++Would you swear a loyalty oath to humanity — or cheer on its extinction? +
++Stars that wink at you. Protons with 11 dimensions. Computers made of rows of human soldiers. Aliens that give virtual reality a whole new meaning. +
++All of these visual pyrotechnics are very cool. But none of them are at the core of what makes 3 Body Problem, the new Netflix hit based on Cixin Liu’s sci-fi novel of the same name, so compelling. The real beating heart of the show is a philosophical question: Would you swear a loyalty oath to humanity — or cheer on its extinction? +
++There’s more division over this question than you might think. The show, which is about a face-off between humans and aliens, captures two opposing intellectual trends that have been swirling around in the zeitgeist in recent years. +
++One goes like this: “Humans may be the only intelligent life in the universe — we are incredibly precious. We must protect our species from existential threats at all costs!” +
++The other goes like this: “Humans are destroying the planet — causing climate change, making species go extinct. The world will be better off if we go extinct!” +
++The first, pro-human perspective is more familiar. It’s natural to want your own species to survive. And there’s lots in the media these days about perceived existential threats, from climate change to rogue AI that one day could wipe out humanity. +
++But anti-humanism has been gaining steam, too, especially among a vocal minority of environmental activists who seem to welcome the end of destructive Homo sapiens. There’s even a Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, which advocates for us to stop having kids so that humanity will fade out and nature will triumph. +
++And then there’s transhumanism, the Frankensteinish love child of pro-humanism and anti-humanism. This is the idea that we should use tech to evolve our species into Homo sapiens 2.0. Transhumanists — who span the gamut from Silicon Valley tech bros to academic philosophers — do want to keep some version of humanity going, but definitely not the current hardware. They imagine us with chips in our brains, or with AI telling us how to make moral decisions more objectively, or with digitally uploaded minds that live forever in the cloud. +
++Analyzing these trends in his book Revolt Against Humanity, the literary critic Adam Kirsch writes, “The anti-humanist future and the transhumanist future are opposites in most ways, except the most fundamental: They are worlds from which we have disappeared, and rightfully so.” +
++If you’ve watched 3 Body Problem, this is probably already ringing some bells for you. The Netflix hit actually tackles the question of human extinction with admirable nuance, so let’s get into the nuance a bit — with some mild spoilers ahead. +
++What does 3 Body Problem have to say about human extinction? +
++It would give too much away to say who in the show ends up repping anti-humanism. So suffice it to say that there’s an anti-humanist group in play — people who are actually trying to help the aliens invade Earth. +
++It’s not a monolithic group, though. One faction, led by a hardcore environmentalist named Mike Evans, believes that humans are too selfish to solve problems like biodiversity loss or climate change, so we basically deserve to be destroyed. Another, milder perspective says that humans are indeed selfish but may be redeemable — and the hope is that the aliens are wiser beings who will save us from ourselves. They refer to the extraterrestrials as literally “Our Lord.” +
++Meanwhile, one of the main characters, a brilliant physicist named Jin, is a walking embodiment of the pro-human position. When it becomes clear that aliens are planning to take over Earth, she develops a bold reconnaissance mission that involves sending her brainy friend, Will, into space to spy on the extraterrestrials. +
++Jin is willing to do whatever it takes to save humanity from the aliens, even though they’re traveling from a distant planet and their spaceships won’t reach Earth for another 400 years. She’s willing to sacrifice Will — who, by the way, is madly in love with her — for later generations of humans who don’t even exist yet. +
+/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25360378/3_Body_Problem_n_S1_E6_00_25_39_21R.jpg_3_Body_Problem_n_S1_E6_00_25_39_21R.jpg)
Courtesy of Netflix
++Jin’s best friend is Auggie, a nanotechnology pioneer. When she’s asked to join the fight against the aliens, Auggie hesitates, because it would require killing hundreds of humans who are trying to help the aliens invade. Yet she eventually gives in to Jin’s appeals — and lots of people predictably wind up dead, thanks to a lethal weapon created from her nanotechnology. +
++As Auggie walks around surveying the carnage from the attack, she sees a child’s severed foot. It’s a classic “do the ends justify the means?” moment. For Auggie, the answer is no. She abandons the mission and starts using her nanotech to help people — not hypothetical people 400 years in the future, but disadvantaged people living in the here and now. +
++So, like Jin, Auggie is also a perfect emblem of the pro-human position — and yet she lives out that position in a totally different way. She is not content to sacrifice people today for the mere chance at helping people tomorrow. +
