TheMarketForIdeas

Ever since mankind first began applying its reasoning and inventiveness towards manipulating the elements of its natural environment to suit its needs and want, humanity became engaged in a profound, mutually transformational relationship with nature. Man’s surrounding environment heavily influenced man’s views and beliefs about his origins, role and purpose in this world as well as the origins, role and purpose of the world and the cosmos. While man’s needs and beliefs led him to explore new ways of meeting his existential (food, shelter etc.), individual (artistic expression, occupational needs etc.) and transcendental needs (religion, cosmogony, the search for ultimate meaning and what lies at the roots of reality etc.), the impact of the human species on the planet began to take shape, slowly but surely over many millennia and generations, growing ever more complex as man’s knowledge, tools and needs grew in breadth and depth.

The aim of this brief article, however, is more modest than the conformist or contrarian “reinterrogations” of scientific literature of the “balance sheet” of the technological Anthropocene on nature (Schneider, 2020; Topan, 2021). Its sphere of interest is narrower: the fundamentally qualitative investigation of the manner in which the new technologies impact the state of the natural environment, especially in light of the regulatory/legal offensive in the sphere of “digital” and “green” transformations which the European Union views as “twin” concepts (European Commission, 2020), with an accent on the geopolitical side of the story.

Cyber Costs and Benefits

At first glance, intuition would tell us that digital and information transformations should not have a significant “environmental footprint”. Despite that, opinions on the effects of digitalisation on the environment remain divided. On the one hand, the general attitude towards digitalisation and its ecological impact appears to be optimistic. There is research according to which the environmental impact of digital technologies in some economic sectors, such as manufacturing, is negligible or even positive. Wen et al. (2021) have found that, in China, the implementation of digital transformation has led to improvements in the production processes as well as the ecological performance by eliminating polluting components and operations, while the effect of digital technologies on the environment is insignificant. A similar conclusion is reached by Li et al. (2020). A report published by the World Economic Forum maintains that the coronavirus pandemic has served as a ramp for accelerating the digital transformation of companies so that they may survive in the new business ecosystem sculpted by the ongoing crisis, and the choice is henceforth “obvious”: either create a digital economy that is ecologically sustainable, or lose the right to run at all (WEF, 2021).

On the other hand, there is also moderation, reserve and doubt. G. Kamiya, cited by Resources Radio (2020), is of the opinion that, while the emissions produced by the IT&C sector must not be ignored, they do need to be analysed in their appropriate context, as there are sectors with a much heavier environmental impact and the future of emissions caused by digital technologies is as yet hard to predict. There are also views explicitly stating that digital technologies negatively affect the environment by increasing the global demand for electricity as well as emissions of carbon dioxide, at one point even surpassing the global emissions generated by the aviation industry in 2019 (Stolz & Jungblut, 2019). Worries regarding the digital impact on the environment also emerge from a report by the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Protection of Nature and Nuclear Safety (BMU, 2020) which holds digitalisation as one of the three “megatrends” alongside globalisation and climate change, with a warning that there is a need to intervene and control this trend before it can exacerbate existing ecological and social problems. An essay by the organisation ICTworks (2020) further asserts that the digital tech industry suffers from numerous issues that call into question its sustainability. Among the main problems described in the essay we find the following:

1) the business model in the digital industry is based on replacing malfunctioning components (thereby creating electronic waste);

2) the speed at which software advances requires more and more sophisticated hardware;

3) increased demand for electricity;

4) the need for rare minerals to manufacture electronic gear;

5) the resulting carbon dioxide emissions, which the authors of the essay assess to represent 2% of the global amount of emissions.

Furthermore, we may notice that both digitalisation and the push for greener technologies have a few aspects in common: both are global trends that many of the world’s powers have stated their interest in; both are controversial topics with regards to their usefulness and effectiveness; both involve costs with potential benefits down the road; both are the subject of public policies enacted by authorities; both are reliant on the promise of new technology and future economic performance, as well as reliant on geopolitically and environmentally sensitive physical materials. As such, we may now turn our attention to the geopolitical overtones surrounding them both.

Towards A New Cyber-Eco-Geopolitical Paradigm?

The association between geopolitics, digitalisation and the quest for environmental sustainability may seem bizarre, as geopolitics observes the fluctuations of power dynamics and the motivations underlying them, while digitalisation is an ongoing trend of broader and deeper integration of information technologies in the spheres of human activity and the search for greener technologies reflects our concern to counteract the negative effects of human activity on the environment. Nevertheless, the use of digital technologies can play an important role in defining global power relations. For example, there is a geoeconomic competition for the rare metals used to manufacture more technological commodities. The US, for instance, is overwhelmingly dependent on China for ensuring its necessary supply of rare earth minerals, and China holds a monopoly that the rest of the world cannot yet compete with, exporting 80% of the rare earth metals consumed globally, and owning 37% of the world’s known reserves of such minerals, which means it can use these resources as geopolitical and geoeconomic leverage, as was demonstrated in 2010, when it blocked its exports of rare minerals to Japan in the context of a diplomatic conflict (Lu, 2021). Turtur (2021) considers that a future in which China would not hold influence on the international market for these minerals is unlikely, although it can be hoped that reliance on China can be reduced by recycling these minerals as much as possible and by seeking replacements (or by accepting the environmental costs of reopening mines in the West, in the US and Australia), an opinion shared by Emily de La Bruyère, cited by Mining Technology (Turner, 2020).

