It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
The Atlantic “Ideas” article had all the trappings of an insightful think piece co authored by one of the most successful former CEOs in Silicon Valley, Eric Schmidt.
Schmidt, who headed up Google from 2001 to 2011, writing alongside Robert O. Work, described by The Atlantic as “the 32nd U.S. deputy secretary of defense,” were given over 2000 words to lay out “Offset-X,” a strategy “for the U.S. to restore the technological superiority of its military over all potential adversaries.” At the heart of their strategy is pivot by the Department of Defense to great power competition and the rapid development and deployment of artificial intelligence technologies.
But there’s a huge potential conflict of interest that the Atlantic failed to disclose to readers on Monday: Schmidt’s venture capital firm Innovation Endeavors is an enthusiastic investor in AI products for the military. Work, for his part, is chairman of the board for Sparkcognition Government Systems, a company that describes itself as the “first full-spectrum artificial intelligence company that leverages proven commercial technologies to meet the needs of the most pressing national security missions.”
In other words, the policies advocated by the two writers in the Atlantic could provide them with direct financial benefits.
And the authors are clear about their worldview that provides an unquestioning endorsement of U.S. military primacy and global hegemony, with no acknowledgement of costs to U.S. citizens who aren’t directly invested in the expensive technology both authors are invested in promoting. They write:
Our military primacy allowed us to shape the global economy — unlocking trillions of dollars for U.S. companies and citizens — and secure the free flow of commerce that enabled supply chains to function and globalization to flourish. It also allowed us to establish the global data network that powers the digital economy and international communication. Most important, our hegemony has helped protect democracy worldwide against challenges from authoritarianism.
Running up the cost of war, a cost that U.S. taxpayers are already footing with a defense budget that currently stands at $847 billion and will likely reach $1 trillion by the end of the decade, is certainly a strategy that would directly benefit two investors in AI weapons. But what’s beneficial for Schmidt and Work might have more costs than benefits for the country as a whole. The Atlantic failed to reveal that the authors had a set of financial interests that may run counter to those of the American public.
The Atlantic did not respond to a request for comment.
Five ways the Biden DOE is spending big on nuclear energy
The Byron Nuclear Generating Station runs at full capacity on May 12, 2007, in Byron, Illinois. Then owned by Exelon, the station is owned/operated by Constellation as of February 2022.
The Department of Energy is spending big to keep America’s old nuclear reactors online while laying the foundations of the nuclear energy industry of the future.
The investment into America’s long-declining nuclear industry — which includes tens of millions of funding announced this week — builds on a far-broader package of federal subsidies invested in the nuclear sector, which remains America’s leading single source of zero-carbon electricity.
One program — a $6 billion fund established under the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure plan — will help to keep otherwise uneconomic nuclear plants from shutting down.
But other programs announced by the Energy Department look beyond the current generation of nuclear plants to build out foundations for the next generation of nuclear energy.
Here are five nuclear goals that the Energy Department is pouring money into.
Advanced and theoretical research
One grant announced on Wednesday will pay $12 million to fund scientists across America’s national laboratories as they work on advanced research into problems at the edges of our understanding of nuclear physics.
The five projects funded “span topics like the 3-dimensional internal structure of nucleons, the exotic states of quarks and gluons, the microscopic properties of quark-gluon plasma and neutrino and nuclear interactions,” according to a statement from the Energy Department.
While this research is advanced and largely theoretical, it has the potential to open up broad practical applications.
“Advances in nuclear physics provide important new insights into the nature of our world as well as novel applications in the areas of national security, energy, health, and space exploration,” Timothy Hallman, associate director of science for nuclear physics, said in a statement.
Any such advances require “rigorous theoretical frameworks” to help scientists drive the next generation of research with practical benefits. Hallman added.
These would include “exploring more clean energy options and new applications in nuclear medicine and industry.”