++But the most interesting character is Will, a humble science teacher who is given the chance to go into space and do humanity a major solid by gathering intel on the aliens. When the man in charge of the mission vets Will for the gig, he asks Will to sign a loyalty oath to humanity — to swear that he’ll never renege and side with the aliens. +
++Will refuses. “They might end up being better than us,” he says. “Why would I swear loyalty to us if they could end up being better?” +
++It’s a radical open-mindedness to the possibility that we humans might really suck — and that maybe we don’t deserve to be the protagonists of the universe’s story. If another species is better, kinder, more moral, should our allegiance be to furthering those values, or to the species we happen to be part of? +
++The pro-humanist vision +
++As we’ve seen, there are different ways to live out pro-humanism. In philosophy circles, there are names for these different approaches. While Auggie is a “neartermist,” focused on solving problems that affect people today, Jin is a classic “longtermist.” +
++At its core, longtermism is the idea that we should care more about positively influencing the long-term future of humanity — hundreds, thousands, or even millions of years from now. The idea emerged out of effective altruism (EA), a broader social movement dedicated to wielding reason and evidence to do the most good possible for the most people. +
++Longtermists often talk about existential risks. They care a lot about making sure, for example, that runaway AI doesn’t render Homo sapiens extinct. For the most part, Western society doesn’t assign much value to future generations, something we see in our struggles to deal with long-term threats like climate change. But because longtermists assign future people as much moral value as present people, and there are going to be way more people alive in the future than there are now, longtermists are especially focused on staving off risks that could erase the chance for those future people to exist. +
++The poster boy for longtermism, Oxford philosopher and founding EA figure Will MacAskill, published a book on the worldview called What We Owe the Future. To him, avoiding extinction is almost a sacrosanct duty. He writes: +
++++With great rarity comes great responsibility. For thirteen billion years, the known universe was devoid of consciousness … Now and in the coming centuries, we face threats that could kill us all. And if we mess this up, we mess it up forever. The universe’s self-understanding might be permanently lost … the brief and slender flame of consciousness that flickered for a while would be extinguished forever. +
+
+There are a few eyebrow-raising anthropocentric ideas here. How confident are we that the universe was or would be barren of highly intelligent life without humanity? “Highly intelligent” by whose lights — humanity’s? And are we so sure that the universe would be meaningless without human minds to experience it? +
++But this way of thinking is popular among tech billionaires like Elon Musk, who talks about the need to colonize Mars as “life insurance” for the human species because we have “a duty to maintain the light of consciousness” rather than going extinct. +
++Musk describes MacAskill’s book as “a close match for my philosophy.” +
++The transhumanist vision +
++A close match — but not a perfect match. +
++Musk has a lot of commonalities with the pro-human camp, including his view that we should make lots of babies in order to stave off civilizational collapse. But he’s arguably a bit closer to that strange combo of pro-humanism and anti-humanism that we know as “transhumanism.” +
++Hence Musk’s company Neuralink, which recently implanted a brain chip in its first human subject. The ultimate goal, in Musk’s own words, is “to achieve a symbiosis with artificial intelligence.” He wants to develop a technology that helps humans “merg[e] with AI” so that we won’t be “left behind” as AI becomes more sophisticated. +
++In 3 Body Problem, the closest parallel for this approach is the anti-humanist faction that wants to help the aliens, not out of a belief that humans are so terrible they should be totally destroyed, but out of a hope that humans just might be redeemable with an infusion of the right knowledge or technology. +
++On the show, that technology comes via aliens; in our world, it’s perceived to be coming via AI. But regardless of the specifics, this is an approach that says: Let the overlords come. Don’t try to beat ’em — join ’em. +
++It should come as no surprise that the anti-humanists in 3 Body Problem refer to the aliens as “Our Lord.” That makes total sense, given that they’re viewing the aliens as a supremely powerful force that exists outside themselves and can propel them to a higher form of consciousness. If that’s not God, what is? +
++In fact, transhumanist thinking has a very long religious pedigree. In the early 1900s, French Jesuit priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin argued that we could use tech to nudge along human evolution and thereby bring about the kingdom of God; melding humans and machines would lead to “a state of super-consciousness” where we become a new enlightened species. +
