25 million people cannot live on their wages: EU needs higher minimum wages and collective agreements for all

In the mid 1990s my beat as a science writer was nuclear energy and radiological health issues. For the Los Angeles Times I visited the Trinity site in New Mexico, where the first atomic bomb was detonated. For Smithsonian I wrote about nuclear waste disposal. After studying the voluminous research on the health effects of plutonium, I did an article for The Atlantic titled “Atomic Overreaction.” The article pushed back against overheated reporting about plutonium, “the most toxic substance known to man,” according to Ralph Nader.

Closer to home—less than five miles from my house as the crow flies—I visited the radioactive interior of the Diablo Canyon Power Plant. Diablo sits above a pretty ocean cove near Avila Beach in the central part of California. Although construction had begun on its two generating units in the late 1960s, it was not until 1985 that the first megawatts of electricity flowed into the grid. Diablo’s commissioning was drawn out, on the one hand, by environmental opposition and public protests, which included mass arrests, and, on the other hand, by the discovery of an offshore geological fault, which prompted seismic reinforcements.

Nestled in the coastal hills, the plant operated for a decade without a hitch, yet many residents distrusted it and wished it weren’t there. I visited Unit 1 during an outage for scheduled maintenance. A photographer took my picture before I went into the containment dome: Draped head to toe in protective white fabric, I looked like a deer in the headlights. The full-body suit was meant to guard me from spot contamination by radioactive substances but not from the ambient radiation, which a dosimeter on my chest kept note of.

The plant’s safety director escorted me around. The reactor, its lid pulled off, ran at a low boil. We stood 100 feet from the open core. I remember the safety director pointing a Geiger counter at a jumble of pipes next to us. “Entirely gamma,” he said, glancing at the counter, referring to the type of radiation. “The rate here isn’t that high, really, but there’s no point in standing around.” We moved away.

“Officially”—so I boasted at the end of my article—“I got a total of six millirems of radiation from my visit to Diablo Canyon, which is on the order of a chest X-ray.” In those days I was the sort of reporter who didn’t mind having an unnecessary X-ray.

Fast forward to the present. My wife and I live in the same house. I’ve had a few chest X-rays over the years, but my health remains good. A second geologic fault was found, but scientists for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission calculated that the power plant could withstand a quake if the fault broke. That is, no additional structural modifications were required. Diablo Canyon hums along, providing 8 to 9 percent of California’s electricity while emitting almost no greenhouse gases. Yet the plant is a dead man walking, because in just three years it is scheduled to close permanently—the first unit in 2024, the second in 2025. In 2015 the owner, Pacific Gas and Electric, working with state and local authorities and environmental groups, decided not to renew the 40-year operating licenses for the twin units.

Nationally, the outlook for nuclear power is not any brighter. Even as it provides about 20 percent of America’s electricity, the atom is fizzling out. Older plants sporadically have closed, and just one new facility has come online since 1996. In Georgia two additional plants are slogging through cost overruns toward completion, but when they open in a year or two they will be the exceptions that prove the rule.

Why is there a rule? Nuclear energy in its civilian garb is innocent of any crime. People may question whether nukes ought to be expanded given the high cost of construction and the nagging matter of waste disposal. Yet to retire existing plants, especially a problem-free facility like Diablo, is sure to aggravate the real crime, the crying shame of climate change. Decarbonize has become the energy watchword of the century, but if you think climate change is really that important, you cannot use the word denuclearize in the same sentence with decarbonize.

Hello, California? With each heat-driven blackout, wildfire conflagration, and doomsday prediction from climatologists, the argument for keeping Diablo open becomes louder. This summer the Sacramento Bee, a statewide newspaper, suggested that closing Diablo would be a mistake. Four of five of my local county supervisors have come out against a shutdown, joining one of my state senators. The state’s Republican delegation in the U.S. Congress is opposed as well.

