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A multipolar world populated by green power centers from the global south is what China advocates on the international stage. Why, then, is its dam-building in Tibet aimed to completely the opposite effect?

Tibet is often described as the world’s third pole, a land of rising mountains, vertiginous valleys, sliding glaciers and once free-flowing rivers, where outstanding biodiversity and geological complexity furnish humankind with a treasure trove of natural and spiritual richness.

Bordering India and China, it straddles the headwaters for culturally and economically vital rivers that flow through both heavyweights, not to mention the Indo-Chinese Peninsula. Its mineral riches are as replete as the pharmaceutical possibilities implied by its numerous world-unique plant species.

These features ought to combine to establish a regional power innately endowed with wealth and clout, one that, with its pastoralist heritage of stewardship towards the natural world, could perhaps suggest a less intrusive and exploitative pathway to development if it was accorded the right to democratic self-determination.

Yet, as described in a report released in May by Turquoise Roof, a collective of Tibet-focused specialists, scholars and analysts, these strengths are being usurped and partially destroyed by the Chinese government, which, having invaded and occupied Tibet since 1950, is aggressively arrogating its resources in order to enmesh the country within itself and render the energy economy of the future dependent on its whims.

Titled “Occupying Tibet’s rivers: China’s hydropower ‘battlefield’ in Tibet,” the report takes as its starting point the recent protests in the Derge area of Kardze in the Tibetan region of Kham, which is currently administered as part of Sichuan Province. In February of this year, Derge broke out into protest over plans to evict families and monks from 12 villages and six monasteries to make way for one section of a dam cascade upstream on the Yangtze River, where it is known as the Jinsha to Mandarin-speakers or the Drichu to Tibetans.

Even though protesters donned the Chinese flag to emphasize that their actions were not aimed at “splittism,” the lowest of crimes in Beijing’s eyes, and religious leaders prostrated themselves in front of Chinese Communist Party officials, their pleas for their homes and heritage resulted in hundreds of arrests, beatings in custody and a paramilitary-style lockdown that apparently continues to the present moment.

Turquoise Roof places this ongoing incident against the backdrop of China’s wider plans to transform Tibet into a literal battery and generator by ramming vast hydropower installations into mountain valleys and bundling them together with solar and wind technologies, irrespective of the social, cultural and ecological cost.

Constructed under the umbrella of the state-owned coal conglomerate China Huadian Corporation, which has just signed a cooperation deal with Siemens, Derge’s Gangtuo Dam, as the 1.1. million-kilowatt hydropower station is called in Mandarin, will merely be one of 13 that are set to transform formerly unadulterated upper reaches of the Yangtze into something like a series of stepped reservoirs with “captive water levels high enough to lap at the bottom of the dam wall of the next dam upriver.”

Alongside more hydropower that China is locating on other major rivers of Tibet, numerous dangers are foreseen. Environmental concerns range from the disruption of a major migratory bird route and wetlands of international importance covered by the Ramsar Convention to the exorbitant release of greenhouse gasses that are required to form and transport materials for the colossal dam walls. Livelihoods from fisheries may be compromised, an outcome that is already attested in scientific literature for both the Yangtze and the Mekong in relation to the existing artificial segmentation of their waterways downstream.

On the other hand, because more suitable locations for construction have already been exploited, Tibetan dams are now being erected on thick silt beds in a seismically active region where mountains are still rising, rivers still cutting into them. As a result, they are said to be structurally akin to tofu, a metaphor that was made famous during the devastating 2008 Sichuan earthquake. According to some hypotheses, that disaster, which killed at least 90,000 people, may have been triggered by the filling of a large, nearby reservoir, and Turquoise Roof argues that something similar could ensue again alongside other dam-induced geological catastrophes in Tibet.

To make way for these dangers, thousands upon thousands of people are being coercively relocated from their homelands to new government-designated residences where they frequently lack the opportunities or skills to adapt. Food insecurity and malnutrition are wolves at the door due to the resettlement of farmers and nomads, who once produced nourishment for themselves and their families.

Thus, Tibet may be looking not just at a cascade of potential dams, but a cascade of potential dam failures visited upon a local population that is already struggling to make ends meet, and, if that sounds fanciful, it is worth remembering that hydropower facilities built by China’s state-owned companies have not always maintained the highest standards for construction and assessment of impact.

Infrastructure has proven defective in Ecuador, Uganda and Guangxi, where a recent dam failure went unreported by domestic media. As pointed out by Turquoise Roof, Tibet has already suffered a major disaster associated with the establishment of a massive dam known as Lawa Batang, too. And, going back to the previous century, the 1975 collapse of the Banqiao Dam in Henan Province led to the loss of more than 150,000 lives.

So why is China pursuing such risky plans despite the engineering fallibilities and cultural destruction that could result? Partly, the subsummation of rural homes and spiritual centers like the fresco-filled, 13th century Wontoe Monastery can be read as another round in China’s long-term attempts to assimilate Tibetans, a policy that is often justified in ecological or poverty alleviation terms, but which is better understood as breaking up Tibetan communities, leaving them disconnected from their heritage and dependent on the Han state.

However, with renewable energy, other motivations are coming to the fore. The rivers of the Tibetan plateau sit upstream from well over a billion people, conferring significant power on anybody who can conquer their flow. The electricity generated by Tibetan dams can meanwhile be routed to nearby mines, where local reserves of minerals like copper and lithium are extracted in often environmentally calamitous conditions to service the battery, electric vehicle and other industries. It is also sent eastwards to feed China’s factory heartlands.

Hence, the discrepancy between what the Chinese leadership practices and propounds is exposed. While it claims to support a multilateral world in which less affluent countries and peoples are freed from Western domination to fulfill their own developmental destinies, it is determinedly chaining the fate of Tibet to itself in an effort to render any concept of its future independence meaningless.

At the same time, it is establishing ownership of Tibetan lands that confer strategic power over the wider region and exploiting the specific natural features of these lands in order to generate the energy required to rob them of their mineral resources. Then, both the energy and the extracted minerals are supplied to Chinese companies, who, under the direction of the state, can produce a cheap flood of products in the green- and high-tech industries, decimating competitors elsewhere in the world and concentrating yet more wealth and influence in Beijing’s clutches.

An independent Tibet that made its own decisions about its rivers and resources would necessarily temper these hegemonic designs. That is why, in the eyes of the Chinese Communist Party, it can never be allowed to occur.

A video recently shared on various Chinese news and social media sites shows a set of timers installed above a row of toilet cubicles in a female washroom, with each stall getting its own digital counter.

When a stall is unoccupied, the pixelated LED screen displays the word “empty” in green. If in use, it shows the number of minutes and seconds the door has been locked. ‘We won’t kick people out midway’

The original video was reportedly taken by a visitor who sent it to the Xiaoxiang Morning Herald, a state-run local newspaper.

'We won’t kick people out midway’

The original video was reportedly taken by a visitor who sent it to the Xiaoxiang Morning Herald, a state-run local newspaper.

“I found it quite advanced technologically so you don’t have to queue outside or knock on a bathroom door,” the paper quoted the visitor as saying.

“But I also found it a little bit embarrassing. It felt like I was being monitored.”

Left unchecked, the technique, which weaponizes emotional data for political gain, could erode the foundations of a fair and informed society.

Aram Sinnreich, Chair of Communication Studies at American University • Jesse Gilbert, former founding Chair of the Media Technology department at Woodbury University.

One of the foundational concepts in modern democracies is what’s usually referred to as the marketplace of ideas, a term coined by political philosopher John Stuart Mill in 1859, though its roots stretch back at least another two centuries. The basic idea is simple: In a democratic society, everyone should share their ideas in the public sphere, and then, through reasoned debate, the people of a country may decide which ideas are best and how to put them into action, such as by passing new laws. This premise is a large part of the reason that constitutional democracies are built around freedom of speech and a free press — principles enshrined, for instance, in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Like so many other political ideals, the marketplace of ideas has been more challenging in practice than in theory. For one thing, there has never been a public sphere that was actually representative of its general populace. Enfranchisement for women and racial minorities in the United States took centuries to codify, and these citizens are still disproportionately excluded from participating in elections by a variety of political mechanisms. Media ownership and employment also skews disproportionately male and white, meaning that the voices of women and people of color are less likely to be heard. And, even for people who overcome the many obstacles to entering the public sphere, that doesn’t guarantee equal participation; as a quick scroll through your social media feed may remind you, not all voices are valued equally.

