I am reminded of the story of the fat cat that I recently read in a Brothers Grimm collection. In case it is not familiar to you:
A cat and a mouse decide to team up and store up some surplus food for hard times. They agree during abundant times to both put a little extra fat into a shared pot. They then store the pot in a safe place. The cat, however, is overcome by hunger even in the abundant times. Every few weeks the cat sneaks to the pot and takes just a little bit, maybe just a few licks at a time. Over the course of a couple of years of sneaking and small stealing the cat manages to completely deplete the pot. Then hard times hit, as both expected. The cat and the mouse both go to the pot together to divide their savings. But when they lift the lid they both gasp in surprise that the pot is empty. The mouse slowly realizes what must have happened. The cat is guilty but won't stand being accused and so it turns on the mouse and eats it.
My whole life I had heard of the rich upper-classes described as "fat cats" but I didn't really understand the message until I read the story. From at least 2008 we were supposed to be saving for the next crisis. Yet here we are at the next crisis and low and behold the pot is empty.
The reason we fall for this over and over again is that the short-term memory of civilization is shorter than the cycles these things happen over.
I read something slightly different into your metaphor: it's about pro-social, positive sum games vs zero/negative sum games.
The mouse is participating in the positive sum game of joint savings, and the cat is robbing it blind (very negative sum as it's also robbing its future self).
There's a lot of that happening across society (healthcare, education, addiction-fueled tech companies, ...), and the people who do it oftentimes do end up (at least short term) better off (= rich), but we as a nation end up poorer (the whole negative sum thing).
There are however plenty of ways to become rich doing positive sum things (though lord knows it's harder than it looks), so there will be rich people who don't deserve the blame so to speak.
But the clearly visible, media-amplified cases will of course be cartoonish villains, all too eager to sell you the rope to hang them with so to speak.
It's not the budget. It's the hidden cuts to services, the declining maintenance to infrastructure, the privatization of essentials. Those are the licks they take from the pot, while they tell you the pot is still full.
"Brexit has delivered some deregulation, though: notably, the Conservative government ditched EU standards on effluent discharges, resulting in the (private) water companies discharging raw sewage into almost every river, and the seas around the UK coastline.
So it is no longer safe to swim in UK waters."
Holy crap!
"the Bank of England are forecasting 13% inflation towards the end of the year."
And we thought things were bad in the US.
This article sounds absolutely dire, can someone in the UK comment - are things really that bad there?
To answer such questions I always imagine transplanting a random citizen of country 1 to country 2 and vice versa. In other words, I guess you should ask the expats.
Having lived in both the UK and the US, I would say that anyone not rich is still much better off in the former because of the free healthcare, better infrastructure, cheaper education, etc.
However, in my experience the UK living standards (again, for a non-rich person) are significantly worse than the rest of Northwestern Europe. And the UK's trajectory is not looking good.
> is still much better off in the former because of the free healthcare
Is it? The NHS is completely useless since the pandemic for anything non-emergency (can't comment for emergencies). You go private or you go without.
Whether it's still cheaper than US, I don't know - US healthcare is priced to milk out as much cash as possible out of insurance policies, so I'm not sure what the true price is when you negotiate and are paying privately.
UK resident here. I am in a lucky position where the current hardships don't affect me financially. In the short-term, I can ignore the issue and pretend it doesn't exist. I wish it was only a short-term issue.
Long-term however, most of what attracted me to the UK in the first place died with the pandemic. The high street in most places is a shadow of its former self (replaced by money-laundering fronts masquerading as gift/American candy shops), work in tech is stuck in a weird hybrid state where it's neither fully remote nor on-site and is the worst of both worlds, wages haven't kept up with inflation while housing prices have skyrocketed, businesses are struggling and will struggle even more as people don't even have the money to pay their heating/energy bills, let alone for discretionary spending. The NHS is basically a write-off at this point and your only option is to go private.
Taxes on the other hand are still high. Now I don't know anybody who likes paying taxes, but it stings less when you feel like you get your money's worth out of them (in terms of infrastructure or services, such as the NHS) and the tax rate is adequately calibrated. However, the tax brackets have yet to adjust for inflation, so you must earn more (and thus pay more tax) even though your standard of living hasn't actually changed at all. Services that you used to be able to get for "free" (paid by your taxes) such as the NHS are no longer functional, so you must now effectively pay twice and go private instead.
