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]]>If the term frontier AI is unfamiliar, it refers to the ongoing development of large-scale AI models capable of doing many things we humans do today. Frontier AI is at the bleeding edge, a rapidly moving target, and forever evolving.
What could go wrong? Well, here are some Geoffrey Hinton quotes that describe his concerns about what is happening as AI rapidly evolves without supervision:
May 23, 2023 – In an MIT Management article, Geoffrey Hinton states: “My big worry is, sooner or later someone will wire into them [referring to AI] the ability to create their own subgoals. I think it’ll very quickly realize that getting more control is a very good subgoal because it helps you achieve other goals. And if these things get carried away with getting more control, we’re in trouble.”
December 8, 2025 – In Gzero World, a podcast interview, Hinton uses a physics analogy: “If you ask a physicist, does he understand what happens when a leaf falls off a tree? A physicist pretty much understands what happens and why the leaf waves from side to side and how a breeze will affect it. But if you ask a physicist to predict where the leaf will hit the ground, he’ll tell you that’s impossible. And predicting why one of these large language models will give the answer it actually gives, that’s not very easy. That’s like predicting where the leaf will hit the ground. So we sort of understand the principles, but there’s a lot of fine details.”
January 21, 2026 – In a Business Insider article, it quotes Hinton from an interview with the BBC: “It makes me very sad that I put my life into developing this stuff and that it’s now extremely dangerous and people aren’t taking the dangers seriously enough.” He goes on, “We’ve never been in this situation before, of being able to produce things more intelligent than ourselves. The idea that you could just turn it off won’t work.”
And in that same interview, he makes this portentous comment, “If we create them [meaning AI] so they don’t care about us, they will probably wipe us out.”
Companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI are three leading American companies developing AI. The other country racing to develop frontier AIs is China, with several companies involved, including DeepSeek, Baidu, ByteDance and Alibaba. This AI race is taking on the characteristics of the Soviet-American 1960s rivalry to be first to the Moon. Getting to the Moon, however, didn’t involve building technologies that could turn on their creators.
The following are observations from three of the leading American frontier AI developers.
Dario Amodei is the CEO of Anthropic; Claude is its AI. In a widely discussed recent essay, Amodei cautions his competitors, Sam Altman of OpenAI and Elon Musk of xAI, urging all of them to slow the pace of development. He writes:
“Over the last few months, I have become convinced that fully addressing the [AI] risks requires even more prudence, not just investing in risk prevention, but pacing the rate of capabilities advancement so that risk prevention has time to keep up.”
Sam Altman heads up OpenAI; ChatGPT is its AI. In response to Amodei’s essay, Altman recently told CNBC:
“I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier. This has been a primary topic of discussion we’ve had at OpenAI in recent weeks.”
“…Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same.”
“…Pacing will be well worth this cost; no amount of American competitive pressure should justify recklessness, or let capabilities get ahead of alignment and monitoring.”
“…We welcome a federal framework that sets consistent safety requirements for frontier AI…no amount of American competitive pressure should justify recklessness.”
Elon Musk heads up xAI; Grok is its AI. On the X social network, Musk provided this three-word reply:
“Dario is right.”
The American President wants to beat China to the AI promised land.
On Truth Social in CAPS, the equivalent of shouting in print, he wrote that the U.S. already has “tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power” regarding AI. He described the comments from the above three as a “SICK conspiracy…against AI and Data Centers.” He concluded, “The only one that is happy about it is China.”
The President also commented about the call for a federal framework, stating:
“The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!”
Trump continued:
“WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS!
We are leading China, and all others, and will continue to do so.
Conspiracy Theorists, Treasonists, Traitors, and Leakers, BEWARE!
Thank you for your attention to this matter!
President DONALD J. TRUMP.”
I don’t know about you, but when it comes to big brains, I don’t see Donald Trump. I do, however, see a Nobel Prize in Physics-winning Geoffrey Hinton in that light.
So, in weighing all those quoted above, I take Hinton over Trump’s Truth Social all-caps ravings.
If Hinton sees unregulated AI as a real threat to humanity, and if the leading Frontier AI model creators express similar concerns, then I know to whom I am listening.
A final note. Recently I watched the 2008 remake of the movie, “The Day the Earth Stood Still.” In it, an alien visitor, played by Keanu Reeves, has arrived on Earth to judge humanity.
He is taken to an Earth scientist who asks why he has come to Earth. The alien comments:
“Your problem is not technology. The problem is you. If the Earth dies, you die. If the human race dies, the Earth survives.”
I can imagine that, instead of an alien with advanced technology, an artificial superintelligence without guardrails were to assess the current state of the planet, it might make the same argument. Exit homo sapiens.
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]]>The post The U.S. Today Has Abdicated Its Scientific, Health, Economic, Trade and Moral Leadership appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>Indeed, Trump’s ascendancy is regal, not presidential. The division of powers enshrined in the U.S. Constitution is not working. The result, America is ruled by King Trump, the successor to George III, a monarch that Americans chose to overthrow in 1776.
The impacts are far more than political. Trump’s executive decisions have been detrimental to fighting the causes of climate change. The health of the U.S. and the rest of the world has been put at risk. Cutting off U.S. Aid has worsened global food security and aided disease outbreaks in the Global South. His war pursuits have disrupted global supply chains. His court jester cabinet and appointees are making a mockery of the law.
