How US Big Tech monopolies colonized the world: Welcome to neo-feudalism
US Big Tech corporations are like the feudal landlords of medieval Europe. These Silicon Valley monopolies own the digital land that the global economy is built on, and are charging higher and higher rents to use their privatized infrastructure.
GeoPoliticalEconomy, By Ben Norton, 19 Aug 24
US Big Tech corporations have essentially colonized the world. In almost every country on Earth, the digital infrastructure upon which the modern economy was built is owned and controlled by a small handful of monopolies, based largely in Silicon Valley.
This system is looking more and more like neo-feudalism. Just as the feudal lords of medieval Europe owned all of the land and turned almost everyone else into serfs, who broke their backs producing food for their masters, the US Big Tech monopolies of the 21st century act as corporate feudal lords, controlling all of the digital land upon which the digital economy is based.
Every other company – not just small businesses, but even relatively large ones – must pay rent to these corporate feudal lords.
Amazon takes more than 50% of the revenue of the sellers on its platform, according to a study by the e-commerce intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse.
Amazon’s cut of vendor revenue steadily rose from roughly 35% in 2016 to just over half as of 2022.
In fact, Amazon basically sets prices in markets by using its infamous “buy box”. The platform removes the button if a user sells a product at a price higher than those offered on competing websites. The result: 82-90% of sales on Amazon end up using the buy box.
Neoclassical economists endlessly condemned the inefficiencies of the central planning of the Soviet Union, but apparently have little to say about the de facto price setting being done by neo-feudal corporate monopolies like Amazon.
A monopolist in the 20th century would have loved to control a country’s supply of, say, refrigerators. But the Big Tech monopolists of the 21st century go a step further and control all of the digital infrastructure needed to buy those fridges — from the internet itself to the software, cloud hosting, apps, payment systems, and even the delivery service.
These corporate neo-feudal lords don’t just dominate a single market or a few related ones; they control the marketplace. They can create and destroy entire markets.
Their monopolistic control extends well beyond just one country, to almost the entire world.
If a competitor does manage to create a product, US Big Tech monopolies can make it disappear.
Imagine you are an entrepreneur. You develop a product, make a website, and offer to sell it online. But then you search for it on Google, and it does not show up. Instead, Google promotes another, similar product in the search results.
This is not a hypothetical; this already happens.
Amazon does exactly the same: It promotes Amazon Prime products at the top of its search results. And when a product sells well, Amazon sometimes copies it, makes its own version, and threatens to put the original vendor out of business.
As Reuters reported in 2021, “A trove of internal Amazon documents reveals how the e-commerce giant ran a systematic campaign of creating knockoff goods and manipulating search results to boost its own product lines”. This happened in India, but vendors in other countries have accused Amazon of doing the same.
Toy salesman Molson Hart produced a fascinating documentary that illustrates Amazon’s dystopian monopoly power.
Amazon is more powerful than any 19th-century robber baron could have imagined. It charges exorbitant fees to vendors that sell goods on its platform (goods that Amazon had nothing to do with creating), and can copy their product and make its own version if it looks profitable.
This problem goes much deeper than Amazon. Apple, the largest company on Earth by market capitalization (with a $3.41 trillion market cap as of August 1, 2024), uses many of the same tactics as Amazon.
While Amazon extracts more than 50% of the revenue of the sellers who use its platform, it can at least try to justify this by arguing that these exorbitant fees include the costs of advertising and “fulfillment” (ie, storage, processing, delivery, etc.).
Apple, on the other hand, charges a staggering 30% fee on all purchases done in apps that are downloaded using the iOS store.
In other words, if a user of an iPhone, iPad, or Mac download an app for a third party through the App Store, Apple requires 30% rent for the business done by those other companies. This is despite the fact that Apple has nothing to do with that business. The other firms manage the commerce and maintain their apps; Apple is the neo-feudal lord demanding its tribute.
In an absolutely scandalous announcement in August, the crowd-funding website Patreon revealed in August that the neo-feudal corporate landlords at Apple are taking a 30% cut of all new memberships registered using the iOS app.
Apple is not providing any service, other than allowing people to download an app that it itself does not manage. All Apple does is host the app, nothing more. It is a digital landlord. But because it has a monopoly, Apple can take 30% of the revenue that creators on Patreon receive for all of our hard work…………………………………………………………………………………………..
It all started with Big Tech corporations first offering supposedly “free” services (which were paid for by selling users’ information). Those “free” platforms soon became monopolies, and were so deeply embedded into the economy that they became digital utilities, albeit privatized ones.
A 20th-century economy needed utilities like an electrical grid, water plants, sewage system, highways, etc. These natural monopolies should be publicly owned, provided by the state as public goods, in order to prevent rent-seeking by corporate landlords. (Of course, neoliberals have long sought to privatize these public utilities as well, and have had success in some countries — with inevitably disastrous results, like sky-high bills and sewage being dumped into the UK’s privatized water system.)
A 21st-century economy needs all of those basic utilities plus new digital infrastructure. But here’s the thing: all of the necessary digital infrastructure that our economies are built on is privatized! You have internet providers, Microsoft Windows, iOS, Apple Store, Play Store, Google, Amazon, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Apple Pay, Google Pay, etc.
Then there is the cloud infrastructure that apps and websites use, which is dominated by a few mostly US companies. Amazon Web Services (AWS) had 31% of global market share as of the first quarter of 2024, followed by 25% for Microsoft Azure, and 11% for Google Cloud……………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
If you want to make a small business, you will almost certainly go bankrupt very quickly if you don’t use Amazon to sell your product; Apple’s App Store or Google Play Store to download your app; Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube to market your good or service; or WhatsApp to make an order (especially in many Global South countries, where WhatsApp is more common than in the US). None of this is to even mention private ISPs for an internet connection, or private telecommunications companies that charge high data fees.
If your company makes an app that is not available in the Apple App Store or Google Play Store, you might as well not exist. Good luck getting the vast majority of your customer base to download it…………………………………………………………………………………………..
These Big Tech monopolists are really digital landlords. They own the land upon which the rest of the digital economy is built. They are the 21st-century version of the feudal lords of Medieval Europe, who owned the land upon which serfs toiled.
Now these neo-feudal corporate landlords are charging more and more fees to use their “free” infrastructure.
This digital infrastructure should be nationalized and treated as a public good, like other basic utilities (which should also be nationalized if they have been privatized, which was increasingly the case in the neoliberal era).
This is global monopoly capitalism…………………………………………………………………………………….
Economist Yanis Varoufakis has referred to this system as “technofeudalism”, in his 2024 book with this title. Although I sometimes disagree with Varoufakis, especially in terms of his criticism of China, I do largely share his analysis of technofeudalism.
Varoufakis is also absolutely right that one of the factors driving Washington’s new cold war on Beijing is the desire by US Big Tech monopolies to destroy their only competitors, which happen to be Chinese. ………………………….
This observation by Varoufakis hits the nail on the head. Where I think he is wrong is in his claim that China, like the US, is becoming techno-feudal.
There is a fundamental distinction between the two: In the US, capital controls the state; in China, the state controls capital.
In China’s unique system, which it refers to as a socialist market economy and “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics”, roughly a third of GDP comes from massive state-owned enterprises (SOEs), which are concentrated in the most strategic sectors of the economy, such as banking, construction, infrastructure, transportation, and telecommunications.
While it is true that many technology companies in China are private on paper, the reality is much more complicated. The Chinese government has a powerful “golden share” (officially known as a “special management share”) in large firms, such as Alibaba and Tencent, which gives it veto power over important decisions.
Although these large technology companies may not be full state-owned, China’s socialist government ensures that they act in the interest of the country and the people, not simply wealthy shareholders.
The US system is exactly the opposite. Large corporations control the government, and create policy on behalf of wealthy shareholders.
The problem is not just that US corporate monopolies control markets; they create those markets themselves, through their control over digital infrastructure.
