Tag: infrastructure

The Public Goods Circular Argument

In our modern, Western world, many justify the state and its policies because of the presupposition that the state—and the state uniquely—is an indispensable service-provider of essential services that could not or would not be provided by the free market or which would be underprovided were it not for the state’s collective provision. This is the public goods argument.

It has become a cliche for defenders of the state to ask critics, especially libertarians, “But without the government, who would build the roads?” It is astounding that it has been easier to convince people to send their children to kill and die in wars, pay exorbitant taxes, see their purchasing power evaporate through inflation, and passively observe general criminal behavior from political elites than to convince people that roads could be built without the state.

While roads and other public infrastructure are considered “public goods,” there are also certain services that have become inextricably linked to the state, such that to not have the state is to not have those services—national defense, collective security, police, courts, etc.

Public goods theory is presented as scientific, value-free economic theory, however, it implicitly smuggles in normative presuppositions that lead to the conclusion that the modern nation-state, and the state alone, must provide certain essential goods and services, which legitimates the state and its actions as necessary and legitimate. Historically, many applications of public goods theory emerged less as neutral demonstrations of state necessity than as retrospective justifications for functions governments had already monopolized.

Hobbesian Theory + Social Contract Theory/Tacit Consent Assumptions + Neoclassical Presuppositions = A Legitimating Myth for the State

Public goods theory—and various arguments made for the state because of assuming it—is a dangerous combination of several fallacious ideas. These errors include 1) Hobbes’s theory of the modern nation-state which argued the necessity and legitimacy of the state because of insecurity; 2) various social contract theories and tacit consent assumptions that argued that people not only need the state but agree with it; and, 3) neoclassical economic assumptions regarding equilibrium as a realistic and normative goal, market failure, and perfect competition. When these fallacious theories are combined, public goods theory becomes apologetic for the state.

Due to the prior assumptions it is even argued that, because someone used public goods—for which he was required to pay through taxation—whatever he successfully produces in such a system comes under some form of collective ownership and the control of the state. Therefore, since the state claims credit for success, the results of success may be legitimately expropriated by the state.

For example, according to Barack Obama and Elizabeth Warren, respectively,

If you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, “Well, it must be because I was so smart,” there are a lot of smart people out there. “It must be because I worked harder than everybody else,” let me tell you something, there are a whole bunch of hard-working people out there. If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The internet didn’t get invented on its own. (emphasis added)

There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there, good for you. But I want to be clear, you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for, you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate, you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for, you didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything that your factory and hire someone to protect against this because of the work the rest of us did. Now, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea, God bless! Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along [via the state]. (emphasis added)

Doubtless, many critiques could be made regarding the statements above, however, this article focuses on the argument that the collective provision of public goods is the independent variable in any success. If public goods theory is accepted, then the state is no longer viewed merely as one institution among many within society, but as the indispensable precondition for society itself, the necessary provider of essential collective goods, and the institutional framework upon which production, exchange, order, and security ultimately depend. Combined with social contract and tacit-consent theories, the continued use of state-provided services is then treated as evidence of public consent, political obligation, and the legitimacy of the state’s ongoing interventions.

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Protesters Target NV Energy At Utility Conference As Anger Over Soaring Electricity Prices Boils Over

Protesters shouting affordability complaints and chanting slogans interrupted a speech by NV Energy President and CEO Brandon Barkhuff on Wednesday. Barkhuff was speaking to some 1,000 utility executives and electricity industry stakeholders during the Edison Electric Institute 2026 conference at the Fontainebleau Las Vegas.

After being escorted out by security, the protesters spoke to the media outside the hotel to demand the cancellation of a daily demand charge for NV Energy customers slated to take effect Jan. 1, 2027, as well as to demand action on clean energy and high electricity bills.

The confrontation shows the extent to which energy costs have stoked public anger, raising pressure on utilities and their regulators.  

Utilities have made affordability a cornerstone of their public messaging as they prepare to spend over $1 trillion over the next five years to meet a surge in demand, much of it driven by large-load data centers. 

In Nevada, The Public Utility Commission in September unanimously approved a demand charge and new rate design for NV Energy customers in the southern portion of the state. It also approved changing the utility’s net metering design in ways that solar advocates said would weaken customer protections and set back Nevada’s clean energy goals. 

“In Las Vegas, one of the fastest-warming cities in the country, you cannot live without electricity,” said protest organizer Leslie Vega. Vega, a climate equity policy fellow at the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada, said she’s lost loved ones to heatstroke and sees the demand charge as air conditioning rationing.

“We’re not just asking for lower rates. We’re asking for survival,” she said.

NV Energy issued a statement following the protest citing “misinformation and confusion” about the daily demand charge. 

