NextEra v. the GOP rollback, ASMLs global sales, the Gen Z gender-divergence & Britain's theorist of countergangs
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Kosmonauten (1973), Weber, Horst (1932-1999) Source: SKD
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NextEra bets against Republican IRA rollback
The biggest US renewable energy developer has expressed confidence that Republicans would not follow through on threats to rip up the Inflation Reduction Act if they win this year’s election … John Ketchum, chief executive of NextEra Energy said such an outcome was “unlikely” as the company offered a booming demand outlook for the years ahead after banking 9,000 megawatts of new orders for solar and wind power and battery storage in 2023. “In the 21 years I’ve been at the company, as we’ve changed administrations and as we’ve seen changes in Congress, we’ve never seen a change or repeal of tax credits — no matter what form they’ve taken,” Ketchum told analysts on Thursday. He said it was “really hard to overturn existing law . . . no matter what the political winds are”, pointing to Republican’s fruitless efforts to roll back Obamacare during the Trump administration. With a market capitalisation of nearly $120bn, NextEra ranks as the fourth-biggest US energy group after oil companies ExxonMobil, Chevron and ConocoPhillips. The Florida-based company, which also owns the state’s largest electric utility, has now booked two consecutive years of record renewables and battery storage orders totalling 17,000 megawatts of capacity. By 2026, if targets are met, it will have a portfolio of 63 gigawatts in operation, more than all but nine countries in the world. Ketchum made his comments as NextEra reported annual net profit of $7.3bn in 2023, up from $4.2bn the previous year and ahead of the $6.9bn pencilled in by Wall Street analysts … NextEra shares rose almost 2 per cent in early trading. The surge in demand for new renewables capacity has been boosted in part by the IRA, which provides 10 years of tax credits for the construction and production of wind, solar and other forms of clean energy. The US Energy Information Administration has forecast that combined wind and solar generation will outstrip electricity from coal for the first time this year. …Much of the investment driven by the IRA has benefited Republican districts. Ketchum said members of the party looking to unpick the legislation risked harming their own constituents. “If you think about where the investments are being made around IRA and where a lot of the benefit of IRA is flowing, it’s flowing to Republican states and it’s flowing to parts of those states that are really difficult to stimulate economically,” Ketchum said. NextEra’s results came in spite of problems that have affected some players in the renewables sector, including supply chain issues, inflation and higher interest rates. The group said it had stocked up on enough transformers and breakers — key pieces of electrical equipment that have faced supply shortages — to cover its buildout until 2027 and that declining interest rates would provide a strong tailwind in the years ahead.
Source: FT
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Gen Z gender-divergence
today’s under-thirties are undergoing a great gender divergence … Gen Z is two generations, not one. In countries on every continent, an ideological gap has opened up between young men and women. Tens of millions of people who occupy the same cities, workplaces, classrooms and even homes no longer see eye-to-eye. In the US, Gallup data shows that after decades where the sexes were each spread roughly equally across liberal and conservative world views, women aged 18 to 30 are now 30 percentage points more liberal than their male contemporaries. That gap took just six years to open up. Germany also now shows a 30-point gap between increasingly conservative young men and progressive female contemporaries, and in the UK the gap is 25 points. In Poland last year, almost half of men aged 18-21 backed the hard-right Confederation party, compared to just a sixth of young women of the same age.
Seven years on from the initial #MeToo explosion, the gender divergence in attitudes has become self-sustaining. Survey data show that in many countries the ideological differences now extend beyond this issue. The clear progressive-vs-conservative divide on sexual harassment appears to have caused — or at least is part of — a broader realignment of young men and women into liberal and conservative camps respectively on other issues. In the US, UK and Germany, young women now take far more liberal positions on immigration and racial justice than young men, while older age groups remain evenly matched. The trend in most countries has been one of women shifting left while men stand still, but there are signs that young men are actively moving to the right in Germany, where today’s under-30s are more opposed to immigration than their elders, and have shifted towards the far-right AfD in recent years. It would be easy to say this is all a phase that will pass, but the ideology gaps are only growing, and data shows that people’s formative political experiences are hard to shake off. All of this is exacerbated by the fact that the proliferation of smartphones and social media mean that young men and women now increasingly inhabit separate spaces and experience separate cultures.
