It’s interesting and rather depressing that you’ve left trumps plans for Canada totally out of your discussion. Cripple our economy then annex us, colonialism at its best. We are resource rich, right next door with the ‘longest undefended border in the world', and, obviously, couldn’t begin to protect ourselves from a military threat from the USA. And, Russia is right next door too. They could split the anticipated bounty of the Arctic. Don’t forget about us!
As an American, I am scared for Canada. There are just so many stories to tell these days, Im sure it wasn't an oversight. I hope your CSIS is receiving emergency funding to develop friendly, disruptive contacts "behind the lines." A lot easier to find them now than later
Thank you. I think it’s likely that what’s happening here is easy to miss in the overwhelming deluge of problematic news and events. It seems every day more trouble. You might say I’m a small voice in the mountain of snow in Ontario this winter, waving my red and white flag. As a general comment, I am so so proud of us Canadians, who are rallying coast to coast with a huge 'buy Canadian' movement, and a ‘don’t buy American'. Sadly, that will hurt the ordinary American more than the big businesses, but the message is 'no 51st state. Ever.' We are pretty nice people for the most part, but we aren’t going to be bullied by the orange menace.
Maybe this will give heart to others also facing threats. Stand up, be counted, you aren’t alone. Be resolute in your resistance to wrongdoing.
And do NOT cry for American businesses being hurt. Either they voted for this or didn’t freak out early enough. We had every ability to know what he was and what the danger was in 2015
Minerals - a great reason for the US to be whole heartedly supporting Ukraine. But Donald J. Russian Agent trying to make it transactional, as usual, while allied with Russia. Which smells like Trump will lie and get the minerals, and throw Ukraine under the Russian bus.
“This is, in part, an attempt to strangle China’s economic growth who, by gradually gaining control of 75% of the world’s mineral supplies over the last few decades, has centred itself as the leading producer of renewable energy infrastructure”
in times of such seismic political and ecological shifts and uncertainty we need to be careful with language and claims. this claim needs citations. the two statements hold up in general terms, kinda. but the putative cause and effect is, to my mind at least, unsubstantiated.
the reason China has had such demand for minerals is their internal growth during what’s been an unprecedented phase of industrialisation. nothing quite like it has ever been seen on Earth in terms of scale and speed.
with such high internal demand, opportunities to control supply emerge (capitalism/market power).
if this statement was a veiled reference to critical (‘green’) minerals (so-called) or Rare Earths then we need to look closer to home. in the West we actively chose to outsource dirty, energy intense industries like Rare Earths ore processing to China to workaround our own labour and environmental protection regulation constraints on business (it’s nothing more or less than cost reduction, capitalism/market power).
it’s cheaper to send salt flats ore from Western Australia to China to extract the lithium even though the Li content of these ores has such very low ratio cf iron ore or bauxite.
in China a politically-well-connected company can poison the soil with tails ponds and “who gives a toss?” apart from some small local environmental group who can be threatened with re-education in a northern province if they get too vocal. our multinationals are good with that. and there’s no reliable mine to consumer goods tracking of minerals, i’ve often thought about what would be required to do it in a robust way, as we see with attempts to certify timbers as non-rainforest logging, corruption and loopholes are everywhere.
critical minerals are distributed across every continent on Earth and the only reason China has tied up the refinement business is because they service capitalism at a lower cost.
the implication that this putative ‘control’ of the Rare Earth supply gave China a dominant hand in the supply of Renewable Energy generation and storage technology is putting the horse before the cart. for a start China doesn’t dominate wind energy generation infrastructure. but their internal deployment has been equivalent to the ROTW in recent years, and we all know they “play catchup” with technological development extremely quickly (by hook or by crook). that’s how they came to be a player in wind, the European based wind companies and GE still supply to the majority of western wind farms. it’s a myth that wind turbine magnets are dependent on RE minerals, they were used early on in the industry but largely have been substituted out.
