AUDIO:

POSSIBLE TOPICS: Online applications for Harris County’s low-income assistance program due Jan. 26; The Secret Life of Gift Cards: Here’s What Happens to the Billions That Go Unspent Each Year; Gov. Greg Abbott responds as NYC adds restrictions on buses bearing migrants from Texas; MARC E. ELIAS on Threads; AP Burns Headline Declaring Plagiarism a ‘Conservative Weapon’ After Harvard Prez’s Resignation; What Constitutes Music Plagiarism? The Sam Smith and Robin Thicke Trials; Will citations prevent me from plagiarizing?; ‘We will coup whoever we want!’: the unbearable hubris of Musk and the billionaire tech bros; Opinion: America’s obligation to Ukraine began with nukes in the early 1990s; Europe Looks To Reduce Risks from Chinese Dependence in Offshore Wind; Putin profits off US and European reliance on Russian nuclear fuel; More.

Welcome to Thinkwing Radio with Mike Honig where we discuss local, state, national, and international stories. My co-host, assistant producer and show editor is Andrew Ferguson.

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Except for timely election info, the extensive list of voting resources will now be at the end.

1. Online applications for Harris County’s low-income assistance program due Jan. 26; By Melissa Enaje | COMMUNITYIMPACT.COM | 2:01 PM Jan 2, 2024 CST / Updated 2:01 PM Jan 2, 2024 CST
   1. Select community members living in Harris County’s top 10 most poverty-stricken ZIP codes will be eligible to apply online Jan. 8 for Uplift Harris, the county’s income assistance program.
   2. The Uplift Harris Guaranteed Income Pilot program will provide $500 monthly cash payments to 1,928 Harris County residents for 18 months. Harris County Public Health is running the initiative, and officials said the goal is to improve participants’ financial and health outcomes.
   3. The application period starts on Jan. 8 at 9 a.m. and ends at 11:59 p.m. on Jan. 26.
   4. Eligible applicants will be selected randomly from two cohorts. The first cohort, which will be around 70% of the participants, will be based on those who live in the targeted ZIP codes. To apply for the program, three requirements must be met, including: 1- Be age 18 or older; 2- Have a household income at or below 200% of the federal poverty line, which stands until March at an annual gross household income of $60,000 for a family of four; and, 3- Live in one of the following 10 ZIP codes: 77026, 77028, 77033, 77050, 77051, 77060, 77081, 77091, 77093 or 77547
   5. The second cohort is for active participants within Harris County’s Accessing Coordinated Care and Empowering Self Sufficiency—or ACCESS—Harris program. Around 30% of the participants will be selected from this population of applicants, according to the program website.
   6. All applications must be submitted online, according to the program’s website, since there are no paper applications. All eligibility documents can be uploaded as photos.
   7. Community members without access to a computer, a smartphone or the internet are encouraged to visit an application assistance partner or a public library. …
   8. Eligible applicants who are interested in receiving an email from county officials when the application opens can fill out an interest form, which does not substitute as an application for the program. Community members must apply when the application period begins Jan. 8.
   9. MIKE: I have read of numerous experiments of basic income assistance not only in cities around the US, but in places around the world. Generally, results have been very positive. Conservative fears that such funds would go to drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, and other “frivolous expenditures” have not come to pass. The experiments that have been done show that people put this extra money toward covering food, rent, and very much toward getting out of debt; debt being a constant money vampire of the poor.
   10. MIKE: The ultimate effect generally is better nutrition, less homelessness, and much better mental health. The constant anxiety of trying to “steal from Peter to pay Paul” becomes substantially eased. Family dynamics improve.
   11. MIKE: Obviously, as the old expression goes, money doesn’t buy happiness. But it does make hardship more bearable.
   12. MIKE: On the other hand, the public money to pay for income assistance doesn’t come from nowhere, so taxpayer “buy-in” — to use a phrase — is essential. How does the taxpaying public benefit from this government largesse to the poor, and how are recipients chosen?
   13. MIKE: The benefit is economic activity. I know for a fact that retailers in poor neighborhoods always look forward to welfare check day. It’s a predictable boost to sales. These sales create profits for business, jobs for workers, and tax revenue back to the government.
   14. MIKE: There’s something called “Velocity of Money”. A dollar paid to a person in wages — or in this case, personal grant money — travels many times before it gets back to government or otherwise goes to static savings of some sort. A dollar goes to the retailer, who pays part of that dollar in wages. Those wages are then also spent. Eventually, some parts of this dollar go to pay venders, utilities, contractors, and eventually back to government as tax revenue. It’s a “virtuous cycle”. And it contributes to general economic growth and health.
   15. MIKE: There are some studies that show that Democrats in power are actually better for the rich than Republicans. The rich may pay more taxes under Democrats, but studies suggest that they actually “net out” more money. As more money is put into circulation for public infrastructure and welfare, this money is spent in the holdings of rich people. It’s just not an intuitive result.
   16. MIKE: As for who should qualify for public stipends and how those criteria are decided? That’s above my pay grade to go into here.
   17. ANDREW: Everything you’ve said is why I really wish I could unreservedly like universal basic income policies, but I have one big concern that I haven’t seen addressed.
   18. ANDREW: It’s often found that surrounding natural disasters, people with more enterprising than ethical spirit will drive prices for essential goods sky-high, since people are trying to prepare and don’t have a whole lot of time to shop around. This phenomenon is called “price gouging”, and it’s so predictable that there are laws against it.
   19. ANDREW: My concern is that something similar will happen with a wide-scale implementation of UBI, or similar policies. Imagine if the federal government announces that every taxpayer in the country will now get $500 a month. I’d be willing to bet that people like landlords and the executives of utility and insurance companies will immediately see dollar signs and jack up their prices because hey, everyone’s got more money now, right? They can afford it.
   20. ANDREW: The problem is that if everyone raises their prices, even if they aren’t trying to eat up the entire $500, the best case scenario is that that money will quickly be taken up by new increases in old expenditures, rather than being able to go into savings or debt reduction like Mike mentioned. Worst case scenario? The increases go way past the $500 basic income payments, and now the money is not only not making life easier for people who need help, it’s enabled their lives to get worse.
   21. ANDREW: I said earlier that I haven’t seen this concern addressed. To be fair, that may be because I haven’t seen it happen in cities where basic income pilot programs have been tried. Maybe I’m worrying over nothing, or maybe these programs being at city-scale and varying in payment amounts rather than being a consistent payment at the federal level means that the basic income isn’t reliable enough for financial vultures to target.
