The US, always a questionable friend, threatens, if Trump wins, to become our greatest threat.

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian  4^th July 2024

Soon after Labour forms a government, it will find itself in a new world. It now seems likely that Donald Trump will win the presidency of the United States. If he does, this should bring an end to our abiding fantasies about a special relationship.

It was always an illusion. After the astonishing, heroic intervention of the US in the second world war preserved us from invasion and fascism, we built a romantic fairytale of enduring love. But both countries act in their own interests. While the UK and Europe have leant on the US for security, the dominant power has long used us as an instrument of policy.

Our joint enterprise has often been devastating to other people. Take, to give just a few examples, the US-UK coup that overthrew Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran in 1953, the 20-year war in Afghanistan, the 2003 Iraq war, or the staunch support offered by Joe Biden and Rishi Sunak for the unfolding genocide in Gaza.

Our countries have also collaborated in developing a global trade and legal regime that favours capital over the democratic state. One example is the system known as investor-state dispute settlement, which grants offshore courts primacy over national sovereignty.

If Trump is installed in the White House again, the US government, always a questionable friend, is likely to become a clear threat to our peace, security and wellbeing. It will rip up what remains of global security and detente, environmental and human rights agreements, and international law. The age of multilateralism, flawed as it always was, would be over, and something much worse will take its place.

In short, the UK and Europe will need to find the means of defending ourselves against a Trump regime and its allies. We might also need, as the lessons of the past century are unlearnt and the far right rises again, to defend ourselves against each other.

Trump has developed a special relationship; not with us, but with Vladimir Putin, to whom he defers as the iron dictator he would like to be. Russia sought to help Trump win in 2016, tried again in 2020 and has long backed Trump for 2024. As if in return, when he was president, Trump announced that he trusted Putin ahead of US intelligence agencies. Subsequently, he praised Putin for his invasion of Ukraine, and has stated he would encourage Russia to attack any Nato member that doesn’t spend heavily on defence.

One result of this special relationship is that Trump, if elected, is likely to end US military support for Ukraine. This means that if European nations don’t step up, Putin will be able to complete his invasion. It seems unlikely that he will stop there. A Kremlin memo last year announced that Russia would take “symmetrical and asymmetrical measures necessary to suppress” such “unfriendly acts” as the use of sanctions. In February, the Danish defence minister warned that Russia could launch an attack on a Nato country within five years. Poland, the Baltic states … ? With a supporter in the White House and the possible collapse of Nato, why would Putin not pursue his advantage?

Ukraine’s strongest ally in western Europe, Emmanuel Macron, is now flailing, while Putin’s friends in Hungary, Serbia, Bulgaria and Slovakia sense that history is on their side.

When circumstances change, so should our positions, however disquieting it might be. I have long called for disarmament. This made sense when the Ministry of Defence concluded in 2003 that “there are currently no major conventional military threats to the UK or Nato … it is now clear that we no longer need to retain a capability against the re-emergence of a direct conventional strategic threat” and when Nato decided a few years later that “large-scale conventional aggression against the alliance will be highly unlikely”.

But the situation has changed. With great discomfort, I find myself open to arguments for rearmament. I now believe we need to enhance our conventional capabilities, both to support other European nations against Russia and – something that seemed unimaginable a few years ago – perhaps to defend ourselves.

Currently, according to a former senior official at the MoD, the UK’s forces would be unable to “fight and win an armed conflict of any scale”. We would rapidly run out of ammunition, could not prevent missile strikes and could not stop an attack on our territory.

Conversely, this is also a good moment for the UK government to rethink its position on nuclear weapons. It’s time to recognise that our “independent nuclear deterrent” has never been independent. Because key components are supplied and controlled by the US, we cannot operate it without US consent. So, if Trump regains the White House, it would not be a deterrent, either: Putin knows we cannot use it. The UK’s nuclear programme is a £172bn heap of bricks. Why waste more money on it?

We are faced throughout our lives with a choice of consistencies. Either our values or our positions can remain unchanged, but not both. Consistently defending our values – such as opposition to imperialism, fascism and wars of aggression – demands that we should be ready to alter our assessments as the nature of these threats changes.

