Syed, Sex, And The City – OpEd

 there’s no political economy without a libidinal economy 

Image: Grok

August 19, 2026

By Aditya Chaturvedi

Key Takeaways:

Ayatollah Khamenei was an early translator of Syed Qutb into Farsi; Qutb’s ideas, shaped by his critical 1950s experience in America, heavily influenced modern Islamist thought and the Iranian regime’s strict gender policies.

Qutb’s deepest dread was not Western technology or consumerism but the emerging sexual freedom and public display of women’s bodies, which he saw as a corrosive threat to Islamic society.

American cultural exports—especially the sexualized, libidinal aspects of pop culture and politics—continue to provoke strong global reactions, including Islamist backlash, while also shaping political spectacle worldwide.

While reading a Guardian profile of Ayatollah Khamenei by Jason Burke, I stumbled across something very interesting.

Ali Khameini, the former Iranian Supreme Leader, an avid reader of Victor Hugo and John Steinbeck, was also the first translator of Syed Qutb into Farsi.

“He met thinkers who sought to meld Marxism and Islamism to create new ideologies, and liked works describing the ‘westoxification’ of his country”, writes Burke.

Qutb, whose most famous ideological disciples include Abdullah Azzam, Al Zwahiri, and Osama Bin Laden, was a descendant of Indian migrants to Egypt. As an Arabic magazine editor, he supported the initial career of none other than the celebrated Egyptian writer and Nobel Laureate Nagib Mehfouz.

I remember reading about his two year stint in Greeley, Colorado, as a middling Egyptian education department bureaucrat, for the first time in Martin Amis’ four part essay post-9/11, ‘The Age of Horrorism’.

Not surprisingly, the Mahaguru of Jihadists also delved into the works of historians Oswald Spengler and Arnold J. Tonybee, whose main theme was the decline of western civilization.
Influenced in America

A Muslim Brotherhood leader, and one-time ally of Gamel Abdel Nassir, Syed Qutb was hanged in 1966 for a plot to assassinate the Egyptian leader. Over the years, the legion of his Islamist disciples would take his clarion call of Jihad against the West too seriously.

Just like Wang Huning, the Chinese communist party top leader who wrote a fierce polemic on America in the 90s – and following the long tradition of French writers, beginning with Alexis De Tocqueville, who wrote critical travelogues on America – Qutb wrote a short book titled ‘The America I Saw’ in 1950 (it’s available to download on the CIA website).

Qutb’s rambling obsessions ranged from Julius Evola style tirades against modernism, to empty spaces, to proclaiming America as a window to a pre-fabricated soulless future. But the primary fixation of this life-long celibate was American women and their conduct. There are prurient anecdotes ranging from a coquettish nurse to a drunk woman who almost fell over him at a university party.

What Qutb feared most was not the churches or evangelicals. They have been labelled as crowd gatherers and theatre managers. The nascent burgeoning of sexual freedom in America and its percolation across the nation was the biggest source of dread for him. This was the era when Betty Paige was the most popular pin-up girl, and the pill revolution was around ten years ahead.

The American essayist Mary Eberstadt has written a book Primal Screams where she blames the Sexual Revolution for the rise of identity politics and social fragmentation. In a somewhat similar fashion, the fear & loathing of Qutb and the first batch of Pan Islamists was not American pizzas, Coca-cola bottles, or canned sardines but the incipient sexualization of mass culture, and its wholesale export.

The modern Islamist fear and obsession with women’s attire and the imposition of black burkha, which translates into cordoning women from public spaces, dictating life choices, and routine misogyny, is also most vividly expressed by Syed Qutb.

“The American girl is well acquainted with her body’s seductive capacity. She knows it lies in the face, and in the expressive eyes, and thirsty lips. She knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, the shapely thighs, sleek legs, and she shows all this and does not hide it”, writes Qutb in his travelogue. Prima facie it reads like an excerpt from a pornographic magazine.

