Leigh Phillips

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...

@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...

"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."

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).

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.

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.

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

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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...

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.

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.

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).

The Beaver and the Eagle: A 200-Year-Old Argument The left case for an independent Canada.

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...

How do you titillate an ocelot?