The word charade has several meanings, and including an act or event that is clearly false (Cambridge Dictionary), something done just for show (Vocabulary.com), or a situation in which people pretend that something is true when it clearly is not (Oxford Leaner’s Dictionary).
The charade I refer to is President Biden’s $7.5 billion dollar investment to install 500,000 electric charging stations along America’s highways by 2030. A reliable and convenient public EV charging infrastructure is critical to achieve the President’s goal of meeting the recent EPA CO2 emission regulations that require nearly 72% of U.S. new light vehicle sales to be fully electric or plug-in hybrid by 2032. Without diving deeper into the announcement, one would likely assume that $7.5 billion is sufficient to construct the 500,000 charging stations, one every 50 miles along the nation’s highways.
To identify the charade, one must first, look at the math: 500,000 charging stations, each with a minimum of four chargers, accomplished with an investment of $7.5 billion dollars. But that is only $15,000 per charging station, installed. A single high capacity charger can cost $100,000 or more, and most stations have multiple chargers. We are now in the second year of the program and only seven stations have been opened so far. At this rate, it will require thousands of years to build all 500,000 charging stations, assuming there are sufficient funds to do so.
Global consulting firm McKinsey and Company estimates that the U.S. will need 28 million charging ports by 2030. There are just two million charging ports today. To meet the goal, about 12,000 new public and private charging ports will need to be added every single day to reach the goal by 2030.
It is true that significantly more government funded charging stations are in the works and will be opened. The stations completed so far cost significantly more than what has been promised. With retailers contributing land to the projects opened so far, the cost of each station has averaged one-million dollars, with the government participation of 80% of the cost. Eight-hundred-thousand dollars for each station is significantly more than the 15,000 committed by the administration. At this rate, the 500,000 charging stations will cost the government $400 billion, not the $7.5 billion the President has promised.
If the administration is so wrong with this program, one must consider how many government programs designed to bring electric vehicles to the masses are similarly defective.
Europe’s leading green energy producer, Statkraft, is drastically scaling back its plans for new wind and solar power plants – due to falling electricity prices and rising costs, so reports Germany’s online Blackout News, a leading site for independent German energy news.
According to company CEO, Birgitte Vartdal, market conditions have become more difficult as the company’s ambitious targets for wind energy and solar power are now being called into question.
The new Statkraft target is two to two and a half GW instead of an originally planned 4 gigawatts annually.
“In the offshore wind energy sector, the Group is now planning a total output of six to eight GW. The original target was ten GW,” Blackout News adds.
The scaleback follows other European countries’ plans to reduce expansion, including Danish energy company Orsted, which “has lowered its targets by more than ten GW” and has also “canceled two offshore wind projects in the USA and reported impairments amounting to 28.4 billion Danish kroner (approx. 3.8 billion euros).”
Portugal’s largest energy supplier, Energias de Portugal (EDP), has also reduced its investment plans – due to the “deterioration in market conditions.” Moreover, French energy supplier Engie earlier had postponed developing hydrogen projects.
Leading officials blame projects having become “much more challenging” and offering “no relative returns.”
As a result, solar and wind equipment manufacturers have seen their values plummeting and ESG equity funds have “recently suffered outflows of 38 billion dollars,” reports Blackout News.
Blackout News is operated by an independent and non-partisan small group of engineers with experience in energy management.
You may have heard about the new “animal-free dairy milk” called Bored Cow. It’s being billed as a more animal and environmentally friendly option to traditional milk that comes from a ruminant’s udders. It all sounds great until you dig a bit deeper to learn that it is produced using synthetic biology (synbio), using genetically engineered (GE) yeast that is then put into a so-called ‘precision fermentation’ system. While the whey protein in it is the same as that found in cow’s milk, that’s only a small part of the overall story. Emerging data from some scientists, like John Fagan from the Health Research Institute(HRI), says the fermentation isn’t as precise as claimed, and there’s a lot of other compounds in the milk, some of which have never been recorded by science before. That might mean that drinking Bored Cow ‘milk’ on a daily basis could have unknown and potentially dangerous human health implications. This might just be one product, but it matters because powerful special interests are working to make synbio the tech platform of our food system moving forward—where farms are replaced with fermentation tanks—in the name of protecting the environment.
What’s happening here is an effort to get consumers to believe they can enjoy all the flavor, mouth feel, and nutrition of real cow’s milk…without the involvement of any cows (hence the “Bored Cow” name). Bored Cow is made with whey protein produced through a process called “precision fermentation,” a form of synbio. This involves taking a gene for whey protein and inserting it into a GE yeast. The yeast is put into fermentation tanks with other nutrients to help it grow. At the end the GE yeast is supposed to be filtered out, leaving only the milk protein. Bored Cow takes this protein and adds vitamins, minerals, and other ingredients to mimic the taste, consistency, and nutritional content of real cow’s milk.
Far from ‘bioequivalent’
The marketing hype behind Bored Cow starts falling apart when you learn that it’s not even close to being equivalent to real milk from pasture. HRI’s independent testing found 92 unknown compounds in this synbio milk. Fagan, HRI’s chief scientist, said these compounds are “completely novel to our food…They are nutritional dark matter.”
The FDA must be on top of this, right? Wrong. Bored Cow has not undergone safety testing at the FDA. Perfect Day, the manufacturer of the synbio whey protein, determined it was “generally recognized as safe” (GRAS) and voluntarily notified the FDA of this determination; in response the FDA said it had no questions. Given how rife the GRAS process is with conflicts of interest, this is akin to taking the company’s word for it that its novel synbio whey protein is safe.
Nor is it very likely that Bored Cow is nutritionally equivalent to real milk. Just as meat is more than just protein, milk is far more than a simple combination of whey and various vitamins and minerals. Milkfat contains 400 different fatty acids. Milk has two types of proteins, whey and casein—and there are several different types of these two proteins contained in milk, and a whole bundle of other compounds like lactoferrin and bioactive peptides that help prime the immune system.
Bored Cow is representative of a whole new generation of GE foods that are in development, some of which we’ve written about previously. Older genetically modified (GM) foods were created by modifying the genome of a living plant by inserting, for example, an herbicide-resistance trait. That was nothing compared to what’s going on now. GE yeast or fungi are being used as little factories to manufacture food components that regulators say are biologically equivalent to their natural counterparts, so, they say, no additional testing is required because the foods have been shown to be safe through their long history of consumption. But, as we’ve seen, getting a yeast to make one protein found in milk, fermenting it, then adding nutrients, and slapping “milk” on the label doesn’t make it milk. Nor, for that matter, is lab-grown meat biologically equivalent to pasture-raised meat.
