It Could Go Either Way

It looks like 2024 will be a pivotal year around the world. On his blog, author Charlie Stross points out that roughly half the world's population will be voting in elections this year, including the United States and the world's two largest Muslim countries. Given that there has been a world-wide trend to autocracy, there could be some bad consequences if that trend continues. 

Some of the potential outcomes are disastrous. A return to the White House by the tangerine shitgibbon would inevitably cut off all US assistance to Ukraine, and probably lead to a US withdrawl from NATO ... just as Russia is attempting to invade and conquer a nation in the process of trying to join both the EU and NATO. This would encourage Russia to follow through with attacks on the Baltic States (Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia), Finland, and finally Poland, all of which were part of the Russian empire either prior to 1917 or under Stalin and which Putinists see as their property. Having militarized the Russian economy, it's not clear what else Putin could do after occupying Ukraine: global demand for fossil fuels (his main export) is going to fall off a cliff over the next decade and the Russian economy is broken. Hitler's expansion after 1938 was driven by the essential failure of the German economy, leading him to embark on an asset-stripping spree: stealing Eastern Europe probably looks attractive from where the Russian dictator is sitting.

But as Charlie points out, there are also some encouraging trends.

Leaving aside the global fascist insurgency and the oil and climate wars, and it's worth noting that we are seeing exponential growth in the rate of photovoltaic capacity worldwide: each year this decade so far we've collectively installed 50% more PV panels than existed in the previous year. 50% annual compound growth in a new energy resource will rewrite the equations that underly economics in a very short period of time. The renewable energy sector now employs more people than fossil fuels, and the growth is still accelerating.

Whatever happens, the world will probably be a very different place in three or four years.  

Incidentally, Charlie's blog is one of the few exceptions to the rule about not reading the comments, especially since he is restricting discussion on this post to non-US politics.