Consider the ostrich
Dollar dominance and energy dominance.
I’ve got a new piece out in Heatmap this week about what the looming repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act portends for the United States’ global position.
Shocker: It’s bad.
Everyone else covering the issue points out, correctly, that the IRA’s potential repeal amounts to abdicating any claim to global leadership over the energy transition, not to mention surrendering the clean technology race to China. I think it’s important to keep stressing these kinds of arguments when defending the IRA—even if they don’t succeed in moving votes. That’s where my piece starts, but it changes tack to focus instead on the dollar system. Even if the United States abandons the IRA, its extensive control over the arteries of global trade and finance constrains how other countries—even China—are able to pursue their decarbonization goals:
Just because the United States might be dropping out of the race for global decarbonization, however, does not mean that the rest of the world can choose to ignore the United States in return. The Trump administration can still play spoiler with every other country’s efforts to decarbonize ― even China’s ― for one overarching reason: the mighty dollar. The United States may be hemorrhaging the political capital that coordinating the energy transition requires, but it still controls the currency of decarbonization itself.
Consider the ostrich: Its head may be stuck in the sand, but its body is still blocking the damn path. Such is our geopolitical reality.1
Perhaps because I’m polycrisis-pilled, I’ve got a lot of faith in the durability and coercive power of the dollar financial system, for better and for worse. So I think it’s worth our time to understand that decarbonization, everywhere, is happening within a global macrofinancial architecture built on the backs of American consumers. Our wallets are the world’s liquidity. Maybe not forever, though.
You can read it here. (If you’d like a pdf copy, please get in touch!)
Thanks for reading.
One other thing: My Heatmap piece criticizes the idea that there’s any coherence to Trump’s “energy dominance” agenda. This isn’t an original argument by any means. But I have to keep stressing it. I’ll extend my own imagery of “energy dominance” being a smokescreen for the fossil fuel industry to say: This agenda will make you sick. It will make people you care about sick. It’s just one part of Republicans’ larger political program to abandon Americans, to abandon their neighbors and their communities—to abandon you!—in the face of economic and environmental precarity.
People on both sides of the aisle can highlight how hypocritical Trump’s actions are as long as they want. But it’s a fool’s errand to continue to take Trump, or his Republicans, seriously—as if invoking “energy dominance” will awaken the sleeper agents embedded in the Republican party who will substantiate Trump’s campaign promises with real, sensible policy. There are no sleeper agents; everyone is wide awake, and the anti-woke partisans are in charge.
There is a difference between, on the one hand, dealing with these partisans as a matter of course—they run the government—and, on the other hand, legitimizing their rhetoric, narratives, and how they think (or don’t) in the course of engaging with them. Know the difference. Don’t let the former become the latter.
Cool things I’ve read lately:
M Rajshekhar’s writing on decarbonization in the Global South (here and here) inspired a lot of my thinking in my Heatmap piece. He writes in Carbon Copy:
That old idea — of turning away from the West and rebuilding through trade with each other — is stirring again. This time, the trigger wasn’t colonialism, but Trump. … in this disruption lies possibility. Across Asia, Africa and Latin America, countries are beginning to look inward — and sideways — at their neighbours, wondering if this time, they can do what the Lagos Plan once set out to do: build resilience from within, and return to the global stage on more equal terms.
Dorothy Thompson’s “Who Goes Nazi”—from 1941—feels pretty chilling in the current moment:
Those who haven’t anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don’t—whether it is breeding, or happiness, or wisdom, or a code, however old-fashioned or however modern, go Nazi. It’s an amusing game. Try it at the next big party you go to.
B.D. McClay has a lovely piece on “AI and the individual talent” about writers’ relationship to their own writing and the works they draw on:
Yet putting me in touch with the past is precisely the thing that AI cannot do for me. … what makes human cognition possible is embodiment. That is, our ability to generalize, for instance, comes from the inefficiencies inherent to not being computers. Art could be the same way. Without human embodiment, AI may, in the end, produce only a series of parlor tricks.
Andrea Long Chu critiques Ocean Vuong’s latest book and the differences between prose and poetry in “The Romance of Being Unreadable”:
The author finally seems to have accepted that prose, unlike poetry, will wither and die without a reader who can actually understand it: At last, he is talking to us.
As someone who’s a big fan of one of the pieces Chu cites, Som-Mai Nguyen’s “Blunt-force ethnic credibility,” I think Chu builds creatively on Nguyen to discuss Vuong’s relationship with Vietnam and with his own writing.
I’ve been reading Karen Russell’s Orange World, and I recently finished “Tornado Auction” and “the Gondoliers.” I read “Black Corfu” last month. What amazing short stories!
I found myself with a copy of Zoe Thorogood’s It’s Lonely at the Centre of the Earth and, oh my gosh, it’s so beautifully drawn and pretty funny, too? I really enjoyed the art style and found it really engaging to read.
It might be hard to ostracize the United States, but you can certainly ostrichize it… Sorry.