Trump’s administration is anti-science and anti-knowledge. This is after more than 80 years when the United States led the democratic world, attracting the best scientists, built the most innovative technologies, and sparked the Green Revolution to reduce global food insecurity and disease. US largesse raised all boats as a Pax Americana ensured a more peaceful world even in the face of a Cold War with the Soviet Union. When the Berlin Wall fell, some historians proclaimed the end of history and the triumph of liberal democracy over communism and fascism. These were heady times despite blips like the Vietnam War and America’s internal racial strife.
America turned swords into ploughshares, taking a military communications technology and turning it into the Internet. Instant global telecommunications became the new reality, which further allowed America to share its intellectual capital with the world.
Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). American scientists gave us our understanding of the environmental challenges our industrial society was creating. They developed insights into pollution and atmospheric chemistry, ecosystem and biodiversity loss, and the growing threat of climate change.
The EPA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) monitored Earth systems using American-built satellites and a network of Earth-based monitors (air, land and water). Their research led to the undisputed scientific conclusion that human activities on Earth were causing greenhouse gas emissions to rise and global warming. Americans collected data and supplemented brilliant science minds and researchers.
Under Trump, through budget reductions and staff firings, today’s EPA and NOAA are hollowed out. Their research-produced environmental standards are no longer being followed. Deregulation has given the industrial polluters a free hand.
The United States, post-World War II, became a leader in contributing to health and food security around the world. It operated through programs set up by the federal government: US AID, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and others.
U.S. programs promoted vaccines, provided maternal and child health and nutrition, supported family planning, research on diseases, health worker training and more. This wasn’t exclusive to when the Democratic Party was in the White House. Republican administrations were equally involved.
The programs combined money, knowledge, data systems, infrastructure, research and partnerships within countries around the world. American support for food security included supplying emergency food during drought and famine, food to counter malnutrition, help in improving local agricultural productivity, and rural financial assistance.
Since the beginning of 2025 under Trump’s second term, foreign aid has been paused. US AID is dismantled. Global health programs to fight HIV, malaria, tuberculosis and Ebola have been decimated. The current Ebola outbreak in Africa has been impacted.
America’s federal international crisis response has been severely weakened by significant funding cuts. American aid is tied to Trump’s America First agenda and national security priorities.
The loss of continuity in funding to support international health and food security programs has been consequential. America’s soft power credentials are in question.
The U.S. has always championed lowering barriers in trade to allow American companies access to global market opportunities. From its days as the Arsenal of Democracy in World War II, to the post-war Marshall Plan, to the championing of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the U.S. has always led.
America promoted open markets, WTO rules and regulations, shared trade rules, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), bringing Mexico, Canada and the U.S. together to create a continent-wide free trade zone. Since Trump’s first term, when he replaced NAFTA with the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), free trade has been under threat.
Trump sees international trade as a win-lose contest. A trade surplus means you win. A trade deficit means you lose. What gets counted and what does not determines winners and losers.
Trump’s Liberation Day announcement last year established arbitrary tariffs on countries that sell and buy from America. This managed trade strategy through the application of tariffs, without congressional oversight, is a departure from how America conducted business with the rest of the world. Everything is bargaining. Everything is transactional. Tariffs no longer follow the WTO guardrails. Signed agreements like the USMCA no longer hold weight.
In the last two days, Canada and the United States have entered a trade war. The two countries in 2025 participated in two-way trade in goods and services totalling CDN$1.287 trillion. The two countries have integrated industries with finished products often going through assembly processes that go back and forth across the international border. It is the world’s largest bilateral trade arrangement and Trump’s managed trade strategy and brinksmanship has brought it to crisis? This is a test case for any other country negotiating under Trump’s managed trade strategy.
Once the global leader in the world, its most powerful political actor, often establishing unilateral positions that led to military blunders like Vietnam and Iraq, the U.S. can no longer assume that allies will follow its lead.
By the end of World War II, America was the sole superpower. It was soon joined by the Soviet Union. These were the first two nuclear-armed nations. Post-war Europe came under the U.S. defence shield through NATO. Canada and the U.S. created NORAD for North American defence.
The Soviet Union fell in 1991. For a little more than a decade, no other nation challenged America’s hegemony. China’s rapid rise in the first two decades of the 21st century has changed the balance of power. As Russia succeeded the Soviet Union, it remains a nuclear-weapons threat. Its war in Ukraine has consumed it for the last four-plus years with little success. That doesn’t lessen Russia as a dangerous global player.
Meanwhile, regional wars are ongoing as new ones emerge. The great power competition and might-makes-right diplomacy are making for a less safe future.
The alliances of the past are less automatic. Economic interdependencies are being weaponized (see the Canada-U.S. trade dispute). U.S. leadership approval among allies has fallen dramatically while more positive perceptions of America’s chief rival, China, are on the rise.
Global confidence in Trump’s America is on a rapid decline, reflecting the administration’s attitudes toward alliance members (Denmark and Greenland), Canadian trade and 51st state threats, restrictive immigration policies and deportations, climate policy, and military interventions like the current Israel-Iran-U.S.-Persian Gulf nations’ conflict.
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]]>The post U.S. Defense Spending (I Mean War Spending) Rises to $1.5 Trillion appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>The number $1.5 trillion was first thrown out by Trump on Truth Social. Trump, who never backs down from a lie and always doubles down once he spouts one, has now given the number wings, with the Pentagon figuring out new ways to spend Americans’ money.
Does the war in Iran justify the $1.5 trillion? Certainly not, although it is adding several billion dollars a day to war spending, and War Secretary Pete Hegseth has recently requested that Congress authorize a $200 billion supplement to the existing nearly $1 trillion annual spending.