As Varoufakis has observed in his discussion of “cloud capital”, Amazon does not just dominate the market; it creates markets — and prevents any potential competitors from creating alternative markets………………………………………………
In the 21st century, the infrastructure of society itself has been privatized.
The solution is clear: the digital infrastructure upon which the modern economy is built must be nationalized and turned into public utilities, like water, electricity, and highways.
That said, the US government nationalizing Silicon Valley Big Tech companies does not solve the problem of the lack of digital sovereignty in other countries.
If Amazon, Apple, Google, and Meta are nationalized, this would still mean the United States has enormous power over nations whose economies rely on this US-controlled digital infrastructure (which, again, is almost all nations everywhere, with the noble exception of China)……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
This is a serious problem that should be debated worldwide. There are likely some potential creative solutions………….. https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2024/08/19/us-big-tech-monopolies-neo-feudalism/
Nuclear power on the prairies is a green smokescreen.
By M. V. Ramana & Quinn Goranson, August 19th 2024, Canada’s National Observer https://www.nationalobserver.com/2024/08/19/opinion/nuclear-power-prairies-green-smokescree
On April 2, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith declared on X (formerly Twitter) “we are encouraged and optimistic about the role small modular reactors (SMRs) can play” in the province’s plans to “achieve carbon neutrality by 2050.”
SMRs, for those who haven’t heard this buzzword, are theoretical nuclear reactor designs that aim to produce smaller amounts of electricity compared to the current reactor fleet in Canada. The dream of using small reactors to produce nuclear power dates back to the 1950s — and so has their record of failing commercially.
That optimism about SMRs will be costing taxpayers at least $600,000, which will fund the company, X-Energy’s research “into the possibility of integrating small modular reactors (SMRs) into Alberta’s electric grid.” This is on top of the $7 million offered by Alberta’s government in September 2023 to oil and gas producer Cenovus Energy to study how SMRs could be used in the oil sands.
Last August, Saskatchewan’s Crown Investments Corporation provided $479,000 to prepare local companies to take part in developing SMRs. Alberta and Saskatchewan also have a Memorandum of Understanding to “advance the development of nuclear power generation in support of both provinces’ need for affordable, reliable and sustainable electricity grids by 2050”.
What is odd about Alberta and Saskatchewan’s talk about carbon neutrality and sustainability is that, after Nunavut, these two provinces are most reliant on fossil fuels for their electricity; as of 2022, Alberta derived 81 per cent of its power from these sources; Saskatchewan was at 79 percent. In both provinces, emissions have increased more than 50 per cent above 1990 levels.
It would appear neither province is particularly interested in addressing climate change, but that is not surprising given their commitment to the fossil fuel industry. Globally, that industry has long obstructed transitioning to low-carbon energy sources, so as to continue profiting from their polluting activities.
Canadian companies have played their part too. Cenovus Energy, the beneficiary of the $7 million from Alberta, is among the four largest Canadian oil and gas companies that “demonstrate negative climate policy engagement,” and advocate for provincial government investment in offshore oil and gas development. It is also a part of the Pathways Alliance that academic scholars charge with greenwashing, in part because of its plans to use a problematic technology, carbon capture and storage, to achieve “net-zero emissions from oilsands operations by 2050.”
Carbon capture and storage is just one of the unproven technologies that the fossil fuel industry and its supporters use as part of their “climate pledges and green advertising.” Nuclear energy is another — especially when it involves new designs such as SMRs that have never been deployed in North America, or have failed commercially.
X-energy, the company that is to receive $600,000, is using a technology that has been tried out in Germany and the United States with no success. The last high-temperature, gas-cooled reactor built in the United States was shut down within a decade, producing, on average, only 15 per cent of what it could theoretically produce.
Even if one were to ignore these past failures, building nuclear reactors is slow and usually delayed. In Finland, construction of the Olkiluoto-3 reactor started in 2005, but it was first connected to the grid in 2022, a thirteen-year delay from the anticipated 2009.
Construction of Argentina’s CAREM small modular reactor started in February 2014 but it is not expected to start operating till at least the “end of 2027,” and most likely later. Both Finland and Argentina have established nuclear industries. Neither Alberta nor Saskatchewan possess any legislative capacity to regulate a nuclear industry.
What Alberta and Saskatchewan are indulging in through all these announcements and funding for small modular nuclear reactors is an obstructionist tactic to slow down the transition away from fossil fuels. Discussing nuclear technology shifts attention from present and projected GHG emissions, while enabling a ramp-up of fossil fuel reliance in the medium-term and delaying climate action into the long-term.
Floating the idea of adding futuristic SMR technology into the energy mix is one way to publicly appear to be committed to climate action, without doing anything tangible. Even if SMRs were to be deployed to supply energy in the tar sands, that does not address downstream emissions from burning the extracted fossil fuels.
Relying on new nuclear for emission reductions prevents phasing out fossil fuels at a pace necessary for the scientific consensus in favour of rapid and immediate decarbonization. An obstructionist focus on unproven technologies will not help.
Quinn Goranson is a recent graduate from the University of British Columbia’s School of Public Policy and Global Affairs with a specialization in environment, resources and energy. Goranson has experience working in research for multiple renewable energy organizations, including the CEDAR project, in environmental policy in the public sector, and as an environmental policy consultant internationally.
M.V. Ramana is the Simons Chair in Disarmament, Global and Human Security and Professor at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He is the author of The Power of Promise: Examining Nuclear Energy in India (Penguin Books, 2012) and “Nuclear is not the Solution: The Folly of Atomic Power in the Age of Climate Change” (Verso Books, 2024).
Meta permanently bans media outlet The Cradle in latest attack on free speech
The Cradle, Mon, 19 Aug 2024, https://www.sott.net/article/494061-Meta-permanently-bans-media-outlet-The-Cradle-in-latest-attack-on-free-speech
On 16 August, Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta permanently banned The Cradle from its social media platforms for allegedly violating community guidelines by “praising terrorist organizations” and engaging in “incitement to violence.”
“No one can see or find your account, and you can’t use it. All your information will be permanently deleted,” reads the message accompanying the ban on Instagram, where The Cradle had surpassed 107,000 followers and amassed millions of views.
“You cannot request another review of this decision,” the message ends, despite the fact the ban came with little warning or any chance for review.
Comment: For the West-Israel, any organisation that it deems to be an opponent can be categorised as ‘terrorist’, and supporting a group’s resistance to the West-Israel’s war of terror can be considered ‘incitement to violence’. Regardless of whether this targeted group’s resistance is considered legitimate under international law; for example: China tells ICJ Palestinians have ‘inalienable right to use armed force’ against Israeli occupation
The Cradle is an independent, journalist-owned news website that covers the geopolitics of West Asia from a West Asian perspective. Since 2021, the publication has made a name for itself by covering regional developments with the kind of breadth and depth – and nuance – that often go missing in mainstream corporate media.
Meta’s accusations of “praising terrorist organizations” and engaging in “incitement to violence” largely stem from posts and videos that relay information or quotes from West Asian resistance movements like Hamas, Hezbollah, and Ansarallah – who are an essential part of the news stories unfolding in a region on the precipice of a major war.
It is also essential to recognize that these are major West Asian political organizations that have deep institutional and civic roots within Lebanon, Palestine, and Yemen and are part of the very fabric of these societies. They are represented in governance, run schools, hospitals, and utilities, and disperse salaries to millions of civilian workers.
Ironically, many of The Cradle’s Meta-flagged quotes on these organizations also come from Israeli and western officials:
“The intelligence information that Hezbollah has collected is accurate at the level of an advanced western intelligence organization, with observation capabilities, accurate intelligence gathering, and real-time documentation … There is almost no target in the north that Hezbollah cannot hit with over 50 percent success.” – Meta claims this two-month old post violated its guidelines, despite the quotes coming from Israeli journalists and officials.
Other posts that Meta claimed violated its rules included a reel on protesters breaking into an Elbit factory in the UK; a news headline image that reads “Israeli army approves plans for offensive on Lebanon“; and a quote from a Hamas official in Lebanon on how the “[Gaza] support fronts … achieved their goal.”