And herein lies the problem. The entire framework for dealing with genetically engineered foods in the US is fundamentally broken. That’s because the federal government decided decades ago that the final product is all that matters, not the process used to create that product. This was codified in the 1986 Coordinated Framework for the Regulation of Biotechnology, which was updated in 1992 and again in 2017. Astoundingly, it wasn’t updated to install more robust safety measures to protect Americans from new and previously unthinkable forms of food. It was updated in large part to remove or mitigate “unnecessary costs and burdens” that “limit the ability of technology developers” to “navigate the regulatory process” which also “hamper economic growth, innovation, and competitiveness.” That is, the Framework was updated to make it easier for the biotech industry to ger their frankenfoods onto our dinner plates!
We’re worried that what’s coming are further “updates” to this framework that allow GE foods and those developed using synbio technologies to be considered “bioequivalent” to their natural counterparts—in essence, drinking the lab-grown food industry’s Kool-Aid. If regulators determine that synbio milk is equivalent to real milk, will consumers be allowed to make their own choices, or will we be sold out as we were with the sham GMO labeling law that allowed companies to hide the GM contents of their food in scannable codes?
Some countries are already moving in that direction: Costa Rica just adopted new regulations which treat a wide-range of gene edited products as equivalent to conventionally-bred products. This is something we have to keep a keen eye on.
The advent of lab-grown meat, plant-based meat, and products like Bored Cow show how inadequate our current laws are in dealing with these foods. Of course it matters how these foods are made! CRISPR, the gene-editing technology, is known to produce unintended outcomes. What evidence is there that eating food grown in laboratories from genetically modified yeast—food that is significantly different than the food we have evolved to eat over human history—is safe, much less healthy?
Put simply, the fake meat and milk synbio manufacturers are exploiting old rules never intended for synbio products so they can escape doing any safety testing before their products hit the market. They’re using all-too-familiar revolving doors with the FDA to get their way, and they want to deceive us into thinking they’re saving the planet from those nasty, carbon dioxide-producing animals while offering us foods that are as safe and healthy as those produced on real farms with the help of real animals—without any of it.
We’re watching these developments closely, and we’ll alert you as soon as we see an opportunity to take political action on this critical issue. In the meantime, please share this article widely, as we need a lot more awareness of how synbio makers are using the principle of ‘bioequivalence’ to get their questionable foods into our mouths.
“We The Peoples of the United Nations determined (…) to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,”
United Nations Charter Preamble (1945)
The United Nations (UN) Secretariat will hold the next Summit of the Future in New York on 22-23 September 2024. It is a vast political program covering the noblest of causes including poverty reduction, human rights, environment, climate change, development, and the welfare and rights of children, youth, and women. World leaders are expected to endorse a declaratory Pact for the Future, and commit to act toward its realization.
It all looks wonderful. As in days of old, the rich, powerful, and entitled are coming to rescue us from ourselves and make us live better lives. Freedom, after all, is intrinsically unsafe.
This is the first in a series that will look at the plans of the UN system designing and implementing this new agenda, covering implications for global health, economic development, and human rights.
Climate and Health at the WHO: Building the Authoritarian Dream
Amidst all the hype and posturing regarding the negotiations on pandemic texts at the recent 77th World Health Assembly (WHA) in Geneva (Switzerland), perhaps the most consequential resolution before the WHA slipped through, approved, but virtually unnoticed. The Resolution WHA77.14 on Climate Change and Health was approved without debate, opening the door for the World Health Organization (WHO) ─ a UN specialized agency ─ to claim a broad swath of normal human activity as a potential threat to health, and therefore coming under the purview of the WHO’s detached business-class bureaucrats.
It was highlighted by a Strategic Roundtable on “Climate change and health: a global vision for joint action,” where speakers, moderated by the Lancet’s Editor-in-Chief Richard Horton, included WHO Director-General (DG) Tedros Ghebreyesus, former US Vice President Al Gore (by video message), and CEO of the 28th Climate Conference of States Parties Adnan Amin.
The Resolution was proposed by a coalition of 16 countries (Barbados, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Fiji, Georgia, Kenya, Moldova, Monaco, Netherlands, Panama, Peru, Philippines, Slovenia, United Arab Emirates, and the UK) and passed without changes, mandating the DG to: i) develop a “results-based, needs-oriented and capabilities-driven global WHO plan of action on climate change and health,” ii) serve as a global leader in the field of climate change and health by establishing a WHO Roadmap to Net Zero by 2030, and iii) report back to future WHA sessions.
United Nations System’s “Newspeak” on Climate Change
There is little surprise in this. It is another predictable move on the global climate chessboard. In the last decade, activities and documents from the UN system have increasingly included climate change as a “newspeak” to signal full compliance with the official narrative.
The head of the UN system, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, is known for pushing the narrative further. In 2019, he posed in water for a picture for Time Magazine’scoverage on “Our sinking planet.” Last summer, he announced that “the era of global warming has ended…the era of global boiling has arrived.”
On 2024 World Environment Day (5th June), he doubled down on his rhetoric: “In the case of climate, we are not the dinosaurs. We are the meteor. We are not only in danger. We are the danger.” We are, it appears, a poison on our planet.
Satellite entities have wildly added their creativity and imagination: UNEP hammering on the “triple planetary crisis of climate change, nature and biodiversity loss,” UNICEF reporting on the “climate changed-child,” UNWOMEN discovering the “interconnection between climate change and gender inequality,” OHCHR claiming that “climate change threatens the effective enjoyment of a range of human rights including those to life, water and sanitation, food, health, housing, self-determination, culture and development,” and UNESCO fully committed “to addressing the impact of climate change on culture, and to enhancing the potential of culture for global climate action.”
Nomination of First Ever WHO Special Envoy for Climate Change and Health
As for WHO, DG Tedros Ghebreyesus has also demonstrated his mastery of dogmatic claims. Climate change, he insists, constitutes “one of the biggest health threats” and “the climate crisis is a health crisis.” His mandate has therefore been broadened from specific environmental issues including air pollution from particulates and chemicals to the whole climate change spectrum. In 2023, the WHO estimated that “between 2030 and 2050, climate change is expected to cause approximately 250,000 additional deaths per year, from undernutrition, malaria, diarrhoea and heat stress alone.”