We can deduce that, by controlling these minerals, China can partially dictate (at least temporarily) the tempo at which digital technologies can progress by controlling access. Rare minerals are also (ironically, since their extraction and refining is highly polluting) important for implementing environmentally sustainable technologies (Lu, 2021), which renders the role of China of the utmost importance, as the EU has its sights set on the eliminating its environmental impact by 2050. At the same time, the EU wants to consolidate its “strategic autonomy” in order to redefine its geopolitical approach (Damoc, 2021), which requires, among others, rebalancing the power relations on European markets between Chinese companies (which benefit from substantial governmental support) and European companies. This implies actions such as compelling extra-EU companies to respect the same framework of regulations to reduce their environmental footprint, which would further complicate the geo-political-economic landscape by activating protectionist counter-reactions at what could be perceived as a kind of European eco-protectionism: conditioning access to EU markets on meeting environmental exigencies/standards.

A geopolitical and geoeconomic order in which green energy predominates, based on renewables instead of hydrocarbons, is one that eliminates the use of the latter as a geopolitical weapon and instrument of coercion. However, there is another that emerges, economic in nature, with access to markets based on meeting environmental requirements, or imposing taxes and tariffs on products and technologies that do not meet environmental protection standards, which will reverse the power ratio between energy exporting and energy importing countries. Russia and Saudi Arabia, although considering, at least declaratively, the promotion of green technologies, have not made significant progress in this direction. Moreover, Champion and Doff (2021) point out that while Russia has much to lose in this race for ecological sustainability (given its efforts to strengthen its status as an energy superpower), it seems certain that the paradigm shift towards the centrality of green energy will happen very soon. This is despite a predisposition to deny climate change among policy makers, and compared to the availability of natural gas in Russia, green energy is more expensive than hydrocarbon-based. If we take into account the entirety of costs associated with green energy, including the indirect subsidies through the maintenance of backup power (usually hydrocarbon based, but also based increasingly on storage) for when intermittent renewable power sources (wind, solar, tides) are not working, green energy may in fact be more expensive everywhere.

As far as digitalisation goes, its geopolitical implications are deceptively deep. We can infer the highly destructive potential of cyberwarfare, cybercrime and cyberterrorism by the degree to which information technologies are embedded in various aspects of everyday political, economic, social and cultural life and can be exploited in order to cripple critical military or civilian assets, steal and extort massive amounts of money, finance traditional terrorist attacks and organised crime groups or run espionage operations. However, it can also be used in a manner that is far less intensive in programming and more reliant on faults in human nature i.e. social engineering in order to enable cyber-attacks or to allow the spread of information and misinformation, to seed doubt, foment conflict and promote a certain viewpoint in order to increase the chances of a desired outcome being fulfilled (Damoc, 2017).

Closing Thoughts

An interesting thing to note is that, as the topic of climate change appears with increasing frequency on the agenda of various international and regional summits, so does the interest for investing in space exploration and increasing the commercial availability of space flights to the general population in the future – by their very nature, however, the technologies involved in making spacefaring possible are also heavily toxic for the environment. The reason why this point is of interest is to underline that, while climate change is indeed a real threat to the livelihood of people everywhere, there are pragmatic economic interests that encourage resistance to adopting greener technologies. The cause here may in fact be a combination of factors.

For one, climate change is seen as something unfolding slowly and its worse effects are perceived as occurring in the distant future, whereas the economic costs of implementing greener technologies represent a cost in the near future. In other words, the benefits of protecting the environment are often hard to perceive on the level of individual, day-to-day life, but their cost is tangible. Due to this, the problem of implementing environmental sustainability begins to resemble the bystander problem, as each individual economic agent does not feel more responsible for the fate of the environment than any of the other individual economic agents. Thus, if the individual, immediate, concrete cost outweighs the general, distant, abstract greater good of the planet, the individual economic decision-maker will be more inclined to seek economic efficiency by means of cheaper, more readily available yet environmentally harmful resources. There are also various asymmetries in play here – between countries that bear the effects of climate change and those who gain economically from activities resulting in emissions; between countries that polluted in the past and are developed and countries that pollute in the present and are not; and, within nations, between the elites driving the adaptation to climate change as to their preferences and the poorer people who end up with a disproportionate cost burden since, for instance, energy consumption represents a larger share of their expenditure, or whose jobs are most likely to be lost due to higher energy costs (e.g., manufacturing).

Secondly, despite there being a scientific consensus on the existence and effects of climate change, it is still surrounded by some politically and economically-fuelled controversies that foster doubt as to whether anthropogenic climate change is indeed a real phenomenon (and the ethics of radical change to counter it) or merely a narrative used by the authorities to justify regulations or taxes that restrict freedom or further exploit smaller enterprises and the average citizen, to the advantage of the well-connected. This is caused at least partially by the differences in focus on environmental education in countries across the world, by the varying levels of trust in public authorities and by cultural factors.

Thirdly, the discrepancies between environmental commitments as per the Kyoto Protocols and the increases in the actual emissions of several developed economies (e.g., the United States, Japan) serve to deepen the impression that environmental policies and climate change are geopolitically-motivated tools employed by the powers that be to stifle developing economies and control their progress to maintain the concentration of power in the hands of only a few actors.

Fourthly, for all these reasons, it must be noted that while moving towards greener tech is a widely touted objective, a country’s decisions will ultimately be dictated by its (or at least its decision-makers’) own interests, meaning that countries that harbour rich, readily available energy resources continue hold a great enough leverage and power (both of the soft and hard varieties) to make the decision harder for their partners.

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