If the $1.5 trillion is to be spent, much of it will go to the seriously under-budgeted Golden Dome. This proposed U.S. defence shield to protect domestic land, air and space assets has been given an initial $175 billion price tag. That number appears to be another pulled out of a hat.
Why? Because many of the proposed technologies have yet to be invented, and because the scale of coverage will likely be well beyond the country’s capacity to implement.
To stop incoming drones, missiles, and bombs, current interceptor technologies won’t cut it. No defence research or science laboratory has yet to create Star Trekkian shields.
Shielding all of American airspace isn’t the same as putting an Iron Dome over a tiny country like Israel. Iron Dome, despite press accolades, has had limited success protecting a land mass of 20,770 square kilometres (a little over 8,000 sq. miles). It consists of 10 Iron Dome batteries designed to protect populated areas covering 155 square kilometres (60 sq. miles) each. That’s why we see newspaper reports that Iranian and Hezbollah missiles are killing Israeli civilians. The reason is simple. Iron Dome has too many holes.
U.S. defence experts, when considering an equivalent to Israel’s limited Iron Dome, describe a system with a minimum of 10 to 20 times the density of coverage to cover America’s urban areas. That leaves most of the rest of the country, amounting to more than 5 million square kilometres (3 million sq. miles), without a defensive shield.
There is no chance that the proposed $1.5 trillion will cut it in implementing the Golden Dome. The last time the U.S. government considered something like it was back in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan.
Reagan called it Star Wars. Its real name was the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). In 1980’s dollars, the never-built SDI budget estimates varied between $170 and $540+ billion.
The current U.S. defence budget sits at around $895 billion without the $200 billion Hegseth funding request. That puts the number over $1 trillion annually. Now add planned Golden Dome expenditures.
The proposed war budget of $1.5 trillion is hard enough to contemplate. But the numbers described above add trillions more, costs that will fall on an America with an increasingly ageing population and many other priorities.
Is this a price worth paying to feed the ego of a malignant narcissist President?
What sane and rational American would see the Golden Dome as a good investment? What does it say about the current nuclear deterrent, supposedly the shield built to protect the country from enemies?
Annual maintenance expenditures for America’s nuclear deterrent today amount to $40 billion annually. With modernization underway, the nuclear deterrent budget is being topped up annually by $60 billion until the mid-2030s.
Consider the Pentagon’s own assessment of 1% likelihood of using the nuclear deterrent in a future war. That’s $100 billion spent annually for a defence that would only be used after an enemy’s first strike because its deployment is guided by the principle of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD).
Some at the Pentagon argue that the Golden Dome would be a substitute for the current nuclear deterrence strategy. Build a protective shield over the country, and nuclear weapons will no longer be a threat.
Reality suggests a very different scenario. Building the Golden Dome could be the invitation for an enemy first strike before its full deployment. If that were the case, then the Golden Dome would make Americans less safe, and for the rest of us, make life as we know it even more precarious.
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]]>The post Realignments in Geopolitics Impacts Higher Education and Research appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>The article’s focus was the U.S.-China rivalry for science and high-tech talent. It described how foreign student restrictions in America were even spilling over into Canada. It made me question Trump’s policies in regard to potential fallout for America’s future scientific and technological progress. Would this also impact Canada? What could Canada do to mitigate this challenge?
America welcomed thousands of post-graduate overseas students to its universities and its big technology companies before Trump’s second term. That, however, is no longer the case. Trump policies, instead, have reversed or redirected the flow of talent to other countries.
What are these new Trump policies?
A reality check is needed. Just a quick read of U.S. science and technology journal articles shows:
One wonders, under these Trump policies, how much longer America will continue to draw the best and most talented minds from abroad?
Trump’s “America First” is disrupting global higher education. The policies restrict international programs that have been a feature of the scientific and technological advancements seen around the world today.
The likely fallout is that America’s dominance as a research hub will wane. Instead, what is emerging is a multipolar academic landscape with other countries relaxing visa requirements, expanding scholarship offerings and establishing new programs to draw the most talented future scientists and engineers away from the U.S.
The U.S. big technology firms are feeling the pain from $100,000 annual visa fees. They have seen per-hire expenses escalate dramatically with Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Google, OpenAI, Apple, and others fear they will be limited to the local talent pool. What will that do to the progress of science and technology innovation in America? How will that help China and other countries compete?
The fallout from Trump’s policies for American universities means lower foreign enrollments. Before upping the visa application fees to $100,000, 85,000 were accepted annually, bringing skilled, post-secondary science and technology educated students to American schools.
Now, international students are going elsewhere. The result is that U.S. universities are losing up to 30% of annual tuition revenue. This is being compounded by the Trump administration’s cuts to university research grants, mostly in Democratic-blue states, totalling over $1 billion annually. For U.S. universities, this is death by a thousand cuts.
Competitors for attracting the higher-educated talent pool include Canada, the European Union, the UK, Australia, and China.
In January 2026, Canada’s federal government began streamlining the process for admitting foreign students to Master’s and PhD programs, waiving study permit caps, and creating a two-week fast track for high-value research applicants. The federal 2026 budget included CDN $1.7 billion to recruit international researchers and to establish new research chairs at Canadian universities.
In addition, Ontario, British Columbia and Quebec created fast-track post-graduate express entry to attract researchers in the fields of artificial intelligence (AI), biotechnology, the health sciences, clean tech and digital innovation.
As of this March, more than 150 U.S.-based researchers have relocated to Canadian universities from schools like MIT, UC Berkeley and Stanford.
EU governments, European universities and companies are responding to the opportunity that Trump’s America First policies are giving them. France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the Scandinavian countries have lowered visa fees and expanded quotas to attract the spillover of high science and tech talent.
