How crises accelerate the process of decline
I’ve always encouraged my readers to take a broader look on the shape of things to come — and to look beyond well curated political narratives. What rarely fits into these stories, is the vital role energy plays in the economy and how its technically infeasible to replace one form of it with another at will. Political ambitions and cold war rhetoric aside, this predicament of irreplaceable resources alone can and most probably will change the existing world order — much sooner than expected.
What is currently going on in Ukraine is one of the worst possible ways to install this new world order: using brute military force (1). The world had already got enough to suffer from: relatives lost to Covid, power shortages, inflation and supply disruptions threatening livelihoods, climate change wreaking havoc on neighborhoods and habitats alike. War raises suffering to a whole new level for the parties involved, but also serves as an expensive distraction from all other things happening at the same time.
This war has a special significance though: it openly questions Europe’s (and in a wider sense the USA’s) hegemony over the continent, and attempts to impose a new (or rather, rebuild an old) world order in the most gruesome way. It does this on the basis of radical changes in energy and resource availability to the western part of the continent, and tries to leverage this imbalance to its favor.
It is a lose-lose game however. In a world after peak oil (which has happened silently, almost unnoticed in 2018 ) and with one of the top three oil producing countries of the world involved, it now has the potential to cause damage to the entire world economy…
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