Five Countries With the Cleanest Energy Grid Globally

By Felicity Bradstock - May 11, 2024

• 
  
• 
  
• Several countries, including Paraguay, Bhutan, Lesotho, Nepal, and Ethiopia, have made significant strides in transitioning to renewable energy.
• 
  
• Hydropower is a significant source of renewable energy in many of these countries.
• The global race to decarbonize and adopt renewable energy offers promising opportunities for a sustainable future.

Countries around the globe are racing to decarbonise in pursuit of a green transition. Several governments have created national policies to encourage a shift away from fossil fuels towards renewable alternatives, in a bid to achieve their Paris Agreement climate pledges. Yet, some have been more successful than others at transitioning. The countries with the highest proportion of electricity coming from renewable energy are all endowed with abundant natural resources, such as geothermal, hydro, and wind power, and most have relatively small electricity grids. 

The countries with the highest proportion of electricity generation coming from renewable sources are constantly shifting, as governments increase funding to accelerate their states’ green transition. In addition, several countries are producing higher levels of renewable energy to contribute to larger power grids. In 2023, those with the cleanest grids were Paraguay, Bhutan, Lesotho, Nepal, Ethiopia, Norway, Switzerland, Iceland, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Albania, showing that the green transition is not concentrated in any singular region of the world. 

5) Ethiopia: 98.1%

Ethiopia, in the Horn of Africa, produces most of its electricity from renewable resources including hydropower, biomass, solar, wind and geothermal energy. Ethiopia is the biggest producer of hydropower in Africa, with the energy source contributing around three-quarters of the country’s electricity. The Omo-Giber River Basin provides around 45 percent of this hydropower, through three major dams. In recent years, Ethiopia has become increasingly vulnerable to climate change, as long periods of drought have had a detrimental impact on its hydropower production. 

Ethiopia has the potential to generate more than 60,000 MW of electric power from hydroelectric, wind, solar, and geothermal sources. Ethiopia has struggled to tap into its natural energy sources due to a lack of investment in the past. At present, it has 5,200 MW of installed generation capacity, which the government aims to increase to 17,000 MW within the next decade, but there are fears that demand may outpace supply as both the economy and population continue to grow. 

4) Nepal: 98.4%

Nepal derives the vast majority of its electricity from hydropower, at around 97 percent. This is made possible thanks to Nepal’s abundant natural resources, including mountains, glaciers and rivers that provide falling water for hydropower production. Nepal produces around 2,200 MW of hydropower and has the potential to produce an estimated 50,000 MW of hydropower, which would make it one of the world’s biggest producers.

The South Asian country has increased electricity access to its population significantly in recent years, from 19 percent in 2000 to 94 percent in 2023, supported strongly by Chinese investment. 

Nepal continues to rely heavily on biofuels and waste, with around 21 million people continuing to use traditional biomass for cooking. In 2021, biofuels and waste contributed around 67.2 percent of Nepal’s energy mix. 

3) Lesotho: 99.3%

Lesotho in southern Africa produces most of its electricity from hydropower resources, with solar and wind power contributing a small amount of energy, as well as relying on biomass for cooking and heating needs in rural areas. It is home to one of the world’s smallest power grids, with a capacity of just 73 MW.

Around 72 MW of the country’s hydropower comes from the Muela Hydropower plant. The government has approved the development of the Polihali Dam, expected to be operational by 2028, which will add 8 MW of hydropower to the grid. Only around 47 percent of households in Lesotho have access to electricity, and this is mainly in the country’s urban hubs. The government previously announced a plan to expand this coverage to 75 percent of households by 2022, but this has not yet been achieved. 

2) Bhutan: 99.8%

Bhutan in southern Asia also generates most of its electricity from hydropower, around 99.7 percent. Its vast forests have helped the tiny Asian country to achieve net-zero carbon emissions, making it one of three carbon-negative countries worldwide, alongside Suriname and Panama. 

In April 2024, the European Investment Bank (EIB) announced plans to lend $160.2 million to Bhutan to help the country develop its renewable energy sector, including solar and hydropower projects in remote regions. The development of Bhutan’s solar power industry will help the country avoid spending on energy imports during the dry months of the year, as well as support energy diversification. 

1) Paraguay: 100% 

Paraguay has the cleanest power grid in the world, achieving a 100 percent clean electricity supply at the end of 2021. Hydropower contributes 100 percent of the South American country’s electricity supply, with a hydropower output of around 9 GW a year, making it the third-largest hydropower producer globally. Most of this power comes from the Itaipu Dam, which contributes 70 percent of the country’s electricity supply as well as energy exports to neighbouring Brazil.                                                                                 

Despite having already achieved 100 percent clean energy production, Paraguay has plans to diversify its renewable energy mix. Earlier this year, the government passed a law on Non-Conventional Renewable Energies (NCRE), to regulate the promotion, generation, production, development, and use of electric energy from non-conventional renewable energy sources other than hydropower. The Minister of Public Works (MOPC) Claudia Centurión stated, “Through regulation, we can involve the private sector in this generation of electric energy to take giant steps towards innovation and the promotion of new industries that will bring us employment and, above all, more sustainability.”

By Felicity Bradstock for Oilprice.com 

Machine Learning Could Make Geothermal Energy More Affordable

By Felicity Bradstock - May 12, 2024, 

Machine learning models can analyze extensive data to determine the best locations for geothermal drilling, reducing exploration costs.

AI-powered drilling technology could make geothermal energy more accessible and cheaper.

Rapid advancements in AI and machine learning technologies are expected to optimize energy operations and drive down costs even further.

As governments and private companies pump funds into research and development, aiming to achieve the innovation needed to advance renewable energy operations, we are seeing greater progress in the global green transition. With major advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and other digital offerings in recent years, some energy experts believe that this technology can now be used to enhance energy production, boosting the potential of the world’s geothermal energy output.