It means that the past European brain drain to the U.S. is now reversed. How significant was this? From 1998 to 2013, annual EU green card applicants to the U.S. averaged more than 61,000 annually. Last year, after Trump announced new visa fees and reductions in federal grants to American post-secondary institutions, the drain has turned into a brain gain for Europe. Asian countries’ post-secondary talent is now being redirected to the EU.
Last September, the UK announced the streamlining of high-skilled, highly-educated talent. Universities increased their promotions to recruit international students. High Potential Individual visa numbers were expanded, aimed to capture talent leaving the U.S. after university research grants there were cancelled.
UK government policies in the post-Brexit era slowed the inflow of skilled workers and graduates from abroad. The new opportunity that U.S. policies have created is leading to a re-evaluation.
As of March 2026, however, there is no data to reflect a brain gain.
Australian universities have technology partnerships with American institutions, presenting problems for ongoing future cooperation. The cancellation of American research grants has impacted seven institutions, including the Australian National University (ANU), University of Technology Sydney, University of New South Wales, Monash University, Macquarie University, Charles Darwin University, and the University of Western Australia.
Skilled foreign workers (43%) and foreign post-graduate students represent a significant number in Australia. In light of Trump’s policies, efforts are being made to fast-track and streamline foreign student applications. Research Training Programs are increasing annual stipends. Intern programs are providing industry placement subsidies to Australian businesses.
China’s push to overtake the U.S. through Trump’s “America First” policies has been given a strategic opening to recruit global top talent and reverse the current talent brain drain to the U.S.
China has reacted. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has created the Qiming Program aimed at science and technology experts. It offers PhDs with bonuses, housing, and family support.
A young scientist program offers opportunities and a salary to attend Chinese universities and work for 6 months to a year in residence. To this, add a fast-track visa that prioritizes science and technology-talented youth to obtain residency in cities like Beijing and Shanghai.
The result, so far, has seen 85 scientists in 2025 leave the U.S. to do their research in China.
The sum of Trump’s policies is quickly becoming apparent. Other nations will gain while America loses. U.S. companies will experience talent shortages. Leadership in technology and science may be lost. Market dominance may end, and trillions in lost revenue from knowledge-intensive industries will be the result. For U.S. science and technology, after Trump, the rebuilding effort to restore the country’s national reputation and primacy may take decades.
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]]>The post The New Improved EPA Says Greenhouse Gases Aren’t An Existential Threat appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>The EPA was established to focus on industrial pollution, vehicle emissions, pesticide use, clean air and clean water, and sewage and wastewater treatment. In 2007, a Supreme Court ruling supported the EPA’s efforts to regulate greenhouse gases (GHGs), such as carbon dioxide (CO₂), as air pollutants. In 2009, the court supported the U.S. administration in giving the EPA authority to address six key GHGs considered dangerous to human health and the climate. This led to the regulation of chimney stack and tailpipe emissions.
As of February 12, 2026, under the current Trump administration, GHGs are no longer a danger. All regulations on vehicles, industry, fossil fuel companies, and utilities related to emissions no longer exist. Climate-heating pollution is no longer a concern of the U.S. federal government. The federal government no longer sees the smog and pollutants from morning commutes as an issue it needs to address. On X, former President Barack Obama described the repeal as one that will make Americans “less safe, less healthy and less able to fight climate change.” He was joined by John Kerry, a former Presidential candidate and Secretary of State, who called the deregulation move “Orwellian” and one that will inflict “enormous damage to people and property around the world.”
Gavin Newsom, the Governor of California, and likely a future Democratic candidate for President, calls the decision “reckless” and states, “it will lead to more deadly wildfires, more extreme heat deaths, more climate-driven floods and droughts, and greater threats to communities nationwide.”
President Trump and Lee Zeldin, his pick to run the EPA, in announcing deregulation, pointed to $1.3 trillion in savings from eliminating oversight of GHGs. Standing beside President Trump, he stated that the “EPA endangerment finding is now eliminated.”
Zeldin has little to no scientific or environmental credentials. His previous history as a Member of Congress has had him vote against EPA regulations and standards. He has opposed federal actions to fight climate change. In justifying his opposition, Zeldin has accused the EPA of overreach under previous administrations. He sees pollution as a matter for state and local communities to handle.
The science of climate change is “undecided,” states Zeldin, countering the definitive conclusions of the vast majority of climate scientists. For proof, he cites a recent U.S. Department of Energy report written by handpicked global warming denialists.
Zeldin’s view is that before his appointment, the EPA was “trying to please a few fear-mongering climate alarmists.”
Through irresponsible acts by the U.S. government, our world will tackle climate change mitigation and adaptation without a leading nation responsible for it. The U.S. is the world’s second-largest GHG emitter. Through climate change denial and abdication in addressing GHGs, Zeldin and Trump are being more than reckless. They are criminals.
Dystopian futures await. If you read Stephen Markley’s “The Deluge,” you may be looking at what could be a likely future. This novel, which came out in 2023, depicts a near-future America grappling with climate change. Markley weaves science, politics, and fiction into a disturbing narrative that begins with a post-Trump administration incapable of mitigating CO₂ levels in the atmosphere from climbing past 430 parts per million by the 2030s. Global atmospheric temperatures rise beyond 1.5°C. Antarctic ice sheets destabilize. The Arctic rapidly loses sea ice. America soon feels the “tipping points” of IPCC reports: prolonged heat waves, growing wildfires, extreme rainfall and flood events, Category 5 hurricanes, superstorms, and sea level rise.