   22. ANDREW: But I think this potential “reactive gouging” effect means that UBI cannot be responsibly enacted on the federal level without some additional policies to prevent prices from eating up the assistance. Ideologically, I’d like to see rent and price controls be that accompanying policy, because I don’t think the market can ever be trusted to treat the consumer fairly given that its mission is to squeeze as much value out of them as possible. However, I believe that such controls then require tighter antitrust law and enforcement and more social housing in order to be effective at limiting the market’s ability to exploit consumers, and frankly that’s probably too much good law for Congress to pass all at once.
   23. ANDREW: When it comes to economics, I think carrots for sellers have a nasty way of becoming sticks for everyone else. But maybe there’s no other feasible way to make universal basic income a reality.
2. The Secret Life of Gift Cards: Here’s What Happens to the Billions That Go Unspent Each Year; Americans are expected to spend nearly $30 billion on gift cards this holiday, according to the National Retail Federation. By DEE-ANN DURBIN – AP Business Writer | WKTV.COM | Dec 25, 2023 / Updated 10 hrs ago
   1. Gift cards make great stocking stuffers — just as long as you don’t stuff them in a drawer and forget about them after the holidays.
   2. Americans are expected to spend nearly $30 billion on gift cards this holiday season, according to the National Retail Federation. Restaurant gift cards are the most popular, making up one-third of those sales.
   3. Most of those gift cards will be redeemed. Paytronix, which tracks restaurant gift card sales, says around 70% of gift cards are used within six months.
   4. But many cards — tens of billions of dollars’ worth — wind up forgotten or otherwise unused. That’s when the life of a gift card gets more complicated, with expiration dates or inactivity fees that can vary by state.
   5. Here’s what to know about the gift cards you’re giving — or getting:
   6. LOVED, BUT LOST — After clothing, gift cards will be the most popular present this holiday season. Nearly half of Americans plan to give them, according to the National Retail Federation. But many will remain unspent.
   7. Gift cards get lost or forgotten, or recipients hang on to them for a special occasion. In a July survey, the consumer finance company Bankrate found that 47% of U.S. adults had at least one unspent gift card or voucher with an average value of $187. That’s a total of $23 billion.
   8. THE GIFT OF TIME — Under a federal law that went into effect in 2010, a gift card can’t expire for five years from the time it was purchased or from the last time someone added money to it. Some state laws require an even longer period. In New York, for instance, any gift card purchased after Dec. 10, 2022, can’t expire for nine years.
   9. Differing state laws are one reason many stores have stopped using expiration dates altogether, says Ted Rossman, a senior industry analyst at Bankrate.
   10. USE IT OR LOSE IT — While it may take gift cards years to expire, experts say it’s still wise to spend them quickly. Some cards — especially generic cash cards from Visa or MasterCard — will start accruing inactivity fees if they’re not used for a year, which eats away at their value. Inflation also makes cards less valuable over time. And if a retail store closes or goes bankrupt, a gift card could be worthless.
   11. Perhaps consider clearing out your stash on National Use Your Gift Card Day, a five-year-old holiday created by a public relations executive and now backed by multiple retailers. The next one is Jan. 20, 2024.
   12. OR SELL IT — If you have a gift card you don’t want, one option is to sell it on a site like CardCash or Raise. Rossman says resale sites won’t give you face value for your cards, but they will typically give 70 to 80 cents per dollar.
   13. THE MONEY TRAIL — What happens to the money when a gift card goes unused? It depends on the state where the retailer is incorporated.
   14. When you buy a gift card, a retailer can use that money right away. But it also becomes a liability; the retailer has to plan for the possibility that the gift card will be redeemed.
   15. Every year, big companies calculate “breakage,” which is the amount of gift card liability they believe won’t be redeemed based on historical averages. For some companies, like Seattle-based Starbucks, breakage is a huge profit-driver. Starbucks reported $212 million in revenue from breakage in 2022.
   16. But in at least 19 states — including Delaware, where many big companies are incorporated — retailers must work with state unclaimed property programs to return money from unspent gift cards to consumers. Money that isn’t recovered by individual consumers is spent on public service initiatives; in the states’ view, it shouldn’t go to companies because they haven’t provided a service to earn it.
   17. CLAIM IT — All 50 states and the District of Columbia have unclaimed property programs. Combined, they return around $3 billion to consumers annually, says Misha Werschkul, the executive director of the Washington State Budget and Policy Center.
   18. Werschkul says it can be tricky to find the holders of unspent gift cards, but the growing number of digital cards that name the recipient helps. State unclaimed property offices jointly run the website com, where consumers can search by name for any unclaimed property they’re owed, including cash from gift cards.
   19. MIKE: My feeling is, if you’re going to send gift cards, send cash, checks, or money orders. Cash gifts are unfettered, letting the recipient actually spend it on what they want … Or to save it, if that’s their need.
   20. MIKE: My wife used to get me gift cards for Half-Price Books. I would always use them up, but they’ve closed the locations most convenient to me. Now she gets me a different gift card where I can find almost any kind of thing I want, and I just put it on my account.
   21. MIKE: Your mileage, as they say, may vary.
   22. ANDREW: I didn’t know about a lot of the things discussed in this story, which I guess is the point! I had always thought there would be some way to resell an unwanted or partially used gift card but never knew specifically how, so hearing about some places to sell them was very interesting. The increasing lack of gift card expiration dates and the fact that unspent value is considered unclaimed property or used for public services in some states also really surprised me.
   23. ANDREW: Talking of unclaimed property, though, I was actually able to find about fifty dollars that the state comptroller was holding for me a few months back. It was a nice little surprise, and I imagine for people who have a larger financial footprint than I do, there might be even nicer, bigger surprises waiting! I think people should get into the habit of checking unclaimed property sites once a year or so. It only takes a few minutes, and you never know what’s waiting for you!
   24. MIKE: I’ve added the link for Texas unclaimed property, but if you search the phrase “unclaimed property”, you get many results, and some may be scammy.
