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Nuclear sector’s views on second Trump administration mixed as Rogan interview raises questions

Donald Trump enacted pro-nuclear policies during his first term and supported an “all-of-the-above” energy policy during the campaign, but some advocates fear a “divide between words and actions.”

UTILITY DIVE, By Brian Martucci, Nov. 8, 2024

Dive Brief:

President-elect Donald Trump in August vowed to “approve new drilling, new pipelines, new refineries, new power plants [and] new reactors” on “day one” of his administration.
But Trump has more recently sounded skeptical about federal backing for large-scale nuclear builds like Vogtle, which he said in an Oct. 25 interview with podcaster Joe Rogan “get too big, and too complex and too expensive,” raising questions about his second administration’s willingness to support the industry.
The nuclear sector has mixed views on the incoming administration’s potential support, with some expressing optimism that Trump would build on pro-nuclear policies enacted during the Biden and first Trump administrations and others concerned about a pullback in federal funding for advanced nuclear development.

Dive Insight:

The second Trump administration is likely to “pursue an overall domestic energy agenda focused on energy production and dominance in the United States” but may not continue the Biden-Harris administration’s “massive appropriations” to the nuclear sector, American Nuclear Society Director of Public Policy John Starkey said.

At least one prominent Trump ally, environmental lawyer and former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has an anti-nuclear track record. Kennedy, a Trump ally who is expected to have an official role in the incoming administration, fought for years to close New York’s Indian Point nuclear plant. More recently, he has voiced opposition to federal nuclear energy subsidies.

“We should have no subsidies … all the companies should internalize their costs in the way that they internalize their profits,” Kennedy told Tesla CEO and fellow Trump backer Elon Musk in an online discussion last year.

But the first Trump administration was broadly supportive of the U.S. nuclear industry. It provided billions in loan guarantees to facilitate construction of Plant Vogtle units 3 and 4; supported the failed Carbon Free Power Project at Idaho National Laboratory, a proposed 462-MW plant that would have used NuScale’s small modular reactor technology; and advanced the pro-nuclear Partnership for Transatlantic Energy Cooperation, the Trump presidential campaign said in 2023.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….But the incoming administration’s likely focus on reducing federal discretionary spending — Musk called for at least $2 trillion in spending cuts last month after Trump in September floated his appointment to a new “government efficiency commission” — “is a concern for a lot of potential customers” for advanced nuclear, said Jessica Lovering, co-founder and executive director of the Good Energy Collective, a pro-nuclear advocacy group.

…………………………….In addition, Trump has vowed to repeal Inflation Reduction Act tax credits for electric vehicles, offshore wind and other cleantech sectors. But the production tax credit benefiting many existing nuclear generators could be more durable given its bipartisan origins, Constellation Energy CEO Joe Dominguez suggested Monday on the company’s third-quarter earnings call.

……………………….. utilities are unlikely to invest in new large light-water reactor construction during the second Trump term without further federal policy support………………… https://www.utilitydive.com/news/nuclear-energy-sector-mixed-views-second-trump-administration-joe-rogan/732407/

November 10, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, USA | Leave a comment

The Government-Media-Academia Misinformation Machine and “Ukraine’s Victory”

Russian and Eurasian Politics, by Gordonhahn, November 9, 2024

The U.S. government’s infiltration into mass media and academia may finally become exposed and its enormous misinformation and divisive effect on the American body politic perhaps diminished as a result of its massive overeach in a matter of war and peace – specifically the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War.

Those who comprise the government-media-academia complex have teams of researchers, access to government data, vast funding and other resources. They know or can learn the facts but choose to relay to the public fake realities. In short, what I describe below are not mistakes but intentional and well-worked out lies designed to manipulate the public contrary to its interests. If the reality were offered to the public, it would see how it runs counter to its interests and would seek policy changes.

This is what we heard from the flagship propaganda organ of said complex – the New York Times – in July as Russia’s offensive gained steam: „Russia is unlikely to make significant territorial gains in Ukraine in the coming months as its poorly trained forces struggle to break through Ukrainian defenses that are now reinforced with Western munitions, U.S. officials say“ (www.nytimes.com/2024/07/09/us/politics/russia-ukraine-nato.html). At the same time, the axis in the persons of such ‚observers‘ as former U.S. General David Patraeus and former US ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul was feeding the American public quite the same line: that Ukraine was winning and would win (even as it said that Russia threatened all of Europe with military conquest).

There are alternative, if ostracized and little known sources for gathering real facts. Not to toot my own horn, but I noted in January 2024 on Glenn Diessen’s and Alexander Mercouris’s podcast that Russia would be very gradually increasing its territorial gains in hunting and ultimately defeating the Ukrainian armed forces: „There will be a very, very gradual acceleration, intensification of the offensive, the Russian…‚aggressive attrition‘ will gradually become more successful in that more and more territory will be taken each month, a few square kilometers more each month in the winter and spring, and then the big question becomes: Will Russia decide to turn that gradual succes into a major offensive…“ (https://youtu.be/P_MJi5H6HKU?si=rxRiaE0EglSgbclw, at the 1:00:45 mark).

In February 2024, I wrote: „This winter, with the demonstrated failure of the Ukrainian counteroffensive obvious by autumn, we have begun to witness Russian forces’ transition to attrit and advance across the entire front, except on the Krynki foothold on the southern Dniepr in Kherson. In November, Russian forces occupied an addition some 13 kilometers and tripled that result in December. We can expect in January a multiple of December’s 40+ kilometers, evidencing the second ‘advance’ aspect of ‘attrit and advance’.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………….Now, as Ukraine’s defense lines are dissolving and its forces are retreating to the Dnieper River, the propaganda complex’s deceptive narrative has come in grave danger of being utterly exposed. This and nothing else, except perhaps a command from Pennsylvania Ave. or Langley, the complex flagship New York Times is coming clean in order to cover its ass, albeit. And it demonstrates what I — a lone, unknown, fully ostracized researcher — was writing early this year.

The intellectual universe in the US is so spoiled that the NYT had to turn to a foreign institute to provide data for its belated, truth-telling, coming clean article. It cites Finnish mapper and analyst Pasi Paroinen. Citing Paroinen, the NYT admits now Russian forces have been making large gains for three months: „Half of Russia’s territorial gains in Ukraine so far this year were made in the past three months alone, according to Pasi Paroinen, a military expert with the Finland-based Black Bird Group.“ „In August, Ukraine’s defensive lines buckled, and Russia rapidly advanced 10 miles“ In October, Russia made its largest territorial gains since the summer of 2022, as Ukrainian lines buckled under sustained pressure. October’s gains amounted to “more than 160 square miles of land in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region”(www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/10/31/world/europe/russia-gains-ukraine-maps.html). But the However, NYT nor any other US mainstream media source or expert mentioned Russia’s August gains.

Moreover, the NYT came clean on something even more important: the im pending, if not imminent collapse of the Ukrainian frontline defense and army: NYT reported in a different piece that „Ukraine has enough soldiers to fight for six to 12 more months, one official said. After that, he said, it will face a steep shortage” (https://archive.is/QgomM). Collapse can occur well before the ‚steep shortage.‘

The NYT article only cites Poinenen regarding Russian gains in Donetsk, but Russian gains are being made all along the front line from the north in Kharkiv to the south in Zaporozhe. Paroinen’s measurement of overall Russian gains so far in 2024 confirms my own expectation of gradually increasing Russian territorial gains:………………………………………………………………………………………..

