Re: <nettime> What is a global energy regime shift?

[Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.com>]

On 19.06.20 07:52, Brian Holmes wrote:
> And despite all the revulsion you may feel if you look into that website,
> isn't this direction a lot more viable than whatever the Trump/Brexit years
> have produced? How are we to stand with respect to this new wave?
> 
> Where does everybody see this thing going?

It's of course hard to say where all of this is going, but the
timing is certainly good because many pieces necessary for such a
transformation are in place. As far as I can tell, technologies for
clean energy have matured to the point where fossil fuels require
massive subsidies to remain competitive. The climate change movement,
particularly around Fridays for Future, made strong inroads into
the managerial class, whose kids were out demonstrating. This made
the issues much more concrete and personal than diagrams on climate
reports. The notion of climate justice is beginning to build bridges
between different social movements.

And, extreme weather has became so extreme as a day-to-day reality
that cognitive efforts required to ignore are sharply rising. Last but
not least, the covid-19 economic crisis shifted the conversation from
whether the state should intervene into the economy to how it should
be done.

In Europe, driven by Germany, this might lead to quite significant
changes in policy. It seems, the German government has learned some
lessons from the 2008 crises and is not calling for austerity at the
periphery, but for a massive investment program, that is at least
labelled as a green new deal. What surprises me the most is that there
is hardly any opposition inside Germany, which will have to shoulder
the bulk of the costs for this.

There is a race between restarting and transforming the economy. I
think structurally, changes are better in Europe (minus UK) than in
the rest of the world. Whether the political institutions here in
Europe have the will, capacity and power to grab the opportunity,
remains to be seen. But the fact that is has been identified and
articulated by core actors is reason for some optimism.




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