Saturday, November 20, 2021

Progressives Slam GOP's 'Shameful' Attempt to Add Another $25 Billion to Pentagon Budget

"Congress must resist the demands of the military-industrial complex, and instead heed calls to invest taxpayer dollars into true human needs."


This picture taken on December 26, 2011 shows the Pentagon building in Washington, D.C.
 (Photo: Staff/AFP via Getty Images)

KENNY STANCIL
COMMONDREAMS
November 19, 2021

Progressive advocacy groups on Friday denounced Sen. Roger Wicker's last-minute attempt to add another $25 billion on top of the United States' already gargantuan military budget—arguing that the Mississippi Republican's proposal reflects Congress' skewed priorities and underscores the need to redirect Pentagon funding to tackle pressing social and environmental challenges in a humane, rather than violent, fashion.

"It's time to fix our broken budget priorities, and start putting human needs over Pentagon greed."

Filed earlier this week as an amendment to the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which the U.S. Senate is expected to consider in the coming days, Wicker's Shipyard Act of 2021 proposes allocating an additional $25 billion for naval shipyard restoration—a move that would cause the cost of the annual bill to surpass $800 billion.

President Joe Biden's original topline military spending request for fiscal year 2022 was $753 billion​​​​—already up from the $740.5 billion approved for the previous fiscal year under the Trump administration. After the House Armed Services Committee in September approved a Republican-sponsored amendment to tack on an additional $25 billion, House lawmakers from both major parties voted 316-113 to authorize a $778 billion military budget.

As Andrew Lautz, director of federal policy at the National Taxpayers Union, pointed out Friday in a statement, Congress "already increased the defense topline by $25 billion earlier this year, going against the request of top civilian officials at the Department of Defense. They could have chosen to direct that $25 billion to naval shipyards, and they did not."

"Lawmakers shouldn't add yet another $25 billion to the defense budget during NDAA debate," he added. "The Shipyard Act in particular is irresponsible, and would give the Navy a huge pot of money with little accountability and oversight of how the money is spent."

Savannah Wooten, the #PeopleOverPentagon campaign coordinator at Public Citizen, said that "attempting to stuff an additional $50 billion, more funding than the agency itself requested, into a Pentagon budget that is already three-quarters of a trillion dollars is shameful, unjustifiable, and embarrassing."

"Congress must resist the demands of the military-industrial complex," said Wooten, "and instead heed calls to invest taxpayer dollars into true human needs like supporting global Covid-19 vaccine production, expanding healthcare access, and funding climate justice initiatives."

U.S. troops recently withdrew from Afghanistan, but "the Senate is preparing to spend over three-quarters of a trillion dollars fueling its addiction to war-making," noted Erica Fein, senior Washington director at Win Without War, even "as the pandemic rages... the rift between rich and poor widens... [and] the existential threat of the climate crisis looms."

"Sen. Wicker's proposal to add $25 billion on top of this already obscene budget may please arms industry lobbyists, but it leaves everyday people out in the cold," said Fein.

Echoing Sen. Bernie Sanders' (I-Vt.) recent critiques of the bipartisan penchant for greenlighting massive levels of military spending while simultaneously opposing relatively modest efforts to improve the lives of working people, she stressed that "it's time to fix our broken budget priorities, and start putting human needs over Pentagon greed."

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'We Need to Get Our Priorities Right': Bernie Sanders a 'No' on $778 Billion Pentagon Budget Vote
Brett Wilkins

Alluding to the Build Back Better Act—which passed the House on Friday—Lindsay Koshgarian of the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) said that "we've had enough of ever-increasing military budgets from lawmakers who won't support basics like infrastructure, early childhood education, and dental care for our elders."

"How can we even consider allocating a sum of this magnitude to the Pentagon when our country is facing severe challenges around climate change, systemic racial oppression, growing economic inequality, and the ongoing pandemic?"

"The Wicker amendment is a shameful grab for another $25 billion, on top of the $37 billion that the [Biden] administration and Congress have already added to the military budget," said Koshgarian. "But there's another option. Senator Sanders' proposed modest cuts would begin to impose some limits on Pentagon spending for the first time in years."

Sanders, who intends to vote against the NDAA, has introduced an amendment to reduce the proposed military budget by $25 billion, down to the $753 billion first offered by the White House.