“Daily demand [charges] will lower bills for the majority of our southern Nevada customers,” it said. “We understand that energy costs are an important issue for our customers, and that’s exactly why daily demand [charges are] critical in stopping subsidies that shift costs to other customers.”

Demand charges are tied to a customer’s peak electricity use, and NV Energy’s daily demand charge is based on the energy a customer consumes during a 15-minute period of peak usage each day. The utility expects the demand charge to add about 49 cents/day to a typical customer’s bill, but says most southern Nevada customers will see monthly bills that are similar to or slightly lower under the new structure.

Regulators and the utility have said that consumers who are concerned about potential spikes on their bill from the charge can shift their electricity use, but advocates say that’s not realistic, especially for cooling. Las Vegas temperatures on Wednesday reached 103 degrees as the city experiences its longest 100-degree streak of the year, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

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Ukraine Strikes St Petersburg As International Economic Forum Commences

Ukrainian forces have struck an oil facility in St. Petersburg, only hours before the start of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, an event highlighted by Russian leadership as a flagship conference on Russian world leadership.

The Kremlin declared, “The “Special Military Operation” is continuing precisely to prevent attacks like the attack on Saint Petersburg from occurring. Putin will speak at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.”

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Russia Bans Jet Fuel Exports As Ukrainian Attacks Cripple Refining

Russia is banning exports of jet fuel through November 30, 2026, as it seeks to ensure domestic supply amid intensifying Ukrainian drone attacks on the Russian refining infrastructure, OilPrice.com reported.

Russia on Monday announced it is temporarily banning jet fuel exports until the end of November to keep sufficient domestic aviation fuel supplies. Supplies under intergovernmental agreements are exempted from the ban, the Russian government said today.

The decision comes after drone strikes on refineries pushed Russia’s crude-processing rate to the lowest in more than 16 years. In an effort to curb the flow of petrodollars into the Kremlin’s coffers, Ukraine has targeted a wide range of energy assets including sea ports and pipelines. 

The ban is not expected to be felt on the tight international jet fuel market as Russia is a small exporter of aviation fuels.  Last year, it exported an average of 30,000 barrels a day, or less than 2% of the global supplies, according to data compiled by Bloomberg from analytics firm Vortexa Ltd. Daily average exports slipped to 28,000 barrels in the first four months of 2026, with Turkey being the main buyer, the data show. 

But the ban on kerosene exports follows a ban on gasoline exports, in force since April 1, as Russia has seen its refining capacity and capability crippled in recent weeks by intensifying drone attacks from Ukraine.

Kyiv has targeted several major refiners and oil export terminals since the war in Iran began, aiming to cripple Russia’s ability to take advantage of the soaring international oil and fuel prices.

Last month, Ukraine targeted the 300,000-barrels per day Yaroslavl oil refinery in Russia, escalating the drone attacks on Russian refining and oil exporting assets, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said.

“We are bringing the war back home – to Russia – and that’s only fair,” Zelenskyy said in May.

The attack on the Yaroslavl oil refinery, co-owned by Gazprom Neft, was the fourth on the facility in one month, as Ukraine looks to diminish Russia’s refining and export capabilities amid soaring international oil and fuel prices.

Since international crude oil prices surged following the war in the Middle East, Russia has boosted its oil revenues as not only prices have jumped, but Russian oil was made desirable in India again, thanks to U.S. waivers for sales of Russia’s crude already loaded on tankers.

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Land, energy, water for data centers are ‘non-negotiable prerequisites’ for global AI infrastructure, digital embassies: WEF

The infrastructure for the global digital control grid that was slowly being constructed over the past five years is now in the acceleration and implementation phase: perspective

There can be no globally shared AI infrastructure or digital embassies without giving data centers all the land, energy, and water they need, according to the World Economic Forum (WEF).

The plan is to build data centers in host countries that have all the money and resources to do so, and then allow other countries to access the AI infrastructure through what they call “digital embassies,” which grant them “AI sovereignty.”

And when it comes to building AI infrastructure, there are two categories of prerequisites that are “non-negotiable” — technical and institutional, according to the WEF and Bain and Company report, “AI Infrastructure in the Age of Sovereignty: Requirements, Strategies and a Trusted Framework for Digital Embassies.”

On the institutional side, it’s about policy, talent, and financing.

For the technical side, it’s all about feeding data centers with enormous amounts of energy, water, and land — enough to sustain the needs of entire cities — while access to this AI infrastructure will move beyond borders.

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Ukraine Continues Assault on Russian Oil Infrastructure with More Drone Strikes

Ukrainian drone strikes caused fires at more Russian oil facilities overnight into Saturday, local Russian officials said, in what appeared to be the latest attack on Moscow’s vital oil industry.