++Teilhard influenced his pal Julian Huxley, an evolutionary biologist who popularized the term “transhumanism” (and the brother of Brave New World author Aldous Huxley). That influenced the futurist Ray Kurzweil, who in turn shaped the thinking of Musk and many Silicon Valley tech heavyweights. +
++Some people today have even formed explicitly religious movements around worshiping AI or using AI to move humanity toward godliness, from Martine Rothblatt’s Terasem movement to the Mormon Transhumanist Association to Anthony Levandowski’s short-lived Way of the Future church. “Our Lord,” indeed. +
+ ++The anti-humanist vision +
++Hardcore anti-humanists go much farther than the transhumanists. In their view, there’s no reason to keep humanity alive. +
++The philosopher Eric Dietrich, for example, argues that we should build “the better robots of our nature” — machines that can outperform us morally — and then hand over the world to what he calls “Homo sapiens 2.0.” Here is his modest proposal: +
++++Let’s build a race of robots that implement only what is beautiful about humanity, that do not feel any evolutionary tug to commit certain evils, and then let us — the humans — exit stage left, leaving behind a planet populated with robots that, while not perfect angels, will nevertheless be a vast improvement over us. +
+
+Another philosopher, David Benatar, argued in his 2006 book Better Never to Have Been, that the universe would not be any less meaningful or valuable if humanity were to vanish. “The concern that humans will not exist at some future time is either a symptom of human arrogance … or is some misplaced sentimentalism,” he wrote. +
++Whether or not you think we’re the only intelligent life in the universe is key here. If there are lots of civilizations out there, the stakes of humanity going extinct are much lower from a cosmic perspective. +
++In 3 Body Problem, the characters know for a fact that there’s other intelligent life out there. This makes it harder for the pro-humanists to justify their position: on what grounds, other than basic survival instinct, can they really argue that it’s important for humanity to continue existing? +
++Will might be the character with the most compelling response to this central question. When he refuses to sign the loyalty oath to humanity, he shows that he is neither dogmatically pro-humanist nor dogmatically anti-humanist. His loyalty is to certain values, like kindness. +
++In the absence of certainty about who enacts those values best — humans or aliens — he remains species-agnostic. +
++
++Coal, oil, and natural gas producers have found their vision for a low-carbon world. +
++HOUSTON, Texas — In a video message projected onto massive screens in a packed conference hall, Sultan al-Jaber, the president of the COP28 climate conference held in the United Arab Emirates last year, graciously accepted a leadership award from one of the world’s biggest energy industry conventions. +
++Al-Jaber, who when not running UN climate summits is also the CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, faced criticism from environmental groups for inviting major oil and gas companies to participate in the international climate negotiations. He also faced scrutiny for his comments that it’s not necessary to eliminate fossil fuels to meet the Paris Agreement target of limiting warming this century to less than 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) by the end of the century. But here in Houston, before a much friendlier crowd, he remained defiant. +
++“If the world is going to meet its climate goals, every stakeholder has to act,” al-Jaber said, with a model of a wind turbine on his desk. “Everyone had a seat at the table, everyone was invited to contribute, and everyone did contribute.” +
++CERAWeek by S&P Global — an annual conference of oil, gas, coal, renewable, and nuclear energy industries — returned the invitation, putting the once taboo topic of climate change in its headline. +
++“It is no exaggeration to say that [al-Jaber] helped the global community chart pathways to a sustainable future,” said Daniel Yergin, the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning oil history The Prize and the founder of CERAWeek. +
++The conference isn’t meant to produce any formal agreements or treaties, but what attendees say on stage and behind closed doors often ripple through the global energy industry. +
++While only a sliver of the size of the last climate meeting — more than 8,000 delegates were at CERAWeek compared to more than 80,000 attendees at COP28 — the conference represents some of the most powerful companies in the world with trillions of dollars at their disposal to shape the future of global energy and the climate. The theme this year was “Multidimensional Energy Transition: Markets, climate, technology and geopolitics.” +