Although The Cradle had occasionally run afoul of Meta’s frustratingly unspecific community guidelines – which the publication always addressed immediately – matters appeared to come to a head following the 31 July assassination of Hamas Politburo Chief Ismail Haniyeh, when the company owned by US billionaire Mark Zuckerberg significantly tightened its grip on free speech.
In the days after Haniyeh’s assassination, Meta took down 10 posts from The Cradle’s Instagram account over 48 hours. These ranged from quotes by Hamas officials and Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah condemning massacres in Gaza and the Israeli strikes in Tehran and Beirut, videos released by local resistance factions clashing with the Israeli army in Gaza, and even news headlines about Haniyeh.
One of the posts removed for violations was a headline that read, “Hamas calls for ‘day of rage’ following assassination of Haniyeh.” Another was a carousel of image quotes by Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah, addressing the assassinations in Beirut and Tehran, and a likely response.
Meta informed The Cradle for the first time in early August, “You could lose our account in the future if you kept violating Meta’s community guidelines.”
Days later, Meta issued its permanent ban, targeting The Cradle’s main Instagram account and a backup account that had not violated any of the company’s guidelines. Hours later, the company disabled The Cradle’s Facebook page, which was not directly linked to the Instagram account and was registered under a completely different email. Meta clarified in its message regarding permanently removing the backup account that it does not allow “creating another account after we’ve suspended yours.” The backup account was created before the suspension.
We believe that this serves as evidence that Meta was targeting The Cradle in its entirety.
The Cradle’s business account on Instagram was clearly identified from the onset as a ‘news website/media’ company.
Other news pages on Meta, such as Middle East Eye and Al Jazeera, post similar footage and content – videos released by Hamas and Hezbollah, for example – and appear free to do so without having their posts removed. The Cradle’s description of these posts has been strictly neutral throughout.
Comment: The difference is that The Cradle is much more explicit in revealing the lies, hypocrisy, and corruption. These other outlets tend to adopt analysis that is erroneously ‘balanced’.
Project 2025: The right-wing conspiracy to torpedo global climate action
Bethany Kozma, a former Trump-era USAID official, said that future appointees “will have to eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere.”
Bethany Kozma, a former Trump-era USAID official, said that future appointees “will have to eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere.”
Bulletin, By Michael E. Mann | August 16, 2024
Summer 2024 saw another round of devastating heat waves, droughts, wildfires, storms, and record-setting global temperatures. The window for averting a catastrophic 1.5 degrees Celsius (3 degrees Fahrenheit) warming of the planet is rapidly closing. Can we meet this moment? I suppose it depends on whom you ask. For this is a tale of two worldviews.
In one—based on facts and evidence—environmental policy is motivated by science and reason, with the intent of advancing the common good and the sustainability of our civilization and our planet. The climate crisis is seen as the defining challenge of our time, demanding immediate and urgent action.
In the other—steeped in myth and conspiratorial ideation—environmental threats are an elaborate ruse perpetrated by scientists and politicians on the take, and environmental sustainability is a Trojan horse, a tool used by “globalists” to instill a new socialist world order. Climate change is a hoax perpetrated by environmental extremists.
Nothing better illustrates this yawning chasm in worldview than two deceptively similar-sounding projects known as the fact-based “Agenda 2030” and the conspiracy-rife “Project 2025.”
The first, “Agenda 2030,” is a United Nations program for Sustainable Development unanimously adopted by UN member nations on September 25, 2015. Agenda 2030 supports a set of 17 global Sustainable Development Goals, or “SDGs,” promoting “peace and prosperity for people and the planet” and the social, economic, and environmental sustainability of our civilization. Among its priorities are the health of the planet’s oceans and forests and the overriding threat of human-caused climate change.
I’ve contributed to the program personally. Back in 2018, I developed a free online course for the SDG Academy, which the UN describes as the “premier source of high-quality resources and guidance on education for the SDGs, with the mandate to enrich the field of sustainable development and advance Agenda 2030.” My course, which is still offered today (so far more than 35,000 people have taken it) is entitled “Climate Change: The Science and Global Impact.” Its stated purpose is that “we need to understand the science behind global warming to avoid the most damaging and irreversible climate change impacts on people and planet.”
So perhaps I’m a bit personally invested in Agenda 2030 and its mission to educate the public and policymakers about the climate crisis. But it is objectively disturbing to see that program attacked in such bad faith by the right. Representative of the assault is the plutocrat and dark money-funded Heritage Foundation, which has denounced Agenda 2030 as “hopelessly flawed from the start,” “replete with imprecise goals and targets,” “senseless, dreamy, and garbled,” and “[the] antithesis of a focused development strategy.” They insist, in fact, that “the US should call out the SDGs for their ineffectiveness and call for a re-evaluation of this failed endeavor.” Strong language. We’ll return to the Heritage Foundation and their role in all of this in a bit.
Agenda 2030, indeed, possesses all the elements despised by the bad actors who help manufacture and promote far-right conspiracy theories. Like the much-vilified Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Agenda 2030 operates under the auspices of the United Nations, feeding the fears of the “one world government,” right-wing fever swamp.
Its laudable goals of reducing poverty, hunger, and social inequality play into conservative fears of “socialism.” Its focus on environmental sustainability feeds the “watermelon” (green on the outside, red on the inside) framing that has for so long been used by conservative influencers seeking to weaponize their base against environmental action.
As a result, social media is now rife with the claim that Agenda 2030 is part of a left-wing global socialist plot against individual liberty and freedom, an excuse for even more pervasive and long-lasting pandemic-like lockdowns.
Now, let’s talk about “Project 2025,” a 900-page plan drafted by the aforementioned Heritage Foundation to implement a far-right policy agenda in the United States. If implemented—by a second Trump administration, for example—it would shrink the federal government, putting thousands of civil servants out of work. It would further expand the powers of the president. It would dismantle the Department of Education, impose massive tax cuts, and halt the sale of the abortion pill. It would cancel the National Weather Service and privatize all its meteorological data.
Project 2025 would gut the EPA, which is responsible for enforcement of environmental policies, and it would reverse the EPA’s 2009 “endangerment finding” that classified carbon dioxide as a pollutant to be regulated under the Clean Air Act. It would eliminate the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which monitors changes in our atmosphere, oceans and climate. Project 2025 would eliminate clean energy loan programs at the Department of Energy and remove climate change—one of the greatest national security threats we face—from the National Security Council agenda. It supports more oil drilling in the environmentally sensitive Arctic and asserts that the government has an “obligation to develop vast oil and gas and coal resources.”
Trump and Project 2025 are inextricably linked in numerous ways. Project 2025 was written for Trump, by Trump affiliates, who will staff the various agencies in a prospective second term. Six of the report authors are former Trump cabinet officials. Trump’s vice presidential candidate, J.D. Vance, wrote the foreward for a book about it (Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America), written by Heritage Foundation president and Project 2025 brainchild Kevin Roberts. Roberts briefed Trump about Project 2025 during its nascent stages back in 2022 on a private flight to a Heritage Foundation conference where Trump went on to say that the effort would “lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do.”
ProPublica recently obtained more than 14 hours of videos from the Project 2025 Presidential Administration Academy, an online training archive to prepare incoming political appointees in a prospective Trump administration so they can hit the ground running from day one; 29 of the 36 speakers in the series are connected to Trump either through this campaign or his previous presidency. Among the instructions given in the academy, Bethany Kozma, a former Trump-era USAID official, said that future appointees “will have to eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere.”
Trump and his co-conspirators were obstructed by their own incompetence during his first term. That proved to be a saving grace from the standpoint of environmental and climate policy. The whole point of Project 2025 is to make sure they don’t repeat that mistake and instead, go in with a detailed, comprehensive blueprint that will allow them to fast track their agenda.