Naturally, the NYT tries to cover up the fact that all during this period of mounting Russian gains until the last day in October, it as the rest of the U.S. and Western mass media told readers that there was a stalemate in Ukraine…………………………………………………

The NYT and other organs of the government-media-academia do one thing somewhat effectively: glossing over its presentation of fables over fact, covering its ass, its tracks and the dripping Ukrainian blood (not to mention that of Russians and others). Will Americans see state apparat and its media-academic complex now? https://gordonhahn.com/2024/11/09/the-government-media-academia-misinformation-machine-and-ukraines-victory/

November 10, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | media, Ukraine, USA | Leave a comment

Trump Puts An Appropriately Ugly Face On A Very Ugly Empire

Caitlin Johnstone, Nov 09, 2024, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/trump-puts-an-appropriately-ugly?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=151402607&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

The only thing I like about Trump is exactly what so many empire managers hate about him: he gives the game away. He says the quiet parts out loud. He’s the only president who’ll openly boast that US troops are in Syria to keep the oil or lament that they failed to take the oil from Venezuela, or just come right out and tell everyone he’s bought and owned by Zionist oligarchs.

Trump is the opposite of Obama, who was very skillful at putting a pretty face on the evil empire. Trump puts a very ugly face on a very ugly thing. He is a much more honest face to have on the empire. A crude, stupid plutocrat who is owned by other plutocrats is the perfect representative of that tyrannical power structure.

The propaganda machine has been spinning its head off trying to frame soccer brawls in Amsterdam as a horrifying “pogrom” against Jewish people because the side instigating the violence were supporters of team Maccabi Tel Aviv who flew in from Israel.

Video evidence shows far right Israeli hooligans terrorizing the streets of Amsterdam, chanting “Fuck the Arabs”, starting fights, beating people, tearing down Palestinian flags, attacking a cab driver, and singing “Let the IDF win and fuck the Arabs! Why is school out in Gaza? There are no children left there!”

In the face of all this evidence of atrocious behavior by Israeli soccer fans, The New York Times ran a story with the headline “Antisemitic Attacks Prompt Emergency Flights for Israeli Soccer Fans”. The Wall Street Journal ran with “Antisemitic Attacks in Amsterdam Prompt Tight Security at Jewish Sites”. “Pogroms have returned to Europe, and the ‘anti-racist’ Left are silent,” says The Telegraph.

Meanwhile the Daily Mail sports section ran with a headline more in line with what people actually saw: “Israeli football hooligans tear down Palestine flags in Amsterdam as taxi drivers ‘fight back’ in night of chaos ahead of Maccabi Tel Aviv’s visit to Ajax”

Leaders of western nations like the US, UK, Canada and France joined the Dutch king in framing these soccer brawls and hooliganism as a historic mass-scale hate crime against Jews, while Israeli officials have been melodramatically shrieking like their hair is on fire.

These exhausting victim-LARPing freaks. Stop playing sports with Israel. Stop holding sporting events which could lead to the deranged members of a genocidal apartheid state showing up in your community stirring up violence and hate so they can cry victim and say you holocausted them.

Another thing that sucks about the fake “antisemitism” crisis that the western political-media class are pretending to believe in is that it will probably become a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy which creates real hatred of Jewish people.

You can’t keep telling everyone over and over and over again that Jews and Israel are one and the same and that any criticism of one is always necessarily an attack on the other while the state of Israel is murdering children by the tens of thousands without contributing to unfair prejudice against Jewish people everywhere. Israel is exacerbating this effect by insisting its actions represent all Jews and are done in defense of Judaism while committing genocidal atrocities under a Star of David flag.

If you understand the truth that modern Israel is a settler-colonialist project of the western empire which uses the Jewish religion as an excuse to inflict violence and tyranny in a crucial geostrategic region, then you understand that there’s no real connection between modern Israel and the Jews you encounter in your community. Sure a majority of western Jews buy into the empire’s lies and support Israel, but a majority of the westerners of all faiths buy into the empire’s lies about its wars and official enemies and all its other propaganda too. This is just what it looks like when you live in a highly propagandized society which is structured to psychologically manipulate people into consenting to nonstop military violence.

Once you understand this, you see that blaming ordinary Jews in your society for the actions of the state of Israel makes about as much sense as blaming ordinary Muslims for the actions of the Saudi royals — but most people don’t understand this. It takes a lot of learning and close examination, and most people haven’t reached that level of lucidity in our confusing information landscape which is distorted by lies and propaganda.

So when they see a self-evidently evil thing being done and hear their leaders and pundits telling them over and over again that if you hate what you’re seeing then you necessarily hate Jewish people, what understanding do you think they’re going to form in their minds?

Greater hatred and prejudice looks like a fairly inevitable consequence of this messaging from where I’m sitting. And it will all be the fault of the western pundits and politicians who are aggressively promulgating this message throughout our society right now in an effort to stomp out criticism of an active genocide.

The garment-rending emotional reaction to the US election results compared to the apathy on Gaza over the last year tells you that liberals don’t see Palestinians as human beings. They’ll deny it, but it’s true. Their emotions show you much more than their words ever will. This is who they are.

Ignore their words and watch their actions. It works with politicians, it works with entire governments, and it works with individuals too. If you see someone flailing around on the ground because their genocidal candidate lost after spending a year walking around functioning perfectly fine throughout a year of genocide, that tells you something about them that their words would never tell you.

People are always much more honest with their actions than their words, because words can spin narratives and actions cannot. If you’re ever unsure of someone’s true motivations and where they really stand, don’t ask them, just watch them. They’ll tell you eventually, with their actions and not their words.

November 9, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | culture and arts, politics, USA | Leave a comment

The Great American Nuclear Weapons Upgrade

New nuclear-capable planes will soon be distributed to U.S. bases. Will they deter warfare or lead to an arms race?

In the plains of western South Dakota, about 25 miles northeast of Mount Rushmore, the Ellsworth Air Force Base is preparing to receive the first fleet of B-21 nuclear bombers, replacing Cold War-era planes. Two other bases, Dyess in Texas and Whiteman in Missouri, will soon follow. By the 2030s, a total of five bases throughout the United States will host nuke-carrying bombers for the first time since the 1990s.

The planes are part of an estimated $1.7 trillion military program advancing the nuclear arsenal of the United States, as tensions continue to rise with nuclear-armed rivals Russia and China. In addition to the B-21s, the Pentagon is upgrading larger aging bombers and may also restore nukes to the ones that had their nuclear capabilities removed. Leaders within the U.S. Department of Defense, such as Air Force General Anthony Cotton, argue that the nuclear modernization program, as it is called, is a “national imperative.” While some nuclear and foreign policy analysts argue that the program is crucial to building — or rebuilding — a formidable arsenal that deters other nuclear powers, others say it raises questions for both nuclear deterrence and arms control.

Still, the costly and massive nuclear modernization program enjoys bipartisan support, said Geoff Wilson, a defense policy researcher at the Stimson Center, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. “The United States has committed itself to one of the largest arms races in history. We’re spending about $75 billion a year on new nuclear weapons,” he said, citing figures from the Congressional Budget Office. In comparison, the entire Manhattan Project cost about $30 billion in today’s dollars, spread over multiple years.

