Democratic Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York agree, and they aren’t leaving the matter to state and local governance. They have introduced a bill to impose a moratorium everywhere in the United States. In a press release, Sanders gives four separate reasons — environmental (“a profound impact on land and water use”), economic (“will drive up electricity costs”), occupational (“eliminating tens of millions of blue- and white-collar jobs”), and apocalyptic: “this revolutionary technology could soon become smarter than humans and escape human control — with potentially cataclysmic outcomes.” You might think that the prospect of a Silicon God enslaving or annihilating humanity, if it were a genuine threat, would be the first item in the list of AI data center dangers, not the last.  

Some Republican supporters of data centers assert that China is responsible for the opposition in the US — a claim as ludicrous as the Democrats’ claim a decade ago that Russia swung the 2016 election from Clinton to Trump.

Today’s opposition to data centers is home-grown, but it is more “astroturf” than grass-roots. The anti-data center movement is merely the latest cause seized upon by a pre-existing coalition of anti-growth environmentalists, anti-corporate progressives, small-is-beautiful populists, and preservationists, who for various reasons want their local landscapes frozen forever as they are now.  

Of the parade of horribles listed as reasons to oppose new data centers, concerns about the environment and electricity prices are legitimate. Data centers consume enormous amounts of water for cooling and electricity for operation. It is both reasonable and necessary to prevent these facilities from exhausting local water supplies or shifting energy costs to local utility bill payers.  How this should be done, and at what level of government, deserve to be important subjects of public debate. The tech accelerationists who oppose all regulation of AI are as misguided as the technophobes.

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The year of cosmic shock

By Sohrab Ahmari and Matthew Gasda

But most Americans who oppose data centers do so on the basis of practical concerns, not progressive ideology. According to a Gallup survey in May, 50% of those who opposed data centers in their local areas cited “effects on resources”: water usage (18%), energy consumption (18%), and unspecified environmental impact (14%), with only 13% citing other reasons for opposition, including loss of farmland, threats to wildlife, natural resource consumption, or the fear that the data center would be an “eyesore.” Other concerns included apprehension about higher costs to utility rate-payers and citizens (20%) and concern about pollution (16%).

What about the other concerns raised by progressives like Sanders? Only 12% of the opponents polled by Gallup worried that AI would replace jobs and only 4% agreed with “Scared of AI/Don’t trust it/AI will take over.”  

Most data-center construction is in low-population suburbs, exurbs, and rural areas that tend to prefer Republicans to Democrats in elections. If the anti-data-center movement were really about practical local concerns, we would expect opposition to be greater among small-town and rural Republicans than among big-city Democrats who are not affected by the construction.

Instead, we find the reverse. According to the same survey, Democrats are far more likely to “strongly oppose” data-center construction than Republicans, by a huge gap of 56% to 39%. What is more, there is a gender gap: women are more likely than men to strongly oppose data-center construction, 55% to 43%.

In other words, a Republican man who lives in a rural county where a data center is likely to be constructed is less likely to be worried about it than a Democratic woman who lives in a big city far from the nearest data center. The truth is that the urban female Democrat opposes data centers only because that is quickly becoming the progressive party line.  Her concern about the possible effects on the rural Republican families she otherwise dislikes for their religious and political views is just virtue-signaling and play-acting, like the performative outrage of urban liberals at the thought that the Keystone Pipeline might cross sacred indigenous lands they will never visit but heard about on NPR, or the theatrical alarm among progressive city-dwellers on reading in The New York Times about road-building in the Amazon rainforest.

The debate about data center construction, then, would be boring and technical if the questions most local citizens have about their role in water use, electricity consumption, and pollution were the only issues. In this case, to use the phrase of the 1960s Left, the issue is not the issue. The real objection of many progressive opponents of data centers is not to this particular kind of industrial development, but to industrial development as such. Apart from the dystopian prospect of superhuman computers running amok, every one of the objections listed by Sanders and other supporters of a data center moratorium could be raised — and have been raised in the recent past — against major manufacturing and infrastructure projects of different kinds, including new factories that are built as a result of initiatives to reshore industrial supply chains lost to China, Mexico, and other countries.

Many of the same progressive advocacy groups that are uniting to oppose data center construction have come together in the past to oppose nuclear power, fracking, and offshore oil and gas drilling, using multiple arguments calculated to appeal to “the groups” as the allied single-issue factions on the left are known. Consider the Keystone Pipeline, proposed in 2008 and canceled by President Biden in 2021. (An alternate version is being considered today.) The Christmas tree logic of the anti-development Left is illustrated by an article published in 2022, after the Biden administration canceled the Keystone Pipeline: “this article draws upon environmental, utilitarian, rights and justice ethics in order to explain why the Keystone XL Pipeline extension was unethical and why its permit was revoked by the Biden Administration in 2021. It debunks the common claims that the pipeline would increase jobs and encourage economic growth, as well as sheds light upon the negative environmental effects and risks to indigenous populations, offering ethical guidelines for the future, such as consulting with indigenous communities before embarking on construction projects.”