Geothermal energy is a natural form of heat energy that is located within the Earth. There is enough geothermal energy on Earth to meet the world’s energy needs, but accessing this energy can be very challenging. Geothermal energy can be accessed in different ways, the first is direct use, which has been popular for hundreds of years. This involves using heated water near the Earth’s surface, such as from hot springs and geysers, which requires no drilling equipment, and the water or steam can be used to heat buildings close to the source. By contrast, the geothermal energy that is used for electricity production is accessed through drilling. Reservoirs of hot water can be found in various places around the world just a few miles beneath the Earth’s surface. They can be accessed through drilling, allowing steam to be extracted to rotate a turbine, which activates a generator that produces electricity. 

Drilling for geothermal energy remains unpopular due to technological restrictions that mean it can be expensive to explore potential geothermal sites. In addition, hard-to-reach reserves can be extremely difficult to access with existing drilling technology. At present, geothermal energy contributes less than one percent of U.S. electricity, despite the huge potential to tap into this abundant renewable energy source. 

Zanskar, a Utah-based startup, has built machine learning models to assess the optimal locations to drill for geothermal energy. The company’s models analyse extensive data to determine the best locations to drill for geothermal energy, which Zanskar believes will lead to a significant reduction in exploration costs in the coming years. This could encourage more companies to invest in the geothermal sector and help diversify the green energy sector. 

Carl Hoiland, Zanskar’s CEO, stated “We've now discovered more of these hidden geothermal resources in just the past year and a half than the entire industry combined had done over the prior decade.” This demonstrates the huge potential of the new technology and could encourage more energy companies to invest in the sector. This month, Zanskar announced it had raised $30 million in a series B funding round led by Obvious Ventures, which values it at $115 million. To date, Zanskar has raised $45 million in funding, which will contribute to greater exploration and the development of its first power plants. The firm plans to work with existing geothermal companies to develop new sites. 

There is great enthusiasm around the potential for developing the world’s geothermal energy as it could provide an endless renewable resource. However, at present, the cost of project development is around five times that of wind energy, meaning that it is often overlooked. It costs around $8.7 million per megawatt of geothermal-derived electricity. This price is so high largely because drillers often fail to find the correct spot to access reservoirs, meaning they may have to drill multiple holes before being successful if they find it at all before running out of time and money. 

Zanskar uses a vast array of data collected from satellites, geological surveys, the waves that travel through the ground after an earthquake, and other data points, to predict the best spots for drilling. The more data available in a region, the more accurate the machine learning programme can be. This technology could be coupled with other innovations, such as advanced drilling techniques, to make geothermal energy more accessible and therefore cheaper. 

The U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) is also developing its AI and machine learning techniques to enhance the production of renewable energy. It has developed a suite of algorithms and tools to improve reservoir characterisation, economise drilling, and optimise geothermal steam field operations. Meanwhile, since 2018, the U.S. Geothermal Technologies Office (GTO) has funded early-stage research and development applications in machine learning to develop new technologies for exploration and operational improvements for geothermal resources. 

Rapid advancements in AI and machine learning technologies have enhanced renewable energy operations, and further progress over the coming decades is expected to help optimise energy operations and drive down costs even further. Some of the main deterrents to developing geothermal energy operations could now be a thing of the past, if machine learning algorithms are as accurate as Zanskar and other companies are promising, allowing us to tap into abundant renewable energy sources around the globe. 

By Felicity Bradstock for Oilprice.com

 

Royal Danish Navy and EMSA Expand North Sea Surveillance with Quadcopter

Unique Quadcopter adds new features to vessel monitoring off Denmark (EMSA)

PUBLISHED MAY 10, 2024 12:56 PM BY THE MARITIME EXECUTIVE

 

 

A four-month program is underway in the North Sea to expand monitoring and surveillance operations. The program is being conducted by the Royal Danish Navy and Danish Customs in cooperation with the European Maritime Safety Agency (EMSA) which provides unique airborne capabilities.

During the deployment, the remote craft will carry out maritime surveillance tasks in the busy waters around the north coast of Denmark. The program will provide information on potential oil spills and discharges at sea the partners report. Environmental monitoring is a key aspect of this service. They report the service is complementing the CleanSeaNet satellite-based oil spill and vessel detection service provided by EMSA.

In the past for similar monitoring programs, EMSA has provided drones that are remotely operated. This year, the program is using a new Hybrid Quadcopter for the remotely piloted aircraft system delivered by EMSA through the contractor Nordic Unmanned. It is the first time this model has been deployed in an EMSA remote monitoring operation with the organizations reporting it will provide added capabilities. 

The Aerosonde Hybrid Quadcopter that is being employed has both fixed wing, enabling it to cover long distances, and four propellers, providing it with vertical take-off and landing capabilities. They report the craft can take off and land vertically, like a helicopter but has the same range as the fixed-wing version. Nordic Unlimited highlights that it is runway-independent.

With more than seven hours of endurance and a radio range of 140 km (86 miles) along the coastline, based on a ground relay station, it can carry out extensive maritime surveillance to support the Royal Danish Navy. The RPAS has infrared and optical cameras and is also equipped with an embedded automatic maritime scanning sensor. The craft weighs approximately 100 lbs. with a payload capacity of approximately 15 lbs.

The European Maritime Safety Agency serves the EU’s maritime interests for a safe, secure, green, and competitive maritime sector. Launched several years ago, its Remotely Piloted Aircraft System (RPAS) services are offered free to all EU member states to assist in maritime surveillance operations including ship emission monitoring. It can also be used to provide support to traditional coast guard functions, including search and rescue and pollution prevention and response. 