Above and beyond the challenges of entrenched racism and sexism, the marketplace of ideas has another major problem: Most political speech isn’t exactly what you’d call reasoned debate. There’s nothing new about this observation; 2,400 years ago, the Greek philosopher Aristotle argued that logos (reasoned argumentation) is only one element of political rhetoric, matched in importance by ethos (trustworthiness) and pathos (emotional resonance). But in the 21st century, thanks to the secret life of data, pathos has become datafied, and therefore weaponized, at a hitherto unimaginable scale. And this doesn’t leave us much room for logos, spelling even more trouble for democracy.

An excellent — and alarming — example of the weaponization of emotional data is a relatively new technique called neurotargeting. You may have heard this term in connection with the firm Cambridge Analytica (CA), which briefly dominated headlines in 2018 after its role in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the UK’s Brexit vote came to light. To better understand neurotargeting and its ongoing threats to democracy, we spoke with one of the foremost experts on the subject: Emma Briant, a journalism professor at Monash University and a leading scholar of propaganda studies.

Modern neurotargeting techniques trace back to U.S. intelligence experiments examining brains exposed to both terrorist propaganda and American counterpropaganda.

Neurotargeting, in its simplest form, is the strategic use of large datasets to craft and deliver a message intended to sideline the recipient’s focus on logos and ethos and appeal directly to the pathos at their emotional core. Neurotargeting is prized by political campaigns, marketers, and others in the business of persuasion because they understand, from centuries of experience, that provoking strong emotional responses is one of the most reliable ways to get people to change their behavior. As Briant explained, modern neurotargeting techniques can be traced back to experiments undertaken by U.S. intelligence agencies in the early years of the 21st century that used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machines to examine the brains of subjects as they watched both terrorist propaganda and American counterpropaganda. One of the commercial contractors working on these government experiments was Strategic Communication Laboratories, or the SCL Group, the parent company of CA.

A decade later, building on these insights, CA was the leader in a burgeoning field of political campaign consultancies that used neurotargeting to identify emotionally vulnerable voters in democracies around the globe and influence their political participation through specially crafted messaging. While the company was specifically aligned with right-wing political movements in the United States and the United Kingdom, it had a more mercenary approach elsewhere, selling its services to the highest bidder seeking to win an election. Its efforts to help Trump win the 2016 U.S. presidential election offer an illuminating glimpse into how this process worked.

As Briant has documented, one of the major sources of data used to help the Trump campaign came from a “personality test” fielded via Facebook by a Cambridge University professor working on behalf of CA, who ostensibly collected the responses for scholarly research purposes only. CA took advantage of Facebook’s lax protections of consumer data and ended up harvesting information from not only the hundreds of thousands of people who opted into the survey, but also an additional 87 million of their connections on the platform, without the knowledge or consent of those affected. At the same time, CA partnered with a company called Gloo to build and market an app that purported to help churches maintain ongoing relationships with their congregants, including by offering online counseling services. According to Briant’s research, this app was also exploited by CA to collect data about congregants’ emotional states for “political campaigns for political purposes.” In other words, the company relied heavily on unethical and deceptive tactics to collect much of its core data.

Once CA had compiled data related to the emotional states of countless millions of Americans, it subjected those data to analysis using a psychological model called OCEAN — an acronym in which the N stands for neuroticism. As Briant explained, “If you want to target people with conspiracy theories, and you want to suppress the vote, to build apathy or potentially drive people to violence, then knowing whether they are neurotic or not may well be useful to you.”

CA then used its data-sharing relationship with right-wing disinformation site Breitbart and developed partnerships with other media outlets in order to experiment with various fear-inducing political messages targeted at people with established neurotic personalities — all, as Briant detailed, to advance support for Trump. Toward this end, CA made use of a well-known marketing tool called A/B testing, a technique that compares the success rate of different pilot versions of a message to see which is more measurably persuasive.

Armed with these carefully tailored ads and a master list of neurotic voters in the United States, CA then set out to change voters’ behaviors depending on their political beliefs — getting them to the polls, inviting them to live political events and protests, convincing them not to vote, or encouraging them to share similar messages with their networks. As Briant explained, not only did CA disseminate these inflammatory and misleading messages to the original survey participants on Facebook (and millions of “lookalike” Facebook users, based on data from the company’s custom advertising platform), it also targeted these voters by “coordinating a campaign across media” including digital television and radio ads, and even by enlisting social media influencers to amplify the messaging calculated to instill fear in neurotic listeners. From the point of view of millions of targeted voters, their entire media spheres would have been inundated with overlapping and seemingly well-corroborated disinformation confirming their worst paranoid suspicions about evil plots that only a Trump victory could eradicate.

Although CA officially shut its doors in 2018 following the public scandals about its unethical use of Facebook data, parent company SCL and neurotargeting are still thriving. As Briant told us, “Cambridge Analytica isn’t gone; it’s just fractured, and [broken into] new companies. And, you know, people continue. What happens is, just because these people have been exposed, it then becomes harder to see what they’re doing.” If anything, she told us, former CA employees and other, similar companies have expanded their operations in the years since 2018, to the point where “our entire information world” has become “the battlefield.”

Unfortunately, Briant told us, regulators and democracy watchdogs don’t seem to have learned their lesson from the CA scandal. “All the focus is about the Russians who are going to ‘get us,’” she said, referring to one of the principal state sponsors of pro-Trump disinformation, but “nobody’s really looking at these firms and the experiments that they’re doing, and how that then interacts with the platforms” with which we share our personal data daily.

Unless someone does start keeping track and cracking down, Briant warned, the CA scandal will come to seem like merely the precursor to a wave of data abuse that threatens to destroy the foundations of democratic society. In particular, she sees a dangerous trend of both information warfare and military action being delegated to unaccountable, black-box algorithms, and “you no longer have human control in the process of war.” Just as there is currently no equivalent to the Geneva Conventions for the use of AI in international conflict, it will be challenging to hold algorithms accountable for their actions via international tribunals like the International Court of Justice or the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

Even researching and reporting on algorithm-driven campaigns and conflicts will become nearly impossible.

Even researching and reporting on algorithm-driven campaigns and conflicts — a vital function of scholarship and journalism — will become nearly impossible, according to Briant. “How do you report on a campaign that you cannot see, that nobody has controlled, and nobody’s making the decisions about, and you don’t have access to any of the platforms?” she asked. “What’s going to accompany that is a closing down of transparency … I think we’re at real risk of losing democracy itself as a result of this shift.”

Briant’s warning about the future of algorithmically automated warfare (both conventional and informational) is chilling and well-founded. Yet this is only one of many ways in which the secret life of data may further erode democratic norms and institutions. We can never be sure what the future holds, especially given the high degree of uncertainty associated with planetary crises like climate change. But there is compelling reason to believe that, in the near future, the acceleration of digital surveillance; the geometrically growing influence of AI, Machine Learning, and predictive algorithms; the lack of strong national and international regulation of data industries; and the significant political, military, and commercial competitive advantages associated with maximal exploitation of data will add up to a perfect storm that shakes democratic society to its foundations.

The most likely scenario, this year, is the melding of neurotargeting and generative AI. Imagine a relaunch of the Cambridge Analytica campaign from 2016, but featuring custom-generated, fear-inducing disinformation targeted to individual users or user groups in place of A/B tested messaging. It’s not merely a possibility; it’s almost certainly here, and its effects on the outcome of the U.S. presidential election won’t be fully understood until we’re well into the next presidential term.

Yet we can work together to prevent its most dire consequences, by taking care what kinds of social media posts we like and reshare, doing the extra work to check the provenance of the videos and images we’re fed, and holding wrongdoers publicly accountable when they’re caught seeding AI-generated disinformation. It’s not just a dirty trick, it’s an assault on the very foundations of democracy. If we’re going to successfully defend ourselves from this coordinated attack, we’ll need to reach across political and social divides to work in our common interest, and each of us will need to do our part.

Left unchecked, the technique, which weaponizes emotional data for political gain, could erode the foundations of a fair and informed society.

Aram Sinnreich, Chair of Communication Studies at American University • Jesse Gilbert, former founding Chair of the Media Technology department at Woodbury University.

One of the foundational concepts in modern democracies is what’s usually referred to as the marketplace of ideas, a term coined by political philosopher John Stuart Mill in 1859, though its roots stretch back at least another two centuries. The basic idea is simple: In a democratic society, everyone should share their ideas in the public sphere, and then, through reasoned debate, the people of a country may decide which ideas are best and how to put them into action, such as by passing new laws. This premise is a large part of the reason that constitutional democracies are built around freedom of speech and a free press — principles enshrined, for instance, in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Like so many other political ideals, the marketplace of ideas has been more challenging in practice than in theory. For one thing, there has never been a public sphere that was actually representative of its general populace. Enfranchisement for women and racial minorities in the United States took centuries to codify, and these citizens are still disproportionately excluded from participating in elections by a variety of political mechanisms. Media ownership and employment also skews disproportionately male and white, meaning that the voices of women and people of color are less likely to be heard. And, even for people who overcome the many obstacles to entering the public sphere, that doesn’t guarantee equal participation; as a quick scroll through your social media feed may remind you, not all voices are valued equally.