   25. REFERENCE: Texas Official Unclaimed Property Site — CLAIMITTEXAS.GOV
3. Greg Abbott responds as NYC adds restrictions on buses bearing migrants from Texas; NYC Mayor Eric Adams says new bus regulations were needed to stop Abbott from using “migrants as political pawns.” BY JEREMY WALLACE, TEXAS POLITICAL WRITER | HOUSTONCHRONICLE.COM | Dec 28, 2023
   1. New York City Mayor Eric Adams is imposing new restrictions on charter buses coming into the city specifically to stop those sent by Gov. Greg Abbott bearingmigrants who have crossed the Texas-Mexico border.
   2. Effective immediately, charter buses will have to provide 32 hours’ notice before arriving in New York City when they carry groups of migrants from Texas and other states. The buses will also be required to provide information on who they are transporting and drop them off at designated locations in Manhattan during specified hours.
   3. “And we need Gov. Abbott to stop playing games with innocent lives,” Adams said in announcing the new program.
   4. Adams accused Abbott of using migrants as “political pawns.”
   5. Renae Eze, Abbott’s director of communications, fired back: “The sheer hypocrisy of these Democrat mayors knows no bounds,” she said.
   6. New York is going to extreme lengths to stop buses when they have declared themselves sanctuary cities for migrants, Eze said, and those mayors should be calling on their own party leaders to secure the border instead of attacking Texas’ efforts.
   7. Abbott has bused more than 80,000 migrants to U.S. cities run by Democratic mayors to put pressure on President Joe Biden to do more about the record surge of border crossings over the last year. U.S. Customs and Border Protection said for 2023 they encountered 2.5 million migrants along the border with Mexico, the most ever recorded.
   8. Abbott’s administration said after migrants are processed by federal officials, they are offered free bus rides to other cities. Just over 30,000 of those migrants have been sent to New York City.
   9. Texas’ border busing mission provides vital relief to our overwhelmed border communities,” Abbott, a Republican, said earlier this month in defending his program.
   10. While Texas has added to New York City’s problem with accommodating its own surge of migrants, Abbott is by no means responsible for all of it. The New York Times reported earlier this month that more than 150,000 migrants have arrived in the city since spring 2022, overwhelming city shelters and social service networks.
   11. Chicago, under Mayor Brandon Johnson, is also fighting back against Abbott’s program. The city has imposed tough new penalties against bus companies if they fail to drop migrants off in designated locations or fail to fill out city paperwork. Those measures have resulted in dozens of lawsuits against bus companies already.
   12. Abbott responded to the changes by instead flying migrants to Chicago from El Paso. 
   13. In a statement in support of Adams, Chicago Mayor Johnson said he and other mayors are pushing for more help from the federal government to deal with growing influx of migrants. …
   14. Adams, a Democrat, and Abbott have been ina cross-country feud over the busing program for months. In May, Adams suggested on national television that Abbott is racially motivated because he’s picking cities that have Black leaders — a charge Abbott has denied, saying he’s simply sending migrants where they want to go. …
   15. Adams’ new regulations require charter buses to drop off migrants at designated locations between the hours of 8:30 a.m. and noon Monday through Friday. A company that violates that order could face a class B misdemeanor that brings up to $2,000 in fines. Companies that knowingly violate the rules could have their buses impounded by police.
   16. MIKE: Greg Abbot is deplorable. His policies of using and abusing human beings for his political purposes are deplorable. Doing everything he can to not only displace illegal migrants from Texas to make a point, but to do so in a way that maximizes the harm to those people being transported, and also maximizes the challenges to help them in the places to which they are effectively “deported”, is deliberate cruelty.
   17. MIKE: The cruelty is the point. The political statement about the burden placed on Texas by illegal migration has become almost beside the point, since I think the political point has been made. Now, it’s just the gratuitous cruelty.
   18. ANDREW: You’ve actually touched on a question I had but haven’t been able to find the answer to. Are these bus rides offered to people who enter the US illegally? Because other stories I’ve found discussing the busing program seem to suggest that it’s offered exclusively to asylum seekers who are allowed by federal authorities to enter the country while their applications are processed, meaning they aren’t entering illegally. I don’t know how materially relevant it is to the discussion around Abbott’s tactics, which are at any rate cruelly using real human beings as political pawns, but I have been surprised by how vague the coverage around the issue has been on this question.
   19. MIKE: I’ll allow that I may have misused the term “illegal immigrants” to be excessively encompassing.
   20. ANDREW: The interesting thing about the busing program is that in some ways, it is helpful to migrants in terms of providing a free way for them to get closer to where they want to be. Unfortunately, the political nature of the program is hindering its helpful potential. By only allowing a few Democratic-run cities as destinations, the program doesn’t respect migrants’ autonomy; by refusing to coordinate with the governments of the destination cities, Abbott is sending people to cities that are running out of the resources they need to support them instead of nearby areas that could handle the load, leaving migrants to fend for themselves in an unfamiliar country. 
   21. ANDREW: Ironically, by exhausting the capacity for migrant support in these Democratic-run cities, Abbott has created competitors for the very federal support he is demanding for Texas border towns, and the concentrations of migrants in those cities may very well mean that Washington sends money their way first. But given that most Republican (and generally capitalist) policy is about shooting yourself in the foot on principle, what else is there to expect.
   22. MIKE: You make a couple of interesting points. As for busing migrants closer to where they want to be, in the case of asylum seekers, it complicates their court appearance requirements. But if you’re Greg Abbott, you really couldn’t care less since the cruelty is the point.
4. MIKE: I ran across this post in BY MARC E. ELIAS on Threads, and I think it perfectly sums up Trump’s calculations. Marc Elias “is an American Democratic Party elections lawyer. In 2020, he founded Democracy Docket …” (https://www.threads.net/@marc.e.elias/post/C1gJ-0_tw1d/)
   1. Trump won’t accept the outcome of the election if he loses and …
      1. He is off the ballot.
      2. He is on the ballot.
      3. There is mail-in voting.
      4. There is not mail-in voting.
      5. Voting is easy.
      6. Voting is hard.
   2. The only way Trump will accept the outcome of the election is if he wins.
   3. MIKE: This is exactly how Trump will play things out. It harkens back to Trump’s comment during an interview in September of 2020 as to whether he would agree to a peaceful transfer of power if he lost the 2020 election. He said, “Well, we’re going to have to see what happens. …”
   4. MIKE: And the rest is history, while still being shamefully unsettled law two years after the fact.
   5. ANDREW: Normally, whether a candidate accepts the results of an election would matter little outside of a likely-doomed legal challenge or two. Unfortunately, we’ve seen what Trump’s refusal to accept reality enables others to do. Preparing to survive the worst of those things sounds like a smarter and smarter idea every day.