 

Report: Dali Will Move to Baltimore Berth Next Week for Investigators

Picture from May 7 shows the starboard bow is cleared as they set the charges to remove the bridge structure from the port side (USCG photo)

PUBLISHED MAY 10, 2024 2:18 PM BY THE MARITIME EXECUTIVE

 

 

Update: The Unified Command reports the controlled demolition has been delayed till Sunday late afternoon due to weather concerns.  After that they plan an inspection of the Dali and possibly dredging before the vessel can be removed to the Baltimore berth.

 

The authorities leading the recovery operation in Baltimore have declined comments on the timeline for the next steps including the removal of the Dali only saying that systematic preparations were underway and that they remain on target to open the full channel by the end of the month. The Baltimore Sun newspaper however is reporting that it obtained an email showing the vessel will be moved to the dock on or about Tuesday, May 14, and handed over to investigators.

The Unified Command alerted the media of a tentative plan subject to weather and other conditions for the controlled demolition of the section of the bridge on the bow of the Dali. It is scheduled for Saturday afternoon with teams then prepared to use the giant claws to remove the sections which should fall into the water around the ship. The goal has been to lighten the forward section of the Dali to refloat the vessel. 

According to the Baltimore Sun, the vessel will be moved to the Seagirt Marine Terminal in the effort to reopen the channel. William Doyle, chief executive of the Dredging Contractors of America reports dredgers will be standing by in case they need to remove mud to free the Dali. 

According to the report in the newspaper, the team from the National Transportation Safety Board is expected to reboard the Dali on May 14 and 15 to continue their investigation. The NTSB has already interviewed the crew and Maryland pilot who was guiding the ship at the time of the allision and has reviewed onboard data. A preliminary report providing an updated statement of the facts is expected to be released in the coming days, possibly shortly after they reboard the vessel.

 

Charges are set (black stripes) for the controlled demolition scheduled for Saturday afternoon (USCG)

 

The Baltimore Sun reports that lawyers and investigators involved in the various lawsuits including one from the City of Baltimore have been told they can schedule visits to the ship after the NTSB. The newspaper reports there will be two groups taken aboard with the vessel available starting May 20.  They are being warned that the bow areas of the vessel may not be accessible as the recovery operation will still be underway.

It is unclear if the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) plans to return to the ship. They boarded the vessel shortly after the incident seizing information. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier in the week that the FBI is involved in an investigation to see if the crew violated a U.S. law from the 1830s which says a ship’s officer or crew can be charged with manslaughter if their negligence or misconduct led to the death of the six road workers who were on the bridge. The paper says the law was passed after a series of steamboat accidents but was invoked as recently as the 2019 dive boat Conception case where a fire killed 34 people off the coast of California.

The U.S. House of Representative's Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure has also scheduled a hearing for May 15 to discuss the federal response to the bridge collapse. They have scheduled witnesses from the U.S. Coast Guard, Army Corps of Engineers, Federal Highway Administration and the NTSB.

With the sections of the bridge removed from the Dali and then the vessel removed from the area, Doyle says dredgers are prepared to complete the task of restoring the channel. Salvage crews will continue to remove the debris from the bridge while this week they recovered the body of the last of the six missing workers from the road crew.

The Port of Baltimore told The Wall Street Journal that it already has requests from about 20 vessels expected at the port in the week following the reopening of the channel. They reported that containerships, car carriers, and bulkers are all scheduling return visits to the port. Two cruise ships that are also scheduled to be sailing from the port are expected to switch back from temporary operations from Norfolk.
 

 

Philippines Seize Japanese Coal Carrier After Loitering for Two Weeks

The vessel's captain admits he was told to delay his arrival but contends the vessel was never a danger to navigation (file photo)

PUBLISHED MAY 9, 2024 6:14 PM BY THE MARITIME EXECUTIVE

 

 

The authorities in the Philippines are still trying to figure out what to do about a Japanese-managed coal carrier that they have been detaining for a week. A warrant for seizure and detention was issued on May 3 with the discussions ongoing on how to handle the incident.

The Ohshu Maru (92,000 dwt) is registered in Liberia and operates under charter to companies managed by NYK. The vessel was built in 2011 and operates as a coal carrier.

According to the information developed by the Philippines’ Bureau of Customs, the bulker was spotted idle in the southern Philippines around April 22. The ship failed to report in to the authorities within 24 hours to declare its intentions as required by law.  They are now also contending that the Philippine Coast Guard was unable to establish radio communication with the vessel.

On May 1, a team comprised of the Bureau of Customs’ Customs Intelligence and Investigation Service, the Philippine Navy, the Philippine Coast Guard, and the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency boarded the vessel. Under the suspicion of smuggling, they ordered the vessel searched. Pictures show dog teams on the vessel.

 

No contraband was found during the search (BoC)

 

The authorities admit that no contraband was found on the ship and it appears all its paperwork was in order. The captain offered an explanation reporting that the vessel was bound for the Japanese port of Kinuura when he was told by the charterer to find a safe place to drift in the Philippine Sea. He said he had been told to delay his arrival in Japan and issued a formal letter of apology to explain why his vessel was in Philippine waters.

The authorities however moved ahead with the action getting the warrant of seizure and detention on May 3. They are contending that a review of Vessel Tracking System records shows the Ohshu Maru turned off its AIS transmission while it was in Malaysia. They allege the vessel was without a signal, i.e. operating dark, for at least a day and eight hours before entering Philippine waters.

The crew of the bulker responds that they never endangered any other vessels in the area. They report the ship was never permitted to come close to other vessels in the area of the Bohol Sea where they were drifting.

The Philippine Bureau of Customs ordered that the vessel be moved to an anchorage on the northern side of Mindanao, where the ship remains. They also requested that the Navy and Coast Guard place the vessel under continuous monitoring. It is unclear what the law prescribes as the possible penalty for a foreign ship failing to register its arrival in the Philippines.