Above and beyond the challenges of entrenched racism and sexism, the marketplace of ideas has another major problem: Most political speech isn’t exactly what you’d call reasoned debate. There’s nothing new about this observation; 2,400 years ago, the Greek philosopher Aristotle argued that logos (reasoned argumentation) is only one element of political rhetoric, matched in importance by ethos (trustworthiness) and pathos (emotional resonance). But in the 21st century, thanks to the secret life of data, pathos has become datafied, and therefore weaponized, at a hitherto unimaginable scale. And this doesn’t leave us much room for logos, spelling even more trouble for democracy.

An excellent — and alarming — example of the weaponization of emotional data is a relatively new technique called neurotargeting. You may have heard this term in connection with the firm Cambridge Analytica (CA), which briefly dominated headlines in 2018 after its role in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the UK’s Brexit vote came to light. To better understand neurotargeting and its ongoing threats to democracy, we spoke with one of the foremost experts on the subject: Emma Briant, a journalism professor at Monash University and a leading scholar of propaganda studies.

Modern neurotargeting techniques trace back to U.S. intelligence experiments examining brains exposed to both terrorist propaganda and American counterpropaganda.

Neurotargeting, in its simplest form, is the strategic use of large datasets to craft and deliver a message intended to sideline the recipient’s focus on logos and ethos and appeal directly to the pathos at their emotional core. Neurotargeting is prized by political campaigns, marketers, and others in the business of persuasion because they understand, from centuries of experience, that provoking strong emotional responses is one of the most reliable ways to get people to change their behavior. As Briant explained, modern neurotargeting techniques can be traced back to experiments undertaken by U.S. intelligence agencies in the early years of the 21st century that used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machines to examine the brains of subjects as they watched both terrorist propaganda and American counterpropaganda. One of the commercial contractors working on these government experiments was Strategic Communication Laboratories, or the SCL Group, the parent company of CA.

A decade later, building on these insights, CA was the leader in a burgeoning field of political campaign consultancies that used neurotargeting to identify emotionally vulnerable voters in democracies around the globe and influence their political participation through specially crafted messaging. While the company was specifically aligned with right-wing political movements in the United States and the United Kingdom, it had a more mercenary approach elsewhere, selling its services to the highest bidder seeking to win an election. Its efforts to help Trump win the 2016 U.S. presidential election offer an illuminating glimpse into how this process worked.

As Briant has documented, one of the major sources of data used to help the Trump campaign came from a “personality test” fielded via Facebook by a Cambridge University professor working on behalf of CA, who ostensibly collected the responses for scholarly research purposes only. CA took advantage of Facebook’s lax protections of consumer data and ended up harvesting information from not only the hundreds of thousands of people who opted into the survey, but also an additional 87 million of their connections on the platform, without the knowledge or consent of those affected. At the same time, CA partnered with a company called Gloo to build and market an app that purported to help churches maintain ongoing relationships with their congregants, including by offering online counseling services. According to Briant’s research, this app was also exploited by CA to collect data about congregants’ emotional states for “political campaigns for political purposes.” In other words, the company relied heavily on unethical and deceptive tactics to collect much of its core data.

Once CA had compiled data related to the emotional states of countless millions of Americans, it subjected those data to analysis using a psychological model called OCEAN — an acronym in which the N stands for neuroticism. As Briant explained, “If you want to target people with conspiracy theories, and you want to suppress the vote, to build apathy or potentially drive people to violence, then knowing whether they are neurotic or not may well be useful to you.”

CA then used its data-sharing relationship with right-wing disinformation site Breitbart and developed partnerships with other media outlets in order to experiment with various fear-inducing political messages targeted at people with established neurotic personalities — all, as Briant detailed, to advance support for Trump. Toward this end, CA made use of a well-known marketing tool called A/B testing, a technique that compares the success rate of different pilot versions of a message to see which is more measurably persuasive.

Armed with these carefully tailored ads and a master list of neurotic voters in the United States, CA then set out to change voters’ behaviors depending on their political beliefs — getting them to the polls, inviting them to live political events and protests, convincing them not to vote, or encouraging them to share similar messages with their networks. As Briant explained, not only did CA disseminate these inflammatory and misleading messages to the original survey participants on Facebook (and millions of “lookalike” Facebook users, based on data from the company’s custom advertising platform), it also targeted these voters by “coordinating a campaign across media” including digital television and radio ads, and even by enlisting social media influencers to amplify the messaging calculated to instill fear in neurotic listeners. From the point of view of millions of targeted voters, their entire media spheres would have been inundated with overlapping and seemingly well-corroborated disinformation confirming their worst paranoid suspicions about evil plots that only a Trump victory could eradicate.

Although CA officially shut its doors in 2018 following the public scandals about its unethical use of Facebook data, parent company SCL and neurotargeting are still thriving. As Briant told us, “Cambridge Analytica isn’t gone; it’s just fractured, and [broken into] new companies. And, you know, people continue. What happens is, just because these people have been exposed, it then becomes harder to see what they’re doing.” If anything, she told us, former CA employees and other, similar companies have expanded their operations in the years since 2018, to the point where “our entire information world” has become “the battlefield.”

Unfortunately, Briant told us, regulators and democracy watchdogs don’t seem to have learned their lesson from the CA scandal. “All the focus is about the Russians who are going to ‘get us,’” she said, referring to one of the principal state sponsors of pro-Trump disinformation, but “nobody’s really looking at these firms and the experiments that they’re doing, and how that then interacts with the platforms” with which we share our personal data daily.

Unless someone does start keeping track and cracking down, Briant warned, the CA scandal will come to seem like merely the precursor to a wave of data abuse that threatens to destroy the foundations of democratic society. In particular, she sees a dangerous trend of both information warfare and military action being delegated to unaccountable, black-box algorithms, and “you no longer have human control in the process of war.” Just as there is currently no equivalent to the Geneva Conventions for the use of AI in international conflict, it will be challenging to hold algorithms accountable for their actions via international tribunals like the International Court of Justice or the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

Even researching and reporting on algorithm-driven campaigns and conflicts will become nearly impossible.

Even researching and reporting on algorithm-driven campaigns and conflicts — a vital function of scholarship and journalism — will become nearly impossible, according to Briant. “How do you report on a campaign that you cannot see, that nobody has controlled, and nobody’s making the decisions about, and you don’t have access to any of the platforms?” she asked. “What’s going to accompany that is a closing down of transparency … I think we’re at real risk of losing democracy itself as a result of this shift.”

Briant’s warning about the future of algorithmically automated warfare (both conventional and informational) is chilling and well-founded. Yet this is only one of many ways in which the secret life of data may further erode democratic norms and institutions. We can never be sure what the future holds, especially given the high degree of uncertainty associated with planetary crises like climate change. But there is compelling reason to believe that, in the near future, the acceleration of digital surveillance; the geometrically growing influence of AI, Machine Learning, and predictive algorithms; the lack of strong national and international regulation of data industries; and the significant political, military, and commercial competitive advantages associated with maximal exploitation of data will add up to a perfect storm that shakes democratic society to its foundations.

The most likely scenario, this year, is the melding of neurotargeting and generative AI. Imagine a relaunch of the Cambridge Analytica campaign from 2016, but featuring custom-generated, fear-inducing disinformation targeted to individual users or user groups in place of A/B tested messaging. It’s not merely a possibility; it’s almost certainly here, and its effects on the outcome of the U.S. presidential election won’t be fully understood until we’re well into the next presidential term.

Yet we can work together to prevent its most dire consequences, by taking care what kinds of social media posts we like and reshare, doing the extra work to check the provenance of the videos and images we’re fed, and holding wrongdoers publicly accountable when they’re caught seeding AI-generated disinformation. It’s not just a dirty trick, it’s an assault on the very foundations of democracy. If we’re going to successfully defend ourselves from this coordinated attack, we’ll need to reach across political and social divides to work in our common interest, and each of us will need to do our part.

Left unchecked, the technique, which weaponizes emotional data for political gain, could erode the foundations of a fair and informed society.

Aram Sinnreich, Chair of Communication Studies at American University • Jesse Gilbert, former founding Chair of the Media Technology department at Woodbury University.

