Bill Gates is energized by the big challenge of climate change - CSMonitor.com
Bill Gates is energized by big challenges, especially climate change
In “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster,” Bill Gates uses plain language to lay out the problem – and the technologies he believes are key to fixing it.
Penguin Random House
“How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need” by Bill Gates, Knopf, 272 pp.
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February 16, 2021
By Richard Schiffman
Bill Gates is a man with a big agenda. He and his wife run the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s largest private charitable foundation. It aims to eliminate diseases, boost food production, and end extreme poverty in sub-Saharan Africa and beyond. As Gates writes in his latest book, “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need,” he gradually came to the realization that climate change poses a major threat to those goals.
It won’t be enough to just reduce emissions of CO2, as governments pledged to do in the 2016 Paris Climate Agreement, Gates insists. The world’s wealthiest countries need to get all the way to zero carbon by the year 2050. That means that, in addition to radically slashing the production of greenhouse gases, we’ll have to start removing them from the atmosphere.
It’s a tall order. But Gates says he’s optimistic.
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We already have the technologies we need – solar and wind power, carbon-capture and storage, and nuclear energy. However, each comes with its own set of problems, which Gates details in the book: The sun doesn’t shine all day long and the wind isn’t always blowing; nuclear power is dirty, dangerous, and prohibitively expensive, as is taking carbon out of the atmosphere; our electric grid is inefficient and out of date.
Breakthroughs are necessary in all of these fields, and they won’t come cheaply. The kinds of innovations that happen relatively quickly in, say, medicine or computing, according to Gates, are harder to come by in the energy field, where transformative technologies take decades to materialize.
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Since the world doesn’t have that kind of time, and no one knows where the energy miracles of the future will be found, Gates says we’ll need to quintuple public investment in climate-related R&D over the next decade and pursue many different lines at once to head off catastrophic warming.
How to go about this is no mere academic exercise for Gates. He has pledged to contribute billions of dollars to support the researchers and companies whose approaches he believes have the best chance of success in limiting climate change and helping humans adapt to it.
That clout is one reason the book will receive lots of attention. It is written by a man who has (for good or for ill) the power to substantially shape the agenda going forward. Another reason is that this is a surprisingly good read. The author’s enthusiasm and curiosity about the way things work is infectious. He walks us through not just the basic science of global warming, but all the ways that our modern lives contribute to it. He offers a primer on farming; transportation; food waste; and concrete, steel, and plastic manufacturing, to name some of the author’s encyclopedic range of concerns.
But how things work will have to be transformed from the bottom up, he argues. Others might be discouraged. Gates seems energized by the sheer size and complexity of the challenge. That’s one of the best things about the book – the can-do optimism and conviction that science in partnership with industry are up to the task.
The catch, however, is that technology has to be implemented by people. And Gates is less confident about what needs to be done with humans and their social and political structures than he is about machines.
Can an economic system pushing consumerism and an endless cycle of growth solve a problem that it continues to create?
Gates argues that corporations are already getting onboard. He says government policies like a carbon tax, subsidies for clean energy, and stricter standards for cleaner fuels and products are needed to further incentivize the private sector to do the right things. But he is mostly silent on how to generate the political will to implement these.
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While wealthy countries may have the resources to pay “the green premiums,” as Gates calls them, that will be required to decarbonize their economies, developing nations do not. Even as they attempt to shift to cleaner technologies, the carbon emissions of countries like China and India continue to rise as these countries struggle to expand their industrial base.
Gates never questions the assumption that we need to continue to grow the economy and even substantially increase energy use, especially in the developing world. Some will see this as the book’s blind spot. It takes for granted that the environment can be saved without a change in lifestyle and material aspirations, especially in the developed world.
He mostly sidesteps questions of ethics and personal behavior, though he admits that sacrifices will be required. “It’s true that my carbon footprint is absurdly high,” the billionaire tech mogul concedes. But eating fewer cheeseburgers and buying carbon offsets may not be enough, either for him or for us.
Climate change, as the author convincingly argues, is the biggest challenge we’ve ever faced. But it is also an opportunity to rethink our human place on Earth, and to find a simpler, more sustainable way to live here.
Essential reading to save the planet
Here are some other books that readers might enjoy, which approach the challenge of climate change and the environment through different lenses.
Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming by Paul Hawken – The book proposes climate solutions ranging from familiar ones like improving refrigerant management and protecting forests to more surprising ones like offering universal education to girls. The findings are based on extensive research.
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Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? by Bill McKibben – Not so optimistic nor as wonkish as Paul Hawken, McKibben, founder of the environmental group 350.org, provides a reality check on how we have gotten to our current dire straits. He writes that political activism and non-violent resistance can potentially turn things around.
The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet by Michael E. Mann. A leading climate scientist, Mann says that the climate denialism funded by fossil fuel interests has morphed into what he calls inactivism, a campaign to block effective policies. He takes heart from youth activism as well as the rapidly falling prices for green energy, but warns that powerful forces still oppose action.
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On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal by Naomi Klein. Klein argues that combatting climate change will require a radical overhaul of our economic system as well as fully enlisting government into the fight. A book to be grappled with whether you agree with Klein’s political prescription or not.
Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver – Though she doesn’t write about climate change, the late poet regales us with simple yet eloquent meditations on our human connection to the natural world. Oliver reminds us that loving the world is a prerequisite for saving it.==
Friendly fire in the war on climate change | Green Left
Friendly fire in the war on climate change
Hans A Baer
February 23, 2021
The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet.
By Michael Mann
Scribe, Melbourne, 2021
351 pp.
Michael E Mann, a world-renowned climate scientist based at Penn State University and the principal inventor of the hockey stick hypothesis as well as a central figure in the “Climategate” affair, decided to become a climate activist upon discovering that his audiences found his lectures on future climate scenarios highly depressing.
Mann’s book reminds me of how variegated and disparate the climate movement is. At the upper end, it includes highflyers such Al Gore and Leonardo Di Caprio, both of whom have endorsed his book. At the other end, it includes climate justice activists who call for “system change, not climate change”, which includes ecosocialists and ecoanarchists. In the middle, the movement includes grassroots climate activists and celebrities such Bill McKibben, a long-time environmentalist and the founder of 350.org and Greta Thunberg, the young Swedish activist who jumpstarted the global student climate movement, both of whom have also endorsed Mann’s book.