In September, House Republicans—as well as Democrats who receive significant campaign contributions from the weapons industry—teamed up to reject similar amendments to reduce Pentagon funding.

Carley Towne, national co-director of CodePink, pointed out that U.S. senators "are considering approving a whopping $800 billion" in military spending just a week after COP26, where "climate and peace activists gathered in Glasgow to demand that global leaders take bold climate action," including by accounting for the military greenhouse gas emissions that are currently excluded from decarbonization pledges.

"Instead of taking the ongoing climate emergency seriously, the U.S. is using the threat of climate change to legitimize spending even more on the Pentagon, which has the largest carbon and greenhouse gas footprint of any organization in the world," said Towne. "To add fuel to this dangerous fire, this $60+ billion increase in military spending will greatly escalate the United States' hybrid war on China, and in doing so, sabotage efforts for mutual cooperation with China on existential crises like nuclear proliferation and climate change mitigation."

Johnny Zokovitch, executive director of Pax Christi USA, said that "as the Senate deliberates on the NDAA, there is urgent need to dramatically cut the bloated Pentagon budget. Our nation's priorities, as reflected in the federal budget, are seriously misplaced."

Citing a recent IPS report, which showed that the U.S. has squandered more than $21 trillion on militarization since 9/11, Jacobin's Luke Savage argued last month that the nation's military spending—now even higher than it was at the height of the Cold War—is not only wasteful but also fundamentally anti-democratic.

The U.S. spends more on its military than the next 10 countries combined, and annual spending at the Pentagon—which has never passed an audit—accounts for more than half of the federal discretionary budget. According to a 2020 Data for Progress survey, a majority of voters want to reallocate 10% of the military budget to meet human needs.

Zokovitch added that "we need to unmask the role of private military contractors, with large teams of lobbyists, who benefit from the scandalous amount of our nation's treasury spent on weapons systems."

In September, researchers at Brown University's Costs of War project estimated that as much as half of the $14 trillion spent by the Pentagon alone since its 2001 invasion of Afghanistan has gone to private military contractors. Koshgarian and her IPS colleagues, as well as Stephen Semler of the Security Policy Reform Institute, meanwhile, have said that corporations gobbled up more than half.

"How can we even consider allocating a sum of this magnitude to the Pentagon when our country is facing severe challenges around climate change, systemic racial oppression, growing economic inequality, and the ongoing pandemic?" Sister Karen Donahue of the Sisters of Mercy of the Americas Justice Team asked Friday. "We know that a significant portion of this money will end up in the coffers of arms manufacturers and dealers where it will contribute nothing to the security of our country or world peace."

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.




How Many Dead Kids Before We Admit US "National Security" Is a Lie?

How many people have to die by our hands—how big do the piles of women's and children's corpses have to get—before mass murder (war) begins looming as wrong?



Smoke and fire billow after shelling on the Islamic State group's last holdout of Baghouz, in the eastern Syrian Deir Ezzor province on March 3, 2019.
 (Photo: Delil Souleiman/AFP via Getty Images)

ROBERT C. KOEHLER
November 19, 2021

A new defense budget looms. Maybe we're running out of wars to fight, but no matter. The proposed figure before Congress is bigger than ever: $778 billion.

How fascinating—and how irrelevant—that the vote is scheduled just a few days after the New York Times published its investigation of a U.S. airstrike in Baghuz, Syria two and a half years ago, which the Defense Department had been desperately trying to cover up.

When people are dehumanized as "the enemy," killing them, especially if powerful weapons are under your control, becomes nothing more than an abstraction.

America, America . . . shall we celebrate our country, boys and girls? Here's a passage from the story: "Civilian observers who came to the area of the strike the next day found piles of dead women and children."

One of the observers said: "There was a lot of freshly bulldozed earth and the stink of bodies underneath, a lot of bodies."

The massacre took place on March 18, 2019. The U.S. military was searching for ISIS members, who apparently were "cornered in a dirt field" just outside Baghuz. A military drone circled overhead, but its camera revealed only "a large crowd of women and children huddled against a river bank."

Nonetheless, to the amazement of the military personnel who were monitoring the drone, they saw a U.S. fighter jet zoom in and pummel the field with a 500-pound bomb. Another jet followed, dropping two 2,000-pound bombs on the women and children. The instant death toll was about 80 people.

Huh? What happened?