One of the foundational concepts in modern democracies is what’s usually referred to as the marketplace of ideas, a term coined by political philosopher John Stuart Mill in 1859, though its roots stretch back at least another two centuries. The basic idea is simple: In a democratic society, everyone should share their ideas in the public sphere, and then, through reasoned debate, the people of a country may decide which ideas are best and how to put them into action, such as by passing new laws. This premise is a large part of the reason that constitutional democracies are built around freedom of speech and a free press — principles enshrined, for instance, in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Like so many other political ideals, the marketplace of ideas has been more challenging in practice than in theory. For one thing, there has never been a public sphere that was actually representative of its general populace. Enfranchisement for women and racial minorities in the United States took centuries to codify, and these citizens are still disproportionately excluded from participating in elections by a variety of political mechanisms. Media ownership and employment also skews disproportionately male and white, meaning that the voices of women and people of color are less likely to be heard. And, even for people who overcome the many obstacles to entering the public sphere, that doesn’t guarantee equal participation; as a quick scroll through your social media feed may remind you, not all voices are valued equally.

Above and beyond the challenges of entrenched racism and sexism, the marketplace of ideas has another major problem: Most political speech isn’t exactly what you’d call reasoned debate. There’s nothing new about this observation; 2,400 years ago, the Greek philosopher Aristotle argued that logos (reasoned argumentation) is only one element of political rhetoric, matched in importance by ethos (trustworthiness) and pathos (emotional resonance). But in the 21st century, thanks to the secret life of data, pathos has become datafied, and therefore weaponized, at a hitherto unimaginable scale. And this doesn’t leave us much room for logos, spelling even more trouble for democracy.

An excellent — and alarming — example of the weaponization of emotional data is a relatively new technique called neurotargeting. You may have heard this term in connection with the firm Cambridge Analytica (CA), which briefly dominated headlines in 2018 after its role in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the UK’s Brexit vote came to light. To better understand neurotargeting and its ongoing threats to democracy, we spoke with one of the foremost experts on the subject: Emma Briant, a journalism professor at Monash University and a leading scholar of propaganda studies.

Modern neurotargeting techniques trace back to U.S. intelligence experiments examining brains exposed to both terrorist propaganda and American counterpropaganda.

Neurotargeting, in its simplest form, is the strategic use of large datasets to craft and deliver a message intended to sideline the recipient’s focus on logos and ethos and appeal directly to the pathos at their emotional core. Neurotargeting is prized by political campaigns, marketers, and others in the business of persuasion because they understand, from centuries of experience, that provoking strong emotional responses is one of the most reliable ways to get people to change their behavior. As Briant explained, modern neurotargeting techniques can be traced back to experiments undertaken by U.S. intelligence agencies in the early years of the 21st century that used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machines to examine the brains of subjects as they watched both terrorist propaganda and American counterpropaganda. One of the commercial contractors working on these government experiments was Strategic Communication Laboratories, or the SCL Group, the parent company of CA.

A decade later, building on these insights, CA was the leader in a burgeoning field of political campaign consultancies that used neurotargeting to identify emotionally vulnerable voters in democracies around the globe and influence their political participation through specially crafted messaging. While the company was specifically aligned with right-wing political movements in the United States and the United Kingdom, it had a more mercenary approach elsewhere, selling its services to the highest bidder seeking to win an election. Its efforts to help Trump win the 2016 U.S. presidential election offer an illuminating glimpse into how this process worked.

As Briant has documented, one of the major sources of data used to help the Trump campaign came from a “personality test” fielded via Facebook by a Cambridge University professor working on behalf of CA, who ostensibly collected the responses for scholarly research purposes only. CA took advantage of Facebook’s lax protections of consumer data and ended up harvesting information from not only the hundreds of thousands of people who opted into the survey, but also an additional 87 million of their connections on the platform, without the knowledge or consent of those affected. At the same time, CA partnered with a company called Gloo to build and market an app that purported to help churches maintain ongoing relationships with their congregants, including by offering online counseling services. According to Briant’s research, this app was also exploited by CA to collect data about congregants’ emotional states for “political campaigns for political purposes.” In other words, the company relied heavily on unethical and deceptive tactics to collect much of its core data.

Once CA had compiled data related to the emotional states of countless millions of Americans, it subjected those data to analysis using a psychological model called OCEAN — an acronym in which the N stands for neuroticism. As Briant explained, “If you want to target people with conspiracy theories, and you want to suppress the vote, to build apathy or potentially drive people to violence, then knowing whether they are neurotic or not may well be useful to you.”

CA then used its data-sharing relationship with right-wing disinformation site Breitbart and developed partnerships with other media outlets in order to experiment with various fear-inducing political messages targeted at people with established neurotic personalities — all, as Briant detailed, to advance support for Trump. Toward this end, CA made use of a well-known marketing tool called A/B testing, a technique that compares the success rate of different pilot versions of a message to see which is more measurably persuasive.

Armed with these carefully tailored ads and a master list of neurotic voters in the United States, CA then set out to change voters’ behaviors depending on their political beliefs — getting them to the polls, inviting them to live political events and protests, convincing them not to vote, or encouraging them to share similar messages with their networks. As Briant explained, not only did CA disseminate these inflammatory and misleading messages to the original survey participants on Facebook (and millions of “lookalike” Facebook users, based on data from the company’s custom advertising platform), it also targeted these voters by “coordinating a campaign across media” including digital television and radio ads, and even by enlisting social media influencers to amplify the messaging calculated to instill fear in neurotic listeners. From the point of view of millions of targeted voters, their entire media spheres would have been inundated with overlapping and seemingly well-corroborated disinformation confirming their worst paranoid suspicions about evil plots that only a Trump victory could eradicate.

Although CA officially shut its doors in 2018 following the public scandals about its unethical use of Facebook data, parent company SCL and neurotargeting are still thriving. As Briant told us, “Cambridge Analytica isn’t gone; it’s just fractured, and [broken into] new companies. And, you know, people continue. What happens is, just because these people have been exposed, it then becomes harder to see what they’re doing.” If anything, she told us, former CA employees and other, similar companies have expanded their operations in the years since 2018, to the point where “our entire information world” has become “the battlefield.”

Unfortunately, Briant told us, regulators and democracy watchdogs don’t seem to have learned their lesson from the CA scandal. “All the focus is about the Russians who are going to ‘get us,’” she said, referring to one of the principal state sponsors of pro-Trump disinformation, but “nobody’s really looking at these firms and the experiments that they’re doing, and how that then interacts with the platforms” with which we share our personal data daily.

Unless someone does start keeping track and cracking down, Briant warned, the CA scandal will come to seem like merely the precursor to a wave of data abuse that threatens to destroy the foundations of democratic society. In particular, she sees a dangerous trend of both information warfare and military action being delegated to unaccountable, black-box algorithms, and “you no longer have human control in the process of war.” Just as there is currently no equivalent to the Geneva Conventions for the use of AI in international conflict, it will be challenging to hold algorithms accountable for their actions via international tribunals like the International Court of Justice or the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

Even researching and reporting on algorithm-driven campaigns and conflicts will become nearly impossible.

Even researching and reporting on algorithm-driven campaigns and conflicts — a vital function of scholarship and journalism — will become nearly impossible, according to Briant. “How do you report on a campaign that you cannot see, that nobody has controlled, and nobody’s making the decisions about, and you don’t have access to any of the platforms?” she asked. “What’s going to accompany that is a closing down of transparency … I think we’re at real risk of losing democracy itself as a result of this shift.”

Briant’s warning about the future of algorithmically automated warfare (both conventional and informational) is chilling and well-founded. Yet this is only one of many ways in which the secret life of data may further erode democratic norms and institutions. We can never be sure what the future holds, especially given the high degree of uncertainty associated with planetary crises like climate change. But there is compelling reason to believe that, in the near future, the acceleration of digital surveillance; the geometrically growing influence of AI, Machine Learning, and predictive algorithms; the lack of strong national and international regulation of data industries; and the significant political, military, and commercial competitive advantages associated with maximal exploitation of data will add up to a perfect storm that shakes democratic society to its foundations.

The most likely scenario, this year, is the melding of neurotargeting and generative AI. Imagine a relaunch of the Cambridge Analytica campaign from 2016, but featuring custom-generated, fear-inducing disinformation targeted to individual users or user groups in place of A/B tested messaging. It’s not merely a possibility; it’s almost certainly here, and its effects on the outcome of the U.S. presidential election won’t be fully understood until we’re well into the next presidential term.

Yet we can work together to prevent its most dire consequences, by taking care what kinds of social media posts we like and reshare, doing the extra work to check the provenance of the videos and images we’re fed, and holding wrongdoers publicly accountable when they’re caught seeding AI-generated disinformation. It’s not just a dirty trick, it’s an assault on the very foundations of democracy. If we’re going to successfully defend ourselves from this coordinated attack, we’ll need to reach across political and social divides to work in our common interest, and each of us will need to do our part.

