Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

The headline of this post is the title of a new book by David Buchan and Malcolm Keay. The subtitle is "Toward an Energy Union?". The general theme of the book is that the EU's reforms on energy related issues have so far been inadequate. They have been too optimistic about the consequences of market liberalization and have underestimated the costs that would be associated with cuts in emissions. The authors spend a fair amount of time on the issue of feed-in tariffs (FIT). These are the deals that member states are willing to offer alternative electricity generators, including for example homeowners who might simply have solar panels on their roof. The payments are determined by technology, and in essence by politics, so kilowatts are not treated as fungible. Though of course once it gets into the grid, a kilowatt is a kilowatt and is indifferent to where it came from. Feed-in tariffs have proven very popular. Every nation state that creates them finds that it ha...

I've been reading a book with the above title, including the punctuation mark as above. The book was written by a committee, the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection (MISTRA). Michael Ndletyana and David Maimela are credited as editors. MISTRA, I add (reading from the copy on the back cover) was "founded by a group of South Africans ... who saw the need to create a platform for engagement around strategic issues facing South Africa."  It is, in short, a think tank, launched in March 2011. MISTRA's definition of resource nationalism is a political drive to increase the extent and types of state intervention in the extractive sectors of the economy. Extraction means what it sounds like it means -- what happens when something is taken out of the ground. That something may be oil, coal, diamonds, etc. The  political drive in question is not necessarily limited to what happens in the capital city of the nation state where the resources to be extracted are...

I gather that one of the points, perhaps the point, of the common bumper-sticker four-word expression above is that one should neither think nor act nationally. Nation states are clumsy things, too large to be local (except in rare cases), yet too small and exclusive for their own self regard to constitute wise stewardship of the planet. Is that it? or am I missing something here? I haven't actually seen such a sticker on the roads in some time. Meanwhile the mass media is endlessly immersed in the ultimate exercise in thinking nationally: the US presidential election cycle. Most of us will spend a lot of hours thinking and talking about it, in some sense even being entertained by it, way in excess of any impact we could conceivably have on it. BTW, my new year's resolution this year is a simple one. Diet. Diet back down to 180 lbs. I've let myself slip up into the 190 neighborhood. This was facilitated by the usual holiday season self-stuffing practices and aggrava...

Without a lot of throat clearing, here are some thoughts. 1. In general, the causes of wars between nations states always involve competition for resources, and the breakdown of earlier means for mediating those conflicts non-violently. Look at it this way: A new war comes about at the end of a precious period of peace, or at least relative peace. Otherwise, it wouldn't be a new war at all, just a continuation of the everlasting one, right? Also, I think it safe to assume for simplicity's sake at least that resource conflicts are constant. Wants are infinite, resources are limited! So ... a war begins both because specific resource conflicts exist and because mediation mechanisms that until then had kept the peace have broken down. 2. In Europe, the First World War came about largely as a byproduct of the scramble for Africa. The major powers each wanted to gobble up large parts of Africa for their own use, for mining, for markets, for prestige, etc. This brought them ...