At the same time, the easing of the pandemic has revived economic activity and demand for electricity. Burning of fossil fuels has surged, not only in California but across the United States and abroad. In Germany and Japan, both of which have resolved to phase out nuclear power, carbon emissions have accelerated and second thoughts about the shutdowns are rumbling, if not yet rife. Even dirty coal is looking good again to stock market investors. And all that was before the war in Ukraine, which has disrupted energy markets worldwide. Germany is now reconsidering the shutdown of its last few plants, and even before the war France decided to double down on nuclear power.

To be sure, my fiercely blue Golden State has been ramping up solar and wind, but no analyst claims that renewable energy will be able to take over Diablo’s contribution by 2025. California has pledged to become carbon neutral by 2045; that means it will offset its greenhouse gas emissions with an equivalent reduction of CO₂ pollution by sequestration or other means. However, the state can deliver on the promise only if it establishes a carbon-free electrical grid. Right now the antiquated grid is maxed out and depends more than ever on plants that run on oil and natural gas.

When the decision to close Diablo was made, critics warned that electrical generation would fall short and that rising greenhouse gas emissions would disrupt the region’s weather. With drought perpetually threatening the state, yesterday’s Cassandras look conservative. “In a cruel twist,” notes the editorial board of the Sacramento Bee, “California needed to burn excess fossil fuels to meet the electricity demand caused by extreme heat that experts say would have been impossible without climate change. That’s right—we need fossil fuels to protect us from the environmental dangers that grew more severe because of our over-reliance on them.”

The crunch that’s looming on the energy horizon is sparking uncomfortable calculations regarding land use. According to a 2021 report by engineers at Stanford and MIT, California’s one remaining nuclear plant, which is fully paid for, occupies just 140 acres. How many acres of new solar panels will be needed to match Diablo’s output? The answer, they approximate, is 90,000.

Or this brainteaser: Which source of power, nuclear or fossil fuels, kills more people? It’s not close. Thousands die each year from breathing carbon particles in the air.

The best spin that can be put on the situation is that the economy has to rob Peter (burn more carbon) in order to make Paul sustainable in the future. President Biden, addressing the awakened appetite for fossil fuels even as his administration promises to go green, acknowledged that it seems “inconsistent.” But will Paul, to mix metaphors, be able to pull a rabbit out of his hat when the time arrives? Right now Paul has nothing up his sleeve but nuclear. The president’s climate plan actually calls for boosting nuclear power, but he doesn’t like to say that in public.

The keep-Diablo argument is so strong that I am more interested in the source of the antipathy on the other side, the revulsion even, that many Americans feel about nuclear energy. It all comes down to fear, of course: the regularly refreshed fear that started with the bomb in 1945.

Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and radioactive fallout from weapons testing during the 1950s overshadowed the bounties promised by “the peaceful atom.” Struggling with the stigma, civilian nuclear power took hold in the 1960s, but then came Three Mile Island (1979), Chernobyl (1986), and Fukushima (2011). Each succeeding accident was perceived by the news media as a disaster, reigniting the fear. Popular movies, their fingers on the pulse, have played on public anxiety ever since Godzilla, a Japanese monster, emerged from a radioactive nimbus. The China Syndrome, about a scary meltdown at a power plant, uncannily came out at the same time as the Three Mile Island accident. Silkwood (1983) enlisted Meryl Streep as a nuclear whistleblower, a woman contaminated with plutonium, doomed as she does her duty.

Richard Rhodes, author of the Pulitzer-winning The Making of the Atomic Bomb, makes a better case than I for the rehabilitation of nuclear power. In his 2018 book, Energy: A Human History, Rhodes reviews the toll of the three accidents. The meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania hurt no one, as radioactive releases were minor. Chernobyl, a primitive reactor without a containment dome, killed the Russian responders who tried to put out the burning core and caused additional deaths from cancers in Ukraine, in part because of radioisotopes that got into the milk supply. Fukushima’s toll of destruction came almost exclusively from the tsunami that knocked out the reactors. The radioactive releases in Japan were on the order of those from Three Mile Island. It does seem there was slightly more radioactive release with Fukushima compared with Three Mile Island, according to the World Nuclear Association, but still not enough to cause harm to human health. None of this is to say that the accidents were not alarming. Yet Rhodes concludes: “Nuclear power’s public health record more than compensates for its few occupational accidents. Its limited air pollution combined with its extremely low greenhouse gas emissions and its 24/7 availability more than 90 percent of the time make it easily the most promising single energy source available to cope with twenty-first-century energy challenges.”