Politically, there doesn't seem to be any urgency to fix the problem either, from any side of the political spectrum. I haven't paid attention to them too much here (I can't vote anyway), but the feeling I got was complete apathy from the ruling class. It always felt like a plane flying on autopilot with nobody at the controls - we happened to luck out for a while and prosper despite that but now we're approaching a mountain and it will be really bad if someone doesn't change course.
I have an EU passport, when my current lease expires I will be moving back to the EU and taking my business with me. At this point I am losing money by staying here, paying huge rents and taxes for sub-par value in return.
Taxes in the UK are not actually that high. I live in a Northern European country and my take home pay on the same salary in the UK would be 12% more a month, and even more if you take into account all the tax free savings options (there's none where I live). And my country doesn't even have that high taxes, take a look at how much you'd be paying in somewhere like Italy.
Plus the UK is a mini tax haven, being one of the best places in Europe for the self-employed.
> I am in a lucky position where the current hardships don't affect me financially.
Yet. But I'm not sure if that is something that has enough staying power to see you through to the end of this. Inflation is a fickle thing. So are bankruns.
It depends on who you ask. If you ask any british person who has been out of the country for a few years, yes, it's absolutely going down the pipes.
If you ask people who have lived there the whole time, they've been frog-boiled.
The truth is somewhere in the middle: the current malaise is a continuation of pre-existing trends. There were always holes in british roads, now there are just more of them. There were always food banks, now they just run out of food before they run out of hungry people.
I don’t think so —- it’s all a bit hyperbolic . Yeah tough times but most inflation forecasts have it going doing to near 0% by the end of 2023 — guy needs to breathe.
Are they the same inflation forecasts that last year said it was 'only transitory'? And that inflation would "peak at 5%"? We're now at 10.1%. Meanwhile the private sector (Citi Bank), who tend to know what's actually going on in comparison to the public sector because their responsibility is to investor's profits rather than catering to politics and public perception, have now got inflation hitting 18% in early 2023. I would love to see how you square going from 18% to 0% in the space of 9 months. Especially when energy bills are forecast to go over £5000 in January unless the government intervenes.
Pubs are warning of over 70% closure rates due to rising energy costs. 457,000 people are employed by pubs. If 70% of those jobs go that's 319,900 jobs lost, not to mention all the knock on effects. How many brewery jobs will be lost? Delivery jobs? Taxi driving jobs? How many communities will be damaged through losing one of the main socialising spaces? This is just one sector of the economy. Similar stories are being reported in restaurants, takeaways, manufacturing and retail.
On top of this we now have barristers, postal workers, railway staff, teachers, refuse collectors, journalists and hospital staff all on strike. More professions will likely be joining the list in the coming months. How is any of this hyperbolic?
There is a very real feeling that this is the calm before the storm and how it plays out is very much going to depend an awful lot on who gets elected next month and what they choose to do about the energy price rise in October.
That cannot possibly be the only thing it delivered. The likes of Farage have been working on this thing for decades. They must be getting a lot more it of it
As much as I want socialized medicine in the US, I worry when look at Britain and see how a wave of regressive politicians can damage carefully built government institutions so quickly
There's plenty but obviously someone who sums up leaving the EU as literally sewage isn't going to give you a straight story on anything. This piece is basically just yet more anti UK propaganda from the Remainer set who never accepted that they lost for good reasons and will continue telling everyone how horrible the UK is until they die. It's a genre, ignore it.
That inflation is mostly driven by energy costs, which are a direct result of European policy failures on nuclear and fossil fuels. The US is mostly a net neutral producer/consumer of fossil fuels and energy, which is why it's insulated from the impacts of Russia cutting off gas.
From an energy security standpoint being net neutral or better is good but is the US insulated from fossil fuel prices?
From a market perspective I would have thought a decrease in supply (say sanctions on Russian oil) would up the price of oil. This would effect domestic oil prices as well since either the domestic producers also participate globally or other sources of oil available domestically are also available globally (higher global price would decrease domestic supply and thus increase domestic price).