Much of the passionate opposition to data center construction today is merely displaced hostility toward tech oligarchs like Elon Musk. Progressive opponents similarly demonized the Keystone Pipeline as a plot to enrich those important Republican donors, the Koch brothers. In 2011, when a Reuters article reported that the Kochs would profit from Keystone Pipeline construction, two Democratic Representatives, Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Bobby Rush (D-Ill.), demanded that Congress subpoena documents from Koch Industries about their interests in the project, if any. Yet, if the Keystone Pipeline was bad, it was bad no matter who profited from it, and if it was in the public interest, the identity of its investors was irrelevant. Associating Keystone with the Kochs was pure demagogy, like attempts by contemporary progressives to smear all data centers by association with Elon Musk.

In the view of the anti-development Left, technological civilization is bad and nature is good.  From this Arcadian ideology follows the conclusion that not only should the existing human-built environment not be extended, but also some existing infrastructure, like electricity-generating dams, should be destroyed. 

While New Deal presidents like Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson promoted hydropower dams for their ability to generate cheap electricity, for decades, one of the goals of radical environmentalists in the US has been dismantling these New Deal icons and “rewilding” the rivers they modified. As in the case of the anti-data center movement, today’s anti-dam advocates provide multiple alternate rationales for the policy, each rationale calculated to appeal to a different part of the progressive coalition. A recent headline on the website of nonprofit The Post Carbon Institute seeks to unite conservationists, global warming activists, and those whose virtue-signaling includes performative displays of guilt toward Native Americans: “Removing hydropower dams can restore ecosystems, build climate resilience, and restore tribal lands.”

From the point of view of progressive political coalition-building, that is a good “three-fer” but it it could have been converted into a better “four-fer” by linking dams to sinister Big Business, or by smearing dams by association with the benighted, provincial Republican voters with motorboats and lake houses — who, once re-wilding is complete, will be conveniently punished by the drainage of the dam-created reservoirs they use for recreation.

The same progressive nonprofit-industrial complex and allied politicians who define the ever-changing progressive party line have now decided that data centers are to be demonized as symbols of the evils of corporate capitalism and inequality, as personal automobiles, highways, suburbs, oil and gas drilling, hydropower dams, and nuclear power plants have been demonized by the anti-development Left since the 1970s. If zero-carbon nuclear fusion technology generating cheap electricity were invented tomorrow, this same half-century-old anti-development coalition would immediately mobilize against it. Stop Big Fusion Now!

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Why NGOs love Tom Steyer

By Michael Lind

The good news is that the anti-development coalition in America is fragile and sometimes breaks down. For example, there is a split between neoliberal boosters of solar power and wind power who back the Green New Deal and more radical deep ecologists and degrowthers. The radical Greens at least are consistent. If Big Data Center is bad for the environment, then so are Big Wind, with its massive windmills spoiling views and killing birds; Big Solar, with its rows of rusting, potentially-toxic solar panels wiping out ground cover and wildlife; and, of course, Big Transmission, with its proposed massive new power lines that are supposed to bring “clean” energy from the bird-killing windmills and the wilderness-killing solar farms.

The progressive coalition against modern industrial and infrastructure development also frequently comes into conflict with organized labor. Construction unions in particular have clashed with environmentalists over their opposition to oil and gas facilities, as well as infrastructure and nuclear power. In the debate about the Keystone Pipeline, for example, the United Association of Plumbers and Pipefitters and the Laborers International Union of North America supported the pipeline’s construction, in the interest of more jobs for their members.  

The anti-development left is also fractured by divisions among Green supporters of industrial-scale renewable energy and the group that might be called “local preservationists” — residents of an area who are not particularly ideological, but oppose construction that would alter a beloved landscape or block a lovely view. In Martha’s Vineyard, a Democratic stronghold, a massive offshore industrial wind project favored by environmentalists has met opposition from citizen groups like Nantucket Residents Against Turbines, citing, in true progressive virtue-signaling fashion, alleged harm to marine life and local fishers. 

In the long run, the non-ideological preservationists may prove to be a greater threat to the future of the US economy than small but noisy minorities like degrowthers and anti-capitalist socialists.  The desire to retain an unobstructed view from your dream house is understandable, and so is the concern about an industrial facility or infrastructure corridor being constructed next door. But all of America’s land is in or adjacent to the “viewscape” or homes of some individuals and families. Giving a few people a veto on further development of the United States on aesthetic or sentimental grounds would be fatal for American prosperity and power.  

A country is not a museum. The occasional quaint historic district is a good idea. Turning an entire nation into a historic district, frozen forever at a particular moment in time and technological evolution, would be national suicide.