He further continues his lurid gazing, “She knows it lies in the clothes: in bright colours that awaken primal sensations, and in designs that reveal the temptations of the body – and in American girls these are sometimes live, screaming temptations”.

Martin Amis called Qutb’s book Milestones, the ‘Mein Kampf of Islamism’. The roots of the Iranian regime’s fixation with the mandatory Hijab in the face of severe protests trace all the way back to Qutb.

Instagram Reel Politics

Emily Ratkajowiski, the ‘My Body’ writer feminist model and performer, who got famous as a ‘sex symbol’ following the Robie Thickie song Blurred Lines, shared a pic with Zohran Mamdani, while wearing a T-shirt that reads ‘Hot Girls for Zohran’. She has over 30 million followers on Instagram, and goes without saying, from every corner of the globe.

America doesn’t just export weapons, technology, and dollars, it also exports the culture of narcissism, libidinal economy, and its political pathologies, anxieties, and indulgences. This is one reason why people globally take excessive interest in the US political theatre, or why Mamdani is global news.

The Hitchens dictum, which he borrowed from Trotsky, of America simultaneously being the most conservative as well as the most radicalizing influence on the whole world, is undeniable.

Allama Iqbal said about the Islamic state that politics & religion can never be separated, and if they are, the end result is barbarianism( Juda Hota hai Deen Siyasat se toh Rehjaati hai Changezi). Similarly, in the US, it’s money and the eros, the ultimate signal of power and glory.

Whether it’s the old hawk Henry Kissinger dating Hollywood actresses Jill St. John and Shirley McLaine (The Red Diary Vogue photoshoot fame), and pronouncing ‘Power is an aphrodisiac’, or Madonna titillating male Democrat voters, or the new space voyager Katy Perry telling to reward XXXX your partner if he does household chores in a podcast, glamour and sex are an integral part of US pop discourse. And whether in pop culture, or cinema, the contagion spreads.

Michael Clouscard, the French philosopher, wrote a book Le Capitalisme de la séduction in the 1970s which loosely translates into Seduction Capitalism. The book remains untranslated into English till date.

In an era of Influencer economy,the most sought after can certainly offer cues into the commodified mass culture of desire, longing, and the interplay of political and pop culture.

Jean Francois Lyotard’s provocative remark that there’s no political economy without a libidinal economy looks menacingly true for the world of today.

About Aditya Chaturvedi
Aditya Chaturvedi is a keen observer of geopolitics, with an avid interest in the intersection of society, politics, pop culture, technology, and history.
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WHATS THE POINT OF A REVOLUTION WITHOUT GENERAL COPULATION

MARAT SADE

 

The Next Energy Crisis Could Be a Water Crisis

By Leonard Hyman & William Tilles - Aug 17, 2026

• Water scarcity is becoming an energy-security threat, affecting hydropower, thermal plants, grids and rapidly growing AI data centers.
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• Markets alone may not solve the problem, as water is essential, politically sensitive and constrained by climate and infrastructure.
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• Water could become a defining commodity of the 21st century, as supplies remain constrained while energy and industrial demand rises.
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Strategic shortfalls? Maybe in getting cobalt out of the Congo or rare earth powders from China or natural gas from Russia or oil from the Persian Gulf? Or maybe something closer to home. Thanks to climate change (yes, just say it and hope the big boss doesn’t hear you), temperatures have risen, and rainfall patterns have changed dramatically. As an example of the consequences, the Colorado River’s flow has diminished and Lake Mead, its principal reservoir, has dropped to record low water levels. Aside from the obvious impact on water users in the Southwest, Hoover Dam, at the foot of Lake Mead, is a large power producer and one of its biggest customers is the giant Metropolitan Water District of California. ( In other words, the MWD stands to lose twice over: water and power).