If domestic policies are put in place which limit access to the global market then that would change things.
Yup. A big thing in past decades was energy independence. The US actually achieved it but it didn't get the attention that griping about not having it got.
But where do you think it'll be in 10 years? Progress is being made towards renewable energy, people are taking trips by bicycle more, and although the change hasn't happened yet, public sentiment is that the NHS needs to be "fixed", whatever that may end up meaning.
I think Brexit has allowed a sort of nihilism to creep into U.K. politics. If you can live with a policy that has such a demonstrable adverse effect on the economy and so many other things then why worry about the impact of other policies.
The standard approach for the government now seems to be to look for short term wins in the tabloids and ignore the long term.
And this is on top of the huge distraction that Brexit has been.
Brexit caused an odd selection effect in the Tory party where sensible responsible politicians such as Ken Clarke and maybe Theresa May were pushed out for pointing out the problems with Brexit and replaced but more the irresponsible fibbing variety who were prepared to deny reality and say everything with hard brexit will be great such as Boris and his fellows. Not sure where this all goes next. Maybe to Starmer who at least is responsible but will have quite the mess to deal with.
* The 1800s of the USA were marked by a large, government program to invent pocket watches to solve the issue of trains crashing into each other.
* There were additional long-term government projects, such as ARPA's Network (aka: the internet).
* Strategic supercomputer initiatives as well.
* The debate over USA's social security is all measured in the year 2040 or later. People constantly use social security as an example of "short term thinking", but policies from the 1980s have been forward looking for at least the next 50 years.
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I dunno much about UK politics, but I imagine that similar forward looking projects and/or decisions / debates have occurred.
There's a useful distinction between lying and bullshitting: liers know what the truth is and want to convince you it's something else, bullshitters don't even care (or potentially, even know) what the truth is.
Governments often did things which failed and then tried to paint them as wins. They also often went for short term wins. But they were real wins (in the short term) even if they failed to get them. I think it's new to have a government run by someone so thoroughly a bullshitter that they don't care about the actual effect of their policies, just how the announcement makes them look. Because, fundamentally most politicians, that get to the top positions, actually want power and to do something with it, even if it's not something you'd agree with.
Governments are surely exactly the place most super-long-term projects have to happen (and typically have happened). It's pretty hard for a corporation to convince shareholders to invest in something that won't pay dividends for 15-20 years.
Religious organizations building cathedrals is probably a rare example of it happening below the state-level (it's hard to imagine without belief in higher powers or an afterlife etc. why many people would thoroughly commit themselves to a project they won't see completed in their lifetimes).
The approach now is to announce a non-feasible hard-right policy in the right wing tabloids, wait for The Guardian to react the next day, denounce that, then the day after forget the whole thing (like Liz Truss' civil service paycuts)
Some of England's problems are unique to them, but I think the reason those who voted for Brexit did so is that they felt the current deal wasn't working for them. Already, way back then, they weren't on a path to a bright future where there was a house of their own to live in, a job that was a good fit for them and society, a future to believe in.
I believe the same things that fueled Brexit persist as malaise today in England. In the US. Probably everywhere else where regulations allow unregulated profit to be squeezed from the less well off. Rent seeking cultures morally bankrupt and rot from the core.
This might sound like cheap shots, but I say it with love for my friends in the Uk...
If you look at Britain historically...coal is dead. Wool is dead. The island itself is fairly small for much agriculture. There aren't a whole lot of natural resources. They had power and resources through their empire, but that is gone. Their one shot, so to speak, was like many developed nations - services, including financial. But Brexit was signaling, and companies saw that there was little incentive to stay and do business there vs. Frankfurt, Zurich, New York, etc.
So... yeah, a lot of us pre-Brexit saw this malaise not only for what it was, but what it was going to become. It isn't a pretty picture and the utter void of competent political leadership means this is probably a protracted decline.
Sounds like the country is regressing to the mean then. Thanks to the empire they are used to being on top of the world, but all their advantages are gone now except for the tax havens and an old cultural narrative that the British are inherently better than everybody else.
Their financial empire still remains strong, as a conduit or storage tank for illicit flows from corrupt countries worldwide (a kind of Switzerland with a large population and areas for investment).