What happened was this: When people are dehumanized as "the enemy," killing them, especially if powerful weapons are under your control, becomes nothing more than an abstraction. This is the nature of war! Even those who aren't actually involved in the conflict—you know, civilians—quickly and easily become collateral damage: They were in the way. We're waging a war against evil. Killing gets easier and easier and easier, and hell remains ensconced on Planet Earth . . . thanks in large part to us, the most powerful nation on Earth, the most financially committed to a future of endless war.

Specifically, as the Times story reported: ". . . the bombing had been called in by a classified American special operations unit, Task Force 9, which was in charge of ground operations in Syria. The task force operated in such secrecy that at times it did not inform even its own military partners of its actions."

In other words, the USA and its allies are waging multiple wars in the Middle East. One of them is public and respectable: No war crimes permitted! But the other one is free of any sort of legal bureaucracy and does what it wants, claiming, whenever necessary, that it took the action it did because troops were in imminent danger. Under such circumstances, legal approval of a military strike isn't necessary. Just do it, and if there's fallout later, hide (i.e., classify) the details, minimize (lie about) the results and, if necessary, have an official spokesman express a meaningless and absolutely consequence-free token of regret and wait for everyone (except the families of the dead) to forget about it and move on, e.g.:

"We abhor the loss of innocent life and take all possible measures to prevent them," the chief spokesman for the U.S. Central Command said in a statement, according to the Times. "In this case, we self-reported and investigated the strike according to our own evidence and take full responsibility for the unintended loss of life."

Any questions?

The only questions I have feel too big, that is to say, too naïve, to ask, but let me ask them anyway, directed in particular at those members of Congress who shrug and give the military-industrialists whatever they ask for, year after year:

How many people have to die by our hands—how big do the piles of women's and children's corpses have to get—before mass murder (war) begins looming as wrong? Are you too much of a coward to demand a complete rethinking of the meaning of national defense? Are you too stupid to realize that Planet Earth is a single planet, and that security for one can only mean security for all? Are you incapable of seeing that dehumanizing people is wrong—and counterproductive—and must not be the basis of national security? As "the leader of the free world," can we not take the lead in evolving beyond war, borders and national dominance? Is the soul of the nation dead?

War dehumanizes everyone it touches, as Paul Tritschler put it, writing at Open Democracy:

"Dehumanization—the process of debasing one's perceived enemy—is not the preserve of evil people: humiliation, alienation, non-recognition, exclusion, the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, and even campaigns of genocide, all fall well within the realm of possibility for the majority of human beings. There are many examples since WW2 of dehumanization at the extreme: Vietnam, Indonesia, Rwanda, Sudan, Iraq, Palestine, Libya, Somalia, Afghanistan and Syria, where populations have also been described as less than human, and where civilians have been killed as a result of so-called 'precision bombing.'. . ."

At best, change comes slowly. At worst, it doesn't come at all—or rather, it comes on its own terms, as the consequence of ignorant behavior. We are at the brink of God knows what. Perhaps oblivion. All of us, you might say, are huddled in the dirt field outside Baghuz.

One way to meet this future is with these words of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: "Some day, after mastering the wind, the waves, the tides, and gravity, we will harness for God the energies of Love, and then for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire."

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His book, "Courage Grows Strong at the Wound" (2016). Contact him or visit his website at commonwonders.com


It Will Take Much More Than Electric Cars to Fix the Climate Crisis

Resolving the climate crisis isn't just about shifting from one technology to another; it's about shifting our ways of thinking and being. It’s a point that often gets missed in conversations about major greenhouse gas emission sources.


While electric vehicle sales are increasing rapidly, they're still far outnumbered by gasoline and diesel car sales. (Photo: joel-t/iStock)

DAVID SUZUKI
November 19, 2021
 by David Suzuki Foundation

That was illustrated at the recent 26th Conference of the Parties (COP26) climate summit, in Glasgow, where governments, automakers and airlines worked on deals to cut global transport emissions. Because transportation is responsible for one-fifth to one-quarter of global emissions, that seems like a good step.

But there are problems.

Shifting away from consumerism and supporting local businesses and production would go as far or farther in reducing shipping emissions, although cleaner ways to fuel ships are needed.

With aviation and shipping, the main idea is to switch from polluting fossil fuels to "biofuels." But with expected increases in both sectors, that could mean destroying more natural areas or displacing food-growing lands with crops for fuel production.