We face a planetary-scale threat in the form of a prospective Trump second term and a radicalized GOP intent on implementing, in Project 2025, the most extreme, anti-environmental policy agenda in American history. In all likelihood, it would mean the end of meaningful global climate action at this critical juncture. The fate of our planet quite literally hangs in the balance. It’s something for all Americans to think about as they prepare for the pivotal 2024 election. https://thebulletin.org/2024/08/project-2025-the-right-wing-conspiracy-to-torpedo-global-climate-action/
The Risk of Bringing AI Discussions Into High-Level Nuclear Dialogues
Overly generalized discussions on the emerging technology may be unproductive or even undermine consensus to reduce nuclear risks at a time when such consensus is desperately needed.
by Lindsay Rand, August 19, 2024, https://carnegieendowment.org/posts/2024/08/ai-nuclear-dialogue-risks-npt?lang=en
Last month, nuclear policymakers and experts convened in Geneva to prepare for a major conference to review the implementation of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). At the meeting, calls for greater focus on the implications of artificial intelligence (AI) for nuclear policy pervaded diverse discussions. This echoes many recent pushes from within the nuclear policy community to consider emerging technologies in nuclear security–focused dialogues. However, diplomats should hesitate before trying to tackle the AI-nuclear convergence. Doing so in official, multilateral nuclear security dialogues risks being unproductive or even undermining consensus to reduce nuclear risks at a time when such consensus is desperately needed.
Last month, nuclear policymakers and experts convened in Geneva to prepare for a major conference to review the implementation of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). At the meeting, calls for greater focus on the implications of artificial intelligence (AI) for nuclear policy pervaded diverse discussions. This echoes many recent pushes from within the nuclear policy community to consider emerging technologies in nuclear security–focused dialogues. However, diplomats should hesitate before trying to tackle the AI-nuclear convergence. Doing so in official, multilateral nuclear security dialogues risks being unproductive or even undermining consensus to reduce nuclear risks at a time when such consensus is desperately needed.
The level of interest in AI at the preparatory committee meeting isn’t surprising, given how much attention is being paid to the implications of AI for nuclear security and international security more broadly. Concerns range from increased speed of engagement, which could reduce human decisionmaking time, to automated target detection that could increase apprehension over second-strike survivability, or even increase propensity for escalation. In the United States, the State Department’s International Security Advisory Board recently published a report that examines AI’s potential impacts on arms control, nonproliferation, and verification, highlighting the lack of consensus around definitions and regulations to govern Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (LAWS). Internationally, there have also been calls for the five nuclear weapon states (P5) to discuss AI in nuclear command and control at the P5 Process, a forum where the P5 discuss how to make progress toward meeting their obligations under the NPT. Observers have called for the P5 to issue a joint statement on the importance of preserving human responsibility in nuclear decisionmaking processes.
However, injecting AI into nuclear policy discussions at the diplomatic level presents potential pitfalls. The P5 process and NPT forums, such as preparatory committee meetings and the NPT Review Conference, are already fraught with challenges. Introducing the complexities of AI may divert attention from other critical nuclear policy issues, or even become linked to outstanding areas of disagreement in a way that further entrenches diplomatic roadblocks.
Before introducing discussions about AI into official nuclear security dialogues, policymakers should address the following questions:
- In which forums could discussions about AI be productive?
- What specific topics could realistically foster more productive dialogue?
- Who should facilitate and participate in these discussions?
Forum Selection………………………………………………………………
Topic Selection………………………………..
Participants………………………………
Think we don’t have a choice when it comes to saving the planet? Think again.
As temperatures around the world increase, Lord Deben explains why it is still within our collective power to mitigate the effects of climate change – before it’s too late
Climate change is increasingly causing global disruption. Human beings naturally seek certainty and modern societies have long taken for granted the relative certainties of the weather. That assumption underpins everything, from insurance, to food security, to global trade, to mass tourism.
We travel and we trade as if that certainty is a given, and we insure against the once-in-a-hundred-years occasion that it isn’t. Indeed, our whole free enterprise system depends on businesses being able to restrict their risks and limit the call on their capital. Insurance and the limited liability company are the necessary facilitators of capitalism.
However, as each year is hotter than the last; as wildfires rip through whole nations and are followed by floods and hurricanes of unparalleled force and extent; and as no part of the world is spared extreme weather events, the insurance model is fundamentally threatened and the ability to limit risk undermined.
From individual homeowners, no longer able to insure against flooding, to great international businesses that can’t protect their global supply chains, a warming world is disrupting the very system that has brought us unparalleled prosperity and opportunity. And every year it gets worse and more extensive.
2023 was the hottest year on record. Canada experienced its worst fire season and there were catastrophic blazes in Hawaii, the Mediterranean, central Amazonia, and Chile. The ferocity and the spread grows apace – and with it, the indirect effects.
People who have no water for their children invade their neighbours who have. Unparalleled levels of heat drive men and women to move – not for a better life, but just to be able to live. The migration that is already a toxic issue throughout Europe and North America is eclipsed when heat becomes intolerable, state structures collapse, and whole nations like Bangladesh are awash with rising sea levels.
The numbers on the move will be of a different order in a world where the rich nations have already shown themselves unable to deal with immigration. They’ve seen nothing yet!
However, this is not just a human disaster. We are sustained by what may well be a unique environment. Centuries of astronomy have not revealed another world capable of maintaining life as we know it. It seems that planet Earth is a rare phenomenon which may well depend on some delicate balances.
It was once too hot to support life, and it was the emergence of trees and bushes that gradually took carbon out of the atmosphere and enabled the emergence of fish and reptiles, insects and mammals, and finally human beings. Those decaying trees laid that carbon down to become, over millennia, coal, oil, and gas. For 200 years we have been putting that carbon back into the atmosphere, so it isn’t surprising that we’ve reversed the cooling and turned up the heat.
And, if the process continues, we don’t know what that will produce. Already, global warming has shifted the earth’s energy balance with unprecedented flows of heat into the oceans; ice caps; soils; and atmosphere. The rate has doubled in less than 50 years, and, as the melting ice caps move more water towards the centre of the globe, it slows the planet’s rotation and lengthens our days.
Almost imperceptible at the moment but, if we allow the effect to increase, it could begin to counter the moon’s attraction on which we depend for the relative stability of our climate. The sheer scale of what is happening means that the ocean currents, like the Gulf Stream, could change entirely and with them the weather patterns that they control.
This is why scientists have sought to convince the world to keep warming below a 1.5-degree increase. Anything more and we really cannot tell what cataclysmic changes would occur. Although we can go back more than a million years and trace temperatures and the air’s carbon content by analysing the layers of ice, we can find no comparable warming.
The ebb and flow of warm and cold periods continues as it has always done, but nothing like the global heating that has grown persistently since the beginning of the industrial revolution. That is entirely unprecedented, man-made, and already very close to levels that are likely to be catastrophic.
So, as American cities black out because of wildfires; China wrestles with persistent drought; Greece battles to protect its monuments from the flames; Niger swelters with temperatures of more than 40 degrees; and even the East of England is officially designated a semi-arid region – the world has a choice.
If this is what we get with 1.5 degrees warming, do we still cling to business as usual until 3 degrees warming produces results we hardly dare contemplate? Or does humankind rise to the occasion and meet the global threat with a global response, creating a new industrial revolution in which renewable energy powers a society that doesn’t cost the Earth, but builds a cleaner, greener, and fairer world?
It is the fundamental challenge of the human condition. We can rise to the heights or disappear in the depths. We have the choice.
Nuclear power is a dead end as a climate solution
Many Climate ‘Solutions’ Are Dead Ends Or Niches & Should Be Ignored
Michael Barnard, Climate futurist advising multi-billion dollar funds and firms.
Money, power and influence. The low-carbon transformation that we have started is the path to immense amounts of money, power and influence. Non-solutions and even major problems are being pitched hard as climate wins. Nuclear energy, carbon capture, hydrogen for energy and synthetic fuels should be ignored by most policy makers and serious investors.
