Brief: The tech sector is replicating the fossil fuel model of government capture in Australia
With our corrupt enabling of a revolving door between politics and industry, the multinational tech sector has an iron grip on our policy direction.
There are two videos you must watch to see how cheaply-bought Australian politicians are, and how dangerous the revolving door between politics and industry is for our policy formation.
The Lever has been covering the ruthless manipulation of America’s tattered democratic project by the tech sector. It’s important to know about the constant machinations there as context.
Andrew Charlton MP is the Assistant Minister for Science, Technology and the Digital Economy. Watch these videos about what that means. This man must never be the treasurer or prime minister he’s been tipped to become.
Another reason why recent changes to donation laws were skewed to favour the party incumbents and against independents. I mean we can’t upset the gravy train can we? The revolving door of lobbyists must be smashed .
I do suspect the Doubt, Deny, Delay crowd like AI for being disruptive to existing trends in energy that appear to favour renewables. In jurisdictions where they are dominant they can make NOT renewables a requirement for government support for AI data centres. That means fossil fuels, possibly with commitment to nuclear at some unknown future date - ie it means fossil fuels. (I think nuclear is seen as so unlikely to ever rival fossil fuels on costs that fossil fuel companies do not fear it - and it remains politically useful as a raised finger to environmentalists and most climate activists.)
I’m not convinced data centres can be successfully decoupled from the factors that have been making RE the dominant new energy - cost, speed of build, versatility, convenience. And did I mention cost?
And somewhere in corporate thinking must be the nagging conviction that global warming and commitments to zero emissions and, worst of all, potential for liability will keep simmering away and cannot be fully suppressed. They don’t want it to come back around to bite them.