News Round-Up: Big Tech's Rising CO2 Emissions, Germans Overwhelmingly Against Immigration and Absurd Search for Extremism in the UK
Every week, the editorial team of Freedom Research compiles a round-up of news that caught our eye, or what felt like under-reported aspects of news deserving more attention.
Over the past week, the following topics attracted our attention:
Google's greenhouse gas emissions jump by almost 50% in five years.
British police's terrorism prevention unit investigating a 12-year-old who stated that there 'are only two genders'.
Majority of Germans are against immigration.
Moderna receives a hefty cash injection for trials of a new vaccine.
The US Supreme Court did not uphold an injunction protecting free speech.
Google's greenhouse gas emissions jump by almost 50% in five years
Tech giant Google reported that compared to 2019, greenhouse gas emissions caused by the company have increased by 48%, Bloomberg reports. In a report published by the company, it said that the company's greenhouse gas emissions in 2023 were 14.3 million tonnes, which is also 13% higher than the 2022 emissions. Google said higher energy consumption at its data centers and emissions from its supply chain were to blame. This means that most of the generating capacities supplying electricity to the company are not 'renewable'. The company still plans to reach Net Zero by 2030, but now admits this will be difficult. Among other things, it will be made more difficult by the development of artificial intelligence (AI), which demands a lot of energy and will increase consumption. As we pointed out in our recent news round-up, AI and its energy demand are being blamed for the delay in the closure of coal-fired power plants in the United States.
At the same time, it should be recognised that there is nothing exceptional about the fact that the energy demand associated with Google's business and services, and therefore greenhouse gas emissions, are increasing. Other similar companies are following the same path. Microsoft, for example, reported in May that its CO2 emissions had increased by 30% compared to 2020. Microsoft also justified this with the development of AI by the company.
On the one hand, the high energy demand of any internet and cloud services company is understandable. On the other hand, however, it is worth paying attention to the messages that these same companies or their owners are giving us about climate change and its causes at the same time, and how hypocritical this all can seem.
Google, for example, started working with the UN already in 2021 'to ensure that factual, trustworthy content about climate is available to as wide a global audience as possible'. “Misinformation is so widespread these days that it threatens progress and understanding on many critical issues, including climate. The need for accurate, science-based information on a subject like climate change has therefore never been greater,” Melissa Fleming, United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications said at the time. In simpler terms, this means that they get to choose what is 'misinformation' and what is not, and any content that challenges the basic tenets of the declaration of a man-made climate crisis will be declared misinformation and hidden away. So though there might be nothing wrong with the presented information, the search engine will still flag it and display less or none of it to the knowledge-seeking user at the request of the UN. In its stead, Google offers searchers information approved by the UN, for example, the one stating that there is scientific consensus among scientists of anthropogenic climate change and that CO2 emitted by human activity drives it, despite both of these claims being controversial to say the least.
Microsoft founder Bill Gates is himself a prominent advocate of the man-made climate crisis and has invested a lot of money in it with hopes of making considerable gains. Among other climate crisis projects with potentially high rewards, he has, for example, invested in technology to capture CO2 from the air and turn it to stone, which is now being developed with the backing of hundreds of millions coming from the US taxpayer.
British police's terrorism prevention unit investigating a 12-year-old who stated that there 'are only two genders'
Officers of the counter extremism unit of the British police are dealing with a 12-year-old schoolboy who recently announced in a video posted online that there are only two genders, reports Daily Mail. He also said that so-called non-binary people – people who say they are neither male nor female – do not really exist. In response to his bullies at school, he also pointed out that he is gay and not queer, i.e. someone who feels, for example, that they are living in the wrong body, is non-binary, etc.
Due to the video, the school informed the boy's mother that the boy would be reported to Prevent, a programme under the Home Office, which aims to stop people from becoming terrorists. The reason for this, according to the school, was the fear that the boy could be at risk of being radicalised by the far-right.
The officers visited the family at their home for questioning and, according to the mother, were concerned that her child had extremist views. For example, when the boy, being Jewish, was asked if there are any groups that should not exist, the boy replied that Hamas should be wiped out. In addition, the officers were concerned that the boy had made a comment he wanted to exterminate his bullies at school. According to the mother, the boy was indeed bullied at school, both verbally as well as by Nazi salutes. The mother had written about it to the school.
The child was also accused of having an unhealthy interest in weapons, which was inferred from another video posted on social media of him demonstrating a toy crossbow.
The boy's mother accused officials of double standards, saying that anti-Semitic incidents at the school were not dealt with in the same way.
A majority of Germans are against immigration
According to a recent poll, an overwhelming majority of Germans are dissatisfied with the left-liberal government's immigration policies and have turned against mass immigration, Remix News reports. 74% of respondents said the government is failing to take enough action against immigration. Only 17% said the government's action was sufficient. 72% of respondents thought that asylum applications should start being processed outside the European Union's (EU) borders, while only 16% thought such a move would be wrong.
The poll also showed that Germans are not only against illegal immigration, but 69% of respondents would like to see immigration reduced as a whole. Only 11% would like to see more immigration.
Germany's coalition government of Social Democrats, Liberals, and Greens, on the other hand, is going against the wishes of the people by relaxing immigration rules, increasing benefits for immigrants, and making it easier to obtain citizenship. It also plans to boost immigration from non-EU countries.
At the same time, according to official statistics, 41% of crimes in the country in 2023 were committed by foreigners, including 6 out of 10 violent crimes. It should be borne in mind, however, that if an immigrant has already obtained a German passport, he or she will be recorded as a German in the statistics when committing a crime. Germany's failure to curb violent crime and recognise its link to mass immigration is something we have also repeatedly written about in our news reviews (see for example here or here).