It's a bit like blaming the Democrats for the political crisis in the US but I have to ask "what the hell is wrong with Labor?" The Tories have dominated politics in the UK since the later 1970s except for the Blair administration, and Blair was an honorary Tory.
There's something wild going on there, too. Leaked documents have shown how their best chance at real Labour-style governance (Corbyn) was intentionally smeared from within as an antisemite, among other things, in order to torpedo his popularity. Instead, Labour has the hugely ineffectual Tory-esque Keir Starmer now. Feels very much like a managed opposition.
Corbyn seems to have done a fine enough job smearing himself over his long and illustrious career of far-left populism and terrorism apologia. His campaign signed up a lot of fly-by-night party members and was successful in getting him elected party leader, but convincing the general public was far more difficult.
(Part of the answer to why Labour has been out of power for 13 years is the Corbyn disaster, it explains half of that time span).
Sounds very similar to this, from the original author, in the comments:
The situation is not irretrievable in theory, at this point.
The problem is that in practice a solution requires the political elite to collectively admit the falsehood of the axioms they built their entire careers on.
If an individual political leader defects from the nationalist-neoliberal consensus, then they get treated exactly the way Jeremy Corbyn was. Corbyn was a soft-brexiter -- his distrust of the EU was based on it having emerged from the EEC, as a capitalist institution: what they hated him for was for being an unreconstructed hang-over from the 1970s when Labour was actually a left-wing party.
Neoliberal politicians can't admit that the crisis is rooted in neoliberal policies.
Tories have done well to court the people that show up at the polls with things like keeping the Triple-Lock pension guarantee[1].
Like the Democrats, Labour's demographics have started to shift more to the well-educated (though I suspect this will swing back massively, come the next election). This alienated their traditional working class base who care more about their own economic realities than whatever social crusade is the flavour of the week.
Young Labour went out of their way to paint pro-Brexiters as racists and bigots. The dirty secret is that even Corbyn has been a long time Euro-sceptic. Because of the in-fighting on the correct position, Labour didn't take a hard stance on Brexit until very close to the end, IIRC. At which point, anti-Brexit votes were being siphoned off by the Liberal Democrats, with pro-Brexit votes going to the Tories.
>Young Labour went out of their way to paint pro-Brexiters as racists and bigots. The dirty secret is that even Corbyn has been a long time Euro-sceptic.
I'm pretty sure that a reason Labour did much better than expected in the 2017 general election is that Brexit voters suspected that Corbyn had secretly voted for Leave.
But if an euro-sceptic like Corbyn (distrust of the EEC more than the EU idea) was in power to negociate brexit, i'm pretty sure the negotiations would've gone better. I don't believe the EU technocrats would've sabotaged him, they care much more about being right than supporting their political side somehow (worked with them two years ago on a project, it was enlightening, made me appreciate technocrats much more than politicians)
What’s remarkable is that everyone recognizes that “the disagreements over solutions have become” “intractable” but thinks the solution is to handle more things at the federal/EU/UN level.
There is nothing remarkable about that. Large problems require large entities to solve them, the kind of hole a country or state can dig itself into requires the next level up to dig it out again.
This is precisely why problems that affect the whole world are so hard to solve: we are not that well organized at that level, there are no sanctions for bad actors that are effective and with veto power and various power blocks not in alignment with each other the stage is set for a lot of misery.
It's not like we can appeal to the union of planets to bail us out.
Close cooperation has many benefits and the further dissection of nations has significant costs. I don’t think it’s surprising people aren’t rushing toward what comes next.
Because breaking up countries, let alone over fuzzy ethnic lines, is seldom a peaceful process that leads to prosperous smaller countries (over one's lifetime anyway). A most common outcome seems to be violence and war short-mid term followed by poverty and corruption long term.
Or an opportunity for a powerful figure to take power by force and rule over all.
I'm not for dictatorships, but we already have too many countries in the world. And provinces and states within these countries. Too many little fiefdoms. Too many wannabe lords. Too many presidents, premiers, prime ministers, governors, chancellors, kings, emperors. Too many parliaments, congresses, too many senators, deputies, representatives. Too much division. Hell, we're going to have American, Chinese, and European bases on the Moon and Mars. No wonder we can't tackle collective challenges. We'll be traveling through other galaxies and still call ourselves based on the particular piece of land we were born in on this particular planet called the Earth.
