Up at the French-Spanish border in Catalonia
From the category archives:
Academia
Update The Trump regime has been stopped, or at least stalled, on all three fronts discussed below. In particular, the Hegseth-Noem report on the Insurrection Act seems to have been quietly buried. That doesn’t mean US democracy is safe by any means, but at least it has some chance of survival. More on this at my Substack
Back in November, when I concluded that Trump’s dictatorship was a fait accompli lots of readers thought I was going over the top. In retrospect, and with one exception, I was hopelessly over-optimistic. I imagined a trajectory similar to Orban’s Hungary, with a gradual squeeze on political opposition and civil society, playing out over years and multiple terms in office,.
The reality has been massively worse, both in terms of speed and scope. Threats of conquest against friendly countries, masked thugs abducting people from the street, shakedowns of property from enemies of the state, concentration camps outside the reach of the legal system, all happening at a pace more comparable to Germany in 1933 than to the examples I had in mind.
Thanks to James Wimberley for prompting me to write this, and alerting me to the data on China’s emissions
Most of the news these days is bad, and that’s true of the climate. Even as climatic disasters worsen, the Trump regime is doing its best to dismantle US and global efforts to decarbonize our energy systems. But there is still some surprisingly good news.
First, China’s emissions from coal-fired electricity appear to have peaked. Thermal power generation fell 5.8 per cent in January and February this year, relative to 2024. The only times this has happened previously were during the Covid lockdowns and in the aftermath of the GFC. On this occasion, total power demand fell by 1.5 per cent due to a warm winter, but the big decline in coal was due to increased solar generation.
And China’s solar industry keeps on growing on all fronts. China added another 277 GW of PV last year, more than all the capacity installed in the world up to 2015. Recorded exports were 236GW, another record. Since production was estimated at more than 600 GW, it seems likely there are some unrecorded installations.
All this is happening even though new coal-fired power stations are still being built, largely for political rather than economic reasons. It seems likely that these plants will see limited operation as solar power (augmented with storage) meets more and more demand.
Second, the great AI boom in electricity demand has turned out to be a mirage, at least so far. This isn’t always obvious from the breathless tone of coverage. For example, this story leads with the claim that “Electricity consumption by data centers will more than double by 2030”, but leaves the reader to calculate that this implies an increase of just 1.5% in global demand.
Notably, Microsoft which was one of the leading promoters of claims about electricity demand is now scaling back its investments. And large numbers of data centres in China are apparently idle
Even Trump is helping in perverse ways. His policies are already reducing projections of US economic growth, which will accelerate the decline of coal-fired power in particular. His attempts to defy economic reality by keeping coal plants open are unlikely to have much effect in this context.
And coal is on the way out in many other countries. Finland just closed its last coal-fired powerand even laggards like Poland are making progress
The picture is less promising with the transition to electric vehicles, which has slowed in most places. But once we complete the transition to solar, wind and storage, electricity will be massively cheaper. And once again, China is a bright sport, with electrics taking 25 per cent of the market in 2024, and new vehicles becoming cheaper and cheaper. BYD is now offering an electric car in Australia for less than $A30 000 (a bit under $20 000 US).
As I argued a year ago, the irresistible force of ultra-cheap solar PV will overcome the seemingly immovable barriers in its way.
Note Links got lost in copying from my Substack. You can find them here
With collapsing stock markets, retirement portfolios, and consumer confidence, there is an all-too-human tendency to focus on the economic effects of tariffs by their critics: they are a tax on consumption, they will raise inflation, reduce efficiency, and reduce take-home income, etc. This is familiar.
But this mistakes the full significance of a tariff-centric public policy. First and foremost, tariffs are an exercise in political agency. In Trump’s administration they are an assertion of political control by the executive branch. And, in fact, political decisionism is (see here; here; and here) a core commitment of the so-called ‘unitary executive theory,’ which I prefer to call (with a nod (here) to Benjamin Constant) ‘Bonapartism.’ According to Bonapartism the will of the American people generates a presidential mandate to take charge. If you were to have a certain conspiratorial sensibility this is a control over ‘Globalists’ or the ‘Woke;’ a certain progressive-democratic sensibility this is the exercise of control over ‘the economy.’ For Bonapartists it’s control over the ‘deep state,’ which turn out to be code for ordinary ‘civil servants and scientists with at-will employment, sanctity of contracts be damned.’
From my own, more (skeptical) liberal perspective tariffs are an expression of mistrust against individuals’ judgments; they limit and even deny us our ability to shape our lives with our meaningful associates as we see fit. And tariffs do so, in part, by changing the pattern of costs on us, and, in part, by altering the political landscape in favor of the well-connected few. Of course, in practice, tariffs are always hugely regressive by raising costs on consumer products. This is, in fact, a familiar effect of mercantilism and has been a rallying cry for liberals since Adam Smith and the Corn league. Tariffs are also regressive as tax instruments displacing the income tax.