Following several people still trying to live their lives, The Deluge introduces climate threats not often discussed. At the same time, the narrative of popular resistance, ecoterrorism, and suffering feels potent and almost real.
I am surprised Trump hasn’t condemned the novel on Truth Social, or that Pam Bondi hasn’t summoned a grand jury. As for Zeldin, a shill for Trump and the fossil fuel industry, little more needs to be said.
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]]>The post Citizens’ Climate Lobby Comments On Mark Carney, Donald Trump, And Climate Action appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>This week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, two starkly different worldviews collided.
On Tuesday, Canada’s Prime Minister, Mark Carney, warned that the world is “in the midst of a rupture of world order,” arguing that the rules-based international system has fractured and that middle powers must act together or risk subordination. One day later, U.S. President Donald Trump declared that “Canada lives because of the United States,” reinforcing a worldview rooted in dominance, coercion, and zero-sum thinking.
Taken together, these statements reveal a deeper truth: the global economy is not a stable system in equilibrium. It is operating in dynamic states that are and will be shaped by tipping points, feedback loops, and rapid, nonlinear change. Words like tipping points and feedback loops are common descriptions climatologists use to explain changes to our global climate.
Theories based on equilibrium have guided economic and political decision-making for decades. The assumption produces incremental change, marginal gains, and burden-sharing, framed as losses to be minimized. In this static worldview, international cooperation is treated as a zero-sum game. If one country gains, another must lose.
But that is not how complex systems such as economies behave under stress.
In complex systems, from climate and energy to technology and geopolitics, ruptures occur when old negative feedback loops break down, and new positive feedback loops take over. Once a tipping point is reached, change accelerates along an S-curve: slowly at first, then rapidly, and self-reinforcing.
This is why today’s geopolitical tension cannot be solved by simply reasserting control. Trump’s rhetoric reflects an attempt to impose dominance on a system that no longer responds predictably to force. Carney’s warning acknowledges reality. We are not managing a smooth transition. We are navigating a period of chaotic adjustment in which outcomes depend on where and how we intervene.
That reality demands new economic thinking.
Author of Five Times Faster, economist Simon Sharpe, argues that the transformation of an economy must be approached sector by sector, focusing on actions to trigger immediate positive feedback loops, not a distant point of equilibrium.
These are not abstract theories. They are observable dynamics already reshaping energy, transportation, and manufacturing.
Solar adoption in China and Pakistan provides a clear example. Once solar panel costs dropped, deployment accelerated, and solar became the economically rational choice, not a moral one. The system tipped, and momentum followed.
Crucially, this transformation does not require unanimity.
History shows that progress accelerates when a coalition of the willing takes the lead. Sharpe’s data are clear: a global transition to a clean energy future is achievable with cooperative leadership from Canada, the European Union, the United Kingdom, China, and California-aligned U.S. states. Once these actors tip key sectors onto the steep part of the S-curve, others follow, not out of altruism, but because the economics change and participation becomes advantageous.
This is positive-sum thinking grounded in real-world system behaviour and cooperation, not ideology.
“For me, this framing makes profound sense,” stated Cathy Orlando, National Director of Citizens’ Climate Lobby Canada. She continued, “I hold a master’s-level science degree in physiology, where we were trained to understand equilibrium, dynamic states, and tipping points. For the past quarter century, my email sign-off has read:
‘If you want to be incrementally better, be competitive. If you want to be exponentially better, be cooperative.’
That insight applies as much to economies and geopolitics as it does to biological systems. As Simon Sharpe has explained, the economic transition to a climate-safe future can happen five times faster when these dynamics are applied.”
In a world defined by rupture, clinging to zero-sum narratives is not a strength. Attempts to dominate rather than cooperate lock countries into defensive postures that slow innovation and amplify instability.
The alternative is strategic realism: act early by strengthening domestic economies, focus on sectors where tipping points are within reach, and build coalitions capable of shifting the system as a whole.
The question facing Canada and the world is not whether we can return to the old equilibrium. That equilibrium is gone. The real choice is whether we shape what comes next through cooperation and positive feedback, or allow coercion and zero-sum thinking to push us deeper into chaos.
Canada is already moving in the right direction. As Prime Minister Carney said in Davos, “Nostalgia is not a strategy.”
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]]>The post Geopolitical Change Dominating This 21st Century Decade: Part 2 – America Losing Its Lustre appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>In Part 1, we examined the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s dissolution on December 25, 1991, and the ensuing power vacuum. The opportunity presented to the United States to fill the void left by the Soviet collapse came and went. At the time, George H. W. Bush was President. He chose diplomacy and economic aid as strategies to support a Russian transition to democracy. It appeared that Western liberal democracy had finally triumphed, with the U.S. the epitome of the meaning. An essay written during that time by Francis Fukuyama, a political scientist, argued that the end of the USSR and the triumph of liberal democracies equated with the end of history. Far from it, a lot of history has ensued since that date, much of it a consequence of the void left by the Soviet state’s demise.
When one looks at the American empire, in many ways it is very different from any that preceded it. America hasn’t projected power through overseas conquests. Instead, its power often comes from ideas and values and from negotiations and conferring with others.
In the 1956 musical, Li’l Abner, there is a song, “What’s Good for General Bullmoose,” based on comments made by Charles Wilson, the CEO of General Motors, who became President Eisenhower’s Secretary of Defense from 1953 to 1957.
During a Senate hearing, Wilson stated that he thought what was good for General Motors was good for the U.S.A., and vice versa.