We should deal with the practical issues of energy use, water use, and pollution that are raised by data center construction. And we should also deal with the separate issues of excessive wealth concentration and insufficient regulation of numerous industries, of which AI is only one. But a crusade against plutocracy and inequality that takes the crude form of blocking all data center construction is as stupid as a crusade against Gilded Age robber barons would have been if it had taken the form of a moratorium on railroad construction. You don’t have to be a godlike, silicon-based, out-of-control artificial intelligence to understand that.

Those essays and articles could be rolled into one easily enough, and sometimes it seems as if they have been. The formula is always the same, and can be usefully applied across the political spectrum. Start with talk of the “rising tide of authoritarianism” all over the world, as evidenced by “populism”, Brexit, Giorgia Meloni, Viktor Orbán, Justin Trudeau, Donald Trump, Joe Biden or any other leader you don’t like. Move on to explore how much of this “rising authoritarianism” is reflected in environmentalism, as evidenced by Just Stop Oil, Extinction Rebellion, the Green New Deal, the Great Reset, Bill Gates, Greta Thunberg or [insert name of bête noire here].

After this, list the historical inspirations for these new green authoritarians: Ted Kaczynski, Pentti Linkola and Dave Foreman should do for starters. Dig into the most miserable chans and Reddits of the internet and “expose” a few anonymised avatars promoting race war in the name of the planet. Mention the Christchurch shooter. Use the phrase “dark undercurrent” a lot. Chuck in the names of a couple of nature writers from the Thirties who became fascists. Mutter darkly about how Hitler was a vegetarian. Did you know there was an organic garden at Dachau? Makes you think, doesn’t it?

Having got here, you can move on to the meat of the thing: sombrely intoning about the “new threat to democracy” represented by this frightening movement. Depending on where you’re coming from, you can now explain how these new eco-authoritarians represent either a threat to our God-given right to drive, mine, manufacture, fly, burn oil and freely enjoy the glories that only Western Progress can provide, or a threat to diversity, equality, human rights, LGBTQIA++ people, refugees, “global justice” and a woman’s right to choose. Either way, the conclusion will be much the same: a non-specific but ominous call for more monitoring of “problematic” views, more work to tackle “radicalisation”, more laws to prevent protests and “hate speech”, and probably more internet regulation. For the safety of us all, of course.

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How far will the eco-fascists go?

By Mary Harrington

The problem, though, is that actual “eco-fascism” is notable mostly for its absence. Dark corners of the internet aside — you can find any craziness there, after all — it’s hard to find a single “eco-fascist” anywhere out in the real world. No public intellectuals, no writers, no philosophers, no politicians, no popular movements embrace anything of the kind. Plenty of people get the label applied to them of course — without the prefix, the word “fascist” has been a meaningless, all-purpose insult for decades — but they all reject it. I was in and around the green movement for a long time and I never met an eco-fascist, though I did have the pleasure of being called one.

So why all the dire warnings? I can think of two possible explanations.

The first is the simplest: there is something we can’t bear to look at, and we are trying to distract attention from it by screaming at the people who are pointing it out. The thing we are avoiding is the thing that we used to call “nature”, and the reality that we are trying to distract attention from is that we are part of it, we live inside it and that everything we do to it we also do to ourselves. Change the climate out there and it changes in here. Erode the soil, erode your soil. Poison the oceans, poison your culture. This is how it works, and this is what we are now facing.

And we cannot face it, even those of us who think we can. Whatever we think our politics are, we have no idea what to do about the coming end of the brief age of abundance, and the reappearance, armed and dangerous, of what we could get away with denying for a few decades: limits. Those who point these limits out — and who point out, especially, that the very existence of industrial modernity might be the root cause of the problems we currently face — can expect to be smacked down with the worst insults our culture can conjure.

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How the Left fell for capitalism

By Paul Kingsnorth

This is one explanation for the mysterious rise of the ghostly eco-fascists. But I think there might be another. The phrase “eco-fascist” is a label which is increasingly being applied to the wrong kind of environmentalist: those who offer up a vision of humanity and nature that involves roots, traditions, smallness, simplicity, a return to previous lifeways. They are contrasted with the right kind of green: those who are modern, global, progressive and — most important — friendly to the onward march of the technological society.

Nearly a decade ago, I wrote an essay called “Dark Ecology”, about the state of environmentalism. In it, I wrote about the emergence of a tendency in green circles which I called “neo-environmentalism”. The neo-greens — who preferred to call themselves “ecomodernists” — emerged as a reaction to the traditional green movement, which in its infancy had been relatively conservative, low-tech and focused on the human scale. The neo-greens rejected all this as backward, impractical and even dangerous. They believed, as I wrote back then, that: “Civilisation, nature and people can be ‘saved’ only by enthusiastically embracing biotechnology, synthetic biology, nuclear power, geoengineering”. The “new environmentalism”, they declared, in manifestoes like this one, would be, as we might now say, “grown-up”.

