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Peek Oil

We get glimpses of before-during-after all the time now; ‘news’ exists in a meta-only form, wherein we have to read many things at once to understand any one thing. Many lines are required to have enough to read between, natch.

One current example: There’s too much oil: winners and losers.

Okay, sure.

This year is set to culminate in the first major glut since 2020. The International Energy Agency forecast in November that global supply will outweigh demand by 2.4 million barrels a day, and expects the gap to expand to a record 4 million barrels a day next year.
Sustained lower prices will put pressure on governments and businesses that are dependent on oil revenue, while others stand to benefit.
Not sure what the N is on gluts since we launched this fine establishment, but many there have been. And winners and losers, sure. Quick story, but put this at the bottom:
Road transport is the biggest source of oil demand. Consumers are used to a certain amount of volatility in fuel prices, but a prolonged reduction could make them less inclined to switch to an electric vehicle. That said, in areas where there are high taxes on diesel and gasoline, such as Europe and California, there could be limited relief at the pump from lower oil prices.
The buildout of clean power sources is less likely to be impacted by a crude surplus. In most regions, other than places such as the Middle East, renewables are usually competing against coal and natural gas for utility-scale electricity generation rather than oil.
Just so. Now, couple that with the new Cop30 deal, like each prior deal always a crowd-displeaser. Big, air-tight solutions remain just out of reach to stave off the ravages of climate breakdown. Yes, but. Hints and allegations find their way into the language of the most earnest until they are just sitting right there:

Teresa Anderson, the global lead on climate justice at ActionAid International, said: “A lack of climate finance is throwing a spanner in the works of climate progress. Global south countries, [which] are already carrying the costs of the climate crisis they have not caused, desperately need support from rich countries if they are to take on any more commitments. Nowhere was this more stark than on the issue of fossil fuels, where specific text once again ended up unfunded and on the cutting-room floor.”

Nikki Reisch, from the Center for International Environmental Law, said: “This is an empty deal. Cop30 provides a stark reminder that the answers to the climate crisis do not lie inside the climate talks – they lie with the people and movements leading the way toward a just, equitable, fossil-free future.”

Okay, part the last, for now. What has been going on for a year now in the Republic of Georgia:

Some footage from today’s protest march. Georgian citizens are demanding that the parliamentary elections, allegedly rigged in 2024, be rerun and that all political prisoners be released.

#GeorgiaProtests
Day 369

[image or embed]

— Publika.ge (@publikage.bsky.social) December 1, 2025 at 1:36 PM

Bottom up. People and movements. There is no they.

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Chimurenga – who no know go know

Along with promoting some recent work, a new project is making clips from my Unscripted interviews available on social media. One of those we’ll get to eventually is with journalist and DJ Ntone Edjabe, founder and editor of Chimurenga, an innovative platform for free ideas and political reflection by Africans about Africa.

And this is one of the rare, correct uses of ‘innovative’ as an adjective. in newspaper form, the issues have a little of everything – poetry, photography, plays, terrific writing of all kinds and of course, news. However,  and I only started to understand this much later and not especially because of the times we are a’living in, Chimurenga’s journalism often presents news stories long after actual events. That is, rather than so-called breaking news – which honestly leaves us mostly flummoxed and discombobulated by its sheer volume (not to speak of those who work the sheer volume for their purposes, ahem) – Chimurenga presents news much later. Maybe more information has come available, maybe people still don’t understand a thing that happened… does this sound familiar?

It really changes the idea of news into information for action and understanding.

A sample of the excellent writing, in an article by saxophonist and composer Shabaka Hutchings:

In a lecture he gave on Afrofuturism, Kodwo Eshun used a phrase which resonated with me – “encoded language”. I believe there is an alternative vernacular present in both hip-hop and jazz which relates the two musics intrinsically, and which exists outside the orthodox analysis. This idea that music has layers of encoded information, passed down through generations, without explicit acknowledgement even from the participants, fascinates me. It speaks to the question of why certain elements of African musical stylings are propagated by the diaspora. Are there more stories within musical elements which survived the middle passage than we choose to admit? Are we in a position to grasp the meanings of these tales? Maybe the formulation of new myths is a valid way of approaching these questions, if only for the creative stimulus imagined answers can inspire.

Let us then try to explore the worlds of both jazz and hip-hop as vessels for an informational network outside the parameters of pre-packaged discourse. What happens when you take away the notion of harmonic movement in jazz as being central to its intrinsic meaning or the message the improvising soloist has to offer? What happens when you take the focus away from lyricism in hip-hop?

Yes, we could learn a thing or three – and wow do we need to. There’s so much more to all of this – and take that however you want. Chimurenga is supported by donations, if you are able. My interview with Edjabe is here.

Image: an issue of Chimurenga I keep in my office.