For Mann, the new climate war is primarily a struggle against the fossil fuel industry, not global capitalism per se. He chronicles how the fossil fuel industry, starting with the now-defunct Global Climate Coalition, orchestrated a climate denial campaign and found support among various ultra-conservative scientists and business interests.
Mann asserts many of the old-time climate deniers or “inactivists” have, by and large, been replaced by an assortment of “deflectors, dividers and doomers”, although he does acknowledge climate denialism on the part of former United States president Donald Trump, and Australian prime minister Scott Morrison in more recent times.
Mann cites the example of a 1970s US public service announcement for the Keep America Beautiful campaign. The so-called “Crying Indian” campaign, blaming people for pollution, framed the climate crisis within individual behaviour and deflected attention from destructive industrial practices of the fossil fuel industries.
He claims air travel receives a disproportionate amount of shaming, and with social media targeting “influential experts and public figures in the climate arena as ‘hypocrites’ by accusing them of hedonistic lifestyles entailing human carbon footprints” (p 82) serves as a divisive tactic. Mann argues that air travel, at least prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, accounted for only about 3% of global carbon emissions. However, he fails to mention that various experts place a factor of two to three on this figure, if other emissions are factored into the equation.
Mann singles out Kevin Anderson, a British-based climate scientist, who gave up flying about 15 years ago, as having been taken in by the deflectors. In actual fact, Anderson maintains that individual actions may serve as the catalyst for deeper systemic changes which would contribute to climate change mitigation. Is Mann himself, as a privileged academic and a former advisor to the Clinton campaign on energy and climate in 2016, perhaps deflecting attention from the greater contribution that elites of various sorts make to emissions?
Mann asserts: “Flight-shaming is a good fit with those who see capitalism itself as the enemy” (p 80). I suspect he would categorise eco-socialists as well as eco-anarchists as dividers: those who engage in “class warfare” with the likes of Al Gore, corporations and corporate-linked bodies such as the World Bank, the OECD and the World Economic Forum, which now claim that they seek to take climate action.
Mann fails to observe that aeroplanes, along with ships, have served as a central lynchpin of corporate globalisation. In the case of COVID-19, aeroplanes contributed greatly to the rapid spread of the virus around the world, first carried by affluent travelers, then passed on to ordinary people.
In addition to its emissions, meat production appears to play a crucial role in the spread of various infectious diseases from animals to humans. Mann, who is a vegetarian, validates the assertion on the part of some ecologists “that our resource-hungry modern lifestyle — in particular, the destruction of rainforests and other natural ecosystems — may be the underlying factor favouring the sorts of pandemics we have just witnessed” (p 249).
Mann believes the systemic changes needed to mitigate climate change can be achieved through market mechanisms, particularly carbon pricing and massive new infrastructural changes, such as renewable energy, energy efficiency, electrification, including electric vehicles.
In terms of carbon pricing, he does not discuss the respective pros and cons of carbon taxes versus emissions trading schemes (ETS). Mann correctly observes that the carbon price mechanism (CPM) implemented in 2012 by the Australian Labor government led by Julia Gillard, with support from the Greens, resulted in a modest reduction of emissions while operating as carbon tax.
However, the CPM was aborted by the newly-elected Coalition government under Tony Abbott in 2014, roughly a year before it was slated to transform into an ETS.
By and large, however, ETSs have proved to be of limited merit in mitigating emissions, particularly in the case of the European Union.
Mann praises billionaire Elon Musk and his company Tesla for constituting “what may be the greatest threat of all to the fossil fuel industry” (p 126). What Mann fails to note is that solar-powered electric vehicles require a tremendous amount of embedded energy and batteries requiring rare metals, which are in limited supply. Furthermore, electric vehicles are still dependent on extensive road systems and can kill and maim people just as conventional vehicles have done for decades.
Mann concedes that “[t]here are many worthwhile societal problems to confront — animal rights, a cleaner environment, social justice, income inequality, the list goes on” (p 78). However, unlike climate justice activists who frequently observe that those who have contributed the least to climate change are those ones who are suffering the most from it, for the most part he chooses to sidestep social justice issues and the fact that global capitalism has contributed to massive social disparities within and between nation states.
Mann broadly supports the Green New Deal’s goals as delineated by US Senator Ed Markey and Congressperson Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. However, he takes potshots at people who have the temerity to critique neoliberalism, such as Naomi Klein as well as Will Steffen, the former executive director of the Climate Change Institute at the Australian National University.
While admitting that Steffen is a credible environmental scientist, he faults his colleague for advocating shifting away from neoliberalism as rapidly as possible as a strategy for drastically reducing emissions.
Mann argues that people such as Klein and Steffen function as dividers. He asserts that they provide conservatives with ammunition against climate action by “reinforcing the right-wing trope that environmentalists are ‘watermelons’ (green on the outside, red on the inside) who secretly want to use environmental sustainability as an excuse for overthrowing capitalism and economic growth” (p 95). What Mann fails to see is that a meaningful struggle against climate change and capitalism — not only neoliberalism — are one and the same.
Fortunately, Mann devotes a chapter to critiquing “non-solution solutions”, including natural gas as an interim energy source superior to coal and petroleum; carbon capture and sequestration; bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS); nuclear power, and various proposed geo-engineering schemes such as shooting sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere and ocean iron fertilisation.
He rightly criticises Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates for supporting the geo-engineering research efforts of David Keith, a Harvard academic, an affiliate of the Breakthrough Institute and signatory of the Eco-Modernist Manifesto.
I am in basic agreement with Mann’s critique of the climate doomists of various shades who argue that climate change has reached a point that has doomed humanity to extinction.
In the closing words of his book, Mann seeks to address the assertion of those he terms “progressives” that current climate policies don’t sufficiently address social injustices, arguing that “simply acting on the climate crisis is acting to alleviate social injustice” (p 266). Unfortunately, he appears to be hostile to climate justice activists who in calling for “system change, not climate change” are also calling for transcending capitalism, not merely tweaking it to make it slightly more social just and environmentally sustainable.