European power producers have a different problem: not enough water in rivers to cool the power stations or carry fuel on barges. (Still another issue, if sea level rises, is the impact of that rise on coastal power stations. But that’s a little farther off.) And, in case you didn’t know, extremely hot weather affects the carrying capacity and operations of electricity transmission and distribution facilities. The big new electricity users, the AI centers, need water not only for their own operations but also for their power plants. Are we heading for markets in which power producers, power users, and everyone else will have to bid for a static or declining water supply? Power generation already accounts for roughly one third of water use in the USA. The Trump administration promotes still more water use by killing offshore wind projects (no freshwater needs) and encouraging, as replacements, nuclear and coal plants  (big water users) as well as downplaying efforts to clean up water supply (less pollution increases usable water supply). So, the government is not here to help you. Maybe Ronald Reagan was right

Do we need a coordinated effort to look at the two industries in a systemic manner, to encourage inter-industry planning to assure water supply to the energy sector or to assure that the energy sector does not mess up everyone else’s water supply?  Why not just let the market do it? Set prices and supply will come. The Field of Dreams approach. There are several reasons to think this will not work well:

• First, higher prices won’t increase precipitation where and when needed, although it might discourage consumption, while encouraging efforts to reduce water losses and to reuse water and making desalination more economical. All that will help, but only so much.

• Second, water is a necessity for the entire population, with no substitutes available, so raising prices or shifting resources to big users could produce damaging social consequences. Do politicians want their constituents to go without sufficient, affordable water?

• Third, for the market solution to work, to efficiently allocate resources, prices must reflect all the long term costs (on the books of account, socially and environmentally) of production and usage, which we doubt is the case now, and would require politically fraught price hikes.

• Fourth, the plethora of laws, jurisdictions and water suppliers with parochial interests will complicate and hinder any process of change. Nobody wants to give up long-held rights.

The electricity and water industries built their infrastructures around certain environmental assumptions that are no longer valid. They have not modified them sufficiently to take into account current and future conditions, in our view, from lack of money, or lack of urgency (the environment changed faster than expected) or ideological rigidity. Sooner or later, the chickens will come home to roost, but how soon?

We don’t see the Trump administration as bringing forth a coordinated approach to water or to the interaction of water and energy because that would involve admitting to the disruptive impact of climate change on both sectors. (The National Academies just removed a chapter on climate from its science manual for the courts. Apparently, the administration believes all that climate stuff is alarmist.) So, if you are in the energy sector (user or producer), just play it cautiously when planning for water supplies (don’t assume they will be there when you need them), expect political interference when the well runs dry, and don’t buy into those estimates based on 100-year average water conditions. You don’t need water issues to add to your problems. You will be busy enough dealing with those overheated, sagging transmission lines that traverse dry forests.

Let’s summarize the political and social issues this way:

A lot of people still haven’t made the connection that adequate supplies of electricity depend on adequate supplies of water. The present administration has no interest in pointing this out. There are really two separate themes here: the emerging environmental polycrisis (a water scarcity triggers electricity shortages in this case, or when the water gets too hot it won’t cool the plants, etc), and the second part is whether the pricing mechanism is even appropriate when there is no elasticity of demand. As we asked previously, what’s the appropriate price for electricity or heat when it’s the temperature hits 20 below zero, and your choice is to heat your house or literally freeze? As Herb Stein, the economist,  said “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” That’s the situation here. Across the political spectrum, people are angry about the extra pollution, rising prices, loss of water etc. We don’ know how this will manifest itself politically, but we have enormous faith that some enterprising politician somewhere will try to use this pent up anger to gain popularity. We seem to be speed-running the excesses of the Gilded Age. The political reaction, if any, remains to be seen. But it surely is coming.

As investors, rather than gloomy economic or environmental prognosticators, though, we would reiterate a conclusion we shared with you before. Water in absolutely essential commodity whose supply remains unchanged while demand for it rises. You can’t beat that combination. Water will be the essential commodity of the 21st century, long after we quit looking for lithium.

By Leonard Hyman and William Tilles for Oilprice.com

When the AI Bubble Bursts, Who Will Be Left Holding the Bag?