The department announced on Wednesday that $5 million will go to three state universities to help them create curriculum to train electrical engineers to work on nuclear reactors.
The joint program — which brings together the University of Texas at El Paso, the University of New Mexico and the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University — will train students to design components that can function in the extreme environments found inside nuclear reactors.
“We are at a particular point in time in which there is a recognition among leaders in industry and government of the pressing need to increase the electrical engineering workforce,” University of Texas electrical engineering professor Miguel Velez-Reyes said in a statement.
Expanding job training is needed “to spur domestic growth in areas such as chip manufacturing, transportation electrification, aerospace systems and advanced electronics packaging,” Velez-Reyes added.
Keep old plants online
The infrastructure legislation passed into law earlier this year contained $6 billion in Civil Nuclear Credits to help keep online nuclear plants that would otherwise be replaced with fossil-fuel infrastructure.
The Energy Department paid out its first disbursement last month, sending $1.1 billion to keep southern California’s Diablo Canyon Power Plant running.
The plant — which became the focus of a public battle over the fate of nuclear power in a carbon-conscious age — had been set to be decommissioned in stages through 2025.
Local officials praised the move.
“In the face of record heat waves and a deepening climate crisis, there is too much at stake for us to move backward in the fight to fully transition California away from polluting fossil fuels,” Rep. Salud Carbajal (D-Calif.) said in a statement.
If it had closed, it would have joined 13 other still-serviceable nuclear plants to close early in the past decade, according to DOE.
The Energy Department will begin accepting the next round of Civil Nuclear Credit applications in January 2023.
Build nuclear fuel supply chains
The Energy Department is putting $150 million into producing nuclear fuel essential to advanced reactors, officials announced in November.
So-called high-assay, low-enriched uranium (HALEU) is uranium that is far more enriched than the nuclear fuel used in current reactors. It’s only low-enriched in contrast to the kinds of enriched uranium used in nuclear weapons.
Since it’s essential to smaller, more efficient nuclear reactors, the Energy Department estimates that the U.S. will need about 40 metric tons of HALEU per year by the end of the decade.
“Reducing our reliance on adversarial nations for HALEU fuel and building up our domestic supply chain will allow the U.S. to grow our advanced reactor fleet and provide Americans with more clean, affordable power,” U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm said in a statement.
The funding — a cost-share with the Maryland-based American Centrifuge Operating company — would help pay for the development of 6 centrifuges that can produce about a ton of HALEU per year — enough to meet immediate U.S. needs.
But the Energy Department framed it as part of a larger drive to create a domestic HALEU industry.
“This demonstration shows DOE’s commitment to working with industry partners to kickstart HALEU production at commercial scale to create more clean energy jobs and ensure the benefits of nuclear energy are accessible to all Americans,” Granholm said.
Unlike fission, fusion energy is created by forcing atoms together, rather than splitting them — a process that releases no radioactive pollution.
But the extreme temperatures and pressures needed to convince atoms to fuse have so far kept fusion as a theoretical energy source, rather than a practical one.
At the superheated temperatures and pressures required for fusion, gas turns into plasma — which is extremely difficult to control.
“We can’t just put it in a vessel because it will melt anything it touches,” said Eugenio Schuster of Lehigh University, who had received $1.75 million to work with researchers on this problem.
The money helps pay for collaborative experiments between U.S. and international scientists at research “tokamaks” at sites in China, the European Union and South Korea.
The most promising solution to that problem is a donut-shaped reactor where spinning magnetic fields contain the growing fusion reaction.
These fields “create what’s essentially an invisible bottle to hold it, and prevent those charged particles from escaping,” Schuster added.
Schuster is stationed at ITER — an international European test-reactor where scientists aim to “produce 10 times more energy than is required to operate it,” he said. “Everyone in the fusion community is directly or indirectly working toward ITER.”
Other disbursements of fusion funding will support U.S. researchers in conducting experiments in EAST and Korea’s KSTAR — both more “long pulse devices” more advanced than alternatives available in the U.S.