Mann, to his credit, has made important contributions to climate science and taken on the climate deniers who have harassed him and other climate scientists for long. However, perhaps it is time that he, as an influential climate communicator, joins forces with a burgeoning climate justice movement, which is calling for deeper systemic changes than those called for by the United Nations Congress of the Parties and supposedly enlightened corporate and political elites around the world.
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Naomi Klein: We Are Sleepwalking toward Apocalypse | JSTOR Daily
Naomi Klein: We Are Sleepwalking toward Apocalypse
Klein talks about her new book, On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal, and the youth movement for climate action.
Naomi Klein
Photo by Kourosh Keshiri
By: Hope Reese
September 18, 2019
11 minutes
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We are all “sleepwalking toward apocalypse,” author and activist Naomi Klein declares in On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal, her new book demanding radical action to save a dying planet.
If we don’t end carbon emissions quickly, the future of our planet is in serious jeopardy. According to the Green New Deal, which Klein co-authored, America has ten years to do it. A burgeoning youth movement recognizes the dire situation. On September 20, 2019, youth around the world organized climate strikes, demanding change. And while its leader Greta Thunberg, a 16-year old Swedish environmental activist whose autistic condition––she sees the climate situation in black and white––has illuminated the dissonance between the rise in global temperatures and the lack of political action, many of us simply turn our heads and look the other way.
Courtesy Simon & Schuster
In On Fire, a collection of reporting, essays, and public talks, Klein argues that the denial of climate change is not actually about disputing science, but, rather, fearing the radical redistribution of power and wealth necessary to heal the planet. Issues such as gender, race, economic inequality, climate change, and corporate overreach should not be seen in silos, Klein contends. They are inextricably interwoven, and only a holistic approach to equalizing society will suffice.
I spoke to Klein, who is a senior correspondent for The Intercept and the inaugural Gloria Steinem Chair in Media, Culture and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University, about what climate change denial is really about—and why cost-benefit analyses are not the answer to the crisis.
Here is our conversation, edited for length and clarity.
Hope Reese: To understand the action required to fight climate change, you make the case that we should look to historical precedents, specifically between 1930 and 1950, to guide us. What can we learn from that period of U.S. history?
Naomi Klein: When we think about whether or not societies can retool themselves quickly, launch a flurry of transformational policies in a very short period of time, the three historical precedents that are usually invoked in climate discussions are the New Deal under FDR, World War II mobilization in North America and in Britain, and the Marshall Plan after the Second World War. None of these historical precedents are perfect analogs for what we need. But they’re still useful to think about, in large part because one of the biggest barriers to doing what is necessary in the face of climate breakdown is a sense of inevitable apocalypse. A message that we just simply aren’t capable of moving as quickly as is needed. And so we’re hearing more and more, not climate change denial, but climate defeatism. Recently there was that high profile piece by Jonathan Franzen saying, “Stop pretending we can stop climate apocalypse.” So it’s still useful to learn the lessons because they all, each in their own way, are examples of societies moving very, very quickly in the face of pressing crises.
You say that we’re pretty much past the point of arguing against the science of climate change. So what is the resistance really about?
So there are still people who deny the science, but what the latest polling is showing is that their numbers are dwindling. And, particularly on the Republican side, younger Republicans do not deny climate change nearly as much as their parents do. It’s not that climate change denial is not still a factor––it is. But what I look at in the book is the socio-political science that shows that there is an incredibly tight correlation between political ideology, or worldview, and your opinions on whether or not you can trust the science on climate change. What the research shows is that people with a strong hierarchical worldview, people who have a comfort level with inequality, who agree with positions like “people pretty much get what they deserve,” or “the government should get out of the way of the market,” things like that, overwhelmingly, in the United States, tend to deny the reality of climate change.
This is not at all a scientific disagreement. They deny the reality of the science because they understand that if the science is true, it is a profound attack on that hierarchical worldview. Because if the science is true, the ultra free-market playbook, of “get out of the way of the market, privatize as much as you can, slash taxes, cut social services”––all of that––really clashes with the kinds of public investments that are absolutely necessary.
This is where the historical precedents around the New Deal, the Marshall Plan, the war effort, what they all show is that change doesn’t happen unless the government becomes very involved in planning and managing the economy, in telling corporations what they can and cannot do. Right? This is what happened during the Second World War when factories were retooled for making military products. It’s also what happened during the Marshall Plan. So the whole free market playbook collapses. That’s why treating this as a problem that can be solved with better science communication is quite misguided. Because it really isn’t the science that is at the heart of the debate––it’s the political and ideological and worldview implications of the science.
“That it is okay for a small elite to have an inordinate amount of power and wealth… is a worldview that deserves to crash. It’s at the heart of our ecological crisis.”
My view is that that intensely hierarchical world view, that dominance-based worldview that really believes that it is okay for a small elite to have an inordinate amount of power and wealth, because they essentially deserve it and everybody else deserves their fate, is a worldview that deserves to crash. It’s at the heart of our ecological crisis. It is at the heart of treating nature as if it is nothing more than wealth for us to extract, imagining ourselves to be able to completely dominate the natural world as well as the people seen as closest to it, whether they are indigenous people or Africans or women. That’s a part of that worldview, and it’s crashing on many fronts. I think climate change is the ultimate challenge to it. And we shouldn’t shy away from talking about, “What stories do we need to tell that are in line with what we are seeing in the world that we rely on to survive?”
You say that the late 1980s, when we were first becoming aware of climate change, was “historically bad timing” in terms of our ability to take action––which is the opposite of Nathanial Rich’s argument in the New York Times, claiming that the timing couldn’t have been better. Can you talk about what was happening at that time?
So, Nathaniel Rich, in a very prominent way, made this argument that the reason we are failing to do the things that are necessary in the face of the climate crisis to preserve a habitable planet has to do with something fundamental about human nature––that we are wired against any kind of personal sacrifice in the face of a medium-term threat. The way he supports this human-nature based argument is by pointing to the period of the late 1980s, when it seemed that all the stars were aligning for a strong response to climate change. So he talks about the moment in 1988 and ‘89 when you had James Hanson testifying on Capitol Hill that he now had 99 percent certainty that humans were changing the climate. You had the creation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change after the first meeting of government to talk about the climate crisis and emission reduction in 1988.
