2015 in Review

It was an “interesting” year, a year which clarified much.

Economically, this was a year of slow down and continued oil price collapse. China’s slow down is the core cause of all this, exacerbated by the insistence on austerity in Europe and to a lesser extent in the US. Many pretend austerity hasn’t been imposed in America, but it’s just been less austere than Europe.

Accelerating inequality has continued to undercut demand. There is too much investment supply in the world and too much money, though calling it investment supply is misleading; it is mostly money which seeks returns without wishing to create a new company, road, or product.

On the good side of the equation, renewable energy continues to drop in price, with coal now being underpriced by solar.  Battery prices are dropping and the process of moving from hydrocarbons to renewables continues. This is undercut by the collapse in hydrocarbon prices, but that will only slow it down.

The mass switch to renewables should have happened years, or rather, decades ago. It would have been more expensive then, but the mass market would have pushed prices down sooner and it would have been a far better way to spend money than on things like the Iraq war or Japan’s insane pouring of far more concrete than the Japanese islands could ever need.

Neo-liberal orthodoxy and the power of entrenched interests, however, would not allow for the massive subsidies necessary to make renewables and energy saving cheaper than hydrocarbons–indeed, subsidies flowed mostly to hydrocarbons.

The price of this will be some rather large number of people dead. I’m guessing the marginal cost is two billion dead or so. The Paris accords are all very nice, but they are too late and unenforced. The hothouse gasses in the air now are sufficient to release methane from northern Russia, the polar seas, and various other sources.

We are past the point of no return on this, and 2015 simply confirmed its inevitability.

A number of significant technologies are coming on line. Blockchains, electric cars, VR, and reusable rockets. Electric cars and reusable rockets should have happened ten and 15 years ago respectively, but were not allowed–until private companies manipulated the situation so the profits would go to themselves.

Hillary Clinton made an idiotic comment about a Manhattan Project on cryptography (the NSA already spends an inflation-adjusted Manhattan Project equivalent every 30 months.) But NASA should have been funded so that reusable rockets (an improvement on the Space Shuttle) were created long ago, and hybrid cars (really batteries) should have been being crashed as well.

While such cars would have had lower travel range than we’d have liked, subsidies and deliberate policies making sure that charging and battery exchange stations were built could have made them feasible far before now.

The majority of buildings in the US could have been made energy neutral using technology we had in the 1990s.

This may seem like a long diversion from “2015,” but the point is that, in 2015, stuff that should have happened long ago, that needed to happen long ago to stop catastrophe, finally began to happen in earnest–only because these enterprises are finally profitable for private companies. I’m glad Musk, et al. are creating reusable rockets and electric cars, but these things should have been happening ages ago.

And remember: What Musk and his competitors want is space mining, which they believe will create the world’s first trillionaire. Making space private property, primarily commercial, will make many of our problems far far worse than they could have been.

On the political side of the equation, 2015 was filled with frustration-borne changes. Syriza’s election fizzled into capitulation, in Canada the Liberals (who, despite great photo ops, look likely to govern largely from the center right) came into power based on an appetite for change. Trump took the lead in America’s Republican primaries, with Cruz and Carson coming on strong.  Bernie Sanders is challenging Clinton strongly from the left. In France, LePen had her best showing ever, though it was frustrated by an “Anyone But LePen” vote. Portugal had a strong showing of the left, and so did Spain.

And, very promising, Jeremy Corbyn stormed to the Labour leadership in England on a very left-wing platform.

These are, however, pre-revolutionary, pre-war developments. The old regime is failing, neo-liberalism’s double-down on austerity means that ordinary people are doing badly. The media has lost its stranglehold on the narrative and people are willing to take a run at anyone who looks like they can make the economy better. They do not care, particularly, if that person is left- or right-wing, they will try anyone who does not parse as part of the current regime. (Yes, Trump has money, but he doesn’t parse as a normal politician, at all.)

They will take the left, or they will take the right. In the 1930s, the US got FDR, but France, Italy, and Spain were not so lucky.  Whoever looks likely to “fix things” will get in eventually.

The European project took some hits in 2015 which may prove fatal. It is clear that the current regime in Brussls is anti-democratic and, more importantly, that they will not (and perhaps cannot) fix Europe’s economy. Even more importantly, it is becoming clear that it is impossible for most countries to have healthy economies within the EU and certainly not within the Euro; the policy flexibility, including monetary flexibility, needed is simply not available.

2015 was also the year that the West’s foreign policy failures came home to roost, with a huge influx of refugees into Europe, causing political chaos. This influx is minor in comparison to what Lebanon, Turkey, and other countries in the region have experienced, but a Europe in austerity does not want to absorb large numbers of refugees.

I have this written before, and I will say again: We are in a pre-war, pre-revolutionary period. Such periods can last a long time, sometimes decades, so this doesn’t mean “War and Revolution tomorrow,” but it does mean that the conditions are now in place. Ideological control, generally, and media control, specifically, are failing, repression is on the rise, the majority of economic gains are going to a handful of people, the majority of the population feels like they are losing economic ground and are willing to try new types of politics–including what amounts to fascism. The international regime is breaking country after country, destroying them physically, destroying their economies, and so on. Failed states are proliferating.

2015 confirmed this in spades. Every attempt to pull back from the brink (such as Syriza in Greece) was rebuffed.

So, repeated disasters have failed to change neo-liberal economic policy, and neo-conservative foreign policy; repeated warnings about climate change have led to an inadequate response, and 2015 confirms that we will continue to stumble towards multiple catastrophes.

The best hope resides in sensible parties on the left, by which I mean something quite different from what the media does.  Corbyn is not a radical. He is a 1960s liberal, a post-war liberal, with a side of environmental understanding and an appreciation for the harms inflicted by racism and sexism.

There are some more radical experiments being conducted being performed in small batches, around concepts like instituting basic incomes and changing how money is created. Those may lead to a more significant change of the political economy going forward and are what I would truly fear if I were an oligarch (money creation more than basic income–an improved dole doesn’t really threaten them.) We shouldn’t get too excited by this, yet. Canada performed an experiment in basic income in the 1970s, for example.

The real dangers in the world are increasing. For the first world, this doesn’t mean “Islamic Terrorism,” which has never been an existential threat; it means political and economic instability at home. The people one should fear most are almost always one’s own leaders, both political and economic, rather than foreigners, and this remains true.

I’ll write more about what the future holds, those shoots of hope that are visible, and what we can do about it in the New Year.  In the meantime, I hope my readers all had good 2015’s personally, and that 2016 showers you with prosperity, health, and happiness.

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