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/251/ Oil & Disorder, pt 2 ft. Helen Thompson (Patreon)

Published:
2022-03-29 07:01:04
Edited:
2022-04-05 11:01:33
Imported:
2026-06
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[Patreon Exclusive]

The second part of our discussion with Helen Thompson, including our After Party. Helen explains why she is sceptical about the promise of green energy and discusses how energy might tie into renewed efforts to build nations.

Readings:

Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century, Helen Thompson

Profits from fossil fuel energy power Russia's war machine, and Ukraine suffers, Helen Thompson, New Statesman

What Is Fueling Our Century’s Global “Disorder”?, Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, The Nation

How Did Europe Get Hooked On Russian Energy?, Paul J. Davies, Bloomberg

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Comments

Sam

How exactly are the lives of people in the West getting worse? And don’t say rising inequality - only bitter proletarianized professionals care about income inequality. People’s lives are not worse than they were 50 years ago. So many of these supposed problems are really just post-hoc statistical constructs invented by academics and/or government bureaucrats. The former need to publish and the latter need graphs to put on their powerpoints. Thompson’s analysis is at bottom just another exercise in Green eschatology. The end times cometh so quick fund my solar panel startup. The “Green New Deal” will never unite the country because it is first and foremost a political patronage program. The “climate crisis,” COVID-19 and January 6th - three jobs programs (for the green energy sector, healthcare/pharma and the intelligence community respectively) marketed as existential crises.

Davka Smolah Collective

I would firmly put the energy version of the end of the end of history in the George W. Bush era. I have a distinct memory of expensive gasoline and a spike of discourse about Peak Oil, right around the time the housing bubble was reaching its peak *and* oil had been made volatile by the invasion of Iraq and falling-apart of the Middle East. IMHO much of what we saw in the 2016-2020 period was a "return of the repressed" after the West basically tried to ignore those lessons of the mid-2000s or ideologize them away from 2008-2016. Or at least, from 2008-2016 governments seemed to treat the underlying economic problems as entirely financial, not material.