Let’s start with nuclear power. Up front, there are a lot of things to like about the technology. It’s low-carbon, low-pollution and safe. Personally, I’m pleased with every nuclear reactor that actually gets attached to the grid. If there weren’t alternatives and serious downsides, I would be all in on the power generation technology.
But there are serious problems for nuclear in the vast majority of countries in the world, and we have to power every country. Wind, solar, transmission and storage are viable in every country, hence their dominance in the short list of climate actions that will work.
Countries have to have some very specific conditions for success for nuclear generation build out, and almost none do in the 21st Century. They have to be at heightened risk of major conflict. They have to have a nuclear weapons strategic requirement, whether a program to build them as with the USA and France historically, or the ability to build them quickly should they become needed as with South Korea. They have to be a big, rich country.
Commercial nuclear generation has to be a national strategy. Federal purse strings have to open wide, and federal governments must have the ability to override local opposition and regulatory hurdles. The federal government has to satisfy 28 major requirements with the International Atomic Energy Agency and establish overlapping circles of physical and cyber defense on the full length of the nuclear fuel supply, use and waste chain.
A single technology and design has to be selected and required for every reactor to enable regulatory, technical and human processes to gain learning experience and more quickly deploy the technology. The nuclear design has to be large, typically gigawatt scale. And the deployment must run its course in 20 to 30 years so that the experienced teams don’t retire, losing their hard-won knowledge.
Every successful deployment of nuclear generation historically has had those characteristics. Without them, nuclear cost and schedule overruns are massive, and the time to approve and build a nuclear power plant is a decade or longer. As global megaproject expert Bent Flyvbjerg’s data set of over 16,000 projects greater than a billion dollars in cost shows, nuclear energy is close to the worst type for cost and schedule overruns, 23rd of 25 categories, with only the Olympics and nuclear waste repositories being worse.
Even then, nuclear power plants are inflexible and so only suitable for 40% or less of annual demand without running into significant challenges. France’s fleet is actually 13% of Europe’s electrical generation and the country trades terawatt hours in all directions annually. Without massive transmission in and out of the country, their cost of electricity and challenges with operations would multiply.
Jurisdictions that can’t commit to dozens of nuclear reactors at the national level and can’t enforce a single reactor design should ignore nuclear entirely.
China is a good natural experiment to consider regarding scaling of nuclear energy versus renewables. It’s had a national strategic nuclear generation program since the 1990s, and wind and solar programs since the mid-2000s. Despite its more centralized planning and authority, renewables have scaled vastly more quickly and are increasing exponentially, while the nuclear program peaked in 2018 and has been slower since.
If China can’t scale nuclear energy as rapidly as wind, solar, transmission and storage, no country can. Equivalent wind and solar generation can be built in a fifth the time for a third the cost with much greater budget and schedule certainty.
Small modular reactors are even worse. They lose the economies of physical size and won’t be able to build enough to achieve economies of manufacturing scale. They are unproven, and first of a kind projects are the highest risk. They require all of the same conditions for success as large scale nuclear. There is no reason to believe claims related to them.
Mechanical carbon capture and sequestration is mostly another subsidy for the fossil fuel industry. Globally, only oil and gas heavy countries are considering it as a reasonable carbon drawdown strategy, and that’s not because it is one. Looking around the world, the majority of countries are sensibly leaning into nature-based drawdown strategies because they scale and work……………………………………………………………….
Hydrogen for energy is another dead end. At present we manufacture about 120 million tons of it, and the process creates as much greenhouse gasses as the entire aviation industry globally. That must be cleaned up. ……………………………… any process which manufactures hydrogen requires a lot of energy
………………………………………. There are powerful and well-funded organizations and individuals attempting to bend our decarbonization journey to their ineffective technologies. They are slowing progress. They are working to create profits for themself at the expense of the planet. Many individuals are well meaning, but simply deluded about the benefits of their favored technology.
Ignore them. The climate crisis and the opportunity are both too great to waste time on clearly poor solutions.
As a reminder, here’s the short list of climate actions that will work:
- Electrify everything
- Overbuild renewable generation
- Build continent-scale electrical grids and markets
- Build pumped hydro and other storage
- Plant a lot of trees
- Change agricultural practices
- Fix concrete, steel and industrial processes
- Price carbon aggressively
- Shut down coal and gas generation aggressively
- Stop financing and subsidies for fossil fuel
- Eliminate HFCs in refrigeration
- Ignore distractions
- Pay attention to motivations
Michael Barnard spends his time projecting scenarios for decarbonization 80 years into the future, and assisting his clients — executives, Boards and investors on several continents — to pick wisely today. ………… mohttps://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelbarnard/2023/10/16/many-climate-solutions-are-dead-ends-or-niches–should-be-ignored/?sh=3eb5ba803987 #nuclear #antinuclear #nuclearfree #NoNukes
Why Nuclear Energy Is Not the Solution to the Climate Crisis
In this Q&A, Dr. M.V. Ramana discusses key insights from his new book and why nuclear power does not help mitigate climate change.
The Good Men Project, August 19, 2024 by Beyond British Columbia, By Sachi Wickramasinghe
Despite about 20 countries declaring plans to triple nuclear energy by 2050 and the backing of billionaires like Bill Gates, we should not support expanding nuclear power.
That’s according to a new book, Nuclear is Not the Solution: The Folly of Atomic Power in the Age of Climate Change, by Dr. M.V. Ramana, the Simons Chair in Global Disarmament and Human Security at the school of public policy and global affairs at UBC.
We spoke to Dr. Ramana about key insights from the book and why nuclear power does not help mitigate climate change.
What motivated you to write this book?
Just 20 or 30 years ago, talking about nuclear energy as an environmentally friendly source of electricity would probably get you laughed out of the room.
But in the last decade, advocates of nuclear energy – from energy companies to governments and tech billionaires – have advertised the technology as a clean source of electricity that is vital to solving climate change.
Their arguments make no sense given what we know about the history and the technical characteristics of nuclear energy, so one motivation for this book is to lay out those arguments yet again, because they seem to have been forgotten.
How do you respond to claims that nuclear energy is necessary for meeting our carbon reduction goals?
Many technologies have low carbon footprints but we need to consider two other important factors: cost and deployment time.
Nuclear energy is one of the most expensive ways to generate electricity. Investing in cheaper low-carbon sources of energy will provide more emission reductions per dollar. Second, it takes about a decade to build a nuclear plant. If you add the time needed for environmental clearances, community consent and raising the huge amounts of funding necessary, you’re looking at 15-20 years before a nuclear project can even start producing electricity. This timeline is incompatible with the urgent demands of climate science.
Thus, nuclear power fails on two key metrics for evaluating any technology claiming to deal with climate change.
What risks associated with nuclear energy are most overlooked by its proponents?
First, nuclear reactors by their very nature are susceptible to catastrophic releases of energy and radioactivity – we’ve seen that happen with Fukushima and Chernobyl. It’s impossible to guarantee severe accidents won’t happen again.
Second, all activities linked to the nuclear fuel chain, from mining uranium to dealing with the radioactive wastes produced, have significant public and environmental impacts. Some radioactive materials remain hazardous for hundreds of thousands of years. There is no demonstrated solution to managing these wastes.
Third, the technology to generate nuclear power is closely tied to the one to make nuclear weapons. Expanding nuclear energy will increase the potential for nuclear weapons proliferation.
Proponents downplay all these problems. But as I explain in my book, they will afflict new nuclear reactors too.
What renewable energy sources are most promising, and how can we accelerate their adoption?
Solar energy has become the cheapest power source in the past decade, with solar and wind now leading new-electricity generation.
We have learned how to manage grids with high proportions of renewable sources. To balance this variability, we must invest in a mix of renewable energy technologies across various regions, and in battery and other storage technologies to store excess energy. In addition, we need to shape electricity demand to more closely match supply.
