Geopolitics of Electricity: Grids, Space and (political) Power

Although electricity grids shape and define both political and economic
spaces, the geopolitical significance of electricity remains underestimated.
In political communities and beyond, such grids establish new channels
for projecting geopolitical influence and new spheres of influence.
∎ In the Europe-Asia continental area, integrated electricity grids meet interconnectors – that is, cross-border transmission lines linking different electric grids. Interconnectors define new, partly competing vectors of integration that extend beyond already integrated electricity grids.
∎ In this context, it is attractive for non-EU states to belong to the electricity
system of continental Europe. This is because interconnected synchronous
systems form “grid communities” that share a “common destiny” – not
only in terms of electricity supply but also in terms of security and welfare.
∎ Germany and the EU must develop an electricity foreign policy in order
to optimise, modernise, strengthen and expand the European electricity
grid. Above all, however, Germany and the EU should help shape interconnectivity beyond the EU’s common integrated electricity grid.
∎ China is gaining considerable influence in the electricity sector, setting
standards and norms as well as expanding its strategic outreach – to the
benefit of its own economy. Its efforts are part of Beijing’s larger Belt and
Road Initiative (BRI), an attempt to reorient global infrastructure and
commercial flows.
∎ In the EU’s eastern neighbourhood, geopolitical issues have dominated
the configuration of electricity grids since the end of the Cold War. There
is unmistakable competition over integration between the EU and Russia.
∎ The eastern Mediterranean region, the Black Sea and Caspian Sea regions,
and Central Asia are, each in their own way, changing from peripheral
zones into interconnecting spaces. The EU, China, Russia and – across
the Black Sea – Iran and Turkey are competing in these zones to influence the reconfiguration of electricity grids. And in South and Southeast
Asia, India’s influence is on the rise

https://www.swp-berlin.org/publications/products/research_papers/2022RP06_GeopoliticsOfElectricity.pdf

#food_crisis #mitigation

Geothermal greenhouses offer alternative solution to food crisis, Turkey
https://www.thinkgeoenergy.com/geothermal-greenhouses-offer-alternative-solution-to-food-crisis-turkey/

#apocalypse #doomed

"It’s Biblical" — Climate Fueled Destruction Circles The Globe | CleanTechnica
https://cleantechnica.com/2021/08/02/its-biblical-climate-fueled-destruction-circles-the-globe/

West of the Mississippi we have droughts, fires and smoke, and east of the Mississippi there’s flooding,” Anne Golden, whose home was destroyed by the Bootleg Fire, told the New York Times. “It’s biblical. It just feels like the plague and everything else.”

In Colorado, mudslides set off by three days of heavy rainfall cascaded down a mountainside burned by the Grizzly Creek wildfire last year. The compound disaster blocked portions of I-70 with boulders and stranded motorists, including more than 100 forced to remain in their cars overnight.

International destruction

Wildfires, fueled by dry heat linked to climate change, are also raging around the Mediterranean including on the Italian peninsula and in Sicily. In Turkey, “The animals are on fire,” Kacarlar resident Muzeyyan Kacar told CNN; at least eight people have died in the more than 100 fires across the country. Wildfires and extreme heat also prompted closures and evacuations across Greece.

Farther East, at least seven people were killed in a landslide in northern India set off by heavy monsoon rains. “I am 58-years-old and I have never seen such a severe flood in my life,” Ved Prakash, a resident of Rajouri, told Reuters. “Welcome to global warming!” George Papabeis, a Greek-American tourist in Athens told Reuters

via tuho


https://diem25.org/have-new-policy-agenda-for-the-2020s/

In 2020 the EU officially endorsed a so-called ‘Green Deal’. Regrettably, it was endorsed “more in the breach than in the observance”: No real funding was ever put aside for this ‘Green Deal’ and, worse still, the EU continues to pursue the extraction and distribution of fossil fuels in a manner that increases geopolitical tensions.
In particular, plans to extract oil and gas in the Aegean Sea and the Eastern Mediterranean are causing geopolitical tensions that only benefit arms dealers and the financial vultures who profit from ‘securitising’ fossil fuels and gas pipelines and that will, most probably, not even see the light of day. They also fuel the pre-existing migration crisis by turning Turkey against the EU and vice versa.
The geopolitical tensions caused by the cynical hypocritical “Green Deal” of the EU are not limited to its southeastern borders. They are expanding to the northeast, where, for example, Germany and Russia are moving along the Nordstream2 pipeline, fostering dark business interests that boost both EU intra-European and international relations, increase the likelihood of military conflict and, in addition to environmental damage, costs to the people of the region.

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During the recent intensification of the global capitalist economic crisis due to Covid-19, the Eurozone suffered the largest decline in investment (50%), the largest flight of capital (€500 billion) and the largest increase in the “output gap” (i.e. the difference between the total product we could produce and that produced) relative to the US, China and the UK. Moreover, intra-European imbalances (which had already grown before and after the euro crisis) increased exponentially. However, the EU has administered the smallest fiscal stimulus in the strongest economic regions of the world and done the least to boost investment – relying almost exclusively on the so-called Recovery Fund, which is both macroeconomically insignificant and politically poisonous. As a result, the 2020s are projected to be Europe’s second lost decade in a row.
....
European Green Recovery & Investment Program: The European Council should give the green light to the European Investment Bank to issue annual bonds of 5% of EU GDP, which the ECB says it will “support” in secondary bond markets. These funds finance a new European institution, the European Green Transition Works Agency whose main purpose is to create the European Green Energy Union and the elaboration of the EU’s Green Transition in general.