Sucks to be right, as the kids say. Since I wrote that essay, the neo-greens have, as predicted, mounted an effective corporate takeover of most of the environmental movement. Examples of what we might call Machine Environmentalism have been embraced by the corporate sector, big NGOs, global institutions and most of the intellectual class, most obviously in the “Green New Deals” that are popping up like summer daisies in all corners of the globe. Meanwhile, the green movement is splintering into camps, determined by attitudes to the kind of intrusive and novel technologies that the Machine Greens are pushing.

In Britain, this divide has been illustrated recently by attitudes to green pundit George Monbiot’s latest book, which embraces the neo-green vision. In the humbly titled Regenesis, Monbiot, an urban vegan intellectual, makes a case — based, naturally, on the “peer-reviewed science” — for the “end of most farming” and the replacement of much of its output with vat-grown, bacterial “food” manufactured via “industrial biotechnology”. The vast acreages of land which have been stripped of their farmers can then be “rewilded” in various Monbiot-approved ways, which mainly seem to involve growing forests for always-on urbanites to go wolf-spotting at weekends.

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George Monbiot's farming fantasies

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In promoting a high-tech, globalised food system (perhaps overseen by the world government he has previously argued for), and casually calling for the destruction of the basis of post-Neolithic human civilisation, Monbiot offers a perfect example of what a neo-green future will look like: utopian, hyper-urban, technological, rational and most of all, “efficient”. What matters now, as he explains, is mathematics:

“It’s time we became obsessed by numbers. We need to compare yields, compare land uses, compare the diversity and abundance of wildlife, compare emissions, erosion, pollution, costs, inputs, nutrition…”

Welcome to what the greens have become.

A number of actual farmers who are also first-rate thinkers have taken aim at Monbiot’s Machine Green dystopia in recent months (Simon Fairlie, Chris Smaje and John Lewis-Stempel offer some of the best critiques), but while they might win the battle they are, for now at least, losing the war. Only last month, a pioneering Finnish “solar food” company championed by Monbiot was given EU permission to roll out production of their new “sustainable protein” (as part of the “European green deal”). The company says that the laboratory in which it produces this “novel food” — which it calls “Factory 01” — is part of a “food revolution” that will, for the first time in history, detach food production from the land, the farmers who work it and the culture it creates. Excitable admirers are already explaining that this may give us the ability to one day 3D-print our own food. I’m salivating already.

Older, crustier greenies like me, labouring under the yoke of a pre-modern sensibility which makes us reluctant to eat the sludge and live in the pod, might feel that something has gone terribly wrong with the numbers-obsessed rationalism that underlies this new, corporate-friendly green technocracy. But we have no five-point plan of our own, and we can’t peer-review our intuition, so our complaints don’t convince anybody who matters. And now that the localists, the deep ecologists, the peasants, the small farmers — and anyone else whose human-scale vision might interfere with the march of Progress — have been conveniently designated “eco-fascists”, we are able to behold the only legitimate form of environmentalism which remains: a globalised technocratic, “progressive” push for “sustainability”, led by intellectuals, entrepreneurs and professional activists.

The green movement, long ago co-opted by the Left, has now been co-opted too by technocrats. For this reason, the neo-green (or should we say soylent green?) food future can’t be viewed in isolation. It is only one aspect of the unfolding phenomenon which has been dubbed the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” — a revolution in which the Machine Greens, wittingly or otherwise, are playing a key part.

Dreamt up, like so many other catchy corporate catchphrases, by the World Economic Forum in 2015, the Fourth Revolution is a way of describing our historical moment. That same year, Foreign Affairs produced a book by the same name, to accompany the annual Davos gathering of politicians, business leaders and Bono. In it, the inescapable Klaus Schwab explains, in prose that could make a Martian invasion sound boring, the import of the times we are living through:

“The First Industrial Revolution used water and steam power to mechanise production. The Second used electric power to create mass production. The Third used electronics and information technology to automate production. Now a Fourth Industrial Revolution is building on the Third… It is characterised by a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres.”

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Is this the end of the world?

By Doug Coupland

The rest of the book, made up of offerings from various scientists, engineers, politicians and philosophers, explores the implications of this “blurring of lines” between created and uncreated, natural and artificial, wild and tamed. Now that we inhabit what the neo-greens like to call the “Anthropocene” — now that we are, in H. G. Wells’s formulation, Men Like Gods — what do we intend to conjure with the thunder and the lightning that pours forth from our just and rational fingers?

All of the contributors stress that overcoming the old-school distinction between the digital and the natural is the essence of the thing. Neil Gershenfeld, for example, defines the “digital fabrication revolution” — the one which will soon be growing our tank-bred bio-sludge dinners — as “the ability to turn data into things and things into data”. “Intelligent” buildings, wearable sensors, implanted chips: six years ago, when this book was written, these may have seemed radical. Today, it feels as if they have been almost normalised.