 

Momentum is Building for Ammonia as Technology Matures

Strong demand is driving development but emissions issues remain

PUBLISHED MAY 12, 2024 12:47 PM BY RENÉ SEJER LAURSEN

 

 

Demand for ammonia is being transformed by the energy transition. Until recently used as an input for fertilizer and chemical products, new markets for green and blue ammonia are emerging, replacing coal in power generation, in green steel production and as a marine fuel.

Today some 200 million tonnes per annum is produced worldwide, with 20 million transported in LPG carriers. The scale of the emerging and potential demand will see these figures rise; how quickly this can be achieved will determine its take-up within shipping.

The interest in ammonia stems both from its zero emissions when used as fuel and because its production isn’t dependent on biogenic carbon sources. As the global economy transitions away from fossil-based fuels, biogenic carbon – from captured CO2, electrolysis and even waste sources – will be subject to increasing competition from different industries.

Biogenic carbon will increasingly replace fossil-based carbon in many of the products in use today in industry and consumer goods. Competition from the energy and aviation sectors will inevitably lead to increased prices but production capacity will need to come from industrial sources rather than biomass harvested for this purpose.

The rise of ammonia also creates potential for green hydrogen as a fuel. But because ammonia is significantly cheaper to transport over long distances – and considering the loss of energy when hydrogen is turned into ammonia via the Haber-Bosch process – it seems likely that a majority of hydrogen will be produced by cracking green ammonia at the location where the hydrogen will be consumed.

Ammonia Production

To realize large-scale production of green ammonia to serve new markets, its production capacity, along with that of renewable electricity and green hydrogen, will need to grow tremendously. The current global installed capacity of wind and solar farms and especially the electrolyzers needed to produce the necessary green hydrogen for ammonia production, are dwarfed by the required capacity needed.

Renewable electricity for electrolysis will need to be produced at locations around the globe that have favorable conditions for wind and solar energy generation and also have large land areas available. Those locations tend to be in remote areas; locations such as Western Australia, Chile, West Africa, Oman and Saudi Arabia are the areas that are expected to dominate production. Ammonia needs to be shipped from these locations to demand centers, in the first instance North/East Asia and Europe. 

Current projections for the growth in global production indicate there will be enough renewable electricity to produce the volumes of green ammonia needed for the maritime fleet alone by 2040. However, because shipping will also be competing with many other industries for both the renewable electricity and green hydrogen necessary to produce ammonia, as well as with other sectors that depend on the consumption of green ammonia such as agriculture and coal-fired power plants, supply is expected to be constrained.

Propulsion Technology

The first tests have been performed using ammonia as fuel in combustion engines by several of the main engine manufacturers. The tests have been very promising and no showstoppers have been discovered for the use of ammonia as a combustion fuel in internal combustion engines.

Though the amount of pilot fuel and levels of NOx, NH3 slip and N2O emissions have yet to be quantified for the commercial marine engines, marine engine makers generally agree that the Diesel cycle is best suited for combustion of ammonia

Research is ongoing for both diesel and Otto cycle combustion concepts. Optimizing emissions reductions is foreseen as a challenge, and control of N2O and ammonia slip requires high-temperature combustion, which also generates high NOx levels. Tests on two-stroke engines have shown that NOx is less of a problem using the Diesel cycle combustion principle when burning ammonia. When ammonia is injected into the combustion chamber, it expands and generates a cooling effect that removes the high peak temperatures in the combustion zones that generated the high NOx.

Pilot fuel is necessary to ignite ammonia and it is also needed to keep combustion stable. For smaller four-stroke engines, 10% pilot fuel is required once engine optimization has been completed and after the engine is in service. For large two-stroke engines using Diesel cycles, just 5% pilot fuel is required, and some engine makers expect that this amount can be further reduced.

Assessing Emissions

The actual amount of NH3 and N2O emissions is therefore still to be accurately assessed, however, emissions are expected to be low, particularly for the diesel combustion cycle. Even so, with N2O having a 20-year global warming potential (GWP) of 264 and a 100-year GWP of 265 according to IPCC 2013-ARS, the emitted levels may negate much of the CO2 benefit of using ammonia as a fuel. This remains a significant potential barrier to adoption.

Two-stroke marine engine designers have, however, found in their tests that N2O level are low - in the same range as we see for other fuels including marine diesel, LNG and methanol. Overall it seems that the diesel combustion principle is ideal for use of ammonia since the temperature in the combustion chamber hits a ‘sweet spot’ where the NOX, N2O and ammonia slip levels are recorded at a very low level. It is therefore expected that those engines will be able to operate to IMO NOx Tier II standards without any need for an abatement system.

As of Q1 2024, the main marine engine makers have the following development plans and lead times for ammonia fuelled engines:

• Two-stroke ammonia dual fuel engines covering power ranges from 5 MW to 31 MW. These engines will be available for delivery starting from Q4 2024/Q1 2025.
• Four-stroke ammonia engines as dual fuel gensets engines are also becoming available. Two engine manufacturers will launch this type of engine at the end of 2024 or beginning of 2025.

Safety and exhaust treatment

Most engine designers expect that exhaust gas after-treatment will be needed to comply with the IMO NOx Tier III standard, and all of them expect to specify selective catalytic reduction (SCR) as the preferred means of cleaning the exhaust gas after it has left the combustion chamber, rather than exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) which changes the combustion conditions thereby limiting NOX formation. The EGR is reducing the amount of oxygen in the intake air, and the fear is that this will have a very negative impact on the performance of ammonia combustion, but this is still to be investigated.