What is it that people desire when they desire riches? It may seem strange that once all basic needs are fulfilled, individuals would continue to strive for ever more, working ever harder, even at the cost of their own health. Why don’t they just enjoy life, with more time, and less stress, on their hands? Some do, but they tend to be regarded as weirdos by the mainstream of Western societies. Most people seem to understand the point of their work or their investment efforts not in fulfilling basic needs, but in something else. But what? As a philosopher working on economic issues, this is an important question, because it matters for understanding how humans behave in the economic sphere, and what this implies for institutional design. And it is also, simply, a philosophical puzzle: where does this seemingly irrational behavior come from? I got to think again about these issues when reading Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert’s The Falling Sky. Words of a Yanomami Shaman.* This fascinating book developed out of the friendship between an anthropologist and a member of the Yanomami community, who live in the North of Brazil. Kopenawa got to know “white people’s” ways early in his life, working, among other things, as an interpreter, but he returned to his community and became a shaman as well as an activist for indigenous rights.
Yesterday Columbia University gave in to blackmail by President Trump (see here the letter [HT: NYT]) in order to allow to begin negotiations over the recovery of $400 million in research funding. Its unsigned letter (here HT: Leiterreports) leaves ambiguous which potentially sensible elements they were planning to do anyway (“parts of our comprehensive strategy”) and which parts were added in light of the demands (“several additional actions.”)
The last sentence of the unsigned letter expresses commitment to the university’s mission, “while preserving our commitment to academic freedom and institutional integrity.” While I am no critic of judicious use of hypocrisy, this passage is also a nice example of what has come to be known as ‘performative contradiction.’ If government officials get to dictate to you that certain departments must be put into receivership, and you then go and promise to rejig the curriculum (for ‘balance’), perhaps you should not claim ‘institutional integrity’ or present yourself as a guardian of ‘academic freedom?’
I want to put this episode in a wider context. But before I get there, I make two of my background commitments explicit. First, there is no essential connection between the modern research university and the values of liberal democracy other than, as (recall) Michael Polanyi noted, that they can have the same enemies. The German research university with its cosmopolitan Humboldtian ideal rose and fell in the absence of liberal democracy. The very first modern research university Stateside, Hopkins, was a private institution that was, however, shaped by Jim Crow (and racially integrated rather late in its history).
It’s been evident since Trump’s inauguration that the US, as we knew it, is over. I’ve been looking at some of the US-centred organisations and economic dependencies that will need to be rebuilt. But I hadn’t given much thought to the university sector, where I work, until I got an urgent email asking everyone at the University of Queensland to advise the uni admin if we had any projects involving US funding.
It turns out that Australian participants in such projects had received demands from the US to respond, at short notice, to a questionnaire asking if anything they were doing violated any of the long list of Trump taboos: contacts with China, transgender issues, persecution of Christians and so on.
This is front-page news in Australia but I couldn’t find anything else about it except for a brief story in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago. Presumably, though, this is happening everywhere.
Here are two groups of Western philosophers. We’ll call them Group A and Group B. Here’s Group A:
Plato, Epicurus, Plotinus, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Francis Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, Newton, Leibniz, David Hume, Herbert Spencer, John Stuart Mill, Schopenhauer, Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Jean-Paul Sartre, Kurt Gödel, Karl Popper, Jeremy Bentham, Alan Turing, Saul Kripke.
And here’s Group B:
Aristotle, Socrates, Descartes, Bishop George Berkeley, Rousseau, Heidegger, Hegel, Marx, Frege, Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, Albert Camus, Frantz Fanon, John Rawls, Willard Quine.
Okay, so: what distinguishes these two groups?
Answer under the cut, but… stare at those two lists. Take a moment; give it a try. Do you see it?
Hints: It’s something pretty straightforward. Frege is an edge case. And while Rousseau is formally part of Group B, he really belongs with Group A.
If you have a guess, put it in a comment, then come and look. [click to continue…]
At the cutting edge of world history and industrial progress back when it was built in 1799, but now Ironbridge and nearby Coalbrookdale are bucolic backwaters where you struggle to get a decent phone signal.
Every time I start writing something about The Situation, it seems pointless. Both the media environment and the world itself seem to be spinning out of control. The bubble of Boomer Realism has been popped. The weirdness which has been bubbling since 2008 has flooded the territory; old maps seem worse than useless. I’ve got nothing better than aphorisms to offer to understand the present.
Thankfully, my job interacting with students and colleagues forces me to be a bit more concrete. I’m very excited about the re-launch of the APSA Experiments Section Newsletter, which I’m editing along with Krissy Lunz Trujillo — check it out here.
But mostly today I want to talk about the graduate seminar I just finished teaching, about Media, Social Media and Politics. The syllabus is here. To summarize what we spent the most time talking about in class, I’ll quote a sentence from Green et al (2025): “The online information ecosystem in the early twenty-first century is characterized by unbundling and abundance.”
A while ago, ALLEA (the alliance of European science academies) published a statement on ethical problems in collaborations between academia and commercial parties.*
With this post, I want to draw attention to this topic (my impression was that it got a bit overshadowed by all the horrible attacks on academic freedom and academic institutions that are currently happening in the US – ALLEA also published a statement on academic freedom in response), but also raise some more questions.