Strangely, however, deaths attributable to cold weather, estimated at 4.6 million globally per year, were not weighed in balance. Nor are inevitable deaths from undernutrition related to a lack of accessible energy for agriculture and transport. Accounting for a reduction in such deaths would significantly reduce projected mortality and perhaps demonstrate an overall advantage. For instance, rising CO2has increased plant growth and contributed to the world’s ability to feed 8 billion people, an achievement once considered impossible and is obviously highly critical to maintaining health.
The WHO’s leaders have become bolder. In June 2023, in a minor lapse of equity, inclusion, and transparency criteria, the DG appointed Dr Vanessa Kerry as “the first ever” Special Envoy for Climate Change and Health for being “a renowned global health expert and medical doctor and CEO of Seed Global Health.” The press release overlooked any connection with her father, former US Secretary of State John Kerry ─ a key US Democratic politician, well-known personality at UN climate forums, and first-ever US Presidential Envoy for Climate (January 2021-March 2024). Her nomination, apparently, was purely meritocratic.
It is estimated that $27.6 million is required to create the reports implementing the 2024 Resolution. Now, $20 million will come from WHO’s biennial 2024-25 budget, and the gap of $7.6 million will be raised through WHO’s continued “discussions with Member States, development agencies and philanthropic organizations.” People who will, perhaps, benefit from the WHO pushing the products they have invested in, such as heavily processed substitutes to (climate-harming) natural foods.
Misleading Resolution WHA77.14 on the “Link between Health, Environment and Climate Change”
All of this appears to follow conventional political and diplomatic playbooks. It comes unstuck if one applies a critical look at how Resolution WHA77.14 was built.
It referred to Resolution WHA61.19 (adopted in 2008) on climate change and health, Resolution WHA68.8 (adopted in 2005) addressing the health impact of air pollution, and Resolution WHA76.17 (adopted in 2023) on the impact of chemicals, waste, and pollution on human health as follows.
Recalling resolution WHA61.19 (2008) on climate change and health and welcoming the work carried out so far by WHO in pursuit of it;
Recalling also resolution WHA68.8 (2015) on addressing the health impact of air pollution and resolution WHA76.17 (2023) on the impact of chemicals, waste and pollution on human health, which recognize the link between health, environment and climate change;
Resolution WHA61.19 was adopted based on a WHO report “Climate change and health.” This report stated that “There is now a strong, global scientific consensus that warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and is caused by human activity, primarily the burning of fossil fuels which releases greenhouse gases into the atmosphere” (para. 1) and that “WHO has, for several years, stressed that the health risks posed by climate change are significant, distributed throughout the globe, and difficult to reverse” (para. 2). These affirmations were made without assessment of levels of evidence (strong, moderate, weak), of the extent to which (modifiable) human activity is involved, or of the actual positive versus negative impacts of higher temperatures (and atmospheric CO2).
Contrary to the statements by Resolution WHA77.14, neither Resolution WHA68.8 nor Resolution WHA76.17 mentioned climate change in the context of pollutants. Excluding rare natural phenomena, particulate and chemical air pollution do result from human activities, including indoor air pollution (e.g. cookstoves) and transport and industrial waste. Hence, these past Resolutions recognized a link between these pollutants and human health, which is common sense. They did not recognize a link between health, environment, and climate change.
Nevertheless, we can probably relax and wait. The WHO’s upcoming reports can be expected to claim a link. They have $27 million to spend on that.
The Climate Agenda Versus “We the Peoples”
It is easy for wealthy self-proclaimed philanthropists and international and governmental bureaucrats to call for phasing out fossil fuels. Living on tax-paid salaries in secure jobs, in economies made rich through the availability of cheap energy, they are able to renew their commitment annually at the Conference of States Parties (COP) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, ignoring the reality that their very ability to be there is due to fossil fuels. The most recent venues ─ Dubai, Sharm-El-Sheik, and Glasgow ─ all built their prosperity on this same energy base.
Being obsessed with the man-made climate narrative, the UN system pushes poor countries to adopt green energies for lighting and cooking, rather than developing the large-scale energy infrastructure that still forms the backbone of wealthier societies.
There seems to be no shame vis-a-vis 2.3 billion people on earth that, according to the WHO, must still rely on dirty and dangerous cooking fuels such as cow dung, charcoal, and wood ─ negatively impacting women and children’s health through particulate air pollution. Increasing the cost of fossil fuels directly increases further deforestation and resultant desertification (and regional climate change) in areas such as East Africa. It feels good, apparently, for the activists of climate COPs and Extinction Rebellion to force African women to walk further each day for firewood, denuding landscapes and their meager savings.
There seems to be no shame either when Western bilateral and multilateral largesse to low-income countries comes on the condition that they pass a “climate check,” or must be spent on developing “green” but unreliable solar and wind generation which barely supplement the base energy supplies of most donor countries. We happily burn Nigerian oil, but our virtue requires Nigerians to do better. After looting wealth through colonialism, this is rubbing noses in the dirt of the poverty left behind.
One can confidently predict that the rhetoric will continue, and more “soft laws” ─ UN declarations, strategies, plans-of-action, and agendas ─ will complement the existing “hard laws” of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and its Protocols. At the WHO, more funding will come to extend the growing industry of climate change and health, diverting financial and human resources from far greater, but less boutique, health burdens.
A plan of action will be put before a future WHA to agree to a binding document seeking to harden the 2024 Resolution into requirements. Highly questionable assumptions that pandemics and malaria, and even tuberculosis, are worsened because of climate change will be drawn to support the global plan, complementing the coming Pandemic Agreement and the massive surveillance system set up by the freshly adopted IHR Amendments to ensure pandemic lockdowns.
Malaria, tuberculosis, and diseases of undernutrition and poor hygiene are primarily diseases of poverty. People in wealthy countries live longer primarily because of improvements in sanitation, living conditions, and nutrition. These improvements were achieved by using energy for transport, to build infrastructure, and to massively improve the efficiency of agricultural production. Locking future generations in low-income countries into poverty will not improve their health and well-being.
This increasingly charade-like global health circus will, in the end, destabilize the world and harm us all. To address complex issues, the world needs rational and honest debates, rather than games played by a self-entitled few. The WHO is demonstrating that it is no longer the organization to lead us to better health. It is on us to regain control of our own future.
The McCullough Foundation, informative update on the current H5N1 global situation has received considerable attention and garnered valuable feedback. Here are the key takeaways:
Practice of culling (mass destruction of entire healthy flocks) when a PCR test is found positive to “eradicate” the virus is futile and may work to constrain the food supply. The current strain H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4.b is not thus far causing necropsy or radiographic confirmed fatal pneumonia in birds or mammals.
H5N1 host range expansion into migratory birds and mammals likely occurred as a result of gain-of-function serial passage research and a lab leak [or release].