And as George Monbiot points out, "Flying accounts for most of the greenhouse gas emissions of the super-rich, which is why the wealthiest 1% generate roughly half the world's aviation emissions. If everyone lived as they do, aviation would be the biggest of all the causes of climate breakdown." Finding better fuels is important, but cutting back on flying—which would mostly affect the affluent—is just as critical. But, of course, that doesn't fit with the current growth-and-profit economic paradigm.

As for shipping, Reuters notes around 90 per cent of traded goods travel by sea, and shipping accounts for about three per cent of global emissions. Our current global economic system encourages corporations to go where resources and labour are cheap and standards are often low to maximize profits. Shifting away from consumerism and supporting local businesses and production would go as far or farther in reducing shipping emissions, although cleaner ways to fuel ships are needed.

With the automobile industry, it's all about electric vehicles. And the focus is on direct emissions rather than the many other environmental impacts, from production to massive infrastructure requirements. Few people even question car culture—why we've decided so many people should each have large machines to transport them in isolation. And why they should be provided with the massive infrastructure to make it possible, from roads and parking to malls and drive-throughs.

This idea of constant economic growth—with the excessive consumption and waste required to fuel it—has become so ingrained that we resort to incremental measures in the midst of a crisis. We just can't imagine different ways of seeing, and so we try to shoehorn solutions into an outdated system that wasn't designed to be sustainable.

As for the COP26 automakers' pledge—which would require all cars and vans sold to be zero-emission by 2040—as inadequate as it is, not everyone is on board.

Again, electric vehicles are important. They pollute far less than internal combustion engine vehicles and can last longer. But what we should really focus on is reducing private automobile use, through good public transit, active transport like cycling and walking, increasingly popular modes like e-bikes and scooters, better urban planning and design, and new technologies like self-driving vehicles that can facilitate car sharing and efficient ride-hailing services. All this would dramatically reduce congestion and pollution, and would even make it possible to convert massive amounts of road and parking to green space.

And while electric vehicle sales are increasing rapidly, they're still far outnumbered by gasoline and diesel car sales. As for the COP26 automakers' pledge—which would require all cars and vans sold to be zero-emission by 2040—as inadequate as it is, not everyone is on board. Even though Volkswagen and Toyota are major electric and hybrid vehicle manufacturers, they didn't back the commitment. The U.S., China and Germany also refused to support the pledge.

According to Reuters, "The wider lesson is that private players can't be relied on to stick their necks out if public action is absent." This shows how essential it is for society to get involved. It's mainly up to governments, business, industry and international agencies to resolve the climate crisis, but without massive public pressure, they'll continue down the status quo road until it's too late to keep the planet from heating to catastrophic levels.

Climate conferences such as COP are important, and perhaps they're more than just "blah, blah, blah," but until we replace the outdated human-invented systems that got us into this mess, we'll only be downshifting rather than putting on the brakes. That's not good enough.


© 2019 David Suzuki Foundation
David Suzuki , an award-winning geneticist and broadcaster, co-founded the David Suzuki Foundation in 1990. He was a faculty member at the University of British Columbia, and is currently professor emeritus. Suzuki is widely recognized as a world leader in sustainable ecology and has received numerous awards for his work, including a UNESCO prize for science and a United Nations Environment Program medal.

IAN HANINGTON is a senior editor at the David Suzuki Foundation.
As the World Burns, Glasgow's COP26 Deemed a Failure

"We should call it the 'Glasgow suicide pact' for the poorest in the world."



Flames are visible from a flaring pit near a well in the Bakken Oil Field. 
(Photo: Orjan F. Ellingvag/Corbis via Getty Images)



AMY GOODMAN,  DENIS MOYNIHAN

 by Democracy Now!


"Wildly here without control,
Nature reigns and rules the whole…"

Scotland's most famous poet, Robert Burns, wrote those lines in 1787. If only the delegates to COP26, the United Nations climate summit that wrapped up last Saturday in Glasgow, had heeded his words. The negotiations ended with a document dubbed the "Glasgow Climate Pact" which many climate activists called a failure. "We should call it the 'Glasgow suicide pact' for the poorest in the world," Asad Rehman of the COP26 Coaltion said on the Democracy Now! news hour. "It does not keep us below the 1.5 degree [Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit] guard rail. In fact, it heads us closer to 3 degrees [C, or 5.4 degrees F]…They're ramming through so many loopholes that it makes a mockery of these climate negotiations."