Authorities in Russia’s Rostov region said falling drone debris sparked a fire that damaged an oil depot and tanker in the port of Taganrog, while officials in the neighboring Krasnodar region reported a fire breaking out at an oil depot in Armavir for the same reason.

“Another facility of Russia’s oil industry has been reached – Armavir,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wrote on X Saturday of the attack in the Krasnodar region, noting that Armavir is “500 kilometers from our state border.”

“We are rightfully bringing the war back to where it came from,” he wrote.

Ukraine has expanded its mid- and long-range strike capabilities, deploying drone and missile technology that it has developed domestically to battle Russia’s 4-year-old invasion. Attacks on Russian oil assets that play a key part in funding the invasion have become almost daily occurrences.

For its part, Russia has used its long-range ballistic missiles to damage Ukraine’s power grid and hammer cities. The Ukrainian capital is bracing for further heavy bombardments after what the Russian Foreign Ministry said earlier this week would be upcoming “systemic strikes” on Kyiv. Zelenskyy said Thursday that he’s being “very persistent” in pressing the United States to provide his country with more Patriot air defense missiles that can counter devastating Russian ballistic missile attacks.

The attacks on Russian oil infrastructure came a day after a Russian drone that was part of an attack on Ukraine went astray and struck an apartment building in eastern Romania, injuring two people in the NATO member country. The incursion added to concerns that the war could spread across the alliance´s borders, and drew strong condemnation across Europe.

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When The Grid Dies: How A Single Blackout Could Unravel A Modern World

For decades, infrastructure analysts, military planners, and emergency preparedness experts have warned that modern civilization is built upon a dangerously fragile foundation.

Electricity is no longer merely a convenience of industrial society; it is the bloodstream of every institution sustaining modern life. Water purification systems, food distribution chains, hospitals, communication networks, banking systems, fuel pipelines, transportation corridors, satellite infrastructure, and emergency services all depend upon uninterrupted electrical continuity.

What follows is a dramatized reconstruction of a prolonged nationwide blackout and the sequence of societal failures that unfolds afterward.

Though fictionalized for narrative intensity, the mechanisms behind the collapse are rooted in real vulnerabilities documented by energy experts, cybersecurity specialists, and federal emergency studies over the past several decades.

The First Day — The Extinguishing of the Great Machine

At 4:12 in the morning, long before sunrise reached the eastern seaboard, the first disturbances began spreading through the electrical arteries of the United States. Inside regional grid control centers, operators noticed unstable fluctuations racing through transmission frequencies connecting several major sectors of the national power network. Similar anomalies had appeared before during severe storms or regional overload incidents, and at first the event seemed manageable. Automated balancing protocols activated instantly while engineers attempted to isolate unstable sectors before the disturbance propagated farther outward. Yet within minutes the system began behaving in ways that experienced technicians later described as deeply unnatural.

Massive substations disconnected from the network one after another as transformers erupted under abnormal strain. Entire transmission corridors collapsed in rapid succession across multiple states while gas compressor stations abruptly failed after synchronization systems destabilized. Power plants automatically disengaged from the grid to protect turbines from catastrophic overload damage, but the protective measures only accelerated the wider collapse already spreading across the country. Before dawn had fully broken, immense regions of the United States disappeared into darkness.

The first reaction among the public was irritation rather than fear. Alarm clocks failed. Wireless networks vanished. Elevators froze between floors. Morning commuters discovered traffic lights dead at major intersections while gas stations sat powerless beside clogged roads. Millions initially assumed the outage would last only a few hours because modern populations had become psychologically conditioned to believe every disruption was temporary and every institution fundamentally stable. Yet beneath the surface of ordinary frustration, panic had already begun inside the agencies responsible for maintaining national order.

Cellular networks became overloaded almost immediately as millions attempted to contact relatives simultaneously. Emergency dispatch systems collapsed beneath an avalanche of calls reporting fires, traffic collisions, medical emergencies, and electrical accidents. Airports grounded flights across the country while financial institutions struggled to maintain even minimal continuity. Then, shortly before midmorning, another layer of modern civilization began deteriorating as large portions of the internet itself started disappearing region by region. Data centers exhausted backup reserves. Routing infrastructure failed. Communication nodes vanished from the network faster than technicians could stabilize them. Social media descended into chaos before becoming inaccessible entirely across many states.

Inside federal emergency facilities, the atmosphere shifted from concern into dread. Continuity-of-government protocols were activated before sunrise while intelligence analysts attempted to determine whether the catastrophe had been orchestrated deliberately. Preliminary evidence suggested coordinated intrusions may have accompanied the cascading failures, raising the terrifying possibility that the blackout was not an accident at all but the opening phase of a far larger attack against the nation’s infrastructure backbone.