American administrations in the post-World War II world often appeared to act with similar conviction, extending the idea that what was good for Americans was equally good for the world. It didn’t always prove true, but for the most part, it was a distinguishing quality of America’s role as “primus inter pares,” a leader among equals in the community of nations.
That no longer appears to be the case under Trump, who appears to act on the premise that what is good for him is good for America and the world.
A book by Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States, illustrates what a global empire without territory is. It is unlike the empires of the past, such as the British, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Russian Empires. These empires involved conquest, colonization and coercion, bringing vast territories under control. With the U.S., the growth in North America came from land purchases, expropriations of Indigenous lands, and two wars, one with Mexico and the other with Spain.
The last expansionist President, William McKinley (Trump’s a big fan), annexed Hawai’i in 1898, and launched the Spanish-American War behind the slogan, “Remember the Maine,” blaming Spain for an explosion on an American battleship in Havana harbour. The war that followed added several overseas territories, including the Philippines, Guam and Puerto Rico. During McKinley’s presidency, the Alaska Boundary Dispute between the British, Canada, and America flared up, only settled after the President’s assassination.
Immerwahr describes America as an empire defined by economic clout and military resources, pointing to bases, mostly in friendly countries (the exception, Cuba’s Guantanamo), around the world. This hidden empire has held up quite well for much of the latter half of the 20th century and into the 21st. American businesses and a flexible foreign policy have served many foreign countries well, with investments used to develop resources and other forms of soft power.
With Trump back in the White House, soft power appears to be at an end. Starting with the tariff walls erected on Liberation Day based on Trump’s view of unfavourable trade deficits, the President has declared a casus belli against all the nations of the world and even islands where there are no inhabitants. He is using laws that give him emergency powers to act to override Congressional opposition.
Domestically, Trump has unleashed paramilitary forces known as ICE to sweep up citizens and non-citizens, mostly in Democratic-led cities, in search of people to deport. He has launched military missions without Congressional approval, including bombing Iranian nuclear sites, the Houthis in Yemen, sinking boats and killing their crews off South America’s coast, claiming without evidence that they are drug runners, and now, the grabbing of Nicolás Maduro.
The Trump administration recently released its 2025 national security strategy. Trump calls it the Donroe Doctrine, a corollary to President James Monroe’s declaration made in 1823 that claimed American hegemony over the entire Western Hemisphere. Trump sees the hemisphere as reserved exclusively for U.S. meddling, and he has demonstrated it repeatedly in the last few weeks.
David Shribman, who writes for Canada’s Globe and Mail, calls the America of today “a lesson in irony.” What does he mean? He sees Trump taking America back to the policies of isolationism, a 19th-century version of the country that defended slavery when the rest of the world was ending it, and a country that isolated itself from many international forums.
This week Trump signed an executive order to end America’s involvement in 66 international organizations. The U.S. is withdrawing from 31 United Nations-affiliated bodies, the World Health Organization and vaccine advocacy associations, international nature conservancies, oversight of the world’s oceans and freshwater resources, and institutes that support democracy, human rights, education, and relief work.
In his previous term as President, he had pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Agreement of 2015, reinstated by his successor, and now back to not any more.
The irony is that while Trump is isolating the United States at the behest of his supporters, he is at the same time openly expansionist.
He has declared a desire to own Greenland, which Denmark repeatedly has told him is not for sale. If he cannot have it, he has threatened to conquer it in the name of hegemonic security, even though a U.S. military presence is already in place.
He has offered to make Canada America’s 51st state, noting, if rejected, the use of economic coercion to achieve this goal.
Both Canada and Denmark are NATO allies, an organization that America founded, and that Trump has belittled in the past.
He has threatened to send U.S. troops to Mexico to fight drug cartels even though the Mexican government recently, at his behest, beefed up domestic efforts to address this issue.
In a complete reversal of an agreement he signed in his previous term, Trump is demanding a rewrite of the trilateral trade treaty with Canada and Mexico, or threatening to abrogate it when it comes up for review this summer.
He has asked Panama to return the Panama Canal Zone, acquired by the U.S. in 1903, and transferred to Panama by Jimmy Carter in 1976. The reassertion of American ownership is to keep the Chinese out.
Behind another old score that the President wants to settle is a threat to end the Marxist regime in Cuba, founded in 1959.
In an interview this week discussing Venezuela and other foreign policy issues, Trump, when asked if there were any limits to his reach, stated, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
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]]>The Soviet Union’s collapse created a void, and nature and politics both abhor a vacuum. When empires fall, new players step in, and that’s exactly what we have witnessed in the rise of a new Russian empire since 2000, led by Vladimir Putin.
Could a futurist have predicted the direction Russia would take? Maybe some could, but in this first part of a three-piece discussion on geopolitical change in the 21st century, we will look at just how a failed Soviet state turned into a Russia gone rogue.
To learn about the decline in the lustrous beacon that is America, you will have to read Part Two, while Part Three looks at China’s rise with parallels to Japan from the late 19th century to the mid-20th century.
For Western democracies and Europe, the collapse of the Soviet Union was an opportunity for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the post-World War II defensive alliance formed to counter Soviet expansionism. Countries, formerly under Soviet control, moved into Europe’s and NATO’s embrace. The Soviet collapse was seen equally as an opportunity for America and China to reset their relationships with the Soviet successor states.
NATO and the European Union expanded. The U.S. confined its interests to economic opportunities and to supporting NATO countries. China saw the Soviet collapse as a cautionary tale. The rump Russian Federation, having lost vast swaths of its former Soviet sway, veered from one crisis to another.
The vacuum left by the Soviet collapse could have been filled by Europe, America, China or Russia. In the end, it was the latter that stepped forward.