Poor, developing nations haven't contributed significantly to the overall climate crisis, but are suffering disproportionately.

One draft of the climate pact included an historic first, calling for "the phasing out of coal and subsidies for fossil fuels." Polluting nations and armies of fossil fuel industry lobbyists managed to dilute that down to "the phase-out of unabated coal power and of inefficient subsidies for fossil fuels." Thus, coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, can still be burned with the promise that the resulting pollution will be "abated" with carbon capture and storage, an unproven technology. And the same fossil fuel corporations that have profited for so long while sowing disinformation about the climate will continue to enjoy lavish subsidies at taxpayer expense.

"This summit was betrayal," Mitzi Jonelle Tan, a climate justice activist from the Philippines, said on Democracy Now! "It is painful for me, knowing that the Philippines is such a vulnerable country for the climate crisis and that we know that we are hit year after year, month after month, with climate impacts." The Philippines, described as the most storm-vulnerable nation on earth, has been hard hit by a succession of especially destructive, climate change-fueled typhoons over the past decade. "All countries," she added, "should be phasing out the fossil fuel industry. That doesn't just stop at coal, but also oil and gas, which the U.S. and the U.K. conveniently took out of the text."

Indigenous land defenders from the Amazon were also in Glasgow for COP26. The world's largest rainforest is called "the lungs of the planet" for the vital role it plays in absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. "We must first change our relationship to nature, change the way we think about the world, and really put at the center of our thinking our connection to life and our commitment to future generations," Domingo Peas, an Achuar indigenous leader from the Ecuadorian Amazon, said on Democracy Now! "There are 30 indigenous nations and 30 million hectares of intact forest that are at stake. We must protect this…The forest is calling on us."

The United States and European nations built their enormous wealth by burning coal with abandon for over a century and a half, a cheap but dirty way to achieve growth. The U.S. remains the single largest historical emitter of greenhouse gases, with close to twice the total that China has emitted, based on 2017 data. China is now by far the largest emitter globally.

In recent years, the U.S., the U.K., and most European Union nations have been able to decrease their reliance on coal, shifting to oil, fracked gas, and renewable sources.

Poor, developing nations haven't contributed significantly to the overall climate crisis, but are suffering disproportionately. To recover from disasters, to adapt to the changing climate, and to build their economies responsibly toward a zero carbon future, these countries need money. COP26 was supposed to deliver on long-promised financing for these needs, but failed to do so.

At COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009, the U.S. and other developed countries pledged $100 billion per year to developing and climate-vulnerable nations from 2020 through 2025. Only a fraction of those funds have materialized, much of it as loans, not as climate aid. Meanwhile, a consortium of African nations recently estimated that the true cost for them to effectively respond to climate change would be closer to $1.3 trillion per year. Polluters should pay, and the United States should lead the way.

Robert Burns died in 1796, when the age of coal was in its infancy. The current National Poet of Scotland is Kathleen Jamie. Inspired by the River Clyde that flows through Glasgow, this week she penned "What the Clyde said, after COP26," which ends,


"sure, I'm a river,
but I can take a side.
From this day, I'd rather keep afloat,
like wee folded paper boats,
the hopes of the young folk
chanting at my bank,
fear in their spring-bright eyes
so hear this: fail them, and I will rise."



The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Amy Goodman is the host and executive producer of Democracy Now!, a national, daily, independent, award-winning news program airing on over 1,400 public television and radio stations worldwide.

Denis Moynihan is a writer and radio producer who writes a weekly column with Democracy Now's Amy Goodman.

The political economy of digital technologies

in Koch, G. (2017), Digitisation. Routledge.
534 Views25 Pages
The political economy of digital technologies is a relatively young field of research which has rapidly grown over the last two decades. I am not aware of an attempt to outline this field in a more systematic way. In fact, it might be debatable whether such an attempt makes much sense in view of the rapid growth of this field and its dynamic transformations and expansions. For this reason, the following reflections are an attempt to provide a provisional appraisal of this field. What is also debatable is the newness of this field of research. While I am claiming that the political economy of digital technologies (PEDT) is an emerging field, it does not come out of nowhere. It has a predecessor, it is emerging from another field of research, the political economy of media and communication (PEMC). I propose two things: Firstly, that PEDT has its roots in PEMC, and that it has developed from PEMC. Secondly, that PEDT has developed with a number of significant transformations and expansions. These expansions from PEMC are so profound that it is indeed legitimate to conceptualise PEDT as a new field of study, which focuses on different themes and questions, which uses and produces different theoretical concepts, and which finally embarks on a different understanding of what it means to create scholarly work.