Partly this is because of the ubiquity of Amazon Alexas, Smartphone apps and endless, boosterish narratives about the exciting future that AI is building. And partly it is because the Covid pandemic was used as a trial run for precisely the kind of technologies — smartphone-enabled passports, digital population tracking, media-driven narrative control — which are now increasingly sold to us as a means of “saving the planet”. It is no coincidence that some of the loudest proponents of Machine Environmentalism were also fanatical supporters of the Covid biosecurity state. We are being trained to like what is coming — or at least to shrug our shoulders and accept its inevitability.

Perhaps the most important aspect of the Fourth Revolution, though, is what has been called “datafication”. The book’s chapter on “Big Data” explains that the knowledge available to each of us today on the Internet dwarfs that which would have been available in the Great Library of Alexandria, the greatest repository of learning in the ancient world. But size, as they explain, isn’t everything:

“Big data is also characterized by the ability to render into data many aspects of the world that have never been quantified before; call it ‘datafication’. For example, location has been datafied, first with the invention of longitude and latitude, and more recently with GPS satellite systems. Words are treated as data when computers mine centuries’ worth of books. Even friendships and ‘likes’ are datafied, via Facebook.”

Here we see the same “obsession with numbers” that George Monbiot demands of us as we contemplate how to produce our food and live in our landscape, and it reveals the elision between Machine Environmentalism and the elite-driven tech revolution it is part of. What we can see is that both achieve their goals through the process of datafication: the quantification of everything. The pattern of reality will be transformed into bits and bytes, comparisons and yields, numbers and statistics, until even novels and friendships and meadows and family meals on winter nights can be measured and compared and judged for their relative contributions to efficiency and sustainability.

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The West has lost its virtue

By Paul Kingsnorth

There is a rift here, and we should gaze deep into it, because there is something down there that we need to make out. It is the ancient rift between those who embrace the mindset of “datafication” — which is, in the form of sums and written language, one of the foundations of civilisation — and those who are repelled by it. I suspect it can never really be healed, because it marks the border between two distinct ways of seeing. The philosopher Jeremy Naydler has referred to them as ratio and the nous, but we could just as well call them left and right brain, mythos and logos, or — perhaps most simply — the sacred and the profane.

The Fourth Revolution and the Machine Environmentalism which it contains offer us a profoundly profane vision of the world. Life in this understanding is not a sacred thing but an engineering challenge. It is something which can be studied, quantified and constantly tweaked until we arrive at the most efficient version. This may be done with the best of intentions (or it may not) but the things which cannot be measured will, of course, be left out of the equation, and the things which cannot be measured happen to be the stuff of life. Love. God. Place. Culture. The profound mystery of beauty. A feeling for land or community or cultural traditions or the unfolding of human history over generations. Song. Art. They’ll “datafy” all of this soon enough, no doubt, or try to. But the kind of people who think that the Great Library of Alexandria contained “exabytes’ worth of information” rather than the collected fruits of hard-won wisdom are lost before they ever sit down to their datasets.

If you have ever wondered why climate change has so utterly dominated the green debate to the exclusion of so many other problems which stem from industrial society — mass extinction, soil erosion, the collapse of human cultures, ocean pollution — then the answer, I think, is here. Climate change is a problem amenable to numerical questions and technocratic answers. It is, furthermore, a problem which, almost by definition, can only be solved by elites. If you can’t read or understand the “peer-reviewed science” then you are open to being intimidated into fearful silence by those who can, or claim they can. And those people — drawn, as all green “thought leaders” are, from the upper strata of society — will bring with them a worldview which treats the mass of humanity like so many cattle to be herded into the sustainable, zero-carbon pen. If you’re wondering where you’ve heard this story before, just dig out your dirty old Covid mask. It will all come flooding back.

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Interestingly, some of the progenitors of the Fourth Revolution are themselves uneasy about where some of it is leading. Even Klaus Schwab, who these days is often lazily presented as a volcano-dwelling Bond villain pulling the global strings, admits to unease at the speed and scale of change. In the book, he expresses his timid concern about how our “quintessential human capacities such as compassion and co-operation” might be eroded by deep shifts like these. “It is already changing our health and leading to a ‘quantified’ self,” he writes, “and sooner than we think it may lead to human augmentation”.

Even as he proselytises for the Fourth Revolution, Schwab can see what is coming. Google maps and smartphone apps were always just the beginning. We are headed into a Brave New World of all-knowing Smart homes and vat-grown sludge for breakfast, and every step along that road will make perfect rational sense. A Panopticon world, remade at the nano level by the allegedly well-meaning, lies just around the corner. C. S. Lewis understood the trap well: “Of all tyrannies,” he wrote, “a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive… those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

What the Fourth Revolutionaries never seem to grasp is that the question you ask will frame the philosophy you develop. If your question is “how can we remove all this atmospheric carbon to avoid what these computer models say is coming?” then the answer can only lead you to a globalised technocracy. If, on the other hand, the question you ask is “how can we build lives which offer us meaning, in alliance with the rest of nature?” then you may be led in a very different direction.

