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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:
2024-07
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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.

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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.

Eli S
>>80796360

I think that shortages of automobiles, airplanes not being able to refuel at some airports, and expensive petrol/gas are all pretty observable ways in which our lives have gotten worse. Now, there are other ways to deal with these things than your typical GND -- the Bunga interview about nuclear energy is just one. But the core point is: the cost of energy is a baseline cost of running an industrialized economy. The more expensive and volatile energy costs get, the stronger the structural pressure towards deindustrialization and sweating labor (remember, labor is just the metabolic energy of the human body turned towards social ends). The cheaper and more stable energy costs get, the greater the allowance for economic development built around political goals and expensive labor.

Eli S

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.