++The unwieldy title is an example of how the convention has grown in scope since it started in 1981 and how the industries it represents have begun to redefine their roles in a world constrained by rising average temperatures, yet still primarily dependent on fossil fuels. What was once a low-key meeting of oil and gas executives and analysts to talk frankly and cut deals has become a slick news-making tech conference where attendees are well fed and, after hours, well lubricated by sponsors. Think of it as Davos for the oil and gas set, hosted in the energy capital of the US. +
+/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25360690/GettyImages_2096633583.jpg)
Yi-Chin Lee/Houston Chronicle via Getty Images
++“Twenty years ago you could not have a conversation here about climate change. Full stop,” Mark Brownstein, senior vice president for energy transition at the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), who has attended the conference for decades, told Vox. +
++By now everyone at CERAWeek has gotten the memo on global warming and understood the assignment, at least in rhetoric. The world’s largest energy firms have come to a general consensus that the world is shifting toward clean energy — but that fossil fuels are still going to be necessary for the foreseeable future. “These truths are not in conflict,” said Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm. “The momentum of the clean energy transition is undeniable, even as we are the largest producer of oil and gas in the world.” +
++Every talk and panel discussion nodded to the energy transition, toward carbon management, efficiency, and clean tech. When it comes to energy sources — wind, solar, hydropower, natural gas, oil, hydrogen, coal, nuclear, geothermal, and even fusion — CERAWeek has truly embraced diversity, equity, and inclusion. +
++But even with greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere reaching levels not seen in eons and after the hottest year humans have ever measured, the fossil fuel industry whose products are driving climate change sees a bright future for itself. After all, despite the extraordinary expansion of clean energy generation, fossil fuels have only lost a small share of the global energy mix and are still expecting more growth. +
++The majors believe that technologies like carbon capture and storage will allow them to continue selling their wares as emissions regulations ratchet down, and that power-devouring technologies like artificial intelligence and growing markets in developing countries will continue to raise demand. By some estimates, data center electricity use is on track to more than double by 2026. Coal, oil, and natural gas consumption are at or near record highs in many parts of the world and their emissions are currently on track to grow through 2050, according to the Energy Information Administration. The world is hungry for BTUs and watts, and the energy industry is eager to serve them. +
++“I’m actually more optimistic today than I’ve ever been in this job,” ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods told attendees, noting that COP28 was the first climate conference he has ever attended. +
+/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25360707/PXL_20240318_212622155.MP.jpg)
Umair Irfan/Vox
++But that optimism hasn’t been matched with urgency on climate change, and the industry has a long history of slowing progress. While the language has changed more recently, the oil and gas industry has spent decades thwarting action on climate change, with lobbying, litigation, and misinformation. Exxon’s own scientists produced accurate internal forecasts of rising average temperatures as early as the 1970s while the company published full-page ads in newspapers casting doubt on warming into the late 1990s. +
++Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine has also put energy security back on the front burner. For some countries, energy security today matters more than climate change tomorrow, leading them to prioritize secure sources, including fossil fuels in some cases. (Energy security wasn’t the only echo of the war — CERAWeek also helpfully reminded participants in its registration form not to attend if they are subject to sanctions.) +
++So while appetites for cleaner energy sources are growing, the stalwarts of the global energy industry have made it clear they aren’t letting go of the fuels that powered their rise. As these companies have grudgingly come to acknowledge climate change, many concerned about global warming have also begun to grapple with the likelihood that fossil fuels aren’t fading away anytime soon. And while most energy companies do envision reducing their greenhouse gas emissions, the current pace is nowhere near fast enough to bend the curve to meet climate goals. The future for the global energy industry is not just brighter, but hotter. +
++There is a lot money to be made in new clean energy +
++Across the skybridge from the hotel in the neighboring convention center, CERAWeek hosts what it calls Innovation Agora, where tech entrepreneurs and energy startups pitch their solutions to climate change in glass-walled booths under purple lights. It was once the kids’ table of the conference when it launched in 2017 but has since evolved into a parallel production, a clear reflection of clean energy’s massive growth and immense potential. +
+/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25360701/PXL_20240321_200928207.MP.jpg)