He tells the story that no one was denying it. The fossil fuel companies hadn’t started funding the opposition. Everything was sort of good-to-go on climate action. And then we just punted—as in, we humans. So the counter-narrative that I tell is that, actually, the stars were not aligned for formative climate action in 1988 and 1989. Those UN meetings were only the tiniest fraction of the story of what was actually happening in the world. The Berlin Wall was about to fall. The first free trade agreement was signed. The end of history was being declared. It was the high ideological watermark for the neoliberal economic project––that “there is no alternative” triumphalism.
And at that moment, when you had elites in Western countries declaring consensus about slashing government, slashing taxes, slashing social services, Ronald Reagan saying “the nine most dangerous words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help'”––which is something that would come as a great surprise to the people of Puerto Rico, who really wanted there to be a government to help them––all of that made it incredibly difficult to do the things that were necessary in the face of the climate crisis. Which, once again, required big investments in the public sphere to bring about a dramatic energy transformation, re-imagining how we live in cities, planning for different kinds of agriculture. I mean, this was a case of epic historical bad timing.
And why shouldn’t the failure to take action be blamed on human nature?
If it’s human nature, we’re doomed. Right? But if, if we look at this within the ebb and flow of these historical tides and we see that, no––there was a very human-created ideological project that was created by a relatively tiny percentage of humans on this planet, and was resisted by a great many more humans around the world. And oftentimes imposed with great violence and the overthrow of governments and all kinds of anti-democratic measures through the World Bank and the IMF—which is what some of my previous writing has been about, The Shock Doctrine. Then what we see is that this is highly contested. Humans are many different things. At different moments in history, humans have different parts of our complex characters catered to by different ideological projects. And neoliberalism happens to cater to our most short-term, our most individualistic, our most consumer-minded, our least collectivist parts of ourselves, right? Humans are complicated. We are greedy and individualistic and short-term. We are loving and empathetic creatures of our communities. So different ideological moments and different political projects unleash those parts of ourselves in different ways.
If we look at the New Deal Era or the war era effor—when you had victory gardens, and 40 percent of the produce that Americans were eating was coming from victory gardens, or we saw the end of leisure driving because fuel was being conserved for the war effort, or we think about the kinds of social solidarity expressed in the New Deal Era––those were policies that unleashed the more collectivist parts of what it means to be human.
If we fast-forward to our current moment, you juxtapose the youth climate rally in New Zealand, which was happening at the same time as the Christchurch shooting, claiming that the two are “mirror opposite reactions to some of the same historical forces.” How so?
I see the book as a story of three fires that are interrelated. The first fires are the literal fires of a warming and overheated planet. The second set of fires are these political fires on the far right, which are in the process of normalizing the fortressing of borders and normalizing mass deaths in the Mediterranean, as in Europe with the de facto “let them drown” policy. Where it becomes illegal for humanitarian organizations to rescue people in the Mediterranean. Of course we are seeing this in the United States, with the dramatic escalation of the most brutal anti-immigration policies. More and more, we are seeing a portion of the far right not denying the reality of climate change, but invoking it as a reason to violently attack immigrants.
There was the Christchurch mosque shooting in New Zealand, with more than 50 people at prayer. And that happened on the same day as the first student global climate strike. There were thousands of students who had walked out of school in Christchurch, as they had in cities around the world. But in Christchurch, their climate strike rally was interrupted when the police came in and said everybody had to disperse because there was a live shooting nearby. It was this horrific snapshot of two very different ways to respond to those fires.
One was the fires of the far right. And the other was the fires of global youth movement that is profoundly internationalist. It is really not interested in national borders at all. These are young people who are building a global youth movement, from Uganda to San Francisco. Greta Thunberg just sailed from Europe to the United States and will make her way to Chile for the next youth climate summit. It’s a profoundly internationalist movement and it is fighting for the rights of all children, for a justice-based response to climate change.
“The days of overt climate denial on the right are numbered, and what we’re headed for, and what we are seeing, is actually climate barbarism.”
So even when you have verbal denials of climate change––you know, in the case of Donald Trump, he still sometimes seems to deny the science––the bigger picture is that this is a worldview that is about protecting its own, as they define it, protecting the in-group and otherizing everybody else—or even animalizing the out-groups, within the United States and without—as a justification for allowing people to die.
We’re seeing this in Trump’s rhetoric toward Central American immigrants. We’ve seen it more recently when he talked about people fleeing from the Bahamas after Hurricane Dorian, casting them as drug dealers who shouldn’t be allowed into the United States––when they’re fleeing for their lives. The days of overt climate denial on the right are numbered, and what we’re headed for, and what we are seeing, is actually climate barbarism, right? So this idea that, somehow, you’re gonna convince the Donald Trumps of the world that the science is real, and they’re going to come back to the UN and re-sign the Paris Climate Accord, and think about a justice-based response to climate change, is delusional. If they accept the science, they become more dangerous. Because that is used to supercharge these supremacist ideologies.
You’ve also written in The Shock Doctrine about how these critical moments can also render us vulnerable to corporate interests. How could even the acceptance of the Green New Deal go wrong?
There are certainly ways to profit in the short-to-medium term from climate shock––privatizing disaster response, building private detention centers for immigrants. And we’re already seeing all of this, but we’re also seeing that if we do not confront the incredible dangers of this hyper-nationalist, hyper-tribalist ideology on the right, then when climate shocks come, they are used as an excuse to not just reinforce borders but to cut foreign aid. In the UK, after heavy flooding, there were calls from right-wing tabloids to slash aid to poor countries and “look after our own.” This is why I think it is so critical to understand that the heart of the problem is that worldview, that ideology. And I don’t believe we’re going to see change on the scale required unless we’re ready for a shift in values.
We can’t be afraid to talk in the language of morality. There was a study that just came out, which Bill Gates was involved in, that did a cost-benefit analysis––that if we spend $1.8 trillion helping countries adapt to climate change, we could save $7 trillion in the long run. That kind of argument doesn’t work, because people’s lives are already being written off. I mean, if you’re comfortable allowing thousands of people to die in the Mediterranean, why would you spend trillions of dollars helping poor countries build sea walls or storm warning systems? It’s why I call it “climate barbarism”––we really have to name it, and we need to understand the danger of this ideology. Sure, there are cost-benefit arguments to make. But the much more important argument is about the value of human beings. The equal value of human beings, regardless of where they live. What we owe each other in an interconnected world, facing such a profoundly interconnected threat like climate change.