In addition to main engines and gensets operating on ammonia, designs are also emerging for auxiliary engines required to complete the transition to vessels running on ammonia. Boilermakers are preparing dual-fuel boilers for use with ammonia as fuel to be able to generate steam and heat from burning ammonia. 

Working with ammonia onboard on a day-to-day basis requires a solution to collect ammonia vapor in a safe manner. This vapor will be released in case of a normal engine stop if the piping system needs to be purged or in case of a malfunction somewhere in the fuel supply system.

Different solutions for vapor handling are under development from several manufacturers, including water scrubber designs that can remove ammonia vapor from the purge air. In this solution, ammonia vapor is stored in dedicated tanks as a water-ammonia solution. However, this approach would require dedicated infrastructure at the port to receive and store it.

All those systems described above are being prepared for newbuilding projects for different ship types and the expectation is that we will see those systems in service by the end of 2025/beginning of 2026. We estimate that approximately 50-70 ships are under order as of April 2024.

René Sejer Laursen is the Director Fuels & Technology at American Bureau of Shipping (ABS).

 

The opinions expressed herein are the author's and not necessarily those of The Maritime Executive.

Build a Majority for Palestine

By Norman Finkelstein

May 10, 2024

Source: Jacobin




Holocaust scholar and pro-Palestine activist Norman Finkelstein expresses his support for the student protests, insisting on the importance of free speech and uniting the majority of Americans around solidarity with Gaza.

On April 21, 2024, Holocaust scholar and prominent pro-Palestine activist Norman Finkelstein visited the Gaza solidarity encampment at Columbia University. Finkelstein expressed his support and admiration for the student protesters, urging them to focus on bringing in the widest possible constituency into the Palestine solidarity movement and insisting on the vital importance of free speech and academic freedom for the Palestinian cause. We reprint his remarks here; the transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

I don’t want to claim any kind of expertise, and I have to always be careful of appearing to be condescending or patronizing, or [claiming to be] all-wise in these matters. I would simply say, based on my experience, the most important things are organization, leadership, and having clear objectives.

Clear objectives means basically two things. One is slogans that are going to unite and not divide. In my youth, when I was your age, I was what was called back in the day a “Maoist” — a follower of Chairman Mao in China. One of the slogans that was famously associated with him was “Unite the many to defeat the few.”

That means, at any juncture in the political struggle, you have to figure out how you can unite the many and isolate the few with a clear objective in mind. Obviously, you don’t want to unite the many with a goal or objective that is not your objective. You have to figure out, having your objective in mind, what is the slogan that will work the best to unite the many and defeat the few?

I was gratified that the movement as a whole, shortly after October 7, spontaneously and intuitively grasped, in my opinion, the right slogan: “Cease-fire now!” Some of you might think, in retrospect, what was so brilliant about that slogan? Wasn’t it obvious?

But in fact political slogans are never obvious. There are all sorts of routes and paths and byways that people can go down that are destructive to the movement. It wasn’t a leadership decision, I don’t think; it was a spontaneous, intuitive sense by the protesters that the right slogan at this moment is “Cease-fire now.”

I would also say, in my opinion, the slogans have to be as clear as possible, leaving no room for ambiguity or misinterpretation, which can be exploited to discredit a movement. If you take the history of struggle, there was the famous slogan going back to the late 1800s, “The eight-hour working day.” It was a clear slogan.

More recent, in your own living memory — for all the disappointments, in my opinion, of the Bernie Sanders presidential candidacy — one of the geniuses of his candidacy, because he had forty or fifty years of experience on the Left, [was the slogan] “Medicare for all.” You might think, what’s so smart about that slogan? He knew that he could reach 80 percent of Americans with that slogan. He knew that “Abolish student debt” and “Free college tuition” would resonate with a large part of his potential constituency.

He didn’t go beyond what was possible at that particular moment. I do think he reached what we might call “the political limit.” The limit at that point in his candidacy was probably jobs for all, public works programs, a Green New Deal, Medicare for All, abolish student debt, and free college tuition. Those were the right slogans. It may seem trivial, but it really is not. It takes a lot of hard work and sensitivity to the constituency that you’re trying to reach to figure out the right slogans.
Free Gaza, Free Speech

My own view is that some of the slogans of the current movement don’t work. The future belongs to you guys and not to me, and I’m a strong believer in democracy. You have to decide for yourselves. But in my view, you have to pick the slogans which are not ambiguous, leaving no wiggle room for misinterpretation, and which have the biggest likelihood at a given political moment of reaching the largest number of people. That’s my political experience.

I believe the “Cease-fire now” slogan is most important. On a college campus, that slogan should be twinned with the slogan of “Free speech.” If I were in your situation, I would say “Free Gaza, free speech” — that should be the slogan. Because I think, on a college campus, people have a real problem defending the repression of speech.

In recent years, because of the emergence of the identity-politics, cancel-culture ambiance on college campuses, the whole issue of free speech and academic freedom has become severely clouded. I have opposed any restrictions on free speech, and I oppose the identity-politics cancel culture on the grounds of preserving free speech.

I’ll say — not as a point of pride or egotism or to say “I told you so,” but just as a factual matter — in the last book I wrote, I explicitly said that if you use the standard of hurt feelings as a ground to stifle or repress speech, when Palestinians protest this, that, or the other, Israeli students are going to use the claim of hurt feelings, pained emotions, and that whole language and vocabulary, which is so easily turned against those who have been using it in the name of their own cause.

That was a disaster waiting to happen. I wrote about it because I knew what would happen, though obviously I could not have predicted the scale after October 7. But it was perfectly obvious what was going to happen.

In my opinion, the most powerful weapon you have is the weapon of truth and justice. You should never create a situation where you can be silenced on the grounds of feelings and emotions. If you listened to [Columbia president Minouche Shafik’s] remarks, it was all about hurt feelings, feeling afraid. That whole language has completely corrupted the notion of free speech and academic freedom.

