Climate Hopes Turn to China

Blayne Haggart says that Trump’s reascension to the US presidency “forces us to ask the uncomfortable question: Does the world still have a chance to avoid the worst outcomes of an overheated planet?”

As Western countries are moving to block Chinese green tech, Haggart takes up the argument that Peter Drahos, “one of the world’s, if not the world’s, leading intellectual property (IP) scholars,” laid out in his 2021 book Survival Governance: Energy and Climate in the Chinese Century: IP laws will play a determining role in access to planet-saving clean technologies, and shackling China’s green tech ambitions will likely worsen the climate emergency.

In October, Canada imposed a 100 percent tariff on electric vehicles imported from China, followed by a 25 percent tariff on Chinese steel and aluminum — actions in stark contrast to “Canada’s long-standing tradition of diplomatic caution and adherence to international trade rules.”

Bernard Colas discusses the motivation behind these measures and the delicate position in which they place Canada that mirrors the challenge “many countries face in an increasingly polarized geopolitical landscape. The outcome...could well influence how other nations approach their own trade policies, potentially redefining the landscape of international trade in the years to come.”

For those invested in technology, the obvious solution to loneliness is technological. But “the boom in empathetic AI or companion AI targeting everyone from children to the bereaved is more akin to corporate coercive control than a tech-enabled cure for loneliness,” Susie Alegre warns in this recent op-ed first published by Tech Policy Press.

Considering recent cases, Alegre writes “it is already clear that companion AIs can cause serious harm...rather than being a solution, this new wave of AI chatbot companions could cause individual and societal damage in the real world far beyond the impacts we have seen from social media over the past decade.”

Tech CEOs have tended to be seen as untouchable, in part thanks to their great power, influence and wealth. So, when Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov — of Russian origin, and not a public figure, unlike Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman — “was arrested by French authorities in France on August 24, 2024, as part of a probe into organized crime, the social media network and its CEO were suddenly thrust into the spotlight….Durov’s arrest also brought into focus the platform’s and CEO’s ambiguous relationship with the Kremlin.”

Marie Lamensch explores “what sets Telegram apart from X, Instagram and even TikTok, and why we’re unlikely to see another social media CEO arrested any time soon. Telegram’s nature and ‘philosophy’ also provide insights into the role that technologies can play in geopolitical tensions and international affairs.”

“The full-scale invasion means that we are lacking some of the democratic tools that would be normally available to the citizens in peaceful times. But that doesn’t mean that democracy cannot go on. We just have to be more creative with it.”

“What we’re seeing now is that whenever the government cannot reach the citizens in a traditional way, it’s using technology to make up for the lost connections. And the citizens respond. This is how the public gets to influence the policy makers, even if this influence is limited by the war.”

These are just two of the perspectives from experts inside Ukraine shared with Anna Romandash in this piece about the country’s application of digital tools as “the next best thing to some of the ‘peacetime’ democratic tools.”