Editors’ Note: This article originally stated that Greta Thunberg is Norwegian. She is in fact Swedish.
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Naomi Klein: Beware the Tech Billionaires and Their “Pandemic Shock Doctrine” | Diane Ravitch's blog
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Naomi Klein: Beware the Tech Billionaires and Their “Pandemic Shock Doctrine”
By dianeravitch
May 9, 2020 //
44
Naomi Klein coined the iconic book Shock Doctrine, about the way that the powerful elites use emergencies to expand their power because of the crisis. New Orleans was one of her prime examples of “disaster capitalism,” where the devastation of a giant hurricane created an opportunity to break the teachers union and privatize the public school system.
In this brilliant essay, published in The Intercept, Klein describes the many ways in which the plutocrats of the tech industry are turning the pandemic into a gold mine for themselves and planning a dystopian future for the rest of us.
Please read this provocative and frightening essay, which has numerous links to support her argument.
What she details is not just a threat to our privacy and our institutions but to our democracy and our freedom.
It is no coincidence, she writes, that Governor Andrew Cuomo is enlisting a team of tech billionaires to reimagine the future of the Empire State. They know exactly what they want, and it’s up to us to stop them.
She writes:
It has taken some time to gel, but something resembling a coherent Pandemic Shock Doctrine is beginning to emerge. Call it the “Screen New Deal.” Far more high-tech than anything we have seen during previous disasters, the future that is being rushed into being as the bodies still pile up treats our past weeks of physical isolation not as a painful necessity to save lives, but as a living laboratory for a permanent — and highly profitable — no-touch future.
Anuja Sonalker, CEO of Steer Tech, a Maryland-based company selling self-parking technology, recently summed up the new virus-personalized pitch. “There has been a distinct warming up to human-less, contactless technology,” she said. “Humans are biohazards, machines are not.”
It’s a future in which our homes are never again exclusively personal spaces but are also, via high-speed digital connectivity, our schools, our doctor’s offices, our gyms, and, if determined by the state, our jails. Of course, for many of us, those same homes were already turning into our never-off workplaces and our primary entertainment venues before the pandemic, and surveillance incarceration “in the community” was already booming. But in the future under hasty construction, all of these trends are poised for a warp-speed acceleration.
This is a future in which, for the privileged, almost everything is home delivered, either virtually via streaming and cloud technology, or physically via driverless vehicle or drone, then screen “shared” on a mediated platform. It’s a future that employs far fewer teachers, doctors, and drivers. It accepts no cash or credit cards (under guise of virus control) and has skeletal mass transit and far less live art. It’s a future that claims to be run on “artificial intelligence” but is actually held together by tens of millions of anonymous workers tucked away in warehouses, data centers, content moderation mills, electronic sweatshops, lithium mines, industrial farms, meat-processing plants, and prisons, where they are left unprotected from disease and hyperexploition. It’s a future in which our every move, our every word, our every relationship is trackable, traceable, and data-mineable by unprecedented collaborations between government and tech giants.
If all of this sounds familiar it’s because, pre-Covid, this precise app-driven, gig-fueled future was being sold to us in the name of convenience, frictionlessness, and personalization. But many of us had concerns. About the security, quality, and inequity of telehealth and online classrooms. About driverless cars mowing down pedestrians and drones smashing packages (and people). About location tracking and cash-free commerce obliterating our privacy and entrenching racial and gender discrimination. About unscrupulous social media platforms poisoning our information ecology and our kids’ mental health. About “smart cities” filled with sensors supplanting local government. About the good jobs these technologies wiped out. About the bad jobs they mass produced.
And most of all, we had concerns about the democracy-threatening wealth and power accumulated by a handful of tech companies that are masters of abdication — eschewing all responsibility for the wreckage left behind in the fields they now dominate, whether media, retail, or transportation.
That was the ancient past known as February. Today, a great many of those well-founded concerns are being swept away by a tidal wave of panic, and this warmed-over dystopia is going through a rush-job rebranding. Now, against a harrowing backdrop of mass death, it is being sold to us on the dubious promise that these technologies are the only possible way to pandemic-proof our lives, the indispensable keys to keeping ourselves and our loved ones safe.
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CategoriesBillionaires, Data and Data Mining, Democracy, Disruption, Education Reform, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Online Education, Privacy, Privatization
44 CommentsPost your own or leave a trackback: Trackback URL
Yvonne
May 9, 2020 at 10:08 am
BEWARE! BEWARE! BEWARE the “Tech Billionaires.”
Klein is right and so is Diane and the rest of us who see the SCAMS, lived the SCAMS, and continue to decry and fight whose SCAMBUGS … who are really SCUMBUGS.
People say they care about kids and then just USE them “for their own profits.” Americans really need to be a lot more critical. Could it be those commercials on TV and everywhere, which use propaganda?
The big daddies …. Common GORE, high stakes testing, and the narrowing of the curriculum to pass stupid tests have ALL failed America.
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retired teacher
May 9, 2020 at 10:37 am
A germ free future is unlikely despite any efforts to make it that way. There is a good deal of research that says that germs and viruses actually actually teach our immune system how to defend itself. Many allergies in children today are thought to be the result of a super-antiseptic existence. Silicon Valley is preying on our insecurities and fears.
Many states are looking to save money in post pandemic America. Parents, teachers and concerned citizens wary of a “Black Mirror” existence must be ready to resist and organize to push back. I think our best defense is to present all of the negatives associated with technology and frame technology explosion as class warfare. The wealthy are not embracing ed-tech for their own children. Why should our young people be denied an equitable opportunity to grow and develop in a humane setting? We need to expose the tech giants for the profiteers they are. Their motives are all about making money at the expense of our young people.
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ciedie aech
May 9, 2020 at 1:07 pm
when “humane setting” means kids dealing with humans, not computers
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SomeDAM Poet
May 9, 2020 at 10:57 am
Humans are biohazards”
Who needs human species?
Biohazard waste
Who needs human feces
Rubbing in their face?