Psychologists talk about “availability bias,” the illogical focus on the thing nearest or highest in mind as the basis for making a decision. That nuclear energy, and by extension Diablo Canyon, is unacceptably dangerous is an irrational belief, but it may be insurmountable. In Sacramento, new legislation and environmental waivers would be necessary to keep Diablo open —and would be challenged in court. In San Luis Obispo County, where I live, the bureaucratic forces working to shut the plant have acquired great momentum, like an ocean liner that won’t be turned around. I’ve attended meetings on Zoom of the citizens’ panel that is advising the utility on decommissioning the plant. We are at the “PSDAR stage,” i.e., discussion of the post-shutdown decommissioning activities report. I have to pinch myself when I hear plans to repurpose Diablo Cove in 2040 after the spent fuel rods and radioactive concrete are magically whisked away. A resort hotel is proposed . . . opportunities to rent kayaks . . . a “glamping” business. Yes, why not? No health concerns for families there!

When preparing this essay, I looked at the Wikipedia page for the Diablo Canyon Power Plant. It’s a journalistic no-no to rely on Wikipedia as a sole or even partial source. You must go to the citations at the bottom of the page, and determine if those sources are good, and review them for accuracy yourself. However, there was one citation I didn’t have to check because I had written it myself for Life magazine in 1979. My article was about Three Mile Island and the implications of the accident. I’d gone to the area of the plant with a Life photographer. Naturally, we did not get very close. The perimeter was off-limits. The photographer had to shoot pictures of the cooling towers from the misty-morning distance.

My mention of Diablo in the article was about the seismic risks and construction delays at the site. There was a possibility that Diablo would never open. Of course, I had no idea I would move to the coast of California in 1992 and would live near the plant for 30 years. Recently I looked again at Life’s spooky blue cover. I probably wrote the headline. It was: Judgment Day for Nuclear Power: Is public confidence gone forever? As a journalist, my finger was always on the pulse.

There was a time when the internet was seen as an unequivocal force for social good. It propelled progressive social movements from Black Lives Matter to the Arab Spring; it set information free and flew the flag of democracy worldwide. But today, democracy is in retreat and the internet’s role as driver is palpably clear. From fake news bots to misinformation to conspiracy theories, social media has commandeered mindsets, evoking the sense of a dark force that must be countered by authoritarian, top-down controls.

This paradox—that the internet is both savior and executioner of democracy—can be understood through the lenses of classical economics and cognitive science. In traditional markets, firms manufacture goods, such as cars or toasters, that satisfy consumers’ preferences. Markets on social media and the internet are radically different because the platforms exist to sell information about their users to advertisers, thus serving the needs of advertisers rather than consumers. On social media and parts of the internet, users “pay” for free services by relinquishing their data to unknown third parties who then expose them to ads targeting their preferences and personal attributes. In what Harvard social psychologist Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism,” the platforms are incentivized to align their interests with advertisers, often at the expense of users’ interests or even their well-being.

This economic model has driven online and social media platforms (however unwittingly) to exploit the cognitive limitations and vulnerabilities of their users. For instance, human attention has adapted to focus on cues that signal emotion or surprise. Paying attention to emotionally charged or surprising information makes sense in most social and uncertain environments and was critical within the close-knit groups in which early humans lived. In this way, information about the surrounding world and social partners could be quickly updated and acted on.