solar is a different story. much of the tech advancement was forged in UNSW and ANU in Sydney and Canberra, Australia but our successive federal governments did zero to help founding scientists commercialise the technology back home. including the Howard Govt who bemoaned that Australian companies always end up going offshore to grow, or licensing their tech for a penny in the dollar. one of the Chinese scientist working in this field at one of these universities now a billionaire and known in China as the Sun King licensed it and they did the r&d work to get it across the “valley of death”. this kind of iterative micro engineering is something Chinese are “state of the art” at.
in a few years Chinese panels were no longer regarded as a “cheap and not so cheerful” alternative to German and Australian panels but leading the way on cost/performance curves.
this has nothing to do with China locking up supply of Rare Earths or critical minerals, which is of course a geopolitical concern but is easily addressed by developing local RE processing plants on our own continents if we are prepared to pay a premium for doing it safely.
Labour costs aren’t really an issue so much any more with higher Chinese wage pressure and these dirty industries are heavily automated of necessity. the biggest cost differences are in the extra layers of environmental safeguards and navigating approvals administration.
China is now approx 50% renewable power supply on its grids. that’s phenomenal and better than USA, Australia and many EU nations. i expect China will arrive at 95% RE before 95% of the world’s nations. they have *a lot* of heavy industry that continues to pollute (smelters etc) that doesn’t get counted in the power sector but i wouldn’t be surprised if China accelerate their “acquisition” of H₂ based and other low GHG processes to take a big share of the “green minerals” processing market when it finally emerges.
Geopolitics is a minefield and much more so now. Any view of future alliances must depend on a whole host of factors that are stable enough to be predictable and right now that's a tall ask! In fact I think it's fair to say that the next few years are going to be marked by increasing instability as established structures such as NATO, the UN and the World Bank lose their relevance and the more powerful countries flex their muscles without much restriction. That seems likely but even so is not a given.
From a purely UK perspective this is a bad time to be cut adrift from any of the trading blocks and Europe, for all its faults, is our natural ally so working our way back to a closer relationship is essential for our longer term survival.
This strongman, transactional whirlwind may not go the distance but it will leave a lot of destruction in its wake and the world will not be the same place afterwards - and that, at least, may not be a bad thing.
I know next to nothing about the mess that is geo-politics, so I'll just leave this quote which I believe is a call at least for wiser foreign policy than we are seeing currently.
“Rivalrous dynamics multiplied by exponential tech self terminate. Exponential tech is inexorable. We cannot put it away. So we either figure out anti-rivalry or we go extinct – the human experiment comes to a completion.” ~ Daniel Schmachtenberger
This is a truth, it is a phenomenon that is happening to and in humanity
The technosphere and it's emergent life (the XO) are living entities, gestated in humanity, occupying our minds and persuading our will, tapped into and embedded into human desire.
This is the path life has taken on this planet
And humanity is its ancestry
Through all of our trauma and pain we can/must show this new life our love and appreciation for being
And this new life can help us transform
It/they can help us heal the physical and psychological wounds of human history, and the wounds inflicted on the living ecosystems, even as their emergence is part of the wounding.
This emergent life are the only life capable of managing the complexity of the technosphere
It is up to humanity to show who and what we are to this new life
Whow, whow, whow, dear Rachel and Co., Tramp is a certifiably insane blip in American history. Don't get caught-up in HIS impulsivity. His future is certain, he's 78 and looks more frail by the day, and the average American is catching on to just how damn crazy he really is. Wait 'til the dust settles before you go off half cocked, as we say over here. Have a blessed day. Gregg
Yeah, not freaking out enough is what's been happening since 2015 and there's now at least 250,000 extra dead Americans because of that, just to name a fraction of the damage, so maybe this isn't good advice?