I fully acknowledge that this is a privileged point of view on my part. I am lucky enough to live in an industrialized and peaceful enough country to be able to hold this opinion without having to worry about my basic survival.
Was this translated from original Russian? Honestly, it really does sound like you're for dictatorships.
I think all that diversity - sure, even competing bases on the Moon - is the sign of a healthy society. Monoculture is much more perilous. Centralization gives you NASA, market chaos gives you SpaceX.
Good points from Stross in the comments: "The problem is that in practice a solution requires the political elite to collectively admit the falsehood of the axioms they built their entire careers on."
Europe has been in an energy war with Russia for the past year, we have a drought affecting hydro power and the French nuclear fleet is just out of service
The government action up to now has been almost nothing, basically amounting to announcing a few LNG import projects and updated 2030 targets. Nearly nothing has been done to the demand side nearly six months into this crisis
What needs to be done that can help 0-6 month time scale:
Gas supply
* Ramp up of Groningen (with payments to affected people living there)
Electricity generation
* Restart of all possible coal plants (only two have announced restart in Germany!)
* Removal of any restrictions limiting oil and diesel fired gensets from operating
* Extension of the three reactors in Germany, and likely also the three shut down reactors
Demand
* Have utility field forces inspect every gas boiler, starting with the vulnerable population, to set the correct flow temperature on condensing boilers (saves 5-10% !), check for easy fixes (e.g., leaky drafts that can be plugged)
* Mandate utilities to pay for avoided gas/electricity use for people on fixed retail tariffs - everyone need to be price responsive, not only large industrials
* Mandate commercial customers to raise AC setting to 25C
* Mandate everyone to lower thermostat to 18C
* Cash payments to households (at least vulnerable customers), but do not link it to the consumption levels and do not lower the price indirectly by other means (e.g., VAT reduction)
This will also require that permits, supply chains, labor etc. get fixed. Apparently that's stopping some of the coal restarts in Germany. That would not be a restriction if this was a shooting war...
> * Restart of all possible coal plants (only two have announced restart in Germany!)
> * Removal of any restrictions limiting oil and diesel fired gensets from operating
are really bad ideas. The current crisis is nothing compared to the looming climate crisis. What we need is a hard sustained break in energy consumption. We can have a good quality of life with a lot less energy, if we stop wasting so many resources on things that don't matter or are not required. We should buy (and produce) less non-essentials and travel should be limited to things that really require physical presence. Home office should be offered whenever possible.
Yeah, it's all fairly bad, but then I'm not sure where I would move to.
US seems bonkers in its own way, Germany is buckling under the gas crisis, France... lovely place but i can't understand how it stays afloat. Poland is just about in free fall. Italy and Spain seem (?) perpetually in the grip of a political crisis. Other countries i know less about.
Isn't it just temporary due to the heatwave? Thus they'll be able to power them back on as winter hits (which coincides with extra demand for heating)?
Readit News
A cat and a mouse decide to team up and store up some surplus food for hard times. They agree during abundant times to both put a little extra fat into a shared pot. They then store the pot in a safe place. The cat, however, is overcome by hunger even in the abundant times. Every few weeks the cat sneaks to the pot and takes just a little bit, maybe just a few licks at a time. Over the course of a couple of years of sneaking and small stealing the cat manages to completely deplete the pot. Then hard times hit, as both expected. The cat and the mouse both go to the pot together to divide their savings. But when they lift the lid they both gasp in surprise that the pot is empty. The mouse slowly realizes what must have happened. The cat is guilty but won't stand being accused and so it turns on the mouse and eats it.
My whole life I had heard of the rich upper-classes described as "fat cats" but I didn't really understand the message until I read the story. From at least 2008 we were supposed to be saving for the next crisis. Yet here we are at the next crisis and low and behold the pot is empty.
The reason we fall for this over and over again is that the short-term memory of civilization is shorter than the cycles these things happen over.