Increased transmissibility of H5N1 has a tradeoff of decreased virulence. Using legacy human mortality rates from cases in Southeast Asia is not appropriate. The US has never had a fatal human case of bird flu.
Fear-mongering promulgated by the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex is designed to promote mass vaccination of animals and humans with lucrative pre-purchased contracts to the vaccine manufacturers and their NGO backers. Mass vaccination into a highly prevalent pandemic promotes resistant strains of the virus in the vaccinated.
If human-to-human spread occurs in the future as expected by many, it will be the product of gain-of-function research that has gone on for years with the goal of creating harm to human populations.
Be prepared with early prevention and treatment strategies on hand. Courageous Discourse has covered dilute iodine nasal sprays and gargles, oseltamivir, hydroxychloroquine, and other antivirals. The Wellness Company has extended its Contagion Kit to cover the case of serious human avian influenza in the event it occurs.
Here in New York, our leaders fancy us to be the “climate leader.” After all, our legislature has enacted the “Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act” of 2019, setting out the most aggressive mandatory emissions-reduction targets of all the U.S. states. Allegedly, 70% of our electricity will come from “renewables” by 2030. Nobody can top us!
But can we really catch up to Germany? Germany was in the “climate leadership” game before almost anybody else had even heard of it. It was all the way back in 1990 that Germany adopted its first emissions-reduction target — 25 to 30 percent fewer CO₂ emissions by 2005, compared to 1987 levels. In 2000, while New York was still in its climate diapers, Germany passed its Renewable Energy Act, granting large subsidies for the development of wind farms. In 2010 Germany adopted its “Energiewende” legislation with mandatory emissions-reductions targets of 80-95% by 2050. All along, the country has been on a crash program to build wind turbines and solar panels for well over 30 years.
So sorry, New York. Germany is the true “climate leader.” Perhaps we should check in on how it is going over there.
The share of renewables on Germany’s power grids rose by 6.6 percentage points to 55% of the total last year, the sector’s regulator said on Wednesday, as Europe’s largest economy moves closer to its 2030 target. . . [of] 80% of its [electricity generation].
The achievement elicited some self-congratulatory happy talk from Environment Minister (and Green Party member) Robert Habeck:
“We have broken the 50% mark for renewables for the first time,” Economy Minister Robert Habeck said in a statement. “Our measures to simplify planning and approvals are starting to take effect.”
Read a little farther, though, and you find out that only 43.2% of the 55% came from wind and solar generators. Most of the rest (8.4%) came from “biomass,” otherwise known as wood chips imported from the U.S. — probably not what you were thinking of as the supposedly emissions-free “renewables.” (The remaining 3+% consists of hydro and some unspecified “other renewables.”).
Perhaps you are wondering, despite Habeck’s happy talk, how can it be that after 30+ years of a crash program, with enormous subsidies, to build wind and solar generators to provide electricity, Germany is only up to getting 43% of its electricity from those sources? Is there maybe some problem? If you are wondering about those things, you will not find the answer here.
And then there’s the question of whether a huge build-out of wind and solar electricity generation might have any collateral consequences for a modern industrial economy. For example, might wind and solar generation be more expensive than electricity generation by fossil fuels? Here are the latest consumer electricity price data from Eurostat, covering the second half of 2023. Key quote:
For household consumers in the EU (defined for the purpose of this article as medium-sized consumers with an annual consumption between 2 500 Kilowatt hours (KWh) and 5 000 KWh), electricity prices in the second half of 2023 were highest in Germany (€0.4020 per KWh), Ireland (€0.3794 per KWh), Belgium (€0.3778 per KWh) and Denmark (€0.3554 per KWh).
Somehow, great “climate leader” Germany has the very highest consumer electricity prices in all the EU. The 40.2 euro cents per kWh is equivalent to 43 U.S. cents at the recent exchange rate of 1.07. The latest data from the U.S. EIA gives the average U.S. consumer electricity price as 16.68 cents per kWh for March 2024. That makes the German electricity price more than two and a half times the U.S. price.
Aren’t wind and solar generation supposed to be cheaper than fossil fuels? Somehow that doesn’t seem to be working out. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that no matter how much wind and solar you build, you can’t get rid of any of the fossil fuel generators, because you need them all for backup of intermittency. So you end up paying for two redundant systems.
Then there is the effect of high energy prices on economic growth. How’s that going in Germany? Here’s a February 23 report from Euronews, with the statistics from Germany for the 2023 year:
Year-on-year GDP growth was -0.2% in Q4 2023, a notch better than Q3 2023’s -0.3% and also in line with market expectations. For the full year 2023, Germany’s GDP shrank 0.3%.
A guy named Theodor Weimer, head of the Deutsche Börse, gave a speech in April to a group of Bavarian business leaders. The speech became public when it was released on YouTube last week, and it was then covered by theTelegraph. Key quote:
The coalition government led by Chancellor Olaf Scholz was, [Weimer] argued, a “catastrophe,” Germany was “economically on the way to becoming a developing country” and “one thing is clear: our reputation in the world has never been so bad.”
And finally, in the European elections just held last week, the German Green Party has been reported one of the biggest losers, going from 21 seats to just 12, a loss of 9, or almost half of the prior total.
Well, maybe being the “climate leader” is not so great after all. At least, maybe, the people are starting to catch on. Here in New York, it will take a while longer.
Euro MPs from Czechia’s populist ANO movement have renounced their affiliation with French President Emmanuel Macron’s Renew Europe political grouping in the European Parliament, citing irreconcilable differences over the Green Deal and mass immigration.
ANO leader and former Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš announced the decision to withdraw his lawmakers from the liberal political group during a press conference on Thursday.
“We went to the polls to fight against illegal migration, to change the Green Deal, which is destroying European industry and agriculture and has a negative impact on our citizens,” Babiš told journalists.
“Based on the negotiations, we came to the opinion that Renew simply has a different position than the ANO movement,” he added.
“Above all, we want the Czech Republic to remain a sovereign country,” the former Czech leader told followers on his X account, hinting at the European liberals’ desire for an “ever-closer union” and a road towards a federal Europe.
It means the Renew Europe group will be seven MEPs fewer after the withdrawal of its Czech faction and makes it even more likely the group will be overtaken by the center-right European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group as the third-largest in the European Parliament.
The move has possible ramifications for European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen who is seeking reelection among the newly-elected parliamentarians and the arithmetic is becoming problematic.
