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CRITICAL STATE
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Your weekly foreign policy fix.
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If you read just one thing …
… read about “Noctalgia” or “sky grief.”
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In the deserts near where I write these newsletters, the stars at night are mostly visible. Go a little way into the mountains, far from the lights of the sprawl, and on a clear night one can see the Milky Way. But this is an increasingly rare experience, and it is one not entirely unblemished by the changes of the 21st century. New satellite constellations, most famously Starlink (but there are others), are putting more objects into orbit that catch the sun and give us a different heavens than before. Writing at Space.com, Paul Sutter writes, “Given the harmful effects of light pollution, a pair of astronomers has coined a new term to help focus efforts to combat it.” Their term is
“noctalgia.” According to the astronomers, it “means ‘sky grief,’ and it captures the collective pain we are experiencing as we continue to lose access to the night sky.” The loss of dark sky is not inevitable. New rules could preserve dark spaces, limit light cast upwards, and manage satellites. Having a word to name the loss makes it easier to fight against it.
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A crisis of theory
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Economics is not the science of revolution, but for many who go into it expecting to discern the shape of the world, it can be a way to understand the conditions for revolution. Writing at Jacobin, Seth Ackerman goes deep on one of the debates within Marxian economics and over the theory of the Falling Rate of Profit, or the notion that firms will turn to capital with a thinner profit margin as a way to stay competitive over time.
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The heart of this debate is to find theoretical grounding for a political position. If the reason for present economic conditions is wasted production and workers too poor to purchase goods, then that requires a different political response than a refusal of firms to enter into the production of needed technologies, like solar panel mass production. In light of the Biden administration’s turn to industrial policy, with its explicit aim of moving industry toward useful production for mitigating and defeating climate change, the debate takes on an existential tenor: is this just a mirage designed to prevent planning, or is this a useful step toward better conditions for all?
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“It follows from this that any adequate analysis of modern capitalist crisis must start, not from the absence of planning, but from the existence of a vastly extended division of labor. With a far-flung division of labor, the activities of millions or billions of people must be minutely coordinated and anything that disrupts this intricate coordination throws a wrench into the gears of production,” concludes Ackerman. The problem is not stagnation, but allocation, which carries with it a hint of optimism. As the world economy continues to grow, better allocation of labor and capital to meet the crisis is still possible.
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Gauging Interest
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When the Soviet Union built its rail network, it did so on a standard that could connect all the various Soviet Socialist Republics. As a downstream effect of that, Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine today use the same rail gauge, which allowed for easy economic interconnection before Russia’s 2014 claim on the Donbas and Crimea, economic connections that fully broke down following the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Before the war, Russian and Belarussian train cars would transit their goods through Ukraine before being transferred to different tracks. Now, however, Ukraine has made it a point — and law — to seize such train cars for the war effort, leading Russia and Belarus to stop returning their train cars from Europe.
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“In train stations in Hungarian towns at the Ukrainian border, almost 500 Russian cargo rail cars had gotten stranded, 300 of which are still occupying tracks and slowing traffic. Previously, Ukraine’s state railway asked Hungary in vain to free up the space by sending them those obsolete Russian wagons. However, rail cars are slowly dissipating: some were sent to Ukraine while others likely got back to Russia via Poland and Belarus,” explain Szabolcs Panyi, Tomáš Madleňák, and Anastasiia Morozova of VSquare.
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The authors report that of the rail cars stranded in Slovakia, most were handed over first to an American-owned steel company but then sent along to Ukraine in a move of dubious legality and clear utility. For train cars stranded in Poland, some went back to Russia via Belarus, with a promise of sending others to Ukraine.
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Something Coherent: Part II
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During the August 2023 heat wave, Bitcoin-mining company Riot shut down its Texas-based operations during peak demand and posted record profits despite a drop in production. (Really, “Bitcoin production” is the effort of tremendous computing power devoted to solving math problems, which occasionally generates a digital object of fluctuating value). The reason for Riot’s success? The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages the state’s power grid, paid the company $31.7 million in energy credits to power down.