These renewables are not a panacea, but they seem to be the best option. Addressing climate change isn’t just about technology; it’s also about making appropriate social and political changes. For reasons discussed in my book, nuclear power is incompatible with the kind of social and political transformations needed to address climate change.
Featured Researcher
M.V. Ramana, PhD, Professor, School of Public Policy and Global Affairs https://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/why-nuclear-energy-is-not-the-solution-to-the-climate-crisis/
What Happens if Ukraine Seizes the Kursk Nuclear Power Plant?
Moscow Times, By Dmitry Gorchakov, Aug. 16, 2024
From the very beginning of Ukraine’s offensive into Russia’s Kursk region on Aug. 6, there has been much discussion about the possible objectives of this operation. Simply glancing at the map begs the question of whether one objective of the Ukrainian incursion might be the seizure of the Kursk nuclear plant, located just 60 kilometers from the border.
It is a scenario the Russian side is taking seriously. Already Rosatom, Russia’s state nuclear corporation, had begun withdrawing staff from the plant and Russian troops are hastily digging trenches around it.
The mere possibility of a nuclear plant being seized during a war is a nightmare scenario for any nuclear and radiation safety specialist. But after the almost two-and-a-half-year-long Russian occupation of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant and the seizures (again, by Russia) of the Chernobyl exclusion zone and the research reactor in Sevastopol during the occupation of Crimea in 2014, such scenarios have become more possible. The longer Russia’s aggression against Ukraine continues, the more common the threat of an accident will become.
While we do not know how events will unfold, our analysis at Bellona and recommendations from the IAEA make clear that should nuclear plants be enveloped by war, every effort should be made to avoid a direct assault on them with heavy weapons. The defending side should not deploy troops at nuclear plants, which would turn them into military targets. Should a nuclear plant be surrounded, it is better to surrender it through negotiations rather than have the facility be attacked or used as a staging ground for attacks.
Having considered these principles, there are a few hypothetical plans that Ukraine could have for the Kursk nuclear plant as its incursion into Russia continues. These scenarios have repeatedly surfaced in the media, and it makes sense to address them in detail.
One theory is that Ukraine may connect the Kursk nuclear plant to its own energy system. I think this is the least likely objective. Should the plant be seized, the safest course of action for its operators would be to put all of its reactors into cold shutdown mode, which stops electricity generation……………………………………………………………..
Some have also speculated that Ukraine is trying to deprive Russia of a vital energy source — hopefully by shutting it down safely rather than a nuclear accident. But the numbers do not support this.
One would like to believe that if such a plan exists, it does not involve the loss of the facility due to a nuclear accident, but rather involves its shutdown through standard procedures…………………………………………….
The most rational objective for seizing the Kursk nuclear plant would be to use it in exchange for the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant in any upcoming negotiations.
When we consider that Ukraine’s army is not only advancing in the Kursk region, but is also fortifying its position by bringing in reserves and other defenses, it appears that Kyiv intends to hold its gains — possibly until the end of the war and the start of negotiations. The presence of a nuclear power plant within the captured territory would significantly increase its leverage and would confirm the strategic nature of this operation.
Nevertheless, as a representative of an environmental organization, I sincerely hope that we do not see any attack or attempt to seize the Kursk nuclear plant. There is simply no safe way to do it. Any attempt to do so carries risks of a nuclear or radiation accident, to say nothing of damaging the political support Ukraine enjoys from its Western allies. ………………….
if ending this war on terms acceptable to Ukraine involves fighting around nuclear plants on both sides of the front, such a process must proceed with minimal risk of a nuclear disaster. https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2024/08/16/what-happens-if-ukraine-seizes-the-kursk-nuclear-power-plant-a86045
Blinken Heads to Israel for Gaza Cease-Fire Push as IDF Slaughter Continues
“We are not facing a deal or real negotiations, but rather the imposing of American diktats,”
“to say that we are getting close to a deal is an illusion.”
“We are not facing a deal or real negotiations, but rather the imposing of American diktats,”
“to say that we are getting close to a deal is an illusion.”
Israeli airstrikes wiped out an entire family in al-Zawayda and killed 10 Syrian refugees in Lebanon as Hamas poured cold water on President Joe Biden’s claim that a cease-fire is “closer than we’ve ever been.”
Brett Wilkins, 18 Aug 24, https://www.commondreams.org/news/blinken-in-israel
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken departed for Israel on Sunday in an effort to secure a cease-fire in Gaza, even as Israeli forces continued to massacre Palestinians in the embattled strip and Hamas dismissed hopeful assertions by optimists including President Joe Biden that an agreement on a cessation of hostilities is within sight.
Blinken’s trip to Israel comes days after Israeli negotiators met with senior U.S. officials, as well as Qataris and Egyptians mediating between Hamas and Israel, in Doha, Qatar. Although those talks ended without any major progress toward a cease-fire deal, Biden said Friday that “we are closer than we’ve ever been” to an agreement, “but we’re not there yet.”
In a separate statement, Biden said that a U.S. negotiating team presented a “comprehensive bridging proposal” offering “the basis for coming to a final agreement on a cease-fire and hostage release deal.”
“I am sending Secretary Blinken to Israel to reaffirm my iron-clad support for Israel’s security, continue our intensive efforts to conclude this agreement, and to underscore that with the comprehensive cease-fire and hostage release deal now in sight, no one in the region should take actions to undermine this process,” the president added.
Israeli negotiators expressed “cautious optimism” over the prospects of a deal, Agence France-Presse reported.
During the weekly meeting of his far-right Cabinet, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that “there are areas where we can show flexibility, and there are areas where we can’t show flexibility—and we are standing firm on them.”
Concistent with what observers say is a pattern of Israeli escalations when cease-fire deals seem within reach, Israeli forces on Saturday bombed a home and adjacent warehouse in the central Gaza Strip town of al-Zawayda, killing at least 15 to 18 members of the al-Ejlah family, according to local and international media.
Victims include Sami Jawad al-Ejlah—a wholesaler who cooperated with the Israeli military to distribute food in Gaza—who was killed along with two of his wives, 11 of their children, and the children’s grandmother, according to officials at al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in nearby Deir al-Balah.
“A massive fire broke out, burning everything in the warehouse as children were torn to pieces,” Al Jazeera correspondent Tareq Abu Azzoum reported from the scene. “Rescue efforts are still continuing to try to recover more bodies.”
According to the Lebanese satellite news channel Al Mayadeen, the al-Ejlah family “was wiped off the civil registry,” a fate shared by at least scores—and perhaps hundreds—of Palestinian families during the 317-day assault by Israel, which is on trial for genocide at the World Court.
Al Mayadeen‘s Gaza correspondent said that “there were still individuals trapped under the rubble, with rescue teams working at the site of the massacre,” and that most of the recovered victims “arrived dismembered” at al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital.
A spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said the attack targeted unspecified “terrorist infrastructure.”
Meanwhile in southern Lebanon, where resistance to Israel’s Gaza onslaught by Hezbollah has prompted fierce retaliation, an Israeli airstrike in the Wadi al-Kafur area of Nabatieh killed 10 Syrian refugees who fled that country’s civil war, including a mother and her two children, according to the Lebanese Ministry of Public Health.
An IDF spokesperson said the strike targeted a Hezbollah weapons storage site.
In response to reports of U.S. and Israeli guarded optimism over a possible cease-fire deal, Hamas Political Bureau member Sami Abu Zuhri told Agence France-Presse that “to say that we are getting close to a deal is an illusion.”
“We are not facing a deal or real negotiations, but rather the imposing of American diktats,” Zuhri added.
Blinken’s trip to Israel comes as the Palestinian death toll of the IDF’s assault on Gaza topped 40,000 this week, with more than 92,000 people wounded and at least 11,000 others missing and presumed dead and buried beneath the rubble of hundreds of thousands of bombed-out homes and other buildings. Pale
The Biden administration has been accused of complicity in genocide for sending Israel tens of billions of dollars worth of arms and providing diplomatic cover, including by vetoing multiple United Nations cease-fire resolutions supported by the overwhelming majority of the world’s nations.stinian and international officials say most of those killed have been women and children.