The UK’s foreign policy will require other sharp turns. On Israel and Palestine, a Labour government should defend peace, justice and international law. Following Keir Starmer’s initial moral failure, Labour’s position has begun to change: David Lammy, the shadow foreign secretary, has said that if the international criminal court (ICC) issues an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu, he would be prepared to implement it. Now he should also demand a complete embargo of British arms to Israel.

As Trump rips up US environmental commitments, other countries will have to redouble theirs to avoid planetary catastrophe. It will do us no economic harm to embrace 21st-century technologies while the US remains in the fossil age. All this becomes especially urgent in the UK if that gurning minion of both Trump and Putin, Nigel Farage, achieves a foothold in politics. The collaborators are already lining up to betray their country.

Independence from the US is difficult, hazardous and uncertain of success. But remaining a loyal servant of the US if Trump becomes commander-in-chief is a certain formula for disaster. There is nothing we can do to stop his election, except to plead with US voters not to let a convicted felon, coup plotter, sex assaulter, liar, fraud and wannabe dictator into the White House. But we can seek to defend ourselves against it.

www.monbiot.com

Bezalel Smotrich says he aims to establish sovereignty over occupied territory and thwart a Palestinian state

Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, has described in explicit terms his active effort to annex the West Bank to Israel, days after the Guardian revealed how the pro-settlement politician and his allies had quietly gained significant new legal powers to that end.

Speaking at a meeting of his Religious Zionism party, Smotrich told colleagues that he was “establish[ing] facts on the ground in order to make Judea and Samaria [an Israeli term for the occupied West Bank] an integral part of the state of Israel”.

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A restomod Hummer H1 EV with Tesla batteries has entered the chat The Hummer H1 EV weighs only about 4,500 pounds The Hummer H1 EV is said to have about 300 miles of range from its 75-kwh battery A Canadian company already established as an EV conversion shop is building an electric Hummer that's lighter than the one General Motors is currently...

This story was originally published by Wired and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Big Tech’s appetite for energy is just about visible from the east coast of Scotland. Some 12 miles out to sea sits a wind farm, where each of the 60 giant turbines has blades roughly the length of an American football field. The utility companies behind the Moray West project had promised the site would be capable of generating enough electricity to power 1.3 million homes once completed. That was before Amazon stepped in.

In January, Amazon announced it had struck a deal to claim more than half the site’s 880 megawatts of output, part of its ongoing attempt to slake its unquenchable thirst for power. As the world’s biggest companies race to build the infrastructure necessary to enable artificial intelligence, even remote Scottish wind farms are becoming indispensable.

In Europe last year, $79.4 million was spent on new data center projects, according to research firm Global Data. Already in 2024, there are signs that demand is accelerating. Today Microsoft announced a $3.2 billion bet on Sweden data centers. Earlier this year, the company also said it would double its data center footprint in Germany, while also pledging a $4.3 billion data center investment for AI infrastructure in France. Amazon announced a network of data centers in the state of Brandenburg as part of a $8.5 billion investment in Germany, later dedicating another $17.1 billion to Spain. Google said it would spend $1.1 billion on its data center in Finland to drive AI growth.

“There is a recognition that as power demand increases, the industry will have to find alternative energy sources.”

As the tech giants rush to build more data centers, behind the scenes there is panic around how to power them. Microsoft, Meta and Google all plan to be net zero before 2030, while logistics-heavy Amazon has targeted 2040. In pursuit of that aim, the past decade has seen those companies hoover up renewable energy contracts with wind or solar companies. But all these projects rely on electricity grids, which are buckling under increased demand for clean energy. That’s forcing the tech giants to think about their energy-intensive futures and consider how they might operate their own off-grid power empires, outside the system.

“There is a recognition that as power demand increases, the industry will have to find alternative energy sources,” says Colm Shorten, senior director of data center strategy at real estate services company JLL, explaining that server farms are increasingly looking for “behind-the-wire” power supply, whether that’s gas or diesel generators or more innovative technology such as green hydrogen.

Data centers need power for two primary purposes. The first is to power the chips that enable computers to run algorithms or power video games. The second is to cool the servers, to stop them from overheating and cutting out. Initiatives such as using liquid to cool the chips instead of air are expected to make modest energy savings. But forecasts still expect data centers’ demand for power to as much as double by 2026, according to the International Energy Association, thanks in part to the demands of artificial intelligence.

