How Energy Is The Economy

And how ‘The Economy’ lives and dies

Van Gogh’s ‘The Potato Eaters’. Van Gogh spent time with poor families in the coal-mining districts of Belgium. Here is a poor family gathered around a oil flame, eating potatoes. A picture of where we are.

As my homie B writes, energy is the economy. As Vaclav Smil says in Energy And Civilization, “Energy is the only universal currency: one of its many forms must be transformed to get anything done.” In that expansive book, he details the history of human civilization through the energy sources we use.

The sweat of our own brows, our beasts of burden, then finally the dug up lifeforms we lit on fire. In one way or another, energy must be expended to get anything done. The great golden god we call ‘The Economy’ is just the sum total of all this activity. It’s just energy expended in different forms.

In the 1970s oil prices crashed the whole global economy, and in the 2020s fossil fuel shocks are again shaking the world. Now as then, this is causing major damage to European economies and outright immiseration in the Global South. As much as economists talk about productivity gains and supply and demand, these are all just waves on the ocean. The economy as we know it is just ships made of coal floating on a sea of oil, with natural gas filling their sails. Should any of those elements fail, the whole thing just stops and people drown.

I’m from a country (Sri Lanka) where fossil fuel supplies almost completely stopped, and you don’t get it. Everything shuts down. No…