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The Financial Decline Of Miami Beach: When Pride Becomes Debt

Every time Miami Beach wants residents to accept another tax increase, another utility hike, another bond, or another excuse for why basic infrastructure still has not been fixed, the same pattern begins. First comes the whisper campaign. Then comes the friendly media narrative. Then come the professional politicians telling you there is no other choice. They want you to believe that more borrowing on your back is the only responsible path forward and that if you question them, you are somehow against progress, resiliency, public safety, or the future.

That is dishonest.

Miami Beach is not broke because the people have failed to pay. Miami Beach is in trouble because the political establishment has failed to lead.

For years, residents have paid more in taxes, more in fees, more in utility bills, and more through debt. The city has approved luxury development, expanded its budget, increased administrative costs, hired more staff, funded consultants, celebrated ribbon cuttings, and marketed itself as a global success story. Yet now we are told the city faces more than one billion dollars in infrastructure needs.

How?

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Homeowners Face Eminent Domain Bulldozers As Data Centers Demand Ever More Power

Georgia Power isn’t negotiating anymore. The Southern Company subsidiary is seizing dozens of homes and hundreds of easements across Coweta and Fayette counties to ram through a 35-mile, 500-kilovolt transmission line that will feed at least four massive AI data centers. Project Wansley is just the latest flashpoint in a backlash that has been building for months.

At least 20 to 30 homes face outright demolition. Another 300-plus properties will get permanent easements for towers planted in backyards and next to pools.

But residents like Ansley Brown are fighting back. Her mother bought their family home in 2003 through a USDA rural development loan for single mothers. Now the utility wants the property for the corridor. Brown’s viral TikTok exposing the lowball offers (she says $70,000 to $100,000 below market) has racked up millions of views and drawn state lawmakers into the fight. 

Georgia Power says the line is essential.

The company is racing to add roughly 10 gigawatts of new generating capacity over the next five years, with executives openly stating that  about 80% of that power will go to data centers. Meanwhile, transmission has become the bottleneck, and utilities are turning to eminent domain to clear the path.

This isn’t happening in isolation. We’ve been pounding the table on data center resistance, from Northern Virginia counties rejecting new substations to Texas communities suing over water drawdowns and power rate spikes. The pattern is the same: hyperscale demand collides with local infrastructure limits, and the costs get socialized while the profits stay private.

Electricity prices are already feeling the pressure. Utilities across the Southeast and Midwest have warned of double-digit residential rate hikes tied directly to data center load growth. Georgia Power’s own filings show residential customers absorbing a growing share of the bill for transmission and generation built primarily for big tech. 

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US Faces Electricity Shortages Heading Into Summer, as Grid Operators Warn of Limits of Green Energy

With more than 25 years of executive experience in the utility industry, people tend to listen when MISO CEO John Bear talks about energy.

And the message he’s sending about electricity shortages as Americans head into summer is clear.

“I am concerned about it,” Bear told The Wall Street Journal in an article exploring why power-grid operators are worried that electricity supplies may struggle to keep up with rising energy demands.

Bear is not some lone prophet foretelling doom.

From California to Texas to the Midwest, the Journal spoke to grid operators warning that conditions are ripe for outages, as plants pivot to new renewable energy sources.

These concerns are not unfounded. Evidence shows America’s power grid is increasingly unreliable and struggling to keep up with demand, and operators are bracing for rolling blackouts that could be arriving as soon as this year during heat waves and cold snaps.

‘Quitting’ Fossil Fuels?

Politicians and policy wonks often speak of “quitting” fossil fuels, as if they are a filthy habit or a narcotic like crack. But the reality is humans could not survive without coal, natural gas, and oil.

Despite their impressive growth, renewable energy sources—solar, wind, hydro and biomass combined—account for just 20 percent of US utility-scale electricity generation.

Fossil fuels, on the other hand, provide 61 percent of utility-scale electricity generation in the country. They heat and cool our homes, run our appliances, and feed the Teslas we drive.

While there is a great deal of excitement around the potential of renewable energy, one cannot simply replace a coal plant with a wind or solar farm and expect things will go just fine. These are intermittent energy sources, for one, but their construction and expansion has also been hit with delays for a variety of reasons, including inflation and supply chain bottlenecks.

“Every market around the world is trying to deal with the same issue,” Brad Jones, interim chief executive of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, told the Journal. “We’re all trying to find ways to utilize as much of our renewable resources as possible…and at the same time make sure that we have enough dispatchable generation to manage reliability.”

The shift from filthy coal to clean energy has not always been smooth.

Last year, for example, Hawaiian officials were stunned to learn the coal plant they had killed had been replaced with a massive battery powered by oil, which one public official described as “going from cigarettes to crack.”

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