5. AP Burns Headline Declaring Plagiarism a ‘Conservative Weapon’ After Harvard Prez’s Resignation; By AJ McDougall | COM | Published Jan. 03, 2024 @ 5:49PM EST
   1. MIKE: This is only 173 words, so I’m going to read the whole thing and then we’ll discuss it.
   2. The headline and first few paragraphs of an Associated Press story on the resignation of Harvard President Claudine Gay were updated with new language on Wednesday after its framing of plagiarism as a “new conservative weapon” was widely mocked across social media. The story’s original headline, archived online as “Harvard president’s resignation highlights new conservative weapon against colleges: plagiarism,” was changed to read “Plagiarism charges downed Harvard’s president. A conservative attack helped to fan the outrage.” Both stories traced the weeks of scrutiny that Gay’s academic work was subjected to after what was perceived as a fumbled response to antisemitism on campus in recent months. An AP spokesperson told Fox News, which first reported the reworking of the story, that the initial piece had not been up to the wire’s standards. The story as originally published was met with fierce online criticism, with Scott Jennings, a conservative political commentator for CNN, observing that it was “remarkable” that conservatives had found time “to invent the concept of plagiarism over the last couple of months.”
   3. MIKE: Honestly, I don’t know if I’ve just been avoiding this story, but this headline grabbed my attention.
   4. MIKE: It’s gone from Republican performative outrage in a House hearing to the category of “Republican Dirty Tricks,” and now has reached the stage of media self-censorship.
   5. MIKE: Conservatives have found a media strategy that works, and now they’re using it routinely … and the news media are aiding and abetting by soft-pedaling stories and headlines that the “outraged Right” doesn’t like.
   6. MIKE: As a Jew — and I’m only speaking for myself, not “all Jews” — I can totally sympathize with the trap into which these university presidents were deliberately snared. They were caught between wanting a safe place for all university students while also being mindful of First Amendment free speech rights and — if they accept Federal money — obeying federal free speech laws.
   7. MIKE: Free speech in this country is a funny thing, and Harvard President Claudine Gay verbalized it pretty well. The speech being considered was personally abhorrent to her, but she also had to consider the gray area where this abhorrent speech may feel threatening to some students.
   8. MIKE: That answer was messy, as most complicated answers are, but it wasn’t enough to get her to resign, so the Rightwing outrage machine went to alleged plagiarism. As I understand it, she had seen a sentence or paragraph and paraphrased it without some acceptable form of citation.
   9. MIKE: Harvard President Gay resigned of her own accord, without being pressured to do so by the Harvard board.
   10. MIKE: I’ve included two references with definitions for plagiarism in writing and in music. One is called, “What Constitutes Music Plagiarism?” The other is, “Will citations prevent me from plagiarizing?”
   11. MIKE: Some of the answers become “maybe/maybe not”. On some level, it’s a matter of how much human thought is original? Aren’t we influenced by everything we’ve seen, heard, or in some way been exposed to? There’s very little new under the Sun.
   12. MIKE: I suggest that you consider the problem for yourselves.
   13. ANDREW: The only thing I have to add is that post-publishing revisions are one of the downsides to online news. When news was mainly found in a newspaper, on the radio, or TV, it used to be a reliable record, because you’d know it wouldn’t change. Nowadays, any headline, any story can morph after the fact to suit whatever narrative it needs to. Can any source that does that really claim to be a “paper of record“?
   14. MIKE: Great points! I hadn’t considered them before. Papers used to have to print retractions or revisions, but the story stayed part of the physical record. Now, every record is ephemeral, making any Big Brother’s work of historical revisionism much easier.
   15. REFERENCE: What Constitutes Music Plagiarism? The Sam Smith and Robin Thicke Trials — LAWYERDRUMMER.COM, March 2017
       1. The law states that anything that reflects a “minimal spark” of creativity and originality can be copyrightable, including melody, chord progression, rhythm and lyrics. In the event of a trial, the person claiming infringement must prove two things:
          1. Access – that the infringer had heard, or could reasonably be presumed to have heard, the original song prior to writing their song; and
          2. Substantial Similarity – that the average listener can tell that one song has been copied from the other. The more elements that the two works have in common, the more likely they are substantially similar.
   16. REFERENCE: Will citations prevent me from plagiarizing? — MARIST.LIBANSWERS.COM
       1. 1. Not always. If you re-use someone else’s paper, image, or a paragraph that happens to have citations in it, you are still plagiarizing because you did not create it.  
          2. It is also possible to cite your sources properly and still plagiarize.
          3. You can plagiarize by re-using a paragraph or a sentence even if you include quotation marks and a citation.
          4. When including sources, think about what is the most important part to quote from the original and try to limit how much you include to the most important portion and cite it properly.  If you include too much from the original source and not enough of your work, it borders on plagiarism even if cited.
          5. You can also plagiarize when rewriting something in your own words.  So if you take a sentence from a source and change a few words or completely rewrite it in your own words and do not include a citation for that source, you have plagiarized even if it is not a word for word reproduction of the original.  
          6. You can also plagiarize even when you include citations.  When paraphrasing or summarizing a source in your own words, it’s important to do so properly.  See the Writing Center’s Handout on Paraphrasing for help. [MIKE NOTE: This link is password-protected.]
6. ‘We will coup whoever we want!’: the unbearable hubris of Musk and the billionaire tech bros; Challenging each other to cage fights, building apocalypse bunkers – the behaviour of today’s mega-moguls is becoming increasingly outlandish and imperial. By Douglas Rushkoff | THEGUARDIAN.COM | Sat 25 Nov 2023 04.00 EST [TAGS: Jeff Bezos Elon Musk Sam Bankman-Fried Mark Zuckerberg]
   1. Even their downfalls are spectacular. Like a latter-day Icarus flying too close to the sun, disgraced crypto-god Sam Bankman-Fried crashed and burned this month, recasting Michael Lewis’s exuberant biography of the convicted fraudster – Going Infinite – into the story of a supervillain. Even his potential sentence of up to 115 years in prison seems more suitable for a larger-than-life comic book character – the Joker being carted off to Arkham Asylum – than a nerdy, crooked currency trader.