In addition to new bombers and nukes returning to bases that haven’t seen them since around the end of the Cold War, the U.S. and some of its rivals are building new missiles and nuke-launching subs. At the same time, the U.S. and Russia have announced their withdrawal from pacts or have suspended their participation in them, including the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, and New START.

With the international arms control regime eroding, experts say, there is little incentive for nuclear powers to reduce their arsenals. Instead, the U.S. and other military powers are advancing or expanding their nuclear weaponry, with few international rules remaining in place.

Though the Cold War ended more than 30 years ago, the U.S. and Russia maintain the biggest bomber fleets in the world………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Each of these new nuclear bombers and storage sites comes with safety and security concerns. After all, numerous military nuclear accidents occurred during the Cold War. For example, in 1958 at Dyess Air Force Base, a fire erupted on a nuke-carrying B-47. The aircraft crashed, causing an explosion that created a crater on the ground. The nuke didn’t detonate, and while three crew members were able to eject safely, one was killed. In 1959 at Barksdale, a transport aircraft nicknamed “Old Shakey” crashed. According to reporting from the Shreveport Times, three thermonuclear devices were destroyed. Then in 1964 at Ellsworth, a small explosion popped off a missile’s cone, which contained a nuclear warhead, and it fell to the bottom of a silo. Fortunately, it did not detonate.

More recently, a non-nuclear B-1 bomber crashed in January 2024 at Ellsworth, and following an investigation, the Air Force fired a commander there. ………………….

The new and upgraded nukes come with arms control and geopolitical concerns as well. During the Cold War, negotiators from the U.S. and USSR hammered out at least five major nuclear treaties, but most of those have since fallen by the wayside. Last year, Putin suspended Russia’s participation in the New START treaty — the final remaining nuclear treaty between the U.S. and Russia — which is now set to expire in February 2026. The accord limits each country to 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads, but there’s a loophole: Each bomber counts as one weapon even though it can carry multiple nukes.

…………………………………………..The U.S. has deployed nuclear-capable bombers in Australia near China, near Russia-occupied Ukraine, near North Korea, and near Iran, which suspended its nuclear program, according to U.S. intelligence reports. The U.S. has been more frequently doing these deployments than before, though such bombers haven’t carried nukes abroad in decades, Kristensen said. The Pentagon also recently deployed nuclear-capable B-2 bombers to strike Houthi targets in Yemen, their first use in combat in years, perhaps intended to threaten Iran as well. The Air Force declined to comment on nuclear-capable bombers overseas.

As tensions worsen, especially between the U.S. and Russia over Ukraine and between the U.S. and China over Taiwan, analysts fear conventional conflicts could escalate into nuclear ones, such as if Putin feels his government is threatened or if a direct war between Russia and NATO erupts.

These conflicts and geopolitical tensions have been a boon for defense contractors, including Northrop Grumman, which is building the B-21 and B-2 bombers for the Air Force. The company has seen its stock rise during Israel’s expanding bombing campaigns and the Russia-Ukraine war, and it has been one of the U.S.’s main contractors for military aid packages to both Israel and Ukraine, along with Boeing, Lockheed Martin, RTX Corporation (formerly Raytheon), and others. (Northrop Grumman did not respond to Undark’s requests for comment.)

Since the Cold War, the U.S. and Russia have operated with the goal of nuclear deterrence, each maintaining a sufficient arsenal to deter its rival from using a nuke. But there’s a risk that such notions could give way to a new arms race, especially when one country cites its rival’s nuclear modernization in order to expand its arsenal, Wilson argues. Deterrence, he said, “has become an excuse to ramp up defense spending and pay more money towards defense contractors who are woefully behind schedule and over-budget on all these things already.”

“I think that people have forgotten what deterrence means,” he added. “It’s based on stability — it’s not based on dominance.” https://undark.org/2024/11/04/the-great-american-nuclear-weapons-upgrade/?utm_source=Undark%3A+News+%26+Updates&utm_campaign=77b2fac5ab-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_5cee408d66-185e4e09de-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D

November 9, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Biden Team Wants To Rush Weapons Shipments to Ukraine Before Trump Inauguration

The administration wants to exhaust $6 billion in remaining military aid

by Dave DeCamp November 6, 2024. https://news.antiwar.com/2024/11/06/biden-team-wants-to-rush-weapons-shipments-to-ukraine-before-trump-inaguration/
—

The Biden administration is preparing to rush over $6 billion in military aid to Ukraine before Inauguration Day, POLITICO reported on Wednesday.

The report said the Biden team expects the incoming administration to end the weapons flow, as President-elect Donald Trump campaigned on ending the proxy war.

The Biden administration has $4.3 billion in military aid that can be pulled from existing US stockpiles, known as the Presidential Drawdown Authority. There is also $2.1 billion available in the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, which provides money to put weapons under contract, meaning it takes longer to deliver.

Biden officials are unsure if they’ll be able to rush all the aid to Ukraine before January 20 since any military equipment they send must be replaced, and it’s unclear if production levels are high enough to ship so many weapons in such a short period of time.

“We have been sending whatever industry can produce each month, but the problem is you can only send these things as they are produced,” Mark Cancian, a former Pentagon budget official, told POLITICO. “The administration could dip into the stockpiles and send equipment more quickly, but it’s unclear the Pentagon would want to do that since it would affect its own readiness.”

Even if the weapons are sent from US military stockpiles, the actual delivery time could still take months, and Biden officials are worried the next administration could cancel them before they arrive in Ukraine.

November 9, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Ukraine, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Can Trump 2.0 defuse the nuclear threat? These Washington heavyweights fear not

The concern about Trump rests on his chaotic and erratic method of decision-making and his personal preference for dictators over democrats – for America’s traditional enemies over its allies.

Peter Hartcher, November 9, 2024

Political and international editor

Bob Woodward is doing his best to remain optimistic in the face of an impending second Donald Trump presidency. “Don’t give up on America’s democracy!”

But when the topic turns to the president’s unique responsibility for US nuclear strategy, his sunny outlook grows dim.

“It’s frightening,” says the noted American journalist and close student of the last 10 US presidents. “We are all walking on eggshells,” Woodward tells me. “Trump is totally unpredictable, he never plans, he operates on instinct.”

Not necessarily because he fears that Trump will recklessly fire off atomic weapons but because he worries about Trump’s ability to deter other powers from doing so.

Woodward, whose initial fame was in breaking the Watergate stories with co-author Carl Bernstein, has interviewed Trump dozens of times over 35 years, and chronicled his political career in four books ripe with insider anecdotes.

Woodward was most impressed with Joe Biden’s management of the nuclear threat from Russia two years ago when Vladimir Putin was threatening to attack Ukraine with a tactical, or battlefield, nuclear weapon. He sets out in detail in his new book, War, how Biden’s administration confronted Moscow, including a phone call from the US Defence Secretary, Lloyd Austin, to his Russian counterpart, Sergei Shoigu:

“It wouldn’t matter how small the nuclear weapon is,” Austin told Shoigu, according to the transcript of the call that Woodward obtained. “If you do this, it would be the first use of nuclear weapons anywhere in the world in three-quarters of a century and it could set in motion events that you cannot control and we cannot control.”