It is the first kind of question that a Machine society will always ask, and there will always be endless, multiplying justifications for asking it. Ecology, equality, feminism, democracy, public health, growth, security, the war on terror or crime or drugs or whatever: there is always a reason for Big Data. The control is always necessary to prevent a greater evil. Even a movement which once challenged this grim way of seeing has today been bought and sold by it.

For at least 200 years we have been thoroughly undermining the foundations of all of our assumptions. Now, new cracks in the masonry are appearing daily. Can we caulk them up with vat-grown eco-sludge and hope they don’t spread? Can Big Data come to our rescue? What can we measure, manage, monitor, to help us escape from this? This is what I think, though I often wish I didn’t: we are living now through what may be the final triumph of Rational Man. The tower he has made has nearly touched the very roof of the world. Every old story can tell us what will happen next.

Chiefly, the F-35 relies on rare earth elements, or REEs, to operate. Its jet engines are coated with yttrium-enhanced ceramic to achieve supersonic speeds, and it requires powerful magnets made from neodymium for its weapons systems to function. Each F-35 jet contains 417kg of rare earth elements, of which between 90% and 95% of the world’s supply is sourced from China. Between 60% and 75% of the world’s supply of finished rare earth magnets is also produced in Chinese factories. 

So fragile is this supply chain, and so dependent on continued free trade with China, that the Pentagon has begun to stockpile a six-month supply of rare earth magnets in case of an emergency, with experts urging the US to invest in domestic manufacturing capacity “so if we go to war with China, we’re not calling them up asking for supply”. America’s new “National Defense Authorization Act” now calls for urgent action from the Pentagon to ensure that the majority of its REEs are sourced from countries other than China within five years.

Rare earth elements are not especially rare — they are more common than gold, for example — but they are present in the earth in microscopic concentrations, making it laborious and costly to extract and refine them. It takes between ten and fifteen years to establish the infrastructure to mine and process them: left to the logic of the free market, there is no case to do so, as it is simply cheaper to import REEs from China. The Chinese government, thinking in strategic rather than narrowly economic terms, has ploughed huge sums into developing the country’s domestic REE production infrastructure, and in doing so has established a system of Western dependency. 

Surveying the global scene just a few years ago, any sensible observer would have noted that there were three potential stumbling blocks to the continued smooth functioning of the globalised economy: a global pandemic, the eruption of great power competition edging into conflict, and catastrophic climate change. The Covid crisis, as a worldwide but not especially lethal pandemic, has raised awareness of the fragility of global supply chains and the strategic necessity for domestic manufacturing capacity in multiple sectors. Yet it is the intersection of the two other risks, climate change and great power conflict, that will shape the world of our near future. 

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The ideology that broke Britain

By Aris Roussinos

With the great industrialised power blocs now redirecting their economies towards the “green transition”, with some form of Green New Deal now the dominant medium-term economic model for Britain, the United States, China and the EU, the supply of rare earth elements and other minerals strategically vital to the new economy will become a new arena for global competition. Just as the wars of the 20th century saw wrangling for control of oil resources, the conflicts of the 21st century will seek to establish control of the elements necessary for the new technologies to function.

Green politics seems inextricably tied, in the popular imagination, with a form of utopian optimism derived from the unworldly idealism of the parties who promote it. Yet perhaps we are looking at the various Green New Deal proposals the wrong way: there is already a great deal of scepticism about their capacity to meaningfully arrest catastrophic climate change. But if we reinterpret the Green New Deal as primarily a means to restart a sluggish global economy after decades of stagnation, a gigantic form of Keynesian stimulus analogous to the New Deal after which it is named, or to the Trente Glorieuses during which a shattered post-war Europe rebuilt itself, its appeal to global policymakers compared to the alternatives of either degrowth or the status quo makes sense. 

A perception of the various Green New Deals as a collection of industrial policies derived from strategic and economic self-interest, as opposed to wooly-minded idealism, has not yet filtered through to the British commentariat. A Times comment piece last weekend, for example, laments the lack of favour purportedly shown by the Government towards the City, and asserts that “the new-found enthusiasm for industrial strategies, which promoted favoured sectors such as self-driving cars, artificial intelligence and green energy almost at random,” is merely the product of a crude anti-banker populism unique to this country, rather than what it is: a new phase of global capitalism, perhaps as significant as the Industrial Revolution in scope, which will reshape the entire global order.

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Europe needs to grow up and defend itself

By Aris Roussinos

Though it has barely impinged on the popular consciousness, we are already witnessing a new “Great Game” as industrial economies seek to secure their control of elements like lithium, essential to the production of the lithium-ion batteries which are rapidly turning electric vehicles from an expensive toy into the affordable, and soon dominant, mode of transport. China already manufactures 73% of the world’s supply of lithium cell batteries, far ahead of the United States, which comes second with a mere 12%.  Yet China is not content with this vast disparity in its favour, and is buying up controlling stakes in lithium mines from Australia to Bolivia, seeking to control the global supply and establishing yet another structural pattern of Western economic dependence on Chinese manufacturing.  