Better is the robot
Running every place
Go bot and the know bot
Human to replace
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Gordon Wilder
May 9, 2020 at 10:57 am
The following, something I wrote for facebook, is not directly applicable to Klein’s great writing but is another aspect of the basic problem, greed, the worship of false gods, the golden calf if you will rather than the good of humanity, its relation to the forces of the great moral leaders and philosophers.
Finality; money is only as good and has only the worth which people give to it. We came within hours of it being worthless. We face a future in which humankind’s problems are becoming insurmountable because of this tendency to think that money gives us personal worth. Far from it.
The Soviet Nation no longer exists. Russia sits alone with Putin and his missiles. Soviets during the cold war spent so much on their military that they had no money to keep society at a cohesive level. Their country divided into independent “states”
“Those who do not know their history are bound to repeat it.”
Eisenhower warned us about the power of the military industrial complex. The United States spends more on national defense than China, Saudi Arabia, India, France, Russia, United Kingdom, and Germany. … Defense spending accounts for 15 percent of all federal spending and roughly half of discretionary spending. U.S. military spending dwarfs the budget of the #2 country – China.
Adequate military defense is necessary of course. WWII non preparation taught us that. BUT; Eisenhower, a Republican president’s budget; domestic priorities first, military expenditures what was left. During his eight-year term, he tamed the warfare state. The Eisenhower era of the 1950s was a time of unprecedented economic growth and prosperity. GDP (gross domestic product) grew by an astonishing 150% in the period from 1945 to 1960. In the 1950s, with only five percent of the world’s population the U.S. economy produced almost half of the world’s manufactured products.
Like the Soviets our infrastructure, roads, bridges etc crumble, our universities, the best in the world – great scholars from aound the world came here to study have been given increasingly less financial assistance from the government so now so very many students cannot attend and academic institutions are having huge financial difficulties and students who do go graduate with humongous debt. [other countries do not make that mistake, students pay little or no tuition and those countries face the future with an educated public] 20% of our children live in poverty, homelessness proliferates etc etc etc. Our state department’s budget is less than minimal but we can bomb and bully without measure.
Emphasizing military preparedness as the ONLY or even primary danger we face has now been proven untenable. What country would even think of attacking us? Now, covid-19 is here plus other dangers which could destroy us as a nation. Lack of preparation is proving devastating. In several countries which were adequately prepared, covid-19 effect has been minimal.
The president’s promises have been illusory. His tax returns which would have shown his true worth, the wall for which Mexico was to pay and now; trillions of added debt, countless unneeded deaths, economy in shambles, all caused by incompetent, inept abilities by the White House occupant. Truman said” the buck stops here. Integrity was known at that time, antithetical to what is happening now.
We positively know from recorded speech, what he said and when; we also know now what was known regarding the virus and when; all proof of gross incompetence in leadership. To this day necessities for testing, adequate protective gear is too often unavailable. The future is unknown but is NOT bright.
Tragically this same ineptitude shows similarly now in the climate change challenge which, instead of confronting its horrors, he has warred against any semblance of mitigating its effects. It is merely a Chinese hoax.
Who needs scholarly study when a president shows his superior understanding to that of those who study problems in detail. Evidently God has given him superior insight, garnered without any study or research on his part.
Scholars who had studied Iraq told George W Bush exactly what would happen with an invasion. He knew better? It happened and as prognosticated the chaos that is now prevalent. Economic depression ensued, thousands of lives lost, trillions added to our national debt. Bush came into office when we were PAYING OFF our national debt. He left office with unemployment at terrible levels, economy poor, one of our most despised presidents. The U. S. will never be the same.
No lesson learned. So many people voted for a man with no political understanding. We can see how that is turning out. We expect professional people to learn, understand, have experience in their craft; doctors, lawyers, dentists, et al but NOT a president?
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Bob Shepherd
May 9, 2020 at 11:18 am
Dear Melinda:
Please let Bill know that there are many hobbies that he can take up that don’t hurt other people’s children. The Common Coring and testing and depersonalized education software and VAM and LMSs and student “data”bases have been terribly destructive and keep me and a lot of others awake at night. Here are a few suggestions: ceramics, macrame, paint-by-numbers, stamp collecting. Our experience with his education initiatives shows that he isn’t willing to invest time into actually learning something about his education hobby, so I hesitate to suggest baking or instrument making, which also involve significant learning curves.
Oh, and by the way, it was very thoughtful of you to remember that I was working on a mystery novel and looking for the perfect deadly potion for my villain to use. The Gates Cocktail you’ve recommended is PERFECT: Two parts money, two parts arrogance, two parts ignorance. A lethal combination.
Thanks again,
Bob S.
P.S. I know that Bill is really fond of numerology generally (e.g., Student “Data” Walls), so he might try Tarot card reading and casting astrological readings. These other pseudosciences are far, far less dangerous than the invalid testing and VAM and LMSs and remote learning software and student “data”bases he’s so crazy about. as you surely know, “remote learning” is a purported educational environment in which there is only a remote chance that any learning is taking place. Thanks.
https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2020/01/06/stopping-by-school-on-a-disruptive-afternoon/
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SomeDAM Poet
May 9, 2020 at 11:44 am
Dear Melinda
Goat wet Bill two Hail
Dun stopper laundry wrote
Dun stopper long entrail
Ax apt do risky coat
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Bob Shepherd
May 9, 2020 at 11:50 am
Yes. She will understand this just as well. Love the Hail/entrail rhyme, btw, and your use of sprung rhythm puts Hopkins to shame. Does this mean that you are entering your SomeDADAist phase?
SomeDAM Poet
May 9, 2020 at 11:55 am
Inspired by Ladle Rat Rotten Hut, Up cures
SomeDAM Poet
May 9, 2020 at 11:57 am
Did you just call me SomeDAM Sadist?
SomeDAM Poet
May 9, 2020 at 12:17 pm
Hint to anyone who does not get the last line “ax apt” has nothing to do with axes.
SomeDAM Poet
May 9, 2020 at 12:20 pm
And I’d like to see an AI program that can decode something like this.
Then I might start to believe some of the hype. Might.
SomeDAM Poet
May 9, 2020 at 12:22 pm
If Bill is a bot, he probably won’t be able to decode that
SomeDAM Poet
May 9, 2020 at 12:29 pm
Actually, even if he’s a human, he probably won’t be able to.