You now have that experience, and hopefully going forward that language and those concepts will be jettisoned from a movement that describes itself as belonging to a leftist tradition. It’s a complete catastrophe when that language infiltrates leftist discourse, as you are seeing now.

I’m going to be candid with you, and I don’t make any claim to infallibility — I’m simply stating based on my own experience in politics: I don’t agree with the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” It’s very easy to amend and just say, “From the river to the sea, Palestinians will be free.” That simple, little amendment drastically reduces the possibility of your being manipulatively misunderstood.

But when I was hearing that this slogan causes pain, anguish, fear, I have to ask myself a simple question. What does the slogan “We support the IDF” convey? The Israel Defense Forces, right now, is a genocidal army. Why are you allowed to have public support at this moment for a genocidal state and a genocidal army?

The language doesn’t seem as provocative — “We support the IDF.” But the content is ten thousand times more offensive and more outrageous to any, so to speak, civilized mind and civilized heart than the “From the river to the sea” slogan. The only reason there is an argument about that slogan — even though, as I said, I disagree with it, but that’s a separate matter whether I agree or disagree — is because we have legitimized this notion that hurt feelings are grounds for stifling speech. That to me is totally unacceptable; it’s wholly alien to the notion of academic freedom.

Some of you might say, that’s a bourgeois notion, it’s socially constructed, and all that other crap. I don’t believe that at all. You read the most eloquent defenses of unhindered, untrammeled freedom of speech by people like Rosa Luxemburg, who was, by any reckoning, an extraordinary individual and an extraordinary revolutionary. But being both did not mean she would accept any curbs on the principle of free speech, for two reasons.

Number one, no radical movement can make any kind of progress unless it has clarity about its goals and clarity about what it might be doing that’s wrong. You’re always engaging in course corrections. Everybody makes mistakes. Unless you have free speech, you don’t know what you’re doing that’s wrong.

Number two, the truth is not an enemy to oppressed peoples, and it’s certainly not an enemy to the people of Gaza. So we should maximize our commitment to free speech so as to maximize the dissemination of what’s true about what’s happening in Gaza — and not allow any excuse for repressing that truth.
What Are We Trying to Accomplish?

You’re doing ten thousand things right, and it’s deeply moving what you’ve achieved and accomplished, and the fact that many of you are putting your futures on the line is very impressive. I remember during the anti–Vietnam War movement, there were young people who wanted to go to medical school — and if you got arrested, you weren’t going to medical school. Many people struggled with the choice between getting arrested for the cause. It wasn’t an abstract cause — by the end of the war, the estimate was that between two and three million Vietnamese had been killed. It was an unfolding horror show every day.

People struggled with whether they would risk their entire futures. Many of you come from backgrounds where it was a real struggle to get to where you are today, to Columbia University. So I deeply respect your courage, your conviction, and every opportunity I have I acknowledge the incredible conviction and tenacity of your generation, which in many ways is more impressive than my own, for the reason that, in my generation, you can’t deny that an aspect of the antiwar movement was the fact that the draft lay on a lot of people. You could get the student deferment for the four years that you’re in college, but once the deferment passed, there was a good chance you were going over there and you were coming back in a body bag.

So there was an element of self-concern. Whereas you young people, you’re doing it for a tiny, stateless people halfway around the world. That’s deeply moving, deeply impressive, and deeply inspiring.

With that as an introduction, to return to my initial remarks: I said any movement has to ask itself: What is its goal? What is its objective? What is it trying to achieve? A few years ago, “From the river to the sea” was a slogan of the movement. I remember in the 1970s, one of the slogans was, “Everyone should know, we support the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization]” — which was not an easy slogan to shout on Fifth Avenue in the 1970s. I vividly recall looking at the rooftops and waiting for a sniper to dispatch me to eternity at an early age.

However, there’s a very big difference when you’re essentially a political cult and you can shout any slogan that you like, because it has no public repercussions or reverberations. You’re essentially talking to yourself. You’re setting up a table on campus, giving out literature for Palestine; you might get five people who are interested. There’s a big difference between that situation and the situation you’re in today, where you have a very large constituency that you could potentially and realistically reach.

You have to adjust to the new political reality that there are large numbers of people, probably a majority, who are potentially receptive to your message. I understand that sometimes a slogan is one that gives spirit to those who are involved in the movement. Then you have to figure out the right balance between the spirit that you want to inspire in your movement and the audience or the constituency out there that’s not part of the movement that you want to reach.

I believe one has to exercise — not in a conservative sense, but a radical sense — in a moment like this, maximum responsibility to get out of one’s navel, to crawl out of one’s ego, and to always keep in mind the question: What are we trying to accomplish at this particular moment?

Norman Finkelstein received his PhD from the Princeton University Politics Department in 1987. He is the author of many books that have been translated into 60 foreign editions, including THE HOLOCAUST INDUSTRY: Reflections on the exploitation of Jewish suffering, GAZA: An inquest into its martyrdom, and most recently, I ACCUSE! Herewith a proof beyond reasonable doubt that ICC Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda whitewashed Israel. He is currently writing a book tentatively titled, I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It: Politically Incorrect Thoughts on Cancel Culture and Academic Freedom In the year 2020, Norman Finkelstein was named the fifth most influential political scientist in the world.

Campus Protests Are Fighting Militarism and Corporatization at Home and Abroad

By Henry A. Giroux

May 10, 2024

Source: TruthOut


April 24, 2024 - Texas State Troopers are violently dispersing a peaceful Palestine solidarity protest on the campus grounds of University of Texas at Austin. | Image credit: @RyanChandlerTV

Student protesters know the fight for Palestinian freedom requires resisting militarization and fascism at home.