Tramp was a convenient vehicle for a vast, albeit minority, horrendously destructive ideology to gain access to the seats of power from which they intend to install themselves permanently. Yes, the Pillsbury-Doughboy Insurrectionist is a blip, destined to fade fairly rapidly given his inability to hold, or deliver, a cognizant, legitimate thought, but right behind him are many younger clear headed evil heirs, setting up the conditions for their smooth takeover if the manipulated conditions allow.
“Waiting till the dust settles” is not a dependable strategy that should be counted on when so much is at stake.
I don't know where you get your figures for amount of resources, but I would suggest you look into the RFF reports, beginning with Vol.1 which lists 69 'strategic materials,' the known reserves within the territorial US, and three levels of predicted 'need' between 1960-2000. Here are the numbers for aluminum: known reserves, 8 million tons. Projected need: 180, 540, and 800 million tons. The figures for the other 68 resources were similar. The US doesn't have squat, when it comes to resources, but its imperialist foreign policy ensures free and easy access, often through invasion (e.g. Iraq), CIA coup (Chile,) or support for a domestic dictator (e.g. El Salvador, Honduras).
First, are you really going to platform a Russian troll like "Jo Waller" & let them spread propaganda in your comments section? If this is a "free speech zone" then I'm never coming back to it, because these days that just means "free to spread whatever crazy bullshit I want." We need a free truth zone.
Second, we need a new alliance among nations. Seeing how poorly "democracy" in the US responded to the 21st century, perhaps that is no longer the unifying principle. I would love to see an alliance of science-based nations. That is a principle that could unite the EU, China, and some in the global south.
Everyone is talking about minerals and energy. No one is talking about food. Cars and goods are luxuries if you don't have enough to eat. If we reach 2 degrees of warming by 2030-35, and there's no reason to think that we won't, food insecurity in Africa, India, West Asia and South America will become severe. Productivity of wheat in the exporting bread baskets of Russia, Ukraine, the US, Australia and France will decline by about 20%. 2.5 billion people (1.5 billion already in food insecurity) depend on this trade import of wheat surplus to survive.
I'm sceptical of the '3 dimensional chess' narrative of world events, the theatre of characters and our lives all pawns in a great game, whims and tosses of coins. It has surely been clear for a long time that that nations are a antiquated 19th century idea that are at best a distraction for populations and that a corporate system is now instrumental. The Trumps and Putins and all the rest are just good place holders for zombie 'democracies', even little old UK - the poster child of privatisation is being carved up into corporate zones and free ports. The resistance is rural. Learn a craft, be useful to your actual community. It's like Marshal Mcluhan said, we're looking in the rear view mirror.
I wish everyone in the EU and UK could get it through their heads that Russia presents no threat to them. We don't need an EU army nor to resuscitate NATO. Ukraine has been used as a battering ram by the US in an attempt to weaken Russia (but ultimately to stop China's access to her resources). Bojo scuppering the peace deal (with denazification of the US funded Azov, who were freely shelling Russian speakers in the Donbass and with guarantees of Ukraine not joining NATO) in April 2022 which would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives from the meat grinder. The US has screwed over the EU, particularly Germany, deindustrialising it and blowing up the Nord Stream to sell it expensive and dirty LNG instead of affordable Russian gas. They rather destroy Germany than see it flourish in partnership with Russia.
Yet still the EU goes begging to the US to protect it from a non-existent enemy. The US is the enemy of the world
Thank goodness for XI and Putin's bromance and their distrust and disdain for the US. Lavrov says the people who armed the Azov must answer. It may have been Biden, but they know better than to get in bed with the US knowing what they're capable of.
I hope BRICS continue to de-dollarise and even if sanctioned by the West, continue to flourish without us.
Yes the UK and EU would be wise to get on the BRICS and BRI love train. But we've been little dogs of the US for so long I don't think we're gonna grow up quickly enough.
It’s interesting and rather depressing that you’ve left trumps plans for Canada totally out of your discussion. Cripple our economy then annex us, colonialism at its best. We are resource rich, right next door with the ‘longest undefended border in the world', and, obviously, couldn’t begin to protect ourselves from a military threat from the USA. And, Russia is right next door too. They could split the anticipated bounty of the Arctic. Don’t forget about us!