His partner Paul Allen was the smart one behind Microsoft.
Bob Shepherd
May 9, 2020 at 1:02 pm
Dadaist. As Ludwig Van said, DaDa Da Dum. Speaking of Dada, Salvador Dali once gave a press conference dressed in a Bugs Bunny suit covered in mayonnaise. But this was in Florida, and it was so hot inside the suit that he collapsed and had to be cut out of it. And all this made about as much sense as Trump’s cornavirus response has.
I am still working on translating the Anguish. Two hail. To hell. Dun stopper. Don’t stop her. Ax ap. Except or Accept. Hmmmm.
dianeravitch
May 9, 2020 at 1:35 pm
When you figure it out, please share.
Bob Shepherd
May 9, 2020 at 4:17 pm
Go with Bill to hell.
Don’t stop along the road.
Don’t stop along a trail
Except to. . . .
to be continued
Bob Shepherd
May 9, 2020 at 5:19 pm
Perhaps:
Go with Bill to hell.
Don’t stop along the road.
Don’t stop along a trail
except to rest the goat. (Billy)
SomeDAM Poet
May 9, 2020 at 1:55 pm
Dun stopper laundry wrote” was stolen directly from Ladle Rat Rotten Hut
SomeDAM Poet
May 9, 2020 at 2:08 pm
SomeDAM Poet
May 10, 2020 at 8:07 am
Bob
You got all but the last part of the last line.
It was supposed to be “Except to this de code”
But that is not really standard English and I think ” except to rest the goat” is much better, at at rate.
So, you win.
The checks in the mail from Trump.
dianeravitch
May 10, 2020 at 10:02 am
What rhymes with Trump? Chump.
SomeDAM Poet
May 10, 2020 at 10:29 am
Incidentally, I think this sort of stuff reveals a lot about language.
Among other things, it tells us that absent context, language loses much of its meaning.
Something for David Coleman to chew on.
SomeDAM Poet
May 10, 2020 at 10:46 am
Conman Corp
Coleman met eh conman corp
Redding clothes, an mulch mulch moor
Coleman’s ding worse jest infest
Inner “vixen” up detest
SomeDAM Poet
May 10, 2020 at 10:49 am
Oops should be
“Conman corps”
SomeDAM Poet
May 10, 2020 at 11:06 am
Gates infested lost up dawdlers
Jest fur nutting, butt sum “scowlers”
Gates well nabber gibbet hup
Grid ass watt hee’s god an gut
SomeDAM Poet
May 10, 2020 at 11:20 am
Grid ass watt ease god an gut
dianeravitch
May 9, 2020 at 12:25 pm
Bob,
I had to laugh out loud at your suggestion that Billy Gates could keep himself busy with macrame!
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SomeDAM Poet
May 9, 2020 at 12:35 pm
With our luck he will take up macabreme
retired teacher
May 9, 2020 at 12:44 pm
Thanks, Bob, for all the hilarious images in your Gates’ letter.
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LisaM
May 9, 2020 at 2:22 pm
I’ve been privy to some dreadful screeds put out by the REOPEN/FREEDOM/LIBERATE movement and they clearly DO NOT like Bill Gates. These fringe groups think Bill has something to do with the manufacture of the virus. I’d bet that they are looking into the rest of these tech giants, also. The techies should be fearful of their lives….because the fringe is truly a dangerous crowd and we are in a desperate situation.
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retiredbutmissthekids
May 9, 2020 at 3:32 pm
LisaM: are fringe groups confusing “viruses” (you know, like computer viruses w/airborne/bodily viruses?!)–??
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LisaM
May 9, 2020 at 5:04 pm
They are linking Gates to the lab in Wuhan, to the World Bank and to WHO. They clearly don’t like WHO either. They have some pretty interesting thoughts. SCARY!
dianeravitch
May 9, 2020 at 5:49 pm
The conspiracy theorists are nuts.
Have they linked Gates to the international Jewish cabal yet, even though he is not Jewish?
LisaM
May 9, 2020 at 8:57 pm
I haven’t seen that one, but they don’t like Dr. Fauci either. Marc Cyborg used to be on their good side, but lately FB is taking down their toxic, untruthful postings….and so they are getting a little frustrated with him. Where is the Cyborg lately? Maybe he got smart and headed to an underground bunker in New Zealand or SD? Usually a vulture like him would be circling the dead meat. Sorry, but I have NO love for the tech giants.
Laura H. Chapman
May 9, 2020 at 4:13 pm
This is a brilliant summary of the forces at work to undermine democracy while also engaging in PR about being of huge importance and benefit to the national defense.
Back in 2016, major tech companies actually formed the “Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society.” The stated mission was to “Harness AI for solutions to some of humanity’s most challenging problems: education, climate change, food, health and wellbeing, transportation, and inequality.”
In 2016, the organization was nothing more than an effort to put a positive spin on AI in the face of increasing public and press disapproval of data mining and the use of algorithms to drive online behavior (e.g. Facebook’s profit-seeking from Russian operatives who interfered with our elections, China-like surveillance systems and social credit schemes).
The grandiose vision of artificial intelligence as a panacea for social problems is clearly betrayed by the overwhelming purpose of the founding companies, all seeking profits from the personal data of individuals. The “founding” the companies were:
–Amazon has customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa.
–Apple sells iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Apple TV, has software platforms — iOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS with services via the App Store, Apple Music, Apple Pay, and iCloud.
–DeepMind, based in London, acquired in 2014 by Google (part of Alphabet group) works on AI programs that can “learn to solve any complex problem without needing to be taught how.”
–Google is a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. Google products/platforms include Search, Maps, Gmail, Android, Google Play, Chrome, and YouTube.
–Facebook. Facebook has AI Research (FAIR) and Applied Machine Learning.
–IBM’s Watson is. .”.the most advanced AI computing platform available today, deployed in more than 45 countries and across 20 different industries.”
–Microsoft says, “More than any other technology that has preceded it, AI has the potential to extend human capabilities, empowering us all to achieve more.”