Der Europäische Gerichtshof (EuGH) hat Ungarn wegen seiner Asylpolitik zu 200 Millionen Euro Strafe verurteilt. Außerdem müsse Ungarn für jeden weiteren Tag des Verzugs bei der Umsetzung der EU-Asylregeln eine Million Euro Zwangsgeld zahlen, entschied der EuGH am Donnerstag. Die tägliche Millionenzahlung beginne ab Donnerstag, sagte ein Sprecher.

Der ungarische Ministerpräsident Viktor Orbán nannte das Urteil empörend und inakzeptabel. „Es scheint, dass illegale Migranten den Brüsseler Bürokraten wichtiger sind als ihre eigenen europäischen Bürger“, schrieb Orbán im Kurznachrichtendienst X. Der EuGH hat seinen Sitz in Luxemburg.

Die ungarische Regierung hatte nach dem Ausbruch der Corona-Pandemie 2020 ein Gesetz durchgesetzt, das Menschen, die internationalen Schutz suchen, dazu zwang, zunächst in den ungarischen Botschaften in Belgrad oder Kyjiw eine Einreisegenehmigung für Ungarn zu beantragen. Erst nach ihrer Rückkehr nach Ungarn konnten sie dann ihre Asylanträge einreichen.

Bereits im Dezember 2020 urteilte der EuGH, dass Ungarn sich nicht an die EU-Politik zur Gewährung von internationalem Schutz und zur Rückführung illegal zugewanderter Migranten gehalten hat. Danach hat die EU-Kommission Strafzahlungen beantragt.

Der EuGH erklärte jetzt, Ungarn sei dem Urteil von 2020 nicht nachgekommen und verstoße gegen den Grundsatz der loyalen Zusammenarbeit in der EU. „Diese Vertragsverletzung, die darin besteht, die Anwendung einer gemeinsamen Politik der Union insgesamt bewusst zu umgehen, stellt eine ganz neue und außergewöhnlich schwere Verletzung des Unionsrechts dar“, hieß es weiter.

Menschen haben das Recht, Asyl oder andere Formen des internationalen Schutzes zu beantragen, wenn sie in ihrem Heimatland um ihre Sicherheit fürchten müssen oder ihnen Verfolgung unter anderem aufgrund ihrer Hautfarbe, Religion, ethnischen Herkunft oder ihres Geschlechts droht.

Archived link

Here is the article as pdf.

Huge planetary problems were fixed in the past, yielding lessons for the current climate crisis — yet this time a solution is justice - [Book review]

Solvable: How We Healed the Earth, and How We Can Do It Again Susan Solomon Univ. Chicago Press (2024)

From lead pollution to the hole in the ozone layer and climate change, Earth is no stranger to human-made — often, man-made — global disasters.

In Solvable, atmospheric chemist Susan Solomon describes how high-income countries, and the United States in particular, have repeatedly inflicted incredible amounts of damage on people and ecosystems. She relates the long and difficult struggles that concerned individuals — often from marginalized groups — faced in trying to convince governments to stop industries from destroying lives and the planet in the pursuit of profit. Solvable is a harrowing read, but Solomon is an engaging writer and there is a lot to learn in this book about the environmental crises of the past century.

Solomon relates the story of US marine biologist Rachel Carson, who rang alarm bells about persistent pesticides such as dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) in her eloquent book Silent Spring (1962). Now that we know just how harmful these pesticides are, it is jarring to read how difficult it was to stop their use.

Carson described how falcons and other birds of prey started to lay eggs with thinner shells, then almost no eggs at all; various other bird populations shrank markedly; DDT in mammals led to the development of tumours and caused sterility. Although the overwhelming evidence for the effect of DDT on animals that Carson presented was independently confirmed by the then US president John F. Kennedy’s own science advisory council, Carson was belittled and portrayed as a hysteric by politicians and the media.

This playbook of deliberate ignorance of the scientific method, disinformation and a hefty dose of misogyny is all too familiar to those advocating for climate justice today.

In the United States, it took a non-governmental organization, the Environmental Defense Fund, and a few highly publicized lawsuits to ban DDT in 1972 — seven years after Carson’s death. Others followed suit, slowly, including in the European Union with partial bans from 1978 and the United Kingdom in 1984.

Yet, the chemical industry continued to manufacture and export DDT to countries that lacked regulation, such as those in Africa and southeast Asia. A global limit was placed on DDT use in 2004 — when the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants came into force. It’s hard to assess adherence, however, because there’s little monitoring.

Geopolitical inequities

In another parallel with the climate crisis, exported DDT found its way back to nations that had banned it, through global supply chains, such as those involved in importing fashion goods from Asia, which often rely on farms that use DDT to grow cotton. Similarly, by consuming goods produced in Asian nations, European countries are exporting their production of carbon dioxide emissions, as well as exploiting cheap labour.

As inexpensive, practical and short-lived alternatives have been found, DDT use is slowly fizzling out. As a result of the bans, populations of peregrine falcons (Falco peregrinus) in the United States and Europe are recovering. Solomon takes hope from this, even though she points out that the alternatives, such as neonicotinoids, are not harmless either. Because of them, bees are now dying out.

Lead additives in petrol and paint are another example of policymakers and industry dragging their feet. Solomon highlights how, in the 1920s, Thomas Midgley Jr, a chemist at the US automotive company General Motors (GM), discovered that adding tetraethyl lead to petrol increased the efficiency and lifespan of internal combustion engines. The health hazards associated with lead were well known — even the ancient Romans had realized, centuries before, that drinking wine from lead-lined pottery caused poisoning. Yet, GM’s compound, marketed under the trade name Ethyl, became widely used.

Lead contaminated the environment and caused serious public-health issues, affecting the brains and nervous systems of many children, causing comas, convulsions and even deaths. From the early 1960s, citizen groups demanded change, citing strong scientific evidence. Yet, policymakers didn’t feel compelled to stop the use of lead in paint and petrol for more than a decade. The US Environmental Protection Agency limited the amount of lead allowed in petrol in 1973. Although the harm such fuels caused — exacerbated by the increasing number of vehicles on the road — was known, they were only fully banned in the 1990s.

Lead-based house paints were banned in 1978 in the United States. Yet, even today, some people are still exposed to lead in old, peeling paints. Similar to climate change, it is often Indigenous communities, people of colour and other marginalized groups who are disproportionately paying the price, with their health and lives, for the decades of profits that have enriched a few in the petroleum industry.

Within a decade, now at the Frigidaire division of GM, Midgley had turned his attention to refrigerants and was involved in the creation of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), particularly Freon. CFCs were initially celebrated for their non-toxic, non-flammable properties, which made them ideal, or so it seemed, for use as coolants in refrigerators and as propellants in aerosol sprays. In the mid-1970s, it became apparent that these compounds break down at cold temperatures and react with ozone.

Over the next 15 years or so, CFCs created a massive hole in the ozone layer that protects Earth and its inhabitants from dangerous ultraviolet radiation. Rates of skin cancer rose. In what Solomon, rightly in my view, sees as an outstanding success of international collaboration, leaders around the globe agreed in the 1987 Montreal Protocol to phase out CFCs. The ozone hole is now closing. But, once again, this phasing out was planned to be very slow, and only sped up when CFCs were replaced with safer alternatives, in the mid-1990s — more than a decade after their harms were known, and only after companies making and using them had found a profitable alternative.

For Solomon, all these examples show that change happens when impacts are personal, perceptible and practical solutions are available — “the three p’s”. For the climate crisis, in her view, the three p’s have been met: its devastating consequences are being felt around the world and renewable energy has become affordable. Thus, she concludes, we can “do it again”.

Broader solutions

I love Solomon’s optimism and agree that it is important to show that the climate crisis is solvable. Yet, as a climate scientist and philosopher, I don’t quite share her outlook. Each struggle she explores, from pesticides and smog to lead in paint and petrol, demonstrates just how keenly policymakers listen to industry — over other people and living things.

None of these cases were solved by overwhelming scientific evidence, or public concern and outcry. Each time, the industry responsible let go of a harmful product (such as DDT) only once it was sure to make a profit from selling its substitutes (other pesticides) — a strategy it could implement owing to its immense lobbying power in governments. But to solve the climate crisis, technological substitutions won’t be enough.

The harms of persistent pesticides were known long before governments banned them.

Substituting every internal combustion engine with an electric vehicle is not sufficient, neither is replacing coal with solar energy: energy demand needs to fall, too. The consequences of climate change are already very dire. Unlike the issues with the ozone hole or peregrine populations, they will not go away once we stop burning fossil fuels.

Ecological restoration is essential. It includes the sustainable management of forests and rivers, as well as changes in agricultural practices to focus less on livestock and more on diverse, drought-resistant crops. These are not just technical issues that can be implemented by one industry. They require an innovative approach to environmental management, through more decentralized industries and wider participation. The industries that profit from exacerbating the climate crisis will not be the same ones that will profit from change. Ultimately, the justice issues that have been set aside in the more-limited solutions of previous planetary problems — which had inserted technological substitutes into an untouched business model — cannot be ignored any longer.