   2. But that’s the way this generation of tech billionaires rolls. …
   3. Billionaires, or their equivalents, have been around a long time, but there’s something different about today’s tech titans, as evidenced by a rash of recent books. Reading about their apocalypse bunkers, vampiric longevity strategies, outlandish social media pronouncements, private space programmes and virtual world-building ambitions, it’s hard to remember they’re not actors in a reality series or characters from a new Avengers movie. …
   4. Contemporary billionaires appear to understand civics and civilians as impediments to their progress, necessary victims of the externalities of their companies’ growth, sad artefacts of the civilisation they will leave behind in their inexorable colonisation of the next dimension. Unlike their forebears, they do not hope to build the biggest house in town, but the biggest underground lair in New Zealand, colony on the moon or Mars or virtual reality server in the cloud. …
   5. To escape “near-term” problems such as poverty and pollution, Jeff Bezos imagines building millions of space colonies housing trillions of people on the moon, asteroids and in other parts of the solar system, where inhabitants will harvest the resources of space for themselves and those left back on Earth. Elon Musk is convinced he will build a city of a million people on Mars by 2050 at a cost of up to $10bn a person. The ChatGPT impresario Sam Altman, whose board of directors sacked him as CEO before he made a dramatic comeback this week, wants to upload his consciousness to the cloud (if the AIs he helped build and now fears will permit him).
   6. Oddly enough, while their schemes are certainly more outlandish, on an individual basis today’s tech billionaires are not any wealthier than their early 20th-century counterparts. Adjusted for inflation, John Rockefeller’s fortune of $336bn and Andrew Carnegie’s $309bn exceed Musk’s $231bn, Bezos’s $165bn and Gates’s $114bn. …
   7. What evidence we do see of their operations in the real world mostly take the form of externalised harm. Digital businesses depend on mineral slavery in Africa, dump toxic waste in China, facilitate the undermining of democracy across the globe and spread destabilising disinformation for profit – all from the sociopathic remove afforded by remote administration. …
   8. Indeed, there is an imperiousness to the way the new billionaire class disregard people and places for which it is hard to find historical precedent. Zuckerberg had to go all the way back to Augustus Caesar for a role model, and his admiration for the emperor borders on obsession. He models his haircut on Augustus; …
   9. While we should be thankful he has chosen to emulate Augustus instead of, say, Caligula, he is nonetheless aspiring toward the absolute power – and hairstyle – of a Roman dictator. Zuckerberg told the New Yorker “through a really harsh approach, he established two hundred years of world peace”, finally acknowledging “that didn’t come for free, and he had to do certain things”. …
   10. MIKE: I love that euphemism for evil doings: “Certain things.” Continuing …
   11. At least Zuckerberg’s anti-democratic measures are expressed as the decrees of a benevolent dictator. Musk exercises no such restraint. In response to the accusation that the US government organised a coup against Evo Morales in Bolivia in order for Tesla to secure lithium there, Musk tweeted: “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.” …
   12. In the last gilded age, each titan owned and controlled pretty much one major industry. Rockefeller may have had the monopoly in oil but Carnegie dominated steel, Vanderbilt had shipping and the railroads, and JP Morgan was the banker.
   13. Musk not only owns X and Tesla but also SpaceX, StarLink, the Boring Company, Solar City, NeuraLink, xAI, and someday, he hopes, another finance company like PayPal …
   14. Similarly, Bezos doesn’t just control Amazon – the world’s biggest ever retailer, if that even does justice to the monolith – but the Washington Post, IMDb, MGM, Twitch, Zoox, Kiva, Whole Foods, Ring, Ivona, One Medical, Blue Origin and, of course, Amazon Web Services, which owns at least one-third of the cloud computing market. Included in Gates’s 20bn dollars’ worth of Microsoft stock and assets are Microsoft Azure (his 23% of the cloud), LinkedIn, Skype and GitHub. He also, incidentally, owns 109,000 hectares (270,000 acres) of US farmland. …
   15. In the 19th and 20th centuries, industrialists understood that giving money to existing institutions meant that it could be distributed wherever it was needed, and so they donated to hospitals, libraries and universities. JP Morgan actually bailed out the US federal government on two separate occasions. Today’s billionaire philanthropists, frequently espousing the philosophy of “effective altruism”, donate to their own organisations, often in the form of their own stock, and make their own decisions about how the money is spent because they are, after all, experts in everything. Rather than donating to a university, [Peter] Thiel’s Fellowship pays $100,000 “to young people who want to build new things instead of sitting in a classroom”. Meanwhile, contests such as Musk’s X Prize and Singularity University focus on “exponential technologies” that solve “global grand challenges”. Such moonshots reward the bold thinking that “aims to make something 10 times better”. …
   16. By combining a distorted interpretation of Nietzsche with a pretty accurate one of Ayn Rand, they end up with a belief that while “God is dead”, the übermensch of the future can use pure reason to rise above traditional religious values and remake the world “in his own interests”. Nietzsche’s language, particularly out of context, provides tech übermensch wannabes with justification for assuming superhuman authority. In his book Zero to One, Thiel directly quotes Nietzsche to argue for the supremacy of the individual: “madness is rare in individuals, but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule”. In Thiel’s words: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” This distorted image of the übermensch as a godlike creator, pushing confidently towards his clear vision of how things should be, persists as an essential component of The Mindset [a belief that with enough money, one can escape the harms created by earning money in that way]. …
   17. MIKE: There is a lot more to this opinion piece, and I suggest going to the link that ThinkwingRadio.com to read it. If anything, it only gets scarier.
   18. MIKE: I think the author does something extremely useful here that I’ve not seen done before in this way: Comparing the fortunes of Rocker, Carnegie, et al. in modern inflated terms. It really helps the context of what the world is dealing with and how it’s different.
   19. MIKE: I’m reminded of a quote from the Star Trek episode, “The Trouble With Tribbles”, comparing James Kirk to, “a swaggering, overbearing, tin-plated dictator with delusions of godhood.” By that standard, we have a whole bunch of James Kirks, but without Kirk’s moral fortitude and without a Prime Directive that at least tries to aim for the “General Good” of society.