Eileen Appelbaum

 August 14, 2026

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Photo by Juan Pablo

A new paper making a stir in the financial press spells out the dangers to which private equity-owned life insurance companies are exposed by private credit funds with large portfolios of loans to software and AI companies. It’s a complicated story that could have enormous consequences.

Pranjal Drall and Andrew Granato, the report’s authors, argue that some of these insurance companies could become insolvent if these loans crash. And an unanticipated consequence of a 60-year-old rule that protects insurance company policy holders from losing all of their life insurance benefits or annuity payments could leave taxpayers holding the bag.

Let’s step back to understand some of the backstory. In 2022, I wrote about private equity firms gobbling up life insurance companies, and in 2026 about the risky, high-fee investments these companies were making with people’s life insurance and annuity premiums. Private equity firms are best known for the private equity (PE) buyout funds they sponsor. These funds buy up anything from doctor’s practices to single-family homes to youth sports leagues. PE funds use money committed by their investors as the down payment (the equity) on these acquisitions, and they use lots of debt to acquire companies in what are known as leveraged buyouts (LBOs).

As PE firms diversify their holdings, life and annuity insurance companies are an attractive target because they amass premium income, but may not need to pay out benefits for years or even decades. PE’s interest in owning life insurance companies emerged in earnest in 2009 following the Great Financial Crisis, and accelerated in the early 2020s.

While traditional insurance companies mostly invested premium income in corporate and Treasury bonds, PE firms count on earning high fees for managing risky investments made with these assets, and on profiting from the spread between what it owes policyholders and what its investments earn. There are no legal barriers to private equity-owned insurance companies using their assets to support struggling companies also owned by their PE owner, and no prohibition on selling poorly performing loans of a PE-owned company to an insurance company owned by the same PE firm. PE-owned life insurers also extract value by transferring assets and liabilities to a shadow reinsurer it owns or is affiliated with. This can reduce the insurance company’s tax liabilities, lower its capital requirements and hide the extent of the risk it is exposed to.

Private Credit Funds Make Big Bets on Software and Data Centers

Stricter financial regulations put in place following the Great Financial Crisis were intended to prevent similar catastrophes in the future. The regulations limited the amount of debt that regulated financial institutions could put on a company, crimping the ability of PE funds to use as much debt in LBOs as they wanted. Banks were restricted from making riskier loans, and this resulted in small- and medium-sized companies finding it difficult to get bank financing.  Immediately, private equity firms stepped into the breach and created private credit funds to make direct loans to companies frozen out of public financial markets  Private credit funds are sponsored by investment firms, including PE firms. They are not subject to the regulations intended to make the financial system safer. They operate in the shadows, making risky loans to companies, many of whom don’t qualify for bank loans. Today, private credit funds hold $3 trillion in largely unregulated, high risk, opaque loans — many made to companies owned by PE firms.

Private credit funds have been a hot investment for the last 16 or so years. These loans are not subject to the rules that govern corporate bonds. Because the loans are risky, lenders demand a premium and borrowers pay high interest rates — a profitable situation that rewards investors in these funds. The funds have bet big on software firms that create code and develop management tools that businesses subscribe to, providing them with multi-billion-dollar loans. The software tools manage various business operations — customer relationships, workflow and corporate spending — and are collectively known as Software as a Service (SaaS). Private credit funds are also behind the multi-billion-dollar loans to the huge data centers that AI firms are building to train their latest AI models.

Where do these billions of dollars come from? While there are multiple sources of funding for private credit funds — including investment banks like Goldman Sachs that are barred from making these loans directly, and pension funds looking for lucrative payoffs — private equity-owned insurance companies figure prominently as a source of capital for these funds. Investments in SaaS have been the bread and butter of private credit funds. The recurring income these companies generate from business subscribers have enabled them to make payments on their massive loans; default rates have been low.