 

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Ruffling the kleptocracy

In other news – just started a subscription to the FT and wow, there ARE other stories out there. Boring, significant. Anyway, the U.S. is about to ban anonymous shell companies:

The Biden administration’s focus on corruption and money laundering may so far have attracted less notice than its other big policy decisions. But it is the most meaningful manifestation of the US president’s argument that making the economy work for ordinary Americans is intimately connected to US national security and foreign policy interests.

There are many reasons to cheer this turn in policy. First, it is an all-too-rare example of relative bipartisanship in a deeply polarised country. Days before the January 6 attack on the Capitol, the Corporate Transparency Act was passed by overwhelming majorities of the US Congress as part of the annual defence spending authorisation bill. This law will, when implemented, in effect ban anonymous shell companies in the US — a favoured conduit for the world’s corrupt to launder dirty money, as Yellen referred to in her remarks.

Second, the administration means it seriously. The Treasury has issued an implementation rule for the shell company ban. Too often, in the US or elsewhere, good laws on paper have been dead letters in practice, because of loopholes or a failure to put enough resources and political support behind enforcement. This time looks different.

So weird, and not to get/stay meta all the time, but this story even hits the mythical ‘bipartisan’ note somehow, and yet still never rises to the level of the local news. Sure, it was drowned out by a coup attempt, but as the article points out, corrupted government institutions are the very things that abet anti-democratic movements. So, striking back at corruption also strikes a blow in support of liberal democracy. Sounds so quaint, but that’s where we are.

Image: Nicobar spindle shell, typically not itself a threat to democracy.

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Faceback

Take the [please!] newest, most naive form of sharing personal news and information, let it be a for-profit business and just for kicks, make it the most profitable non-product the world has ever known. What would you get?

On the one hand, the company wants to curtail the spread of disinformation across its site. At the same time, it wants to avoid alienating the groups and candidates who depend on its platform for fund-raising and organizing. So in trying to find a way to please everyone on the issue, Facebook has managed to please no one.

The social network has now become an outlier in how freely it lets political candidates and elected officials advertise on its platform. While Mr. Zuckerberg declared last month that Facebook would not police political ads, Twitter said it would ban all such ads because of their negative impact on civic discourse. On Wednesday, Google said it would no longer allow political ads to be directed to specific audiences based on people’s public voter records or political affiliations.

Part of our own vulnerability rests within an inability to understand simple words like ‘sharing’, and reluctance to engage with non-simple contracts like the many we would rather click agree to and just get back to posting our favorite stuff. More on all of this soon, but we’re really staring into the abyss here without noting the swirl. We hear the sound, but not its signal; can do steps but are not invited to the dance.

Thumbs up!

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Climate news floods Florida

Even though the U.S. Department of Agriculture knows that without studies showing its dangers, climate change is not really happening, news outlets in Florida are banding together to talk about the weather:

Now six Florida news organizations — The Miami Herald, South Florida Sun Sentinel, Tampa Bay Times, Palm Beach Post, Orlando Sentinel, and WLRN — are forming a partnership to cover climate change stories together. They’ll start out by sharing content across their newsrooms, but over time are hoping to collaborate on reporting as well. The partnership may also expand to include universities and nonprofit newsrooms.

“We aim to be the ProPublica of environmental reporting for our state,” Nicholas Moschella, editor of The Palm Beach Post, said in a statement.

Many of the participating news organizations have worked together in some capacity in the past. The Miami Herald and WLRN have had an editorial partnership for 15 years and share newsrooms, for instance, and the Herald, WLRN, Sun Sentinel, and Post are already partners on The Invading Sea, an investigation into sea-level rise. “This is an opportunity to maximize our ability to cover the biggest story of our lives,” said Julie Anderson, executive editor of the Sun Sentinel and Orlando Sentinel, both Tribune papers.

Just for scale, the  U.S. is also surrounded on two sides by water and supposedly split down the middle by… indecision.

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X Marx the Spot

In the capital of capitalism, where capitalism is doing its greatest damage. You don’t have to be an American apostate to think this, just look around you.

Hunter-gatherers persisted in their way of life for thousands of years, slave cultures for almost as long and feudal societies for many centuries. In contrast, capitalism transforms everything it touches.

It’s not just brands that are constantly changing. Companies and industries are created and destroyed in an incessant stream of innovation, while human relationships are dissolved and reinvented in novel forms.

Capitalism has been described as a process of creative destruction, and no-one can deny that it has been prodigiously productive. Practically anyone who is alive in Britain today has a higher real income than they would have had if capitalism had never existed.

That’s from an article on Marx from the BBC, and that point would indeed be difficult to argue with. But of course, it’s not the end of the story – only an enticement to get you to embrace the system further, until the system begins to destroy everything that brought it about. Including democracy – it will have to kill that. In a capitalism vs. democracy cage match, doesn’t capitalism, to even be defined as true capitalism, doesn’t it have to win? What does this mean?