Working in these overseas research institutions “will help us learn from these superconducting tokamak machines so that eventually, we can build a long-pulse reactor-degree device in this country,” Schuster said.
Western Australia eager to expand China space research, investment with ‘science not bound by borders’
Western Australia is co-host of a global radio telescope project, along with South Africa, with China, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal and Switzerland also members Projects like the Square Kilometre Array are viewed as ‘obvious candidates’ for China and Australia cooperation
The launch of construction of the Square Kilometre Array-Mid telescope outside the town of Carnarvon, in Northern Cape, South Africa. Photo: Reuters
China and Australia mark the 50th anniversary of diplomatic and trade ties in December. Post reporter Kandy Wong recently attended the 12th Australia-China Youth Dialogue, and her four-part series looks at various aspects of the relationship between Beijing and Canberra. In part two, she looks at potential science cooperation between the two countries.
Western Australia expects to step up its space research cooperation with China, according to a top Australian government official, in a move aimed at utilising its copious scientific resources, while also boosting local innovation, investment and jobs.
Australia is a co-host of a worldwide radio telescope project, the UK-headquartered Square Kilometre Array, along with South Africa, while China, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal and Switzerland are all members.
Construction 800km (497 miles) north of Perth, began on Monday, and more than 130,000 two-metre tall, Christmas tree-shaped antennas will be built as part of the project.
Minister for Industry and Science Ed Husic, who officiated at the groundbreaking ceremony, said the project is expected to attract an estimated A$1.8 billion (US$1.2 billion) in foreign income flows to Australia over its first 30 years and create around 350 medium-term jobs. Artist’s impression of low-frequency stations forming the Square Kilometre Array radio telescope, to be built in Western Australia. Photo: Australia’s Department of Industry, Science and Resources/AFP
“[We are] confident that Western Australia will continue to be an important investment location for China,” Western Australia premier Mark McGowan told the Post at the end of last month.
The low-frequency antennas located at Murchison Shire have already attracted some of the world’s best researchers, astronomers and scientists, according to McGowan, with Western Australia already home to a range of radio astronomy infrastructure at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory.
He added that Western Australia is eager to build on more than 60 years of experience in the space industry to leverage the economic and social benefits from the project.
“My government is committed to strengthening its relationship with China into the future,” said McGowan.
“Our geographic location, dry environmental conditions, radio quiet zones and clear skies provides an attractive setting for major space projects.”
Science is not bound by national borders, and innovation is a never-ending endeavour
Wang Zhigang
South Africa’s Karoo region will carry the core of the high- and mid-frequency dishes for the Square Kilometre Array project, which will be the largest radio telescope in the world when completed in 2028.
The project – which aims to allow scientists to use the telescopes to collect data for analysis to enable them to study the evolution of the universe, explore the origins of life and understand the nature of gravity – has also attracted interest from the likes of France, Spain, Germany, Canada, India, Sweden, South Korea and Japan.
Projects like the Square Kilometre Array are “obvious candidates” for China and Australia cooperation, according to James Laurenceson, director of the Australia-China Relations Institute at the University of Technology Sydney.
The meeting last month between President Xi Jinping and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese also highlighted that “there is a clear need to translate that reconnection to concrete collaborations between the two countries”, added Laurenceson.]
“Science is not bound by national borders, and innovation is a never-ending endeavour,” said China’s Minister of Science and Technology, Wang Zhigang, in a video statement released on Monday.
I’m very keen to see Chinese companies consider Perth as a technology hub for growing their businesses into the Australian marketTamryn Barker
Wang added that international “mega-science projects” can help improve international science and technology cooperation and deepen bilateral and multilateral exchanges.
“Our country is willing to join hands with all participating countries in global collaboration, jointly constructing, delivering and sharing the world’s largest synthesised aperture radio telescope to explore the vast universe and create a better future for mankind,” he added.]