With cobalt and manganese too, both elements vital to the production of lithium-ion cells, China possesses only 1% of global supply within its borders, but controls 80% of the global production of refined cobalt. Two-thirds of the world’s cobalt supply is mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo: China owns eight of the country’s fourteen cobalt mines.

It is striking that while in Western countries, environmental policy has been until now limited to debating whether or not climate change is actually happening, and in the construction of an elaborate and largely meaningless system of carbon trading on the open market, Chinese policymakers have seen the future, and taken concrete steps to ensure that they control it.

It is, then, not far-fetched to imagine the Cold War between China and the United States, the initial stages of which we now live in, manifesting itself in an increased focus on and intervention in the politics of countries like Bolivia or the DRC. Myanmar, for example, mines around half of China’s supply of rare earth elements: its internal politics are therefore a matter of major strategic concern for China, and China’s leadership will aim to ensure a smooth and stable relationship with whoever controls the country, whatever their chosen system of government. This pattern will surely play out across the world, with climate change and the global order being fated to intersect, but what is the political end state? 

One strange and interesting recent book, Climate Leviathan, is a rare attempt to construct a non-utopian vision of the future political order deriving from both climate change and the industrial efforts to mitigate it. Taking their cues from the emphasis on sovereignty driving the political works of both Hobbes and Carl Schmitt, the authors, academics Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright, assert that the logic of the Green New Deal, as of liberalism itself, ultimately leads towards global governance, the “Leviathan” of the title, which was perhaps always the endpoint of liberalism, as “all liberalism secretly anticipates a world government on the horizon of history”.

“A planetary green Keynesianism,” they write, “the only kind that might have a hope of confronting the problem in its scale and magnitude, is thus forced down one of two planetary paths — both of which lead, ultimately, to the same destination”: a form of Kantian perpetual rule under the hegemony of, most probably, the United States. By asserting both the urgent necessity of reordering the world in order to save it, and its own unique capacity to do so, the US will simultaneously assert itself, in Schmittian fashion, as global sovereign. 

“A US-centered Climate Leviathan like this could conceivably last a long time,” they predict, “since any attempt to defeat the United States militarily would also seem to unsettle the very management of life of Earth. Attempts to resist US hegemony would be treated as treasonous ‘terrorism’ of an extreme type, confronted with overwhelming military technology.”

Yet America does not necessarily possess the mandate of heaven: “we could see world war between two spheres of influence, leading to a collapse in the world system, or the consolidation of Climate Leviathan through collaboration between the United States and China [instead of] a US-centric Leviathan.”

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It is very possible to envisage, they observe, Earth being divided into two great spheres of influence in a grand bargain between a declining United States and a rising China, a division of “the world system in a sort of grand compromise that includes shared planetary management, a “G2” concentration of the existing order bilaterally constituted to save life on Earth.”

Whether or not this vision is convincing, the urgency of theorising the politics of the emerging global system ought to be clearly apparent. Concrete action to mitigate climate change does not necessarily herald a new age of global cooperation against a shared threat: the Green transition is just as likely, if not more, to be a new arena of international friction and competition, against a darkening backdrop of ever-accelerating climate doom. 

The competition for the strategic resources of the new global economy, no doubt to be framed as ideological contests between liberal democracy and autocracy or between anarchic barbarism and human rights, will surely shape the world for the rest of our lifetimes. Whatever the merits of the Queen Elizabeth carrier group’s deployment to East Asia, the rare earth elements buried deep within the airframes of its showpiece fighter jets points to an unglamorous, but urgently necessary task for the government: to ensure that Britain secures its access to the minerals vital to the new technologies, and in doing so, safeguards our national security in the dawning age of great power competition.

What these dissatisfactions share is a sense of being trapped in an economic logic whose priorities no longer benefit society as a whole, but that — we are told — cannot be challenged without making things even worse. The foundational premise of that system is continual growth, as measured by GDP (gross domestic product) per capita. Economies must grow; if they do not, then recession sinks jobs, lives, entire industries. Tax receipts fall, welfare systems fail, everything staggers.

But what happens when growth harms societies? And what happens when growth comes at the cost of irreparable harm to the environment?

As Sir David Attenborough put it in 2013, “We have a finite environment – the planet. Anyone who thinks that you can have infinite growth in a finite environment is either a madman or an economist.”

This is the argument of Tim Jackson’s Prosperity Without Growth. The challenge the book sets out is at once simple and staggering. In a finite world, with limited natural resources, how do we deliver prosperity into the future for a human population that keeps on growing?