While Texas has a unique market approach to its state electric grid, the payoff represented an unusual moment. Why was the government going out of the way to reward a business that functionally exists to hold electricity hostage?
In “‘Our Way of Life is not up for Negotiation!’: Climate Interventions in the Shadow of ‘Societal Security,’” authors Duncan McLaren and Olaf Corry offer one possible answer. Using a “societal security” framework for climate response, they argue that many state interventions around climate change are based not on actual mitigation of greenhouse gasses or climate harm but on preserving the existing quality of life of a certain segment of the national population.
“Drawing on recent legislation, public databases of litigation against climate protesters, and investigative journalism, as well as extant scholarly studies of the politics of climate migration and climate protests, we show that what we term societal climate securitization has already begun casting identities and lifestyles that rely on high (fossil) energy consumption as the referent object of security,” the authors write.
They draw their paper title from a statement made by President George H. W. Bush at a 1992 UN summit on the environment held in Rio de Janeiro, in which the elder Bush said that the “American way of life” was not up for negotiation.
By adopting a societal security framework, the authors can explain that “the extraordinary responses justified by climate securitization need not be directed at reducing causes of climate change or its impacts on human or ecological systems, but primarily at defending (politically dominant groups’) values, identities or ‘ways of life.’ From this perspective, responses such as climate migration and activism, or even rapid emissions mitigation in general are potentially ‘threats’ themselves warranting exceptional measures.”
In other words, while the warming climate may threaten all life as we know it, for those already well-off, criminalization of climate protestors and climate migrants protects the wealthy from having to even consider adjusting their existing fossil fuel-dependent lifestyles.
Throughout the paper, the authors draw a comparison to the Global War on Terror, in which the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were used to justify the expansive erosion of personal rights at home and military interventions abroad. “Deploying conventional military or cyber interventions to close down fossil fuel facilities in multiple other countries, for example, even if materially similar to foreign drone strikes against terror suspects, would appear disproportionate,” they write.
Seen from the perspective of normal markets, a Bitcoin miner taking a payout to cease operations during a heatwave (and thus ensure air conditioning stays on, saving lives) is business as usual. Were the state to seize the Bitcoin operation and shut it down, ensuring that it never held the grid hostage for a bribe again, that would disrupt the entire status quo society governments are at present trying to maintain.
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Carolyn Beeler sunk into the case being made by a coalition of small island nations that greenhouse gas pollution is covered (and prohibited) under the UN’s Convention on the Law of the Sea. The convention is a treaty agreed to by most of the world’s nations for how to share the oceans. The United States formally abides by it but is not party to the treaty. The coalition, writes Beeler, “believes that the Law of the Sea should be interpreted by the court as requiring countries to slash emissions enough to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.”
Zenaira Bakhsh interviewed the poor who were displaced and hidden by India’s government during the G20 summit. Police patrols, concerned with image, cleared stalls and enclosures where small-time vendors piled their wares and trades, depriving the poorest Indians of income for the summit’s duration. “About 10 miles away from Jamia Nagar, a prominent roundabout junction close to the airport was covered with tall green curtains through which convoys of ‘VIPs’ frequently pass. Hidden from the passersby’s view, except for a few small openings, was a densely populated slum inside the roundabout island,” wrote Bakhsh.
Tibisay Zea dug into the dispute over a planned canal along the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The canal, authorized and started in 2021 by Haiti’s then-existing government, was designed in keeping with shared water rights over the Massacre (or Dajabón) River, which forms part of the border between the two countries. Seeking relief from drought, farmers in Haiti have organized and taken it upon themselves to dig the canal where their absent government has not. In response, and likely with reelection in mind, Dominican President Luis Abinader shut down the border between the countries over the canal construction.
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Critical State is written by Kelsey D. Atherton with Inkstick Media.
The World is a weekday public radio show and podcast on global issues, news and insights from PRX and GBH.
With an online magazine and podcast featuring a diversity of expert voices, Inkstick Media is “foreign policy for the rest of us.”
Critical State is made possible in part by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
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