Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century

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I always try to give books a fair shake, but sometimes, it’s just not meant to be, and unfortunately, this was one of those times. I started it with enthusiasm (yes, I’m a bit of a nerd when it comes to socio-political analyses), but ended up waving the white flag before reaching the end. 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. Geo Politics - much discussion about Europe - the difference between the European Union (a political alignment) - and the Euro Zone countries that have adopted the Euro as the currency. Thompson indicates that this will be an ongoing Economic Problem for this region - citing the difference between the Nationalist viewpoint and the European wide viewpoint on who pays what level of tax to whom.

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Margot Robbie stars as the eponymous fashion doll in this live-action adventure directed by Greta... The final section is in my opinion the weakest, because it simply isn’t that fresh. For anybody who listened to Thompson on Talking Politics for the last 5 years, you’ll recognise a lot of the points and even events brought up in this section on the problems of democracy in the 21st century. Where this sections brings together the previous threads of oil and finance, however, is where it really shines. Hive Store Ltd 2020. (hive.co.uk) is registered in England. Company number: 07300106. VAT number: 444950437. That said, this book was my introduction to geopolitics. A very compelling but tough read, frankly quite inaccessible at times, which I think could be remedied by some thorough editing. However, definitely still 4 stars, because I have seldomly read something so informative and (paradoxically) elucidating.

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Nonetheless, the move to green energy is very much a part of the present geopolitical competition between the United States and China. I think there is a fear in Washington that, in the same way the age of oil geopolitically belonged to the United States and to some degree the Soviet Union, the age of green energy will belong to China, not least because of China’s dominance in the metals on which non-carbon energy production depends. The tragedy of Europe’s post-2008 experience is that there was no such conflict. Until the war in Ukraine, inflation in Europe had consistently been slower than the central bank’s target, thanks in large part to economic weakness caused by the euro crisis itself. The German government may have been led by scolds who practiced “ pedagogical imperialism,” in the words of Der Spiegel, but ordinary Germans failed to benefit from its austerity. They may have done better than the millions of Spaniards who lost their jobs, but they nevertheless suffered from meager wage growth and degraded public services. 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? HT: I am not sure whether it is primary or not. There is a lot already in play, especially given the rise of China’s navy and high-tech manufacturing competition in defense areas. I also think fossil fuel energy questions have long caused tensions in the US-China relationship, especially on the Chinese side.

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and most recently the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where valuable Russian gas exports to Europe are vulnerable to transmission tariffs imposed by Ukraine on the pipelines that traverse it (and where Russia objects to Ukraine's efforts to deter Russian interference by applying to join the EU and NATO). In a search for a comprehensive explanation of the last decade’s disruption, this book starts from the premise that several histories are necessary to identify the causal forces at work and a conviction that these histories must overlap,” Thompson writes in her introduction. Following the defeat of the Nazis in 1945, the idea took hold that Austria had been the first casualty of Hitler’s aggression when in 1938 it was incorporated into the Third Reich.’This book appraises rising instability and fragility in domestic settings in the West and in the global political economy. It offers histories in three overlapping spheres – geopolitical (focused largely on fossil fuels); economic, with global finance in the foreground; and representative democratic politics, whose decay is hastened by forces at play in the first two spheres.

Disorder ebook by Helen Thompson - Rakuten Kobo Disorder ebook by Helen Thompson - Rakuten Kobo

Oil could cut both ways, however, and was influential in the collapse of the Soviet Union (as was the Chernobyl disaster, discussed in my review of Serhii Plokhy’s book Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy. ) The high oil prices of the 1970s incentivised production of oil and gas from the North Sea, as well as additional output in Alaska and Mexico, and this extra production capacity reduced the ability of Opec to control prices. So too did the creation of oil futures contracts on US exchanges, which gave the holders the right to buy oil at an agreed price in the future. Faced with this, Saudi Arabia led Opec in production cuts in an effort to retain control over prices, but as Saudi Arabia’s income began to fall, it reversed course, pumping up production to secure market share, leading to a price crash in 1986. This hugely diminished oil revenues for the Soviet Union, reducing its capacity to finance domestic spending, adding another destabilising factor that led to the dissolution of the Soviet project in 1991. Russia re-emerged to play the Soviet Union’s role in energy supply internationally, particularly to Europe, complicated by the fact that pipelines ran through former countries of the Soviet bloc, such as Ukraine and Poland. That story is of course very much active today. The book examines the global political economy with an emphasis on how dollar has become even more important in global transactions weakening American monetary power over America's domestic economy while magnifying the importance of its decisions on foreign nations which need prompt help in tough times which is not always forthcoming. I am not an economist so I am not really able to be super critical of her claims but they seemed reasonable and I found her arguments interesting, especially the critical role of eurodollar markets and the difficult strictures the eurozone is in. Digital Reads A Curse For True Love : the thrilling final book in the Once Upon a Broken Heart seriesHowever, 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. This is a vastly abbreviated summary of the highly complicated history of oil and geopolitics presented in the book. Missing here are the Syrian civil war, NATO actions in Libya in the 2010s, China’s rising demand for energy and the effects on international finance, the US shale revolution, Turkey’s increasingly militaristic claiming of oil and gas resources in the Eastern Mediterranean, amongst other things, but being more recent these might be more familiar to the reader.

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

The second reason is more powerful still. While on the surface it may seem that lower oil demand will ease competition over resources, new energy technologies require their own specific metal and minerals resources. Though there are overlaps, these are generally distributed differently to oil resources, adding further dynamics to energy geopolitics – China, a large energy importer in recent decades, has many of the minerals of the clean energy transition. “Geopolitically, an energy change will necessarily result in upheaval. If Britain was the power that climbed to dominance during the age of coal and the United States the power that ascended during the age of oil and coal, the spectre haunting Washington is that without a decisive American strategic turn to renewables and electrification, the new energy age that depends on metals and minerals will belong to China. For the EU, there is the hope that green energy will prove an escape from the world of oil and gas that through the twentieth century did so much to weaken the European powers.” Her choice of a tripartite structure for the book I did not like. Of the three, I found her approach towards the analysis of democracy to be the weakest when there are clearly better analytical structures than her chosen one. Although, it can simply be that this area has boundaries beyond which one courts the increasingly repressive forces that would endanger the ability to retain a place in mainstream academic discourse should they be crossed. The analysis of the role of energy was first rate, as well as that of the evolution of the monetary system. Likewise if and when there is another Energy transition - to renewables - the U.S. and China will contest for dominance in that age - Geo politics/alliances will change as appropriate.The past few decades have not been kind to the democracies of the North Atlantic. Deindustrialization, financial crises, mass unemployment, chaos in the Middle East, and rising inequality have shortened life expectancies, undermined social stability, and opened the door to demagogues and authoritarians. And that was before the pandemic killed tens of millions of people and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine displaced millions more and upended global commodity markets.