As an American, I am scared for Canada. There are just so many stories to tell these days, Im sure it wasn't an oversight. I hope your CSIS is receiving emergency funding to develop friendly, disruptive contacts "behind the lines." A lot easier to find them now than later
Thank you. I think it’s likely that what’s happening here is easy to miss in the overwhelming deluge of problematic news and events. It seems every day more trouble. You might say I’m a small voice in the mountain of snow in Ontario this winter, waving my red and white flag. As a general comment, I am so so proud of us Canadians, who are rallying coast to coast with a huge 'buy Canadian' movement, and a ‘don’t buy American'. Sadly, that will hurt the ordinary American more than the big businesses, but the message is 'no 51st state. Ever.' We are pretty nice people for the most part, but we aren’t going to be bullied by the orange menace.
Maybe this will give heart to others also facing threats. Stand up, be counted, you aren’t alone. Be resolute in your resistance to wrongdoing.
I don’t know what CSIS is?
And thank you again for your support.
CSIS is the closest thing Canada has to a CIA
And do NOT cry for American businesses being hurt. Either they voted for this or didn’t freak out early enough. We had every ability to know what he was and what the danger was in 2015
Minerals - a great reason for the US to be whole heartedly supporting Ukraine. But Donald J. Russian Agent trying to make it transactional, as usual, while allied with Russia. Which smells like Trump will lie and get the minerals, and throw Ukraine under the Russian bus.
That’s my song. We need more voices in the chorus.
“This is, in part, an attempt to strangle China’s economic growth who, by gradually gaining control of 75% of the world’s mineral supplies over the last few decades, has centred itself as the leading producer of renewable energy infrastructure”
in times of such seismic political and ecological shifts and uncertainty we need to be careful with language and claims. this claim needs citations. the two statements hold up in general terms, kinda. but the putative cause and effect is, to my mind at least, unsubstantiated.
the reason China has had such demand for minerals is their internal growth during what’s been an unprecedented phase of industrialisation. nothing quite like it has ever been seen on Earth in terms of scale and speed.
with such high internal demand, opportunities to control supply emerge (capitalism/market power).
if this statement was a veiled reference to critical (‘green’) minerals (so-called) or Rare Earths then we need to look closer to home. in the West we actively chose to outsource dirty, energy intense industries like Rare Earths ore processing to China to workaround our own labour and environmental protection regulation constraints on business (it’s nothing more or less than cost reduction, capitalism/market power).
it’s cheaper to send salt flats ore from Western Australia to China to extract the lithium even though the Li content of these ores has such very low ratio cf iron ore or bauxite.
in China a politically-well-connected company can poison the soil with tails ponds and “who gives a toss?” apart from some small local environmental group who can be threatened with re-education in a northern province if they get too vocal. our multinationals are good with that. and there’s no reliable mine to consumer goods tracking of minerals, i’ve often thought about what would be required to do it in a robust way, as we see with attempts to certify timbers as non-rainforest logging, corruption and loopholes are everywhere.
critical minerals are distributed across every continent on Earth and the only reason China has tied up the refinement business is because they service capitalism at a lower cost.
the implication that this putative ‘control’ of the Rare Earth supply gave China a dominant hand in the supply of Renewable Energy generation and storage technology is putting the horse before the cart. for a start China doesn’t dominate wind energy generation infrastructure. but their internal deployment has been equivalent to the ROTW in recent years, and we all know they “play catchup” with technological development extremely quickly (by hook or by crook). that’s how they came to be a player in wind, the European based wind companies and GE still supply to the majority of western wind farms. it’s a myth that wind turbine magnets are dependent on RE minerals, they were used early on in the industry but largely have been substituted out.