Tamryn Barker, a founder at the Core Innovation Hub that focuses on the resources and energy sector, said the post-coronavirus era offers companies a new chapter to “revisit international partnerships and opportunities” on science and innovation.
“Currently we don’t have Chinese start-ups or Chinese businesses located [Western Australia],” she added.
“I’m very keen to see Chinese companies consider Perth as a technology hub for growing their businesses into the Australian market.”
Square Kilometre Array Observatory in South Africa.
Photo: Square Kilometre Array Observatory
The Western Australia government plans to promote science and innovation development by building the 100-hectare (247-acre) Australian Automation and Robotics Precinct in Perth, according to Barker.
The Core Innovation Hub will operate the facility that will help companies to test and develop new self-driving vehicles, sensor networks and other information technology systems.
“We’re inviting international companies to take part in building that ecosystem,” Barker added.
“I think we have a lot to learn from China in this space because it is already leading the world in automation.”
Tamryn Barker, founder at the Core Innovation Hub. Photo: 12th Australia-China Youth Dialogue
Western Australia has the skills, according to Barker, but needs Chinese partners to scale up businesses.
However, the Australian government’s support for research collaboration involving China has become lukewarm in recent years over national security reasons, according to Laurenceson.
The Australian Research Council has awarded just 23 grants for Discovery Projects – that seek to expand the knowledge base and research capacity in Australia and offer economic, commercial, environmental, social and/or cultural benefits – that involve collaboration with China this year, down from an average of 61 between 2019-21.
“Still, the increased risk mitigation frameworks that Australian universities have applied in recent years to collaborate with China, at Canberra’s insistence, won’t be removed,” Laurenceson added.
“There is a sense that there may be more obstacles still to come, but the full extent of that is not yet clear.”
There is a sense that there may be more obstacles still to come, but the full extent of that is not yet clearJames Laurenceson
Wu Xiangping, China’s lead scientist on the Square Kilometre Array project, said in 2018 at the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation in Beijing that his team was eager to remain at the forefront of the pioneering development and China would speed up its cooperation with South Africa.
China has sped up its own scientific development in space survey in recent years and has built the world’s largest single-dish radio telescope in southwestern Guizhou province.
Last year, the Chinese Academy of Sciences granted 10 per cent of the Five-hundred-metre Aperture Spherical Telescope’s observation time to international astronomers.
The Chinese Academy of Sciences also said early this year that it had set up committees to establish data-sharing policies, select major projects, plan the direction of research and handle time allocation and users.
Kandy Wong Kandy Wong returned to the Post in 2022 as a correspondent for the Political Economy desk, having earlier worked as a reporter on the Business desk. She focuses on China's trade relationships with the United States, the European Union and Australia, as well as the Belt & Road Initiative and currency issues. She graduated from New York University with a master's degree in journalism in 2013. An award-winning journalist, she has worked in Hong Kong, China and New York for the Hong Kong Economic Journal and the Financial Times, E&E News, Forbes, The Economist Intelligence Unit, Nikkei Asia and Coconuts Media.
Supreme Court admissions case could upend environmental justice laws
by Alex Brown
Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain
In recent years, more states have crafted environmental justice policies to help communities of color plagued by polluted air and water, poor health outcomes and limited access to green space.
But now they fear that work could be upended by a pair of pending U.S. Supreme Court cases examining affirmative action admissions policies at universities. If the court strikes down affirmative action, many state lawmakers believe, the ruling could open legal challenges to "race-conscious" laws that seek to help marginalized communities.
"State laws are very explicitly self-aware in acknowledging the past explicit racism that underlies the environmental injustice that we continue to see," said Emily Hammond, an environmental law expert and professor at the George Washington University Law School. "That's heartening, but it's worrisome to see those on a crash course with a different policy agenda to make race neutrality the explicit law of the land."