Capitalism is killing the planet – but curtailing it is the discussion nobody wants to have
Pádraic Fogarty, Thu Aug 08 2024 https://www.irishtimes.com/environment/2024/08/08/capitalism-is-killing-the-planet-but-curtailing-it-is-the-discussion-nobody-wants-to-have/
If life on our one and only planet is to be pulled back from the brink, the time for voluntary ecological measures from businesses has surely passed
The sheer magnitude of the biodiversity crisis is laid bare in the biannual Living Planet Index compiled by the World Wildlife Fund and the Zoological Society of London. Their latest report from 2022 showed there was a 69 per cent collapse in monitored wildlife populations since 1970.
In 2018, when the decline was “only” 60 per cent, their report lambasted “exploding human consumption” as “the driving force behind the unprecedented planetary change we are witnessing, through the increased demand for energy, land and water”.
However, these reports do not delve into why consumption of land and resources has exploded in this time. In an article for the Conversation website, Anna Pigott, who is a lecturer in human geography at Swansea University in Wales, criticised WWF/ZSL for failing to identify capitalism as the “crucial (and often causal) link” between the destruction of nature and galloping levels of consumption.
“By naming capitalism as a root cause,” wrote Pigott, “we identify a particular set of practices and ideas that are by no means permanent nor inherent to the condition of being human” and that “if we don’t name it, we can’t tackle it”.
Capitalism, according to Jason Hickel, academic and author of Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World (Penguin, 2020), has three main defining characteristics: enclosure and artificial scarcity, perpetual expansion, and a lack of democracy, insisting “democratic principles are rarely allowed to operate in the sphere of production, where decisions are made overwhelmingly by those who control capital”. The result is that capital is directed not towards meeting the needs of people and nature, but into promoting consumption.
In an interview available on YouTube, Hickel expands on his ideas, noting that “the overriding objective of all production is to maximise and accumulate profit … not to meet human needs, or to achieve ecological goals or to advance social progress”. The conclusion is that “we are hostage to this insane logic”: while we have the technological capacity to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and protect ecosystems, “capital chooses to invest in fossil fuels and high-emitting activities” such as production of SUVs, cruise ships and private jets.
If capitalism is the overriding driver of runaway consumption of resources, and so the collapse of biological systems, it is remarkable how it has been nearly absent in debates around the ecological crisis.
Our current economic doctrine, what many refer to as “neoliberal” capitalism (as it dates from the Reagan-Thatcher period of deregulation in the 1980s) has delivered immense wealth, not only to the 1 per cent but to a burgeoning global middle class (including here in Ireland) who are drawn by the allure of owning cars, taking foreign holidays and shopping at the weekend.
The World Economic Forum (WEF) remarks that “without sufficient consumption, which creates more demands for production, the production cycle would be paralysed”. It adds that “mass consumption – or consumerism – is not merely a cultural phenomenon. It is embedded in the core tenets of capitalism as an economic system”. However, the lure of endless growth in production and consumption is now butting up against the very finite limits of our one and only planet.
That it has come to this was foretold, most notably in 1972 with the publication of the Limits to Growth, which was scorned at the time but whose model scenarios for societal collapse are worryingly on track.
While the unleashing of the profit motive has brought wealth, comfort and luxury to many, it has also led to widening inequality in the rich world, while two billion people, a quarter of humanity, remain mired in poverty. All the while, accelerating deterioration of ecosystems, climate and water bodies may render the capitalist experiment little more than a blip in the human story. The WEF points out that there is no mechanism in the capitalist system to control its excesses, so do we need to “smash capitalism”, as some demonstrators call for, or can it be reined in, and if so, how?
Patrick Bresnihan, associate professor in geography at Maynooth University, says “there is a conflation of capitalism with reality, that this is the only way things operate. There are other ways of organising our relationships with nature and each other.” He says that today there is hardly anywhere on Earth that is not touched by the “voracious need to reduce costs, to find more resources, to exploit more labour in order to increase profits”.
Resources such as forests, fish or minerals mined from the Earth, as well as the waste products of production – pollution of air and water, loss of habitats for species – are made to be artificially cheap, if they are paid for at all. “So that commodity that is produced and is generating profit has all sorts of invisible costs that are not in the price [that is paid]”.
One response to making those costs visible is the production of so-called “natural capital accounts”, effectively a mechanism of confronting economic sectors with the true costs of their services or products. Ireland’s fourth National Biodiversity Action Plan, published earlier this year, makes natural capital accounting official government policy, and by 2027 it is expected that the first assessment of ecosystem accounts will be published and that the concept will be “mainstreamed” across all sectors.
Bresnihan was on the steering committee of Natural Capital Ireland when it was first established, but he feels that there is an inherent naivety to the approach. The impact to nature, he contends, “has not been discounted or undervalued due to a lack of knowledge”, but “because it is a necessary element to capitalism”. The idea that you can challenge the forces behind capitalism by putting figures on its impact to nature “misunderstands how capital and power work”, he says.
While there is a clear need to draw private finance into nature restoration, Bresnihan contends natural capital frameworks, despite being around since the early 1990s, simply have not worked. Instead, he wants to channel the “spirit and political will” of the early days of the Irish State when there was planned investment in social projects so that certain aspects of the economy (he mentions housing, nature conservation and renewable energy) are “decommodified”.
So where does that leave the role of private companies? Lucy Gaffney is the director of the Business for Biodiversity platform, an initiative funded by the National Parks & Wildlife Service and Department of Agriculture, which aims to get every Irish business to incorporate nature into their decision-making. “For a lot of organisations, their impact will be in their value chain, and you now have a responsibility to know where that impact is and where it’s happening,” she says, referring to the new Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) introduced last year (although she notes this affects only a very small number of companies in Ireland).
“Being nature positive is about eliminating, or reducing as much as possible, the negative impacts to nature. We want to get into a place where we’re operating within planetary boundaries and we’re giving the natural world an opportunity to regenerate,” says Gaffney. This goes far beyond tree-planting and bee hotels, she says. Gaffney believes natural capital is a useful tool but remains in its infancy, and “we still have a way to go before it becomes mainstream”
Nevertheless, she adds “businesses won’t act unless they have to. Things like CSRD will trigger businesses into action because they have to and because there are penalties if they don’t comply”.
The time for voluntary measures from businesses has passed, in her estimation. “We are extracting and harvesting all our natural capital assets through our primary sectors. It’s being transformed into this stuff that we consume, then it goes into finance, where it sits in banks. How do we get that wealth back into nature restoration, so we can operate in a circular way? The only way to do that is through taxation. Imagine if we added half a per cent on to corporation tax, for nature? Taxation is the way to go.”
Curtailing consumption is the conversation nobody wants to have. Talk of how we can transition to a post-capitalist society has not yet made it into mainstream debate. Yet, there is no escaping these issues if there is to be a safe and equitable future for everyone on this planet
Moscow Says Ukraine Destroyed Russian Bridge With Western-Provided Missiles
The Russian Foreign Ministry says the bridge was likely destroyed by US-provided HIMARS
by Dave DeCamp August 18, 2024 , https://news.antiwar.com/2024/08/18/moscow-says-ukraine-destroyed-russian-bridge-with-western-provided-missiles/
The Russian Foreign Ministry said Friday that Ukrainian forces used Western-provided missiles to destroy a bridge in the Glushkovsky district of Russia’s Kursk Oblast.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said the missiles were likely launched using the US-provided HIMARS rocket systems, which the US has been supplying to Ukraine since 2022.
“For the first time, the Kursk region was hit by Western-made rocket launchers, probably American HIMARS,” Zakharova wrote on Telegram. “As a result of the attack on the bridge … it was completely destroyed, and volunteers who were assisting the evacuated civilian population were killed.”
Another bridge in Kursk was reported to be hit by Ukrainian forces on Sunday. According to the Russian news site Mash, both bridges were targeted with US-provided HIMARS.