The US would review all the self-imposed restraints it had imposed in supporting Ukraine’s war effort, Austin told him.

Separately, Biden called Xi Jinping to enlist his help. China’s economic support keeps Russia solvent through its war. So Xi’s opinion matters in the Kremlin.

“If Putin were to break the seal on nuclear use, that would be an enormous event for the world,” Biden told Xi, according to the book. China’s president agreed and undertook to warn Putin off. He did so publicly when he said: “Nuclear wars must not be fought.”

America’s Cold War-era plans for nuclear and conventional escalation with the Soviet Union were reworked and refitted for war with Putin’s Russia.

Woodward says he was shocked to learn that, during this episode, the US intelligence assessment of the risk that Putin would actually use a battlefield nuke had started at a 10 per cent chance but peaked at 50 per cent. Putin, of course, ultimately did not act on his threat.

The Biden administration showed “unique, steady, purposeful, informed leadership” in handling the risk from Russia, says Woodward. “It’s a road map for how you avoid a nuclear catastrophe.”

He adds: “There is nothing steady and there is nothing purposeful in Donald Trump’s leadership. He’s focused on himself and his own instinct.”

…………………………………………………………………………..The concern about Trump rests on his chaotic and erratic method of decision-making and his personal preference for dictators over democrats – for America’s traditional enemies over its allies.

But there is a new factor that Trump will have to confront. “All of US Cold War nuclear strategy was bipolar – it was the US and the USSR,” Woodward says. “With China’s rapid nuclear build-up, strategy will have to be tripolar.”

So a president given to simplistic plans and impulses must deal with a whole new level of nuclear complexity for which neither he nor the US system is yet equipped. Woodward need not fear contradiction on this point: “This is such a dangerous time.” https://www.theage.com.au/world/north-america/can-trump-2-0-defuse-the-nuclear-threat-these-washington-heavyweights-fear-not-20241108-p5kp0n.html

November 9, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics international, USA | Leave a comment

Report: Trump Plans UK-Style Attack on Israel Criticism

The Washington Post reported in May that Trump told donors in New York that he would deport foreign students if they demonstrate for Palestine. “One thing I do is, any student that protests, I throw them out of the country. You know, there are a lot of foreign students. As soon as they hear that, they’re going to behave,” Trump told the donors, the Post reported.

Their aim is to crush the anti-genocide movement within 12 to 24 months.

November 4, 2024, Consortium News. more https://consortiumnews.com/2024/11/04/report-trump-plans-uk-style-attack-on-israel-criticism/

Joe Lauria says the Heritage Foundation’s “Project Esther,” as covered by Drop Site News, replicates the U.K.’s use of a terrorism law to criminalize pro-Palestine speech and activism.

A second Trump administration could criminalize criticism of Israel’s genocide in Gaza as support for terrorism, along the lines of the British Terrorism Act, according to a report in Drop Site News.

The report says the plan is to “break the pro-Palestinian movement in the U.S.”

“The plan, dubbed ‘Project Esther,‘ casts pro-Palestinian activists in the U.S. as members of a global conspiracy aligned with designated terrorist organizations. As part of a so-called ‘Hamas Support Network,’ these protesters receive ‘indispensable support of a vast network of activists and funders with a much more ambitious, insidious goal — the destruction of capitalism and democracy,’ Project Esther’s authors allege.

This conspiratorial framing is part of a legal strategy to suppress speech favorable to Palestinians or critical of the U.S.-Israel relationship, by employing counterterrorism laws to suppress what would otherwise be protected speech, legal experts told Drop Site News.”

The authors of the plan are part of the right-wing Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, Drop Site says. Former President Donald Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025 but he is a strong supporter of Israel, having moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem and accepted Israel’s annexation of Syria’s Golan Heights, considered illegal by the U.N. Security Council.

The Washington Post reported in May that Trump told donors in New York that he would deport foreign students if they demonstrate for Palestine. “One thing I do is, any student that protests, I throw them out of the country. You know, there are a lot of foreign students. As soon as they hear that, they’re going to behave,” Trump told the donors, the Post reported.

The report in Drop Site News, written by Ryan Grim and Murtaza Hussain, quotes an attorney at Palestine Legal as saying that

“concepts like the ‘Hamas Support Network’ or ‘Hamas Supporting Organizations,’ another term that the authors use to describe pro-Palestinian activist groups, is intended to construct a narrative justifying the use of counterterrorism and sanctions laws to suppress the First Amendment rights of individuals involved in the pro-Palestine movement …”

‘They need to make a claim that these organizations are being directed and controlled by Hamas, which they’re not,’ attorney Dylan Saba said. ‘So their claim now is that these organizations are effectively serving as a propaganda wing for designated terrorist organizations.’”

This is precisely what the British government has been doing.

2000 Terrorism Act

Using the 2000 Terrorism Act, authorities have been stopping journalists and activists at border entry points to interrogate them, sometimes arresting them, or conducting raids on their homes all because they dare expose and condemn Israel’s ongoing barbarism in Gaza and now Lebanon and misconstrue it as support for proscribed organizations, namely Hamas and Hezbollah.

Among those interrogated under the Terrorism Act for this purpose have been Craig Murray, writer, former British diplomat, new Consortium News board member; journalist Richard Medhurst who was held in a cell for 24 hours; and Asa Winstanley, an editor at Electronic Intifada whose home was raided by counterterrorism police.

[See: Police Escalate Britain’s War on Independent Journalism]

As Trump wins we could expect the same thing as is happening in the U.K. from his second administration, according to Drop Site News.

“To achieve its goals, Project Esther proposes the use of counterterrorism and hate speech laws, as well as immigration measures, including the deportation of students and other individuals,” Drop Site News reported.

The draconian measures being planned also include using racketeering laws “to help construct prosecutions against individuals and organizations in the movement,” the site reported.

The project would first attempt to purge “propaganda” from schools, then intimidate students not to take part in protests. This process is expected to lead to a point where “both the U.S. public and a preponderance of Jewish community perceives HSOs” — short for Hamas Support Organizations — “as a threat to their safety.”

Their aim is to crush the anti-genocide movement within 12 to 24 months.

As with most things in the duopoly, the Biden administration has given Trump a head start by designating a Palestinian prisoner support group named Samidoun a terrorist organization, the site says.

Israel has been accusing any critic of being pro-Hamas, such as how they smeared U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Or they accuse you of being part of Hamas. What is even more disturbing is that Western governments have taken up these ludicrous claims to ensure Israel remains above criticism while it openly commits genocide.

It is one of the most transparent tricks going back millennia for a government to smear its legitimate critics as being card-carrying members of its most ardent enemies — and Western governments are willfully falling for it, criminalizing journalists who oppose the slaughter.

If Trump follows through with this plan he will be totally abrogating the First Amendment, which is supposed to separate the U.S. from the country it rebelled against a long time ago.

November 8, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | civil liberties, USA | Leave a comment

The Evil Warmongering Zionist Won (No Not That One, The Other One)

Caitlin Johnstone, Nov 06, 2024,https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/the-evil-warmongering-zionist-won?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=151266086&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

The Democratic Party has lost control of both the White House and the Senate. As of this writing it is still unclear which party will secure control of the House of Representatives. Turns out campaigning on the promise of continuing a genocide while courting endorsements from war criminals like Dick Cheney is not a great way to get progressives to vote for you.

