iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Leigh Phillips

Yakov Feygin @buddyyakov.bsky.social · 16/07/2025

@fredstaffordcs.bsky.social knocks it out of the park with this. The NYPA nuclear announcement should be celebrated as one of the most critical experiments in rebuilding state capacity in the country. The way we win is with big public investment at all scales: jacobin.com/2025/07/hoch...

jacobin.com

Atomic Abundance and Its Enemies

Wrangling over the construction of nuclear power in New York State has revealed the priorities of some of the state’s biggest environmental lobbies. For them, creating bureaucratic procedures they can...

1307

Reposted by Leigh Phillips

Olivia Gonzalez Killingsworth 🌹🦾 🐜 @oliviakillingsworth.com · 03/08/2025

"Those of us... who come from the Left and remain connected to industrial labor — can tell you plainly: it’s both unaccountable markets *and* an unaccountable NGO-academia-legal bureaucratic class that are stalling public progress."

063

Reposted by Leigh Phillips

Matt Huber @matthuber.bsky.social · 03/08/2025

I was confused by the wholesale Left rejection of "Abundance" both bc it's central to the general socialist project & bc the book itself has valuable insights. So here finally is our sympathetic/critical review of the book & its critics (w @leighphillips.bsky.social & @fredstaffordcs.bsky.social).

2227

Reposted by Leigh Phillips

Fred Stafford @fredstaffordcs.bsky.social · 01/05/2025

If the left analysis goes no further than "sticks vs de-risking subsidies" and openly embraces all of the above, maybe the left is fetishizing the particular consumer product too much, at the expense of clear thinking.

051

Reposted by Leigh Phillips

Fred Stafford @fredstaffordcs.bsky.social · 01/05/2025

This will add to new home costs; will necessitate means tested loans for buyers; will create a vampiric dependency on solar services firms to make the most of the panels; and will require subsidies from utility rate base to compensate exported energy, whose value decreases the more there is.

142

Leigh Phillips @leighphillips.bsky.social · 26/04/2025

A muscular social democracy could do so much more space-faring than if we leave the endeavour just to markets. We need leftwing space policy, not leftwing anti-space ideology. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

theguardian.com

How space exploration can improve life on Earth | Leigh Phillips

There is a cynical, ‘anti-space’ ideology emerging, especially on some parts of the left. But this is misguided

000

Leigh Phillips @leighphillips.bsky.social · 26/04/2025

Finally, it’s not enough just to make the left case for space; I show how the left can do space better: Private space firms can only provide such services as are profitable. Yet there is far more that society needs to know from space than merely the information that can make money.

110

Leigh Phillips @leighphillips.bsky.social · 26/04/2025

For all its purported sobriety, anti-space ideology amounts to an anti-humanist critique that unwittingly embraces a politics of neoliberal austerity while ironically undermining our ability to deal with the manifold ecological and social crises we face.

100

Leigh Phillips @leighphillips.bsky.social · 26/04/2025

So I make the left case for space, arguing that space science *is* earth science, *is* social science, and that we cannot combat climate change—and many social challenges as well—without it. It is a great shame that space-faring has become right-coded, when it is indeed For All Mankind.

100

Leigh Phillips @leighphillips.bsky.social · 26/04/2025

Some on the left have reacted against certain space-fanatic billionaires whose names rhyme with pesos and husk by viewing space-faring as an elitist toy, or even ‘settler colonialism’, saying we should stop polluting our planet before we head off to pollute another one.

110

Leigh Phillips @leighphillips.bsky.social · 26/04/2025

As Trump targets NASA with 20% budget cuts, & deeper cuts to planetary science, earth science & any research remotely sniffing of climate, the Guardian asked me to write a defence of space exploration against the emerging anti-space ideology on the liberal-left. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

theguardian.com

How space exploration can improve life on Earth | Leigh Phillips

There is a cynical, ‘anti-space’ ideology emerging, especially on some parts of the left. But this is misguided

180

Leigh Phillips @leighphillips.bsky.social · 12/03/2025

Our biggest barrier to decarbonization is the legacy of green anti-nuclearism and the neoliberal economics that blocks nuclear deployment, not the emergence of new sources of load on the grid.

100

Leigh Phillips @leighphillips.bsky.social · 12/03/2025

We start with cleaning of the grid rather than saying there must not be any additional new load until the grid is clean. Another option is to incentivize large new sources of load to locate themselves in places with already decarbonized grids, like BC, Quebec, Norway etc.

100

Leigh Phillips @leighphillips.bsky.social · 12/03/2025

3 different approaches to abundance: one is that it is a sufficient condition for the good society (right &, to a lesser degree, centre); second is that it is necessary but not sufficient (socialist); third is that it isn’t necessary (green left).

110

Leigh Phillips @leighphillips.bsky.social · 02/02/2025

I don’t have a lot of time right now with all the coursework of my exploration geology MSc, but I managed to squeeze out a left defence of an independent Canada in the face of Trump’s tariffs & annexationist threats: jacobin.com/2025/02/cana...

jacobin.com

The Beaver and the Eagle: A 200-Year-Old Argument

The left case for an independent Canada.

141