The long-simmering crisis over Israel’s genocide of Palestinians has reached a breaking point. Campus protests in solidarity with Gaza have erupted across North America, spanning at least 45 U.S. states, Canada and Mexico. Similar demonstrations have surged across Europe, including in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Additionally, expressions of moral outrage and solidarity have erupted in Central and South American countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica and Cuba, as well as in Asia (including India, Indonesia and Japan), the Middle East (including Egypt, Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon and Yemen), Africa (including South Africa and Tunisia), Australia, New Zealand, and beyond. Many faculty have protested alongside their students, and on May 8 a group of professors at The New School in New York City erected the U.S.’s first faculty encampment in solidarity with Gaza, signaling the growing momentum of the movement.

Meanwhile “Hands Off Rafah” rallies have drawn thousands into the streets, while a global day of mass protest is being planned for May 11.

No longer ripped from history, decontextualized, banished from public discourse and relegated to the sphere of silent questions and neglected connections, the horrors Palestinians have faced and are facing are writ large in all their brutality.
Uncompromised, uncompromising news

Get reliable, independent news and commentary delivered to your inbox every day.Email*

Meanwhile, politics, collective agency and mass student resistance are being reimagined as supposedly democratic societies across the globe have embraced fascist responses to mass resistance. In the midst of the current protest movement, the historical, political, economic and cultural framing mechanisms that connect the current repression on campuses and the struggle for Palestinian rights have become more visible. What has also become more visible is the long history of the politics of disposability, a rising culture of violence against those considered other, and the transformation of higher education into an adjunct of corporate power.

What must be extremely threatening to the far right and corporate media alike is that student protesters and their allies are clear about the connections between the issues of academic freedom, police violence, colonialism and human rights that they are raising — they are refusing to let these issues be separated in a fragmented, isolated, ahistorical and induvial fashion. In the manner of German Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin, the student protests are blasting “open the continuum of history,” rethinking it with fire.

While the issues of academic freedom, Palestinian rights, and the scourge of militarism and war are crucial issues for the students, they are not disconnected from the blight of neoliberalism and racialized state violence as fundamental elements of oppression. Hence, what the protests signify in the broader sense are new insights, new framing mechanisms, and a critical interrogation of history in order to avoid the protests and their call for a radical democracy from being spectacularized, depoliticized and torn from the history.

With the outbreak of Israel’s war on Gaza, students are courageously protesting the indiscriminate and massive killing of women, children and civilians by the Israeli government — with more than 35,000 killed thus far. The student protests have called for a permanent ceasefire, recognition of a secure state for the Palestinian people and for universities to disinvest from industries that produce weapons of war, particularly for Israel. The protests have struck a nerve and awakened the need for rethinking the role of higher education in a time of tyranny and war.

University administrators, liberal and far fight politicians, the corporate media and right-wing billionaires have responded by disingenuously condemning the protests as “antisemitic,” claiming that the protests are the work of “outside agitators,” and those in charge have supressed student resistance with militarized force.

At first glance, this appears to be part of the usual self-righteous, smug and repressive strategy of diversion and blame. But there are deeper forces at work in the ideological and militarized responses by most of the universities where the campus protests are taking place. University presidents under pressure from powerful far right politicians and billionaires are increasingly relying upon the police to deal with acts of civil disobedience by student protesters who have set up campus tents in opposition to “the U.S.-backed Israeli military offensive in Gaza.” As of May 5, 2024, over 2,400 people have been arrested by police. Students as well as faculty have been assaulted by the police, zip-tied, hauled into buses and criminally charged for standing up for their beliefs.

As Tim Dickinson points out in Rolling Stone, it is alarming to see “rooftop snipers and militarized police subduing protesters.” He further notes:


The behavior of law enforcement has — once again — shined a stark spotlight on police brutality and disregard for First Amendment rights protecting freedom of assembly, speech, and the press. As cops have gone ham on protesters, and engaged in dubious mass-arrests, they’ve also roughed up journalists and even smashed college professors to the ground.

This type of indiscriminate violence against peacefully protesting students and faculty echoes what one would expect in outright fascist regimes. Historian Rick Perlstein astutely observes that military-like responses to campus protests today would have been unimaginable in the 1960s. He highlights some of the most egregious abuses against faculty members, underscoring their significance. In a piece for The American Prospect he writes:


At the University of Wisconsin, a balding, bespectacled professor face down, two cops pinning his left arm sharply behind his back, and a disabled professor getting her dress torn and suffering internal damage from police strangulation. The 65-year-old former head of Dartmouth’s Jewish studies program who dared scream “What are you doing?” at cops being taken down with a wrestling move that also left her with an arm wrenched behind her back. Then a second cop arriving to keep her pinned as a third looks on blithely, rifle at the ready. (She was suspended by her university for her trouble.) At Washington University in St. Louis, a 65-year-old professor, a Quaker, was told by his doctor he was “lucky to be alive” after absorbing a flying tackle from a very large officer for the sin of filming cops with his cellphone, then being dragged to a nearby patch of grass, writhing, then to a police van, where he fell limp.

Much of the response is an attempt to punish students for addressing what one might call one of the crucial moral and political issues of our time: freedom for Palestinians to determine their own political fate. At the same time, the repression signals to students that when free speech begins to hold power accountable, there are severe consequences, extending from suspensions, expulsions, loss of future job opportunities and even to potential arrest.

In this case, it becomes clear that the basic values often attributed to higher education as a social good — extending from teaching students how to be critical, informed, socially responsible, compassionate and engaged citizens — are viewed with disdain and subordinated to the repressive values and notions of learning aligned with the corporate university. These include viewing the world through normalized template of market values, embracing a cutthroat notion of competitiveness, defining the worth of a degree through commercial interests, disdaining any mode of learning not tied to future financial gain and disregarding connections between knowledge from larger social issues. This is a pedagogy of capitalist cloning buttressed by the threat of state terrorism.