But when the interests of the platform do not align with the interests of the user, these strategies become maladaptive. Platforms know how to capitalize on this: To maximize advertising revenue, they present users with content that captures their attention and keeps them engaged. For example, YouTube’s recommendations amplify increasingly sensational content with the goal of keeping people’s eyes on the screen. A study by Mozilla researchers confirms that YouTube not only hosts but actively recommends videos that violate its own policies concerning political and medical misinformation, hate speech, and inappropriate content.

In the same vein, our attention online is more effectively captured by news that is either predominantly negative or awe inspiring. Misinformation is particularly likely to provoke outrage, and fake news headlines are designed to be substantially more negative than real news headlines. In pursuit of our attention, digital platforms have become paved with misinformation, particularly the kind that feeds outrage and anger. Following recent revelations by a whistle-blower, we now know that Facebook’s newsfeed curation algorithm gave content eliciting anger five times as much weight as content evoking happiness. (Presumably because of the revelations, the algorithm was changed.) We also know that political parties in Europe began running more negative ads because they were favored by Facebook’s algorithm.

Besides selecting information on the basis of its personalized relevance, algorithms can also filter out information considered harmful or illegal, for instance by automatically removing hate speech and violent content. But until recently, these algorithms went only so far. As Evelyn Douek, a senior research fellow at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, points out, before the pandemic, most platforms (including Facebook, Google, and Twitter) erred on the side of protecting free speech and rejected a role, as Mark Zuckerberg put it in a personal Facebook post, of being “arbiters of truth.” But during the pandemic, these same platforms took a more interventionist approach to false information and vowed to remove or limit COVID-19 misinformation and conspiracy theories. Here, too, the platforms relied on automated tools to remove content without human review.

Even though the majority of content decisions are done by algorithms, humans still design the rules the tools rely upon, and humans have to manage their ambiguities: Should algorithms remove false information about climate change, for instance, or just about COVID-19? This kind of content moderation inevitably means that human decision makers are weighing values. It requires balancing a defense of free speech and individual rights with safeguarding other interests of society, something social media companies have neither the mandate nor the competence to achieve.

None of this is transparent to consumers, because internet and social media platforms lack the basic signals that characterize conventional commercial transactions. When people buy a car, they know they are buying a car. If that car fails to meet their expectations, consumers have a clear signal of the damage done because they no longer have money in their pocket. When people use social media, by contrast, they are not always aware of being the passive subjects of commercial transactions between the platform and advertisers involving their own personal data. And if users experience has adverse consequences—such as increased stress or declining mental health—it is difficult to link those consequences to social media use. The link becomes even more difficult to establish when social media facilitates political extremism or polarization.

Users are also often unaware of how their newsfeed on social media is curated. Estimates of the share of users who do not know that algorithms shape their newsfeed range from 27 percent to 62 percent. Even people who are aware of algorithmic curation tend not to have an accurate understanding of what that involves. A Pew Research paper published in 2019 found that 74 percent of Americans did not know that Facebook maintained data about their interests and traits. At the same time, people tend to object to collection of sensitive information and data for the purposes of personalization and do not approve of personalized political campaigning.

They are often unaware that the information they consume and produce is curated by algorithms. And hardly anyone understands that algorithms will present them with information that is curated to provoke outrage or anger, attributes that fit hand in glove with political misinformation.

People cannot be held responsible for their lack of awareness. They were neither consulted on the design of online architectures nor considered as partners in the construction of the rules of online governance.

What can be done to shift this balance of power and to make the online world a better place?

Google executives have referred to the internet and its applications as “the world’s largest ungoverned space,” unbound by terrestrial laws. This view is no longer tenable. Most democratic governments now recognize the need to protect their citizens and democratic institutions online.

Protecting citizens from manipulation and misinformation, and protecting democracy itself, requires a redesign of the current online “attention economy” that has misaligned the interests of platforms and consumers. The redesign must restore the signals that are available to consumers and the public in conventional markets: users need to know what platforms do and what they know, and society must have the tools to judge whether platforms act fairly and in the public interest. Where necessary, regulation must ensure fairness.