The mouse is participating in the positive sum game of joint savings, and the cat is robbing it blind (very negative sum as it's also robbing its future self).
There's a lot of that happening across society (healthcare, education, addiction-fueled tech companies, ...), and the people who do it oftentimes do end up (at least short term) better off (= rich), but we as a nation end up poorer (the whole negative sum thing).
There are however plenty of ways to become rich doing positive sum things (though lord knows it's harder than it looks), so there will be rich people who don't deserve the blame so to speak.
But the clearly visible, media-amplified cases will of course be cartoonish villains, all too eager to sell you the rope to hang them with so to speak.
I really like your metaphor, but it is misleading.
Dead Comment
Holy crap!
"the Bank of England are forecasting 13% inflation towards the end of the year."
And we thought things were bad in the US.
This article sounds absolutely dire, can someone in the UK comment - are things really that bad there?
Having lived in both the UK and the US, I would say that anyone not rich is still much better off in the former because of the free healthcare, better infrastructure, cheaper education, etc.
However, in my experience the UK living standards (again, for a non-rich person) are significantly worse than the rest of Northwestern Europe. And the UK's trajectory is not looking good.
Is it? The NHS is completely useless since the pandemic for anything non-emergency (can't comment for emergencies). You go private or you go without.
Whether it's still cheaper than US, I don't know - US healthcare is priced to milk out as much cash as possible out of insurance policies, so I'm not sure what the true price is when you negotiate and are paying privately.
UK resident here. I am in a lucky position where the current hardships don't affect me financially. In the short-term, I can ignore the issue and pretend it doesn't exist. I wish it was only a short-term issue.
Long-term however, most of what attracted me to the UK in the first place died with the pandemic. The high street in most places is a shadow of its former self (replaced by money-laundering fronts masquerading as gift/American candy shops), work in tech is stuck in a weird hybrid state where it's neither fully remote nor on-site and is the worst of both worlds, wages haven't kept up with inflation while housing prices have skyrocketed, businesses are struggling and will struggle even more as people don't even have the money to pay their heating/energy bills, let alone for discretionary spending. The NHS is basically a write-off at this point and your only option is to go private.
Taxes on the other hand are still high. Now I don't know anybody who likes paying taxes, but it stings less when you feel like you get your money's worth out of them (in terms of infrastructure or services, such as the NHS) and the tax rate is adequately calibrated. However, the tax brackets have yet to adjust for inflation, so you must earn more (and thus pay more tax) even though your standard of living hasn't actually changed at all. Services that you used to be able to get for "free" (paid by your taxes) such as the NHS are no longer functional, so you must now effectively pay twice and go private instead.
Politically, there doesn't seem to be any urgency to fix the problem either, from any side of the political spectrum. I haven't paid attention to them too much here (I can't vote anyway), but the feeling I got was complete apathy from the ruling class. It always felt like a plane flying on autopilot with nobody at the controls - we happened to luck out for a while and prosper despite that but now we're approaching a mountain and it will be really bad if someone doesn't change course.
I have an EU passport, when my current lease expires I will be moving back to the EU and taking my business with me. At this point I am losing money by staying here, paying huge rents and taxes for sub-par value in return.
Plus the UK is a mini tax haven, being one of the best places in Europe for the self-employed.
Yet. But I'm not sure if that is something that has enough staying power to see you through to the end of this. Inflation is a fickle thing. So are bankruns.
If you ask people who have lived there the whole time, they've been frog-boiled.
The truth is somewhere in the middle: the current malaise is a continuation of pre-existing trends. There were always holes in british roads, now there are just more of them. There were always food banks, now they just run out of food before they run out of hungry people.
Pubs are warning of over 70% closure rates due to rising energy costs. 457,000 people are employed by pubs. If 70% of those jobs go that's 319,900 jobs lost, not to mention all the knock on effects. How many brewery jobs will be lost? Delivery jobs? Taxi driving jobs? How many communities will be damaged through losing one of the main socialising spaces? This is just one sector of the economy. Similar stories are being reported in restaurants, takeaways, manufacturing and retail.
On top of this we now have barristers, postal workers, railway staff, teachers, refuse collectors, journalists and hospital staff all on strike. More professions will likely be joining the list in the coming months. How is any of this hyperbolic?
