which odd bases give larger k than even bases — the opposite of the pattern noted for smallest weakly prime number at OEIS A186995. However, the reasoning is the same as that for A186995 — that in an odd base there exist more possibilities for the last digit of a prime, although certain digit combinations which yield decimal expansions of primes cannot do so in many odd bases.