Pathfinders: The next big thing (2025)

The Pathfinders Column from the January 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mainstream news stories are an endless diet of misery which activists seem to force-feed themselves, under the highly contestable assumption that bad news motivates people to action, rather than into depressed fatalism. If you feel the need for an injection of positivity this January, you ought to try the many free science news websites.

The reason science stories are often positive is because science is about solving problems instead of despairing over them. Now it is true that sometimes those problems are ones that science itself accidentally created. Nobody’s perfect. The law of unintended consequences is always at work, so we ended up with lead in petrol, CFCs in fridges and ‘forever chemicals’ in Teflon. Worse, because science is forced to obey the capitalist prime directive of profit, too often these unintended consequences become ‘unattended externalities’.

Even so, reading science news is a good way to maintain a ‘can-do’ perspective on the world. And socialists have another reason to be interested, because science can offer glimpses of emerging tools and techniques that global socialism might, just might, be able to use in the future, even if they are deemed uneconomical in the present.

Take the current anxiety about micro and nanoplastic particles now being found in almost every animal cell on Earth, together with those forever chemical compounds which don’t break down naturally and have been found in human blood, organs and breast milk. The long-term consequences of all this are unknown, and mainstream news treats it as an unmitigated disaster. But new research has shown how to remove up to 94 percent of nanoplastics from water by just using carbonised epoxy, while a team in China have developed a sponge filter that they say can remove 99.9 percent of microplastics. Forever chemicals can be broken down using expensive high-energy processes, but new light-powered catalysts are thought do the same job at a fraction of the energy cost.

As is well known, renewable energies are intermittent and require back-up storage, generally in the form of lithium-based batteries. But lithium mining or via brine extraction is energy intensive and environmentally destructive. A new study suggests that half of all lithium requirements could actually come out of wastewater instead while an alternative approach offers a low-energy and sustainable means to extract it directly from seawater.

Socialist society will most likely pivot away from the unsustainable capitalist-era obsession with private car ownership, towards comprehensive public transport, but there will still be a role for electric vehicles. At present the battery is the most expensive and least durable part of an EV, but a new type of single-crystal electrode lithium-ion battery could outlast the vehicle it’s in, and then see a ‘second-life’ usage as grid energy storage. Lithium is used because it’s light, so it has an optimal power to weight ratio, but the heavier sodium has similar properties and is 500 times more abundant, so sodium-ion batteries are under development for grid storage, which doesn’t need to move. Problems to date have been low power and slow charging times, but a high-power sodium-ion battery is in development that can charge in seconds.

Battery life and weight currently make long-distance aviation infeasible, but what about old tech in the form of airships? Sustainability concerns are changing attitudes to next-gen air transport, and multiple airship models are in development, including the carbon-fibre and all-electric Pathfinder 1 (no relation), the hydrogen H2 Clipper and the helium Flying Whales, with the UK Airlander 10 expected to be in commercial service by 2026. Helium is hard to get, but the manufacturers point out that airships don’t consume it, they store it, and only need occasional top-ups. If capitalism can do airships, why not socialism?

For short hops, some European companies are developing electric vertical take-off and landing (EVTOL) craft for use as low-cost, noiseless and emission-free air taxis. But they’ve run into funding problems recently as investors are sceptical of getting a good return on investment (ROI). That’s one problem the technology wouldn’t face if a democratic socialist society was, for some reason, smitten with the idea of roof-hopping public transport systems.

In other tech news, AI is an order of magnitude greater consumer of electricity than conventional computing, and an important question is where all the electricity is going to come from. One team believes they can cut AI power consumption by 95 percent simply by rejigging some algorithms. Global warming is creating a global water crisis, and desalination plants are power hungry, but a new method promises zero-electric solar desalination. There’s a plan to stop millions of tons of e-waste by printing circuits onto tree leaves. And self-heating concrete is a thing, if you mix it with paraffin, and could be used for de-icing roads.

In health news, a new biomaterial can regrow cartilage in old joints, meaning no more knee replacements. A twice-yearly injection reduces HIV risk by 96%, more effective than PrEP pills which have to be taken daily. Asthma research has seen the first breakthrough in 50 years with a monoclonal antibody treatment that isn’t a steroid so it doesn’t lead to osteoporosis. And a raft of new research confirms what we already suspected, that nature is good for us. Studies show that time spent in woods, fields or gardens – especially if you get mud on your skin – seems to realign your body’s microbiome with ‘good’ bacteria that are lost through urbanisation and are now believed to inhibit a colossal range of gut-implicated ‘urban’ illnesses (Good Nature, Kathy Kelly, Bloomsbury, 2024).

