Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century

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You may change or cancel your subscription or trial at any time online. Simply log into Settings & Account and select "Cancel" on the right-hand side. Three threads - Geo Politics around the world; Energy; Power of the Central Banks (U.S. Federal Reserve in particular) - are discussed in great detail with extraordinary insight. The biggest 'take-away' is that we've traditionally looked at each of these three threads - as separate 'silos' to be studied. Thompson makes the point that these three threads are interrelated - and should be thought of as impacting one another.

Century’s Global “Disorder”? | The Nation What Is Fueling Our Century’s Global “Disorder”? | The Nation

The year 2005 marked geopolitical turning points in the U.S., China, and Germany, among other nations. Thompson frames her analysis in terms of material drivers – control over money, credit, arms, fossil fuels and to a modest extent, the absence of control over the climate breakdown. In the foreground is coercive power, yet the roles of non-material drivers, norms and goals, go largely unmentioned. Neoliberalism, politico-cultural strivings, chauvinisms and other kind of idea-driven politics remain offstage. She trenchantly evaluates the roles of powerful institutions like the IMF and central banks at the behest of Western interests, but not the orthodoxies they insist upon. (Fortunately, however, she does footnote important books about those matters by Slobodian and by Tooze.) Yet while foregoing additional ways to fortify the arguments, her materialist / realist account remains compelling. I also think there are limits—bound up with the differing densities of energy sources and the present intermittency of energy supplied by solar and wind—that must be faced around the Net Zero project. I understand the argument for saying that we just need to be optimistic, because optimism is the necessary condition of technological innovation; indeed, I think in some respects that is right. But that optimism should be balanced by realism about energy and a consciousness of what this energy revolution actually entails. Otherwise, the politics of Net Zero will become dangerous because of the time scales: We can’t just pretend a future has arrived that hasn’t. We also need to reflect on what a politics that demands sacrifices in Western countries might look like and what that means in distributional terms, because who consumes how much energy in many ways defines inequality. Thompson notes the rise of Eurodollar markets to finance energy supplies, and the related breakdown of national control of monetary policies that allowed excessive borrowing to disturb financial markets. But, given that QE began as a Japanese policy in the 1990s to manage deflation, it is reasonable to think that the rise of QE policies in the West generally may be more complicated than simply an effect of speculative financial markets inflated by the energy sector.Future global geopolitics may not be as grimly repetitive or dystopianly restrictive as Thompson seems to suggest, if a core dynamic of global progress is the conflict between democratic and authoritarian impulses for governing, of which energy politics is a subset rather than the determinative factor. The good parts is that this book is extremely thorough and detailed analysis of these three areas, mostly in a way that is understandable to the non-specialist. Though only for the non-specialist who is interested in quite complex history and detail. I learnt a lot and for that I rate the book highly. But the most difficult sections deal with the Eurozone and the impact of its problematic construction on European unity, especially where Britain is concerned. She argues that ‘the Eurozone crisis set in motion the path [ sic] that led Britain out of the EU. Of course, the crisis did not determine Brexit.’ Well, I hear you ask, did it or didn’t it? Essentially her view is that it did. ‘The Eurozone crisis destabilized the relationship between the EU and the Eurozone, unravelling British membership of the EU.’ How so? Because the European Central Bank (ECB) chose to prioritise the fight against inflation, slowing the European recovery from the financial crisis, and increasing unemployment in the southern countries in particular. You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. A really excellent retelling of the modern political history of Western Europe and the US through the lens of energy. What Thompson does is not so much to introduce new stories, but to frame what you already know in a new and novel way.

Disorder by Helen Thompson | Waterstones

DSJ: Is it correct to assume that you believe the move to green energy will play the primary role in accelerating a cold war with China? However, Thompson is a realist: she notes in her concluding comments the emerging competition for advantage and dominance in renewables and new electrification technology, but argues that Net Zero ambitions currently are illusory, given the limited capacity of the technologies to generate substantial and continuous flows of energy from renewables and to electrify widespread industrial infrastructure powered by oil and gas. Thompson seems here to be echoing the substantial reservations about renewables discussed in recent books on climate politics by American environmentalist Michael Shellenberger, fossil fuel energy campaigner Alex Epstein, and others. That the latter parts of the 1980s and the 1990s were in good part intermissions from the intensity of these geopolitical and economic problems was largely the function of an energy interlude. Low oil prices, aided by the last years of China’s energy self-sufficiency, yielded low inflation and reasonably high growth. Soviet and then Russian weakness, as well as Washington’s ability first to use Iraq to contain Iran and then air power to police Iraq, allowed the United States to exercise power in the Middle East while fighting only one brief land war to free Kuwait. Separately, relative German economic weakness in the late 1990s and early 2000s meant that the euro’s early years were fairly conflict-free. There is a November 2022 interview on the Demand Side podcast where the author explains how the book gestated since 2018 especially its delay due to Covid-19. Thompson describes how she divided the book into geopolitics driven by energy supply particularly oil and gas and finance particularly the dismantlement of Bretton woods and democratic politics which cannot be separated from nation states.I read non-fiction because I want to learn something. A clear, concise, and convincing argument should be made. I want to walk away thinking, “yes — that makes sense”. In this absorbing and wide-ranging study Helen Thompson unravels the complex intersections of oil, money, and democracy for understanding the politics of the last century. She provides an indispensable and illuminating guide to our current predicaments.