In addition to other problems, immigration also has a clear financial dimension. For example, in 2023, Germany spent €48.8 billion on immigrants.
Moderna receives a hefty cash injection for trials of a new vaccine
About a month ago we wrote in our news round-up that the US government is poised to announce an agreement worth tens of millions of dollars to fund human trials of Moderna's experimental mRNA-based bird flu vaccines. In reality, the company's payoff turned out to be much bigger.
The US Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) will pay the vaccine manufacturer $176 million (€164 million) to develop a new vaccine against bird flu and conduct human trials with it, reports Wired.
According to Moderna, they have already begun testing and hope to publish the results of the first and second phases of trials this year, with a view to moving on to the third phase the following year. The funding is intended for late-stage development of the vaccine, according to the company. “mRNA vaccine technology offers advantages in efficacy, speed of development, and production scalability and reliability in addressing infectious disease outbreaks, as demonstrated during the Covid-19 pandemic,” Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel said in the company's announcement.
While Bancel is probably right about the speed of development and the production scalability opportunities, the efficacy and reliability of Covid vaccines have certainly never been at a level acceptable to society.
For example, these products cannot be considered reliable, since reliability should certainly include safety. However, it is precisely on the safety side that these products have serious problems since they are associated with serious, including life-threatening, side effects.
Their efficacy has also always left something to be desired. For example, the ability of Covid vaccines to prevent infection and the transmission of the virus in the first place was not even tested in the trials before they were put on the market, and they failed to accomplish that task.
We have reported extensively on the problems with Covid vaccines in various articles and analyses. You can read more about it in our subsection Health & Science.
The US Supreme Court did not uphold an injunction protecting free speech
On Wednesday 26th of June, the US Supreme Court overturned by a vote of 6 to 3 an injunction that would have restricted the US government's ability to interact with social media companies and require them to censor posts. A majority of the justices ruled that the plaintiffs had no legal basis to ask for such an injunction. It is important to note that the Supreme Court's decision was made on a preliminary injunction granted by lower courts and that the substantive dispute is still ongoing.
The case began in May 2022, when the attorneys general of the states of Missouri and Louisiana filed a lawsuit against Joe Biden and the officials of his administration, alleging that the Biden administration was using social media companies to enforce censorship and thereby suppressing free speech protected by the First Amendment to the US Constitution.
Censorship was used in the context of Covid-19 when officials demanded censorship of truthful information – for example, preventing discussion of the possible laboratory origin of the SARS-Cov-2 virus, information and speech critical of the lockdown policy used to contain the spread of the virus, and anything that cast a negative light on Covid vaccines, including talk of vaccine injuries by victims themselves. Other issues were also suppressed – for example, on the instructions of the authorities, social media platforms blocked articles in The New York Post ahead of the 2020 presidential election that exposed the corrupt business practices of Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden while the former was the vice-president under Barack Obama. Posts about possible election fraud in the 2020 presidential election were also deemed inadmissible.
In the autumn of 2022, private individuals who had been censored on social media under pressure or directions from the government were added as plaintiffs in the same case. They included Stanford University medical professor Dr. Jayanta Bhattacharya, now former Harvard Medical School professor Dr. Martin Kulldorff, psychiatrist Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, creator of The Gateway Pundit Jim Hoft, and Jill Hines, a leader of the consumer and human rights group Health Freedom Louisiana.
In early July last year, Judge Terry A. Doughty of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana issued an unprecedented ruling banning the U.S. government and its officials from interacting with social media companies in this way. "During the COVID-19 pandemic, a period perhaps best characterized by widespread doubt and uncertainty, the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian “Ministry of Truth”," Doughty wrote in a 155-page explanation accompanying his injunction.
In September last year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit also said that Biden's White House, top healthcare decision-makers, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) were likely to have violated the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The three-judge unanimous decision stated that the White House “coerced the platforms to make their moderation decisions by way of intimidating messages and threats of adverse consequences”. In other words, undue influence was used to get tech companies to remove or restrict the circulation of posts about, for example, Covid or the elections. At the same time, the ruling limited the scope of the injunction issued by Judge Doughty by removing the ban on some of the agencies that were included in the original injunction.
The debate in the Supreme Court took place in March this year, and although the current composition of the court is dominated by conservative judges, it was already clear from that debate that the majority of judges view the issue from a different angle than the lower court judges.
The majority of the court now based its decision not to grant the injunction in particular on the fact that the plaintiffs failed to prove that they had suffered direct harm as a result of the interaction between federal officials and social media platforms. Writing on behalf of the majority, Justice Amy Coney Barrett said that companies such as Facebook and YouTube have been engaged in content moderation for some time, and the plaintiffs failed to show that the companies decided to remove the posts because of government pressure. “While the record reflects that the Government defendants played a role in at least some of the platforms’ moderation choices, the evidence indicates that the platforms had independent incentives to moderate content and often exercised their own judgment,” Barrett stated.
However, Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch, who dissented, criticised their colleagues in the majority for failing to address the underlying free-speech questions at issue in the case, calling efforts by the government to police content it sees as problematic a form of “coercion.” Alito, who wrote the minority opinion, said that the court 'shirks that duty and thus permits the successful campaign of coercion in this case to stand as an attractive model for future officials who want to control what the people say, hear and think'.
While this time the White House was able to welcome the Supreme Court's decision instead of criticising it, those who suffered social media censorship at the behest of officials, of course, were not satisfied. For example, Dr. Kheriaty cited the court's majority opinion that, for an injunction to be enforceable, plaintiffs must prove a continuing risk that the government will pressure a social media platform to censor them. “Apparently, the fact that we are still being censored on several platforms is insufficient to establish this?” he asked. Kheriaty added that as far as it was only a decision on a preliminary injunction, his and the co-plaintiffs' fight will continue.