Four basic steps are required:

• There must be greater transparency and more individual control of personal data. Transparency and control are not just lofty legal principles; they are also strongly held public values. European survey results suggest that nearly half of the public wants to take a more active role in controlling the use of personal information online. It follows that people need to be given more information about why they see specific ads or other content items. Full transparency about customization and targeting is particularly important because platforms can use personal data to infer attributes—for example, sexual orientation—that a person might never willingly reveal. Until recently, Facebook permitted advertisers to target consumers based on sensitive characteristics such as health, sexual orientation, or religious and political beliefs, a practice that may have jeopardized users’ lives in countries where homosexuality is illegal.

• Platforms must signal the quality of the information in a newsfeed so users can assess the risk of accessing it. A palette of such cues is available. “Endogenous” cues, based on the content itself, could alert us to emotionally charged words geared to provoke outrage. “Exogenous” cues, or commentary from objective sources, could shed light on contextual information: Does the material come from a trustworthy place? Who shared this content previously? Facebook’s own research, said Zuckerberg, showed that access to COVID-related misinformation could be cut by 95 percent by graying out content (and requiring a click to access) and by providing a warning label.

• The public should be alerted when political speech circulating on social media is part of an ad campaign. Democracy is based on a free marketplace of ideas in which political proposals can be scrutinized and rebutted by opponents; paid ads masquerading as independent opinions distort that marketplace. Facebook’s “ad library” is a first step toward a fix because, in principle, it permits the public to monitor political advertising. In practice, the library falls short in several important ways. It is incomplete, missing many clearly political ads. It also fails to provide enough information about how an ad targets recipients, thus preventing political opponents from issuing a rebuttal to the same audience. Finally, the ad library is well known among researchers and practitioners but not among the public at large.

• The public must know exactly how algorithms curate and rank information and then be given the opportunity to shape their own online environment. At present, the only public information about social media algorithms comes from whistle-blowers and from painstaking academic research. Independent agencies must be able to audit platform data and identify measures to remedy the spigot of misinformation. Outside audits would not only identify potential biases in algorithms but also help platforms maintain public trust by not seeking to control content themselves.

Several legislative proposals in Europe suggest a way forward, but it remains to be seen whether any of these laws will be passed. There is considerable public and political skepticism about regulations in general and about governments stepping in to regulate social media content in particular. This skepticism is at least partially justified because paternalistic interventions may, if done improperly, result in censorship. The Chinese government’s censorship of internet content is a case in point. During the pandemic, some authoritarian states, such as Egypt, introduced “fake news laws” to justify repressive policies, stifling opposition and further infringing on freedom of the press. In March 2022, the Russian parliament approved jail terms of up to 15 years for sharing “fake” (as in contradicting official government position) information about the war against Ukraine, causing many foreign and local journalists and news organizations to limit their coverage of the invasion or to withdraw from the country entirely.

In liberal democracies, regulations must not only be proportionate to the threat of harmful misinformation but also respectful of fundamental human rights. Fears of authoritarian government control must be weighed against the dangers of the status quo. It may feel patermalistic for a government to mandate that platform algorithms must not radicalize people into bubbles of extremism. But it’s also paternalistic for Facebook to weight anger-evoking content five times more than content that makes people happy, and it is far more paternalistic to do so in secret.

The best solution lies in shifting control of social media from unaccountable corporations to democratic agencies that operate openly, under public oversight. There’s no shortage of proposals for how this might work. For example, complaints from the public could be investigated. Settings could preserve user privacy instead of waiving it as the default.

In addition to guiding regulation, tools from the behavioral and cognitive sciences can help balance freedom and safety for the public good. One approach is to research the design of digital architectures that more effectively promote both accuracy and civility of online conversation. Another is to develop a digital literacy tool kit aimed at boosting users’ awareness and competence in navigating the challenges of online environments.

Achieving a more transparent and less manipulative media may well be the defining political battle of the 21st century.