Solvable is essential reading. I am convinced that Solomon is right: the climate crisis is solvable and this fight does have parallels with previous global challenges. But to address — or rather, redress — the climate crisis, any solution must have human rights at its heart, instead of the continued profits of industries.

Archived link

Here is the article as pdf.

Huge planetary problems were fixed in the past, yielding lessons for the current climate crisis — yet this time a solution is justice - [Book review]

Solvable: How We Healed the Earth, and How We Can Do It Again Susan Solomon Univ. Chicago Press (2024)

From lead pollution to the hole in the ozone layer and climate change, Earth is no stranger to human-made — often, man-made — global disasters.

In Solvable, atmospheric chemist Susan Solomon describes how high-income countries, and the United States in particular, have repeatedly inflicted incredible amounts of damage on people and ecosystems. She relates the long and difficult struggles that concerned individuals — often from marginalized groups — faced in trying to convince governments to stop industries from destroying lives and the planet in the pursuit of profit. Solvable is a harrowing read, but Solomon is an engaging writer and there is a lot to learn in this book about the environmental crises of the past century.

Solomon relates the story of US marine biologist Rachel Carson, who rang alarm bells about persistent pesticides such as dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) in her eloquent book Silent Spring (1962). Now that we know just how harmful these pesticides are, it is jarring to read how difficult it was to stop their use.

Carson described how falcons and other birds of prey started to lay eggs with thinner shells, then almost no eggs at all; various other bird populations shrank markedly; DDT in mammals led to the development of tumours and caused sterility. Although the overwhelming evidence for the effect of DDT on animals that Carson presented was independently confirmed by the then US president John F. Kennedy’s own science advisory council, Carson was belittled and portrayed as a hysteric by politicians and the media.

This playbook of deliberate ignorance of the scientific method, disinformation and a hefty dose of misogyny is all too familiar to those advocating for climate justice today.

In the United States, it took a non-governmental organization, the Environmental Defense Fund, and a few highly publicized lawsuits to ban DDT in 1972 — seven years after Carson’s death. Others followed suit, slowly, including in the European Union with partial bans from 1978 and the United Kingdom in 1984.

Yet, the chemical industry continued to manufacture and export DDT to countries that lacked regulation, such as those in Africa and southeast Asia. A global limit was placed on DDT use in 2004 — when the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants came into force. It’s hard to assess adherence, however, because there’s little monitoring.

Geopolitical inequities

In another parallel with the climate crisis, exported DDT found its way back to nations that had banned it, through global supply chains, such as those involved in importing fashion goods from Asia, which often rely on farms that use DDT to grow cotton. Similarly, by consuming goods produced in Asian nations, European countries are exporting their production of carbon dioxide emissions, as well as exploiting cheap labour.

As inexpensive, practical and short-lived alternatives have been found, DDT use is slowly fizzling out. As a result of the bans, populations of peregrine falcons (Falco peregrinus) in the United States and Europe are recovering. Solomon takes hope from this, even though she points out that the alternatives, such as neonicotinoids, are not harmless either. Because of them, bees are now dying out.

Lead additives in petrol and paint are another example of policymakers and industry dragging their feet. Solomon highlights how, in the 1920s, Thomas Midgley Jr, a chemist at the US automotive company General Motors (GM), discovered that adding tetraethyl lead to petrol increased the efficiency and lifespan of internal combustion engines. The health hazards associated with lead were well known — even the ancient Romans had realized, centuries before, that drinking wine from lead-lined pottery caused poisoning. Yet, GM’s compound, marketed under the trade name Ethyl, became widely used.

Lead contaminated the environment and caused serious public-health issues, affecting the brains and nervous systems of many children, causing comas, convulsions and even deaths. From the early 1960s, citizen groups demanded change, citing strong scientific evidence. Yet, policymakers didn’t feel compelled to stop the use of lead in paint and petrol for more than a decade. The US Environmental Protection Agency limited the amount of lead allowed in petrol in 1973. Although the harm such fuels caused — exacerbated by the increasing number of vehicles on the road — was known, they were only fully banned in the 1990s.

Lead-based house paints were banned in 1978 in the United States. Yet, even today, some people are still exposed to lead in old, peeling paints. Similar to climate change, it is often Indigenous communities, people of colour and other marginalized groups who are disproportionately paying the price, with their health and lives, for the decades of profits that have enriched a few in the petroleum industry.

Within a decade, now at the Frigidaire division of GM, Midgley had turned his attention to refrigerants and was involved in the creation of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), particularly Freon. CFCs were initially celebrated for their non-toxic, non-flammable properties, which made them ideal, or so it seemed, for use as coolants in refrigerators and as propellants in aerosol sprays. In the mid-1970s, it became apparent that these compounds break down at cold temperatures and react with ozone.

Over the next 15 years or so, CFCs created a massive hole in the ozone layer that protects Earth and its inhabitants from dangerous ultraviolet radiation. Rates of skin cancer rose. In what Solomon, rightly in my view, sees as an outstanding success of international collaboration, leaders around the globe agreed in the 1987 Montreal Protocol to phase out CFCs. The ozone hole is now closing. But, once again, this phasing out was planned to be very slow, and only sped up when CFCs were replaced with safer alternatives, in the mid-1990s — more than a decade after their harms were known, and only after companies making and using them had found a profitable alternative.

For Solomon, all these examples show that change happens when impacts are personal, perceptible and practical solutions are available — “the three p’s”. For the climate crisis, in her view, the three p’s have been met: its devastating consequences are being felt around the world and renewable energy has become affordable. Thus, she concludes, we can “do it again”.

Broader solutions

I love Solomon’s optimism and agree that it is important to show that the climate crisis is solvable. Yet, as a climate scientist and philosopher, I don’t quite share her outlook. Each struggle she explores, from pesticides and smog to lead in paint and petrol, demonstrates just how keenly policymakers listen to industry — over other people and living things.

None of these cases were solved by overwhelming scientific evidence, or public concern and outcry. Each time, the industry responsible let go of a harmful product (such as DDT) only once it was sure to make a profit from selling its substitutes (other pesticides) — a strategy it could implement owing to its immense lobbying power in governments. But to solve the climate crisis, technological substitutions won’t be enough.

The harms of persistent pesticides were known long before governments banned them.

Substituting every internal combustion engine with an electric vehicle is not sufficient, neither is replacing coal with solar energy: energy demand needs to fall, too. The consequences of climate change are already very dire. Unlike the issues with the ozone hole or peregrine populations, they will not go away once we stop burning fossil fuels.

Ecological restoration is essential. It includes the sustainable management of forests and rivers, as well as changes in agricultural practices to focus less on livestock and more on diverse, drought-resistant crops. These are not just technical issues that can be implemented by one industry. They require an innovative approach to environmental management, through more decentralized industries and wider participation. The industries that profit from exacerbating the climate crisis will not be the same ones that will profit from change. Ultimately, the justice issues that have been set aside in the more-limited solutions of previous planetary problems — which had inserted technological substitutes into an untouched business model — cannot be ignored any longer.

Solvable is essential reading. I am convinced that Solomon is right: the climate crisis is solvable and this fight does have parallels with previous global challenges. But to address — or rather, redress — the climate crisis, any solution must have human rights at its heart, instead of the continued profits of industries.

Archived link

Here is the article as pdf.

Huge planetary problems were fixed in the past, yielding lessons for the current climate crisis — yet this time a solution is justice - [Book review]

Solvable: How We Healed the Earth, and How We Can Do It Again Susan Solomon Univ. Chicago Press (2024)

From lead pollution to the hole in the ozone layer and climate change, Earth is no stranger to human-made — often, man-made — global disasters.

In Solvable, atmospheric chemist Susan Solomon describes how high-income countries, and the United States in particular, have repeatedly inflicted incredible amounts of damage on people and ecosystems. She relates the long and difficult struggles that concerned individuals — often from marginalized groups — faced in trying to convince governments to stop industries from destroying lives and the planet in the pursuit of profit. Solvable is a harrowing read, but Solomon is an engaging writer and there is a lot to learn in this book about the environmental crises of the past century.

Solomon relates the story of US marine biologist Rachel Carson, who rang alarm bells about persistent pesticides such as dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) in her eloquent book Silent Spring (1962). Now that we know just how harmful these pesticides are, it is jarring to read how difficult it was to stop their use.