Rio Tinto now the sole owner of Diavik diamond mine

Cecilia Jamasmie | November 18, 2021

Aerial view of Diavik diamond mine. (Image courtesy of Dominion Diamond.)

Rio Tinto (ASX, LON, NYSE: RIO) became on Thursday the sole owner of the iconic Diavik diamond mine in Canada’s Northwest Territories after buying the 40% share held by Dominion Diamond Mines, despite previously saying it had no plans to take full control of the aging Arctic mine.


The deal gives Rio Tinto all remaining Diavik assets held by Dominion, including unsold production and cash collateral held as security for the mine’s future closure costs. In return, the world’s second largest miner has released Dominion and its lenders from all outstanding liabilities and obligations to fund the operations or closure of the joint venture.


The transaction comes after a 19-month process triggered in April 2020 by Dominion Diamond Mines filing for insolvency protection under the Canadian Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act.

Dominion, which was purchased by The Washington Companies in 2017 for $1.2 billion, was once the world’s fourth largest diamond producer. Its financial troubles — which played out in court over several months last year — ultimately led it to sell in December 2020 its other Canadian mine, Ekati.

“Diavik will now move forward with certainty to continue supplying customers with high quality, responsibly sourced Canadian diamonds,” Rio Tinto Minerals boss Sinead Kaufman said in the statement.

Diavik, which faces closure by 2025 and will cost hundreds of millions of dollars to clean up, has been in production since 2003 and is Canada’s largest diamond mine. It yielded 6.2 million carats of rough diamonds in 2020.
Sector “fully recovered”

The diamond market came to a standstill at the height of the covid-19 pandemic, increasing worries that oversupply could hurt the sector for years. But surging purchases by intermediaries who cut, polish and trade stones has all but wiped-out miners’ stockpiles, even as Alrosa (MCX: ALRS) — the world’s top diamond miner by output — and its closest competitor, Anglo American’s De Beers, have hiked prices.

Alrosa said in October it believed the industry had “fully recovered” from the effects of the the global pandemic, with sales of both roughs and diamond jewellery up this year about 23% compared to 2020 levels.

Rio Tinto becomes sole owner of Diavik Diamond Mine

Diavik scheduled to shut down in 2025

The Diavik Diamond Mine on the edge of N.W.T.'s Lac de Gras. Rio Tinto is now the sole owner of the mine, which is scheduled to shut down in 2025. (Rio Tinto)

Rio Tinto is now the sole owner of one of Canada's biggest diamond mines.

The company announced Thursday it has completed a transaction to acquire Dominion Diamond Mine's 40 per cent share of Diavik Diamond Mine, located about 300 kilometres northeast of Yellowknife.

The transaction was approved by the Court of Queen's Bench of Alberta on Tuesday.

In a news release, Rio Tinto said it acquired all remaining Diavik assets held by Dominion, including unsold Diavik production and cash collateral held as security for Diavik's future closure costs. 

"In return, Rio Tinto has released Dominion and its lenders from all outstanding liabilities and obligations to fund the operations or closure of the joint venture," it read.

The transaction comes after Rio Tinto previously indicated it was not interested in any part of Dominion Diamond Mines.

Dominion Diamond Mines filed for insolvency protection in April 2020

The two companies then became entangled in a lawsuit over the mine's operating costs.

A spokesperson from Rio Tinto told CBC News in an email that Diavik "continues to operate as normal."

NWT & Nunavut Chamber of Mines executive director Tom Hoefer says the timing of the transaction is good for Rio Tinto because the diamond market is rebounding again after a "big COVID hit last year."

"This gives [Rio Tinto] 100 per cent control of the sale of the stones and of course, they're 100 per cent responsible for cleaning up the mine site which is a work in progress as we speak," he said.

The mine is scheduled to close in 2025.

In the release, Rio Tinto's chief executive of minerals Sinead Kaufman was quoted as saying Diavik will "now move forward with certainty" while "making a significant contribution to the Northwest Territories."

