Weekly Grounding #67
Weekly Groundings are published every Friday to highlight the most interesting news, links, and writing I investigated during the past week. They are designed to ground your thinking in the midst of media overload and contribute to Handful of Earth’s broader framework. Please subscribe if you’d like to receive these posts directly in your inbox.
“World’s Biggest Banks Pledge Support for Nuclear Power”
The Financial Times reports that “Fourteen of the world’s biggest banks and financial institutions are pledging to increase their support for nuclear energy, a move that governments and the industry hope will unlock finance for a new wave of nuclear power plants.” George Borovas, “head of the nuclear practice at law firm Hunton Andrews Kurth and a board member of the World Nuclear Association” states that “the support from the banks would help normalise nuclear energy as ‘part of the solution for climate change’ rather than ‘a necessary evil.’”
If the support from high finance for so-called “green” nuclear power isn’t damning enough, the article adds that “Nuclear energy has also started to gain support from Big Tech, which sees it as one low-carbon solution to powering data centres. On Friday, Microsoft announced a 20-year deal with Constellation Energy to restart an 835-megawatt nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania that was in the process of being decommissioned.” See Weekly Grounding #56 for a discussion of the Three Mile Island revival.
“Green Jobs or Greenwashing?”
Speaking of fake “green” projects,
exposes the “greenwashing” of lithium-mining and related technologies at . He writes that “more than two-thirds of the minerals used in renewable energy and electric vehicles come from mines on Indigenous or peasant lands, often in the Global South…In Guatemala, Russia, Argentina, Indonesia, and scores of other nations around the world, mining corporations have been implicated in land theft, violence, assassinations, sexual abuse, and pollution. Many elements in renewable technology supply chains, including nickel, copper, iron ore, and cobalt, involve well-known human rights violations and environmental destruction. This has led Sami indigenous activists in Northern Sweden to begin calling these new extraction projects ‘green colonialism,’ and the term has caught on”Wilbert continues: “And as always, dirty and polluting industries always disproportionately harm the poor. ‘The depositing of toxic wastes within the black community is no less than attempted genocide,’ proclaimed Dr. Charles E. Cobb at a 1982 protest deemed the beginning of the environmental justice movement. Cobb wasn’t exaggerating, as history has shown that dirty businesses often deliberately target communities with little political or economic power. For example, in 1991 Lawrence Summers, then Chief Economist for the World Bank, penned a now infamous leaked memo stating that ‘countries in Africa are vastly underpolluted’ and encouraging ‘more migration of the dirty industries’ to the Global South.”
“In Deep-Blue Philly, Working Class Voters Are Shifting Toward Republicans”
Turning to labor and poverty in the United States, The Philadelphia Inquirer offers a fascinating report on the recent shift of poor and working class voters in Philadelphia toward the Republican Party: These voters, “once reliable voting bloc for the party, have drifted right in recent years…It’s one of the biggest potential areas of concern for Harris, whose quest for the White House may hinge on Pennsylvania, where President Joe Biden four years ago defeated Trump by just 80,000 votes. Harris’ best opportunity to run up her vote total is in Philly, where 20% of the state’s Democrats live, but where Democrats bled more votes in 2020 than in any other county. Biden performed worse than Clinton in 41 of the city’s 66 political wards.”
The Inquirer’s analysis confirms that “class and voting patterns are closely tied in Philadelphia. Between 2016 and 2020, the Philadelphia precincts with the highest proportion of residents in poverty shifted furthest to the right, according to the Inquirer’s analysis. At the same time, voting divisions with least poverty [sic] shifted most to the left”:
“The Battle Over Robots at U.S. Ports Is On”
As I have previously argued at Handful of Earth, technology is a pivotal factor in these kinds of contemporary class realignments. The Wall Street Journal reports that “Tens of thousands of dockworkers last week returned to their jobs on East Coast ports after a three-day strike that threatened to snarl trade and hobble the economy. Workers won a 62% pay increase. But a much larger, thornier issue remains—one that’s playing out in other businesses as well, from factories to grocery stores to Hollywood: How much, and how quickly, are humans willing to concede to machines?”
International Longshoremen’s Association leader, Harold Daggett, “said he wants to take his fight worldwide. He has talked in recent months about joining with unions around the world to punish ocean shipping companies that push automation by temporarily refusing to work their ships. ‘I don’t care about lawyers and governments,’ he said. ‘It’s time to stop machines from taking our jobs, destroying our lives and crippling the American economy. It’s time we put companies out of business that push automation.’”
For more on this topic, see my essay, “The Left’s Problem with Technology.”
“Automatic Against the People: Reading, Writing, and AI”
As the rapid proliferation of Chat-GPT has demonstrated, it is not only blue-collar occupations that are under threat from automation and artificial intelligence. At Unemployed Negativity, Jason Read ponders “what is lost when we automate the acts of reading and writing.” In response to the question of “why learn how to write?,” Read reflects: “Isn’t writing just one technology among others when it comes to the retention and communication of thoughts. I could just as easily make an audio or visual recording of my ideas as something to share with others or even as notes to myself. The difference between these different ways of recording is how each relates to time. Videos and audios have their own time span, a film is ninety or a hundred and twenty minutes, a podcast an hour or more, and so on. That cannot change without distorting it…When I read, however, the timing of the reading is more undetermined and less hardwired into the technology, if it does not sound too weird to call writing technology…Reading has a unique relationship to the time of thinking. In some sense reading is thinking.”
Read concludes: “I have heard people say that LLMs like ChatGPT can do the work of jotting down some ideas, or summarizing the secondary readings, and then they can take it from there in order to create something interesting. This creates a division between a part of thinking that is rote, repetitive, and mechanical and a part of writing that is creative and intentional. This seems to me to be an utterly specious and false division. For me writing is much more akin to playing an instrument, or sport, or learning an art or martial art in which the most mechanical basics and drills are foundational and must be returned to again and again in order to get inspiration to do the interesting stuff. Personally, I get my best ideas when I am doing something like transferring my notes for class from handwritten pages to something typed up, or copying down passages into a slide for presentation, in doing exactly the kind of work that could be automated. Reading and writing are thinking. Can technology such as ChatGPT give us a better product? Perhaps. What it cannot do, however, is replace the process of reading and writing, and that process is education.”
What grounded your thinking this week? Feel free to share in the comments.