There is a very real feeling that this is the calm before the storm and how it plays out is very much going to depend an awful lot on who gets elected next month and what they choose to do about the energy price rise in October.
Sources: https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/markets/article-10645425...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12196322
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/aug/22/uk-inflatio...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-23/uk-had-ea...
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/aug/23/pubs-winter...
https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-62632167
That inflation is mostly driven by energy costs, which are a direct result of European policy failures on nuclear and fossil fuels. The US is mostly a net neutral producer/consumer of fossil fuels and energy, which is why it's insulated from the impacts of Russia cutting off gas.
From a market perspective I would have thought a decrease in supply (say sanctions on Russian oil) would up the price of oil. This would effect domestic oil prices as well since either the domestic producers also participate globally or other sources of oil available domestically are also available globally (higher global price would decrease domestic supply and thus increase domestic price).
If domestic policies are put in place which limit access to the global market then that would change things.
Dead Comment
The standard approach for the government now seems to be to look for short term wins in the tabloids and ignore the long term.
And this is on top of the huge distraction that Brexit has been.
Was this ever not the case?
* There were additional long-term government projects, such as ARPA's Network (aka: the internet).
* Strategic supercomputer initiatives as well.
* The debate over USA's social security is all measured in the year 2040 or later. People constantly use social security as an example of "short term thinking", but policies from the 1980s have been forward looking for at least the next 50 years.
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I dunno much about UK politics, but I imagine that similar forward looking projects and/or decisions / debates have occurred.
Governments often did things which failed and then tried to paint them as wins. They also often went for short term wins. But they were real wins (in the short term) even if they failed to get them. I think it's new to have a government run by someone so thoroughly a bullshitter that they don't care about the actual effect of their policies, just how the announcement makes them look. Because, fundamentally most politicians, that get to the top positions, actually want power and to do something with it, even if it's not something you'd agree with.
The approach now is to announce a non-feasible hard-right policy in the right wing tabloids, wait for The Guardian to react the next day, denounce that, then the day after forget the whole thing (like Liz Truss' civil service paycuts)
I believe the same things that fueled Brexit persist as malaise today in England. In the US. Probably everywhere else where regulations allow unregulated profit to be squeezed from the less well off. Rent seeking cultures morally bankrupt and rot from the core.
If you look at Britain historically...coal is dead. Wool is dead. The island itself is fairly small for much agriculture. There aren't a whole lot of natural resources. They had power and resources through their empire, but that is gone. Their one shot, so to speak, was like many developed nations - services, including financial. But Brexit was signaling, and companies saw that there was little incentive to stay and do business there vs. Frankfurt, Zurich, New York, etc.
So... yeah, a lot of us pre-Brexit saw this malaise not only for what it was, but what it was going to become. It isn't a pretty picture and the utter void of competent political leadership means this is probably a protracted decline.
(Part of the answer to why Labour has been out of power for 13 years is the Corbyn disaster, it explains half of that time span).
The situation is not irretrievable in theory, at this point.
The problem is that in practice a solution requires the political elite to collectively admit the falsehood of the axioms they built their entire careers on.
If an individual political leader defects from the nationalist-neoliberal consensus, then they get treated exactly the way Jeremy Corbyn was. Corbyn was a soft-brexiter -- his distrust of the EU was based on it having emerged from the EEC, as a capitalist institution: what they hated him for was for being an unreconstructed hang-over from the 1970s when Labour was actually a left-wing party.
Neoliberal politicians can't admit that the crisis is rooted in neoliberal policies.
Tories have done well to court the people that show up at the polls with things like keeping the Triple-Lock pension guarantee[1].
Like the Democrats, Labour's demographics have started to shift more to the well-educated (though I suspect this will swing back massively, come the next election). This alienated their traditional working class base who care more about their own economic realities than whatever social crusade is the flavour of the week.
Young Labour went out of their way to paint pro-Brexiters as racists and bigots. The dirty secret is that even Corbyn has been a long time Euro-sceptic. Because of the in-fighting on the correct position, Labour didn't take a hard stance on Brexit until very close to the end, IIRC. At which point, anti-Brexit votes were being siphoned off by the Liberal Democrats, with pro-Brexit votes going to the Tories.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Pension_(United_Kingdom)...