The development comes a week before Diavik president and chief operating officer Richard Storrie is scheduled to deliver an update on the Diavik Mine at a virtual geoscience forum organised by the NWT & Nunavut Chamber of Mines, the government of the Northwest Territories and the Canadian Northern Economic Development Agency.  

Corrections

  • A previous version of this story said Rio Tinto's chief executive Sinead Kaufman is scheduled to deliver an update on Diavik mine at a geoscience forum next week. In fact, Diavik president and chief operating officer Richard Storrie is scheduled to deliver the update.
    Nov 18, 2021 4:11 PM CT

 Vacuum Cleaner For Space Needed

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As we fire more and more wonderful tech into orbit around the Earth, the need grows for increased “space traffic control” and simple garbage collection tech to cope with decay and inevitable obsolescence.

The problem of space debris has been highlighted this week by Russia blowing apart one of its own satellites in a test of an anti-satellite missile. The US protested that it generated more than 1,500 pieces of “trackable orbital debris and will likely generate hundreds of thousands of pieces of smaller orbital debris”, threatening people working at the International Space Station and “other human space flight activities”.

There is no tech deployed to date that can “Hoover” up such potentially deadly fragments. Japan’s Astroscale is the closest we have to a space clean-up company. Its ELSA-d prototype successfully demonstrated in August how it could magnetically capture redundant satellites, with the aim of towing them away to disintegrate in the Earth’s atmosphere as they descend. UK satellite company OneWeb is already fitting its latest satellites with compatible magnetic docking plates.

Katrina Manson and Max Seddon report the debris cloud created by Russia in low earth orbit threatens to affect hundreds of commercial satellites, including from SpaceX and the US imaging company Planet, while refocusing rising tensions between Russia and the US on the escalating weaponisation of space.

“They basically set off a bomb in the middle of the new space race,” said Daniel Ceperley, chief executive and co-founder of Leo Labs, which uses radar to track objects in space to prevent collisions.

The Californian company recently received a follow-on investment from Seraphim Space Investment Trust, the world’s first listed SpaceTech fund, which reported September quarter results today after listing in London in July.

Seraphim said it had also invested in antenna, earth observation and navigation companies. “The SpaceTech investment market remains buoyant, with record levels of private investment,” said CEO Mark Boggett. Its research shows $6.4bn was invested in SpaceTech in the first half of this year and nearly 600 satellites were launched in the second quarter. Anyone with good ideas on how to enable a circular economy for the thousands of objects circling the earth ought to be getting some of that money as well.

When debris disaster strikes

When debris disaster strikes
The history of space debris creation. Credit: ESA / UNOOSA

In 2021 so far, some 2467 new objects large enough to be tracked have been added to world catalogs of orbital objects, out of which 1493 are new satellites and the rest are debris. While new objects are added, others are dragged down to Earth by the atmosphere where they safely burn up, resulting in a net increase of at least 1387 trackable objects between 2020 and 2021.

In addition, an estimated 1500 new objects—an increase of about 5% with respect to the total population—were added just this week, meaning the risk to missions must be reassessed.

Every now and then, an event occurs in Earth orbit that generates large quantities of new . Accidental explosions caused by leftover fuel onboard satellites and rockets have created the greatest number of  objects, but second in line are deliberate breakup events.

Some 36,000 objects larger than a tennis ball are orbiting Earth, and only 13% of these are actively controlled. The rest comprise  debris, the direct result of 'fragmentation events' of which roughly 630 are known to have occurred to date.

Based on observations of larger objects together with statistical models (for those objects too small to be observed with telescopes on Earth), ESA estimates there are in orbit today:

  • 36,500 objects greater than 10 cm in size
  • 1,000,000 objects from 1 cm to 10 cm
  • 330 million objects from 1 mm to 1 cm

After each new fragmentation event, ESA's Space Debris Office begins its analysis. What happened? How will this shape the debris environment, now and in the future? What has been the change in collision risk to active satellites and spacecraft in orbit? Which altitudes and orbits are the most affected?

When debris disaster strikes
Evolution of space debris. Credit: European Space Agency

New objects tracked

In 2021 so far, some 2,467 new objects large enough to be tracked have been added to world catalogs of orbital objects, out of which 1,493 are  and the rest are debris. While new objects are added, others are dragged down to Earth by the atmosphere where they safely burn up, resulting in a net increase of at least 1387 trackable objects between 2020 and 2021.

