DO WE MANAGE THE ECONOMIC CRISIS - or seek a permanent solution?

This is an important contribution. Protecting people with fuel subsidies is humane - BUT it will not solve the underlying problem of reliance on hydro-carbons. We have to tackle that.... 

'The account of seller’s inflation is a valuable contribution to understanding how concentrated capital transmits and amplifies upstream energy shocks. The proposed remedies are humane and, in the narrow sense, sensible. But they remain politically and thermodynamically inadequate to the scale of the challenge. They belong to a tradition that seeks to manage capitalism’s crises more fairly, not to reconstruct the energetic basis of social reproduction. Today, I suggest, that is not enough. We are not merely trying to get through another price spike. We are living through the exhaustion of a hydrocarbon-centred regime and the opening of a struggle over what comes next. In that setting, the priority should not be to subsidise fossil normality, even in softened form. It should be to use every available lever to hasten electrification, reduce hydrocarbon exposure and build a more resilient energetic order.

Politically humane crisis management is welcome, arguably necessary to alleviate short-term crises, but without thermoeconomic renewal it risks becoming a subsidy for energetic renewal inertia.'




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