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Science and decolonization: Keeping the debate on track
First Nations seem unusually well placed to challenge an exclusionary politics that withholds scientific power from the majority of those affected by it. The successes of these First Nations could lead to greater changes. Perhaps this is why the faux-partisan pundit classes seem so bent on distracting us with their interminable squabbling over how to divide the cake amongst themselves.
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Telecom giants—not Google and Facebook—continue to dominate Canada’s media economy
Those following the Senate and Parliamentary hearings into Bills C-11 and C-18 might think Canadian media are wasting away while foreign digital giants like Google, Facebook and Netflix are replacing them. But big telecom companies like Rogers and Bell continue to take the lion’s share from subscription revenues for cable, Internet access, and wireless services.
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Does the US chip ban on China amount to a declaration of war in the computer age?
The US has gambled big in its latest sanctions on Chinese companies in the semiconductor industry, believing it can kneecap China and retain its global dominance. From the slogans of globalization and “free trade” of the neoliberal 1990s, Washington has reverted to good old technology denial regimes that the US and its allies followed during the Cold War.
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Could Google, Meta quit Canada over Bill C-18?
The high-stakes game of chicken that is the Online News Act reached a new, dangerous level after the federal government closed the list of speakers on its pending Bill C-18 without inviting Meta. That prompted the owner of social network Facebook to issue a statement threatening to stop carrying links to news stories from Canada if Ottawa tries to force it to pay for doing so.
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Is the energy transition taking off—or hitting a wall?
If the energy transition is the biggest technical challenge ever, it is also the biggest social, economic, and political challenge in human history. It may also turn out to be an enormous geopolitical challenge, if nations end up fighting over access to the minerals and metals that will be the enablers of the energy transition.
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Shift from fossils to renewables will save $12 trillion by 2050
Replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy will save countries at least US$12 trillion by 2050, an Oxford University research team reports. The study concludes that “the decarbonization of the energy system will not only see a major reduction in the cost of producing and distributing energy, but will also help expand energy access around the planet.”
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Carbon capture and storage: a necessary evil?
We are in the middle of an historic energy crisis. Recently, news headlines have been overwhelmed by commentaries on the price of energy across Europe, driving governments like Canada’s to make sweeping statements about the future of natural gas and hydrogen. Many of these new climate plans are predicated upon carbon capture and storage technologies.
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Paris Marx: Improving the world is a political project, not a technological one
Paris Marx is one of the leading authorities on all things “tech.” As host of the award-winning Tech Won’t Save Us podcast and author the upcoming Verso book Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation, Marx expertly dissects the countless promises—and far more often, failures—of Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and fads like cryptocurrency and the Metaverse.
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The false hope of carbon capture and storage
Do we need carbon removal? Almost certainly, but not because we need to offset “hard-to-decarbonize” industries: we need it because we’ve already disrupted the climate to dangerous levels. Just ask any of the billion people who just endured a 50 degree heatwave on the Indian subcontinent. But the far higher priority is immediate and rapid decarbonization and an end to fossil fuel expansion.
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Huawei ban undermines Canadian and world security
Far from ensuring the safety of Canadians, the government’s prohibition against Huawei and ZTE dangerously aligns Canada with the NSA and other members of the Five Eyes spy network. This coalition of settler-colonial states may parade as the epitome of liberal democracy, but in fact it is based on the ongoing sagas of Indigenous dispossession and the imposition of empire on subject peoples in the Global South.