Rob’s comments are in italics.Derek’s comments are in normal font.
We're going to do a bit of a recap as we approach the end of January. We keep saying every week on the show, if you don't like what's going on this week, come back next week because the world might be different.
We were having a chat before the call, we established that I've been head down in my bunker, not paying attention to worldly goings on. So what should we be aware of?
Ceasefire In The Middle East
Well, in Israel, the Israelis and Hamas have signed a ceasefire. The Israeli cabinet has just had a meeting today after some shilly-shallying and agreed to it. So this does seem to be in place.
This is something that Donald Trump sent over an envoy to insist they go ahead with, which is interesting because Biden could have applied the same pressure at any time in the last year. He could stop sending them ammunition.
Anytime he wanted, a very quick phone call.
So we'll see how that works out.
The worry with Trump is that he might ramp up aggressions against Iran, just move the shift of focus somewhere else. All of this remains to be seen, doesn't it?
There is a lot of alarming talk about getting into a battle with Iran. With all of these things, you've got to take everything with a pinch of salt. Anything on the official news will be spun in the direction that people in charge want portrayed.
I get a distinct impression that Israel is punching above its weight with the number of different directions it's going in. They're not only attacking Gaza mercilessly but also the West Bank occupied territories.
They're moving into Syria as well as Lebanon. There's a lot of ambiguity because the other side of Syria, they've got Turkey, whilst Turkey's not really a friend of Israel. Then there's the issue between Turkey and the Kurds.
The Americans were supporting the Kurds. The whole thing doesn't appear to have a coherent strategy to me.
Bit opportunistic.
Yes, then there's this war in Ukraine. We've just had news today that Sunak has been to Kiev, announcing that we're friends of Ukraine. The UK is going to play its part. There's even an announcement that we'll be friends for 100 years.
Can you imagine if in 1920, anybody in any government anywhere in the world thought they could make commitments for 100 years' time where we've been now? That's ridiculous.
That's it.
The Russians are really calling the shots in Ukraine. This talk from some of our politicians about keeping the fighting going to be in a stronger position - the longer the fighting goes on, the weaker the Ukrainian government's position becomes. It's a war of attrition.
There appear to be many desertions in the Ukrainian army. I couldn't blame them if I were in that position. The Russians have got swarms of drones attacking NATO tanks used by the Ukrainian army.
They're destroying them left, right and centre, capturing larger amounts of territory every day. The only thing that really worries me is that it could spiral into a much wider conflict.
The potential for unintended consequences is always a risk, isn't it? I keep coming back to the fact that there was going to be a peace deal signed at the outbreak of this conflict. Boris Johnson went over on behalf of the NATO alliance and sabotaged that. Here we are with millions of deaths later that were avoidable.
The Russians are going to be demanding at least what they offered then.
Then, so what was the point?
Right, I was going to mention a couple of books I've read lately. One is called The Collapse of Globalism by John Walston Saul, a Canadian political commentator and journalist. The other is The Energy Imperative by Herman Scheer.
Herman Scheer was a social democrat, member of the German parliament, a big campaigner for renewable energy. That second book was published in 2010.
The Collapse of Globalism was originally published in 2005 with a second edition in 2009. You'll remember when we were talking the other week I mentioned the Empire of Illusions, that also was 2009.
The Collapse of Globalism?
Looking back on books about the state of the world from that time, 15-16 years ago, 20 years ago in the case of the first edition of The Collapse of Globalism - apart from an afterword he added, I don't know how much of the text was updated.
People were saying things which appear entirely sensible if anybody was saying them now. They were saying it then, to anybody who actually read this and reflected on it would make perfect sense at that time.
Here we are, we've drifted along. It seems like the entire world situation has been marking time or drifting sideways, not actually getting anywhere. The book on the collapse of globalism made a very interesting point.
It was just a throwaway line, but quite significant in the discussion. He said there's no reason why globalism in the sense of a unified view of the world should be collapsed with neoliberalism.
When people are talking about globalism, they've got in mind the international movement of capital. They've got in mind outsourcing to low labour, low regulation countries, manufacturing goods which are then consumed in the world.
The extortion, the extraction, the consumption.
It's an unworkable situation. If you go back to the 1950s and 1960s when the Western world was functioning pretty healthily, there was full employment. Due to union pressure, the labour force was being rewarded better than ever throughout history.
They were in a position to buy the output of all that industry. It was explicitly Henry Ford's agenda, at least publicly stated, that he intended to sell cars cheaply enough whilst paying assembly workers well enough to buy them.
That was happening through the 50s and 60s. Now, most drastically in America but also in this country, the entire manufacturing base has been hollowed out. We have to buy mostly from China, Vietnam and India.
Japan is now in the Western camp, suffering from the same things. With wages driven down in the United States and Britain, larger levels of unemployment in both countries, there isn't the buying power to purchase these things.