This only scratches the surface, and of course not all developments will pan out. But the key takeaway from science news is the awareness that the next huge breakthrough, the discovery or invention that changes everything, is just as likely to happen tomorrow as in a hundred years. If that’s not a reason for optimism, we don’t know what is.

Paddy Shannon

Urban Mining – E-Waste Recycling (2022)

From the November 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard 

The more modern neo-Malthusians disparage the idea that a post-scarcity society of bountiful abundance is possible by insisting that the world’s resources are finite and such a vision is unsustainable. Economic growth and calculating the planet’s ‘carrying capacity’ are conceived in their capitalist context. One of socialism’s aims will be to reduce waste of all kinds where the goal will be conservation. Quality goods will replace built-in obsolescence. Cleaning up their mess robs corporations of their profits, the costs in human health and environmental problems are not their worry. With socialism, resources will no longer be frittered away and instead people will devote their energy and skills to healing a sickened poisoned planet.

Mining is a dangerous, dirty, destructive and damaging method of extracting metals and minerals. It is harmful to the environment and to the local communities. Yet it is viewed as the inevitable price to be paid to supply the world’s industry and technology.

Could it be different?

Some of the richest deposits of valuable elements necessary for manufacturing are found in refuse dumps and landfill, ranging from gold in smartphones to cobalt in electric car batteries.

Tons of disused electronic equipment are wastefully dumped every year. According to UN research, 50 million tons of e-waste were produced in 2018. Discarded mobile phones, televisions, computers, car parts and countless other items contain varying amounts of gold and silver, lithium, nickel, cobalt, copper and zinc. They can be reused if processed properly.

The annual production of electronic goods worldwide requires 320 tons of gold and 7,500 tons of silver. Yet only 15-20% of the world’s electronics are recycled annually.

The US generated an estimated 6.92 million tons of e-waste in 2019. To put that into monetary terms, the value of the materials contained in those electronics is estimated to be around $7.49 billion. But in terms of labour, it is millions of hours of toil.

If we look at cell phones alone, one ton of cell phones produces 150g of gold. Not a lot but consider that one ton of ore excavated from a gold mine produces only 5g of gold. The Environmental Protection Agency estimated that for every million units recycled, one could extract: 75 pounds of gold, 772 pounds of silver, 33 pounds of palladium and 35 thousand pounds of copper.

‘…we need a circular economy for these materials. At the moment, we’re just mining them out of the ground constantly,’ Elizabeth Ratcliffe from the Royal Society of Chemistry has explained (bbc.in/3SMz2KV).

Prof Richard Herrington, the head of Earth sciences at London’s Natural History Museum, has suggested that ‘…by 2035, we’ll have sorted out a good source of recycled metal; we’ll need to continue some mining. But hopefully, by 2050, we would have built a truly circular economy so that most if not all of what we need can come from metals that we’ve already mined and are already being used in products and technologies’ (bbc.in/3y7QDFc).

However, the Socialist Party doubts such optimism. Costs of recycling deter investments in urban mining. Currently, companies choosing to skirt the regulations around how e-waste is processed means more money for them in the short term.

In the name of profit production, capitalism depletes an enormous amount of the world’s resources and its people’s abilities. We’ve got the technology to reduce, repair, reuse, and recycle much of what we throw away, but its use isn’t encouraged enough by our current system. Before we can apply more sensible and practical approaches to using our resources, capitalism itself needs to get thrown onto the rubbish dump. Production can be geared to meeting needs in an ecologically acceptable way, instead of making profits without consideration for the environment.

The Socialist Party is not appealing to individuals or governments to launch lifestyle campaigns to recycle more. We want systemic change to make a real difference.

“Not enough is being produced, that is the root of the whole matter. But why is not enough being produced? Not because the limits of production have been reached — even for today ndand by present-day means. No, but because the limits of production are determined not by the number of hungry bellies, but rather by the number of purchasers with full purses. Bourgeois society has no desire, and can have no desire, to produce more. Those impecunious bellies, the labour which cannot be utilised with profit and is thus incapable of purchasing, fall prey to the mortality figures. Let us assume that there is a sudden boom in industry, such as is constantly occurring, to enable this labour to be employed with profit, then the labour will acquire the money with which to purchase, and the means of subsistence have as yet always been found. It is the endless circulus vitiosus [vicious circle] in which the whole political economy revolves. One takes bourgeois conditions in their entirety as one’s premise, and then proves that each separate part is a necessary part thereof — ergo, an ‘eternal law’ (Marx, letter to F.A. Lange, 29 March 1865).

ALJO