For the past five years, tech companies have been on an increasingly frenzied shopping spree for renewable contracts known as power purchase agreements (PPAs), which can enable data center operators to reserve power from a wind farm or solar site before the projects have even been built. In Denmark, there are solar farms paid for by Meta. In Norway, there are wind farms bankrolled by Google. As early adopters of these types of deals, tech companies have helped fuel Europe’s now-thriving PPA market, says Christoph Zipf, spokesperson at WindEurope. This month, Microsoft struck the world’s biggest renewables energy deal, signing a $10 billion contract for clean power across Europe and the US.

Yet renewables still need to run through the electricity grid, which is becoming a bottleneck—especially in Europe, as a surge of renewable producers try to connect to feed green transition demand across a multitude of sectors. “We’re going to run into energy constraints,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg predicted on a podcast in April. At Davos this year, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also warned that the status quo was not going to be able to provide AI with the power it needed to advance. “There’s no way to get there without a breakthrough,” he said at a Bloomberg event.

Grid operators are essentially saying the same thing. Ireland’s state-owned electricity provider Eirgrid cited grid problems when it imposed an effective moratorium on Dublin data centers two years ago. When the municipality of Amsterdam introduced a similar pause, the Dutch Data Center Association, an industry group, hit back. “The current grid congestion in North Holland is blocking the growth of the data center sector,” it said in a statement.

In the search for space on the grid, data centers are being pushed into parts of Europe where their arrival is more conspicuous, risking backlash from the smaller communities when they show up. That trend is already visible in Germany, according to Simon Hinterholzer, researcher at Germany’s Borderstep Institute for Innovation and Sustainability. “In the past, the large majority of new data centers were being built in Frankfurt,” he says. “This has completely changed in the last two or three years.” He points to a 300-megawatt data center being built in the small town of Wustermark, as well as Amazon’s latest investment into Brandenburg, the region bordering Berlin where more than 70 turbines were installed last year.

To cope long-term, there are more calls for data centers to find ways to survive off-grid. “The size of AI projects are getting bigger and bigger, reaching up to 1 gigawatt of power, which cannot be supplied by the traditional power grids,” says Ricardo Abad, founder of data center Quark, which is working on a new site with an unnamed partner in Spain that will be able to generate its own power through on-site solar and wind power. These types of on-site projects are technically still connected to the grid—in case they want to offload excess power—but they have the ability to operate independently, he says.

In the US, Microsoft has already been experimenting with hydrogen fuel cells, touting them as a form of emission-free power back-up.

The same year Dublin announced restrictions on data centers, Amazon also opened its largest-ever on-site solar farm, spanning the roof and car park of its fulfillment center in Seville, Spain. Google’s head of data center location strategy in Europe has also expressed interest in on-site renewables for its next generation of server farms. Microsoft and Meta denied running any projects that are entirely off-grid. But in Dublin, Microsoft is building a data center alongside its own backup gas power plant, meaning the site can keep running even if the grid operator kicks it off.

But Big Tech is really in search of clean energy ideas—even if those ideas are still in their very early stages. “In the future, technologies like advanced nuclear reactors, renewable energy sources, and energy storage solutions will be crucial in making this possible,” says Kilian Wagner, an expert in sustainable digital infrastructures at German digital association Bitkom. OpenAI’s Altman is already an investor in Helion Energy, an American nuclear fusion company that has also agreed to provide Microsoft with 50 megawatts of electricity from its first fusion nuclear plant, once operational. In the US, Microsoft has already been experimenting with hydrogen fuel cells, touting them as a form of emission-free power back-up.

What server farms going off-grid would mean for the rest of us is unclear. By going it alone, Big Tech firms could strike gold in their search for the clean energy source of the future. Until they figure it out, they’re stuck with the grid.

During a recent webcast at the annual Evercore ISI Global Clean Energy & Transitions Summit, Lucid Motors CEO and CTO Peter Rawlinson shared some exciting news about the automaker and electric mobility in general. Earlier this week, a version of its flagship Lucid Air sedan delivered an efficiency ratio of 5 miles per kWh, which could soon translate to more affordable long-range models for all.

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Despite the market moving toward EVs, Toyota, Subaru, and Mazda are committed to developing next-generation ICE engines. The new engines are “tailored to electrification” with integrated EV components.

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