Carson described how falcons and other birds of prey started to lay eggs with thinner shells, then almost no eggs at all; various other bird populations shrank markedly; DDT in mammals led to the development of tumours and caused sterility. Although the overwhelming evidence for the effect of DDT on animals that Carson presented was independently confirmed by the then US president John F. Kennedy’s own science advisory council, Carson was belittled and portrayed as a hysteric by politicians and the media.

This playbook of deliberate ignorance of the scientific method, disinformation and a hefty dose of misogyny is all too familiar to those advocating for climate justice today.

In the United States, it took a non-governmental organization, the Environmental Defense Fund, and a few highly publicized lawsuits to ban DDT in 1972 — seven years after Carson’s death. Others followed suit, slowly, including in the European Union with partial bans from 1978 and the United Kingdom in 1984.

Yet, the chemical industry continued to manufacture and export DDT to countries that lacked regulation, such as those in Africa and southeast Asia. A global limit was placed on DDT use in 2004 — when the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants came into force. It’s hard to assess adherence, however, because there’s little monitoring.

Geopolitical inequities

In another parallel with the climate crisis, exported DDT found its way back to nations that had banned it, through global supply chains, such as those involved in importing fashion goods from Asia, which often rely on farms that use DDT to grow cotton. Similarly, by consuming goods produced in Asian nations, European countries are exporting their production of carbon dioxide emissions, as well as exploiting cheap labour.

As inexpensive, practical and short-lived alternatives have been found, DDT use is slowly fizzling out. As a result of the bans, populations of peregrine falcons (Falco peregrinus) in the United States and Europe are recovering. Solomon takes hope from this, even though she points out that the alternatives, such as neonicotinoids, are not harmless either. Because of them, bees are now dying out.

Lead additives in petrol and paint are another example of policymakers and industry dragging their feet. Solomon highlights how, in the 1920s, Thomas Midgley Jr, a chemist at the US automotive company General Motors (GM), discovered that adding tetraethyl lead to petrol increased the efficiency and lifespan of internal combustion engines. The health hazards associated with lead were well known — even the ancient Romans had realized, centuries before, that drinking wine from lead-lined pottery caused poisoning. Yet, GM’s compound, marketed under the trade name Ethyl, became widely used.

Lead contaminated the environment and caused serious public-health issues, affecting the brains and nervous systems of many children, causing comas, convulsions and even deaths. From the early 1960s, citizen groups demanded change, citing strong scientific evidence. Yet, policymakers didn’t feel compelled to stop the use of lead in paint and petrol for more than a decade. The US Environmental Protection Agency limited the amount of lead allowed in petrol in 1973. Although the harm such fuels caused — exacerbated by the increasing number of vehicles on the road — was known, they were only fully banned in the 1990s.

Lead-based house paints were banned in 1978 in the United States. Yet, even today, some people are still exposed to lead in old, peeling paints. Similar to climate change, it is often Indigenous communities, people of colour and other marginalized groups who are disproportionately paying the price, with their health and lives, for the decades of profits that have enriched a few in the petroleum industry.

Within a decade, now at the Frigidaire division of GM, Midgley had turned his attention to refrigerants and was involved in the creation of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), particularly Freon. CFCs were initially celebrated for their non-toxic, non-flammable properties, which made them ideal, or so it seemed, for use as coolants in refrigerators and as propellants in aerosol sprays. In the mid-1970s, it became apparent that these compounds break down at cold temperatures and react with ozone.

Over the next 15 years or so, CFCs created a massive hole in the ozone layer that protects Earth and its inhabitants from dangerous ultraviolet radiation. Rates of skin cancer rose. In what Solomon, rightly in my view, sees as an outstanding success of international collaboration, leaders around the globe agreed in the 1987 Montreal Protocol to phase out CFCs. The ozone hole is now closing. But, once again, this phasing out was planned to be very slow, and only sped up when CFCs were replaced with safer alternatives, in the mid-1990s — more than a decade after their harms were known, and only after companies making and using them had found a profitable alternative.

For Solomon, all these examples show that change happens when impacts are personal, perceptible and practical solutions are available — “the three p’s”. For the climate crisis, in her view, the three p’s have been met: its devastating consequences are being felt around the world and renewable energy has become affordable. Thus, she concludes, we can “do it again”.

Broader solutions

I love Solomon’s optimism and agree that it is important to show that the climate crisis is solvable. Yet, as a climate scientist and philosopher, I don’t quite share her outlook. Each struggle she explores, from pesticides and smog to lead in paint and petrol, demonstrates just how keenly policymakers listen to industry — over other people and living things.

None of these cases were solved by overwhelming scientific evidence, or public concern and outcry. Each time, the industry responsible let go of a harmful product (such as DDT) only once it was sure to make a profit from selling its substitutes (other pesticides) — a strategy it could implement owing to its immense lobbying power in governments. But to solve the climate crisis, technological substitutions won’t be enough.

The harms of persistent pesticides were known long before governments banned them.

Substituting every internal combustion engine with an electric vehicle is not sufficient, neither is replacing coal with solar energy: energy demand needs to fall, too. The consequences of climate change are already very dire. Unlike the issues with the ozone hole or peregrine populations, they will not go away once we stop burning fossil fuels.

Ecological restoration is essential. It includes the sustainable management of forests and rivers, as well as changes in agricultural practices to focus less on livestock and more on diverse, drought-resistant crops. These are not just technical issues that can be implemented by one industry. They require an innovative approach to environmental management, through more decentralized industries and wider participation. The industries that profit from exacerbating the climate crisis will not be the same ones that will profit from change. Ultimately, the justice issues that have been set aside in the more-limited solutions of previous planetary problems — which had inserted technological substitutes into an untouched business model — cannot be ignored any longer.

Solvable is essential reading. I am convinced that Solomon is right: the climate crisis is solvable and this fight does have parallels with previous global challenges. But to address — or rather, redress — the climate crisis, any solution must have human rights at its heart, instead of the continued profits of industries.

Archived link

Here is the article as pdf.

Huge planetary problems were fixed in the past, yielding lessons for the current climate crisis — yet this time a solution is justice - [Book review]

Solvable: How We Healed the Earth, and How We Can Do It Again Susan Solomon Univ. Chicago Press (2024)

From lead pollution to the hole in the ozone layer and climate change, Earth is no stranger to human-made — often, man-made — global disasters.

In Solvable, atmospheric chemist Susan Solomon describes how high-income countries, and the United States in particular, have repeatedly inflicted incredible amounts of damage on people and ecosystems. She relates the long and difficult struggles that concerned individuals — often from marginalized groups — faced in trying to convince governments to stop industries from destroying lives and the planet in the pursuit of profit. Solvable is a harrowing read, but Solomon is an engaging writer and there is a lot to learn in this book about the environmental crises of the past century.

Solomon relates the story of US marine biologist Rachel Carson, who rang alarm bells about persistent pesticides such as dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) in her eloquent book Silent Spring (1962). Now that we know just how harmful these pesticides are, it is jarring to read how difficult it was to stop their use.

Carson described how falcons and other birds of prey started to lay eggs with thinner shells, then almost no eggs at all; various other bird populations shrank markedly; DDT in mammals led to the development of tumours and caused sterility. Although the overwhelming evidence for the effect of DDT on animals that Carson presented was independently confirmed by the then US president John F. Kennedy’s own science advisory council, Carson was belittled and portrayed as a hysteric by politicians and the media.

This playbook of deliberate ignorance of the scientific method, disinformation and a hefty dose of misogyny is all too familiar to those advocating for climate justice today.

In the United States, it took a non-governmental organization, the Environmental Defense Fund, and a few highly publicized lawsuits to ban DDT in 1972 — seven years after Carson’s death. Others followed suit, slowly, including in the European Union with partial bans from 1978 and the United Kingdom in 1984.

Yet, the chemical industry continued to manufacture and export DDT to countries that lacked regulation, such as those in Africa and southeast Asia. A global limit was placed on DDT use in 2004 — when the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants came into force. It’s hard to assess adherence, however, because there’s little monitoring.

Geopolitical inequities

In another parallel with the climate crisis, exported DDT found its way back to nations that had banned it, through global supply chains, such as those involved in importing fashion goods from Asia, which often rely on farms that use DDT to grow cotton. Similarly, by consuming goods produced in Asian nations, European countries are exporting their production of carbon dioxide emissions, as well as exploiting cheap labour.

As inexpensive, practical and short-lived alternatives have been found, DDT use is slowly fizzling out. As a result of the bans, populations of peregrine falcons (Falco peregrinus) in the United States and Europe are recovering. Solomon takes hope from this, even though she points out that the alternatives, such as neonicotinoids, are not harmless either. Because of them, bees are now dying out.