One interesting point is that Donald Trump appears to have taken the battleground state of Michigan, where Kamala Harris was soundly rejected by the large Arab American population of Dearborn despite their voting overwhelmingly for Biden in 2020. Back in August, Harris famously shushed Muslim anti-genocide protesters at a campaign rally in Michigan by admonishing them with the words “I’m speaking”.

Well, who’s speaking now?

To be clear, this is not a good result. A good result was not possible this election. The warmongering Zionist genocide monster lost, which means the other warmongering Zionist genocide monster won.

Donald Trump is still bought and owned by Adelson cash, which means we can expect him to be just as much of a groveling simp for Israel as he was during his first term. The president elect has publicly admitted that when he was president the Zionist plutocrats Sheldon and Miriam Adelson were at the White House “probably almost more than anybody” asking him to do favors for Israel like moving the US embassy to Jerusalem and acknowledging Israel’s illegitimate claim to the Golan Heights, which he eagerly did.

Trump closed out his campaign tour alongside his former CIA director and secretary of state Mike Pompeo, which should be enough to dash the hopes of even the most naive Trump supporters that US foreign policy is headed in a positive direction in January. As CIA director, Pompeo led a plot to assassinate Julian Assange and cheerfully admitted that “we lied, we cheated, we stole” at the agency. This odious swamp creature has remained in Trump’s good graces for the last eight years, and is reportedly expected to have a position in Trump’s cabinet once again.

Speaking at a campaign event in Pittsburgh on Monday, Pompeo boasted that he has been called “the most loyal cabinet member to Donald J Trump” and said that when Trump is re-elected “we will take down the ring of fire; we will support our friends in Israel.” The “ring of fire” is think tank speak for Iran and the militias in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Palestine who oppose Israel.

So things are probably going to get uglier and uglier. But they were getting uglier and uglier under Biden, and they would have gotten uglier and uglier under Harris as well. That’s just what it looks like when you’ve got a dying empire fighting to retain planetary control like a cornered animal. You don’t get to be the US president unless you are willing and eager to do ugly things.

Democrats exaggerate how destructive Trump is relative to their own bloodthirsty psychopath candidates. While we can expect Trump to inflict tyranny and abuse upon Americans, it will be nothing compared to the tyranny and abuse he’s going to inflict on people in other countries, and it will be nothing compared to the tyranny and abuse his predecessor has been inflicting on people in other countries. All the histrionic shrieking we see from US liberals about Trump only works inside a western supremacist worldview that does not see the victims of US warmongering as fully human, and therefore sees scorched earth genocidal atrocities as less significant than comparatively minor abuses concerning US domestic policy.

Abandon hope that any positive changes will come from this election result

Abandon hope that Trump will do good things.

Abandon hope that Democrats will learn any lessons from this loss.

Abandon hope that liberals will suddenly remember that genocide is bad and start protesting against the US-backed slaughter in Gaza.

Abandon hope in US election results, period.

US elections do not yield positive results. They are not designed to benefit ordinary human beings.

Nothing changes for those of us who are dedicated to fighting against the abuses of the US empire. It will be the same fight after January 20 as it was on January 19. We fight on.

November 8, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, USA | Leave a comment

Trump has a strategic plan for the country: Gearing up for nuclear war.

The erosion of the arms control and non-proliferation regime is not a defect of the proposals; it is one of its central goals.

By Joe Cirincione | July 2, 2024, https://thebulletin.org/2024/07/trump-has-a-strategic-plan-for-the-country-gearing-up-for-nuclear-war/

President Joe Biden has a terrible nuclear policy. A re-elected President Donald Trump’s would be much worse.

Biden has authorized the largest nuclear weapons budgets since the Cold War, delayed then squandered his chance to contain Iran’s nuclear program, and apparently has no policy for containing North Korea’s missiles and weapons. But a re-elected Trump would put nuclear weapons programs on steroids, trash what remains of the global arms control regime, and likely trigger new nuclear weapons programs in more other nations than we have seen at any time since the early 1960s.

Trump’s nuclear policy is all spelled out in a new conservative manifesto by Project 2025, a coalition of over 100 far-right groups led by the Heritage Foundation, which is widely seen as the template for a possible Trump 2.0 administration. If readers of the Bulletin have heard of Project 2025, chances are that they did not go through its 900-page book “Mandate for Leadership.” They should. This policy agenda, dubbed the “Conservative Promise,” is a blueprint for the most dramatic take-over and transformation of the US democracy in history.

The Project 2025 coalition members are staffed by over 200 former officials of the first Trump administration. These sophisticated Trump-movement MAGA operatives now know how to work the levers of government and have learned from what they see as their main mistake during Trump’s first term: leaving the “deep state” intact. These conservatives proudly served Donald Trump through his administration and attempted insurrection. They are now ready to help him complete the job and their plan is here for everyone willing to see.

“Our goal is to assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained and prepared conservatives to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State,” writes Paul Dans, a former chief of staff of the Office of Personnel Management during the Trump administration and now the director of Project 2025, in his foreword to the report. Russ Vought, the chief of staff of the Office of Management and Budget under Trump and now the president of the conservative think tank Center for Renewing America, agrees: “We have to be thinking mechanically about how to take these institutions over.” Vought vows to be “ready on Day One of the next transition,” adding, “Whatever is necessary to seize control of the administrative state is really our task.”

In the nuclear realm, “seizing control” would mean implementing the most dramatic build up of nuclear weapons since the start of the Reagan administration, some four decades ago. If this hawkish political coalition gets its way in November, the scope, pace, and cost of US nuclear weapons programs would increase all at once. Their plan, which seeks to significantly increase budgets and deployments of nuclear weapons and related programs and destroy the remaining arms control agreements, would dramatically increase the risks of nuclear confrontation as a result.

Nuclear proposals. The nuclear proposals are a key part of the Project 2025 coalition’s recommendations to reshape the Defense Department. This chapter is led by Christopher Miller, a former US Army special forces colonel who served as Trump’s last defense secretary. As Michael Hirsch reports in Politico, the agenda “is far more ambitious than anything Ronald Reagan dreamed up.” (In 1980, President Reagan ordered a massive nuclear buildup, which scholars now consider to have greatly escalated the Cold War.)

In condensed and translated form, Project 2025 proposes that a second Trump administration:

Prioritize nuclear weapons programs over other security programs.
Accelerate the development and production of all nuclear weapons programs.
Reject any congressional efforts to find more cost-effective alternatives to current plans.
Increase funding for the development and production of new and modernized nuclear warheads, including the B61-12, W80-4, W87-1 Mod, and W88 Alt 370.
Develop a new nuclear-armed, sea-launched cruise missile, even though neither the administration nor the Navy has requested such a weapon, and the Navy has not fielded this type of weapon since they were retired by President George H.W. Bush in 1991.
Increase the number of nuclear weapons above current treaty limits and program goals, including buying more intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) than currently planned.
Expand the capabilities of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s weapons production complex, including vastly increasing budgets, shedding non-nuclear weapons programs at the national laboratories (such as those devoted to the climate crisis) and accelerating production of the plutonium pits that are the cores of nuclear weapons.
Prepare to test new nuclear weapons, even though the United States has signed the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty that prohibits such tests and has not tested a full-scale nuclear device since 1992.
Reject current arms control treaties that the coalition considers being “contrary to the goal of bolstering nuclear deterrence” and “prepare to compete in order to secure US interests should arms control efforts continue to fail.”
Dramatically expand the current national missile defense programs, including deploying as-yet-unproven directed energy and space-based weapons, or as the report puts it: “Abandon the existing policy of not defending the homeland against Russian and Chinese ballistic missiles.”
Invest in a sweeping, untested “cruise missile defense of the homeland.”
Accelerate all missile defense programs, national and regional.