How many people who work for Tesla driving home in a Tesla that they own?
Very few I would imagine.
Essentially the argument of the book was that this was an unworkable situation. It had become contradictory, a classic reduction to absurdity. It couldn't go on much longer.
We're now 15-16 years ahead from when that second edition came out, 20 from when the first came out. The same international structures are still hanging on. That inevitable fracturing of it in some way is almost certain.
The End of the ‘Fossil Fuel’ Era
Returning to The Energy Imperative, the key argument is that, like it or not, we're getting to the end of the fossil fuel era. The sooner we wake up to that - he was saying this back in 2010. He died that year, the book came out posthumously.
People might not like the fact that the fossil fuel age is drawing to a close. We need to operate with reality, not wishful thinking. What's essential is that we harness currently available power from the sun.
We need to set things up so this provides all our energy needs. The energy arriving on earth from the sun is 20,000 times the amount that the entire human race currently consumes for everything.
We now have the technology to capture that in various ways. He was arguing very strongly for distributed energy production. If you look at poverty-stricken areas of Asia and Africa, there's no way we'll cover those with electrical distribution grids.
Feels like a key point, doesn't it?
Every house, every farm, every village could have its own generation capacities. There'd be no need for a grid.
The ultimate form of distributed energy creation like that is having a diesel generator in your backyard. We're not going to have the diesel generator, but you might have something on a more local level.
You could easily have each household with a methane digester. This would get rid of all food waste, gardening waste and sewage without causing downstream problems by pumping it into rivers and sea.
It would generate methane for cooking, domestic heating and electricity generation. A mix of those things is entirely feasible. Everywhere in the Western world we could probably have as comfortable a lifestyle on 50% of current energy consumption.
The inefficiencies in every direction are enormous. We've hinted at one of those in recent talks regarding built-in obsolescence and throwaway items, throwaway pens, throwaway lighters.
It's extraordinary how we've gradually over a few decades come to accept spending a pound on a lighter to get effectively a penny's worth of fuel refill, or spending a pound on a pen for a penny's worth of ink.
To play devil's advocate, if you're not replacing stuff as often then the profit incentive for manufacturers is going down. But I don't think that's unsurmountable. There can still be a profit incentive there of refilling pens or repairing washing machines. I think there's a workable solution. It just needs rethinking, reframing.
I often think of Alice in Wonderland where Alice is running with the Red Queen. She says we don't seem to be getting anywhere. The Red Queen says you have to run this fast to stay in the same place.
I don't know what Lewis Carroll had in mind for that metaphor. Maybe it was apparent to some people in the Victorian era that with all this machinery and industry, to keep the machine going, we were all working just as hard.
That's definitely the case now. It's within our capabilities that we could all work less, have more durable goods, have time for leisure and creativity, whatever other forms of self-expression.
Retain a Sense of Awe and Wonder!
I was saying to somebody the other day, things look pretty perilous. Even I sometimes get down at times. But when I look at how amazing the universe is, what an extraordinarily finely balanced system it is.
Even if this is one unique place where it's happening in the universe. When you look at the scale of stars, galaxies and solar systems, it's inconceivable there aren't myriads of planets with similar things happening.
The chances of any being close enough to visit or come visit us seem totally remote. The mere fact that this universe has created this thing, formed all these elements in the hearts of stars, distributed them as dust through interstellar space.
It's formed solar systems and planets out of that dust. Some planet like this one is just in the right place with the right conditions for life to develop. Once life gets started, it becomes more complex.
Eventually it gets to where we can have human beings with everything that humans have created. The technology is there waiting for us to discover, invent and utilize.
The two-edged sword is that it can be used for destructive and painful ends, or for benefit. It's inconceivable to me that you could have this amazing universe with that capacity, developed to this extreme state only to piss it up the wall.
Well, that's like what Solzhenitsyn said in the Gulag Archipelago, that the line of evil runs through the middle of every human heart. We're all capable of great things and terrible things. That's a fractal principle that extends up to society as a whole. I agree, it's worth maintaining a sense of awe and wonder.
It's easy to get wrapped up in the negativity of what's going on. We need to put as much energy as we can muster into thinking about what we want to create. What's the world that works that we want to create?
Any time from the end of the Second World War when people came out of that nightmare, we just had two nuclear bombs go off. People could see the dreadful potential of that.
From then onwards there have been people saying we need to stop doing it like this, this is silly. Silly is obviously an understatement for things happening in the world at the moment.
Silly is about as much as you can say. It's ridiculous that people could put that amount of energy and effort into perpetrating those things. It's ridiculous that a critical mass of the population hasn't grasped the gravity of the situation.
They haven't grasped the potential both for the downside and upside of what we have in front of us. It seems necessary to have this rammed in our faces to this degree for people to get the point. Who knows when enough people will get the point? Interesting times.
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