Lead additives in petrol and paint are another example of policymakers and industry dragging their feet. Solomon highlights how, in the 1920s, Thomas Midgley Jr, a chemist at the US automotive company General Motors (GM), discovered that adding tetraethyl lead to petrol increased the efficiency and lifespan of internal combustion engines. The health hazards associated with lead were well known — even the ancient Romans had realized, centuries before, that drinking wine from lead-lined pottery caused poisoning. Yet, GM’s compound, marketed under the trade name Ethyl, became widely used.

Lead contaminated the environment and caused serious public-health issues, affecting the brains and nervous systems of many children, causing comas, convulsions and even deaths. From the early 1960s, citizen groups demanded change, citing strong scientific evidence. Yet, policymakers didn’t feel compelled to stop the use of lead in paint and petrol for more than a decade. The US Environmental Protection Agency limited the amount of lead allowed in petrol in 1973. Although the harm such fuels caused — exacerbated by the increasing number of vehicles on the road — was known, they were only fully banned in the 1990s.

Lead-based house paints were banned in 1978 in the United States. Yet, even today, some people are still exposed to lead in old, peeling paints. Similar to climate change, it is often Indigenous communities, people of colour and other marginalized groups who are disproportionately paying the price, with their health and lives, for the decades of profits that have enriched a few in the petroleum industry.

Within a decade, now at the Frigidaire division of GM, Midgley had turned his attention to refrigerants and was involved in the creation of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), particularly Freon. CFCs were initially celebrated for their non-toxic, non-flammable properties, which made them ideal, or so it seemed, for use as coolants in refrigerators and as propellants in aerosol sprays. In the mid-1970s, it became apparent that these compounds break down at cold temperatures and react with ozone.

Over the next 15 years or so, CFCs created a massive hole in the ozone layer that protects Earth and its inhabitants from dangerous ultraviolet radiation. Rates of skin cancer rose. In what Solomon, rightly in my view, sees as an outstanding success of international collaboration, leaders around the globe agreed in the 1987 Montreal Protocol to phase out CFCs. The ozone hole is now closing. But, once again, this phasing out was planned to be very slow, and only sped up when CFCs were replaced with safer alternatives, in the mid-1990s — more than a decade after their harms were known, and only after companies making and using them had found a profitable alternative.

For Solomon, all these examples show that change happens when impacts are personal, perceptible and practical solutions are available — “the three p’s”. For the climate crisis, in her view, the three p’s have been met: its devastating consequences are being felt around the world and renewable energy has become affordable. Thus, she concludes, we can “do it again”.

Broader solutions

I love Solomon’s optimism and agree that it is important to show that the climate crisis is solvable. Yet, as a climate scientist and philosopher, I don’t quite share her outlook. Each struggle she explores, from pesticides and smog to lead in paint and petrol, demonstrates just how keenly policymakers listen to industry — over other people and living things.

None of these cases were solved by overwhelming scientific evidence, or public concern and outcry. Each time, the industry responsible let go of a harmful product (such as DDT) only once it was sure to make a profit from selling its substitutes (other pesticides) — a strategy it could implement owing to its immense lobbying power in governments. But to solve the climate crisis, technological substitutions won’t be enough.

The harms of persistent pesticides were known long before governments banned them.

Substituting every internal combustion engine with an electric vehicle is not sufficient, neither is replacing coal with solar energy: energy demand needs to fall, too. The consequences of climate change are already very dire. Unlike the issues with the ozone hole or peregrine populations, they will not go away once we stop burning fossil fuels.

Ecological restoration is essential. It includes the sustainable management of forests and rivers, as well as changes in agricultural practices to focus less on livestock and more on diverse, drought-resistant crops. These are not just technical issues that can be implemented by one industry. They require an innovative approach to environmental management, through more decentralized industries and wider participation. The industries that profit from exacerbating the climate crisis will not be the same ones that will profit from change. Ultimately, the justice issues that have been set aside in the more-limited solutions of previous planetary problems — which had inserted technological substitutes into an untouched business model — cannot be ignored any longer.

Solvable is essential reading. I am convinced that Solomon is right: the climate crisis is solvable and this fight does have parallels with previous global challenges. But to address — or rather, redress — the climate crisis, any solution must have human rights at its heart, instead of the continued profits of industries.

The South Australian premier, Peter Malinauskas, has announced plans to ban donations to registered political parties, members of parliament and candidates. The state will provide funding to allow parties and candidates to contest elections, run campaigns and promote political ideas, according to the proposed bill.

Loans to registered political parties, MPs, groups, or candidates from anyone other than a financial institution would also be prohibited, it says.

To ensure new entrants to the political process are not disadvantaged, newly registered political parties and unendorsed candidates will be entitled to receive donations of up to $2,700, and will also be subject to a spending cap.

A person who knowingly participates in a scheme to circumvent the proposed donation laws could face a fine of up to $50,000 or up to 10 years in prison.

The bill proposes a restructure and mandatory application of the existing public funding model, including a reduction in the amount parties, MPs and candidates can spend.

Given that under the proposed scheme participants would no longer be able to fundraise, the bill proposes to increase the amount of public funding provided, and a system of partial advance payments, so funding entitlements are available to parties and candidates prior to an election campaign.

This significant reform is complex and may well be subject to legal challenge, including via the High Court.

Starting today, members of the public and other interested parties are welcome to provide feedback on the draft bill over a four-week consultation period via the YourSAy website. Quotes

Attributable to Peter Malinauskas

Since its foundation, our state has a rich tradition of leading the world in democratic reform.

In the 1850s we pioneered universal male suffrage and the Australian ballot. Half a century later, we did the same for universal female suffrage and became the first jurisdiction in the world to grant women the right to stand for Parliament.

Now, we are on the cusp of becoming a world leader in ending the nexus between money and political power.

We want money out of politics.

We know this is not easy. These reforms may well face legal challenge.

But we are determined to deliver them, with this bill to be introduced in the Parliament in the near future.

Attributable to Dan Cregan

These reforms are ambitious and, if realised, will ensure South Australia is at the forefront of protecting and improving democratic practices.

Banning political donations will not be easy. Sectional interest groups and lobbyists will fight tooth and nail to keep the current system.

No political donor should be able to buy a favourable political outcome in our state by donating to parties or candidates.

The hard truth is that public confidence in democracy is in decline. We need to take real steps to address that decline or risk falling into the extreme political disfunction which is playing out in other jurisdictions.

The hard truth is that public confidence in democracy is in decline. We need to take real steps to address that decline or risk falling into the extreme political disfunction which is playing out in other jurisdictions.

The South Australian premier, Peter Malinauskas, has announced plans to ban donations to registered political parties, members of parliament and candidates. The state will provide funding to allow parties and candidates to contest elections, run campaigns and promote political ideas, according to the proposed bill.

Loans to registered political parties, MPs, groups, or candidates from anyone other than a financial institution would also be prohibited, it says.

To ensure new entrants to the political process are not disadvantaged, newly registered political parties and unendorsed candidates will be entitled to receive donations of up to $2,700, and will also be subject to a spending cap.

A person who knowingly participates in a scheme to circumvent the proposed donation laws could face a fine of up to $50,000 or up to 10 years in prison.

The bill proposes a restructure and mandatory application of the existing public funding model, including a reduction in the amount parties, MPs and candidates can spend.

Given that under the proposed scheme participants would no longer be able to fundraise, the bill proposes to increase the amount of public funding provided, and a system of partial advance payments, so funding entitlements are available to parties and candidates prior to an election campaign.

This significant reform is complex and may well be subject to legal challenge, including via the High Court.

Starting today, members of the public and other interested parties are welcome to provide feedback on the draft bill over a four-week consultation period via the YourSAy website. Quotes

Attributable to Peter Malinauskas

Since its foundation, our state has a rich tradition of leading the world in democratic reform.

In the 1850s we pioneered universal male suffrage and the Australian ballot. Half a century later, we did the same for universal female suffrage and became the first jurisdiction in the world to grant women the right to stand for Parliament.

Now, we are on the cusp of becoming a world leader in ending the nexus between money and political power.

We want money out of politics.

We know this is not easy. These reforms may well face legal challenge.

But we are determined to deliver them, with this bill to be introduced in the Parliament in the near future.

Attributable to Dan Cregan

These reforms are ambitious and, if realised, will ensure South Australia is at the forefront of protecting and improving democratic practices.

Banning political donations will not be easy. Sectional interest groups and lobbyists will fight tooth and nail to keep the current system.

No political donor should be able to buy a favourable political outcome in our state by donating to parties or candidates.

The hard truth is that public confidence in democracy is in decline. We need to take real steps to address that decline or risk falling into the extreme political disfunction which is playing out in other jurisdictions.

The hard truth is that public confidence in democracy is in decline. We need to take real steps to address that decline or risk falling into the extreme political disfunction which is playing out in other jurisdictions.