In addition, an estimated 1500 new objects—an increase of about 5% with respect to the total population—were added just this week.


Because debris objects travel at high velocities, a collision with a fragment as small as just 1 cm in diameter can generate the same amount of destructive energy as a small car crashing at 40 km/h.

While the smallest, sub-millimeter-sized debris particles may only degrade the functioning of a satellite upon impact, 'larger' pieces—in the centimeter range—can cause complete destruction.

Earth's atmosphere can cause orbital objects to re-enter over time and burn up. The higher the orbital altitude, the thinner the atmosphere, and so the longer objects will naturally stay in space. In altitudes above 600 km, the natural 'residence time' in space for such objects is typically more than 25 years.

ESA's Earth Observation missions, which orbit in this region, have each had to perform two 'collision avoidance maneuvers' on average per year, to dodge oncoming debris.

When debris disaster strikes
Falling to Earth takes a long time. Credit: ESA / UNOOSA

Reassessing risk

After fragmentation events, such as one that happened this week, the risk to missions must be reassessed.

"This major fragmentation event will not only more than double the long-term collision avoidance needs for missions in orbits with similar altitudes, but will furthermore significantly increase the probability of potentially mission-terminating collisions at lower altitudes," says Holger Krag, Head of ESA's Space Safety Programme.

International cooperation

Space debris are constantly monitored by the US space surveillance network, and ESA's space debris experts use this and other monitoring data to improve and update models to better understand the evolving debris environment.

By performing daily collision risk analyses and creating models that predict the future position and density of debris objects at various altitudes, the team can advise satellite operators on how best to keep their missions safe.

When debris disaster strikes
An impressive shot from ESA's latest space debris movie: Time to Act. The launch of Sputnik, humankind’s first satellite, in 1957 marked the dawn of a new era for the people of the 'Pale Blue Dot'. Decades later, our planet is now surrounded by spacecraft carrying out extraordinary work. But they are up against a huge problem, they share space with millions of fragments of fast-moving and dangerous space debris. Credit: ESA

Keeping space highways safe

The United Nations has set out guidelines to reduce the growing amount of space debris in orbit. Experts from ESA's Space Debris Office have contributed to these guidelines and routinely advise on how to implement them for ESA missions.

Furthermore, as part of the Agency's space safety and security activities, ESA is working to keep Earth's commercially and scientifically vital orbital environment as debris-free as possible and to pioneer an eco-friendly approach to space activities.

ESA is the first space agency to adopt the ambitious target of inverting Europe's contribution to space debris by 2030, directly tackling the issue of space debris by advancing the technology needed to maintain a clean space environment. ESA has initiated the first active debris-removal mission to be launched in 2025 to demonstrate the ability to remove debris from an orbit at 700 km.

But as the 'New Space' era beckons, and large constellations comprising thousands of satellites start to be launched, much more needs to be done to ensure Earth's space environment is used sustainably for future generations.

In 2025, the first active debris removal mission, ClearSpace-1, will rendezvous, capture and take down for reentry the upper part of a Vespa (Vega Secondary Payload Adapter) from Europe's Vega launcher. This was left in an approximately 800 km by 660 km altitude gradual disposal orbit, complying with space debris mitigation regulations, following the second Vega flight in 2013. ClearSpace-1 will use ESA-developed robotic arm technology to capture the Vespa, then perform a controlled atmospheric reentry. Credit: ClearSpace SA

ESA accelerates the protection of our space investment

The current situation calls for new technology that will allow regulators to consider a systematic implementation of zero-debris policies. A new European commercial capability needs to be forged to provide innovative in-orbit services, such as refueling, refurbishing and extending the life of existing missions. This will lead to a 'circular economy' in space.

To ensure safe access to space, high-precision position information on all orbital objects must become available, and automated coordination between spacecraft operators must be implemented. Novel technology will be required for these ambitious steps, which are proposed as part of the new 'Protect' Accelerator, one of three currently being defined to help shape Europe's future in space.

Space technology, and the multitude of applications that flow from it, is vital to Europe's economy. Ensuring the safety of our space infrastructure and investments, and therefore Europe's non-dependent use of space, is vital for safeguarding businesses, economies and ultimately our way of life.Video: How to clear Earth's orbit of space debris

Provided by European Space Agency