7. Opinion: America’s obligation to Ukraine began with nukes in the early 1990s; by Bohdan Vitvitsky, opinion contributor | THEHILL.COM | 12/30/23 3:00 PM ET. Tags Bill Clinton , Boris Yeltsin , Budapest Memorandum , Clinton , George H. W. Bush history , Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty , Nuclear weapons , Russia , Soviet Union , Ukraine , Ukraine aid , USSR collapse
   1. Does the U.S. have an obligation to aid Ukraine? The short answer to this question, one that many have been evading, is yes. The reasons have to do with America’s choices, policies and actions during the early 1990s.
   2. As the Soviet Union was collapsing, the H. W. Bush and [ Bill] Clinton administrations had … numerous meetings and telephone calls both on the presidential level and on various ministerial levels. People were on a first-name basis and many American leaders tended to see the world the way Moscow’s leaders did.
   3. When the USSR finally collapsed in December 1991, Soviet nuclear assets were found in the Russian Federation, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus. Ukraine at that time had the third-largest nuclear arsenal on earth, after the U.S. and Russia. As Eugene Fishel describes at length in his important volume “The Moscow Factor: U.S. Policy toward Sovereign Ukraine and the Kremlin,” America and Yeltsin had begun to pressure Ukraine and the other two republics to agree to surrender their nuclear arsenals to Russia even before the collapse.
   4. The American desire to accommodate Yeltsin after he became Russia’s president was motivated in part by an understandable interest in maintaining a de-escalated state of U.S.-Russian relations and by a desire to help Yeltsin domestically. And so when Yeltsin told Bush at Camp David in 1992 that Moscow’s priority was to see Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan become denuclearized, he found a very receptive ear. There was little awareness or concern that the U.S. was essentially acquiescing to Russia gaining an additional advantage over its former colonial possessions.
   5. Washington’s thinking was Russo-centric and perhaps naively hopeful. As an internal State Department memorandum in April 1992 stated, “Nothing is of more central importance in this process than consolidation of nuclear weapons in a democratizing Russia.”
   6. The Clinton administration basically continued Bush’s policies towards Russia and Ukraine. There was domestic pressure inside Ukraine for the nation to keep at least some of the nuclear arsenal as a form of deterrence against future Russian invasions. This was no idle fear — over the preceding century, Ukraine had been invaded by troops from Tsarist Russia, Bolshevik Russia, White or monarchist Russia, or the Soviet Union on at least seven occasions.
   7. But President Clinton and Secretary of State Warren Christopher bullied Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk to do our bidding, and at an airport meeting in Ukraine they told Kravchuk in threatening terms that if Ukraine did not agree to transfer its nukes to Russia, “it would be a major setback for Ukraine’s relations with both Russia and the U.S.”
   8. As Fishel has noted, “the U.S. government saw all Ukrainian behavior meant to demonstrate, advocate for, and defend Ukraine’s own independent interests as unhelpful, provocative, and even worthy of ridicule and outright bullying.”
   9. The intense, three-year arm-twisting campaign resulted in Ukraine’s agreeing in 1994 to transfer all of its nuclear arsenal to Russia and to sign on to the Non-Proliferation Treaty. In exchange, Ukraine received the so-called Budapest Memorandum, signed by the U.S., the United Kingdom, Russia and Ukraine, in which all of the signatories committed to assure Ukraine of its sovereignty and territorial integrity.
   10. But in 2014, Russia invaded and occupied parts of Ukraine, and since February 2022 Russia has attacked and tried to destroy all of Ukraine.
   11. Was it delusional on our part to think or expect Russia to become a good international citizen? Given Ukraine’s history of having suffering repeated invasions, was it a mistake for us to bully Ukraine into giving up the nuclear arsenal on its territory? Should Ukraine have been made to surrender its nuclear arsenal to, of all places, Russia? Whatever the case, there was only one upper-level official in our government who thought that our preferential orientation towards Moscow was a mistake, and that actor was Dick Cheney, then Bush’s secretary of defense.
   12. It is noteworthy that President Clinton, one of the principal agents inducing Ukraine to give up its nukes, said during an April 2023 interview that he now regrets his role in getting Ukraine to forfeit its nuclear weapons in 1994, and he has suggested that Russia would not have invaded had Ukraine still had its nuclear deterrent. But this and the whole story behind the Budapest Memorandum and Ukraine’s agreement to denuclearize seems altogether to have escaped Congress’s notice or its collective institutional memory.
   13. Over the centuries, we have developed a clear understanding of the obligations that flow from agreements involving a bargained-for exchange. If pursuant to an agreement one party produces that for which the two parties bargained — and here Ukraine did surrender its nukes — then the second party needs to produce that which was bargained for — here a defense of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. Aid to Ukraine is that bargained-for consideration.
   14. Some in Congress today seem to think that aid to Ukraine is a charitable-giving option and act accordingly. Others understand that it is a matter of our geopolitical interests. But none seem to grasp that, based on our having pressured and induced Ukraine to surrender all of its nuclear arms to Russia, it is actually a matter of obligation.
   15. MIKE: It’s amazing to me how widely this has been forgotten or overlooked, and how little it’s mentioned in the context of military and financial aid to Ukraine.
   16. MIKE: In return for giving all their nuclear weapons to Russia in the interest of non-proliferation, WE MADE A COMMITMENT to Ukraine’s sovereignty, territorial integrity and independence.
   17. MIKE: Does anyone doubt that a nuclear-armed Ukraine would never have been invaded by Russia? If we don’t keep our moral and contractual commitment to Ukraine, we become complicit in any success achieved by Putin in Russia’s aggression.
   18. ANDREW: I would actually doubt that, for two reasons: first, I think a significant reason Putin invaded Ukraine was to put international political pressure on NATO to back off from Russia’s border. Not the only reason, but one I think was part of the calculus, and one I don’t think would have been affected by Ukraine’s hypothetical nuclear capability. Second, Putin has implied before during this invasion that he would be willing to use nuclear weapons if he deems it necessary, and at least one Russian minister has accused Ukraine of being able to use a “dirty bomb”. If Russia was apprehensive about the potential for nuclear weapon use during this invasion, Putin would not have made that implication, and Russian troops would have withdrawn from Ukraine for fear of this hypothesized dirty bomb.
   19. ANDREW: Now, that doesn’t mean I think denuclearizing Ukraine completely was the right thing to do. I would, of course, have preferred the weapons in question to have never existed at all. But they did/do, and they were in Ukraine at the time though they had been USSR property. I think it was reasonable and would have been a helpful show of goodwill to return most of the weapons to Russia as the largest member of the former union, but that it was equally reasonable for Ukraine to keep some of them.