This PR campaign is now up and running, fully staffed, and with a long list of “partners.” Of these, 21 are for-profit partners but 76 are non-profits. The meaning of “partner” is not clear, nor is the cost of a partnership, but the logos and lists of partners are worth a second look. https://www.partnershiponai.org/about/
For example, some of the non-profits listed as partners are promoters of AI. One is the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE.org). IEEE is building standards to legitimize and expand the scope and influence of AI decision-making. A recent example is a trademarked draft of an IEEE’s “Well-being Metrics Standard for Autonomous and Intelligent Systems” with this definition of well-being.
“Well-being, for the purposes of IEEE P7010, Well-being Metrics Standard for Autonomous and Intelligent Systems is defined broadly to encompass positive and negative affect (feelings), flourishing (also called eudaimonia), satisfaction with life and satisfaction with domains of happiness (also called conditions of life), and the state of the domains. Positive affect includes feelings of happiness, joy, contentment, calm, peace, and other positive feelings.
Negative affect includes feelings of sadness, stress, anxiety, unhappiness, anger, confusion and other negative feelings. Flourishing includes but is no limited to purpose, meaning, positivity, optimism, worthiness, mastery, self-esteem and other aspects of flourishing.
Satisfaction with the domains (also called conditions of life) and the state of the domains can be measured with objective and subjective indicators – the domains are: (1) Affect, (2) Community, (3) Culture, (4) Education, (5) Economy, (6) Environment, (7) Human Settlements, (8) Health, (9) Government, (10) Psychological Well-Being/Mental well-being, (11) Satisfaction with life and (12) Work.”
Just imagine this definition and set of standards being reduced to computer code based on AI training for social-emotional learning (SEL), now a hot topic in education, with Alexa or Siri programmed to detect moods and serve in lieu of a therapist.
Click to access IEEE-P7010_WellbeingMetricsforA_IS_ShortPaper_December272018For_Submission_reviewedbyIEEELegal-1.pdf
I think that more than one of the non-profit supporters of this Partnership for the Benefit of People and Society are interested in risk management for AI systems (reducing legal liabilities) or they have band-wagon enthusiasms for AI. For example, the American Psychological Association appears to be enthusiastic about AI https://www.apa.org (search Artificial Intelligence)
The ACLU has no formal positions on AI, but it is circulating papers from outside experts. Many of these papers are raising red flags, especially about privacy but also the use of AI in making “governmental” decisions. See these at https://www.aclu.org/issues/privacy-technology/will-artificial-intelligence-make-us-less-free
Also, if you have an interest in gender and other biases in AI, checkout the 2019 report of AI Now housed at New York University or their amazing study titled “Amazon’s Echo: An anatomical map of human labor, data and planetary resources” at https://anatomyof.ai
I am suspicious of organized tech and its rebranding efforts. The International Association for K-12 Online Learning (iNACOL) has rebranded its online competency-based agenda as the Aurora Institute. The rebranding is happening with some help from Chan/Zuckerberg and the New Profit grant program. Somehow the “Partnership for the Benefit of People and Society” has the ring of a Soviet-style propaganda operation.
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speduktr
May 9, 2020 at 7:41 pm
Somehow their solutions to problems seem to leave out much of a role for people.people
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GregB
May 10, 2020 at 12:27 am
I really suck at math, but if my calculations are close to correct, Sweden, with a population of approximately 6 million is 1/55th of the US population. If that is correct, their incidence rate is slightly higher than ours, with a high death rate of people who are elderly or with underlying risk factors. I can already anticipate some naysayers out there saying, “see, it we had done nothing, we’d still be exactly where we are.” The real answer, if most of us were not responsible, is that the incidence and death rates would still be significantly higher here. But with quashing and ignoring CDC guidelines, we may well reach our potential.
LeftCoastTeacher
May 9, 2020 at 7:41 pm
Disaster capitalism is a pandemic.
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speduktr
May 9, 2020 at 7:43 pm
Where is the AI when I make obvious mistakes?
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bethree5
May 9, 2020 at 10:59 pm
Don’t be distracted by the specific business of tech moguls. IT automation/ surveillance is scary, but what’s key here is how its titans propose to enhance their global position.
“More than any other factor, however, the NSCAI points to China’s willingness to embrace public-private partnerships in mass surveillance and data collection as a reason for its competitive edge.”
“By late February, Schmidt was taking his campaign to the public… Schmidt called for ‘unprecedented partnerships between government and industry’ and, once again, sounding the yellow peril alarm”
Four decades’ incremental unravelling of democracy toward something that’s starting to resemble feudalism… The principal fief-holders, chafing at democratic limits to global dominance, now crab-walk us toward a bizarre version of Asia’s capitalist-modified socialism. Well-captured in the liberal scoff “socialize the risk and privatize the profits” (shorthand: “corporate welfare”).
Is US govt/ public so unschooled as to buy Schmidt’s disingenuous recommendation to adopt his faux version of Asian biz model? What he recommends is nothing like the tinkering with Chinese socialism [or with Japan’s age-old govt/ family-dynasty “nation-as-family” companies], adding less-govtlly-regulated capitalist elements to bolster social programs– where the overriding goal is to spread wealth more evenly. In our govtl context, it’s simply oligarchy. Russian– not Asian– a govtl model that’s bringing Russians no closer to equitable or even functional distribution of goods than they had under communism. Recommendations completely untethered to notions of social welfare. Schmidt says so himself: “”Ultimately, the Chinese are competing to become the world’s leading innovators, and the United States is not playing to win.”
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kzahedi
May 10, 2020 at 8:24 am
Of course Cuomo’s “reimagining eduction” – with Gates on board- will imagine more tech in schools. I’m concerned about the health concerns around the radiation levels of 5G. School were already struggling with the impact of too much tech in schools. The incidence of depression and anxiety run parallel with increased tech connectivity. Of course much of it is the social/emotional impact of social media, but the physical concerns of kids not knowing (perhaps energetically) the difference between the impasse of their own thoughts and waves (in the air) seemed to be at play.
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gitapik
May 10, 2020 at 8:49 pm
At first I thought it was Gates, Bloomberg, and that other guy…Schmidt. Then I checked out “that other guy”.
This is beyond serious. I’m sending this link and info out to my friends and will be posting it on FB, tomorrow.
The key here, in my mind, is to hop on it NOW, in terms of questions and resistance. Gates took us by surprise with the CCSS. By the time the public was made aware; the money was spent and the train had left the station.
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