But share prices of these software companies cratered in 2026 under pressure from Claude, AI company Anthropic’s code-writing frontier model and other similar models. As a whole, these AI tools are undermining the SaaS business model and challenging the “assumptions around software growth, pricing power and borrower durability.“ Investors in private credit funds worry that many of the SaaS companies will not be able to repay their loans.

Similar doubts are being raised about the construction of super expensive data centers that private credit funds are financing amid rising concerns about an AI bubble and anxiety about what will happen if the bubble bursts. Will many of the data centers become white elephants, deserted by the AI firms that planned to use them to develop new AI models? Will the return on investment in models trained in these expensive data centers justify business spending on these high-cost AI models? Will the much cheaper Chinese AI models out compete the US models and take market share away from American AI companies? These questions are raising doubts about whether all of these loans can be repaid. And if the loans can’t be repaid, what then?

Insurance Regulations Could Bail Out Risky PE Bets 

PE-owned life insurance companies will see their investments in private credit funds crushed, marked down substantially or even wiped out. Private credit default rates above 15 percent may lead some insurance companies to become insolvent and unable to make good on the life insurance payouts or annuity payments promised to beneficiaries.

At that point, state Insurance Commissioners will step in. Rules put in place decades ago to protect beneficiaries of insurance companies enable the commissioners to require the remaining life insurance companies in the state to pay into a special guaranty fund that will make good on the policies held by the beneficiaries of the defunct company, up to a cap of about $300,000 on life insurance and about $250,000 on an annuity. That varies by state. Insurance companies not affiliated with a PE firm and that didn’t make risky bets on private credit will be required to bail out the failed insurance companies that did. And the PE firm that owned the insolvent company will get off scot-free and not have to pay anything. That creates a moral hazard and seems to be a miscarriage of justice.

But the story doesn’t end there. In 44 states, these payments are fully creditable over five years against state taxes on premium income. That means that, ultimately, it is taxpayers in those states that provide the backstop when software and/or AI companies can’t repay their loans to private credit funds, and a private equity-owned insurance company that invested in private credit funds becomes insolvent. The result is, as the report’s authors point out, “a system that socializes losses.”

First published by CEPR.

One Disaster After Another: Global Warming is Global Warning

John K. White

 August 12, 2026

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Photograph Source: Frenchbluesman – CC BY 4.0

Have we become so desensitized to alarm from the many life-jarring troubles around the world that we can’t see the reality of human-induced global warming? The same way violence in film, television, and 24-7 streamed news has desensitized us to war and conflict, compartmentalized as something from afar. Not in my backyard. I can’t hear you. Well, the heat is here, whether we admit it or not, no more evident than this summer in Europe.

Spain, France, Portugal, Greece, Italy, and the UK have all suffered extreme heat events in 2026, breaking previous temperature records, while much of the northern hemisphere is undergoing increased hot and dry conditions, impacting agriculture and producing more fires. Record surface temperatures above 33 °C (91.4 F) in the Mediterranean Sea (warmer than the Gulf of Mexico) are also intensifying heat waves across Europe. The Romanian navy even blew up a large underwater rock in a controlled explosion to increase flow to the Old Danube river to provide more cooling to the Cernavodă nuclear power plant amid reduced electric grid output. Mitigation and adaptation may be all we have left.

In the 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore presented a series of climate disasters in seemingly off-the-radar, underdeveloped countries, but those same disasters are now occurring in developed countries as global temperatures rise and extreme events become more frequent, producing stronger storms, worsening drought that is devastating farms, and generating more virulent fires across wide swathes of land. Amid the worst-ever fire season this past July in Spain and France, former Australian fire and rescue commissioner Greg Mullins stated, “Countries that have always burnt are burning more and countries like the UK, Norway, Greenland that have never burnt are now burning.”

Spain was first to dominate the news cycle this summer as temperatures soared past 40 °C (104 °F) throughout much of the country, intensifying wildfires in Almería that killed 13 people unable to evacuate through instant walls of fire ignited in dried-out vegetation. Wildfires west of Madrid and in Ávila destroyed hundreds of thousands of hectares of land, while some are still burning. One Zaragoza city temperature sign showed 56 °C in direct sunlight and Sumacàrcer in Valencia registered a sensación térmica (feels like) over 60 °C. Increased “desertification” across the Iberian Peninsula is now a major concern.