   20. ANDREW: But that isn’t what happened. The US meddled, and with our meddling Ukraine really felt no other option but to surrender all of its weapons to Russia. (Let this be a lesson to every interventionist politician and pundit on these shores.) As a result of the agreement we made happen, we do have an obligation to help the Ukrainian people defend their right to self-determination. But equally, we have a responsibility to find the most just resolution to this conflict that saves the most lives, I’ve given my general opinion on what that is on the air before, so I’ll leave my latest thoughts on this week’s blog post at thinkwingradio dot com.
   21. ANDREW: We should not allow the invasion of Ukraine to become another forever war. This would be bad for Ukraine, bad for the US, and bad for Russia. Our support should be designed to achieve a favorable negotiating position for Ukraine so it can demand the removal of all Russian troops from all of its territory pre-invasion, aside from the breakaway republics who should have a UN-administered and protected referendum on their future, and to maintain that negotiating position until negotiations are complete. And then we should erase any debt Ukraine incurred for our support so we’re not kneecapping them as they stand back up.
   22. ANDREW: I’m biased, of course, but I think this is the most balanced position between pragmatic acknowledgement of the tendencies of the players and the respect for the ideals that we expect others to uphold and thus must uphold ourselves. In other words, the reasonable approach. I just hope we get some reasonable leaders soon enough to make it happen.
8. Europe Looks To Reduce Risks from Chinese Dependence in Offshore Wind; By Tsvetana Paraskova | OILPRICE.COM | Nov 26, 2023, 4:00 PM CST
   1. Europe has intensified efforts this year to protect its clean energy manufacturing industries and reduce dependence on China for its renewable energy rollout.  
   2. Several proposed EU acts are aimed at boosting Europe’s competitiveness in the global clean energy supply chain and minimize risks to energy infrastructure security.
   3. Europe’s wind industry, which accounts for around 16% of the EU’s electricity consumption, has been struggling in the past two years amid slow permitting processes, supply chain disruptions, rising costs and interest rates, and increased pressure from international competitors, especially China. 
   4. Security risks have also increased in Europe’s offshore energy infrastructure, following the damage to the Balticconnector pipeline between Estonia and Finland in the Baltic Sea in early October. A Chinese ship was implicatedin the incident, with the Finnish National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) saying it believes the damage was caused by “an external force” that was “mechanical, not an explosion” and later revealed that a large anchor – believed to belong to the 169-meter-long ship – was found near the pipeline and likely broke off as it was dragged across the sea floor.
   5. “These incidents are alarming because the west is so dependent on this maritime infrastructure: pipelines to deliver our oil and gas supplies, undersea cables carrying the data for our modern digital economies, and offshore wind to power the energy transition,” Elisabeth Braw, a senior associate fellow at the European Leadership Network, writes in the Financial Times.  
   6. Wind power operators need to step up monitoring of their offshore infrastructure, Braw says, noting that Europe also needs to encourage domestic clean energy manufacturing to reduce dependence on Chinese components.  
   7. Over the past year, the EU has been looking to keep domestic manufacturing in the green energy supply chain but is currently failing as low-cost Chinese products and the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act could take away Europe’s competitiveness. 
   8. The WindEurope association, for example, saidin September that unless the EU changes its policies, it could lose European manufacturing.  
   9. “And the struggles of the European wind supply chain mean Chinese turbine manufacturers are now starting to win orders here. They offer cheaper turbines, looser standards and unconventional financial terms,” WindEurope said.  
   10. “There is a very real risk that the expansion of wind energy will be made in China, not in Europe.” 
   11. China also plays an outsized role in the global supply chain of clean energy technology, which presents another set of energy security concerns due to the highly geographically concentrated supply chains for both technology and critical minerals, as the International Energy Agency (IEA) acknowledges. 
   12. According to the agency’s forecastin the World Energy Outlook, China will have a 79% share of the solar PV [photovoltaic] supply chain in 2030, 64% in wind power, 68% in batteries, 54% in lithium chemicals, and 72% in refined cobalt. 
   13. In a bid to keep Europe competitive, the European Commission unveiled last month the so-called European Wind Power Action Plan, “to ensure that the clean energy transition goes hand-in-hand with industrial competitiveness and that wind power continues to be a European success story.” 
   14. Kadri Simson, European Commissioner for Energy, said“In the space of two years, Europe has lost its leadership as the largest world market for wind to the Asia Pacific region. Now this trend starts to be visible in the EU as well.” 
   15. “This happens as the pressure from international competitors is growing. These players can leverage the advantage of operating in larger domestic markets and benefiting from various forms of government support,” Simson added. 
   16. This week, the European Parliament backed plansto boost Europe’s net-zero technology production. The proposed Net-Zero Industry Act sets a target for Europe to produce 40% of its annual deployment needs in net-zero technologies by 2030, and to capture 25% of the global market value for these technologies.  
   17. The Parliament and the EU Council now have to launch talks on the final shape of the new law.  
   18. MIKE: This is another example of the complex incentives toward reduction of the usage of carbon fuels. Here we have economics, international commercial competitiveness, and national and regional security all impelling government policies toward renewable energy in a way that’s almost independent of the fear of global warming. Sure, it’s a major factor, but it’s possibly not the factor that’s driving the economic impetus.
   19. ANDREW: Indeed. Though, to step out of the slightly-paranoid mindset for a bit, the competitiveness that Europe is looking to establish may prove to be good for both the domestic and international consumer, as competition often is. And these targets will undoubtedly make some positive impact on the climate crisis, despite that not being the main driver here. With that in mind, though, the question is: if polluting will help the EU achieve its production goals, will they sacrifice that climate progress? I hope not.
9. Putin profits off US and European reliance on Russian nuclear fuel; By MARTHA MENDOZA and DASHA LITVINOVA | APNEWS.COM | Updated 8:13 AM CST, August 10, 2023
   1. The U.S. and its European allies are importing vast amounts of nuclear fuel and compounds from Russia, providing Moscow with hundreds of millions of dollars in badly needed revenue as it wages war on Ukraine.
   2. The sales, which are legal and unsanctioned, have raised alarms from nonproliferation experts and elected officials who say the imports are helping to bankroll the development of Moscow’s nuclear arsenal and are complicating efforts to curtail Russia’s war-making abilities. The dependence on Russian nuclear products — used mostly to fuel civilian reactors — leaves the U.S. and its allies open to energy shortages if Russian President Vladimir Putin were to cut off supplies. The challenge is likely to grow more intense as those nations seek to boost production of emissions-free electricity to combat climate change.