These proposals would add unnecessary new weapons to an already expansive nuclear arsenal. If implemented, these new and expanded programs would accelerate the nuclear arms race the United States is already engaged in and encourage the expansion—or initiation—of new nuclear weapons programs in other nations around the globe.

It is not as if the United States needs to spend more on nuclear weapons.

At $70 billion, President Joe Biden’s Fiscal Year 2025 budget request is already the most the country will have spent on nuclear weapons since the Cold War. Under Trump and now Biden, the United States has engaged in a sweeping replacement of nearly all existing nuclear weapons systems, including a new generation of strategic bombers (the B-21), strategic missile submarines (the Columbia class), intercontinental ballistic missiles (the Sentinel), several new warhead programs, and the development of new nuclear weapons, including smaller, “more usable” nuclear warheads and air-launched cruise missiles.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the currently planned nuclear weapons programs will cost $750 billion over the next decade (2023-2032). And the costs will rise every year: Biden’s requested $70 billion for the next budget is a 22 percent increase from last year. The total cost of the programs will approach $2 trillion. And there is more. The Biden administration also requested $30 billion for Fiscal Year 2025 for missile defense programs, much of which will be devoted to weapons designed to intercept long-range, nuclear-armed missiles.

The policy recommendations made by the Project 2025 coalition would substantially increase these costs. Unlike other generalized calls for more weapons, these conservative authors have developed a detailed plan for how to implement their apocalyptic vision and minimize any opposition. It is a far more specific plan than any before it, and more developed than anything groups trying to save what remains of the global arms control regime have even attempted.

Implementation plan. In March, the Heritage Foundation detailed the steps necessary to implement these proposals in asking the president to “revitalize the US strategic arsenal.” The authors propose that the next US president—meaning Donald Trump, but never mentioning him—immediately upon assuming office:

Make a major speech soon after inauguration to “make the case to the American people that nuclear weapons are the ultimate guarantor of their freedom and prosperity.”
Direct the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which is charged with producing all nuclear weapons fissile materials and the manufacture of all warheads, to provide monthly briefings in the Oval Office and to submit its budgets separately from the Energy Department, within which department the agency resides.
Direct the Office of Management and Budget to submit to Congress a supplemental budget request to accelerate key NNSA projects and Defense Department nuclear weapons delivery systems (missiles, bombers, and submarines).
Increase the number of deployed nuclear warheads by directing the placement of multiple warheads on each of the currently deployed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles. (Each missile in the current fleet of 400 ICBMs holds one warhead. Under this plan, the next president would order each missile to deploy multiple warheads by 2026. The new, replacement ICBM, the Sentinel, would also be fielded with multiple warheads.)
Direct the production and deployment of new nuclear weapon types, including the sea-launched cruise missile (SLCM-N) and putting nuclear warheads on Army ground-launched missiles. (Both capabilities were eliminated by President George H.W. Bush in 1991.)
Add nuclear capabilities to several hypersonic systems currently under development as non-nuclear missiles.
Direct the Air Force to examine a road-mobile version of the Sentinel ICBM. (President Reagan investigated such a program in the early 1980s and found it to be highly controversial, expensive, and impractical.)
Direct the expansion and enhancement of US nuclear weapons capability across the globe, including by pre-positioning nuclear bombs and aircraft in Europe and Asia. (The United States currently deploys 100 nuclear bombs abroad at five bases in NATO Europe.)
Direct the NNSA to “transition to a wartime footing,” including the expansion and construction of facilities to produce plutonium and plutonium cores for nuclear weapons.

Implications for national security. Should these recommendations be implemented, they will result in a sharp decline in the security of Americans and a dramatic increase in the risk of regional and global conflicts. At the very least, the proposed programs will explode the national debt. With the defense budget already at $850 billion for Fiscal Year 2025 and the budget for nuclear weapons and related programs at over $100 billion, these new projects could add hundreds of billions of dollars to weapons development, production, and deployment costs. The Heritage Foundation estimates that these additional programs will cost “tens of billions,” but this is a gross underestimate.

The existing US strategic arsenal already exceeds what is required for any conceivable nuclear mission. The United States currently maintains a stockpile of some 3,708 nuclear warheads for delivery by missiles and aircraft. Of those, approximately 1,770 warheads are deployed, ready for use within minutes of an order to launch. The rest of the operational stockpile (1,938 warheads) is held in reserve for potential use. In addition, the United States has approximately 1,336 retired, intact warheads in storage awaiting dismantlement. The explosive yields of most of these weapons are 10 to 30 times greater than the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

To put the power of this arsenal in perspective, one city destroyed by just one nuclear weapon would be a level of destruction not seen since World War II. Ten weapons burning 10 cities would be a catastrophe unprecedented in human history. One hundred such weapons would destroy not only the targeted nation but likely unleash a nuclear winter and subsequent famine that could destroy virtually all human civilizations—even those far from the conflict.

Increasing the US arsenal at the scale recommended by the Project 2025 would likely compel rival nations—including Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea—to increase their defense budgets, warfighting plans, and nuclear weapons developments and deployments to match what they will see as an increasing threat from the United States. Allied nations will also be caught up in the competition, fueling an already existing nuclear arms race: Japan, South Korea, and even Germany could be pushed over the nuclear line.

This would be the unintended consequence of an unleashed nuclear modernization. While each nuclear-armed state sees its programs as defensive, their adversaries see them as offensive programs striving for a military advantage. Each move engenders a countermove; each nation believes it is responding to the other. That’s how the security dilemma has spiraled since World War II. But the Project 2025’s recommendations go one step further: They are based on the belief that the United States would win any arms contest through superior technology, resources, and political will.

In 2019, former President Trump’s arms control negotiator Marshall Billingslea said: “We know how to win these races and we know how to spend the adversary into oblivion. If we have to, we will.”

But such programs would further weaken nuclear guardrails that are already gutted by the withdrawals from major arms control agreements—including most significantly, Trump’s withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that reduced, contained, and controlled the Iranian nuclear program and his withdrawal again from Reagan’s Intermediate Nuclear Forces agreement that eliminated most nuclear weapons deployed by the United States and Russia in Europe.

The erosion of the arms control and non-proliferation regime is not a defect of the proposals; it is one of its central goals. The Project 2025 authors believe that arms control has failed, and that treaties negotiated with both allies and rivals weaken Americans, rather than are protecting them. These views are not shared by most US allies. Those allied nations committed to restraining or eliminating nuclear risks will, therefore, increasingly doubt US leadership in international relations, weakening the alliance system so essential to US national security since the end of World War II.