Spain’s prime minister Pedro Sanchez called a climate emergency “to address the increasingly extreme impacts of climate change,” noting that “climate change denial is the worst fuel” as opposition leaders questioned the reality of human-induced global warming and extreme weather from the continued burning of fossil fuels. The politicization of climate stress is worsening, where ecology is blasted as a new kind of communism.

France especially suffered with 5,700 excess deaths in June, many in Paris among the elderly. In July, in the southwest of France, in the Gironde and Landes regions near Bordeaux, more than 250,000 people were evacuated and 240 homes destroyed amid horrific, out-of-control fires and record-breaking daily temperatures over 40 °C. As the fires threatened the city of Bordeaux, French authorities curtailed the final day of the Tour de France to provide more support.

Because of increased temperatures and longer summers, vegetation is becoming drier, creating more fires and drying out even more land in a horrific climate feedback. Apocalyptic scenes in the Gironde were described with 35-metre “Dantesque” flames as one resident who escaped the fire said, “It was like the end of the world.” Fifty firefighters were injured, while the world saw firsthand the effects of a new type of climate reality, the pirocumulonimbus or “fire cloud” that heats the air even more, spreading toxic ash as dry crisp vegetation is gobbled up. Lightning can also occur, threatening even more fires.

All of Wales was in drought after the driest July in 190 years as well as half of England, causing the natural environment to “deteriorate” and damaging agriculture and food supplies. The UK is undergoing a fifth summer heat wave as the countryside turns from green to brown. All 27 citiesmonitored by the Italian health ministry were under red alert as people were “advised to avoid sunlight, sweet carbonated drinks, coffee, and alcohol.”

Elsewhere, South Korea recorded the highest temperatures ever and issued an outdoor activity alert as temperatures passed 40 °C for five consecutive days. Hong Kong recorded its highest temperatures since 1884. This past year, wildfires began much sooner than usual in Canada, causing smoky skies across southern Ontario and parts of the United States, affecting FIFA World Cup matches and producing the world’s worst air quality in Toronto on July 15. This past week in British Columbia a state of emergency was declared. When does a local emergency become a global emergency?

Numerous regions have suffered unimaginable horrific scenes in the past few years, killing residents, destroying homes, and wiping out large parts of towns as yet another unprecedented fire is added to the record books: Fort McMurray, Alberta (2016), Lytton, British Columbia (2021), Jasper National Park in Alberta (2024). In 2009, 173 people died and thousands of homes were destroyed during Australia’s worst-ever “Black Summer” bushfires. In 2018 in Greece, 104 people died as fires approached Athens. In 2024, over 1,000 fires burnt in Portugal.

Today, BC and the northwest US are under constant threat. Few of us will forget the daily scenes in Los Angeles last year as over 18,000 homes and buildings were destroyed, aided by 100-mph hurricane-force Santa Ana winds. An independent wildfire map that uses data from NASA’s VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) shows over 27,000 current wildfires, almost 16,000 labelled as “critical.”

At the same time, oil companies are racking up record profits. The US president supports even more oil production, despite cartoonish comments by the oil industry’s number-1 lobbyist that oil companies are “making too much money,” showing that lawmakers are beholden to profits at all costs. The rah-rah war strategy in Iran that sustains $80/barrel oil prices is a boon to oil producers, including Chevron, ExxonMobil, and BP, shamelessly profiting from yet another war over oil to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. The Pentagon is the number-1 consumer of oil on the planet, costing billions of dollars annually and “a stunning volume of pollution.” War is now just another business. Eat, drink, and be merry, tomorrow will be even hotter.