I'm pretty sure that a reason Labour did much better than expected in the 2017 general election is that Brexit voters suspected that Corbyn had secretly voted for Leave.
London has a Labor major and it is the economic Center, so maybe there was a lot of Labor influence on the economy after all?
Desperate balkanization coming for many, I think.
This is precisely why problems that affect the whole world are so hard to solve: we are not that well organized at that level, there are no sanctions for bad actors that are effective and with veto power and various power blocks not in alignment with each other the stage is set for a lot of misery.
It's not like we can appeal to the union of planets to bail us out.
Except for the accelerationists, of course.
I'm not for dictatorships, but we already have too many countries in the world. And provinces and states within these countries. Too many little fiefdoms. Too many wannabe lords. Too many presidents, premiers, prime ministers, governors, chancellors, kings, emperors. Too many parliaments, congresses, too many senators, deputies, representatives. Too much division. Hell, we're going to have American, Chinese, and European bases on the Moon and Mars. No wonder we can't tackle collective challenges. We'll be traveling through other galaxies and still call ourselves based on the particular piece of land we were born in on this particular planet called the Earth.
I fully acknowledge that this is a privileged point of view on my part. I am lucky enough to live in an industrialized and peaceful enough country to be able to hold this opinion without having to worry about my basic survival.
I think all that diversity - sure, even competing bases on the Moon - is the sign of a healthy society. Monoculture is much more perilous. Centralization gives you NASA, market chaos gives you SpaceX.
Counterpoint: no we won't lol.
Europe has been in an energy war with Russia for the past year, we have a drought affecting hydro power and the French nuclear fleet is just out of service
The government action up to now has been almost nothing, basically amounting to announcing a few LNG import projects and updated 2030 targets. Nearly nothing has been done to the demand side nearly six months into this crisis
What needs to be done that can help 0-6 month time scale:
Gas supply
* Ramp up of Groningen (with payments to affected people living there)
Electricity generation
* Restart of all possible coal plants (only two have announced restart in Germany!)
* Removal of any restrictions limiting oil and diesel fired gensets from operating
* Extension of the three reactors in Germany, and likely also the three shut down reactors
Demand
* Have utility field forces inspect every gas boiler, starting with the vulnerable population, to set the correct flow temperature on condensing boilers (saves 5-10% !), check for easy fixes (e.g., leaky drafts that can be plugged)
* Mandate utilities to pay for avoided gas/electricity use for people on fixed retail tariffs - everyone need to be price responsive, not only large industrials
* Mandate commercial customers to raise AC setting to 25C
* Mandate everyone to lower thermostat to 18C
* Cash payments to households (at least vulnerable customers), but do not link it to the consumption levels and do not lower the price indirectly by other means (e.g., VAT reduction)
This will also require that permits, supply chains, labor etc. get fixed. Apparently that's stopping some of the coal restarts in Germany. That would not be a restriction if this was a shooting war...
> * Restart of all possible coal plants (only two have announced restart in Germany!)
> * Removal of any restrictions limiting oil and diesel fired gensets from operating
are really bad ideas. The current crisis is nothing compared to the looming climate crisis. What we need is a hard sustained break in energy consumption. We can have a good quality of life with a lot less energy, if we stop wasting so many resources on things that don't matter or are not required. We should buy (and produce) less non-essentials and travel should be limited to things that really require physical presence. Home office should be offered whenever possible.
Sure, everyone is struggling but there are some unique twists and turns in the UK right now, and some have been made worse by own goals.
US seems bonkers in its own way, Germany is buckling under the gas crisis, France... lovely place but i can't understand how it stays afloat. Poland is just about in free fall. Italy and Spain seem (?) perpetually in the grip of a political crisis. Other countries i know less about.
Switzerland? Netherlands? Denmark?
Isn't it just temporary due to the heatwave? Thus they'll be able to power them back on as winter hits (which coincides with extra demand for heating)?
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/economy/article/2022/04/24/french-...
And I would add: a very large industrial effort to create heatpumps on such a scale that we can convert all of Europe in two years tops.