The ground incursion into Kursk came a few months after the Biden administration gave Ukraine the greenlight to use US-provided missiles in strikes inside Russia in border regions. The US says it won’t support “long-range” strikes in Russia but hasn’t defined what the limit is.
The Times reported on Friday that the US is effectively blocking Ukraine from using British-provided Storm Shadow missiles inside Russia, which have a range of about 155 miles. Ukrainian forces are using other types of British weapons in Kursk, including Challenger 2 tanks.
The US and its NATO allies insist they were unaware of Ukraine’s plans to invade Kursk, but Russian officials are pinning the blame for the incursion on Kyiv’s Western backers.
“The operation in the Kursk region was also planned with the participation of NATO and Western special services,” Nikolai Patrushev, an aide to Russian President Vladimir Putin, said on Friday. “Without their participation and direct support, Kyiv would not have ventured into Russian territory.”
Tech Companies Are Racing to Harness Nuclear Power
Oil Price, By Felicity Bradstock – Aug 18, 2024
- Tech companies are investing heavily in nuclear energy to power their AI operations.
- Regulatory challenges and utility opposition are hindering the development of new nuclear projects.
With the demand for power increasing rapidly, tech companies are looking for innovative solutions to meet the demand created by artificial intelligence (AI) and other new technologies. In addition to solar and wind power, several tech companies are investing in nuclear energy projects to power operations. The clear shift in the public perception of nuclear power has once again put the abundant clean [!] energy source on the table as an option, with the U.S. nuclear energy capacity expected to rise significantly over the coming decades. ……………………………
Tech companies have invested heavily in wind and solar energy to power their data centers and are now looking for alternative clean power supplies. In 2021, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, invested $375 in the nuclear fusion startup Helion Energy. Last year, Microsoft signed a deal to purchase power from Helion beginning in 2028. Altman also chairs the nuclear fission company Oklo. Oklo is planning to build a massive network of small-scale nuclear reactors in rural southeastern Idaho to provide power to data centers as the electricity demand grows. It is also planning to build two commercial plants in southern Ohio.
However, getting some of these nuclear projects off the ground is no easy feat. Oklo has found it difficult to get the backing of nuclear regulators. In 2022, the Federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission (FERC), which oversees commercial nuclear power plants, rejected the firm’s application for the design of its Idaho “Aurora” project, for not providing enough safety information. …………………………………………
In addition to the red tape from regulators, many utilities are opposing new nuclear projects due to their anticipated impact on the grid. Some data centers require 1 GW or more of power, which is around the total capacity of a nuclear reactor in the U.S. PJM Interconnection, the biggest grid operator in the U.S., recently warned that power supply and demand is tightening as the development of new generation is falling behind demand. However, some tech companies are proposing to connect data centers directly to nuclear plants, also known as co-location, to reduce the burden on the grid.
However, several U.S. utilities oppose co-location plans……………………………………………………… more https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Nuclear-Power/Tech-Companies-Are-Racing-to-Harness-Nuclear-Power.html
IAEA warns of heightened security dangers facing Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant
ABC News, Sun 18 Aug
In short:
A drone strike on the perimeter of Ukraine’s Russian-controlled Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant has sparked fresh concerns for nuclear safety.
The International Atomic Energy Agency has warned of security dangers escalating and urged both countries to steer clear of attacks on energy facilities.
What’s next?
Zaporizhzhia’s power plant, the largest in Europe, is now reliant on just one power line, which if cut off, could set off cumulative explosions.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has called on Kyiv and Moscow to exercise “maximum restraint” amid fears of a deteriorating safety situation around the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in south-eastern Ukraine.
The facility came under Russian military and operational control in 2022, and has since been a target of repeated shelling with each side blaming the other.
Director-general of the IAEA, Rafael Mariano Grossi, on Saturday said a drone strike carrying an explosive payload had hit a perimeter access road, causing damage just outside of the plant’s protected area.
“Yet again we see an escalation of the nuclear safety and security dangers facing the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant power plant,” he said.
“I remain extremely concerned and reiterate my call for maximum restraint from all sides and for strict observance of the five concrete principles established for the protection of the plant.”
Russia has accused Ukraine of detonating the explosive, according to reports from the TASS news agency.
The IAEA said the impact site was close to the essential cooling water sprinkler ponds and about 100 metres from the Dniprovska power line, the only remaining 750 kilovolt line providing a power supply to the plant.
There were no casualties or impact on equipment, however, there was damage between two main gates of the plant.
The attack comes as Ukraine continues an incursion into Russia, claiming to have taken control of 82 settlements over an area of 1,150 square kilometres in the Kursk region since August 6.
Moscow wants to discuss the drone strike with the IAEA, Russia’s RIA news agency reported, citing Roman Ustinov, the acting Russian representative in Vienna.
Why it matters
The Zaporizhzhia site is the largest nuclear power plant in Europe, holding six reactors containing Uranium 235.
All six reactors are now in cold shutdown and the plant is no longer producing electricity, as Ukraine and Russia repeatedly level allegations of sabotage against each other.
But despite the plant being dormant, electrical pumps moving water through the reactor core must still keep working to cool the nuclear fuel.
If the region’s final remaining power line is damaged, this cooling system will stop working, and result in a fuel meltdown which could begin a fire or explosion and induce a major nuclear disaster………………….. more https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-18/ukraine-zaporizhzhia-nuclear-power-plant-hit-by-drone-srike/104238964
’Balance of terror’: South Korea’s unthinkable ‘shift’
Amid worrying times, South Korea is considering building nuclear weapons of its own in what could create a “balance of terror”.
news.com.au Jamie Seidel, August 19, 2024
North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un now has 50 nuclear warheads under his thumb.
US presidential candidate Donald Trump wants to pull out of the troubled peninsula altogether. That’s left South Korea thinking the unthinkable – building nuclear weapons of its own.
“Proponents argue that this approach would create a ‘balance of terror’ similar to that which maintained peace during the Cold War, ensuring that neither side could risk initiating a conflict without facing catastrophic consequences,” argues Seol-based Asia Institute geostrategist Dr Lakhvinder Singh.
A national campaign was launched Thursday to gather 10 million signatures in support of establishing a South Korean nuclear weapons program.
“This represents a profound shift, driven by doubts about the reliability of relying solely on the United States for extended deterrence,” says Singh……………………..
Now, many South Koreans doubt the 70-year-old “nuclear umbrella” of protection offered by the United States remains a reliable deterrent……………………………………………………………………………more https://www.news.com.au/technology/innovation/military/balance-of-terror-south-koreas-unthinkable-shift/news-story/2459122e37191a7b7e5644932ca85b62
1 This Month
25 June- THE PUKE ON NUKES
Thursday, June 25, 2026
7pm Central Time (8pm ET, 6pm MT, 5pm PT) UTC – 5
From NRC & DOE Deregulation to Techno-Fascist Billionaires Going Nuclear, Plus a Few Songs from Atomic Cabaret REGISTER
26 June – Radiation Trainwreck at the NRC / Join the Protect Better Campaign – https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/4ZlZ5_qLSHGiLSCg8FF6Bg#/registration
1st July – Webinar Waste of Space: The Environmental Harm of Military and Civil Space Activity st July, 7 pm
Report Launch Online: We are seeing an increasing exploitation of space for military and commercial purposes. This must change.
Protect Sazan Island from the Trump family! https://secure.avaaz.org/campaign/en/protect_sazan_island_from_the_trump_family_loc/?bqFCVab&v=174511&cl=22707147157&_checksum=5e9dde668860e8231c33699735e16a1fbf22ab2cb01da50c999fe8732b9775ef&utm_source=email&utm_medium=blast_email&utm_campaign=174511
Cuba Is Not a Failed State – It Is a Besieged State
PETITION: “Global Appeal to Endorse Palestinian Right of Return of Refugees”
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity – go to https://nuclearinformation.wordpress.com
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