State lawmakers who have backed such measures say they're carefully watching the Supreme Court cases, and many Democrats worry they'll have to revise a whole slew of state laws to help them survive legal challenges. There's not yet a clear consensus on whether the environmental justice proposals that legislators will consider in their 2023 sessions should be written to exclude race.
"Do I think our environmental justice law hangs in the balance? I do," said New Jersey state Sen. Troy Singleton, a Democrat. "This could have a seismic impact on how public policy is crafted. I would be naive to tell you I'm not concerned about it."
Singleton was among the sponsors of a law, passed in 2020, that requires New Jersey state regulators to consider the environmental and public health effects of facilities proposed in overburdened communities. Among the qualifiers for the "overburdened" label are communities with 40% of residents who are racial minorities or tribal members.
Republicans have largely opposed efforts to address environmental issues through the lens of race, with many characterizing systemic racism as a thing of the past.
"It's just a dangerous trajectory for us to continue to force this conspiracy of racism on all of these decisions," U.S. Rep. Garret Graves, a Louisiana Republican, said last year during a hearing on a federal environmental justice bill, E&E News reported.
Environmental justice advocates note that communities of color face numerous health disparities and outsize exposure to pollution, because of the racist legacy of practices such as housing segregation and the siting of highways, industrial facilities and waste dumps. They've pushed state lawmakers to address those imbalances with investments in air quality monitoring, permitting safeguards, regulatory changes and funding to prepare for the effects of climate change.
Many of those policies, which have passed largely in Democratic-led states in recent years, target such efforts at communities with large minority populations or tribal membership, among other factors such as income and health disparities.
"If you look at which communities are getting dumped on, getting the greatest share of pollution impacts, race is the most potent predictor," said Robert Bullard, a professor at Texas Southern University who has been dubbed the father of the environmental justice movement. "If somehow you don't take race into account, you are not creating a tool that can get at the heart of the problem."
Legal challenge
The Supreme Court is expected to rule next year on a pair of cases questioning admissions policies at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina. Opponents of the policies argue that race-conscious admissions violate the 14th Amendment's guarantee of equal protection under the law.
Supporters of affirmative action counter that the 14th Amendment was crafted to secure equality for victims of discrimination, noting that the same Congress that drafted the amendment passed its own race-conscious legislation, including the Civil Rights Act of 1866.
Earlier this year, the Biden administration released its Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool to steer federal funding to disadvantaged communities. The tool's 21 indicators notably omit race, Grist reported, a calculation that seeks to protect the effort from legal challenges.
Administration officials argued that the factors it included would still send money to communities of color without explicitly naming them. Grist's analysis confirmed that, noting that "many of the criteria that the tool uses—proximity to hazardous facilities, linguistic isolation, and proximity to traffic, among others—are effectively functioning as proxies for race."
A similar approach has been taken in California, which is bound by a 1996 ballot measure that bans affirmative action and considerations of race in public employment and contracting. The state requires that 35% of the revenue raised under its cap-and-trade program for greenhouse gases be reinvested into disadvantaged communities, but does not use race in its methodology to identify those communities.
The ballot measure did not explicitly outlaw race considerations in environmental law, said Alvaro Sanchez, vice president of policy at the Greenlining Institute, an inequality-focused nonprofit, but the "shadow" of a potential lawsuit caused its omission. He said the state's screening tool has largely been able to steer funding to communities of color.
Lawmakers prepare
In other states, Democratic lawmakers said they intend to defend the legality of the environmental justice laws they've passed. But some also plan to begin working on alternative wording if race-conscious language becomes unviable.
"Proxies may be the only approach, because it's dead on arrival otherwise," said Pennsylvania state Rep. Chris Rabb, a Democrat. "It's infuriating, because there should be no dispute that racism is at the heart of this inequality. When you look at where investment and divestment happens, it's overwhelmingly along racial lines."