Jackson, who today is Professor of Sustainable Development at the University of Surrey, and Director of the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP), argues that we need to start by scrapping GDP as the core metric of prosperity. As the book puts it: “Rising prosperity isn’t self-evidently the same thing as economic growth.”

Growth is not distributed equally, and inequality is widening. At the time of the book’s first publication this was already true; after some ten years of quantitative easing in an attempt by governments to stimulate economies, the situation is even worse. But governments had to print money, because if they did not growth would falter.

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The pursuit of growth is also undermining social bonds and overall wellbeing. In 2018, a commission reported on the ‘loneliness epidemic’ that is blighting lives and worsening health across the UK, driven in part by greater mobility of individuals away from family connections. (Mobility of labour, of course, is essential to drive economic growth.)

This year, even The Economist acknowledged that rising growth does not guarantee rising happiness.

If that were not enough, the resources available to supply continued growth are dwindling: “If the whole world consumed resources at only half the rate the US does […] copper, tin, silver, chromium, zinc and a number of other ‘strategic minerals’ would be depleted in less than four decades.” (Prosperity Without Growth)

Rare earth minerals, essential for technologies from circuit boards to missile guidance systems, are projected to be exhausted in less than two decades. 

And this is before we get to the contested questions of “peak oil”, and climate change, and how far and fast we need to decarbonise — a topic on which even The Economist expressed concern in December this year.

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Inasmuch as the public debate considers these nested dilemmas, the vague sentiment is that technology will save us. The jargon term for this is ‘decoupling’ — that is, the ability of the economy to grow without using more resources, by becoming more efficient. But will decoupling happen?

The theoretical core of Jackson’s book is a detailed unpacking of models that suggest it will not, or that if absolute decoupling is possible it will happen so far into the future we will already have wrecked the climate and run out of everything. Rather than rely on this fantasy, Jackson argues, we must challenge the dependence on growth.

But how? The global economic system depends on growth and in times of recession it is the poorest who suffer first. It is a policy double bind: on the one hand, we must think of the environment, so governments encourage us to buy less, consume less, recycle more and so on. But on the other, they must deliver a growing economy, which mean encouraging us to buy more, consume more, keep the economy going. Electorates are, understandably, cynical about the sincerity of this flatly self-contradictory position.

What, then, is the alternative? Jackson is an economist, not a revolutionary firebrand, and his book does not call on us to bring down capitalism. In the second part of Prosperity Without Growth, he instead suggests some quietly radical approaches to bringing the global economy back into the service of human flourishing.

He advocates government intervention to drive much of the change he proposes, including encouraging economies to pivot away from manufacturing, finance and the pursuit of novelty at all costs toward less obviously productive but more human services such as slow food cooperatives, repair and maintenance or leisure services.

He also advocates heavy state support for ecologically-oriented investment. When I contacted him to ask about his book ten years on he spoke positively of the contribution that a “Green New Deal” could make on this front: “It shows a commitment to social and environmental investment that is absolutely essential to achieve a net zero carbon world”, he told me. “Simply put, we just can’t achieve that without this scale of investment, and that form of commitment from Government.”

He also told me he is often criticised for being “too interventionist in relation to the state”, as he puts it. But perhaps (though Jackson does not use the term himself) he might be more fairly described as post-liberal. Prosperity Without Growth is a quiet but excoriating critique of the growing human and ecological costs of liberal economics.

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Intriguingly, within Jackson’s proposals lurks another challenge to liberalism, that to date has not been greatly associated with the left: the critique of radical liberal individualism as a social doctrine. Along with state intervention to tweak the economy and drive ecological investment, Jackson argues that governments should promote “commitment devices”: that is, “social norms and structures that downplay instant gratification and individual desire and promote long-term thinking”.

Examples of ‘commitment devices’ include savings accounts and the institution of marriage. Governments should implement policies that clearly incentivise commitment devices, for doing so will promote social flourishing and resilience even as such institutions offer alternative forms of meaning-making to the pursuit of shopping-as-identity-formation.

Thus, we cannot save the earth without reviving some social values and structures today thought of as small ‘c’ conservative: stable marriage, savings, settled and cohesive communities with lower levels of labour mobility.

I asked Jackson whether some of the more vociferous socially liberal proponents of environmental change had cottoned on to these potentially quite conservative implications of his theories. He told me “This is an interesting question, for sure, and one that I don’t think has really been picked up – even by me!” (Except at UnHerd – see here and here for example.) But, he says, it is incumbent on us to set aside political tribalism in the search for solutions to our current dilemmas.

“I believe there are elements of a Burkean conservatism which are profoundly relevant to a politics of the environment, even as I am convinced that the progressive instincts of the left are essential in our response to social and environmental inequality. I see it as incumbent on those working for change both to understand the underlying motivations of different political positions and also to adopt a pragmatic politic in which solutions are suited to the challenges of today rather than the dogma of yesterday.”

Indeed.