Source: John Burn-Murdoch FT
Neue Musik, Weber, Horst (1932-1999) Source: SKD
Disease X at Davos
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The Brussels Atomium
Belgium’s #Atomium Cutaway, Brussels...Expo'58 h/t Angel Muñiz
The British General who terrorised the colonies
General Sir Frank Kitson, who has died aged 97, saw the people of Kenya, Malaya and Northern Ireland as little more than laboratory rats to test his brutal military theories. “Controversial” was the euphemism most commonly used in obituaries describing the life and legacy of General Sir Frank Kitson – the most highly decorated British soldier of his generation who died, aged 97, on 2 January. “No general in recent times has provoked more intense and sustained controversy than Frank Kitson, a short and ramrod-straight figure with a jutting chin, nasal voice and dislike of small talk,” said The Times obituary. The Daily Telegraph opined: “He was regarded as one of the most capable and controversial soldiers of his generation, and his expertise in counter-insurgency operations was probably unrivalled”. Little focus in the many plaudits from the predictable sources was directed at the politicians and government spooks who unleashed him onto the people of Kenya, Malaya, Oman, Cyprus and Northern Ireland – all of whom he appears to have viewed as little more than laboratory rats to test his military theories. A member of the Order of the Bath for the past 43 years (his many other ‘honours’ are too many to list) Kitson rose to become Commander-in-Chief UK Land Forces from July 1982 and Aide-de-Camp to Queen Elizabeth II from 1983-1985. His 1970s role in the early days of the violence in Northern Ireland has had most attention. But as recently as 2006 US General David Petraeus (then commander of US Central Command and coalition forces in Iraq) visited Kitson at his home in Devon, apparently for advice…. As early as 1972, Kitson’s fame in Belfast was such that the now defunct This Week (describing itself as “Ireland’s Quality News Magazine”) featured a broadly smiling Kitson on its front cover, with the headline “Kitson’s War Against The IRA” and a seven-page inside feature. Paddy Devlin, a founding member of the moderate nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), said Kitson “probably did more than any other individual to sour relations between the Catholic community and the security forces” in Northern Ireland. Kitson brought to Belfast his experiences in Kenya, fighting the Kikuyu Land and Freedom Army (exotically dubbed the “Mau Mau” by the British) in the early 1950s where he honed a practice of using “turned” or “converted” rebels into “counter-gangs”. In his book Gangs and Countergangs Kitson wrote: “There are innumerable ways in which the principle [of counter-gangs] can be applied and it is up to those involved to invent or adapt such methods … as may be relevant to the situation”. … One of Britain’s victims was US President Barack Obama’s paternal grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, who was arrested in 1949, and tortured by having pins inserted under his fingernails. Kitson later wrote in his memoirs, Bunch of Five, “Most soldiers [regarded the] finding and disposing [of Mau Mau] in the same way as they would regard the hunting of a dangerous wild animal”. In Northern Ireland, Kitson sought to duplicate his Kenyan experience, forming the Military Reaction Force. This consisted of covert units liaising with local “proxies” to carry out deniable murders and foment internal dissent within republican paramilitary groups – along with mass screenings of the “suspect community”. Former SAS man Tony Geraghty claims that, in Northern Ireland by the spring of 1971, the British authorities, desperate to penetrate the IRA, did so by adopting Kitson’s counter-gang tactics. Kitson himself wrote in December 1971 that successes against the IRA would be hard to achieve without radical change and “we are taking steps to do so in terms of building up and developing the MRF”. … In Low Intensity Operations Kitson infamously wrote that, although the law must be respected when fighting opponents, it can be changed to fit the circumstances so that it equates to “little more than a propaganda cover for the disposal of unwanted members of the public”. Even more sinister is a further quote from the same book, that if “the fish [terrorist] has got to be destroyed” but it proves impossible to do so “directly by rod or net” then “conceivably it might be necessary to kill the fish by polluting the water …”.
Source: Declassified UK
Selbstbildnisse mit Fahnen (1990) Weber, Horst (1932-1999) - Maler Source: SKD
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