In light of the student protests and the repressive response, the university’s reactionary neoliberal values and the pedagogical practices that enforce them have revealed the hollowness of the university’s claim to free speech and academic freedom, on the one hand. The protests also underscore the extent to which higher education has been corporatized and militarized. It is important not to forget, as the South African Nobel Prize winner in literature, JM Coetzee points out, that powerful corporate elites have little regard for higher education as a critical institution and public good, and “reconceive of themselves as managers of national economies who want to turn universities into training schools equipping young people with the skills required by a modern economy.”

Moreover, this attack on higher education is not only ideological but also, as we see with the campus protests, relies on the repressive militaristic institutions of the punishing state. What is often missed in progressive analyses of the protest movements is the interconnection between the corporatization of higher education and the current efforts to militarize it through outright suppression by the police and other forces of state repression.

There is a long history of increasing neoliberal influence on higher education, its alliance with the military-industrial complex, and its willingness to accept huge amounts of financial support from corporations serving defense industries. In fact, as I noted in 2007 when I published The University in Chains-Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex, former President Dwight Eisenhower’s famous critique of the military-industrial complex originally included the term “military-industrial-academic complex” — the latter term he was persuaded to drop before his Farewell Address to the Nation on January 17, 1961.


Education is increasingly seen as a target for suppression, not only by the far right but also by both political parties.

Since Eisenhower’s speech, especially in the aftermath of the 9/11 attack, the U.S. has become increasingly militarized and policed. On the domestic front, police violence has escalated dramatically, especially with the relentless killing of Black and Brown people, the most notorious and public examples including the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. At the same time, higher education has increasingly aligned itself with the national security state, becoming a site of commerce, research for the Pentagon and a training ground for staffing innumerable intelligence agencies.

Since the 1970s, a form of predatory neoliberal capitalism has waged war on the welfare state, public sphere and the common good. The new mode of governance argues that the market should govern the economy and all aspects of society. It concentrates wealth in the hands of a financial elite and elevates untrammeled self-interest, unchecked individualism, deregulation and privatization as the governing principles of society. Under neoliberalism, everything is for sale, and the only obligation of citizenship is consumerism. We live in an age when economic activity is divorced from social costs, while policies that produce racial cleansing, militarism and staggering levels of inequality have become the organizing features of everyday life.

Largely defined as a workstation for training global workers and increasingly in need of funding, higher education — as John Armitage writes in Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies — easily assumed the role of a “hypermodern militarized knowledge factory.” As public schools increasingly model themselves after prisons, becoming shooting galleries due to the prevalence of guns and military weapons in the U.S., higher education has further boosted its unholy alliance with the defense and intelligence industries, which largely served dominant state, military and corporate interests.

Under an austerity-driven neoliberal project, education has defaulted on its willingness to cultivate critical citizens essential for a democratic public sphere. In a broader perspective, education is increasingly seen as a target for suppression, not only by the far right but also by both political parties. Their aim is to reduce it to a mere appendage of the corporate and defense industries while imposing pedagogies of repression and conformity.

The current assault on higher education exemplifies how market values erode the public good and destroy any viable sense of higher education as a democratic public sphere. Operated as a business, higher education prioritizes profits over fostering an education that nurtures an informed and creative citizenry, forsakes democracy as a guiding principle, and reshapes higher education through what Wendy Brown in Public Servants: Art and the Crisis of the Common Good, describes as “vulgar forms of marketization.”

Defunded and corporatized, many institutions of higher education have been all too willing to make the culture of business the business of education. This transformation has corrupted their mission, making them all the more susceptible to aligning themselves with anti-democratic forces of militarization. Actions by universities to stifle student protests and employ oppressive elements of the national security state must be understood against this backdrop. Viewed as guardians of the market, as vehicles to produce compliant workers for the neoliberal order, higher education institutions transform into right-wing indoctrination centers, they establish such educational institutions that play a formidable role in the ongoing militarization of U.S. society. Hence, it should come as no surprise that, in the face of campus protests, school administrators were all too willing to stifle dissent and employ the police to shut down peaceful protests.

The merging of neoliberalism, militarism and a politics of indoctrination pose a dire threat to higher education, academic freedom and democracy itself. What must not be forgotten is that the campus protests signify more than a struggle for Palestinian rights and freedom; they also represent a fight to reclaim higher education as site of democratization, a public good and a crucial civic institution where student voices can be heard, and where the dynamics of critical thinking, dialogue, informed judgment and dissent can take place without fear of repression.

It is worth remembering Martin Luther King,Jr.’s words composed in 1963 in which he stated: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere…. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” In the spirit of King’s impassioned words, higher education offers a crucial civic space for dialogue, critique, historical memory, the affirmation of mutuality and social responsibility. It is a space where the death of those considered disposable can be made visible and challenged, where the stories of the ungrievable can be told, and politics and pedagogy become a form of moral witnessing and empowerment.

The fight for Palestinian freedom cannot be separated from the challenge of building a multiracial working-class movement struggle against neoliberal capitalism, confronting the militarization of higher education and beating back an emerging fascist politics both at home and abroad.



Henry A. Giroux (born 1943) is an internationally renowned writer and cultural critic, Professor Henry Giroux has authored, or co-authored over 65 books, written several hundred scholarly articles, delivered more than 250 public lectures, been a regular contributor to print, television, and radio news media outlets, and is one of the most cited Canadian academics working in any area of Humanities research. In 2002, he was named as one of the top fifty educational thinkers of the modern period in Fifty Modern Thinkers on Education: From Piaget to the Present as part of Routledge’s Key Guides Publication Series.