The old guard of the European People’s Party, Socialists & Democrats (S&D), and Renew is losing control of the narrative in the European Parliament and von der Leyen needs almost all of the votes from these respective parties to guarantee her reelection.
Should 13 percent of the voting bloc refuse to endorse her candidacy, a figure previously seen during her first term and for the election of former president, Jean-Claude Juncker, von der Leyen would fall short of the support she needs to remain in post.
On the future of the ANO and its European affiliation, Babiš remained coy about what was next for his party, but did rule out joining the ECR, which includes lawmakers from Czechi’s governing ODS party.
“ECR is certainly not a solution for us. Representatives of other Czech political parties have a big say in the factions, and the ECR is certainly not our choice. We’ll see, maybe a new faction will emerge,” he said.
“We will now look for partners in the European Parliament with whom we can promote our program,” he added.
The current variant of Bird Flu appears to be a product of human agency, including mass vaccination of poultry with leaky vaccines and possible genetic manipulation in US and Chinese government funded laboratories. Thus, as was the case with the emergence of SARS-CoV-2, official narratives about origins, spread, testing, and risk mitigation should be subjected to rigorous examination. Independent investigation, ongoing research, and analysis are critical to understanding the reality of this pathogen and the purported threat it poses to animal and human health.
Still no plausible natural explanation for new clade’s detection in Newfoundland and in South Carolina in December 2021
By John Leake | Courageous Discourse™ | June 17, 2024
As I have noted in previous posts, the conventional explanation in virology circles is that the new variant of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza H5N1 Clade 2.3.4.4b was purportedly carried by migratory birds across the North Atlantic in 2021, and arrived in North America in the autumn of 2021.
The HPAI H5N1 viruses that were detected in Newfoundland in November and December 2021 originated from Northwest Europe and belonged to HPAI clade 2.3.4.4b. Most likely, these viruses emerged in Northwest Europe in winter 2020/2021, dispersed from Europe in late winter or early spring 2021, and arrived in Newfoundland in autumn 2021.
The first time I read this Conclusion, I interpreted it as suggesting that migratory birds from Northwest Europe arrived in Newfoundland in autumn 2021.
However, this morning I received an e-mail from a friendly reader who pointed out that, in fact, the authors of the “Transatlantic spread” paper proposed that birds migrated from Northwest Europe to Iceland in the spring of 2021. While on Iceland for the summer, these bird theoretically mingled with birds from North America who were also on Iceland for the summer, and then returned to Newfoundland in autumn 2021.
While I humbly confess that I should have read the body text of the paper more carefully instead of jumping ahead to the Conclusion, I would like to reiterate that there is a striking paucity of evidence to support the proposition that the new variant of bird flu—known as Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza H5N1 Clade 2.3.4.4b—was borne across the North Atlantic by migratory birds in 2021.
1). While it apparently took nine years for earlier variants to spread from Europe to the United States, H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b was first detected in the Netherlands October 2020 and then in the United States in late 2021—that is, in only one year. The intercontinental spread of the previous variants are thought to have been from Eurasia to North America over the Bering Straight.
2). The hypothetical spread of a new avian influenza variant by migratory birds from Europe to North America by crossing the North Atlantic has never been documented before and therefore appears to be unprecedented.
3). We are being told that the new clade is highly pathogenic to wild birds, including ducks, which is not consistent with their fitness for flying 1400 kilometers from Ireland or Norway to Iceland, or 2,600 kilometers from Iceland to Newfoundland.
However, retrospective screening of wild bird samples from Iceland showed that an HPAI case was in a juvenile white-tailed sea eagle (Haliaeetus albicilla) found dead in the southern Westfjords, Iceland, during October 2021.
Just one sick white-tailed sea eagle—a species notoriously susceptible to mortality by ingesting toxic, man-made substances—found in Iceland in fall 2021 is inconsistent with the proposition that large flocks of infected migratory birds spending summer 2021 on Iceland and infecting other large flocks from North America that were also summering on Iceland.
5). Conventional reporting invariably refers to the new variant first being detected in a sick great black-backed gull in a pond in Newfoundland in December 2021. No mention is made of other sick wild birds found in the same area around the same time. Moreover, the genetic sequence purportedly found in this sick gull has not been published in Genbank.
6). While the sick gull found in Newfoundland in December 2021 is frequently reported, I can find no other field biologist reports of sick birds from this variant anywhere on the North American east coast in 2021.
7). During the same month (Dec. 2021) the virus was detected in the sick gull in Newfoundland, it was also purportedly found in ducks in Colleton County, South Carolina—200 miles east of Athens, Georgia. Note that the winter migration from Canadian summer nesting grounds to the American South begins in September, peaks in October, and concludes in November.
CONCLUSION
There remains a paucity of evidence to support the hypothesis that Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza H5N1 Clade 2.3.4.4b was borne across the North Atlantic by migratory birds in 2021.
The new clade was first detected in the Netherlands in October 2020, not far from the Erasmus University Rotterdam, where the prominent virologist Ron Fouchier—who happens to be a co-author of the “Transatlantic Spread” paper—is known to have conducted dangerous Gain-of-Function experiments on H5N1 bird flu in recent years.
It’s notable that the Erasmus Medical Center, headed by Ron Fouchier, previously collaborated closely with the SEPRL to develop vaccines against H9 avian influenza viruses, indicating the two laboratories likely share virus samples. This raises the suspicion that the Erasmus lab shared a sample of the new clade with the USDA poultry lab in Athens sometime in 2021, and that it somehow got out of the lab and spread to waterfowl on the Atlantic flyway.
The results of the parliamentary elections across the 27 member states of the European Union have been published this morning. They are not complete and final, but they are highly indicative of how it all ends.
The front-page diagram of The Financial Times comparing the outgoing and incoming party affiliations of the deputies tells it all. Though the deck chairs on the Titanic have been rearranged, though the Greens have had losses, the Renew grouping of Macron and Belgium’s Guy Verhofstadt have had losses, the EPP had gains and the net result appears to be that the Center Right-Left coalition that held the European Parliament in its firm grip these past 5 years will continue to have a voting majority of more than 400 seats. This means that barring some accident, Ursula von der Leyen will be reelected and the awful, self-destructive, even suicidal policies of the EU with respect to Russia will continue for the coming 5 years, if there is no Continent-wide war as a result that wipes Europe off the face of the earth.
