World
The Polycrisis is a newsletter and a series of essays and panels exploring intersecting crises with a particular emphasis on the political economy of climate change and global North/South dynamics.
It is edited by Tim Sahay and Kate Mackenzie.
Green Industrial Strategy
The scale and scope of Biden’s landmark climate investments
The Inflation Reduction Act is the most significant piece of climate legislation in US history. Alongside its three other major legislative achievements, the Biden administration has passed between $500 billion and $1.2 trillion worth of new climate spending, depending on…
A New Foreign Policy
To beat China you must become China
Leaders need followers. Last month, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan delivered a speech outlining the Biden administration’s international economic policy at the Brookings Institute in Washington. The “New Washington Consensus” was not directed at citizens but at capitals abroad.…
The End of the Cold Peace
Can the Asian growth miracle survive?
Watch the Korean Peninsula. It is in South Korea that the New Cold War has most visibly upset the delicate balance between industry, security, and domestic politics. South Korea’s growth miracle has been based on deterrence and detente between China,…
The Gigantic Austerity Drive Underway
Two billion people are suffering austerity as governments follow IMF diktat
We are quietly witnessing the largest shift to austerity undertaken in this century. Debt-strained developing countries are making further cuts to already ragged budgets, in many cases as they battle to meet punishing new conditions demanded by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which held…
Testing Loyalties
A year later, the Russia sanctions and an emerging geopolitical order
Pain and resolve: have we reached the beginning of the end of sanctions?
Mercantilist Deals of the Great Powers
Decoupling from China is an uphill task in both the global North and the global South
This is the twelfth edition of The Polycrisis newsletter, written by Kate Mackenzie and Tim Sahay. Subscribe here to get it in your inbox. The maiden flight of a new cargo route between Shenzhen and São Paulo took off on…
Stranded Countries and Stranded Assets
Outsourcing the energy transition to the Gulf
This is the eleventh edition of The Polycrisis newsletter, written by Kate Mackenzie and Tim Sahay. Subscribe here to get it in your inbox. The US routinely flouts its international climate financing commitments, rarely delivering on its promises. Last year, for example,…
Cash, Cars, Chemicals (and Corn)
Three big decarbonization plots
This is the tenth edition of The Polycrisis newsletter, written by Kate Mackenzie and Tim Sahay. Subscribe here to get it in your inbox. Decarbonization—reducing the output of invisible CO2 molecules into the atmosphere—requires nothing less than remaking the chemical basis of…
Debt and Power in Pakistan
The subcontinent’s embattled debtor isn’t merely the passive victim of the climate crisis— it is being plundered by its elites
The subcontinent’s embattled debtor isn’t merely the passive victim of the climate crisis—it is being plundered by its elites.
Securitizing the Transition
The logic of privatization in climate finance
In the eyes of the IMF, a G20 panel, and, lately, the US Treasury Secretary, the time has come for multilateral development banks to adapt their development mandates to the logic of derisking. This tactic—lauded as a solution for “mobilizing”…
The Carbon Triangle
China’s real estate bubble and global emissions
China has ended zero-Covid. The resultant viral tsunami is crashing through China’s cities and countryside, causing hundreds of millions of infections and untold numbers of deaths. The reversal followed widespread protests against lockdown measures. But the protests were not the…
The EU and the IRA
Supply and demand in the great powers’ decarbonization race
This is the eighth edition of The Polycrisis newsletter, written by Kate Mackenzie and Tim Sahay. Subscribe here to get it in your inbox. At Davos last month, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen announced Brussels’ “Green Deal Industrial…
Don’t Say “Scramble for Africa”
Debt and diplomacy on the African continent
Debt, diplomacy, and the risks of a new Cold War.
Militarized Adaptation
War, energy, and NATO’s new climate framework
This essay first appeared in GREEN, a journal from Groupe d’études géopolitiques. When NATO held its two-day summit in Madrid in June 2022, the Spanish government deployed ten thousand police officers to cordon off entire parts of the city, including…
The Dollar and Climate
How US dollar hegemony fuels the climate crisis
The climate crisis offers a new angle from which to evaluate US dollar hegemony, since carbon emissions are tied to economic activity.
Inflation and Energy
Can clean energy reduce inflationary pressures?
This is the sixth edition of The Polycrisis newsletter, written by Kate Mackenzie and Tim Sahay. Subscribe here to get it in your inbox. There has been little research into the inflationary implications of either climate change itself, or of responses to climate…
Emergency Prices
An interview with Isabella Weber
In How China Escaped Shock Therapy (2021), Isabella Weber analyzes how China applied market reforms selectively, avoiding the broad agenda of liberalization advocated for in the West. Retaining oversight of prices for critical goods was key to this strategy. Recently,…
Facts on the Ground
Uncertainty and information in the global energy system
Assessing the crisis The energy system that underpins contemporary life is marked with blindspots. Take the fossil fuel sector. Facing simultaneous existential and geopolitical vulnerability—due to Russia invading Ukraine, advances in renewable energy, and the climate imperative—there is profound uncertainty…
Europe’s “Leap Into the Future”
Do exceptional crisis-fighting policies signal the arrival of an interventionist Europe?
This is the fifth edition of The Polycrisis newsletter, written by Kate Mackenzie and Tim Sahay. Subscribe here to get it in your inbox. In 2020, as demand for liquefied natural gas boomed in Asia, the shippable fuel was an afterthought in…
Money and the Climate Crisis
COP27 and financing the green transition
The conclusion of COP27 reflected persisting uncertainties around coordinated global action towards decarbonization. Major agreements—including the establishment of a loss and damage fund—were reached, but the burden of mounting debt among global South countries continued to limit climate ambition. The…
Development Bank Self-Sabotage
What’s stopping MDBs?
This is the fourth edition of The Polycrisis newsletter, written by Kate Mackenzie and Tim Sahay. Subscribe here to get it in your inbox. When the World Bank and IMF make radical noises, the US is typically the voice of restraint. So…
Collective Action and Climate Finance
Can the COP move markets?
This is the third edition of The Polycrisis newsletter, written by Kate Mackenzie and Tim Sahay. Subscribe here to get it in your inbox. At UN climate summits, the items that appear on the agenda are usually those that advocates have fought…
A New Non-Alignment
How developing countries are flouting Western Sanctions and playing the great powers off each other
This essay first appeared in GREEN, a journal from Groupe d’études géopolitiques. In March of this year, as Russia’s war in Ukraine intensified, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi made a trip to New Delhi to speak with his Indian counterpart…
Domestic Politics & Planetary Change
Will a Lula victory be better for the climate than anything that happens at COP27?
Will a Lula victory be better for the climate than anything that happens at COP27?
An Introduction
An introduction to The Polycrisis
This is the first edition of The Polycrisis newsletter, written by Kate Mackenzie and Tim Sahay. Subscribe here to get it in your inbox. What crisis? A year ago, one might be forgiven for thinking there was a moment of relative calm…
The Geopolitics of Stuff
A discussion on supply chains, commodities, and climate
The material economy is back. Economists and commentators in recent decades had heralded (or lamented) the arrival of an automated, redundant, frictionless system of international commerce. But over the past two years, multiple global crises have exposed the fragile physical…