#39 | Frankly
Just Stop Oil!?: The Economic Foundation We Ignore
Description
This week’s Frankly is an episode from summer of 2023, which is being re-released to provide context for one of the most important questions we face today: what is the role of energy, specifically oil, in the global economic system we’ve built?
In this second part of a previous series on the channel – Just Stop Oil!? – Nate examines how and why energy is currently so deeply embedded in the foundations of our modern economy. He touches on the ecological and energetic laws that apply to all life, including humans and our economies, as well as the way accessing a huge surplus of dense carbon energy set us on the trajectory toward our current predicament. Building up from there, Nate looks at the relationship between energy and economic growth and why declining access to abundant, affordable energy will have implications that extend beyond the price at the gas pump. Overall this episode unpacks some of the systemic implications of an economy tethered to perpetual growth, particularly as the foundations that allowed for this system to emerge in the first place erode.
Why did fossil hydrocarbons become so embedded in our modern economic system? What happens to an economy built around exponential growth when the energy surplus that powers it begins to decline? And how much “choice” do we really have within a system shaped by such intense physical constraints?
Show Notes & Links to Learn More
Download transcriptThe TGS team puts together these brief references and show notes for the learning and convenience of our listeners. However, most of the points made in episodes hold more nuance than one link can address, and we encourage you to dig deeper into any of these topics and come to your own informed conclusions.
Grab-and-Go Resources:
Start here:
Foundations:
- Reality Blind Vol. 1 – Energy Part 4: Our Fossil Armies
- The Maximum Power Principle (The Bottleneck Reader)
Take action:
Resources by Timestamp:
00:39 – 2026 Strait of Hormuz crisis, Frankly on the Strait of Hormuz, Iran war
00:49 – Global oil stockpiles and storage at multi-year lows
01:19 – Charles Eisenstein
01:28 – Just Stop Oil !!?? Part 1 – Gasoline
01:33 – Just Stop Oil !!?? Part 4 – The Intersection
02:04 – Nora Bateson (The Great Simplification appearances), Emergence
02:19 – Serial refining of oil: Middle distillates, Bitumen, Bunker fuel, Petrochemical
02:44 – Ten pathways to post-growth economies
03:31 – Energetics of evolution
03:43 – Maximum power principle, Howard T. Odum, Fourth law of thermodynamics
04:05 – Leaves maximize sun exposure
04:36 – Kleiber’s law
04:50 – Allometric scaling of countries
05:14 – Energy blindness
05:30 – Energy and GDP coupling, Decoupling GDP growth from environmental impact, Scientists’ warning on affluence
05:50 – Power outages, Power outages and national economic growth
06:13 – Carbon Pulse
06:32 – Burning Buried Sunshine
06:39 – Anthony Barnosky, *Global mammal biomass has roughly tripled since 1850
06:58 – Livestock and humans as most of the mammal biomass increase
07:13 – Fossil labor: a barrel of oil replaces years of human work
07:38 – *~100 billion barrels of oil equivalent of primary energy per year, ~400 billion human worker equivalents
08:07 – Pikes Peak
08:31 – ~40 always-on devices in the average American home
08:50 – Fossil fuel primary energy consumption
09:16 – Heterodox economics, Solow residual
09:44 – Per capita fossil energy use vs. GDP per capita
10:02 – Energy density and transportability of crude oil
10:22 – Economic superorganism explained in 7 minutes
10:32 – Shareholder value, Share of primary energy from fossil fuels
10:44 – Metcalfe’s law, Energy cost of societal complexity, Nate and DJ’s book covering such
11:33 – Global shipping and air freight routes
11:54 – Dissipative structures
12:01 – Energy for transportation
12:29 – Debt-based money creation and the growth imperative
13:10 – Exergy (high-quality usable energy)
13:22 – Energy and materials sector taking a growing share of the economy, Ouroboros
13:34 – Jevons paradox
13:52 – Global energy intensity – 1990 versus 2021, Global primary energy consumption
14:04 – Wide-boundary perspective
14:22 – New York All-Electric Buildings Act, Internal combustion engine bans
14:38 – Electric vehicles as a systemic climate response, Leverage points: places to intervene in a system
15:07 – Peak oil
15:33 – Art Berman (The Great Simplification appearances), Rystad Energy, *Crude oil production peaked in 2018
15:44 – Natural gas plant liquids
15:57 – *[Update: world oil production set a new all-time high in July 2025]
16:04 – Declining net energy
16:18 – Financial claims outrunning the energy that backs them
16:31 – Nate’s essay: The World After Cheap Energy
17:02 – Power vs. energy, The Great Simplification Ep highlighting such, The efficiency paradox
17:46 – Self-driving cars, Dopamine, Time preference
18:34 – Trilemma between prosperity, inequality and the environment
18:49 – Net zero (Frankly #90), Global North to Global South wealth transfer
19:34 – Remaining carbon budget
20:06 – Antonio Guterres
20:44 – Carbon Majors emissions attribution
20:56 – Shareholders optimizing profits: Exxon, Google, General Electric, The Home Depot
21:14 – Nate’s Earth Day video on why fossil fuel companies are not to blame
21:22 – Fossil energy subsidies, *$7 trillion in 2022, 82% of it implicit subsidies, Art Berman on the subsidy numbers
21:47 – Consumption subsidies to households in oil-producing countries, Renewable energy subsidies
22:19 – Just Stop Oil, New UK oil and gas licences
22:50 – UK oil and gas production history
23:19 – UK investment lowest in the G7
23:35 – Joe Biden, Rishi Sunak, Willow project in Alaska, Rosebank oil field
23:55 – Printing money to buy energy: Japan and the European Union
24:08 – Energy and the Wealth of Nations
24:48 – Kevin Anderson
24:53 – Inequity of emissions between the Global North and Global South
25:27 – Degrowth
25:58 – Possible future shapes of the Carbon Pulse, Energy demand growth in India and Southeast Asia
26:23 – Thermal comfort
26:37 – Public support for sufficiency behaviours
26:52 – Paper wealth
27:40 – Social metabolism
28:05 – Russian invasion of Ukraine, Biophysical phase shift
28:17 – *Saudi Arabia, Russia and Iraq are the top three crude oil exporters
28:39 – Dollar hegemony, BRICS
29:14 – Agency
30:08 – Market fundamentalism
30:21 – Wile E. Coyote moment
30:26 – Downward causation
31:07 – The Great Simplification thesis