Here in Belgium, the good news comes from the north of the country. The anti-status quo Flemish parties N-VA and Vlaams Belang came in first and second, garnering almost a third of the seats in the Chamber of Representatives. My estimation of the results comes from applying the old Russian Marxist analytic tool: the worse, the better. The comfy life of our most prominent politicians is coming to an end. Prime Minister De Croo was compelled to resign when his party took a beating. Now he can resume the search for his next sinecure that began one week ago when he called upon Joe Biden in the White House. If only this discomfiture extends to the other incompetent lackeys of Washington that the MR Party has sent to the European Institutions, Didier Reynders on the Commission and Charles Michel at the Council, then I will break out the champagne.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and French President Emmanuel Macron should abandon politics after their respective parties suffered damaging setbacks in the European Parliament elections, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev believes.
Scholz’s center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) is projected to finish third in the key ballot, behind the center-right Christian Democrats and the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD).
Macron’s Besoin d’Europe coalition is expected to win less than half of the votes received by the right-wing National Rally party associated with Marine Le Pen, prompting the French president to call a snap parliamentary election after preliminary results emerged on Sunday.
In a social media post on Monday, Medvedev claimed the outcome proves that Scholz and Macron are “respected by no one.” The former Russian leader linked the poor performance at the ballot box with the “idiotic economic and migration policy” pursued by the two leaders and their support for Ukraine “at the cost of [their] own citizens.”
“Time to retire. To the ash heap of history!” said Medvedev, who currently serves as deputy chair of the Russian Security Council.
Vyacheslav Volodin, the speaker of the lower chamber of the Russian parliament, earlier called on Scholz and Macron to resign and to “stop victimizing the citizens of their states.”
Officials in Moscow have accused leaders of EU nations of betraying the interests of their populations in favor of US geopolitical goals. Responding to the Ukraine crisis in 2022, the bloc vowed to support Kiev militarily for “as long as it takes,” and imposed an array of economic sanctions against Russia. Most notably, Brussels has pushed EU countries to stop buying Russian natural gas.
Large consumers such as Germany have struggled to substitute cheap Russian pipeline fuel with other sources, including renewables and expensive liquified natural gas. American LNG producers have since taken over a large share of the European market. A hike in energy prices has forced many energy-intensive businesses to either move out of the EU or shut down entirely.
The world of climate policy abounds with bad ideas – from force-feeding an increasingly reluctant driving public a steady diet of EVs, to regulating popular household appliances out of existence.
But one of the worst is megaprojects aimed at sucking carbon dioxide (CO2) out of the air and burying it deep underground. These pricey monstrosities, we are told, are necessary if the planet is to be saved from the onslaught of manmade greenhouse gases. Known as “direct air capture,” the unproven technology has attracted enough investor interest to finance decarbonization plants that are beginning to sprout up in the U.S. and elsewhere.
In southeastern Montana’s Snowy River region, two strange bedfellows – the Biden administration and ExxonMobil – are proposing a giant carbon sequestration project on and underneath federal land. It would be supported by a vast “carbon capture” network consisting of tens and thousands of miles of new pipelines and dozens of remote storage sites. The White House sees the scheme as advancing its decarbonization agenda, and ExxonMobil is eager to pocket what The Washington Postreports could be as much as $12.7 billion in federal subsidies for participating in the project.
But the Snowy River project is running into fierce resistance from locals, led by ranchers and county officials, who don’t want to see their part of the world used as a dumping ground for a technology they don’t trust. A similar uproar in the Midwest proved the undoing of the Heartland Greenway. Also known as the CO2 pipeline, the Heartland Greenway was supposed to pump 15 million tons of carbon dioxide captured annually from emissions of ethanol plants via a 1200-mile pipeline traversing five states to an underground site in North Dakota. Such was the outcry among landowners, regulators, and elected officials along the path of the pipeline that the developer, Navigator CO2, abandoned the project last October.
Louisiana has over 20 carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) projects in various stages of planning and development, most of them in the southeastern part of the state. Yet even in a state as historically friendly to the oil and gas industry as Louisiana, the projects are encountering stiff headwinds from residents concerned about the impact of injecting massive amounts of CO2 into ground overladen with bayous. In Iceland, Swiss start-up Climeworks recently opened the world’s biggest direct air capture facility, dubbed “Mammoth,” designed to remove 36,000 tons of CO2 from the air each year. After Climeworks captures the CO2, and has it pumped deep underground, it sells offsets based on the captured CO2.
But global carbon offset markets have become so dodgy that the Biden administration found it necessary to issue a set of voluntary guidelines to restore trust in the transactions. Released May 28, the new guidelines will “advance high-integrity” voluntary carbon markets, the White House said in a fact sheet.
Carbon offsets are an artificial commodity – completely unrelated to the climate or any other tangible asset. They are an open invitation to fraud, because it is impossible to say what effect buying or selling them will have on the climate. As even the Biden administration acknowledges: “In too many instances, credits do not live up to the high standards necessary for market participants to transact transparently and with certainty that credit purchases will deliver verifiable decarbonization.” A nine-month investigation in Europe into Verra, the world’s leading certifier of the voluntary carbon offset market, concluded last year that “more than 90% of their rainforest offset credits – among the most used by companies – are likely to be ‘phantom credits’ and do not represent genuine carbon reduction.” Companies using the Verra standard included Disney, Shell, and Gucci.
Corporate interest in the $2 billion carbon offset market has sagged in recent years, and it is not clear that the White House’s guidelines, including such things as voluntary disclosures by market participants, will improve matters. But carbon offsets and direct air capture and sequestration of CO2 fit neatly into the prevailing narrative that rising atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide are dangerously warming the plant.
But are they? Atmospheric levels of CO2 began rising in the mid-20th century, but the slight warming the Earth is undergoing dates from the late 17th century. In other words, the planet’s slow rebound from the Little Ice Age (ca. 1250-1800) cannot have been caused by something that happened after World War II. Moreover, today’s higher levels of atmospheric CO2 – about 420 parts per million (ppm) compared with roughly 250 ppm in the Little Ice Age – are highly beneficial to plant life and essential to growing crops needed to feed the world’s 8 billion people.
Some entities – whether selling carbon offsets, providing software platforms to facilitate carbon market transactions, or pocketing taxpayer subsidies for carbon capture and sequestration – can make money on the scheme the White House is trying to rescue. But the price paid by ordinary people for solving a non-existent climate crisis is incalculable.
Foundational innovation in cloud technology and artificial intelligence will require more energy than ever before—shattering any illusion that we will restrict supplies.
The laptop class has rediscovered a basic truth: foundational innovation, once adoption proceeds at scale, is followed by an epic increase in energy consumption. It’s an iron law of our universe.