Pennsylvania Democrats will take a narrow majority in the state House next session, but with Republicans holding the Senate, it will be an uphill battle to pass environmental justice legislation, Rabb said. Still, he pointed to proposals, such as a bill to require environmental impact assessments for facility permits in burdened areas, that may stand to get more consideration in the House.
Washington state lawmakers passed a pair of laws last year that require state agencies to factor environmental justice into their strategic plans and set up an air monitoring network in overburdened communities. The state's new cap-and-invest program for carbon emissions requires that 35% of revenue be directed to projects in overburdened communities, and 10% of projects must have tribal support.
Democratic state Rep. Debra Lekanoff, a member of the Tlingit tribe and a key backer of the state's environmental justice efforts, said the Supreme Court cases could threaten a broad swath of state laws, as well as tribal sovereignty.
"It just affects every policy across the state that we've developed that targets those who are in critical areas," she said. "We think it's scary for the state of Washington. There will be a heavy lift of going through all of these policies and making proxies to ensure that these laws can still move forward, but if this goes a bad way, that is a step we'll have to work on."
In Maryland, Del. David Fraser-Hidalgo, a Democrat who serves on the Environment and Transportation Committee, is working on legislation related to air quality monitoring, electric school buses and equitable access to electric vehicles. The pending court decision could affect how those bills are written.
"The last thing you want to do on the state level is pass a bill and have it declared unconstitutional," he said. "From the drafting perspective, you're going to have to very closely define economically challenged as opposed to losing X number of years going through the process and then starting all over again."
Some lawmakers remain hopeful that their policies will hold up.
"I'd like to think that we're going to be OK, but I can't really say," said Maine state Rep. Vicki Doudera, a Democrat and member of the Environment and Natural Resources Committee. Doudera helped pass a bill earlier this year that requires state regulators to incorporate equity considerations into their decisions, and to define "environmental justice populations" with factors that include race and ethnicity.
In North Carolina, state Rep. Pricey Harrison, a Democrat who serves as vice chair on the House Environment Committee, plans to propose legislation that would require state regulators to analyze whether permits related to solid waste, air emissions, water quality and animal waste would have a disproportionate impact on communities of color and low-income communities. While the bill is unlikely to earn support from the Republicans who control the statehouse, Harrison said the bill still will be written with the legal threats in mind.
"If the Supreme Court undermines the ability to take race considerations into account when engaged in government action, that's a real problem," she said. "We'll make sure to put protections in place in case the court does something."
Looking ahead
As states begin their 2023 legislative sessions, policy trackers again expect environmental justice proposals to be a major area of focus. Some legal experts think lawmakers should craft those bills with an eye toward potential court challenges.
"The United States Supreme Court has steadily, over decades, limited government power to define harms in race-conscious ways and remediate them in race-conscious ways," said Toni Massaro, constitutional law professor at the University of Arizona. "The legally safest path for states today is to craft laws that redress environmental harms without using race or even tribal status per se."
But Bullard, the environmental justice icon, called on states to redress environmental racism explicitly until a court rules otherwise. And he expressed hope that states would carry on the work even if a ruling went against them.
"I applaud those states that have stepped up to really capture what's happening on the ground," he said. "I'm hoping they will be adaptive and creative and try to get at these problems in some way and not just throw it out the window."
I’m sad for Brazil, but I also can’t help but be happy for Croatia. In fact, I want to party with them.
Brazil and Croatia faced off in a 2022 FIFA World Cup quarter-finals matchup Dec. 9. The game was so intense the whole way through that it ultimately went into both extra time and a penalty shootout off a 1-1 tie. After Croatia hit all four of their shots and Brazil missed two of theirs (including a heartbreaking smash of the post), the eastern European nation collected the 1-1 (4-2 PK) win, as well as their tickets to the semi-finals.
Absolutely devastating for Brazil, but what a time to be alive for Croatia — a country with only four million people.
And all four million of them are acting like it, too, by absolutely partying their asses off as I write this (as they should).