The 1990s saw Russia slip from aspiring democracy to oligarchy and autocracy. With the Communist Party’s fall and the dissolution of the Soviet state, former bureaucrats cherry-picked the corpse. A superrich new oligarchy ended up rallying around and a former KGB operative, Vladimir Putin, who eventually became President. He has subsequently ruled Russia throughout this century.
Putin has described the Soviet collapse as an epic tragedy. He believes that the former socialist republics that formed the Soviet Union were a convenience and a charade presented to the world by the Communist Party. As a result, Putin has shown regard for the sovereignty of the countries that emerged from the Soviet demise. He questions the legitimacy of Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, Moldova, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, and the Central Asian republics carved from the old Soviet state. Russia’s foreign and domestic policies support Putin’s aspirations to restore the empire. He has been grabbing land for the last two decades: first in Georgia, then Armenia and Azerbaijan, supporting Transnistrian separatists in Moldova, seizing the Crimea from Ukraine and subsequently backing separatists in the Donbas. Since 2022, Putin has launched a march on Kyiv that failed and an invasion of Eastern Ukraine with a goal to first, topple the government, and second, to reabsorb what he considers an illegitimate country back into the Russian motherland. Putin’s war is entering its fourth year.
When confronted by critics, of which there are none in Russia, Putin justifies his expansionist agenda by pointing to NATO’s eastern expansion since the fall of the Soviet Union and the threat it poses. Putin, when threatened, waves the nuclear option in the face of NATO opponents and others.
Since Trump was re-elected in 2024, he promised almost immediate peace between Russia and Ukraine. That was unworkable. Now, Trump is looking for a way out that robs Ukraine of territory and rewards Putin for aggression. Trump has lobbied the Nobel Peace Prize committee to recognize his unparalleled skills as a peacemaker.
In the absence of making peace, however, there is nothing for the Committee to recognize. When Trump doesn’t succeed, he will blame others. At best, any Trump-generated peace will be temporary at best, and likely to lead to more war. For Putin’s Russia, therefore, the climb back to past greatness will remain unresolved. And that’s where we sit today, on the 9th day of January, 2026.
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]]>COVID-19 was a virus that likely jumped from animal populations to humans, first in China, and then through our modern global transportation network, spread around the world. To date, COVID-19 is still a threat. We may not be calling it a pandemic anymore, but it is endemic, with estimated global deaths directly attributed to the virus standing at over 7 million. Excess mortality analysis, based on data from the World Health Organization (WHO), with the U.S. no longer a member, indicates deaths above expected national baselines have been estimated to be 2.74 times greater.
That was Trump’s first term. Now, in his second he has inflicted Robert F. Kennedy Jr. upon the American public with ramifications for the CDC and global health. Kennedy Jr. was awarded the job of Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), not because he has scientific expertise, but because he dropped out of the 2024 presidential election, throwing his support to Trump.
Kennedy Jr. is a graduate of the University of Virginia’s law school. He has also acquired a master’s degree in environmental law from Pace University. He has no medical or public health background. Traditionally, HHS has been run by leaders with medical or public health experience, or by executives recruited by large hospitals and health systems. The resume or curriculum vitae of HHS secretaries usually includes familiarity with U.S. Medicare, Medicaid, and now Obamacare. Not Kennedy Jr. He has no qualifications for the job, but has lots of opinions with no scientific credibility.
Kennedy Jr. may be remembered as the second pandemic to descend on the American public, taking the CDC down in the process as an institution that supports recommendations and decisions using scientific evidence. Trump, in appointing Kennedy Jr., has tasked him with the role of making America healthy again. So, how is he going about doing this?
The Kennedy Jr. relationship with the CDC, part of his HHS mandate, has included:
Terminating a CDC Director over disagreements on vaccine policy, and replacing the members of the federal vaccine advisory committee with anti-vaccine appointees.
Altering CDC online content related to vaccines and autism without any scientific evidence to support the changes.
Cancelling federal funding for mRNA vaccine research on 22 projects, including promising progress on mRNA vaccines to treat cancer.
Inserting his alternative medical views as the head of HHS to further undermine CDC credibility, including:
His opinion that Lyme disease is an engineered bioweapon.
Questioning the role of HIV in AIDS.
Questioning the use of thimerosal, a commonly used preservative in vaccines and linking it to autism.
Promoting the miasma theory of disease (toxins and pollution in the environment) over germ theory (viruses, bacteria and other pathogens) as the primary cause of allergies and autoimmune conditions in children.
Linking COVID-19 deaths to Vitamin-D deficiency.
Promoting unpasteurized milk and natural health remedies over drugs and vaccines as the way to make Americans healthy again.
Removing fluoride from public water supplies because of his belief that the chemical lowers the IQ of children, meanwhile ignoring the evidence of how community water fluoridation has decreased the level of dental caries (a chronic and preventable disease that affects 1 in 4 children living below the poverty line), and, if unmanaged, leading to heart disease.
Where Kennedy Jr. gets it right is in his views about the increasing amount of ultra-processed foods in the American diet, linking their consumption to increasing obesity and cases of Type 2 diabetes. That’s because these packaged and fast foods are high in sugar, sodium and saturated fats, and low in dietary fibre and key nutrients such as Omega-3, magnesium, zinc, chromium, vitamins B, C and D.
It is good to know that Kennedy Jr. got at least one thing right in the middle of all of his other opinions he brandishes as science.
The fallout from Kennedy Jr. and Trump on the CDC has weakened America’s primary source of science-based health information. It is harder for the public to trust the site.