To illustrate that law, consider three recent examples, all vectors leading to the “shocking” discovery of radical increases in expected electricity demand, now occupying headlines today. First, there’s the electric car, which, if there were one in every garage, as enthusiasts hope, would roughly double residential neighborhood electricity demands. Next, there’s the idea of repatriating manufacturing, especially for semiconductors. This is arguably a “foundational innovation,” since policymakers are suddenly showing concern over the decades-long exit of such industries from the U.S. Restoring American manufacturing to, say, the global market share of just two decades ago would see industrial electricity demand soar by 50 percent.
And now the scions of software are discovering that both virtual reality and artificial intelligence, which emerge from the ineluctable mathematics of machine-learning algorithms, are anchored in the hard reality that everything uses energy. This is especially true for the blazing-fast and power-hungry chips that make AI possible. Nvidia, the leader of the AI-chip revolution and a Wall Street darling, has over the past three years alone shipped some 5 million high-power AI chips. To put this in perspective, every such AI chip uses roughly as much electricity each year as do three electric vehicles. And while the market appetite for electric vehicles is sagging and ultimately limited, the appetite for AI chips is explosive and essentially unlimited.
Consider a recent headline in the Wall Street Journal: “Big Tech’s Latest Obsession Is Finding Enough Energy”—because the “AI boom is fueling an insatiable appetite for electricity.” And, as Reuters reports, “U.S. electric utilities predict a tidal wave of new demand . . . . Nine of the top 10 U.S. electric utilities said data centers were a main source of customer growth.” Today’s forecasts see near-term growth in demand for electric power three times as great as in recent years. Rediscovery of the iron law of growth inspired an urgent Senate hearing on May 21 entitled “Opportunities, Risks, and Challenges Associated with Growth in Demand for Electric Power in the United States.” (Full disclosure; a hearing at which I testified.)
Data centers, the information “powerplants” at the center of the cloud revolution, are flagged as the primary culprit for this exploding power demand. These warehouse-scale buildings are chock-full of all manner of computer chips, including conventional processors, memory chips, and communications chips. And now datacenters are pouring AI chips into the mix as fast as manufacturing plants can build them. As one researcher notes, adding AI to Google “search” boosts the energy use per search tenfold. And that’s only the first, perhaps the least, significant of the many possible applications for AI.
As one senior operative at Friends of the Earth recently put it: “We can see AI fracturing the information ecosystem just as we need it to pull it back together.” The fracturing is not about AI and child safety, or deep fakes, or the looming threat of new regulations. It’s about aspirations for an “energy transition” in how the world is fueled. It is inconvenient, to put it mildly, to see demand for electricity—especially reliable, 24–7 supply—take off at the same time as regulators are forcing utilities to shut down conventional power plants and spend money on costlier and less reliable power from wind and solar hardware. The epiphany that transition aspirations and the power realities of AI are in conflict was epitomized in a recent New Yorker essay titled, “The Obscene Energy Demands of A.I.” The article’s subtitle asks: “How can the world reach net zero if it keeps inventing new ways to consume energy?” The question answers itself.
The challenge is not only the need for far more electricity than forecast a mere year or so ago but also the need for it to be both inexpensive and available precisely when needed—and soon. New factories and new datacenters are coming online rapidly with many more coming in a few years, not decades. There aren’t many ways to meet the velocity and scale of electric demand coming without a boom in building more natural-gas-fired power plants.
This seemingly sudden change in the electricity landscape was predictable—and predicted. Almost exactly 25 years ago, my long-time colleague Peter Huber and I published articles in both Forbes and the Wall Street Journal pointing to the realities at the intersection of energy and information. (A decade ago, I also published a study on the matter, which, it turns out, accurately forecast electric demands from data, and I more recently expanded on that theme in my book The Cloud Revolution.) At the time, we were nearly alone in making such observations in the public-policy space, but we were far from alone in the technical community, which has long recognized the power realities of information. Indeed, in the engineering community, the convention for talking about the size of datacenters is in terms of megawatts, not square feet.
There’s a full-on race in the tech industry, and in tech-centric investment communities, to spend billions of dollars on new AI-infused infrastructures. The furious pace of expanding manufacturing to produce AI-capable silicon chips and simultaneously building massive, AI-infused datacenters is shattering the illusion that a digital economy enables a decoupling of economic growth from rising energy use.
As recently as two years ago, an analysis from the OECD (an organization in the vanguard of the “energy transition” vision) concluded: “Digital transformation is increasingly recognised as a means to help unlock the benefits of more inclusive and sustainable growth and enhanced social well-being. In the environmental context, digitalisation can contribute to decoupling economic activity from natural resource use and their environmental impacts.” It turns out that the physics of power and information neutered that aspiration.
Now the key question for policymakers and investors is whether the current state of affairs is a bubble or signals a more fundamental shift. Just how much more power will information consume? It is now conventional wisdom to see the digital economy as vital for economic growth, and that information supremacy matters both for economies and for militaries. But the core feature of an information-centric economy is in the manufacturing and operation of digital hardware—and unavoidably, the energy implications of both.
To see what the future holds, we must take a deep dive into the arcana of today’s “cloud,” the loosely defined term denoting the constellation of data centers, hardware, and communications systems.
Each datacenter—and tens of thousands of them exist—has an energy appetite often greater than skyscrapers the size of the Empire State Building. And the nearly 1,000 so-called hyperscale datacenters each consume more energy than a steel mill (and this is before counting the impacts of piling on AI chips). The incredible level of power use derives directly from the fact that just ten square feet of a datacenter today has more computing horsepower than all the world’s computers circa 1980. And each square foot creates electric power demands 100 times greater than a square foot of a skyscraper. Even before the AI revolution, the world was adding tens of millions more square feet of datacenters each year.
All that silicon horsepower is connected to markets on an information highway, a network whose scale vastly exceeds that of any of its asphalt and concrete analogues. The universe of communications hardware transports bytes not only along “highways” comprised of about 3 billion miles of glass cables but also along the equivalent of another 100 billion miles (that’s 1,000 times the distance to the sun) of invisible connections forged by 4 million cell towers.
The physics of transporting information is captured in a surprising fact: the energy used to enable an hour of video is greater than the share of fuel consumed by a single person on a ten-mile bus ride. While a net energy-use reduction does occur when someone Zooms rather than commutes by car (the “dematerialization” trope), at the same time, there’s a net increase in energy use if Zoom is used to attend meetings that would never have occurred otherwise. When it comes to AI, most of what the future holds are activities that would never have occurred otherwise.