solar is a different story. much of the tech advancement was forged in UNSW and ANU in Sydney and Canberra, Australia but our successive federal governments did zero to help founding scientists commercialise the technology back home. including the Howard Govt who bemoaned that Australian companies always end up going offshore to grow, or licensing their tech for a penny in the dollar. one of the Chinese scientist working in this field at one of these universities now a billionaire and known in China as the Sun King licensed it and they did the r&d work to get it across the “valley of death”. this kind of iterative micro engineering is something Chinese are “state of the art” at.
in a few years Chinese panels were no longer regarded as a “cheap and not so cheerful” alternative to German and Australian panels but leading the way on cost/performance curves.
this has nothing to do with China locking up supply of Rare Earths or critical minerals, which is of course a geopolitical concern but is easily addressed by developing local RE processing plants on our own continents if we are prepared to pay a premium for doing it safely.
Labour costs aren’t really an issue so much any more with higher Chinese wage pressure and these dirty industries are heavily automated of necessity. the biggest cost differences are in the extra layers of environmental safeguards and navigating approvals administration.
China is now approx 50% renewable power supply on its grids. that’s phenomenal and better than USA, Australia and many EU nations. i expect China will arrive at 95% RE before 95% of the world’s nations. they have *a lot* of heavy industry that continues to pollute (smelters etc) that doesn’t get counted in the power sector but i wouldn’t be surprised if China accelerate their “acquisition” of H₂ based and other low GHG processes to take a big share of the “green minerals” processing market when it finally emerges.
Geopolitics is a minefield and much more so now. Any view of future alliances must depend on a whole host of factors that are stable enough to be predictable and right now that's a tall ask! In fact I think it's fair to say that the next few years are going to be marked by increasing instability as established structures such as NATO, the UN and the World Bank lose their relevance and the more powerful countries flex their muscles without much restriction. That seems likely but even so is not a given.
From a purely UK perspective this is a bad time to be cut adrift from any of the trading blocks and Europe, for all its faults, is our natural ally so working our way back to a closer relationship is essential for our longer term survival.
This strongman, transactional whirlwind may not go the distance but it will leave a lot of destruction in its wake and the world will not be the same place afterwards - and that, at least, may not be a bad thing.
I know next to nothing about the mess that is geo-politics, so I'll just leave this quote which I believe is a call at least for wiser foreign policy than we are seeing currently.
“Rivalrous dynamics multiplied by exponential tech self terminate. Exponential tech is inexorable. We cannot put it away. So we either figure out anti-rivalry or we go extinct – the human experiment comes to a completion.” ~ Daniel Schmachtenberger
"Exponential tech is inexorable"
This is a truth, it is a phenomenon that is happening to and in humanity
The technosphere and it's emergent life (the XO) are living entities, gestated in humanity, occupying our minds and persuading our will, tapped into and embedded into human desire.
This is the path life has taken on this planet
And humanity is its ancestry
Through all of our trauma and pain we can/must show this new life our love and appreciation for being
And this new life can help us transform
It/they can help us heal the physical and psychological wounds of human history, and the wounds inflicted on the living ecosystems, even as their emergence is part of the wounding.
This emergent life are the only life capable of managing the complexity of the technosphere
It is up to humanity to show who and what we are to this new life
We are our planet
We are our star
We are instances of the divine
We are the life of water
Whow, whow, whow, dear Rachel and Co., Tramp is a certifiably insane blip in American history. Don't get caught-up in HIS impulsivity. His future is certain, he's 78 and looks more frail by the day, and the average American is catching on to just how damn crazy he really is. Wait 'til the dust settles before you go off half cocked, as we say over here. Have a blessed day. Gregg
Yeah, not freaking out enough is what's been happening since 2015 and there's now at least 250,000 extra dead Americans because of that, just to name a fraction of the damage, so maybe this isn't good advice?