   3. [S]aid Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Washington-based Nonproliferation Policy Education Center. “If there isn’t a clear rule that prevents nuclear power providers from importing fuel from Russia — and it’s cheaper to get it from there — why wouldn’t they do it?”
   4. Russia sold about $1.7 billion in nuclear products to firms in the U.S. and Europe, according to trade data and experts. The purchases occurred as the West has leveled stiff sanctions on Moscow over its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, blocking imports of such Russian staples as oil, gas, vodka and caviar.
   5. The West has been reluctant to target Russia’s nuclear exports, however, because they play key roles in keeping reactors humming. Russia supplied the U.S. nuclear industry with about 12% of its uranium last year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Europe reported getting about 17% of its uranium in 2022 from Russia.
   6. Reliance on nuclear power is expected to grow as nations embrace alternatives to fossil fuels. Nuclear power plants produce no emissions, though experts warn that nuclear energy comes with the risk of reactor meltdowns and the challenge of how to safely store radioactive waste. There are about 60 reactors under construction around the world — 300 more are in the planning stages.
   7. Many of the 30 countries generating nuclear energy in some 440 plants are importing radioactive materials from Russia’s state-owned energy corporation Rosatom and its subsidiaries. Rosatom leads the world in uranium enrichment, and is ranked third in uranium production and fuel fabrication, according to its 2022 annual report. …
   8. Rosatom’s CEO Alexei Likhachyov told the Russian newspaper Izvestia the company’s foreign business should total $200 billion over the next decade. That lucrative civilian business provides critical funds for Rosatom’s other major responsibility: designing and producing Russia’s atomic arsenal, experts say. …
   9. Nuclear energy advocates say the U.S. and some European countries would face difficulty in cutting off imports of Russian nuclear products. The U.S. nuclear energy industry, which largely outsources its fuel, produces about 20% of U.S. electricity. …
   10. The reasons for that reliance goes back decades. The U.S. uranium industry took a beating following a 1993 nonproliferation deal that resulted in the importation of inexpensive weapons-grade uranium from Russia, experts say. The downturn accelerated after a worldwide drop in demand for nuclear fuel following the 2011 meltdown of three reactors at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi power plant.
   11. American nuclear plants plants purchased 5% of their uranium from domestic suppliers in 2021, the last year for which official U.S. production data are available, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The largest source of uranium for such plants was Kazakhstan, which contributed about 35% of the supply. A close Russian ally, Kazakhstan is the world’s largest producer of uranium.
   12. The Biden administration says it is trying to revive uranium mining and the production of nuclear fuel, and lawmakers have introduced legislation to speed up the process. [But in August of 2023,] President Joe Biden announced the formation of a national monument to preserve land around Grand Canyon National Park that would prevent new uranium mining in the region.
   13. “It is critical that we stop funding Russia’s state-owned nuclear monopoly, Rosatom,” said Sen. John Barrasso, the Wyoming Republican who introduced legislation earlier this year to fund America’s nuclear fuel supply chain. “We also need to give America’s nuclear fuel suppliers market certainty.”
   14. Europe is in a bind largely because it has 19 Russian-designed reactors in five countries that are fully dependent on Russian nuclear fuel. France also has a long history of relying on Russian-enriched uranium. In a report published in March, Greenpeace, citing the United Nations’ Comtrade database, showed that French imports of enriched uranium from Russia increased from 110 tons in 2021 to 312 tons in 2022. …
   15. Some European nations are taking steps to wean themselves off Russian uranium. Early on in the Ukraine conflict, Sweden refused to purchase Russian nuclear fuel. Finland, which relies on Russian power at two out of its five reactors, scrapped a trouble-ridden deal with Rosatom to build a new nuclear power plant. Finnish energy company Fortum also announced an agreement with the U.S. Westinghouse Electric Company to supply fuel for two reactors after its contracts with Rosatom subsidiary Tvel expire over the next seven years.
   16. The Czech Republic has sought to wean itself off Russian supplies completely and turned to Westinghouse and the French company Framatome for future shipments of fuel assemblies for its only nuclear power plant, currently supplied by Tvel, with the new supplies expected to begin in 2024. Slovakia and Bulgaria, two other countries that rely on Tvel for nuclear fuel, have also turned to different suppliers.
   17. Despite the challenges, experts believe political pressure and questions over Russia’s ability to cut off supplies will eventually spur much of Europe to abandon Rosatom. “Based on apparent prospects (of diversification of fuel supplies), it would be fair to say that Rosatom has lost the European market,” said Vladimir Slivyak, co-chair of the Russian environmental group Ecodefense. …
   18. France has not expressed a willingness to shut off Russia’s uranium spigot. Hungary, which maintains close ties to Russia, is fully dependent on Moscow to provide fuel for its four-reactor nuclear power plant. It has plans to expand that plant by two Rosatom reactors — a project that is financed by a 10-billion euro line of credit from a Russian bank.
   19. Those reactors, experts said, will be fully reliant on Russian nuclear fuel for years, if not decades, to come.
   20. MIKE: This problem is interesting. The goal was to utilize weapons-grade nuclear material for power reactors as part of a plan to get this material off the market. Unfortunately, the unforeseen side effect — if it was unforeseen — was the diminishment of domestic capacity for creating this material at home. This has created a significant problem for security, industrial policy, economic dependence, and diplomacy.
   21. MIKE: A part of the story says, “… There are about 60 reactors under construction around the world — 300 more are in the planning stages.”
   22. MIKE: As someone who has come to believe that nuclear reactors built with current technology is extremely dangerous in the long run, That scares me at least as much as anything else in the story, if not more.
   23. ANDREW: Yeah, I think that’s where a potential solution to some of these nations’ dilemma lies. If they’re currently buying Russian atomic fuel and want to stop due to the invasion, and fuel from another country would be more expensive, maybe they should consider just biting the bullet and swapping to renewable energy. It would be even more expensive than finding another source of fuel, but it would mean a major injection of government cash into the economy as any infrastructure project is, with all of the economic boosts that come with that. And it would come with the bonus of less vulnerability to supply chain disruption, whether through a disaster like the COVID-19 pandemic, or through war. Something to think about.

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