Katelyn Jetelina, the publisher of Your Local Epidemiologist, a public health newsletter, recently noted that the CDC is now dominated by political actors overriding science. She states, “It’s getting harder and harder to know what is data-driven and what is spun,” referring to the CDC site. Jetelina believes there is still credible science to be found on the CDC website, but she is knowledgeable about medicine and not the average user. She recommends that none of the information on vaccines at this time can be trusted.
For the majority of the public, therefore, determining the difference between CDC fact and fiction will increasingly be difficult, at least for the remaining term of Kennedy Jr’s and Trump’s reign.
Jetelina suggests finding alternative data-driven sources and The Evidence Collective, with the latter developing what amounts to an alternative to the CDC as a reference site for data-driven medical science.
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]]>Woke is street slang for wake up to oppression and fight for civil liberties. The expression “stay woke” was originally associated with the American black community and was first introduced by Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican who urged black people to stay woke in his writings about African national identity.
In the 1960s, “woke” and “wokeness” were popularized by black American songwriters and playwrights from the late 1930s and were words associated with the black power movement.
Today, expressions that include the word “woke” are associated with social, political and systemic inequality and injustice around race, gender, sexual orientation, and culture. To practice “wokefulness” requires awareness of the inequities of modern Western civilization and its history and values, and addresses these systemic faults through actions that come under the banner DEI, referring to diversity, equity and inclusion, programs offered in schools, businesses, and governments.
Associated with left-wing ideologies, “being woke” is seen by right-leaning governments and aligned social groups as harmful to traditional American family values. These groups and governments see American culture as “white” (they don’t overtly state this) and, for the most part, “Christian” (again, no overt admission). In their view, if you are “woke,” you self-identify as LGBTQ+, black, Indigenous, or people who practise Islam or Judaism.
So how has “woke” become associated with science? Likely it started with research in the soft sciences that studied gender, race and health issues. “Woke science” is a term that the right uses to identify DEI practices. The current U.S. administration and supporting conservative groups are anti-DEI and have declared war on perceived woke science as practiced by American universities.
Without acknowledging that American traditional cultural values are as much an imposition on research perspectives as those conforming to DEI, the current Trump administration has used its bully pulpit to issue executive orders that ban DEI policies in businesses receiving government largess and in universities that receive funding and grants from federal departments. The administration has pressured university heads to eliminate DEI references and training, and to fire academic staff associated with DEI teaching. In other words, academic freedom in the U.S. is no longer in practice at schools that comply with the U.S. administration’s DEI policies. The new norm for these schools is self-censorship, deference to the person in the Oval Office, and a voluntary donation to his causes. The risk to universities that do not comply is a loss of billions of dollars in federal research grants, affecting all programs from soft to hard sciences, with subsequent impacts on students and faculty.
Brendan O’Malley, in the November 14, 2025, issue of University World News, describes what he calls the “knock-on impact on international science collaborations, a reorientation of international student flows and a raft of policy changes across other countries to capitalize on the flight of scholars from the U.S.”
The anti-DEI policy of the U.S. administration has caused collaborative research programs with international academic institutions to grind to a halt. O’Malley describes one example, involving Columbia University and the Centre de Recherche du Centre Hospitalier de l’Université de Montréal (CHUM) in Quebec, with the latter receiving a memo notifying it that the project was on hiatus.
The above is just one of many for researchers outside the country who have been collaborating with American universities, receiving grants from the U.S. federal government. The latter has been sending out questionnaires to these foreign researchers asking if there are DEI, climate or environmental elements to their work.
The response from international academia has been universal. Universities outside the U.S. are opening their doors to invite American professors and researchers to join them.
Canada is inviting Americans to cross the border. The latest federal budget earmarks CDN$1.7 billion to attract a thousand U.S. academics. In the last week alone, three academics have announced they were leaving the U.S. to come to the University of Toronto: Sara Seager, an astrophysicist, and Jacquelyn Pless and Mark Duggan, both economists. Toronto’s University Health Network recently launched the Canada Leads 100 Challenge to attract international academics and scientists to relocate to Canada to do advanced medical research, offering two-year funding commitments and other incentives.
There are many other international invitations. Australia’s Academy of Science has created the Global Talent Attraction Program to invite disaffected U.S. researchers and technologists.
The European Research Council is offering €500 million, a seven-year super grant program to attract American academics.
France is aggressively recruiting American scientists and academics with programs like Choose France for Science and the Mission Europe Safe Place for Science initiative, offering up to €15 million over three years, plus support for visas and family accommodation.
Spain has launched ATRAE, a government-sponsored research agency aimed at recruiting American and other international talent.
The Netherlands’ Dutch Tulip Fund was established this summer to attract American researchers to relocate.
The international response to the American administration’s assault on academia and science has not gone unnoticed by students. Those who hoped to enroll in STEM studies in the U.S. are no longer applying. Among them could be the future research leaders in American science. I don’t say this lightly, having written about many American breakthroughs by scientists who have come to the U.S. and achieved their successes in American university research programs and laboratories. Now, international students are aware that America no longer wants them and Studyportals, a site that lists bachelor’s, master’s and PhD programs around the world, confirms a reported 61% decline in international students looking to enroll at U.S. universities.
How can this be happening in the U.S. in this third decade of the 21st century, a period of dynamic and accelerating change covering artificial intelligence (AI), quantum computing, fusion energy, medical discoveries, environmental challenges and climate change on the science and technology agenda?
Governments should be begging to draw science and academic talent. Fortunately for non-American governments, the current U.S. administration is making that much easier.
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