Umair Irfan/Vox
++“Globally, clean energy investment has overtaken fossil fuel investment every year since 2016, according to the IEA,” Granholm said. “In the US, clean energy investment has tripled since 2018.” +
++The fossil fuel industry talks less about competition between conventional sources and renewables and more about collaboration between the “molecule” and the “electron” solution set, as Exxon’s Woods described it. The molecules are the hydrocarbons of coal, oil, and gas and increasingly, hydrogen, while the electrons are those generated by solar panels and wind turbines. +
++“I’m not suggesting one’s better than the other one,” Woods said. “What I’m suggesting is, we need both, and you need companies who have our scale, our capabilities.” +
++Unsurprisingly, the “molecule” companies have their eyes set on the technologies that play to their strengths. Hydrogen, a gas most commonly produced by reforming methane, fits well into the fossil fuel industry’s existing refining, pipeline, storage, and retail infrastructure. Geothermal, which harnesses heat from beneath the Earth’s surface, draws on the sector’s expertise in geology and drilling. Carbon capture — from smokestacks, from the ocean, from the air — gives fossil fuels a way to zero out their emissions, at least on paper, extending them a lifeline in a world where emissions must ratchet down. In the US, the Biden administration has set a target of cutting national greenhouse gas emissions in half compared to 2005 levels by 2030 and achieving net zero emissions by 2050. +
++US government incentives are sweetening the deal for cleaner energy technologies. The trio of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act have mobilized billions of dollars to research, build, and deploy low-emissions energy systems and the products that enable them. Unlike past legislative attempts to tackle climate change, these laws are almost all incentives, with no restrictions or caps on greenhouse gases baked in. +
++“I am very supportive of the IRA, because, as legislated, the IRA focuses on carbon intensity and in theory, [is] technology agnostic,” Woods said. +
++As for the villains, the energy industry as well as environmental groups a common adversary in methane. It’s about 30 times more powerful than carbon dioxide when it comes to trapping heat in the atmosphere. It’s the dominant component of natural gas, so producers do have an incentive to limit its leaks since it’s a salable product. At COP28, dozens of oil and gas firms committed to ending their methane pollution by 2050. Simply reducing methane output by 30 percent from 2020 levels by 2030 could avert 0.2°C of warming (0.36°F) by 2050. But methane is colorless and odorless, making it hard to detect where it’s escaping, and estimates of its emissions vary widely. +
+/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25360824/PXL_20240323_001535142.MP.jpg)
Umair Irfan/Vox
++These concerns have fertilized the growth of the carbon accounting and verification business. Context Labs, one of the companies presenting at the Agora, has developed software so companies can track emissions across their facilities, sometimes down to individual pieces of hardware like generators or furnaces. The goal is to give companies actionable information about where they need to cut pollution, how they can route their operations to be more carbon efficient, and what assets will be at risk when emissions regulations get stricter. +
++Not everyone is ready to take these companies at their word, though. The Environmental Defense Fund launched a satellite to track global methane emissions just a few days before CERAWeek began and advertised it on the streets of Houston. EDF plans to publish its findings publicly to spur polluters to act. +
++Major oil producers warn of “hard realities” for the switch to clean energy +
++There were still points of friction at the oil-soaked conference, as laid out by Amin Nasser, president and CEO of Saudi Aramco. It’s not just the world’s largest oil company, with nearly four times the market capitalization of ExxonMobil; it’s the fourth-mightiest of all companies, shaping economies around the world. And as a mostly state-run enterprise under an autocratic regime, Saudi Aramco isn’t as swayed by activists or shareholders as a fully investor-owned company like Exxon. +
++Nasser laid out what he called five “hard realities” for the energy transition. +
++The first is that alternatives to hydrocarbons like wind and solar energy have received decades of research and development and billions of dollars in investment, but still hold single-digit market shares. Second, reducing the carbon intensity of fossil fuels — particularly through energy efficiency and switching from coal and oil to natural gas — has delivered greater greenhouse gas emissions reductions than the rise of clean energy. Third is that many alternative energy strategies like electric vehicles are unaffordable for a majority of people around the world. That ties into the fourth point, that most of global energy demand growth in the coming years will occur in developing countries. But despite representing 85 percent of the world’s population, these countries receive a tiny fraction of clean energy investment. +