It’s not like we didn’t know. Global warming was forecast as far back as the start of the Industrial Revolution. The French mathematician Joseph Fourier, the Anglo-Irish physicist John Tyndall, and the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius all did early work to establish the now well-known, heat-trapping properties of water vapor, carbon dioxide, and methane. Often overlooked, US scientist Eunice Foot was the first to posit that carbon dioxide could heat the air in her 1856 paper, “Circumstances Affecting the Heat of the Sun’s Rays.”

Popular Mechanics has published numerous articles on climate change, including Remarkable Weather of 1911 (1912), Is Our Climate Changing? (1930), Coal Dust Speeds Melting of Ice by Absorbing Sun’s Heat (1940), and What’s Happening to the Weather (1957). American geochemist Wally Broeker coined the term “global warming” in a 1975 Science paper, “Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?,” stating that “the exponential rise in the atmospheric carbon dioxide content will tend to become a significant factor and by early in the next century will have driven the mean planetary temperature beyond the limits experienced during the last 1,000 years.” We have long known the science and the consequences.

In his 2010 book Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, 350.org’s Bill McKibben wrote that “The planet on which our civilization evolved no longer exists. The stability that produced that civilization has vanished.” Citing numerous examples, including hotter air (holding more vapor), increased rainfall, more desert, more lightening, increased ocean heat (more hurricanes), higher acidic seas, more drought, dry rivers (e.g. Lake Mead), lost seafront, lower farm yields, disappearing glaciers, no more coral reefs (perhaps by 2050), and vanishing species, he noted that more of the earth is “now experiencing a tropical climate.”

And yet every year, greenhouse gases continue to rise, carbon dioxide now at 429.12 ppm and methane at 1937.59 ppb. With a world population of over 8 billion, double 50 years ago, growth-based consumerism is exacerbating a runaway crisis, aided and abetted by profiteering corporations and denialist governments. Rome is literally burning as we fiddle.

So what can we do? Better forest management, warning systems, and fire breaks are all needed. Upon visiting the fire-ravaged Gironde, French president Emanuel Macron compared the situation to World War II and vowed to “rebuild a different kind of forest.” One hopes that includes ending subsidized industrial biomass that falsely accounted for 10% of Europe’s “green” energy.

Citing the buildup to the 2024 Olympics, former Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo championed a progressive green strategy with more green spaces, cycle lanes, and electric buses (1,000 now and counting). Solar canopies that provide both power and shade are now mandatory for large French parking lots.

Less is more: oil, plastic, mindless consumption. But will any of it be enough as temperatures continue to rise? Oddly, the newly reformed Schuman Square outside the EU headquarters in Brussels is mostly concrete, called “Europe’s largest frying pan,”while a green canopy was shelved from the plans,

Increased green energy will help. More solar and wind power has been installed in the past two years than in the previous 20 years. We may see a green grid and 100% EVs by 2050. The exponential growth of cheap renewable energy (95% new energy installations) and the rise of electric vehicles (20% of new car sales) are displacing more fossil fuels year on year.

Each year, electric vehicles cut into the global oil supply. At the current rate of conversion, China’s public transportation will be 100% electric by 2035, displacing more than 1 million barrels of diesel fuel per day. The “inflection point” – the moment of price parity between gasmobiles and EVs – will signal the end, coming soon as battery prices continue to fall. With increased EV adoption, roadside pollution is also being reduced.

We have no choice but to change our ways, sooner than later as our climate worsens. We are already in crisis, never mind a limited petroleum supply that will eventually run out this century. Where once we could choose to change, change is now being forced upon us despite our unwillingness and a callous oil industry spurred on by compliant politicians. The heat is on. The disaster spectacle is real.

John K. White, a former lecturer in physics and education at University College Dublin and the University of Oviedo. He is the editor of the energy news service E21NS and author of The Truth About Energy: Our Fossil-Fuel Addiction and the Transition to Renewables (Cambridge University Press, 2024) and Do The Math!: On Growth, Greed, and Strategic Thinking (Sage, 2013). He can be reached at: johnkingstonwhite@gmail.com