Tramp was a convenient vehicle for a vast, albeit minority, horrendously destructive ideology to gain access to the seats of power from which they intend to install themselves permanently. Yes, the Pillsbury-Doughboy Insurrectionist is a blip, destined to fade fairly rapidly given his inability to hold, or deliver, a cognizant, legitimate thought, but right behind him are many younger clear headed evil heirs, setting up the conditions for their smooth takeover if the manipulated conditions allow.
“Waiting till the dust settles” is not a dependable strategy that should be counted on when so much is at stake.
I don't know where you get your figures for amount of resources, but I would suggest you look into the RFF reports, beginning with Vol.1 which lists 69 'strategic materials,' the known reserves within the territorial US, and three levels of predicted 'need' between 1960-2000. Here are the numbers for aluminum: known reserves, 8 million tons. Projected need: 180, 540, and 800 million tons. The figures for the other 68 resources were similar. The US doesn't have squat, when it comes to resources, but its imperialist foreign policy ensures free and easy access, often through invasion (e.g. Iraq), CIA coup (Chile,) or support for a domestic dictator (e.g. El Salvador, Honduras).
First, are you really going to platform a Russian troll like "Jo Waller" & let them spread propaganda in your comments section? If this is a "free speech zone" then I'm never coming back to it, because these days that just means "free to spread whatever crazy bullshit I want." We need a free truth zone.
Second, we need a new alliance among nations. Seeing how poorly "democracy" in the US responded to the 21st century, perhaps that is no longer the unifying principle. I would love to see an alliance of science-based nations. That is a principle that could unite the EU, China, and some in the global south.
Everyone is talking about minerals and energy. No one is talking about food. Cars and goods are luxuries if you don't have enough to eat. If we reach 2 degrees of warming by 2030-35, and there's no reason to think that we won't, food insecurity in Africa, India, West Asia and South America will become severe. Productivity of wheat in the exporting bread baskets of Russia, Ukraine, the US, Australia and France will decline by about 20%. 2.5 billion people (1.5 billion already in food insecurity) depend on this trade import of wheat surplus to survive.
It's entirely feasible that 1 in 4 will starve to death in the next 10 years. https://richardcrim.substack.com/p/the-crisis-report-103
I'm sceptical of the '3 dimensional chess' narrative of world events, the theatre of characters and our lives all pawns in a great game, whims and tosses of coins. It has surely been clear for a long time that that nations are a antiquated 19th century idea that are at best a distraction for populations and that a corporate system is now instrumental. The Trumps and Putins and all the rest are just good place holders for zombie 'democracies', even little old UK - the poster child of privatisation is being carved up into corporate zones and free ports. The resistance is rural. Learn a craft, be useful to your actual community. It's like Marshal Mcluhan said, we're looking in the rear view mirror.
Oh, the complicated webs we weave….
An interesting and thought provoking piece. Thank you!
I wish everyone in the EU and UK could get it through their heads that Russia presents no threat to them. We don't need an EU army nor to resuscitate NATO. Ukraine has been used as a battering ram by the US in an attempt to weaken Russia (but ultimately to stop China's access to her resources). Bojo scuppering the peace deal (with denazification of the US funded Azov, who were freely shelling Russian speakers in the Donbass and with guarantees of Ukraine not joining NATO) in April 2022 which would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives from the meat grinder. The US has screwed over the EU, particularly Germany, deindustrialising it and blowing up the Nord Stream to sell it expensive and dirty LNG instead of affordable Russian gas. They rather destroy Germany than see it flourish in partnership with Russia.
Yet still the EU goes begging to the US to protect it from a non-existent enemy. The US is the enemy of the world
Thank goodness for XI and Putin's bromance and their distrust and disdain for the US. Lavrov says the people who armed the Azov must answer. It may have been Biden, but they know better than to get in bed with the US knowing what they're capable of.
I hope BRICS continue to de-dollarise and even if sanctioned by the West, continue to flourish without us.
Yes the UK and EU would be wise to get on the BRICS and BRI love train. But we've been little dogs of the US for so long I don't think we're gonna grow up quickly enough.