++Nasser concluded with his fifth point: that the energy transition strategy of replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy needs a reset. “We should abandon the fantasy of phasing out oil and gas and instead invest in them adequately, reflecting realistic demand assumptions,” Nasser said to widespread applause. “We should ramp up our effort to reduce carbon emissions, improve efficiency and introduce lower carbon solutions. And we should phase in new energy sources and technologies when they are genuinely ready, economically competitive, and with the right infrastructure.” +
+/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25360697/GettyImages_2087326377.jpg)
Mark Felix/AFP via Getty Images
++Many activists and other in the energy industry disagree with Nasser’s assessment. However, his comments echo the ongoing rifts at COP meetings between major fossil fuel-producing countries that became rich off oil and those often poorer countries facing the immediate effects of climate change like sea level rise, who want to see fossil fuel consumption zeroed out. It’s led to long, tortuous negotiations over language like “phase down” versus “phase out” and “unabated” emissions from fossil fuels. +
++But while many zero-carbon technologies are still expensive, so too are the systems required to keep burning coal, oil, and gas in a world where emissions must halt by the middle of the century to meet climate targets. Some of the cheapest carbon capture technologies to date still cost about $40 per metric ton of carbon dioxide, adding up to billions of dollars to capture any meaningful share of the 37.4 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide emitted last year. +
++The US, now the world’s largest oil producer and natural gas exporter, is also in an awkward spot. While pledging to reduce its own emissions, the US is anticipating more fossil fuel exports and financing import facilities in other countries. That includes a doubling of liquefied natural gas shipments abroad by 2030, despite the White House’s pause on new export terminals. “The whole world needs to transition away from fossil fuels, but in the meantime, we still have to support our friends and allies in their energy needs,” John Podesta, the White House climate adviser who also leads climate diplomacy, told reporters. +
++Now in an election year, the Biden administration is trying to walk the line between taking credit for low gasoline prices and facilitating more fossil fuel extraction as it faces a challenger who wants to ramp up coal, oil, and natural gas, potentially adding another 4 billion metric tons by 2030 to the US’s already massive greenhouse gas emissions tally. +
++All the while, the era of low interest rates that drove the massive expansion of both renewables and natural gas in the US in the past decade is ending just as the country needs a massive new buildout of energy production and infrastructure. Financing expenses are getting higher while permitting time and costs remain an obstacle, slowing down the shift to cleaner energy. So while the threats from climate change are more apparent than ever, it’s getting harder to wield the tools to keep it in check, and that means the fuels of the industrial revolution will continue to light the road ahead, for a while at least. +
++Russia’s year-long detention of Evan Gershkovich is one part of a very grim picture for journalism. +
++This morning, Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter and the first American journalist to be arrested in Russia on espionage charges since the Cold War, woke up to his second year in prison. +
++After five years of covering Russia, he was arrested in March 2023. It came as a shock: Though Russian journalists have long faced increasing repression and even deadly peril, international journalists “were generally a somewhat protected class,” as my former colleague Jonathan Guyer wrote one year ago. +
++One thing Gershkovich had in common with many Russian journalists who have run afoul of the state: His arrest was bogus. Within two weeks, the US government officially designated him as “wrongfully detained.” Reporters Without Borders (RSF), meanwhile, considers him a “Russian state hostage.” Despite a year of pre-trial hearings and extensions on his detention, Russia has publicly provided no clear evidence to substantiate its allegations. +
++For the media that remains in the country, it has also “had a huge chilling effect, with further self-censorship,” Jeanne Cavelier, the head of RSF’s Eastern Europe and Central Asia desk, said over email. +
++That all serves Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aims amid the ongoing war in Ukraine. But what’s happened to Gershkovich isn’t just about Putin. +
++Yes, his government was already particularly bad on press freedom and has only gotten worse since Russia invaded Ukraine: Over 30 journalists in Russia are currently imprisoned because of their reporting, and “between 1,500 to 1,800 Russian journalists were forced into exile” over the last two years, according to a report by the RSF’s JX Fund. +