Thus, the nature of the cloud’s energy appetite is far different from that of many other infrastructures, especially compared with transportation. For transport, consumers see where 90 percent of energy gets spent when they fill up a gas tank or recharge a battery. When it comes to information, though, over 90 percent of energy use takes place remotely, hidden away until utilities “discover” the aggregate impact.
Today’s global cloud, which has yet to absorb fully the power demands of AI, has grown from nonexistent, several decades ago, to using twice as much electricity as Japan. And that estimate is based on the state of hardware and traffic of several years ago. Some analysts claim that, as digital traffic has soared in recent years, efficiency gains were muting or even flattening growth in datacenter energy use. But such claims face countervailing factual trends. Since 2016, there’s been a dramatic acceleration in datacenter spending on hardware and buildings, along with a huge jump in the power density of that hardware—and again, all of this before the AI boom.
To guess what the future holds for the energy appetite of the cloud, one must know two things: first, the rate at which efficiency improves for digital hardware in general, especially for AI chips; second, the rate of growth in demand for data itself.
The past century of modern computing and communications shows that demand for data has grown far faster than engineers can improve efficiency. There’s no evidence to suggest this trend will change. In fact, today’s information-system energy use is the result of astounding gains in computing energy-efficiency. At the energy-efficiency of computing circa 1984, a single iPhone would use as much power as a skyscraper. If that were the case, there would be no smartphones today. Instead, we have billions of them. The same patterns hold across the entire silicon landscape, including for AI. Chip efficiencies for AI are improving at a blistering pace. Nvidia’s latest chip is 30-fold faster for the same power appetite. That won’t save energy—it will accelerate the market’s appetite for such chips at least 100-fold. Such is the nature of information systems. And the continued and dramatic improvement in AI chip efficiencies is built into the assumptions of all the industry-insider forecasts of ballooning overall energy use for AI.
But this raises the fundamental question: Just how much demand is there for data, the “fuel” that makes AI possible? We are on the precipice of an unprecedented expansion in both the variety and scale of data yet to be created, stored, and subsequently refined into useful products and services. As a practical matter, information is an infinite resource.
If it feels as though we’ve reached a kind of apotheosis in all things digital, the truth is otherwise: we are still in the early days. As an economic resource, data are unlike natural analogues—because humanity literally creates data. And the technological means for generating that resource are expanding in scale and precision. It’s one of those rare times when rhetorical hyperbole understates the reality.
The great explosion of data production will come from the nature and capacity to observe and measure the operation and activities of both our built environment and our natural environment, amplified by the increasing automation of all kinds of hardware and systems. Automation requires sensors, software, and control systems that necessarily generate massive data streams. Long before we see the autonomous car, for example, the “connected” car, with all its attendant features and safety systems, is already generating massive data flows.
Similarly, we’re seeing radical advances in our capacity to sense and measure all the features of our natural environment, including our own bodies. Scientists now collect information at astronomical scales, not only in the study of astronomy itself but also in the biological world, with new instruments that generate more data per experiment than trafficked on the entire Internet a few decades ago.
All trends face eventual saturation. But humanity is a very long way away from peak information supply. Information, in effect, is the only limitless resource.
One way to guess the future magnitude of data traffic—and derivatively the energy implications—is in the names of the numbers we’ve had to create to describe quantities of data. We count food and mineral production in millions of tons; people and their devices in billions of units; airway and highway usage in trillions of air- or road-miles; electricity and natural gas in trillions of kilowatt-hours or cubic feet; and our economies in trillions of dollars. But, at a rate of a trillion per year of anything, it takes a billion years to total one “zetta”—i.e., the name of the number that describes the scale of today’s digital traffic.
The numerical prefixes created to describe huge quantities track the progress of society’s technologies and needs. The “kilo” prefix dates back to 1795. The “mega” prefix was coined in 1873, to name 1,000 kilos. The “giga” prefix for 1 billion (1,000 million) and “tera” (a trillion, or 1,000 billion) were both adopted in 1960. In 1975, we saw the official creation of the prefixes “peta” (1,000 giga) and “exa” (1,000 peta), and then the “zetta” (1,000 exa) in 1991. Today’s cloud traffic is estimated to be roughly 50 zettabytes a year.
It’s impossible to visualize such a number without context. A zetta-stack of dollar bills would reach from the earth to the sun (93 million miles away) and back—700,000 times. All the molecules that comprise the Earth’s atmosphere weigh about five zettagrams. Even if each byte entails an infinitesimal amount of energy, the sheer volume of zettabyte-scale operations leads to consequential energy use.
Until just over a year ago, there was only one remaining official prefix name for a number bigger than a zetta: the 1,000 times bigger “yotta.” Given the AI-accelerated pace of data expansion, we’ll soon be in the yottabyte era. So now the bureaucrats in the Paris-based International Bureau of Weights and Measurements have officially given names to even bigger numbers, because before long, data traffic will blow past the yottabyte scale. One thousand yottabytes? That’s a ronnabyte. Your children will be using such numbers.
Such astonishing volumes of data being processed and moved will overwhelm the gains in energy efficiency that engineers will inevitably achieve. Already today, more capital is spent globally on expanding the energy-consuming cloud each year than all the world’s electric utilities combined spend to produce more electricity.
Credit Andreessen Horowitz’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” for observing that “energy is the foundational engine of our civilization. The more energy we have, the more people we can have, and the better everyone’s lives can be.” Our cloud-centric and AI-infused twenty-first-century infrastructure illustrates this fundamental point. The world will need all forms of energy production imaginable. An “energy transition” would only restrict energy supplies—and that’s not going to happen. The good news is that the U.S. does have the technical and resource capacity to supply the energy needed. The only question is whether we have the political will to allow the proverbial “all of the above” energy solutions to happen.
The people leading India and China lack the ability to predict the long-term consequences of their policies, a senior aide to Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky has claimed.
Mikhail Podoliak pointed to what he called “the problem of the modern world,” singling out India and China, in an interview with Ukrainian media on Tuesday.
“The problem with these countries is that they do not analyze the consequences of their own moves. These countries, unfortunately, have low intellectual potential,” he said.
Podoliak suggested that even though India has a lunar exploration program, it “does not mean that this nation understands what the modern world precisely is.”
The dismissive remarks were in the context of Beijing and New Delhi’s refusal to support Kiev in its conflict with Moscow. Podoliak complained that India, China and Türkiye were “profiting” from the war by maintaining trade with Russia.
“Technically, it is in their national interests,” he acknowledged, before presenting his view of what would benefit China in the long-run.
“China should be interested in Russia disappearing, because it is an archaic nation that drags China into unnecessary conflicts,” he claimed. … continue
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