Importantly, these proposed programs and activities will almost certainly have the United States abandon its commitment not to test nuclear weapons under the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Should the United States conduct new nuclear tests, other nations will almost immediately follow suit, adding more fuel to the nuclear fire.

Taken together, the policies and programs advocated by the Project 2025’s self-proclaimed “mandate for leadership” would push the United States onto the precipice of an expensive, dangerous, and destabilizing nuclear confrontation—something not seen since the darkest days of the Cold War.

November 7, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

After election, will progressives acknowledge and oppose US genocide in Gaza?

Walt Zlotow, West Suburban Peace Coalition, Glen Ellyn IL 4 Nov 24

During the current US election cycle, many progressives have recoiled from addressing the 13 month long US enabled Israeli genocide in Gaza.

They are singularly focused on pushing Kamala Harris to victory, saving democracy from the unhinged authoritarian Trump. As a result they’ve banished the word much less the reality of the genocide which the US enables.

That is deplorable. Every day dozens, hundreds, possibly a thousand Palestinian civilians die in the worst genocide this century. All financed, publicly supported and weaponized by their beloved Biden/Harris administration.

When the genocide in Gaza is brought up for discussion, too many progressives are ‘hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil.’

When asked to push back against US weaponizing, publicly supporting, financing the genocide, progressives come up with the darnedest excuses

‘There is no genocide in Gaza, just a defensive war against Hamas.’

‘Don’t dare say anything that will jeopardize Harris’ chances.’

‘The destruction in Gaza will be much worse under Trump.’

‘The United States has no influence on the government of Israel.’

‘President Biden and Vice President Harris are working night and day to achieve ceasefire in Gaza.’

‘People have been fighting each other there for thousands of years and nothing will change that.’

Maybe these otherwise fine progressives will open their eyes and souls to ongoing destruction of Gaza once the election ends and decide to resist it passionately.

Alas, with both candidates locked in ironclad support for sending endless billions for Israel to ‘finish the job’, they just might shrug and continue ignoring the most greatest moral dilemma of their lifetime.

November 6, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Gaza, Israel, politics, USA | Leave a comment

Regulators deliver successive blows to Amazon and Meta’s nuclear power ambitions

https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/04/regulators-deliver-successive-blows-to-amazon-and-metas-nuclear-power-ambitions/

Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft have placed big bets on nuclear power to secure electricity for their data centers as AI and cloud computing have sent power use surging.

But as Amazon and Meta discovered last week, those bets are far from a sure thing. A series of recent rulings from regulators dashed their hopes of finding a quick fix for their electricity needs. For now, Microsoft’s plans to revive a reactor at Three Mile Island are moving ahead.

Perhaps unexpectedly, the roadblocks have nothing to do with nuclear power itself, illustrating the challenges of building massive data centers without first locking up new sources of electricity.

Meta, for example, is planning to build an AI data center next to an already operating nuclear power plant. But as the project progressed, regulatory hurdles began piling up. CEO Mark Zuckerberg told staff in an all-hands meeting that one hurdle was the sighting of a rare bee species on the land, according to a Financial Times report. (Many bee populations are currently fragile, at best, after decades of exposure to a new generation of pesticides, among other stressors.)

Amazon’s plans have also hit a snag. The company is planning to build a new hyperscale data center next to the nuclear power plant near Susquehanna, Pennsylvania, and use a significant portion of the plant’s electricity. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), which oversees the U.S. electricity and natural gas grids, voted 2-1 on November 1 to deny the expansion of an existing data center power agreement that would have allowed Amazon to connect directly to the power plant.

The concern in Amazon’s case was that other customers would potentially suffer lower reliability — brownouts or blackouts — and higher costs as the data center would divert a significant portion of the massive power plant away from the rest of the region’s electricity grid.

This likely won’t be the last time FERC wades into the power question for hyperscale data centers: The commission has at least another eight large co-location requests to review.

November 6, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs, USA | Leave a comment

Amazon’s nuclear datacenter dreams stall as watchdog rejects power deal

Federal Energy Regulatory Commission cites grid stability concerns

The Register, Dan Robinson, Mon 4 Nov 2024

Amazon has hit a roadblock in its plans for nuclear-powered US datacenters. Federal regulators rejected a deal that would let it draw more power from a Susquehanna plant to supply new bit barns next to the site, on the grounds this would set a precedent which may affect grid reliability and increase energy costs.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) issued an order on November 1 rejecting an amended Interconnection Service Agreement (ISA) that would have increased the amount of co-located load from 300 to 480 MW, and to “make revisions related to the treatment of this co-located load.”

Co-located load means the Cumulus datacenter complex that Talen Energy built next to the 2.5 GW Susquehanna nuclear plant in Pennsylvania which it operates, and which Amazon acquired in March via a deal worth $650 million.

The online megamart announced plans in May to expand the site with more than a dozen new datacenters for its Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud subsidiary over the next decade.

Soon after that, official objections were filed by two utility companies, American Electric Power (AEP) and Exelon. They argued that the revised agreement between Talen and PJM Interconnection, the regional power grid operator, would give the Cumulus site preferential treatment and may result in less energy going to the grid in some circumstances.

Exelon and AEP also argued that the amended ISA should be subject to an official hearing because “it raises many factual questions,” and, in the absence of any such hearing, that FERC should reject the amended ISA. It seems a majority of the commissioners agreed.

Specifically, Exelon and AEP said the amended ISA had not been adequately supported, meaning no good reason was given as to why the amendments were necessary………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

The move highlights the difficulties datacenter operators face in expanding their facilities to keep pace with the booming demand for training and operating the latest AI models, and the challenges that power companies face in delivering the energy required.

As The Register has covered recently, access to enough power has become a major issue in building or expanding those bit barns, with one major commercial property developer in the UK citing this as the single biggest constraint it faces.

Yet according to Bloomberg, the hyperscalers – Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, and Microsoft – are set to collectively splash out well over $200 billion this year chasing the AI dragon, despite increasing warnings the AI market is a bubble set to burst and many investors and enterprises are not seeing much return for all the cash they are throwing at it.

Amazon itself said in its recent earnings report it expects to spend $75 billion on capex this year and even more in 2025, largely due to rising demand for AWS services related to generative AI.

We asked the company to comment on the rejected Susquehanna power proposal.

The company has also recently pursued small modular reactors (SMRs) via a $500 million investment into three projects to develop these miniature nuclear plants. https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/04/aws_nuclear_datacenter_ferc/

November 6, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | ENERGY, USA | Leave a comment

Endangered Bees Halt Meta’s Nuclear-Powered AI Data Center Plans

Mark Zuckerberg is trying to find more renewable energy sources for his AI ambitions.

By Kate Irwin, Nov 05, 2024, https://au.pcmag.com/ai/108105/endangered-bees-halt-metas-nuclear-powered-ai-data-center-plans

Meta’s plans to set up a nuclear-powered AI data center in the US have been halted in part because a rare bee species was found on the land, the Financial Times reports.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told staff about the issue in an all-hands meeting, according to sources familiar with the situation. The project has also faced other environmental and regulatory hurdles, and Meta is now looking for other ways to access carbon-free energy for its AI data centers.

Zuckerberg previously said Meta would build bigger AI computing clusters if the company could get the electricity to do so, admitting that limited energy resources are the main bottleneck for AI expansion.