++“Russia is ranked 164th out of 180 countries in the last Press Freedom Index,” Cavelier pointed out. “It dropped another nine places last year, in the worst category of the ranking where the press freedom situation is classified as ‘very serious.’” +
++But it would be short-sighted to think that brazen attacks on the media stop at Russia’s borders. +
+/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25360764/GettyImages_942902308.jpg)
Mustafa Hassona/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
++Impunity in action +
++The most egregious example of what happens when there’s a sense of impunity over attacks on journalists is the Israel-Hamas war. +
++As the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) noted in December, 68 journalists were killed in the first 10 weeks of the war — more “than have ever been killed in a single country over an entire year.” +
++That tally has only grown since. +
++Gaza was already a difficult place to conduct independent journalism, given Hamas’s harassment, intimidation, and physical abuse of reporters. And war zones are obviously dangerous for all civilians, reporters included. +
++But Israel has said it cannot guarantee journalists’ safety in Gaza and has denied international reporters access to the territory. Even more concerning: Critics say the Israel Defense Forces also appear to have a pattern of targeting journalists. +
+ ++“In at least one case, a journalist was killed while clearly wearing press insignia in a location where no fighting was taking place,” CPJ reported. “In at least two other cases, journalists reported receiving threats from Israeli officials and IDF officers before their family members were killed.” +
++This builds on years of broader restrictions and harassment of the media, including 20 killings of journalists by Israeli fire over the last two decades. Israel has opened investigations into many of these deaths, to be sure, but no one has ultimately been held accountable. +
++One notable example: In 2022, Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was killed as she was reporting for Al Jazeera on an IDF raid in the West Bank. Independent media investigations indicated it was a deliberate attack by IDF soldiers. +
++Israel says there is a “high possibility” a soldier shot Abu Akleh but there was “no suspicion that a bullet was fired deliberately.” (The US response to the killing of one of its citizens was slow to materialize; only six months after her death did reports break that the US had opened an investigation into her killing.) +
++Yes, wars are dangerous to report from. With one exception, “the countries with the highest number of journalists killed for their work in any given year” — Syria in 2012, Afghanistan in 2018, Ukraine in 2022, and Somalia in 2012 — were at war or amid an insurrection, per CPJ data. +
++But this isn’t exclusive to war zones. +
+/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25360765/GettyImages_1258460787.jpg)
Joao Gabriel Alves/Picture Alliance via Getty Images
++The broader picture +
++Anywhere there’s a struggle for power or even just a lot of money at stake, the media is at risk — be that from the state, non-state actors (like cartels, terrorist groups, or business interests), or an unholy union of the two. +
++Nowhere is that clearer than in Latin America and the Caribbean. +
+-
+
- +In Guatemala, for example, Q’eqchi’ Mayan journalist Carlos Choc has been subjected to years of legal intimidation and persecution in response to his reporting on the country’s mining industry. + +
- +In Haiti, there are questions over whether a powerful prosecutor covered up — or even ordered — the murder of a popular radio journalist. + +
- +In Ecuador, where gangs have been fighting over a newly lucrative narco industry and defying the government with increasing impunity, letter bombs were delivered last year to at least five TV and radio journalists. (Thankfully, no serious injuries were reported.) + +
- +In Mexico, right before Abu Akleh’s killing, three journalists were killed in the span of three days. I’m highlighting it as a stark example of the dangers that reporters, especially those who cover politics or organized crime, face in Mexico — the most dangerous country for media workers for three years running before the outbreak of the Ukraine war. + +
- +In Brazil, British journalist Dom Phillips was murdered in 2022 alongside a Brazilian activist while reporting for a book on the destruction of the Amazon. It is part of what the Guardian described as “the increasingly violent atmosphere that has gripped Brazil since the 2018 election of a president who has overseen what activists call a historic assault on Indigenous rights and the environment.” + +
+At the risk of making your eyes glaze over, I’ll stop there. +
++This profession has never been safe. But until a decade ago or so, there was at least a sense that journalists had a recognized role in reporting from even the world’s worst conflicts — and that role afforded them some protection. +
++The last couple of years have felt particularly grim, and the outbreak of two wars by two governments, both known to operate with impunity toward reporters, is an obvious turn for the worse. +
++This story appeared originally in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions. +
++