Because AI uses a lot of electricity (and water), energy is one of its biggest challenges. Because of existing rules, adding new sources to US grids can take years, and utility firms may not want to add large, new power plants to their systems because of the challenges associated with the additions, MIT researcher and energy council member Robert Stoner previously told PCMag.

A 2017 report from the Center for Biological Diversity found that there are 347 endangered bee species in North America and Hawaii. It noted that 90% of wild plants require pollinator activity in order to survive, meaning that disrupting bee habitats could result in not only extinct species but also a loss of plant life, which could further accelerate climate change.

The 1973 Endangered Species Act currently only protects one species of endangered bee in the continental US: the Rusty Patched Bumblebee. While it’s unclear which bee species has posed a challenge to Meta’s nuclear plans, according to a map from the US Fish and Wildlife Service, there are only about 471 Rusty Patched Bumblebees left, and most of them are in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, and around the Virginia-West Virginia border.

Meta’s website currently lists nearly two dozen data centers worldwide, with the majority concentrated in the US. A map shows 26 data centers either completed or being built in addition to 75 different solar power locations, 21 wind power locations, and 25 “Water Restoration” projects.

Meta isn’t the only big tech firm eyeing nuclear power, though. Google has ordered six or seven small modular nuclear reactors from Kairos Power, and Microsoft has made plans to reopen Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania to power its AI plans.

November 6, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | ENERGY, environment, USA | Leave a comment

US Bombers Arrive in Middle East as Part of New Deployment for Israel

The US has reportedly warned Iran not to respond to Israel’s attack

by Dave DeCamp November 3, 2024, https://news.antiwar.com/2024/11/03/us-bombers-arrive-in-middle-east-as-part-of-new-deployment-to-protect-israel/

US B-52 bombers arrived in the Middle East on Saturday as part of a new deployment to “defend” Israel amid speculation over whether or not Iran will respond to Israel’s October 26 attack.

“B-52 Stratofortress strategic bombers from Minot Air Force Base’s 5th Bomb Wing arrived in the US Central Command area of responsibility,” US Central Command wrote on X.

The Pentagon announced it was beefing up its military presence in the region on Friday, saying Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin ordered the “deployment of additional ballistic missile defense destroyers, fighter squadron and tanker aircraft, and several US Air Force B-52 long-range strike bombers to the region.”

The Pentagon said the purpose of the deployment is the “protection of US citizens and forces in the Middle East, the defense of Israel, and de-escalation.” The US also recently deployed a THAAD missile defense system and about 100 troops to Israel.

Iranian officials have been vowing there will be a response to Israel’s attack, which killed four Iranian soldiers and one civilian. Israel launched the airstrikes on Iran in retaliation for the October 1 Iranian missile barrage that was fired into Israel in response to a string of Israeli escalations and assassinations in the region.

Axios has reported that Israeli intelligence suggests Iran is planning to launch a major attack from Iraqi territory and that it could happen before the US presidential election on November 5. However, a report published by The Wall Journal on Sunday said that Iran didn’t want to influence the US election and would likely wait until after.

The Journal report, which cited unnamed Arab and Iranian officials, said Iran has told Arab diplomats it’s planning a complex response against Israel that would involve more powerful warheads and other weapons not used in its previous attacks on Israeli territory. One source said Iran would likely target military facilities again “but much more aggressively than last time.”

Another Axios report said the US warned Iran that if it attacked, the US wouldn’t be able to restrain Israel. “We told the Iranians: We won’t be able to hold Israel back, and we won’t be able to make sure that the next attack will be calibrated and targeted as the previous one,” a US official told Axios.

November 5, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Israel, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Biden’s Destructive Legacy

by Daniel Larison , November 01, 2024, https://original.antiwar.com/Daniel_Larison/2024/10/31/bidens-destructive-legacy/

As President Biden’s term approaches its end, the US and several parts of the rest of the world are significantly worse off than they were when he took office. While the president is frequently lauded by members of the foreign policy establishment as a successful foreign policy leader, his tenure has been marked for the most part by deepening US involvement in foreign conflicts that show no signs of ending anytime soon. US policies under Biden have served only to stoke destabilizing conflict, and the president has shown no inclination to bring any of the wars currently backed by Washington to an end. Biden’s presidency showed the world just how extensive the rot in US foreign policy is, and most other nations will not soon forget what restored American “leadership” wrought.

Biden ran on the promise of ending America’s forever wars, but after the withdrawal from Afghanistan he then spent most of his presidency going out of his way to involve US in conflicts where no vital American interests were at stake. The risk of great power conflict has also risen under Biden as he has pursued a China policy of containment and rivalry that the US can ill afford while US-Russian relations have sunk to new lows over Ukraine. In the Middle East, Biden has enabled Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, backed their invasion of Lebanon, and supported their attacks on Iran. He has helped Israel sow chaos across the region, and he committed the US to a new open-ended and illegal war in Yemen. The president’s extreme ideological attachment to Israel led him to pursue an indefensible policy of unconditional support that has fueled the slaughter of civilians and created one of the worst man-made famines in modern times.

The president’s aversion to serious diplomatic engagement meant that the US continued the disastrous economic wars against Iran, Venezuela, and North Korea that Trump had been waging. Biden’s refusal to reenter the nuclear deal with Iran ensured that there would be no progress in negotiations with Tehran. The administration’s efforts to secure a ceasefire in Gaza have been a face-saving exercise so that the US could claim to be doing something to end the war while it continued arming Netanyahu’s government to the teeth. The US hasn’t so much as pretended to be interested in a ceasefire in Ukraine. On almost every front, the Biden administration’s answer has been more militarism.

The Biden administration has brought the US close to direct conflict with Iran thanks to Washington’s backing for Israel. It is still possible that the US and Iran might be at war in the next few months. It would be bad enough to get into an unnecessary war to support a non-ally, but to do it when the client is also massacring and starving civilians is inexcusable. US backing for the wars in Gaza and Lebanon is a strategic and moral debacle, and Biden shouldn’t be let off the hook for putting the US in this position. Even if the US and Iran avoid war again, it is a measure of how dangerous administration policy has been that it was ever this close to happening.

There is never any real accountability in Washington for the outrages and crimes committed by our leaders. It is doubtful that officials in the Biden administration will face legal or personal consequences for their role in these horrors. Regardless, Americans should remember that Biden and his administration were willing accomplices to mass starvation and genocide. Their complicity should never be forgotten, and they deserve all the opprobrium that the world has to offer.

The result of Biden’s decisions is that our already heavily militarized foreign policy has become even worse than it was before. The administration’s limited diplomatic efforts have been consumed by the president’s obsession with giving Saudi Arabia a security guarantee. Biden has done extensive damage to the reputation and interests of the United States, and he will likely be remembered as one of the two worst foreign policy presidents of the last fifty years along with George W. Bush. Biden’s foreign policy legacy is mostly one of fanning the flames of war and the destruction of innocent lives.

Daniel Larison is a columnist for Responsible Statecraft. He is contributing editor at Antiwar.com and former senior editor at The American Conservative magazine. He has a Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago. Follow him on Twitter @DanielLarison and at his blog, Eunomia, here.

November 4, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, USA | Leave a comment

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